Princess Valerie's War

by Terry Mancour

  He was less-restrained in the officer quarters, but then so were the officers who had lived there. The cabins were opulent by comparison to the more business-like Nemesis or Corisande, with plenty of extravagant decoration (much of it looted) and extraneous décor. And by the time he explored the senior officers’ quarters, including the Captain’s cabin and the suite used by Prince Havilgar, he was in awe of how much wasted mass they’d included.

  But there were some disturbing signs in Havilgar’s cabin. It had a shabby look to it, unlike other areas of the ship, despite its ostentation. Lucas looked around very carefully, and saw unmistakable signs that the place had been lived in . . . for a while. Little things, like the enamel basin of the gold-plated sink in the bathroom that was loose and cracked. A broken mirror that had been painstaking glued back together. A well-worn deck of cards, a well-used microbook reader . . . the whole suite felt more like a cell, and less like a flying palace.

  “Seal this room,” he commanded Sebastian. “I don’t want anyone else in or out of it. There might be evidence here – of what, I don’t know. But I don’t want it disturbed.”

  The Captain’s cabin was only slightly less well-appointed, but it had apparently been put to other use after the Captain had died on Aton. Someone had converted it into a large office, and nearby staterooms also looked as if they had been used more for administrative than residential purposes. There were piles of microbooks and notebooks around, too, some neatly bound and labeled, some scattered haphazardly around a work area.

  A nearby security station clearly had the look of a guard room, down to a severely scratched table, scuff marks, and piles of dirty dishes in the sink.

  “There’s a story here, all right,” Lucas said, when he and Sebastian stopped to smoke a ridiculously bad cigarette. “Someone was imprisoned in the royal suite. Someone else kept them there. I want to know exactly who and exactly why.”

  “Perhaps we’ll find some clue on the bridge, Highness?” the young officer suggested. “Security tapes, log books – there must be some record of what went on.”

  “Excellent point – if they weren’t removed. And I believe with the lifts out we’re going to have to go through the main officer’s mess to get there. That should be amusing.”

  It was too much to hope that the Iron Crown would yield much in the way of provisions, of course – even the most well-preserved items would have likely been unpalatable, if not inedible. But other items, like the excellent distilled spirits they’d found, might still be consumable. They were surprised to find that while almost all of the original provisions were gone, a large section of storage had been stocked with Atonian military rations, only a few decades out of date. They weren’t too much worse than the food served in Camp, Lucas decided. He didn’t fancy a long trip existing on them, but it was a small price to pay for getting off of Planet X.

  The bridge did, indeed, yield some fascinating information directly, in the form of a skeletal corpse stretched out in the throne-like command chair. It was still dressed; its bony fingers still bore a readable signet ring. It only took Lucas a glance to see that it was the sigil of the royal house of Haulteclere.

  “His Royal Highness, Crown Prince Havilgar of Haulteclere,” Lucas pronounced, reverently.

  “Shot in the back of the head, Highness,” Sebastian noted. “See? Military caliber bullet, too – went right through his cheekbone, didn’t stop at all.”

  “Not exactly the noble death in battle his House portrayed,” Lucas noted, wryly. “I’m guessing that’s who was imprisoned in that suite.”

  “If he was there, Highness, where did the rest of his crew go?” wondered Sebastian.

  “Good question. Probably shipped off to someplace just like Planet X, or died in a nameless prison on Aton, or were executed as war criminals,” speculated the Prince. “Poor bastards.”

  “So the Atonians captured him, and Duke Morgan lied about it. And got everyone else on the two ships that came back to lie about it.”

  “That seems like quite a stretch,” Lucas observed. “That had to have been three or four thousand men. Can you imagine any way to keep a secret among four thousand men? Keep it so that not a whisper of it got out?”

  “Are you sure it didn’t, Highness?” the officer proposed. “Consider, what would happen if someone did start spreading the rumor that Havilgar was still alive on Aton? When there are that many men – dangerous men, sworn to Morgan – who would disagree?”

  “You have a point,” admitted Lucas. “And that was the start of a nasty dynastic war. Hard to keep your facts straight when rival houses are shooting at each other. Ah, there will be time enough to re-hash this in the future. Let’s see if any of these control boards work, shall we?”

  The controls were largely the same as on any Sword World ship, arrayed around the perimeter of the bridge in stations dedicated to different functions. There was an inner ring of controls, as well, which controlled the weapons systems and communications of the vessel. The captain’s chair faced those directly, with the command chair with their skeletal host grinning down from on high.

  Some of the boards were intact and functional – the engineering controls, for instance, that managed the ship’s interior power, lights, pseudograv, air recycling and other vital ship’s functions were thankfully untouched. The weapons stations, however, had been thoroughly disassembled. The Iron Crown couldn’t launch a slingshot from the bridge, the way things stood. Both the normal space pilot’s station and the hyperspatial astrogation station had been taken apart, but put back together again. Lucas hoped they still worked – or that Max the Tinker could repair them.

