Chapter 12: Winter Break

“Tomorrow, we have to go back to the palace,” Ruth muttered under her breath so just Olaf and his current lap sitter could hear her. “You three have to attend a formal dinner. You must escort both your concubines,” she added as she looked around to make sure nobody else overheard her. They initially planned to spend the winter break at the condo while most of the other students went home. Olaf had yet to properly take the virginity of his two concubines but both of them still received a tongue-lashing at least once every weekend.

“What is the occasion?” Vanessa asked as she wrapped her arms around Olaf’s neck as she cuddled on his lap. They were in the seniors’ lounge of the school, where the seniors and their guests relaxed between and after classes. The other students have gotten used to Olaf having two ‘girlfriends’, girlfriends who were not jealous of each other and had no problem showing a lot of public displays of affection towards Olaf.

“The duke just returned from Pleiades Prime, from attending a meeting of the imperial council,” Ruth commented.

“I didn’t even know he left,” Olaf muttered.

“We were a bit busy with schoolwork,” Alice said with a smile. She was sitting behind Olaf but close enough to hear what was being said. “He left with the Taygete, Colonel Crenshaw ordered me to stay with you, and to go to college with you. I’m officially on permanent detached duty from the Imperial Marine Corps.”

“You are an imperial marine?” Helm blurted out. He and Burt, a classmate of Olaf, had sat down with Alice. Burt seemed to have a crush on Alice and had been trying for most of the semester to flirt with her. Alice realized she had just outed herself to the world. “What on earth are you doing here?”

“What she is not saying is that the commander of the Imperial Marine Battalion on the Taygete is her uncle,” Olaf said out loud. “He got her into the marines when her asteroid home was destroyed. I kind of convinced her to finish high school and go to university with me.”

“You two are not a couple as well, are you?” Burt asked, clearly disappointed.

“Very close friends,” Olaf responded.

“Friends with benefits?” Helm asked with a lewd smirk on his face. He and Peet, their other roommate, regularly teased Olaf about his two girls who always hung onto his arms at the same time.

“No! At least not yet,” Alice said as she blushed and looked back down at the book she was reading.

“What were you guys talking about?” Peet asked.

“Ruth just mentioned that the duke just came back from Pleiades Prime on official imperial business.” Alice explained.

“Did he come back on the Taygete?” Olaf asked.

“No, he left with the Taygete, but I think he returned on some other navy ship,” Ruth explained. “As a member of the imperial council he and his predecessor both made use of any available navy ship.”

“How do you know so much about the duke’s business,” Bert asked.

“My mother is working in the office of the duke,” Ruth explained with a shrug.

“Maybe you should not reveal the duke’s movements to the public,” Ingrid commented as she and Betta, two more classmates of Olaf and friends of Helm, Peet, and Bert, also joined the group.

“I only tell what I know after it happened,” Ruth said as she gave Ingrid a level stare. “I know how to keep official secrets.”

“Have you ever seen the new viscount, the new heir to the duke?” Betta asked excitedly.

“Yes, I have,” Ruth said as she looked back at the two girls without blinking an eye or hesitating.

“What is he like?” Betta asked as she moved closer.

“Why is he never seen in public?” Ingrid asked. “I don’t think there is even a photo of him.”

“I can’t answer any of those questions,” Ruth said. “If the palace discovered that I am revealing anything about the people living there, my mom will be in trouble.”

“I have heard that he is a very quiet yet sexy guy,” Vanessa said.

“Where have you heard that from?” Ingrid asked.

“I am a family friend of the Baron of Lindholm,” Vanessa said with a shrug. “I actually saw him once at a formal event.”

“For somebody who is friends with nobility, you never drop names like some of the others like to do,” Betta said accusingly.

“No need to,” Vanessa said. “Besides, the baron’s oldest son is a bit of a jerk in my eyes.”

“What does he look like?” Betta asked excitedly. Olaf did his best to tune out the female chatter about guys and how dreamy or handsome they were.

The next day after the last class, the group left for the condo where Alec met them, and they all flew to the palace. Olaf asked Vanessa if she wanted to go home for a while, but she just shook her head and clung to him. Aster nodded her head and clung to his other arm.

