March Upcountry

by David Weber

  "Good—" the valet paused, obviously checking the clock in his toot "—evening, Your Highness." He smiled. "You're looking well."

  "Thank you, Valet Matsugae," Roger said, much more careful to maintain his formality in front of so many listening ears. "How are you?"

  "Very well, Your Highness. Thank you." Matsugae gestured to the rear of the compartment. "Sergeant Despreaux has been a mine of helpful information."

  "Despreaux?" Roger lifted an eyebrow and leaned sideways to look down the line of troops, and caught the brief flash of a refined profile.

  "She's a squad leader in Third Platoon, Your Highness. A very nice young lady."

  "Given their resumes," Roger said with a smile, "I doubt that you could categorize any of the young ladies in The Empress' Own as 'nice.' "

  "As you say, Your Highness," Matsugae said with an answering smile. "How can I be of service?"

  "I have to get out of this armor and into something decent."

  Matsugae's face crumpled.

  "I'm sorry, Your Highness. I should've known. Let me go get my pack." He started to scramble up onto the transom again, preparing to retrace his route.

  "Wait!" Roger said. "I have a uniform packed up in the command compartment. I just need help getting out of the armor."

  "Oh, well then," Matsugae said, climbing back down. "If Captain Pahner could give me a hand? I don't actually know all that much about armor, but I'm willing to learn."

  As they disconnected the armor's various latches and controls, Roger became curious.

  "Matsugae? Am I to understand that you have spare uniforms for me in your pack?"

  "Well, Your Highness," the valet said almost shyly, "Sergeant Despreaux told me that you weren't able to bring all your clothes. And why. I didn't feel it appropriate that you have only one suit of armor and a single uniform, so I packed a few extra outfits along. Just in case."

  "Can you carry it?" Captain Pahner sounded skeptical. "Of course, if that's all that you're carrying . . ."

  "I will admit, Captain," the small valet said in a pert voice, "that I'm not carrying the weight of ammunition most of your Marines are. However, I am carrying my full equipment load and a share of the squad load for the headquarters group. His Highness' gear is, so to speak, my ammunition allotment."

  "But can you carry it?" Pahner repeated darkly. "Day after day."

  "We shall simply have to see, Captain," Matsugae replied calmly. "I think so. But we shall have to see."

  He returned to his task of peeling the prince, and Roger soon found himself once again standing in the midst of scattered pieces of armor.

  "I'm forever putting this stuff on and taking it off." He brushed an imaginary fleck of dust from the singlet he'd worn under the armor as Matsugae scrambled up the steps to the command compartment.

  "Not for much longer, Your Highness," Pahner pointed out. "Once we land on the planet, it will hardly ever be used. But if we need it, we're really going to need it."

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  "What else do we need?" O'Casey asked, thumbing through the list of supplies the Marines had loaded.

  "Whatever it is, it better not weigh much," Kosutic replied. The sergeant major was doing a recalculation of fuel use, and she looked up with a grimace. "I don't think we have much margin."

  "I thought you could glide one of these things in," Eleanora said uncomfortably. It was hardly her area of expertise, but she knew that the shuttles' swing-wing configuration gave them a tremendous glide ratio.

  "We can." Kosutic's tone was mild. "If we have a runway, that is." She gestured at one of the monitors, where the small map from the Fodor's was displayed. "Do you see many airports? In glide mode, one of these things needs a nice, old-fashioned runway. You try to land without one, and you might as well give your soul to His Wickedness."

  "So what happens if it were running out of fuel, then?"

  "Well, if we were headed in for a standard atmosphere insertion, we could correct at the last minute and do some atmospheric skipping to slow down. The problem is, if we do an orbit, we'll be detected. Then the whole plan goes out the airlock, and we have a cruiser and the garrison hunting us dirtside.

  "If, on the other hand, we do a steep reentry—which, by the way, is what we're planning—and run out of fuel, we'll just pancake."

  "Oh."

  "Make a hell of a hole," Kosutic snorted.

  "I can imagine," O'Casey said faintly.

