“They’d really try to overthrow a government just to improve their balance of trade?” Duke Morland asked, confused and shocked.
“You obviously aren’t very familiar with politics in the Old Federation,” Valerie said, sourly. “The Great Powers do this sort of thing all the time. Baldur has been funding a back-woods rebellion on Fyorgan for years – they make Fyorgan Shine, there, and it’s rare and very popular, especially on Ishtar. Isis administers the colony as a dependent, and they have a monopoly on Shine sales. So whenever there’s an uprising that disrupts the supply, then sales of Baldur Honey-Rum to Ishtar rise – and with eight billion people, that’s a lot of cocktails. A couple of thousand sols worth of guns and military advisors leads to millions in increased sales.
“Of course, they don’t want the rebels to win out-right, so they only give them enough to be a nuisance, not enough to actually prevail. Which means a long, slow, bloody civil war . . . and higher quarterly profits. And since nearly everyone in the government has a stake in one part of Honey-Rum production or another, nobody minds. Nobody on Baldur, anyway.”
“And they call us barbaric,” muttered Morland, disgusted.
“That sort of thing has happened in the Old Federation for centuries,” dismissed Valerie. “I heard about it constantly when I worked for the Mardukan Royal Family. Even we did it: a little explosion here, a little assassination there, and the political situation changes just enough so that somebody’s margins get thicker. I understand the tactics; I just want to be certain of the perpetrator before we take action. One doesn’t engage in war with one of the Great Powers without knowing for damn sure that it’s the right Great Power.”
There was silence in the room as the small council tried to absorb that.
“So we’re going to war with one of the Great Powers?” Valpry finally managed.
“As soon as we find the right one,” Valerie agreed, smoothly, “yes.”
“Don’t we have a war going on already?” he said, with a trace of whine in his voice. “I just want to keep track.”
“We are, technically, at war with Gram,” Nikkolay said, ticking off his fingers. “We are in an unfriendly state of relations with Xochitl, which is a whisper away from war. And we are apparently on the bad side of Haulteclere, who has an interest in both Gram and Xochitl. And we have a private little war with Garvan Spasso.”
“So what’s one more war?” Valerie asked, defiantly. “Someone is holding Spasso’s leash, and that appears to be . . . Bartee? Bartee. And someone has to be holding Bartee’s leash, and according to Mr. Dawes, that person is not in the Sword Worlds. As soon as we trace that leash back . . .”
“Well, this might help,” Karffard said, putting a second microtape into the clerical robot. “This was on another microtape Sir Alexi recovered. A bit of our ancient history.” He inserted the tape into the clerical robot and played it. The picture proved to be a very old audiovisual recording.
The man in the center of the camera was standing in front of a banner that hadn’t been seen in centuries, wearing a uniform that hadn’t been worn in at least that long: the black-and-green banner of the System States Alliance, and the uniform of one of her military staff officers. The man was unfamiliar to Valerie, but most of the rest of the room recognized him, and the context of the recording. Karffard saw her confusion and paused the recording to explain.
“This is Field Marshal Piet Verwoerd, the last senior-ranking commander of the System States Alliance. This address was given on the eve of the Great Migration from Abigor, nearly five hundred years ago. It’s a famous address – to anyone in the Sword Worlds. It’s full of hope and inspiration and defiance, and it’s dutifully played every Founder’s Day to teach our children where we come from. Verwoerd’s son, Marius, was the first King of Excalibur, and the Royal Family is still referred to as the ‘Verwoerd Line”.
“That’s fascinating,” Valerie said, shaking her head, “but how does this matter?”
“Most of the speech is designed to raise the spirits of the ten-thousand soldiers and spacemen who refused the Federation’s offer of surrender,” Karffard explained. “They weren’t being pressed by military advances yet – Abigor was pretty distant from the worst of the fighting – but the writing was on the wall: the System States Alliance was over, and the Federation had won after the Pandemonium Campaign. They were defeated. So Verwoerd gave this speech after they decided to flee into obscurity, rather than bow to the Federation.”
“The Federation treated the System States worlds that surrendered with dignity and respect!” Valerie countered. Mardukans saw themselves as inheritors of the moral compass of the Old Federation – indeed, all of the Great Powers did – and the idea that the grand old organization that was their common root was less than fair made her bristle. The people of Marduk, Odin, Baldur, Isis, Ishtar and Aton saw the age of the defunct Federation as a golden one. “That was part of the problem, why the Interstellar wars started: some thought that the Federation wasn’t oppressive to the System States Alliance enough!”
“Ancient history,” dismissed Karffard. “And most of the speech is grandiose, patriotic garbage. But this part isn’t usually broadcast with the rest, since it’s less timely.” He activated the tape again.
