One of the most controversial provisions of the Stanley Doctrine was the one regarding marriages. Nobles were free to marry anyone they chose, whether the chosen was noble or common. Royalty did not have this freedom. (In fact, this is the only limitation placed on royalty in the entire document.) Members of the royal family were required to marry commoners. Moreover, the Stanley family name was to be retained even when a princess married; in that one case alone, the male changed his surname. This provision was considered shocking when it was announced, but the reasoning behind it was sound. Empress Stanley Three wanted to avoid the inbreeding that had absolutely destroyed the European monarchies by the twentieth century C.E. By absolutely forbidding marriage within a consanguinity of one thirty-second, she insured the continuing strength of the Stanley line.
(Stanhope, Elements of Empire, Reel 2, slot 411.)
No one at the Hotel Splendide saw the Velasquezes return to the hotel that night, but that was not unusual; they had sometimes in the past come in via the garage and gone straight up to their suite on a private elevator tube. Nor did anything seem unusual when they came down to breakfast at their usual time of eleven o’clock the next morning. There was a difference, though, in that they had actually slept that late this morning- they’d earned it.
Of course, Carmen and Carlos knew nothing of the arrests of the night before when the eager waiter hurried into the dining room with the breakfast they had punch-ordered ahead from their room. They could tell that something important had happened by the fact that he was accompanied this time by his captain, who carried both local morning newsrolls in his hand.
‘Good morning, gospodin and gospozha,’ the captain said respectfully. ‘You have perhaps not yet heard the extraordinary news on your receiver?’
‘Uh uh.’ Jules covered a yawn with his hand and shook his head. ‘We’re hardly awake yet.’ He was dressed in gold satin pantaloons and a short purple vest; Yvette wore her fabulous headpiece and a purple-and-gold morning robe that, while opaque in a few places here and there, was practically transparent everywhere else.
‘Did something happen that concerns us?’ Yvette asked languidly.
‘Most assuredly. It is something that rocks the faith of every honest citizen. The most tremendous, the most sensational scandal the Empire has seen in twenty years - and it happened right here on Algonia!’
He put the newsrolls down beside Yvette while he helped the waiter arrange the breakfast table most meticulously. ‘But perhaps I intrude. You will read of it later, I’m sure. You will naturally now want to eat your breakfast while it is still hot. Forgive me for intruding.’ The two hotel men accepted the Velasquezes’ usual generous gratuities and left the pair in peace.
After their meal, Jules and Yvette went back up to their suite and read through the story with great interest and also with an occasional snort or giggle. The official version was, of course, new to them, but they had to admit that Borton had done a credible job in fabricating it. SOTS, under the masterly direction and leadership of its planetary chief, had been keeping this band of traitors under close and continuous surveillance for over a year. They had waited until they were sure they had found every member and connection of the band, and then had struck at every point simultaneously. They had made a clean sweep.
Faced with the absolute proof of their guilt, each of the traitors had confessed fully. The Service, acting in its capacity as administrator of the Emperor’s justice, promptly carried out the mandatory sentence for treason: death.
That sentence even included the Baron of Osberg, who had been the group’s ringleader. Normally he would have been entitled, as a peer of the realm, to a High Court of justice; but so overwhelming was the evidence against him that he broke down, confessed his crimes and was permitted to take the ‘honorable’ way out.
The news report hastened to point out that the Baron was the only member of his family to be involved in these treasonous activities, and so his barony would not revert to the Crown. Instead, his wife became the Baroness Dowager Carlotta, and his daughter Ilse - only nineteen years old - became the new Baroness. Ilse was known as a kind, generous woman, active in sports as well as in numerous philanthropic organizations, and would give Osberg the new, dynamic leadership it needed -and so on.
Planetary Chief Borton had had only the help of his brave assistant, Alf Rixton; none had come from Earth. No suggestion was made anywhere that nitrobarb had been used - and for good reason. The mere possession of that powerful drug had been made a capital offense some fifteen years earlier.
‘Nice,’ Yvette said. ‘That story’s so tight I almost believe it myself.’
‘Yeah,’ sighed Jules, leaning back on his bed. ‘But now comes the roughest part of all waiting. I’d love nothing better than to move on to Aston and follow up that lead we got from the Baron ... it could dry up before we can move. But we’re stuck here for a while at least because we can’t draw attention to ourselves. If Carlos and Carmen left right after this raid, somebody might put two and two together to get twenty-two.’
Yvette thought for a moment. ‘I know that’s what I told Borton last night, but I’m not so sure right now. The fact that we were here on Algonia - coupled with the fact that those two ‘Delfians’ in the Dunedin Arms could only have been a high-grav twosome - would be plenty of evidence already for people not half as smart as the ones we’re up against. It won’t take the enemy too long to associate the Velasquezes with the Delfians. So whether we stay here a month or leave today makes no difference - except, perhaps, as an exercise in the old guessing game.’
