Throne of Stars

by David Weber

The shot from the anti-armor device had spun Giovannuci backwards and on to the deck. Now he climbed back to his feet and raised his hands.

  “I’m sorry I missed,” he said tightly. “But we’re all going to die anyway. Pollution take you.”

  “I don’t think so,” Roger grated. “We have your second-in-command, and she’s more than willing to turn it off. You are going to, though, I promise you,” he continued in a voice of frozen helium, and looked at Kosutic. “Sergeant Major, take the colonel to the shuttle bays. Make sure he doesn’t do any more damage, but don’t let anything happen to him on the way, either. We’ll deal with him later, and I want him in perfect shape when he faces the hangman.”

  The sergeant major said something in reply, but Roger didn’t hear her as he dropped to his knees beside Pahner. He turned the captain over as gently as possible, but there wasn’t really much point. This time, the placement had been accurate. The one-shot had struck the Marine squarely on the his armor’s carapace, and the ricocheting scab of armor had done precisely what it was supposed to do.

  Roger bent close, trying to see through the flickering distortion of the captain’s helmet. The readouts indicated that there was still brain function, but as the blood drained from the head into the shattered body, it was fading fast.

  “I promise,” Roger said, lifting the captain and holding him. “I promise I won’t die. I promise I’ll save my mother. You can depend on me, Armand. You can, I promise. Rest now. Rest, my champion.”

  He sat there, rocking the body, until the last display flickered out.

  EPILOGUE

  Roger tapped his display as the former Saint officer left the captain’s office. All things considered, Beach had taken the news rather well. On the other hand, since she’d thrown her lot in rather definitively with the group around Roger, there wasn’t much she could do but help. As it was, she was an outlaw under both Saint and Imperial law. If Roger succeeded, she’d be sitting pretty. If he didn’t, she wouldn’t be any worse off. Once they got near civilization, of course, he wouldn’t be able to trust her. But until they got to wherever they were going to start the process of infiltrating the Empire, she really had only two choices: help them, or die. It wasn’t much of a choice.

  He looked up from the display and stood as the next person on his calendar entered.

  “Sergeant Despreaux,” he said. “I’d like to speak to you about near-future plans.”

  He sat back down and returned his attention to his display, then looked back up with an irritated expression as Despreaux came to a position of parade rest.

  “Oh, hell, Nimashet. Would you please sit down?” he demanded in exasperation, and waited until she’d obeyed before he glanced back at the display and shook his head.

  “I hadn’t realized how short you really were when we left Old Earth. You should have ended your term while we were still in Sindi.”

  “I thought about that at the time,” she replied. “Captain Pahner spoke to me about it, as well. Obviously, I couldn’t just leave.”

  “I could probably find a way for you to leave now,” Roger sighed. “Along with the four other people who are alive and over their terms. But there’d be the little problem of the price on your heads.”

  “I’ll stay with you for the time being, Sir,” Despreaux said.

  “Thank you,” Roger said formally, then drew a deep breath. “I . . . I have to ask a . . . I’d like to make a request, however.”

  “Yes?”

  He rubbed his face and looked around the cabin.

  “I—Nimashet, I don’t know if I can do this . . .” He stopped and shook his head. “I—Damn it, I know I can’t do this alone. Please, please promise me that you won’t leave at the first opportunity. Please promise that you won’t just go. I need you. I don’t need your gun; I can find plenty of gunners. I need your strength. I need your sense of humor. I need your . . . balance. Don’t leave me, Nimashet Despreaux. Please. Just . . . stay with me.”

  “I won’t marry you,” she said. “Or, rather, I’ll marry ‘Prince Roger,’ but I refuse to marry ‘Emperor Roger.’”

  “I understand,” Roger said with a sigh. “Just don’t leave me. Okay?”

  “Okay,” she said, and stood. “Will that be all, Sir?”

  Roger looked at her for a moment, then nodded.

  “Yes, thank you, Sergeant,” he said formally.

  “Then goodnight, Sir.”

