“I’ll get you!” the pirate snarled at Sophora, reaching for the long dagger in his boot, but Krystal’s accurate kick made him grab something else instead. Krystal took the knife and his life before he could move.
Mirabel whirled. The Queen screeched, hands to her neck, as the pirate tugged at her necklace one-handed, while fending off the King with his cutlass. Mirabel charged across the floor, but before she could intervene, the necklace broke. The pirate thrust it into his belt, and ran for the door. Mirabel followed.
Behind her, sergeants bellowed and corporals cursed. A good dozen of the members ran for the armory, where they could find weapons enough to deal with a mere handful of pirates, no matter how vicious, but in the meantime—Harald snatched one of the wards from her booth, and held a blade to her neck. His men did the same; one even had the child who had guarded the door, holding her by her braids, with the cutlass over her head.
“Now, now—you don’t want me to hurt this sweet child, do you?”
The uproar sank to a growl, and Mirabel skidded to a stop just out of reach of Harald Redbeard. He winked at her. “Come on along, sweetheart—I’ll teach you how to use that thing properly. I like a girl with spirit.”
“Do you?” Mirabel said, and signalled.
The nine-year-old dropped abruptly to the length of her braids, then bounced up between her captor’s legs. Her little bronze cap hit his pelvic arch with an audible crunch. He shrieked and fell; she grabbed his cutlass and hamstrung the pirate next in line. As Harald turned to look, the girl he was holding sank her teeth into his thumb; Mirabel stepped to one side and ran her blade up under his ribs.
“I already know how to use this thing,” she said, wincing as blood spattered her borrowed gown. The girl grabbed his cutlass, and passed it to another adult. Two of the other pirates dropped the children they held only to find that the girls were more dangerous loose, and all the guests knew how to use a cutlass when they had one.
“But you aren’t real warriors,” moaned the last survivor, cowering from the blows of three energetic orphans pelting him with misshapen pottery from the pottery stall. “Cap’n said so—”
“Your Cap’n might say something different now,” Krystal said. “If he could.” Her blade, already bloody, swung once more.
In the aftermath of the brawl, in the flurry of cleaning up, no one could find the Queen’s necklace. Not until they stripped the pirates’ bodies, and the shattered remnants were found in the codpiece of the pirate who’d been felled by Sarajane. “So the Queen was wearing paste…” Sophora said, and looked at Mirabel. Mirabel sighed. She knew where her duty lay, but how she would explain to Dorcas… first blood on the gown, then this…
“Here.” She unhooked the clasp and handed it over. “Tell her you found it, and mine was crushed.”
Sophora smiled at her. “Mirabel, you’re finally growing up. I’m proud of you.”
When the crowd settled down, Lord Mander collected Cabella and Mirabel and tried to call for a second vote, but a loud yell of “We already paid!” drowned him out.
Cabella took Sophora aside. “Look—I’ve been Queen before, and you don’t want to give it to Krystal. Why not Mirabel? She’s decorative enough, she fought the pirates, and she gave up the necklace.”
Sophora looked at Mirabel.
“But I—but I never imagined—”
“Sounds like a Queen to me,” Sophora said. She gave Mirabel’s name; cheers rang out. Lord Mander put the tinsel crown on Mirabel’s head, and a score of men stood in line to dance with her, bring her drinks, fetch her snacks, anything she wanted.
She could get used to this Queen business.
The King himself took her hand for the last dance of the evening. The King danced better than Mirabel expected, though his gloved hand wandered along her spine.
“About that necklace,” he murmured in her ear.
“I borrowed it,” she said.
“From a gorgeous brunette in Dorcas’s house?” he asked.
“Yes…” She worked it out—if he knew that, then—for the first time she felt a pang of sympathy for the Queen. Over his shoulder she saw Corporal Nitley lurking near the wine punch, only to be collared by Sergeants Gorse and Dogwood. No tropical fruit surprise this year, then. Over his other shoulder, she saw Primula herding a sulky Krystal and her followers, loaded with dirty dishes, toward the kitchen.
“Thank you, my dear,” the King said, “for getting me out of a very sticky situation. I will, of course, explain to the… er… young woman who had been… er… taking care of it. But is there anything I can do for you?” His hand wandered lower.
“No, thank you,” Mirabel said, surprised to realize that what he could give, she didn’t want. Not from him, anyway. “Only a donation to help our poor defenseless orphans.”
A resounding crash came from the kitchen passage; Krystal stormed back into the ballroom. “It’s not fair,” she said. “Why should I have to do all the work? I killed two pirates.”
“Shut up, Krystal,” Mirabel said, in chorus with others.
Welcome to Wheel Days
Murray and Steve were down under the floor, digging out last year’s leftover flyers for the festival when the speaker clicked. I slammed my hand on the off button and continued what I was doing, calculating how many porta-potties we could afford to hire from Simmons Sewer Service. Our Ecosystems Chief Engineer insists that he can’t let the festival crap (the technical term in this colony) run through the usual pipes, just in case some idiot visitor eats lead or mercury or some other heavy metal that would poison the weedbeds. So every year we have this problem. You just can’t run a festival without porta-potties, and with the gravity gradient in LaPorte-Centro-501, that means three separate sets of them, sexed. We never have enough, and we always have complaints, chiefly from uptowners near the core, who go into jittering fits if some stranger in a hotsuit knocks on their door and wants to use the inside can. I will admit, low-grav mistakes are the hardest to clean up, but still you’d think they’d understand why the festival is so important. If LaPorte-Centro-501 continues to grow, we all benefit.
Murray crawled out with the dance flyers. All we had to do was change the year and the day; we were having the Jinnits again for lead band, and Dairy and the Creamers for backup. Some people complain about that, but Murray’s old buddy Conway is the keyboard man for Jinnits, and they’ll come here without a guarantee. We don’t get soaked if a solar flare keeps everyone home. So far that’s saved us a bit more than I’d like to confess, when we’re talking here about a successful annual festival that draws crowds from all over the Belt. And Dairy’s local; the Creamers play at Hotshaw’s all year ’round, and everyone likes them well enough. The flyers looked pretty good; I nodded and Murray racked them into the correction bracket and went to work. Steve was still out of sight, but I could hear him scrunching around in the insulation.
That’s when the speaker clicked on again, and I didn’t get my hand on the off button in time. “Radio relay message,” said the voice, and I sighed. Nobody I wanted to talk to was going to be calling me for another week. I punched for a hard copy, rather than voice, and watched the little strip of paper come zipping out the groove. It’s not really paper, of course—paper is precious—but it acts like paper. You can write on it. I tore it off and crammed it into a pocket without looking at it. That was a mistake.
The parade flyers Steve had gone after were all unusable; something had leaked and frozen into them. We had the old master, and we refilled the crawl space with insulation, then set up the master for a print run. I crossed my fingers, assumed five percent more attendance than last year, and ordered another set of porta-potties. Next up were the day’s parade and display entries.