“You are now our home, our man, our life,” Vanessa said. “Besides, Mom and Dad will be here tonight for the formal dinner.”

Olaf was standing next to his grandmother just inside the door, welcoming the guests, when Baron Rudolf of Lindholm Province arrived with his wife and his heir. Olaf was not used to the formal reception lines and was just following orders from the dowager duchess. The duke was standing nearby chatting softly to a blushing Aster, who was dressed in a new version of the traditional fisher-folk dresses that the island women loved to make and wear. Then Vanessa slipped in next to him smiling at him.

“I outrank my own mother,” Vanessa muttered just as her father bowed before the dowager duchess.

“Not pregnant yet?” Baron Rudolf asked his daughter as he shook Olaf’s hand after bowing to the young viscount. Vanessa blushed prettily and shook her head. The baroness also blushed as she curtsied to Olaf before she rushed to hug her daughter. The two instantly left the reception line to have a private chat. Olaf was glad to see that Derick Rasmus, heir to the baron, was not displaying a fake ribbon like the last time they met. He was also quite shy towards Olaf.

When Viscount Dirk, his wife, and Herman arrived, Herman seemed very eager to chat with him, but he was still part of the receiving line. Once Olaf was free from the reception obligation, he noticed that Herman was surrounded by a few younger girls, daughters of a few barons.

Olaf found himself seated between his mistress, Lady Thelma, and the plump and giggling wife of another baron while his own concubines were seated with the duke and Baron Lindholm. Olaf was a bit concerned about how Aster would fit in with the Ceres nobility, but the duke seemed very chatty towards her, and the baron sitting on her other side seemed totally fascinated by her. She was smiling shyly for most of the dinner.

“What is Pleiades Prime like, Your Grace?” The wife of one of the barons asked during dinner.

“It is an amazing system,” the duke responded. “I would say the most spectacular part is the space station known as Pleiades Prime Habitat except everybody just refers to it as PPH. The planet where the capitol city is located is called Secundus. The really interesting part is that the original spaceship in which our ancestors arrived here, is still part of the Pleiades Prime Habitat. It is huge, Both the original spaceship and the habitat were built inside huge hollowed-out asteroids. The entire structure is several kilometers long and about two kilometers in diameter. It looks like a cigar. It is nearly the same distance as the planet from the sun, but its orbital speed has been adapted so it is orbiting the sun on its own. The result is that it stays near the planet as both of them orbit the sun. There are more people living inside it than on the entire planet of Secundus.”

After the dinner ended, the ladies all went to the various restrooms as the men gathered in the library with their drinks. Olaf was being surrounded by a small group of awkward young men, the few heirs of some of the barons who attended the dinner, while the older men surrounded the duke. None of the younger men except for Herman, heir to Viscount Dirk, felt comfortable chatting with Olaf but they eagerly listened as Herman and Olaf talked about school.

“Baron Rudolf, can I have a word with you and any of the council members in my office for a moment please. Dirk, you and Olaf might as well join us.” The duke said. “It will not be long.” The duke led the two viscounts and four barons into his office and invited everybody to sit. There was not enough seating, so Olaf stayed standing as he leaned against the windowsill. He could see a few of the barons were confused about what to do, to offer their seats to him or to ignore him.

“This is something that came across my desk when I got back from Secundus,” Duke Wilbur said. “It does not seem to have the same pattern as the last trouble we had but it could possible grow and become a problem. I had a message from Baron Hillshire, on the far side of the continent. He drew my attention to local news reports about some low levels of civil disobedience in the barony next to him, in the Zephyr district.”

“They are so far from here that I am not surprised that we have not heard anything,” Baron Rudolf said, with the other barons nodding their heads in agreement. “What type of civil disobedience?”

“Not yet riots,” the duke said. “Parades and peaceful protests. Hillshire could not tell me what the grievances were, just that the protests were becoming more frequent and bigger. I would like some suggestions. We should nip that in the bud before it gets out of control and starts spreading.”

“There is that new militia base near there,” one of the older barons commented. “Maybe we can just send in the troops and squash it early.”

