The Thirteenth Man

by J. L. Doty

  “Your Highness,” he said. “I must apologize that I don’t have the time. The ducal council convenes momentarily.”

  Ell jabbed an elbow into his ribs and hissed in his ear, “Go talk to her, you idiot.” She gave him a little shove forward.

  Delilah came forward, leaving her retinue behind, and the two of them met halfway, like two generals meeting under a flag of truce with armies at their backs. When she spoke, it was almost a whisper. Clearly she didn’t want the armies behind them to hear. “What have I done to anger you so?”

  “After betraying me you wonder why I’m angry.”

  “Betray you? I haven’t betrayed you.”

  “Don’t lie to me. On Tachaann you fingered me to the Syndonese.”

  “No. That’s not true. I swear. I mean I know it must have been my fault. I made a scene, and I shouted your name in that bar, and they must have been following me because they picked me up the next morning. But if I’m guilty of anything, Charlie, it’s just stupidity.”

  It was plausible. It could be that simple. But then he recalled her sitting at table five with a Syndonese. “He’s the de Maris bastard?” the Syndonese had asked, and Del had replied, “Yes.” Charlie put all the ice into his voice he could muster. “No, Your Highness. It is I who am guilty of stupidity, for I trusted you.”

  He didn’t wait for a reply. He stepped around her and started walking. Her retinue parted as he walked through them and he heard his own small entourage rushing to catch up.

  “We are assembled here today to vote on several important issues,” Nadama said. He had previously been elected as council chair and was running the show. “The first and foremost is to ratify the inheritance of the de Lunis ducal seat. To that end—­”

  Charlie stood. “I object.” He, Winston, and Rierma had considered this carefully. Most of the council would expect Charlie to be completely ignorant of his rights, perhaps an easy mark for some clever maneuvering. “My inheritance needs no ratification, and in fact this council does not have the authority to ratify such an inheritance. Nor is it customary to do so. The only action this council might take in that regard is to consider a dispute concerning said inheritance, and there is no such dispute before this council now.” Charlie sat down.

  There was a long moment of silence, then Telka said, “He’s right.”

  Nadama took a deep breath and let it out dramatically. “Very well,” he said. “Then the next order of business is—­”

  Charlie stood again. “The next order of business is that I exercise my right to adjourn this council until I’ve had time to carefully consider all of the matters before it.” Now everyone started shouting.

  This too they had planned carefully. By law, a newly consecrated duke could table all issues before the council for a period of one hundred days. In an orderly succession the heir, in all likelihood, would’ve been carefully briefed on the issues and probably would not exercise such a right. But it was still the heir’s choice to do so if he felt it necessary, and by law, he need not justify his actions. Also by law, during that period the council could not meet, nor could the king command the heir’s presence at court.

  Charlie didn’t answer any of the shouts, just stood there without expression until the shouting died. In the ensuing silence he sat down without a word. There was some argument, but within a matter of minutes the first council of the Ten in three hundred years ended without ado.

  “Your Grace, there’s a man here who wishes to speak with you.”

  At the sound of the page’s voice Charlie didn’t immediately look up from the accounts of House de Lunis, but held up a hand to forestall him.

  Darmczek had shown up a few days ago, sworn himself to Charlie, and told him that all of the Two Thousand—­as they were now calling the men he’d shared the chain with—­and most of the de Maris servants and much of the guard were prepared to do the same.

  Apparently Theode and Gaida had demonstrated their most endearing traits to everyone.

  But Charlie couldn’t pay any of them. By all rights he should be broke. The holdings on Istanna were losing more money than those on Aagerbanne and Toellan were bringing in. And there were no revenues associated with the Sol system. It was simple mathematics; if you lose more money than you make, you’ve got a problem. House de Lunis should have been bankrupt long ago, but it wasn’t. In fact, the accounts, which were held at a bank on Toellan, always grew—­at a modest rate, but they nevertheless grew. Charlie wasn’t rich, but he wasn’t broke, though he didn’t have enough to pay a single servant, let alone vassals, retainers, and an entire house full of servants. Something didn’t add up.

