The Golden Princess: A Novel of the Change (Change Series) (41 page)

What’s that Nihongo word Orrey mentioned?
Hatamoto
, yes.

“Now we plan,” Órlaith said.

After the explanation Sir Aleaume’s eyes went a little unfocused. He’d had a fair bit of military experience in the Protector’s Guard, including the undramatic logistical parts that made the rest possible.

“There are two ways to do this, Your Highness,” he said. “A full expedition, pushing ahead bases and supply dumps through the dead lands, digging wells and repairing roads. And a quick and dirty in-and-out, which I presume is what you have in mind.”

“Exactly,” Órlaith said. “And sure, the latter is the only practical one . . . considering the circumstances. A great whacking do with engineers and the like would take far too long, that it would, nor could we do it without the Crown being involved. It isn’t an expedition for destriers and full harness, either, no matter if knights are along. We’ll have to equip lightly and move fast.”

“Bicycles, I suppose?”

He sighed; bicycles were distinctly lower class, or middle at best.

“To be sure; we’re not going to cram forty coursers on a ship—a few horses for scouts, and that’s it. Frankly, I wouldn’t take any horse I cared for on this trip. Now, first we’ll get a hippomotive and train ready here at Montinore—”

Larsdalen Station, Bearkiller Outfit Territory

(Formerly northwestern Oregon)

High Kingdom of Montival

(Formerly western North America)

July 8th, Change Year 46/2044 AD

L
uanne Salander was an A-Lister of the Bearkiller Outfit. That status was new enough that the little blue burn-mark between her brows she’d gotten at her Initiation still itched as she waited in the dark behind the wooden sheds that made up the train station. A single light burned there, the watchkeeper waiting and yawning and occasionally getting up to do a walk-around.

The skin between her shoulderblades itched too as she huddled at the base of a hedge, breathing the strong scents of ancient horse-piss and hay and the nose-memory of manifold freights centered on Larsdalen’s famed wine and brandy that hung around the station and its warehouses on a summer’s night. And not just because she was sweating and the night had its share of mosquitos and other buggy things. The glare of disapproving parental eyes in her mind made it feel that way. The fact that the disapproval was strictly speaking hypothetical—she hadn’t told anyone she was doing this—didn’t make them any less real in her imagination.

Her parents—hopefully!—didn’t know where she was, but you couldn’t count on that, though she’d gone out the second-story window of her bedroom with all the stealth she could. Her mother had been a military glider pilot for the Outfit in the Prophet’s War flying
reconnaissance missions, a hideously dangerous specialty, and she’d worked in the Intelligence Service since. She was a shrimp; her barely-adult daughter towered eight inches above her five-one, which put her about midway between her parents, but height was not a job qualification for pilots or spies, and Alyssa Salander-née-Larsson had a well-deserved reputation for wits of ample size and vicious sharpness. She’d earned it after the war as well, spending a decade winkling out the remnants of the Cutters—the Church Universal and Triumphant—from the mountains and prairies of what had once been most of Montana and was now known as the Crown Province of Nakamtu.

Luanne’s father Cole Salander had been in the United States of Boise’s Special Forces and had captured Alyssa when her glider crashed during the Prophet’s War—after he shot the grizzly bear that had been trying to pull her from the wreckage like the kernel out of a cracked walnut. Once he’d gone over to the Montivallan side along with most of his compatriots the two of them had entered a Boise occupied by the Prophet’s men under false colors and pulled off the spectacular special operation that had opened the city’s gates from the inside. The Outfit had voted him A-Lister status unanimously, a rare honor for an outsider. Afterwards he’d led dozens of patrols into the Bitterroots on leads Alyssa had sniffed out, outsmarting bandit-partisans on their own ground and running them to earth. And usually to death, by the blade or at the end of a rope, since the amnesty had long run out by then.

Which means I can’t count on
my
parents being idiots. Middle-aged stick-in-the-muds, yes, stupid or unobservant or slow, no. Mary Mother be thanked I took the hint and talked to the courier where nobody could hear! Which was sort of cool in itself, I must say.

The whine of gearing and rumbling metallic clatter of wheels sounded northwards, and around a corner and a woodlot came the harsh yellow light cast by a hippomotive’s headlamp. It flickered as the track curved and the trunks of the big Chinar trees along this stretch of the West Valley Railroad cut the beam one after another.

Right on time,
she thought.
Less than an hour out from the Montinore siding, probably.

