A left-hand glove and a right-hand gauntlet, both in burgundy, lay beside the dress. Black tights and steel-grey boots accompanied the outfit.
A jacket hung from a hanger on a hall tree. This steel-grey garment was cut to match the dress, but had a half-belt in front and shoulder epaulets patterned with silver roses entwined with edelweiss.
Sandy knew that the silver rose was the insigne of the Nobility (within The Empire, Princesses – Space and domestic – were the nobles) and that edelweiss, once known as the silver star, was The Emperor's device.
"This is your uniform," Brenner announced. "This," she gestured to the throat emblem, "is a radio and well as a translation device, linked to our Main Signal-Corps Computer. Upon verbal request, you will be provided with a translation of any language spoken on earth, Sangar, or Randnar."
"Here," she picked up the opera-length gauntlet, "is your sidearm. Regular officers are armed with hand-pistols, but you will use this gauntlet. The buckle near the shoulder is a power battery. This gesture," she made the centuries-old finger-pistol hand sign, forefinger pointed straight out, thumb up, other fingers bent to the palm, "activates a miniature hand BLASER – a beryllium LASER – projector, good for very short-term use."
Sandy had already been briefed on the use of weapons in space. Space Princesses carried the only energy weapons, small versions of the super amplified-light device of the twentieth century. Regular officers carried percussion pistols loaded with rubber projectiles, more than suitable for felling foemen, but not tough enough to punch holes in bulkheads.
"Inside the gauntlet, against the upper arm, is a pocket for tools and the like."
Now the Brenner woman brought a silver-and-obsidian object from a pocket and handed it to Sandy. "This is your badge. It is worn on the belt of the jacket or the hip of the uniform, left side."
Sandy accepted the ensign, holding it gingerly.
"Over the next few days you will become familiar with His Majesty's Space Ship Thetis and her crew, with whom you will assigned... ."
THE FIRST OF October, three weeks later, Allesandra Pendragon found herself, a Princess of the Realm, waiting beside a launching pad at the Marina. She had indeed become familiar with a whole vessel, and a group of people she'd never met. After two weeks of outgoing leave, she'd been driven here and left off.
High overhead, a space-going pinnace was silently drifting down, all of its weight but a few ounces balanced against gravity.
Now it was close enough to read the identification strip below the dorsal tail fin. Like all Imperial pinnaces, used for routine passage among the Inner Planets, the vessel was named after an old-time science-fiction writer.
HMSS H. Beam Piper touched down on an abrupt puff of air, landing smoothly on its pad.
Sandy swallowed once, hard. This was it. In an hour she'd be in outer space!
Chapter Two
A Princess on Board
FALLING AWAY BEHIND was the blue and white of Earth. Ahead lay the jet and silver of Empire. The Service pinnace arced through the velvet emptiness, following a well-traveled course.
Sandy Pendragon still reclined on her acceleration couch in her private quarters, but she had released the safety belt when the pilot had told her it was OK.
"Your Grace," his voice came now, "we're in orbit for Service Headquarters. Is there anything you need?"
It took Sandy a moment to remember that she was "Your Grace". She was now "Her Grace, Princess Allesandra", invested with Nobility and all the privileges and responsibilities appertaining thereto. She touched the intercom button on the console of the bedside table. "Nothing I can think of."
"I understand this is your first time in space," the pilot's voice said. "I wanted to make sure you were all right."
Sandy pondered a second. "I guess I'm fine. Y'know, that's what they said at the academy; that I'd take to space like a duck takes to cider."
"Uh... Isn't that—"
"I know, Captain. That's what I thought, too. But you don't argue with The Emperor."
"Oh. Meal service is at eight bells. But if you're hungry, you can eat whenever you'd like."
"Thank you." She sat up and picked up the laminated card on the other side table. It listed the statistics for the ship and the trip. Tonnage on Earth, volume, engines (Conestoga drives with Dillingham superchargers), screenage (CL-arium gravity baffles effective to ninety-nine point nine percent of attraction), electromagnetic diversion charge, accommodations for eight crew, two passengers.
