Weber, David - March Upcountry 03 - March to the Stars

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Prolog

The body was in a state of advanced decomposition. Time, and the various insect analogues of Marduk, had worked their way with it, and what was left was mostly skeleton with a few bits of clinging tendon and skin. Temu Jin would have liked to say it was the worst thing he'd ever seen, but that would've been a lie.
He turned over one of the skeletal hands and ran a sensor wand across it. The catacomb-like tomb was hot and close, especially with three more team members and one of the gigantic Mardukans packed into it with him. The heat on Marduk was always bad -- the "temperate" regions were a fairly constant thirty-five degrees -- but in the tomb, with the remnant stink of decomposition (not to mention the smell of the unwashed assholes he'd arrived with), it was like an antechamber to Hell. 
One that was already inhabited.
There was no question that its occupants had been Imperial Marines. Or, at least, people with Marine nano packs. The trace materials and surviving nanites were coded, and the sensor practically screamed "Imperials." But the questions were how they had gotten here ... and why they were here? He could think of several reasons, and he liked the stink of all of them less than he did the stench in this room.
"Ask them again, geek," Dara said in a tight voice. The survey team leader choked for a second -- again -- then hawked, spat, and finished by blowing out his nose on the floor. Marduk was hell on his sinuses. "Talk gook. Make sure this is all there was."
Jin looked up at the towering Mardukan and ran the translation through his "toot." The tutorial implant, lodged just inside his mastoid bone, took his chosen words, translated them into the local Mardukan dialect, and adjusted his speaking voice to compensate.
"My illustrious leader wishes to ensure, once again, that there were no survivors."
Mardukan expressions were not the same as those of humans. Among other things, their faces had fewer muscles, and much of their expressiveness came from eloquent gestures of their four arms. But the body language of this Mardukan was closed, as well. Part of that might be from the fact that he was missing one arm from the elbow down. Currently, there was a rather nice prosthetic hook in its place, razor-sharp on both sides. So Dara had to be either stupid, arrogant, or both to ask, for the fifth time, if the Voitan representative was lying.
"Alas," T'leen Targ said with a sorrowful but cautious sweep of his arms (and hook), "there were no survivors. A few lasted a pair of days, but then they, too, succumbed. We did all we could for them. That we had been only a day sooner! The battle was great; your friends warred upon more Kranolta than the stars in the sky! They stacked them against the walls of the city and cut them down with their powerful fire-lances! Had our relief force but been sooner, some might have survived! Woe! But we were too late, alas. However, they did break the power of the Kranolta, and for that Voitan was and is eternally thankful. It was because of that gratitude that we interred them here, with our own honored dead, in hopes that someday others of their kind might come for them. And ... here you are!"
"Same story," Jin said, turning back to the team leader.
"Where's the weapons? Where's the gear?" Dara demanded. Unlike the commo-puke's, his toot was an off-the-shelf civilian model and couldn't handle the only translation program available. It was loaded with the local patois used around the distant starport, but handling multiple dialects was beyond its capability, and Jin's system couldn't cross load the translation files. 
"Some of that stuff should have survived," the team leader continued. "And there were supposed to be more of them at the last city. Where'd the rest of 'em go?"
"My illustrious leader asks about our dear friends' weapons and equipment," Jin said. The communications technician had had fairly extensive dealings with the natives, both back at the distant starport and on the hellish odyssey to this final resting place of the human castaways. And of them all, this one made him the most nervous. He'd almost rather be in the jungles again. Which was saying a lot.
Marduk was an incredibly hot and stable planet. The result was a nearly worldwide jungle, filled with the most vicious predators in the known worlds. And it seemed that the search team -- or assassination team, depending on how one viewed it -- had run into all of them on its journey here.
The starport's atmospheric puddle-jumpers had flown them to the dry lakebed where the four combat shuttles had landed. There was no indication, anywhere, of what unit had flown those shuttles, or where they had come from. All of them had been stripped of any information, and their computers purged. Just four shuttles, totally out of fuel, in the middle of five thousand square kilometers of salt.
There had, however, been a clear trail off the lakebed, leading up into the mountains. The search team had followed it, flying low, until it reached the lowland jungles. After that it had just ... disappeared into the green hell.
Their initial request to return to base had been denied. It was unlikely, to say the very least, that the shuttle crews might survive to reach civilization. Even taking the local flora and fauna out of the equation, the landing site was on the far side of the planet from the starport, and unless they had brought along enough dietary supplements, they would starve to death long before they could make the trip. But unlikely or not, their fate had to be known. Not so much because anyone would ever ask, or care, about them. Because if there was any shred of a possibility that they could reach the base, or worse, get off planet, they had to be eliminated.
That consideration had been unstated, and it was also one of the reasons that the tech wasn't sure he would survive the mission. The "official" reason for the search was simply to rescue the survivors. But the composition of the team made it much more likely that the real reason was to eliminate a threat. Dara was the Governor's official bully-boy. Any minor "problem" that could be fixed with a little muscle or a discreetly disappearing body tended to get handed to the team leader. Otherwise, he was pretty useless. As demonstrated by his inability to see what was right in front of his eyes.
The rest of the team was cut from the same cloth. All fourteen of them - there'd been sixteen . . . before the local fauna got a shot at them on the trek here - were from the locally hired "guard" force, and all were wanted on one planet or another. Aware that maintaining forces on Class Three planets was difficult, at best, the distant Imperial capital allowed local governors wide latitude in the choice of personnel. Governor Moser had, by and large, hired what were still known as "Schultzes," guards who could be trusted to see, do, and hear nothing. Still, there were those special occasions when a real problem cropped up. And to deal with those problems, he had secured a "special reaction force" composed of what could graciously be called "scum." If, of course, one wanted to insult scum.
Jin was well aware that he was not an "official" member of the Special Force. As such, this mission might be a test for entry, and in many ways, that could be a good thing. There was one huge issue associated with the mission even so, however: it might involve fighting the Marines. He had several reasons, not the least of which was the likelihood of being blasted into plasma, to not want to fight Marines. But the mission had been angling steadily that way.
Now, however, it seemed all his worry had been for naught. The last of the Marines had died here, in this lonely outpost, overrun by barbarians before their friendly "civilized" supporters could arrive to save them!
Sure they did, he thought, and snorted mentally. Either they wandered off and these guys are covering for them ... or else the locals finished them off themselves and are graciously willing to give these 'Kranolta' the credit. The only problem at this point is figuring out which.
"Alas," the local said yet again. He seemed remarkably fond of that word, Jin thought cynically as Trag gestured in the direction of the distant jungle somewhere outside the tomb. "The Kranolta took all their equipment with them. There was nothing left for us to give to their friends. That is, to you."
And you can believe as much or as little of that as you like, Jin thought. But the answer left a glaring hole he had to plug. And hope his efforts never came to light.
"The scummy says the barbs threw all the gear into the river," he mistranslated.
"Poth!" Dara snarled. "That means it's all trashed. And we can't trace the power packs! Even trashed, we could've gotten something for them."
What an imbecile, Jin thought. Dara must have been hiding behind the door when brains were given out.
When a body is looted, the looters very rarely take every scrap of clothing. Nor was that the only peculiarity. There was one clinging bit of skin on the corpse before him which had clearly been cut away in an oval, as if to remove a tattoo after the person was dead ... and there were no weapons or even bits of weapons anywhere in sight. For that matter, the entire battle site had been meticulously picked over to remove every trace of evidence. Some of the scars from plasma gun fire had even been covered up. The barbarians, according to the locals' time line, could not possibly have swept the battlefield that well, no matter how addicted to trophy-taking they might be, before the "civilized" forces arrived to finish driving them off.
The last city they'd passed through had also been remarkably reticent about the actions the objects of the search team's curiosity had taken on their way through. The crews of the downed shuttles had apparently swept into town, destroyed and looted a selected few of the local "Great Houses," and then swept out again, just as rapidly. According to the local king and the very few nobles they'd been permitted to question, at least. And in that town, the search team had been followed everywhere by a large enough contingent of guards to make attempts to question anyone else contraindicated.
All of that proved one thing to Jin, and it took a sadistic, snot-filled idiot like Dara not to see it.
The bodies had been sterilized.
Somebody wanted to make damn sure that no one could determine who these Marines had been without a DNA database. The dead Marines' toots were already a dead issue, of course. Their built-in nanites had obediently reduced them to half-crumbled wreckage once their owners were dead. That was a routine security measure, but the rest of this definitely went far beyond "routine." Which meant these particular people were something other than standard Marines. Either Raiders or ... something else. And since the locals were covering for them so assiduously, it was glaringly obvious that all of them hadn't died.
All of which meant that there was a short company -- from the number of shuttles, Jin had put their initial force at a company -- of an Imperial special operations unit out there wandering in the jungle. And the only reasonable target for their wandering was a certain starport.
Lovely.
He pushed aside a bit of the current corpse's hair, looking for any clue. The Marine had been female, with longish, dishwater blond hair. That was the only thing about the skeletal remains which would have been recognizable to anyone but a forensic pathologist, which Jin was not. He had some basic training in forensics, but all he could tell about this corpse was that a blade had half-severed the left arm. However, under the cover of the hair, there was a tiny earring. Just a scrap of bronze, with one ten-letter word on it.
Jin was unable to keep his eyes from widening, but he didn't freeze. He was far too well trained to do something so obvious. He simply moved his hand in a smooth motion, and the tiny earring was ripped from the decaying ear, a scrap of skin still dangling from it.
"I'm not finding anything," he said, getting to his feet as he willed his face to total immobility.
He looked at the native, who returned his regard impassively. The local "king" was named T'Kal Vlan. He'd greeted the search team as long-lost cousins, all the time giving the impression that he wanted to sell them a rug. For T'leen Targ, though, it always seemed to be a tossup between selling them a rug and burying them in one. Now the local scratched his horn with his hook and nodded ... in a distinctly human fashion.
"I take it that you did not find anything," Targ said. "I'm so sorry. Will you be taking the bodies with you?"
"I think not," Jin replied. Standing as they were, the team leader was behind the local. Jin reached out with his left hand, and the Mardukan took it automatically, another example of acculturation to Terrans. Jin wondered if the Marines had realized how many clues they were unavoidably leaving behind. Given who they apparently were, it was probable, for all the proof of how hard they'd worked to avoid it. As he shook the Mardukan's slime-covered hand, a tiny drop of bronze was left behind, stuck in the mucus.
"I don't think we'll be back," the commo tech said. "But you might want to melt this down so nobody else finds it."
In the palm of the native's hand, the word "BARBARIANS" was briefly impressed into the mucus.
Then it disappeared.

Chapter One

"It's a halyard."
"No, it's a stay. T'e headstay."
The thirty-meter schooner Ima Hooker swooped closehauled into aquamarine swells so perfect they might have been drawn from a painting by the semi-mythical Maxfield Parrish. Overhead, the rigging sang in a faint but steady breeze. That gentle zephyr, smelling faintly of brine, was the only relief for the sweltering figures on her deck.
Julian mopped his brow and pointed to the offending bit of rigging.
"Look, there's a rope -- "
"A line," Poertena corrected pedantically.
"Okay, there's a line and a pulley --"
"T'at's a block. Actually, it's a deadeye."
"Really? I thought a block was one of those with cranks."
"No, t'at's a windlass."
Six other schooners kept formation on Hooker. Five of them were identical to the one on whose deck Julian and Poertena stood: low, trim hulls with two masts of equal height and what was technically known as a "topsail schooner rig." What that meant was that each mast carried a "gaff sail," a fore-and-aft sail cut like a truncated triangle with its head set from an angled yard -- the "gaff" -- while the foremast also carried an entire set of conventional square sails. The after gaff sail - the "mainsail," Julian mentally corrected; after all, he had to get something right - had a boom; the forward gaff sail did not. Of course, it was called the foresail whereas the lowest square sail on that mast was called the "fore course," which struck him as a weird name for any sail. Then there were the "fore topsail," "fore topgallant," and "fore royal," all set above the fore course.
The second mast (called the "mainmast" rather than the "aftermast," for some reason Julian didn't quite understand, given that the ship had only two masts to begin with and that it carried considerably less canvas than the foremast), carried only a single square topsail, but compensated by setting a triangular "leg of mutton" fore-and-aft sail above the mainsail. There were also staysails set between the masts, not to mention a flying jib, outer jib, and inner jib, all set between the foremast and the bowsprit.
The sixth schooner was different -- a much bigger, less agile, somehow unfinished-looking vessel with a far deeper hull and no less than five masts - and, at the insistence of Captain Armand Pahner, Imperial Marines, rejoiced in the name of Snarleyow. The smaller, more nimble ships seemed to regard their larger sister with mixed emotions. No one would ever have called Snarleyow anything so gauche as clumsy, perhaps, but she was clearly less fleet of foot, and her heavier, more deliberate motion almost seemed to hold the others back. 
All six of the ships carried short-barreled cannon along their sides. Snarleyow mounted fifteen of them to a side, which gave her a quarter again the broadside armament of any of her consorts, but all of them carried a single, much larger cannon on a pivot mount towards the bow, as well. And every single one of them had ropes everywhere. Which was the problem.
"Okay." Julian drew a deep breath, then continued in a tone of massive calm. "There's a line and a pu - block. So why isn't it a halyard?"
"Halyard hauls up t'e sail. T'e stay, it hold t'e pocking mast up."
The Pinopan had grown up around the arcane terminology of the sea. Despite the impression of landsmen -- that the arcana existed purely to cause them confusion -- there was a real necessity for the distinct terminology. Ships constantly encounter situations where clear and unambiguous orders may mean the difference between life and death. Thus the importance of being able to tell hands to pull upon a certain "rope" in a certain way. Or, alternatively, to let it out slowly, all the while maintaining tension.
Thus such unambiguous and unintelligible orders as "Douse the mainsail and make fast!" Which does not mean throw water on it to increase speed.
"So which one's the halyard?" Julian asked plaintively.
"Which halyard? Countin' t'e stays'ils, t'ere's seventeen pocking halyards on t'is ship...."
Hooker's design had been agreed upon as the best possible for the local conditions. She and her consorts had been created, through human design and local engineering, to carry Prince Roger and his bodyguards -- now augmented by various local forces -- across a previously unexplored ocean. Not that there hadn't, as always, been the odd, unanticipated circumstance requiring last-minute improvisation. The fact that a rather larger number of Mardukan allies than originally anticipated had been added to Roger's force had created the need for more sealift capacity. Especially given the sheer size of the Mardukan cavalry's mounts. Civan were fast, tough, capable of eating almost anything, and relatively intelligent. One thing they were not, however, was petite. Hardly surprising, since the cavalrymen who rode into battle on their backs averaged between three and three and a half meters tall.
Carrying enough of them to sea aboard the six original schooners had turned out to be impossible once the revised numbers of local troopers had been totaled up. So just when everyone had thought they were done building, they -- and somewhere around a quarter of the total shipbuilding force of K'Vaern's Cove -- had turned to to build the Snarleyow. Fortunately, the local labor force has learned a lot about the new building techniques working on the smaller ships, but it had still been a backbreaking, exhausting task no one had expected to face. Nor had Poertena been able to spend as much time refining her basic design, which was one reason she was ugly, slabsided, and slow, compared to her smaller sisters. She was also built of green timber, which had never been seasoned properly and could be expected to rot with dismaying speed in a climate like Marduk's. But that was all right with Prince Roger and his companions. All they really cared about was that she last long enough for a single voyage.
Although she was scarcely in the same class for speed or handiness as Poertena's original, twin-masted design, Snarleyow was still enormously more efficient than any native Mardukan design. She had to be. The nature of the local weather was such that there was an almost unvarying wind from the northeast, yet that was the very direction in which the ships had to sail. That was the reason for their triangular sails. Their fore-and-aft rig -- a technology the humans had introduced -- made it possible for them to sail much more sharply into the wind than any local vessel, with its clumsy and inefficient, primitve square-rigged design, had ever been able to do. Similar ships had sailed the seas of Earth all the way up to the beginning of the Information Age, and they remained the mainstay for water worlds like Pinopa.
"Now I'm really confused," Julian moaned. "All right. Tying something down is 'making fast.' A rope attached to a sail is a 'sheet.' A rope tied to the mast is a 'stay.' And a bail is the iron thingamajig on the mast."
"T'e boom," Poertena corrected, wiping away a drop of sweat. The day, as always, was like a steambath, even with the light wind that filled the sails. "T'e bail is on t'e boom. Unless you're taking on water. T'en you bail it out."
"I give up!"
"Don' worry about it," the Pinopan said with a chuckle. "You only been at t'is a few weeks. Besides, you got me an' all t'ose four-armed monstrosities to do t'e sailing. You jus' pull when we say 'heave,' and stop when we say 'avast.'"
"And hold on when you say 'belay.'"
"And hold on tight when we say belay."
"I blame Roger for this," Julian said with another shake of his head.
"You blame Roger for what?" a cool female voice asked from behind him.
Julian looked over his shoulder and grinned at Nimashet Despreaux. The female sergeant was frowning at him, but it slid off the irrepressible NCO like water off a duck.
"It's all Roger's fault that we're in this predicament," he replied. "If it wasn't for him, I wouldn't have to learn this junk!"
Despreaux opened her mouth, but Julian held up a hand before she could retort.
"Calmly, Nimashet. I know it's not Roger's fault. It was a joke, okay?"
Despreaux's frown only underscored the classical beauty of her face, but it was dark with worry.
"Roger's ... still not taking Kostas' death very well, Adib. I just don't.... I don't want anybody even joking about this being his fault," she said, and Poertena nodded in agreement.
"T'e Prince didn't maroon us here, Julian. T'e Saints an' whoever set t'at pocking tombie on us marooned us." The diminutive armorer shrugged. "I guess it wasn't very pocking punny."
"Okay," a chagrined Julian said. "You've got a point. Roger has been sort of dragging around, hasn't he?"
"He's been in a funk, is what you mean," Despreaux said.
"Well, I'm sure there's some way you could cheer him up," Julian suggested with an evil grin.
"Oh, pock," Poertena muttered, and backed up quickly. After a crack like that the fecal matter was about to hit the impeller.
"Now this is a mutinous crew, if ever I've seen one," Sergeant Major Kosutic said. She looked from Despreaux's furious face to Julian's 'butter-wouldn't-melt-in-my-mouth' expression and frowned. "All right, Julian. What did you say this time?"
"Me?" Julian asked with enormous innocence but little real hope of evading the consequences. The sergeant major had an almost miraculous sense of timing; she always turned up just as the action was hottest. Which come to think of it, described her in bed as well. "What would I have said?"
Now he looked from the sergeant major to the fulminating Despreaux, decided that coming clean offered his best chance of survival, and shrugged with a repentant expression.
"I just suggested that there might be a way to cheer Roger up," he admitted, then, unable to help himself, grinned again. "I guarantee I'm right. God knows I've been more cheerful lately."
The sergeant major rolled her eyes and crossed her arms.
"Well if that's your attitude, you'll damned well be less cheerful for a while!" She looked at the three noncoms and shook her head. "This is a clear case of His Evilness' finding work for idle hands. Poertena, I thought you were supposed to be conducting a class in rigging."
"I was trying to get Julian up to speed, Sergeant Major," the Pinopan said, tossing a length of rope to the deck. "T'at's not going too good."
"I've got all the stuff loaded in my toot," Julian said with a shrug. "But some of the data seems to be wrong, and the rest just seems to be hitting and bouncing. I mean, what's 'luff' mean?"
"It's when the sail flaps," Kosutic replied, shaking her head. "Even I know that, and I hate sailing. I guess we should've known better than to try to teach Marines to be sailors."
"We don't really need them, Sergeant Major," Poertena told her. "We've got plenty of Mardukans."
"We need to work on our entry techniques, anyway," Julian pointed out. "We've been engaging in all these open-field maneuvers, but when we take the spaceport, it's going to be mostly close quarters. Whole different style, Smaj. And we haven't really done any of that since Q'Nkok."
The sergeant major frowned, then nodded. She was sure Julian had come up with that because it was more fun than learning to sail. But that didn't mean he was wrong.
"Okay. Concur. If we wanted sailors, we should've left you on the DeGlopper and brought Navy pukes. I'll talk the change over with the Old Man. If he approves, we'll start working on close combat techniques for the rest of the voyage."
"Besides," Poertena pointed out gloomily, "we might need them before then. I've never seen a place like t'is t'at didn't have pirates."
"And then there's the 'fish of unusual size.'" Julian chuckled and gestured out over the emerald waters. "So far, so good, right?"
"Don't laugh," Despreaux muttered. "I read that log. I do not want to tangle with something big enough to bite a boat in half, even a small one."
"Well," Kosutic said, with a tug on her earlobe. "If worse comes to worst, we can always give Roger a pocket knife and throw him at it."
"Ooooo!" Julian shook his head. "You haven't even met one of these little fishies and you hate them that much?"
* * *
Prince Roger Ramius Sergei Alexander Chiang MacClintock, Heir Tertiary to the Throne of Man, turned away from the creaming waves to look across the shipboard bustle. The sergeant major had just broken up the huddle around Julian, and the four NCOs were headed in four different directions, and he took a moment extra to watch Despreaux make for the fo'c'sle. He knew his depression was beginning to affect her, and that he needed to snap out of it. But the loss of Kostas was the one wound that would not seem to heal, and he'd had too much time to think about it since the frantic haste of getting all seven ships built had eased into the voyage itself. For the first time in what seemed forever, he wasn't engaged in frantic efforts to train native troops, or build ships, or simply hike through endless jungle. For that matter, nothing was actively attempting to kill him, devour him, assassinate him, or kidnap him, and a part of him was distantly amazed to discover just how much having that respite depressed him. Having time to think, he had discovered, was not always a good thing.
He supposed he could pull up the list of casualties on his implanted toot. But there wouldn't be much point. When they'd first landed, the Marines of Bravo Company, Bronze Battalion, had been just so many faces. And the officers and crew of the Assault Ship DeGlopper, long since expanding plasma, had just been blurs. But since sometime after the pilots of the shuttles had brought them to deadstick landings on this backward hell, sometime between the internecine fighting that had erupted at the first city they'd visited and the furious battles with the Kranolta barbarians, the Marines had become more than faces. In many ways, they had become more than family -- as close as a part of his own body.
And each loss had been like flaying skin.
First the loss of half the company in Voitan, fighting the Kranolta. Then the constant low-level seepage as they battled their way across the rest of the continent. More good troops killed in Diaspra against the Boman, and then a handful more in Sindi against the main Boman force. The ones that fell to the damnbeasts and the vampire moths. And the crocs. The ever-be-damned damncrocs.
And one of those had been Kostas..
Kostas. Not a Marine, or even one of the Navy shuttle pilots. Not one of the Mardukan mercenaries who had become welded to the Bronze Barbarians. Roger could, to an extent, justify their losses. The entire purpose of Bravo Company, and of the mercenaries, was to protect the once lily-white skin of Prince Roger Ramius Sergei Alexander Chiang MacClintock. But that wasn't Kostas' purpose. He was just a valet. A nobody. A nonentity. Just ... Kostas.
Just the man who had stood by Roger when the rest of the world thought he was a complete loss. Just the man who, thrown the responsibility for feeding and clothing the Company on its march, had taken it on without a qualm. Just the man who had found food where there was none, and prepared sumptuous dishes from swamp water and carnivores. Only the man who had been a father figure to him.
Only Kostas.
And not even lost to enemy action. Lost to a damncroc, five meters of rubbery skin and teeth. One of the innumerable hazards of the damned jungles of Marduk. Roger had killed the croc almost immediately, but it had been too late. He'd killed dozens of them since, but all of them were too late for Kostas. Too late for his ... friend.
He hadn't had many friends growing up. Even as the least little scion of the Imperial Family, Roger had faced a future of power and wealth. And from the youngest age, there had been sycophants aplenty swarming around the prince. The innumerable Byzantine plots of Imperial City had sought constantly to co-opt one self-absorbed prince. And from the time he was a teenager, it had been Kostas -- cautious, mousey Kostas -- who had helped him thread the rocks and shoals. Often without Roger ever knowing it.
And now, he was gone. Just ... gone. Like Hooker and Bilali and Pentzikis and ... gods. The list went on and on.
Oh, they'd left a few widows on the other side in their wake. They'd made alliances when and where they could, even passed without a ripple in a few places. But more often than not, it had been plasma guns and bead rifles, swords and pikes and a few thousand years of technical and tactical expertise, blasting a swath of destruction a blind man could track because they had no choice. Which created its own problem, because they scarcely needed to be leaving any bread crumb trails behind them. Especially when they already knew they didn't face only "casual" enemies on the planet. True, there were more than enough foes who had become dangers solely because they felt ... argumentative when the Company had needed to cross their territory, but beyond them, Roger and the Barbarians faced the sworn enemies of the Empire and the Imperial House.
The planet Marduk was, technically, a fief of the Empire of Man. In fact, it was officially personally held by the Empress herself, since it had been discovered a few hundred years before by the expanding Empire and promptly claimed in the name of the House of MacClintock. For almost a hundred years, the planet had been no more than a notation on a survey somewhere, though. Then, early in the reign of Roger's grandfather, plans had been advanced for the Sagittarius Sector. Settlers were going to be sent out to the planets in the region, and a "new day of hope" would dawn for the beleaguered poor of the inner worlds. In preparation for the projected wave of expansion, outposts had been established on several of the habitable planets and provided with bare-bones starports. The Imperial government had put some additional seed money into establishing a limited infrastructure and offered highly attractive concessions to some of the Empire's biggest multi-stellar corporations to help produce more, but by and large, the planets in this sector had been earmarked strictly as new homes for the "little people" of the Empire.
Roger supposed the plans had spoken well for his grandfather's altruistic side. Of course, it was that same misplaced altruism and his tendency to trust advisers because of what he thought their characters were which had created most of the problems Roger's Empress Mother had been dealing with, first as Heir Primus and then as Empress, for longer than Roger had been alive. And it had also been an altruism whose hopes had been frustrated more often than not.
As they had been in the case of the Sagittarius Sector project.
Unfortunately for Grandfather's plans, the "poor" of the inner worlds were relatively comfortable with their low-paid work or government stipends. Given a choice between a small but decent apartment in Imperial City or Metrocal or New Glasgow or Delcutta and a small but decent house in a howling wilderness, the "poor" knew which side of their bread was buttered. Especially when the howling wilderness in question was on a planet like Marduk. For one thing, even in Delcutta, people rarely had to worry about being eaten.
So, despite all of the government's plans (and Emperor Andrew's), the sector had languished. Oh, two or three of the star systems in the area had attracted at least limited colonization, and the Sandahl System had actually done fairly well. But Sandahl was on the very fringe of the Sagitarius Sector, more of an appendage of the neighboring Handelmann Sector. For the most part, though, the Sagitarius planetary outposts and their starports had discovered that they were the designated hosts for a party no one came to. Except for the Saints.
One of the less altruistic reasons for the effort to colonize the sector in the first place had been the fact that the Cavaza Empire was expanding in that direction. Unfortunately, the plan to build up a countervailing Imperial presence had failed, and eventually, as the Saints continued their expansion, they had noticed the port installed on the small, mountainous subcontinent of Marduk.
In many ways, Marduk was perfect for the Saints' purposes. The "untouched" world would require very little in "remedy" to return it to its "natural state." Or to colonize. With their higher birthrate, and despite their "green" stand, the Saints were notably expansionist. It was one of the many little inconsistencies which somehow failed to endear them to their interstellar neighbors. And in the meantime, the star system was well placed as a staging point for clandestine operations deeper into the Empire of Man. 
Roger and his Marines were unsure of the conditions on the ground. But after their assault ship/transport, HMS DeGlopper, had been crippled by a programmed "toombie" saboteur, they had needed the closest port to which they could divert, and Marduk had been elected. Unfortunately, they had arrived only to be jumped by two Saint sublight cruisers which had been working in-system along with their globular "tunnel-drive" FTL carrier mother ship. The presence of Cavazan warships had told the Marines that whatever else was going on here, the planetary governor and his "locally" recruited Colonial Guards were no longer working for the Empire. That could be because they were all dead, but it was far more likely that the governor had reached some sort of accommodation with the Saints.
Whatever the fate of the governor might have been, the unpalatable outlines of the Bronze Barbarians' new mission had been abundantly clear. DeGlopper had managed to defeat the two cruisers, but she'd been destroyed in action with all hands herself in the process. Fortunately, the Prince and his Marine bodyguards had gotten away undetected in the assault ship's shuttles while she died to cover their escape and conceal the secret of Roger's presence aboard her. Unfortunately, the only way for the Marines to get Roger home would be to take the spaceport from whoever controlled it and then capture a ship. Possibly in the face of the remaining Cavazan carrier.
It was a tall order, especially for one understrength Marine company, be it ever so elite, shipwrecked on a planet whose brutal climate ate high-tech equipment like candy. The fact that they'd had only a very limited window of time before their essential dietary supplements ran out had only made the order still taller. But Bravo Company of the Empress' Own, was the force which had hammered fifteen thousand screaming Kranolta barbarians into offal. The force which had smashed every enemy in its path across half the circumference of the planet.
Whether it was turncoat Colonial Guards or a Saint carrier wouldn't matter. The Bronze Barbarians, and His Highness' Imperial Mardukan Guards, were going to hammer them into dust, as well.
Of course, that didn't mean all of the hammers were going to survive.
* * *
Armand Pahner chewed a sliver of mildly spicy bisti root and watched the prince out of one eye as Kosutic approached. She was probably going to suggest a change in the training program, and he was going to approve it, since it had become abundantly clear that they were never going to make the Marines "real" sailors in the short voyage across the Northern Sea.
They were just about on the last leg of the journey they had begun so many months before, and he couldn't be more pleased. There would be a hard fight at the end. Taking the spaceport and, even more importantly, a functional ship would take some solid soldiering. But compared to the rest of the journey, it ought to be a picnic.
He chuckled grimly to himself, not for the first time, at how easily and completely a "routine" voyage could go wrong. Assuming they got back to report, this would definitely be one for the security school to study. Murphy's fell presence was obvious everywhere, from the helplessly programmed saboteur secreted within the loyal ship's company to the poor choices of potential emergency diversion planets, to the presence of Saint forces in the supposedly loyal system.
Once they'd reached the planet's actual surface, of course, things had only gone downhill. The sole redeeming quality of the trip was that they had left Earth guarding what was surely the weakest link in the Imperial Family. Now ... he wasn't. The foppish, useless prince who had left Earth had died somewhere in the steaming jungles of Marduk. The MacClintock warrior who had replaced him had some problems of his own: most seriously, a tendency to brood and an even more dangerous tendency to look for answers in the barrel of a gun. But no one could call him a fop anymore. Not to his face, at least. Not and survive.
In a way, looked at with cold logic, the trip had been enormously beneficial, shipwreck, deaths, and all. Eventually, the old prince -- unthinking, uncommitted, subject to control or manipulation by the various factions in the Imperial Palace -- would probably have caused the deaths of far more than a company of Marines. So the loss of so many of Pahner's Barbarians could almost be counted as a win.
If you looked at it with cold enough logic.
But it was hard to be logical when it was your Marines doing the dying.
* * *
Kosutic smiled at the company commander. She knew damned well what he was pondering, in general, if not specifically. But it never hurt to ask.
"Penny for your thoughts, Captain."
"I'm not absolutely sure what his mother is going to say," the captain replied. It wasn't exactly what he'd been thinking about, but it was part and parcel of his thought process.
"Well, initially, she'll be dealing with disbelief," Kosutic snorted. "Not only that we, and Prince Roger in particular, are alive, but at the change in him. It'll be hard for her to accept. There've been times it seemed the Unholy One Himself was doing the operational planning, but between you and me, he's shaping up pretty well."
"True enough," Pahner said softly, then chuckled and changed the subject. "Speaking of shaping up, though, I take it you don't think we can turn Julian into a swabbie?"
"More along the lines of its not being worth the trouble," Kosutic admitted. "Besides, Julian just pointed out that we've gotten awful shabby at close combat work, and I have to agree. I'd like to set the Company to training on that, and maybe some cross-training with the Mardukan infantry."
"Works for me," Pahner agreed. "Despreaux took the Advanced Tactical Assault Course," he added after double-checking with his toot implant. "Make her NCOIC."
"Ah, Julian took it, too," the sergeant major said. Pahner glanced at her, and she shrugged. "It's not official, because he took it 'off the books.' That's why it's not in his official jacket."
"How'd that happen?" Pahner asked. After this long together, he'd thought he knew everything there was to know about the human troops. But there was always another surprise.
"ATAC is taught by contractors," Kosutic pointed out. "When he couldn't get a slot for the school, he took leave and paid his own way."
"Hmmm." Pahner shook his head doubtfully. "I don't know if I can approve using him for an instructor if he didn't take it through approved channels. Which contractor was it?"
"Firecat, LLC. It's the company Sergeant Major Catrone started after he got out."
"Tomcat?" Pahner shook his head again, this time with a laugh. "I can just see him teaching that class. A couple of times in the jungle, it was like I heard his voice echoing in my head. 'You think this is hot? Boy, you'd best wait to complain in HELL! And that's where you're gonna be if you don't get your head out of your ass!'"
"When in the Unholy One's Fifth Name did you deal with Sergeant Major Catrone?" Kosutic asked. "He'd been retired for at least a decade when I joined the Raiders."
"He was one of my basic training instructors at Brasilia Base," Pahner admitted. "That man made duralloy look soft. We swore that the way they made ChromSten armor was to have him eat nails for breakfast, then collect it from the latrines, because his anus compressed it so hard the atoms got crushed. If Julian passed the course with Tomcat teaching it, he's okay by me. Decide for yourself who should lead the instruction."
"Okay. Consider it done." Kosutic gave a wave that could almost have been classified as a salute, then turned away and beckoned for the other NCOs to cluster back around her.
Pahner nodded as he watched her sketching a plan on the deck. Not be all there was to war, but it was damned well half. And --
His head jerked up and he looked towards the Sea Skimmer as a crackle of rifle fire broke out, but then he relaxed with a crooked, approving grin. It looked as if the Marines weren't the only ones doing some training.


