Prince of Tanith Read online

  In fact, empty real estate was the primary asset of the Realm. In ten years, the sphere of influence of civilization had been confined, with exceptions, to a five-hundred mile radius around Rivington. There were five other continents that had barely been touched by the Space Vikings. And Rivington itself still had plenty of room for expansion. Despite the thirty thousand people who lived in the city today, there was still far more vacant space than occupied space among the ruins – after all, when the city had been at its peak it had held at least two million people. It would be centuries before Tanith grew to fill that space.

  “Just be sure you don’t have to disturb any more native settlements than necessary,” he warned. “The last thing I need is another shoot-out between so-called ‘squatters’ who’ve been living there for generations and a Space Viking with a shiny new deed. Public relations is starting to become important, especially with the natives.”

  Well over a third of the inhabitants of Rivington had been born on Tanith before Lucas had arrived, and had flocked to the reborn city for jobs and a better life. In the far-off villages from which they’d come life largely went on the way it had for the last several centuries, nearly untouched by high technology after ten years. Rivington, by comparison, was almost a magical place to the pre-literate culture.

  But that was starting to change, as the native Tanith people – probably around a million medieval neobarbarians, scattered in tribes and villages planet-wide – had begun to soak up and spread the technologies of the Sword Worlds among themselves. And then someday they would discover that the lands that had been theirs and their ancestors since the fall of the Old Federation were now suddenly the property of someone from another planet whose name they didn’t even know. That had happened a couple of times already, with bloody results.

  You had to be careful with that, lest you risk a nasty peasant uprising. The civilized new owners and the uncivilized natives had to learn to get along and cooperate, if Tanith was to prosper. It was a short-term problem -- eventually the people who were given those lands by the Realm would have to take residence and find a way to rule and lead those same natives. Sometimes it was hard to convince the Sword Worlders or their Mardukan counterparts that having neobarbarians on their new estates was a benefit, not a liability. And it would be harder still to convince someone that the Gilgameshers could make better use of an estate than they could.

  “Find a way to make it happen,” he agreed. “I don’t want to ruffle feathers among our people, but the Gilgameshers are too important a resource to snub now, especially after what they did to help us on Marduk.”

  “I agree,” Valerie sighed, “but some of those old Space Viking—I mean, ‘Royal Navy of Tanith’ officers purely hate the Gilgameshers and would swear white with black to spite them.”

  There was a lot of that kind of hate around – the people of Gilgamesh were civilized – that is, they used advanced technology like contragravity and hyperdrive engines, flew space ships and used viewscreen communications. But their planet had also adopted a theocratic radical monotheism and a host of spiritual rules that discouraged contact with the “unclean” – which was anyone who wasn’t a Gilgamesher.

  It wasn’t as if they were warlike, far from it. They were practically pacifists. Instead of raiding other worlds like the Space Vikings did, they traded – and they were adept at that, so much so that the term “Gilgamesher” had become synonymous with sharp dealing across a hundred worlds. Space Vikings raided. Merchantmen traded. Gilgameshers haggled bitterly and went everywhere.

  The result was a kind of mutual antipathy between regular commercial space traders, Space Vikings, and the Gilgameshers. But Lucas didn’t let that prejudice stand in the way of utilizing them as a valuable resource, and he had done everything possible to extend courtesies to the odd culture.

  “So don’t tell them why we’re taking it,” reasoned Lucas, “just inform them that the Realm has need, and let them find out after the fact. Send the Gilgamesher ambassador a list of the ones we could manage and let him pick one out. Then figure out which officer we bump. If they give you any guff, let me know, and I’ll find some ways to persuade them.” He grinned, letting her guess just what ways he would choose. Lucas had a reputation as a very civilized Space Viking prince, but that didn’t mean he eschewed brutal methods when the need arose. He ruled Tanith, not just reigned over it. He’d de-commission any man in his command who did not want to heed his wishes, but he’d find other ways to influence him, first.

  “As His Highness wishes,” she said, checking off the item on the list, “now I can blame you for the decision, which I very much appreciate. Next,” she continued, sipping her juice daintily, “there is the matter of opening up Cavendard.”

  “What’s Cavendard?” Lucas asked, his fork stopping half way to his mouth.

  “Why, it’s the second biggest city on Tanith,” she said in surprise. “I’m surprised His Highness is unaware of such an important fact about his Realm.”

  “There’s a bucket of things I know about our realm against an ocean of things I don’t know,” Lucas commented, chewing thoughtfully. “For instance, I’ve lived here ten years and haven’t even been to the ocean, yet. Where is Cavendard?”

  “It’s on the Gamma continent,” she said, referring on a map she produced to a long, shoestring-like land that ran northeast-southwest, with a large bulge in its northeastern quarter. “It’s in the tropical fertile basin, there, between the base of the mountain range and the jungle. Records indicate that there were 300,000 people there, before the . . . whatever it was that crashed civilization here. Now it is home to about a half dozen illiterate tribes who prowl the ruins for scavenging rights.”

