Prince of Tanith, page 36
“What about the other team?” Valerie demanded.
“The other team shot a couple of servants on their way in, then started moving through the service sections, shooting people indiscriminately. And they might still be there – they were headed for the residential section. Your Highness, I beg you, reconsider: let us take you out of the line of fire!”
“There was the third team that just shot at us, remember?” Valerie prompted the young trooper. “That’s three teams. Probably more. That’s organized.”
He nodded. “Correction, three teams of bandits,” he informed his commander., giving a brief description of the attack by aircav mounts and an account of their demise. “Warning: we’re coming in on the southeast stage. Confirm to the Prime Minister that Princess Alpha is secured, but returning to play.”
“I am anything but secured,” growled Valerie to herself. She was breathless with worry as the car slowly circled the empty landing stage before moving in for a landing. Before it even set down, she could see bodies in the doorway to the interior of the building, and bloody handprints on the open door. People in Royal Household livery. People she knew. She felt sick, but then she remembered about little Elaine, and she readied the pistol.
“Gentlemen, precede me. I’m not going to put myself in unnecessary danger, but I am not going to cower in hiding while my daughter is out in the open. If I see you imperil her at the expense of protecting me, I will be most vexed. Is that understood?”
“Yes, Highness,” Karvall and Freaskar said in unison, looking at each other nervously.
“Good. Let’s do this. Driver, you hold your position until help arrives. I want to be able to leave in a hurry, if we have to.” He nodded obediently, a fierce determination in his eyes. Another Golden Hand. What were they feeding those boys?
Valerie took a deep breath, and grabbed a spare combat helmet out of the front seat and jammed it on her head before she opened the hatch. The Golden Hand guards tumbled out with practiced ease, coming to their knees in firing position, their submachine guns held steady as rocks even in the high winds on the landing stage. But there were no gunshots, no yells, no movement, save what the wind blew ferociously over the transplast windguards. Karvall advanced to the doorway, nodded to Freaskar, who had apparently forgotten about the slug in his shoulder, and he motioned Valerie forward.
Eschewing the illusion of cover, she strode boldly across the stage to the doorway, intent on her goal – but not so intent that she did not constantly scan the area.
She felt Freaskar creep up on her shoulder, and then Karvall was moving again. She padded along behind him, pistol ready, trying to ignore the unaccustomed weight of the combat helmet. The royal apartments were just through here, she remembered – two more bodies, a servant and a Royal Army trooper – and down to a checkpoint that had been completely blasted away. Anti-personnel grenade, she saw, from the shrapnel and the bits of people and smears of blood that coated the walls.
The bodies of two – no, three – Golden Hand guards were scattered here and there around the room, though she saw three empty carbine cartridges on the floor. They had defended their post to the last. She looked more closely, realizing to her horror that one of the three Golden Hand was none other than Captain Hortega. She looked away, quickly. She’d liked the man, gruff but polite, an excellent Captain of the Royal Guard. A family man, too, she remembered, with a wife and two small children. She tried not to think about that, now.
The ornate double doors were open, too, and she gingerly followed Karvall through the wreckage. The nursery was at the end of the hall, she remembered – this was only the second time she and the baby had stayed here instead of Trask House, but the suite was simply laid out.
And completely empty.
There was a massive gaping hole in wall, where the ferrocrete wall between the two great transplast windows had been blown away. The transplast had been resistant to the blast, of course, but the ancient structure of the Planetary Building had given way under the force of the explosion – angled in such a way that even Valerie could see it had been blasted from the inside. There were more bodies here, but all adults so she ignored them and ran to the cradle.
The empty cradle.
She looked around again, as her guards swept the room and then examined the casualties.
“She’s not here,” she stated, flatly, as Karvall rose, his face pale. “Inform the Prime Minister: I want everything in the air that flies, right now, and lock down the spaceport. No ship lands or takes off until I say. I want a fifty mile perimeter around Rivington and if anything bigger than a lionmole crosses it, I want it being questioned under a veridicator.” Karvall nodded and began speaking to his commander on his radio, just as a squad of heavily-armed Royal Army troops arrived. Only then did she bend down and examine the damage the villains had done.
One Golden Hand guard was dead, shot nine times in the face and abdomen, his carbine and pistol empty and his dress-sword bloodied in his hand. The other was only shot six times in the chest and shoulder, and he was still breathing. Valerie made a compress of the man’s cloak and had a Royal Army trooper hold it until the trauma team could arrive from downstairs.
Then she found the crumpled body of Lady Ashley, who had gunshot wounds in her thigh, abdomen, shoulder, and arm – it looked as if she had caught a burst of submachine gun fire – and a fierce bruise and laceration across her left cheek and temple. There was an empty pistol in her hand, too – and miraculously, she still breathed. Valerie tried to make her as comfortable as possible until the medics arrived from the emergency services clinic.