Chapter Two

Captain Krindi Fain tapped the rifle breach with a leather wrapped swagger stick.
"Keep that barrel down. You're missing high."
"Sorry, Sir," the recruit said. "I think the roll of the ship is throwing me off." He clutched the breach-loading rifle in his lower set of hands as the more dexterous upper hands opened the mechanism and thumbed in another greased paper cartridge. It was an action he could perform with blinding speed, given the fact that he had four hands, which was why his bright blue leather harness was literally covered in cartridges.
"Better to miss low," the officer said through the sulfurous tang of powder smoke. "Even if you miss the first target, it gives you an aiming point to reference to. And it might hit his buddy."
The shooting was going well, he thought. The rifles were at least hitting near the floating barrel. But it needed to be better, because the Carnan Rifles had a tendency to be in the thick of it. Which was a bit of a change from when they had been the Carnan Canal Maintenance Workers of God.
The captain looked out at the seawater stretching beyond sight in every direction and snorted. His native Diaspra had existed under the mostly benevolent rule of a water-worshiping theocracy from time out of mind, but the few priests who'd accompanied the Diaspran infantry to K'Vaern's Cove had first goggled at so much water, then balked at crossing it when the time came. So much of The God had turned out to be a bad thing for worship.
He stepped along to the next firer to watch over the private's shoulder. The captain was tall, even for a Mardukan. Not as tall or as massive as his shadow Erkum Pol, perhaps, but still tall enough to see over the shoulder of the private as the wind swept the huge powder bloom aside.
"Low and to the left, Sardon. I think you've got the aim right; it's the motion of the ship that's throwing you off. More practice."
"Yes, Sir," the private said, and grunted a chuckle. "We're going to kill that barrel sooner or later," he promised, then spat out a bit of bisti root and started reloading.
Fain glanced towards the back of the ship -- the "stern" as the sailors insisted it be called. Major Bes, the infantry commander of the Carnan Battalion -- "The Basik's Own," as it was sometimes called -- was talking with one of the human privates assigned to the ship. The three humans were "liaisons" and maintained communications with their Terran systems. But unlike most of the few remaining humans, these were still uncomfortable around Mardukans, and the team leader seemed particularly upset about the quality of the food. Which just went to show that humans must be utterly spoiled. The food which had been available since joining the Army was one of the high points for most of the Mardukans.
"I like the food," Erkum rumbled discontentedly behind him. "The human should keep his opinions to himself."
"Perhaps." Fain shrugged. "But the humans are our employers and leaders. We've learned from them, and they were the saviors of our home. I'll put up with one of them being less than perfect."
There was more to it than that, of course. Fain wasn't terribly introspective, but he'd had to think long and hard before embarking on this journey. The human prince had called for volunteers from among the Diaspran infantry after the Battle of Sindi. He'd warned them that he could promise little -- that they would be paid a stipend and see new lands, but that that was, for all practical purposes, it.
The choice had seemed clear cut to most of the Diasprans. They liked the humans, and their prince perhaps most of all, but things were happening at home. The almost simultaneous arrival of the Boman hordes and the humans had broken the city out of its millennia-old stasis. New industries were being built every day, and there were fortunes to be made.
As a veteran officer of the Sindi campaign, Fain was bulging with loot to invest, and his family had already found a good opportunity, a foundry that was being built on the extended family's land. A tiny bit of capital could see a handsome return. In fact, he could probably have retired on the income.
Yet he'd found himself looking to the west. He hadn't known what was calling to him at the time. Indeed, he hadn't even begun to understand until days after he'd volunteered for the expedition. But some siren song had been pulling him into the train of the humans, and he'd found the answer in an offhand comment from one of those same humans. Fain had made a pronouncement about the status of "his" company, and Sergeant Julian had cocked his head at him and smiled. "You've got it bad," the NCO had said.
And that was when Fain had realized he'd been bitten by the command bug.
The command bug was one of the most pernicious drugs known to any sentient race. To command in battle was both the greatest and most horrible activity in which any adult could participate. Any good commander felt each death as if it were his own. To him, his men were his children, and holding one of his troops while he died was like holding a brother. But to do it well was to know that whatever casualties he'd taken, more lives would have been lost under an inferior commander. And Fain had commanded well.
Handed a company out of the gray sky, he'd taken them into the most complicated environment possible -- outnumbered skirmishers on the flank of a large force -- and managed to perform his duty magnificently. He'd lost troops, people he'd known for months and even years. But he'd also been in a few other battles, both before and since, and he'd known that many more of those people would have died under the commander he'd replaced. He'd kept his head, been innovative, and known when and how to cut his losses.
So when the choice came, to give up command and return to a life of business and luxury, or to take a command into the unknown, following an alien leader, he'd taken only a moment to decide. He'd sent most of his accumulated funds, the traded loot of four major and minor battles, to his family for investment, raised his hand, and sworn his allegiance to Prince Roger MacClintock and the Empire of Man.
And, to no one's amazement (except, perhaps his own), most of his company had followed him. They'd follow him to Hell.
Most of his troops were aboard the Ima Hooker with Sergeant Knever, but there was also a small detachment here on Sea Skimmer, and today was one of its twice-weekly riflery drills.
Fain made it a point to supervise those drills in person, because he'd learned the hard way that good marksmanship was an important factor in the sort of warfare the humans taught. The Carnan Rifles' entire battalion had gradually segued into a rifle skirmisher force, following the lead of its most famous captain. And with skirmishers, excellent marksmanship was paramount. They were supposed to get out in front of conventional forces and snipe the leaders of approaching formations. They had to be able to hit something smaller than the broadsided the temple to do that job, and the Carnan Rifles were proving they could do just that. 
Well, most of them.
Then there was Erkum.
At almost four meters of height, the big Mardukan dwarfed even his captain. Mardukans generally ran to three meters or so, from their broad, bare feet to their curved double horns, so Erkum was a giant even for them. And, except for mentally, he wasn't slow, either, despite his size. Fain had seen him catch spears in flight and outrun civan for short bursts.
But he couldn't hit a pagathar with a rifle at ten paces. If it was headed straight for him.
At a walk.
Erkum had attached himself to the captain before that particular weakness became apparent. Before, in fact, Fain had been anything but a junior pike NCO. But everything seemed to have worked out. Erkum protected the captain's back, and that wasn't long-range work. As long as Fain's enemies came within five meters or so, the hulking private could usually hit them. And even if he hit them only with the butt of his weapon, they tended to stay down. More than that, he had acquired what was probably the perfect tool for his chosen spot.
The weapon was more cannon than gun. It was the brainchild of the same inventor who'd come up with the standard Mardukan rifle, and it used metallic cartridges similar to the ones which had been developed for the bolt action rifles which had replaced the Marines' bead rifles as their sophisticated ammunition ran out. But its barrel diameter was nearly three times that of the standard rifles, and it fired "semi-automatically." A bar-like magazine protruded vertically from the top of the weapon. It held seven short, stubby cartridges, each as wide as a Mardukan hand, and as each round was fired, the bar slid downward to expose the next cartridge to the firing mechanism and hammer. The weight of the dropping "magazine" both cocked the weapon and brought the next round into position.
It had been originally intended as quick-firing swivel gun to mount on the schooners' bulwarks as an anti-sea monster defense, but in the end, it had been replaced by the pintle-mounted harpoon cannons. As part of its original design concept, however, it had been designed to fire either buckshot or conical slugs, and Erkum carried a pair of reloads for each ammunition type on his person at all times.
The breach-bar reloads were a meter long by themselves, and could be lifted by a human only with difficulty. Erkum, on the other hand, reloaded one-handed, and fired the rounds as fast as he could pull the trigger. Of course, his target had to be within a few meters for him to have a prayer of hitting it, and being near the line of fire was rather unhealthy. But it was a decent weapon for a combat-environment bodyguard. Even one who couldn't hit a mountain if it was falling on him.
Unfortunately, he had the damnedest time admitting his lack of marksmanship.
"These youngsters, they don't know how to hit nothing," the big Mardukan growled. If he were a season older than most of the recruits and privates, Fain would have been astonished.
"It's okay, Erkum," the captain said, knowing what was coming. "Really. They're doing fine."
"They need to be showed how to really shoot," Erkum rumbled, taking the semi-portable cannon off his back.
"You don't have to do this," Fain muttered. But although Erkum was easy to control in most areas, he was inordinately proud of his lack of skill with the damned gun.
"None of you biset could hit the side of a temple!" he yelled to the riflemen lining the rail. "I will now show you how it is done!"
The gun had a double shoulder rest with a lower support/stock that rested on the hips. It was held and "gross" aimed with the lower falsehands and "fine" aimed with the upper truehands. Now the private shouldered the weapon, dropped in one of the magazine bars, and opened fire.
The gun really was a small cannon, and emitted the smoke level of one. But even with the smoke, the slow-moving shot could be tracked visually as it lofted through the air and fell beyond the barrel. The private wasn't able to use that information to adjust, however, because he'd already triggered two more bruising, smoke-spewing blasts from the weapon during its time of flight.
Fain coughed on the stinking cloud of smoke and tried not to laugh. Judging by the splashes, the rounds were falling all around the barrel and even tracking far enough off to be a hazard to the longboat that had dropped the target. None of them, however, were coming within a reasonable distance of the barrel itself.
He glanced over his shoulder at a semi-sensed movement, then clapped his lower hands as one of the humans surreptitiously hefted her own bead rifle and cracked off a single, irreplaceable round.
The hyper-velocity bead was impossible to see, and the sound of the single shot was buried under the ongoing blasts from Erkum's cannon. The effect, however, was easy to discern as the barrel shattered into a thousand pieces.
"Hah!" Erkum grunted as he threw the gun over his back once more in satisfaction. "And they say I can't shoot."
He snorted magnificently, picked up the expended magazine, and slid it into one of the holders on his harness.
Fain shook his head in a gesture copied from the humans, and clapped his lower hands.
"No question," he agreed. "You're getting better."
"Me and my gun, we'll protect you, Krindi." Erkum rubbed a horn and shook his own head. "Did you see how it just exploded? I can't wait to get to use it for real."
Krindi looked to the stern of the ship and smiled as the human lifted her visor and gave a sardonic salute. And because the Mardukan was looking in that direction, he was one of the few to see the ocean open up behind the ship.
The opening was at least twenty meters across, a yawning cavern in the abruptly surfacing snout of a piscine easily as long as Sea Skimmer herself. The giant predator was an ambush hunter, like the terrestrial stonefish, and the snap-opening of its tooth-filled maw created a low-level vacuum that literally stopped the ship in her tracks.
Then the schooner dropped.
There were screams, human and Mardukan, throughout the ship as it first stopped dead in the water, then dropped backwards to scrape its copper-sheathed hull across the lower teeth of the beast. And there were more screams as the maw snapped shut. The jaws shattered the ship, cutting it nearly in half, and pulling the mainmast over backwards as they clamped down on the stays.
Krindi bit down his own scream as the schooner staggered backwards and he saw the human sergeant and Major Bes tumble off the stern of the ship and down the creature's gullet. There was nothing wrong with his reflexes, however, and his left truehand lashed out and grasped a line just before the beast bit down.
Erkum bellowed in rage as the impact of the thing's jaws on the deck flipped them both into the air like toys. Instead of grabbing a rope, though, the big private was clawing at his cannon even as he roared his fury, and then everything came back down and the beast pulled back with a twist of its massive head that reduced the already shattered transom to splinters.
What remained of the truncated ship started to settle by the stern, the deck sloping precariously down to the water, masts shattered and over the side. Anyone who hadn't already grabbed a rope was left to scramble for lines as they slid towards the frothing green water, and Krindi cursed and grabbed his own flailing cable with a stronger falsehand. He heard screams and cries from below decks, and knew that any of his detachment he hadn't lost in the first tremendous bite were probably doomed. But for the moment, all he could think about was whether he, personally, would survive.
He snatched at Erkum as the still-cursing private slid past. Somehow, Pol had gotten his gun back off of his back, and now he was trying to fit a magazine into place. What he thought he was going to do with it was more than Fain could have said, but the captain wasn't about to let him die just because he was being an idiot.
Krindi glanced at the water and hissed in anger as he saw the shadow of the beast, surrounded by a pool of red, whip around and come back. Apparently, the first taste hadn't been good enough, and it wanted the rest of the ship.
Unfortunately, there wasn't much the Diasprans could do about that.
* * *
Roger had been leaning on the ship's rail, looking at nothing in particular, when the beast surfaced. It wasn't in his direct line of sight, but movement draws the human eye, and as the company had found out, a combination of natural genetics and engineering had left Roger with reactions that were preternaturally quick. Which let him get his head around in time to watch the giant fish eat half the ship and a good bit of one of his better battalions.
The thing submerged after half a moment, swirling off to the ship's port side, its massive gills opening and closing. The gills obviously doubled as strainers, and the water went crimson behind it as it pulsed out a trail of shattered wood and blood. It nosed around to the stern and picked off a few of the flailing Mardukans on the surface by sucking them under with comparatively delicate inhalations. Then it dove once more, apparently lining up for another run at the beleaguered ship.
The sight was enough to give anyone pause, but Roger and most of the surviving Marines were still alive because they'd proven they were the fastest, luckiest, and - above all - deadliest of an already elite group. Shock no longer noticeably slowed them.
The prince heard commands from behind him -- crisp, clear, and unhurried from Pahner, slightly louder and more shrill from the surprised Mardukan officers. But that was for others. In his case, there was only one action that made sense. He reached over his shoulder for his own rifle.
That weapon went everywhere with him, even aboard Hooker. It was an anachronism, a "smoke pole," as the Marines had derided it when they first landed. They'd thought he hadn't heard the sniggers and comments. The antique weapon of a spoiled a boy. A "big game hunter" who'd never faced a real threat in his life.
Most of the bodyguards hadn't been with him for very long at that point. Guarding the original, patented, spoiled-rotten Prince Roger had been a rotating assignment for the Bronze Battalion's personnel. Being assigned to it had also been the equivalent of Purgatory, and anyone who'd been able to avoid it had done so . . . with alacrity. Which meant that very few of his current crop of babysitters had realized that he habitually shucked his bodyguards whenever he hunted. Or that many of the things he had hunted over the years would have made their blood run cold. The four-meter-long, gold-threaded Arcturian hypertiger in his trophy room was not a gift ... and it had been taken with that same "smoke pole."
The Marines used hypervelocity bead guns, which were good weapons for killing people and overcoming conventional body armor. But the prince's rifle was for killing animals, and big animals, at that. When they'd first landed, the Marines had assumed the major threats would be the hostile natives, and so it had turned out. But they'd discovered that the wildlife was no picnic, either. And that was where the prince, and his "pocking leetle rifle," as Poertena had christened it, came in. There was no question anyone's mind that the casualties due to wildlife, especially an ugly creature called the damnbeast, had been at least halved by the prince and his pocking rifle.
And now, once again, he proved why.
The prince had the old-fashioned, dual-action rifle off his shoulder, with a round chambered, and aimed faster than most people could draw and fire a bead pistol. The beast had submerged even more quickly, though. It was no more than a green-gray shadow in the aquamarine water, and he weighed his options as he watched it over his sights. He could see it coming around for another run, and he considered shooting through the waves. He'd made shallow-water shots often enough on the trek upcountry, and the relatively low velocity bullets of the rifle would penetrate where the hypervelocity beads shattered on the surface or skipped off. But the bullets also lost most of their energy in the first meter or so. Unless the creature was right at the surface, and basically raising a water-foot, shooting it submerged would be pointless.
Even as he considered that, another part of his brain was pondering shot placement. The fish was huge, with a body nearly as long as one of the schooners and a head twice as wide. In fact, it looked somewhat like one of the fish that was a staple in K'Vaern's Cove, their port of embarkation. If it really was something like a giant col, then shot placement was going to be a bitch.
Col were traditionally served whole, since there was a "pearl" that formed at the rear of the skull and collecting it was part of the ritual of the meal. Because of that, and because he'd been to more dinners in K'Vaern's Cove then he cared to count, he had a fair idea of the fish's anatomy. The opalescent jewel was of varying quality, but it rested directly above the spot where the fish's spinal cord connected to its skull. Given the angle from which Roger would be firing, if he tried for a spinal shot -- not impossible for him, even from the moving deck -- the round would probably bounce off the ersatz armoring of the pearl. If he tried for a heart shot, however, even he was likely to miss. That organ was deep in the body, and the round would have to travel through several meters of flesh to reach it. But any other body shot would be useless.
The rear of the head would be the best shot, then. The head was wide, and it was bone, but it was also filled with cavities. Rather than being primarily for armoring the brain, it was based upon the mechanics of the huge jaws. If he put the shot right at the rear of the skull, it should penetrate to the brain and "pith" the fish. Given the disparity in size between the bullets and the target, it was the best chance he'd have.
The entire train of thought flashed through his mind in a moment, and he took a breath and timed the roll of the ship as the fish started to surface for another tremendous bite.
* * *
Fain suddenly realized that although Erkum sounded incoherent, his actions made perfect sense. The private was not an intellectual, by any means, but he was -- in that wonderfully ambiguous human term -- "good with his hands." Fain had been in far too many fights for his few years, and he'd long since discovered that Erkum was a good person to have by your side, be it with hands, pipes, or guns. He might not be able to hit the broadside of a temple at any sort of range, but he instinctively acted in ways that kept him alive when it all fell into the pot. He left the thinking to Fain, but when it came to up close and personal mayhem, Erkum was as good as it got.
And he was about to lay down some mayhem. Fain had grabbed one of the furiously cursing private's feet, preventing him from falling into the water, but Erkum could have cared less. He'd finally gotten a magazine of solid shot lined up, and he was waiting for his turn at the big fish. Fain suspected that the private had known he would be grabbed, trusted his boss to do the right thing, just as Fain trusted him, and now Erkum waited for the thing to surface.
Fain risked a look around and saw that Pol was not the only one planning a probably hopeless defense. A few of the remaining riflemen, those who'd had the presence of mind to grab a line or rail, instead of slipping down the rapidly tilting deck, were already pointing their rifles at the water. But several others were simply holding on for dear life. Couldn't have that.
"Company! Prepare to volley fire!" he called, trying to fumble out his own pistol with the fourth hand that wasn't occupied holding onto ropes or Erkum.
They were only going to get one shot.


