Admiral Read online

  I nodded again, taken aback by the wonder of it all. "You say they've achieved a stable government?"

  "They function, albeit in fits and jerks and not at all efficiently. The good news is that they're fully aware of what a miserable job they were doing and that all it would've taken was a single epidemic or major shortage of some kind to topple them." Nestor smiled. "They welcomed us with open arms, sir, and accepted every expert we offered them with not just relief but outright enthusiasm. The temporary head of the government stepped down the moment she learned we were in-system, for example—her first words to me were 'Long live the King!'. And that's been the attitude there ever since. You know how practical and down to earth most Rabbits are, sir. All they want is to be free, and to get back to growing food."

  I nodded slowly. "It sounds like you've done well, Nestor. Congratulations."

  His ear-linings darkened. "I'd never have been anyone without you, sir. Sometimes I think none of us ever would've been."

  I smiled back. "Nonsense! This... revolutionary doe, I suppose you could call her. I've never had anything to do with her, now have I? Yet she's freed a world, if I have my facts straight. That's one accomplished Rabbit right there, one who can proudly stand on her own two legs and look any human there ever was dead in the eye! She didn't need any outside help from anyone." I leaned back in my chair. "Now there's a girl I'd like to meet!"

  Nestor smiled again, but didn't raise his eyes. "Someone had to come and make the formal surrender. To kneel before you in person, in other words. It just so happens she was chosen for the honor." His smile widened. "Sir, her name is Frieda. She's originally from Marcus Prime. And curiously enough, she's even more eager to meet you than you are her."

  16

  All the next day, everyone I had any personal contact whatsoever with was most unaccountably smiling. Well, a few could be said to be grinning as opposed to outright smiling, but that was putting too fine an edge on the matter. I might've been irritated by this, and probably would've been had it happened even a few days earlier. But as things were, well… A Prince of the Realm can have no real privacy, especially when he gets so carried away in the magic of a moment that he forgets to close the security-shutters in his sleeping-chamber. So by now it was inevitable that everyone knew Frieda and I were already a lot more than merely good friends.

  Not that we could've kept it a secret very long anyway. "My Prince," Frieda greeted me immediately after making her supplication in the name of her planet's populace. "I once promised to save something for you. And here it is after so many years that I nearly gave up all hope." Then, very slowly, she pulled a pressed and dried fire lily from her bosom and presented it to me.

  And that was all I could stand—all either of us could stand, most likely. I asked Nestor to please clear my schedule until the next morning, then within minutes my doe and I found our way into my bedroom. And, well… so far I can see the rest isn't anyone's business but our own, no matter how many Heralds and guards and other personal servants must've stood at the forgotten shutters and gaped at the goings-on. The good news was that as near as I could tell everyone in my retinue seemed to approve overwhelmingly. The smiles might've been knowing in nature, but they also reflected a genuine sharing of my own happiness.

  Everyone smiled on the bridge as well when I made my late-morning appearance there. Sir Leslie was already there waiting for me, sipping fragrant coffee from an expensive cup and of course wearing his own silly smile. It should've been a long, tough slog to the bridge; I'd barely slept at all the night before, and had expended considerable energy besides. Yet I practically danced all the long way there—I felt as if I'd shed twenty years. The colors were brighter, the scents cleaner, the brasswork shinier… I felt as if I were a middie again. And of course I smiled too.

  "Well, Sir Leslie," I began. "We've come to the far end of the Empire. Beyond this point lies little but unexplored space."

  His smile widened. "Heaven knows that when I was a young officer I never expected to live to see it."

  "Nor I." Then I wriggled my nose for a moment. "There's not much more of value to be accomplished out this way, that I can see at least."

  "No, sir," he agreed again. "We've dismembered them—taken everything worth having. All the local planets trade with Royal worlds now. I can't imagine why the Emperor won't surrender. He couldn't win even before. But now… He's been reduced to practically nothing."

  "It's a form of insanity, I fear. A dangerous one." For the first time in hours my smile faded, and I stood silent as I thought matters over.

  "I'm very pleased that you found her, sir," Leslie said into the silence. "I had no idea you were even looking. No one did, apparently. But now… Nothing could've made me happier, David. And I mean that."

  My smile returned. "Thank you, Sir Leslie." Then I made my final decision. "We've done what we can do towards ending the war out this way, I think. There's no more pressure to be applied, once everything of value has been taken. So I think it's time for the Third Fleet to shape a new course."

  "If you think so, David, then so do I."

  I smiled again. Our mostly-noble officer corps was in some ways still just as blind and ignorant as it'd been when I was still just a ship's boy. This was something I'd always wanted to remedy, but as yet hadn't had much opportunity. To give them their due, however, they'd proven remarkably open-minded about many things. Or at least they had once the facts were rammed far enough down their throats! Was this relative flexibility of mind on the part of our officer corps, tiny as the advantage was, the ultimate reason we'd finally beaten the Imperials? One among many, I decided. Certainly it was the ultimate reason our slaves were being freed as quickly as we could make it happen. And despite all his faults, Sir Leslie had been the first of the nobles to admit he'd been wrong. For this as well as his personal courage I'd always respect him. Even if he wasn't exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, I'd respect him. "Let's go join the blockade of Imperious," I ordered. It may've appeared a spontaneous choice, but I'd been planning for weeks to make the move just as soon as Nestor's squadron rejoined us. "Perhaps we can find more mischief to make there."

