before long he
found that, there was nothing exciting going on; it was just a
spaceship, and he'd been on ships before. Her Highness the Crown
Princess, or maybe her Majesty the Queen of Marduk, stopped being
excited about the same time, and she and Steven and Mopsy played
together. Of course, Myrna was only a girl, and two years younger
than Steven, but she was, or at least might be, his sovereign, and
beside, she had been in a space action, if you call what lies
between a planet and its satellite space and if you call being shot
at without being able to shoot back an action, and Relentless
Ravary, the Interstellar Terror, had not. This rather made up
for being a girl and a mere baby of going-on-ten.

One thing, there were no lessons. Sir Thomas Kobbly fancied himself
as a landscape-painter and spent most of his time arguing techniques
with Vann Larch, and Steven's tutor, Captain Rainer was a normal-space
astrogator and found a kindred spirit in Sharll Renner. This left
Lady Valerie Alvarath at a loose end. There were plenty of volunteers
to help her fill in the time, but Rank Hath Its Privileges; Trask
undertook to see to it that she did not suffer excessively from
shipboard ennui.

Sharll Renner and Captain Rainer approached him, during the cocktail
hour before dinner, some hundred hours short of emergence.

"We think we've figured out where Dunnan's base is," Renner said.

"Oh, good!" Everybody else had, on a different planet. "Where's yours?"

"Abaddon," the Count of Ravary's tutor said. When he saw that the
name meant nothing to Trask, he added, "The ninth, outer, planet of
the Marduk system." He said it disgustedly.

"Yes; remember how you had Boake and Manfred out with their ships,
checking our outside planets to see if Prince Viktor might be hiding
on one of them? Well, what with the time element, and the way the
_Honest Horris_ was shuttling back and forth from Marduk to some
place that wasn't Gimli, and the way Dunnan was able to bring his
ships in as soon as the shooting started on Marduk, we thought he
must be on an uninhabited outer planet of the Marduk system."

"I don't know why we never thought of that, ourselves," Rainer put
in. "I suppose because nobody ever thinks of Abaddon for any reason.
It's only a small planet, about four thousand miles in diameter, and
it's three and a half billion miles from primary. It's frozen solid.
It would take almost a year to get to it on Abbot drive, and if yo