‘Tu as raison, as always. But, as you said, the old guessing game can be important, and I think we should take some time to set up some sleight of hand. Let’s put in a call back home and see what we can arrange, shall we?’
It was eight days later that Carlos and Carmen Velasquez bid a tearful farewell to the Hotel Splendide. Tears were plentiful on the other side of the counter as well, because the staff knew they might never again encounter such heavy tippers. True to their fashion, the dizzy pair of ex-Puritans scattered their parting largesse from the penthouse all the way to their limousine, and thence to the spaceport.
Once there, they boarded a luxury liner bound for Lateesta via Aston. As the ship’s last port of call had been DesPlaines - and as it had taken on some passengers there - sections of the vessel had been marked out for artificial gravity. Feeling what they considered to be the only honest gravitational pull after so long made Jules and Yvette considerably homesick; but that homesickness was at least in part alleviated in a couple of minutes when they visited the suite of the three passengers who had traveled here from DesPlaines.
The door to the suite opened, and there stood a small, powerfully-built girl with brown hair, almond- shaped eyes and an exquisitely beautiful face. That face lit up with surprise and delight as the girl belatedly recognized the pair standing before her.
‘Jules!’ she shrieked, and leaped at him so suddenly that even with his strength he had to take a step back to maintain his balance.
‘Vonnie! Sweetheart!’ His arms clasped around her solid but decidedly feminine - body as their lips met in a passionate kiss. Time froze for them for maybe half a minute as the two young people renewed their love after a four-month separation.
After being motionless in each other’s arms for so long, Yvonne Roumenier pulled back a little, looked Jules up and down with critical eyes, and finally shook her head. ‘I have got to have a picture of you like that. Both of you,’ she added, seeming to notice Yvette for the first time. The two girls kissed affectionately on the cheek. ‘Come on in,’ Yvonne said, opening the door wider to admit them.
The stateroom was first-class, but not the deluxe one that the ‘Velasquezes’ had taken, several levels away. The furniture was all comfortably upholstered and solidly built; it had to be to withstand the three gees of artificial gravity within the room.
‘They told me you’d disguised yourselves,’ Yvonne continued, ‘but this is something that has to be seen to be believed. Gabby, Jacques, come on out here and see the pair of peacocks who dropped by.’
As the two people so addressed entered the room, Yvonne continued to look at Jules. ‘You always were a handsome so-and-so, Julie, but now you’re simply beautiful!’ She kissed him a few more times. ‘But I’m not wild about that mustache - it tickles.’
‘You’ll get used to it,’ Jules smiled back at his fiancee. ‘I did.’
The two other people who now entered the room were both DesPlainians, with the short, stocky bodies that characterized inhabitants of that planet. The woman was Gabrielle d’Alembert, sister in-law to Jules and Yvette. Her husband was their older brother Robert, heir to the Duke’s title and the man who really ran DesPlaines while the Duke was off managing the Circus. Gabrielle had an aristocratic tilt to her nose and steel-gray eyes that could be quite cold, though they seemed friendly enough right at the moment.
She was slightly older than Yvette, though she kept her skin so smooth and perfect that they might have been sisters in fact as well as in law.
The man beside her was Jacques Roumenier, Yvonne’s younger brother. Both the Roumeniers were children of one of Duke Etienne’s best friends, Baron Ebert Roumenier of Nouveau Calais; they themselves were lifelong friends of Jules and Yvette and had, in fact, been raised together. They were also cracking good SOTS agents.
Jacques was a slightly horse faced man, homely but nice. His face now sported the same type of mustache as Jules’. ‘Hello, Yvette,’ he said softly, gazing intently at her feet. Jacques had always had a crush on her and, while she loved him as a friend, her feelings did not extend beyond that - and he knew it. She was always warm and companionable with him, though, for she hated to hurt him any more than necessary.
‘Hello, Jacques,’ she beamed back at him. ‘You know, there’s something about that mustache that looks familiar.’
‘Of course,’ said Yvonne, leaping into the conversational breach. ‘He’s going to be the new Carlos, and Gabby’s going to replace you. I asked the Duke to let me be Carmen Velasquez - begged him, practically on my knees - but the dirty mudlug wouldn’t listen. He went by the thousand point test, like always, and Gabby’s nine ninety three beat me out.’
Jules grinned. ‘Did you think he’d skip the scores on something this important?’
‘Well, he certainly ought to’ve given me the job, since I’ve got a nine eighty nine and I’m engaged to his son, the only thousand-pointer alive.’
