The Prince by Jerry Pournelle and S.M. Stirling

Marine life is abundant, and is based on native equivalents of plankton. Common species include the grunter, notable for its great numbers and resemblance to the terrestrial cod, the multiclawed rockcrawler, much in demand as a delicacy offworld, and the torpedofish, a predatory species up to 10 meters in length, which attacks its prey by ramming with its bone-armored nose. All vertebrate piscoids are gill-breathers but have pseudomammalian features such as four-chambered hearts, and are viviparous. The tangler kelp is the sole source of Ez-e-MindTM, Lederle AG’s vastly profitable “morning after” contraceptive. Introduced terrestrial species include the common dolphin and the orca (killer whale), both wild and domesticated.

* * *

We have fed our sea for a thousand years

And she calls us, still unfed,

Though there’s never a wave of all her waves

But marks our English dead:

We have strawed our best to the weed’s unrest,

To the shark and the sheering gull.

If blood be the price of admiralty,

Lord God, we ha’ paid in full!

—Rudyard Kipling

* * *

Steven Armstrong pushed his chair back from the table and loosened his belt. Been doing that a lot lately, he thought. Growing a bit of a pot, to offset the massive shoulders and bull neck and the barrel chest that bulged out his roll-necked sweater. . . . He grinned and tossed back thick rough-cut hair the color of butter, only lightly streaked with gray. Once he took the Alicia out of harbor and north to the Thule Sea, he’d work that off soon enough, no matter how good Cookie’s hash was. The air was full of the odors of good solid cooking, with an overtone of pipe tobacco and damp cool air from Constitution Bay below; they were close enough to the docks to hear the gulls, and the clacking sound of the cranes.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” he said, standing and raising his stein. “I give you—the Alicias, both of ’em! The ship, and the lady who made her possible!”

There was a cheer from all the tables he had rented in the Neptune; hearty cheers, though nobody had been drinking more than enough to put a little edge on. Most of them would be sailing with him in an hour or so, after all. All eyes had turned to his wife at the other end of the table. Alicia Armstrong was smiling and wiping at her eyes at the same time, as the guests began to applaud her. She was a round-faced woman with a close-cropped head of tightly curled hair, and eggplant-black skin that set off her gold seashell earrings. Three children from four to ten were seated next to her; they leaped up and began clapping too, with high-pitched shouts of “Mommy! Mommy!”

“I—” she began, as cries of “speech, speech” rang through the taproom. Then: “Oh, let Steven make the speech—he likes doing it.”

More laughter; Steven Armstrong had been Senator-legate of the Maritime Products Trade Association for a year now, and was famous for a rhetorical style that included thumping lecterns hard enough to break the wood at Pragmatist rallies.

“OK, I promise not to damage Mrs. Kekkonen’s tables, at least,” he began, looking around until he caught the proprietor’s eye and winked. She winked back; the Armstrongs and the Neptune Inn went back a long way. It was the sort of place he enjoyed; not fancy, just a taproom and kitchen with an outdoor terrace for summer and some rooms above. A workingman’s place, where you could get a good solid mess of grunter fillet and yam or a twenty-ounce steak and potatoes and pie for an honest tenth-crown; the sort of place you could bring your family, too. “Actually, I hate giving speeches.”

“Then you must love to suffer, bucko!”

“Shut up, Sven. Where was I . . . Armstrong & Armstrong’s come a long way,” he said. “When Alicia and I got married, we honeymooned here at the Neptune because we couldn’t afford anything else—”

“Well!” the widow Kekkonen said, mock-indignant.

“—and all we had was these hands”—he held them up; massive and reddened, scarred and callused with hooks and nets and lines—”Alicia’s brains and one rickety overgrown dory with an engine that worked, sometimes. I busted my butt, and Alicia kept books better than the computer we couldn’t afford—found out that the Meijians would pay through their noses for rockcrawler claws—and we saved every penny. Now we’ve got four trawlers and damned good ones, and best of all—the Alicia. You all know what it’ll mean, being able to tap the Thule Sea shoals; off-planet exchange, for one thing. No reason to let the Newfies get it all.”

Cheers and jeers; nobody much liked the secretive and clannish settlers of New Newfoundland, the big island in the gulf where the Oinos Sea met the outer Jefferson Ocean.

