“Yeah, I had a few ancestors who fought against them. So why hide the thing here?” Ivan asked, confused. “Not that Planet X isn’t a good place to hide something.”
“Good question,” Lt. Delio agreed. “However, we’re far more concerned with how to get her off this world at the moment. And we’re making good progress, too. We plan to have her ready to lift in about another two, three hundred hours.”
“You’re serious?” Ivan asked astonished. “A real ship? Who’s going to pilot her?” he demanded.
“Actually, most of my men are accomplished space men,” Lucas supplied. “A good seventy of them, a good crew, well versed with how to fly a ship. Especially a Sword World ship, which she is. We’ve also got a short platoon of crack neobarb infantry, a ship’s engineer, and . . . well, actually, nearly all we’re missing . . . is a ship’s cook. Someone who can help provision her, and, when she’s in flight, feed us.”
Ivan’s eyes narrowed shrewdly. “I see. And that’s where we come in?”
“Actually, yes, we are indeed short a cook, Your Majesty,” Lt. Delio admitted. “The robochefs still operate, but we don’t have the standard stocks they require, at least not yet. While most of the ship should be ready to go soon, provisioning her with enough food to last the journey is problematic. And we figured you’d be in a much better position to secure those supplies than we are.”
“Convince me she’ll fly, and promise me you’ll get me and mine off of this sorry world, and I’m in,” the un-reigning monarch grunted, cautiously.
After the lorry landed, he was a bit taken aback by the number of extremely well-built, half-naked tattooed savages bearing automatic weapons, but once he was introduced to Captain Carundun as an extraplanetary head-of-state, the neobarbarians were cordial, even though they didn’t see his “paperwork”.
Grinning good-naturedly at the man’s confusion, Lucas escorted him through the remnants of the savage camp under the landing legs and into the now well-lit interior of the Iron Crown. A quick lift to the bridge, where Max and three of his crewmen were repairing or replacing – or in some cases building from scratch – the control circuitry required to manage basic functions aboard the ship, and King Ivan became much more impressed.
“You’ve got Maxie working on this?” Ivan asked, incredulously. “Allright, Trask, your capital just went up. Max is the only decent technician in camp. Tore a microray rig out of an old robochef for me, installed it into the kitchen like it was right from the factory.”
“This is a little more complicated than that, Your Majesty,” Max chuckled, dropping his tools to shake the stocky chef’s hand. “Ivan, great to see you. So, Luke, you want to bring this ape along, too?”
“And his whole family, if they’ll come. We need a cook, don’t we? And a provisioner?”
“Most of the robochefs that are intact lack basic staples,” Lt. Delio agreed. “Could you find a way to procure enough supplies for an entire crew of a hundred or so for . . . say, twenty days?”
“That’s being generous,” Max said, shaking his head. “We don’t have much more than twenty hours of power for the Dillinghams.”
“For now,” Lucas said. “That’s assuming you can get her to fly,” he added, a bit of challenge to his voice.
“She’ll fly,” Max agreed, wiping his hands on a filthy rag. “Not gracefully, at least until we can get her Abbots tuned, but she’ll get us to orbit. And at least twenty-two hours of hyperspace, at a smidge under a half light-year an hour.”
“That’s the best you can do?” Lucas asked, dismayed.
“Without a fresh power supply and a lifter full of shiny new parts, yes,” Max said, defensively. “We need plutonium, Luke. I told you, that’s the only way.”
“Isn’t there some out at the spaceport?” King Ivan asked, rubbing his bristly chin.
“If we want to brave their guns with a short crew and almost no ammunition,” Lucas pointed out. “But it is a possibility. What about that settlement on the other side of the island?”
“The natives?” Ivan snorted. “They don’t have any plutonium. They barely have electricity. It’s just a cluster of huts around a warehouse and clinic, in the middle of about nine aquaculture lagoons. I went out there a few years ago, to see if the mollusks were any good to eat. They ain’t,” he added. “Just pearl machines.”
That niggled at Lucas’ subconscious for some reason. There was something important about that, he knew.
“Ivan,” he asked, cautiously. “You didn’t by chance ask the natives what world we’re on, did you? They can’t call it ‘Planet X’.”
“Uh . . . Myra? Mira? Something like that? Could barely understand them,” he admitted. “They speak Lingua Terra, but its pidgin, Balduran so half their words are derived from French. But you can communicate with them just enough to trade, if you have anything they want for their pearls. Pretty things, but the only thing worth a damn on the whole planet.”
“It’s not a planet,” Lucas reminded him. “It’s a moon. In fact, gentlemen, now I think I know which moon.”
“What?” Max asked, confused. “You suddenly just know where we are?”
“I’m sure of it.” Lucas could hear his wife’s voice as clear as if it were yesterday, and not at a busy meeting over a year ago. Ludmilla grows pearls. Some kind of aquaculture. That’s why the Atonians want to protect it.