This trip would require forty-one hours to make the journey to Earth Harbor on the asteroid Chiron, out beyond Saturn.
Chiron represented the limit of civilization, and ships arriving were required to check in here. The gigantic deep-space vessels docked here, their crews and cargoes transferred to smaller ships for maneuvering within the confines of the planetary wheel.
Five large Station Class Service craft patrolled the orbit of Chiron, endlessly trailing the asteroid at multiples of sixty degrees around the orbit. This was Earth's distant early warning system – and Earth's watchdog against smugglers.
(Admittedly, Sandy knew, there were no smugglers coming in from trans-Neptunian space, and few enemies out there; but the Star Service looked toward the future at all times. Better to be ready early than not be ready in time.)
Sandy went to the closet and brought out her new outfit. About time she got into uniform.
SHE SAT AT the table in the Ward Room a bit later, dressed in her uniform, but without the jacket or the glove and gauntlet. She leaned forward, elbows on the table, holding a steaming cup of cocoa in both hands. The pilot, Captain Fine, was pouring a mug of joe for himself.
Sandy watched him, carelessly pouring the liquid just as though he was planetside. Apparently, all it required was a little practice. But for now, Sandy would pour carefully, clutch her cup to make sure it didn't wander away. Sure, her ears and eyes told her there was one gee under her feet, courtesy of the miracle metal under the deck; but it was still outer space, and Sandy knew all about outer space. ...Didn't she?
"Y'know, Captain," she broke a brief silence, "I'm looking forward to my assignment. But right now, I'm mostly a little homesick – and more than a little bored."
"That, Mum, is the down side of Interplanetary Justice."
"Yeah. The side they leave off the recruiting posters."
Fine laughed. He himself had been attracted by one of those posters, art-deco designs of heroic spacemen and shiny control panels. Well, the control panels were shiny, and there were a few heroic spacemen in the Service. But they didn't captain pinnaces.
"Well, Mum," he suggested, "there's an extensive video library on micros. And with any luck, your ship will actually be there when we dock."
Sandy looked up at that remark. What did he mean?
THE ANSWER WAS reflected in a flimsy lying on a great slate desk far ahead of Beam Piper. The desk was in an office that was the nerve center of a tremendous structure. The structure stood like a fortress at one side of the vast lagoon formed by man-made arms reaching out, crab-like, from the asteroid Chiron. Several large and many small spacecraft huddled within the psychological protection of those arms.
The building was the outer headquarters of Star Service, and the office was that of Eli Wallace, Commander in Chief of what the underworld called the sky cops or, less politely, "badgers".
Wallace was a bulky, middle-aged man, with hair the color of rusty iron, and a jaw made for clamping down on cigars. Since smoking wasn't allowed on Earth Harbor, he could only chew his stogies and glower, which he did much of the time.
Few things seemed to please him, and the one thing which seemed to displease him the most was being babysitter to a pack of hot-shot top-gunner Swashbucklers of the spaceways, which was unfortunate, since that was his main job. Rule-book spacemen were all right, but in the Service, daring and initiative were mandatory for the all-important combination of successful justice enforcement and survival.
Wall
ace ordered and routinely chewed out several teams of Sky Marshals and ship captains, and, truth to tell, he was terribly proud of them all. But he knew they needed at least some governing authority, and being a rat bastard to them made it easy.
And things like this made his pose even easier: the flimsy on his desk was a report from Central Dispatch downstairs. The import of the message was that one of his ships was missing!
He grimaced at his orderly, Cedric Wilkins. "How the blazes can we lose an entire corvette?"
Wilkins stammered. "Uh, w-well, sir, Thetis was last reported at checkpoint five lambda, heading this way. But it should've reached six theta and hasn't."
"Anything strange in their last report?"
Wilkins shook his head.
"What was their last assignment?"
Wilkins had to consult the sheaf of papers under his arm. "Uh... Marshal Webbe was taking depositions from victims of the Tortuga Gang, in Herculeneum."
Wallace nodded thoughtfully. Webbe was the Sky Marshal on board HMSS Thetis. Herculeneum one of the cities on Mars. And the Tortugas the worst gang of space pirates in the system.
