March Upcountry

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Chaplain Pannella placed his hands behind his back and sniffed.

"Lord Arturo isn't going to be happy," he observed.

Captain Imai Delaney, skipper of the Caravazan Empire parasite cruiser Greenbelt, refrained from snarling at the ship's chaplain. It wasn't the easiest restraint he'd ever exercised, and it got even harder as he looked around and recognized his bridge officers' stunned disbelief. He drew a deep breath and wiped his face. They'd obviously gotten sloppy, and "not happy" was a very pale description of what Lord Arturo would be when he heard about this one.

At the same time, he understood exactly how it had happened. There had been no problems at all since the two parasites had been put on station, and they were mainly there to make sure that no one noticed the Saint presence in the system. They'd let a few transports—the ones with registered schedules—through and taken a few of the tramps as prizes. But their primary job wasn't commerce raiding; it was supporting the tactical operations that were being staged through the system, and it had become routine. Too routine.

"It's a Puller-class transport," the tactical officer reported as he studied his readouts. "There was one flash of nearly full power. They're masking their drive, somehow, but that flash was clear."

"Why would the Earthies send in a single armed transport?" the chaplain demanded. "And why is its acceleration so low?"

The captain decided that screaming would probably be unwise, however tempting. The answer to both questions was obvious, but if he simply stated them bluntly he might be accused of "insufficient consideration" for the chaplain's feelings and opinions. As if a chaplain should have a voice in military matters!

He looked around the bridge. His officers' uniforms were the somber and slightly off-color tones that bespoke preparation in low-acid processes. The textiles were all natural, too... which meant that unlike in most navies, if there was a sudden shipboard fire the crew was subject to immolation.

Captain Delaney had been aboard an Empie parasite cruiser once. The bridge had been all cool tones and smoothly rounded edges; on his own ship, the edges were jagged and unfinished. Finishing and "trim" were considered unnecessary frills. Unnecessary frills used excess energy. Excess energy, eventually, was bad for planetary environments. So, no trimming for Greenbelt's bridge.

The same philosophy extended throughout the ship. Everything looked rough hewn and badly fitted. Oh, it worked. But it wasn't as smooth as it would have been aboard a damned Empie warship. Nothing was... not even the command relationships. On an Empie ship, the captain was king. He might be under the command of an admiral, but on his own ship he was lord and master.

On the Saints' ships, though, the chaplain always had to be considered. Adherence to the tenets of the Church of Ryback was as important, to the higher-ups, as capability. So besides fighting the damned aristos for command slots, Captain Delaney had been fighting the Church for his entire career.

Not that there was going to be any difference of opinion about what to do in this instance.

"I believe she might be damaged," he said, allowing no trace of his thoughts to color his tone. "That one burst of power is probably all their phase drive could stand."

"Well... I suppose that makes some sense," the chaplain said doubtfully. "What are we going to do about it?"

We are going to kill it, Delaney thought. Which would be easier to do if you would just get your eco-freak butt back to the chapel and off my bridge!

"The data from Green Goddess indicates that the enemy's tactical net is probably damaged," he said aloud. He scratched his beard and thought about it. "We'll stay at the edge of the powered missile envelope and pound her to scrap. She can't maneuver, and we should have the better tac net." He nodded his head in self-agreement. "Yes. That should work."

"How much damage will we take?" the chaplain asked nervously. "Damage repair will do great harm to the environment. We must limit our use of resources in every way we can. And it will surely damage the ki of the crew."

"Do you want the ravening imperialists to fully colonize this world?" Delaney asked rhetorically. "That ship is filled with Marines, carrying their humanocentric infestation with them to new worlds. What would you have me do? Let them go?"

"No," the chaplain snapped, shaking his head. "They must be destroyed. The infestation must be ripped out root and branch. This fine world shall not be polluted by man!"

Fine world, indeed, the captain thought behind a smile of agreement. It's a green hell. Killing these Marines is probably doing them a favor.

Sergeant Major Kosutic reached across the narrow compartment and tapped the prince's chief of staff on the shoulder.

"You can undog your helmet now," she said, suiting action to words and removing her own.

O'Casey undid the latches clumsily, and looked around the cramped compartment.

"Now what?" she asked.

"Now we wait a couple of hours, and hope His Evilness Who Resides in the Fire decides we get to live," Kosutic answered, scratching the back of her neck. She set down the helmet and reached under the command station. "Aha!" she said, and pulled out a long plastic tube with a faint ripping sound.

"What is that?" O'Casey asked, looking up as she opened her pad to begin an entry.

