Princess Valerie's War

by Terry Mancour

  “Lucas likes to take an active hand in things,” Valerie chuckled. “You should have seen what he did to a local warlord last year when he started raising a ruckus.”

  “No doubt,” Sir Thomas agreed. “I will be frank: I was concerned when you accepted Prince Lucas’ proposal so quickly. Understandable, I suppose – we’d all just been through such a trying experience, I think we were all a little shell-shocked after the Battle of Marduk, and I didn’t have the heart to tell you my misgivings. But I see you here, now . . . Valerie, you seem in your element.”

  “Not without Lucas here,” Valerie said, unhappily. “I feel cheated! I had him for just over a year, and now he’s . . . out there.”

  “My point was I didn’t think you had it in you to be a ruling princess – or at least the type of ruling princess you’ve turned into.”

  “I’ve had to learn and grow into the job,” she admitted, stubbing out her cigarette butt in the ashtray. “And it hasn’t always been easy. Getting your daughter kidnapped and your husband captured is not the best way to learn to rule, but then again I don’t think there is a good way. You can thank his staff for that: the people Lucas put into place have been stalwart in their support.”

  “I hope so,” sighed Sir Thomas, as the headed back into the Blue Room, where the Prime Minister was playing peek-a-boo with the Heir, while the future monarch of one of the Great Powers tickled her chubby little feet to distract her. “I have to admit, if Lord Hennesey, our present Prime Minister, was caught on camera tickling babies, he’d be considered an undignified laughingstock!”

  “We do things differently on Tanith,” admitted Valerie, smiling as Alvyn Karffard finally capitulated to temptation and moved his bulky body to the carpet, to participate in the baby-baiting. “You peel away the gruff, violent Space Viking exterior, and it turns out the whole lot of them are just a bunch of old softies.”

  Chapter Nineteen:

  Assassin!

  Princess Myrna – as “Baroness Cragsdale” – spent the next few days as Valerie’s guest at Trask House, since it was considered the most secure building on the planet. Worried that the inevitable Atonian spies that still haunted Rivington would see her, Valerie convinced her to temporarily dye her hair and adopt a more casual style of dress when she inevitably wanted to go out in public and see the city, and all of the changes that had taken place in Rivington since her last visit.

  It hadn’t been difficult to convince her to change her appearance – as a fourteen-year-old girl, changing her appearance was at the top of her priorities – but it had been difficult to keep her from wandering off on her own. To keep better tabs on her, Valerie imposed on her to accompany her and Princess Elaine (and entourage) to the opening of a new clinic in the industrial suburb of Gorramton.

  The clinic was part of Countess Dorothy’s effort to extend basic health-care to as many of the local populations as possible. And while the clinics at the spaceport and the Government Section of the Planetary Building were only a few minutes away by air car, having a clinic proximate to where people actually lived was better, in the long run, than trying to ferry every sick person to a centralized location. In another year the real hospital complex would be open, but even when it was it would be reserved for serious cases.

  Valerie was a little perplexed by the Space Vikings’ attitude towards medicine. It was seen as necessary, of course – but only if you were sick or injured. The Sword Worlders did little about preventative medicine, apart from vaccines and some elementary nutrition. The Sword Worlders took far less concern over regular health maintenance than anyone did on Marduk, where periodic checkups by the Planetary Health Service were mandatory before you could qualify for public assistance. And while some considered the mandate an unnecessary intrusion into the personal rights of the Mardukan citizenry, the plain fact was that managing the healthcare of billions of people required a more organized approach than depending on each individual to take care of themselves. It was a matter of public health, not freedom.

  The Gorramton clinic was a new structure, partially pre-fabricated and partially built on site, a great sweeping dome that held room for a number of sub-clinics, a robotic laboratory, and even a small operating theater. There would be seven staff members here, as well as a dozen robodocs and an administrative center, health education center, and pharmacy. As part of the grand opening, Countess Dorothy herself would be conducting health screenings on one and all.