Chapter Three

"Move it! We're only going to get one shot!"
Kosutic turned from the harpoon gun crew to watch the Marines fanning out along the starboard rail. The ships hadn't come about, and the shattered schooner, which had been in the lead position, was slowly falling astern. If the harpoon gun didn't get into action quickly, it might not get a shot. Not unless they came around for one, and Pahner would never agree to that. He was trying to get the prince's ship away from that ... that ... thing as fast as he could.
At least the harpoon gear had been set up, ready, by the gun when all hell broke loose. It was against normal practice to pile charges for the ship's guns on deck, because it was too easy for black powder to become wet and useless. But this particular weapon had been designed for just this contingency, and the need to get it into action as quickly as possible had dictated otherwise in its special case. The humans had empty stores containers, plasteel boxes that maintained temperature and humidity, and one of those had been pressed into duty as a standby magazine.
Now the Mardukan gun crew threw back the lid and snatched out the first cartridge. The charge bag was small, only half a kilo or so of powder. But it would throw the harpoon far enough, and without shattering the hardwood shaft.
As the gunner shoved the charge into the muzzle, the assistant gunner assembled the harpoon. Fitting the steel head to the shaft took only a moment, then the coiled line was attached with a human-designed clip. Last, the plug-based shaft was shoved down the barrel of the cannon, acting as its own ramrod.
But drilled and quick as the gun crew was, all of that took time. Time Sea Skimmer didn't have.
* * *
Krindi Fain had often wondered if he was going to die. He'd wondered the time a stone wall fell on the crew he was working with. That time, he'd been sheltered by a few sticks of scaffolding, and he'd survived. He'd wondered again, as a private in his first pike battle, by the canals of Diaspra. And he'd wondered repeatedly while fighting the Boman inside and outside of Sindi. But he hadn't known he was going to die.
Until now.
The beast opened up its maw, and he grunted in anger as he saw it surging up behind the sinking ship once again. He could see bits of wood and cloth, and red flesh, sticking to the thousands of teeth lining the inside of the fish's mouth. But he still didn't scream. He was frightened. God of Water knew he was! But he was going to go to his God as a soldier and a leader, not a coward.
And so, instead of screaming, he paused for a moment. That brief pause, so necessary for everyone to get fully lined up. And then, he yelled "Fire!"
Five of his men were still more or less on their feet, with their wits sufficiently about them to obey his command, but they were almost incidental. The two things that drove the fish off were Erkum and the prince.
The five rifle bullets all impacted on various places in and around the mouth. Two of them even penetrated up into the skull of the fish, but none of them did any vital damage, nor did they particularly "hurt." They were less than spines to the giant piscine.
Erkum's round, on the other hand, hurt like hell.
The one hundred-millimeter bullet penetrated the roof of the mouth and traveled upward, blowing a massive tube through the skull of the sea monster. By coincidence -- it could have been nothing else, given the quality of the marksman -- the huge slug severed the right optical nerve, blinding the fish on that side, and blew out the top of its skull in a welter of gore.
At almost the same moment, the prince's round entered the back of the beast's head.
It wasn't the pith shot Roger had been trying for, but the round was much higher velocity than anything the Mardukans had, and it generated a significant "hydrostatic shock" cavity -- the region in a body that was damaged by the shock wave of a bullet. In this case, the prince had missed his shot down and slightly to the right, but the region that the shot passed through was directly beneath the spinal cord, and the shock wave slapped against that vital nerve.
The combined result was that instead of slurping down the rest of the Sea Skimmer, the fish thrashed away to port and dove. But it did so wildly, uncontrolled. It was half-blind, there was damage to its spinal cord, and half its muscles weren't responding properly.
This food had spines.
* * *
"Pentzikis, come about to port and engage. Sea Foam, come to starboard and engage. Tor Col, prepare depth charges."
Pahner glanced at the prince, who was still tracking the thrashing shadow. He didn't know if Roger had gotten off another impossible shot, or if it was the flurry of blasts from the sinking ship. But whichever it had been, it had at least momentarily dissuaded the fish. Now to put it down.
"Grenadiers to the rigging. Set for delay -- I want some penetration on this thing, people," he continued, cutting off a fresh slice of bisti root and slipping it into his mouth. The general outline of this fight had been worked out in advance -- as well as it could be, at least, when no one had ever actually seen whatever it was that ate ships in this stretch of ocean. Well, never seen it and lived to report it, at any rate. But, as usual, the enemy wasn't playing by the plans. It had been assumed that they'd at least get a glimpse of the beast before it struck, which should have given them at least some chance of driving it off first. Now, all they could do was fight for the remaining six ships and hope to rescue a few of the survivors.
Sea Skimmer was sinking fast by the stern, but she was going down without a list. If they could finish the fish off in a few shots and send in boats, they might save most of those on her deck. The ones below deck were doomed, unless they could fight their way to the main hatch or swim out. It was still a hell of a way to lose half a company, and probably a damned fine junior officer with them. But there hadn't been many good places to die on this damned trek.
He glanced at Roger again, and shook his head. The prince had headed for the shrouds and was trying to get a better vantage point. Give him credit for trying, but Pahner doubted the prince's rifle was going to win this round.
As he thought that, the first harpoon gun boomed.
* * *
"I doubt that even you can do anything with a pistol, cousin," Honal said with a handclap of grim humor. His cousin, the former crown prince of Therdan, had drawn all four pistols at the first cry and had them trained over the side before the warning's echoes had faded.
"True," Rastar said now, and reholstered three of the percussion revolvers. "But if it comes after us, I'll at least let it know I'm here."
"Best stand clear, whatever else you do," Honal said dryly. "Our fine sailor friends are about to see if a harpoon is better than a pistol!"
"Well, that depends on the harpoon and the pistol," Rastar grunted in laughter. "After all, it's not what you use; it's how you use it!"
"And I intend to use it well!" the chief of the gun crew called. "But if you're in the way of the line as it flies, you'll be a red smear! Clear!"
The gun was fitted with a percussion cap hammer lock. Now the gun captain gave Honal and Rastar a heartbeat to duck to the side, then took a deep breath and yanked the firing lanyard.
The bang wasn't really all that loud, but the smoke cloud covered the entire foredeck, and there was a "whippity-thwhip!" as the coil of hawser at the base of the pintle reeled out. Then there was a cry from the rigging.
"Target!"
"Rig the line!" the gun captain bellowed, and the crew warped the five-centimeter hawser around a bollard as the line began to scream and smoke.
"Prepare to come about on the port tack!" Pentzikis' captain shouted.
"Rig the line into the clamps!" the gun crew chief called. "The damn thing is going to go right under the keel! If the captain's not careful, it'll take us right over on our side!"
"Let that line run!" the ship's captain barked. "Come onto it when we're on tack!"
"Haul away!" the gunner cried. "We're getting slack!"
"Hold on!" Rastar shouted. "The Tor Col is about to run across the line!"
* * *
"Contact!" Sergeant Bilali called over the company net from Tor Col's afterdeck. "Sir, we have solid contact."
"Right," Pahner acknowledged, glancing at the formation. "Have your captain keep falling off to port. I want you to take a heading of nearly due south and try to drag this thing off Sea Skimmer. Sea Foam, take another shot. All units, engage with care. Try to get some rounds on it, but don't hit the other ships."
Hooker's own harpoon gun boomed behind him as the schooner came around to starboard. It wasn't strictly speaking proper. The ship with the prince on it should be sailing out of harm's way, not into it. But with the fish pinned, it was probably safe enough.
Tor Col passed above the thrashing shadow, and a huge white and green waterspout appeared behind the schooner. The depth charges used a combination of a grenade detonator and local blasting powder. Pahner hadn't been sure they would function as intended, but it turned out that they worked just fine. Bilali's very first drop scored a direct hit, and the monster fish flopped a few more times, then drifted gently to the surface, belly-up. Its underside was apparently covered in chromatospores, since it was flickering through a riot of colors when it broke the waves. It rippled a dozen shades of violet, then through the spectrum until it began flickering green, and finally stopped and slowly turned a cream color.
"Get that target longboat alongside Sea Skimmer. Launch all the ships' boats, and let's start recovering survivors. Warrant Officer Dobrescu!"
"Yes, Captain?" a calm tenor replied. Pahner glanced over his shoulder, and saw the speaker standing beside the mainmast while he gazed at the floating monster with an air of almost detached contemplation.
Chief Warrant Officer Dobrescu had been one of DeGlopper's shuttle pilots, a relatively safe job that had gone badly wrong. But in a previous life, he had been a Raider Commando medic, a person trained not only to stabilize a combat casualty, but to repair one if necessary. His accidental inclusion on the trip had been, literally, a lifesaver. A factor he was sometimes at pains to point out, not to mention complain about.
"I want you to prepare to receive casualties. If there are none, or if they're limited, I'll want your input on our little find here."
"Yes, Sir," the medic replied. "Of course, I'm a shuttle pilot, not a xenobiologist, but it looks like a col fish to me. And that's my professional opinion."
* * *
"It's a col fish," Captain T'Sool said. Ima Hooker's captain rubbed his horns, then clapped his hands. "It's impossible, but may the White Lady damn me if it isn't one."
One of the Hooker's sailor's held up a dripping bag in both truehands. The oil-filled sac was common to the col fish, part of its buoyancy system. But in normal-sized ones, the sac was the size of the last joint of a human thumb and filled with what, to Mardukans, was a deadly poison. As it had turned out, that oil was possibly the only substance on the planet that the Marines' nanites packs could convert into the numerous lipid-based vitamins and amino acids the planet's food lacked.
"Well," Kosutic said. "At least we've got plenty of feed for the civan. And that's enough col oil to keep us for quite a while," she added, gazing at an oil sac that was at least a meter across.
"It's still a net zero," Pahner growled. "We lost an entire ship getting it, along with half of its crew, damned near a platoon of infantry, and three more Marines. I don't like losing troops."
"Neither do I," Kosutic agreed. "And this trip says it all. His Putridness' hand has certainly been over us the whole time."
"What just happened?" Eleanora O'Casey asked, as she climbed up through the main hatch to the deck.
* * *
The prince's chief of staff was the only remaining "civilian" caught on the planet with him. Although none of the shuttle pilots had been as prepared for the conditions here as the Marines, they'd at least had some background in rough conditions survival and a basic military nanite pack. But prior to the crash landing of the shuttles on the backside of the planet, the chief of staff had never set foot outside a city, and her nanites - such as they were - were designed for a nice, safe, civilized environment.
The "adventure" had had some benefits for her. She was in the best shape she'd ever been in her life. But her stomach, never the most robust, had not taken the journey well. And it was taking the voyage aboard ship even worse. Now the short brunette turned her head from side to side, counting masts.
"Aren't we missing one ship?" she asked.
"Not quite yet," Pahner said dryly. "But it won't be long now." He pointed over the side, to where Sea Skimmer's shattered hull was beginning its final plunge. "We've discovered what ate the other expeditions," he added.
O'Casey walked to the side of the gently rocking schooner, and her eyes widened.
"Ooooooh!" she gasped, and quickly ran to the far rail, where she wouldn't get anything on the Mardukans butchering the vast fish.
"Well, I guess she won't be coming to dinner," Kosutic observed with a shake of her head.
* * *
"I guess this stuff gets tougher as it gets older."
Julian bounced the tines of his fork off of the slab of col fish on his plate to emphasize his point.
There'd been no more attacks on the ship, and soundings indicated that the area in which Sea Skimmer had been ambushed was a seamount. Dobrescu theorized that a line of such seamounts might be the haunt of the gigantic col fish. If he was right, it might be a possible to create an industry to harvest the species, once its habits were better understood. The profit would certainly be worth it, if it didn't involve losing a ship every time.
"It probably does," the medic agreed now. "Not that anyone in K'Vaern's Cove ever saw a col fish this big to give us any sort of meter stick." He rolled the head-sized opalescent pearl back and forth on the table, and the bright, omnipresent cloud-light of Marduk made it seem to float above the surface.
"On the other hand, this thing seems to be identical to the ones from the smaller fish," he went on, rapping the pearl with a knuckle. "It's a hell of a lot bigger, of course, and it has more layers. There's a bone directly under it that's layered as well, and I'd suspect from the markings that the layers indicate its age. And these things must grow fast as hell, too. If I've figured out how to calculate its age properly, this fish was less than five times as old as the ones we ate in K'Vaern's Cove."
"How can that be?" Roger asked while he sawed at the tough flesh. He wasn't particularly hungry, and the meat was both oily and unpleasantly fishy, unlike the normally dry and "white" col fish. But he'd learned that you just ate. You never knew if there would be worse tomorrow. "This thing was at least a hundred times that size!"
"More like forty or fifty, Your Highness," Despreaux corrected. She and Julian were relatively junior, but both of them had become a regular part of the command conferences. Julian by dint of his background in intelligence, and Despreaux because she kept Roger calm. Of course, her background in communications and tactics helped.
"The layers indicated massive growth spurts," Dobrescu said with a shrug, "but the genetic material is identical. These things could interbreed with the K'Vaern's Cove variety; ergo they're the same species. I suspect that studying these things' life-history would be difficult. At a guess, they probably breed inshore, or even in freshwater. Then, as they grow, they begin jockeying for territories. If they get the territory of a larger version, they grow very fast to 'fill' the territory." He paused and rolled the pearl again. "I also suspect that if we went back through this area, we wouldn't run into another specimen this large. But there would still be some damned big col fish around."
"And in a few years...." Pahner said with a nod. "By the way, Your Highness, nice shot."
"Excuse me?" Roger gave the fish another stab, then gave up. He wasn't the first, by any means.
The heavyset red and black striped beast in the corner knew its cue. Roger had picked the pet up quite by accident at the village of D'Nal Cord many months before. The lizard-like creatures fulfilled the role of dogs among Court's people, although Roger had seen no sign of any similar species elsewhere on their travels.
Now Dogzard stood up and gave a vertebrae-popping stretch that extended her practically from one end of the compartment to the other. Being the only scavenger in a group that had blasted its way through endless carnivore-infested jungles had been good for the former "runt," and if she ever returned to her village, she would be double the size of any of the ones which had stayed behind.
Now she flipped out her tongue and regarded Roger's plate carefully as it came towards her. After a brief moment verifying that, yes, this was food and, yes, she was permitted to have it, her head snapped forward in one of its lightning fast strikes, and the chunk of meat disappeared from the plate.
Satisfied that that was all for now, she returned to the corner to await the next meal. Or to fight. Whichever.
"There was a good solid crack on that vertebra," Dobrescu replied for Pahner in response to Roger's question. "One of the reasons, at least, that it didn't come back at that ship was your shot." 
He flicked his own lump of fish towards the prince's pet. The chunk of meat never came within a meter of the deck before it disappeared.
"There was also a fist-sized hole through the roof of its mouth," the warrant officer continued, and raised an eyebrow in question as he glanced at the junior Mardukan at the foot of the table.
Fain was desperately trying to figure out the tableware. He'd tried watching Honal, Rastar, Chim Pri, and Cord, but that wasn't much help. The Mardukan officers had never quite mastered the knife and fork, either, and Roger's asi -- technically, a slave, although Fain rather doubted that anyone would ever make the mistake of treating D'Nal Cord as anyone's menial -- refused to use them at all.
In Cord's case, at least, Fain suspected, the refusal was mostly a pose. The old Mardukan shaman took considerable pains to maintain his identity as a primitive tribesman, but it was obvious to the Diaspran that the asi was more than a match for any Water Priest he'd ever met. In the others' case, the captain was less certain. Honal had hacked off a chunk of the rubbery meat and was gnawing on it, while Rastar and Pri had lifted slightly larger chunks and were doing much the same. The human ability to hold the meat down with a fork and cut off small pieces was apparently beyond them.
Now, trapped by the medic's implied question, Krindi cleared his throat and nodded in a human gesture many of the mercenaries had picked up.
"That would be Erkum," he said. "At least one shot, perhaps more. It was very ... confused on board, of course."
"Not so confused that you lost your head," Pahner noted, and took a sip of water. "You had everyone with a weapon fire a volley. I doubt most of the Marines would have kept control of their units that well."
"Thank you, Sir." Fain rubbed a horn. "But from what I've seen, I will politely disagree. Certainly, you and Prince Roger kept control of yours."
"No, I didn't," Roger said. He reached for the pitcher of water and poured himself another glass. "I should have been giving orders, not shooting myself. But I got angry. Those were good troops."
"Hmmm." Kosutic frowned. "I don't know, Your Highness. Let the cobbler stick to his last, as it were." The slight frown became a smile. "I have to admit that having you with a weapon in your hand never seems to be a bad idea."
Pahner smiled at the chuckles around the table, then nodded.
"Whether His Highness should've been shooting or ordering, we need to find a berth for Captain Fain. The infantry side was already short, so I'm just going to consolidate your personnel into a combined company. We lost Turkol on the Sea Skimmer along with your boys, so we need a replacement vice Captain Yair, who will be promoted to major and take Bes' place. Initially, I'm going to attach you to His Highness as a sort of aide de camp. The bulk of your company's survivors are already aboard the Hooker. We'll work them into the rest of her detachment, and giving you a little experience with the 'staff' will give you a chance to see how things run. Hopefully, we'll have you fully on board by the time we land. Clear?"
"Yes, Sir." Fain kept his face placid, but seeing "his" company lose its identity was not pleasant, however necessary its survivors' absorption might be. "One question..."
"Yes, you can hang onto Pol," Roger said with a very Mardukan grunt of laughter.
"Please do," Captain Yair endorsed. "You're the only one who can handle him."
"We don't know how many more of these things there might be," Pahner continued in a "that's settled" tone of voice, and gestured at the pearl Dobrescu was still fondling. "Or any damned thing else about threats along the way. But we've found out we can kill them, at least. Any suggestions about how to keep them from doing this again?"
"Mount a cannon at the rear. Maybe a couple," Fain said without thinking, then stopped when everyone looked at him.
"Go on," Roger said, nodding. "Although I think I know where you're going."
"Keep them loaded," Fain continued. "Ready to fire, with a crew to man them at all times. When it surfaces, fire. You have about a second and a half from when they appear to when you have to shoot."
"You'd have to have somebody being very vigilant on a continuous basis." Julian shook his head. "Then you'd have to make sure the powder didn't get wet and misfire. I don't think we have the technical capability to do that without modifications we'd need a shipyard to carry out."
"But a defense at the rear...." Roger rubbed a fingertip on the table, obviously intrigued by the notion. Then a sudden, wicked grin lit his somber face like a rising sun. "Who says it has to be a local cannon?" he demanded.
"Ouch!" Kosutic laughed. "You've got an evil mind, Your Highness."
"Of course!" Julian's eyes gleamed with enthusiasm. "Set up a plasma cannon on manjack mode. If something disturbs the sensor area: Blam!"
"Bead," Pahner corrected. Julian looked at him, and the captain waggled one hand palm-down above the table. "Those things get too close for a plasma cannon. We'd torch the ship."
"Yeah, you're right." Julian nodded. "I'll get it set up," he said, then wiped his mouth and looked unenthusiastically down at the chunk of meat still sitting on his plate. "You want me to break out some rations?" he asked in a decidedly hopeful voice.
"No." Pahner shook his head. "We need to eat what we've got. Until we know how long this journey is going to be, we need to conserve. He paused and took a breath. "And we also need to shut down the radios. We're getting close enough to the ports that we have to worry about radio bounce. They're low-intercept, but if the port has any notion that we're here, we're in the deep."
"So how do we communicate between the ships, Sir?" Despreaux asked. The sergeant had been particularly quiet all evening, but she was one of the two NCOs in charge of maintaining communications. With Julian setting up the weapons, it was her job to plan a jury-rigged replacement com net for the flotilla's units.
"Com lasers, flags, guns, flashing lights," Pahner said. "I don't care. But no radios."
"Yes, Sir," Despreaux said, making a note on her toot. "So we can use our tac-lights, for example?"
"Yes." Pahner paused again and slipped in a strip of bisti root while he thought. "In addition, the sailors in K'Vaern's Cove reported that piracy is not an unknown thing on Marduk. Now, why am I not surprised?"
Most of the group chuckled again. Practically every step of the journey had been contested by local warlords, barbarians, or bandits. It would have been a massive shock to their systems if it turned out these waters were any different.
"When we approach the far continent, we'll need to keep a sharp lookout for encroaching ships," Pahner continued. "And for these fish. And for anything else that doesn't look right."
"And His Dark Majesty only knows what's going to come next," Kosutic agreed with a smile.