"It's a wiring harness cover." Kosutic leaned forward and inserted the flexible tube into the neck of her suit. "Most of these shuttles have had them stripped out already." She began rubbing the corrugated tube up and down her back. "Ahhh," she gasped. "I forgot mine, by Satan."

"Oh," Eleanora said, suddenly noticing the itchiness of her own back. "Can I, um, borrow it?"

"Check by your left knee. I don't mind your borrowing it, but you might as well find your own. Best back scratcher ever created."

Eleanora found the wiring harness where the sergeant major had indicated and pulled its cover out.

"Ooooh," she sighed after a brief try. "Boy, this is good!"

"And for telling you that deep, dark secret, known only to Old Marines," Kosutic said, "you have to tell me something."

"Like what?"

"Like what's eating the Prince," Kosutic replied, propping her heels on the command station in front of her.

"Hmmm," Eleanora said thoughtfully. "That's a long story, and I'm not sure how much of it you're cleared for. What you know about his father?"

"Just that he's the Earl of New Madrid; that he's on the watchlist, which means he doesn't get within a planet of the Empress; and that he's quite a bit older than the Empress."

"Well, I'm not going to get into why he was banished from Court, but Roger not only looks like his father, he acts very much like him. New Madrid is a gorgeous man, who's a terrible dandy. And he's also very much involved in The Great Game."

"Ah." Kosutic nodded. The intrigues of the Empire had gotten deeper and deeper during the reign of Emperor Andrew, Alexandra's father. While things had never, quite, come to the point of outright civil war, they seemed to be edging closer to it. "So is the Prince involving himself in the Game?" she asked carefully, and Eleanora sighed.

"I'm... not sure. He's been in contact with some of the known conduits in his sports clubs. I mean, one of the other fellows on his polo team is a known member of New Madrid's clique. So, maybe. But Roger hates politics with a purple passion. So... I'm not sure."

"You should know."

"Yes, I should," the chief of staff admitted. "But it's not the sort of thing he would confide in me. I'm an appointment of his mother's."

"Is he... conspiring against the Empress?" Kosutic asked even more carefully.

"I doubt that very much," Eleanora said. "He seems to truly love his mother, but he might be being used as a dupe. The way he acts, the... frivolity. It just doesn't make any sense. With his background, with what his father did, Roger has to realize that presenting such a front lays him open to charges of following in New Madrid's footsteps. So half the time I'm certain he's doing it on purpose, and the other half... I just don't know."

"Maybe it's a double-blind," Kosutic suggested. "He might be putting on these airs as a cover for being really, really capable?"

She was aware that she was engaging in wishful thinking, but there had to be at least a shred of light in the darkness. Otherwise, the Marines had stuck their heads into a guillotine for an enemy of all they held dear.

"I doubt it," Eleanora said with a grim chuckle. "Roger's just not that subtle." She gazed down at her pad for several moments, then sighed. "And, frankly, however subtle he is or isn't, he's always been the odd one out in the Imperial Family."

She tapped at the pad's controls for several seconds, then closed it and turned her chair to face the sergeant major.

"At the expense of possible lesse majeste," she said, "Roger can act like a real pain in the ass sometimes. No, let's be honest—he can be a real pain in the ass. But I think it's fair to point out that it's not entirely his fault."

"Ah?" Kosutic kept her face carefully expressionless, but mental ears pricked at the chief of staff's tone. Despite the fact that Bronze Battalion was specifically charged with the task of guarding the Heir Tertiary, and despite the amount of time the Bronze Barbarians had spent in their charge's presence (not with any particular sense of pleasure for either party), no one in the company really knew Roger at all. O'Casey obviously did, and if she was prepared to give Kosutic any insight at all into the prince, the sergeant major was more than ready to listen.

"No, it's not," O'Casey told her, and shook her own head with a crooked smile. "He's a MacClintock, and everyone knows that all MacClintocks are brave, trustworthy, fearless and brilliant. They're not, of course, but everyone knows they are, anyway, and the fact that Crown Prince John and Princess Alexandra actually live up to the stereotype—like their mother—only makes it even harder on Roger. The Crown Prince has a record as a diplomat anyone could envy, and even without her family connections, Princess Alexandra would be respected as one of the finest admirals in the Fleet. And then there's Roger. Decades younger than the others, always on the outside, somehow... the classic 'bad boy' of the Imperial Family. The never-do-well, spoiled, pampered aristocrat." She paused and cocked her head at the sergeant major.

"Sound familiar?" she asked with a quirky half-grin.

