Empire of Man

by David Weber

  Roger looked down at the body of his friend and shook his head.

  “Could we have a couple of hours, Captain? We have a . . . situation here.”

  “Are you under attack?” Pahner asked.

  “No . . . No we’re not, Captain,” Roger said.

  “Then whatever it is, handle it and get on the road, Your Highness,” the Marine said crisply. “You’re a mobile unit, and I need you mobile. Now.”

  “Yes, Sir,” Roger said quietly. He keyed off his mike and looked at the corporal. “Can the ceremony, Reneb. I promised no more mistakes and no more dawdling. Bag him and burn him; we’re moving out.” He switched back to the captain. “We’ll be on the trail in ten minutes,” he said.

  “Good,” Pahner said.

  Rastar slid off his civan and moaned.

  “I’d kill to be able to take off this armor,” he groaned, and Honal grunted in laughter.

  “You Therdan people are too soft. A mere forty kolong, and you’re complaining!”

  “Uh-huh,” the prince replied. “Tell me you’re not in pain.”

  “Me?” the cavalry commander said. “I think I’m going to die, as a matter of fact. Why?”

  Rastar chuckled and rubbed his posterior gingerly while he looked at the stream.

  “Thank goodness for accurate maps,” he said. “I never appreciated them properly before.”

  “Yes, knowing where to water and where to hide—as opposed to where to fight—is very important,” Honal said a bit tartly.

  “Don’t worry, cousin,” Rastar told him. “There’ll be plenty of fighting before this is done. Send back skirmishers with a communicator. Have them find the Boman, but tell them not to get too close. Just give them a few shots to sting them, then pull back. Make sure they have plenty of remounts and know where to go.” He pulled out his map and studied its markings. “The turnoff for the first group is just ahead, and I especially want to know if the Boman split up when we do.”

  “Will do,” Honal agreed. “I still say this plan is too complicated, though. Splitting ourselves up is crazy.”

  “We need to keep the Boman interested until it’s time to lead them back home again,” Rastar said, not looking up from the map, “and Boman are simple sorts. If we just run in a straight line, they may lose interest and start heading back too soon. That would be bad. But if we run all over the countryside like headless basik, their uncomplicated little souls should find the puzzle irresistible and keep them coming right behind us. We hope.”

  “Can I still not like it?”

  “Yes . . . as long as you do it. And speaking of doing, it’s time to go.”

  Fresh civan had been brought up from their string of spares while the officers talked, and Honal looked up at the towering expanse of his new mount with a sour expression.

  “I don’t know if I can climb clear up there,” he groaned.

  “Here, let me give you a boost,” Rastar offered. “You Sheffan super-trooper, you.”

  Camsan cursed.

  “Another group splitting off!” he complained.

  “And in a whole different direction,” Dna pointed out. “They must have cut their numbers by half with all this scattering.”

  “Hard to tell,” the war leader said. “They’re keeping in line to confuse our trackers about numbers, but I think you’re right—there are fewer headed toward Therdan than there were.”

  The Boman leader rubbed a horn in thought.

  “Have all of the messengers reported back yet?” he asked.

  “All but the one to Hothna Kasi,” Dna replied. “He had the farthest to go, but he should have arrived there by midnight of last night.” The other Boman glanced up at the overcast, estimating the time. “By now, all of them should be on the trail.”

  “Good,” Camsan grunted, “because that means all this splitting and scattering isn’t going to do them any good in the end. It’s just going to break them up into even smaller bits and pieces when our warriors finally start catching up with them. But I think we need to split off some parties of our own to go directly after these groups. I want to know where they’re all really headed.”

  “Break up ourselves?” the scout leader asked.

  “Yes. This isn’t like the iron heads,” the war leader said quietly. “They’re being more devious than normal, and I smell a trap. Something, somewhere, is going on. Something big.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  “Damn,” Beckley said. “I didn’t believe it could be done.”

  “Neither did I,” Chim Pri said.

