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When he asked the moonbase who she was, he was told that she was the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu. That was, by almost a year, better than he had expected of them. Otto Harkaman was out in the Corisande, raiding and visiting the trade-planets. He found his cousin, Nikkolay Trask, at Rivington; when he inquired about Traskon, Nikkolay cursed.
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.
Finally, when I was suspected, one of the officers he was arrested and tortured to death later managed to smuggle me onto a lighter for the Moonbase. I was an orderly in the hospital there. The day the Crown Prince was murdered, we had a mutiny of our own. We killed everybody we even suspected of being a Makannist. The Moonbase has been under attack from the planet ever since."
Prince Bentrik shook his head. "We don't know. The King was alive when we left Moonbase, but that was five hundred hours ago. We don't know anything about her mother, either. She was at the Palace when Prince Edvard was murdered; we've heard absolutely nothing about her. The King made a few screen appearances, parroting things Makann wanted him to say. Under hypnosis.
They'd have detection, and he knew what they were detecting a clump of sixteen rending distortions of the fabric of space-time, as sixteen ships came into sudden existence in the normal continuum. Beside him, Bentrik had a screen on; it was still milky-white, and he was speaking into a radio hand-phone. "Simon Bentrik, Prince-Protector of Marduk, calling Moonbase."
I suppose there were physical symptoms they couldn't allow to be seen." Bentrik was cursing horribly under his breath; the officer at Moonbase nodded. "I hope for his sake that he is dead." Poor Goodman Mikhyl. Bentrik was saying, "So do I." Trask agreed, mentally. The commodore at Moonbase was still talking: "We got two more renegade RMN ships, within a hundred hours after you left."
By now, the odds were that Makann was as much his prisoner as King Mikhyl VIII had been Makann's. "So Dunnan has conquered Marduk. All he has to do, now, is make it stick," he said. "I see four ships off Moonbase; how many more have they?" "These are Bolide and Eclipse, Dunnan's ships, and former Royal Mardukan Navy ships Champion and Guardian.
"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."
"From there, they'll try to rally as many of the Royal Navy units as haven't gone over to Makann. They're to assemble on Gimli and await my return. If I don't return in fifteen hundred hours from the time I left Moonbase, they're to use their own judgment. I'd expect that they'd move in on Marduk and attack." "That's sixty-odd days," Otto Harkaman said.
There are five orbiting off the planet: Ex-RMNS Paladin, and Dunnan ships Starhopper, Banshee, Reliable and Exporter. The last two are listed as merchantmen, but they're performing like regulation battlecraft." The four that had been circling Moonbase broke orbit and started toward the relieving fleet; one took a hit from a Moonbase missile, which staggered her but did no evident damage.
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