Princess Valerie's War

by Terry Mancour

  But there were many, many more who hated Aton, the Party, and all that it stood for. And some had been just too violent or too anti-social to live amongst the sterile confines of civilization. There was an ample gangster population, for instance, Lucas noticed: shifty-eyed men surrounded by overbearing thugs as they walked across the camp, other people moving out of their way.

  There was a ring around the headquarters building of small shanty shops, the “commercial district” of the camp, wherein just about anything could be purchased. A single avenue – actually, just a wide space between hemispheres of the camp – continued the commercial district all the way to the edge of the camp, where there was a rough little market set-up to trade vegetables and scavenged items. There were shops dedicated to gardening and microbooks, to clothing – all gray, Lucas noted – to shoes, a few small restaurants offering locally grown vegetables, a few bars selling homemade brews which tasted foul, and a few shops wherein the comfort of a man or woman could be rented by the half-hour, no questions asked.

  Those last shops were the most frightening. About a third of the camp’s population was female, but the constant rain, mud, and rough conditions were brutal. As hard as the women tried to beautify themselves, the result was depressing and sad, not alluring in the slightest.

  In just a few hours, Lucas was able to figure out that the more frightened of the wilderness a prisoner was, the closer they tried to get to the headquarters building and its illusion of security. Those who were antithetical to the Atonian regime tended to stay on the outskirts of the camp. And plenty of those on the outermost rim were willing to brave the dangers of the wilderness to bring back items for exchange.

  While wild-caught food was a hot commodity – although one bite of the slug-like white meat offered at one vendor turned Lucas’ stomach – the big draw was the scavenging.

  “Yeah, Aton drops all their high-end garbage here,” a short, balding vendor explained to him, once he made it clear he was new in town. “Every big project that goes to pot but might be too embarrassing to just mass-convert gets sent here. Anything embarrassing. Wreckage. Trash. Wasted government funds on projects that don’t work. That sort of thing. The mudflats are one massive junkyard, so some of these fellas try to re-assemble the junk. That’s what I do, re-sell the junk.”

  And junk it was. The pile of rusty scraps on the vendor’s blanket was an eclectic mix of jerry-rigged electronics, simple machines inexpertly repaired, and even battered toys. Lucas poked through it with interest, though he didn’t see anything he or his men needed.

  That evening the three teams re-converged at Lucas’ quarters to exchange information and share a meal together. Lucas established that as a regular practice, as an exercise in keeping his men together in the face of the bitter despair that they were all starting to feel.

  “I know it looks bad right now, gentlemen. But I expect you to fulfill your sworn duties, and I will fulfill mine. There has got to be some way off of this rock, and if we have to build a space ship ourselves out of junk, mud and Party literature, we will find it.”

  “Wouldn’t it be easier just to take the one that brought us?” one man asked from the rear, Mr. Pierce, his voice dangerously close to whining. “Or the next one, seeing as how that one left already. I mean, we don’t even know where the Nifflheim we are!”

  “An excellent point, Mr. Pierce: thank you for volunteering to find out. We can table the issue of escape for the moment, however, until we have a better idea of what resources we have to work with. Mr. Delio, can you sum up the local political situation for us?”

  The young officer shrugged elegantly. “About what you would figure, Sire. Outside of the central Headquarters Complex, six or seven large blocs control the camp, proper, broken down by region. Typical prison power blocs: ethnic and political divisions, criminal organizations, plus some out-and-out thugs. Most are fairly well-organized mutual-protection-and-support groups that oversee social assistance, but each one has a militant component. The big ones surround the blasted Atonian Planetary Nationalist Party – sycophants who believe if they scream how devout they are to the Party, they might get to go home again – two criminal gangs exported from Aton in toto, it seems, something called the United Front for the Reformation of Aton, an organization known as the Planet X Cooperative, and the Atonian Royalists. That’s a little group of exiles sent here after the Party took total control fifty years ago or so and decided that being a King was not congruent with the Party’s egalitarian social policies. The King was a Mardukan puppet, by all accounts, but still . . . it seems rude.”

  “Yes, it’s shocking how poorly the Atonians treat royalty,” mused Lucas, with a smirk. That brought a welcome chuckle from the rest of them. “Anyone else?”

  “Those are the large groups, give or take, but there are plenty of smaller communities too. Monks from Nuit, neobarb insurgents from Sif, corporate criminals from Enlil, warlords from Bubastis, pirates, spies, and ne’er-do-wells of all sorts from across their fetid little empire. Some are dangerous, most just want to be left alone and go home.”

  “And does everyone play well together?” Lucas asked.

  “Actually, things are fairly civilized, considering. There’s sporadic fighting over territory, women, and supplies, but the local gangs have the situation pretty well in hand. Some of them go back to the camp’s founding. Some are more recent imports. There’s around a two-week waiting period considered customary before we’ll be expected to declare our loyalties . . . or decide to head for the swamps. Constant new arrivals either get assimilated or they get booted into the wilderness pretty quickly.”

  “Good, it sounds like a system we can work with. Mr. Jameson, how’s our food situation?”

