Princess Valerie's War

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Princess Valerie's War Page 4

by Terry Mancour


  She was trusting in Lucas’ trust in them, but she accepted the report as factual. “I see. Is that all, Admiral?”

  “Not quite, Highness,” he said, deferentially. “The regularly scheduled liner from Beowulf came in, as well, with a military attaché from the government at Hrothgar City. He reported to me immediately. There’s a thousand-foot ship playing cat-and-mouse with the Beowulf Planetary Defense Force, out amongst their outer planets. Right around where they found Lucas’ abandoned pinnace from the Nemesis. They can’t identify it, yet, but I’d bet money that it’s another of Viktor’s ships. Or one of Gram’s.”

  “I thought we had all of Gram’s ships here, Admiral?” she jested, humorlessly. Harkaman laughed politely.

  “It would seem like it, wouldn’t it?” he said, a rare smile on his face. “That was a fine gift Lucas gave us before he . . . went on holiday. And that has to stick in Omfray’s craw: five brand-new ships, several years worth of labor and investment, five fresh-from-school crews – and they’re all gone, now. Four in our pocket, one destroyed. Now all future members of the Royal Navy of Tanith fleet – just as soon as we find good people to staff them.”

  Not only had Lucas prevailed over Omfray of Gram’s fleet in the skies of Amateratsu, he had tracked the beaten Sword Worlders and their stolen gadolinium to where the Gram ships had agreed to rendezvous, on a neobarb planet known as Shamash. The green crews and commanders, thinking they were safe, foolishly neglected proper detection protocols, so Lucas was able to sneak up on them and captured three of them on the ground without firing a shot.

  It was an undeniably bold and daring raid, one that was already spreading around the Space Viking planets. And it deprived one of their enemies, Omfray of Gram, of a fleet he’d spent years building and paying for. Lucas had sent the prisoners taken ahead to Tanith aboard the Moon Goddess – including one very annoying Captain Harrelsan. Valerie had sat in on his interrogation herself. If that was the best that Gram had to offer, she wasn’t nearly as worried anymore about the prospects of invasion.

  “But unfortunately there are more where they came from. From what Alvyn’s friends have told him, Omfray has several more on the way towards completion.” Alvyn Karffard had once been Harkaman’s executive officer aboard his old ship, the original Corisande, and then again when he was commanding the Nemesis for Lucas. Now he operated as Tanith’s unofficial spymaster and intelligence chief, using his lifetime of Space Viking and Sword World contacts – his many “friends” – to ferret out information valuable to the Realm.

  Retirement from space seemed to suit him well, especially in his new role. Karffard’s ability as a multi-talented organizer and strategist had served the Realm well. The old Space Viking was also getting fatter by the day, though no one would think of offending his dignity by telling him so.

  “Perhaps he’ll furnish our whole fleet then. Very well, Admiral, thank you for passing that along.”

  “My pleasure, Highness,” he said, bowing his head before switching off the screen.

  Valerie sighed. She hated to see Harkaman so formal and reserved. Deferential, even. That was the face of a beaten man, and that was wrong. Otto was supposed to be a larger-than-life figure, as imposing as a thunder cloud, as subtle as an atomic bomb, an inspiration for all of Tanith. For all of his vitality and strength, he was impotent make this better, for all of the ships and guns and men he commanded. To see him haunted by her grief over the kidnapping made the entire episode that much worse. Another debt she owed to Garvan Spasso.

  At least they had learned a few things about Spasso in the aftermath of his deceitful attack, she reminded herself as she refilled her coffee at the serving robot. The few mercenary prisoners they had captured (a motley mix of third-rate Space Vikings, armed merchants and neobarb triggermen from Vitharr, Mertha, Melkor, and places even worse off) had revealed a few tantalizing bits of information about the one-armed man who’d hired them. Not enough to track him, yet, but some revealing details nonetheless.