“ ‘Mira’ is a degeneration of ‘Milla, which is short for ‘Ludmilla’ -- a small moon that Aton recently put on a list of protected planets. I was at the Volund conference where they proposed it, and I’d never heard of it,” he explained. “Later, my wife mentioned she’d heard of it.”
“Ludmilla,” Max repeated, “But this can’t be the entirety of civilization on Ludmilla,” he complained. “A prison camp and a village of pearl divers?”
“Why not?” Lucas proposed. “It’s . . . a port, of sorts.”
“Oh, it’s habitable, but it isn’t colonizable,” Max disagreed. “At least not under Old Federation rules, which they would have followed if they were going to hang a real name on it like that. And Federation colonial rules stated that a planet could not be considered viable for colonization unless at least five percent or more of its surface was dry land. That was considered enough land to sustain a human population in perpetuity -- don’t ask me how they came up with that figure.”
“So?” Ivan demanded.
“So . . . I’ve been all around this island. It’s only seventy miles long at most, and not more than thirty wide. That’s tiny. But it can’t be the only land here, or it wouldn’t have been colonized.”
“But they did, so . . . there’s another island on the horizon is what you’re saying?” Lucas asked, intrigued.
“Probably on the antipodes,” suggested Lt. Delio. “The whole world isn’t more than four thousand miles wide. Another big island or continent would give you the needed land area to proceed with colonization.”
“And if it was the antipodes, out of sight of the horizon,” Lucas agreed, “then it would make a dandy prison. Call it ‘Planet X’ and pretend the other side of the world doesn’t exist. Why even bother trying to escape if no one believes there’s anyplace to escape to?”
“But have a base close enough by to help out if there’s a real insurrection,” nodded Max. “Clever.”
“And the folks on the other side . . . well, why would they come here?” asked Ivan.
“Exactly,” agreed Max. “But if there’s civilization, that means a civilian spaceport. Which means plutonium. And other things we need. Getting them presents a problem.”
“I don’t see how,” Lucas said.
“Well, we don’t happen to have a lot of cash on hand at the moment,” Max complained. Lucas clapped the young man on the shoulder.
“Max,” he chuckled, “here’s an old Space Viking saying: when you have a heavily armed space ship, you don’t need cash.”
“But . . . it’s not heavily armed,” Max observed. “You barely hav
e enough ammunition to load the few working guns you have left. And almost no missiles.”
“When there’s a Space Viking ship looming over your city, threatening to nuke you to ashes, are you really going to stop and question their veracity?” Lucas proposed.
Max considered. “I see your point,” he conceded. “So we’re to be pirates, eh?”
“Space Vikings,” Lucas corrected.
“There’s a difference?”
“Pirates loot ships. Space Vikings loot worlds. More profit in it.”
“I never appreciated the distinction before,” Max admitted. “All right, we’ll be Space Vikings. You think we can bluff our way into plutonium?”
“If you think you can figure out a decent place to go once we get it,” Lucas replied.
“Point taken,” the Tinker admitted. “But let’s figure out where we are, exactly, first. Let’s take a look at a few charts . . .” he said, pulling up the astrogation computer display he’d recently repaired.
“Let’s see, if we’re on Ludmilla . . . oh, Ghu, that’s a long way out! Great place for a prison, though, you have to admit. The good news, gents, is that with our current engines and power, we can make it anyplace within ten light-years . . . and we have a winner. A planet called Kumarbi.”
“Never heard of it,” admitted Lucas.
“Me, neither,” agreed Ivan.
“That’s because it’s almost as big of a flyspeck as Planet X,” explained Max, wryly, as he studied the display. “But it fits. Ludmilla, according to this chart, is around the same type of Jovian world we’re orbiting, under the same class sun. So I’d say your guess was fairly astute, Luke.
“Which means that Kumarbi is a little over eleven light-years away, or just maybe barely within range, if we’re lucky. According to this, it was settled at the same time as this gem, but is a proper planet with some sort of population on it. More importantly, I have heard of it before, sort of. I believe that there’s a Gilgamesher outpost there.” Max looked up from the chart with a sigh. “And that about exhausts my knowledge of Kumarbi.”
“For all we know there’s an Atonian naval base there,” Ivan said, discouraged.
“What we do know is that it’s not Planet X,” Lucas countered. “And perhaps you’ve enjoyed your exile here, Your Majesty, but I’ve got a baby girl to get home to. Kumarbi could be crawling with Party officials and Atonian thugs, and I’d still welcome it. So tell me, Max, if we know where we are now, how far away is Tanith?” It was a question he was desperate to know – and desperately afraid to hear the answer to.
“Tanith?” Max asked, rubbing his chin again, “Let’s see . . . as the hawkmoth flies . . . we’re about thirty-three hundred light-years away. But more a more likely route back, quickest way . . . closer to thirty-eight hundred light years. If you don’t mind crossing through a big chunk of Atonian-claimed space. But there’s no way the I.C is going to make it back there in her present state, not in one jump.”
