Princess Valerie's War

by Terry Mancour

  “And . . . ?” she asked, pointedly.

  “And . . . they can’t find him,” she revealed, dramatically.

  “WHAT?” Valerie shrieked.

  “I said, they can’t find him. He escaped.”

  “How the hell did he escape?” Karffard barked. “He escaped? From the toughest, most secret prison in Aton’s empire?”

  “Pretty much,” nodded Myrna, casually. “Escaped with all of his men. And blew up the prison pretty good too, before he left, from what the report said.”

  “But how did he leave?” begged Valerie.

  “That’s . . . kind of murky, right now,” Myrna admitted. “He apparently stole a space ship.”

  “How could Lucas steal a space ship?” Nikkolay asked, confused. “I mean, he had his men with him, and he’s a good captain, but . . .?”

  Myrna gave a shrug. “Who knows? But he’s not under the Atonians’ power any more. Only they can’t admit that, or they’ll look weak and stupid. Well, stupid-er. So they’re clinging to the story that they just won’t budge on returning Lucas, and hope that you guys will just go away or forget about him or something.”

  Valerie snorted. “Fat chance!”

  Myrna nodded, sympathetically. “That’s what I said,” she agreed. “Those words exactly, actually. There’s no way you’d let a—let Prince Lucas stay a prisoner. If you’re willing to go after a thousand common-born neobarb whores—”

  “Wait, you heard about that?” Valerie asked, aghast. Of course she had, she reminded herself mentally. Myrna was kept informed of important matters to the Kingdom she’d one day rule, and Marduk’s continuing interest in Tanith certainly counted.

  “Heard about it? Valerie, it was all over the Mardukan newscasts for weeks! You got named Woman of the Year in some places. The ‘Mardukan Space Viking Princess With A Heart Of Gold’. It beat the hell out of all of those ‘local girl makes good’ stories they ran about your wedding and coronation.”

  “Language, young lady!” Valerie snapped automatically, before she realized it. If she offended the soon-to-be-reigning monarch of over six billion people, she didn’t show it.

  Indeed Myrna looked especially sheepish. “Sorry! I’ve been hanging around space men for too long.”

  “So,” Nick asked, drumming his fingers, “while I appreciate the speedy update on Lucas’ whereabouts, that still doesn’t answer the question of why you were the one to bring it.”

  “That’s . . . a loooong story,” she assured, making it perfectly clear that it was a long story she didn’t want to tell.

  “I find I have my evening free,” Karffard said, settling in eagerly. “This should be good.”

  “I, um, I kind of . . . took the yacht for a spin,” she said, twisting her hair with one hand. “Um, it was just supposed to be for a few days, of course—”

  “Just how does the most-protected person on Marduk manage to sneak off and take a space ship for a spin without her legal guardian knowing?” asked Valerie, pointedly.

  “Well, they’d never let Princess Myrna leave Mardukan space without at least a couple of cruisers for escort,” she admitted. “I mean, I can’t go to the beach without five hundred guards and retainers! And if I had tried to get aboard as ‘Princess Myrna’, they’d be on the screen to Prince Simon faster than hyperspace. So . . . I borrowed a trick from Daddy,” she said, referring to her late father, the Crown Prince. “I had Sir Thomas make the arrangements for ‘Baroness Cragsdale’. The nobility go for jaunts all the time,” she dismissed. “No one checks to see if they’re secretly Royalty. If a Baroness or a Count want to check out their family’s yacht, the port authorities just let ‘em, mostly. Or they get chewed out and re-assigned to some remote lunar base. And since I had the clearance codes from Mardukan Naval Intelligence—”

  “And just how did you come by those, young lady?” demanded Valerie.

  “Hey! I’m a future head-of-state! I have to know those codes!” she protested. “I get briefed on crap like that all the time.”

  “That explains how you did it,” reasoned Nikkolay, “but it doesn’t really cover why you did it.”