  Charlie snapped out of his reverie and looked at the page. “I’m sorry. You said there’s a man here to see me.”

  “Yes, Your Grace. But he seems a rather unsavory sort. I’ve already sent him away five times, but he keeps returning, and he claims to be a friend of yours.”

  “Did he give a name?”

  “Yes, Your Grace. A rather strange name. Nano-­who-­never-­loses, or something like that.”

  “Nano’s here?” Charlie jumped to his feet. “Where is he?”

  “He’s in the library, Your Grace.”

  Charlie left the page behind, burst into the library, and found Nano helping himself to a drink and a cigar from Rierma’s stash. “Frankie,” Nano said, eyeing the cigar carefully. “You now some big-­shot duke being, eh?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Momma said you got trouble, and you’re family, so we’re here to pull your ass out of the fire. But guess you don’t need no help.” Nano puffed on the cigar and blew a big smoke ring into the air.

  Suddenly Charlie felt good. “Tell Momma thanks. But I was in a dungeon in this palace. There’s no way you could’ve gotten to me.”

  Nano switched to standard. “Frankie, I brought Janice and Sally with me. They can fuck their way into anyplace. And if they need to, they know how to kill good too.”

  “Momma let Janice and Sally come?”

  Nano grimaced. “She don’t like the loss of revenue, but the girls begged and pleaded—­drove us all nuts—­and they were due a vacation.” Nano raised a hand, and rubbed his thumb against two fingers in the universal sign of money. “The girls also pointed out there’d be some rich pickings here.”

  “How’d you get here?”

  “In our ship.”

  “You have a ship?”

  “Of course we have a ship. We’re smugglers. How do you think we smuggle, up our asses?”

  Not only had Momma sent Nano, Janice, and Sally, she’d sent Willie, and Stan Fourhands, pickpocket, lock-­pick, computer wizard, a man of many talents. Charlie had Nano retrieve them and bring them up to Rierma’s suites. Janice and Sally launched themselves at Charlie and smothered him in kisses. Sally looked at the bandages on his face and her eyes grew big. She turned to Janice. “Hey, they fixed him up. He gonna be pretty on both sides. I got dibs on doin’ him first.”

  Janice shrugged. “I already done him, though I gotta say the way he done me I don’t care what his face looks like.”

  Charlie introduced them to everyone. “A reunion of old friends,” Rierma said, “in more ways than one. We’ll have a party tonight, and we can all share how we met and became friends.”

  Sally sidled up to Rierma. “You know,” she said. “You pretty good lookin’, for a old guy.”

  CHAPTER 15

  INCONSISTENCIES

  Charlie needed a ride, literally. It had become a bit of a joke throughout the palace that near-­destitute House de Lunis didn’t own a ship to transport His Grace to his ducal estates on Luna. Rierma offered him the loan of one of his ships, but Nano volunteered his, saying, “Hey Frankie. We’ll take you in our ship. Momma ain’t expecting us back for a ­couple months.”

  Charlie said, “I don’t have any way of paying
you back. I’ll do what I can, but I have no idea when that’ll be.”

  Nano shrugged and said, “We’ll extend credit.”

  Janice chimed in, “We owe him anyway, ’cause he saved my ass that night.”

  Sally agreed with her, and the three of them got into a family argument.

  Charlie had Add and Ell inspect Nano’s ship. Add summed the ship up as, “She’s a tramp merchantman, little brother. Looks like a tramp merchantman. Probably runs like a tramp merchantman.” So Charlie departed Turnlee in the tramp merchantman Goldisbest, a beat-­up, decrepit smuggler’s scow. On the outbound leg, while trying to clear Turnlee nearspace and set their vector for up-­transition, Turnlee customs officials boarded the ship. They were actually Syndonese in Turnlee uniforms, whose only purpose was clearly harassment. They took vids of the interior and exterior of Goldisbest and released them to the media, an attempt on Goutain’s part to humiliate Charlie. But Goutain had never had to shit in a bucket while chained to two thousand men.