  * * *

  "I imagine that this is about where we should be detecting the Saint, Sir," Sublieutenant Segedin said.

  "Understood." Captain Krasnitsky looked at the helmsman. "Prepare for course change. Quartermaster, pass the word to the Marines to prepare for separation."

  * * *

  "They should have detected us by now," Captain Delaney said. "Why are they still decelerating for the planet?"

  "Could they still intend to land their Marines?" the chaplain asked, leaning over the tactical display beside him.

  Delaney's nose wrinkled at the sour smell of the chaplain's unwashed cassock. Washing among the faithful was an occasional thing, since it used unnecessary resources. And such harmful chemicals as deodorants were, of course, right out.

  "They must," Delaney mused. "But they're still too far out." He smiled as the display changed. "Ah! Now we have a feel for their sensor damage. There's the course change."

  * * *

  "Prepare for separation. Five minutes," the ennunciator boomed.

  Roger looked up in surprise from his conversation with Sergeant Jin. The Korean was surprisingly well versed on current men's fashions, and after Roger had circulated briefly around the compartment (doing his best imitation of Mother at a garden party), he'd settled down for a long talk with the sergeant. Better that than a long talk with the fascinating Sergeant Despreaux. Something told him that getting "interested" in one of his bodyguards in a situation like this one probably was a bad idea. Not that it would have been a good idea under any circumstances, he reflected with a familiar moodiness.

  "You'd better get your armor back on, Sir," Jin said, glancing at the chameleon suit Roger had changed into. "It'll take you at least that long."

  "Right. Talk to you later, Sergeant." Roger had become accustomed to walking the transom, and now he sprang lightly onto it and skipped forward, swinging gracefully from pillar to pillar.

  * * *

  "Show off," Julian muttered as he shifted the rucksack across his knees. It wasn't particularly uncomfortable, since it was supported by his armor, but the confinement got to him after a while.

  He'd been awakened by the prince's circuit, and hadn't yet gotten back to sleep. He realized that his responses to the fop's rote questions had been a bit surly, but the prince hadn't seemed to notice.

  "I don't think he was showing off," Despreaux said tartly. "I think he was hurrying up front."

  Julian raised an eyebrow. Since Despreaux was seated across from him, it gave him the perfect opportunity to needle her, and it would have violated his most deeply held principles to pass it up.

  "Ah, you're just jealous because he has better hair than you do."

  She glanced sideways to get a glimpse of the rapidly undressing prince.

  "It is nice," she murmured, and Julian's mouth dropped open as the realization dawned on him.

  "You like him, don't you? You've got the hots for the Prince!"

  Her head snapped back around, and she glared at the other squad leader.

  "That is the stupidest thing— Of course I don't!"

  Julian started to tease her further, but then the full implications hit him. There was no way the Regiment would allow one of the guards to carry on with a member of the Imperial Family. He looked around, but all the other troopers seemed to be asleep or had earbuds in. Fortunately, no one had caught his earlier outburst, and he leaned forward as far as the packed equipment permitted.

  "Nimashet, are you nuts?" he hissed softly. "They'll have your ass for this!"

&n
bsp; "There's nothing going on," she replied just as quietly, fingering the gray chameleon cover of the rucksack on her knees. "Nothing."

  "There'd better be nothing!" he whispered fiercely. "But I don't believe it."

  "I can handle it," the sergeant said, leaning back. "Don't worry about me. I'm a big girl."

  "Sure you are. Sure." He shook his head and leaned back as well. What a cock-up, he thought.

  * * *

  On the opposite side of the transom, Poertena managed to turn a laugh into a cough. He rolled his head around as if half-asleep, and coughed again. Despreaux and the Prince, he thought. Oh, t'at's pocking funny!

  * * *

  "What's so funny, Sir?" Commander Talcott asked. The XO had just returned from a survey of the ship, and the news wasn't good. Four of DeGlopper's eight missile launchers had taken enough damage to put them out of play for the next bout, and the dead cruiser's fire had gouged deep wounds into the ChromSten-armored hull. Some of them threatened loaded magazines, and although the laser-pumped fusion warheads wouldn't detonate from impact, the power systems of the missile drives would . . . and take the entire ship with them.

