Empire of Man

by David Weber

  “What?” O’Casey demanded. As the manager for the translation program it was her job to make sure that that sort of thing didn’t happen, and she started to bristle indignantly. Then she remembered all the times the program had tried to switch gender, and looked at Cord, stretched out behind Roger.

  “But . . .” she began, and blushed.

  “What you’re looking at, Ms. O’Casey,” the medic told her with an even wider evil grin, “is an ovipositor.”

  “An ovi . . . What?” Roger asked, checking his impulse to turn around and look. Dealing with the habitually nude Mardukans had slowly inured the humans to the size of the natives’ . . . members, but he wasn’t about to turn around and get all depressed again.

  “Gender is a slippery term when you start discussing xenobiology,” the medic continued, pulling up a different entry on his pad. “But the current ‘definitive’ definition is that the ‘male’ gender is that which supplies numerous gametes to fertilize a single gamete. However that’s done.”

  “I take it, then, that Cord and his ‘gender’ do not supply numerous gametes,” Pahner said carefully. “They certainly look . . . capable of doing so.”

  “No, they don’t, and yes, they do,” Dobrescu responded. “The gender we’ve been calling ‘male,’ Cord’s gender, that is . . . implants, is the correct term, between four and six gametes that are functional cells, with the exception of a matching set of chromosomes. Once these have been implanted, they’re fertilized by free swimming zygotes resident in the egg pouches of what I suppose should technically be called ‘brooder males.’” The medic pursed his lips. “There are a few terrestrial species of fish that use a similar method, and it’s common on Ashivum in the native species.”

  “So, Cord is actually a female?” Pahner asked.

  “Technically. However, there are sociological aspects that make the ‘males’ fill traditional female gender roles and vice versa. That and the physiology are what have been confusing the program.”

  “And me,” O’Casey admitted, “but I’ll bet you’re right. We didn’t have much of a language kernel to start with, and I never tried to get at its fundamental, underlying assumptions. Even if I’d thought about it, I wouldn’t have known how to access them or what to do with them once I had. But given what Mr. Dobrescu just said about ‘definitive’ definitions, I’d guess that whoever prepared the kernel in the first place knew that Cord and his gender were technically ‘female.’ It tried to switch gender a couple of times, which is just the sort of literal-minded lunacy you might expect out of an AI with partial data, and I wouldn’t let it.”

  “I am not a female,” Cord stated definitively.

  “Shaman Cord,” Eleanora said, “we’re having a problem with our translator. Try not to pay any attention to the flipping gender discussions.”

  “Very well,” the shaman said. “I can understand problems with your machines. You have them all time. But I am not a female.”

  “What was the word he actually used there?” Dobrescu asked.

  “‘Blec tule’?” O’Casey consulted her pad. “The etymology looks to be something like ‘one that holds.’ ‘One that holds the eggs’? ‘One that broods’? I bet that’s it.”

  “What about Dogzard?” Roger asked, looking at the faintly snoring lizard.

  “Another interesting aspect of local biology,” Dobrescu answered. “There are two dominant families in Mardukan terrestrial zoology. You can think of them as equivalent to reptiles and amphibians if you want. Cord is from the ‘amphibian’ type. So are damnbeasts and damcrocs and bigbeasts. They all have slimy skin and similar internal organ structures.

  “But the feck beasts, the dogzards, and the flar-ta are completely different. They have a dry integument with some scaling and radically different internal structures. Different heart chambers, different stomachs, different kidney analogs.”

  “So is Dogzard a he or a she?” asked Roger in exasperation.

  “She,” Dobrescu answered. “The ‘reptile’ analogs are set up, sexually, much like terrestrial reptiles. So Dogzard will eventually have puppies. Well, eggs.”

  “So what do we do about the translator?” Roger asked.