  Valerie made a little speech at the gathering, gave Countess Dorothy a very big introduction, and then after the official festivities were done, she and her party helped welcome people into the center with little gifts of fruit or candy. Typical, utterly-mundane monarch stuff.

  Of course, compared to how her day usually went, with military briefings and diplomatic crises before breakfast, she found she didn’t mind smiling, waving, and talking to the common people about their concerns for a change. It was revitalizing, and it reminded her just who all of her efforts truly benefited when she was tempted to complain about her busy life.

  About two hours into the reception, she excused herself and found out where Dorothy was. She’d planned on snagging the Minister of Health for a smoke break behind the building, but the doctor was in the middle of an exam in the OB-GYN clinic. She was examining two young women – twins – about Myrna’s age when she interrupted.

  “Ready for a break, Dorothy?”

  “Oh! Your Highness!” the doctor said, looking up from her instruments in a bit of a daze. “As soon as I’m finished with this exam, yes, I’ll be quite ready. Enjoying your day away from militarism and mayhem?”

  “It’s a refreshing change,” the princess admitted. About then the two girls – lovely things, with long red-brown hair and deep brown eyes, and a dusky skin that told Valerie that they were natives, not Sword World immigrants—realized that they were in the presence of The White Lady of Tanith and it was all Dorothy could do to restrain them from prostrating themselves. Valerie calmed them herself, explaining in halting native dialect that she would be happy to meet the girls after they were done with the exam. That, alone, mollified them enough to sit still until the instruments were done with their work.

  “Thank you!” Dorothy said with a sigh. “Keeping girls that young from squirming is hard enough – with a demi-goddess in the room, it would have been impossible.” Valerie blushed at that, but didn’t comment. She was starting to get used to the semi-divine deference with which the natives treated her. The twins sat utterly still after that and just stared, their eyes growing bigger and bigger. “Tell me, though: do these young ladies look familiar?”

  “Should they?” Valerie asked, confused.

  “That’s the question, isn’t it?” Dorothy murmured, mostly to herself. “Here, I have an idea . . . let’s run them through the medical databank. It’s possible that I’ve examined them before and just don’t remember, but there is something about them . . .”

  “Now that you mention it, they do seem familiar,” Valerie said, studying the two more closely. That made them nearly quiver with excitement, but she soothed them as she looked in their eyes.

  “Their names are Dalla and Mitta,” Dorothy explained. “They’re around fifteen or sixteen – they don’t know exactly how old, not surprisingly. They grew up in a little village that used to be just outside the spaceport, until Spasso and Valkanhayn showed up. They fled south with the other refugees when they were girls. Now they’re back to work. Mother’s dead – no father that they remember. Their grandmother’s been raising them. Dalla, there, works at the snack bar of the transport station, and Mitta works as hostess in a local diner. A real diner, not a brothel,” Dorothy emphasized. “Believe it or not, both of these pretty girls are hymen intactae.”

  That was a departure for a Tanith girl. Most were married off right after menarche, if a more casual arrangement hadn’t been made first.

  “And . . . here’s the results of the search,” Dorothy finished. Valerie watched as she
read the screen, and then her eyes opened very, very wide. Without commenting, she shut down the screen and then shook her head as if to clear it. “You ladies . . . please go sit in the waiting room, but do not leave yet,” she said slowly in Lingua Terra, and then repeated it in native dialect until the two understood, nodded, and reluctantly left Valerie’s presence with a series of nervous bows. “C’mon,” Dorothy said, gruffly, “I suddenly find myself very much in need of a cigarette.”

  They proceeded to the rear of the OB-GYN clinic and found themselves on a little patio installed there for employee breaks. There were a few security guards patrolling around, of course – the Golden Hand had a half-dozen aircav mounts and three aircars constantly circling the clinic – but no one else. Dorothy heaved a titanic sigh as she lit two cigarettes and passed one to Valerie, who inhaled it gratefully.

