Vicky Peterwald: Target Read online

  If they gave her half a chance.

  The silence in the room stretched long.

  Vicky chose to take the initiative in shattering it. She cleared her throat.

  “I am Victoria Peterwald, and I need your help to stay alive.”

  The room stayed just as silent after she finished.

  The elderly man at the head of the table finally said, “How is it that you, Lieutenant, are alive, and all others who went out to the stars with you are dead?”

  Oh, that, Vicky thought with a sigh. COMPUTER, CAN YOU FIND A SCREEN IN THIS BARN?

  THERE IS ONE BEHIND YOU, her computer answered.

  Vicky turned in her seat. There was what looked like a large oil painting of a field at harvesttime behind her. “Computer, please display the battle report.”

  The bucolic scene blinked away. The huge mother ship now filled it.

  Behind Vicky, the room was suitably impressed. Then the Hellburners did their thing, and the watchers were even more impressed. They were again impressed as the damaged base ship and the surviving ships began to tear into the battle fleet.

  That was quickly replaced with the scene of one corvette doing its best to hold the jump. It blew one emerging ship after another, but it died in the end.

  “In order to avoid assassin or assassins unknown on the Fury, I was on Kris Longknife’s flagship Wasp when the battle took place. As you would expect of a Longknife, she managed to escape the massacre of her subordinate ships, and me with her. That, ladies and gentlemen, is why I am here and not dead like so many others.”

  “An answer that has the grace of honesty, if not wisdom,” replied a woman seated halfway down the table. “Be warned, young Peterwald, not all of those assembled here share your family’s visceral distaste for the Longknifes. Some of us fought beside them in long-ago wars and have more respect for their professional skills and courage than is usually recognized in the palace.”

  “Having spent so much time of late with Kris Longknife,” Vicky was quick to add, “I can understand how people not handicapped by an upbringing in the palace might find it easy to respect her skill and courage.”

  “So, having shown us that you are alive and our children are not, through no fault . . . or skill . . . of your own, why are you here?” the woman continued.

  So, apparently, this woman was to be Vicky’s inquisitor. Vicky looked her in the eye.

  “Admiral Gort, before he was murdered by my stepmother’s hired assassin, told me that he, or should I say, the Navy, had three choices to make concerning me. Officially, the orders were to return me as quickly as possible to the palace. However, there were two, shall we say, unofficial options.

  “My stepmother offered a rather large sum of money to assure that I did not return alive. Just how I was to die was left up to the Navy to decide just so long as I wasn’t breathing when my body arrived at the palace. The other option open to the Navy was to provide my still-breathing body to a party or parties unknown. They, I strongly suspect, wanted me as a standard-bearer to raise the flag of rebellion. To rally all of my father’s Empire around me and against him.”

  Vicky paused to look around the table. “Do I have the three basic outcomes out on the table? I haven’t been able to think up a fourth, but I’m only an inexperienced lieutenant. I don’t have your years of lived experience to draw on. And, clearly, I’m not likely to have a chance to gain those years of experience under at least one, if not all, of these options.”

  A mild chuckle surfaced around the table. The woman questioning Vicky was not amused. “Your humility tastes feigned, young woman. But yes, I do believe that you have laid all our options on the table. Go on. Which do you think we should take advantage of?”

  What she said in the next few moments would decide whether Vicky kept on living or vanished beneath some manure pile in this pastoral paradise.

  “I think you and the Navy have decided that you don’t much care for any of the three options on the table. If you wanted me dead, I would not have survived the first hour aboard the Stalker. Admiral Gort would have had my head on a platter. Period. End of discussion.”

  Vicky surveyed the table. She saw no surprises.

  “If you wanted me waving the flag of rebellion, again, Admiral Gort would have delivered me, hog-tied and gagged, to the conspirators, and I would never have known what hit me until it was too late.”

  Another glance around the table told Vicky that not everyone listening was impressed with her ability to figure out what was going on around her.

