by David Weber
"I know, Your Highness." There was no doubt at all in Pahner's reply. "How? Well, the Saint cruiser is still alongside. If it had captured one of the crew and made him talk, it would be accelerating away at top speed. It isn't; so the plan has to be working."
And God bless, Captain, the Marine thought quietly, allowing no trace of his inner anguish to show as he watched the data codes and thought of the men and women about to die. You've done your part; now we'll do ours to make it worth something. He's a pain in the ass, but we'll keep him alive somehow.
* * *
"It's not working," O'Casey said to herself.
The sergeant major had drifted into the troop bay to buck up the troops, leaving the civilian to fend for herself. Which was ironic, because Eleanora was feeling seriously in need of bucking up herself. Of course, even the sergeant major might have gotten tired of the smell, which could help explain whose morale she'd decided to improve.
To take her mind off the situation, O'Casey had started reviewing the plan—if it was really fair to call it that. From the moment the second cruiser had been spotted, there'd been no time for anything as deliberate and orderly as formulating anything Eleanora O'Casey would have called "a plan." Everything had been one frantic leap of improvisation after another, and she'd been sure something vital had to have been overlooked. For that matter, she still was, but she'd never had time to stop and reflect, and now she was feeling so out of sorts and woozy that her brain was scarcely in shape for critical analysis.
Unfortunately, it was the only brain she had, and despite its grumpy complaints, she insisted that it apply itself to the problem.
They'd loaded the trade goods. She'd suggested adding refined metals, as well, but Pahner had rejected the suggestion. The captain hadn't felt that the weight-to-cost ratio would make metals worth carrying, and besides, most of the material available consisted of advanced composites, impossible for local smiths to work at the Mardukans' technology level. And, as Pahner had pointed out, material that couldn't be adapted to the locals' needs would be effectively useless to them.
There'd been no great stock of "precious" metals or gems on the ship, either. A smidgen of gold was still used in some electronics contacts, but there'd been no way to get it out. Captain Pahner had ruthlessly appropriated the small store of personal jewelry, but there hadn't been a great deal of that, either. At least what there was ought to be very attractive to a barbarian culture, even though it was little more than costume jewelry by the standards of the Empire of Man. She doubted that anyone on Marduk had ever heard of a synthetic gem!
But even if one assumed that Mardukans valued such items as highly as human cultures of comparable tech levels had valued them, there simply weren't enough of them to even begin to meet their needs. The trade goods would be worth far more in the long run, yet Eleanora still felt she was missing something. Something important. It bothered her that she had all this incredible store of knowledge about ancient cultures and—
Knowledge.
* * *
Chief Warrant Officer Tom Bann ran the calculations for the fifteenth time. It was going to be close, closer than he liked. If everything went perfectly, they were going to have less than a thousand kilos of hydrogen when they landed. To a groundhog, that might have sounded like a lot; a pilot, on the other hand, knew that it was nothing over the distance they were traveling. The margin of error was more than that.
He glanced at the monitor and shook his head. He was a "Regiment" pilot, not one of the shuttle pilots assigned to DeGlopper, but it still hurt to watch a sacrifice like that. They were all Fleet, whether they were Marines or Navy, and Krasnitsky had sure taken the highroad. He shook his head again and looked at the number. It would really suck if it all turned out to be for nothing.
"Hello? Pilot?" He didn't recognize the voice in his earbud at first, but then he realized it was the prince's chief of staff.
"Yes, Ma'am? This is Warrant Bann." He wondered what the airhead wanted at a time like this. It had better be important to interfere in a deathwatch.
"Can we still get a connection to the ship's computers?"
Bann thought about all the things wrong with the request and wondered where to start.
"Ma'am, I don't think—"
"This is important, Warrant Officer," the voice in his earbud said firmly. "Vital, even."
"What do you need?" he asked warily.
"There's a copy of the Encyclopedia Galactica in my personal database. Why we didn't bring it with us, I don't know."