“ . . . We shall not bow our heads to this colossus who has bombed our worlds into slag or slaughtered our young men so cavalierly!” the man declared. “We shall instead seek a new world, far from here, past the furthest explorations of Man, a world that we can call our own without any other as our master! And then, and then, my comrades, we shall rebuild the System States. We shall grow strong. And in one generation or two, or six or a dozen, one great day some descendant of ours will lead our reborn armies back into the domain of our ancient enemy, where we will, with God’s blessing, conquer the conquerors once and for all! This is my pledge, my comrades, this is my promise: follow me into the void and your children shall be masters of the entire galaxy! This I vow: one day, one great and glorious day, the Black and Green banner will fly over all the worlds, over the capital of Terra, herself! Our dead shall be avenged! Our wounded shall be healed! And our sacred honor, so ruthlessly torn from us by the callous hands of Foxx Travis and his minions shall be restored on that grand and glorious day!”
There was cheering and applause in the background, but there the tape ended.
“So . . . why was Spasso interested in this?” Valerie asked, confused. “It seems a little academic for his tastes, from what I understand.”
The Wizard’s lackey seemed to understand. “It’s propaganda,” he declared. “Pure and simple, like those horrible movies Aton makes everyone on their world watch all the time.”
“Verwoerd was trying to lead a beaten people to a brighter future,” Harkaman agreed. “All that silliness about invading the Federation was just smoke and mirrors to keep them all on board. Vengeance is a powerful motivator – just as Prince Lucas, sometime, when he gets back. You have to understand, at the end of the System States war, a lot of people on Abigor and Mephistopheles and those other worlds wanted to keep fighting to the last man, even after a dozen years of slaughter. They wanted to make the Federation pay dearly for every square inch of soil.”
“So why didn’t they?” asked Valerie, who was largely ignorant of this piece of ancient history.
“Verwoerd and what was left with the Command Council knew that was slow suicide. And he sat there on Abigor with a bunch of bright young military cadets, a bunch of old seasoned special operations units told off for rear-guard duty, a couple of combat divisions, ten ships and two shipyards. And a whole lot of politicians who had already been tried and condemned to death for treason by the Federation en abstentia. And the Federation fleet was less than six months away. Abigor would have resisted for about a month, and then been utterly conquered – if Foxx Travis hadn’t just ordered the whole world nuked from orbit, like he did with Ashmodai. It was a losing proposition.
“He had to harness that rage and
shame of defeat and turn it into something positive to get everyone to leave. Promising that someday their children would invade the Federation and bring it to its knees – it was pipe dream, a romantic notion, not a serious policy plan.”
“But that doesn’t mean that it didn’t have a lot of traction in the Sword Worlds,” Nikkolay pointed out. “As recently as the founding of Flamberge, there was still a vocal minority who thought that was a productive long-term strategy for us. Call it loser’s remorse, if you will, but there’s always been a sense of destiny amongst the Sword Worlds that one day we’d come back to the Federation as conquerors. Perhaps that’s why we became Space Vikings so readily. For three hundred years our culture cowered in fear at the edge of known space, waiting for the day when the big ugly Federation would show up and demand we submit. When we found the Federation in ruins . . .” he shrugged.
“That’s . . . really quite disturbing,” Valerie admitted. “It sounds like the entire Sword World culture has a deep sense of paranoia coupled with profound self-esteem problems.”
Morland chuckled. “If you wanted to psychiatrically diagnose us, then yes. You’ve captured our essence admirably, Highness. Culturally speaking we feel we have something to prove because we are descended from rebels on the losing side of a war. That’s not fundamentally a negative thing, but when you add in star ships and nuclear weapons, I suppose it does make us a bit of a theoretical existential threat.
“But it’s all nonsense. No one back in the Sword Worlds seriously thinks that we could conquer the Old Federation. No one with the sense to pour pee out of a boot,” he added, disparagingly.
“Well, that exempts a great deal of the Sword World ruling class,” rumbled Karffard. “Verwoerd’s Pledge has been kicked around as rallying cry for strong, decisive action for centuries. There are even secret societies dedicated to it – the Black & Green Bones Society at the University of Excalibur, for instance – nearly every royal son or daughter is invited to join. There’s even a bounty for the man who can bring back Foxx Travis’ skull. But its all ancient history – no one takes the idea seriously, no matter how solemn they are about their rituals.”
“I heard there was nude wrestling,” joked Valpry. “That’s why Father sent me to school on Joyeuse. Didn’t want me around a bad element.”
“The fact remains, someone is using Verwoerd’s Pledge as a stick to drive . . . something,” Karffard said. “Just because reasonable people don’t take it seriously doesn’t mean that it’s not a serious threat. Those prisoners from Gram Prince Lucas captured, for instance. Their Capt. Harrelsan was quite adamant about how inevitable a real Sword World invasion is, and how Tanith needs to be on the right side of it. Perfectly reasonable man . . . who feels the pull of Verwoerd’s Pledge devoutly. And he is not alone. My friends have told me about a rising tide of such rhetoric back home.”
“With a lot of it being slung from Haulteclere, I’m guessing,” Harkaman pointed out. Karffard nodded.
“King Konrad is mostly focusing on appearing regal and royal and above reproach. But he’s building ships. His allies and henchmen on Excalibur, Joyeuse, Durendal, Morglay, and now Gram are also building ships. His vassal Viktor is building ships. The other Sword Worlds are building ships, too – not because they’re planning an invasion, but they don’t like the idea of one Sword World monarch building up such a strong power base unchallenged. In my estimation – and this is just a guess, mind you, but an informed guess – inside three years, the Sword Worlds could muster a fleet of eighty warships a thousand feet or above. That’s not counting the two-hundred odd Space Vikings already in the Federation. That, Highness, is a tangible sign that someone is taking Verwoerd’s Pledge seriously.”
