March Upcountry

CHAPTER SIX

"Prince Roger to the bridge, please. Prince Roger to the bridge."

The intercom announcement, backed by a ping on his implant, caught Roger at an inopportune time. He was finally being fitted for a suit of armor, and the process was not going well.

The decision had been made, not without some heated discussion, that although Roger would not be permitted to join any assault on the port facilities, he would go down with the second wave of technical support from the ship. It was only half a victory, from his perspective, but at least Pahner had admitted that since there might still be some hostile fire, breaking out a suit of armor and fitting it to the prince was probably a good idea.

Roger suspected that the captain's rationale was intended as much to get the Marines' charge out of his hair as anything, but it only made sense to put as much security around the Imperial Person as possible. Unfortunately, the fitting was going to be interrupted, and he felt some trepidation as he looked over at the armorer who was glaring at the intercom with his lips drawn back in a snarl.

Since good armorers were much harder to find than good guards, and since their function was an "out of sight, out of mind" one, armorers assigned to The Empress' Own went through a far less stringent winnowing process than the guards and faced only one true criterion: extreme competence. And when there weren't enough volunteers, extremely competent armorers were sometimes "volunteered." This occasionally led to the assignment of persons who, while more or less suitable to take out in public, were not the sort with whom Roger normally dealt.

"So what do we do now?" the prince asked, staring at a hand frozen in an alloy gauntlet. The gauntlet's interface was proving cranky, and the armorer had been deeply engrossed in the debugging process when the announcement came in.

"Will, Yer Highness," said the slight Marine, whose name tag read Poertena, "I guess we git a pocking can opener and cot you out."

It took Roger a moment to translate the sergeant's thick Pinopan accent. Pinopa was a world of widespread archipelagoes and tropical seas which had been settled in the first wave of slow-boat colonization by refugees from the Dragon Wars in Southeast Asia, and although the planet's official language was Standard English, the Pinopan had obviously grown up in a non-English household. Despite the accent, Roger was pretty sure he had "pocking" translated correctly. He hoped, however, that the corporal was exaggerating the rest.

"Should I call them and tell them I'm busy?" Roger asked, unsure how they were going to get him out of the ill-fitted armor in any short period of time. Normally, it was a matter of hitting controls which opened the armor along numerous seams, but given the problems this particular suit had been evincing, the experienced armorer had locked down and tagged out most of the controls. The alternative, in which he wasn't particularly interested, was the possibility of intercepting several hundred amps of current or getting cold-cocked by a flailing fist. Now it would be necessary to reconnect all the contacts before the prince could be extracted.

"New, Yer Highness. I'll have you out in a pocking minute. Tell them yer gonna be ten mikes, and that'll cover it. Besides, I got all this udder pocking suits they need pix." His arms swept around the Armory, where half a dozen suits were up on racks awaiting repair. "Pocking gun-bunnies alles breaking t'eir suits. Pocking passers."

The armorer crossed the room to a disused tool chest and extracted a one-meter wrench. He dragged the mass of metal back over to the prince, who was immobilized by the armor, and looked the noble right in the eye.

"Now, Yer Highness," the slight, dark Marine said, grinning nervously, "t'is ain't gonna hurt a bit."

He swung the giant wrench back like a batter, and, with a grunt of effort, slammed its head into the left upper biceps of the suit with all his might.

Roger grimaced when he realized what was about to happen, but other than an unpleasant vibration, the only effect on the suit was that the connection from the arm piece to the shoulder popped free. The collapsed molecules of the ChromSten armor barely noticed the impact, but Poertena dropped the ersatz hammer and shook his hands.

"Pocking vibration."

He looked at the disconnected arm in satisfaction, then picked the wrench up and maneuvered to the other side.

"I used to use a hammer fer t'is." The right biceps was disconnected with another grunt of effort and another noisy clang. "But my cousin-in-law, he said, 'Ramon. Gets you a wrench, pudder-mocker.' So I gets a wrench. An' tee pudder-mocker was right." He dropped the wrench and reached up into the gap created by the detached arm piece. "Wonce you get tee arms detached, it all over but tee counting." He slid his small hand and forearm up along the prince's back. Roger could feel him fumbling for something, then there was a release of tension as the seam along the rear of the suit's carapace opened. Unfortunately, the suit bent at the shoulders, and that trapped the armorer's forearm in the gap. "Pock," was his only comment. Then—

"Prince, can you sock it op an' push you shoulders pack?"

