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“I think they are on the second
deck,” Marisea replied. “There’s a sort of passenger section there.”

“Passenger section?” Park asked.
“This isn’t a cruise liner.”

“No, but there’s a crew lounge
where people can go on their off-hours,” Marisea explained, “This ship has the
room for an extra amenity or two, you know.”

“Okay,” Park nodded between
yawns. “Please ask Dannet and Sartena to join us for that meeting.”

“Melise too?” Marisea asked.

“Dannet’s wife?” Park responded.
“I didn’t know she was on board. Isn’t she expecting? Well, never mind, sure. I
don’t mind if she’s there too. I mostly just want to make sure we don’t get
arrested for violating Dennseean space simply because we approach at the wrong
angle or break out of Hyperspace in the wrong place. I figure Dannet and
Sartena would know.”

It turned out that Park need not
have worried. Very few systems were as paranoid about strangers as the
Iztapellians had been. However, they did not enter the Dennsee system
unchallenged. As in the Iztapel system there were patrol ships on the watch for
incoming ships, but rather than face an instant challenge, they were hailed
nearly half an hour after they broke out into normal space.

“This is Earth ship
Tawatir
,” Park responded to the inquiry,
“Parker Holman commanding. We carry Prince Dannet and his wife and are en route
to pay our respects to Lord Rebbert.” He waited a minute and then realized, “Oh
yeah, even at the speed of light it is going to take an hour to get a response.
Dannet?”

Dannet and Melise were on the
bridge for the entry into the Dennsee system. “Hold your course until you get
confirmation,” Dannet instructed. “They’ll give us a course to Dennsee.”

“We know where your planet is at
the moment,” Garro Tinns, the navigator, remarked.

“I’m sure you do,” Dannet nodded,
“but for security reasons, there may be an alternative course they want you to
follow. I know our space force laid out mine fields during the last incursion
by the Dark Ships. Some of them, at least, are probably still in place.”

“Even with our stasis plating,
that could be uncomfortable,” Park admitted. “We could get bounced all over the
field like a pin ball. It wouldn’t do much for your defenses either. And
waiting an hour to adjust our course won’t make that much of a difference from
this distance.”

“It could have been much worse,”
Marisea pointed out. “If we had been hailed from Dennsee, the initial contact
would not have been for at least another hour yet and would have been waiting
around even longer to continue the conversation.”

Dennsee was a world of
climatological extremes, being more tilted on its axis than Earth. It had polar
ice caps that almost completely melted each summer and reformed with the onset
of winter. There was a broad habitable band that straddled Dennsee’s equator
but the temperature range there was temperate, not tropical although so-called
tropical storms were not uncommon during the summer months along the edge of
the habitable region.

It surprised Marisea that there
were no trees on Dennsee and she commented on it as they flew in a large
suspensor-driven vehicle. The vehicle was not entirely unlike a Mer buggy, but
it was larger and more comfortably appointed. This one also bore the royal arms
of Dennsee
 
on its hull. “My ancestors
tried to import some,” Dannet told her, keeping his eyes on the scenery below.
He was obviously drinking in the first sight of his home world in years. “But
the seasons were all wrong and the soil has the wrong nutrients, I suppose.
None of them thrived. The best this world can support are some particularly
hardy woody shrubs. That is why my ancestors were genetically designed to
produce chlorophyll in our skins. It was a way of supplementing our food
sources. We have a lot of sunlight and more ultraviolet light reaches our
surface than on most worlds, so it works out for us.”

“The rest of us will just have to
wear sunblock then,” Park commented.

“Most visitors do,” Dannet
admitted.

“Is Gennsee like this too?”
Marisea asked Melise.

“Not at all,” Dannet’s wife shook
her head. “Oh we also enjoy the same intense sunlight, but our climate is
warmer than that of Earth and we have a profusion of trees and all sorts of
other plant life as well. So much so that our seas are bright green and so is
our sky along the edges.”

“Green sky?” Marisea asked. “On
Earth that means a really bad storm.”

“Just another sunny day on
Gennsee,” Melise replied with a smile.