“I would like to know why they are protesting before I do that,” the duke said.

“Call Baron Zephyr here and get him to make a report,” another baron said.

“You look like you have an idea, Olaf?” Viscount Dirk said.

“I was just thinking of sending an investigator there, talk to the people, find out what is bothering them,” Olaf said.

“Hillshire did mention that the protesters all seem to be young kids,” Duke Wilbur said.

“Maybe I can go have a quick look,” Olaf suggested. “I will go incognito, talk to some kids of my age and get an idea what is going on.”

“You are going to have to take all of your security detail with you,” the duke said.

After the formal dinner, when all the guests had left, only Baron Rudolf and Viscount Dirk and their families were left behind as the men discussed Olaf’s suggested mission to the opposite side of the single huge continent on the planet. Olaf brought Vanessa, Aster, Ruth, Alice, and Alec in to let them know of his planned absence for the rest of the winter break.

“I’m obviously part of your security team,” Alice insisted.

“I need to go with you,” Ruth demanded as well.

“I can see us needing a team of eight, not counting me and Corporal Alice,” Alec said. “Four to accompany Lord Olaf and the ladies, and four more to be in reserve. They will stay with the hovercraft and be ready to do some rapid extractions if things go south unexpectedly.”

“Lord Olaf has access to two under-cover hovercraft,” The head of security for the palace, a militia major said. “Why not take the second hovercraft as a backup as well?”

The single continent on Ceres spanned from just below the equator on its most southern edge, all the way to just inside the northern pole circle and covered about a third of the planet’s circumference. The capitol city of New Oslo was on the eastern edge, a bit less than halfway towards the northern edge. Most of the population occupied a relatively thin band of land since the far north was full of mountains and glaciers while the part on or near the equator was mostly jungle. There were large sections in the deep interior that were arid but not complete desert.

The two extreme ends of the continent were the two only industrial regions on the planet. While the city of New Oslo was a picturesque city with a population of about three hundred thousand, the region surrounding New Oslo was where all the factories were located. Most of the factory workers also lived within walking distance of their places of employment since most of the housing belonged to the various industrial corporations. The same pattern was true for the far west end of the continent.

As Olaf and his team left New Oslo in the two shuttles for the first of two twelve-hour leg of their trip, they flew over the vast industrial complexes just over the ridge which separated the city from the flatland beyond. There was a definite pattern; large wide-spread factory complexes surrounded by a thin green belt and then blocks of middle-income housing interspersed with five-story apartment complexes for the lower income groups. Each apartment complex had a neat park surrounding it and there were numerous parks forming green islands among the houses.

While the public transport in the city consisted of above-ground trolleys, Olaf already knew that public transport on the factory flats was all underground, as were the heavy cargo transport systems between the various factories and the various space port complexes located closer to the equator. The space ports were privately managed corporations. The space port outside New Oslo was just one of four on the planet, each one independent from the others as well as from the space station in orbit around the planet. The space station was imperial property and fell directly under the jurisdiction of the duke but with the Imperial navy running the station.

The two shuttles climbed to sub-orbital altitudes using their anti-gravity drives and then used their atmospheric propulsion systems. Olaf could still observe the ground directly beneath the shuttle using a private view screen which was fed from high resolution cameras mounted all over the shuttle. Once they were away from the city, the land became much more agricultural in nature. About forty percent of the farms belonged to large corporations with the rest being privately held family farms. The land under the shuttle consisted of numerous small, compact villages surrounded by large open fields. Most of the farmers, even the corporate farming employees, lived in the nearby towns and commuted to the various fields every day.

The two shuttles left New Oslo at sunrise that morning so when they finally landed after about twelve hours flying time, at the halfway point, a small city nestled against a long low maintain ridge towards the north, and surrounded by vast open natural grazing land, it was only mid-afternoon. The city, Thunder City, was the home of the baron of the county called Thunder Valley, a huge farming community about in the middle of the continent.

“The duchess insisted that we spend the night here,” Ruth said as she grabbed her overnight bag and headed for the exit of the shuttle. “I can do with a long soak in a hot tub.”