Vicky Peterwald: Survivor (Vicky Peterwald Series Book 2) (21 page)

B
Y
midmorning, Vicky was back in Mannie’s office. Only this time, she came as the full Grand Duchess. Well, the full Navy officer who was the Grand Duchess.

That morning, Kit and Kat had dressed her carefully in dress whites. It turned out that Vicky was officially attached to the admiral’s staff, so a gold aiguillette was added to the left shoulder of her uniform. Her medals were few, but the golden starburst of the Order of St. Christopher, Star Leaper, made up for any lack with its weight. The few stripes of a lieutenant commander might be light, but it showed she worked for a living.

A ballroom gown had been laid out, but Vicky had sent it back to the closet. “These people remember when the Navy saved them from my loving stepmom’s Security Consultants. I need all the good memories I can snatch.”

Still, her appearance stopped Mannie in his tracks.

“Oh my Grand Duchess,” he said. “Is this what you really look like?”

“Yesterday, I was underdressed. Today, I came prepared.”

“I’m grateful for the vision, Your Grace, but you really needn’t have. I have quite a deal for you,” he crowed.

“I come with a better one to lay on the table,” Vicky said.

With a puzzled frown, Mannie ushered Vicky to his couch and took his place in his usual chair. Two minutes later, Vicky was off the couch and showing him around a star chart. Five minutes later, he was out of the chair and pacing.

“Good God, woman, don’t you ever think small?”

“I’ve thought small most of my life,” Vicky admitted. “Small isn’t going to cut it in the mess we’re in. You can’t cross a ten-foot-wide, thousand-foot-deep chasm in two five-foot hops.”

“Not unless the last leap is a doozy,” the mayor muttered. “But this. It’s not a ten-foot hop you’re asking for. It’s a thousand-foot hurdle!”

“But it gets you what you want,” Vicky said, pointing to the star chart. “Out here, there are dozens of inhabitable planets just waiting for Greenfeld to expand into. Where is the logical base for that expansion?” Vicky asked. “Here, on St. Petersburg. You could be the next Wardhaven, the mother of colonies, the supplier of goods and services that this whole new sector of Imperial colonies need.”

She eyed Mannie. He was eyeing the star chart as if he’d never seen it before.

“You already had the initial market needed for your first growth spurt. The Navy needs everything for Port Royal. The five closest planets need just about anything you can fabricate and get to them as well as what you, in return, need to make it.”

Vicky had her computer cascade the list of raw materials that each of the five planets provided, then opened a new window that cascaded their needs alongside that original list. Then she did the same for St. Petersburg.

Mannie nodded along as the matches became clear.

Then Vicky punched one more button and added Metzburg and New Brunswick.

Mannie whistled.

“You get much sleep last night?” he asked.

“My computer did all the work after I asked it the right questions.”

“Do you always ask the right questions?”

“I rarely did until last night. I got bored during a meeting about upgrading the space docks to work on heavy cruisers. I scratched an itch I didn’t know I had, and this is what came of it.”

“Well, I can vouch that long talks about upgrading the yard and docks on High St. Petersburg can be boring,” Mannie said, casting Vicky a whole new look.

Vicky found she kind of liked that different look in Mannie’s eyes. It tasted of a job well done, and proud of it. She could really get used to it.

“You’re right. We are thinking small, but small is the way we’ve been trained to think. Small and
legal
.”

Rubbing his chin, he walked over to one of his office’s large windows. Vicky joined him. Her eye was drawn to the larger tower, the one where they had met with the titans of banking and industry last night.

“Are they still in town?” she asked.

“Likely sleeping. We were up into the wee hours last night. No, this morning.”

“You think you can wake them up?”

“Damned if I’m not going to give it a try. And any that blow me off, roll over, and go back to sleep will deserve what they don’t get,” he said with a boyish laugh. “Oh, Vicky. I had no idea what I was getting into the morning I ambushed Kris Longknife’s truck. I figured I’d get her to get you down here to sign off on the greatest brainchild of my life.”

“You did.”

“No, Your Grace. I used a princess to hook a Grand Duchess, and now I’m riding a tigress who seems to know no bounds.”

“We could all end up being hanged?” Vicky decided she should point that out. Mannie was being most manic.

“Yes, I imagine we could. Or we could save
your
Empire.”

“I like to think of it as
our
Empire. To the Navy folks I talk to, it’s theirs as much as mine.”