“What about rain?” Iris asked.
“The world is reputed for its sunny days, but even for this much vegetation it
must rain with reasonable frequency.”

“It does,” Dannet confirmed. “All
human life and that descended from Earth life must have water to survive and
this world is no different. I think our reputation for so much fair weather is
undeserved, however. I’ve looked at the statistics and the average rainfall
across our habitable region fits well within the normal range for most human
worlds.”

“What’s that patch of red-looking
grass?” Marisea asked, looking to the left side of the vehicle.

“One of the rare survivors from
the establishment of Earth-life on our world, I was taught,” Dannet replied.
Its gene-structure is certainly different than most life. It’s actually an
invasive weed although I understand there was quite the fashion for making
whole lawns of it a few centuries ago. That didn’t last too long. As I say,
it’s invasive and it has to be constantly weeded out of a garden, so after a
while the constant maintenance is just not worth it and so all the red lawns
were torn up and replaced with green grass, but it’s not unusual for patches
like that to spring up and once they do, they’re very difficult to get rid of
completely.”

“I like the color,” Marisea
remarked, “but if it’s that bad a weed maybe I won’t bring any home.”

“Good choice,” Park told her. “Is
that the royal palace up ahead?” He pointed toward a large tower that rose over
a thousand feet into the sky and appeared to have been faced with polished
granite.

“That?” Dannet laughed. “God, no!
It’s the public library. The Lord’s Manor is a few miles beyond it.”

As the vehicle swung around the
library, Park finally got his first look at Lord Rebbert’s home. It was only
three stories tall, but it was tremendous, covering several acres by itself.
There were large gardens and lawns surrounding the manor and some very tall
plants.”

“So you do have trees!” Marisea
exclaimed with delight.

“Actually those are ferns,”
Dannet corrected her. “However, they bear no genetic relation to the ones you
know on Earth. Like the red grass, these are indigenous plants. However, unlike
the grass, these are highly prized and very expensive.”

“And this is your home?”

“I grew up here,” Dannet
shrugged. “It was nice enough, I suppose, but it did not prepare me well for a
military career. Lack of status is a real shock when you get brought up like
this and that was with father warning me. Still, life in the Alliance Fleet did
me a world of good and I didn’t have anywhere as much trouble fitting in as
some of my fellow young nobles did. I knew, at least on the conscious level
that our trainers were not going to be impressed by our heritage and would not
care who our parents were. Some young nobles don’t get that until it gets
pounded into them by the other guys in their unit. No one gets special
treatment in the Fleet. The sooner that sinks in the better.

“I think my first shock was
discovering what it meant to sleep in a barracks and not in a private room,”
Dannet continued. “I don’t think I slept the entire first week, but I acclimated.
Of course, by the time I was really comfortable with sleeping in a barracks I
had a commission on a ship and only had to share a cabin with four others, all
of whom were usually on some other shift so we only saw each other coming and
going.”

“And later you were a captain and
had your own cabin again,” Marisea noted.

“It took still more time to get
used to that,” Dannet chuckled, “but yes, I suppose this is home, although I
have my own estate a hundred miles from here. I doubt we shall be staying there,
however.”

“Why not?”

“Because we are here to visit my
father,” Dannet replied. “I hope he is recovering well.”

“You could have asked ever since
we made contact after break out, you know,” Marisea pointed out. “Why didn’t
you?”

“I suppose I was too relieved
that no one was addressing me as ‘My lord,’” Dannet replied. “So long as that
didn’t happen I knew Dad was still alive.”

“You still should have asked,”
Marisea told him, although she kept an accusatory note out of her voice.

“Not really,” Melise came to her
husband’s defense. “It is probable that we might not have been given an
accurate report. If Lord Rebbert were not expected to recover it is possible
that would have been kept from the public. We were met by a commercial
chauffeur to bring us to the manor so he would not have known anything that is
not public already. So we shall have to wait another few minutes.”

The vehicle circled the manor,
giving it a wide berth and then came to a gentle landing in a wide area with
several similar vehicles already parked in carefully marked places. Dannet
picked up his bag and led the others out and toward the manor.