  “And why do we want this jewel in the jungle again?” he asked. “Isn’t there enough to do here in Rivington? And the northern towns?”

  “Lifetimes,” she agreed. “But if all civilization is locked up here, then what happens when someone comes along and drops a hellburner on us, and turns us all to radioactive slag? We need to spread civilization out some, if we want it to spread past the local area. Keep it from being concentrated on one continent. Tanith is a big world. We should take advantage of it.”

  “I agree,” Lucas murmured, not happy with the thought of his bride being incinerated from orbit. “But how come that sounded suspiciously like a sales pitch?”

  “Because it’s basically the one I got from Lady Essen last night,” she admitted with an apologetic smirk. “Am I that transparent? Anyway, Lady Susan Essen – you hired her husband, Sir Dafyd, from Morglay, to oversee the lunar mines? But Lady Essen isn’t content with a simple life of leisure in Rivington, enjoying the perks of her husband’s position. She feels the Realm has need of her,” Valerie said, emphasizing the word to the point of caricature. “She wants to form a development-and-exploitation firm to re-open Cavendard.”

  “What are the pros?” Lucas asked, willing to consider it. Ambition was a precious commodity on a frontier world, and like fire or nuclear energy, it could be used to build or destroy. He wanted to encourage it, but he didn’t want to someday be facing down the very nobles he’d elevated due to their over-ambition. He remembered the woman vaguely, now, from some “official” function they’d thrown last year. She and her husband had gotten on the wrong side of the royal court of Morglay, he recalled, and had chosen exile three-thousand light years away on barbaric Tanith rather than apologize or face the consequences.

  Luckily for Tanith, Lord Dafyd Essen was an adept mine administrator, and had the robotic mines, foundries and factories on Tanith’s single five-hundred mile iron-nickel moon running with superb efficiency. Indeed, Lucas had already made a mental note to establish the lunar mines as an official industrial Barony as a reward at the next Princely court. He’d figured that Essen’s wife would join him on the moon and support her husband that way, but apparently Lady Essen had ambitions of her own. The Essens had brought a dozen or so retainers and henchmen from Morglay with them, he
recalled, and while most of them were fairly superfluous, they seemed very loyal to the Essens and very supportive of his reign. Just the sort of subjects he liked.

  “Well, the jungle has all sorts of interesting medicinal herbs and exotic fauna,” Valerie pointed out. “Plus there’s an old germanium mine in the foothills. Oh, and there’s a couple of gemstone mines, too, but we don’t really know what kind or how extensive. But her big reason is the weather. She hates the temperate climate at Rivington and wants someplace warm and sunny. Cavendard is her choice.”

  “Cons?”

  “If it gets her and her Sword World cronies out of Rivington, I don’t see any,” Valerie said, making a face. While she loved Lucas dearly, there were some dramatic cultural differences between Valerie’s ancient world of Marduk, and the less refined – but no less arrogant – culture of the Sword Worlds which Lucas was from. And that could be a problem, too. After the Mardukans and the Tanith natives, the nascent nobility and basic institutional culture of Tanith was made up in large part by expatriates from the Sword Worlds.

  The Sword Worlds were a cluster of a dozen worlds beyond the edge of Old Federation space. They had been founded over five hundred years before – about the same time Tanith had been originally colonized – by 10,000 die-hard veterans of the System States Alliance, the great civil war that signaled the beginning of the end of the first great interstellar human culture, the 300-world strong Federation. Lucas’ ancestors had lost, but refused to surrender with their comrades. Instead they gathered at Abigor, the furthest planet out, and plunged into the unknown, uncharted galaxy in search of a safe, new world where they could live without their Federation foes even knowing they existed.

  The first world was named Excalibur, after King Arthur’s famous blade, and within two generations other colony worlds of Flamberge and Joyeuse had been formed, and further colonies in the decades after that. With a culture descended from the System States military – including a great deal of the Intelligence section, the Political section, and the military officer’s academy on Abigor – the Sword Worlds developed a culture and political system usually described as “neo-feudalism”. Unlike Marduk, where noble titles were institutional measures of respect and reward, in the Sword Worlds a noble was expected to rule his fief on behalf of his suzerain, pay taxes, provide troops, and control their own lands without outside help. The world Lucas had grown up on, Gram, was one of the more recently settled of the Sword Worlds.

  But the story didn’t end there. The Sword Worlds had built their own independent civilization in secret for almost four hundred years, when they finally began to tentatively return to the edges of Federation Space – only to find the government and civilization they had feared and fled from had long vanished. The grand Federation was no more.

  What remained were abandoned colony worlds in various states of de-civilization, with a few bright jewels where the old Federation culture had survived its fall. The vast majority of the old colonies had fallen to the oxcart-and-battle-axe stage of development. That made them highly vulnerable to exploitation by enterprising Sword Worlders. The neobarbarians, as the decivilized natives were termed, could rarely resist the advanced weapons of the Sword Worlds, and could not defend their valuable property. A generation after re-contact, the raiders – colorfully referred to as Space Vikings – were regularly journeying to the distant neobarb planets of the Old Federation and bringing home amazing amounts of loot and plunder to the Sword Worlds.