With a few more contortions, the prince found himself standing in the middle of scattered bits of powered armor. He looked down at his singlet, and chuckled. "So much for modesty."

The armory hatch whooshed opened and a female sergeant in chameleon dress stepped in. She had a cool face with high Slavic cheekbones, and her long brown hair was done up in a bun at the back of her head. The rippling distortion of the chameleon fabric denied any impression of shape, but her quick tread and lithe movements indicated a high level of athleticism. She didn't bat an eye at the half-naked prince or the scattered armor.

"Your Highness, Captain Pahner requests your presence on the bridge."

"Com the Captain and tell him that it took a bit to get out of the armor," Roger said testily. "I'll be there in a minute."

"Yes, Your Highness," the sergeant said blandly and tapped the transmitter button on her side as Roger began getting dressed in the clothes he'd chosen for these few, tense hours. He'd considered combat dress, but decided that it was just too uncomfortable and finally chosen a safari outfit made of a brushed cottonlike material. It wouldn't be appropriate for combat, but it gave a fine aura of adventure and was much more pleasant than the chameleon cloth everyone else had changed into.

Roger watched the sergeant surreptitiously as he dressed. At first, he thought that she was wiggling her jaw to work a bit of food out of her teeth, but he eventually realized that she was having a long subvocal discussion or argument with someone. The throat microphone was almost invisible against her long, tanned neck, and the receiver, of course, was embedded in her mastoid bone.

Finally he was dressed, and he gave the multipocketed shirt a tug and flipped off a bit of lint.

"Ready."

The sergeant touched the hatch control, but stayed behind as the prince left, escorted by the two guards in the passage outside. As the hatch closed, she turned to the armorer who was reassembling the suit on a mannequin rack.

"Poertena," she said in severe tones, "did you do the hammer thing to the Prince?"

"Of course I didn' do tee hammer ting," the armorer said nervously. "I don' do tee hammer ting no more."

"Then what the hell is that wrench doing on the floor?"

"Oh, t'at. I don' do tee hammer ting, I do tee wrench ting."

"Poertena, you start fucking around with the Prince, and Pahner will have your ass for breakfast."

"Pock Pahner," the armorer snapped, gesturing around the compartment. "You see t'at? I got six pocking sets of pocking armor to get ready. You see Pahner helping? You see you helping? I gonna go get reamed by Pahner, or I gonna pix suits?"

"If you need help, ask!" The sergeant's blue eyes flashed, and she crossed her arms and glared at the half-pint armorer. "We're finished loading the boats. I've got two squads sitting around with their thumbs up their butts. They can be down here in a second."

"I don' need a buncha ham-fist clowns pocking up my suits," the armorer said petulantly. "Every time I gets help, they pock up my suits."

"Okay," the sergeant said with a nasty smile. "Tell you what. I'll get Sergeant Julian to help you."

"Oh, nooo," Poertena said as he realized that he'd put himself in a trap with his bitching. "Not Julian!"

"Hey, Troop!" Julian entered the weapons bay, walked up to the nearest trooper, who was a recent join from Sixth Fleet, put a hand on her shoulder, and grasped her hand for a firm handshake. "Glad you could make it." He gestured with his chin at the plasma rifle the trooper was preparing to disassemble. "You need some help with that there plasma thingamajig?"

The plasma rifle was the IMC's version of a squad automatic weapon. It weighed six kilos, and was supplied by external powerpacks which weighed two kilos each and were good for three to twelve shots, depending on the weapon's discharge settings. The "basic load" for a plasma gunner was twelve packs, the gunners normally carried up to thirty packs in their rucksacks, and their squad mates usually distributed another thirty among them. If there was one thing in the universe a Marine squad hated, it was running out of plasma ammo.

