Princess Valerie's War

by Terry Mancour

  “By sabotaging Marduk?”

  “By absorbing Marduk,” Blackmar corrected. “At least, that was the plan. But that’s not going to happen now, thanks to you. Another way will have to be found – and it will be. Too many people have planned for too many years for it not to be. And it would be glorious, Trask: imagine a grand alliance of worlds, united under a common security banner, promoting peace and prosperity across the galaxy—”

  “And utterly controlled by Aton,” finished Lucas, disapprovingly.

  “Someone has to lead,” Blackmar shrugged. “And someone with a devotion to supporting the institutions of the State, not merely the people holding the titles and enjoying the prerogatives of power. There will have to be some changes along the way. We need to do away with all of this silly aristocracy nonsense – it’s a genuine tool of oppression. It also makes it difficult to enact true policy reforms. And the royalty – what an utter waste of time!”

  “Hey! That’s my day job that you’re talking about!” Lucas complained, good-naturedly.

  “Your night job will be forbidden, too. No more Space Vikings. The new Federation will have a total monopoly on the tools of war, of course, especially nuclear weapons. Can’t have independent armed factions skulking around, can we? Eventually, of course. For now, we need all the Space Vikings we can get, making as much trouble as they can.”

  “That’s why that Aton ship only pretended to shoot up Viktor’s, on Jotun!” Lucas realized. “You’re trying to exaggerate the threat of the Space Vikings, so that you can scare the civilized worlds into banding together!”

  “Just one more bit of evidence,” Blackmar mused. “I assure you, your own fleet did more than we did to push the civilized powers towards an alliance. You messed with the balance of power, and that got a lot of people’s attention. Most figured you’d fade back into the frontier after you took what you wanted. But then you had the temerity to show up at the conference on Volund and propose that League idea of yours – yes, I do read the diplomatic briefings, Trask, even if no one else does. Not much else to do in hyperspace.”

  “Then you know my idea of the League of Civilized Worlds is similar to your own idea of a new Federation,” Lucas pointed out, amiably. “Shouldn’t that make us allies?”

  “And let the dreaded Space Viking menace we’ve spent a century building up turn into a simple diplomatic exercise? I’m afraid not, Trask. That wouldn’t suit Aton’s purposes at all. Nor would we allow such near-barbarians as the Sword Worlders into our alliance without extensive re-education. No, a new Federation will only appear on the forge of war, Trask, and that’s the objective. Consider how the first Federation came about, or the United Nations of ancient history? We need the Space Vikings as opposition, to craft a more secure alliance.”

  “That’s madness,” fumed Lucas. “Inspired madness, I admit, but to purposefully provoke a war with Tanith to get a dozen worlds riled up?”

  “War with Tanith?” scoffed the man, politely. “No, Trask, that’s not what this move is about. We could care less about that distant dust mote, or its pathetic fleet. I assure you, Tanith is no danger to the might of Aton. You were taken into custody in part as punishment for your role in the Marduk Affair, and in part as a favor for . . . another party.”

  “Who?” demanded Lucas.

  “That’s not a secret I have to tell you, I’m afraid. Not that it would matter if I did.” Was it the Wizard? Lucas wondered. That enigmatic figure had dogged him for over a year now, and it still wasn’t clear if he was friend or foe. Had the Wizard arranged for his capture?

  “I suggest you consider releasing me and my men, then,” Lucas said, confidently. “Because otherwise Tanith is going to be very much on Aton’s mind, I assure you.”

  Blackmar smiled indulgently. “Let me tell you what is going to happen to you, Trask. You will be taken to a secret Atonian base, where you will be tried for your crimes in a scrupulously fair and recorded show-trial, at which you will be found guilty. Now, if you cooperate and sign a full confession, then you will be taken to comfortable quarters where you will await some future diplomatic functionary’s decision of what to do with you. Your men will be assigned to a re-education facility on a reasonably comfortable military base.

