Prince of Tanith Read online

  Prince Of Tanith

  A Space Viking Novel

  Based on the works of H. Beam Piper

  By Terry L. Mancour

  Cover art by Neal Dillon

  Second Edition Copyright © 2011 Terry L. Mancour

  First.

  Because it needed to be done.

  Thanks to H. Beam Piper for a galaxy full of space-opera genius,

  the best legacy of all.

  DEDICATION:

  To my very own beautiful, strong, blue-eyed Princess,

  Laurin.

  Every man should have one.

  LONG LIVE PRINCE LUCAS!

  When Prince Lucas Trask of Tanith, Space Viking, put a bullet in the head of the man he’d crossed the galaxy to revenge himself on for slaying his bride moments after they’d wed, he figured that his eight-year ordeal was over. He could settle down, rule his frontier planet and his enterprising band of vicious Space Vikings, marry a beautiful noblewoman from a civilized world, and watch Tanith grow and prosper into his dotage.

  But Space Vikings don’t usually die in bed, and the galaxy seems to have plans for Prince Lucas. A flurry of assassination attempts, a stark summons from his homeworld’s vile new King, a foreign-funded native insurrection, a moody princess, and the rejection of his idea of a League of Civilized Worlds by the very civilized worlds he admired were problematic; discovering that he’s about to become a father is even more so. To top it all off, a mysterious figure known only as “The Wizard” is protecting him and advising him, for reasons unknown.

  Now he has to convince his motley band of aristocrats, warlords, entrepreneurs allies and exiles to come together to protect the nascent Planetary Realm he’s fought so hard to establish, as powerful forces array themselves against the . . .

  PRINCE OF TANITH

  Table Of Contents

  Chapter One: Breakfast With The Princess

  Chapter Two: The Council of Tanith

  Chapter Three: Harkaman House

  Chapter Four: The Trial of Garvan Spasso

  Chapter Five: The Enemy Within

  Chapter Six: The Birth Of The Golden Hand

  Chapter Seven: Prince Lucas Goes Raiding

  Chapter Eight: Princess Valerie’s Raid

  Chapter Nine: The Fleet Comes In

  Chapter Ten: The Reclamation Of Cavendard

  Chapter Eleven: The Sandcastle Of Valeria

  Chapter Twelve: The Shrine Of The Trasks

  Chapter Thirteen: The Battle of Amateratsu

  Chapter Fourteen: Spasso’s Return

  Chapter One:

  Breakfast With The Princess

  His Royal Highness, Sovereign Prince Lucas Trask looked out over the skyline of Rivington, capital (and only real) city of the Princely Realm of Tanith, where the looming mass of the Planetary Building produced a cloud of dust from the reconstruction work going on there. He was atop the uppermost balcony of Trask House, and heaved a deep breath of the cool spring air, smelling the abundantly fertile grasslands that surrounded the city with every breath. The view was spectacular from the upper balcony – one of his favorite things about his new palace.

  Trask House. He never thought he’d have a home like this again.

  He’d built a palace once before. He had spent months designing and building the original Traskon New House in his ancestral lands for his new bride Elaine, back on his homeworld of Gram a decade before. That house he had never lived in, nor had he and his beloved ever consummated their love there. She had been tragically killed on their wedding day by a depraved suitor, and Lucas himself had been near mortally wounded.

  That first manor, with its stately architecture and glorious view of the tawny valley teeming with bisonoids under Gram’s perpetually cloudy skies, was now in the hands of some appointed manager in the wake of Gram’s bloody civil war. Even the memory of it was sour in his mind. But that was a decade in the past and three-thousand light-years away. Tanith was his home, now, and he had a new bride.

  By contrast, this Trask House had none of the tasteful, well-designed elegance of the earlier home. It had been built by his loyal subject, supreme Admiral, and best friend Otto Harkaman and gifted to him upon the occasion of his wedding and coronation half a year before. The place had originally been a museum, when Tanith had been first settled five hundred or so years before during the last gasps of the great Old Federation.

  Then it had become a minor fortress of an iron-age neobarbarians warlord, after Tanith lost touch with the rest of the galaxy and de-civilized for reasons lost to history. And then it had been a slowly crumbling ruin, a home for rodents and predators who roamed free in the ruined city. Its delicate parts had decayed away long ago, leaving behind only the ferrocrete superstructure.

  But with enough labor and money the gallant old heap had been brought back to – if not splendor, then at least a certain shabby livability that passed for splendor in this post-holocaustic world. As private residence on Tanith went, it was quite nice, if a little eclectic: he and his new bride had enjoyed furnishing it from the loot of a dozen worlds. Nothing quite matched, but the over-all effect was impressive.