This particular squad from First Platoon had gathered in the bay for one last cleaning of weapons, and since the plasma rifle had a mass of subcomponents, it was natural that the gregarious Julian, from Third Platoon, would offer to help. The new private had just started to smile when her fire team leader spoke up.

"Don't do it, gal," Corporal Andras said.

"What?" Julian affected a hurt expression. "You don't think I can help this rookie trooper?"

The trooper, Nassina Bosum, had just spent six months in the Husan Action before reporting as a Bronze Barbarian. She opened her mouth to retort angrily that she was anything but a rookie, but was cut off by her team leader.

"Oh, you'll help all right... ." Andras muttered.

"Seven seconds," Julian said with a smile, and the corporal eyed him beadily.

"No way." There were over forty subcomponents in the M-96 plasma rifle. There was no way to disassemble it completely in seven seconds. Not even for the legendary Julian.

Julian reached into a breast pocket and extracted a chip. "Ten creds says I can do it in seven seconds."

"Impossible!" Bosum snapped, forgetting the implied insult. The standard was over a minute; nobody could disassemble a plasma rifle that fast.

"Put your money where your mouth is," Julian said with a smile, and tossed the chip onto the table.

"I'll take some of that," a grenadier said from down the table, and the squad leader, Sergeant Koberda, pushed forward to manage the piles. Finally there were two chips on Julian's side, and a pile of five- and ten-credit chips opposite.

"Who bet on Julian?"

"I did," Andras said sourly. "He's taken my money every other time."

"We ready?" Julian asked, his hands hovering over the plasma rifle.

"Uh, hang on," said one of the bead riflemen, pulling a helmet out from under his station chair and putting it on his head. "Okay," he said, tapping a control so that the ballistic-protection visor extruded. "Fine by me."

Sergeant Koberda touched the plasma gunner on the shoulder.

"You might wanna step back," he said with a little warning wrinkle of the nose. He suited action to words himself, then put his arms over his head, and the gunner saw others do the same.

"Wha... ?" Bosum began, but the squad leader had already activated the timer in his toot and said: "Go!"

Removing the compression pin to begin the disassembly process took the longest, just over a third of a second. The new troop watched in awe until the first magneto ring bounced off her skull. Then she realized that pieces of the weapon were flying all over the compartment and started to yell for the sergeant to stop... just as the last bit of component flew across the open space and bounced off a bulkhead.

"Done!" Julian yelled, raising his hands.

"Six point four-three-eight seconds," Koberda announced morosely, consulting his toot as he kicked aside a capacitor.

"Thank you, thank you, ladies and gentlemen," Julian said, bowing and splitting the heap of chips into two equal piles. He slid one across to Andras, picked up his own, extracted a bundle of other chips large enough to choke a unicorn, and added the squad's offerings to the bundle. "Always a pleasure," he added, and headed for the next compartment.

Corporal Bosum looked around the compartment, trying to figure out where all the pieces of her weapon had gotten to.

"Does he do this often?" she asked sourly.

"Every chance we give him," Andras said. He picked up a capacitor ring and tossed it to her. "But sooner or later, he's gotta lose."

"Sergeant Julian to the Armor Bay," chimed the intercom. "Sergeant Julian to the Armor Bay."

"Oh, man," Koberda said. "That was Despreaux. Despreaux, Poertena, and Julian all in the same compartment! I'd rather be on the bridge!"

Roger tugged down the skirts of his safari jacket and flipped off an imaginary bit of fluff before nodding at the guard to trigger the hatch command. The guard waited patiently, then tapped the green square and stepped through the hatch to do an automatic sweep for hostiles. What the sweep turned up was a massive amount of tension.

Roger stepped over the now tape- and padding-covered control runs and crossed to the tac center. He took a stance with his feet shoulder-width apart and his hands behind his back, nodded coolly at Krasnitsky and Pahner, and then glanced at the rippling tactical display. His cool demeanor vanished abruptly, and his hand flew forward to point at the red icon in the hologram.

"Look! There's a—"

"We know, Your Highness," Pahner said stonily. "Another cruiser."