Chapter Four

"Land ho!"
The lookout's cry rang out only two days after the attack by the giant col. No one was really surprised by it, though. The evidence of an approaching landfall had been there for at least a day -- a thin gray smoke on the horizon, and a golden alpineglow before dawn.
Julian swarmed up the ratlines to Hooker's fore topmast crosstrees with an agility which might have seemed at odds with his determinedly anti-seaman attitude. He took his glasses with him. They were considerably better than his helmet visor's built-in zoom function, and he spent several minutes beside the Mardukan seaman already perched there, studying the distant land. Then he zoomed the glasses back in and slid back down to the deck.
"Active volcano, sure enough," he reported to Pahner. "The island looks deserted, but there's another in the chain just coming over the horizon."
Pahner consulted his toot and nodded. "It doesn't appear on the map," he said, "but at this resolution, it wouldn't."
"But there is a line of mountains on the eastern verge of the continent," Roger pointed out, projecting a hologram from his pad. He pointed at the light-sculpture mountains for emphasis. "They could be volcanic in nature. Which would probably make this a southern extension of that chain."
"Hullo, the deck!" the lookout still at the crosstrees called. "Nother to the south! We're sailing between them."
None of the islands were visible from deck-level, yet, but Captain T'Sool, more accustomed to the shallow, relatively confined waters of the K'Vaernian Sea than the endless expanse of the open ocean, looked nervous.
"I'm not sure I like this," he said. "We could hit shoals anytime."
"Possibly," Roger conceded, with a glance at the azure water over the side. "It's more likely that we're still over a subduction trench or the deep water around one. Water tends to be deep right up to the edge of volcanic formations. I'm actually glad to see our first landfall be volcanoes, actually. You might want to slow the flotilla and get some depth lines working, though."
"What are these 'volcanoes' you keep speaking of?" T'Sool asked. Roger checked his toot and realized that it had used the Terran word because there was no local equivalent.
"Have you ever heard of smoking mountains?" he asked.
"No," the seaman said dubiously.
"Well, you're in for a treat."
* * *
"Why does smoke come from the mountain?" Fain asked in awe.
The flotilla had slowed as it approached the chain, and now it proceeded cautiously between two of the islands. The one to the south was wreathed in thick, leafy emerald-green foliage that made it look like a verdant paradise. Of course, as the Marines had learned the hard way, it was more likely to be a verdant hell, Mardukan jungles being what they were.
The island to the north, however, was simply a black hunk of basalt, rising out of the blue waters. It's stark, uncompromising lines made it look bigger than it actually was, and the top -- the only portion formed into anything resembling a traditional cone -- trailed a gentle plume of ash and steam.
"I could tell you," Julian replied with a grimace. "But you'd have to believe me rather than your religion."
Fain thought about that. So far, he'd found nothing that directly contradicted the doctrines of the Lord of Water. On the other hand, the dozens of belief systems he and the other infantry had encountered since leaving Diaspra had already indicated to him that the gospel of the priests of Water was not, perhaps, fundamentally correct. While there was no question that the priests understood the science of hydraulics, it might be that their overall understanding of the world was less precise.
"Go ahead," he said with a handclap of resignation. Then he chuckled. "Do your worst!"
Julian smiled in response and gestured at the vast expanse of water stretched out around the flotilla.
"The first thing you have to accept is that the priests' description of the world as a rock floating in eternal, endless waters isn't correct."
"Since we're intending to sail to the far side, I had already come to the conclusion that 'endless water' might not be exactly accurate," Fain admitted with another handclap.
"What the world really is, is a ball floating in nothingness," Julian said, and raised both hands as Fain started to protest. "I know. How is that possible? Well, you're going to have to trust me for now, and check it out later. But what matters right now is that the center of the ball -- the world -- is very, very hot. Hot enough to melt rock. And it stays that way."
"That I have a hard time with," Fain said, shaking his head. "Why is it hot? And if it is, when will it cool?"
"It's hot because there's ... stuff in there that's something like what makes our plasma cannon work," Julian said, waving his hands with a sort of vague frustration as he looked for an explanation capable of crossing the technological gulf yawning between his worldview and Fain's. "Like I said," he said finally. "You'll just have to trust me on some of this. But it is -- hot, I mean -- and somewhere under that mountain, there's a channel that connects to that hot part. That's why it smokes. Think of it as a really, really big chimney. As for when the inside of the world will cool, that won't happen for longer than I can explain. There will no longer be humans -- or Mardukans -- when it starts to cool."
"This is too strange," Fain said. "And how do I explain it to my soldiers? 'It's that way because Sergeant Julian said so'?"
"I dunno," Julian replied. "Maybe the Sergeant Major can help you out. On the other hand...."
* * *
Roger watched Bebi's team begin the entry. The team had already worked on open area techniques. Now they were working on closed ... and they looked like total dorks.
There was nowhere to create a real shooting environment on the flotilla's ships, so the troopers were using the virtual reality software built into their combat systems and their toots. The "shoot house" was nothing more than the open deck of a schooner, but with the advanced systems and the toots' ability to massage sensory input, it would be as authentic to the participants as if there were real enemies.
But since their audience could see that they were standing on nothing more than an unobstructed stretch of deck planks, the "entry team" looked like a group of warrior-mimes.
The virtual reality software built into the troops' helmets would have been a potent training device all by itself, and its ability to interface with the Marines' toots was sufficient to make the illusion perfect. Now Macek smoothed thin air as he emplaced a "breaching charge" on the fictitious door, then stepped to the side and back. As far as he could tell, he was squatting, nearly in contact with a wall; to everyone else, he looked as if he were getting ready to go to the bathroom on the deck.
The sergeant major next to Roger snorted softly.
"You know, Your Highness, when you're doing this, one part of you knows how stupid you look. But if you don't ignore it, you're screwed. I think this is one of His Wickedness' little jokes on the Marines."
Roger smoothed his ponytail and actually opened his mouth to say something, then closed it.
"Yes, Your Highness?" Kosutic said softly. "I take it there's something about that statement that bothers you?"
"Not about your observation," Rodgers said as Bebi triggered the notional charge and rushed through the resulting imaginary hole. The prince had set his helmet to project the "shoot house" in see-through mode, and the team seemed to be fighting phantoms in a ghost building as he watched. Combined with his question, the ... other-worldly nature of their opponents sent something very much like a shiver down his spine.
"It was that last comment," he said. "I've been wondering.... Why is Satanism the primary religion of Armagh? I mean, a planet settled by Irish and other Roman Catholic groups. That seems a bit ... strange," he finished, and the sergeant major let out a chuckle that turned into a liquid laugh Roger had never heard from her before.
"Oh, Satan, is that all? The reason is because the winners write the history books, Your Highness."
"That doesn't explain things," Roger protested, pulling at a strand of hair. "You're a High Priestess, right? That would be the equivalent of -- an Episcopal bishop, I guess."
"Oh, not a bishop!" Kosutic laughed again. "Not one of those evil creatures! Angels of the Heavens, they are!" Roger felt his eyes trying to cross, and she smiled at his expression and took pity on him. 
"Okay, if you insist, Your Highness, here's the deal.
"Armagh was a slow-boat colony, as you know. The original colonists were primarily from Ireland, on Old Earth, with a smattering from the Balkans. Now, Ireland had a bloody history long before Christianity, but the whole Protestant/Catholic thing eventually got out of hand."
"We studied the nuking of Belfast at the Academy as an example of internal terrorism taken to a specific high," Roger noted.
"Yes, and what was so screwed up about those Constables was that they killed as many -- or more -- of their own supporters as they did Catholics." She shrugged. "Religious wars are ... bad. But Armagh was arguably worse, even in comparison to the Belfast Bomb.
"The original colonists were Eire who wanted to escape the religious bickering that was still going on in Ireland but keep their religion. They didn't want freedom from religion, only freedom from argument about it. So they took only Catholics.
"Shortly after landing, though, there was an attempted religious schism. It was still, at that time, a purely Catholic colony, and the schismatic movement was more on the order of fundamentalism rather than any sort of outright heresy. The schismatics wanted the mass in Latin, that sort of thing. But that, of course, threatened to start the arguments all over. So, as a result, to prevent religious warfare from breaking out again, they instituted a local version of the Papal College for the express purpose of defining what was religiously acceptable."
"Oh, shit," Roger said quietly. "That's ... a bad idea. Hadn't any of them studied history?"
"Yes," she said sadly, "they had. But they also thought they could do things 'right' this time. The Inquisition, the Great Jihad of the early 21st century, the Fellowship Extinction, and all the rest of the Jihads, Crusades, and Likuds were beside the point. The worst of it was that those who founded the Tellers were good people. Misguided, but good. The road to Heaven is paved with good intentions, after all. Like most ardent believers, they thought God would make sure they got it right. That their cause was just, and that the other people who'd screwed up exactly the same idea before them had suffered -- unlike them -- from some fundamental flaw in their vision or approach."
"Rather than from just being human." Roger shook his head. "It's like the redistributionists that don't see the Ardane Deconstruction as being 'what will happen.'"
"The one thing you learn from history, Your Highness, is that we're doomed to repeat it. Anyway, where was I?"
"They set up an Inquisition."
"Well, that wasn't what they'd intended to set up, but, yes. That was what they got." Kosutic shrugged grimly. "It was bad. That sort of thing attracts ... bad sorts. Not so much sociopaths -- although it does attract them -- but also people who are so sure of their own rectitude that they can't see that evil is evil."
"But you're a Satanist. You keep referring to 'His Wickedness,' so why does the concept of evil bother you?" Roger asked, his tone honestly perplexed, and Kosutic shrugged again.
"At first the organized opposition to the College was purely secular. The Resistance actually had a clause in its manifesto calling for an end to all religion, always. But the planet was too steeped in religious thought for that to work, and the Tellers, the Determiners of Truth, insisted on referring to anyone in the Resistance as 'minions of Satan.'"
"So instead of trying to fight the label, you embraced it for yourselves."
"And changed it," Kosutic agreed. "We won eventually, and part of the peace settlement was a freedom of religion clause in the Constitution. But by that time, the Satanists were the majority religion, and Christianity -- or, at least, Armagh's version of it -- had completely discredited itself. There's a really ancient saw that says that if Satan ever replaced God, he'd have to act the same. And to be a religion for the good of all, which was what we'd intended from the outset, we had to be good. The difference between Armaghan Satanism and Catholicism is a rejection of the supremacy of the Pope, a few bells and whistles we stole from Wicca, and referring to Satan instead of the Trinity. It really is Episcopalianism, for Satanists, which makes your bishop comparison even more humorous."
She'd been watching the training entry team as she spoke, and now she grimaced as Bebi flinched. The exercise was simple, "baby steps" designed to get the Marines back into the close-combat mode of thinking. But despite that, the team hadn't taken the simple security precaution of checking all corners of the room for threats, and the "enemy" hiding behind a pillar had just taken out of the team leader.
"It's the little things in life," she muttered.
"Yep," Roger agreed. "They don't seem to be doing all that well."
He watched as Macek "responded" to the threat by uncovering his own area. At which point another hidden enemy took advantage of the lack of security to take out Berent. Kosutic's nostrils flared, and Roger grinned mentally as he pictured the blistering critique of the exercise she was undoubtedly compiling. But the sergeant major was one of those people for whom multi-tasking came naturally, and she resumed her explanation even as she watched Berent become a casualty.
"One of the big differences between the Church of Rome and Armaghan Satanism is our emphasis on the Final Conflict and the preparations for it," she continued, her expression now deadly serious. "We believe that the Christians are dupes, that if God was really in charge, things would be better. It's our belief that Lucifer was cast out not by God, but by the other angels, and that they have silenced The One True God. It's our job, in the Final Conflict, to uphold the forces of good and win this time."
She turned to face the prince fully, and smiled at his widened eyes. It was not an especially winsome expression.
"We take that belief very seriously, Your Highness. There's a reason that Armagh, a low-population planet, supplies three percent of all the Imperial Marines, and up to ten percent of all the elite forces. The precepts of the Elders call for all good Satanists to be ready for the Final Conflict at all times. To uphold good in all their doings, and to be morally upright so that when the time comes to free God from the Chains of the Angels, we won't be found wanting."
She turned back to watch the training and shook her head.
"I mention this only to note that the Brotherhood of Baal would eat Bebi's team for lunch. The Brotherhood has used the Imperial freedom of religion clause to perform some tinkering on themselves that gives most of the rest of us Satanists cold chills. I doubt that any court would consider an Abbott of Baal human if he or she didn't have documents to prove it. But you have to see them to believe it."
Roger watched as Bebi collected his "dead" and "wounded" and started the debrief.
"I imagine that Christians are ... somewhat ambivalent about that approach."
"We don't preach," Kosutic said. "We don't proselytize. We certainly don't discuss our beliefs around the general public. And, frankly, we believe that as long as Christians and Jews and Muslims are being 'good,' they're violating the intent of their controllers. So we applaud them for it." She turned and gave him a truly evil smile. "It really confuses them."
Roger chuckled and shook his head as Despreaux began enumerating the team's faults. The plan had been good, but when they'd hit the door, they'd forgotten it and fought by the seat of their pants. They had, in fact, been fighting the way they would have fought Mardukans. But the next major conflict would probably put Bravo Company -- what was left of it -- up against humans. True, those humans would probably be pirate scum and garrison troopers, but standard colonial defenses called for space-intercept capable plasma cannon, monomolecular "twist" wire, and bunkers with interlocking fields of fire. And then they had to capture a ship.
It wasn't going to be a walk in the park.
"Well," Roger said with a sigh. "I just hope whoever the 'good guys' are, they're on our side."
* * *
Captain Pahner looked around the cramped cabin. The one fault of Ima Hooker's design, which no one had considered in advance, was that the schooner had never been intended as a command ship. Poertena had recognized the necessity of designing around higher deckheads to allow more head room for the towering Mardukans of her crew. There was a limit to what he could do, but the final result -- however claustrophobic the natives might still find it -- was that even the tallest of the humans could stand upright without worrying about hitting his head on a deck beam. But however the ship might have been stretched vertically, there was only so much that could be done horizontally in a hull of Hooker's length and beam. Despite the fact that Pahner, or Prince Roger, rather, had a minimal "staff," its members packed into the wardroom of the command schooner only with difficulty. Especially the Mardukans.
And that was before adding Roger's pet. Or his asi "bodyguard."
"All right," Pahner said with a grim smile. "We need to keep this meeting short, if for no other reason than so that Rastar can unbend his neck."
He looked over at Rastar Komas Ta'Norton, who stood hunched forward with his horns banging on the ceiling. The former prince of the Northern League wasn't large for a Mardukan, but he still towered over the humans.
"How're the civan doing?" the captain continued.
"As well as could be expected," the Northerner said with a shrug. The ostrich-like, omnivorous cavalry mounts were actually related to the vastly larger pack beasts, so they had leathery skin and were more capable of handling desiccation than the slime coated, amphibian-derived Mardukans. But they still weren't well-suited to a lengthy sea voyage. "They fit into these toys as well as we do, and they never had to deal with the pitching and rocking before. At least they have more head room aboard Snarleyow than we do here, and that outsized col fish has stretched their feed supply nicely, but they aren't happy. We haven't lost any, yet, but we need to get to land soon."
"According to our map, we should," Julian commented. He tapped his pad, and an image of the large island or small continent they were approaching floated into view. "This is as detailed a zoom as I can get from the world map we had. It appears there's only one main river, and that it travels in a sort of semicircle through a good part of the continent. There should be a city on or near its mouth, and that should be less than three more days sailing from where we are right now -- assuming this line of islands extends from the eastern chain."
"The spaceport is on the central plateau," O'Casey added, "and the continent is ... extensively mountainous. In fact, it makes Nepal look flat -- the province or the planet. Travel to the spaceport may take some time, and it could be arduous."
"Oh, no!" Roger chuckled. "Not an arduous march!"
Pahner grinned momentarily, but then shook his head.
"It's an important point, Your Highness. Col oil or no, we're short on dietary supplements, and there won't be any more col fish to get oil from once we head inland. That means we're short on time, too, so traveling through that region had better be fast."
"We have the additional problem of overhead coverage, Captain," Kosutic pointed out. "From here on out, we need to consider our emissions. If we're able to hear them, and we have been, then they can hear us, if they're listening. And they can also detect our heavy weapons. Plasma cannons especially."
"Also, Sir," Julian said diffidently, "it's likely that the people from the ships visit more than just the starport. There are always tourists, even on planets where the local critters can't wait to eat them. We need to keep that in mind."
"Noted and agree." Pahner nodded. "Anything else?"
"The Diasprans," Despreaux commented. "They're ... not happy."
Pahner turned to Fain. The infantry captain was still settling in to command Yair's old company (and the transferred survivors of his own, original command), but he was continuing to demonstrate an impressive capacity for assuming additional responsibilities. He was also working out well as Roger's aide de camp, and he'd ended up being the regular liaison to the human command conferences, despite being junior to the other two Diaspran commanders.
"Comments, Captain?" Pahner invited, and Fain rubbed a horn gently.
"It's the water. And ... the space, I suppose."
"It's the lack of a chaplain," Kosutic snorted.
"Perhaps." Fain shrugged. "We probably should have brought a priest. But they didn't like the God in such abundance. It was troubling for them. And now, it's becoming troubling to the men, as well."
"The Diasprans are having a spiritual crisis, Captain," Kosutic explained. "Their cosmology calls for a piece of land floating in an eternal, endless body of water. It also calls for all water that hasn't been specifically contaminated to be 'good,' which means potable. So here we are, way out of sight of land, sailing over an apparently eternal body of ... bad water."
"Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink," Pahner said with a slight grin, then looked serious again. "I can see where that would be a problem, Captain Fain. Do you have a suggestion for solving it?"
"I've been talking with Sergeant Major Kosutic, Sir," the Mardukan said diffidently. "I believe it would be useful for her to deal directly with the troops as a replacement for our usual priests. And, if possible, when the ships go back to K'Vaern's Cove, it would also be useful if, upon return, they brought a priest over with them."
Pahner gazed at him for a second, then shook his head in resignation.
"By the time they could get back here from K'Vaern's Cove, hopefully, we'll be well on our way to the port. If we're not, we might as well not have made the trip." The Marine tapped his fingers together while he thought, then gave Kosutic another slight grin. "Okay, High Priestess, you're on. Just no converting."
"No sweat," the sergeant major said. "I'll just point out to them that there's no problem, within their cosmology, with there being more than one 'world.' We're traveling across what is, technically, infinite water -- a sphere is infinite, looked at in a certain way. For that matter, their definition practically cries out for multiple worlds, or, in fact, continents. And from what I've gleaned, there's nothing saying that all water is potable. In fact, they deal with certain types of nonpotable waters all the time. Waters that have been soiled by wastes, for example. And the God of Waters loves them just as much as he loves potable waters, and rejoices whenever they are restored to potability. Gets us into the concept of sin and redemption."
"The Prophet Kosutic," Roger said with a chuckle, and the sergeant major smiled at him.
"I'd invite you to a service, but I don't think the Empire is ready for that just yet."
"Now that we hopefully have that crisis dealt with," Pahner said, "there's another one to consider. Taking the port isn't going to be a picnic, and I've been watching the squad close-tactics training. It's not going well. Comments?"
"Train, train, train," Julian said. "We're barely scratching the surface yet, Sir. The teams are improving. Just not very rapidly."
"Sergeant Major?"
"Well...." Kosutic frowned. "I gotta say I don't feel like they're there, Julian. They're not concentrating. They're just going through the motions. We need to put some steel in their asses."
"With all due respect, Sergeant Major," Despreaux interjected, "I don't think you can say any of us are lacking in 'steel.' I think our credentials on that are fairly clear."
"Maybe," Kosutic returned. "And maybe not. One thing about being in battle as long and as often as we have is that for just about everybody, after a while, the edge goes away. You can't be on Condition Red forever, and we've been on it for a helluva lot longer than is recommended. So I think that that steel, Sergeant, is starting to melt. And it couldn't come at a worse time. You do realize that after we take the port, we're going to have to take a ship, right?"
"Yes." Despreaux nodded, her eyes dark. "I do realize that."
"Obviously, we're not going to hit the port when we know there's a ship in orbit to watch us do it," Kosutic said. "But that means that whenever a ship does turn up, we're going to have to grab any shuttles it sends down the instant they hit dirt." She leaned forward and stabbed a rock-hard finger into the wooden table. "And prevent communication between them and their ship when we do it. Then, we'll have to send our own shuttles up, blow the hatches, and do a forced boarding. We'll have to blast our way through the whole ship without smashing anything that can't be fixed. And it's probably going to be a ship used to bad ports -- to the idea of pirates trying to grab it. So its crew won't be sitting there with their guard down. Now how easy do you think that's going to be?"
"Sergeant Major," Roger said in mild reproof. "We're all aware that it's not going to be a walk in the park. But we'll get it done."
"Will we?" Kosutic asked. "It won't be Voitan or Sindi, Your Highness. We won't be in a fixed position waiting for the scummies to throw themselves onto our swords. It won't even be just a smash and grab, like Q'Nkok and Marshad. We'll have to move like lightning, in the boarding and taking the port. And we'll have to be precise, as well. And we're not moving like that right now."
"Can you take this ship without our help?" Rastar asked suddenly. "Isn't this what you brought us for? To fight by your side, your foes as ours?"
All the human heads in the cabin swiveled like turrets as their owners turned to look at him. Roger's mouth flapped for a moment before he could spit out a sentence. Then --
"It's ... not that easy."
"This environment isn't one you want to fight in, Rastar," Eleanora said quietly. "You'll undoubtedly be involved in the taking of the port. But the ship will be another issue."
Roger nodded then leaned forward in the lamplight and placed his hand atop the Mardukan's.
"Rastar, there are very few people I would rather have by my side in a firefight. But you don't want to fight on shipboard. Onboard, if you press the wrong button, you can find yourself without any air to breathe, your breath stolen and your skin freezing until you die, quickly."
"There are ... hazards, Rastar," Pahner agreed. "Hazards we would prefer not to subject your forces to. They aren't trained for that sort of environment. And despite the difficulty, a short platoon of Marines will be able to take most freighters. For that matter, since there will probably be functional armor at the spaceport, we can probably take a pirate down, as well. If as the Sergeant Major has noted, we're trained to a fine edge."
He rubbed his cheek for a moment in thought.
"Who are the best at this sort of thing? Roger asked. "I mean, of the troops we have."
"Probably myself and Despreaux, Your Highness," Julian answered.
"Don't count me out, boy," Kosutic said with a wink. "I was door-kicking when you were in swaddling clothes."
"Why don't we have a demonstration?" Roger asked, ignoring the byplay. "Set up a visible 'shoot-house" on the deck, made out of -- I dunno, sails and stuff -- and let the teams watch Despreaux and Julian do their thing. And the Sergeant Major, of course, if she's not too old and decrepit. Show them how it's done."
"Decrepit, huh?" The senior NCO snorted. "I'll show you decrepit, sonny!"
"That's 'Your Highness Sonny,'" Roger retorted with his nose in the air.
The comment elicited a general chuckle. Even Pahner smiled. Then he nodded more seriously.
"Good call, Roger. It will also give our allies a look at what we're doing. Since we're not going to be using live rounds, we can give them detectors and let them be the opposition. Let them see if they can stop the Sergeant Major's team."
"Surprise is the essence of an assault," Despreaux said quietly. "If they watch us prepare, they're not going to be too surprised."
"We'll train in the hold," Kosutic said, tugging at the skull earring dangling from her right ear. "Then duplicate the conditions on deck."
"That sounds good," Julian said, but his tone was a bit dubious. She cocked her head at him, and he shrugged. "You know how much of this is about muscle memory," he said. "Even with the helmet VR and our toots, we're still going to need at least some room to move in, if we're going to do it right. And, frankly, I don't think there's enough room in Hooker's hold."
"He's got a point, Smaj," Roger said. The prince frowned for a moment, then shrugged. "On the other hand, there's a lot more room below decks on Snarleyow. I bet the civan have eaten enough of the forage to give us a lot more room in Snarleyow's forward hold then we could find in any of the other ships."
"That's an excellent idea, Roger," Pahner approved. "Her between-deck spaces are even deeper than ours are, and she's got a lot more beam, as well."
"Still not as much room as I'd really like, but a lot better, " Kosutic agreed.
"And we'll be the 'opposition'?" Rastar asked.
"Yes" Pahner said with a nod. "We'll set up a facility above decks on one of the other schooners. It may still be a little cramped for troopers the size of yours, but it should work out. As far as the demonstration itself goes, you'll know they're coming, but not quite when. And you'll be armed with your standard weapons, but no ammunition. The computer will be able to tell which shots hit and which miss, and the system will tell you with a buzzer if you're hit or killed."
"Can I participate also?" Feign asked. "I ... don't have much to do."
"Certainly," Pahner said, then chuckled. "A sergeant major and two sergeants going after a prince and his officers. It should be interesting."
"Could I participate, instead?" Roger asked. "I'd like to see how I do on this tac team."
Julian started to open his mouth in automatic protest, then thought about it. Every single time he had doubted the prince's abilities in a firefight, he'd been wrong. And so, after a moment more of thought, he shut his mouth, instead.
Kosutic frowned contemplatively. Then she nodded.
"We'll ... introduce you to it, at least. It's more than just being able to shoot straight. Some people who aren't much good at other fighting are very good at close-quarters work, and vice versa. If you do well in the preliminary training, you'll participate in the final demonstration. If not, not."
"Fine," Roger said with a nod. "How long to set this up?"
"Start in the morning," Pahner said. "Captain T'Sool and I will get with Snarleyow's skipper and have Hooker's main deck set up to duplicate the conditions in Snarleyow's hold. You do your prep down there, then do the assault on the deck. That way we can all watch."
"And make rude comments, I'm sure," Kosutic snorted.
"So are we going to play shirts and skins?" Julian ogled Despreaux luridly. "If so, I say we take skins."
The sergeant major's palm-strike would have been a disabling or even killing blow if it had landed a few inches further forward on the side of his head, or if she'd used the base of her palm instead of the side. As it was, it just hurt like hell.
"You're toast, buddy," she chuckled as he rubbed the side of his head.
"Man," he protested. "Nobody around here can take a joke!"
"And don't let this interfere with your discussions with the Mardukans," Pahner reminded the sergeant major, ignoring the byplay. "I'm not sure that either takes precedence over the other."
The captain was still unsure and unhappy about the relationship between his senior NCO and his intel sergeant. They were discreet, and there wasn't a hint of favoritism, but small unit command was about managing personalities, and sex was one of the biggest destabilizers around. There were strict rules against the type and degree of fraternization the two of them were engaged in, and they knew it just as well as he did. But, he reminded himself yet again, none of the rules had contemplated a unit being cut off from all outside contact for over six months.
"Got it," the sergeant major nodded, noting his dark expression.
"Should we load anything else onto the list?" Roger asked, deliberately trying to reclaim a less serious mood. "I don't think Sergeant Major Kosutic has enough on her plate, yet."
"Ah, you just wait, Your Highness," the NCO told him with an evil smile. "As of tomorrow, you're just 'Recruit MacClintock.' You just keep right on joking."
"What's the worst that can happen?" Roger said with a smile. "Going back to Voitan?"


