Prince of Tanith, page 5
The eightieth through ninety-first floors had been designated for governmental use, and was where they were destined for the overdue council meeting. The bottom of the section focused on more mundane matters – Department of Land Management, Department of Zoning (one small office), Department of Corrections, Department of Auxiliaries, the Rivington Police force and the Emergency Response offices.
Above that was the office for the spaceport administration, the Royal Army and Royal Navy offices, the Royal Exchequer office run by Lothar Ffayle, the Home Office run by Duke Paytrik, the Foreign Office run by Duke Valpry, the War Office, where Harkaman’s secretary sat and told everyone he wasn’t there, Rathmore’s Commerce and Trade Office -- and there were plenty of spaces for more. Eventually the government would move to the very top of the tower, once it was declared stable, but from the eternal swarm of construction equipment laboring day and night around the peak, that might take years to accomplish.
Until then the Council Chamber was separated from easy access to the rest of the government section, and had become the unofficial Court of the Realm. The place had started life as one of the finer hotels in Rivington, before de-civilization. Now it was known as the Royal Section, four complete floors with its own landing stages, power converters, and defensive emplacements where Royal Army troopers were stationed with rockets and anti-aircraft guns.
The bottom part of the old hotel, the ballroom and adjoining facilities, was where he kept his throne when he didn’t need it elsewhere. That’s where his wedding and coronation ceremony had been. There was also half a floor of Royal Residence, a spacious apartment that he’d rarely slept in since Trask House was open. He remembered his cousin Nikkolay Trask, the Prime Minister, had an apartment there, too, and there were two entire guest suites for visiting dignitaries entitled to the honor. There were a few smaller galleries on the third floor of the complex, for more intimate meetings or the odd execution, but the Council of Tanith, made up of his closest ministers and advisors, was on the ninety-first floor.
It had been Lucas’ cousin, and the Trask family lawyer Nikkolay Trask – pardon, His Grace, Duke Nikkolay of New Traskon, Prime Minister of and Heir to the Realm and – who had insisted on developing a space where the upper nobility and close advisors could meet, discuss issues and debate policy in a secure environment, and do so without outside scrutiny – and with liberal access to a robobartender.
Of course it was his prerogative to choose the center of his government, such as it was, wherever he wanted it. And Lucas had to admit he’d done an outstanding job for a man who hadn’t really been in government before. So he, like Lucas, ended up making things up as he went along. Tanith was ideal for on-the-job training.
Between them they had instituted periodic, if irregular, council meetings after his official coronation. Mindful of the quick degeneration of his former liege, King Angus I of Gram after he came to power, Lucas had insisted that the Privy Council meetings be kept with a minimum of formality and a focus on business, and completely closed to the press. Candor and plain-speaking were encouraged. Lucas was a practical man, and if he couldn’t trust what his closest people were saying, or they became fearful of giving him their earnest advice, then he risked everything he had built and all those who came to depend upon it. These weren’t merely his government or his court; these were his most trusted friends. Without them, he could not rule.
He had a gaudy, richly-appointed office here, too, with a desk the size of a Gram titanothere and a grand view of the spaceport. Since his honeymoon he had rarely been there except for a few official meetings with off-worlders. It was more ornate than his working office, but then again it was the office of a planetary monarch, not merely a Space Viking captain.
Instead he used one of the many rooms at Trask House for real work and dealt with his affairs there, or his stateroom on the Nemesis. He also had his old office out at the spaceport, which hadn’t been touched since the fateful day after the Battle of Marduk, when he had erased every bit of the Big Board he had used to track Andray Dunnan for half a decade. That part of his life was over, now. He’d locked the office door he had started fresh. He hadn’t been back since.
There was a small party gathered at the stage ready to greet them: Prime Minister Nikkolay Trask himself, looking very important in the long green-and-gold coat – reminiscent of the colors of their ancestral home, Traskon, back on Gram –
that he had adopted as the Prime Minister’s official outfit. With him was an honor guard of nine black-clad Royal Army of Tanith infantry, their automatic carbines held in salute to their sovereign. His cousin smiled broadly and waved in a most unofficial manner.
“Nick, glad to see you! And glad to be back home again!” Lucas said, pounding his cousin on the back after he returned the soldiers’ salute. “Can’t wait to get this treaty stuff out of the way. I’ve got some news,” he said, cryptically.
“You won’t be the only one,” his cousin assured him, wearing his poker face. After Nikkolay had been appointed the regent of the family’s ancestral lands on Gram, Traskon, Lucas hadn’t thought he’d see much of his only cousin. But Duke Angus – sorry, King Angus – had turned the estate over to his second wife’s father during the waning days of his reign, and Nick had come to his cousin like a beggar.