"It hasn't moved out yet," Krasnitsky said with a sigh. "It's probably warming up its pulse nodes because we haven't slowed down." He rubbed his stubbly jaw and sighed again. "The XO has been hailing the first one. It wants us to begin decelerating to prepare for boarding. It's claiming to be an imperial cruiser, HMS Freedom, but it's not. For one thing, the Freedom is a cruiser carrier, not a cruiser. For another, its captain has a Caravazan accent."

"Saints." Roger's mouth felt dry.

"Yes, Your Highness," Pahner said. He didn't comment on the obviousness of the conclusion. "Probably," he corrected. "Whoever they are, the worst-case scenario is Saints. So we assume it's them."

"But, Captain," the prince said, looking at Krasnitsky, "can your ship win against another cruiser?"

Krasnitsky looked around the bridge. Not a hair had twitched, but he knew better than to have that discussion in public.

"Perhaps we should step into the briefing room," he suggested.

Once the hatch had closed, he turned to the prince. "No, Your Highness. There is zero chance that we can survive taking on two cruisers. We're not a full-scale Line ship, just a heavily armed and armored transport. Were we at full strength, without damage, maybe. As it is, there's no chance."

"So what do we do?" Roger looked from Pahner to Krasnitsky. "We have to surrender, right?"

It was Pahner's turn to sigh. "That's... not really an option, Your Highness."

"Why ever not?" Roger asked. "I mean," he turned to the grim looking Fleet officer, "you're going to die if you don't!"

Pahner bit his tongue on a sharp rejoinder, but Krasnitsky simply nodded. "Yes, Your Highness, we will."

"But why?" Roger asked, his eyes wide in amazement. "I mean, I know it isn't the proper thing to surrender, but you can't run, and you can't win. So why not?"

"He can't risk their getting their hands on you, Your Highness," Pahner snapped finally.

"But..." Roger began, then stopped to think about it. He pulled his ponytail in frustration. "Why not? I mean, what could they do with... with me, for God's sake? I mean, I could understand if it was Mother, or John, or even Alexandra. But who the heck cares about Roger?" he ended a trifle bitterly. "I don't know any secrets, and I'm not in immediate line for the throne. Why not turn me over to them?"

The prince's face hardened with resolution.

"Captain, I insist that you surrender. As a matter of fact, I order you to. Honor is all well and good, but there is a line between honor and stupidity." He lifted his chin and sniffed. "I will surrender to them myself, with honor. I'll show them who's a MacClintock." The stance would have been improved if there hadn't been a slight quiver in the pronouncement.

"Fortunately, Your Highness, you're not in my chain of command," Krasnitsky said with a wry smile for the bravado. "Major Pahner, I'm going to go get ready for the change in plans. Do you want to try to explain it to him?" With that, he nodded at the prince and left the compartment.

"What?" the prince gasped as the hatch closed behind him. "Hey! I gave you an order!"

"As he said, Your Highness, you're not in his chain of command," Pahner said with a shake of his head. "But you might at least thank him for committing suicide, not berate him."

"There's no reason for them not to surrender," Roger said stubbornly. "This is just stupid!"

Pahner cocked his head and looked at the prince darkly.

"What happens if the Saints get their hands on you, Your Highness?"

"Well," Roger said, thinking about it. "If they tell the Empire, it's war, or they hand me back over. I suppose they could force a few concessions, but they don't want a war."

"And what if they don't tell the Empire right away, Your Highness?"

"Uhmmmm..."

"They can't tamper with your toot, Your Highness; not with its security protocols. But what about psychotropic drugs?" Pahner tilted his head to the other side and raised an eyebrow. "What then?"

"So I make funny noises and bark like a dog," Roger scoffed. Until they were finally fully banned, psychotropic drugs had been common at comedy clubs for the terminally humorless.

"No, Your Highness. My guess—and I'm not privy to these sorts of scenarios—but my guess is that they would have you babble all the state secrets that you know to their 'free and independent' news services."

"But that's the point, Captain Pahner," Roger said with another laugh. "I don't know any state secrets."

"Sure you do, Your Highness. You know all about the Empire's plans to invade Raiden-Winterhowe."