  But at least the phase drive had suffered no further damage. In fact, it was actually in better shape than for the last encounter, so they'd have a few more gravities to play with and more time on the power. And while they'd lost launchers, they'd also used less than half the total missile inventory against their first opponent, so the next fight would be nearly even.

  Except for the cruiser's ability to dance rings around them.

  "Oh, I was just thinking about our ship's namesake," Krasnitsky answered the question with a grim smile. "I wonder if he ever thought 'What the heck am I doing this for?'"

  * * *

  Roger watched the external monitors as the giant docking hatches opened. The perfect blackness of space beckoned as the tractor moorings cut loose, and the shuttles drifted forward. As they cleared the ship's field, DeGlopper's artificial gravity fell away, and they were in freefall.

  "I forgot to ask, Your Highness," Pahner said tactfully. "How are you in microgravity?" He carefully avoided any mention of the excuses O'Casey had made to explain the prince's "indisposition" the first evening aboard.

  "I play null-gee handball quite a bit," the prince said in an offhand manner as he swiveled the monitor around to watch the ship disappearing in the distance behind them. "I don't have any problems with freefall at all." He smiled evilly for just a moment. "Eleanora, on the other hand . . ."

  * * *

  "I'm gonna diiie," the chief of staff moaned, clutching the motion sickness bag to her mouth as another wave of wracking nausea washed over her.

  "I've got a Mo-Fix injector around here somewhere," Kosutic said with the half-malicious chuckle of one who possessed a cast-iron stomach. Even the smell of the ejecta was survivable; it wasn't like she hadn't smelled it before.

  "I'm allergic." Eleanora's voice was muffled by the plastic bag. Then she leaned back and zipped the bag shut. "Oh, Goddd. . . ."

  "Oh," Kosutic said in more sympathetic tones. She shook her head. "We're going to be out here for a couple of days, you realize?"

  "Yes," Eleanora said miserably. "I do realize that. But I'd forgotten these shuttles don't have artificial gravity."

  "I don't think we can rotate, either," the sergeant major told her. "We're going to do a long, slow burn. I don't think we can do that and rotate at the same time."

  "I'll live . . . I think." The chief of staff suddenly ripped the bag open and buried her face in the contents. "Arrggg."

  Kosutic leaned back and shook her head.

  "I can see this is gonna be a great trip," she said.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  "On a scale from one to ten," Captain Krasnitsky muttered, "I give this trip a negative four hundred."

  He coughed and shook his head to clear the mist of blood the cough brought up. The instructions on the box were fairly clear. Now if he could just hold together long enough to enter the codes.

  Finding the keys for this particular device had been tough. Talcott, who'd had one, had been cut in half on his way back from Engineering. And, of course, the third had been in the suit of the acting engineer. He'd felt awful about having to cut it off of her to get to the device, but he'd had no choice. Tactical had had the fourth, and Navigation the fifth; those two had been easy to snag after the hit on the bridge.

  Somewhat to his surprise, the ship had held together. And now, the Saints, after receiving the surrender transmission and the recording of the prince ordering Krasnitsky to surrender, were practically salivating. Capturing the prince would set every member of the ship's crew up for life, even in the austere Saint theocracy.

  There was no plot here in the armory, but he didn't need one to know what was happening. He could hear the parasite cruiser docking onto the larger ship, and the concussion as the Saint Marines forced the airlocks for boarding.

  Lessee. If I have all five keys, but only one activator, I have to set a delay. Okay. Makes sense.

  * * *

  "Captain Delaney, this is Lieutenant Scalucci." The Caravazan Marine paused and looked around the bridge. "We've taken the bridge but no prisoners. We are encountering resistance from the crew. So far, no prisoners. They're fighting hard—some of them in powered armor—and not surrendering as I would've expected. We have yet to encounter the Prince's bodyguards." He paused and looked around again. "There's something about this I don't like."