  “Oh,” Myrna said, guiltily. “That. Okay, um, have you ever heard of Lady Millicent’s Academy For Young Ladies?” she asked. “It’s a lot like Planet X, only without the glowing reputation for charm.”

  “Hey!” Valerie protested. “I went to Lady Millicent’s! It’s been the school of choice for the Mardukan aristocracy for over two hundred years! Every lady in the Royal Family goes there!”

  “I know!” Myrna said, rolling her eyes expressively. “Prince Simon pointed that out like a million times when he was trying to convince me to go! He and the whole court! They want me there for four years!” she said, pronouncing it as if were a prison sentence. “Steven doesn’t have to go – he’s a cadet at the Naval Academy, now! He gets some adventure to look forward to until we get married!”

  Count Steven Ravary was Myrna’s distant cousin, and also the son of Prince Regent Simon Bentrik. He was a year older than Myrna, but the two had known that they were to be wed since Myrna was twelve, in an effort to consolidate Simon’s hold on power in the aftermath of the Mardukan Affair. Myrna and Steven had both accepted the fact, and since they were childhood playmates they were generally well-disposed to the idea.

  “You know what I have to look forward to? Four years of ‘how to throw a tea party’ and ‘how to hire the right servants’ and ‘History of the Kingdom and its Nobility’? I’d rather go to Planet X!” she said, defiantly. “When Prince Simon decided he was going to be unreasonable about it . . . well, I borrowed a trick from you, Valerie. I commandeered the ship and gave myself the mission. I mean, this is about Prince Lucas!” she said, ardently. “I couldn’t keep you waiting for a message like that! And I couldn’t very well let some miserable intelligence officer give you that kind of news!” she said, as if that had justified everything.

  “Don’t you dare blame this stunt on me, young lady!” Valerie reproved, heatedly. “I wasn’t trying to escape my responsibilities, I was embracing them! There’s a difference!”

  “I’m embracing mine, too!” the teen whined. “C’mon! I’m gonna run the whole planet in about five years! I’ve got people who can plan a tea party and tell me any applicable history I need to know!”

  “Running away from finishing school is not the same thing as embracing your responsibilities!”

  “It is too!” Myrna said, defiantly. “Look, I’ve only got maybe four, five years before they pin me down and make me wear that stupid, gaudy, heavy crown for the rest of my life! And I am not going to spend it learning how to arrange flowers and fold table linens!”

  “All right, all right, calm down,” Nikkolay said, reasonably. “Let us at least inform Prince Simon of your whereabouts – there’s been a rash of princess kidnappings in our neighborhood, in case you haven’t heard,” he said, dryly. “I’m sure he’s got half the fleet out looking for you by now!”

  “I left a note!” Myrna said, defensively. “I told him where I was going! I brought Sir Thomas along!” she added, looking to her aide for help. The old man looked both amused and uncomfortable.

  “Sir Thomas?” Valerie said, her eyebrows raised. “You allowed this, this truancy to happen?”

  The old knight cleared his throat. “Actually, Highness, I was about to inform His Royal Highness of our departure, when Her Royal Highness reminded me – in no uncertain terms – that I had taken an oath of fealty and loyalty to her House, not Prince Simon’s, and she compelled me to stay silent until we were able to get away.”

  “Your attention to your duty does you credit, Sir Thomas,” Valerie said, darkly. “But there is duty and then—”

  “Lady Val— sorry, Your Highness, have you ever tried to argue with a fourteen year-old girl?”

  Valerie blinked. Her training had been in early childhood development, not adolescent development. For a reason. “No, Sir Thomas, not since I was that age,” she admitted.<
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  “Well, Highness, I have five daughters, God bless them, and I raised them all to maturity. I’m no greenhorn when it comes to . . . willful and spirited children,” he said, smiling fondly at the blushing Princess Myrna. “But please believe my utmost sincerity when I say that I would rather charge an enemy gun emplacement with a feather duster and a bag of rocks than try to keep Her Highness from doing what she’s set her mind to.” While there was definitely a reproving tone to his voice, he could not also disguise the note of fatherly pride. “She gave me an order. I followed it.”

