March Upcountry

CHAPTER FOUR

Roger was never sure afterwards if it was the General Quarters alarm or the rough hands of the Marines that startled him awake.

The Marines' faces were unfamiliar to his mostly sleeping brain in the dim red emergency lights, under the banshee howl of the alarm, and he reacted violently as he was slammed roughly into a bulkhead. As a member of the Imperial Family, his toot was equipped with several bits of software not available to the general public, including a complete "hardwired" hand-to-hand combat package and an "assassin" program which did several interesting things. Moreover, the prince had always been athletic. He held black belts in three separate "hard" martial arts, and his sensei (not surprisingly) was one of the best in the entire Empire of Man.

With all of that going for him, he was not a safe person to jump upon, without warning, in the dark, whatever Bravo Company might have thought of him. Even taken by surprise in a sound sleep, he managed to kick backward, trying for a knee strike as one arm was wrenched to the left and inserted in a sleeve. Considering his surprised, sleep-groggy state, it was a remarkably well-executed attempt... and accomplished absolutely nothing.

If the members of The Empress' Own were surprised by his response, they had a surprise or two for him, as well. Like the fact that their toots offered hardwired booster packages of their own... and that all of them had spent even longer training in the martial arts than he had. He was spun around and struck in the solar plexus for his troubles.

The two Bravo Company privates seemed unconcerned by his chokes and gasps as they expertly stuffed him into an emergency vac suit, and once they had him in the suit, with his helmet on, they sat on him. Literally. He was pushed roughly to the deck, where the two bodyguards pinned him down and sat on him, weapons trained outward.

Due to the oversized cretin sitting on his chest, he couldn't reach his suit controls, and since the com was in its default "off" mode, he couldn't even call Captain Pahner and order him to get these slope-browed bruisers to let him up. Although he was technically their commander, the privates paid no attention to his first few queries, shouted through the plastron of the helmet. As soon as he realized his efforts were ineffective, he gave up. The hell if he was going to be ignored by these goons.

After what seemed an eternity, but couldn't have been more than ten or fifteen minutes, the compartment hatch opened to reveal two Marines in battle armor. The guards sitting on him stood up, one of them giving him a hand to help him to his feet, and left the compartment. The two new guards, faceless nonentities behind the flickering visors of their powered armor, sat him on the bed and sandwiched him between them, weapons trained outward once again. But in this case, the weapons were a quad-barreled heavy bead gun and a plasma cannon trained, respectively, toward the door and toward the next compartment. If boarders came slicing through the wall, they were in for an uncomfortable surprise.

He now had time to examine the vac suit and found that—surprise, surprise—the com was limited to the emergency "Guard" frequency only. It was an unforgivable sin, roughly comparable to eating one's own young, to use that frequency in anything but a true emergency. That was a lesson (one of the few) he'd learned quite painfully during his mandatory ordeal at the Academy, and since the troopers didn't seem to be hostile—just very, very determined to keep him safe—this probably didn't count as a "true" emergency. So no communicator.

Which left him to ponder what was going on with virtually no data. There was air, but the emergency lights were on. He reached for the latches on his suit to take the helmet off, but one of the armored Marines tapped his hand away from them. The tap was obviously intended to be polite but firm, but the pseudo-muscles of the armor turned it into a stinging slap.

Rubbing his knuckles, Roger leaned over until his helmet was in contact with the Marine's.

"Would you mind telling me what the hell is going on?"

"Captain Pahner said to wait until he got here, Your Highness," a female soprano, badly distorted by the helmets, responded.

Roger nodded and leaned back against the bulkhead, flipping his head inside the helmet to try to make his ponytail lie flat and smooth. So, either there'd been a coup, and Pahner was in on it, or there'd been some sort of emergency, and Pahner wanted to be able to give him a complete report rather than a garbled version second- or third-hand.

If the second scenario were correct, well and good. He would just cool his heels here for a while, then find out what the problem was. If it was a case of the first scenario... He looked at the armored Marine with the bead cannon pointed at the door. There was probably a snowball's chance in hell that he could actually wrest it away from the Marine and kill Pahner with it, but if this was a coup, his life was worth less than spit anyway. Might as well go out like a MacClintock.

He walked mentally back over every step of the event, and noticed that the floor had stopped vibrating. The background hum of the various life-support and drive systems had become so familiar that it was unnoticed, but now, with it gone, its absence was obvious. If those systems were off-line, they were in deep trouble indeed... which at least militated against the coup theory.