“You keep this up, Duchess, and a whole lot of people will be thinking of it the same way.”

Again, Vicky found herself feeling warmed by Mannie’s words in a way that she’d never quite felt before. “We will have to talk about this more,” she said, feeling almost shy before his approval.

“But first, we need to talk to some very important people who have no idea just how important they are about to become.”

“Or very dead,” Vicky added.

“The less we say about that, the better, Your Grace.”

“Are you suggesting that I am wrong to think so?”

“No, Vicky,” he said, using her given name for the second time. “I am suggesting that you are right. Oh so very right. These people will know how so very right just as soon as the words are out of your mouth. However, there is no need for us to belabor the obvious. Not when the obvious is what we intend to avoid.”

“Very wise advice, good Mayor.”

V
ICKY
found that the third time she presented her proposal for St. Petersburg’s new future, it flowed smoothly into a natural structure. That was good. Its third audience needed to have it fed to them smoothly.

It did not go down easily.

She was hardly into her proposal before she was getting looks from around the table like she had never gotten before.

Half eyed her with eagerness, ready to follow her to hell and back. The other half clearly thought her mad and well gone around the bend.

“This treason is just plain suicide,” one banker shouted into the silence when she had finished her presentation.

“Maybe it is suicide, but if it isn’t, it’s the future for my kids, grandkids, and their grandkids as well,” followed on the heels of the first response.

Vicky sat down and allowed the initial reactions to gently wash around the room like a tsunami. By the clock, it took a full half hour for the waters to calm.

Finally, someone voiced an idea that captured unanimous consent. “Come on now, none of us here are innocents in the woods. We’ve all had our hands in a bit of smuggling somewhere
in our lives. If we haven’t actually done the smuggling, we’ve passed this or that trade off to someone who has. And you bankers, you’ve funded a few accounts here and there that didn’t make any sense on the usual ledgers, now haven’t you?” The speaker raised his hands in an expressive shrug. “We smuggle a bit of this or that to New Brunswick or Metzburg, and they smuggle what we want right back.”

The room heaved a sigh of assent, and everyone smiled.

Until Vicky cleared her throat and said, “That confession of ancient sins sounds delightful, but it won’t work. Not in the here and now.”

She could not have unsettled the room more by lobbing a hand grenade onto the table.

“Hold it, Peterwald,” snapped an attractive young woman, one of the few females present. She sported a bright red power suit and had been a strong ally of Vicky’s until a moment ago. Now she was on her feet. “Did I miss something? Wasn’t this your idea? Are you suddenly getting all Peterwald graspy at talk of a bit of smuggling?”

Vicky waited for the table side chatter to settle to a dull roar. “No. I still support the idea. However, you will not be able to implement it with a bit of smuggling here, there, or yonder.”

“And why not?” the young woman demanded, hands on hips.

Vicky stood to face the woman eye to eye. “Because smuggling is out of the question. You smuggle a little bit of this or that by adding a few containers to this ship or that. You slip them through customs with a wink and a bribe, and all is well. Smuggling gets lost or hidden in the normal flow of trade. I’m sure you have noticed that nothing is normal about the flow of trade these days.”

Many around the table mouthed a silent “Oh.” The young woman actually gave voice to a squeaked one.

“The situation is even more complicated than that. We don’t just have a lack of trade. We actually have ships in space with a clear intent to restrict trade and even blockade certain planets,” Vicky said, going on in the face of growing amazement around the wide, gleaming conference table.

“My darling stepmama and the rest of the Bowlingame family are not just grabbing the fruit that falls as Greenfeld
wallows through this autumn of its life but are actively shaking the tree.”

The woman in red had collapsed into her chair. Vicky settled into her seat, refusing to tower over those around her.

“Last night, Admiral von Mittleburg shared some of the nastier sides of our present situation. As revenues have shrunk, so has the official budget. So has the budget of the Navy. Ships that still had several years of use in them have been laid up in ordinary. Some have even been sold for scrap to raise money, no doubt so my father could pay the stonemasons working on his palace,” Vicky said dryly.

“The problem is, some of those scrapped ships have been showing up in the crosshairs of ships still serving our Empire.”

Vicky paused to let that sink in. “Just last month, a Navy light cruiser found itself fighting a Bremerhaven class heavy cruiser.”