  “Highness!” Ensign Sebastian called to him, as he was inspecting the signals and communication station, “I think I found security footage! And log entries!”

  “Seal them,” Lucas ordered. “We’ll study them later. And let’s find a camera somewhere and record this, before we have to start tearing it apart to restore it. Somehow I don’t think ol’ Havilgar up there is going to want to stick around to watch, nor would I feel comfortable with him doing so. But I want to record him exactly as we found him.”

  “Why, Highness?” asked the confused engineer.

  “Because I’m starting to suspect that he’s the key to Aton’s animosity towards Tanith – and all Space Vikings. And if that’s the case, then I want to be able to have as much evidence as possible to prove it, should it become necessary.” He stared at the empty eyesockets, one exploded grotesquely outward, of the fallen monarch. “In fact, it may well prove more important that he returns to the Tanith than I do!”

  Chapter Twelve:

  Jailbreak!

  Max returned to the Iron Crown camp just before dusk, with three more Tanith spacemen Lt. Delio had selected from the crew, somewhat terrified by the treetop-clipping ride in Max’s jalopy aircar.

  All three men had technical expertise, and after being introduced to the Sifians and admitted to the ship, they eagerly fell to making repairs on the ancient ship. The first thing they got to work on was the contragravity vehicles, under Lucas’ direction. The sooner they could retire Max’s homemade flying machine, the better, in Lucas’ opinion. And having a working aircar would dramatically speed up the process of scavenging parts from the other wrecks and piles of debris that dotted the mudflats.

  For his part, Max began work on the Abbot lift-and-drive mechanism. Without it, the Dillingham hyperdrives wouldn’t matter. It took the Abbots to be able to move the incredibly massive ship even an inch, much less get her into orbit.

  Lt. Delio had sent a report explaining how he had organized the men: they would begin pulling out of the camp slowly, in threes and fours, while a small group would remain behind to act as spies and procurers. Of course the fact that there was a potentially-working space ship a few miles away was kept secret – not hard to do, as it turned out. The Space Vikings had been so poorly portrayed on the ubiquitous “re-education films” that it was rare that the rest of the camp wo
uld voluntarily interact with the Tanith men. Lt. Delio had made a deal with Max to tend his shop in the camp – they’d need some way of bartering some selected loot from the Iron Crown into things like parts and supplies, and the Tinker’s shop was ideal for that.

  The Sifians, for their part, were unhelpful in terms of repairing the ship. They were willing to engage in nearly any kind of physical activity for the effort, but outside of some very basic mechanical knowledge the workings of a space craft might as well have been magic to the neobarbarians. Without a basic understanding of physics, chemistry, and electricity, they were useless in conducting repairs.

  What they were ideal for, however, was security. After Max arrived with the second load of Space Vikings, Lucas took the time to distribute some of the infantry weapons he’d discovered to the Sifians. After breaking them down and showing them how they were not that different from the Old Federation-derived firearms they’d had experience with, the marines proved adept at being able to field-strip, clean, and re-assemble the weapons after being shown only once.

  The distribution of weapons had another unintended effect: apparently, there was some religious ritual involved with the practice. When a Sifian commander gave a gun to one of his men on their homeworld, it had mystical significance, binding that man to the commander like a spiritual oath of loyalty. Each of the marines accepted the guns – carbines, for the most part – with the utmost solemnity and each insisted on making a speech invoking his ancestors, his service record, and the holy Regs before he sat down. He made certain the holy Gunny shaman had a pistol and a submachine gun. To Captain Carundun, Lucas not only gave him a carbine and a pistol, but one of the ornate swords he’d found in the officer’s quarters

  “Among my people,” he explained as solemnly as possible, “the sword is a great symbol of our strength and honor – we are known as the Sword Worlds, and our planets are named for mystical blades from Terra’s ancient history. When a noble gives a sword to a vassal, it’s a pledge of protection, duty, and honor. To turn a sword against the one from whom it was given is considered a great dishonor. I ask that you remember this, Captain.”

  To his surprise the neobarb chieftain understood implicitly. “Treat with us honorably, Prince Lucas, and we shall not dishonor you!” he assured. “I accept this token in temporary service, until your pledge to return us home is fulfilled.” And that was the end of the matter – after that, Carundun was as attentive and as loyal to Lucas as old Noam of Tradetown. Of course, the three gallons of liquor he distributed that evening in celebration probably helped.

  That was the great thing about working with neobarbarians, Lucas reflected later, as he had one of the Tanith crewmen tend his aching shoulder, his fresh tattoo still extremely tender to the touch: they had very unsophisticated ideas about most things. Unlike civilized folk, their personal universes usually came down to very basic, simple rules. Once you understood that, and recognized the particular cultural peccadilloes their tribe, clan, or nation subscribed to, relations with them usually went pretty smoothly.