  “The damage has been done,” sighed Valerie. “And while I can’t approve of your methods, I certainly welcome you to enjoy our hospitality – Baroness Cragsdale.”

  “Thank you, Highness,” Myrna said, curtseying sarcastically. “Please don’t send me back to Lady Millicent’s! I’ll claim refugee status, if that helps! I want to stay here for a while and learn about, um, Space Viking culture. It would be an important element for putting my future reign into perspective,” she said, with exaggerated solemnity.

  The adults in the room couldn’t help it – they all burst out laughing.

  “You may stay for a few hundred hours,” promised Valerie, “but then you have to go back and face your guardian’s wrath. Sorry, Myr, not even I can save you from that.”

  The teen shrugged. “I figured. I’m not worried. I’m gonna be the Queen someday – what’s he going to do?”

  “Clap you in irons?” suggested Nikkolay, gruffly. “Confine you to quarters? Internal exile?”

  “He wouldn’t dare!” Myrna said, almost shrieking.

  “Myrna, you know what you did was wrong,” Valerie said, firmly. “You have to face the music.”

  ‘Oh, I know!” she pouted. “But at least I got a holiday out of it.”

  Just then Lady Ashley arrived with the sleepy-eyed Princess Elaine, and the teenager insisted on rolling around on the floor to play with the nine-month old baby. Elaine, for her part, was enchanted with the lively and giggly teen, and started cackling manically and grabbing her hair and pulling. Valerie watched indulgently for a few moments before she excused herself to speak alone with Sir Thomas.

  “Is what she says accurate?” she asked, quietly, when they went out on the veranda for a cigarette.

  “Minus the hyperbole, yes,” the Mardukan knight agreed. “Things are pretty tense back home right now, Val—Your Highness.”

  “Please, Thomas, suspend the royalty when we’re in private. I’m still Valerie. Just a really, really worried Valerie with a crown, a throne, and a space fleet.”

  “If anything, Myrna downplayed just how much your raids have spooked the Atonian commercial interests,” the knight continued. “Your raiders have taken nine ships in the last four months. And hundreds of prisoners. If kidnapping your husband was supposed to keep Tanith quiet, or sucker you into making a foolish attack, it backfired in their faces. Now the Atonian corporations are screaming for guarded convoys, but the fact is that Aton’s expansion has left them with too few ships to cover both defensive work at home and convoy duty.”

  “Good,” Valerie said, as she leaned casually against the railing and lit her cigarette. “What do you think the chances are that they’ll attack here in force?”

  “Well, from what I saw in orbit, it would take a pretty sizable fleet to do it,” Sir Thomas said, approvingly. “Are all of those ships Space Vikings?” he asked, flashing his eyes skyward.

  Valerie chuckled. “Actually, most of those are Royal Navy of Tanith ships, now,” she corrected. “Just before my husband got himself kidnapped, he very brilliantly not only stopped an attack on Amateratsu – that’s one of our treaty allies in the League of Civilized Worlds which also happens to produce a whole lot of gadolinium – but he figured out where the losers headed when they got beaten, followed them there, and ended up capturing three ships on the ground in the process. Brand new, Sword World-built, too,” she added. “We’re just scrambling to find crews for them all, now.”

  “Impressive,” Sir Thomas nodded. “It looks like your ready to invade someplace.”

  “Tanith has plenty of enemies,” Valerie shrugged. “Aton, Gram, Xochitl, and those are just are classier ones. We’ve strengthened the moonbase, added more launch sites planetside, and armed the common people.”

  “And continued to build ships,” Sir Thomas added, gesturing to the distant Gorram Yards.