  “We don’t do anything about it,” Pahner said. “We inform the troops of the physical aspects, and explain to them that the Mardukans are flipped gender, but we’ll continue with our current distinction. As Elenora just suggested, the difference is purely technical, and since none of us are xenobiologists, I think we can get away with ignoring it. I can’t see that it matters one way or the other, anyway, and this way we keep from confusing the troops. And the software.”

  “Just make sure that they’re aware,” Cord said stiffly, “that I am not a brooder.”

  “He’s a female?” Julian asked.

  “Sort of.” Roger laughed. “But just keep treating him like he’s a male. And hope like hell the software doesn’t slip up when you get a visualization miscue.” The implant-based software had already miscued once, with Poertena and Denat. Fortunately, it was a minor wound. The Pinopan would heal quickly, and the tribesman had accepted the explanation.

  “Oh, man,” Julian said, shaking his head. “I cannot wait to get off this planet. I got so much culture shock I feel like my dick’s stuck in a culture socket.”

  Roger touched PFC Gelert on his shoulder as he strode past. The Marine grinned back at him, and hefted the spear over his shoulder. He obviously still found it an odd item for a Marine to carry.

  All the Marines were armed with Mardukan weaponry. There’d been thousands of ex-Kranolta weapons available to choose from, and the New Voitan forces had let no time pass getting the first forges lit. They weren’t up to custom work yet, but they were able to modify most of the weapons to fit the smaller humans, so the company was now well armed with short swords—long daggers, to the Mardukans—and Mardukan-style round shields, as well as at least one spear or javelin per Marine.

  During the three weeks of rest while the company recovered, the Marines had begun their training. They had nowhere near the ability of the Mardukans, who’d practically been born with weapons in their hands, but unlike the natives, they were soldiers, not warriors. All of their training emphasized teamwork and cooperation, not individual, uncoordinated prowess, and they only needed to be good enough for one platoon to hold a shield wall—which no Mardukan seemed ever to have heard of—while the other one got out the real weapons.

  Roger grinned back at the private and jabbed a thumb to indicate the sword over his own shoulder. The entire company looked better for the rest, although a few of the most seriously wounded were still going to be riding flar-ta.

  Roger tossed a salute toward Corporal D’Estrees. She’d been one of the worst burn cases, and Dobrescu had eventually been forced to remove her left arm from the elbow down. Now she waved in return with her pink stump and scratched at the growing bulb of regenerating tissue. It itched like mad, but in another month or so, she’d be back in gear.

  Roger finally reached the pack beast assigned to Cord. The shaman gestured to the straps holding him in place.

  “This is most undignified.”

  Roger shook his head and waved at the endless row of grave mounds along the woodline. Figures could be seen moving down there, cutting wood for the charcoal pits and clearing brush from the beds of former roads.

  “Be glad you’re not in one of those.”

  “Oh, I am,” Cord said, with a grunt, “but it is still most undignified.”

  Roger shook his head again as Pahner approached from the opposite direction.

  “Well, Captain, are we ready?”

  “Looks that way, Your Highness,” the captain answered as a delegation headed by T’Leen Targ and T’Kal Vlan approached.

  “We’re leaving a lot of good people behind,” Roger murmured, his smile fading just a bit as he glanced at the entrance to the city catacombs.

  “We are,” Pahner agreed quietly. “But we’re leaving them in good company. And
to tell the truth, Your Highness, I think it’s better this way. I know it’s a Marine tradition to bring our dead out with us, but I’ve always thought a soldier should be buried where he fell.” He shook his head, his own eyes just a bit unfocused as he, too, gazed at the catacomb entrance. “That’s what I want if my time ever comes,” he said softly. “To be buried where I fall, with my comrades . . . and my enemies.”

  Roger looked at the Marine’s profile in surprise, but not as much of it as he might have felt before reading “If.” Or the other dozen or so Kipling poems Elenora O’Casey’s toot had contained. There were depths to the captain which the old prince had never suspected . . . and which the new one respected too deeply to mention out loud.

  “Well,” he said cheerfully, “I’ll bear that in mind if the time comes, Captain. But don’t go getting any ideas! You’re strictly forbidden to die until you get my royal butt home where it belongs! Clear?”