  To everyone’s surprise, the contragravity lorry was the first vehicle to be made operational, though its power cell was down to twenty percent. The thirty foot long flying platform, with the enclosed control cabin at the front, was designed for hauling loot in from the battlefield, and the sidewalls of the open bed were tall enough to keep anyone from falling out. That simplified transferring the bulk of the Tanith men to the ship. The next night, Max flew his contraption back to camp, had the Tanith men steal away to the edge of camp, and then the air-lorry was able to pick them up in bulk.

  That’s when the repair work began in earnest. While it was true that the skeleton crew who had escaped with him on the pinnace of the Nemesis had been largely junior-grade officers and inexperienced crewmen, they had all graduated from Tanith’s training program. They had all served at least one or two rotations on the Lamia, Tanith’s permanent guard ship in orbit. They were familiar enough with ship’s systems so that the least trained of them were able to help track down broken circuits, repair leaking pipes, restore simple controls, and run mass-energy converters or power tools as needed.

  Having Lt. Delio back was helpful, too. “You know when we lift, I’m going to need a ship’s executive officer,” Lucas reminded him. “That’s you. And looking at the pool of talent I have available, you’re also going to have to double as guns-and-missiles officer. That is, if we can actually fire guns and missiles. The controls are dismantled.”

  “Having seen what young Max can do, Sire, I’m hopeful,” Lt. Delio admitted. “But we have yet to settle the question of where we are. We can’t very well punch ‘Planet X’ into the computer and expect to figure that out. I’ve taken some astronomical observations on the few nights it isn’t overcast, but I haven’t recognized anything helpful. We’re a small moon revolving around a medium-sized mud-colored Jovian world which in turn revolves around a weak G4 sun. Hardly remarkable.”

  “We’ll figure it out,” Lucas assured him. “If we can get into orbit, maybe we can take some better readings, and track it down from there.” Once you located Galactic Center, and identified a few stable pulsars, after all, plotting a ship’s location wasn’t too difficult.

  Then Lucas told him about finding the late – very late – Prince Havilgar on the bridge, and the evidence that he’d been held captive aboard his own ship for an extended period of time. The two of them took great care of photographing every inch of the scene before they had the body respectfully removed to its former quarters. Lucas not only didn’t want the Royal Suite disturbed, he had no desire to sleep there himself. The captain’s quarters served him just as well – and even it was far more opulent than his stateroom on the Nemesis.

  Lt. Delio helped him sort and organize the wealth of information included there, too, at least well enough to be gone through later at their leisure. But even a preliminary review showed that the Atonians had, indeed, held Havilgar captive on the ship for years – exactly how long was unknown, but it was at least a decade – before someone put a bullet in him. There were also extensive notes on the various systems of the Iron Crown and how they differed from Atonian ships – references that proved helpful for Max as he put the ship back together again.

  Once all of the sensitive information was cleared from the bridge and sealed in the Royal Suite, Lucas turned to the task of provisioning the ship.

  Within days the water purification systems were running again, and the local environment had ample supply, so that clean, untainted water was available for drinking and bathing. The Sifians looked skeptical at the joy the Tanith men took in bathing – the neobarbs cleansed themselves quarterly, whether they needed it or not – but apart from the fine liquor and cruddy tobacco, it was easily the most luxury they’d experienced in thousands of hours. Once the tanks were full, the self-automating system ensured that there was a lavish supply for all.

  Food was another matter. While a number of local plants had been cultivated by the residents of the camp, none of it was particularly healthful, nutritious or palatable. There were mutated potatoes, a common staple of colonial life valued for their hardiness and ability to adapt to a number of climates, but the limited sunlight kept the spuds feeble-looking and small. There were Lokian serrea tubers, which grew slightly better, but they had a bitter taste and not much in the way of nutritional value. There were three or four native animals that were edible and one that was particularly tasty, if you didn’t think about what part of the beast you were eating, so Lucas detailed a Sifian hunting party to go in search of the creatures on a daily basis. It also gave them an opportunity to practice with their carbines, although they viewed hunting with guns with general disdain. Firearms were for fighting – the Sifian who couldn’t stalk his prey and slaughter them by hand didn’t deserve his first Private’s chevron tattoo.

  But as prolific hunters as they were, there was a lot of crew to be fed on a spaceship. Over seventy Tanith men, twenty-six Sifians, and Max ma
de almost a hundred people to feed three meals a day. And at least a few hundred hours worth of food would have to be procured and stored, assuming the Iron Crown would fly again. After discarding almost all of the inedible rations aboard the ship, Lucas realized he’d have to find a better way to supply food for his people. A week after he’d left it, he and one the Golden Hand guards, Lt. Jameson, returned to the prison camp in the middle of the night. After checking in with the two Tanith men watching Max’s booth, they wandered towards the center of the camp, to the commercial center.

  “So how do we go about ordering enough provisions for a hundred people for an extended space journey from someone without rousing suspicion, Lieutenant?” Lucas asked, conversationally.