  Too smart can get me just as dead as too dumb.

  Vicky hurried on to the last option.

  “Dropping me off at the palace seems like the default option, but it has its problems as well. Alone in the palace, I can wind up just as dead. I can also be suborned into someone else’s conspiracy, which the Navy might or might not like. Lastly, I could somehow manage to stay alive and even advance my pawnship to Imperial queen. If I did that without your help, would you really like the results?”

  Vicky only paused for a second for them to consider what she said before going on.

  “That is why Admiral Gort risked taking me into the full extent of the boiling cauldron that is politics in our beloved Greenfeld. Was I too dumb to figure out all the dangers ahead of me? Even if I was smart enough, was I too smart for my own good? Would I consent to be the Navy’s willing pawn? And when I’m no longer a pawn, would I likely be a good ally for the Navy or would I be a poisoned, self-centered bitch from hell like my dearly beloved stepmom?”

  Vicky paused to glance around the table. “How am I doing?”

  “Well. Maybe too well,” the old woman observed dryly.

  “Yes, I know. It’s a very narrow line I walk between the graves on either side of me.”

  “Do I pity her more than I pity us?” someone asked along the table.

  The question drew muttered agreement, but no clear course of action sprang from it.

  Vicky took a deep breath and went on. “I was born to the palace. It raised me, in the words of Admiral Gort, to use needlepoint and the Kama Sutra for both defense and offense. I will never get the stink and poison of that upbringing out of my hair, no matter how much ship’s water I wash in.”

  Sadly for Vicky, those words drew an awful lot of nods around the table. Well, she meant to give on this. Now everything depended on what she said next.

  “However, by whatever gracious God there is in heaven, I was sent to the Navy for an apprenticeship. And the Navy very wisely handed me over to Admiral Krätz’s tender mercies.”

  Vicky risked a smile at that. There were plenty of smiles around the table. And plenty had doubting eyes as well.

  “For the last two long years, I have lived with Admiral Krätz’s words ringing in my ears and his boot never far from my backside. He taught me what a junior officer needed to know. His discipline broke me of anything he found faulty and cured me of any defective habits I brought with me from the palace.

  “It was a long, hard school.

  “And every once in a while, he would turn to me, and say, ‘Watch that young man. He’s Navy through and through,’ or he’d point out another junior officer, and say, ‘Poor guy, born and raised Navy, but he’ll never be Navy.’ He never defined exactly what he meant by Navy, but he could point out its presence or lack easy enough. You know what I mean?”

  That got nods even from her doubters.

  “I’ve come to conclude that what you call ‘professionalism’ has something to do with it. It can be anything from the shine on your shoes even if there is no inspection today to the willingness to lay down your life without question when the commander says, ‘Take that hill so the rest of us can get out of this mess.’ And you do it, without question, without reservations. You do it because you’ve been squared-away Navy for so long, you can’t be anything but it.

  “Am I getting close, Admirals, Captains, ladies?”

  “Surprisingly close,” the old-woman inquisitor sa
id.

  “Not to argue, ma’am, but remember, I am both Her Grace, the Grand Duchess Victoria Smythe-Peterwald and Lieutenant Vicky Peterwald, proudly serving in the Greenfeld Navy.”

  “Can anyone be both?” was asked from somewhere near the head of the table.

  “That is what we are here to find out,” the old man at the head said. “Assuming we can find anything out from a Peterwald.”

  “Yes, sir, my family’s reputation for telling anything but the truth doesn’t help here, does it?” Vicky admitted.

  That grew muttered agreement from the senior officers.

  “So, that is your risk,” Vicky said. “But it is also mine. I’ve been played most of my life. I’ve been used in games that others were playing. I’ve never been an active pawn at anything because no one before trusted me to do anything but look good in a cute dress. The palace didn’t require more.” Vicky found herself almost spitting out the words.

  “Admiral Krätz didn’t want a plaything. He wanted a good junior officer, able to stand her watch under light supervision. And he chewed me out and kicked my butt until I could.

