by David Weber
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!”
“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 hi
m 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 . . .”
“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 t
he 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!”