"But . . ." Bann said, thinking about the problems of connecting to the ship. Even if there were surviving antennae, he'd have to use a whisker laser, and with the Saints attached to the hull, there was a good chance that they would detect it, which would give away the shuttle's location.
"I know there's hardly anything on Marduk in it," O'Casey said quickly, anticipating part of his objection, "but there is data on early cultures and technologies. How to make flintlocks, how to make better iron and steel. . . ."
"Oh." The warrant officer nodded in his helmet. "Good point. But if I try to connect with the ship, we might be detected. And then what?"
"Oh." It was O'Casey's turn to pause in thought. "We'll have to take the chance," she said after a moment, her voice firm. "This data could make or break the expedition."
Bann thought about it as he warmed up the laser system. He saw her argument—it could be vital data—and there certainly wasn't much time to kick the idea around. If he tried to find Captain Pahner's blacked-out shuttle first to ask for permission, DeGlopper would almost certainly be gone before they could get anything. Which meant that he had to decide if it was worth endangering the entire mission to get some possibly useless data.
On the whole, he decided, it was.
* * *
"Whisker laser!" The lieutenant at Ship Defense Control turned towards her superior. "It appears to be sending a data request to the Empie assault ship. From . . . two-two-three by zero-zero-nine!"
"The shuttles," Delaney said. "It's the shuttles, trying to sneak away to the planet."
"We're too far out," the chaplain objected. "You said so yourself. They can't brake and make a reentry. And even if they could, we'd still be here to control the planet."
"True." Delany nodded. "But they could hide on the surface for a time."
"Only until the carrier detected them," Panella said dismissively. "They'd be mad to try to sneak down to the surface. Besides, we can still run them down, and we would've detected them soon after they started their deceleration."
"Maybe," the captain said dubiously. "But those shuttles use a hydrogen reaction jet that's fairly hard to detect much beyond a light-minute." He scratched his beard in thought about it for a moment. "Still, you're right. They must have expected to be detected."
He thought for a moment more, and in his eyes flew open wide.
"Unless they know we won't be here to detect them!" He wheeled to his bridge crew.
"Detach the ship! Detach now!"
* * *
"What to download?" O'Casey asked the empty compartment. "What? What, what? Come on, load!" she snapped.
Warrant Officer Bann had experienced great difficulty finding a connection, but Eleanora was in now, and waited as the final connects were made. When the screen finally came up, she sent the command through her toot.
"Search 'survival,' " she whispered, watching the results of the query come up. "Scroll down, scroll down, 'hostile flora and fauna' download, 'medicine' download. Search 'fuels, shuttle.' Scroll down. 'Expedient' download. Search, 'military, primitive.' Refine, 'arquebus.' Scroll down, scroll." She kept one eye on the loading diagram. The whisker laser was a relatively small bandwidth system, and the first download on hostile flora and fauna survival wasn't complete yet. She hissed, and then shook her head as a default message came up. "Four thousand three hundred eighty-three articles. Damn." She didn't have time for this.
"Refine . . . 'generals.' Refine, 'greate
st.' " She viewed the results. There was only one name she recognized offhand, despite her doctorate in history. She'd been more interested in societal developments than in military destructiveness, and arquebuses were as distant as ancient Rome and its fabled legions. But one name stood out in both the military and societal continuum.
"Download, 'Adolphus, Gustavus.' "
* * *
"Damn," Pahner snarled.
Roger nodded, more comfortable with the information now. "Disconnection."
"Yes," the captain replied in a quiet voice, watching the simple text "TOS" which had replaced the data feed from DeGlopper. Termination of Signal. Such a . . . sanitary acronym. The letters held his eye, and then the sensor readouts on the Saint cruiser disappeared, as well.
"Ah," he said sadly, and Roger nodded again.
"Well," the prince said after a moment, trying to lighten the atmosphere, "at least they got them."
Without even turning around, he felt the temperature in the compartment drop, and swore at himself for putting his foot into his mouth yet again. He'd been wrong about the Marine's lack of feeling, he realized.
