The Princess & The Privateer

by Peter Rhodan

All three laughed at the obvious excitement in her voice, but Andreas sobered quickly.

  “Yes, but there is no re-spawn in that armor. You will give her some instruction before you turn her loose on a real surface?” Andreas asked, turning to Lothar.

  Lothar nodded by way of reassurance.

  “No worry Andreas, I check your Princess out good before we do real test.” He turned to Gizel. “First lesson. Do not use too much energy when trying to move. The armor will translate your leg and arm actions into mechanical and hydraulic force. Walk down ze corridor and you will see.”

  Gizel nodded and took a step and her helmet crashed into the roof, she brushed it the second step and then walked calmly to the end of the corridor and returned.

  “How was that?” she burbled, pleased with herself.

  Andreas shook his head.

  “It took me four goes to be able to do that. Not fair. It’s that bloody game isn’t it?” he complained.

  Lothar and Karvon laughed.

  “Sort of. The game is not quite the same as actually being in the real thing, but the principle is the same. This is so cool!” she exclaimed and was disappointed when Lothar told her it was time to exit the armor, at least for now.

  The ship stopped briefly at the station in orbit around Medio to offload the electronic shipment and fill up the reaction mass tanks. They were also briefed on the latest intel regarding the pirate they where about to start hunting. As they moved out from the station and headed for the nearest of the two jump points that led outwards, Gizel took the seat she had been assigned at the back of the bridge to keep her out of the way of the working crew. They had barely cleared the station when Krevis piped up.

  “Got some news on our guest here,” he said to Karvon.

  Karvon, who had the ship steady on course, waved for him to continue.

  “Found it in the social news section. I’ll put it on the right-hand screen.”

  He pressed a button and the screen changed from a view of the left aft hull to a couple of dressed-up studio presenters sitting in easy chairs. The very pretty male turned his head slightly to take in the elaborately coiffured woman.

  “And in other news Selena, it appears that the Princess has been struck with some sort of viral illness, which is why she has missed so many engagements these last few weeks. The Palace says she is now on the road to recovery but is being sent to a health resort on Carmatheon Island in the hope that the isolated peace and quiet there will help speed along her recovery.”

  This news was backed up by a vid of someone who looked a lot like Gizel sitting in a medical power chair while being guided from a Palace limousine to one of the Imperial Family’s sub-orbital yachts. Gizel recognized the location as the Imperial Family’s special entry port at Kimeria City airport. The fake Gizel waved in the direction of where the vid was being filmed, presumably by one or more of the usual mass of reportnicks who followed the Imperial Family’s every move.

  Krevis made a pantomime of looking from Gizel to the screen and back.

  “Sure looks like you,” he said. “Apart from the hair.”

  Gizel smiled at this mention of her ineffectual attempt at disguise. Although it had worked in practice, she just realized. No one had recognized her or even looked at her twice. At least in that way. The bad guys didn’t count as their bug meant it would not have mattered how she had looked. Her currently blonde hair was starting to grow out but the girl in the video had her normal brown hair.

  “That’s Carla. She is my double for security scares and such. They never let her speak as she sounds nothing like me. Has a Faldorian accent she simply can’t get rid of.”

  Karvon nodded, clearly in thought as he ran his fingers over his chin studying the screen.

  “The Palace is hiding your disappearance. Interesting.”

  He studied her for a moment.

  “I passed that on when I reported your, ah, adventure.”

  Gizel sat up with a start, suddenly alarmed.

  “You told someone I am here?” she demanded.

  Karvon waved his hand in a motion of negation.

  “Not precisely. I report to Royal Naval Intelligence, theoretically. What I normally do is pass on things I think they might find interesting or of military value. In your case, I mentioned that there had been an attempt on the life of the Imperial Princess and that the Palace was covering it up. That is all.”

  Gizel still felt betrayed, and then Lothar spoke.