Then he thought about the two troopers who'd dragged him out of bed. They'd suited him up and literally sat on him for a good ten minutes before anyone showed up to relieve them. And they hadn't had suits. If the cabin had lost pressure, they would have died rapid and unpleasant deaths. So the privates, at least, thought he was worth keeping alive. Which also argued against the coup theory.

They'd also risked their lives to protect him, and while that willingness to risk or lose their lives to keep their charges alive was assumed on the part of the Imperial Family, Roger had never been in an emergency. There'd never been a situation in which his bodyguard's life was threatened. Well, there'd been that one disastrous encounter on a vacation, but the bodyguard was never actually in danger, whatever the young lady had threatened... .

But in this case, two people whose names he didn't even know had risked an awful death to protect his life.

It was a confusing thought.

Nearly two hours passed before "Captain" Pahner appeared, accompanied by Captain Krasnitsky. Pahner was in a chameleon suit, while the ship's captain was in a Fleet skin suit, with his helmet flopped back out of the way.

Pahner nodded to the two guards, who left the cabin, closing the hatch behind them. Roger took a good look at Krasnitsky, and promptly waved him into the station chair at the small desk. While the Fleet captain collapsed into the seat, Pahner touched the stud to lock the hatch, then turned and faced the prince.

"We have a problem, Your Highness."

"Oh, really, Captain? I hadn't noticed." The prince's voice was muffled through the plastron of the helmet. After a moment's fumbling, he released the standard catches and dumped the helmet on his bunk. "By the way," he continued sourly, "there wouldn't happen to be a skin-suit in my size on board, would there?"

"No, Your Highness, there wouldn't," Pahner answered stoically. "I've already checked. That detail was overlooked. As were others, apparently." He turned to the miserable-looking captain. "If you'd care to continue, Captain Krasnitsky?"

The captain rubbed his face and sighed.

"We were sabotaged, Your Highness. Badly."

"Sabotaged?" the prince repeated incredulously. "By whom?"

"Now that is the million-credit question, Your Highness," Pahner admitted. "We know the who as in 'who actually did the sabotage.' That was Ensign Amanda Guha, the ship's logistics officer."

"What?" Roger blinked in confusion. "Why would she do that?"

Captain Krasnitsky opened his mouth to answer, then looked at Pahner, and the Marine shrugged his shoulders and continued. "We're not positive, of course, but I believe she was a toombie."

"A toot zombie?" Roger's eyes widened. "Here? Are there any more?" Then he shook his head at the stupidity of his own question. "We wouldn't know, would we?"

"No, Your Highness, we wouldn't," Pahner replied with considerable restraint. "However, there are some indications that she was the sole toombie. It's vanishingly unlikely that anyone else in the Company is at risk. Everyone who is expected to have contact with you is regularly swept and has up-to-date security protocols. And everyone in the ship's company was swept before the voyage. Including Ensign Guha. But we found a device in her cabin... ."

"Oh, shit," Roger said.

"I can think of at least twenty ways the device could have made it on board," Pahner continued. "However, that's not the most pressing issue at the moment."

"Your Highness," Captain Krasnitsky said finally, with a nodded thanks at Pahner, "Captain Pahner is correct. How they got to Guha is less important than what she did to us, I'm afraid. She managed to attach explosive devices to several of the tunnel drive plasma conduits. When they went off, we nearly lost Engineering entirely from an unvented plasma core leak. When the plasma breach was detected, the automated systems were supposed to shut off deuterium flow, but the next bead in the magazine was a worm program that she apparently dumped into the control systems. It cut out the safety interlocks, so the plasma kept venting... ."

The captain stopped and wiped his face, trying to find the right words to report the disaster, but Pahner did it for him.

"We've lost all but one fusion plant, Your Highness," the stone-faced Marine said. "Tunnel drive is off-line. Phase drive is off-line. The chief engineer got the flow shut down manually, but a plasma blast took her out right after she did it. And she was our only fully qualified engineering repair officer."

"A physical and cyber attack." The prince sounded stunned. "Against a member of the Imperial Family?"

"Yes, Your Highness," Pahner said with the bleak smile of the truly pissed professional. "Lovely, don't you think? And it wasn't as if they were going to stop there. We've got worm programs and viruses in every major subsystem: Navigation, Fire Control—"

"And Environmental," Krasnitsky interrupted with a shake of his head. "Well, had. I'm pretty sure we got them all wiped out, but we've taken some heavy casualties in Engineering, and—"

"I was 'pretty sure' there wasn't anything like them on board to begin with!" Pahner snapped angrily. "We need to be more than 'pretty sure,' Captain."