  “Aye, ‘Colonel,’” Pahner agreed with a grin. “I’ll bear that in mind.”

  “Good!” Roger said, and the two of them turned back towards the approaching delegation together.

  “I’d say this is the farewell committee,” Kosutic observed, coming around the pack beast. She gestured at the groups of soldiers gathering along the route out of the rebuilding city. “I think they’re getting ready for the big sendoff.” She scratched at her own pink skin.

  “I’ll put on a bigger hat,” Roger said jokingly, and flicked at a bit of leaf on the front of his chameleon suit. The suit was indelibly stained in places, but it was still self-cleaning, to an extent, and was more or less intact. Many of the company’s uniforms were in tatters from where they’d been cut off in the course of hasty first-aid.

  “Well, if you can find one, you can wear it,” Pahner said calmly.

  “Why, thank you for that permission, Sir.” The prince grinned. “Should I go look?”

  “I wouldn’t suggest it at the moment, Your Highness,” O’Casey said tartly. The little chief of staff had snuck up behind them so quietly that her unexpected voice made Roger start. “I think we need to thank our benefactors.”

  “I suppose,” Roger answered impishly. “Of course, they might have saved our bacon, but we wiped out the Kranolta for them,” he pointed out, and Pahner smiled again as Targ approached.

  “I suppose there is that,” the captain agreed.

  It took an hour, but the company finally broke free of its brothers in arms, after profuse expressions of eternal friendship and undying mutual fealty, and started back on the long trail to the sea.

  Marching upcountry.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  The messenger lay prostrate in front of the throne. He couldn’t think of any bad news in what he had to convey, but that didn’t really matter. If the king was in a bad mood, the messenger’s life was forfeit, anyway, no matter how important he was.

  “So, ‘Scout,’” the king said with a grunt of humor, “you say that the humans will come out on the Pasule side of the river?”

  “Yes, O King. They follow the old trade route from Voitan.”

  “Insure that they bypass Pasule.” The monarch picked at the ornate intaglio of his throne. “They must come to Marshad first.”

  “Yes, O King,” the messenger said. Now to figure out a way to do that.

  “You may go, ‘Scout,’” the king said. “Bring them here. Bring them to me, or kill yourself before We lay Our hands on you.”

  “It shall be done,” the messenger said, wiggling backwards out of the king’s presence. Cheated death again, he thought.

  “Cheated death again.” Julian sighed as the company broke through the final screen of trees into obviously civilized lands.

  “Yeah,” Despreaux said. “Damn, but I’m glad to be out of the jungle.”

  The passage over the hills from Voitan hadn’t been terrible. In fact, they hadn’t lost even one person to the jungle flora and fauna, although Kraft in Second Platoon had been badly mauled by a damnbeast.

  The march from Voitan had also given them time to shake down into their new organization. The reduced company had separated into just two platoons, Second and Third, and they were getting used to all the empty files. Not happy about them, but adjusted.

  All in all, they were probably in better shape both physically and in morale than at any time since leaving Q’Nkok, and the vista stretching out before them would help even more.

  The region was obviously long and widely settled. Cultivated fields, interspersed with patches of woodland, spread for kilometers in every direction, and the river the old path had been following was flanked in the middle distance by two towns, one clearly larger than the other.

  Captain Pahner waved for the column to hold up as it cleared the jungle completely. The bare track they’d been following for the last day had suddenly become a road. Not much of one these days, perhaps—weeds and even small trees thrust up through the roadbed’s cracked, uneven flagstones—but it showed that this had once been an important route.

  The company stopped by the ruins of a small building. The structure was set on a raised mound, one of many scattered across the floodplain, and its construction had been massive. It looked as if it had been a guardhouse or border station to receive the caravans from Voitan, and Pahner stepped up onto its two-meter-high mound to watch the caravan pull to a halt as the company deployed.