  “I reported pretty much the same to ISIS. What about you Andreas?”

  Andreas nodded, smiling. “I said the same to the Imperial Security, of course, they already know you were missing.”

  He winked at Gizel.

  “I will get into trouble eventually for not passing on where she is, but then what is life without a little excitement eh?”

  Gizel looked from one to the other unsure of what was going on. Krevis piped up.

  “I haven’t reported anything to Naval Intelligence, I didn’t feel our navy needed to know about the Princess.”

  Moxton looked over from his engineering station.

  “I haven’t mentioned it either, although I might yet, just to cover my arse.”

  Gizel eyes widened at this chorus

  “You are all spies?” she gasped.

  Karvon shook his head

  “Yes. Well no, that is a very harsh title. Not spies. We consider ourselves information brokers.” A sneaky look came over his face after he said this last bit. “Yes, that sounds much better, information brokers,” he said, smiling at her.

  Lothar laughed. “I like zat. Information broker. I tell my contact in Iskander Security Intelligence Service zat your term is my new title in next report. He will have fit!”

  Which idea he seemed to find quite humorous.

  Karvon laughed and the others all smiled at her.

  “We are all still tied to our homelands to some extent. I am still a captain in the Navy list although I appear as being on half-pay and not actively serving, at least officially. Lothar is officially retired. Andreas was a real spy who your Imperial Security have theoretically placed on the ship as an agent since he joined me.”

  He nodded at Andreas who made a mock bow in return.

  “Krevis is a Lieutenant in the Nue Limburg Naval Reserve, again his intelligence people have tried to get him to work for them. He has made noises that he has agreed to this and even passed on the occasional piece of information to keep them happy. Moxton is actually here officially. He is a Captain in the Nordland Special Intelligence Agency and they asked if they could plant him on me. Which was very polite of them.”

  He nodded at Moxton who gave a very casual salute in return.

  “Okay. Hang on right there for a minute. So this is not really a cargo ship is it?” she asked, looking around the crew.

  Karvon sat back and played with his chin again.

  “Well yes. We do carry cargo. Mostly small shipments that need fast delivery or safe delivery or both. We have quite a reputation in the underworld for carrying, ah, delicate cargos quickly and safely from point A to point B, with no questions asked.”

  He paused and grinned.

  “Of course, we scan those shipments thoroughly, and after they have been safely delivered we anonymously pass on the details of their contents to the appropriate authorities if we deem it necessary. We do this very selectively, so our ship doesn’t get suspected.”

  “And we hunt pirates and such like.” Andreas threw in. “The Kormorant is the best Privateer in the quadrant!”

  He seemed proud of this claim.

  Gizel looked from one face to another and could only describe their expressions as enthusiastic!

  “How does a cargo ship take on a pirate?” she asked at length.

  “Very carefully!” Andreas said.

  He couldn’t keep a straight face, and neither could the others. Gizel found herself getting annoyed with the boys own routine.

  “Okay! What am I missing?”
she asked in frustration seeing them all laughing.

  At her? At what Andreas had said? She couldn’t tell.

  Karvon put his hand on her shoulder, which sent the most unusual sensations through her, and she looked up at him in surprise, as this was the first time he had ever touched her casually. At least when she had been conscious! She felt herself blush at the thought of him being the one to undress her. He looked down onto her face for a moment as though startled by something, then seemed to shake it off and smiled in a way that could only be described as very fox-like.

  “We only look like a freighter. Inside we are built like a light cruiser and armed like a heavy cruiser. We have moveable plates that can be reconfigured so that we can take on the appearance of one of six different small freighter outer shells. Our weapons systems are largely automated, unlike a real warship’s, but effective nonetheless. We have dual fifty-centimeter plasma turrets in dorsal and ventral mountings, four dual nine-centimeter laser turrets, two fore, and two aft, plus four quad point defense chain guns. Plus we have four-centimeter armor on the key areas, strength seven shields all around, and a lot of self-healing and automated repair systems. Plus, the missile battery we officially carry for self-defense. We’re a sort of pocket heavy cruiser, without the crew of a heavy cruiser though, so if things break it can be a problem.”