  He was working with several partners, for one, including a beautiful young Sword World woman who they all simultaneously lusted for and feared. He was using an old Sword World 300 foot courier ship, a commercial job that had been refitted with some basic weaponry. He had a base – somewhere – in Old Federation space. And it had to be close, from the time and distances involved in the attack. Within a hundred light-years of Tanith – a hundred and fifty, outside.

  Unfortunately, there were nineteen inhabited worlds within the former volume, and twenty-eight in the latter. That was more worlds than Tanith had ships. If she started with the closest and visited each in turn, in an ever-expanding spiral, it would be quite possible for her to stumble across her daughter while she was going through adolescence. So they had to figure out which planet he was hiding on, and that depended a lot on what allies, friends and mercenaries he was working with.

  They had discarded Xochitl, right off the bat: Prince Viktor was known to personally loathe Spasso just like everyone else who’d met him, for one thing. It was well-known that Spasso had been banned from his port back when he had been a meager Space Viking captain of the Lamia. And while Viktor didn’t like his professional competitor, he wasn’t stupid enough to goad Tanith that blatantly – not unless he wanted a hellraid from the fleet.

  Of course, just because Viktor didn’t like him didn’t mean that he didn’t have allies among the other powerful Space Vikings who used Xochitl as a home port. But the distances were too long to make it Spasso’s base. The problem was he had a lot of other ties and connections from half a lifetime spent raiding and trading in the Old Federation that were unknown. The things they didn’t know about Garvan Spasso could fill volumes. Karffard was working on that, she knew, but she was growing impatient and desperate for some lead – any lead.

  Matters were more complicated by ships from Xochitl and Gram who had been making their presence known around Tanith’s neighborhood. And the sudden interest of the powerful civilized world of Aton, whose ships had chased Lucas from Shamash. Dispersing the fleet to search for Spasso would make Tanith vulnerable at a critical time. But if Viktor’s men – and the Atonians, for that matter –skulking around made finding out where he’d taken her daughter that much trickier, that made Valerie that much more determined. She was assuming that there was now an undeclared war going on between Tanith and Gram, and there were open hostilities now between Tanith and the powerful ‘civilized’ world of Aton. One or the other of them was responsible for Lucas’ disappearance from his pinnace in Beowulf’s system. The Beowulfers said it was an Aton ship, but there was no hard evidence that it was. It didn’t make sense for Aton to be after Lucas – and sending a small fleet out in search of him just seemed ludicrous. But they had, apparently. Now she was waiting for some word – from them or Lucas or Xochitl or even Spasso – and that made her feel impotant and powerless.

  Not a great time to be conducting a multi-planet missing-persons investigation.

  But that didn’t mean she would stop. Far from it. She had deployed the majority of the Royal Family’s cadre of multi-purpose bodyguards, the Golden Hand, to various worlds in the vicinity, to gain information and ferret out any valuable clues. Most had left in pinnaces or commercial transport, or had hitched a lift with a friendly merchantman or outbound Space Viking. She knew the new elite corps, less than a half a year old, was beside itself in grief for its failure to protect baby Elaine. Even though Captain Hortega had sacrificed his own life in the effort to defend her, the fanatically-dedicated unit had devoted itself to rescuing Elaine with a grim determination that bordered on fatalism. But if there was anyone who could do it, it was those determined young men – they were motivated.

  She was about to fix herself a real drink, without the coffee, when one of the black-and-gold clad Golden Hand guards approached with a message that the Prime Minister’s aircar was arriving, unscheduled. She had a fresh serving robot sent up from the kitchen and prepared to meet Lucas’ cousin, Nikkol
ay Trask, as graciously as possible. Grace was difficult to come by, she realized, when you were completely emotionally numb inside, a gale of frost coating her heart until she almost couldn’t breathe.