Chapter Five

"ARE YOU GOING TO KEEP AN EYE ON YOUR OWN SECTOR NEXT TIME, RECRUIT?"
"One hundred and twenty-seven. YES, SERGEANT MAJOR!"
There were several axioms, handed down from generation to generation by the noncommissioned officers who were the true keepers of the tribal wisdom, in which Sergeant Major either Kosutic believed firmly. "No plan survives contact with reality." "In battle, His Wickedness always has a hole card." "If the enemy is in range, so are you." All of them were rules the military forgot at its own peril, but the one that was currently paramount in her own mind was "The more you sweat, the less you bleed."
And at the moment, some people obviously needed to do a little more sweating than others, she thought bitingly.
Roger MacClintock had several things going for him when it came to close combat. He had been gifted, both naturally and through long ago manipulation of the MacClintock genotype, with the reactions of a pit-viper. He was a natural born shot, with the hand-eye coordination of a master marksman, and he had spent many a lonely hour building on that platform to perfect his aim. And he had a good natural combat awareness; in a fight, he always knew "where" he was and had a good feel for where the enemies and friendlies were around him. That was an often underrated ability, but it was crucial in the sort of high-violence and sudden-death environment for which they were training.
But although he'd learned to be a "team player" in soccer, he'd never really had to perfect that in combat. Worse, perhaps, he tended to go his own way, as had been proven repeatedly on the long march from the shuttles' dry lakebed landing to K'Vaern's Cove. Roger was never one to integrate himself into a fire plan. Which made it a good thing that he always led from the front, since he also tended to kill anything that got in front of him.
"Your job, when we do an entry, is to watch my back! Not to watch where I am going! If I run into resistance, I will deal with it. But if I have to watch your sector at the same time, you are OFF THIS TEAM! Do I make myself perfectly clear?"
"CLEAR, SERGEANT MAJOR!" Roger hammered out his final push-up. "One fifty, Sergeant Major!"
"You just stay there in the front leaning rest position, Recruit MacClintock! I'll get to you when I'm ready."
"Yes, Sergeant Major!" the prince gasped.
The schooner Snarleyow's forward hold was hotter than the hinges of hell and reeked of decaying filth in the bilges. But it was also the largest concealed open space aboard any vessel of the flotilla, which, from Eva Kosutic's perspective, made it the best possible place for training. It still didn't offer as much unobstructed area as she would have liked -- not by a long chalk -- but the cavalry's civans had already consumed the fodder which had originally been piled into it. And unlike the upper cargo deck, there were no civans in the hold itself.
Which was a very good thing. Civans, and especially the trained war-civans Prince Rastar and his men favored, were much more intelligent than most humans might have thought upon meeting them for the first time. But what they most definitely were not was cute or cuddly. In fact, any civan tended to have the temper of an Old Earth grizzly bear with a bad tooth. The temperament -- and training -- of those selected as cavalry mounts only exacerbated that natural tendency. Which was why the civans stalled along the sides of Snarleyow's upper cargo deck were "tethered" (if that was the proper verb for it) not with halters or ropes, but with five-point chain tie-downs.
Even so, the Mardukans charged with their care and feeding were extremely careful about how close they got to the beasts' ax-like jaws and razor-sharp, metal-shod fighting claws. For herself, Kosutic was delighted to have a training space, be it ever so hot, dank, and smelly, in which she didn't have to worry about losing a limb because she strayed too close to a civan in a worse mood than usual.
Of course, at the moment, she was in a worse mood than usual, and she shook her head, then gestured for the other two NCOs to follow her. She led them to the forwardmost end of the hold, then turned to face them.
"Options," she said quietly, and Julian wiped away a drop of sweat and shook his head.
"He's good, Smaj. Very good. But he won't stay focused on defense."
"He's too used to having as do that for him," Despreaux pointed out. "He's used to barreling through the opposition while we cover his back. Now you're barreling through the course, and he's supposed to cover your back." She shrugged ever so slightly. "He can't get used to it."
"Yeah, but a big part of it is that he's one aggressive son-of-a-bitch," Julian said with a quiet chuckle. "No offense intended to Her Majesty."
"There's that," Kosutic agreed, tugging at an earlobe. "I don't really want to switch him out for somebody else, either. He's got the moves to be better than just about anybody else in the Company, if we can ever get them harnessed and coordinated, and only Macek might be able to equal him as it is. But I'm not going to get whacked because he's not covering his sector."
And that was exactly what had happened, three times so far.
When the helmet systems came on and their connection to the team's toots kicked in, the hold became a virtual shoot-house, and Kosutic had set the difficulty level very high. That meant that enemies weren't just in plain sight, on the route that the team took. Which, in turn, meant there had to be eyes turned in every direction ... and Roger insisted on facing forward, along the line of assault. Not only did that permit the "enemies" he would otherwise have neutralized a clear shot at the team, but in one case he'd managed to "shoot" the sergeant major in the back.
Something had to be done, and Despreaux furrowed her brow as all three of them considered the problem.
"We could...." she said, then stopped.
"What?" the sergeant major asked.
"You won't like it," Despreaux replied.
"I've done a lot of stuff I don't like," Kosutic sighed. "What's one more thing, by His Evilness?"
"All right," Despreaux said with a shrug. "We could put Roger on point."
"Uh," Kosutic said.
"Hmmm." Julian rubbed his jaw. "She's got a point. I think he might do pretty well."
"But..." the sergeant major said. "But -- "
"'But that's my spot!'" Julian finished for her with a faint, humorous whine.
Kosutic looked daggers at him for a moment, then shook her head sharply.
"It's more than that, Adib. Do you really think the Captain isn't going to use us? He put us together for more than just to show how it's done. My guess is that he's thinking of using us for something, as a team."
"What? His company's sergeant major, two of his squad leaders, and the prince?" Julian laughed. "You're joking, right?"
"No, I'm not," the sergeant major said seriously. "Just take it as a given that that might happen. Then think about putting Roger on point."
"Oh," Julian said.
"I can see your objection, Sergeant Major," Despreaux said carefully. "But I'm not sure it matters. Perhaps we should get Macek or Stickles instead of the Prince. But if we are going to use him, I still think he should be on point. Frankly, I think, with all due respect, that he might be ... a touch better even then you."
Despreaux gazed calmly at the sergeant major, waiting for the explosion, and Kosutic opened her mouth again. Then she closed it with a clop, fingered her earlobe for a moment, and shrugged.
"You might be right."
"I think she is, Smaj," Julian said with equal care. "The pocker is fast."
"Is that any way to talk about the Heir Tertiary to the Throne of Man?" Kosutic demanded with a grin. "But you're right. The pocker is fast. And he can shoot, too. But I hate to seem to ... reward him for screwing up."
"You think point is a reward?" Julian shook his head.
* * *
Roger stood with his right elbow just touching the wood of the bulkhead, his head and body hunched and turned to his left. The wood was real, but just to his right was a large doorway which had been cut into it only recently. In his helmet systems, the doorway was visible to only as an outline sketched on the wall with explosives. And the wall wasn't wood; it was plascrete. And in just a moment, the "explosives" were going to go off and blow a new door through it. And they would be going off less than a half-meter from his arm.
It was going to be an unpleasant experience. Roger rather doubted that even the sergeant major appreciated the full capabilities of his own toot. All the Marines were accustomed to using their implanted computers as both combat enhancers and training devices, and their toots' abilities in those regards far exceeded those of the hardware available to most citizens of the Empire. But Roger's toot was at least as much more capable than theirs as theirs were than the average civilian model. Which meant that the training simulation was even more "real" for him than for anyone else in the team. He'd considered kicking in the filters in an effort to spare himself some of the sergeant major's simulation's ... energetic programming tricks, but he'd decided against it. He'd come to embrace the wisdom of another of Kosutic's beloved axioms: "Train like you're going to fight."
He pushed that thought away and concentrated on the moment at hand. Other than the initial walk-through of the simulated rooms, this was his first time on point, and he suspected that the sergeant major was going to be making a statement. In fact, it would be just her style to make the course unsurvivable. That would fit her passion for making training harder than real life could possibly be, and he'd already discovered the hard way that she had an undeniable talent for doing her passion justice. On the other hand, this was supposed to be training for her, too, so whatever was waiting for him was waiting for her, as well. Of course, to get to her, it probably had to go through him first, and he couldn't help wondering what the simulator AI was going to throw at them. He hadn't bothered even to attempt to wheedle any more information out of the sergeant major. She wouldn't have told him, of course. But even if she might have, she probably couldn't. The way she'd set things up when she punched the basic scenario parameters into her computer to generate the simulation, not even she should know exactly what was on the other side of the wall.
But it was bound to be bad.
Despreaux quietly laid in the last bit of the simulated breeching charge and stood back. The explosion should fill the room beyond with flying fragments, along with a world's worth of overpressure, smoke, and noise. The Marines' helmets and chameleon suits would serve to reduce that same concussion, so it should give them a moment of surprise and shock in which to overcome whoever might be defending the room. Assuming that the defenders weren't outfitted with equipment similar to that of the Marines.
Despreaux held up a thumb, indicating that she was ready to go, and watched the rest of the team. Julian held up a thumb as well and hunched away from the blast area, followed by Kosutic.
Roger held up his own thumb and gripped his bead rifle tightly. The weapon was the standard issue field rifle for the Marines, but its "bullpup" design made it equally handy at close quarters. He'd become familiar with the weapon in the course of the battle across the continent, and it was now as much an extension of his body as his pistol or his personal rifle. In addition, his toot's combat pack had come with a slot for bead rifle, and he'd used the training system assiduously, building up his ability and confidence day by day. He'd never had much call for automatic weapons' training before, but he instinctively tended to be light on the trigger, so his bursts were always short and clean. With most targets, he'd tended to put two or three rounds into the upper chest, neck, or head. But except for the few targets which had presented themselves to "ass end Charlie" in the run-throughs, that had been against stationary targets. Now it was time to see if he really had what it took.
Despreaux took one more look at the team, hunched away herself, and triggered the breeching charge.
The suit systems -- and toots -- did the best they could to simulate the conditions, and that "best" was very good indeed. The helmets simulated a vast overpressure on their ears as they clamped onto the team's heads, their toots gave their sense of balance a hard jolt, and their chameleon suits went momentarily rigid and squeezed hard in kinetic reaction to the "pressure wave." But even before the cloth had started to settle again, Roger was through the door.
The room beyond was fairly small, no more than four or five meters square. A table in the center occupied much of its volume, and there was another door in the far wall. The scenario had called for no reconnaissance on the room, so the numbers or locations of hostiles had been unknown. But, as it turned out, there was plenty for a young prince to work on.
As he plunged through the smoke, he identified a hostile on the far side of the room. But that hostile was only just drawing a bead pistol, and something made Roger look to his right.
There was human in the corner with a bead rifle trained right on him. The person wore the shoulder patch of a Colonial Garrison Trooper, but otherwise his equipment and uniform were identical to the Marines'. And it was clear that he'd reacted immediately to the detonation and entry. But as fast as the sim was reacting, "he" had never dealt with Prince Roger
Roger flipped the bead rifle sideways and "double-tapped" the defender in the corner off-hand, then flipped back to the left to engage another defender in the other corner. Only then did he engage and neutralize the first threat ... who was just starting to level her bead pistol. Beads caromed off the floor and past his legs as that threat flew back against the far wall in a splash of red.
But by then, Roger was already gone.
* * *
Kosutic followed the prince through the smoke and covered left. In this case, she did know the layout and position of defenders, and she was shocked to see all three of them already dead. The two "sneaks" in the corners were both headless corpses, and the primary threat against the far wall had one round through the forehead and two more in her chest. The sergeant major was even more shocked as Roger threw a flashbang through the far door and followed it before it could detonate.
"Roger! Satan damn it, SLOW DOWN!"
* * *
The prince vaguely heard the sergeant major, but his helmet visor's heads-up display showed that so far the team had taken no casualties. That was how he intended to keep it. He followed the disarmed flashbang through the door, and, as he'd expected, all the defenders on the far side had hunched away in anticipation of the flash that never came. This room was larger, with an open door along the right wall, and a closed-door in the left wall. There were also quite a few defenders -- seven, to be precise. For some reason the words "target rich environment" came to mind. And also "Eva Kosutic is a bitch." 
He shot two that were arrayed beside the door to his right, then took cover behind a handy workbench. From under the bench, he began single-tapping knees and shins as the other five defenders dropped to the floor and thus into view.
A grenade from one of the "wounded" defenders flew over the workbench, and it appeared to be the just and proper time to abandon his position. However, that wasn't all to the bad. The grenade was a standard issue frag, and the explosion, while unpleasant, would only manage to lift him over the bench a little faster. The chameleon suits was proof against all but high-velocity beads, and the shrapnel from the grenade wouldn't penetrate it. He wasn't sure if the combat simulator was designed to simulate shocked amazement on the part of the "enemy," but real ones would have stopped in dazed wonder at the front-flip that he managed over the workbench, riding the wavefront of the explosion.
* * *
Kosutic caught a flicker out of the corner of her eye as she came through the door, but realized it was the prince. Just then, a notional "grenade" went off to her right and slapped her against the wall. That was okay, but it threw off her first shot, and by the time she'd reacquired the two remaining defenders, they were both down with head and throat shots.
"Roger!"
* * *
Apparently there had been a purpose for all those saddle exercises they'd put him through in boarding school. Either his maneuver had temporarily locked up the processor, or else it was designed to allow for amazed shock, because both of the remaining targets just sat there, frozen, clutching their wounds while he terminated them. The sergeant major was yelling about something, but he hadn't set up this nightmare, and he damned sure wasn't stopping or even slowing down until all the targets were cleared. He thumbed a frag grenade, set it for two-second detonation, and pitched it through the open door. Then he followed.
* * *
"Roger!" Kosutic shouted in exasperation. She'd seen the grenade go through the door, and he was following it far too closely, anti-ballistic chameleon suit or no. Putting him on point might make some sense; she could barely keep up with him, so Satan only new what it would be like for the opposition! But it was just as clear that with him in the lead, His Wickedness was running wild.
* * *
The system finally threw Roger a curve and graded his bead rifle as damaged by the grenade explosion. It also graded his right hand as damaged, and his toot obliged the AI by sending a stab of all to genuine pain through the hand. That reduced his options considerably, so as the three targets in the room tried to recover from the slap of the fragmentation grenade, he reached across and drew his pistol with his left. 
He also made a mental note to figure out a better way to enter rooms. Maybe it would be better not to follow his grenade "door knocker" quite as closely next time.
* * *
Despreaux shook her head over the carnage in the room. It was pretty clear that the sergeant major had intended to stack the deck. But apparently she hadn't stacked it well enough.
Nimashet had nothing to do as "ass-end Charlie," so she backed along, covering Julian now, and keeping the single closed door in the edge of her vision. If they were counterattacked, it would probably come from there. But it didn't pay to concentrate only one threat axis. It was better to be open and ready to engage in any of "her" directions, she reminded herself.
Which reminder was of no damned use at all when the ceiling fell in.
* * *
Roger's new room had only the three defenders, and they were all down with double-taps before they recovered from the grenade. Unfortunately, the left end of the room was a plasteel wall with an armored gun-port. The cannon in it had been unable to engage as long as there were live defenders in its way, but as the last hostile fell, it opened up.
Roger managed to duck under the stream of bead-cannon rounds and crouched along the wall, sheltered from its fire. Unfortunately, there was a certain amount of ricochet, and Kosutic wasn't able to follow him through the door. He could hear a firefight going on in the other room, so he knew he couldn't stay where he was for long. And it looked as if there was just enough room to get a hand through the firing slot past the bead cannon.
He slipped a grenade from his pouch, and as he did, the indicators for Despreaux and Julian went to yellow, then orange. Both were wounded and would die without support.
* * *
Eva crouched behind the workbench Roger had abandoned and cursed. Despreaux and Julian were both down, and she herself was pinned by fire from the ceiling and the three heavily armored commandos who'd dropped through the hole. The targets were advancing cautiously, but their heavier armor was shrugging off most of her shots, even after she'd switched to armor piercing. It wasn't powered armor, just very heavy reactive plate, but if something didn't come through soon, they were going to lose this one.
* * *
Roger set the grenade to one second, flipped it into the bead cannon bunker, and dove for the door. If the damned simulator's AI didn't have the people in the bunker at least trying to get the grenade back out of their position, it wasn't very well written.
He wasn't punctured by the heavy weapon, so it appeared to have worked. But the situation in the far room sounded bad, and he was tired of going blind. He thought about it for just a moment, then flipped on his helmet's vision systems.
As it turned out, the "dead" -- or at least "seriously wounded" -- Julian had his head turned to the side. Roger looked in the same direction through the camera on his helmet and saw three heavily armored targets closing on the workbench he had flipped across on his own way through. He slipped a fresh magazine into the pistol and contemplated his right hand. It was still graded as "yellow" (and that damnably efficient toot of his was still giving him direct neural stimulation that hurt like hell to back up its "damage"), and he wasn't sure how much use he could make of it. But there was only one way to find out, so he drew a throwing knife and approached the door in a crouch.
This was going to take timing. Lots of timing.
* * *
Timing is everything, and in this case it was on the side of the righteous. Kosutic's HUD showed her the icon of the prince approaching the door, and she smiled. As the prince's actual figure appeared in the opening, she concentrated on the shooter in the ceiling.
Time to get some of their own back.
* * *
Roger stepped through the door as Kosutic started tearing into the ceiling with long, concentrated bursts of blind fire. His own firepower was more limited, but unlike her, he could actually see the shooter. He flipped up the knife and threw it towards the hole in the ceiling even as he fired at the three crouched targets in the room.
He saw the backs of each of their necks go red, then grunted in anguish as his chameleon suit hardened and the toot threw some more neural stimulation at him. Pain echoed through his chest, and his helmet's HUD flashed a brief schematic of his body with his torso outlined in yellow. But by then he had directed the pistol towards the ceiling, and before the shooter could get off another round, he was credited as a kill. The hostile fell through the hole to the deck, and Roger noted the knife blade buried in the bad guy's left arm.
Roger rotated to the right along the wall, trying to disregard the flashes of pain his toot obediently sent along his nerves each time he moved. At least one rib broken, he estimated. It hurt like hell, but his nanny pack was already deadening the pain -- or, at least, his toot was grudgingly acting as if the nanites were doing their job -- so he made himself ignore it as he reloaded his pistol. 
Then he picked up Julian's bead rifle in place of his own, attached it to his harness' friction strap, and reloaded it, as well. Then he sidled towards the remaining closed door, cradling the rifle in his undamaged left hand.
He looked across at the sergeant major and gestured to the door and the hole in the ceiling, then shrugged. She grimaced back at him and gestured at the ceiling. He nodded, thumbed himself, then jabbed the same thumb upward. She grimaced again, but she also nodded and crouched down, setting her rifle on the floor and interlacing her fingers.
Roger let the friction strap pull Julian's rifle up, drew his pistol again, and stepped over to the sergeant major. He put one boot into her hands, leapt upward into the hole --
-- and slammed instantly into overhead.
* * *
The next thing he knew, he was on the floor, clutching his head and neck in pain (which was not at all simulated) as Kosutic, Julian, and Despreaux tried not to laugh.
"Clear VR," the sergeant major said, and the simulator's AI obeyed, although Roger was half-surprised it could understand the command through her laughter. She leaned over him, and shook her head in an odd mixture of amusement and contrition.
"Satan and Lucifer," she got out. "I'm sorry about that, Your Highness. Are you okay?"
Roger lay on the floor of the poorly lit hold, clutching his neck and stared up at her - and the completely solid deckhead above her.
"Good Christ," he groaned. "What in hell happened?"
"I got so into the scenario, I forgot it wasn't real," Kosutic admitted. "Snarleyow's big enough that I could build two or three rooms into the hold, but there wasn't anything I could do about the vertical limits, and I got so involved I forgot that there couldn't really be a hole in the 'ceiling.' That's the upper cargo deck planking. There's not even a hatch."
"Where's the targets?" Roger moaned pitifully. "Where's the bead-cannon? Where's the door? We were doing so welllll!"
Julian rolled over on his side, still laughing, while Despreaux climbed to her feet.
"Fortunately," she observed with a disdainful glance at the giggling armorer, "I'm not dead."
"Oh, my head," Roger said, ignoring her. "I hate VR! Sergeant Major, did you just piledriver me into the ceiling?"
"That's more or less what I just said, Your Highness," Kosutic said, still chuckling.
"Oooooooo," Roger groaned. "Can I just lie here for a while?"

