The Prince
by Jerry Pournelle and
S.M. Stirling
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Prologue
An oily, acrid smell assaulted him, and the noise was incessant. Hundreds of thousands had passed through the spaceport. Their odor floated through the embarcation hall to blend with the yammer of the current victims crammed into the enclosure.
The room was long and narrow. White painted concrete walls shut out bright Florida sunshine; but the walls were dingy with film and dirt that had been smeared about and not removed by the Bureau of Relocation’s convict laborers. Cold luminescent panels glowed brightly above.
The smell and sounds and glare blended with his own fears. He didn’t belong here, but no one would listen. No one wanted to. Anything he said was lost in the brutal totality of shouted orders, growls of surly trustee guards in their wire pen running the full length of the long hall; screaming children; the buzz of frightened humanity.
They marched onward, toward the ship that would take them out of the solar system and toward an unknown fate. A few colonists blustered and argued. Some suppressed rage until it might be of use. Most were ashen-faced, shuffling forward without visible emotion, beyond fear.
There were red lines painted on the concrete floor, and the colonists stayed carefully inside them. Even the children had learned to cooperate with BuRelock’s guards. The colonists had a sameness about them: shabbily dressed in Welfare Issue clothing mixed with finery cast off by taxpayers and gleaned from Reclamation Stores or by begging or from a Welfare District Mission.
John Christian Falkenberg knew he didn’t look much like a typical colonist. He was a gangling youth, already at fifteen approaching six feet in height and thin because he hadn’t yet filled out to his latest spurt of growth. No one would take him for a man, no matter how hard he tried to act like one.
A forelock of sand-colored hair fell across his forehead and threatened to blind him, and he automatically brushed it aside with a nervous gesture. His bearing and posture set him apart from the others, as did his almost comically serious expression. His clothing was also unusual: it was new, and fit well, and obviously not reclaimed. He wore a brocaded tunic of real wool and cotton, bright flared trousers, a new belt, and a tooled leather purse at his left hip. His clothes had cost more than his father could afford, but they did him little good here. Still he stood straight and tall, his lips set in defiance.
John stalked forward to keep his place in the long line. His bag, regulation space duffel without tags, lay in front of him and he kicked it forward rather than stoop to pick it up. He thought it would look undignified to bend over, and his dignity was all he had left.
Ahead of him was a family of five, three screaming children and their apathetic parents—or, possibly, he thought, not parents. Citizen families were never very stable. BuRelock agents often farmed out their quotas, and their superiors were seldom concerned about the precise identities of those scooped up.
The disorderly crowds moved inexorably toward the end of the room. Each line terminated at a wire cage containing a plastisteel desk. Each family group moved into a cage, the doors were closed, and their interviews began.
The bored trustee placement officers hardly listened to their clients, and the colonists did not know what to say to them. Most knew nothing about Earth’s outsystem worlds. A few had heard that Tanith was hot, Fulson’s World cold, and Sparta a hard place to live, but free. Some understood that Hadley had a good climate and was under the benign protection of American Express and the Colonial Office. For those sentenced to transportation without confinement, knowing that little could make a lot of difference to their futures; most didn’t know and were shipped off to labor-hungry mining and agricultural worlds, or the hell of Tanith, where their lot would be hard labor, no matter what their sentences might read.
The fifteen-year-old boy—he liked to consider himself a man, but he knew many of his emotions were boyish no matter how hard he tried to control them—had almost reached the interview cage. He felt despair.
Once past the interview, he’d be packed into a BuRelock transportation ship. John turned again toward the gray-uniformed guard standing casually behind the large-mesh protective screen. “I keep trying to tell you, there’s been a mistake! I shouldn’t—”
“Shut up,” the guard answered. He motioned threateningly with the bell-shaped muzzle of his sonic stunner. “It’s a mistake for everybody, right? Nobody belongs here. Tell the interview officer, sonny.”
John’s lip curled, and he wanted to attack the guard, to make him listen. He fought to control the rising flush of hatred. “Damn you, I—”
The guard raised the weapon. The Citizen family in front of John huddled together, shoving forward to get away from this mad kid who could get them all tingled. John subsided and sullenly shuffled forward in the line.
Tri-V commentators said the stunners were painless, but John wasn’t eager to have it tried on him. The Tri-V people said a lot of things. They said most colonists were volunteers, and they said transportees were treated with dignity by the Bureau of Relocation.
No one believed them. No one believed anything the government told them. They did not believe in the friendship among nations that had created the CoDominium, or in the election figures, or—
He reached the interview cage. The trustee wore the same uniform as the guards, but his gray coveralls had numbers stenciled across back and chest. There were wide gaps between the man’s jaggedly pointed teeth, and the teeth showed yellow stains when he smiled. He smiled often, but there was no warmth in the expression.
“Whatcha got for me?” the trustee asked. “Boy dressed like you can afford anything he wants. Where you want to go, boy?”
“I’m not a colonist,” John insisted. His anger rose. The trustee was no more than a prisoner himself—what right had he to speak this way? “I demand to speak with a CoDominium officer.”
“One of those, huh?” The trustee’s grin vanished. “Tanith for you.” He pushed a button and the door on the opposite side of the cage opened. “Get on,” he snapped. “Fore I call the guards.” His finger poised menacingly over the small console on his desk.
John took papers out of an inner pocket of his tunic. “I have an appointment to CoDominium Navy Service,” he said. “I was ordered to report to Canaveral Embarcation Station for transport by BuRelock ship to Luna Base.”
“Get movin!—uh?” The trustee stopped himself and the grin reappeared. “Let me see that.” He held out a grimy hand.
“No.” John was more sure of himself now. “I’ll show them to any CD officer, but you won’t get your hands on them. Now call an officer.”
“Sure.” The trustee didn’t move. “Cost you ten credits.”
“What?”
“Ten credits. Fifty bucks if you ain’t got CD credits. Don’t give me that look, kid. You don’t pay, you go on the Tanith ship. Maybe they’ll put things straight there, maybe they won’t, but you’ll be late reporting. Best you slip me something.”
John held out a twenty-dollar piece. “That all you got?” the trustee demanded. “OK, OK, have to do.” He punched a code into the phone, and a minute later a petty officer in blue CoDominium Space Navy coveralls came into the cage.
“What you need, Smiley?”
“Got one of yours. New middy. Got himself mixed up with the colonists.” The trustee laughed as John struggled to control himself.
The petty officer eyed Smiley with distaste. “Your orders, sir?” he said.
John handed him the papers, afraid that he would never see them again. The Navy man glanced through them. “John Christian Falkenberg?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you, sir.” He turned to the trustee. “Gimme.”
“Aw, he can afford it.”
“Want me to call the Marines, Smiley?”
“Jesus, you hardnosed—” The trustee took the coin from his pocket and handed it over.
“This way, please, sir,” the Navy man said. He bent to pick up John’s duffel. “And here’s your money, sir.”
“Thanks. You keep it.”
The petty officer nodded. “Thank you, sir. Smiley, you bite one of our people again and I’ll have the Marines look you up when you’re off duty. Let’s go, sir.”
John followed the spacer out of the cubicle. The petty officer was twice his age, and no one had ever called John “sir” before. It gave John Falkenberg a sense of belonging, a sense of having found something he had searched for all his life. Even the street gangs had been closed to him, and friends he had grown up with had always seemed part of someone else’s life, not his own. Now, in seconds, he seemed to have found—found what, he wondered.