  “You have no faith in the Laborers of God,” Turkol Bes told them with quiet pride. “When the God rains destruction, you have to build and repair fast. It’s what we’re best at.”

  The road from D’Sley to Sindi, which had been reduced to so much soupy mud by Boman foot traffic, had changed. Engineering crews, working to Rus From’s careful plans and equipped with giant crosscut saws, axes, sledgehammers, and splitting wedges, had altered the landscape almost beyond recognition. Massive trees, some of them more than a meter in diameter, had been cut off close to the ground, sawn into lengths, split, and dragged out to the side of the roadbed. Wood wasn’t the best material for covering a road, especially on Marduk, because it rotted and broke too quickly. But this road was being designed for one purpose and one purpose only, and it only had to hold up for a few days of heavy use.

  Behind the woodcutters and splitters had come other teams of Mardukans, including civilians impressed from D’Sley and K’Vaern’s Cove, leveling and grading the beaten track and filling in the deepest bogs with gravel and gabions of bundled barleyrice straw. When they finished, a third group had taken the split logs by the side of the grading and laid them down to form a corduroy road. The entire project had been one continuous motion, and now that it was done, the first wagon loads of supplies and materials liberated from Sindi were creaking along it towards D’Sley.

  Ther Ganau, one of Rus From’s senior assistant engineers, trotted up on a civan and waved two hands.

  “Stay out of the right-of-way, if you will. I don’t want anything to slow traffic.” He gestured at the heavy flow of nose-to-tail wagons. “What do you think?” he asked Roger.

  Pri looked over at the silent prince, and sighed. “Brilliant, Ther Ganau. Truly amazing. I’ve never seen such a sight in all my days.”

  Roger remained silent, and Cord dug a thumb into his back.

  “Say something,” the shaman hissed, and Roger looked up at last.

  “Very nice, Ther,” he said listlessly. “The Captain said he wants us anchoring this end of the line. Where’s the best place to dig in?”

  The engineer began to reply, then paused for a moment as he noted the roll of material lying on the withers of the prince’s flar-ta. He recognized one of the humans’ devices for cremating their dead, but all the people who would normally have been around Roger in the field were still there, and he brushed the question aside. He could deal with that mystery later.

  “Yes, Your Highness. The Captain has called most of our infantry forward from this end of the line, so if I could borrow the Carnan Battalion for close security and push your cavalry a bit further out to the west, I’d be grateful.”

  “Whatever,” Roger said. “Take whatever you want.” The prince kneed Patty towards the river and lifted his rifle from the scabbard. Unless the Tam was totally abnormal, there were bound to be damncrocs in it.

  “What happened?” Ganau asked quietly, gazing after the flar-ta.

  “A croc got Kostas,” Beckley replied.

  “The God take him,” the priest-engineer said sincerely. “A terrible loss.”

  “Especially to the prince,” the Marine pointed out. “Kostas was with him for years. And he’s blaming himself.”

  “What should we do?” the engineer asked. “Is there anything?”

  “I don’t know,” Beckley said as a shot rang out from the river bank. “I just don’t know.”

  The incoming call’
s priority code said it came from the sergeant major, and Pahner told his toot to accept it.

  “Pahner.”

  “We have a situation with His Highness,” Kosutic said without preamble. “Beckley just called it in. She says Kostas bought it this morning, and Roger’s in a total funk. He’s turned over his command to Ther Ganau and isn’t answering calls. Reneb says he’s sitting down by the Tam shooting crocs and won’t talk to anybody.”

  Pahner carved off a slice of bisti root and popped it into his mouth.

  “You know,” he said after a long moment, “I’m trying and failing to decide which part of that I like the least.”

  “Me, too. I’m gonna miss Kostas’ damnbeast casserole. And I’m not sure I’ll be able to eat croc again.”