"Yes, I suppose they did. Your Highness," Pahner said flatly.
* * *
"Damn!" Eleanora shouted, slamming her hand down on the panel. The transmission had shut off in mid-line, and she'd only gotten part of the way through the entry on Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden.
She'd hunted for other data after entering that article, and as she had, she'd realized the incredible reach of the information available. The Marines could use data on improved metallurgy, agriculture, irrigation, and engineering. On chemistry, biology, and physics. It had all been sitting there the whole time, available for translation to pads or even toots. They could've loaded the whole thing into individual toots and had a walking encyclopedia!
But only if she'd thought of it in time.
"What's wrong?" Sergeant Major Kosutic asked, coming back into the compartment. She glanced at the monitors and nodded. "Oh. The DeGlopper's gone. But they got the Saint."
"No, no, no. That's not it!" O'Casey snapped, banging the workstation again. "I realized after you'd gone that I had the whole universe in my hand. I had a copy of the Encyclopedia Galactica in my personal system on the ship. I hardly used it, because it was only outline information. But there were all sorts of things that we could've downloaded if we'd only thought of it in time. I started grabbing articles, but the signal terminated on me."
"Oh? Did you get anything?"
"Yeah," O'Casey replied as she brought up the data. "I think I got the most critical stuff. Survival and hostile environments, survival first-aid, something on expedient shuttle fuels and the beginning of a download on a general from Earth when they used arquebuses." She frowned and looked at the files. "The one on shuttle fuels looks a little slender."
Kosutic's mouth worked as she tried not to smile while the academic brought up the data on shuttle fuels.
"Oh. According to this, the field expedient shuttle fuel can be made by using electricity to break down water and—"
"And there's a system on the shuttle that can do it," Kosutic interrupted. "They get the power from solar cells . . . and it takes about four years to fill a shuttle's tanks."
"Right." O'Casey turned from the monitor. "You already knew that?"
"Yep," Kosutic admitted, still fighting back a grim chuckle. "And before anyone joins the Regiment, she goes through a Satan-Be-Damned course that includes combat survival skills. In fact, Captain Pahner is a survival instructor."
"Oh," O'Casey said. "Damn."
"Don't worry about it," Kosutic advised her, and this time the sergeant major allowed her chuckle to escape. "The Empire's worlds have an enormous variety of tech levels, and the Marines recruit from almost all of them. You'd be amazed by the stuff some of the troops know. When we need something done, most of the time there'll be a troop who has the skill. You just watch."
"I hope you're right."
"Trust me. I've been riding herd on Marines for almost forty standard years now, and they still surprise me sometimes."
"In that case, I guess we just sit here and wait for the landing," O'Casey said sourly.
"Pretty much," Kosutic agreed. "You play pinochle?"
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
"Oh, joy."
Pahner tapped the monitor control, but the picture didn't get any better. Not that there was anything wrong with the sensors or their readouts.
For the last three days the shuttles had been on a pursuit arc headed to overtake the planet from behind. The port was on a small continent or a large island, depending on how one chose to look at it, and their flight plan had been carefully calculated to bring them down just on the far side of the local ocean. That would have put them within a thousand klicks of their objective, and the Mardukans were supposed to have seafaring capability, so most of the trip could be accomplished on shipboard. All they'd have to do would be to hire a ship or ships to carry them across.
It had been, Pahner admitted modestly, a neat and tidy plan. The only real drawback had been that it pushed the parameters of the shuttles' range envelope. The deep-space burns required to put them on the proper intercept course for the planet had consumed so much of their total fuel that they had just enough left to complete their approach and land.
Unfortunately, there was a ship in orbit above the port.
She was powered down, or DeGlopper would have detected her, but she was probably the carrier for the parasite cruisers. And whoever she was, parked in that position, she would be able to detect and track the shuttles' reentry unless they landed, literally, on the far side of the planet.
