to come down. You'll act as
her personal escort. And don't think you're being shoved into the
background. She's Crown Princess, and if she isn't Queen now, she
will be in a few years. Escorting her now will be the foundation of
your naval career. There isn't a young officer in the Royal Navy who
wouldn't trade places with you."

"That was the right way to handle him, Lucas," Bentrik approved,
after the boy had gone away, proud of his opportunity and his
responsibility.

"It'll do just what I said for him." He stopped for a moment, to
play with an idea that had just struck him. "You know, the girl will
be Queen in a few years, if she isn't now. Queens need Prince
Consorts. Your son's a good boy; I liked him the first moment I saw
him, and I've liked him better ever since. He'd be a good man on
the throne beside Queen Myrna."

"Oh, that's out of the question. Not the matter of consanguinity,
they're about a sixteenth cousin. But people would say I was abusing
the Protectorship to marry my son onto the Throne."

"Simon, speaking as one sovereign prince to another, you have a lot
to learn. You've learned one important lesson already, that a ruler
must be willing to use force and shed blood to enforce his rule. You
have to learn, too, that a ruler cannot afford to be guided by his
fears of what people will say about him. Not even what history will
say about him. A ruler's only judge is himself."

Bentrik slid the transpex visor of his helmet up and down
experimentally, checked the chambers of his pistol and carbine.

"All that matters to me is the peace and well-being of Marduk. I'll
have to talk it over with ... with my only judge. Well, let's go."

* * * * *

The top terraces were secure when their car landed. More vehicles
were coming down and discharging men; a swarm of landing craft were
sinking past the building toward the ground two thousand feet below.
Auto-weapons and small arms and light cannon banged, and bombs and
recoilless-rifle shells crashed, on the lower terraces. They put the
car down one of the shaftways until they ran into heavy fire from
below, at the limit of the advance, and then turned into a broad
hallway, floating high enough to clear the heads of the men on foot.
It looked like the part of the Palace where he had lodged when he
had been a guest there but it probably wasn't.

They came to hastily constructed barricades of furniture and
statuary and furnishi