by David Weber
“Right,” Pahner said. “Okay. Toss these crap capacitors into the fucking jungle, except for a couple of samples. When we get back, I think Her Majesty is probably going to hang a couple of subcontractors. Given how annoyed she’s going to be over this entire little adventure of ours, I think that may be a literal statement. And I’ll tie the rope for her.
“After you get rid of them, put together the best plasma guns you can, as many as you can. Check every component, every piece and connection. Go over all of them with a field-scope. Then put them in zipbags with something to keep them dry.
Julian grimaced.
“Losing the plasma guns is really gonna suck, Boss.” The weapons were almost a security blanket for the ground-pounders.
“Can’t be helped. I’m not losing another squad to a breech blow. We’ll hold them in reserve until it really has dropped in the pot. If it turns out we can’t survive without them, we’ll bring them out.”
“It’ll take us a while to put them together,” Julian said.
“I’ll get you some help. You’ve got today and tomorrow.”
“Okeedokee,” Poertena acknowledged with a resigned headshake. “Nice pocking trick,” he added. “Where’d you learn it?”
“Son, I’m seventy-two,” the captain said. “I joined up when I was seventeen. After fifty-five years of being on the ass-end of the supply chain, you learn to make do.”
Kostas Matsugae had always enjoyed cooking on a small scale, but preparing dinner for a wider audience was a challenge. That was especially true with completely unknown spices and foods, but he was learning to make do.
With the company stopped, he finally had some leisure to experiment. He knew the troops had started complaining about the sameness of the menu, and he didn’t really blame them. With very little time each evening and a large number of meals to prepare, he’d been forced to fall back on stew almost every night. The running joke was that they’d have a different meal every day—today it was stew and barleyrice; tomorrow it was barleyrice and stew.
The valet might not be a Marine, but he recognized the importance of food to morale, and he meant to do something about it. Although he intended to stay with the basic “lots of stuff in a big pot” meal plan, those parameters permitted a variety of dishes, and he was working on a new one now.
The Mardukans grew a little-used fruit that was vaguely similar to a tomato. He’d purchased a large quantity of it, and now he was simmering it in a pot spiced with the blowtorch herb peruz and filled with a brown legume which filled much the same culinary niche as lentils in Q’Nkok. With any luck—and it was certainly smelling good—he had a Mardukan chili in the pot. Or, it might turn out to be inedible. In which case, the company would be having . . . barleyrice and stew. It was Wednesday, after all.
He smiled as Sergeant Despreaux leaned over the pot and sniffed.
“My,” she said, “that smells heavenly.”
“Thank you.” Kostas stirred at the top of the large kettle with a wooden spoon and took a taste. Then he waved at his mouth and took a hasty drink of water. “A bit too much peruz,” he said in a strangled voice.
Dogzard had been sleeping in a patch of sun that penetrated the enveloping canopy. But at the sound of a spoon hitting the side of the pot, the lizard flipped to all six feet and padded rapidly over to the cooking area, and Kostas picked a small bit of meat out of the ersatz chili and tossed it to the begging lizard. The dog-lizard had become a general company mascot, emptying bowls and cleaning up messes with indiscriminate zeal. Since leaving the village of The People she’d started to grow, and was already a fairly large example of the species. If she didn’t stop growing soon, she was going to end up a veritable giant.
“It’ll remind us to drink,” Despreaux said. She looked around for a moment, then lowered her voice. “Can I ask you a personal question?” she asked seriously.
Kostas cocked his head to the side and nodded.
“I would never betray the confidence of a lady,” he said, and Despreaux snorted a laugh.
“La, sir! Seriously, no lady I. Being a lady and a grunt are sort of contradictions in terms.”
“No,” Kostas said. “They’re not. But ask your question.”
Despreaux looked around again, then looked at the pot rather than meet the valet’s eye.
“You’ve known the Prince for a long time, right?”
“I’ve been his valet since he was twelve,” Kostas said. “And I was a general servant in the Imperial Household before that. So, yes, I’ve known him for quite some time.”