"Well, yes, actually," Kosutic admitted. It wasn't something any Marine, and especially any member of Bronze Battalion, had any business admitting to anyone, anytime, anywhere, but she admitted it anyway, and O'Casey chuckled without humor.

"I thought it might. But when you consider the cloud his father is under, the fact that no one really knows where Roger himself stands, and the fact that the Empress' own attitude towards him often seems... ambiguous," she chose the word with obvious care, "it's probably inevitable that he should turn out at least a bit that way." She snorted sadly. "Kostas Matsugae and I have argued about it often enough, but I've never disagreed with Kostas' insistence that Roger wasn't exactly dealt the fairest possible hand. But where Kostas and I differ is on where we go from where we are now. I wasn't Roger's first tutor, you know. In fact, I've only been with him for a little over six years, so I wasn't there when he was a hurt little boy dealing with the unfairness of life. I can feel for that little boy's pain, I suppose, but I have to be more concerned with getting Roger the theoretical adult to face up to the fact that life isn't fair and learning to deal with it as a MacClintock and as a prince of the Empire. And," she admitted heavily, "I don't seem to be doing a very good job of it."

"Well," Kosutic told her, picking her words with equal care, "I can't say I envy you. I've done my share of kicking wet-behind-the-ears lieutenants into Marine officers, but the Corps gives me a lot better support structure for that kind of thing than you seem to have."

"It would be nice if I could use the sort of judo I've seen you using on Captain Pahner's officers," O'Casey agreed wistfully. "But I can't. And, frankly, Roger has a positive genius for digging in his heels. He may not be the overachiever his brother and sister are, but he's certainly got every bit of the MacClintock stubbornness!"

She paused with a sudden laugh, and Kosutic raised an eyebrow at her.

"What's funny?" the sergeant major asked.

"I was just thinking about Roger and stubbornness," O'Casey replied. "Well, that and God's peculiar sense of humor."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Have you ever been to the Imperial War Museum?" the academic asked, and the Marine nodded.

"Sure. A couple of times. Why?"

"I take it you've seen the Roger III Collection, then?"

Kosutic nodded again, though she wasn't at all sure where O'Casey was headed with this. Roger III had been one of the many unreasonably capable emperors the MacClintock Dynasty had produced, and, as seemed to be the norm among his relatives, he had been a man of passionate (and, some would say, peculiar) interests. One of them had been military history and, particularly, that of Old Earth between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, CE, and he had assembled what was probably the finest collection of arms and armor from the period in the entire history of the human race. When he died, he had bequeathed the entire collection to the Imperial War Museum, where it had become and remained one of its star attractions.

"Ever since Roger III's time," O'Casey went on a bit obliquely, "the continuance of his hobby interest in ancient weaponry has been something of a tradition in the Imperial Family. Oh, there's an edge of affectation to it, of course—something that makes good PR as a 'family tradition' that imperial subjects can ooh and ah over—but there's also more than a little truth to it. The Empress and the Crown Prince, for example, can spend hours explaining more than you ever wanted to know about things like Gothic armor and Swiss pikemen." She grimaced with so much feeling that Kosutic chuckled.

"But not Roger," the academic continued. "I said he can be stubborn? Well, he dug his heels in and flatly refused to have anything to do with the 'tradition.' I suppose it was a fairly harmless way to express his rebellion, but he was certainly... firm about it. Maybe it's partly because it was all started by another Roger who also happens to have been another of those MacClintock figures everyone respects—unlike our Roger—but despite his family's very best efforts, he never showed the least interest in the entire subject, which is a pity really. Especially now."

"Now?" Kosutic gazed at her for a moment, then barked a laugh as understanding struck. "You're right," she said, "it would be handy if he knew anything about it, given the local tech level on Marduk."

"Absolutely," O'Casey agreed with another sigh, "but that's our Roger all over. If there's a way to do it wrong, he'll find it every time."

Roger watched Pahner make his way down the center transom of the shuttle bay and shook his head. With the troops squashed into the shuttle like old-fashioned sardines in a can, the only way to move up and down the troop bay was by walking on the transom on which the center seats were mounted. That meant, of course, that he was walking at head level to the seated Marines.

The problem was that while Pahner was in a relatively light and fairly nimble skin suit, which he'd donned in preference to armor for just this reason, Roger was wrapped in ChromSten. He could no more make his way down that narrow strip in armor than he could walk a tightrope, and he rather doubted that any of his bodyguards would feel happy about being stepped upon, however daintily, by armor that weighed as much as a tyranothere.