  But death, destruction, and larceny weren’t the only things the Sword Worlds exported. The distance between the nearest Sword World and the nearest world of the Old Federation was still over 2000 light-years. At a rate of an hour a light-year, that was far too long a voyage to return home quickly. So after fifty years or so of raiding, Space Vikings began selecting planets in the Old Federation to transform into raiding bases, places they could put in between raids and repair their ship, replace their crews, and sell their loot without the long trip back to the Sword Worlds.

  Local bases allowed for much greater penetration and higher profits. And the natives on those worlds quickly picked up high technologies and other hallmarks of a starfaring civilization. The side effect was the neobarbs in contact with Space Vikings on those worlds were slowly being dragged back into civilization. Located deep in Old Federation space, three-thousand light-years from Gram, that was what Tanith was originally intended to be. That and a platform from which he could hunt Andray Dunnan.

  But that had been ten years ago, and times and circumstances had changed. Dynastic troubles in the Sword Worlds, particularly on his native Gram, had convinced him to eschew most Sword World society in favor of beginning anew on Tanith. The king who had supported the Tanith Adventure and used its success to put himself on the throne, Angus I, had gone crazy and gotten greedy about the colony.

  That had forced Lucas to give up his title as Prince Viceroy and taken over Tanith in name, as well as in deed. After all, Tanith was Lucas’ vision, once he recognized the potential the rich, lush world had. But what had begun as simple political expediency had transformed into a real attempt to re-establish the light of civilization in this once dark corner of the universe.

  Unfortunately, most of his most-talented technicians still came from the distant Sword Worlds, like Sir Dafyd’s experience with non-atmospheric mining. And with the technicians came spouses – many of whom had very “Sword World” ideas of how things should be run on Tanith. And that often meant attitudes and elitism that often made it difficult for Sword World aristocracy to adjust well to Tanith and its limitations. Sir Dafyd was from Morglay, but Lady Essen was from Excalibur, he suddenly remembered. To Valerie, that wouldn’t make much difference. In Lucas’ experience, folk from Excalibur, the oldest and most formal of the regal Sword Worlds, tended to be the highest-minded. He suddenly had a lot more sympathy for his wife.

  “She’s a pleasant enough woman,” Valerie admitted, “but one would think that offering the new Princess that much advice on her new reign might be considered rude. It’s like she thinks I’m a brainless teenager, or wasn’t raised properly, or something. So if we grant her this, she leaves what passes for Rivington night life. And leaves me alone.”

  “Well, we’ll just have to get along without her, won’t we?” Lucas asked, sweetly. “So what exactly does she want from us?”

  “Full charter to hold the territory in sovereign fief to the Realm; title as Duchess of Cavendard; suitable taxation to be split with the Crown; and official recognition of her appointments to local positions. Plus, she wants security and support guarantees. And a five-hundred man army contingent. She requested experienced troops.”

  Lucas winced. That would hurt. Hiring out troops to other Space Vikings was becoming a serious source of revenue for the Realm. There was a big garrison of them stationed in the city at a well-maintained old fortress-turned-barracks near the spaceport, and then a bigger one surrounding the new Camp Valiant, to the east. It had taken a decade to train or attract a cadre that skilled in the arts of destruction. Most were veterans of off-world raids, and proven fighters who were instrumental in bringing back loot and trade goods from unhappy natives.

  It had been Duke Otto Harkaman’s idea to construct a large residential complex outside of the spaceport, where itinerant Space Viking veterans could feel comfortable living between terms of service on an independent ship. Most Space Viking mercenaries didn’t really have much place to call home, and Harkaman’s idea had been to give them one. Small residential units were available for rent or lease at low rates, and there were plenty of advanced amenities available for their use at the complex. And it had improved the local economy, too. Already there was a four-mile stretch of land on the mercenary complex side of the spaceport that was lined with pawn shops, brothels, taverns, and even some more refined amusements.

  There were plenty of experienced soldiers available. But redeploying them to guard an old ruin wasn’t cost-effective. Since the Realm was paid a commis
sion on every trooper hired through the Department of Auxiliaries in the Ministry of War, he was loathe to take so many men out of the pool at one time for what was likely to be light duty. He’d have to find some compromise.

  “Okay, here’s what we do: have the charter prepared, but make her title and enfiefment conditional on her successfully re-establishing a viable city within one year, to my satisfaction. She may take two hundred Home Office sepoy troops at the Realm’s expense for six months, and a platoon of Royal Army of Tanith men – we can rotate them through to get use to the territory – but no mercenaries. I can’t have her looting the barracks to keep real fighting men in garrison duty. That’s bad policy.” He didn’t mind sparing the sepoy troops as much. Those were almost entirely native-born subjects who had been given basic infantry training, but hadn’t qualified for more advanced combat training yet. The Home Ministry, under Duke Paytrik Morland, was supposed to do that sort of thing anyway.