  “Conversely, you’ll refuse to confess, you’ll get belligerent and vocal, and we’ll use the footage as anti-Space Viking propaganda. And then you will be sent to a kind of Never-Never Land, a quiet little planet that no one has ever heard of – call it Planet X – where Aton puts its embarrassments, and you’ll spend the rest of your life there in hard labor with your fellows, until you die or Aton has further use for you.”

  “You’re forgetting a third possibility,” Lucas said, casually.

  “I am? And what would that be?”

  “That my men and I will escape, kill every Atonian on this ship, and then use it to bomb Aton until it glows in the dark.”

  “I’ve processed hundreds of prisoners, political and otherwise. You, Trask,” Blackmar chuckled, “you are going to be one of my favorites, I can tell already.”

  * * *

  He didn’t know how long he was confined to that tiny cell, but it had to have been at least two hundred hours before he was visited again, this time to be transferred to another, larger Atonian ship. It wouldn’t have been so bad if it hadn’t been for the incessant droning of the viewscreen in his cell that played nothing but Atonian propaganda films in an endless loop.

  The Political Officer on the new ship was much less chatty than Blackmar, however, and apart from demanding some pieces of useless information (“how many men do the Space Vikings command? How many ships? When are they planning on invading?”) the interrogator asked nothing of consequence. He was relentless in his questioning, however, as if he feared he was being observed and would be penalized for a lack of conviction.

  They didn’t quite torture Lucas – Aton was ‘civilized’, after all – but they did strive to keep him uncomfortable and on-edge. Lucas personally found the efforts annoying, but little else. He’d developed Harkaman’s technique for catching lighting-quick cat-naps while on watch, being able to snap awake focused and attentive no matter how long – or little – you’d slept, so the Atonian efforts to deprive him of sleep were futile. The climate in his room was always a little too hot or a little too chilly, but nothing he couldn’t handle. Even the food, while unappetizing, wasn’t particularly bad.

  After three hundred hours in that ship, Lucas was transferred again, this time to a planetary base on an uninhabitable planet: a bubble-city overlooking a broad gray airless plain under a brilliantly starry sky. He could catch just a glimpse of it as he was being repatriated with his men and led at gunpoint into a contragravity bus.

  Wherever the secret base was, it was busy: the huge circular spaceport had five different ships, from five-hundred feet up to a massive three-thousand foot battleship, docked around its edges. There was a gleam in the distance off of other large collapsium hulls, and he counted at least six or seven more large ones in the distance before they disappeared behind a jagged ridge as they descended. He got to view quite a bit out side of the window of the pressurized cabin of a contragravity bus as they transferred him and the rest of the Nemesis’ crew to a new holding cell. They were issued light gray, non-descript cover-alls with a number stenciled on the back, as well as a pair of paper slippers and a small bag of basic toiletries, when they arrived at the prison.

  It was the most escape-proof holding cell Lucas had ever seen. It was merely a big pressurized collapsium dome with an airlock on one side, tethered to the larger complex by air and power lines. Try to escape, and the twenty feet of vacuum between the cell and the complex would make it difficult.

  The lorry locked on to the airlock, and a brace of Atonian guards in armor used shock-sticks to herd the prisoners into the cell. It was a stark place, a large empty room with limited lighting, sanitary facilities on one side, a kitchen on the other, and a big space in the center piled w
ith sleeping bags and towels.

  “Welcome to your new home,” one of the guards snorted, brutishly. “We have any problems with any of you, all we do is press a button and everyone’s breathing vacuum. Understand?”

  “Perfectly,” Lt. Delio said, cheerfully. “Honestly, this isn’t so bad. You should have seen our training camp. Compared to Valiant, this is nearly homey.”

  “Shaddup!” the guard spat, pushing his electrified baton into Delio’s kidneys. After the man stopped spasming he sighed.

