The Doe With the Golden Horns Shakes Artemis' Reins from Her Neck

Watching Hilde and Kircheis leave for Castrop’s planet was one of the worst feelings of Yang’s life. Although he knew that they were both competent, and he couldn’t have stopped Hilde from going on her quest to rescue her father if he had tried, he still looked at her like she was his student, and he had a responsibility to keep her safe. By letting them go, he was abandoning that responsibility. He wished that he had some way of rescuing the count himself— the debt of gratitude that Yang owed him was enormous, and if anything happened to his daughter while following Yang’s plan, he knew the count would not forgive him. But Yang couldn’t think of anything better, at least not anything that Hilde would have accepted. So, he had to let them go.

As soon as the shuttle disembarked, Yang ordered his ship to move far back from Castrop’s planet. He didn’t know what the effective range of the Artemis Necklace was, but since it seemed designed to stop a landing invasion, it was probably safe to lurk out in the farther reaches of the system. If most of Castrop’s plan for rebelling hadn’t been based on simply hunkering down and living an agrarian lifestyle— if this had been happening on a planet with much more vigorous trade— it would be an effective tactic to simply blockade the system from outside the Necklace’s reach. Most planets would starve that way— starve of resources, if not food. They dropped some tiny surveillance satellites as they retreated, which would report back on anything that they were too far away to see. He doubted that Castrop would bother shooting them down with the Necklace, at least not until whatever “negotiations” he was having with Hilde ended.

He knew that there would be no communications with Hilde and Kircheis as soon as they made it to the planet, so he didn’t expect any. Yang remained on the bridge, sitting cross legged at one of the computer stations, just watching the magnified view of Castrop’s planet on the screen, waiting for the shuttle to make its reappearance. The soonest it could come was a couple hours, but Yang wondered if it might take days.

He had one task to complete while he was waiting, and although it distracted him from the agony of waiting for Hilde and Kircheis to reappear, it was itself a delicate task that he did not expect to enjoy. As he sat on the bridge, Yang wrote out a letter, one that would be sent as soon as he destroyed the Artemis Necklace.

Your Majesty Friedrich IV,

Although I remember very clearly the conversation that we had on the day of Count Marbach’s funeral, where I realized that I, being a member of Duke Braunschweig’s staff, no longer could consider myself as having Your Majesty’s favor, I am writing you now asking for special consideration for my actions. I know that this is strange, and even quite impertinent, but if there was ever any small friendship between Your Majesty and this humble servant, please do consider what I have to say.

By the time that this letter arrives to you on Odin, I will have destroyed the Artemis Necklace surrounding Lord Castrop’s planet. To you, when you have been waiting and holding off on deploying a fleet to deal with this lord as a matter for the crown, this must surely appear like Duke Braunschweig is performing rogue military maneuvers against Your Majesty’s wishes. I know that I do not have your favor any longer, but I beg you to understand that this is not the case, or not completely the case.

I have not destroyed the Artemis Necklace because of any designs that Duke Braunschweig has on Lord Castrop’s land or fortune: his land and fortune are irrelevant. This place, remote as it is, will not be useful as a stepping stone for Duke Braushweig’s political or military feats. And, with the Artemis Necklace destroyed, it has no defenses. It is a remote planet, useless to everyone except the local lord.

The reason that I have destroyed the Artemis Necklace is a personal one: as you know, Count Mariendorf is Lord Castrop’s prisoner. I have been lucky enough that Count Mariendorf has considered me a friend since my youth, when I was a student at the Imperial Officers Academy. He has been like a father to me, and has supported me for these many years. Because he is now in grave danger, I could not bear to do nothing to assist him. In order to free him, the Necklace must be destroyed. That is all.

I understand that, since I am acting as Duke Braunschweig’s subordinate, this action will be interpreted as a show of strength by the Duke. I apologize to Your Majesty, for disrupting the peace of Odin and the court with this.

The crown surely wishes to deal with Lord Castrop. I have no intention of stepping in between and enacting my own sense of justice upon him, whatever it may be. My only interest is in Count Mariendorf, who is a loyal servant of the crown. I will defer to him once we have been reunited.

If there is to be a punishment for deliberately contradicting the crown’s policy in this matter, please let that punishment fall upon myself, rather than upon Duke Braunschweig and any of his other staff, or upon Lady Hildegarde von Mariendorf, who pleaded with me to rescue her father— I would have done this on my own had she not asked. The plan for disobeying Your Majesty and destroying the Artemis Necklace was mine alone, and I have abused Duke Braunschweig’s trust in me to enact it.

Furthermore, if I may continue to strain Your Majesty’s patience, I ask that when the crown takes control of Lord Castrop’s lands, that special care may be taken to improve the living conditions for the people on his planet. Lord Castrop has been a ruler who has not given much thought to the needs of his people, and they lack much of what is required for a happy and secure life: medical services, adequate food, and education for their children. The crown is generous for providing these things to her people on Odin, even to such a man as myself, and, when she takes control of the traitor’s lands, I beg that she provide these things for the people there as well.

Thank you for all the consideration that you have given me, both today and in the past. As always, I wish to remain,

A humble servant of the Empire’s people,

Captain Hank von Leigh

Letter written, Yang settled in to wait.

The waiting was agonizing, but Yang had a peculiar mental mechanism that allowed him to sit watch anyway, like a meditation or a vigil. There was nothing he could do, so the anxiety was something he held in his heart quietly, rather than a feeling that compelled him to leap around and pace and get in everyone’s way. Castrop’s planet turned, and the line of darkness separating day from night crawled over the main city area. Unlike orbiting Odin or Phezzan, in the darkness, the planet had no lights of its own, just hearth fires not bright enough to show up on satellites. The whole place seemed desolate and uninhabited.