  "Tell him to keep his opinions to himself!" Chaplain Panella snapped. "And find the Prince!"

  Captain Delaney glanced at the chaplain, then keyed his throat mike.

  "Continue the mission, Lieutenant," he said. "Be careful of ambushes. They apparently haven't surrendered after all, whatever their captain said."

  "It doesn't appear that way, Sir. Scalucci, out."

  The captain turned to face the chaplain squarely.

  "We'll find the Prince, Chaplain. But losing people doing it is stupid. I wish we'd had a pinnace to send the Marines over." An unlucky hit to the boat bay, unfortunately, had settled that. "If the Prince weren't on board, I'd put this down as a trap!"

  "But he is," the chaplain hissed, "and there's no way they'd risk his life playing some sort of ambush game!" He grinned like a rabid ferret. "Although, if they had any sense, they'd cut his throat themselves to keep him out of our hands. Imagine what we can do with a member of the Imperial Family of that damned 'Empire of Man'!"

  "Captain!" It was Lieutenant Scalucci. "The shuttle bays are empty! The shuttles must have already punched!"

  The Saint captain's eyes flew wide.

  "Oh, pollution!" he swore.

  * * *

  "The Saint is matching the last known accel of the DeGlopper," Pahner said.

  "How can you tell?" Roger asked, eyes aching from the strain of staring at the tiny screen. "I can't tell a thing from this."

  "Bring up the data records, instead," Pahner advised. "I've always said there's no reason we couldn't have larger screens in these things. But the command station was an afterthought in the design, and nobody's ever changed it."

  "Well, we will!" the prince smiled as he banged the side of the recalcitrant instrument. "Oops."

  He'd forgotten the power of the armor, and he withdrew his hand carefully from the fist-sized hole driven into the side of the workstation.

  Pahner spun his own chair around and typed commands on the secondary keyboard at the prince's station. The now flickering monitor switched from a wider view of power sources in near space to a list of data.

  "There's the last known velocity and position of the DeGlopper," the captain said. "And there's her current probable position and velocity." He sent a command through his toot, and a different screen came up. "And this is the Saint data."

  "So they're alongside?" Roger asked, noting the obvious similarities in the data.

  "Yep. They've matched course and speed with the DeGlopper. Which means they fell for
Krasnitsky's little deception hook, line, and sinker."

  Roger nodded and tried to reflect some of the Marine's satisfaction, but it was hard. It was odd, he thought. Pahner was military, like Krasnitsky, and he knew as well as Roger that the Fleet captain and his entire crew were committing suicide to cover their escape. Somehow, the prince would have expected that to produce more emotion in the Marine. He'd always suspected that people who chose military careers had to be a little less . . . sensitive than others, but Pahner had been quick to let him know, however respectfully, whenever he stepped on one or another of the Marines' precious traditions or attitudes. So why was Pahner so detached and clinical over what was about to happen when he himself felt a hollow void of guilt sucking at his stomach?

  This wasn't the way things were supposed to happen. People weren't supposed to throw away their lives to protect him—not when even his own family had never seemed quite certain he was worth keeping. And when gallant bodyguards and military personnel offered to lay down their lives for their duty, weren't they supposed to get something out of it besides simply dying?

  The questions made him acutely uncomfortable, and so he decided not to think about them just at the moment and reached for some other topic.

  "I didn't sound all that good on the recording," Roger said sourly.

  "I think you sounded perfect, Your Highness," Pahner said with a grin. "It certainly suckered the Saints."

  "Uh-huh," Roger acknowledged even more sourly. Until he'd heard the edited playback of him ordering the officers to surrender which Krasnitsky had sent to the Saint cruiser, he hadn't realized how truly childish he'd sounded. "Surrender with honor." What poppycock.

  "It worked, Your Highness," Pahner's voice was much colder, "and that's all that matters. Captain Krasnitsky has them right where he wants them."

  "If there's anyone left to detonate the charge."

  "There is," Pahner said firmly.

  "How do you know? Everybody could be dead. And unless there's at least one officer left who knows the codes . . ."