“There is the matter of appointing his regent, sir.”
“The ministers have met?”
“Not yet, sir. They will do so within the hour. I was instructed to beg the honor of your presence as they discuss this gravest of issues.”
Trent nodded. “Please inform the ministers of the Privy Council that I will be in Council Chambers within the hour.” Trent wet a finger and held it up. “That is to say, if we get half a breeze out here.”
“Sir, if I might make a suggestion —”
Trent glanced at the speedboat. “No, we’ll stay with the Inside Straight. I don’t trust your men to bring her in safely, even under power. They don’t have a nautical look about them.”
Tyrene straightened up. “But, Your Royal Highness —”
“I need time to clear my wits, Tyrene. I may be a little late, but I’ll be there. Tell them not to start without me.”
Tyrene slumped. “Yes, sir.”
“Buck up, old man. These things are inevitable, even with the long life-spans the likes of us are blessed with.”
“I suppose. Nevertheless …” Tyrene groped for words.
“Yes, a death’s a shock to the system. All the more so for the false sense of security we’re lulled into because of its long postponement.”
“Aye.” Tyrene sighed and looked off forlornly. “He was a great man.”
Trent hesitated the barest second. “One of the greatest. Now, off with you. This is a vulnerable time, a critical juncture if there ever was one. You’re needed back at Perilous.”
“Aye.” Tyrene came to attention once again. “Your Royal Highness.” He turned slightly and bowed. “My lady.”
“Oh, Tyrene.” Sheila went to him and hugged him.
Tyrene looked uncomfortable hugging back.
“I must go, my lady.”
“Be careful.”
And he tried to be. But in the attempt to reboard the launch, his rubbery land-legs failed him. He got caught with one foot in each perversely drifting boat, and for some reason neither his men nor Trent could prevent him from falling into the drink with a mighty splash. He got a full ducking, head to toe.
No one laughed. They hauled him out.
Miserable beyond human endurance, Tyrene nevertheless bore up with dignity. “It hasn’t been a good day,” he said.
Trent cast them off. The motor came to life, and the launch sped away, heading back to the marina. The small sloop bobbed in its wake.
Sheila looked stricken. “I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe he’s dead.”
After a moment Trent said, “Neither can I.”
They hugged each other a good while before making preparations for getting the vessel underway.
Trent went below and fiddled with the emergency engine until it coughed and began chugging merrily.
As soon as it did, a sailor’s mistress of a sea breeze came across the water to luff the sails.
Five
Planet
They stumbled through forests of boulders, following a twisting path. She could walk, but the pain in her side was excruciating, or so Gene guessed from her constant grimacing and lip-biting. He helped her along while glancing constantly skyward, expecting strange, hostile spacecraft to appear at any second.
But whoever was in pursuit seemed to have lost the scent. Gene guessed that the three craft he had seen streaking through the planet’s upper atmosphere had either overshot their intended landing site or were deploying into a wide search pattern.
He asked, “Do you think their instruments got a fix on you as you landed … uh, crashed?”
“They were tracking me as I deorbited, but I employed …” She grunted as she stepped up to a ledge. “I used every deception ploy and decoy device that the lander had to offer. Something might have worked.”
“Seems to have.”
“They’ll be following phantom sensor readings for a good while. We may have time enough to reach the test mine — if we’re lucky.”
“Test mine?”
“Yes, a test shaft and a number of tunnels, if the information I have is correct. Production mining never commenced here, and the facility was mothballed. Unless scavengers found it, there may be an operating multiphone there.”
“Some kind of radio?”
She gave him a curious look. “What strange terminology you use. Radio? No. It doesn’t broadcast on the usual spectra. It employs paired virtual photons to propagate probability waves through …” She shrugged. “You must be a bumpkin from the darkest of galactic provinces if you need the principles of superluminal [3] communication explained to you.”
“Yeah, you might say I’m from the boondocks,” Gene told her.
She frowned. “Could it be that you don’t speak Universal? I seem to be understanding you, but I just suddenly realized you’re actually speaking some other tongue. Do you have a running translator working?”
“Sort of.”
“It must be very sophisticated. You had me fooled.”
“It is sophisticated, very,” Gene said. “It’s downright magical, in fact. How far to this mine thing?”
“It should be just over this next ridge. Uhhh …”
She sank to her knees.
“Take it easy. Do you want to rest?”
“No!” She forced herself to rise as he assisted. “We must get there and send for help. It’s only a matter of time before they realize they’ve been fooled and begin to recognize our life readings hidden in the false data.”
They moved on. The pink sky looked darkly ominous now, as if warning of a strange storm to come. The orange scrub moved nervously with the breeze. The rocks looked greener here, shading from verdigris to jade.
They made their way across rugged terrain for a good ten minutes.
“Kind of obvious question, and maybe I’m missing something,” Gene said, “but won’t your broadcast on this multiphone gadget — By the way, it is a broadcast you’re talking about, something that can be detected easily?”
“A multiphone transmission can be detected by anyone with a multiphone receiver anywhere in the universe.”
“I see. So my question is, Won’t your transmission give our position away?”
“Not at all.” She was out of breath. “No way to … determine the origin of a multiphone transmission … omnidirectional … uhhh.”
“We’ve got to slow down. You could be bleeding again.”
She suddenly pointed. “There!”
Gene looked ahead. An inverted hexagonal umbrella, looking very like an advanced communications dish, was jutting above the crest of the next hill.
“Isn’t this the first place they’ll look?” he asked.
“Not if the lander’s decoy drones succeed in convincing the Irregulars that I came down on the other side of the planet,” she said. “They won’t search here until they realize they’ve been hoodwinked.”
“Another obvious question,” Gene said as he helped her up the steep rise. “Why do they want you?”
She was silent.
“Just thought I’d ask,” he said.
“How do I know you’re not an Irregular agent?”
“Would I be helping you?”
“You could be leading me into a trap while trying to get me to divulge information without resorting to either torture or mind probe. Not that either would yield anything of value.”
“I concede the point.”
She gave him an analytical look. “But I don’t think you are an Irregular. You’re a bit of mystery. You haven’t even mentioned your ship. If you have one,that is the first place they would have looked — unless your ship is in a stealth mode that is beyond their capacities to defeat. In which case, you might just be a freebooter.”
He said, “In which case I might be tempted to turn you over to your pursuers for any reward they might offer. Are they offering a reward?”