  “Well, that’s probably going to stop, for a while,” she sighed. “We’ve got more ships now than men to run them. And now that we’ve got a bumper-crop of captured merchantmen, too, I’m afraid we’re probably going to have some slack capacity for a while.”

  “Not necessarily,” Sir Thomas said. “I’ve been a lot more active in politics since our daring escape,” he grinned. “Hard not to be, with His Highness not certain whom he could trust. Prince Simon has wanted as many loyal men around him as possible, so I get to overhear an awful lot. You know the Malverton and lunar shipyards are going at full production now, as we try to rebuild the fleet. It’s a great jobs program, too,” he added. “And without a functioning parliament, there’s no one to start yelling about the expense. But it’s slow going. The first ship won’t be ready for another six months, and the others will take just as long.”

  “Well, we can loan you a ship or two if you need them,” Valerie said reluctantly, biting her lip.

  “Oh, no, we have enough to cover our defense obligations – but it occurs to me that if your yard is going to be idle, then I might be able to persuade His Highness to contract out some work. Since our yards are focusing on replacing our ships-of-the-line that were destroyed, they won’t be able to work on the smaller ships we want for at least two or three years – and we’ll need them sooner. So if your people can build to Mardukan specifications, it’s possible we can strike a deal for, say, six thousand-foot cruisers?”

  “That would keep Basil’s people eating for a couple of years,” she nodded. Then she cut her eyes at Sir Thomas slyly. “And, of course, if Tanith was building them, then they wouldn’t exactly be visible to every Atonian spy in Malverton, either, would they?”

  “Suddenly producing a fleet of brand-new cruisers out of nowhere would keep them off-balance, yes,” admitted the old knight with a smile. “It would at least upset some of their calculations.”

  “It’s also possible that we could do it cheaper here, too,” Valerie encouraged. “I know that the cost per ship for us seems a lot lower I recall Marduk building them for.”

  “Well, unionized labor, institutionalized procurement, and rampant corruption don’t help,”

  he grumbled good-naturedly. “In fact, they add almost a third to the cost of actually getting a ship built. These last few were low-bid contracts that went to consortiums, and ever division wants to soak the Crown for as much as they can get away with. So if we contracted that work out to you, then everyone wins. The unions on Marduk aren’t going to complain about what they don’t know about, and they’re members already have steady jobs for the next five years until the big ships are done, and if you can actually do it cheaper, then everyone wins. I’m not an official government representative—”

  “But you’ll put in a good word,” Valerie nodded, understanding his meaning. “Thanks, Thomas.”

  “So,” the older man said, clearing his throat a little, “how are you holding up, with that dashing young man gone?”

  Valerie felt her shoulders sag automatically. “Truthfully? Personally, I’m absolutely miserable. I try to keep myself occupied, and I’ve got plenty to do. I have my . . . amusements,” she assured him. “I work out a lot with my guards, for instance. I’m getting pretty deadly,” she said, proudly. “But then at night, I look up into the stars and know that he’s out there somewhere, probably fighting for his life, desperately trying to get back to me.”

  “What amazes me is that he was able to escape at all,” Sir Thomas said, admirably. “You don’t understand just how secret Planet X is. The At
onians have been using it as a storeroom for political dissidents and enemies of the state for forty years or more. In all that time, we haven’t been able to pin down an exact location. A pity – the former King of Aton was a distant cousin of Princess Myrna,” he added. “The whole Atonian Royal Family was ‘relocated’ to this ‘reeducation camp’ after the Party took power forty years ago, and they just . . . disappeared. Our agents have been grinding away at this constantly, but while the rank-and-file of the Atonian Planetary Nationalist Party is gloriously corrupt, the secret police and political section are not – they regularly screen themselves with veridicators to keep our lads out. But in all that time not once did we hear a whisper of escape. Now your husband manages to pull off not just an escape, but an entire prison break in less than a few months of arriving? Spectacular!”