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More servants installed him in his rooms, unpacked his cases, drew his bath and even tried to help him take it, and fussed over him while he dressed. There were over a score for dinner. Bentrik had warned him that he'd find some odd types; maybe he meant that they wouldn't all be nobles.
After a decent interval, Crown Prince Edvard escorted him and Prince Bentrik down the same route, the others falling in behind, and across the hall to the ballroom, where there was soft music and refreshments. It wasn't too unlike a court reception on Excalibur, except that the drinks and canapes were being dispensed by human servants.
Took a couple of hits from ground batteries getting off, and from ships around Moonbase getting in. Ships of the Royal Mardukan Navy!" he added furiously. The pinnace in which they had made the trip to Tanith had taken a few hits, too, running the blockade. Not many; her captain had thrown her into hyperspace almost at once. "They sent the yacht off to Gimli," Bentrik said.
"I had a broken leg when I left Moonbase, but that's mended on the way," Bentrik said. "I have little Princess Myrna aboard with me. For all I know, she's Queen of Marduk, now." He gulped slightly. "Prince Trask, we've come as beggars. We're begging help for our planet." "You've come as honored guests, and you'll get all the help we can give you."
The people there had risen in support of the Makann regime, and he wanted authorization to use nuclear weapons against them. "Could you talk your people into going to some other city?" Trask asked. "We have a city for you; big industrial center. It ought to be fine looting. Drepplin." "The people there are Mardukan subjects, too," Bentrik began. Then he shrugged.
There was a stir behind him; turning, he saw Princess Bentrik and the boy enter the room. He rose. "We'll talk about this later. There are some people here...." He motioned them forward and turned away, shoo-ing everybody else out of the room. The news was all over Rivington, and then all over Tanith, while the pinnace was still coming down.
And three ships were missing the three independent Space Vikings, Harpy, Curse of Cagn, and Roger-fan-Morvill Esthersan's Damnthing. Prince Bentrik frowned over that. "I can't think that all three of those ships would have been destroyed, without anybody seeing it happen." "Neither can I. But I can think that all those ships broke out of the battle together and headed in for the planet.
Immediately, they were beset by a flurry of servants; the second boat, with the Bentrik servants and their luggage was circling in to land. Elaine, he discovered, wasn't with him any more, and then he was separated from the Bentriks and was being floated up an inside shaft in a lifter-car.
"That's Zaspar Makann and his stooges you're talking about?" Bentrik laughed. "Well, the Constitution...." He thought better of that, before somebody asked him what Constitution. "Well, a Regent has to be chosen by election. Even members of the Royal Family can't just make themselves Regent by saying they are." "I can. I just have.
Prince Trask of Tanith and Prince Simon Bentrik were dining together on an upper terrace of what had originally been the mansion house of a Federation period plantation. It had been a number of other things since; now it was the municipal building of a town that had grown around it, which had, somehow, escaped undamaged from the Dunnan blitz.
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