  Pahner looked out over the gathering heaps of material outside the gates. The stores of Sindi, which soon would be the stores of D’Sley and K’Vaern’s Cove, were unbelievable. Despite the tremendous inroads the Boman had made upon them, the food supplies of the city remained enormous. Sindi had completed its own massive harvest just before the invasion began, and it was also a central gathering point for the products of the entire region. More than that, it seemed obvious that the rumors that Tor Cant had been stockpiling grain for at least two full harvests in anticipation of the present war had been accurate.

  The result, when gathered in one place, was a truly awesome mountain of barleyrice, and the Boman had barely begun to devour it. The barbarians had been too busy eating the draft animals of the city and its satellite communities to waste much time with mere grains and vegetables. All of which meant that even with the barges which had moved the infantry upriver, there was no way to recover those supplies before the Boman returned. The barges would have time to make one, possibly two, trips, but if he committed them to that, they would be unavailable in the event that the plan came apart and a precipitous retreat from Sindi became necessary. Which didn’t even consider the fact that there had never been enough barges to lift the combat troops and Ther Ganau’s engineers.

  The city’s magazines had also contained several dozen tons of gunpowder, but that posed no particular transportation problems, since From and his engineers were busily expending it as they completed the destruction of northern Sindi.

  If they were going to get all the other captured supplies out, though—and God knew K’Vaern’s Cove could use every scrap of food in Sindi, especially if things worked out to leave a Boman field army still active in the area—then that corduroy road through the swamps had to be held. And while this would-be Boman Napoleon, Camsan, seemed to be chasing Rastar and Honal as fanatically as one could wish, there were still other bands of barbarians wandering around out there. If one of them should hit the convoys of wagons and flar-ta lumbering back and forth between Sindi and D’Sley, the results could be catastrophic. Which meant he needed Roger functional. Now.

  He thought about a solution and grimaced. The obvious one—which wouldn’t work—was to call Roger and tell him to get over it. The one which would work, unfortunately, wasn’t a good answer in the long-term. The consequences could be literally cosmic, but it was the only one that might work in less than the couple of days it would take Roger to get over his funk without it.

  “Eva,” he said, “I’m gonna have to break every rule in The Book. As a matter of fact, I’m gonna have to throw it away.”

  “Okay,” the sergeant major said. “What are we gonna do?”

  “Get me Nimashet.”

  Nimashet Despreaux paused.

  The prince sat on the river bank, rocking back and forth, his rifle across his lap. She knew, intellectually, that there was no way he would use it on her, but she also knew that he wasn’t tracking very well at the moment. So she cleared her throat just a bit nervously.

  “Your Highness?”

  Roger looked out over the rippling water. He was scanning for “v”s in the fading evening light, but even as his eyes watched the stream with the alertness and intensity of the hunter he was, he wasn’t really present. His mind, to the extent that he was thinking at all, was in a brighter past. A past that wasn’t filled with blood and death. A past where his mistakes didn’t kill people, and where all he had to worry about was getting his mother’s attention, if not approval, and not completely screwing up in the process. Not that he ever had. God knew he was a screwup. He always had been. It just did not make any sense to give him the slightest shred of responsibility. All he ever did was fuck it up.

  He started without turning his head when someone laid a hand on his shoulder.

  “Go away. That’s an order. I’m busy.”

  “Roger. Your Highness. It’s time to leave.” Despreaux wondered if she could get the rifle away from him without inflicting—or suffering—damage, then decided to shelve that question. Even if she’d been able to get the rifle, he’d still have his pistol, and facing Roger with a pistol in his hand was a losing proposition. “We need to get your cavalry into position,” she said.

  “Fuck it,” the prince said in a flat voice. “Let Ther tell Chim what to do. And Turkol. I’m done giving orders, or even making requests. All I ever do is fuck things up. Even us.”

  He looked up over his shoulder at last, and the sergeant almost stepped back at his expression.

  “Look at us, what there is of ‘us.’” He snorted bitterly. “I can’t even carry on a fucking conversation with a woman I love without totally screwing up.”