Chapter Six

BAM!
"Man, I want my bead rifle back!" Julian muttered as his round plunked into the water, well clear of the floating target. 
He and Roger stood side by side at Ima Hooker's rail, between two of her starboard carronades. They'd just watched Rastar's team run through its own training on the schooner's main deck, and the experience had been fairly ... ominous. They were due to have their "close contact" contest with the Mardukans the next morning, and it didn't look like it was going to be a walkover, even with Roger on point. The Vashin cavalry and selected Diaspran infantry who were going to act as the notional "guards" on key defenses of the spaceport would be graded as having light body armor. And since all the Vashin carried at least three weapons, it was going to be interesting.
"You're just jealous," Roger retorted as the barrel Julian had missed shattered from his own shot. "And it pains your professional ego to be shooting a 'smoke pole,'" he added with a grin.
The new rifles had been produced just in time for the battles around Sindi, and with their availability, the Marines had, for all practical purposes, put away their bead rifles until they reached the starport. The weapons had been designed using Roger's eleven-millimeter magnum Parkins and Spencer as a model, but modified in light of available technology.
The Parkins and Spencer's dual bolt-action/semi-automatic system had been impossible to duplicate, but the base for the bolt form was a modification of the ancient Ruger action, and that worked just fine. With the addition of scavenged battery packs from downchecked plasma rifles and various items of gear dead Marines no longer required, the electronic firing system built into the Parkins' cartridge cases also worked just fine. And since the prince had doggedly insisted on policing up his shooting stands whenever possible and dragging along the empty cases, there was sufficient brass to provide over two hundred rounds for each of the surviving Marines.
The black powder which was the most advanced form of explosives available on Marduk had made for a few compromises. One was that the rifles' slower-velocity bullets simply could not match the flat trajectory of a hyper-velocity bead, which meant that at any sort of range, the barrel had to be elevated far beyond what any of the Marines were comfortable with. Which also explained why so many of their rounds tended to fall short.
"You can throw a rock faster than these bullets go," Despreaux growled from Roger's other side. "I still say that gun cotton I made would have worked -- and given us a hell of a lot better velocity, too!" 
"Overpressure," Roger commented with a shake of his head. "And it was unstable as hell."
"I was working on it!" she snapped.
"Sure you were ... and you're lucky you're not regrowing a set of fingers," Julian told her with another chuckle as he fired again. This time the round was on range for the second barrel, but off to the left. "Damn."
"Windage," Roger said laconically as he shattered that barrel, as well.
"Sight!" Julian snapped.
"Care to trade?" the prince offered with a smile.
"No," the Marine replied promptly, and glowered at Despreaux when she snickered.
While a good bit of it was the sight, most of it -- as Julian knew perfectly well -- was the sighter. The Marines had learned on the long march to the sea that while they were all very good, very nasty warriors, their "charge" was probably at least as dangerous as any of them were. And he was certainly a better shot than almost all of them.
"Seriously," Roger said, gesturing for Julian's rifle. "I'd like to try. I turn the sight off from time to time, but it's not the same. And what happens if I lose it?"
Julian shook his head and traded rifles.
"It's going to be a bit tough to zero," he warned.
"Not really." The prince looked the rifle over. He'd checked them out when the first of them came off the assembly line, even fired a few rounds through one of them. But that had been months ago, and he took the time to refamiliarize himself with the weapon. Especially with the differences between it and his own Parkins.
Dell Mir, the K'Vaernian inventor who'd made the detailed modifications, had done a good job. The weapons were virtually identical, with the exception of removing the optional gas-blowback reloading system -- which Roger had to disengage anyway, when he used black-powder rounds in the Parkins -- and the actual materials from which it was constructed. 
It was fortunate that while the Mardukans' materials science was still in the dark ages, their machining ability was fairly advanced, thanks to their planet's weather. Whereas industrial technology had been driven, to a great extent, by advances in weaponry on Earth -- and Althar, for that matter -- the development of machining on Marduk had been necessitated by something else entirely: water. It rained five to ten times a day on this planet, and the development of any sort of civilization with that much rain had required advanced pumping technology. It was a bit difficult to drain fields with simple waterwheel pumps in the face of three or four meters of rain a year.
Production of the best pumps, the fastest and most efficient ones -- and the ones capable of lifting water the "highest" -- required fine machine tolerances and resistant metals. Thus, the Mardukans had early on developed both the machine lathe and drill press, albeit animal driven, as well as machine steel and various alloys of bronze and brass that were far in advance of those found at similar general tech levels in most societies.
But because they'd never developed electricity, there was no stainless steel, and no electroplating, so the rifle was made out of a strong, medium-carbon steel that was anything but rust-proof. And the stock, instead of a light-weight, boron-carbon polymer like the Parkins and Spencer's, was of shaped wood.
The weapon's ammunition was slightly different, as well. The cases were the same ones Roger had started with -- as long as his hand, and thicker than his thumb, necking downward about fifteen percent to a bullet that was only about as thick as his second finger. The major changes were in the propellant and the bullet.
Roger's rifle used an electronic firing system that activated the center-point primer plug, and in the one operation that had been handled almost entirely by the Marines, Julian and Poertena had installed firing systems in each of the rifles created from spare parts for their armor, downchecked plasma rifles, and odd items of personal gear that hadn't been used up on the trek. Each of the weapons had the same basic design, although each had a few different parts. Mostly, though, he used parts from the plasma rifles, including the faulty capacitors which had made the off-world weapons unsafe to use. There was no problem using them for this application, since the energy being temporarily stored was far below that necessary to cause the spectacular -- and lethal -- detonations that had forced the weapons' retirement.
Julian had recommended, effectively, scraping all of the plasma rifles and using their stocks for the base of as many of the black-powder rifles as possible, but Captain Pahner had nixed the idea. There hadn't been enough of the plasma rifles to provide all the black-powder weapons the company was going to require, so the majority of them would still have had to be made from native materials. Besides, he was still debating whether or not Julian and Poertena might be able to come up with a "fix" good enough to use the energy weapons for just one more battle. Given the probable difficulty of taking the starport, the plasma rifles might be the difference between success and failure, and he'd been unwilling to completely foreclose the possibility of using them.
The propellant in Roger's original rounds had been an advanced smokeless powder. From the perspective of the Marines with their electromagnetic bead rifles, long-range grenade launchers, and plasma rifles, that propellant had been a laughable antique. Something dating back to the days when humans were still using steam to make electricity. But that same propellant was far, far out of reach of the Mardukans tech base, so Dell Mir and the Marines had accepted that black powder was the only effective choice for a propellant.
Black powder, however, had its own peculiar quirks. One, which was painfully evident whenever someone squeezed a trigger, was the dense clouds of particularly foul-smelling smoke which it emitted. Another was the truly amazing ability of black powder to foul a weapon with caked residue, and that residue's resistance to most of the Marines's cleaning solvents. Old-fashioned soap and water actually worked best, but the Bronze Barbarians' sensibilities were offended when they found themselves up to their elbows in hot, soapy water scrubbing away at their weapons with brushes and plenty of elbow grease.
But the biggest functional difference between black powder-loaded rounds and the ones Roger had brought out from Old Earth with him was that black powder exploded. More modern propellants burned -- very rapidly, to be sure, but in what was a much more gradual process, relatively speaking, then black powder's ... enthusiastic detonation. While nitro powders might well produce a higher absolute breach pressure, they did it over a longer period of time. For the same breach pressure, black powder "spiked" much more abruptly, which imposed a resultant strain on the breach and barrel of the weapon.
Not to mention a particularly nasty and heavy recoil.
Fortunately, the old axiom about getting what you paid for still held true, and the Parkins and Spencer was a very expensive weapon, indeed. Part of what Roger had gotten for the purchase price, was a weapon which was virtually indestructible, which was a not insignificant consideration out in the bush where he tended to do most of his hunting. Another part, however, was the basic ammunition design itself. The Parkins' designers had assumed that situations might arise in which the owner of one of their weapons would find himself cut off from his normal sources of supply and be forced to adopt field expedients (if not quite so primitive as those which had been enforced upon the Marines here on Marduk) to reload their ammo. So the cases themselves had been designed to contain pressures which would have blown the breach right out of most pre-space human firearms. And they had sufficient internal capacity for black-powder loads of near shoulder-breaking power.
In fact, the power and muzzle velocity of the reloaded rounds, while still far short of what Roger's off-world ammunition would have produced with its initial propellant, had been sufficient to create yet another problem.
The rounds Roger had started out with had jacketed bullets -- old-fashioned lead, covered in a thin metal "cladding" that intentionally left the slug's lead tip exposed. On impact, the soft lead core mushroomed to more than half-again its original size and the cladding stripped back into a six-pronged, expanding slug. The main reason the cladding was necessary, however, was because the velocity of the round would have "melted" a plain lead bullet on its way up the barrel, coating the barrel and rifling in lead. Modern chemical-powered small arms ammunition was manufactured using techniques which were a direct linear descendent of technology which had been available since time immemorial: copper or some other alloy was added to the outside of lead bullets by a form of electroplating. But Mardukans didn't have electroplating, and it was a technology there'd been no time to "reinvent," so the humans had been forced to make do.
There'd been three potential ways to solve the problem. The first had been to reduce the velocity of the rounds to a point where they wouldn't lead the barrel, but that would have resulted in a reduction in both range and accuracy. The second choice had been to try to develop a stronger alloy to replace the lead, but since that wasn't something the Mardukans had ever experimented with, it would once again have required "reinventing" a technology. Finally, they'd settled on the third option: casting thin copper jackets for the rounds and then compressing the lead into them. There was an issue with contraction of the copper, but the compression injection -- another technique garnered from pump technology -- took care of that.
So the rounds were copper jacketed -- "full-metal jacketed," as it was called. They weren't quite as "perfect" as Roger' original ammunition, of course. Every so often one of the bullets was unbalanced, and would go drifting off on its own course after departing the muzzle. But however imperfect they might have been by Imperial standards, they were orders of magnitude better than anything the Mardukans had ever had.
Now Roger cycled the bolt and popped up the ladder sight. The sight -- a simple, flip-up frame supporting an elevating aperture rear sight and graduated for "click" range adjustment using a thumbwheel -- was necessary for any accurate really long-range work. Elevating the rear sight forced the marksman to elevate the front sight, as well, in order to line them up, thus compensating for the projectile drop. It was another contraption the humans and Mardukans had sweated over, but once the design was perfected (and matched to the rounds' actual ballistic performance), the Mardukans had had no problem producing it.
But the sights weren't exactly a one-size-fits-all proposition, because everyone shot slightly differently, if only because everyone was at least slightly different in size, and thus "fitted" their weapons differently. As a result, the sights of any given rifle were "zeroed" for the individual to whom it belonged, which meant this rifle was zeroed for Julian, not Roger. Given that the range was about two hundred meters, the bullet could actually miss by up to a meter even if Roger's aim was perfect according to Julian's sight. But there was only one way to find out how bad it really was, so Roger calculated the wind, let out a breath, and squeezed the trigger.
The recoil was enough to make even him grunt, but he'd expected that, and he gazed intently downrange. Although the rounds were comparatively slow, they weren't so slow that he could actually watch them in flight. But the surface of the ocean swell was sufficiently smooth for the brief splash -- to the left, and over by about half a meter -- to be clearly visible.
"Told you it was the sight," Julian said with a slight snicker.
"Bet you a civan he makes the next one," Despreaux countered.
"As long as you're referring to the coin and not the animal, you're on," Julian replied. "Crosswind, rolling ship, bobbing barrel, and an unzeroed rifle. Two hundred meters. No damned way."
"You make a habit of underestimating the Prince," Cord observed. Roger's asi had been standing behind Roger, leaning on his huge, lethal spear while he silently watched the children play with their newfangled toys and observed the byplay. "You don't tend to underestimate enemies twice, I've noticed," the shaman continued, "which is good. But why is it that you persist in doing so where 'friendlies' are concerned?"
Julian glanced up at the towering native -- the representative of what was little better than a hunter-gatherer civilization, who was undoubtedly the best-read and probably best educated Mardukan in the entire expedition. As always, it was impossible to read his expression, but his amusement showed clearly in his body language, and Julian stuck out his tongue at him.
"That was my zero shot," Roger announced, ignoring the exchange between the Marine armorer and his asi. Then he put the rifle back to shoulder and punched out another round.
This time, the barrel was smashed.
Julian gazed at the bobbing wreckage for a moment, then reached into his pocket and pulled out a thin sheet of brass, which he handed over to Despreaux.
"I give."
Despreaux smiled and pocketed the brass, a K'Vaernian coin equal to a week's pay for a rifleman.
"It was a sucker bet, Adib. Have you ever won a shooting contest with Roger?"
"No," Julian admitted as Roger hefted the rifle once again. There were four more barrels scattered across the surface of the ocean, each floating amid its own cluster of white splashes as the Marines lining the schooner's side potted at them.
Roger lined up a shot at the most distant barrel, then shook his head when the round plunked into the sea well short.
"I'll admit that the scope does help," he confessed as he chambered another round. He brought the rifle back into firing position, but before he could squeeze the trigger, a shot rang out from the foredeck. Three more followed in rapid succession, and each bullet struck and shattered a barrel in turn.
Roger lowered Julian's rifle and looked forward as Captain Pahner lowered his own rifle and blew the gunsmoke out of the breach.
"I guess the Captain wanted me to be sure who was king," the prince said with a smile.
"Well, Your Highness," Julian told him with a shrug, "when you've been doing this for fifty more years, you might be at the Captain's level."
"Agreed, Julian," Roger said, leaning on the bronze carronade beside him. "I wonder if we'd have survived to this point with any old Bronze Battalion commander along. Captain Grades seemed -- I don't know, 'okay.' But not at Pahner's level. Or am I wrong?"
"You're not," Despreaux said. "Pahner was a shoo-in for Gold Battalion. Hanging out at each level on the way there was just a formality."
"I thought he was going back to Fleet." Roger frowned.
"So did he," the sergeant replied. "I doubt it would've happened, though. Somebody was going to tell him to go on to Steel, and then to Silver. Most of the officers in those battalions didn't 'choose' to be there, you know."
"This is weird." Roger shook his head. "I thought the Regiment was voluntary."
"Oh, it is," Despreaux told him with a wink. "'Captain Pahner, you just volunteered to take Alpha Steel. Congratulations on your new command.'"
"So does Pahner know this?"
"Probably not," Julian said. "Or, if he does, he's trying to ignore it. Even with rejuv, he's getting a bit long in the tooth to be a line commander. And he doesn't want to go higher. So he wants one last Fleet command before he retires. For him, Steel or even Gold would be a consolation prize."
Roger nodded with an understanding he could never have attained before marching halfway around the circumference of Hell with Pahner at his side. Then he chuckled softly.
"You know, when we get back Mother is going to owe me one huge favor. I'd thought about asking for a planetary dukedom as an alternative to hanging out at Imperial City, but maybe there's something else I should throw into the pot with it. Seems to me that if the Captain wants a Fleet command, a 'friend at court' couldn't hurt his chances!"
"I'd guess not," Julian agreed with a grin, then cocked his head at the prince. "I'm glad to hear you're thinking beyond the end of the journey, Your Highness. But why a dukedom?"
"Because I want to be something more than the black sheep," Roger said with a much thinner smile. "Of course, you haven't asked me which planet I want."
"Oh, no!" Despreaux shook her head. "You've got to be joking!"
"Marduk has all of the requirements for a successful and productive Imperial Membership planet," Roger replied. "The fact that it's held directly in the Family's name would make it a lot simpler for mother to designate it as such, and the Mardukans are fine people. They deserve a better life than that of medieval peons. And if one Roger Ramius Sergei Alexander Chiang MacClintock shepherds them from barbarism to civilization over five or ten decades, then that prince is going to be remembered for something more than being an unfortunate by-blow of the Empress."
"But...." Despreaux stopped and looked around at the ocean. "You want to raise kids on this planet? Our children?"
"Right, well, I'll just be going," Julian said as he stepped back. "Remember, no hitting, Nimashet. And no removing any limbs or vital organs."
"Oh, shut up, Adib," the sergeant said sharply. "And you don't have to leave. It's not like Roger's plans are any huge secret."
"Our plans," the prince corrected mildly. "And, yes, I think this would make a fine dukedom. Among other things, it would get you away from Imperial City's biddies - male and female, alike. I don't think they'll be able to handle having me may marry one of my bodyguards as opposed to, say, one of their own well trained, highly qualified, and exquisitely bred daughters. None of whom would have lasted ten minutes on Marduk. Princess of the Empire or not, some of those dragons will make your life Hell, given half a chance, and to be perfectly honest, neither you nor I really have the skills to respond in an appropriate -- and nonlethal -- fashion." He flashed her a wicked smile.
"And if you think I'm going to set up shop at K'Vaern's Cove or Q'Nkok, you're crazy," he went on. "I was thinking of the Ran Tai valley, frankly."
"Hmmm." Despreaux's expression was suddenly much more thoughtful. The valley was four thousand meters above the steamy Mardukan lowlands, and actually got chilly at night. It wasn't subject to the continuous rain of the jungles, either. All in all, it was a rather idyllic spot for humans. Which meant it was hell for Mardukans, of course.
"'Hmmm,' indeed," Julian said. "But you're assuming the Empress doesn't have some other task perfectly suited to you. She probably has a half dozen things she would've liked to throw your way if she'd trusted you before we left. Frankly, letting you 'languish in a backwater' is probably going to be at the bottom of her list."
"I may not give Mother the choice," Roger said darkly. "Frankly, I don't give a damn about Mother's needs at this point. My days of caring what Mother thinks ended in Marshad."
"She's your Empress, just as she is mine, Roger," Despreaux said. "And it's your Empire, just as it is mine. And our children's."
"One of these days, I will stop having to say this..." Cord began with a gesture that was the Mardukan equivalent of a resigned sigh.
"I know, I know," Roger answered. "'I was born to duty.' I got it the first time."
"And it's a big cruel universe out there, Your Highness," the Julian said with unwonted seriousness. "If you think the Boman and Kranolta were bad, you need to pay a little more attention to the Saints. There's not much worse than a 'civilized' society that considers human beings expendable. 'One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.' They live that philosophy. Also, 'The only problem with biospheres is that they occasionally develop sophonts.' I mean, these people aren't just into human extinction; they want to get rid of the Phaenurs and the Mardukans and the Althari, too. All sophonts. Except, of course, the best of the 'enlightened' Saint leadership, who -- unlike any other enviro-destructive tool-using species -- are capable of 'handling' the management of planets. Amazing how they think our pissant population growth rate is so bad when their Archon has six kids and nearly fifty grandkids."
"Okay, okay," Roger said. "I get the point. If Mother has something worthwhile she wants me to do, I'll do it. Okay?"
"Okay," Despreaux agreed. "Of course, that assumes we live to get off this mudball. But so far nothing's been able to stop our Rog," she added with a smile.
"Sail ho!" the Mardukan at the fore topmast crosstrees called suddenly. "Sail on the starboard bow, fine!" After a moment he leaned down and shouted again. "Looks like some more behind it!"
"And where there are sails, there are cities and trade," Julian observed.
"And where there's trade, there are pirates," Despreaux added. "And multiple sails means either a convoy, or...."
* * *
"Pirates," Roger said. The platform at the foremast crosstrees was crowded with four humans, D'Nal Cord, and Captain T'Sool. Fortunately, the Mardukan lookout had remained at his post at the fore topmast crosstrees, twelve meters above them. His greater height above sea level gave him a marginally better view, but the humans could see the oncoming sails themselves, and everyone who could had climbed the ratlines for a better look.
"Why pirates?" Pahner asked.
"The ship in the lead is carrying too much canvas for conditions," the prince replied. "They're running with the wind, but the breeze has been steadily increasing all afternoon. Between seeing another ship coming towards them -- and I assume they've spotted us -- and the increasing breeze, not to mention the way it's clouding up for a storm, she should have reduced sail by now. And she hasn't. So whatever she's sailing away from is more dangerous than risking a cracked mast or even capsizing."
The Marine glanced speculatively at the prince. Roger was still gazing out at the approaching ships, but he seemed to feel the weight of Pahner's eyes, and turned to make them.
"So what's our call?" he asked the captain.
Pahner returned his own attention to the unknown ships and dialed the magnification back up on his helmet systems as he pondered that. The safe bet was simply to avoid the entire situation. There was no upside to an engagement ... except that they had almost no information about the continent towards which they were traveling.
If Roger's analysis was correct, and if they were able to make contact with the ship being pursued, it might be to their benefit. There appeared to be six of the -- probable -- pirate ships. Each was similar to an ancient cog, but with a pair of masts, not just one. Each mast carried only a single square sail, however, and their deep, rounded, high-sided hulls had clumsy-looking castle-like foredeck citadels which undoubtedly mounted some of Marduk's massive, unwieldy bombards. They were scarcely the sleekest ships he'd ever seen, and he wondered why pirates, if that was what they were, didn't have ships a tad faster.
"What's an alternative to pirates?" he asked.
"Is this a trick question, Captain?" Kosutic inquired.
"I don't think so," Roger said. "I think his point is that if they are pirates, all well and good. If we blow the crap out of them, we establish our bona fides with the local powers that be. But if they're not pirates, announcing our intentions with a broadside might be a Very Bad Idea. We have to make peaceful and, hopefully, smooth contact with the local government. So what if they're harmless merchant ships which are supposed to be sailing company, and the lead ship just has a lousy captain who's gotten too far ahead of the rest? In that case,Blowing them away without a warning would not be a good way to make 'smooth' contact."
"Exactly," Pahner said. "So what are the other possibilities?"
"The boat in the lead could be a smuggler," Kosutic suggested. "Or something along those lines. And the ones behind could be revenue cutters. Well, revenue boats. Revenue tubs."
"And it could be even more complex than that," Roger pointed out. "They could be operating under letters of marque or some equivalent. So the ones in back could be both pirates and representatives of a government we need to contact. And if that's the case, asking the lead ship won't tell us so."
"All right," Pahner said with a nod. "We'll tack to intercept the group. We will not fire until fired upon. Get a helmet system for Ms. O'Casey so she can use the amplifiers for communication. We'll move alongside or send off a boarding party to make contact. If we take fire from either group, we'll respond with a single broadside. That should make the situation clear. If they continue to press it, we sink 'em."
"And if they are 'official' pirates?" Roger asked.
"We'll deal with that as we have to," Pahner answered. "We need intel on this continent ... but we also need to live to use it."