  “Well, we learned an awful lot about why water conservation isn’t just important to Aton’s society and the Party, but how it could save the planet. Oh, and why aristocratic forms of government are inherently inferior, oppress the people, and are doomed to failure.”

  “I’ll be quite interested in seeing that one,” Lucas said, dryly. That got another chuckle out of the men. That was a good sign. Most of them were scared and depressed over their seemingly impossible plight. He needed to appear relaxed, calm, and in charge of the situation – and no matter what, don’t allow them to see just how much he shared their feelings.

  “Now, the first order of business is raising our standard of living a little. I don’t want a man here to go hungry or cold tonight, or any night hereafter. So we focus on building up whatever surplus we can, and ensure we won’t have to spend all of our time with our eyes glued to Aton’s propaganda screens. Once we manage that, and figure out where we are, we’ll take the next step and figure out how to get home. Remember, Tanith is counting on us. Dismissed.”

  As the men wandered off to their bunks, Lt. Delio and Lt. Barnes hung back to address him directly, as Lt. Jameson helped get the men to their assigned bunks in the prefab sheds.

  “Okay, Gentlemen, now tell me what you really think,” Lucas said quietly. They glanced at each other and nodded.

  “Well, Sire, the Atonians in charge here aren’t any happier about the posting than we are – it’s a punishment, akin to banishment. That tiny settlement on the other side of the continent is the only other human habitation, and they don’t possess a spaceport. Or contragravity. They ship whatever it is they grow here to the camp a few times a year, and then it goes back with the prison ship,” Barnes supplied.

  “Further, the tribes surrounding the camp are, indeed, feral,” added Delio. “But not entirely unfriendly. They prowl the junkyards and slag heaps for things they can trade in camp. Descendants of prisoners, or neobarbs from other worlds trying to rebuild their lives. No raiding of the camp, from what I can tell. The tribes all have alliances with the power blocs inside the camp, so it seems like a pretty stable system. Oh, until recently: a band of new prisoners weren’t playing nicely and got kicked out of camp. They built a little fort in the wastelands and everyone else
is afraid to go near there, now. They were insurgents on some Atonian trade world who got caught in a trap, then got sent here for ‘reeducation’. And they apparently don’t like anyone who isn’t them strongly enough to shoot them.”

  “They have guns?” Lucas asked, intrigued.

  “Crossbows,” Delio corrected, running his finger across his chin thoughtfully. “The weapon of choice of the scrapheap. And spears and knives and clubs, of course. Guns are rare here on . . . Planet X,” he continued with a smirk. “Not even the guards have much ammunition. The commandant is afraid of mutiny or an uprising – it’s happened a few times -- so they only have a few rounds each. The rest is stored in a cargo container in orbit, where one of the lighters at the spaceport can go fetch it if needed.”

  “Now that is interesting,” Lucas nodded. “Very interesting. Give the guards just enough rounds to keep the prisoners at bay, but not so many that they start feeling independent. We might be able to use that. Anything else? Potential allies, perhaps?”

  “Hard to tell, yet, Sire,” admitted Barnes. “Almost everyone here is from Aton or one of its dependents. With a few foreigners who got in the way mixed in. On the bright side, there might be a few Mardukans around. But that doesn’t mean that they’d necessarily be well-disposed to us. It looks like we’re the first Space Vikings to get sent here, and there’s no one particularly interested in being our friend just yet.”

  “Keep looking around,” Lucas ordered, tiredly. “See who’s got the most resources, the most man-power, and the most pull with the guards. If we’re going to get off this planet, we’re not going to be able to do it alone. If that means taking over the whole camp and starting an uprising, capturing a ship, and flying it to a friendly port, fine. But we’re going to need some allies before we can do much of anything.”

  The men from Tanith ended up acquiring one, sooner than Lucas expected. The next day, after sitting through an hour-long presentation on the Flaws Of The Old Federation And Why The Planetary Nationalist Party Is A Better Way and a lackluster pre-packed breakfast, he took a couple of his bodyguards back to the marketplace to see if the few personal possessions they’d manage to keep from being confiscated could be traded for something more helpful. They walked the long way around, discovering a corridor of tent stalls and booths that stretched from the headquarters building all the way out to the edge of camp.

  Along the way they stopped and asked several people what planet they were on, receiving a wry laugh for their troubles at each stop. “Planet X” was the only name anyone, even the guards, knew the world by. It was a moon, fairly distant from the mud-colored Jovian world around which it orbited, and the star in the sky was unremarkable, likely a G2 or G3. No one seemed to recognize the stellar constellations, either. Which made escape that much more difficult. It was hard to plot a course to somewhere you knew unless you knew where you were to begin with.

  One of the vendors was a junk dealer who specialized in small consumer items that had been reclaimed from the trash piles. There were a few electric lights that had been rigged into makeshift hand torches, an electric razor, a couple of water heaters made from heating elements scavenged from other sources, but nothing looked particularly helpful to their cause.