  “You didn’t screw up, Roger,” the sergeant said, sitting down at his side. Her heart had taken a tremendous lurch at the word “love,” but she knew he didn’t need her throwing herself at him at the moment. “I did. I realize that now. In fact, I’ve realized it all along—I just didn’t want to admit I have, because it was so much easier to go on being mad at you, instead. But all you were trying to say was that fraternization is a bad idea, and you were right. If you don’t watch it, it screws up a unit faster than anything else ever could.”

  “That wasn’t what I was trying to say,” the prince said. “It is a bad idea, but with so much fooling around going on in the Company, what damage could one more affair do?”

  “So what did you mean to say?” Despreaux asked warily. “I assume you weren’t going to refer to the hired help?”

  “No.” Roger rubbed his face and looked out on the water again. “What I meant to say was: I don’t fool around. Put a period on the end of that sentence. I did a couple of times, and they were outright disasters. And I felt like a shit each time. All I could think about was that I didn’t want another bastard in the world. I didn’t want to betray someone like my father and mother had.”

  He pulled his helmet off and set it on the ground. The river bank was covered in a low, soft ground cover, somewhat like short clover, under the shade of a massive jungle giant. It was as comfortable a place as any on the planet to deal with bleak despair.

  “I didn’t know what the relationship was between my mother and the bastard formerly known as ‘my father,’” he said. “But I did know that wondering what the relationship was, and blaming myself for whatever it wasn’t, had to be the worst way for a kid to grow up. And there are places in the Empire where it matters how ‘pure’ you’ve been, and I had to think about that, too. Most people think I never gave a good goddamn about my obligations as a prince, but that’s not true, either. Of course, it’s not surprising they think that way—I managed to screw up those obligations, too, after all. But that didn’t mean I didn’t care, or that I didn’t recognize that the risk was too great for me to justify fooling around.”

  “At all?” the incredulous sergeant asked. “For how long? And, I mean, uh . . .”

  “I lost my virginity when I was fifteen. To a younger daughter of the Duke of New Antioch. A very ambitious daughter.”

  “I’ve heard about that one,” Despreaux said carefully. The “scene” was a minor legend in the Emperor’s Own and the cause of one of the few resignations of a company commander in its history. “And I’v
e heard that nobody had ever seen you ‘with’ anyone else. But, I mean, what do you—I mean, that’s a looong time.”

  “Yes, it is. Thank you for pointing that out.”

  “It’s not good for you, you know,” the Marine said. “It’s not healthy. You can develop an enlarged prostate even while you’re young. Sure, they can fix it, but prevention is a much, much better alternative.”

  “Do I really have to discuss the details of my non-sex life with you?” the prince asked. “Especially right now?”

  “No, you don’t,” Despreaux admitted. “But didn’t anybody ever talk to you about it? Didn’t you have a counselor?”

  “Oh, sure. Plenty of them. And they all took the same position: I needed to release my bonds to my father, put my sense of his betrayal of me behind me, and take responsibility for my own life. This is referred to as ‘reality therapy’ or ‘quit being such a fucking whiner.’ Which would have worked real well, except that it wasn’t my father I resented the hell out of.”

  “Oh.” The sergeant tugged at an earlobe. “That has to be weird. Everybody in the Empire regards the Empress like, well, like a goddess, I guess.”

  “Yep,” Roger said bitterly. “Everyone but her son. I never, ever forgave her for the fact that I didn’t have a dad. She at least could have remarried or something. I finally figured out that was one of the reasons I went into sports—look at all those father figures.”

  “Oh,” Despreaux said again, and then, very, very carefully, “And Kostas?”

  “Sort of,” Roger said with something halfway between a chuckle and a sob, then drew a deep breath. “Kostas was hard to see as the kind of larger-than-life pattern kids want in their fathers, I guess. But in every other way that counted, he was the closest I ever got. Could have gotten, maybe. He was always there when I needed him . . . and I wasn’t there when he needed me. Of course.”