  “Well,” Dorothy said, shaking her head slowly, “that was a revelation.”

  “What? Are they sick?” Valerie asked, alarmed.

  “Nope. Perfectly healthy. Healthy as kregg mares, actually. No diseases or infections. But I doubt they’ve hit their full-grown height. Considering how tall their father is, they’ve probably got a few inches left to go.”

  “Their . . . father? I thought you said their father wasn’t . . . well, he just wasn’t.”

  “Someone’s sperm had to fertilize that egg,” Dorothy said. “I’ve been a doctor for a long time, sweetie, but I haven’t seen a single case of immaculate conception yet. I had a hunch. I ran their genetic profile against the War Ministry’s database, on the off-chance that their father was a Space Viking. As usual, my hunch paid off.”

  “Oh, Great Ghu! Is he dead?”

  “Oh, not even close. Or at least, not as of his last physical. No, those two lovely young girls are – without a single doubt in my mind – the daughters of Duke Otto Harkaman, Warlord of the Realm and Admiral of the Fleet.”

  Valerie stared at her doctor in stunned silence. “Otto?” she finally blurted out. “Really? Otto?”

  “Yes. Really. Otto,” pronounced Dorothy, with a small grin. “I don’t know the man well, but he’s . . . he’s got a very distinctive genetic profile. And there’s a 99.999999% chance that he’s their biological father.”

  Valerie’s head was swimming. Otto? A father? “Surely they’re too old,” countered Valerie. “I mean, Space Vikings have only been on Tanith for a decade or so. Those girls are at least five or six years too old . . .”

  “You haven’t studied the Warlord’s service record,” Dorothy said, shaking her head. “I made a point of review all senior-level staff’s medical histories and that includes their service histories. If I recall correctly, long before Prince Lucas came here in the Nemesis, Otto was here in his first ship, was he not?”

  “The original Corisande,” Valerie nodded, excitedly. “Yes, that’s right! That’s when he got the idea that Tanith would make a good base planet in the first place!”

  “Well, when Harkaman took off for the stars, he left a little piece of himself behind,” grinned Dorothy. “Two of them.”

  “Oh, my,” Valerie said, her eyes even wider. “He can’t possibly know about them . . . can he?”

  “I doubt it,” Dorothy shrugged. “I mean, he was only here for a few hundred hours back then, if the logs can be trusted. From what I recall about the process, it takes considerably less time.”

  “So . . . are you going to tell him?”

  “Well, ethically speaking, that would technically violate the girls’ privacy, and there are eight hundred pages of Mardukan medical regulation that prohibits that sort of thing. Luckily for me, I’m in charge of medical regulation here. And those two sweet girls have never heard of medical ethics – and I doubt they really understand the idea of medical privacy. So yes, I’m going to go against thirty years of medical training and divulge this to His Grace. I’m just not quite certain how to, yet.”

  “Let me know if I can help,” Valerie agreed, smiling. “So Otto’s a daddy . . . now he and Lucas and Nick can all be in the club!”

  “It’s going to be an even bigger club,” Dorothy said. “Since I’m violating patient privacy anyway, it seems only fair that I inform my sovereign – under the rose, of course – that His Grace, the Duke of Morland and his wife are expecting, now.”

  “Paytrik, too?” Valerie said. “Oh, that’s wonderful! I forced him to take a few days off and take his wife to my private island, after the Winter Ball. I guess . . . well, I guess it worked.”

  “The Sandcastle Palace? Sounds like a lovely place,” agreed Dorothy, stubbing out her cigarette. “Let me think on the whole breaking-it-to-Harkaman thing, all right? I don’t know how he wants to handle it, and the last thing he needs with everything else on his shoulders is a scandal.”