  “You really want some good stuff? Go see Max,” the gruff little vendor assured him. “Young guy, just got in a few thousand hours ago. He started buying some stuff off of me, when he first came here. I like to help the new guys out, it’s good for business. Anyway, Max started buying stuff from me, fixing it, and then selling it. Fixes stuff better than anyone. I took to calling him Max the Tinker, and now he’s got a booth a few rows north. Tell him Jerry sent you,” he added.

  “You think that this Max might have something helpful, Sire?” Lt. Barnes, one of his escorts asked.

  “We have to explore all possibilities,” admitted Lucas. “I at least want to see what he has.”

  A few more rows over they found his shop and its owner, but the man was in the middle of a negotiation with another customer – if being held off the ground while a muscular giant screamed at you could be considered a negotiation.

  “I won’t pay that much!” the big man bellowed. “You give it to me for half price, or I’ll just take it!”

  “N-now, Mr. Flack, that’s not fair, is it?” the smaller man stammered as he struggled to get his feet to touch the ground. Flack, who had cut the sleeves off of his tunic to reveal large, muscular arms covered with tattoos of indeterminate origin, just grinned evilly and brought Max’s face to within centimeters of his own.

  “Fair? That’s not a word we use on Planet X, new boy!” he laughed. “Here I take what I want, and no one says otherwise. I want the music player, I get the music player. If I decide to pay you, then you’re grateful. If I decide not to pay you, then you’re grateful I let you live. Understand?”

  “Now, Mr. Flack—” Max struggled again, clutching at the powerful forearm that held him up. Then the young man twisted, and Lucas saw the flash of something shiny, maybe a knife, in Max’s hand. That was foolish, Lucas thought – unless you shoved it in the big man’s eye, a knife would likely just make him more angry.

  But it wasn’t a knife. There was a small buzzing sound and suddenly Flack let Max drop to the ground while he howled in rage and clutched at his arm.

  “You bastard!” he bellowed. “You shocked me!”

  “It’s just a little capacitor,” the tinker said, as he picked himself up. “Stings a little, but it’s harmless. I tried to tell you, I can’t—”

  “You’re a dead man!” the hulking prisoner roared as he put his head down, preparing to charge right through the young tinker.

  “Gentlemen, as entertaining as this is,” Lucas murmured, “I detest a bully.”

  “Understood, Sire,” Lt. Barnes said, glancing at his partner, Lt. Canara. They nodded to each other, and as Flack charged Barnes’ foot caught him delicately in one knee, sending him sprawling face-down in the mud, as Canara brought a booted foot down on the big man’s neck and applied enough pressure to keep him there. Flack tried to throw him off, but every time he tried to get leverage Barnes knocked his legs or arms out from under him. He finally managed to get his chin up to knee level, just in time to catch another kick to the face that left him unconscious.

  “Sorry about that,” Lucas said, nodding to the body. “I hated to tear you away from another customer . . .”

  “I appreciate the help,” Max the Tinker said, adjusting the multi-lensed glasses he wore. He was clad in the same gray tunic as everyone else, but he had added pockets all over the front and sides. “Of course, when he wakes up, he’s not going to be happy.”

  “I’m not concerned about him,” Lucas said. “I heard that you were the new fix-it guy around.”

  “That’s me,” Max admitted. “I buy a lot of old junk from the scavengers. Every now and then I can get something working. Want to see what I’ve got?”

  Most of it was consumer oriented stuff –microbook readers, old robotics parts, electric lights taken from their original fixtures and remade – but there were a few more curious items there, as well. One in particular attracted Lucas’ attention, instantly.

  “What’s this?” he asked, curious, as he held the piece up.

  “Something I got a few weeks ago,” Max supplied. “I think its part of a power converter, but it isn’t one like I’ve ever seen before.”

  “It looks similar to the ones we used back on Gram,” Barnes said, thoughtfully. “I’m not a technician, but I’ve seen the style before.”

  “Wait,” Max said, suddenly. “Did you say Gram? Isn’t that one of the Sword Worlds?”

  “Yes,” Lucas acknowledged. “Most of my men and I are from Gram. A long, long way from here. Nearly five thousand light-years.”

  The tinker whistled, long and low. “Wow. You guys are a long way from home. Uh, can I ask what brought you here to Planet X? Besides the obvious prison ship?”

  “My men and I were taken pri
soner by the Atonians near our world – Tanith, we’ve left Gram behind – and secretly tried and convicted. I was found guilty of being a Space Viking, which follows, because I really am a Space Viking. Prince Lucas Trask, of Tanith,” he said, adding a bow.

  “Hiya, Luke, they call me Max the Tinker,” the man said, shaking Lucas’ hand without being the slightest impressed by Lucas’ title. “I sure am glad to meet you, though . . . tell me,” he said, conspiratorially, “you got any interest in not being here so much any more?”

  “You mean . . . escape?” Lucas asked, looking around to see if anyone could overhear.

  “Oh, you don’t gotta worry about that,” Max said, when he realized what Lucas was worried about. “Everyone here talks about escaping. It’s like the weather: it doesn’t change, everyone talks about it, and nobody ever does anything about it.”