  After that, humiliation was a relative thing.

  Charlie came to realize that, in an odd sort of way, his near-­destitute status provided better protection than a platoon of armed troops. No one considered him a threat, so it wasn’t worth the time and effort to do anything about him, though he decided not to depend on that too much. He asked Nano to plot a roundabout course to the Sol system, down-­transiting for nav fixes in unpredictable places.

  Charlie had nothing to do on the trampsie smuggler. He spent the time reviewing the de Lunis accounts with Winston, and working out with Add and Ell, with an occasional romp in bed with Janice. Goldisbest broke down three times, and each time they had to spend a day or two dead in space while Nano and his crew repaired her. Twenty days after departing Turnlee they transited into Sol nearspace.

  The Sol system was quite unusual. Eight planets and one planetoid appeared to have been named after the nine dukes. The de Lunis estate, named Starfall by Cesare, had been carved out of solid rock on Luna, the only moon orbiting the third planet, Terra. There were archeological sites on almost every object in the system, evidence it had been colonized and settled a ­couple thousand years ago. In fact, there was evidence to indicate that Terra had once held a population of several billion ­people. But at some point about two thousand years ago it had been the target of a massive bombardment from space. There were large radioactive hot spots all over the planet’s surface, its atmosphere was toxic, and its population now limited to a few dozen archeologists willing to live and work in radiation-­shielded environments.

  There were also a number of prehistory sites on Luna. They’d been similarly bombarded, were now nasty hot spots, but with no atmosphere the contamination hadn’t spread to cover Luna’s entire surface. The coordinates for Charlie’s estates pointed to a location not far from the largest of these in a region known as Mare Crisium, and the gravity on Luna, one-­sixth of a standard gravity, was low enough that Nano was comfortable actually bringing Goldisbest down to the surface, rather than shuttling them down. Winston provided the keys to the house, security codes that, when broadcast on the correct frequency, activated a number of systems that had shut down while there were no occupants present.

  Charlie watched their approach on one of Goldisbest’s screens. Starfall nestled high up the side of the rim of a massive, ancient impact crater. The landscape was uniformly gray, with intense shadows, and not until they slowed to a crawl and approached to within a few hundred meters of the estate did Charlie realize what he was looking at. From the outside Starfall was quite grand and big, a palace in every sense of the word, with story after story climbing the side of the crater. But anyone could see that it was old.

  Winston told Charlie, “Cesare didn’t build it. He got it with the Sol system when he purchased it. He also bought it at fire-­sale prices, so don’t expect a lot. He did renovate its systems, but I believe a lot of the architecture is outdated.”

  As they approached, the massive doors of a hangar swung outward. Nano’s pilot maneuvered the little ship into a large bay, and set her down gently as the hangar doors closed behind them. Janice’s voice blared out of allship. “Frankie, your new place looks pretty cool.”

  The structure had a sterile, unlived-­in quality to it. According to Winston no one had lived within its walls since the demise of the twelfth Duke de Lunis three hundred years earlier. Cesare had expanded it somewhat but never used it, though it had been kept under pressure to preserve the many items that would not survive the vacuum of Luna’s surface, and maintenance and cleaning bots kept it clean and dust free. There were ballrooms, sitting rooms, studies, libraries, enormous suites for guests. Charlie could easily entertain Lucius, the Ten, their retinues, and the entire court from Almsburg, though doing so would bankrupt him before they even arrived. But he was already so close to bankruptcy it didn’t matter. It was quite grand, and quite sterile.

  What had Cesare been thinking?

  They were standing in the middle of one of the ballrooms, all of them, when Sally said, “Whoever made this place musta been thinking a king was gonna live here.”

  There was a moment of hesitation, then they all turned and looked at Charlie.

  Charlie shrugged. “Let’s take up residence in one of the suites and leave the rest empty—­hopefully that helps keep expenses down. I wish Momma were here. Does anyone know how to cook? I’m hungry.”

