nds; friends with whom you have a treaty. Remember?"

The child began to cry, bitterly. "That was when I was just a
play-Queen. And now I know what they meant when they talked about
when Grandpa and Pappa would be through being King. Pappa didn't
even get to be King!"

Something big and warm and soft was trying to push between them;
a dog with long blond hair and floppy ears. In a year and a half,
puppies can grow surprisingly. Mopsy was trying to lick his face.
He took the dog by the collar and straightened.

"Lady Valerie, will you come with us?" he asked. "I'm going to find
quarters for Princess Myrna."

* * * * *

"Is it Princess Myrna, or is it Queen Myrna?" he asked.

Prince Bentrik shook his head. "We don't know. The King was alive
when we left Moonbase, but that was five hundred hours ago. We don't
know anything about her mother, either. She was at the Palace when
Prince Edvard was murdered; we've heard absolutely nothing about
her. The King made a few screen appearances, parroting things Makann
wanted him to say. Under hypnosis. That was probably the very least
of what they did to him. They've turned him into a zombi."

"Well, how did Myrna get to Moonbase?"

"That was Lady Valerie, as much as anybody else. She and Sir Thomas
Kobbly, and Captain Rainer. They armed the servants at Cragdale with
hunting rifles and everything else they could scrape up, captured
Prince Edvard's space-yacht, and took off in her. Took a couple of
hits from ground batteries getting off, and from ships around
Moonbase getting in. Ships of the Royal Mardukan Navy!" he added
furiously.

The pinnace in which they had made the trip to Tanith had taken
a few hits, too, running the blockade. Not many; her captain had
thrown her into hyperspace almost at once.

"They sent the yacht off to Gimli," Bentrik said. "From there,
they'll try to rally as many of the Royal Navy units as haven't gone
over to Makann. They're to assemble on Gimli and await my return.
If I don't return in fifteen hundred hours from the time I left
Moonbase, they're to use their own judgment. I'd expect that
they'd move in on Marduk and attack."

"That's sixty-odd days," Otto Harkaman said. "That's an awfully long
time to expect that lunar base to hold out, against a whole planet."

"It's a strong base. It was built four hundred years ago, when
Marduk was fighting a combination of six other planets. It held out
against continu