Prince of Outcasts (20 page)

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Authors: S. M. Stirling

BOOK: Prince of Outcasts
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I wonder how they got
here?

CHAPTER TEN

C
ITY
P
ALACE
, D
ARWIN

C
APITAL
CITY
OF
THE
K
INGDOM
OF
C
APRICORNIA

(F
ORMERLY
N
ORTHERN
T
ERRITORY
, A
USTRALIA
)

O
CTOBER
21
ST

C
HANGE
Y
EAR
46/2044 AD

“O
h, for fuck's
sake
, Pete!” Lady Fiona Holder said. “Wake up!”

The accents of the vanished American West were still strong in her voice, despite forty-six years in and around and across post-Blackout Australia and all the seas that bordered it; she'd been born in a trailer park in what was then the dry eastern part of Oregon.

She supposed it was still dry and still had cows, though it was part of the High Kingdom of Montival now, which was an absolute kick in the head on the infrequent occasions she thought about it. Outsiders often mistook her range-country twang for faded Southern Gothic, and for sure when her temper frayed, you could still hear an echo of the conga line of deadbeat stepdads who'd passed through her mom's trailer all those years ago. Years, decades, whole worlds ago. They'd spoken a uniform dialect of genuine Toothless Cracker Appalachio-Methhead, though by now she supposed there weren't many left who knew or cared about the regional variations. She'd taken off at sixteen and never looked back. As best she knew, her mom, a onetime
Hustler
model, had sucked the big one a couple of years later in the great die-off after the Blackout. The Change they called it back there.

Not back home. This was home now. Had been for the longest time.

Sir Peter jerked his head up in the bamboo lounger and closed his mouth, reaching for the tall cool glass of Saltie Bites Lager at his elbow.

“Not sleeping. Just thinking,” he said, but his voice was thick with the granddad nap she'd caught him at. “Worried about Pip. She's all we have left of Jules now.”

“You were on the nod, Pete. Don't shit a shitter,” she said, conscious that her own worry was making her snap.

Lady Fiona—universally known as Fifi, though only the favored few called her that to her face—was in her sixties, with just a few streaks of golden corn-silk color left in her shoulder-length white hair. Her figure, still very trim for her age, worked well in the national dress of Capricornia—khaki shorts, slip-on leather sandals and the blue sleeveless vest favored by the kingdom's iconic sheep shearers. Her face had the leathery reddish tan of a blonde who'd spent much of her life on the tropical oceans and her hands were covered in thick calluses that would never go away. Neither she nor her husband favored the broad-brimmed hats with dangling corks you saw everywhere on the streets of the capital. Instead they made do with the Capricornian Salute, a hand waved in front of the face to move the flies along. An act performed so often it became as natural as breathing.

Her husband was at least a decade older, with thick white chest-hair showing over the top of his vest. More hair than he could boast of up top. Pete had gone egg-bald some time ago, a hard thing for a man as quietly vain as him. He had so enjoyed his earlier, virile legend as Cap'n Pete, greatest of all the mighty Salvagers. Fifi knew he was “at least” a decade older, but other than that, Pete could not say. He'd always been vague about exactly when he'd been born. Not that he was reluctant to specify, but the years were never the same twice. He was adamant though that he was a born and bred Tasmanian, which made of him a natural republican. He was forever teasing the King about it.

“Hmmmph,” Fifi said, and took another pull at her gin-and-tonic.

The umbrella-set rooftop terrace was part of the city palace of the Birmingham dynasty of the Kings of Darwin; currently the residence of
the first of that name, generally known as JB to the peasantry, whose interests he routinely favored over those of the gentry. At least according to the gentry. JB was pretty much their friend, certainly their patron in the older, wilder days, and definitely an ally now. He was also older and balder and even more wrinkly than Pete. In Fifi's opinion that was all just camouflage, though. She had never met a man who put her more in mind of a crocodile drifting along with only the eyes and nostrils showing. Not that she took Pete's act too seriously either. He might present these days as a harmless-granddad-sitting-in-the-shade, but together he and his old mate the King were the richest, most powerful old bastards in this part of the world. They were far from fucking harmless.

