“I called ahead, Prince Michael,” Valless said without waiting to be asked. “My duty requires that you be properly protected. Since we’re leaving the planet, and in pursuit of potentially dangerous people, I couldn’t take the responsibility for your safety wholly upon myself.”
“Understood, Vincent,” Michael said. “Do they know of our mission?”
“I haven’t told them,” Valless replied. “They’re part of the detail already assigned to your protection, so I could alert them without any need for explanations.”
“Fine. Explain now, making clear—very clear—why we’re not giving advance notice for what we’re doing.”
“Yes, Prince Michael. As I’m the senior member of this detail, they’ll obey my decision.”
And that means, Judith thought, that Vincent Valless is taking a lot on his own head. If something goes wrong, he could find himself being tried or court-martialed or whatever they do to security officers who let their subjects put themselves at risk.
Well, she thought, taking the seat Michael indicated was hers and strapping herself in, I’ll just have to do my best to make sure that no one has anything to regret.
An eighth person, this one a regular Navy master chief, stepped into the passenger cabin through a small hatch, then paused, raising one eyebrow as he saw Judith and Todd.
“Your Highness,” he said in an admirably calm tone, and Michael grimaced.
“Master Chief,” he replied, then looked at the others. “Master Chief Lawrence is Ogapoge’s flight engineer. He’s been my keeper on these little jaunts for the last year or so. Master Chief, Lieutenant Liatt and Ms. Judith Newland. I believe you know the rest of our little crew?”
“Yes, Sir,” Lawrence replied, nodding respectfully to Todd and Judith.
“We’re going on a slightly different excursion, Chief,” Michael continued. “And I’m going to want everything the compensator can give us.” His eyes met Lawrence’s levelly. “And I do mean everything, Chief. We’re going to redline her.”
“Your Highness,” Lawrence began, “I—”
He paused, looking into the prince’s eyes, then glanced once at Lieutenant Valles and the other Palace Security personnel.
“Yes, Sir,” he said instead, and Michael gave him a tight nod before turning back to Todd.
“Todd, you take the helm. You always scored higher than I did when it came to piloting small craft.”
“In any sort of piloting,” Todd cheerfully reminded him.
“Whatever,” Michael said, a small smile quirking one corner of his mouth. “I’ve got some research I want to take care of while we’re in transit. I can’t do that and handle the ship.”
Todd nodded, solemn for a moment as Ruth’s predicament once again came to the fore. Then his usual high spirits surfaced and he grinned with pleasure.
“I’ll be happy to take her up, Michael. Besides this is the only way I’m likely to fly one of these darlings.”
“Good,” Michael said. “Now, hurry up and get acquainted with your own true love, will you, Toad Breath? We need to break orbit the instant Astro Control clears us.”
“I’ll be ready for it,” Todd said, turning to head for the fleet little vessel’s compact flight deck. “You just figure out where we’re supposed to be going once we get to Sphinx.”
“That,” Michael said, settling in to the seat next to Judith and pulling out his minicomp, “is precisely what I’m hoping to do.”
* * *
“They’re not,” Babette said, mild disbelief in her voice, “going to give in to our demands.”
George grunted reluctant agreement as he examined the information feed they had pulled in from various satellites.
“I thought,” he said, “when they stayed in that Judith’s apartment for so long, that they were going to knuckle under, that they were waiting for a reasonable hour for the prince to go clubbing.”
Babette nodded. “I know. When they headed toward Mount Royal, I wasn’t worried. After all, there are many more highly visible night spots near the palace than there are out in the sticks where Human Services settled those Masadans.”
George pushed his chair back. The holofeed showed Ogapoge already heading out of orbit, and despite their surprise, neither of them really doubted where the fleet little runabout was headed.
“Dulcis McKinley and Wallace Ward have two definite advantages. They have a solid lead, and they have the child. There is another factor in our advantage.”
“Which is?”
“Prince Michael may suspect they are being observed,” George said, “but he cannot be certain.”
“How can we take advantage of that?”
“I think we should switch to our second plan,” George said.
“So soon? Before they have a chance to come through?” Babette frowned. “Manticoran reactions to turning the child over to her Masadan father have always been harder to calculate.”
“As far as Manticoran reactions go, yes,” George agreed. “But we can be certain how the Graysons will react. There is a high probability that proof of how little the Star Kingdom could do to protect one child—and having that child turned over to their hated enemies—will tilt the balance of public opinion so far that the Grayson government will be forced by an angry public to renounce their alliance with the Star Kingdom.”
“True,” Babette said. “After all the treaty nearly didn’t happen. If the Navy hadn’t interfered in what was a purely local political situation, I think it’s likely the Grayson government would have decided against the alliance. You’re right. First goal has always been to achieve a termination of that treaty. Discrediting the Royal family has always been a bonus.”
George hadn’t waited for his wife’s agreement. He’d already reached for his com unit and was coding in a call for Banshee. The call took somewhat longer than usual to place because of the numerous layers of security screening he had in place, not to mention the fact that Banshee had been underway and accelerating at 5.491 KPS2 for almost thirty-six minutes. She was already over 12.8 million kilometers away from Manticore, moving at 11,860 kilometers per second. At only three percent of light-speed, the time dilation effect wasn’t noticeable, but the forty-two-second light-speed communications lag certainly was.