That drew a gasp.

“Fortunately, the amateurs fighting the larger guns were less well trained and officered. The
Emden
left the pirate bloodied and glad to surrender. Navy intel is still going over the captured data, but they have a pretty good picture of what the pirates are up to and why. The only thing they haven’t been able to get to the bottom of is the “who.”

“What is going on?” Mannie asked in pure puzzlement.

“We are all suffering as trade shrinks,” Vicky said. “But we are not suffering fast enough for some people’s greed. These pirates have been unleashed to speed the decline of trade, and the Navy has been shrunk to cause the pirates less trouble, if not to fatten the pirates on the ships stripped from the fleet.”

“Damn their black hearts,” Mannie muttered.

“Yes,” Vicky agreed. “Interrupted trade causes fabricators to close down. No work sends jobless men and women into the streets. Overburdened governments can hardly feed the starving. And when the hungry riot, the Security Consultants arrive with an offer to bring back law and order, but at a price. A very high price, because the vultures quickly strip off what is worth taking at a price that would have been thought a bad joke only a few months before. My in-laws are building themselves a private empire off the scraps they strip from the carcass that was our Empire.”

Vicky paused, then made a sour face. “Did I mention that I do not like my new in-laws very much?”

“May I mention that I never had any love for any Peterwald?” the woman in red said.

“I have begun to see just why we are not loved,” Vicky said. “The last few years have been an eye-opening experience for me, as the Navy showed me what had been missing from my training, and a certain Wardhaven princess rubbed my face in my own shortcomings. She also laughed at some of the more absurd aspects of what I had been raised to firmly believe in.”

Vicky ran a worried hand through her hair. “It has been a tough time for me,” she said, but then turned to face those around the table. “But a worse time for you and the Empire.”

“You found out about this blockade gambit last night,” Mannie said.

“Yes.”

“But you still brought this idea to us this morning? I take it that you don’t see the lack of the smuggling option to be a showstopper.”

“No.”

“How?” the mayor asked.

“We do for Metzburg and New Brunswick what we did for Poznan and Presov. We load a convoy with what they need and we can provide, then have the Navy escort it to its destination. If pirates attempt to stop us, the Navy blows them out of space.”

“You make that sound simple,” the woman in red said.

“It has been simple enough to work in the real world. I’m told simplicity tends to.”

“But it lacks something,” the woman said, waving a hand. “What shall I call it? Subtlety? No. How about secrecy? We fit out a fleet and parade it halfway into the heart of the Empire. Everyone will know what we’re doing.”

“And right now they don’t already know it?” Vicky said, raising both eyebrows in mock shock.

“These consultations are secret,” the woman snapped. “We swore it among ourselves.”

“I have been a guest on your planet for only a short time,” Vicky said, “and already there have been two attempts on my life. Just yesterday, a little note from my loving stepmom was slipped into my computer in a fashion that left the best security
technicians dumbfounded. Do you honestly think that you can do anything without its being reported to certain circles on Greenfeld?”

The tsunami of shock, fear, and desperation smashed back into the room. It swept around the table before swirling into eddies of panicked conversation.

Vicky waited again for the waters to calm, then stood. “You have the same choice I have.” She held up her fist. “One, you can wait for them to come for you.” She raised her thumb.

“Two”—she jabbed her pointer finger out—“you can run away and hide and hope you are not worth the cost of hunting you down and hanging you.”

She paused and emitted a laugh that came out sounding more like a cackle. “I don’t have that option.”

“Or”—she added her middle finger to the jab—“we can grab for something we want, that your planet needs, and make your future better than your past. We go for it and do our best to get away with it for as long as we can before anyone figures out what we’re up to. And maybe, in the grabbing, someone we all love to hate will unbalance herself into a pratfall. Remember, those who hoist themselves up on the bodies of their innocent victims can fall a very long way.”

Vicky let her eyes circle round the table. “Which will it be?”

The silence was hard and went long. Eyes flitted from one to another around the table as friends, allies, maybe even enemies silently took each other’s measure and waited for someone to launch themselves into the long hush.

“It seems to me,” the woman in red finally said, “that you have taken that second option. You fled Greenfeld to try to lose yourself on St. Petersburg. We are just about as far from the palace as you can go and still have indoor plumbing.”

That drew a nervous laugh from around the table.