‘I’m still proud of you, darling,’ he cooed, slipping his arms around her delicate waist. ‘You’re still more than enough woman for me to handle.’
Then he looked up and smiled at the two newcomers. ‘Hi, Gabby; hi, Jacques’ he said, giving them the belated salutation.
‘”Cabby” indeed,’ said Gabrielle, pulling herself up to her full aristocratic height of one hundred and sixty- four centimeters. ‘That’s Marchioness Gabrielle to you, varlet. I don’t think I’ll deign to speak to any of the common herd any more unless they come crawling, bumping their foreheads on the floor.’ Her words were haughty, as was her tone, but there was a slight sparkle to her eyes that indicated she was joking.
‘Hear, hear,’ Yvonne said, to which Yvette added, ‘That’s telling him, Gabby.’ Then in a slightly more wistful vein, she went on, ‘You know, Iliked wearing these jewels and that tiara and stuff, damn it. They did something for me.’
‘Yeah,’ Jules commented. ‘They blinded everyone in the room so that they wouldn’t have to look at you. By the way, where’s the rest of t he group we ordered?’
‘There wasn’t any point to sending them along on a posh ship like this; Rick said that he and his boys would meet you directly on Aston,’ Vonnie said.
Jules and Yvette briefed Jacques and Gabrielle on the personal habits and idiosyncrasies of Carlos and Carmen, and what would be expected of them. ‘Can’t you tell us what this whole affair is about?’ Gabrielle asked.
‘Sorry, can’t even leak it to family. You’ll find out when it’s all over, I suppose. In the meantime, I’m afraid you’ll just have to settle for being decoys.’
Jules and Yvette escorted their replacements secretly back to their cabin, where they turned over the Velasquez wardrobe and lifestyle to the new people. They had their hair dyed back close to the original brown coloring and had it restyled so that it would be long and straight. Jules had his mustache trimmed as well; it looked much better after it had been unwaxed and uncurled, and Yvonne commented favorably on it. By the time they donned their shapeless brown homespun trousers and jackets, there was not a trace of Carlos or Carmen left in them. They looked, instead, like somewhat unorthodox but still-practicing Puritans.
Any enemy spies at the landing field on Aston would have noted nothing suspicious. The Velasquez couple stayed in their cabin the whole time, their ultimate destination being Lateesta. A man and a woman from some heavy gravity planet did disembark, but they could hardly be the same two.
Meanwhile, the new Carlos and Carmen Velasquez traveled on to Lateesta, halfway across the Empire, where they continued their practice of tossing fifty-ruble bills around like confetti - and where they did nothing else suspicious whatsoever.
Jules and Yvette took adjoining rooms at a small local hotel, and awaited the arrival of their cousin, Richard d’Alembert, and his team of circus wrestlers. Word had come that they would arrive on a ship tomorrow; in the meantime, Jules and Yvette made not a single move in the direction of the bar that was their next target.
Jules had cleared the few movable items of furniture in his tiny room out of the way so that he had a path to pace. He always thought better, he claimed, when he was moving. His fists were jammed deep within his pockets and his eyes were focused intently on the floor as he strode back and forth over the cheap carpeting. Yvette sat on the edge of his single bed, her brow knit and her lips in a frown of concentration.
Their new quarters were something of a letdown after their previous accommodations, but neither really noticed.
‘I just can’t help feeling that it’s like fighting fog,’ Jules said aloud. ‘We knocked out an entire planetary organization after a couple of weeks’ work, and what did we get for it? The contact point for the head of the organization on one other planet. Period. There’s close to fourteen hundred planets in the Empire. If we continue on at the same rate, we’ll have the whole mess cleared up in only fifty six years - after which we’ll probably have to start the job all over again, because we can’t expect Banion to be standing still while we mow down his organization. He’ll rebuild as fast as we knock down.’
‘He’s getting along in years, you know. He could die first.’
‘In that case, he’d make his move against the “Throne before his death - and if we just keep nibbling around the edges, we won’t do him any damage at all. There’s got to be some other way to go about this.’
Yvette looked up at him speculatively. ‘You know, I had a dream last night about Uncle Marcel.’
Jules stopped pacing and looked quizzically at her. What could the Circus’ magician have to do with their problem?
‘You know the key part of his act; the word he’s always harping on?’
‘I should; I was always hanging around his tent as a kid.’ Jules smiled. He let his voice take on a high-pitched, nasal twang in imitation of his uncle. ‘ “Misdirection is the key. I tell you to watch one hand and something pops out in the other.” Yes, I think I see what you’re getting at.’