Chapter Seven

Tob Kerr, master of the merchant vessel Rain Daughter, closed the glass and cursed. He wasn't sure where the strange ships had come from -- there wasn't anything on that bearing but the Surom Shoals, and nobody actually lived in these demon-infested waters -- but they were headed right for him. And sailing at least forty degrees closer to the wind than any tack he could take. He not only didn't recognize the origin of the ships, he couldn't even begin to identify their design, or imagine how sails like that could work.
However they did it, though, they obviously did a better job of it than his own ship could manage, and he wondered where they could possibly have sprung from.
The Lemmar Raiders behind him, on the other hand, were all too well known a quantity. With luck, they would only take his cargo. More likely, though, they would sell him and the crew into slavery, and sell his ship for a prize. Either way, he was ruined. So the best bet was to continue on course and hope for a gift from the Sar, because this was clearly a case of worse the devil you knew than the devil you didn't.
He looked back at the oncoming strangers. The more he studied them, the odder they looked. They were low, rakish, and almost unbelievably fast, and they carried an enormous sail area - one far larger than anything Kerr had ever seen before. It was amazing that they could sail the deep ocean at all; with so little freeboard, he had to wonder why the water didn't wash right over their decks. But it didn't. In fact, they rode the swells like embera, green foam casting up from their bows and their strange, triangular sails hard as boards as they sliced impossibly into the oncoming wind.
He grabbed a line and slid to the deck. The callouses of decades at sea made nothing of the friction, and his mate, Pelu Mupp walked over to him and flipped his falsehands in an expression of worry.
"Should we change course?" he asked.
It was a damnably reasonable question, Kerr thought grimly. The Lemmar Raiders had been in a fairly unfavorable position at the start. Well, as far as Rain Daughter was concerned. Certain other ships had been less fortunate, but Kerr had taken full advantage of the slim opportunity for escape the pirates' preoccupation with the convoy's other members had offered him. By the time they'd been free to turn their full attention to Rain Daughter, Kerr had managed to put enough distance between them to give him and his crew a better than even chance. A stern chase was always a long one, and under those conditions, victory could go to either side. The pirate ships were a bit faster than the merchantman, but the Daughter had a good lead, and any number of circumstances could have resulted in the Kirstian ship's escaping, especially if Kerr could only have kept clear of the Lemmar until darkness fell. But now, with the unknowns closing from almost dead to leeward, the trap seemed to have closed.
"No," Kerr said. "We'll hold our course. They might be friendly. And how much worse than the Raiders could they be?" 
If the crew went into slavery, they would probably end up back in Kirsti, but as "guests" of the Fire Priests. And if that was the alternative, he preferred to throw himself over the side now.
"We'll hold our course, Mupp. And let the Lady of the Waters decide."
* * *
Roger pulled on a strand of hair and sighed.
"Captain, much as I hate making suggestions --" he began, only to stop dead as Pahner let loose an uncharacteristic bark of laughter that momentarily made him jump. Then the captain snorted.
"Yes, Your Highness?"
"Well, I don't," Roger retorted.
"I know you don't, Your Highness," Pahner said with a smile. "You tend to do something by yourself, and then ask me if it was okay later. That's different from making suggestions, I'll admit. So let's have it -- what's the suggestion?
"I was thinking about wind position," Roger continued, after deciding that it wasn't a good time for a discussion of whether one Prince Roger MacClintock had been making too many stupid mistakes lately. Most of the watchers had returned to the deck once the general outline of the approaching ships and their formation had been established. A Marine private was now perched at the fore topmast crosstrees beside the Mardukan lookout, using her helmet systems to refine the data. But at this point it was a matter of waiting nearly two hours as the ships slowly closed the intervening gap.
"They're coming in fine on our starboard bow, straight out of the wind, but the formation of six ships is spread to our west, and it takes a few minutes for us to wear around. If we stay on this course, when the pursuers come up to us, the most westerly ship will be in a position that would make it hard for us to completely avoid her."
"I'm ... not quite getting this," Pahner admitted.
Roger thought for a moment, then did a quick sketch on his toot, detailing the human/K'Vaernian flotilla, the lead unknown, and the trailers.
"I'm sliding over a graphic," he said, flipping the sketch from his toot to the Marine's. "From the point of view of avoiding contact, we can break off from the lead ship easily. But if we decided to avoid the trailers, we'd have three choices. One would be to tack to starboard when we come up to them. That would put us in a position to take full advantage of the schooners' weatherliness to run past them into the wind and avoid contact handily. But it takes a bit of time to tack, and there's a small risk of getting caught in irons."
Pahner nodded at that. A couple of times, especially early in the voyage, when the native Mardukan captains were still getting accustomed to the new rig, one or more of the ships had been caught "in irons" while tacking, and ended up facing directly into the wind, effectively unable to move or maneuver until they could fall off enough to regather way. It was not a situation he wanted to be in with potential hostiles around.
"We don't want that to happen," he observed. "Go on."
"Our second choice would be to fall off to the west," Roger said, "opening out our sails and either sailing across the wind, or coming around to let it fill our sails from behind while we run almost away from it. That's a 'reach' or a 'broad reach.' The problem is, on either tack, the westernmost ship would have at least some opportunity to intercept us. We could probably show them our heels -- I'd back any of ours, even Snarleyow, to outrun anything they've got. But there's a risk of interception."
"In which case, we blow away whatever unfortunate soul intercepts us," Pahner noted as he brought up the sketch on his implant and studied it.
"Yes, Captain, we can do that," Roger agreed, licking a salty drop of sweat off his upper lip. "But I submit that it would be better to be in a position where we can avoid contact altogether, if that's what we decide to do. Or control the maneuver menu if we decide to engage."
"Can we?" the captain asked. "And should we be discussing this with Poertena or the Skipper?"
"Maybe," Roger said. "Probably. But I was thinking. If we tack to starboard and put them on our port side, we've got all that maneuver room to starboard. It's a better wind position. Also, if we decide to jump in, we can get to windward for maneuvering better from that position. But we need to wait a bit, until we're a little closer."
"I'll talk it over with T'Sool," Pahner agreed. "But unless I'm much mistaken, that's a very good idea."
* * *
"They're wearing around," Pelu said.
"I can see that," Kerr answered. He rubbed his horns as he considered the small fleet's maneuvers. Its units were changing to an easterly heading on the port tack, and the maneuver was a thing of beauty for any seaman to watch. The sails seemed to float into position naturally, and in a remarkably short period of time, all five ships were hove over and flying before the wind.
"They're in a better position to drop on us from windward," Pelu worried. "Could they be some new ship type out of Lemmar?"
"If Lemmar could build ships like that," the captain snorted, "we'd already be in chains in Kirsti! And if they're in a better position to drop on us, they're also in a better position to avoid all of us. They can leave us in their wake any time they want to now, but before, they could have been cut off by the western Reavers. Actually, I think what they're doing now is a better sign."
"I wish we knew who they were," Pelu fretted.
"I wonder if they're wishing the same thing?"
* * *
"Ready for some more unsolicited input?" Roger asked with a grin.
"Certainly, Your Highness," Pahner replied with a slight smile. "Every fiber of my being lives to serve the Empire."
"Somehow, I think I detected just a tad of sarcasm attached to that answer," Roger said with an answering grin. "But I digress. What I was going to say is that we need to make contact with these folks."
"Agreed. And you have a suggestion?"
"Well, for first contact, we'll need someone who's well versed with the translator program and whose toot has enough capacity to run it. And that means either Ms. O'Casey or myself. And since it's a potentially dangerous situation..."
"You think it makes more sense to send the person I'm supposed to be guarding," Pahner finished. Then he shook his head. Firmly. "No."
"So you're going to send Eleanora?" Roger asked sweetly.
"Quit smiling at me!" Pahner snapped. "Damn it. I'm the commander of your bodyguard, Your Highness. I'm not supposed to be sending you into situations because they're too dangerous to send somebody else!"
"Uh-huh," Roger said. "So, you're sending Eleanora?"
"There is no way you're going over to that ship," Pahner said. "No. Way."
"I see. So...?"
* * *
"Ah, freedom!"
Roger leaned back in the sailing harness, suspended from a very thin bit of rope less than an arm length above the emerald sea as the catamaran cut through the water at nearly sixteen knots. D'Nal Cord shifted and tried to get into something that felt like a stable position -- difficult for someone his size on the deck of the flimsy craft -- and rubbed a horn in exasperation.
"You have an unusual concept of freedom, Roger."
Most of the small boats of the flotilla were traditional "v" hulls, but both Roger and Poertena had insisted on at least one small "cat" for fast movement. Building it had required nearly as much human-provided engineering knowledge as the much larger schooners -- light, fast catamarans require precise flexion in their crossbraces -- but the result was a small craft that in any sort of decent weather was even faster than the schooners.
And it was fun to sail.
"I have to admit that this is sort of fun," Despreaux said, fanning her uniform top. "And the breeze is refreshing."
"Back on Earth, catting and skiing were as close as I ever got to being free," Roger pointed out, bounding forward in the harness to see if it improved the point of sail. "You guys would actually let me get away for a little bit."
"Don't complain," Kosutic replied. "Your lady mother's spent most of her life wrapped in cotton. As your grandfather's only child, there was no way the Regiment was willing to risk her at all. She rarely even got to leave the palace grounds."
"Frankly, I could care less about mother's problems," Roger said coldly, swinging back in his harness as Poertena altered the cat's course slightly.
"Maybe not," the sergeant major replied. "But you've had more experience with 'real people' in the last six months than she has in her whole life. The closest she ever got to dealing with anyone but Imperial functionaries and politicians was the Academy. And even there, she spent the whole time still wrapped in cotton. They wouldn't even consider having her do live zero-G drills -- not out of atmosphere, at least. It all had to be in simulators, where there was no possibility of exposing her to death pressure. And if they never let her do that, you can just imagine how much less likely they were to let her do things like, oh -- just as an example that comes from the top of my head, you understand -- leading a charge into a barbarian horde. And no cut-ups like Julian were allowed within a kilometer of her."
"And your point is?" Roger asked. He leaned further outward and dangled his hand into the water as a slightly stronger puff of wind hit the sail. "Speaking of risks, you do realize that if there are any of those giant col around, we're toast?"
"That sort of is the point," Kosutic said soberly. "Imperial City is filled with professional politicians and noble flunkies, most of whom have never had to scramble for money to supply a unit in the field. Who've never been exposed to 'lower class' conditions. Who have never slept on the ground, never gone to bed hungry. In some cases, that means people who not only don't understand the majority of the population of the Empire, but who also don't like them or care about them. And in other cases -- which I happen to think are worse -- they don't understand them, but they idealize them. They think there's a special dignity to poverty. Or a special quality to being born into misery and dying in it."
"Saint Symps," Despreaux said.
"And various soclibs," Kosutic agreed. "Especially the older style pro-Ardane redistributionists."
"There's at least an argument there," Roger said. "I mean, too much concentration of power, and you're not much better off than under the Dragon Lords." He paused and grinned. "On the other hand, I know you're all a bunch of low-lifes!"
"And if you live entirely by what you think is 'the will of the people,' you get the ISU," Kosutic continued, pointedly ignoring the prince's last comment.
"Pockers," Poertena growled, and spat over the side.
"Yeah, Armagh mostly sat that one out," the sergeant major admitted. "But Pinopa got it bad."
"What really burned some of the early members of the Family was that the ISU used Roger MacClintock's policies as their 'model' for that idiocy," Roger said. "Prez Roger, that is. Roger the Unifier. But without accepting the societal sacrifices that were necessary. And then, when it all came apart, they tried to blame us!"
"I could kind of understand getting involved in planetary reconstruction," Despreaux commented. "Some of those planets were even worse off than Armagh. But leaving your main base completely uncovered was just idiotic."
"And why did they do that?" Kosutic asked, and proceeded to answer her own question. "They had to. They were already so wrapped up with social welfare programs that they couldn't build the sort of fleet and garrison force they needed and still be redistributionist. So they depended on bluff, sent the entire damned fleet off to try to do some planet-building, and the Daggers nipped in and ate the Solar System's lunch."
"The Daggers were very good at killing the golden goose," Roger said. "But we -- the MacClintocks, that is -- learned that lesson pretty well."
"Did we?" Kosutic asked. "Did we'd really?"
"Oh, no," Roger moaned. "This isn't another one of those 'let's not tell Roger,' things, is it?"
"No." The sergeant major laughed, but her eyes were on the native ship they'd come to meet, and her gaze was wary as Poertena wore around its stern, preparing to come alongside to port. "But take a good look at your grandfather's career," she continued, "and then tell me we've learned. Another person who'd never worked a day in his life and thought the lower classes were somehow magical. And, therefore, that they should be coddled, paid, and overprotected ... at the expense of the Fleet and the Saint borders."
"Well, that's one mistake I would never make as Emperor," Roger joked as Poertena completed his maneuver. "I know you're all a bunch of lying, lazy pockers."
"Be about time to hail," Poertena said. The ship and the catamaran were about a hundred meters apart now, on near parallel headings, with the cat slightly to the rear of the much larger merchant ship. Since that put the wind at their stern, Poertena had brought the sail in until it was luffing and dangerously close to jibing, or falling over to the other side of the boat. It might make them a little anxious about collisons between things like heads and booms, but it also slowed them down enough that they wouldn't pass the slower Mardukan ship.
"Get us a little closer," Roger ordered as he unclipped the harness and secured it to the mast. "I need to be able to hear their reply. And I don't see any guns."
"Odd, that," Kosutic said. "I agree we need to get closer, but if those are pirates, or even letters of marque, chasing them, you'd think they would have defenses. And I don't even see a swivel gun."
"Something else to ask about," Roger said as Poertena fell off to starboard. The change quickly filled the sail, set as it was for a reach, and the cat began skipping across the rolling swell.
"Shit!" Despreaux flattened herself and tried to figure out where to move as it suddenly seemed obvious that the cat was about to go clear over on its side.
"Hooowah!" the prince said with a laugh, throwing his weight back outboard again to offset the heel. "Don't dunk us, for God's sake, Poertena! We're trying to show our good side."
"And I cannot swim," Cord added.
"Lifejackets!" Roger laughed. "I knew we forgot something!"
"T'is close enough?" Poertena asked as he brought the boat back to port with a degree more caution. They had closed to within sixty meters or so, and the Mardukan ship's crew was clearly evident, lining the side, many of them with weapons in their hands.
"Close enough," Roger agreed, then stood back up and grasped a line to stay steady. "Try not to flop us around too much."
"What? And have you get all wet and sloppy?" Despreaux said.
"Hea'en forbid!" Poertena laughed. "I try. Never know, though."
"You'd better," Kosutic growled. "Straight and steady."
* * *
"Just keep us on this heading," Kerr said to the helmsman. "They don't seem to be threatening us. And I don't see what they'd be able to do with that dinky little boat, anyway."
"Who are they?" Pelu asked.
"How the hell do I know?" Kerr shot back in exasperation. "They look like giant vern, but that's crazy."
"What do we do if they want to come aboard?"
"We let them," Kerr answered after a moment. "Their ships can run rings around us, and I think those ports showing on the sides are for bombards. If they are, there's not much we can do but heave to and do whatever they say."
"It's not like you just to give up," Pelu protested.
"They're not Lemmar, and they're not Fire Priests," Kerr pointed out. "Given the choice of them, or the Lemmar and the priests, I'll always take the unknown."
* * *
"Here goes nothing," Roger said.
"What language are you going to use?" Despreaux asked.
"The kernel that came with the program. It's probably taken from the tribes around the starport, and we're finally getting close to that continent. Hopefully it will at least be familiar to them for a change." He cleared his throat. 
"Hullo the ship!"
* * *
"Oh, Cran," Pelu said.
"High Krath," Kerr muttered. "Why did it have to be High Krath?"
"Are they Fire Priests?" the helmsman asked nervously. "It can't be Fire Priests clear out here, can it?"
"It could be," Kerr admitted heavily. "Those could be Guard vessels."
"I never heard of the Guard having ships like that any more than the Lemmar," Pelu said. "Anyway, they would've used Krath, not High Krath. Most Guard officers can't speak High Krath."
"But they're not priests!" Kerr snarled, rubbing his horns furiously. "So where did they learn High Krath?"
* * *
"No response," Despreaux said. The unnecessary comment made it evident just how nervous the veteran NCO was.
"They're talking it over, though," Roger said. "I think the two by the helmsman are the leaders."
"Concur," the sergeant major agreed. "But they aren't acting real happy to see us."
"Oh, well," Roger sighed. "Time to up the ante. Permission to come aboard?"
* * *
"Well, at least they're asking," Pelu observed. "That's something."
"That's odd, is what it is," Kerr answered. He stepped to the rail and took a glance at the more distant ships. They had crossed his course almost a glass before, and then swung back to the west. At this point, they were still to his east and the range from them to Rain Daughter would have been opening as she ran past them on her southeasterly heading . . . except for how close they were to the wind. As it was, their nearest approach was still to come. But it didn't seem that they intended any harm. Either that, or they were jockeying for a good wind position.
"What do we do?"
"Let them board," Kerr said. His curiosity was getting the better of his good sense, and he knew it. But he didn't suppose, realistically speaking, that he had very many options, anyway. "One, I want to know who they are. Two, if we've got part of their crew on board, they're less likely to attack us."
He walked over to the rail and waved both truehands.
"Come aboard!"
* * *
Roger caught the dangling line and swarmed up it. Technically, he should have let either Kosutic or Despreaux go first, and he could hear the sergeant major's curses even through the sound of rigging and water. But of the three of them, he was the most familiar with small boats, and he felt that even if it was a deliberate trap, he could probably shoot his way clear of the four-person welcoming party.
The scummies waiting for him were subtly different from those on the far continent. They were definitely shorter than the Vashin Northerners who made up the bulk of the cavalry, closer to the Diasprans in height. Their horns were also significantly different, with less of a curve and with less prominent age ridges. Part of that might have been cosmetic, though, because at least one of them had horns which had clearly been dyed. They were also wearing clothes, which, except for armor, had been a catch-as-catch-can item on the far continent. The "clothing" was a sort of leather kilt, evidently with a loincloth underneath. Otherwise (unless they were very unlike any of the other Mardukans the humans had met), certain "parts" would be showing under the kilt. The two leaders also wore baldrics which supported not only swords, but also a few other tools, and even what were apparently writing implements.
The leader of the foursome, the one who had waved for them to board, stepped forward. His horns were undyed and long, indicating a fairly good age for a Mardukan. He wasn't as old as Cord, though, or if he was, he was in better condition, because his skin was firm and well coated in slime, without the occasional dry spots that indicated advanced age in the locals.
Roger raised both hands in a gesture of peace. It wasn't taking much of a chance; he could still draw and fire before any of the four raised a weapon.
"I am pleased to meet you," he said, speaking slowly and distinctly and using the words available on the kernel that was the only Mardukan language the software had initially offered. "I am Prince Roger MacClintock. I greet you in the name of the Empire of Man."
"Sadar Tob Kerr ... greet," the officer responded.
Roger nodded gravely while he considered what the toot was telling him. The language the local was using was similar to the kernel, but it contained words which were additional to the five hundred-word kernel, combined with some that were clearly from another language entirely. It appeared that the leader was attempting to use the kernel language, but that it was a second language for him, not primary. The toot was flagging some of the words as probably being totally bogus. The captain -- this Tob Kerr -- clearly wasn't a linguist.
"Use your own language, rather than the one I was using," Roger invited as Kosutic followed him over the side. If the others were on plan, Cord would be the next up, then Despreaux. Poertena would remain in the cat. "I will be able to learn it quickly," he continued. "But I must ask questions, if I may. What is the nature of your position, and who are the ships that pursue you?"
"We are a ... from the Krath to the ... base at Strem. Our ... was ... by Lemmar Raiders. The Guard ships were destroyed, and we are the only ship who has made it this far. But the Lemmar are ... I do not think we'll ... Strem, even if we can ...."
Great, Roger thought. What the hell is Krath? Then he realized that the answer was lodged in the back of his brain.
"Krath is the mainland ahead?" he asked. The toot automatically took the words from the language the captain was using where it had them, and substituted kernel words where it didn't. The sentence was marginally understandable.
"Yes," the officer replied. "The Krath are the ... of the Valley. Strem is a recent acquisition. The ... is attempting to subdue the Lemmar Raiders, but taking Strem means they have to supply it. We were carrying supplies and ritual ... for the garrison. But the Lemmar came upon us in force and took our escorts. Since then, these six have been running down the survivors. I believe we are the last."
"Oh bloody hell," Roger muttered. "Are the rest between us and the mainland?"
"Yes," the local told him. "If you're making for Kirsti, then they are on your path. They're just below the horizon from the mast."
"Great. Just ... great," Roger muttered again, then shook himself. "Tob Kerr, meet Sergeant Major Eva Kosutic, my senior non-commissioned officer." Cord dropped to the deck, and Roger rested his left hand lightly on the shaman's lower shoulder. "And this is D'Nal Cord, my asi." He had to hope that the translation software could explain what an asi was.
"I greet you, as well," Kerr said, then returned his attention to Roger and spoke earnestly. "Your ships can wear around and make sail for Strem. It's less than a day's sail from here, and you would surely make it. Those fine craft of yours are the fastest I've ever seen. But I cannot guarantee the garrison's greeting when you arrive there -- this convoy was important to them."
"Are you getting this, Sergeant Major?" Roger asked, shutting off the translation circuit and slipping into Imperial.
"Yes, Your Highness," the NCO replied. Roger's toot had automatically updated her onboard software with its translations of the local language. As soon as he got back into proximity with the rest of the party, the updates would be transferred to them, as well, skipping from system to system. The Marine toots were well insulated against electronic attack, and while the greater capacity and power of Roger's toot made him the logical person to do the initial translation, his much more paranoid design required a manual transfer, rather than the automatic network of the Marines.
"I'm still not sure of what the Lemmar are," the prince continued. "But if this fellow is telling the truth, they're enemies of the continental forces. And there are apparently a stack of prize ships, with some crew to fight, between us and the continent. Again, if this guy is telling the truth."
"Pardon me," Kerr interrupted, "but I'd like to ask a question of my own, if I may. Who are you, and where did you come from?"
"We came across the Eastern Ocean." Roger trotted out the set response. "We are the first group we know of to actually make it, although others have tried. Our intent is to travel to the larger continent to the north and establish trade routes. But you say there are pirates between here and there?"
"Yes, both the six you see, and the prizes, some of whom are armed," Kerr said. "And as far as I know, you are indeed the first group to make the crossing. A few from our side have also attempted the crossing, including one large group of ships. It was assumed that there were very hostile people on the far side of the ocean. I take it that was wrong?"
"Oh, yeah," Kosutic broke in. "Your problem was very hostile and very large fish between here and there. Col fish the size of a ship. We lost one of our vessels to one of them."
"We must make decisions and communicate with the other ships," Cord pointed out. Without a toot, the shaman was unable to understand anything Kerr had said, but, as always, he maintained his pragmatic focus on the matter in hand.
"You're right," Roger agreed. He nodded to his asi, then turned back to the merchantman's captain. "Tob Kerr, we must cross back to our own ships and advise them as to the situation. Then we will decide whether to turn for Strem or to go on."
"You cannot go on," Pelu broke in excitedly. "There are six of them -- plus the armed prizes!"
Roger snorted, and Cord, standing at his back, sighed at the sound. Not so, the sergeant major.
"And your point is?" Eva Kosutic asked with a snort of her own.
* * *
"The Lemmar are an island nation," Roger said, pointing to the chart they had extracted from Tob Kerr. "They live in this volcanic archipelago that stretches down from the continent to this large island to the southeast. South from that, there's open ocean which is apparently also infested with killer col fish. Nobody's ever come back to say 'aye or nay,' at any rate. But there's another archipelago to the southwest of it that stretches to the southern continent, and they're in contact with that continent on a fairly tenuous basis. This 'Strem Island' is apparently the crossroads of the trade between them, which makes it a rather rich prize. But while it can produce sufficient food, it also requires additional supply from the mainland. And it was a supply convoy that got hit. They were taking down weapons, new soldiers, and 'temple servitors,' and they would have brought back the goods -- mostly spices -- that have been stored at Strem awaiting safe transport.
"But the Lemmar changed their plans," Pahner said.
"Yes, Sir," the sergeant major answered. "The Lemmar are pirates, and there have been plenty of times in human history when pirates banded together into fairly large groups. But having six of their 'large' ships pounce on the convoy simultaneously was apparently a fairly bad surprise. And the Krath apparently aren't particularly good sailors -- or, at least, their Navy is no great shakes. The Lemmar took out the three galleys that were supposed to guard the convoy without any ship losses of their own, then tore into the merchantmen like dire wolves on a flock of sheep. As far as Kerr knows, his ship's the only survivor."
"We have an opportunity here," Roger noted carefully.
"I'm aware of that, Your Highness," Pahner said. "Remember that little talk about going out on a limb, though? This is the classic Chinese sign for chaos: danger and opportunity mixed. Of course there's an opportunity ... but my job is to pay attention to the danger, as well."
"If we take out the pirates," Roger pointed out, "and recapture most of the ships, the authorities on the continent should automatically treat us as the good guys."
"'Should,'" Eleanora O'Casey interjected. "But that depends on the society, and there's no societal data at all in the database where these people are concerned. In fact, there's no societal data for any of the locals on this continent. Which, even allowing for the general paucity of data on this godforsaken planet, is a remarkable oversight.
"Without any information at all, it's impossible to say how they might actually react to our intervention. They could resent our showing our military prowess. They could be worried by it. They could even have an honor system under which saving their people would put us in their debt. There are a thousand possibilities that you haven't explored which could arise from recapturing those ships. And that assumes that, militarily, we can."
"Oh, I think we can," Pahner noted. He knew he was a landlubber, but it would take someone without eyes to miss the clear difference in capabilities between the ships. The pirate vessels were somewhat sleeker than the merchantman, and obviously had much larger crews -- a common sign of pirates. But they mounted only a few clumsy swivel guns for broadside armament to back up the single large bombard fixed and pointed forward in their heavy bow "castles." Sinking them wouldn't be difficult, not with the flotilla's advantage in artillery. Reducing the crews, and then taking them by a boarding action, wouldn't even have been too costly in casualties, given all the bored Diasprans and Vashin they had on board. But there would be some casualties, and the end result had better be worth every one of them.
"Militarily, we can take these six fairly easily," the captain continued. "But we will take casualties, especially if we try to take them intact."
"How much are these ships worth?" Fain asked, with a slight clap of his hands that indicated mild humor. "I'm sorry to interrupt, but from the point of view of the people taking the casualties, there are only two things they're going to worry about. Will it prevent us from taking the starport -- which is our big mission -- and how much money will we get for those ships?"
"Mercenary," Roger said with a smile. "In most societies, ships cost a good bit. I'd say that if we can get them to port, and if the authorities permit us to sell them as a matter of standard prize rules, then there'll be a fair amount to spread around. Even if we take only one. And we may be able to claim most or all of the ships the pirates have already taken as legitimate prizes of war, assuming we manage to retake them, as well. If we can, it would be enough for an officer to retire on."
"Well, I already have that," Fain said. "But not all of the troops were in on the sack of Sindi. As one of the potential casualties, and if we can determine that we can sell them as prizes, my choice is to take the ships."
"T'ey going to slow us down sailing upwind to Krat'," Poertena pointed out. "We migh' be able to rig some jib sails, but t'ey still ain't gonna be as fast as us. Not enough keel, for one t'ing."
"That's something to think about quite a bit down the line," Pahner noted. "Taking these six warships is the significant issue. After that, we contact Kerr again and get his reaction. If it's favorable, we'll determine where to get sufficient prize crews, then sail on our way. If we encounter the rest of the prizes, we'll engage as seems most favorable at the time."
"In other words, we're going to play it by ear," Roger said with a grin. "Where in hell have I heard that operations order before?"