“The back-up security team for this residence at Site One was ambushed,” Karvall reported to her, a moment later. “They were stationed about a mile away on the roof of one of the warehouses. An incendiary grenade and a couple of bursts from an aircav pod, and they were done. You saw what happened at the checkpoint – Captain Hortega held them off for ten minutes, until they overwhelmed his position. The three patrolling guards were shot individually, but it looks like they put up a fight. They each dropped a man. And three more in here,” he said, motioning towards the far side of the room, where the invaders had used a divan for cover. “Off-world mercenaries, if I had to say. Space Vikings, probably. Not local.”
She was nodding, her head swimming, when the Nikkolay Trask showed up with the rest of the medical team, Countess Dorothy herself leading it.
“She’s gone,” Valerie told her kinsman, simply. “Elaine is gone, Nick. They took her! I don’t know who and I don’t know where, but they can’t have gotten far.”
“We’ll find her,” Nick reassured, putting his hand on her arm. Valerie knocked it away by reflex.
“Damn right, we’ll find her,” she said, barely able to control her rage at the thought of anyone touching her daughter, and the feeling of helplessness she felt that someone had. “Tear the city apart. No one leaves. Trace these mercenaries, find who did this. Start reviewing the security tapes at once. And bring me the Gilgamesher and that other man, I want to talk to them. They must be involved somehow. Move, damn you!” she screamed at the stunned troopers standing around her, then stopped briefly next to Dorothy.
“Get them well,” she said, nodding to the medics already applying pressure bandages and administering medication to the wounded. A robomedic was pumping fluids into lady Ashley, while she was still pumping her own red fluids out onto the ornate carpet.
Dorothy, too, put her hand on Valerie’s shoulder, but this time the princess didn’t knock it away – she’d have to apologize to Nick when this was all over for that, she realized.
“I’ll take good care of your friends, Your Highness,” the older woman assured her, calmly. “I can at least make them comfortable.” She had that practiced tone of a physician dealing with a distressed loved one. Valerie spared her one moment for a long, searching stare.
“I don’t care if they’re comfortable,” she said, evenly, “I want them awake. They need to be questioned. I want to know exactly what happened, who did it, and every other detail possible. Until my daughter is found, that is your highest priority, understood?”
Her tone allowed no possibility for argument. “Understood, Highness,” Dorothy bowed. Valerie had to hand it to her – on Marduk, a doctor in that position would be prattling on about professional ethics and their Hippocratic Oath and their first responsibility to their patient’s welfare and second their medical board. But Dorothy had been around Space Vikings for over a year, now, and she had adapted well.
“Highness!” Freaskar called. “I found something!” The dark young man was holding up a video microcassette that had been tossed through the window, evidently from the aircar that had stolen her baby, and into the abandoned crib. Valerie took it and jammed it into the player in the study next door, her guards and the Prime Minister huddling in behind her. In moments the face of Garvan Spasso leered out from the screen at them.
Gone was his finery and his well- groomed appearance, replaced by a three-day growth of beard and the garb of a spaceport barfly. He was recording this from the bridge of a small, very old ship. He was wearing a heavy military-grade semi-automatic in his shoulder holster, but gone were the knight’s star and the bejeweled dress dagger at his belt. And gone was his right hand. In its place he wore a cheaply-made black plastic prosthetic, two claw-like pincers and an opposing thumb-like apparatus looking almost mockingly like a proper limb.
The calculating, nearly feral gleam in his too-close set eyes was still there, however, and the sneer had yet to leave his lip.
“Greetings, Prince Trask,” the apparition said, leering from the screen. “If all goes well, then by the time you’re viewing this I’m safely off-world and into hyperspace. Let’s assume that all went well, then, otherwise you’re staring at my corpse.
“The last time I enjoyed your hospitality, I believe I left something behind,” he said, holding up the stump of his arm and flexing his prosthetic fingers menacingly. “Not only that, but you chose to humiliate me in front of my liege. I’m sure you’ll be happy to note that I was stripped of my titles and my lands when I returned to Gram,” he scowled, “and thrown into prison -- a prison I once ran.
“Well, enjoy that thought, you son-of-a-whore, because Garvan Spasso still has friends on Gram – and aye, elsewhere, too! Friends who got me out, who got me a ship, and who will help me do what my lord commanded me to in the first place. Or the next best thing.
“So now I have your brat, and maybe even your ‘civilized’ bitch, too, if I’m lucky. Either way, I’ve got them and if you want them, then you’re going to have to do what ol’ Spasso wants.”
Valerie could hear the murmurs and threats and oaths being muttered around her, but she was utterly focused on the words out of that despicable man’s mouth.
“For one thing, call off your dogs: I get even a hint that I’m being pursued, and your precious family pays the price. I’m a fair man,” he said, aloofly, “a man of honor – I won’t necessarily hurt them, but . . . well, you do have a very attractive wife, Trask!” he leered. There was a small explosion of appalled voices behind her, so loud she had to shout for quiet.