He scowled and resumed his pacing. ‘It is very pat. In sixty-seven years of investigation - and pretty intensive investigation, at that - every single scrap of evidence points at the planet Durward as the source of all the problems. Whenever a top agent would go to Durward and get close to anything, he would disappear without a trace. Indicating, presumably, that there is something on Durward being guarded so heavily and so well that none of our people can get near it.’
‘Like perhaps the Patent.’
‘But would it be there at all? Let’s look at a couple of other things. Aimee Amorat disappeared with her son Banion after their abortive coup against her husband, Duke Henry of Durward. Over the next sixty- seven years, an Empire-wide criminal organization builds up ...’
‘And that sort of thing takes cash!’ Yvette interrupted excitedly. ‘Even assuming that the Beast stashed away a lot of loot she embezzled from her husband - and as I recall there were some missing funds - she would have needed hundreds of billions ... no, trillions of rubles to build it up as big as it is now.’
‘Of course, much of it could have been expected to pyramid along the way.’
‘Even so, she and her son would have needed help. Either they had someone from the start- and with her connections at court that wouldn’t be altogether unlikely- or else they latched onto someone very quickly.’
‘And someone high up.’ Jules said pensively. ‘They would need a power base to work from, too. They would need someone with the authority to conceal facts and misdirect snoopers, someone who already had an organization spread out over wide volumes of space, someone who could act with relative impunity and move about freely.’
‘We are talking,’ Yvette enunciated clearly, ‘about a grand duke.’
‘That’s the way I added it up, too.’ He stopped pacing again and leaned against a bureau, facing his sister. ‘Only a grand duke would have the widespread organization that could serve as a basis for what Banion has built up. Only a grand duke would have the initial financial resources to build this up so big in one lifetime.’
‘If this is true, then the work will get a lot harder than it’s been. After all, we can’t go sticking nitrobarb into grand dukes at random. There’s only thirty six of them, and they’re bound to be missed.’
‘True, but there may be another approach. If it really is Banion behind all these machinations - and all the evidence points that way - then he must be preparing for a takeover of the Empire. He’s getting old, and he will want his share of glory before he goes. No matter how impressive that Patent is, he’ll need a lot more than that behind him before he could succeed. He’ll need manpower, he’ll need arms and he’ll need ships.’
‘Those can all be disguised as other things. He could hide whole armies as maintenance men inside factories, guns could be buried until needed, battleships could be listed as freighters ...’
Jules nodded. ‘But,’ he said significantly, ‘there is something you can’t hide from an expert: cash flow. If there is a coup in the works, it will show up in finances in various ways - a little too much money being spent here, one area becoming unexplainably richer than another, a stockpiling of funds over there ...’
‘We’ll hit them with accountants!’ Yvette exclaimed.
‘Why not? It’s a time honored method.’
‘Little brother, you are a genius.’
‘It’s still only the wildest of guesswork, so far,’ Jules hedged. ‘We don’t know any of this.’
‘It’s feeling righter and righter to me every second. SOTS has been barking up the wrong tree for more than half a century, and all forty-seven of those reels of data are junk. I think we ought to send out the word to the Head tonight and tell him to get cracking.’
‘We’d better have a system worked out first. Let’s see, Durward is in Sector Ten, Algonia is in Three, Aston’s in Six, Nevander’s in Thirteen, and Gastonia is a rim-world clear to hellangone out on the edge of Twenty.’
Yvette looked at him, startled. ‘Hold on a second. Durward, Algonia, Aston and Nevander have all appeared in this investigation before somewhere, but you left me two jumps behind you with Gastonia. Where did that come from?’
‘My own twisted mind. Empress Stanley Five started exiling rebels there way back in the late twenty-two hundreds, and that practice has been followed more or less faithfully ever since. A century and a half of rebel mentality is ample breeding ground for treason. What could be a better place for Banion to recruit from?’
‘Khorosho, then here’s what we’ll do. We message the Head tonight to check out the growth curves and financial statements of every planet and sector for the last seventy years. That’ll take manpower, I know, but he’s got it and this case has priority. His computers will work overtime. Then he takes the top six or seven and hands them over to his best financial analysts for detailed scrutiny.’
‘And in the meantime,’ Jules picked up her scheme, ‘we’ll continue on with what we were originally intending tomorrow, until we find out what the Head has learned from these little audits. Then we’ll revise our plans accordingly.’
‘What if we learn more facts tomorrow that point directly to Durward?’
‘Then,’ Jules said slowly, ‘I’d take it as a sign that we were meant to go to Durward, and that the planet is really a trap for us. So we’ll go anywhere but there.’
There was one thought that neither voiced, yet both were thinking. If this new theory was right, and some grand duke or duchess were behind the whole affair, then the trail would lead inevitably right back to Mother Earth itself.