  17

  Interstellar voyages resemble travel by old-fashioned sailing ship more than anything else. Though the weather is far less interesting in space and the likelihood of arriving alive at one's destination is considerably higher, both modes of travel consume enough months that the ships become miniature communities complete with gossip, crime, newspapers, and social cliques. And of course shipboard romances are justifiably famous. On passenger liners, where people of both sexes live in close proximity to each other and the usual inhibitions are at least partly lifted, well… such affairs are the stuff of so many novels that they practically constitute a genre of their own. Every year saw the production of a brand-new mountain of the stuff.

  Romances were not commonplace on navy ships, however—our crews were all-male, and while homosexuality was permitted there were surprisingly few takers even among the humans, who were far more flexible in these matters than we ex-slave-species. And so I suppose that Frieda must've felt very lonely for girl-type company once our initial joy at seeing each other after so long was sated. It probably sounded very well indeed to have a prince as a boyfriend, but like most of the population of the universe my beloved had never spent any time at all around a working Court or even just a throne room, and therefore had no concept whatsoever of how terribly twisted out of true my life was. The Heralds' continual questions and efforts to predict my actions weirded her out to no end, for example, while Nestor had to explain to her why I was so cold and haughty when sitting on my throne. (I had to be, lest even my friends begin walking all over me.) Then there were the long hours and the constant reading-up on current events and dinners, dinners, dinners everywhere, with her on my arm but with us both so very much on-stage every second of every minute that we might as well have been on different planets in terms of intimacy. Via much fighting, kicking and scr
eaming, I managed to free up almost an hour a day to spend with the doe I very much hoped to soon marry. That doesn't sound so bad until you realize that it included breakfast and lunch, meals at which I was practically forced to entertain at least one or two visitors. Plus, she told me once, she was rather taken aback at how accustomed I'd become to having my bidding done for me without a single question being asked. "You're in command so much of the time that you don't even realize what you sound like to a non-subordinate," she explained once, not long after breaking out weeping in my cabin. "I… I want to be special to you, not just another junior officer!" And she was right, I came to understand. It was shocking, how far my hard-won conversational skills had degenerated into "Do this!" and "Do that!" without my even noticing. It was probably an occupational hazard for both admirals and princes royal, but that didn't make me feel any less embarrassed when I finally realized the truth.

  Not that I was the only one carrying scars. The Imperials had decided that Frieda was a very able slave indeed, and therefore she'd been forced to marry. And marry and marry and marry again, in fact, since somehow she kept failing to litter despite the fact that her medical tests all came up normal. It was the gengineering again, of course—the Marcus doctors had made plenty certain in various subtle ways that she wouldn't become pregnant with the wrong fetus and spoil several generations worth of planning. When she told me—weeping, of course—about her previous husbands, well… The experience was awkward and unpleasant in more ways than I could possibly count. It wasn't the other Rabbits—how could I fail to forgive them, especially when they were being forced as well? But it also turned out that Frieda still didn't know about her being gengineered any more than I had at first and, well…

  She wasn't cleared to know!

  It was possibly the most miserable, ridiculous situation I'd ever faced. I loved Frieda and she loved me—the pheromones made utterly certain of it. And yet… everything depended on the gene-cutting remaining secret. Though my beloved had done so much for not just for her own planet but for the various species of the humanities, well… James and I were still perfectly capable of losing our crowns over this sort of thing. It was our great vulnerability, a shared weakness that we dare not expose to anyone, ever. But how could I tell my love, when in so many ways I still knew so little about her? Was she prone to gossip with the girls? Did she suffer from a pathological need to impress others? Did she talk in her sleep, for heaven's sake? It wasn't cruel or calculating or sadistic not to tell her the whole truth just yet. Rather it was prudence, or perhaps even self-preservation. This was especially true because I'd begun speculating with considerable unease about the purely human side of the Marcus family. Long ago I'd noticed that unlike other Houses they seemed to produce nothing but superior leaders, generation after generation. How much of that was coincidence? Or that James was such a stunning genius? Or that His Majesty King Albert was infertile with every female he ever slept with save just the once, with a Marcus noblewoman? Had a Marcus doctor gotten to him while he was still an infant, perhaps, and arranged matters decades before the fact? Oh yes, it was definitely self-preservation not to let my secret spill; in fact, I rather wished that I'd never been told about the matter myself! On the other hand, how could I so thoroughly mislead someone I cared so much about? If I didn't tell her right away she'd be furious when she found out, and strictly from her own point of view she'd have every right to be.

  Finally, Nestor and I cooked up a plan. One evening he asked to dine with my beloved alone, and during dinner the conversation somehow drifted around to slave-improvement breeding programs, which were entirely legal and accepted. He explained that she and I had been part of such a program, a very advanced one of great intensity meant to produce slaves of the highest possible capabilities. This, he explained, was probably why we had such strong feelings for each other, and only for each other. My friend also explained that this information could be terribly embarrassing to me, and that it was important to the future of all the ex-slaves that it not be leaked. "People need to see David as a sort of everyman," he explained, sharing only a fraction of the truth. "Not the result of special breeding. That's too much like the human nobles."