“I think I have a higher opinion of St. Petersburg than you may have,” Vicky offered. “Yes, I fled here, but I fled to a planet that had the best industrial base I knew of.”

“Knew of and owed you a bit of a debt,” the woman shot back.

“Knew of and was in better shape because I had stuck my neck out and helped you when you asked for it.”

“Helped us because a certain Princess Kris Longknife suggested you help,” was sharp as any knife.

“Yes. I admitted that the last couple of years have been a learning experience for me. There’s nothing wrong with learning from the best, even if they are one of those damn Longknifes.”

Laughter softened the hard edge of the silence. Around the table, people turned to each other and whispered among themselves. Vicky could only hope they were not taking the counsel of their fears.

“How will we work this trade?” a man asked. “Ships showing up in orbit with a load of miscellaneous junk might work for planets in the depth of collapse, but I don’t see Metzburg and New Brunswick in that shape.”

“Many of you have business agents on those planets,” Mannie put in. “Admittedly, we were limited to selling dried fruits and fine wines before, but we have agents, and we can have them quietly check into expanding the range of our product line to include dried electronics and fine crystal fabrications.”

Again the room tasted the softness of shared laughs.

“You can have most of what we’re carrying already sold before it arrives in orbit, and most of what you want built and waiting for us on the pier as we dock,” Vicky said. “As quickly as we can off-load and onload, we’ll be out of there and on our way back here.”

“But you said our convoy could be fighting its way through a blockade of pirates with heavy cruisers. Some of us have heard about the
Attacker
. The pirates got it good,” the woman in red pointed out.

“Have you heard of my new yacht?” Vicky said, most daintily. “Its name is the
Retribution
, and it sports 18-inch guns and three-meter armor.”

“You call that a yacht?” the woman said, eyes wide.

“I’m a Grand Duchess. I do things a bit grander than most,” Vicky said, grinning.

“I should say you do.”

“What will happen to us if we start this new trade route?” a man asked.

“You will make enemies in high places,” Vicky said, as offhand as she could manage. “Or should I say, you already have people in high places plotting your downfall and plunder. You will make them unhappy. Is that a problem?”

“Not in my book,” Mannie said. Now it was his turn to stand. “For those of us living in Sevastopol, Greenfeld has kept us under its boot for a very long time. Sometimes harder than others, but there was never any doubt: We were the dirt. They were the boot, and they had the upper hand.

“Well, thanks to our city charter, we managed to soften the boot, but it was still a boot. Then things went to hell for some of you, but we down on the south coast managed to make lemonade out of those lemons. It was also nice to not have a boot on our necks.”

He turned to Vicky. “I don’t have a doubt that under any projected regime likely to take hold in the palace on Greenfeld, there is a boot in my future. Under the Empire I see in Vicky’s eyes, there is no such boot. Not for Sevastopol. Not for St. Petersburg. Not for the Empire.

“I don’t know about you, but I’m game for this chance for a change. I’ve had enough of boots; let’s see what we can do about making our own future.”

That got a few cheers from the table.

The woman in red stood silent, though. When the room grew quiet again, she shot a verbal dart at Vicky. “Do we need a damn Empire? What have the Peterwalds and the Empire ever done for us but keep that damn boot of yours, Mannie, on our necks. Put that in your pipe, Your Grand Douchessness, and smoke that.”

Vicky couldn’t say that she was surprised at the shot. She’d even found herself gnawing on that question quite a bit of late. Not while she was growing up. Not while she lived in the warm embrace of the palace. But fleeing from the palace had caused her to reflect, and in reflection, find herself questioning.

She examined the possible comebacks and found the first one the best.

“I’m not surprised at your barb, ma’am. I’ve found myself considering the same question as I dodged one assassin after another sent by the Empress. I think most of you were raised like me, to sing the praises of Greenfeld, and if it wasn’t an Empire back then, it sure walked and quacked like one, or so it seemed to me.”

She got a few nervous chuckles at that.

“I do not doubt that whatever we had is dead and gone. What we will have for your kids and grandkids and their grandkids will depend a lot on what we do here and now.

“Now, as for me?” Vicky laid her hands on the table and spread her fingers wide. “Princess Kris Longknife shared something with me that likely won’t surprise any of you. She has no idea what a princess is worth. She isn’t at all sure that the worlds need another princess, but she is one, at least for now, and she’s willing to see just how high she can push up the value of a princess.”