March Upcountry

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 him 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 the 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!"

"The shuttles," Delaney said. "It's the shuttles, trying to sneak away to the planet."

"We're too far out," the chaplain objected. "You said so yourself. They can't brake and make a reentry. And even if they could, we'd still be here to control the planet."

"True." Delany nodded. "But they could hide on the surface for a time."

"Only until the carrier detected them," Panella said dismissively. "They'd be mad to try to sneak down to the surface. Besides, we can still run them down, and we would've detected them soon after they started their deceleration."

"Maybe," the captain said dubiously. "But those shuttles use a hydrogen reaction jet that's fairly hard to detect much beyond a light-minute." He scratched his beard in thought about it for a moment. "Still, you're right. They must have expected to be detected."

He thought for a moment more, and in his eyes flew open wide.

"Unless they know we won't be here to detect them!" He wheeled to his bridge crew.

"Detach the ship! Detach now!"

"What to download?" O'Casey asked the empty compartment. "What? What, what? Come on, load!" she snapped.

Warrant Officer Bann had experienced great difficulty finding a connection, but Eleanora was in now, and waited as the final connects were made. When the screen finally came up, she sent the command through her toot.

"Search 'survival,' " she whispered, watching the results of the query come up. "Scroll down, scroll down, 'hostile flora and fauna' download, 'medicine' download. Search 'fuels, shuttle.' Scroll down. 'Expedient' download. Search, 'military, primitive.' Refine, 'arquebus.' Scroll down, scroll." She kept one eye on the loading diagram. The whisker laser was a relatively small bandwidth system, and the first download on hostile flora and fauna survival wasn't complete yet. She hissed, and then shook her head as a default message came up. "Four thousand three hundred eighty-three articles. Damn." She didn't have time for this.

"Refine... 'generals.' Refine, 'greatest.' " She viewed the results. There was only one name she recognized offhand, despite her doctorate in history. She'd been more interested in societal developments than in military destructiveness, and arquebuses were as distant as ancient Rome and its fabled legions. But one name stood out in both the military and societal continuum.

"Download, 'Adolphus, Gustavus.' "

"Damn," Pahner snarled.

Roger nodded, more comfortable with the information now. "Disconnection."

"Yes," the captain replied in a quiet voice, watching the simple text "TOS" which had replaced the data feed from DeGlopper. Termination of Signal. Such a... sanitary acronym. The letters held his eye, and then the sensor readouts on the Saint cruiser disappeared, as well.

"Ah," he said sadly, and Roger nodded again.

"Well," the prince said after a moment, trying to lighten the atmosphere, "at least they got them."

Without even turning around, he felt the temperature in the compartment drop, and swore at himself for putting his foot into his mouth yet again. He'd been wrong about the Marine's lack of feeling, he realized.

"Yes, I suppose they did. Your Highness," Pahner said flatly.

"Damn!" Eleanora shouted, slamming her hand down on the panel. The transmission had shut off in mid-line, and she'd only gotten part of the way through the entry on Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden.

She'd hunted for other data after entering that article, and as she had, she'd realized the incredible reach of the information available. The Marines could use data on improved metallurgy, agriculture, irrigation, and engineering. On chemistry, biology, and physics. It had all been sitting there the whole time, available for translation to pads or even toots. They could've loaded the whole thing into individual toots and had a walking encyclopedia!

But only if she'd thought of it in time.

"What's wrong?" Sergeant Major Kosutic asked, coming back into the compartment. She glanced at the monitors and nodded. "Oh. The DeGlopper's gone. But they got the Saint."

"No, no, no. That's not it!" O'Casey snapped, banging the workstation again. "I realized after you'd gone that I had the whole universe in my hand. I had a copy of the Encyclopedia Galactica in my personal system on the ship. I hardly used it, because it was only outline information. But there were all sorts of things that we could've downloaded if we'd only thought of it in time. I started grabbing articles, but the signal terminated on me."

"Oh? Did you get anything?"

"Yeah," O'Casey replied as she brought up the data. "I think I got the most critical stuff. Survival and hostile environments, survival first-aid, something on expedient shuttle fuels and the beginning of a download on a general from Earth when they used arquebuses." She frowned and looked at the files. "The one on shuttle fuels looks a little slender."

Kosutic's mouth worked as she tried not to smile while the academic brought up the data on shuttle fuels.

"Oh. According to this, the field expedient shuttle fuel can be made by using electricity to break down water and—"

"And there's a system on the shuttle that can do it," Kosutic interrupted. "They get the power from solar cells... and it takes about four years to fill a shuttle's tanks."

"Right." O'Casey turned from the monitor. "You already knew that?"

"Yep," Kosutic admitted, still fighting back a grim chuckle. "And before anyone joins the Regiment, she goes through a Satan-Be-Damned course that includes combat survival skills. In fact, Captain Pahner is a survival instructor."

"Oh," O'Casey said. "Damn."

"Don't worry about it," Kosutic advised her, and this time the sergeant major allowed her chuckle to escape. "The Empire's worlds have an enormous variety of tech levels, and the Marines recruit from almost all of them. You'd be amazed by the stuff some of the troops know. When we need something done, most of the time there'll be a troop who has the skill. You just watch."

"I hope you're right."

"Trust me. I've been riding herd on Marines for almost forty standard years now, and they still surprise me sometimes."

"In that case, I guess we just sit here and wait for the landing," O'Casey said sourly.

"Pretty much," Kosutic agreed. "You play pinochle?"