But not for long – one thing Lucas had learned in his brief tenure as monarch was how difficult it was to run a major operation like a base – much less a major city and entire planet and a growing trade empire – without adequate people. Nick was more than adequate. He was politically adept, he was an outstanding administrator, and he was a lawyer by trade. His status as heir apparent, being his next closest blood relative, was barely a factor. Lucas had jumped at the chance to draft his cousin into his reign, without fear of any unseemly ambition coming between the two.
It was an ideal match, in fact: Nick actually enjoyed the minutia of running a planet, but didn’t envy the ultimate responsibility of making policy. That, and his deep loyalty to his cousin, made him the perfect Prime Minister.
Lucas surveyed his cousin with concern. “Problems?”
Nick nodded. “We’ll discuss it in Council, but the long and short of it is that we received a special envoy last night, three hours after you landed, who wants to informally address the council.”
“Who?”
Nikkolay smiled tiredly. “If His Royal Highness will allow his humble Prime Minister to conduct the business of the Realm as he sees fit . . . ?”
Lucas chuckled and nodded. That’s why he liked Nick: while it seemed everyone in nine cubic light-years was sycophantically fawning on him these days, Nicky had known him since they were kids. No matter how many pointy hats and ostentatious titles Lucas piled on his head, he’d always be Nicky’s little cousin who’d conspired to drop water balloons on the chief servant’s head at New Years, in his mind. You just couldn’t buy that kind of trusted counsel with mountains of gold.
“All right, we’ll play it your way, Prime Minister. Lead on,” he said, waving. The two men waited for Princess Valerie to daintily dismount the air car before Lucas escorted her into the building.
Inside Nikkolay’s aide de camp, the young Sir Homer Malynda, was waiting at the control station with a clerical robot and another brace of armed guardsmen. He bowed to Their Highnesses and inquired as to their needs before handing a sheaf of papers to his boss.
“The rest of the Council is within, my Lords,” he announced, “and is waiting at the pleasure of Their Royal Highnesses.”
“And our . . . other guest?” Lucas asked, hoping the aide would spill his identity inadvertently. He should have known better – Homer was as loyal to the Realm as any soldier, but he was more loyal to Nick.
“I have him in the Yellow Room, Your Highness,” Malynda confided. “When you’re ready, call, and I’ll bring him in.”
“Good show, Homer,” the Prime Minister assured. “I’ve got this from here – why don’t you go attend to that other matter we were discussing?”
“At once, Prime Minister,” Malynda said, bowing and then disappearing like a shadow.
“Sorry about that,” Nick apologized. “Business. Let’s get started, then,” he sighed, pushing the heavy wooden doors to the conference room open.
Lucas stopped the herald from formally announcing him and Valerie – these were mostly old friends, they knew who he was. And after weeks of diplomatic ceremonies at the conference, he was done with such fripperies. He escorted Valerie to her seat at the head of the table and took his own beside her. Most of the others waited a respectful moment before joining them in the Council Room.
It had once been a spacious conference room, then the abode of an aerial predator with a two-meter wingspan. Now it was the ritziest room on the planet. A massive wooden table, a richly-carved antique stolen from a cathedral on Mot, the arms of Tanith enameled into the surface, had become the irregular hub of power for the nascent civilization. The floors were strewn with exotic furs, tapestries and trophies plundered from neo-barbarian fortresses on a dozen worlds lined the room, and a magnificent contragrav floating globe of Tanith, her little moon in tow, floated above the table.
This is where the business got done, officially and sometimes unofficially.
Lucas glanced around and mentally took attendance as he seated his wife and the others went to their big chairs, stopping only to refill their drinks at the robobartender. More than half of them had been with him on the Nemesis the first time she fell out of the sky on Tanith. Now, a decade older and presumably wiser, they were undoubtedly more rank-heavy. At his coronation Lucas had made sure to reward his friends handsomely for their good work here, and since paying them what they were worth would bankrupt the Realm, he had been liberal with titles of high nobility and large land-grants.
At the foot of the table was Home Minister Paytrik Morland. Duke Paytrik had been one of the original gentleman-adventurers who had come with Lucas on the Tanith Adventure out from Gram, a simple knight with political ambitions back home and a talent for leading men in battle. He and Baron –now Duke and Commerce & Trade – Hugh Rathmore, who sat near to him, had been instrumental in first negotiating the deal between Trask and the two itinerant Space Vikings who had tried to claim the planet ahead of them, and then in the establishment of the rudiments of government and civilized administration for the new realm.
Even though he had advocated heavily for Lucas to intervene in the affairs of Gram once Duke Angus went crazy, he had maintained his loyalty to Trask in the end and had given up dabbling with Sword World realpolitiks. Lucas had rewarded him – if that was the word – with the post of Home Minister of Tanith, as well as with a vellum scroll that had promoted him from Baron to Duke, and a theoretical fief on the lush southern end of the continent. Morland had yet to visit his new lands, nor inform the inhabitants of their new overlordship, but he didn’t seem to be in a hurry; he was having too much fun running the internal affairs of the Realm, which included a several-thousand man sepoy army which he commanded.