The good news was that the second Saint cruiser obviously hadn't realized the shuttles had escaped—or, at least, hadn't realized in time to alert her carrier. If she had, the carrier would have moved to watch the side of the planet which the port's sensors couldn't cover in order to prevent the shuttles from sneaking in. The bad news was that the carrier's mere presence, and the diversion that would force upon them, would add some ten thousand kilometers to their dirtside journey.
And, of course, that they wouldn't have enough fuel for the landing, anyway.
"Oh, this is bad," Roger said, looking over the captain's shoulder. "Very, very bad."
"Yes, Your Highness," Pahner said with immense restraint. "It is."
He and the prince had been at close quarters for three days, and neither was in the best mood.
"What are we going to do?" Roger asked, and that faint edge of whine was back in his voice.
Pahner was spared the necessity of an immediate response by the attention chime of the communicator. He managed not to let his relief at the interruption show as he hit the button that acknowledged the com request. Rather than answer immediately, however, he switched the system to holo-mode and waited patiently. It wasn't a long wait, and he smiled thinly at the series of holograms which soon hovered in the compartment.
"I take it that you've all noticed our friend," he said dryly once his audience—all three lieutenants, all four pilots, Sergeant Major Kosutic, and Eleanora O'Casey—was complete.
"Oh, yeah," Warrant Bann said. "The planned IP is out, and so are aborts one and two."
"We should have had a plan in place for this!" Chief Warrant Officer Dobrescu snapped. The pilot of Shuttle Four looked at Pahner as if this were all his fault. Which, in a way, it was.
"That's true enough," Bann said, "but the fact is that we never did have the fuel for a conventional powered landing, no matter where we set down. We needed that atmospheric braking even to hit the prime site."
"Which site is completely out of the question with that damned carrier sitting there," Pahner pointed out. It was, he decided, almost certainly the most unnecessary observation he'd ever made, but he made himself continue with the thoroughly unpalatable corollary. "We'll have to land in the backlands, instead."
"We can't," Dobrescu said. "You can't land one of these things in a ju
ngle unpowered!"
"What about these white patches?" Roger asked, and Pahner and all of the holograms turned to look at him as he tapped the limited chart he'd been feverishly reviewing. The map on the handheld pad had been prepared from a cursory spatial survey and had virtually no detail, but certain features stood out, and he tapped the image again.
"I don't know what they are," Pahner said. He took the pad and gazed thoughtfully at the irregularly shaped patches in a mountainous region on the far side of the planet from the port. "Whatever they are, they aren't created structures; they're too big for that."
He started to say that they wouldn't help, then stopped. They weren't jungle or water or mountain, and that was about all the planet had to offer. So what were they?
By now others were studying their pads.
"I think . . ." Lieutenant Gulyas began, then stopped.
"You think what?" Warrant Bann asked. He too was drawn to the white patches.
"They're one of two things," Gulyas said. "I can't tell if they're above or below sea level, but if they're low enough, I think they might be dry lakebeds."
"Dry lakebeds on a jungle world," Dobrescu snorted. "That's rich. And very convenient if they are. But if we aim for them and they're not, we're dead."
"Well," Bann replied, "a planet is a damned big place, Chief. There almost have to be dry lakebeds on it somewhere, and we're dead anyway if the carrier sees us or we auger into a mountainside. Might as well try the possible lakebeds and hope."
"I agree with Lieutenant Gulyas," Roger said. "That's why I pointed them out. This looks like the sort of folded mountain formation where you'd get them. If the mountains folded around them and cut off their water sources, that would leave dry lakebeds." He scanned across the rest of the map. "And there are others, closer to the port. See? It's not just here."
"But the rest of the world is swamps, Your Highness," Dobrescu pointed out. "You need desert terrain for dry lakes, and why would there be desert only there?"
"I'd say that whole mountain range is probably arid," Pahner said. "The surface color is brown, not green. And there are other arid regions—they're just few and far between. So there's a good chance these really are dry lakes."