  Gizel took this in, or at least tried to, as she was finding Karvon’s proximity very distracting. The tall Brython was good-looking, yes, but she didn’t think that was why he was affecting her. She had met any number of really handsome young men socially, especially in the last few years as she became old enough for people to start looking at her in terms of a suitable marriage, even though she was technically still at school. Standing here next to him she found there was something about Karvon that gave her butterflies unlike anything she had ever felt before. Her thoughts were still processing this strange sensation when he took his hand off her shoulder and moved away from her immediate vicinity.

  “She probably has no idea what you just said,” Krevis said in a jocular tone.

  Andreas felt compelled to defend his Princess.

  “She is going to the Fleet Academy next year, so I think she probably has some idea already,” he said tartly, clearly trying to defend his Princess.

  Gizel was struggling to focus on the conversation, but this was helped when Karvon moved to the other side of the table.

  “I know what plasma cannons are and your laser armament is primarily for use against local space defense fighters I imagine, or perhaps small pirate strike ships. Do you really have fifty-centimeter plasma cannons on this ship?” she asked, somewhat surprised by the size of the guns.

  They all grinned.

  “Oh yeah,” said Andreas. “Comes as a real nasty surprise to whoever we deploy them against too. Brython Mk 27s. A bit dated now but still a nice weapon, and of course, we have quad missile launch tubes both bow and stern. Only light anti-missile birds but still very useful against fleeing pirates.”

  Gizel had not bothered with any serious amount of preemptive study for her impending two years at the Fleet Academy, which was the traditional education path for members of the Imperial Family. Especially as she was a female. A male second child may have been required to serve in the Imperial Army or more likely the Marines. With her brother already in the Fleet and knowing the direction of her own career path over the next few years, she had picked up some idea of ship weaponry.

  Fifty-centimeter plasma cannons were the normal armament of heavy cruisers in pretty much every navy in the quadrant. Most carried four dual turrets she was pretty sure, the Lotharians had those big superheavy cruisers that mounted two triple sixty-centimeter turrets it was true, and Nue Limborg had those heavy defense cruisers she remembered Lucas telling her about. All laser turrets and missile batteries on a heavy cruiser hull. In both cases, no other navy had followed suit as far as she knew.

  She smiled as she thought of the shock a pirate would get when this ship unveiled her big guns. As far as she knew most pirates were usually frigate or corvette class ships, small, fast, and lightly armored and armed with maybe two six-centimeter plasma cannons or possibly only five-centimeter ones on many of the older small ships. Either way, they would have little effect on the seven shields strength this ship had, whereas just one salvo from a duel fifty-centimeter plasma cannon would probably smash a corvette or frigate.

  “Where did this ship come from? Did you build her?” she asked looking over to Karvon who shook his head in negation.

  “Was a Iskander design.” Lothar chimed in. “Designed as commerce raiders after last war wiz your Empire. Navy built six but after fifty years zey were classed as unnecessary, stripped, and scrapped. All but zis one. Last captain did deal wiz breakers and bought hull intact, sans weapons. He refitted ship to some extent and became drug runner. Lasted a few years before he got caught by the Brythons.” He nodded at Karvon. “Some Captains can see through a ship’s hull apparently.”

  She suddenly noticed Lothar always pronounced Brython properly unlike other words with th in them. Odd. Gizel clapped her hands looking over at Karvon.

  “You captured this ship?”

  Karvon nodded smiling.