  “So much for ‘civilized’ folk,” the Golden Hand officer said, lightly, as the airlock clanged behind him. “I’ve been treated better by neobarbarians.”

  Lucas looked around the room, at all of the men under his command who now shared his fate, and he felt a wave of regret wash over him. He was responsible for these men, and it took everything he had to refrain from bursting out with an apology. These were his men, after all. They had sworn an oath to protect him. But they also needed to feel some sense of hope. “Head count, Mr. Delio,” Lucas ordered.

  “At once, Sire,” the officer said, gracefully. He made the rounds, patting men on the back and making a casual inspection before he returned. “We have twenty-six here, Sire, including two Golden Hand, myself and Mr. Jameson. The others must be in another pod.” There were seventy-six Tanith men who’d been captured with their pinnace.

  “Very good, Mr. Delio. Well, gentlemen, we seem to have taken an unexpected excursion,” he said, addressing them for the first time since the capture. “But in doing so, we have an opportunity to learn what’s on the mind of our enemies. All I can ask is that we find a way to survive all of this, to be able to bring word back to Tanith and warn the Realm.” He went on to explain the reasoning behind his capture he’d been able to ferret out of Blackmar, along with some conclusions of his own. “It’s clear that Aton wants to force the issue of a new Federation,” he finished. “And they’re willing to use the Space Viking threat – real or imagined – as a boogeyman to frighten the other worlds into line. Which makes Tanith a big fat target, if they get organized. So our first priority is to bring this news home, understood? Now, any questions?”

  “Where are we, Sire?” one of the young ensigns, Mr. Roupe, asked.

  “Good question,” admitted Lucas. “Any guesses?”

  “It’s a Type F star,” one of the men – the astrogator, Mr. Pierce, he remembered – offered. “A low F, maybe F3 or F4. This means there’s probably not an inhabited planet around.” It was incredibly rare for a planet with the proper chemical proportions to form life – at least life compatible with Terro-Human biochemistry – around such an exotic star. “If I could get the spectral signature, and access to a star chart, I might be able to figure it out.”

  “Gravity’s almost normal – a bit light,” another crewman offered. “Probably .85 g, or thereabouts.”

  “Well, it would also have to be within 500 light-years of Beowulf,” pointed out one of the Golden Hand. “Considering that’s about how far away we should be right now. And on the Aton side of Beowulf, of course.”

  “It’s obvious that this is a secret Atonian base,” agreed Lucas. “One that we’re not expected to tell anyone about. Now, I have it on good information what will happen in the near future,” he began, and then described the incipient trial and condemnation he was supposed to be facing, according to Blackmar.

  “I’m going to stand mute, and claim diplomatic immunity as a head-of-state,” Lucas shared. “I won’t give them the satisfaction of a confession, or of me screaming into the audiovisual cameras. Now, that means we’ll likely be sent away to ‘Planet X’, but I think that’s actually our best bet for escape.”

  “Sire,” asked one of the other Golden Hand guards, Dolf Jameson. “Why all the funny business with the show-trial? Why not just pop the airlock and have an end to us all?”

  “My guess?” Lucas offered, “I think it’s a lot easier to turn a live prince into a dead one than vice versa. The fact is, to the Atonians we may still be useful, at some future point. As ransom, as hostages, to lead behind their chariots in a victory parade, who knows? But that doesn’t mean that they won’t kill us, just that it would be imprudent to. That’s a distinction we’ll want to remember.”

  “Do you think they’re listening in on us?” asked another crewman.

  “I know I would,” admitted Lucas. “So let’s be careful about our conversations. No sharing Duke Harkaman’s secret starberry jam recipe, or the giant planet-killing superweapon we’ve been hiding in Valkanhayn’s liquor cabinet, all right?”

