allowed her to survive without a heart attack.
“You called for me, Your Excellency?” he asked as nicely as he could.
“Yes,” she said. Her voice was a throaty rasp, escaping from deep inside her throat. She
reached out one ponderous arm to him and extended a hand as round as a balloon.
Garst brought the hand to his lips and kissed it.
He wanted to drop the hand after the kiss, but the Marchioness gripped his hand tightly
with her own and pulled him closer to the side of her bed. The stench of her perfume
grew ten times worse with each centimeter closer he came.
A silence hung in the air for a long moment, until Garst’s impatience got the better of him.
“May I ask, Your Excellency, why you sent for me at this particular hour? Though the
urgency of matters of state of course pales beside my desire to please you, there are
still some details that are important and must be done at certain times.
Marchioness Gindri looked up at him with great, rheumy eyes. “You haven’t been to see
me in three days.
Her voice wavered, as though she were on the verge of tears. “I need to know that you
still love me.” Though his outward expression did not alter, Garst’s inward fuming
resumed at an increased level. This stupid sow called me all the way over here for that?
he thought. Oh, how good it will be when I can get away from this moon and start out in
business on my own. “Of course I still love you,” he said aloud, seating himself on the
little bit of edge next to the woman’s enormous body. “What is there not to love about
you? You’re beautiful, intelligent, personable, wealthy and powerful, everything I admire
most in a woman.” And if you believe that, I deserve the Galaxy Award for acting.
But the Marchioness saw no falseness in his words or eyes, and was reassured of his
continuing affection. Spreading her arms apart to welcome him to her bosom, she said,
“Come to me then, my lamb, and prove your love for me.
With thoughts darker than the blackness of space, Garst crawled into her arms. I won’t
always be stuck on this miserable little rock-and when that day conies, I’ll see that you
get the rewards you’ve earned. Just wait.
CHAPTER 2
The Problem with Vesa
As La Comete Cuivre drifted purposefully through the void of interplanetary space toward
its rendezvous, its two occupants were keyed to the breaking point with eager
anticipation. Yvette and Jules d’Alembert had been ,.on vacation” for three months-far
longer than they would have liked-and they were itching for action.
“I wonder what we’ll be up against this time,” Yvette speculated aloud. “Are there any
more grand dukes plotting against the “Throne?.
“Probably nothing so dramatic,” her brother smiled. He spoke in the French-English
patois that was their native tongue. “After all, it doesn’t take a direct threat against the
Emperor’s life to endanger the peace. There’s always a long, uphill battle against
entropy.
They stopped speaking as their radarscope indicated they were nearing their destination.
Jules quickly computed the approach pattern and laid it into the ship’s computer. The
action was followed moments later by a flashing light on the control panel in front of them
and, five seconds after that, a short blast from the retrorockets. La Comete, according
to the numbers flashed on Jules’ screen, would be docking with the other ship in four
minutes, thirty-seven seconds.
“Let’s see what she’s like out there,” Yvette said, reaching for a different switch. Both
turned their heads and watched a panel to the right of their seats as a vidscreen that had
been dark suddenly jumped to life. Though they had known intellectually what to expect,
they still could not stifle the gasps of awe as they gazed at the ship they were
approaching.
The Anna Liebling was easily the biggest private space going vessel they had ever seen.
The d’Alemberts had grown up among circus ships that had to carry all the personnel and
equipment of the Greatest Show in the Galaxy, monstrous fat freighters ranging up to a
hundred meters long. That was considered the maximum size for any ship that had to
maneuver through an atmosphere and land on the surface of a planet, and they had
never thought they would behold anything bigger short of a battle cruiser. But now they
did.
The ship before them looked like a giant rectangular box a hundred and twenty-five
meters long and perhaps fifty wide and deep. Its outer hull was dull and pitted from
uncounted billions of encounters with micrometeoroids. It was a ship that could only have
been constructed in space, and would never be able to land. The dartlike sliver of the
ten-meter-long Comete seemed terribly insignificant beside the space behemoth.
“Wow,” Yvette whispered softly. “Rank certainly doth have its privileges.
As they came closer to the enormous vessel, part of the hull slid open and, like modern
Jonahs, the two d’Alemberts and their ships were swallowed intact by the space-going
whale.
The hull closed again behind them as their ship came to rest inside a giant hangar next to
several other small shuttles that served to take the Anna Liebling’s passengers to and
from the ship. From one of the hangar’s walls a long metal tube three meters in diameter
snaked toward the d’Alembert vessel and attached itself firmly to their airlock hatch. This
shuttle room was simply too big to use as an airlock; it would require too much time and
energy to pump air into and out of it each time it was used. So it was left free of air, and
these transit tubes allowed passengers to walk to and from the shuttles without donning
spacesuits.
“All right,” Jules said as the tube wheezed its airtight connection onto their lock, “let’s find
out what the Head has in store for us.
Dressed as they both were in the routine gray spacer’s coveralls that fit them only
loosely, neither Jules nor Yvette d’Alembert looked like what they truly were the two
most capable, most highly trained secret agents in the Galaxy. Both were a trifle too
short when compared to the standard Earther height these days-Jules stood at a
hundred seventy-three centimeters while his sister was ten centimeters shorter-but that
was because they weren’t from Earth. Both were natives of DesPlaines, that harsh
mining world with a surface gravity three times that of Earth normal. Over the course of
the fourteen generations their family had lived on that planet, they had adapted well to
life under extreme conditions.
Under their loose-fitting outfits, their bodies were packed with solid muscle, tested to
withstand the grueling pull of their world’s gravity. Their reflexes were lightning fast, as
they had to be-on a planet where objects fell at such an increased rate, even a slight
stumble could be fatal. The d’Alemberts’ bones were thicker and harder than an Earth
person’s, their sinews tougher, their muscles stronger.
But there was more to their heritage than just tough bodies. For the d’Alembert family
had, for the past two centuries, operated and starred in the Circus of the Galaxy, the
number one attraction throughout human occupied space. Jules and Yvette had been the
premier aerialists for the Circus for over a dozen years, their already perfect bodies
honed to clinical precision by the intensive training and impossible demands of their art.
Several months ago, though, Jules and Yvette had left the Circus. There was no outward
sign that they had departed, for their younger cousins had stepped in to become the new
“Jules and Yvette,” while the old ones, as their predecessors had before them-moved up
to their real jobs: undercover agents for the Service of the Empire.
Almost from its inception, the Circus had provided SOTE with its top agents. The
specialized skills its performers possessed were ideal for the jobs that the Service
needed done. Added to that was the fact that the d’Alembert family, led by Duke Etienne
d’Alembert, had always been extremely intelligent and unquestioningly loyal to the
Throne, and that the Circus was able to travel all over the Galaxy without arousing
suspicion. The Circus was SOTE’s secret weapon against the forces of disorder, with
the emphasis on the word secret. Only a handful of people knew about it-and since that
handful comprised the Imperial family, the Head of the Service and his chief assistant,
that secret was well-kept indeed.
As Jules and Yvette emerged from the transit tube they found the chief assistant waiting
for them. Duchess Helena von Wilmenhorst was obviously bred of Earth, tall, willowly and
beautiful, with her long black hair tied into braids behind her so that it wouldn’t be in her
way on the ship. Apparently not all portions of the Anna Liebling were under ultragrav as
this part was.
Helena strode quickly toward them. Her brown- and peach-colored pants suit