"Captain," the prince said warily, "what are you talking about? Not only are we at peace with Raiden-Winterhowe, but taking them on would be stupid. They've got nearly as good a navy as we do."

"In that case, Your Highness," Pahner said with another smile, "what about the Empire's conspiracy to enslave all the alien species we can find and to terraform planets that have been reserved because of their unique flora and fauna?"

"Captain Pahner, what are you talking about?" the prince demanded. "I've never heard of any of this! And that sounds like Saint rhetoric... ." He stopped. "Oh."

"Or about how your imperial mother eats fetuses for breakfast, or about—"

"I get the point!" the prince snapped. "You're saying that if they get their hands on me I'll be their mouthpiece for all that bullshit they're always spouting."

"Whether you want to or not, Your Highness." Pahner nodded. "And I don't even want to think about what they'll do with your big game hunting record. For that matter, it would make the lives of the rest of the Family worth less than a plugged millicred. If they could kill the rest of the Family, that would make you heir."

"Parliament would impeach me," Roger said with a bitter laugh. "Hell, Parliament would probably impeach me even if the Saints weren't putting words into my mouth. Who the hell is going to trust Roger at the controls?"

"It takes two-thirds to impeach, Your Highness," the captain said darkly.

"Are you suggesting that the Saints could influence a third of Parliament?" Roger was beginning to think he'd stepped through a looking glass and into some sort of weird fantasy universe. There'd always been bodyguards around him, certainly, but no one had ever seriously suggested that he might be a target of another empire's designs. He'd always assumed that the guards were there mainly for show or to keep off the occasional overly smitten female fan. Now he suddenly realized that what they were there for was... sitting on his chest, waiting for the air to evacuate.

"Why?" he asked, quietly, wondering what would make people serve and protect someone that even he didn't like looking back at him in the mirror.

"Well," Pahner replied, not understanding the true question, "the Saints want to ensure that humanity doesn't expand further into uncontaminated worlds. It's a religion to them." He paused, unsure how to go on. "I'd assumed that you'd been briefed, Your Highness."

Actually, it was common knowledge. The Church of Ryback had a few outlets in the capital, all heavily financed by the Saints, and they ran regular commercials. For that matter, it was a common subject for discussion in civics and history classes, which made Pahner wonder about the prince's education. Asking what the Saints wanted made no sense at all, given that O'Casey had been Roger's tutor for years and she had a quadruple doctorate in, among other things, history.

"No. No, that's not what I meant. I meant..."

Roger looked into the bleak face of the Marine and realized that this was not a good time to get the question off his chest. And even if he asked it, Pahner—as most people seemed to do when Roger asked questions—would probably just provide some opaque answer that ensured deeper confusion.

"I meant, 'What.' What do we do now?"

"We're going to go for the longshot, Your Highness," Pahner said, nodding now that the question made sense again. He suspected that something else had gone on in that airhead, but what it had been he neither knew nor particularly cared. There was a mission to perform, and it looked to be a long one.

"We're going to reload the boats. With the cruiser topside, taking the port by assault is out. So we're going to have to land on the planet and make our way to the port on foot. We can't let anyone know we're there, or they'll slaughter us, so we're going to have to come in on a ballistic approach and land quite a way around the planet from the port. Marduk was an afterthought to the Empire, so it's never been fully surveyed, and there's no satellite net, so the port won't be able to detect us as long as we stay out of line of sight. Once we reach the port, we capture a ship and head for home."

It sounded easy put like that. Right.

"So we're going to land on the backside then take the shuttles across... um, I can't remember the term. Low to the ground so they don't get spotted?"

"Nape of the Earth," Pahner answered somberly. "No, Your Highness. Unfortunately, we're going to have to launch nearly five light-minutes out. We're going to put three platoons and a few support personnel from the ship in four assault shuttles: enough room for a reinforced company. The rest of the load is going to be fuel for deceleration. When we're down, if we have enough fuel to do a couple of klicks we'll be lucky."

"So how are we going to get to the port?" Roger asked, dreading the answer.

"We're going to walk, Your Highness," the captain said with a grim smile.