  “I got a real good look over her when we captured her and I had this idea that I put to our intelligence people who also liked it, so she was supposedly condemned in a prize court and sold for scrap. Again. Instead, we secreted her away in one of our supposedly secret fleet yards and restored her to her original role as an armed merchant cruiser.” he paused and looked down for a moment. “I was asked to captain her but for appearance’s sake, I went on the inactive list and beached myself on half pay while she was refitted. I already knew Corinne and Lothar so they formed the start of a crew. I finished up with half a dozen others, all experienced and tough, but mostly too far on the illegal side of things with the wrong sort of attitudes. It took a couple of years to weed them out, but now it’s even worse as I have a ship full of foreign agents instead. It’s like getting rid of the foxes and replacing them with wolves.” he said grinning.

  “Still, you seem a little, um, under crewed. Even with automated weapons.”

  “Oh shit, yeah,” Krevis said.

  Lothar waved around the ship.

  “Need at least one more engineer, two assault people now Corinne won’t fight anymore. Anozer communications and or navigation tech. Someone who can repair plasma and laser weapons would be good too, or a full-on armorer. Perhaps a couple more. Just a few people.”

  Gizel looked from Lothar to Karvon who sighed in agreement.

  “It’s just so hard to find good help these days,” he said lamely, putting on a fake hang-dog expression and everyone dutifully laughed at his age-old joke.

  “Speaking of assault people Karvon, we need to find a surface for Gizel to try out the armor.” Andreas put in.

  Krevis looked up. “We’ve got no real records out here past Medio. They gave us some data on the first few systems beyond each jump point but after that, it’s very much blaze your own trail.”

  He looked over at Karvon.

  “The next system has a gas giant with a dozen moons. There are supposed to be a couple of mining operations but other than that the entire system is uninhabited.”

  “Good. We should be able to find a suitable place to put the Princess through her paces,” Karvon said.

  He sat back down in the command chair. Almost at once, the atmosphere changed, it was almost a physical thing, Gizel noted in surprise, and then she realized they were putting their warship crew faces back on and were suddenly all very military.

  “Aligned for the jump point, Captain,” Andreas said all formal.

  “Very good. Steady as you go. We’re in no rush so we will cut deceleration now.”

  “Roger that. Cutting deceleration now.” Andreas responded.

  The vibration of the engines died away. When entering a jump point your actual relative speed did not seem to matter as far as j
umping went. The passage did impose some sort of molecular vibration at a subatomic level which seemed to be a function of your relative speed to the jump point. At really high relativistic speeds this vibration caused ships, and everything in them, to oscillate violently to the point where the ship could literally shake apart. No one had been able to work out why or provide any means to dampen the effect despite all the years humans had been studying the problem. Even more odd was the fact that the resulting debris still arrived at the correct system, but that was of no consolation to those that had been aboard the destroyed ship.

  A very different result occurred if a ship was being subjected to acceleration or deceleration at the jump point. In the recorded history of man using jump points to travel the stars no ship that had entered a jump point while changing velocity had ever arrived at its intended destination. Every other generation or so some genius would decide to have a go at solving the problem but no one had ever succeeded in getting a ship to arrive, manned or robotic. It was one of the few remaining scientific conundrums that had yet to be solved.

  There were those old tales about how the first people in this part of the galaxy had, in fact, come through a warp point while accelerating and found themselves on the other side of the galaxy from where they had started and rather less likely, several millennia in the past. All sorts of trivid stories revolved around this idea, which was, well not so much laughed at by the scientific establishment, as ignored deemed not even worthy of their consideration.

  Actual records from the first colonists or marooned crew were few and probably later fabrications. Certainly, there had been two different groups early on. The large general groups were all made up of descendants of either Kimeria or Brython, take your pick. Legend recounts that the Brythons were there first, but they had lost their ability to travel space until the Kimerians had come along. Iskander was genetically from a different founder group, but there were even fewer accounts of their early history. They had adopted a language that combined elements of old Earth German and Russian, as well as a pseudo-German culture to go with it. Many historians thought both were completely fake and were deliberately put on long after their initial arrival in this part of the galaxy.