“Is he gay?”
Kostas stifled a snort. Not because the question was unexpected—he’d almost answered it for her before she asked—but because it was such an incredibly normal question out of this enormously capable Amazon.
“No.” He was unable to keep his amusement entirely out of his tone. “No, he’s not gay.”
“What’s so funny?” Despreaux asked. Of all the reactions she’d anticipated, amusement hadn’t been one.
“You have no idea, nor will I try to give you one, how many times I’ve heard that question,” Kostas replied with a smile. “Or heard the suggestion. Or noted the rumor. On the other hand, I’ve heard the opposite question just as often. There are just as many—perhaps more—gay young men as straight young ladies who have hit Roger’s armor and bounced.”
“So it’s not just me?” she said quietly.
“No, my dear.” This time, there was a note of sympathy in the valet’s voice. “It has nothing to do with you. Indeed, if it makes you feel any better, I would guess that Roger finds you attractive. But that’s only a guess, you understand. The Imperial Family follows the core world aristocratic tradition of providing its children with first-class sexual education and instruction, and Roger was no exception. I also know that he’s inclined to prefer women; he’s had at least one sexual encounter I’m aware of, and it was with a young lady. But he’s also rebuffed virtually every other advance that I’m aware of.” He chuckled. “And I’m aware of quite a lot of them. Frankly, if Roger were interested, he could have more ‘action’ than a company of Marines, pardon the expression.”
“No problem.” The Marine sergeant smiled. “I’ve heard it before. So what’s with him? He’s . . . what’s the term? Asexual?”
“Not . . . that, either.” Kostis shook his head, and there was a thoughtful, almost sad, look in his eyes. “I haven’t discussed it with him, and I don’t know anyone who has. But if you want the opinion of someone who probably knows him better than most, I would say it’s a matter of control, not disinterest. Precisely why he should choose to exercise that control, I don’t know, but that in itself tells me quite a bit.” The valet shook his head. “There are many things Roger won’t discuss with most people; I think there are very few he won’t discuss with me, but this is one of them.”
“This is . . . weird,” the Marine said. Her own lovers hadn’t exactly been as numerous as the stars in the sky, but she wasn’t counting them on the thumbs of one hand, either.
“That’s my Roger,” Kostas told her with a smile.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
“Looks like it’s just you and me again, Pat,” Roger said, patting the pack beast just below the bandages swathing its side.
Pahner had the three most heavily injured flar-ta, shorn of the company’s supplies, breaking trail. The pack beasts’ individual reactions to the ambush had been remarkably variable. Most of them had run away from the fire and confusion of the attack, but two of them—the one Roger had coincidentally been riding and one in Third Platoon’s sector—had charged the attacking Kranolta. For obvious reasons, these particularly aggressive beasts were two of the three breaking trail.
Roger, who’d decided that near a flar-ta was the place to be in an ambush, was walking beside “his.” She reminded him of a “Patricia” he’d known in boarding school, and the name the mahouts gave her was nearly unpronounceable, toot or no toot. So “Pat” it was.
/> The company had been hit three more times, but not only had the additional ambushes been on a smaller scale, the wider path being forged by the trio of pack beasts had prevented the Mardukans from surprising them at such close quarters. Coupled with Pahner’s decision to beef up his point team and push it further forward, the humans had escaped the attacks unscathed.
It would be nice if anyone had expected that to remain the case.
According to Cord, they were nearing the region Voitan had dominated in his father’s day. Thus far they’d seen no sign of civilization, but neither had there been any sign of a Kranolta concentration against them, and the company was inclined to take the good with the bad.
Roger saw one of the point-guards raise a hand and drop to one knee. The mahouts drew the pack beasts to a stop instantly in response, and the prince trotted forward as the column accordioned behind them.
Dogzard looked up from where she’d been riding on Patty’s rump. The dog-lizard raised her striped head as she sniffed the air and hissed. Matsugae wasn’t cooking, and nothing was trying to eat anyone, so she jumped off her perch and followed Roger.