  WE FEW

  Publisher’s Note:

  We Few is not divided into separate chapters, but simply is separated into the prologue and main text. “Chapter 1” is the only chapter.

  PROLOGUE

  Of Alexandra VII’s three children, the youngest, Roger Ramius Sergei Alexander Chiang MacClintock—known variously to political writers of his own time as “Roger the Terrible,” “Roger the Mad,” “the Tyrant,” “the Restorer,” and even “the Kin-Slayer”—did not begin his career as the most promising material the famed MacClintock Dynasty had ever produced. Alexandra’s child by Lazar Fillipo, the sixth Earl of New Madrid, whom she never married, the then-Prince Roger was widely regarded prior to the Adoula Coup as an overly handsome, self-centered, clothes-conscious fop. It was widely known within court circles that his mother nursed serious reservations about his reliability and was actively disappointed by his indolent, self-centered neglect of those duties and responsibilities which attached to his position as Heir Tertiary to the Throne of Man. Less widely known, although scarcely a secret, was her lingering distrust of his loyalty.

  As such, it was perhaps not unreasonable, when the “Playboy Prince” and his bodyguard (Bravo Company, Bronze Battalion, of the Empress’ Own Regiment) disappeared en route to a routine flag-showing ceremony only months before an attack upon the Imperial Palace, that suspicion should turn to him. The assassination of his older brother, Crown Prince John, and of his sister, Princess Alexandra, and of all of John’s children, combined with the apparent attempt to assassinate his Empress Mother, would have left Roger the only surviving heir to the throne.

  What was unknown at the time was that those truly behind the coup were, in fact, convinced that Roger and his Marine bodyguard were all dead, as his assassination had been the first step in their plans to overthrow Empress Alexandra. By hacking into the personal computer implant of a junior officer aboard the Prince’s transport vessel, they were able, through their unwilling, programmed agent, to plant demolition charges at critical points within the vessel’s engineering sections. Unfortunately for their plans, the saboteur was discovered before she could quite complete her mission, and the ship, although badly crippled, was not destroyed outright.

  Instead of dying almost instantly in space, the “Playboy Prince” found himself marooned on the planet of Marduk . . . a fate some might not have considered preferable. Although legally claimed by the Empire and the site of an Imperial starport, it was obvious to the commander of his bodyguard, Captain Armand Pahner, that the system was actually under the de facto control of the Caravazan Empire, the ruthless rivals of the Empire of Man. The “Saints’” fanatical attachment to the principle that humanity’s polluting, ecology-destroying presence should be excised from as many planets as physically possible was matched only by their burning desire to replace the Empire of Man as the dominant political and military power of the explored galaxy. Their interest in Marduk was easily explainable by the star system’s strategic location on the somewhat amorphous boundary between the two rival star nations, although precisely what at least two of their sublight cruisers were doing there was rather more problematical. But whatever the exact details of their presence in the Marduk System might be, it was imperative that the Heir Tertiary not fall into their hands.

  To prevent that from happening, the entire crew of Roger’s transport vessel, HMS Charles DeGlopper, sacrificed their lives in a desperate, close-range action which destroyed both Saint cruisers in the system without ever revealing DeGlopper’s identity or the fact that Roger had been aboard
. Just before the transport’s final battle, the Prince and his Marine bodyguards, along with his valet and his chief of staff and one-time tutor, escaped undetected aboard DeGlopper’s assault shuttles to the planet. There, they faced the formidable task of marching halfway around one of the most hostile, technically habitable planets ever claimed by the Empire so that they might assault the spaceport and seize control of it.

  It was, in fact, as virtually all of them realized, an impossible mission, but the “Bronze Barbarians” were not simply Imperial Marines. They were the Empress’ Own, and impossible or not, they did it.