  The Marines had been training hard with their new weapons, and it showed. Bead rifles and grenade launchers were still slung over their shoulders, but their primary weapons were clearly the short swords and spears they carried, and the small units spread out in a cigar perimeter, one swordsman to each spear carrier. Once Pahner had the shields designed, the formation would be quite different, but that was going to have to wait. The tower shield was another thing the Mardukans had apparently never discovered, so he would have to have them built somewhere.

  And that somewhere would, hopefully, be here.

  He made another gesture, and his “command team”—a grandiose term for a small group of battered Marines and civilians, but the only one he had—gathered about him. Sergeant Julian was filling in as Intel officer in the wake of Lieutenant Gulyas’ death, but other than that, it was the same group he’d faced in Voitan.

  “Okay,” he said, gesturing to the two towns, “it looks pretty much the way the Voitan contingent said it would. This has to be the Hadur region.” Heads nodded, and he wished—again—for an even half-way decent map. According to the Voitanese, the Hadur region took its name from the Hadur River, which had to be a truly major stream even for Marduk from the descriptions. He had no reason to doubt them, but he hated trying to fix his position without a reliable map. “If we’re where we think we are,” he went on with a crooked smile, “that larger town should be Marshad. And that,” he pointed to the smaller town “must be Pasule.”

  Heads nodded again. Marshad had been the primary destination for caravans from over the hills before the fall of Voitan, which had made it a wealthy mercantile center. Pasule, on the other hand, was just a farming town, according to T’Leen Targ.

  “I’d almost prefer to get our toes wet locally in Pasule before we tackle the big city,” he went on, “but if we’re going to get the shields and armor made, it will have to be in Marshad. On the other hand, we need resupply, too, and Pasule might be a better source for that.”

  As he spoke, he looked around the nearer fields, where peasants had stopped their work to gawk at the force coming out of the jungle. Most of the workers were breaking ground for another crop of barleyrice, but other laborers were harvesting the ubiquitous kate fruit. That was good. It meant that both the fruit and the previous barleyrice harvest would be fully available when it was time to buy.

  “Yeah,” Jasco agreed, with a grunting laugh that sounded almost Mardukan, as he, too, watched the workers, “these damn pack beasts go through some grain.”

  “Sergeant Major, I want you and Poertena to handle the resupply and procurement of the
shields.”

  “Got it.” The NCO made a note in her toot. They’d discussed the possibilities before, of course, but now that they were actually able to see the lay of the land, it seemed clear that Pasule would be a better, and probably cheaper, source for the food.

  “We’ve seen that they can make laminated wood, plywood,” said Roger, who’d been quietly listening. “We should have the shields made out of that.”

  “Plywood?” Jasco sounded incredulous, but, then, he hadn’t been present to hear the prince discuss sword making with the Voitanese leaders. “You’ve got to be joking . . . Your Highness. I’d want something a little more solid than that!”

  “No, he isn’t joking.” O’Casey shook her head. “The Roman shield was probably the most famous design ever to come out of Terran history, and it was made out of ‘plywood.’ The histories always call it ‘laminated wood,’ but that’s what plywood is, and it’s enormously tougher than an equivalent thickness of ‘solid’ wood.”

  “They have to have metal or leather rims to protect the edges,” the prince continued, “but the bulk of the shield is plywood.”

  “Okay.” Pahner nodded. “Kosutic, coordinate with Lieutenant MacClintock on the design of the shields.” He looked around and shook his head. “I hope I don’t have to remind anybody that we need to maintain as low a profile as possible. We can’t afford another butt-kicking like Voitan. Hopefully, we’ll be greeted as heroes for taking out the Kranolta and be able to pass on quickly. But if we get into a hassle, we have to think our way out of it. We’re way too short on ammo to shoot our way out!”

  Corporal Liszez trotted toward the command group with one of the locals. The Mardukan wore a haversack full of tools and appeared to be some sort of tinker.

  “LT?” the corporal said as she approached Roger.

  “Whatcha got, Liz?” the prince replied with a nod.