"Well, Your Highness?" Pahner asked as he reached the end and swung easily to the floor.

"I'm going to have a hard time making my way down the bay in this," Roger said, gesturing at his armor. Pahner glanced at the gray battle steel and nodded.

"Take it off. We're going to be rattling around for a couple of hours."

"Take it off where? There's not enough room in the compartment."

"Right here," Pahner said, gesturing at the small open area. The patch of deck was the only open area in the bay, a tiny sliver of room for the shuttle crew to move around in. A ladder led up from it to a small landing with two hatches, one to the command compartment, and the other to the bridge. There was another hatch on the troop level portside. It was a pressure door leading to the exterior.

"Right here?" Roger juggled the helmet under his arm to give himself a moment to think while he looked around. Most of the guards were still doing their own things. A few had gotten up to move around, but most of those had headed to the rear of the bay where the palletized cargo afforded room to stretch out. It seemed awfully... public, though.

"I could get your valet," Pahner said with a faint smile. "He's back there," he continued, gesturing towards the rear of the troop bay.

"Matsugae?" Roger's face brightened. "That would be grea— I mean, yes, of course, Captain. Do you think you could fetch my valet?" he ended in a refined drawl.

"Well," Pahner said, his face closing down again, "I don't know about 'fetch.' " He banged the nearest sleeping guard on the shoulder. "Pass the word for Matsugae."

The Marine yawned, shoved the next Marine in line, passed on the word, and promptly went back to sleep. A few moments later, Roger saw the small form of the valet emerge from under a pile of rucksacks. He bent down and spoke to someone, then climbed onto the transom and made his way toward the prince.

Vertical pillars ran up from the transom to the roof every two meters, and if Matsugae was far less nimble on the uncertain footing than Captain Pahner had been, he had the overall idea down. He would hold onto a vertical, then move forward of it, using it to balance as he shuffled out on the transom as far as he could before making a hopping lunge for the next. Using this technique, he slowly made his way forward to the prince's position.

"Good—" the valet paused, obviously checking the clock in his toot "—evening, Your Highness." He smiled. "You're looking well."

"Thank you, Valet Matsugae," Roger said, much more careful to maintain his formality in front of so many listening ears. "How are you?"

"Very well, Your Highness. Thank you." Matsugae gestured to the rear of the compartment. "Sergeant Despreaux has been a mine of helpful information."

"Despreaux?" Roger lifted an eyebrow and leaned sideways to look down the line of troops, and caught the brief flash of a refined profile.

"She's a squad leader in Third Platoon, Your Highness. A very nice young lady."

"Given their resumes," Roger said with a smile, "I doubt that you could categorize any of the young ladies in The Empress' Own as 'nice.' "

"As you say, Your Highness," Matsugae said with an answering smile. "How can I be of service?"

"I have to get out of this armor and into something decent."

Matsugae's face crumpled.

"I'm sorry, Your Highness. I should've known. Let me go get my pack." He started to scramble up onto the transom again, preparing to retrace his route.

"Wait!" Roger said. "I have a uniform packed up in the command compartment. I just need help getting out of the armor."

"Oh, well then," Matsugae said, climbing back down. "If Captain Pahner could give me a hand? I don't actually know all that much about armor, but I'm willing to learn."

As they disconnected the armor's various latches and controls, Roger became curious.

"Matsugae? Am I to understand that you have spare uniforms for me in your pack?"

"Well, Your Highness," the valet said almost shyly, "Sergeant Despreaux told me that you weren't able to bring all your clothes. And why. I didn't feel it appropriate that you have only one suit of armor and a single uniform, so I packed a few extra outfits along. Just in case."

"Can you carry it?" Captain Pahner sounded skeptical. "Of course, if that's all that you're carrying..."

"I will admit, Captain," the small valet said in a pert voice, "that I'm not carrying the weight of ammunition most of your Marines are. However, I am carrying my full equipment load and a share of the squad load for the headquarters group. His Highness' gear is, so to speak, my ammunition allotment."

"But can you carry it?" Pahner repeated darkly. "Day after day."

"We shall simply have to see, Captain," Matsugae replied calmly. "I think so. But we shall have to see."

He returned to his task of peeling the prince, and Roger soon found himself once again standing in the midst of scattered pieces of armor.

"I'm forever putting this stuff on and taking it off." He brushed an imaginary fleck of dust from the singlet he'd worn under the armor as Matsugae scrambled up the steps to the command compartment.

"Not for much longer, Your Highness," Pahner pointed out. "Once we land on the planet, it will hardly ever be used. But if we need it, we're really going to need it."