  “And I found out just how good it felt to do a job and do it well.

  “I’m offering myself to you as a pawn to use in your game. No,” Vicky said, shaking her head. “‘Game’ is too cute a word. I’m offering myself to you as a resource to help you as you struggle to do your duty as you see it. As you would defend our beloved Greenfeld and not as some grasping civilian would use you to their ends. Have I got that right?”

  “All too right,” came from the head of the table. He followed it with a loud sigh before he went on.

  “Lieutenant, you present us with a problem. We need all the help we can beg, steal, or borrow, but we can’t afford a loose cannon on the gun deck. Times are coming when good men and women are going to die for no better reason other than that they stood in the way of some power-maddened maniac who had lots and wanted more. Do you know how disgusting that is to people like us?”

  “I think I learned how disgusting it was to Admiral Krätz, sir. I think I’ve gained his distaste for it.”

  “I hope so because, if you don’t end up dead, you’re likely to end up at the pinnacle of power for our beloved Greenfeld. I’d like to believe that what we in the Navy have given you might make you a better ruler than your father or father’s father. But we don’t know what you will be like. We don’t know whether or not you will survive the coming struggle for power. When we are honest with ourselves, there is too damn much we don’t know.”

  “Gee,” Vicky said. “And I thought I was the only one like that.”

  “Don’t be cute, young woman,” the man at the head of the table snapped, and went on. “When we learned that the battlecruiser fleet was to be scattered around to show the flag and possibly aid any survivors of BatRon 12, we wondered what was really up. Then the first report of a bribe to one of the captains surfaced, and we knew what the Navy was getting into. The second bribe arrived quickly on the heels of the first. That was when we met on the matter. There were some of us who liked the idea of removing one Peterwald from the competition.”

  The man glanced around the table. No one met his eyes, everyone seemed intent on studying the table in front of them.

  “But there were others who remembered Admiral Krätz’s last report on you. ‘She’s almost Navy,’ he said. And there were others who just balked at doing the will of that bitch your father married. If she offered anyone here so much as a glass of water, I doubt there’s a person at the table who’d take it.”

  “Probably poisoned,” Vicky couldn’t help but mutter. Though that drew a few frowns, there were a lot more smiles or winks.

  “About the other thing, you’re right. We don’t think now is the time to start a rebellion. Things are bad, but not that bad. Now if those two damn battleships building on High Anhalt do launch with foreign skippers, even I might be tempted to start sewing a rebel flag or two, but we don’t know yet. We don’t know what they can or will do.”

  “And by the time we do, our options are likely to be nil, zip, and zero,” the woman at his elbow said.

  “I know. I know,” the man at the head of the table said. “I know the risk we take. Maybe if we had her in the palace, she could find out more.”

  “But she has no idea how to stay alive in that den of scum and villainy. She said so herself.”

  “She still knows the place better than you and I do. Better than anyone Navy does. We go in the door, and if we’re lucky, we come back out the door a few hours later. She knows the staff. She’s been wheedling the cooks for sweets for twenty years. She knows the back ways and hiding places. Don’t you, Lieutenant?”

  Vicky had never considered those real skills. But then, does a fish know much about water? “Yes, I do know a whole lot more about the palace, now that you mention it. I can swim its halls like a fish while you’d flop around in it like a fish tossed on the dock. I can be of help to you.”

  Hey, I’m worth more alive to you than I am dead. Listen to the old guy.

  “But what if they turn her?” the man at his other elbow asked. “Hell, what if she runs straight to them and tells them everything she knows?”

  “Then I will not have a lot to tell them,” Vicky put in without waiting. “I noticed that there was no introduction before we started. No offense intended, but you all look like a lot of old men. Who can tell one old man from the next?”

  “That’s what I always tell you,” her inquisitor said, elbowing the man next to her.