Next to him was the Fleet Admiral of the Royal Navy of Tanith and supreme military commander of all armed forces, Duke Otto Harkaman. A professional Space Viking of legendary status, he was as adept at shrewd politics as he was military theory or space command, though he didn’t always see eye-to-eye with Lucas on grand strategy.
Lucas could certainly forgive that, considering the wealth of talent he had in the man. Harkaman studied history as a hobby, mostly Ancient Terran history, but he loved using the ancient wars and revolutions of humanity’s cradle world as examples of predictive history. Lucas had grown to trust Otto not just with his life, but with his Realm. After his wife had been killed on Gram that fateful day, and Lucas had hired him to command the Nemesis, he had been as close a friend as Lucas had.
He was personally huge, physically dominating any room he was in. Today he wore a long black cloak with a silver chain over his heavily braided dark blue captain’s jacket. His dark red-brown hair was seeded with gray, now, as was his square-cut beard. He had assumed his new duties as chief of Tanith’s military with the same presence of command that he had employed when running his own ship, the Corisande II. He was as proud of that ship as he was anything else he’d seen on Tanith. It was the first vessel produced at the Tanith shipyard by Basil Gorram, and Harkaman used it as much as a Space Viking raider as a flagship of a civilized space navy. He was recently returned from a short raid-and-trade mission himself.
Next to him was Count Boake Valkanhayn, another Space Viking-turned-military officer, but whose scarred face made him seem much more the former than the latter. Originally his ship, the Space Scourge, had been a chicken-stealing boat, hitting low-technology planets like Melkarth and Set, where the local weapons were no match for industrialized warfare – and where there was very little of value worth the price of stealing it. He and another chicken-thief had teamed up to lay claim to Tanith in anticipation of the original Tanith Adventure, hoping to capitalize on their nuisance value.
Instead, Lucas had taken Boake and his ship into service. The opportunity had transformed the once-slovenly captain into a real Space Viking again, and his gratitude had been expressed in a deep loyalty to Trask and the Realm. Now the heavily-refitted Space Scourge was one of the choice assignments in Tanith’s tiny fleet, and by far the most active in terms of raiding. While Valkanhayn didn’t have a ministry-level post, his noble title permitted him attendance to the Council by courtesy. In truth, Lucas would have had him there regardless – he admired the man’s character and advice, and often found his caustic attitude amusing.
Lothar Ffayle – now Duke of Hamsly, wherever on Tanith’s map that was – the Royal Exchequer and president of the Bank of Tanith was in attendance, since the Treaty of Volund included significant clauses concerning exchange rates and such. He, too, had been one of the original gentleman-adventurers, and when King Angus I of Gram started becoming drunk with the power and prestige of the monarchy, Ffayle had moved most of the Bank of Gram’s assets three thousand light-years away to Tanith.
Now he handled nearly all the Princedom’s financial dealings, loans, and taxes. There were thankfully few of the last – the proceeds from ship repairs and tariffs on re-sold loot from other Space Vikings who utilized Tanith’s generous port had been more than enough to sustain the fleet and the administration, thus far. Add to that the wealth that the Tanith fleet brought in from raiding and trading, and Tanith was now almost comfortably in the black. But then the Star of Tanith and the two new fifteen-hundred footers the Realm had ordered from the shipyards were terribly expensive, too – taxation was inevitably going to come to Tanith.
Countess Dorothy Deban, a middle-aged woman whom Valerie had recruited from Marduk, was there in her capacity as the Minister of Health and Royal Physician. The Realm had decided early on that the people of Tanith – or at least those in Rivington and environs – deserved the most advanced medical care possible – the injury rate from raiding being particularly high.
Countess Dorothy was the answer to that need. She was a veteran trauma surgeon who had gladly relocated her clinic to Tanith for the opportunity to oversee the health of the colonial realm, not to mention a dramatic reduction in paperwork. Over three hundred medical technicians and skilled medical robotics programmers had come with her, lured by the adventure and the high pay, and she’d imported the most advanced robomedics available.
Lucas had given her the ancient site of the Rivington General Hospital, although it would be years before it was ready for patients – another project that needed to be done yesterday. Until then, she worked out of the spaceport clinic and oversaw her administrative duties from a small office in the clinic of the Government section. Countess Dorothy, for her part, was also keen on exploring Tanith’s expansive countryside for medicines which might have a market in the more civilized worlds. When she wasn’t otherwise occupied, she toured the far-flung regions of the Realm administering medicine to the natives and taking notes about local remedies.
When she had first arrived, Lucas was unsure if she’d be able to adapt to the rigors of frontier life, and he’d had misgivings about entrusting a Mardukan with such an important post. He’d seen the kind of officiousness that so many administrative people on Marduk seemed to carry like Space Vikings carried side arms, and that was something he didn’t need.