The point, Lance Corporal Kane from Third Platoon, was stopped at the lip of a marsh. The bank was short, barely a quarter of a meter of bare dirt, and then there was only water, covered with weeds.
The vista stretching into the distance wasn’t encouraging. The swamp was choked with fallen trees and dead vines, and the live vegetation was gray and weirdly shaped, clearly different from the normal jungle foliage. Roger looked around, then walked over to a sapling and lopped it off with the sword he’d taken to carrying slung over his back.
He was probing the marsh with his stick while Dogzard sniffed at the water disdainfully when Pahner walked up behind him.
“You know, Your Highness,” the captain said dryly, “sometimes there are things that eat people at the fringe of water like this.” The Marine seemed to have at least partially forgiven Roger for blasting the company with a stick of grenades, but the prince was still inclined to watch his tongue with rather more care than usual.
“Yes, there are,” he agreed. “And I’ve hunted most of them. This isn’t exactly shallow,” he continued, withdrawing the chopped off sapling and examining the sticky mud which coated the first meter of its length. A bubble of foul-smelling gas followed the probe to the surface.
“Or solid,” he observed with a choking cough.
The company had spread out in a perimeter, and seeing that there was no immediate threat, Kosutic had wandered up behind Pahner. She looked at the black, tarry goo clinging to the stick, then at the swamp, and laughed.
“It looks like . . . the Mohinga,” she announced in hushed, hollow tones which would have done a professional teller of horror stories proud.
“Oh, no!” Pahner said, with an uncharacteristic belly laugh. “Not . . . the Mohiiinga!”
“What?” Roger tossed the sapling into the swamp. “I don’t get the joke.”
Dogzard watched the stick land and considered going after it. But only briefly. She sniffed at the water, hissed at the smell, and decided that discretion was the better part of getting in there. Balked of any possibility of “fetch the stick,” she looked up at the humans speculatively. None of them seemed to be up to anything interesting, though, so she trundled back to the flar-ta with her thickening tail waggling behind her.
“It’s a Marine joke,” Kosutic told the prince with a smile. “There’s a training area in the Centralia Provinces on Earth, a jungle training center. It has a swamp that I swear the Incas must have used to kill their sacrifices. It’s been drained a couple of times in the last few thousand years, but it always ends up back in the military’s hands. It’s called—”
“The Mohiiinga. I got that much.”
“It’s a real ball-buster, Your Highness,” Pahner said with a faint smile. “When we’d get Raider units that were, shall we say . . . a little more arrogant than they should have been, we’d set up a land navigation course through the Mohinga. Without electronic aids.” His smile grew, and his chuckle sounded positively evil. “They quite often ended up calling for a shuttle lift out after a couple of days of wandering around in circles.”
“You were a JTC instructor, Sir?” Kosutic sounded surprised.
“Sergeant Major, the only thing I haven’t instructed in this man’s Marine Corps is Basic Rifle Marksmanship, and that was only because I skated out of it.” Pahner grinned at the NCO. Although the marksmanship course was critical to developing Marines, it was also one of the most boring and repetitive training posts in the Corps.
“All paths lead into the Mohiiinga,” Kosutic quoted with horrified, quavering relish, “but . . . none lead ooout!”
“I won’t say I wrote that speech,” Pahner said with another chuckle, “because it was old when I got there. But I did add a few frills. And, speaking of the Mohinga . . .” The captain looked around and shook his head. “I certainly hope we can go around this one.”
Cord walked up to look at the swamp as well, then walked over to where Roger and his group stood laughing in the human way. It was apparent that they didn’t realize the full import of the marsh.
“Roger,” he said with a human-style nod. “Captain Pahner. Sergeant Major Kosutic.”
“D’Nal Cord,” Roger replied with an answering nod. “Is there a way around this? I know it’s been some time since you came this way, but do you remember?”