  “And what have you told me?” Vicky quickly went on. “Forgive me if I sum up the total of what I’ve heard as zero, but that’s what it is. You don’t know any more about what to do next than I do. Yes, I’m getting to go home alive, but that was the official order, wasn’t it? Yes, my stepmommy dearest will be disappointed to see my smiling face, but she can hardly take a complaint to my father since he’s the one that ordered me home soonest and alive.

  “As for the other bribe, all I really know is that it is reported that some captains were paid to deliver me to someone. We can only guess what would happen next, and since it hasn’t happened, we know less about it than any of the rest.

  “Oh dear,” Vicky said, feigning innocence as best as she ever could, “I don’t know a thing. Not a thing.” She grew suddenly serious. “Now do I?”

  “No question she’s good,” said the woman next to the head of the table.

  “Krätz said she was,” the man across from her agreed.

  The head of the table let out a huge sigh. But his eyes were roving the table, taking a silent vote. Done, he nodded at Vicky.

  “Lieutenant, I think we will let you live. Please don’t make me regret this decision. If I do, it likely won’t be for long. My wife will kill me, likely just after your stepmother does. A man can hardly win with two women intent on killing him.”

  That drew a chuckle from around the table and a swat from the woman at his elbow.

  “Go with our blessing, for all that it’s worth. You will be taking your three assassins with you, him,” he said, nodding at Mr. Smith, “and the two lovely young ladies. You may also take the lieutenant and the chief. We will try to get you some other support. There are aides and other Navy types in the palace to serve hors d’oeuvres and otherwise make the Imperium look warlike and feared. We’ll see what we can do to help you stay alive.”

  “Thank you, sir. I appreciate that. Please let me know what I can do to further our own mutual interest in advancing the cause of our beloved Greenfeld.”

  “I will, as soon as I figure it out,” he assured her.

  The chief of staff took Vicky by the elbow and led her from the room.

  As the door closed, Vicky could hear a loud debate break out.

  No doubt, whether she got safely home to the palace was still open to discussion.

  CHAPTER 16

  TO Vicky’s great surprise, she actually made it back to Greenfeld all in one piece.
r />   The Stalker docked at High Anhalt, and Vicky quickly departed. She and her team were in dress whites since it was early summer at the capital. A squad of Marines in dress black and greens added gravitas to her passage down the elevator. They also pretty much filled up one end of the VIP bar. Thus, Vicky had a corner to herself. Likely any assassin waiting to earn Stepmommy dearest’s reward took one look at the situation and kept walking.

  Or Vicky was moving too fast for Plan C or D to be put in play.

  Either way, it wasn’t a bad approach.

  A half dozen courtiers in getups that showed access to some bankrupt opera house’s wardrobe and a total lack of good taste met the Grand Duchess at the groundside station along with six palace guards in the new uniform, black on red on black, that the Emperor had recently established. With a smile, Vicky sent them to provide an outer perimeter for her dozen Marines.

  Their lieutenant barely suppressed a scowl, but the Marines had a captain leading them who failed to hear the lieutenant’s claim that palace guards took precedence on Anhalt. The Marines took the inside while the palace guard scattered themselves around their perimeter, and Vicky, Mr. Smith, Doc Maggie, and the two women assassins formed the target in the center. The lieutenant and the chief with their black boxes took the lead with the courtiers.

  It was quite a circus, but it served to warn normal travelers to stand clear, and they did. No one came anywhere close to Vicky and her entourage.

  Which meant the assassin her dear stepmom had sent was very likely with either the guards or the courtiers. Wherever he or she was, the would-be assassin didn’t get close enough to risk the hit, and Vicky made it to a line of limos with no shots fired.

  With hardly a shrug wasted, Vicky dragooned the limo in front of and behind hers into the Marine Corps. While one Marine held down each of the limos, the others secured the Grand Duchess’s own ride. Once she was seated with her closest team members, a nod from the captain sent the Marines racing for their rides. The three limos pulled away while the other courtiers and palace guards were still arguing about who got in what car.