As with the call to Judith, neither George’s face nor his voice would be in the final feed. Anonymity was everything, after all, and when he’d established initial contact with Dulcis McKinley and Wallace Ward, the professional criminals who were the Ramsbottoms’ hands and feet for this job, George had represented himself as a revolutionary fanatic.
Precisely what he—or she, for George had chosen to represent himself as an androgynous creature, rather like a winged angel in his contact with the criminals—was fanatical about had been left deliberately unclear. A liberal scattering of phrases such as “The Will of God” and “Divine Revelation” had been included to give the impression that the fanatic was not a mainstream member of the Star Kingdom, most of whom were pragmatic rather than otherwise in their political dealings, no matter how religious they might be in private.
“We are switching to Plan B,” George announced without preamble. “Instead of delivering the child to Choire Ghlais, make rendezvous with Kwahe’e.”
He waited patiently for the transmission to catch Banshee and Banshee’s reply to reach him. Eighty-four seconds later, it did.
“Rendezvous with Kwahe’e?” Wallace Ward’s voice said. “Why?”
He sounded both unhappy and suspicious, George noted. It wasn’t a surprise. The man was a professional, and he didn’t like unexpected changes.
“It was always a possibility,” George reminded him. “That’s why we set up the rendezvous in advance. Now the good Lord wills that we use it. And you should know that it is possible you are being pursued.”
“Unlikely,” Ward said hotly, a minute and a half later.
“All things are possible,” George rebuked sternly, “and only the Lord is infallible.
As an added safeguard, you are to go to Aslan Station and exchange Banshee for Cormorant to change your transponder code. They are both Pryderi class ships, so you should have no difficulties. Take Cormorant for your rendezvous with Kwahe’e.”
“We will do as you command,” the other man said after the unavoidable, lengthy, and very irritating transmission delay, “when our bank balance shows that the added deposit has been made.”
“Done,” George said. “The additional deposit has been made to your account. When you transfer the child to the custody of Kwahe’e’s captain, your final payment will be authorized. The crew of Kwahe’e will take over from that point.”
George recited the coordinates where Kwahe’e, a hyper-capable ship belonging (through several shell corporations) to the Ramsbottoms, would be waiting. In order to not attract undue attention, Kwahe’e was in a distant parking orbit, listed with Astro Control as awaiting parts and supplies.
And so they are, Babette thought as George alerted Kwahe’e to expect Cormorant and to accept consignment of her rather unusual cargo.
One reason Kwahe’e was owned by a shell corporation was that it tended to be given jobs that fell rather into the legal gray areas. Returning a child to her father, and recording the reunion might be peculiar, but it was far more legitimate—at least superficially—than many other jobs Kwahe’e’s captain and crew had performed.
Neither George nor Babette expected any difficulty.
After George had signed off, Babette rose and stretched.
“I must be going,” she said. “I’ve promised to go out with some of my friends tonight. I had hoped we would witness Prince Michael’s disgrace, but it seems I shall have to settle for an evening of dancing and fine food instead.”
George rose and embraced Babette with a fervor she returned. After Babette broke from his kiss she said thoughtfully, “I do have one regret that we were forced to go with our second plan. I had so looked forward to Michael Winton becoming disillusioned with his Masadan lady, then putting our Alice in his way. I really think she could have been the one to soothe his broken heart. I thought their meeting at Mount Royal earlier was very promising.”
“I agree,” George said. “I took some infrared readings, and his surface skin temperature rose quite a bit when he was talking with Alice. I don’t believe he is at all indifferent to her.”
“We don’t need to give up,” Babette said, reaching for her cosmetic case and touching up her lips. “After all, when this attempt to rescue Ruth fails, I doubt the relationship between Michael and Judith will survive.”
George gave a deep sigh, as of one who sees a wonderful banquet set up just out of reach. “That would be splendid. We have the Liberal and Conservative parties covered, but Alice could be our conduit into the inner workings of the Crown Loyalists. It would be lovely to have our daughter as the one who rehabilitates Prince Michael in the eyes of his peers.”
“Who knows?” Babette said, turning to go with a swirl of her skirts, “we may yet hear our grandchildren call our reigning queen ‘Auntie Liz.’ ”
* * *
“Choire Ghlais.” Michael looked up from his minicomp. “That’s our destination,” he said into the silence that had settled over the passenger compartment of Ogapoge.
Three hours and forty minutes had passed since they had cleared Manticore orbit, and they were just over fifty-five and a half million kilometers short of Sphinx, decelerating hard. Banshee was twenty million kilometers ahead of them, also decelerating. The other runabout would enter Sphinx orbit in another fifty-nine minutes; Ogapoge was fourteen minutes behind her.
“Choire Ghlais?” Judith said. “What is that? A city?”
“A private estate,” Michael said. He heard the tension in his own voice and forced himself to calm as he explained. “There is a town associated with the estate, and some nice hotels. The area is owned by a wealthy businessman, a major landholder. They say he has aspirations toward a title.”