After the sun set, the surveillance satellites sent back a message: they were tracking the launch of a shuttle and following it as it came up through the atmosphere. Although the dust cloud which surrounded the planet made radio transmissions difficult, the cameras of the satellites were sharp enough to watch the shuttle’s engine glow— at least on this planet, there were so few light sources that, at night, it stood out like a tiny star. The shuttle made odd, wide circles, either hovered or landed in one spot, then continued circling until it eventually exited the atmosphere.

It was Hilde and Kircheis’s shuttle. But when Yang tried to raise them on the radio to find out their status, he didn’t get any response. This was odd.

What was odder still was the way that the shuttle moved. As soon as it had exited the atmosphere, but before it entered the rock cloud that surrounded the planet, it did one long burn of its engines, setting it on a strange trajectory, one that would have it half-circle the planet, and then enter the rock cloud without power.

Yang understood immediately what Kircheis was doing: checking the Artemis Necklace’s ability to discriminate between a shuttle and the rocks that surrounded it. Yang wondered if the Necklace had the ability to fire backwards towards the planet, and targets below where its orbit was. He doubted it, so the shuttle— which he was now sure was unoccupied— was safe until it entered the rock cloud, at the very least.

The shuttle entered the cloud, and it sat there, even bumping into a small asteroid. Minutes ticked by, with no action from the shuttle or the Necklace.

After it had drifted through the rock cloud for a while, the shuttle turned its engine back on, and began to move through the rocks, trying to escape. Yang watched with bated breath. As soon as the engines were on full power and the shuttle was moving, there came a glow from several of the rocks within the cloud, and lines of white fire shot out to vaporize the shuttle instantly.

Although Yang knew that Kircheis and Hilde had not been on board, the sight still shocked and froze him for just a moment— the power of the Necklace revealing itself.

But Kircheis’s test had given Yang exactly what he need to know. He had revealed how to bait the Necklace into firing, and how Yang could exploit that to hunt down all its constituent parts and destroy them.

Yang gathered up the staff of the ship who could enact his plan. It was a very simple plan, all told, and it came to him very easily. The Necklace— as Kircheis had realized— had to have some way of tracking targets without constantly firing on the asteroids that surrounded it. Large ships could be targeted visually as they entered the system, but other things— like missiles, which the Necklace would also want to destroy— would be small enough to be confused with rocks, except for their heading and speed and emissions. Shuttles fell into that category. But it meant that anything that looked like a rock, was the size of a rock, and moved unpowered like a rock, might be able to slip through the net.

Yang had his technicians aboard the ship strip out the insides of some of their supply of mines, remove their small heat-tracking engines and replace them with a much simpler electro-mechanical system. The interior of the mines, he left alone. It took a long while to fashion these makeshift bombs, but after two days, Yang had a stack of them at his disposal, and he could put his plan into action.

Not expecting any to make it through, Yang ordered the ship to fire missiles at Castrop’s planet. At first, he only used them as bait to determine which objects in orbit were the dangerous Necklace links. He kept up this barrage for a while, turning the sky above Castrop’s planet into a fireworks show, each of the missiles handily destroyed by the Necklace before they could even get close.

To a small selection of missiles, Yang had the technicians attach the modified mines to the missile’s fuel tanks. Since he had removed their normal propulsion, the mines would be carried most of the way by the missiles, and then dropped in a much closer orbit, from which they could begin their independent mission. The mines made it most of the way to Castrop’s planet with their ballistic rides, then detached and floated free in space, looking like debris: spent fuel cells, if anyone happened to be looking closely.

On the mines, the propulsion system that Yang had substituted was made up of small gas cylinders, which were barely enough to nudge the mines through the debris field. They wove their way towards the links in the Artemis Necklace, moving in tiny little bursts, barely distinguishable from rocks hitting each other and spiraling away. When they each bumped into their target link of the Necklace, they clung to it.

Yang had no way of being sure that each of the little mines had reached their target. But he waited until they all should have made it, and then a little while longer, and then gave the command that would set off their bombs.

At once, they detonated, bombs filled with the highly explosive Zephyr gas. They didn’t knock the Necklace links out of the sky, but they did completely incapacitate them, destroying their focusing mechanisms or power generators and scattering chunks of rock far away.

The watching crew of Yang’s ship cheered, especially when they sent one last test missile to scrape the atmosphere of Castrop’s planet, and it made it through unscathed before harmlessly exploding in space.

But Yang couldn’t find it in himself to cheer. He didn’t care about Castrop’s Necklace: Count Mariendorf was still a prisoner, and Kircheis and Hilde were still somewhere down on that planet. He tried calling Lord Castrop to urge him to surrender, but his call was met with complete silence.

The whole process had taken three days.

As soon as Castrop’s ship raised itself out of the atmosphere, like a whale rising from the depths, Yang received a message on the ansible from Castrop’s planet.

Yang answered the call immediately, and the image of Kircheis flickered onto the screen, standing in the clean white marble of Castrop’s home, though in the background, Yang could hear yelling. Kircheis was filthy, with his face streaked with mud, and his uniform torn at the shoulder. He had a haunted expression on his face, and, before he could even speak, the fact that he was alone in the frame made Yang’s heart drop into his stomach.

“Hilde is on that ship,” Kircheis said.