Free The Princess of Caldris by Dante D'Anthony

Faster than any
ship I’d ever been on. Even my father’s racing yachts were no
match.
    I reached into the hyperstreams and felt for
bad intent. There was, however, nothing but the epochal spaces
expanding with their radiant energies since the bang of our
universe. Forces, vectors, molecules in the deep streams, beyond
the edge now since we rode the hyperstreams.
    No more assassins. For now.
    Days came and went aboard
ship. The routine of hyper space. Since Star systems were full of
gravity wells, the best courses avoided them until one arrived at
the destination system. We made for the space between the galactic
arms-the void. Very few systems in the voids.
    It was my first venture
outside the five or six star systems around Caldris, beyond the
Royal Hegemony.
    My head ached and my body
was wracked with sudden pains after a time. Thoughts of the missing
Princess had taken a toll. There was, however, small solace or
retreat.
    The warmth old Hammerstein
granted was a comfort-but the continual hustle and bustle in
strange environs, the attacks as well, battered me. The Kanaafutura
streamed through the hyper dimensions and I tried to gather my
strength in my bunk.
    Who to trust-and whom was sharpening their
knives to plant them deep in our backs?
    It would only get worse, I knew, at Langley
Stay. Light years away I could sense that system like a tangled web
of intrigues looming in the void. I glanced at Mr. Gibbons, always
watching, and was glad for him-a faithful friend in a universe of
treacherous rogues.
     
    The ruins of New Haven
City were particularly disturbing. Here the bold colonists had
dared reclaim the best in mankind's dreams only to have it come to
this. Here they had carried their cherished ideals and set out upon
the uncharted with dash and brilliance, and here too the meaner
aspects of human vice had ground those hopes once again to nothing.
The genius of their architecture-once soaring, deft and Dexter-sad
relics.
    My team and I negotiated the strange
landscape of horrors with a curious confusion, unsure at all times
the realities that lay behind the war. CCCE claimed always the
Colonials had built an armada planning attack-but such was not the
character of the colonists to take by force that which they earned
by creativity and dogged work. The macabre landscape told of an
ultimate betrayal. A betrayal of an ideal, nay-a betrayal of all
that was ideal in mankind.
    My eyes must have been a frightful
sight.
    Later, underneath the Capitol, I chanced
upon a disk in the transportation hub and wondered. It contained
the transportation logs of the entire city the week before the war.
I could recreate that week in it's ordinary prelude to the tragedy.
How strange that would be.
    -Princess Maggio,
Caldris.

 

    VII
    Langley Stay, Void's
End
    Tokushima was at the helm
when the Kanaafutura signaled Langley Stay system. The edges of the
Sagittarius Spiral Arm of the galaxy, the world was an anomaly
among the Outwords in a number of ways. It had been a spearhead
settlement at a time when the ancient nation state of "America" had
still existed before Earth itself became just one more world in the
Imperium. From there, the Americans and various affiliated nations
had settled the Arcturian Colonies, then Langley had too fallen
into Imperial hands, and in a final twist won a sort of defacto
independence after the war when the Imperials abandoned it. In the
thousands years since, with the rise of the refugee Outworlds, now
it was important again but it's culture was entirely
untamed.
    We were being hailed. Systems were
responding to autoscans when holos of Security officers from their
system police appeared. "Processing registrations" one of the holos
said, with a sudden widening of the eyes when he realized it was a
Royal Warship from Caldris.
    "Caldris Royal Envoy." Tokushima informed
him.
    "Officer Tokushima on
official business." "Yes, we see. Rather large warship, officer.
What is the nature of your business in system,