“I remember very clearly,” the old shaman said, “and this wasn’t here in my father’s day. The fields of Voitan and H’Nar stretched outward through this region. But as I recall, they had been drained from a swamp that surrounded the Hurtan River.” The shaman clapped his false hands in regret. “I fear that this may fill the valley of Voitan. It may stretch all the way to T’an K’tass.”
“And how far is that?” Kosutic asked.
“Days to the south,” Cord replied. “Even weeks.”
“And north?” Pahner asked, looking at the swamp and no longer chuckling.
“It stretches as far north as I have knowledge of,” the Mardukan said. “The region to the north, even in the days of Voitan, was held by the Kranolta, and they didn’t permit caravans through their lands.”
“So,” Roger said dubiously, “we have to make a choice between going several weeks out of our way to the south, getting hit by the Kranolta the whole way. Or we can go north, directly into their backyard. Or we can try to navigate the swamp.”
“Well, your Marines and my people may have some problems,” Cord admitted. “But not the flar-ta. They can easily make it through a swamp no deeper than this.”
“Really?” It was Kosutic’s turn to sound doubtful. “That thing that was chasing you was in a desert. These things—” she jerked a thumb over her shoulder at Patricia “—don’t look that different.”
“The flar-ta and the flar-ke are found everywhere,” Cord pointed out. “They prefer the high, dry regions because of the absence of atul-grack, but they can be found in swamps as well.”
Pahner turned and looked at D’Len Pah. The chief mahout had taken over Pat when her original mahout was killed in the first ambush, and now waited patiently for the humans to make up their minds.
“Do you think the pack beasts can cross this, Pah?” the captain asked skeptically.
“Certainly,” the mahout said with a grunt of laughter. “Is that what you’ve been jawing about?”
He tapped the beast in a crease in the armor just behind her massive head shield to get her in gear, and the flar-ta whuffled forward. She moaned dolefully when she saw the black muck, but she stepped into it anyway.
The pack beast’s feet each consisted of four toes with leathery bases. They were equipped with heavy digging claws, and their pads were broad and fleshy. They were also webbed, and now Patricia spread her toes wide, more than tripling the square area of her foot. That foot sank into the sloppy mud but found “solid” footing well before the belly of the creature touched the water
.
“Hmmm.” Roger watched thoughtfully. “Can she move out into the swamp?”
Pah prodded again, and the beast grumbled but moved out into the black water. Obviously, she was as at home in the swamp as in the jungle, but a moment later she burbled and started to back up hastily as a “V” ripple started towards her from deeper in the swamp.
Roger picked up his rifle from where he’d leaned it against a tree and flipped it off safe. Beads from Marine rifles started bouncing off the surface as the panicking beast lumbered back up out of the water, but the prince only drew a breath and led the approaching ripple.
Pahner flicked the selector switch on his bead rifle to armor-piercing as he realized that the lighter ceramic beads were simply skipping off the water, but just as he was about to fire, Roger’s big rifle boomed, and the ripple turned into a whitewater of convulsions. The creature jerking and flopping at the center of the maelstrom was longer and narrower than a damnbeast but otherwise similar, with the same mucus-covered skin as a scummy. The green and black-striped beast thrashed a few more times as the huge hole blown through its shoulder and neck bled out, then rolled over to float belly-up on the surface.
“Dinner,” Roger said calmly, jacking another round into the chamber.
“Well,” Pahner observed with a sniff, “that’s half the problem solved. We’ll pile the rucksacks on the beasts and follow them through the swamp.”
“It will make Kranolta attacks less likely, as well,” Cord said ruminatively as the mahouts waded into the water to retrieve the kill. “Such swamps are useless to the forest people. They won’t be as at home there as in the forest, and they’ll never expect us to cross it here. But,” he continued, gesturing into the swamp with his spear, “somewhere in there is the Hurtan River. And that the flar-ta will be unable to cross.”
“We’ll build that bridge when we come to it,” Kosutic said with a laugh. “First, we have to deal with—”