“Second, I want you to publicly swear fealty to His Majesty Omfray I of Gram, and submit to his Royal justice. That was my charge, and I’ll see it done – like I said, I’m a man of honor.” No doubt that would earn him back into the good graces of Omfray, and possibly even earn him a viceroyalty on Tanith. The very thought of that man sullying the good work they had done here sickened her.
“Thirdly, I want my ship back – not that rusty old hulk the Lamia, but the one I came there with, the Seven Stars. I was fond of that, and it was a personal gift from the king, so you can imagine how much sentimental value it has for me.
“Lastly . . . I want my damned hand back!” he nearly screamed into the screen. “Making me fight that damned hulking neobarb was humiliating enough, you bastard, but then letting him take my own flesh and blood and make a mockery of me? Hang it on a temple wall and let the neobarb filth piss on it? That, Sir, is a disgrace! I want that hand returned to me, with my ship, with your fealty . . . and maybe you get to enjoy that pretty little wife of yours again, and see your little brat grow up.
“Don’t try to cross me, Trask – I’m an honorable man,” he sniffed, “but I’m also a desperate man, and in desperate times sometimes a man has lapses . . . well, you get the picture, now. I’ll send word through the Everarrds of Hoth, they’re neutral enough, about where and when. And in the mean time, you have my word . . . I’ll take real good care of your family, Prince. Real good care!” he laughed, and the recording ended.
There was a pause of three heartbeats before the room exploded in orders, demands, and general outrage. Valerie herself was still, as she absorbed the evil little man’s words and their implication. She allowed the chaos around her to wash over her, while her brain raced furiously. She reentered the conversation as Nikkolay was saying “—alert the Mardukans by pinnace at once, see if they’ve seen any activity on their end of the galaxy. I—”
“Prime Minister,” Veronica interrupted, her voice low but intense.
“Yes, Your Highness?” he asked.
“Attend me: in my husband’s absence, I dictate policy. Here it is: Ignore his threat to my daughter – she’s the only thing that’s keeping him alive right now, and the only real bargaining chip he’s got. He won’t hurt her unless he’s cornered. And I won’t let the fear of him harming her stand in the way of us recovering her.
“My previous orders stand: scour the city, investigate where these men came from, and damn it, find his ship before it leaves the atmosphere! In the event he eludes us, I want a ship or a pinnace headed for every inhabited world in a hundred light-year radius – and yes, I know how many worlds that is,” she said, intercepting his objection.
“From this moment on, Garvan Spasso has a bounty on his head of one million stellars, payable in gold. Another reward of a million stellars for the safe return of my daughter. And the man who accomplishes both can put ‘Duke’ in front of his name. That’s what I want those worlds to know. And you,” she said, pointing to the wide-eyed Gilgamesh ambassador who was being escorted in with his guest, both of them manacled. “I want you to get word to your people the same thing. Tell them all. I want Spasso to have no safe hole to crawl inside, and no friend to run to, anyplace in the galaxy. Is that clear?”
“But, Your Highness,” Trask began, a strong mix of emotion playing across his face. “I understand how you must feel, but—”
“But nothing, Nick, and don’t tell me you know how I must feel! What if that was your boy? Think about that! And then think about what you would do if Spasso had gotten your wife, too! What if he was the kind of man to take Cecelia away from you? You do what I tell you to do, damn it, because it’s the only way we’re going to get out of this.
“He’s obviously working on his own, so we can forget about the Sword Worlds as his sponsor. That leaves Space Viking planets, civilized worlds, and neo-barb worlds, and I can’t see him heading for Baldur or Odin, can you? Not to mention the thousands of uncharted asteroid colonies, space stations, protected environment planets, and space ships he could be on. Our best bet is to make things as dangerous for him as possible.
“Now you can agree with my strategy or not, that’s your affair. But if it doesn’t work and she dies,” she said, her chin quivering defiantly, “then it’s on my head, not yours. Understand? This is my responsibility, in Lucas’ absence, and it’s not one I can share with anyone else. So you will all comply with my directives, as you all have sworn to do, until we get her back!” she said, loudly, addressing everyone else in the room.
“We are at your command, Highness,” Nikkolay said, straightening and throwing in a bow. “And Valerie, we’re going to do everything in our power to get her back and see that obscenity in human form blotted from the universe. Tell me what to do,” he said, almost pleading. But then he straightened. “But do not tell me how to do it, or find yourself a new Prime Minister. That girl is my kin, too. The next few hours are critical. You’ve set policy, now let me execute it!”
He paused, as a Golden Hand guard approached, holding a radio. They conferred a few moments, before Nikkolay turned back to her. “Forgive me, but I just received a report that the designated safe-area that you were supposed to have gone to was over-run – they were waiting for you to land on that roof, only you changed course and didn’t. Our people re-took the area, and captured two prisoners. They’re being brought here now.”