Nor was she.

Fifi freshened up her drink from the fixings on a small occasional table next to her lounger. The ice was fresh, as it always was at the City Palace and she wondered, as she always did, what mad bastard adventurer had been dispatched to some snow-capped mountain far, far away to retrieve it for her drinking pleasure. She walked to the balustrade, resisting the urge to ask Pete if she thought Pip would be okay. Despite his protests he really was half asleep in the late afternoon heat and, besides, she knew she would just be flapping her gums to stop her fears and her guilt running wild off her tongue. After all, were it not for “Aunt” Fifi, Lady Pip would be ensconced at the Court of St. James under the wing of the current King-Emperor. In Winchester, on that cold rainy patch on the other side of the planet, safely bored out of her pretty head, not tear-assing around the islands east of Java and north of Lombok.

At least Fifi hoped she was still tear-assing around the . . .

“She'll be fine, darlin'. She is her mother's daughter.”

Pete had come up behind her, surprising her when he put his hands around her waist. He had always been able to do that—sneak up on her. There was a reason he had been the designated back tracker when they'd run salvage under the Royal Warrant. She placed her free hand over his and squeezed, sipping at the drink again. Not trusting herself to speak.

From here you could look out over Stokes Hill wharf and the busy
port, a forest of masts from fishing smacks to the tall spars of warships and oceangoing merchantmen, stacked with their bowsprits stretching in over the pavement and the inset tracks of the freight trams.

A fair share of the hulls worked for their Darwin & East Indies Trading Company, sailing from Hobart to Patagonia, Hainan to Zanzibar. Trading in wheat and wool and wine, sandalwood and copra, salvage steel and fresh-cut teak, rubber and gear-trains and swords and rice and rum, coffee and tea, hides and . . .

And once we shipped a dozen baby elephants to the Raja of Bali, and we had to catch them first. And then the fucking ship just disappeared and we had to do it all over again!

It was sundown, and just slightly cooler; they'd had a thunderstorm earlier, washing the air, the sign that the Wet was coming soon. Lightning flickered in the black clouds on the horizon, over the azure surface of the Arafura Sea. There was still a clamor of voices and a ratcheting of cranes and more and more bright lanterns, and a distance-softened surf-roar of voices and wheels from the streets beyond where
late
didn't begin until well after midnight.

The silty wet smell, sometimes fetid with fish-guts or perfumed with spices and always seasoned with eucalyptus woodsmoke, made her think of voyages gone by. Back when it had been just her and Pete and Jules on the old
Diamantina
, the most successful salvagers and smugglers and all-around fortune-and-glory rogues afloat in the chaos of the years after the Blackout. Back then, this time of day, they'd have been down in the dockside pubs, the sort of place where you sat on your sheathed knife with the hilt coming out from under your right butt-cheek. So you wouldn't forget it was there and could draw without bringing your hand across to your belt. Sitting amid caterwauling music and a fug of smoke that just started with tobacco, knocking it back and pretending to play cards and sniffing after the scent of an opportunity like sharks in waters full of tempting, juicy, bleeding toes paddling temptingly into range.

She'd seen this city recover from the terrible years, seen it change and grow and flourish like some brawling, bawdy child; a mutant mix of old
and new, and she'd been part of that. Her children and grandchildren had grown up in and with it, grown into its bone and blood. The kids were even respectable, in a raffish here's-the-deal-and-here's-my-catapult sort of way.

But there are times I miss the old days. Even if there was a lot less lounging on teak decks surrounded by potted palms and bougainvillea. Though Jules did always love a G&T with ice when she could get it; I wouldn't ever have drunk one except for her.

“Nostalgia's a bitch, isn't it?” Pete said.

She sipped at her drink, but couldn't keep back a grin. It would have been surprising if they didn't know each other well after forty-six years in each other's pockets, plus Pete had always been smart. And one of those rare men who really knew how women thought, too, without letting his own—enormous—macho legend get in the way.