  The cool spring breezes wafted the smell of waffles and coffee up from the spherical serving robot on the terrace below, and Lucas realized just how hungry he was. Only twenty hours back home from the tedious conference on Volund, and his stomach was just now catching up with his sleep schedule as he readjusted to planetside life. He strolled leisurely down the granite stairs from the balcony to the well-flagged courtyard, where his bride and a few attendants were milling around a simple but elegant garden table – locally made, he noted with pride. They all rose when they caught sight of him.

  “Your Royal Highness,” said Princess Valerie Trask, né Alvarath, a flicker of a smirk on her face as she bobbed her head in token curtsey.

  She was strikingly beautiful, jet-black hair and bright blue eyes that danced like sapphires in the light. Wrapped in a gorgeous white dressing gown, soft and thick against the springtime chill, she looked the part of a princess far more than he did a prince, to his mind. Of course the servants around her bowed far lower, as befitting their station, a gesture of respect he’d just as soon they did without. Lucas was not a monarch who stood on a lot of needless ceremony.

  “My lady Princess,” he said, returning the bow with just a little more exaggeration. That inspired a giggle, dimples, and a broad smile that made the sun pale in comparison. The Trasks gently mocked each other this way often, reminding each other constantly that the titles and positions they held were secondary to their marriage. Or at least complementary. Lucas appreciated Valerie’s humor because he felt it kept him from taking himself or his title too seriously.

  That happened to a lot of royalty, he’d observed, and the results were almost never positive. After all, the sovereign of a planet was merely the chief of the great nobles, not a divinely-appointed monarch able to do no wrong, as some of the galaxy’s neobarbarians believed. To lose sight of that important fact was to take the first step towards ruling poorly, and Lucas was not the type of man to do that.

  Once again he thanked Ghu, or whichever deity was listening today, that he’d found Valerie and convinced her to rule with him. The raven-haired beauty, having been raised in the highly civilized, overly-officious culture of the Mardukan nobility, nevertheless had a very appealing earthiness to her that Lucas found both personally endearing and professionally advantageous. That she saw herself as wife, first, and ruling sovereign princess, second, was telling to him – and one of the many reasons he had proposed they yoke their fortunes together. That and the fact he was deeply in love with her, something he never thought he’d feel again after the tragedy of Elaine’s horrific death.

  “So what is on
the agenda this morning, my sweet? Anything I should know before this meeting?” he asked as the robot deposited coffee at his elbow, already prepared to his specifications. Tomic, a local boy who had been so well trained for service that Valerie had hired him away from his master, presented a plate laden with native fruits, smoked klegg bacon, and hen’s eggs scrambled with breen in front of him, and he began to eat. The boy had learned his lessons well and withdrew slowly, reverently, just like any good servant, the livery of the royal house displayed prominently on his tunic. But his expression went beyond respect and into the reverent and worshipful.

  Lucas was having a hard time getting used to that, too: in the few years that he had been on Tanith, focusing on re-building the devastated planet nearly from scratch, he discovered he had somehow garnered a quasi-divine reputation among the natives. Thanks to the dramatic improvement in prosperity and civilization here around Rivington, as well as some obscure local mythology he didn’t even pretend to understand, some of his more primitive subjects saw his reign as a gift from the gods. While it made Lucas uncomfortable, Valerie and his other counselors encouraged that kind of devotion in his people for political reasons – and that made Lucas even more uncomfortable, sometimes.

  “Well, there are just a few minor matters that I reserved for your judgment while you were gone so long,” she said, as she went over the list her secretary had prepared for her. “I handled most of the mundane issues, but there are some which are policy decisions only Sovereign Crown Prince Lucas may decide,” she chuckled. That meant issues that she did not want the responsibility for deciding – which made her a wise and capable monarch. And a superlative wife. Even if it put more pressure on him as Prince.

  “First, the embassy for Gilgamesh. The original site we offered them, out by the spaceport, isn’t kosher with their fanatical deity for some reason. I think it has more to do with how remote it is. They want a space closer to the commercial sector, preferably one large enough to accommodate . . . well, it looks like an entire compound.”

  “They’ll use it as a trading post as much as an embassy. That’s their way. Any suitable sites available?” he asked, putting down his coffee after a long, delicious sip.

  “Yes, that’s not the problem. There’s at least three or four old plantations or estates along that route that would probably be fine. The problem is most of those have been claimed by senior naval officers.”

  “Really? How did that happen?” he asked, confused, as he started into the waffle.