“Who?” Judith asked, when Todd poked his head back into the passenger compartment from the flight deck.
“Sorry if I’m interrupting anything,” he said, “but it’s pretty obvious these people are going to make orbit before we do, and I don’t really recall anyone explaining just what it is we’re going to do when that happens.”
He looked back and forth between Michael and Lieutenant Valles.
“They’re only going to be fourteen minutes ahead of us,” Michael pointed out, “and it’s going to take at least a few minutes for them to get a shuttle up from the planet to meet them. So, for all intents and purposes, we’ll actually be in a dead heat.”
“And we’re going to do precisely what after this ‘dead heat’ arrival?” Todd inquired politely.
“I’ve been thinking about that, Toad Breath,” Michael replied. “I’ve pulled the stats on Banshee from her last safety inspection, and she’s completely unarmed. So one possibility is to make orbit right behind her, then use Ogapoge’s guns to prevent the landing shuttle from docking with her. They may not even have realized we’re back here, and even if they have, there wouldn’t be a lot they could do about it.”
“And then? Threaten to fire on Banshee if they don’t surrender and hand Ruth over?”
“Tempting, Toad Breath. Very tempting. And it would probably work, assuming these people are as professional as I think they are. On the other hand, they’d know we were basically bluffing. There’s no way we’re going to fire on them when they’ve got Ruth on board.”
“So once they know we’ve got them and their shuttle can’t get to them, we call in the cops?”
“If we have to,” Michael agreed. “I’d really rather not do that, though. If they really are professionals, they’re probably smart enough to hand Ruth over unharmed when they realize they’re trapped. Certainly no professional criminal is going to risk making things even worse by harming her at that point! But if we do it that way, the kidnapping, at least, comes out into the open, and I doubt we’ll ever have any hard proof of who was really behind it.”
“I know you, Michael,” Todd said, watching him narrowly. “And I know that tone of voice. So since it’s obvious you don’t want to do it ‘that way,’ suppose you tell us just what you do have in mind?”
“What I’d really like to do is to let them land—with Ruth,” Michael said, looking squarely at Judith. “I’m pretty sure I know where they’re headed, and if I’m right, and if Vincent can whistle up a couple of sting ships from the Sphinx detachment, we could use them to cover the estate and prevent anyone from smuggling her out while I confront the estate’s owners over the com.” He smiled thinly. “Believe me. Once they know that we know who they are and can prove their involvement if we have to, they’ll hand Ruth back so fast her head will spin! We may not want this to come out into the open, but neither will they…especially with the possibility of prison hovering in the background. But only if you trust me enough to do it that way, Judith. Otherwise, we hold them here in orbit, call the cops, and get Ruth back now, and the hell with the scandal or nailing the people behind it.”
Judith looked back at him levelly. Her face looked thin and pinched with worry, but his heart swelled at what he saw in her extraordinary eyes.
“I trust you,” she said simply. “But I would like to know what makes you so confident that you know where they’re heading and who’s responsible for all this, Michael.”
“Of course,” he said. “Let me show you what I’ve been working on.” He turned his minicomp so she could see the display and started tapping keys.
“I was fascinated by the software the kidnappers used when they contacted you,” he began. “Eventually, I want to go into research and design for the Navy. So while Todd has been reading spaceship ’zines, I’ve been keeping up with the latest in technology—especially electronics and communications.”
Judith was nodding, her expression relaxing a touch. Michael couldn’t help but remember how she hadn’t drawn her hand back when he?
??d squeezed it, and he longed to reach out again.
But enough is enough, he cautioned himself, and returned to his explanation.
“What struck me right off was that the software being used to generate that particular avatar simulation was a very new design.” Seeing a wrinkle of protest shaping around her mouth, he hastened to continue. “Really. I realize to you it probably didn’t look any different from the programs kids use to play games, but I assure you, it was cutting edge. That particular program is very, very expensive, and so I figured that relatively few copies would have been sold at this point. I contacted the company and requested a list of purchasers—hinting I was interested in buying a copy myself, and wanted to check with others who were using the program.”
Judith managed a smile—a very small one, but the bravery of it wrung Michael’s heart.
“And the opportunity of being able to say ‘as used by Crown Prince Michael’ was such a tremendous temptation that I bet they overcame any qualms they had about customer confidentiality.”
“That’s right,” Michael said. “But I wasn’t pinning all my hopes on that one angle. I also put in a request for information about Banshee. Vincent helped there. Between his sources and mine, we came up with the owner of the ship.”
Judith frowned. “Wouldn’t that be a matter of public registration?”
“Oh, absolutely,” Michael agreed, “and learning the ship was owned by Starflight Rentals told us less than nothing. However, Starflight Rentals is a franchise, and this particular franchise is run by Timberlake Incorporated of Sphinx, and Timberlake Incorporated of Sphinx is owned by Mountain Holding Trust, and Mountain Holding Trust is wholly owned by one George Ramsbottom—who also happens to be on the very short list of people who bought the security software package in question.”
“And Banshee is heading toward Sphinx,” Judith said.
“Michael,” Todd said, his voice puzzled, “wasn’t the young lady—the one we met today—wasn’t her name…”