“I miss Jules,” she said. “And I worry is all. I promised her, Pete. I said we'd look out for Pip.”

“And we did. That's why her father won't talk to us anymore.”

Fifi sighed. The Colonel-designate of Townsville Armory had a serious pickle up the ass, but he had a point too. . . .

“Did I do the wrong thing?”

He tugged gently on her elbow, turned her around. She was struck again by how much she was still attracted to him. After all of those years. And wrinkles. He was still such a good-looking man, as he never tired of reminding her. In his younger days he'd looked a bit like his fellow-Tasmanian Errol Flynn, though an increasingly scarred and battered version as time went on. Flynn might have played piratical swashbuckling adventurers in the old movies. But Pete had
done
it for real, starting well before the Change too, and those days had left their marks.

He grinned.

“You know who I miss?”

“Your younger, prettier self?”

She pronounced it “purdier”—exaggerating her accent, as she did when they were playing.

“No. I'm still pretty. But no, I kinda miss Shoeless Dan.”

Fifi snorted a mouthful of gin and tonic through her nose.

“Yeah, right. That's why you let the sharks have him.”

“No, no. I let the sharks have him because the treacherous bastard tried to arsefuck us on that Sydney run for JB. That was just business. He fed us to the Biters, I returned the favor.”

“And? Now you miss him?”

“I miss the fun we had because of him. In spite of him. The man was a perfidious arseclown, but he did put us onto some of our best scores.”

“So he could rip us off . . .”

“So he could
try
. And fail. He always failed. Because we were better than him. You, me and Julesy. Especially Jules. Remember when he thought he finally had us? And she just carved through his boys with those choppers of hers?”

The memory was both horrific and satisfying. Fifi shuddered and smiled, faintly.

“Well, as good as Julesy was, she raised Pip, and Pip is better. A natural. She'd have died a thousand fucking deaths at Court back in the Old Country, Fifi. But out there”—he waved at the slate gray sea under the dark wall of thunderheads—“you just know she won't even get a scratch.”

Two burly guards in helmets and water-buffalo-hide cuirasses with the white-gray-orange Desert Rose of seven petals on their chests lounged outside the notional door to the dining room, with heavy Golok-knife choppers at their waists and the handles of asymmetrical war-boomerangs showing over their shoulders. They had identically tall rangy muscled builds and might have been brothers except that one was blue-eyed and weathered red and the other extremely black; both had their round shields hanging from the shoulder-straps and leaned casually on broad-bladed spears—the Capricornian military didn't go in for standing to attention—but their eyes never stopped roving. They had the knack of good Palace guards though—making Fifi feel as though they purposely did not see her, which was good, given the enthusiastic groping she was receiving from her husband.

The door to the room was open wrought iron, and the whole space
was really just a tall louvered roof supported on drum-shaped pillars of the same blocks of compressed and stabilized laterite that made up the palace. Bamboo screens between the pillars were overgrown with floribunda vines whose clusters of white flowers scented the air passing through.

One of the palace staff leaned her head out the doorway and jerked a thumb over a bare tattooed shoulder.

“Come on, your feed's ready!” she announced cheerfully. “Better get a move on before JB scoffs the lot.”

Pete gave Fifi a pat on the ass to get her moving towards the chamber every crony of JB knew well; it held a long table suitable for dinner for twelve guests but it was set for seven tonight, wicker chairs, and a slow-moving overhead fan driven from a windmill on the roof. When the breeze failed, wallah-boys were sent up to pedal stationary bikes hooked into the drive train. Globes of frosted glass lit by gaslights were suspended from the center-beam of the exposed roof trusses. The floor was the same openwork teak as the deck, and there was a mill-and-swill area fronting a fully stocked bar. A normal visitor would have marveled at the genuine antique bottles of wine and spirits on display. Fifi did not. She had salvaged at least half of them from the dead cities.

The open space in front of the bar was occupied now by sawhorses, and on them was . . .

“Fuck me purple,” Pete said reverently, and fished his bent spectacles out of a pocket in his shorts, putting them on and peering intently.

“Holy shit,” Fifi said, almost in the same breath.

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