"Probably went shooting off on some lead. Jack Flynn may be the best ship's captain we've got," Wallace groused, "but his ability to remember to follow orders needs a lot of work."
"Thetis is due to be joined by that new Princess, isn't she?" Wilkins asked.
Commander Wallace nodded.
"Maybe that crew of jolly Swashbucklers doesn't want a woman on board. Maybe they think she'll be re-assigned if they're late."
Wallace slowly set his cigar down in his ashtray. He stared a pair of holes in his orderly. "If they think that they've got another think coming.
"Get their stardrive frequency-signature from Communications. We'll find them that way, no matter why they're off the air."
Wallace waved the other man away. Wilkins sketched a salute, turned smartly on a heel, and left.
The Commander's gaze turned to the wall chart. All cis-Neptunian space was laid out there before him. Somewhere on that chart was the position of HMSS Thetis.
But where?
BETWEEN MARS AND Jupiter is a vast array of tiny planetoids known to the twentieth century as the Asteroid Belt and to The Empire as the Alderson Belt, named for the twentieth-century scientist whose computer program had made passage through the belt possible. Some of the component chunks of rock are named. Most are just represented by a number in the System Catalogue. One of the latter is Five-twenty-nine dash eighty-five, the only distinction of which was that HMSS Thetis was sitting on its sunside even as Commander Wallace spoke.
Thetis was a corvette-class ship, with accommodations for a complement of ten officers and crew, including one Sky Marshal. With internal specs roughly triple that of a pinnace, a corvette was designed to patrol the space lanes and planet hop at high speeds. The ship was built something along the lines of an old steam iron, flat keel with cut-outs amidships. The radio mast doubled as a rudder, and stubby wings aft port and starboard extended for atmospheric flight. Art Deco accoutrements decorated the design. The bridge was located in the forecastle, and a Benedictus-glass windshield, sealed by a retractable bulkhead during space flight, allowed the crew a window on the world... whatever world it might be.
The ship lay inert on the lump of space rock, heedless of the hundred other rocks tumbling slowly along nearby.
"B" deck was the lower level inside, and two members of the crew were working at an access panel at the rear of the axial corridor. One, a dashing fellow with a Captain's insigne on his blouse, leaned on the bulkhead, eating an apple. The other, who happened to be the ship's engineer, was on a stool, head-and-shoulders inside the access.
"Y'know, Johnny," the first man said between bites, "Eli's gonna think I did this on purpose."
A hollow voice answered from within, "I'm not convinced you didn't. Jack Flynn has a reputation for dumb stunts all over the System." Flynn, The apple-eater himself, frowned at the back of Johnny's head. As if he could feel the stare, John Hale pulled himself out of the bulkhead and added, "I mean, I can't figure out how this linch-pin could come loose without help."
He resumed his work while the Captain finished his apple, drop-kicking the core into the disposal bin a few yards away. After a long moment, John Hale's voice sounded again, echoey and stunned. "Oh."
Hale stepped down and displayed a small metal pin in his palm. "Someone's nicked it with a LASER."
"Not me," said Jack.
"No. Not you. Not even you would try something this crazy.
"In fact, if you hadn't decided that the boat was getting wobbly and set us down, the whole back end would've been blown to cosmic dust by now."
"I guess that is real trouble."
"The realest. You wanna guess what'd a' happened to the front end of the boat?"
Jack Flynn's expression declined for him. "Can you fix it?"
"Take about twenty minutes. But I'd better do a diagnostic before we blast off. Who knows what else might be damaged?"
"Call it what it is: sabotage," Flynn said with a frown. "Somebody's got his foot in our gears for a reason, and we'd better find out what it is!"
Flynn stalked away, leaving a puzzled Hale in his wake. The classical allusion was over the engineer's head.
ELI WALLACE LOOKED up sharply. Wilkins came skittering in, screeching to a halt at attention. He saluted and presented a new message flimsy.
"What is it?"
"Signal from Thetis, sir."
Wallace looked impatient. "Well..?"
"Captain Flynn reports sabotage."