  For eight endless months, they fought their way across half a world of vicious carnivores, sweltering jungle, swamp, mountains, seas, and murderous barbarian armies. When their advanced weapons failed in the face of Marduk’s voracious climate and ecology, they improvised new ones—swords, javelins, black powder rifles, and muzzle-loading artillery. They learned to build ships. They destroyed the most terrible nomadic army Marduk had ever seen, and then did the same thing to the cannibalistic empire of the Krath. At first, the horned, four-armed, cold-blooded, mucus-covered, three-meter-tall natives of Marduk seriously underestimated the small, bipedal visitors to their planet. Physically, humans closely resembled oversized basiks, small, stupid, rabbitlike creatures routinely hunted by small children armed only with sticks. Those Mardukans unfortunate enough to get in the Empress’ Own’s way, however, soon discovered that these basiks were far more deadly than any predator their own world had ever produced.

  And along the way, the “Playboy Prince” discovered that he was, indeed, the heir of Miranda MacClintock, the first Empress of Man. At the beginning of that epic march across the face of Marduk, the one hundred and ninety Marines of Bravo Company felt nothing but contempt for the worthless princeling whose protection was their responsibility; by its end, Bravo Company’s twelve survivors would have fixed bayonets to charge Hell itself at his back. And the same was true of the Mardukans recruited into his service as The Basik’s Own.

  But having, against all odds, captured the spaceport and a Saint special operations ship which called upon it, the surviving Bronze Barbarians and The Basik’s Own faced a more daunting challenge still, for they discovered that the coup launched by Jackson Adoula, Prince of Kellerman, had obviously succeeded. Unfortunately, no one else seemed to realize Empress Alexandra was being controlled by the same people who had murdered her children and her grandchildren. And, still worse, was the discovery that the notorious traitor Prince Roger Ramius Sergei Alexander Chiang MacClintock was being hunted by every member of the Imperial military and police establishments as the perpetrator of the attack on his own family.

  Despite that . . .

  —Arnold Liu-Hamner, PhD,

  from “Chapter 27:The Chaos Years Begin,”

  The MacClintock Legacy, Volume 17, 7th edition, © 3517,

  Souchon, Fitzhugh, & Porter Publishing,

  Old Earth

  Imprimis, they nuked the spaceport.

  The one-kiloton kinetic energy weapon was a chunk of iron the size of a small aircar. He watched it burn on the viewscreens of the captured Saint special operations ship as it entered the upper atmosphere of the planet Marduk and tracked in perfectly. It exploded in a flash of light and plasma, and the mushroom cloud reached up into the atmosphere, spreading a cloud of dust over the nearer Krath villages.

  The spaceport was deserted at the moment it turned into plasma. Everything movable, which had turned out to be everything but the buildings and fixed installations, had been stripped from it. The Class One manufacturing facility, capable of making clothes and tools and small weapons, had been secreted at Voitan, along with most of the untrustworthy humans, including all of the surviving Saint Greenpeace commandos who had been captured with the ship. They could work in the Voitan mines, help rebuild the city, or, if they liked nature so much, they could feel free to escape into the jungles of Marduk, teeming with carnivores who would be more than happy to ingest them.

  Prince Roger Ramius Sergei Alexander Chiang MacClintock watched the explosion with a stony face, then turned to the small group gathered in the ship’s control room, and nodded.

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  The prince was a shade under two meters tall, slim but muscular, with some of the compact strength usually associated with professional zero-G ball players. His long blond hair, pulled back in a ponytail, was almost white from sun bleaching, and his handsome, almost beautiful, classic European face was heavily tanned. It was also lined and hard, seeming far older than his twenty-two standard years. He had neither laughed nor smiled in two weeks, and as his long, mobile hand scratched at the neck of the two-meter black and red lizard standing pony-high by his side, Prince Roger’s jade-green eyes were harder than his face.

  There were many reasons for the lines, for the early aging, for the hardness about his eyes and shoulders. Roger MacClintock—Master Roger, behind his back, or simply The Prince—had not been so lined and hard nine months before. When he, his chief of staff and valet, and a company of Marine bodyguards had been hustled out of Imperial City, thrust into a battered old assault ship, and sent packing on a totally nonessential political mission, he had taken it as just another sign of his mother’s disapproval of her youngest son. He’d shown none of the diplomatic and bureaucratic expertise of his older brother, Prince John, the Heir Primus, nor of the military ability of his older sister the admiral, Princess Alexandra, Heir Secondary. Unlike them, Roger spent his time playing zero-G ball, hunting big game, and generally being the playboy, and he’d assumed that Mother had simply decided it was time for him to steady down and begin doing the Heir Tertiary’s job.