  “Your Highness,” Lucas’ cousin and family lawyer said, bowing sharply. Shorter than her husband by a good three inches, there was nevertheless a strong family resemblance. Strong jaw. Intense eyes. A commanding presence. Good looking, these Trask men. And Nikkolay had the added benefit of being a genuinely nice fellow, for a lawyer and a politician. Lucas had needed someone he could trust to administer the Realm, and he’d been blessed with a capable and dedicated vassal in his cousin Nick. He ran the day-to-day administration of the planet, and did a marvelous job. But he, too, always looked distraught these days. His own son was only a few months older than Elaine and he felt her loss sharply.

  He wasn’t alone, either. He had Alvyn Karffard in tow – Duke Alvyn Karffard, she reminded herself. Lucas had raised him to the peerage for his valuable service to the Realm, and his stake in the Tanith Adventure had made him wealthy enough that he’d retired from shipboard life to Rivington, and took service in the government. While his official portfolio read “Minister of Cultural, Security, and Educational Affairs”, in reality he was Tanith’s head of intelligence. As such, he was about the most unlikely-looking spymaster she could think of. Of course, anyone who mistook his jovial attitude for a lack of intelligence or craftiness – or outright ruthlessness – would soon regret the assumption.

  “To what do I owe the pleasure, gentlemen?” she asked, finally pouring that drink. “Join me?”

  They looked at her, an expression of concern. “Don’t worry,” she sighed. “It’s not like I’m breastfeeding. In fact, my milk is drying up. It’s been three weeks,” she added, pouring them each three finger's worth. “And I’ve been up since before dawn.” That inspired an exchange of worried looks between the two nobles.

  “We’re sorry, Highness,” Nick said, taking the drink gingerly. It was still early for him. And it was still early in his career, she reminded himself. Valerie had been around career administrators when she worked for the Mardukan royal family as a governess. As good and wholesome as Nick was, in five years he’d be sneaking a flask before lunch. She found his reluctance to indulge so early just adorable. “We just wanted to stop in and have a word, if you have a moment.”

  “Please,” she said, indicating that they should sit in front of the fireplace. “I’m always free to speak to my ministers. What is need of my attention?”

  Again, the concerned look between them. Something was up.

  “Highness,” Alvyn Karffard began, in his slow, plodding, friendly and utterly disarming way, “you said you wanted to be kept informed of any new developments. Well, my friends and I have been hard at work trying to recreate Spasso’s career, see if we could find anything useful.”

  Karffard’s “friends” were a motley group of independent Space Vikings, merchantmen, freetraders, bandits, hooligans, mercenaries, and other disreputable characters he’d made the acquaintance of over a long career in space.

  “Excellent, anything you can come up with will be helpful!” she said, nodding approvingly as the men took a seat at the sofa, opposite her. Somewhere, she knew the key to getting Elaine back was buried in Spasso’s miserable life story.

  “It’s a lot like trying to retrace the steps of a rabid dog,” Karffard said, apologetically, as he removed a single sheet of paper from his coat. “But this is what we know:

  “Garvan Spasso left the Sword Worlds – and we’re still not sure which one he spawned on – about twenty years ago, as a junior officer on the Long Tom, that was Tom Brandwyn’s ship, out of Morglay. He did two years on that ship, rose to Quartermaster’s Mate, and then got kicked off at Jagganath for being drunk on duty. He stayed there a year, waiting for a new berth, and got picked up as second astrogator on the Orion’s Belt, a tiny, thousand-foot raider out of Joyeuse. Captained by Baron Idalgo. A real pirate, sadistic and depraved, and just the role-model Spasso was looking for.

  “He stayed with Idalgo for three years, until his ship was damaged in a raid on Loki – idiot, going after the Lokians – and he limped into Mertha. His Dillinghams failed, and stranded her. And there she – and Spasso – stayed for three years while Idalgo arranged to get his ship fixed.