  They found the master suite. It had enough rooms to house ten times their number. Charlie insisted on something smaller, but they argued that he was the master. And they argued long enough that he finally gave in.

  For the next two days he alternated between pouring over the de Lunis accounts with Winston and Paul, and exploring Starfall’s halls with Janice and Sally. The three of them were deep in the bowels of Starfall’s cellars on the morning of their third day when Sally called, “Hey Frankie. Look at this.”

  Sally stood in the intersection of two corridors holding a computer tablet linked into Starfall’s main systems. She turned it to one side, then the other, and her brow wrinkled into a frown. “It ain’t on the map,” she said.

  Janice demanded, “What ain’t on the map?”

  She and Charlie looked over Sally’s shoulder. The tablet’s screen showed a three-­dimensional map of Starfall, with a small red target pinpointing their present position.

  “This hallway here,” she said, pointing into an unlit corridor that branched off to her right.

  Charlie looked at the map carefully, and she was right. “Probably just an oversight.” Nevertheless, he stepped into the dark corridor and the palace’s system responded by turning on the lights. They were surprised to find a blind corridor about three meters long that ended in a featureless stone wall. Charlie stopped and stared at it, while Janice stepped up to it and pressed her hand against its surface.

  “This is weird,” Sally said. “Look at this, Frankie.”

  Charlie looked over her shoulder again, and now the blind corridor did appear on the map. “As soon as we walked in here it showed up.” She turned around, retraced her steps back out of the corridor. “No, it’s still there now.” Charlie followed her to have a look for himself. “Wow!” she said as he stepped out of the corridor. “It’s gone now. Go back, Frankie.”

  They discovered by simple experimentation that the blind corridor appeared on the system map only when Charlie entered it.

  “Frankie,” Janice called suddenly. “Come look at this.” Janice was at the end of the corridor, running her hand over the featureless wall. “The wall ain’t where the wall is.”

  She was right. It appeared as if Janice’s hands had sunk into the stone of the wall up to her wrists. Charlie pressed his hands against the wall, watched his own hands appear to sink into the stone, found that the actual, physical wall was about ten centimeters behind where it appeared to be, and it was as featureless as the apparent wall. “A visual disto
rtion field,” he said, looking around for the projector. But whoever had installed it had hidden it well; he found nothing.

  “Something funny going on here, Frankie,” Janice said.

  They showed the blind corridor to Nano, Winston, and Paul, but Charlie swore them all to secrecy, and they agreed not to discuss it or reveal its existence to anyone else. Cesare, even after his death, was up to something.

  Late one afternoon Winston showed Charlie some discrepancies he’d discovered in the de Lunis accounts. “You’re right,” Charlie conceded. “It doesn’t add up. And everything points to this shipping company on Istanna: Allston Import/Export. What’s interesting is that while they lose money every year, it’s always exactly five percent of operations, never more, never less. And you know nothing of this?”

  “Your father was quite mysterious about all this. I knew that he’d purchased the rights to the de Lunis ducal seat, and he made some additions to this estate—­though I’d never seen it and was not aware of its extent—­and I was responsible for the legal framework surrounding your inheritance. But as to the de Lunis properties and accounts, my first glimpse of these records was only after your father’s death. Your Grace, in this I’m as ignorant as you.”

  Charlie thought of the blind corridor in the cellars; the de Lunis accounts were no less mysterious. “I think it’s time I paid a visit to Allston Import/Export.”

  Winston considered that for a moment. “It would be appropriate for a newly installed lord to tour his holdings, to review accounts with key managers. And there’s no reason you shouldn’t begin with Istanna.”

  Charlie looked at the paperwork they’d been reviewing. How was he going to tour his holdings when he was broke? Nano would give him a free ride, for a while. But ­people would expect him to travel in the style befitting a Duke of the Realm. “Oh, what the hell! Let’s get Nano and plan a little trip.”