  “You haven’t been around Sword Worlders very long,” Valerie remarked. “Bastardy isn’t a scandal in the Sword Worlds. It’s almost expected. A king or great noble who doesn’t have a couple of illegitimate kids around to act as triggerman or retainers or potential heirs if his legitimate ones don’t work out isn’t considered much of a man. There’s even a mechanism in place for recognizing the fact.”

  “And does this same lack of scandal apply to the women, too?” Dorothy asked, as she ushered her sovereign back into the clinic.

  “Oh, no. They’re pretty atavistic that way. A high-born woman who bore a bastard would be disowned, most likely. Of course, amongst the lower orders bearing a nobleman’s bastard is considered a step up, so . . .”

  “That’s what I figured,” Dorothy said, rolling her eyes. “Let’s go tell the girls that they have a daddy, shall we?”

  “You go ahead,” Valerie agreed, “I need to use the little princesses’ room.” She ducked into the bathroom, with a sigh as the Countess nodded and started rigorously scrubbing her hands.

  Valerie was washing her own hands after attending to her business, musing on the shocked look that Otto Harkaman’s face would undoubtedly wear at the revelation, when she heard the door open behind her. A young woman came in and smiled, then curtseyed once she realized who Valerie was, and headed for the far stall.

  That was almost refreshing, too, Valerie realized as she turned off the tap. It had been a long time since she’d been able to use the bathroom in a public place without a squad of Golden Hand standing outside the stall. It almost made her feel like a normal person.

  That feeling was suddenly shattered when, for no reason she could explain, she suddenly looked up into the mirror and saw the grim face of the other woman behind her, a ten-inch combat knife in her hand.

  Valerie didn’t think; her daily sessions with her unarmed combat instructor took over. She dropped to her left, suddenly, and swept her left leg back and around. It didn’t knock the assassin off of her feet, like Valerie had hoped, but it did send the woman off-balance into the stall door to her left.

  The attacker recovered quickly, and the grim mask of an expression she had been wearing was replaced by a determined look, garnished with anger and surprise. The knife, unfortunately, had not left her grip, and Valerie saw it flash as the assassin shifted it from one hand to the other.

  Valerie’s own dress dagger was in her hand now, too – and while she knew that the complex was crawling with guards, the thick walls and doors of the lavatory were too thick for her shouts to be easily heard. She began backing towards the door, her own six-inch blade held competently in the knife-fighting stance she’d been taught. If she could just make it to the door . . .

  The assassin didn’t give her the chance. The woman launched herself at Valerie, her blade flashing towards her face. Once again Valerie moved automatically, the conscious part of her brain partially locked in terror and adrenaline, partially stunned in wonderment over how smoothly her muscles were functioning without her direct control. She was able to successfully block the woman’s forearm as it descended with her left arm as she twisted behind her, driving her own blade into her midsection in the vicinity of the attac
ker’s right kidney.

  Valerie felt sick as she felt the weapon enter the woman’s body, but the combat reflexes she’d been learning didn’t pay attention. Instead she forcibly pushed the assassin up against the back of the lavatory door hard enough to make a dull thud. Hopefully, the wound and the chance to escape would be sufficient opportunity to convince the woman that her attack had failed.

  She wasn’t that lucky – and the assassin wasn’t about to give up that easily. She ricocheted off of the door and spun, sending a roundhouse-kick towards Valerie’s jaw in the process. Valerie blocked it by reflex, though it threw her back against the sink, hard. She blocked the next swipe of the knife, too, but missed the backhand slash that the woman threw, and earned a shallow cut on the point of her chin for the mistake.

  The pain and blood helped steady Valerie’s resolve, and she began to be more aggressively, driving her knee into the attacker’s solar plexus when she rushed forward to attack again. That didn’t stop the charge – and the momentum pushed both of them back against the stall door once again. The back of the princess’ head smacked against the thin metal partition, dazing her a bit, but now the assassin was clenched with her and trying desperately to drive her knife through Valerie’s throat. Only her left hand, wrapped around the wrist of her foe, kept the wickedly gleaming blade at bay.