  The discussion went on for a few hours while everyone got caught up on what had happened to everyone else in the course of the voyage. Apparently there were a few attempts at beating information out of them, but lackluster attempts at best that did little to convince the Tanith men that the Atonians were even very competent at the art of interrogation. Even the greenest crew-men were unfazed by the treatment, and the Golden Hand guards had endured worse from their instructors during their first week of training. If this was Aton’s attempt to frighten the Sword Worlders with their power and might, it was failing.

  Frightening them with bueracracy, on the other hand, was well within their power. Each man was required to fill out dozens of forms for processing, some with questions about their origins and education that the men were unwilling to divulge. But it gave Lucas and his staff some insights into what kind of foe had captured them. The Atonians weren’t ruthless, they weren’t blood thirsty, they weren’t evil, per se. In fact, the entire process seemed to be designed to dehumanize the prisoners and reduce the Atonian secret police into a faceless, impersonal force whose only language was paperwork.

  Dinner proved to be more emergency rations from the cut-down robochef in the kitchen area. The men bedded down as needed, the invariable light making it impossible to determine the proper time of day. Of course every bit of jewelry, clothing, and technology had been confiscated from them. But Space Vikings will find a way to gamble when they’re bored, and the crew of the Nemesis was no exception: someone had smuggled a pair of dice in somehow, and a lively game began.

  The accommodations were rough, but not harsh. The worst part was the tamper-proof viewscreens installed around the cell, which played Atonian propaganda clips constantly. At first they were mildly interesting, and then just annoying, and the men quickly learned to tune out the noise altogether. But after watching yet another cycle of How Timely Reporting Of Suspected Troublemakers Protects You And The Party and Your Duties As A Citizen and The Perils Of Fanatical Religious Cults and Progressive Taxation Means More For All!, a much more interesting piece came on: one featuring Prince Lucas. The Space Viking pirate king Lucas, according to the piece.

  “Your Highness!” one of his men called to him, anxiously, when they realized it concerned Tanith. “It’s one about you!”

  The men gathered around the screen eagerly to watch the program. It showed some aerial views of Tanith, and of Rivington, taken during one of the city’s powerful summer night-time thunderstorms. The shots included plenty of views of ruined buildings, and focused on the small camp of itinerant workers who had taken up residence in the Slags. Raggedly clothed peasants looked fearfully at the spaceport in the distance, where lightning reflected off of the collapsium of the ships’ hulls and cast the whole scene in a sinister light. The children were obviously frightened of the lightning storm, but the way the footage had been edited it appeared as if they were in fear of the ships. An overly dramatic announcer provided the voiceover:

  Attention, People of Aton! The Party’s brave operatives have risked life and limb in pursuit of your freedom and security to bring you this exclusive footage of the outlaw Space Viking base known as Tanith! This once-rustic culture has been transformed by the arrival of the despotic warlord, Lucas Trask, into a virtual slave colony where the people are forced to serve their Sword World masters.

  The scene shifted to what Lucas recognized as TanithNews footage
of the aftermath of Spasso’s failed assassination attempt, with Royal Army of Tanith troopers shouting and running around pointing submachine guns and carbines at people at Harkaman House as they searched for the assassin. The announcer told a different story.

  This self-styled “prince” enforces his brutal rule with elite, heavily-armed thugs, who don’t hesitate to use force and intimidation on the simple neobarbarians of Tanith. They’re forced to work building palaces and war machines for their cruel master. Worse, this arrogant oppressor isn’t content with merely dominating his slave-realm, he insists his subjects mindlessly worship him!

  The scene cut away to an exterior view of the Trask shrine at Tradetown, mobbed by natives seeking entrance. There was a security detail of Royal Army troopers attempting to keep peace in conjunction with Baron Bentfork’s local troops, but the angles and the lighting and editing made it seem as if the guards were forcing the people into the temple. Then the interior was shown, the giant statues of he and Valerie made to look like horrific, domineering idols. The camera lingered over the gold-plated severed arm of Garvan Spasso, decorating a place in the center of temple.