  “Part of the Realm’s reward program,” she explained. “You remember. We did that last year, right after we restructured the government? About the time we got married?” she reminded him. “Expressions of gratitude and support for those who gave their all to the Realm, and all that?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Lucas agreed. “Sorry, I recall being a little . . . distracted at the time.” Now that she had mentioned it, he did remember something about an incentive and rewards program for the officer corps of the nascent Royal Navy of Tanith’s senior officers. He had just figured that they would prefer lands farther from what was becoming an increasingly busy city in an effort to enjoy the quiet rural life that Tanith had in abundance. That was the bright side about re-establishing civilization here on Tanith: there was plenty of beautiful real-estate to go around to deserving retainers. And that was a cheap way to ensure their loyalty.

  “Since those lands were gifts from the Realm,” she went on, “and pretty much crumbling ruins when we granted them, anyway, most of those officers have made improvements on them. We’d have to compensate them for that. And some of them have gotten pretty attached to them.”

  “Well, they can get unattached, if it makes the Gilgamesher’s happy,” Lucas frowned. “They’re too important a source of information, not to mention trade, to alienate them. Offer a generous compensation on top of a choice of other lands. How are we handling title issues, now, anyway?” he asked, as he sliced a fork through the golden-brown waffle. When Lucas had led the re-colonization of Tanith under the auspices of the commercial Tanith Adventure “property rights” as such had extended to how much a man could carry and whatever he could keep someone else from carrying off. That had been fine, when Rivington had been a simple raiding base and the off-world population living here was under a few thousand.

  But now Tanith was a sovereign Princedom, and as such things like who owned what – and who owed what taxes to the Realm – had become increasingly important. Early on in the colonization Lucas had established an ad hoc administrative council but it had been largely concerned with matters of defense and development – not too far different than how a Space Viking ship was run. Since Tanith had been under threat of attack during the time, it had made sense. Better, it had worked, at least enough so that they hadn’t needed to fix it much. And since Lucas’ primary goal had been the death of the man who killed his first bride, he hadn’t let such details as administrative efficiency of his Realm concern him.

  But now the threat of Andray Dunnan was no more. The madman who had slain his first wife before they’d spent a single hour wed, who had driven him to trade his venerable old family barony for a spaceship of war and a crew of vicious Space Vikings, as he pursued Dunnan across the galaxy in revenge, had been dead almost two years. Lucas had ended that chapter in his life – along with Dunnan’s life – with a 10mm pistol at point-blank range, in the ruins of the Royal Palace on Marduk. It had ended a painful, eight-year long chapter of obsession and vengeance in his life. But as consumed as he had been, he hadn’t let the vengeance define him.

  Now that it was over, he was more concerned with rebuilding civilization here on Tanith than anything else, turning this abandoned backwater world, so lush and ripe with promise, into a shining beacon of a modern, progressive society. Or at least a decent place to live for he and his wife.

  When he’d proposed to Valerie, in the aftermath of the Battle of Marduk, Lucas presented the union as much as a joining of civilizations as a wedding of two people in love, and Valerie had found the appeal in the notion.

  Tanith was a hybrid culture, after all, part slowly-recivilizing neobarbarian natives, part militaristic Sword World culture and part Old Federation civilization, specifically that of her native Marduk. After the Mardukan Affair, the grateful people of Marduk had laden Tanith with all sorts of aid and assistance – not to mention several thousand talented professionals who were willing to trade emigration from the crowded, well-developed cities of Marduk for the prospect of a meaningful life on the frontier. Valerie had helped organize that. She had departed her heavily-populated homeworld with nearly three thousand highly-trained technicians, artisans, and skilled workers who wanted to make their fortunes and seek a new life far away from the crowded cities of Marduk. The influx in the last two years had dramatically improved the quality of life and level of civilization on Tanith.

  She’d also brought a few hundred adventure-seeking aristocrats who wanted to see a Space Viking colony up close. Some of them were annoying and naïve, but most looked strongly to Valerie, and they were slowly becoming assets to the Realm.

  But the Mardukans, for all of their valuable help, had high expectations of government that had produced problems of its own. Before, all Lucas had to worry about where the number of ships and men he needed to defend Tanith and make the occasional raid. But the Mardukans expected things like property rights and inheritance issues to be long-settled matters of law, not slap-dash policy dreamed up on the spot. Suddenly things like property rights, and inheritance laws, and taxation, and dispute settlement, zoning, and government regulation and public health were suddenly important.

  That was just one more reason why he was ecstatic that he had married Valerie: she was an ideal administrator and an adept politician, two vital traits for a young ruling Princess. He wasn’t too proud to admit that she did a lot of his thinking for him on certain subjects.

  “I appointed that Morglayan, Sir Tomas Geraldo, as Realm Secretary of Propert
ies under Duke Morland at the Home Office,” she reminded him. “I had to offer him a barony and let him write his own rules – subject to His Highness’ approval, of course – but he started doing the job just after you left for Marduk last time. Good man. He can find room, if we need to shift around someone. We have plenty of space.”