  Wide-eyed she'd nodded and sworn her everlasting silence, and that night we made love that would've been perfect had it not been for the sense of guilt that came with founding such an important relationship on nothing more substantial than a politically-convenient lie. My god! Couldn't I even find my long-lost love without the royalty-thing screwing it all up?

  Apparently not.

  Still, the biological imperatives between us were, well…. Imperative. I didn't mislead or mistreat her any more than I could help, and she displayed an almost unlimited amount of patience, a trait she'd perhaps perfected under the Imperial whip. The hard-wiring of the brain is far more subtle and important in our day-to-day lives than almost anyone gives it credit for; we could probably have treated each other like dirt and still been incapable of not loving one other with all our hearts. All I could do was hope that love both conquered all and forgave all, as the poets claimed. I did what I could, including salving my own conscious by writing and ring-sealing a dated letter that explained how much I wished I could tell her the whole story and why it was that I hadn't been able to. Who could know? Perhaps someday I might be able to deliver it to her after all? By then she might even have been a princess long enough to begin to appreciate how much wisdom there was in the old saying, "Uneasy lies the head upon which rests a crown".

  By the time our journey was almost over, Frieda had mastered the basics of the princessing business. She knew how to dress, how to behave in Court, what to expect from the less privileged, and how to exist without privacy. Her table manners were polished, and it was shocking to see how effortlessly she absorbed the arts of high-society repartee and conversation. While there were still plenty of rough spots—some due to a lack of female nobles to practice with, while others had their root in her pragmatic nature as a Rabbit—I personally found her idiosyncrasies to be charming more than anything else. After all, I shared many of them myself! And so on the last night before we Jumped to rejoin the First Fleet portion of the blockading forces, she and I hosted a huge dinner for all the hundreds of officers and nobles aboard all of our ships who could make it, along with each and every Rabbit and Dog. We announced our engagement there, holding hands and looking deep into one another's eyes. "We've both got a few miles on us," I observed, "and carry scars from where we've been and some of the things we've been obliged to do. But—" here I snuck a quick kiss—"we're going to be married regardless."

  The officers had already guessed, of course—they were polite, but it would've been dishonest to feign surprise. And Nestor had known for ages. But the rest of the ex-slaves, well… "Hurrah!" they cried over and over again, highly-decorated marines and normally-phlegmatic footbunnies alike bouncing about like excited kits, while the Dogs howled in joy. "Hurrah!"

  And then the furred among the crowd picked Frieda and I up and carried us down Javelin's corridors on their shoulders for a time. It must've been the most undisciplined and inappropriate behavior seen aboard a king's ship since I couldn't imagine when. But no one seemed to mind. Over and over again Frieda and I found ourselves locking eyes and losing our souls in the depths of each other's shimmery orbs. It went on forever and ever, until finally we were deposited on the deck just outside the Royal Suite. "Three cheers!" called out Juan Baptiste, one of my lead footbunnies. "And a tiger!" The result nearly deafened us all, then Juan smiled and opened the outer door for me. "Now you two get at it," he whispered with a wink. "Even if it's still a mite early, legally speaking. So that my children and their children's children will have sovereigns as worthy of our love and respect as we do."

  18

  I'd like to be able to say that I felt as calmly self-assured as I tried to appear on Javelin's bridge when we finally burst through to join the First Fleet, which with its sister organization was maintaining a tight blockade
around the Imperial core worlds. A thousand million things could've gone wrong in the many months that'd passed since I'd ordered them here. The Imperial Fleet might've sortied and against all odds won a resounding victory, the Yans might've been detected and our whole overlarge diplomatic contingent slaughtered in revenge, there might've been another coup attempt back home… But it only took me seconds to see that all was well, and in many ways would remain well forever after. For, neatly formed up under the massed guns of the Bard-class battleships drifted the remnants of the Imperial Line of Battle, the core of the Emperor's strength and the ultimate source of all his power to make mischief.

  They'd surrendered at last—the long, long nightmare was finally over.

  It didn’t take me long to catch up on what'd happened and how. According to Admiral Regan, my peace-waging campaign had been so successful and impossible to conceal that a bloody palace revolt had erupted, led by "sane" Imperials who wanted to accept our terms. The Emperor's nephew had led this movement, he explained, and though he perforce remained on Imperious attempting to consolidate his power he'd sent representatives to wait for me and make his submission as soon as I returned. The new Lord of the House of Boyen—the only title he claimed—seemed like a good, responsible man, the admiral opined, the kind of person one could do business with. And of course that was how the history books would always tell it, even though within hours I had a report from the Yans in my pocket that told a very different story indeed. It didn't matter, I supposed. Jason was indeed someone with whom we could do business; in fact I'd trust him with my life, as he'd done at least twice with me. The truly important thing was that the wars were finally over! There'd be no more bloodshed and violence on the industrial scale—it was done and, best of all, done properly and permanently!