The Outfit’s chunk of the western Willamette was directly south of the Protectorate—if you didn’t count the little autonomous Brigittine monastery and its clutch of allied freeholder villages—and stretched south to Corvallis. Eastward were the ruins of Salem where the new capital was being built, and beyond that the Queen of Angels Commonwealth and the Mackenzies and the odd enclave of Mithrilwood, where the Dúnedain had their headquarters. Westward the Outfit’s domain went to the Pacific. Though few lived beyond the Coast Range, only a scattering of villages and the salt-works at Lincoln along the sea despite on-and-off talk of making a port.

Montinore and Forest Grove were right north of here, and Todenangst not far off to the northeast. The cryptic message from Órlaith had arrived just after dinnertime, and had said the train
wouldn’t
be stopping for horses here at the Larsdalen station because their journey was
pressing and interesting
, and that it was
possibly very regretful
they wouldn’t have a chance to visit and discuss it either here or in Corvallis.

The Crown Princess had left it to Luanne to tool on down to the station if she wanted to and could figure that much out, and find when a quick-passage train under a recent High Kingdom military override authorization was scheduled to pass through. That had turned out to be twenty-four hundred hours in the notation Bearkillers used, or midnight to most others. Which meant they’d left Montinore not much earlier, and at a time deliberately calculated to find most people asleep and to get into Newport with the largest possible share of the whole trip done in the dark. That was much the same thing since few but the wealthy stayed up long after sunset, especially in summer’s short nights. Ordinary trains stopped for the night on sidings, too, which meant the route would be clear.

If I wasn’t up to figuring out that this has to have something to do with the High King’s killing and the mysterious strangers who were on the funeral train, I’d
deserve
to be left out and read about it afterwards in the
Bearkiller Gazette
,
she thought.
Damned if I will be, though. Jumping on here is a safer bet than waiting for them in Corvallis, it’s much busier there.

Larsdalen had a couple of thousand people behind the cyclopean wall
and famous Bear Gate; Bearkillers didn’t build cities and had few towns of any size.

Whether she’d be able to get
on
the hippomotive-drawn train was another matter. An ordinary train traveled no faster than the team pulling it along hoof-on-gravel, which was usually at a brisk equine walk, equivalent to a slow jog for a human. Horses could pull a lot more on rails than they could on a road, about ten or fifteen times as much, but both ways they did it at a pace they could sustain all day. Like men, horses could walk a
lot
farther than they could run. A hippomotive’s treadmills and gears and driving wheels translated some of that tractive power into speed, trading off cargo weight they could have pulled otherwise.

All that went through her mind automatically; logistics were part of the standard Bearkiller education, calculations of time and weight and speed and distance. They generally regarded Associates as play-actors and dilettantes who wasted time on galliards when they could be playing
kriegsspiel
.

Figuring out what was going on needed smarts, mostly. Actually getting on the train would require more in the way of speed, strength, agility and a willingness to risk going under the wheels and getting cut in half, which implied a lot of motivation.

So cousin Órlaith is testing me for brains, brawn, nerve and commitment all at the same time. Not to mention luck. Economical, Orrey! You
deserve
to be High Queen!

She thought she could manage it. In height and build she took more after her father, who was a tall sandy-blond man of mostly
Svenska
descent. There were big fair men on her mother’s side too, like her grandfather Eric Larsson; but
his
wife had been born Luanne Hutton, and
her
mother and father had been what the ancient world called black and Tejano respectively. Luanne herself thought that she’d gotten the best of what her ancestors had to offer. She was tall for a woman, she could bench-press more than twice her hundred and fifty-five pounds, and even her weapons instructors agreed she was quick and precise and learned fast and had excellent situational awareness, which she thought she got from her glider-pilot mother. Pleasing a Bearkiller armsmaster wasn’t at all easy. Her grandmother and namesake admitted she was first-rate with
horses; Luanne Larsson had been horse-mistress of the Outfit for a generation, and
her
parents had been breeders and wranglers with a ranch in Texas before the Change stranded them in Idaho delivering stock to a customer.

What she saw in the mirror every morning was perfectly satisfactory in her opinion, and other people found it attractive as well, which was nice or in some cases very nice. Dark gray eyes, olive skin that tanned easily, slightly curly hair of a warm medium brown, and features with just enough African and mestizo fullness to moderate the beaky Nordic hatchet-face that prevailed on her great-aunt Signe’s side of the family and which only looked good for a short while. These days Signe’s nose and chin were making acquaintance, and her lips had practically disappeared. While grandmother Luanne had a weathered handsomeness at sixty-two that showed you what a peach she’d been when Eric Larsson fell for her with a dull thud just after the Change.

