Chapter 25

“Do you think I was afraid of Viktor of Xochitl?” he demanded. “Half a dozen ships; we could make a new Van Allen belt around Tanith of them, with what we have here. Our real enemy is on Marduk, not Xochitl; his name’s Zaspar Makann. Zaspar Makann, and Andray Dunnan, the man I came out from Gram to hunt; they’re in alliance, and I believe Dunnan is on Marduk, himself, now.”

The delegation who had come out from Gram in the yacht of the Duke of Bigglersport were unimpressed. Marduk was only a name to them, one of the fabulous civilized Old Federation planets no Sword-Worlder had ever seen. Zaspar Makann wasn’t even that. And so much had happened on Gram since the murder of Elaine Karvall and the piracy of the Enterprise that they had completely forgotten Andray Dunnan. That put them at a disadvantage. All the people whom they were trying to convince, the half-hundred members of the new nobility of Tanith, spoke a language they didn’t understand. They didn’t even understand the proposition, and couldn’t argue against it.

Paytrik Morland, who was Gram-born and had been speaking for a return in force to fight against Omfray of Glaspyth and his supporters, defected from them at once. He had been on Marduk and knew who Zaspar Makann was; he had made friends with the Royal Navy officers, and had been shocked to hear that they were now enemies. Manfred Ravallo and Boake Valkanhayn, among the more articulate of the Raid-Xochitl-Now party, snatched up the idea and seemed convinced that they’d thought of it themselves all along. Valkanhayn had been on Gimli and talked to Mardukan naval officers; Ravallo had brought Princess Bentrik to Tanith and heard her stories on the voyage. They began adducing arguments in support of Trask’s thesis. Of course Dunnan and Makann were in collusion. Who tipped Dunnan off that the Victrix would be on Audhumla? Makann; his spies in the Navy tipped him. What about the Honest Horris; wasn’t Makann blocking any investigation about her? Why was Admiral Shefter retired as soon as Makann got into power?

“Well, here; we don’t know anything about this Zaspar Makann,” the confidential secretary and spokesman of the Duke of Bigglersport began.

“No, you don’t,” Otto Harkaman told him. “I suggest you keep quiet and listen, till you find out a little about him.”

“Why, I wouldn’t be surprised if Dunnan was on Marduk all the time we were hunting for him,” Valkanhayn said.

Trask began to wonder. What would Hitler have done if he’d told one of his big lies, and then found it turning into the truth? Maybe Makann had been on Marduk ... No; he couldn’t have hidden half a dozen ships on a civilized planet. Not even at the bottom of an ocean.

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Alvyn Karffard was shouting, “if Andray Dunnan was Zaspar Makann. I know he doesn’t look like Dunnan, we all saw him on screen, but there’s such a thing as plastic surgery.”

That was making the big lie just a trifle too big. Zaspar Makann was six inches shorter than Dunnan; there are some things no plastic surgery could do. Paytrik Morland, who had known Dunnan and had seen Makann on screen, ought to have known that too, but he either didn’t think of it or didn’t want to weaken a case he had completely accepted.

“As far as I can find out, nobody even heard of Makann till about five years ago. That would be about the time Dunnan would have arrived on Marduk,” he said.

By this time, the big room in which they were meeting had become a babel of voices, everybody trying to convince everybody else that they’d known it all along. Then the Back-To-Gram party received its coup-de-grace; Lothar Ffayle, to whom the emissaries of Duke Joris had looked for their strongest support, went over.

“You people want us to abandon a planet we’ve built up from nothing, and all the time and money we’ve invested in it, to go back to Gram and pull your chestnuts out of the fire? Gehenna with you! We’re staying here and defending our own planet. If you’re smart, you’ll stay here with us.”

The Bigglersport delegation was still on Tanith, trying to recruit mercenaries from the King of Tradetown and dickering with a Gilgamesher to transport them to Gram, when the big lie turned into something like the truth.

The observation post on the Moon of Tanith picked up an emergence at twenty light-minutes due north of the planet. Half an hour later, there was another one at five light-minutes; a very small one, and then a third at two light-seconds, and this was detectable by radar and microray as a ship’s pinnace. He wondered if something had happened on Amaterasu or Beowulf; somebody like Gratham or the Everrards might have decided to take advantage of the defensive mobilization on Tanith. Then they switched the call from the pinnace over to his screen, and Prince Simon Bentrik was looking out of it.

“I’m glad to see you! Your wife and son are here, worried about you, but safe and well.” He turned to shout to somebody to find young Count Steven of Ravary and tell him to tell his mother. “How are you?”

“I had a broken leg when I left Moonbase, but that’s mended on the way,” Bentrik said. “I have little Princess Myrna aboard with me. For all I know, she’s Queen of Marduk, now.” He gulped slightly. “Prince Trask, we’ve come as beggars. We’re begging help for our planet.”

“You’ve come as honored guests, and you’ll get all the help we can give you.” He blessed the Xochitl invasion scare, and the big lie which was rapidly ceasing to be a lie; Tanith had the ships and men and the will to act. “What happened? Makann deposed the King and took over?”

