a single servant, let alone vassals, retainers, and an entire house full of servants. Something didn’t add up.
Charlie snapped out of his reverie and looked at the page. “I’m sorry. You said there’s a man here to see me.”
“Yes, Your Grace. But he seems a rather unsavory sort. I’ve already sent him away five times, but he keeps returning, and he claims to be a friend of yours.”
“Did he give a name?”
“Yes, Your Grace. A rather strange name. Nano-who-never-loses, or something like that.”
“Nano’s here?” Charlie jumped to his feet. “Where is he?”
“He’s in the library, Your Grace.”
Charlie left the page behind, burst into the library, and found Nano helping himself to a drink and a cigar from Rierma’s stash. “Frankie,” Nano said, eyeing the cigar carefully. “You now some big-shot duke being, eh?”
“What are you doing here?”
“Momma said you got trouble, and you’re family, so we’re here to pull your ass out of the fire. But guess you don’t need no help.” Nano puffed on the cigar and blew a big smoke ring into the air.
Suddenly Charlie felt good. “Tell Momma thanks. But I was in a dungeon in this palace. There’s no way you could’ve gotten to me.”
Nano switched to standard. “Frankie, I brought Janice and Sally with me. They can fuck their way into anyplace. And if they need to, they know how to kill good too.”
“Momma let Janice and Sally come?”
Nano grimaced. “She don’t like the loss of revenue, but the girls begged and pleaded—drove us all nuts—and they were due a vacation.” Nano raised a hand, and rubbed his thumb against two fingers in the universal sign of money. “The girls also pointed out there’d be some rich pickings here.”
“How’d you get here?”
“In our ship.”
“You have a ship?”
“Of course we have a ship. We’re smugglers. How do you think we smuggle, up our asses?”
Not only had Momma sent Nano, Janice, and Sally, she’d sent Willie, and Stan Fourhands, pickpocket, lock-pick, computer wizard, a man of many talents. Charlie had Nano retrieve them and bring them up to Rierma’s suites. Janice and Sally launched themselves at Charlie and smothered him in kisses. Sally looked at the bandages on his face and her eyes grew big. She turned to Janice. “Hey, they fixed him up. He gonna be pretty on both sides. I got dibs on doin’ him first.”
Janice shrugged. “I already done him, though I gotta say the way he done me I don’t care what his face looks like.”
Charlie introduced them to everyone. “A reunion of old friends,” Rierma said, “in more ways than one. We’ll have a party tonight, and we can all share how we met and became friends.”
Sally sidled up to Rierma. “You know,” she said. “You pretty good lookin’, for a old guy.”
CHAPTER 15
INCONSISTENCIES
Charlie needed a ride, literally. It had become a bit of a joke throughout the palace that near-destitute House de Lunis didn’t own a ship to transport His Grace to his ducal estates on Luna. Rierma offered him the loan of one of his ships, but Nano volunteered his, saying, “Hey Frankie. We’ll take you in our ship. Momma ain’t expecting us back for a couple months.”
Charlie said, “I don’t have any way of paying you back. I’ll do what I can, but I have no idea when that’ll be.”
Nano shrugged and said, “We’ll extend credit.”
Janice chimed in, “We owe him anyway, ’cause he saved my ass that night.”
Sally agreed with her, and the three of them got into a family argument.
Charlie had Add and Ell inspect Nano’s ship. Add summed the ship up as, “She’s a tramp merchantman, little brother. Looks like a tramp merchantman. Probably runs like a tramp merchantman.” So Charlie departed Turnlee in the tramp merchantman Goldisbest, a beat-up, decrepit smuggler’s scow. On the outbound leg, while trying to clear Turnlee nearspace and set their vector for up-transition, Turnlee customs officials boarded the ship. They were actually Syndonese in Turnlee uniforms, whose only purpose was clearly harassment. They took vids of the interior and exterior of Goldisbest and released them to the media, an attempt on Goutain’s part to humiliate Charlie. But Goutain had never had to shit in a bucket while chained to two thousand men.
After that, humiliation was a relative thing.
Charlie came to realize that, in an odd sort of way, his near-destitute status provided better protection than a platoon of armed troops. No one considered him a threat, so it wasn’t worth the time and effort to do anything about him, though