Of course, Signe’s lips might have gone away because her favorite expression is thin-lipped disapproval,
Luanne thought with a grin.
Thank God Mike Jr. is Bear Lord now, and that he’s got a better disposition than his mom. Even if I get caught, he’ll probably commute it to . . . oh, a couple of months public-service call-up or going out and working on one of the Outfit’s ranches down south. Unless I get killed, of course; he’ll be
really
pissed off then.

She’d always gotten along well with her first cousin once removed, even if he was Asatruar, which faith Luanne regarded as one of Great-Aunt Signe’s less inspired decisions.

The train was getting closer. Luanne held up her index and little fingers, used the known distance to a familiar tree, and estimated speed.

Doing close on twenty miles an hour,
she thought unhappily.
Hand-gallop speed. A horse couldn’t keep that up more than a couple of miles, but a hippomotive . . . they could barrel right through the station without slowing down since they’ve got a military priority order to clear the tracks.

You
could
deal with objects moving that fast. One of the tricks her grandmother had taught her mother, and her mother her in turn—the lineage ran back to skills learned in rodeos before the Change—was to grab the saddle-horn of a horse as it galloped by and swing up onto the
beast’s back in one movement. Things like that were very impressive and even occasionally useful. The downside was that if you failed, even on turf or sand or sawdust you could easily dislocate your shoulder or break half your bones—or your spine, or your skull. Luanne had done that training with nothing worse than a lot of bruises, a broken collarbone and a mild concussion or two, but the equivalent with a moving vehicle, at night, on uneven ground with steel and rock and unyielding cross-ties all underfoot . . .

I sure hope cousin Órlaith has that thing slow down a bit!
she thought.

She was carrying a lot more gear than she did at gymkhanas, too. Granted most of it was in a knapsack she could hopefully toss on board, she was still wearing a mail-lined leather tunic and a sword. She hurriedly took off the backsword, tied the guards of the sword and dagger to the scabbard-lip with a leather thong, and slipped it through a loop on the backpack and cinched it tight. That left her unarmed except for the holdout daggers in her boot and collar, but needs must.

Closer now . . . was it slowing down or speeding up? She started taking rapid but deep and controlled breaths to build extra burst endurance. No lights except in the hippomotive itself, the cars were dark . . . well, it was midnight. Presumably most of the people aboard had been woken out of a sound sleep to be hustled onto the train; you didn’t give information out before it was absolutely necessary on a clandestine movement. Now they were trying to make up the lost sack-time. All her instructors had said you slept whenever you could. She crossed herself and touched her crucifix, and murmured inaudibly:

“O God, You know me to be set in the midst of great peril. Grant me such strength of mind and body, that those evils which I suffer for my sins I may overcome through Thy assistance. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.”

The open-sided power car came closer, with the moving shadows of the twin four-horse teams within, massive muscled shapes in the moonlight. Then four slab-sided wooden rectangles on wheeled bogies. The rear car would have a bit of open platform at its end behind a railing, and she could just make that out.

She was a little to the south of the main station building, where the
salvaged solid metal rails gave way to the more modern steel-strapped wood; there was a clear straight stretch here. She turned and began running along the track before the hippomotive passed, working up to a full sprint just as the rear carriage swept by. Crushed rock ballast crunched under her boots, and the creosoted cross-ties tried to throw her off. It would be just perfectly glorious to trip, twist her ankle, bang her head on the rails and then get it cut off by the hippomotive as she lay unconscious.

The length of the train passed her. She estimated distances in the dark, and—

Thump-clung!

The backpack swung out of her hand and landed on the boards. She used the motion to help her leap and her hands in their fingerless kid-leather gloves clamped down on a rusty rear rail of salvaged pipe. She took one more bounding step. For an instant her arms felt as if they were being wrenched out of their sockets and then she had her feet snatched up and braced against the floor. One foot slipped a little, the hobnails skittering on smooth fir boards, and then she held it with a desperate pressure. If it
had
slipped it would have gone right into the bogie up to the knee and been cut about three-quarters of the way through. Of course, the motion of the wheel would have dragged her right down and underneath as well. Which would have killed her, but not as quickly as she’d have wanted by that point.