  “Those were an eventful three years for Spasso. You have to understand, there’s not so much a base on Mertha as a couple of towns that are aware that the sky isn’t just a big black bowl with holes in it where the lower sorts of Space Viking can make port, rest, resupply, and do a little trading. They have some agriculture, and they know how to brew and never lost gunpowder. But the whole small planet is no prize – very rocky, infested with hill tribes who seem to live on rocks, with no major assets or important luxury goods to export. This makes it a great place to skulk around and plan skullduggery. If you need a couple of gun-hands who aren’t too picky about who they’re shooting or what you feed them, Merthans are ideal. Most would be happy to cut a throat for the promise of a bottle of booze or something shiny. There are at least twenty large gangs of them, and some will hire out their entire armies for the right price. Spasso actually fell in with a group of out-and-out bandits, for a while, half-breeds and half-civilized neobarbs, real cutthroats, a gang known as the Devil’s Henchmen.”

  “How . . . colorful,” Valerie said, distastefully.

  “Oh, they were a real nice gang of thugs. All of the worst parts of being a Space Viking combined with the worst parts of being a mercenary neobarb: slaving, pimping, murder, you name it. Mertha’s not a nice place.

  “So Spasso spends three years there, gets in cozy with the gang, and then gets a chance to space out again on the Fair Lady, out of Durendal. Captain Blackie Jones, a half-breed with a stolen ship. Baron Idalgo may have been a sadist, but Jones was ambitiously sadistic. He takes Spasso on as astrogator after he shot his last one, and the two were together almost five years. Over a dozen raids, but each one getting more and more ambitious.

  “Finally, the Fair Lady takes one hit too many over Set, and Spasso disappears for another few years. We think he may have made it back to Mertha, actually, and spent six months there or so before catching a ride back to Hoth. We catch up with him again a few years later, as the chief astrogator on the Lamia, under Captain Blythe, who has a ‘mysterious accident’ during a raid on Agni, and afterwards somehow Spasso ends up in command. And that’s also when he starts being a real chicken-thief.”

  “Fascinating, Duke,” Valerie said, without obvious interest. “But what does it suggest to you?”

  “Well, Highness,” Karffard sighed, “it suggests to me that Spasso has a strong tie to one place in this vicinity. That’s the gang on Mertha. He’d feel safer there than anywhere. It’s only sixty-eight light-years away, so that puts him well within range of both Tanith and Hoth, where he said he’d leave word about his demands. There are probably a dozen different mountain strongholds he could be holed up in, a neobarb army around him, feeling invincible and invisible. He’d be able to get someone to take care of the baby there pretty easily, too. Honestly, it’s the best guess I’ve got,” he confessed, sincerely.

  “He would feel he was able to trust people, there,” she admitted. “Have we sent any scouts out that way?”

  “Not scouts, per se,” Nikkolay spoke up. “But the Gunloggi was going to stop in there and trade a little before they returned from Vitharr. They’ll probably stop here first in a few hundred hours. If they’re on schedule.” The Gunloggi was the newest ship of a Tanith-allied planet, Beowulf. Beowulf was one of the local “neobarbarian” worlds that Lucas had assisted back to the stars. They’d already had a pretty high level of technology, and Lucas gave them the last little bit they needed to rejoin stellar civilization, and they were grateful to Tanith for that. Plus, they were adept at the mad science of nuclear weaponeering, and fierce space fighters. Handy friends to have. But too slow.

  “I don’t want
to wait that long, gentlemen,” she decided. “Dispatch a Golden Hand squad in a pinnace – use the Golden Hand itself, if you have to,” she said, referring to the fifteen-hundred foot Tanith-built raider the royal guards had co-opted for their own use, with the Realm’s tacit permission. “But I want that whole planet scouted and reconnoitered. If there’s even a hint of Spasso having visited, I want to know about it.”

  “At once, Highness,” Karffard nodded. “I’ll send them with one of my friends, however, I think. Something as bright and shiny as a newly-built pinnace from Tanith will attract more attention than we want.”

  “I trust your judgment,” she declared, quietly, as she lit a cigarette. “And thank you, both. I know this has been driving us all, and I feel a great deal of gratitude towards you gentlemen for your dedication. I really don’t say that as often as I should. “

 

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