"Thanks," Onrad said simply. "You've been damned good about it." Reaching inside his cloak, he handed Brim a small, pink envelope. "Here," he said. "She left this with Petty Officer Tutti—who was fortunately with the baby when the blast came."
Brim ground his teeth as he looked blindly at the envelope— it was the old-fashioned kind of communication Raddisma favored; she had a deep respect for trappings from bygone ages. "I only hope to the Universe she didn't suffer much."
Onrad shook his head. "I was only two rooms away, Wilf," he said, pointing to the bandage on his forehead. "I got there moments later, and as I am a man, I can attest that the poor woman never felt a thing."
"What a horrible, horrible waste this war is," Brim said bitterly, unfolding the letter that was written in traditional ink on antique paper.
Dear Wilf,
Since you are reading this letter, I will have passed away for one reason or another without being able to say a personal farewell. Not what I intended at all. I believe that I loved you—or was certainly on my way to that comfortable state of repose. I also believe that I might have made you happy. Perhaps in another life.
This letter is not about me. Rather, it is about our daughter who I shall also presuppose has survived; Tutti would not have otherwise delivered this letter. I shall now have to ask that you at least keep an eye on her until Mustafa Eyren finds her some sort of a home.
With a new Chief Consort replacing me in his bed, the Nabob's interest in this female child will wane rapidly. Perhaps you can use your influence to insure that she goes to a good future, I had such fine hopes for her!
Again, it is imperative that you understand you have no responsibility for this child other than what you choose to take for yourself. It is certainly no fault of hers that she was born, but then it is none of yours, either, since the decision to conceive was exclusively mine during one special night of complete ecstasy. I am truly sorry that I failed to survive long enough to carry out this responsibility on my own.
Thank you for whatever you are willing to do.
Love,
Raddisma
Brim's eyes filled with tears and he handed the letter to Onrad. "She was quite a lady, Your Majesty," he whispered. "I think you should share this."
Carefully placing his eyeglasses on the bridge of a swollen nose, Onrad took the letter and read it. Presently, he looked up. "One night?" he asked. "That's all you knew each other?"
"That's all," Brim said.
Onrad smiled. "Well, you must have made quite an impression, my friend," he said. "Since she moved in, she followed any news that reached the palace about you. And she kept a sizable journal of media pieces that mentioned your exploits," He pursed his lips for a moment, then peered at Brim in a conspiratorial way. "Hmm," he mused. "Old Mustafa's going to be problem here for a while, but—unless you have some good objections—I'm going to take the child into the palace household. Being born here on an Imperial planet, she'll have her choice of citizenship when she grows up. So we'll simply have to spoil her sufficiently that she makes the right choice when the time comes. Besides," he said with a smile, "a little girl will considerably brighten up the palace—especially since we shall all be living some distance underground for a while. She'll have Petty Officer Tutti as her personal governess and her favorite 'Uncle' Wilf can visit her anytime he is in town. How about it, Admiral?" he asked.
It took Brim a long time to force through the rush of emotion that captured his entire being.
"W-what in the Universe could I possibly say to such kindness, Your Majesty?" he stammered, only half in control of himself.
"How about 'yes'?" Onrad asked softly.
"Yes," Brim managed to choke. "Please."
"I'll take care of it immediately," Onrad said, then he blinked and held up an index finger. "Oh, yes," he added, reaching inside his cloak once more. "The doctor gave me this for you—it nearly slipped my mind." This time, he handed Brim a small plastic envelope embossed with Onrad's Imperial seal.
Brim opened it carefully and withdrew a small, personal-sized hologram. It pictured a tiny, wrinkled infant, clearly born only metacycles before.
"She's pretty as a picture, isn't she?" Onrad said, looking over his shoulder. "What're you going to name her?"
" N-name?"
"Yeah. She's got to have a name, you know."
