"Perhaps Lady Fortune was more kind to her than that," Borodov suggested.
"You've heard something?" Brim asked, feeling a surge of excitement in spite of his fatigue.
The older Bear nodded. "When word concerning the Princess first reached me," he said, "I caused certain... 'inquiries' to be made through Sodeskayan military intelligence organizations." He smiled.
"Sometimes, being Grand Duke has its rewards."
"And you found...?" Brim prodded, now completely alert.
"Almost nothing, at first, my friend," Borodov answered, "Not until last week did I receive any sort of word that held promise of her survival."
"What did you hear...?"
"Last week, Wilfooshka, rumors surfaced in remote part of galaxy concerning golden-haired 'princess' passing along some old trade routes a few Standard Weeks or so following your raid." He sighed. "Not much to go on, but enough to keep flame of hope alight, eh? Especially since some reports alleged that she was accompanied by a child."
" Anything's better than the certainty she's dead," Brim said earnestly. "At least there's a chance."
"A chance," Borodov said, staring off into another time. "Odd," he mused, "but I can remember evening you two-met as if it were yesterday. Nikolai Yanuarievich and I were there, in wardroom of old I.F.S. Truculent." He shook his head wistfully. "Somehow, I never dreamed Universe would allow such beauty to end up in such trouble...."
"Thanks," Brim said, refilling his goblet. Margot Effer'wyck was out of his life now, and he had to keep it that way, otherwise he'd spend the remainder of his days mooning after her memory. With an almost physical effort, he forced her from his mind. "And how is Nik getting along these days?" he asked.
"Ah, he has been inquiring after you," the old Bear said with a smile. "From correspondence, he seems to be having time of his life working on intelligence projects."
"Nik? In Intelligence?"
"Oh, yes," Borodov said with raised eyebrows. "You know how he loves theoretical work."
"What's his field now?" Brim asked. "I never attempted to keep track of his interests."
Borodov frowned. "Curious," he said. "I do not know exactly what he does there. But you will remember his fascination with remote aiming systems. Last time he visited me at Manor house outside Gromcow, he talked at some length about KA'PPA COMM-based systems that could triangulate two or more beams at great distances with terrific accuracy. My guess is he is working on something like that.
But who knows?" He laughed. "As he said himself, 'If you want to keep something concealed from your enemy, you do not disclose it to your friends.' So we talked of other things...."
After that, conversation became a lot less structured as the four veteran warriors settled down to rare moments of peace and a chance to reminisce about old times and places. Emperor Nergol Triannic's League of Dark Stars was a fierce, remorseless enemy. Soon enough it would be on the march again through civilized portions of the galaxy. Then, there would be little time for anything but fighting. Tonight, a little repose yet remained in the Universe. A very little....
Brim awoke to the insistent chiming of a communicator from his nightstand. He could recall very little more of the evening— except that he'd collected a considerable meem hangover. Nudging the little device into operation, he heard Mark Valerian on the other end.
"Let's go see a starship, Wilf," the designer said.
"Mark," Brim groaned at the privacy darkened display, "it's got to be the middle of the night." No light emanated from the room's small window at all.
"On Gimmas, who can tell?" Valerian laughed.
"How come you don't have a hangover?" Brim complained.
"Oh, I do," Valerian assured him. "But they don't last long once you're outside in the cold."
Brim chuckled in spite of himself. "I can believe that," he said. "All right, I'll be down in a couple of cycles. You're in the lobby?"
"Not yet," Valerian said. "I'm still in my quarters. But by the time you drag yourself downstairs, I'll be there."
Less than a metacycle later, the two were hurtling along through driving snow in a rattle-packed staff skimmer that was clearly left over from early in the last war. The heater was nonoperative, and steam rose in clouds from the PyroMug of cvceese' Brim held in his gloves. Valerian sipped from a similar mug with one hand while he navigated with the other. Riding with the designer was always a thrill for Brim—much like being in a dogfight. He always came out of it with the adrenaline flowing and renewed appreciation for life.
"You say they flew the new 1C in from Bromwich only a week ago?" Brim asked.
"The 'week ago' part's right, Wilf," Valerian said, skidding around a corner at high speed—and just missing the all-too-solid-looking concrete base of a Karlsson lamp, "but they didn't bring her in from the factory at Bromwich. She was built 'way out in the asteroid mining sections of Carescria. In one of the shadow factories old Emperor Greyffin IV funded in secret a couple of years ago."
"Factories in Carescria?" Brim asked in amazement. "They don't make anything out there, except maybe poverty and too many children. I know. That was my sector of the Empire. At least it was until I managed to escape.
"Oh, yeah," Valerian said. "I'd almost forgotten. You are a Carescrian, even though you don't talk like one." He frowned. "Anyway, Greyffin got something in his craw about the place, 'cause from what I understand, he started a number of secret complexes there to build military starships." With no hands on the tiller, he brushed ice from the windshield as they passed the rusting, snow-covered remains of a crashed starship—one of hundreds that dotted the landscape around Gimmas's great starship wharves. The wrecks—both Imperial and enemy—were left over from one of thousand-odd failed attempts by the League to put the base out of business.
Brim sipped his cvceese', the hot, sweet liquid searing his tongue as it came from the PyroMug.
"Carescria," he mused, thinking back through what seemed like centuries to his youth in that depressed region—before his family had been wiped out by one of the Leaguers' surprise attacks that heralded the beginning of the last war. Then, the only Carescrian industry had been asteroid mining. Brim had learned to fly starships by piloting the infamously dangerous Carescrian ore barges—worn-out military space barges with huge Drive chambers and oversize gravity generators that could race to the smoke-belching hullmetal smelters that polluted the natural beauty of nearly all (so-called) "habitable" Carescrian planets.
He'd been one of the lucky ones who managed to escape—and only because he'd been blessed at birth with extraordinarily keen vision and the quick reflexes of a rothcat.... But had he really escaped Carescria? Not if one judged by what other people said. It was always "you are a Carescrian," not "you were." After years of trying to distance himself from anything even slightly Carescrian, his impoverished youth still seemed to taint him.
"That shut you up, Wilf," Valerian commented as he pulled of the highway, across five sets of glowing, tube-shaped tram tracks, and through the gates of a parking lot beside a gigantic finishing bay—probably the one he'd spotted from Jacques Schneider. The mammoth brick structure was surrounded on three sides by rows of huge, roaring generators and squat, finned towers that flashed alternatively in deep blue and reddish orange. Overhead, fat cables arced from great conduits in the surface to connect with dozens of shimmering globes mounted on the building's roof.