It came to that, Bentrik told him. It had started even before the election. The People’s Watchmen had possessed weapons that had been made openly and legally on Marduk for trade to the Neobarbarian planets and then clandestinely diverted to secret People’s Welfare arsenals. Some of the police had gone over to Makann; the rest had been terrorized into inaction. There had been riots fomented in working-class districts of all the cities as pretexts for further terrorization. The election had been a farce of bribery and intimidation. Even so, Makann’s party had failed of a complete majority in the Chamber of Representatives, and had been compelled to patch up a shady coalition in order to elect a favorable Chamber of Delegates.

“And, of course, they elected Makann Chancellor; that did it,” Bentrik said. “All the opposition leaders in the Chamber of Representatives have been arrested, on all kinds of ridiculous charges--sex-crimes, receiving bribes, being in the pay of foreign powers, nothing too absurd. Then they rammed through a law empowering the Chancellor to fill vacancies in the Chamber of Representatives by appointment.”

“Why did the Crown Prince lend himself to a thing like that?”

“He hoped that he could exercise some control. The Royal Family is an almost holy symbol to the people. Even Makann was forced to pretend loyalty to the King and the Crown Prince...”

“It didn’t work; he played right into Makann’s hands. What happened?”

The Crown Prince had been assassinated. The assassin, an unknown man believed to be a Gilgamesher, had been shot to death by People’s Watchmen guarding Prince Edvard at once. Immediately Makann had seized the Royal Palace to protect the King, and immediately there had been massacres by People’s Watchmen everywhere. The Mardukan Planetary Army had ceased to exist; Makann’s story was that there had been a military plot against the King and the government. Scattered over the planet in small detachments, the army had been wiped out in two nights and a day. Now Makann was recruiting it up again, exclusively from the People’s Welfare Party.

“You weren’t just sitting on your hands, were you?”

“Oh, no,” Bentrik replied. “I was doing something I wouldn’t have thought myself capable of, a few years ago. Organizing a mutineering conspiracy in the Royal Mardukan Navy. After Admiral Shefter was forcibly retired and shut up in an insane asylum, I disappeared and turned into a civilian contragravity-lifter operator at the Malverton Navy Yard. Finally, when I was suspected, one of the officers--he was arrested and tortured to death later--managed to smuggle me onto a lighter for the Moonbase. I was an orderly in the hospital there. The day the Crown Prince was murdered, we had a mutiny of our own. We killed everybody we even suspected of being a Makannist. The Moonbase has been under attack from the planet ever since.”

There was a stir behind him; turning, he saw Princess Bentrik and the boy enter the room. He rose.

“We’ll talk about this later. There are some people here...”

He motioned them forward and turned away, shoo-ing everybody else out of the room.

The news was all over Rivington, and then all over Tanith, while the pinnace was still coming down. There was a crowd at the spaceport, staring as the little craft, with its blazon of the crowned and planet-throned dragon, settled onto its landing legs, and reporters of the Tanith News Service with their screen pickups. He met Prince Bentrik, a little in advance of the others, and managed to whisper to him hastily:

“While you’re talking to anybody here, always remember that Andray Dunnan is working with Zaspar Makann, and as soon as Makann consolidates his position he’s sending an expedition against Tanith.”

“How in blazes did you find that out, here?” Bentrik demanded. “From the Gilgameshers?”

Then Harkaman and Rathmore and Valkanhayn and Lothar Ffayle and the others were crowding up behind, and more people were coming off the pinnace, and Prince Bentrik was trying to embrace both his wife and his son at the same time.

“Prince Trask.” He started at the voice, and was looking into deep blue eyes under coal-black hair. His pulse gave a sudden jump, and he said, “Valerie!” and then, “Lady Alvarath; I’m most happy to see you here.” Then he saw who was beside her, and squatted on his heels to bring himself down to a convenient size. “And Princess Myrna. Welcome to Tanith, Your Highness!”

The child flung her arms around his neck. “Oh, Prince Lucas! I’m so glad to see you. There’s been such awful things happened!”

“There won’t be anything awful happen here, Princess Myrna. You are among friends; friends with whom you have a treaty. Remember?”

The child began to cry, bitterly. “That was when I was just a play-Queen. And now I know what they meant when they talked about when Grandpa and Pappa would be through being King. Pappa didn’t even get to be King!”

Something big and warm and soft was trying to push between them; a dog with long blond hair and floppy ears. In a year and a half, puppies can grow surprisingly. Mopsy was trying to lick his face. He took the dog by the collar and straightened.

“Lady Valerie, will you come with us?” he asked. “I’m going to find quarters for Princess Myrna.”

“Is it Princess Myrna, or is it Queen Myrna?” he asked.

Prince Bentrik shook his head. “We don’t know. The King was alive when we left Moonbase, but that was five hundred hours ago. We don’t know anything about her mother, either. She was at the Palace when Prince Edvard was murdered; we’ve heard absolutely nothing about her. The King made a few screen appearances, parroting things Makann wanted him to say. Under hypnosis. That was probably the very least of what they did to him. They’ve turned him into a zombi.”

“Well, how did Myrna get to Moonbase?”

“That was Lady Valerie, as much as anybody else. She and Sir Thomas Kobbly, and Captain Rainer. They armed the servants at Cragdale with hunting rifles and everything else they could scrape up, captured Prince Edvard’s space-yacht, and took off in her. Took a couple of hits from ground batteries getting off, and from ships around Moonbase getting in. Ships of the Royal Mardukan Navy!” he added furiously.

The pinnace in which they had made the trip to Tanith had taken a few hits, too, running the blockade. Not many; her captain had thrown her into hyperspace almost at once.