Brim grimaced. The furthest thing from his mind during the last year was finding a name for a baby girl. He looked at die hologram. His daughter had Raddisma's lovely almond eyes—and wore a pink ribbon around a shock of black, curly hair. By the very Universe, she was beautiful. He had closed his eyes for a moment, thinking of names, when it came to him, "I've got it!" he said.
"The name?"
Brim nodded.
Onrad waited a few moments, then smiled. "Are you going to tell me what it is?" he asked impatiently.
Brim smiled. "The only name she could have, Your Majesty. 'Hope.' "
This time, it was Onrad who closed his eyes for long moments, clearly too full of emotion to speak. Finally, he nodded and smiled. "It'll do," he said, a tear starting down his cheek. "It'll damn well do...."
As the Triad's first rays warmed FleetPort 30, Barbousse wakened Brim with a special bulletin newly decoded from the Admiralty. According to Sodeskayan Intelligence sources, Hoth Orgoth's High Command in Occupied Effer'wyck had taken advantage of the gravity storms to organize what promised to be a colossal, maximum-effort raid. For two days running, "borrowed" attack ships had been arriving from bases throughout the League's conquered empire, and were now approaching numbers that could literally swamp the Imperial defenses, good as they had become. Clearly, the Leaguers were rapidly building up to some sort of climatic event.
Only metacycles later, the midday gravitological forecast from the Admiralty predicted that the turbulent gravity would soon begin to stabilize, bringing (relative) calm to the galactic center—and a renewed threat of invasion to Avalon. In midafternoon, Brim boarded a shuttle for Avalon to meet Calhoun at another War Cabinet meeting in Avalon. There, he was called for firsthand information only twice, but he did listen to Hagbut warn that a large number of transport craft the Leaguers had previously dispersed to remote sections of Effer'wyck were now being gathered at locations on habitable spacecoast planets from which an invasion might be launched. Afterward, Hagbut's staff presented a cogent-but-lengthy dissertation warning that these movements—in conjunction with the increased scale of attacks on Avalon City itself—indicated a Leaguer incursion was not only likely, but it was imminent.
And much as he disliked giving in to fear-mongering, Brim was very close to embracing the idea that an invasion very well might take place in the near future. He shivered as he caught a staff skimmer to the shuttle stop at Lake Mersin Fleet Base.
From the reports he'd heard, the Imperial defenders were going to need a lot more than three hundred crystals jury-rigged into the odd Starfury or Defiant. If someone didn't deliver Ursis's self-propelled space mines soon, the good people of Avalon would be learning Vertrucht in the very near future.
The first Leaguer raids reached Avalon before Brim even made it to the shuttle base. Caught out on Vereker Boulevard when the explosions began, his driver pulled to the curb and ran for shelter. By now rather acclimated to being shot at by Leaguers, Brim simply got out and watched the unfolding battle with a sort of professional interest. Judging from the noise—and thundering salvos from Universe only knew how many disrupters—he estimated that at least a hundred Leaguer starships were attacking over a wide area, while bringing even more terror and death to the city. After a while, he climbed behind the controls of the staff skimmer himself and continued on toward the base. He could be hit equally well standing still or on the move, and the latter got him closer to the front of the shuttle boarding line, so he drove. But he came to an abrupt halt at the blazing wreck of a Gradgroat-Norchelite cathedral—it had clearly been hit within a metacycle. Pulling to the curb, he rushed inside—two great oaken doors had been blown across eight lanes of thoroughfare—where he encountered still another scene out of someone's private vision of Hell. Two blood-drenched women were calmly piecing bodies together and laying their ghastly creations in cartons placed in neat rows on the floor. Unable to confront the gruesome scene before him, he looked up into what must have once been a high, vaulted ceiling. Now, all that remained were shards of supports along the tops of the walls. A disrupter beam must have pierced the roof like an eggshell and burst among a group of women and children sheltering in the sanctuary. Fighting his gorge to a draw, he choked, "Can I... er... g-get help for you?"