“Fine. If we make it to Kumarbi, what’s the next leg of the journey?”
“If we make it to Kumarbi,” he said, as if the question was open to doubt, “and we get decently re-supplied, then the next destination would likely be seventy light-years past that, a planet called Danu. I don’t know anything about Danu, except that Baldur claims it as part of their empire. Past Danu, it’s sixty-one light-years to Nix, or sixty-nine light-years to Ninlil. I’d recommend Ninlil.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s a technically neutral port, for one thing, established by the Baldur-Odin Treaty fifty years ago. For another, there’s a large Gilgamesh trading colony there, which means we could find some basic spare parts, if necessary.”
“What about Nix?”
“It’s controlled by Isis, small world, just beginning to recivilize – they’re at the early industrial stage, right now.”
“Baldur is ambivalent about Space Vikings,” Lt. Delio pointed out. “Isis is not. They don’t like us.”
“Which is why Ninlil is our best bet, I think. And because it’s just a hop, skip and a jump of fifty-five light-years to Uller.”
“What’s so important about Uller?” asked Ivan. “Apart from the opals?”
“Uller is a treaty-protected colony of Odin,” explained Max. “But it has special trading rights with all of the other major powers, too – that was at the Uller Company’s insistence, so that the colony wouldn’t be forced to direct all the opal trade through one monopoly. Odin still gets the best rate, but any ship can put into port on Uller and trade. Which means there might be ships from all over, there.”
“Including Marduk,” agreed Lucas, excitedly. “And if we can make it back to Mardukan territory, we can request assistance from their government. And I happen to be on extremely good terms with Prince Regent Simon Bentrik. He was at my wedding.”
“That’s pre-supposing an awful lot going right,” Max said, pessimistically. “Getting aloft. Getting supplied. Shooting our way out of here. Getting into orbit. Getting into hyperspace. Getting to Kumarbi. Getting past Kumarbi.”
“And the sun not going nova tomorrow, thank you very much,” Lucas added with a roll of his eyes. “Come on, Max: what else do you have to do that’s more pressing?”
“I’m just pointing out that it’s going to be ridiculously hard, is all,” the engineer said, irritated. “It’s all very easy to sit in the command chair and say – ‘let’s go here!’ and twist that big honking handle, but Luke, there’s a lot that’s goes on below for that to work.”
“So it’s a challenge,” Lucas encouraged. “How many other engineers do you know who’ve brought a junked Sword Worlds ship back from the dead?”
“None,” admitted, the tech, as he led them all to the Captain’s Lounge, a small office-and-waiting room off of the main bridge. He plopped into an over-stuffed office chair at the big conference table and helped himself to a drink from the decanter. “But that doesn’t mean I relish the task. And want to risk my life on the result.”
“I’ve ridden in your aircar,” Lucas reminded him. “If you can make that junkpile fly . . .”
“Hyperspace is different,” Max said, shaking his head as he sipped the Haultecleran bourbon. Lt. Delio poured rounds for the rest of them. “Hyperspace you can’t fool around with. It is reality itself you’re bending. That takes power and control, Luke, power and control. Right now we got a tiny bit of power and not much more control. We throw her into nothingness without a good way to get out again . . . well, it’s going to be a long trip if we aren’t careful. Eternal.”
There was a lot of truth to that. Every year ships were lost in hyperspace, due to a hundred things that could go wrong. Even if the best-case scenario happened and your ship got dumped back into reality, it was often into the voids between stars, trapped by the limits of the speed of light and doomed to lifetimes of flight in normal space before you got to any star. “I don’t care, Max: you’ll find a way.”
“Glad you’re so confident,” he said, ruefully.
“I am,” Lucas agreed. “Look, what were the chances I’d end up here? After the Wizard sent me a photoprint of this very ship? And me and my men being the only ones on this side of the galaxy who knew how to open her up?”
“Look, you’ve been lucky, I know,” Max agreed. “I just want to be sure you know what we’re risking here.”
“I know what we’re risking by staying,” Ivan said, visibly appreciating the fine whiskey in his glass. “I saw my father go from being a strong, capable leader of men to being reduced to working in a restaurant his loyal retainers put together, and dying a bitter, useless old man. My wife was beaten down by how depressing this place was, and she couldn’t take it and died. Leaving me and my family here to rot. Now that I’ve got a chance to get off this rock, I’ve got to take it. So I don’t care if we end up on Nifflheim, just get us off Planet X!”
“Wait, did you say ‘the Wizard’?” Max asked, instantly curious.
“Yes, some figure
who uses that name has been advising His Highness and the Realm for the last year,” Lt. Delio answered, smoothly. “Among the intelligence he – or she – provided to us was a photoprint of this very ship, taken in front of a city on Ludmilla.”
Princess Valerie's War Page 31