“So good to have you home again,
Dannet,” a short fat man greeted him as he approached a wide door. The man had
skin as green as Dannet and Melise did, but his hair was silvery with age and
had just a faint hint of green in it. “Your father has been asking for you.”

“Thank you, Mahten,” Dannet
replied. “How is he?”

“In a terrible state, sir,”
Mahten replied, shaking his head. “I can only hope your arrival will improve
the situation.”

Dannet nodded, dropped his bag
just inside the door and
 
walked at a
brisk pace
 
through the house, forcing
the others to struggle to keep up to him. The manor seemed even larger on the
inside than it had from the air and they passed dozens of people, who bowed
their heads in respect as Dannet rushed by them. Noticing shocked looks on
their faces, Marisea waved at them impishly, even as she flew past them at the
same speed.

Since her injury, Marisea had
still not been cleared to use her tail save in very specific daily exercises,
so rather than using the typical Mer hop-step, she had adjusted her suspensor
belt to allow her to float and fly in whatever direction she wished. Resetting
the device on the fly took practice but she was already a menace to everyone
else’s navigation as she zoomed around. Marisea laughed at the near collisions
and Park had to content himself that at least she didn’t shout “Wheee!” at the
same time.

Lord Rebbert’s private apartment
was on the top floor at the end of the North Wing of the Lord’s Manor. Dannet
led the party directly to a small circular chamber
 
that when they looked upward turned out to be
a shaft that reached to the roof of the manor. When they were all in, he merely
said, “Tower.”

“Yes, Your Highness,” a voice
replied seemingly from all around them. “and welcome home.”

“I didn’t see a tower from
outside,” Sartena commented as they started rising up from the floor of the
shaft in a suspensor field.

“The Tower was my not-so secret
name for the private residence when I was growing up,” Dannet admitted. I
programmed the Manor’s security system to accept that name. Dad kept me
confined to the Manor of a week after that,” he laughed. “It nearly became a
month when security told him they couldn’t remove it from the programming
safely.”

“I think that would have gotten
me a prize,” Sartena laughed, “but then my Dad doesn’t rule a world.”

They reached the top floor and a
surface slid in place just beneath their feet. As soon as there was something
under his feet, Dannet started forward again, leaving he others two paces
behind him. Marisea glanced back over her shoulder to see that the temporary
floor was already sliding out of sight again. “Park,” she commented, “that was
fun. Can we get lifts like that installed in Van Winkle Base?”

“I’ll put it on the list,” Park
promised, “but I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for it. We have more important
things to build before that reaches the top of our priorities.”

“Never mind then,” she responded.

They finally reached a broad door
where Dannet abruptly stopped at the sounds of a booming laugh. “I suppose we
should go on in?” Park suggested to him.

Dannet shot him a puzzled look,
but then turned back and opened the door to reveal Lord Rebbert sitting in a
suspensor chair, holding something that looked like a flat broom from which the
bristles had been cut down to only two inches in length. Beside him two other
men were standing with the same cut-off brooms in their hands. They were
playing a game that looked like shuffleboard although all the pieces floated an
inch about the floor.

As the door opened, Rebbert
turned
 
to see Dannet, Park and the
others, and shouted his happy greetings to them. “Come in, come in!” he
laughed. “You’re letting in a draft.”

“Father,” Dannet admitted,
showing intense relief, “I was expecting to find you on your deathbed.”

“Deathbed?” Rebbert laughed.
“Nonsense! I only lost an arm and half a leg.” Park looked again and saw that
Rebbert’s left arm was missing as was the leg on that side from just above the
knee. “The doctors tell me it will take months to clone the replacements. Can
you believe that? I thought the process was faster than that.”

“That’s a fairly major injury,
Lord Rebbert,” Park pointed out.

“Hah!” Rebbert laughed. “It was
hardly worth inducing a coma for. Now that angered me. I was knocked out for
the entire trip home. They still won’t let me put in a full day’s work. No,
it’s therapy, therapy, therapy. And why? Once I have the new arm and leg I’ll
have to train for them all over again.”