“I’d like to thank everyone who helped make it possible,” he went on. “Even Consolidated Hume Financial.” More laughter, sheepishly joined in by the representative of the bank in his conservative brown tunic and sash and knee-breeches. Well, nobody loves a banker, Armstrong thought. Especially not on a planet starved for capital and with a strict hard-money policy. “And the great people from Huang, Lee and Parkinson.” The shipbuilders; his sincerity came through. “My friends from the Association, who paid as the only way to shut me up and get me out of Sparta City”—cries of protest and a few half-eaten rolls flew past his ears, with the odd “damn straight”—”and most of all, my wife. My only regret is she isn’t coming with us—but she’s got the best excuse I can think of.”

Six months of pregnancy, now showing considerably. She put her hand on her stomach and met his eyes.

“Yeah, Armstrong, but when’s yours due?” Sven Nyqvist said, poking a stubby finger into his captain’s midriff. Steven Armstrong’s booming voice led the laughter.

* * *

“Thank Christ that’s over,” he muttered, standing beside the wheel of the Alicia. Dockside was a kilometer to the west now, Sparta City a sprawl of white and pastel and greenery across its hills. And the dockside crowds, and the reporters.

The Capital Herald’s little newsblimp was still overhead, with the irritating buzz of its twin engines; he was strongly tempted to give it the finger. No. The cameras could count the hairs in your nose from 800 meters. Too many watching, he thought. Ignore them.

As he’d ignored the reporters with their asinine questions. “Why do you want to enslave the transportees, Senator Armstrong?”

“Assholes.”

“Sir?” from the helmsman.

“Steady as she goes. Just glad to get out of town. If I never see another equals sign, it’ll be too soon.”

“Amen,” said the helmsman.

Enslave the transportees, Armstrong thought disgustedly. Sweet Christ, I married a transportee, didn’t I? Many of his best workers were transportees, and he had sponsored a half-dozen into the Brotherhood of Poseidon after helping them make Citizen. Even the common ruck of them weren’t too bad, once they learned they couldn’t sit in the gutter and live on handouts here. He snorted again; anyone who starved on Sparta deserved it; you could eat for a week on two day’s wages for casual labor. Hell, you can walk out of town and throw rocks at the rabbits. He’d done that himself as a boy, when times were really hard.

No, it was the real scum that needed attention. Not those scooped up by BuReloc for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, like Alicia’s parents; the real criminals, the pimps and street-gangers and whores. Bad enough they cut each other up down in Minetown, dropped their bastards in the gutters without even caring enough to take them to the nuns. Now they were swarming into that son-of-a-bitch Croser’s NCLF, outnumbering the real workingmen in the Dockworkers’ and half a dozen other unions. Strikes—only last month he’d lost fifteen tons of rockcrawler while they struck the packing-plant over some idiot political thing. Killings, like that mess at the Spartosky. Thank God Alicia hadn’t been there.

“Aaah, enough politics,” he muttered.

He pushed the captain’s cap back on his head and worked the cigar to the corner of his mouth. One of cookie’s stewards brought him a cup of coffee the way he liked it, black and sweet, and he cupped his hands around the thick white china. The Alicia was making good speed, seven knots; not wise to go much faster. Constitution Bay had enough sandbars and shallow water to give a strong man the willies. She would do better out in the open ocean, though. He looked around with pride: fifteen hundred tons, good von Alderheim steel for the hull, decking and upperworks of redwood. Two thousand-horsepower diesels with electric transmission, burbling their song of power through his feet. Deck-winches, nets, processing-holds and bunkrooms, all the best that Sparta City could make, and that was damned good. Even off-planet electronics, echo-sounder and radar.

The horseshoe bridge with its consoles and dials smelled of paint and seasoned wood and very slightly of the vegetable-oil fuel burned by the engines; he liked it, would like it even better when she’d been battered a little by the ocean swells, and smelled of salt and piscoid. The shallow Aegean and Oinos swarmed with good eating-fish, far more than Sparta’s limited population could use. The Alicia was bound for bigger game: the huge piscoids of the cold and dangerous Thule Sea; that was what the rocket-harpoon launcher was for. Lustrous metallic-scaled hide, mouth-ivory more beautiful than the vanished elephant herds of Earth. Complex oils with a dozen uses, from perfumes to drugs.