  What he hadn’t known at the time, hadn’t known until months later, was that he was being hustled out of town in advance of a firestorm. The Empress had gotten wind, somehow, that the internal enemies of House MacClintock were preparing to move. He knew that now. What he still didn’t know was whether she’d wanted him out of the way to protect him . . . or to keep the child whose loyalty she distrusted out of both the battle and temptation’s way.

  What he did know was that the cabal behind the crisis his mother had foreseen had planned long and carefully for it. The sabotage of Charles DeGlopper, his transport, had been but the first step, although neither he nor any of the people responsible for keeping him alive had realized it at the time.

  What Roger had realized was that the entire crew of the DeGlopper had sacrificed their lives in hopeless battle against the Saint sublight cruisers they had discovered in the Marduk System when the crippled ship finally managed to limp into it. They’d taken those ships on, rather than even considering surrender, solely to cover Roger’s own escape in DeGlopper’s assault shuttles, and they’d succeeded.

  Roger had always known the Marines assigned to protect him regarded him with the same contempt as everyone else at Court, nor had DeGlopper’s crew had any reason to regard him differently. Yet they’d died to protect him. They’d given up their lives in exchange for his, and they would not be the last to do it. As the men and women of Bravo Company, Bronze Battalion, The Empress’ Own, had marched and fought their way across the planet they’d reached against such overwhelming odds, the young prince had seen far too many of them die. And as they died, the young fop learned, in the hardest possible school, to defend not simply himself, but the soldiers around him. Soldiers who had become more than guards, more than family, more than brothers and sisters.

  In the eight brutal months it had taken to cross the planet, making alliances, fighting battles, and at last, capturing the spaceport and the ship aboard which he stood at this very moment, that young fop had become a man. More than a man—a hardened killer. A diplomat trained in a school where diplomacy and a bead pistol worked hand-in-hand. A leader who could command from the rear, or fight in the line, and keep his head when all about him was chaos.

  But that transformation had not come cheaply. It had cost the lives of over ninety percent o
f Bravo Company. It had cost the life of Kostas Matsugae, his valet and the only person who had ever seemed to give a single good goddamn for Roger MacClintock. Not Prince Roger. Not the Heir Tertiary to the Throne of Man. Just Roger MacClintock.

  And it had cost the life of Bravo Company’s commanding officer, Captain Armand Pahner.

  Pahner had treated his nominal commander first as a useless appendage to be protected, then as a decent junior officer, and, finally, as a warrior scion of House MacClintock. As a young man worthy to be Emperor, and to command Bronze Battalion. Pahner had become more than a friend. He’d become the father Roger had never had, a mentor, almost a god. And in the end, Pahner had saved the mission and Roger’s life by giving his own.

  Roger MacClintock couldn’t remember the names of all his dead. At first, they’d been faceless nonentities. Too many had been killed taking and holding Voitan, dying under the spears of the Kranolta, before he even learned their names. Too many had been killed by the atul, the low-slung hunting lizards of Marduk. Too many had been killed by the flar-ke, the wild dinosauroids related to the elephant-like flar-ta packbeasts. By vampire moths and their poisonous larva, the killerpillars. By the nomadic Boman, by sea monsters out of darkest nightmares, and by the swords and spears of the cannibalistic “civilized” Krath.

  But if he couldn’t remember all of them, he remembered many. The young plasma gunner, Nassina Bosum, killed by her own malfunctioning rifle in one of the first attacks. Corporal Ima Hooker and Dokkum, the happy mountaineer from Sherpa, killed by flar-ke almost within sight of Ran Tai. Kostas, the single human being who’d ever cared for him in those cold, old days before this nightmare, killed by an accursed damncroc while fetching water for his prince. Gronningen, the massive cannoneer, killed taking the bridge of this very ship.

  So many dead, and so far yet to go.