"Agreed, Captain," the captain said shortly. He stood and straightened his back. "Your Highness, with your permission, I need to get back to my ship. I have high hopes that we can make sufficient repairs to get us to a habitable planet. Although," he turned and looked at the granite-faced Pahner again, "the system we have to make for..."

He let his voice trail off and shrugged, and Roger nodded, with a dazed expression.

"Of course, Captain. You need to get back to work. Good luck. Call me if you need anything."

He realized how fatuous the last sentence sounded even as it dropped from his lips. What the heck could he do that trained and experienced crew members couldn't? Cook? But the already exhausted captain paid no attention to the silliness of the remark. He simply bowed, and stepped past Pahner and out of the cabin.

The hatch closed behind him, and Pahner gave the prince another bleak smile.

"What the Captain didn't mention, Your Highness, is where we're headed."

"Which is where?" the prince asked warily.

"Marduk, Your Highness."

The prince searched his memory, but found nothing. A quick check of his implanted database found the planet, but it was simply listed as a Class Three imperial planet. A toot had a fairly large memory, but much of it was taken up by the interaction protocols. The remainder was filled with data which, in Roger's case, anyway, was selected at the user's discretion. Now the entry flashed across the surface of his consciousness as figures and pictures scrolled across his vision. Most of the data was textual and symbolic, the better to crowd into the memory allocation, and he frowned thoughtfully as he scanned it. The world maintained an imperial post with what sounded like very limited landing facilities, but it wasn't even an associate member—just a place where the Empire had planted its flag.

"It's one of ours," he stated carefully.

"Nominally, Your Highness. Nominally," Pahner snorted. "There's a port, but no repair facilities—certainly none capable of repairing one of these assault ships. There's an automated refueling post over one of the gas giants which is owned by TexAmP, but the port is locally managed. Out on the back of beyond like it is, who knows what's actually going on?"

Pahner consulted his own toot and frowned much more unhappily than Roger had.

"The only intel note I have on the region is that the Saints might be active out here. On the other hand, Your Highness, out here on the frontier about half the time you turn around there's a Saint SpecOps team nosing under the tent." He smiled faintly. "Of course, they probably feel the same way about us."

Pahner consulted his notepad, with its much greater memory, and frowned again.

"The locals are hostile and primitive, the fauna is vicious, the mean temperature is thirty-three degrees centigrade, and it rains five times a day. The region is notorious for Dream Spice smuggling, and piracy is rampant. Of course." He shook his head. "Frankly, Your Highness, I feel like I'm taking you down Fourteenth Street at oh-three hundred on a Saturday night in August dressed in thousand-credit chips."

Fourteenth Street had been in existence since the days when Imperial City had been the District of Columbia, the capital of the former United States, and it had never been a good place to wander. But that was the last thing on Roger's mind at this particular moment, and he rubbed his face and sighed.

"Is there any good news?" The question had a note of a whine in it, and he kicked himself for being such a shit. Everyone else was busting their butts to save his sorry ass. The least he could do was not whine about the situation!

Pahner's face tightened.

"Well, you're still breathing, Your Highness. So I haven't failed my charge yet. And I think the Captain can get the ship to Marduk, which is a blessing. At least in a military ship they can reroute the fixed control runs, although that's going to take a week or more, with most of the Company pitching in alongside the crew to do, pardon the pun, grunt work.

"It's good news that the senior engineer was in the compartment in the middle of the night and reacted fast enough to shut down an out of control reaction. It's good news that we're on a military ship. It's good news that we only got knocked six or seven light-years off course, and not clear into Saint territory. It's good news that we're still breathing. But other than that, no. I can't think of any."

Roger nodded. "You have an interesting definition of good news, Captain. But I see your point. What can I do to help?" he asked, carefully controlling his voice.

"To tell you the truth, Your Highness, the best thing you can do is to stay in your cabin and out of the way. All your presence would do would be to distract the crew and make my guys have to run around using up extra oxygen. So, if you'd stay put, I'd appreciate it. I'll have your meals delivered."

"What about the gym?" Roger asked, his eyes flicking around the tiny cabin.

"Until Environmental comes back online, none of us are going to be doing much working out, Your Highness. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to work."

Without waiting for permission, Pahner hit the hatch key and let himself out. The hatch cycled shut behind him, leaving Roger to stare at the walls that seemed smaller than ever.

And to listen for the returning circulation of air.