“It’s said that Crown Prince Havilgar’s original intention in raiding Aton a century ago was to establish a central base from which to conquer the Federation,” Harkaman added. “He was a member of that Black & Green Bones fraternity, if I recall correctly. When he got killed, that set their plans back, I suppose, which is why all of the subsequent Space Viking bases are much further away from the center of the Federation. Tanith is among the deepest, and we’re brand-new. But the first ones – Aditya, Jagannath, Nergal, they’re all within a thousand light-years of the Sword Worlds.”
“This is fascinating,” Mr. Dawes said, nodding thoughtfully. “I’m very unfamiliar with the Sword Worlds, but this makes a lot of sense. It also suggests a connection to the Old Federation. Highness, could I request a star chart on the screen, please?”
When the large screen at the far end of the conference room was activated and the map called up, the mysterious man from the Old Federation studied it a moment, fingering his beardless chin as he did so.
“Take a look,” he said, finally. “Here are the Sword Worlds, way over here – two thousand light-years beyond the furthest Old Federation planet. Your ancestors chose well, if they wanted to escape detection. Over here, on this side of the map, is the center of the Old Federation – what’s left of Terra, Odin, Marduk, Baldur, Isis, the lot of the civilized worlds. Oh, there are some civilized outliers – Freya, over here, for instance, and Gilgamesh here, but basically you have the Great Powers here, and the Sword Worlders here. Now,” he said, moving to the Sword World side of the big screen, “if I wanted to invade the Old Federation, each of those powers is going to have to be challenged. They each have significant spheres of influence and military power beyond their home systems – their various trading empires and alliances – and none of them are going to roll over and die without a hellacious fight. So . . .”
Dawes picked up a light pen and began marking up the image. “If you want to counter Odin’s sphere of influence, then the best route to do so is likely here: through Braggi, through Agni, to Odin’s naval base on Zarathustra, and finally here, to the heart of Odin’s territory. The most efficient way to plan an attack on Odin means you need to a forward base for supply and repair and personnel, somewhere in this region,” he said, making a wide circle with his hands.
“That’s where Aditya is!” Harkaman frowned. “Morglay took that world a century ago, and then mostly abandoned it. Not close enough to good raiding territory, I guess. There’s still some kind of base there, though.”
“Right,” Dawes agreed. “And if you were going to counter Isis’ powerful fleet and dug-in military, then the best route would be to go through here: Irminsul, to Lakshmi, to Fafnir, they’d have to defeat the fleet at Freya, but then they’d be at Isis’ doorstep. Best place for an advanced staging area would be . . . in this area,” he said, pointing.
“That’s Hoth,” Nick Trask said, his mouth open. “The Everrards’ base.”
“Exactly. See where I’m going with this? You want to counter Baldur, you have to go through here from the Sword Worlds: Chermosh, Rimmon, all the way across this void to Veles, then skirt along here to take out their big moon base at Ziva, and then you’re in downtown Baldur. Best place to launch an attack on that route begins . . . here.”
“That’s Nergal,” Karffard agreed. “Not much of a base, though,” he admitted. “But that would explain why a consortium of investors from Curtana and Tizona started upgrading the facilities there a few years ago.”
“Now the big ones,” Dawes continued. “Aton: you can’t ask for a better invasion route than this: Nuit, Jotun, Enlil, and then you’re right there at Aton. And the best place to start that trip is right there at Xochitl with your old pal Prince Viktor. And then there’s Marduk. Best path to Marduk is right through there, Ganpat, Gimli, Lugaluru, Gylfi, Loki, and boom, there’s Marduk. And the best place to launch a full-scale invasion of Marduk is . . . right here.”
He was pointing at Tanith.
“That explains . . . a lot,” Valerie sighed, heavily. “You can’t very well invade the Old Federation and not invade Marduk. We’d – they’d feel left out,” she corrected herself. “Only, Lucas came here and ended up befriending Marduk, not attacking it. And that went counter to . . . someone’s pla
ns.”
“Right,” Karffard agreed, pursing his lips in thought. “Does anyone recall who it was that Angus of Wardshaven said suggested establishing a profitable Space Viking base?”
“I was working for Lionel of Northport as his guard captain at the time,” Morland said, shaking his head.
“I remember, actually,” Duke Valpry said, his eyes narrowing as he recalled the thought. “It was after Angus returned from a business trip. Trying to find new markets for Wardshaven. Oh, he was looking at building a planetary throne even then, but he didn’t have much idea about how to go about it without getting into a shooting war with every other great house on Gram. But he met with some other businessmen on that trip – to Flamberge, it was, I believe. One of them suggested the original idea, and even recommended Otto as captain of the expedition. You know who would know more about that trip? Hugh Rathmore. He was on it.”
“Where is the esteemed Duke?” Valerie asked, surprised. She should have recognized that Rathmore was not present. It was too quiet.
Princess Valerie's War Page 22