Ravenna Secunda Vallia Vallian was the eldest daughter of the Lord of House Vallian. Currently, she was enjoying a nice cup of tea inside her favourite garden inside the Palace.
The garden was bordered by a high row of trees with spreading branches. In spring, the trees blossomed with pink, yellow and white flowers. When the wind blew through the garden, these colours were swirled through the air and looked as if they were dancing.
That's where the garden got its name. Flower Dance Garden. A path ran along with the trees, once around the outside and then in all four directions through the garden. The quarters separated in this way all had their own theme and colours. The plantings were arranged in such a way that they grew taller from the outside to the heart of the quarter. In the middle of each quarter was a pavilion where one could rest, read or discuss things. The buildings were simple and open on all four sides. Delicate metal struts supported overhanging roofs in different styles and everything was painted in the colours of the surrounding plants and flowers.
When she was younger, she had liked to come here to hide from her teachers when she didn't feel like studying.
Later, she had played here with her little sister, whom she adored more than anything. Since the little girl had been kidnapped, the atmosphere in the garden was no longer the same. No matter how often she came here, something was always missing.
The princess sighed softly and sipped her tea again. As soon as the affair with the Voidfarer was over, she desperately needed a holiday. She would grab her little sister and a stable full of soldiers and guards and retire to one of her mother's paradise worlds for a year or two.
After all, she now could understand much better why the woman kept out of the political intrigues of the family. Getting her brother to leave Vallia for a few days had been hard enough. She had tried talking, then luring him away and even spreading the rumour of a valuable artefact, nothing had been able to move the man. In the end, her only option had been to hire some pirates to occupy a spaceport in a nearby mining colony.
After the governor of the said colony had failed to recapture the spaceport several times. Her brother had finally been forced to leave Vallia with his troops to restore order at the other end of the system. This finally gave her the time window she needed to deal with the voidfarer.
Still, it had been an unspeakable amount of work and she could already feel that at least one wrinkle must have remained on her forehead. She vowed to hold her brother's stubbornness against him as soon as her little sister was back.
...
Maya sat with her back against the wall on a small metal platform and looked up at the small window that was her only connection to the outside world. The hole was in the upper part of the wall, almost under the ceiling, and was barred with metal bars. It was not a real window either, on the first day she had jumped up and held on to the bars to be able to look behind them.
Unfortunately, she had only discovered that there was only a projector and a few large lamps that gave the impression of freedom. Nevertheless, she sat there now and listened to the fake singing of the birds.
Her body still ached from the tasers and the intense questioning, but fortunately, the princess's men had had to semi-restrain themselves, as her father was a close friend of the princess's older brother.
Still, they had not been exactly squeamish and her plan to stand firm and say nothing had lasted barely a day. At first, she had thought she was strong and nothing could scare her, then she had thought she could at least hide the most important things. The interrogation specialists of the House of Vallian had taught her better.
After that, she had cried all night, first from shame and later from pain.
Fortunately, the visits had become less frequent after that. The princess had not seen her at all after the woman had gotten what she wanted.
Now she only waited every day for her father to come and fetch her. In this situation, boredom was her biggest problem. Unlike her father, Maya had never been one to seclude herself for days on end or not speak to people for a solid week. Sitting in this cell and only being able to talk to a guard twice or thrice a day, was its own form of torture to her.
Escape was out of the question, but she had played it out in her head anyways. It wasn't as if she had anything else to do.
Her cell was in a corridor with seven other cells, each of them sealed with an energy barrier. The barriers could be switched on and off by a lever on the outside of the cell. At the end of the corridor was a door behind which was a small guardroom. Maya had a rough idea of what the room looked like; every time the guard brought her food, she could see the inside of the room for a few moments.
Unfortunately, that was where her knowledge of her surroundings ended. After the incident in the courtyard, she had woken up in the cell and whenever she was taken away for questioning, she had been blindfolded. The guards were not slack and there were always three of them when she was given food, so there was no chance of her overpowering them and running away.
At least the food was good, or maybe the food on the ship was just worse than she thought it to be. The cell was pretty spacy as well, with fifteen square meters, a bunk a small table and a rub to sit on. She would have to ask her father about that.
...
In space, on a direct line between Vallia and the prison station, several voidfarers lay in wait. They had been offered a large sum of money to intercept Jack's ship and escort him to the planet to make sure he did not escape the clutches of the princess. Jack was also a Voidfarer captain, but there was no real bond between them and even to call the Voidfarer a faction was an overstatement. So it was nothing out of the ordinary to accept missions that implicated other Voidfarer.
As their target flew past them, escorted by several Vallian warships, the Voidfarer could do nothing but weep for the money they had missed and wonder what political infighting was taking place on the surface.
Jack, on the other hand, sat in his cockpit and was equally annoyed with the escort. He was in an extremely bad mood and taking it out on a few smaller voidfarer would have suited him just fine. Unlike the pirates, a fight between Voidfarer was rarely fatal. For that reason, and to test his new crew, Jack had a momentary temptation to break away from the column, but in the end, his common sense prevailed.
They reached the planet without any further hindrances. Jack docked in the same dry dock that he had reserved at great expense. The stay in Vallia and the associated costs had already eaten up half of his monetary reserves.
Commander Vander's ship landed nearby and her soldiers reinforced the security guards around the dock without further communication, something Jack was very grateful for in light of the circumstances.
Lyna had sent him the videos he had requested earlier, but he didn't have the patience to watch them. Instead, he called her over the communicator again.
"Have you been able to find out anything about Maya's whereabouts yet?"
"We've been on the ground for about five minutes and I connected to the planet's official communication channels two minutes ago."
"And?"
"No, of course, I don't have anything new yet. Give me a day, or at least a couple of hours. You have enough underworld contacts of your own, why don't you put them on it or ask your prince who should have been looking after her anyway?"
"He's is away, liberating some spaceport from pirates, and as long as he's not here, my contacts have too much respect for the rest of his family to act."
"That's definitely not a coincidence. But I'm glad you brought it up, maybe I can find some dirt to pin on the princess, er, I mean, to prove it was her doing all along."
"..."
"Anything else, Captain?"
"I'm not really sure."
"Well call me again if you are. I have work to do."
With that's she hung up and Jack was left wondering if he had said something wrong. He scratched his head but decided it was a problem for another time and focused back on trying to get his trader friends and connections to give him information as to what happened to Maya.