The Commander leaned back, exasperated, fingers gripping the air.
"No, sir," Wilkins answered the gesture. "It's been confirmed by the engineer. Apparently someone damaged a linch-pin, whatever that is."
Wallace knew what it was, and knew it would not have been damaged capriciously. "All right. I'll want a complete report. What's their current status?"
Wilkins consulted the flimsy. "Fired up and on the way. But they won't make their scheduled rendezvous. Their new course slingshots past Jupiter, though, and—"
Wallace cut in, gesturing with an upraised palm. "Yeah, yeah." He replaced his cold stogy, anchoring it in the corner of his mouth as he spoke. "Signal Beam Piper to divert to Io station. And Thetis to meet her.
"And," he removed the cigar, rolling it between fingers and thumb, "order a security check at Thetis’ last port." The Commander sketched a salute at his orderly. "Dismissed."
Wilkins snapped a salute, quick-turned, and left. Wallace's eyes went back to the wall chart. This time, though, he knew where the source of his aggravation was.
IO WAS ONCE the beloved of great Zeus, pater familias of the Hellenic gods. Now her name was given to one of the Jovian natural satellites, home to a research station full of scientists gleefully studying the huge planet. The Star Service maintained a presence there, protecting the science boys from pirates and occasionally from their own follies.
Two blips showed on Io's RADAR screens, out at the far edge of sense. The operator confirmed that the vessels were identifying themselves as, respectively, Thetis and Beam Piper, moving to rendezvous.
Captain Fine's voice crackled on the radio. "Ahoy, Thetis. Make fast for transfer.
The reply came. "Aye, aye."
Beam Piper closed on the other ship, sliding up portside to portside, and began the docking maneuver. When the airlocks were abreast, Beam Piper checked its relative motion, and magnetic grapples seized the larger ship.
Portals jutted out around the hatches of each ship, came together, and were magnetically locked. Air was pumped into the newly created chamber, and both hatches opened.
Allesandra Pendragon, dressed in her full uniform as a Princess of Space, and proudly carrying her own duffel, stepped into the airlock. She paused a moment, looking back, then stepped on through.
As the hatch closed behind her, crewmembers approached. She heard Captain Fine's voice on the loudhailer,
echoing his statement from the other ship. "Five by five, Thetis. And best of luck to Her Grace."
Abruptly, the crewmen drew firearms, aiming them at the Princess. She tensed and remained quite still.
A hatch opened at the other side of the corridor as Sandy was pinioned between two misshaven specimens of inhumanity. In the compartment beyond, she saw a tall, mean-faced but elegantly groomed and costumed figure. He glared at her, and smiled a cruel smile as he held a microphone in one hand.
He was saying, "Thank you, Beam Piper. I'm sure she'll settle in nicely."
Chapter Three
The Princess and the Pirate
THE GLEAMING ARROWHEAD of His Majesty’s Space Ship Thetis turned into the slingshot orbit around Jupiter, respectfully maintaining its distance from the sphere. Shortly, the disc of tiny Io came into view.
"Jupiter Control," Jack Flynn spoke into his radio, "Thetis at lane one. Any word from Beam Piper?"
In the Security Office on Io, station commander Dick Terrance looked up from his work. Across the room, the Space-Traffic Controller looked up, too. His look told his boss that he had no idea what this call meant. That made two of them.
Terrance gestured to the controller, who cut the commander’s desk mike into the circuit. "Repeat message, Thetis?"
"Any word from space pinnace H. Beam Piper? We received a radio to divert here and meet her."
Terrance made a face. "Uh... didn't you do that already?"
On the bridge of his ship, Flynn released the call button and turned to his companion. "Uh, oh," was all he said.
The other man, who wore the star of Sky Marshal, reached past Flynn and touched the button. "This is Imperial Marshal William Webbe. What are you talking about?"
"We watched you rendezvous with Beam Piper not two hours ago, Marshal."
Webbe and Flynn looked at each other, troubled.
Webbe said, "Maybe this explains the sabotage."
Planet Patrol: The Interplanetary Age (Star Service Book 1) Page 2