Chapter Eight

Cred Cies fingered his sword as five of the six ships changed course to windward. The biggest of the strangers held its initial course, heading to intercept -- or protect -- the fat merchantship Rage of Lemmar had pursued so long.
"They're going to engage us," Cra Vunet said. The mate spat over the side. "Six to five. The odds favor us."
Cies looked at the skies and frowned.
"Yes, they do. But no doubt they can count as well as we can, and they've obviously chosen to leave their biggest ship behind. I'm not sure I like the looks of that. Besides, it will be pouring by the time they get here. Only the bombard is sure to fire under those circumstances, and they seem to have nearly as many men aboard as we do. It will be a tough fight."
"And after it, we'll sail back to Lomsvupe with five ships of a new and superior design -- six, after we scoop up the one that's hanging back!" the mate said with a truehand flick of humor. "That will pay for a thousand nights of pleasure! Better than a single stinking landsman tub."
"On the other hand, they clearly think they can take us," Cies pointed out, still the pessimist. "And we'll have to wear around to engage, while they'll have the favor of the wind. If I'd been sure they were going to attack before, I would've changed course to attack them from upwind, and with our bombard bearing. But I didn't. So, like I say, the fight will be a tough one. Tough."
"We're the Lemmar," Vunet said with another gesture of humor. "A fight is only worth bragging about if it's a tough one!"
"We'll see," Cies replied. "Wear ship to port; let's see if we can't get to windward of them after all before we engage."
* * *
"There they go," Roger said, leaning on the anti-col bead cannon mounted on Ima Hooker's afterdeck. "Wearing to port, just like I predicted."
"I don't get it," Pahner admitted. "Even if they manage to get to windward of us, it still leaves them in a position where we can rake their sterns."
"They don't think that way, Captain," Roger said. "They fight with fixed frontal guns, which means they don't have a concept of a broadside. They're expecting us to do what they'd do: turn to starboard just before we come opposite them, and try to sail straight into their sides. By that time, if they have the respective speeds figured right, they'll be slightly upwind and in a position to swing down on our flank. The worst that could happen is that we end up with both of us going at each other front-to-front and both broad-on to the wind, which isn't a bad point of sailing for one of those tubs.
"Now, the question is whether or not there's some way we can tap dance around out of range of those bombards while we get into a position to hammer them broadside-to-broadside."
"I thought the idea was to cross the enemy's 'T,'" Julian interjected as he watched the "tubs" wearing around. It was evident that the pirate vessels had extremely large crews for two reasons -- both as fighters and because the squaresail ships just plain required more live bodies on the sheets and braces. "That's what they're always talking about in historical romances."
Roger turned towards him and lifted first his helmet visor and then an eyebrow.
"Historical romances?" he repeated, and Julian shrugged with a slightly sheepish expression.
"What can I say? I'm a man of many parts."
"I wouldn't have expected romance novels to be one of them," Roger commented, dropping the visor back as he returned his attention to observing the enemy. "But to answer your question, crossing the 'T' is an ideal tactic against an enemy who uses broadsides. But except for some swivel guns to discourage boarders, these guys don't have any broadside fire at all to speak of. Which isn't quite the case where those big, pocking bombards in the bows are concerned. So we're going to try very, very hard not to cross their 'T.'"
Pahner was uncomfortable. For the first time since hitting Marduk, it was clear that Roger's expertise, his knowledge, far exceeded the captain's own. On one level, Pahner was delighted that someone knew his ass from his elbow where the theory of combat under sail was involved. But "Colonel MacClintock" was still, for all practical purposes, a very junior officer. A surprisingly competent one, since he'd gotten over the normal "lieutenant" idiocy, but still very junior. And junior officers tended to overlook important details in combat operations. Often with disastrous consequences.
"So what plan do you recommend, Your Highness?" the captain asked after a moment.
Roger turned to look at him. The mottled plastic turned the prince's face into an unreadable set of shadows, but it was clear that his mind was running hard.
"I guess you're serious," Roger said quietly. He turned back to gaze at the distant ships and thought about it for perhaps thirty seconds. "Are you saying I should take command?" he asked finally, his voice even quieter than before.
"You're already in command," Pahner pointed out. "I'll be frank, Your Highness. I don't have a clue about how to fight a sea battle. Since you obviously do, you should run this one. If I see anything I think you've overlooked, I'll point it out. But I think this one is ... up to you."
"Captain," Kosutic asked over the dedicated private command circuit, "are you sure about this?"
"Hold on a moment, Your Highness," Pahner said, turning slightly away from the prince. "Gotta let 'em out of the nest eventually, Sergeant Major," he replied over the same channel.
"Okay. If you're sure," the noncom said dubiously. "But remember Ran Tai."
"I will," Pahner assured her. "I do."
He turned back to the prince, who was pacing back and forth with his hands clasped behind him, looking at the sky.
"I'm sorry, Your Highness. You were saying?"
"Actually, I wasn't." Roger stopped pacing, pulled out a strand of hair, and played with it as he continued to look at the sky. "I was thinking. And I'm about done."
"Are you going to take full command, Colonel?" the captain asked formally.
"Yes, I am," Roger replied with matching formality, his expression settling into lines of unwonted seriousness as the weight of responsibility settled on his shoulders. "The first thing we have to do is reef the sails before the squall sinks us more surely than the Lemmar."
* * *
"They're reducing sail," Cra Vunet said. The five other raider ships had completed their own turns before the wind from the storm hit and were following the Rage in line ahead.
"Yes," Cies said thoughtfully. "Those edge-on sails probably tend to push them over in a high wind. I imagine we'll be able to sail with it quite handily, compared to them."
"We'll lose sight of them soon!" Vunet yelled through the sudden tumult as the leading edge of the squall raced across the last few hundred meters of sea towards the Rage. "Here it comes!"
The squall was of the sort common to any tropical zone -- a brief, murderous "gullywasher" that would drop multiple centimeters of rain in less than an hour. The blast of wind in front of the rain -- the "gust front" -- was usually the strongest of the entire storm, and as it swept down upon them, the placid waves to windward started to tighten up into an angry "chop" crested with white curls of foam.
The wind hit like a hurricane, and the ships heeled over sharply, even with their square sails taken up to the second reef. But the Lemmar sailors took it with aplomb; such storms hit at least once per day.
"Well, they're gone!" Cies shouted back as the strange ships disappeared into a wall of wind, rain, and spray. "We'll stay on this course. Whether they fall off to windward or hold their own course, we'll be able to take them from the front. One shot from each ship, then we go alongside."
"What if they alter course?" Vunet shouted back.
"They're going to find it hard to wear around in this," Cies replied. "And if they try it, they'll still be settling onto course when we come on them. And the storm will probably be gone by then!"
* * *
"Come to course three-zero-five!" Roger shouted.
"I'm having a hard time punching a laser through to Sea Foam!" Julian yelled back over the roaring fury of the sea." The signal's getting real attenuated by all this damned water!"
"Well, make sure you get a confirmation!" Pahner shouted, almost in the NCO's ear. "And we need a string confirmation on it!"
"Will do!"
Roger looked around the heeling ship and nodded his head. The Mardukan seaman were handling the lines well, and the situation, so far, was well in hand. The human-designed schooners had come well up into the wind, steering west-by-northwest, close-hauled on the starboard tack, in a course change which would have been literally impossible for the clumsy Mardukan pirates' rigs to duplicate. In many ways, the current conditions weren't that different from other storms they'd sailed through along the way, but they hadn't tried to maneuver in those. They'd simply held their course and hoped for the best. In this case, however, his entire plan depended upon their ability to maneuver in the storm.
It wouldn't be disastrous if they were unable to effect the maneuver he had in mind. It wouldn't be pleasant, but he was fairly certain that the schooners could take at least one or two shots from the pirates' bombards, assuming the simplistic weapons could even be fired under these conditions. But if they managed to pull off what he had in mind, they should suffer virtually no casualties. If he had to take losses, he would, but he'd become more and more determined to hold them to the absolute minimum as the trek went on.
The rain seemed to last forever, but finally he sensed the first signs of slackening in its pounding fury. That usually meant one more hard deluge, then the storm would clear with remarkable speed. Which meant it was almost time to start the next maneuver.
"Julian! Do you have commo?"
"Yes, Sir!" the sergeant responded instantly. "I got confirmations of course change from all ships."
"Then tell them to prepare to come to course two-seven-zero or there abouts. And warn the gun crews to prepare for action to port, with a small possibility that it could be to starboard, instead. Tell the captains I want them to close up in line, one hundred meters of separation, as soon as the rain clears. I want them to follow us like beads on a string. Clear?"
"Clear and sent, Your Highness. And confirmed by all ships."
"Do you really have any idea where they are?" Pahner asked Roger over the helmet commo systems.
"Unless I'm much mistaken, they're over there," Roger said, gesturing off the port bow and into the blinding deluge.
"And what to do we do when the other ships follow us 'like beads on a string'?" the captain asked curiously.
"Ah," Roger said, then glanced back at the commo sergeant. "To all ships, Julian. As soon as we clear the rain, send the sharpshooters to the tops."
The ship heeled hard to port as a fresh blast of wind from the north caught it, and Roger casually grabbed a stay.
"It's clearing," he observed. "Now to see where our other ships are."
"The Foam is right behind us," Julian said. "But they say some of the others are scattered."
The rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun, without even the slightest tapering off, and the rest of the K'Vaernian "fleet" was suddenly visible. The Sea Foam was some two hundred meters behind the Hooker, but the rest were scattered to the north and south -- mostly south -- of the primary course.
Roger looked the formation over and shrugged.
"Not bad. Not good, but not bad."
Pahner had to turn away to hide his smile. That simple "not bad" was a miracle. It was clear that getting the flotilla back together would take quite a few minutes, and any hope of simply turning and engaging the enemy whenever they appeared, was out of the airlock as a result. But the prince had simply shrugged and accepted that the plan would need revising. That was what a half a year of almost constant battle on Marduk had taught the hopeless young fop who'd first arrived here ... and that, by itself, was almost worth the bodies scattered along the trail.
"Captain T'Sool," Roger said, "come to course two-seven-zero and take in the mainsail. We need to reduce speed until the rest of the fleet can catch up."
"Yes, Sir," the Mardukan acknowledged, and began shouting orders of his own.
"Julian," Roger turned back to the sergeant while T'Sool carried out his instructions. "To all ships: make all sail conformable with weather and close up in order. Get back in line; we have pirates to kill."
* * *
"Kral shit," Vunet said. Then, "Unbelievable!"
The rain had finally cleared, and the enemy fleet was once more visible ... well upwind of their position, jockeying itself back into line. Neither he nor anyone else aboard the raiders' ships had ever heard of vessels which could do that. They must have tacked almost directly into the wind instead of wearing around before it! But it was clear that however well the individual ships might sail, they weren't well-trained as a group, and they'd gotten badly scattered by the storm.
The Lemmar ships, by contrast, were still in a nearly perfect line, and Cred Cies wasn't about to let the enemy have all day to get his formation back into order.
"Make a signal for all ships to turn towards the enemy and engage!"
"We'll be sailing almost into the teeth of the wind," Vunet pointed out.
"I understand that, Cra," Cies said with rather more patience than he actually felt. They wouldn't really be sailing into the "teeth of the wind," of course -- it wasn't as if they were galleys, after all! And it was painfully evident that the strangers could sail far closer to the wind than any of his ships could hope to come. But if he edged as close to it as he could without getting himself taken all aback....
"We can still catch them before they reassemble," he told his mate. "Maybe."
* * *
Pahner tried not to laugh again as Roger folded his hands behind his back and assumed a mien of calculated indifference. The expression and posture of composed sang-froid was obviously a close copy of Pahner's own, and he'd seen more than one junior officer try it on for size. Roger was wearing it better than most, but then the prince smiled suddenly and swung his hands to the front, slamming a closed fist into the palm of his other hand.
"Yes," he hissed. "You're mine!"
Pahner watched as the pirate ships swung up into the wind. Or, rather, towards the wind. It was obvious that they could come nowhere near as close to it as the schooners could, and the way their square sails shivered indicated even to his landman's eye that they were very close to losing way. But for all that, it also brought those big, bow-mounted bombards around to line up on the Ima Hooker.
"Doesn't look so good to me," he opined.
"Oh, they're going to get some shots off at us," Roger admitted. "We may even take a few hits, although I doubt that their gunnery is going to be anything to write home about. But as soon as everyone is back in line, were going to turn onto a reciprocal heading to put the wind behind us. We can put on more sail and really race down on them. They're going to get off one -- at the most two -- shots at us, and most of those are going to miss. If we lose a ship, I'll be astonished, and I don't even anticipate very many casualties. Then we'll be in among them, and we'll rip them up with both broadsides. They're about to get corncobbed."
"So this is a particularly good situation?" Pahner asked, looking back at the ships assembling behind the Hooker. The flagship was close-reaching on the starboard tack now, sailing about forty-five degrees off the wind. That was nowhere near as high as she had been pointing, but apparently it was still high enough for Roger's purposes, and Pahner could see that it gave the rest of the flotilla additional time to catch up. Sea Foam had reduced sail dramatically to conform to the flagship's speed, whereas Prince John had crammed on extra canvas now that the squall had passed and was driving hard to get into position. Pentzikis and Tor Col were coming up astern of Prince John, and it looked like everyone would be back into formation within perhaps another fifteen minutes.
"Well, if they'd continued on their original course and tried to continue past us, then work their way back up to windward behind us, it would have been a pain," Roger told the Marine. "They'd have played hell trying to pull it off, but to get this over within any short time frame, we have to sail in between them, where our artillery can hammer them without their bombards being able to shoot back, and their line was spaced a lot more tightly together than I liked. If they'd continued on their easterly heading, we'd have run the risk of getting someone rammed when we went through their line. By turning up towards us, they've effectively opened the intervals, because those ships are a lot longer than they are wide, and we're looking at them end-on now. In addition, at the moment we actually pass them, we'll be broadside-to-broadside. That means our guns will be able to pound them at minimum range, but that those big-assed bombards are going to be pointing at nothing but empty sea.
"The other choice would have been to sail around behind them, come up from astern, and pick them off one by one. That would keep us out of the play of their guns, too, but I don't want to still be fighting this thing come morning. Among other things, they're those other prize ships to chase down."
"We'll see," Pahner commented. "After this fight, and if Kerr's response is good. I don't want to do this sort of thing for nothing."
* * *
"What are they thinking?" Cies asked himself. 
The lead enemy ship had waited patiently as the Lemmar ships put their helms down and headed up as close into the wind as they could. In fact, the entire enemy formation seemed to have deliberately slowed down, which didn't make any kind of sense Cies could see. It was painfully obvious to him that those sleek, low-slung vessels were far more weatherly than his own. He was edging as close into the wind as he could come, and by slowing down, the enemy was actually going to allow him to bring his artillery to bear on the last three or four ships in his line. He hadn't had to let Cies do that, and the raider captain was suspicious whenever an opponent provided opportunities so generously. His own ships would miss the lead enemy vessel by at least two hundred meters, but after they'd hammered the other ships and then boarded them, there would be plenty of time to deal with the leader. If it decided to run away, there wasn't much the Lemmar could do about it, given its obvious advantages in both speed and maneuverability. But if it tried to come back and do anything to succor its less fortunate consorts, it would have to re-enter Cies' reach.
In which case there definitely was something he could do about it.
"Perhaps they're like the damned priests," Vunet said. Cies glanced across at him. He hadn't realized that he'd asked his rhetorical question aloud, but now his mate clapped his hands in a "who knows?" gesture. "Maybe they plan on sailing into our midst and trying to grapple us all together so they can board, like the priests would."
"If that's what they're thinking, they'll take a pounding," the captain replied. "We'll get off several shots as they close, then sweep their decks with the swivel guns as they come alongside."
* * *
"Julian, do we have hard communications in place?" Roger asked.
"Yes, Sir," the intel NCO answered. "Good fix on the Foam and the Prince John. We're all linked, and we're not emitting worth a damn."
"Okay, put me on." 
Roger waited a moment, until each of the ship icons on his helmet's HUD flashed green, then spoke across the tight web of communications lasers to the senior Marine aboard each schooner. 
"This needs to be relayed to all the ships' captains. On my mark, I want them to put their helms up, and we'll bear away ninety degrees to port. That will let us run directly downwind. Once we're on course, put on all sail conformable with the weather. I'm designating the enemy vessel's one through six, starting from the most westerly. Hooker will pass between one and two; Pentzikis will pass between two and three; Sea Foam will pass between three and four; the Johnny will pass between four and five; and Tor Col will pass down the starboard side of number six. If the enemy holds his course, we'll wear to port after we pass, and rake them from astern. Prepare to bear away on my mark. Flash when ready to execute."
He raised one arm as he stood beside Captain T'Sool and waited until all the HUD icons flashed green. It only took a moment, and then his arm came slashing down.
"All ships: execute!"
* * *
"They're actually doing it," Cies said in disbelief.
"I don't even see a forecastle," Vunet said in puzzlement. "Where the hell are their bombards?"
"How the hell do I know?" Cies growled back. "Maybe all they've got are those overgrown swivels on the sides!" He rubbed his horns, pleased that the enemy was being so stupid but anxious that it still might turn out that it wasn't stupidity at all, just something the enemy knew ... and Cies didn't.
"Get aloft and direct the swivel guns. I don't want anything unexpected to happen."
"Right," Vunet grumped. "Something like losing?"
* * *
Roger walked down Hooker's port side, greeting an occasional Mardukan gunner on the way. Most of the flotilla's gunners had been seconded from the K'Vaernian Navy and had served in the artillery at the Battle of Sindi. Roger had been away from the city for much of the battle, having his own much smaller set to with a barbarian force which had refused to be in a logical place. But he'd arrived towards the end, after successfully protecting the main army's flank and annihilating the threat to its line of retreat, and he'd spent quite a bit of time around the artillerymen since. Most of them were native K'Vaernians, like the seamen, and figured that kowtowing to princes was for other people. But, like members of republics and democracies throughout the galaxy, they also had a sneaking affection for nobility, and they'd really taken a shine to Roger.
"Kni Rampol, where did you come from?" the prince asked as he reached up to clap one of the gun captains on his back. "I thought you were on the Prince John?"
"Captain T'Sool asked me to shift places with Blo Fal because he couldn't get along with the mate." The gunner stood up from his piece and caught a backstay to steady himself. The ship was running with the wind coming from astern, and with all sail set, she was swooping up one side of each swell, then charging down the other.
"Well, it's good to see you," Roger said with a modified Mardukan gesture of humor. "No playing poker during the battle, though!"
"I don't think so," the Mardukan agreed with a grunt of humor. "Before you know it, Poertena would find the game, and then I'd be out a month's pay!"
"Probably so, at that," Roger laughed. "In that case, better hang on to your money, keep the muzzle down, and keep firing until you're told to quit. This will be a solid battle to tell the children about."
"Good afternoon, Your Highness," Lieutenant Lod Tak said. The port battery commander was doing the same thing as Roger -- walking the gun line, checking and encouraging his gun crews.
"Afternoon, Lod," Roger acknowledged. "You know the fire plan?"
"Load with grape and ball," Tak replied promptly. "Hold our fire until we bear, then a coordinated broadside at point blank, and go to individual fire. Grape if we're close enough; ball, if we're not. Sound good?"
"Sounds fine," Roger answered. "I don't think they'll know what hit them. The game plan is for us to wear round to the port tack after we pass side to side. That will bring us across their sterns, and we'll get a chance to give them a good, solid rake at close range that should take most of the fight out of them before we board. Grape shot should do the job just fine ... and leave the damned ships in one piece as prizes, too!"
"That sounds good to me, Your Highness," the Mardukan agreed with cheerful bloodthirstiness. K'Vaern's Cove had always paid excellent prize money for enemy ships captured intact, and every member of Hooker's crew knew exactly how this game was played.
Roger nodded to the lieutenant and continued forward, to where Despreaux stood beside the pivot gun. The bronze carronades along Hooker's side threw eight-kilo shot, and their stubby tubes looked almost ridiculously small beside the towering Mardukans. But the pivot gun was a long gun -- with a barrel as long as one of the three-meter natives was tall -- and it threw a fifteen-kilo solid shot. Or a fifteen-centimeter explosive shell.
Despreaux and Gol Shara, Hooker's chief gunner, had just finished fussing over loading the gun, and Shara's body language expressed an unmistakable aura of frustration.
"What's his problem?" Roger asked the Marine, jabbing his chin at the gunner.
"He wanted to try the shells," Despreaux replied, never taking her eyes from the approaching enemy vessels. 
"He did, did he?" Roger gave Shara a quick grin, which the Mardukan returned with complete impassivity, then turned back to admire Despreaux's aquiline profile. He decided that she would definitely not like to be told that she looked like a ship's warrior maiden figurehead. "The object is to take them as close to intact as we can get them," he pointed out mildly, instead.
"Oh, he understands; he just doesn't like it," Despreaux said, but still she never looked away from the Lemmar, and Roger frowned.
"You don't look happy," he said more quietly. He also thought that he would like to wrap her in foam and put her in the hold, where she wouldn't be exposed to enemy fire. But she was his guard, not the other way around, and any suggestion of coddling on his part would undoubtedly meet with a violent response.
"Do you ever wish it could just end, Roger?" she asked quietly. "That we could call over to them and say, 'Let's not fight today.'"
It took the prince a moment to think about that. It was a feeling that he'd had before his first major battle, at Voitan, where better than half the company had been lost, but he'd rarely experienced it since then. Rage, yes. Professional fear of failure, yes. But as he considered her question, he realized that the normal and ordinary fear of dying had somehow fallen behind. Even worse, in some ways, the fear of having to kill was doing the same thing.
"No," he said after the better part of a minute. "Not really. Not since Voitan."
"I do," she said still very quietly. "I do every single time." She turned to look at him at last. "I love you, and I knew even when I was falling in love with you, that you don't feel that way. But sometimes it worries me that you don't."
She looked deep into his eyes from moment, then touched him on the arm, and started back towards the stern.
Roger watched her go, then turned back to watch the oncoming enemy. She had a point, he thought. On Marduk, the only way to survive had been to attack and keep on attacking, but sooner or later, they would make it back to Earth. When they did, he would once again become good old Prince Roger, Number Three Son, and in those conditions, jumping down the throat of the flar-ke to kick your way out its ass was not an effective tactic. Nor would Mother appreciate it if he blew some idiotic noble's brains all over the throne room's walls, he supposed. Sooner or later, he'd have to learn subtlety.
At that moment, the lead Lemmar ship opened up with its bombard, followed rapidly by all five of its consorts.
Yes, she had a point. He had to admit it. One that bore thinking about. But for now, it was time to kick some ass.


Chapter Nine

"Prepare to run out!" Roger called, gauging the speed of the oncoming ships. The two formations sliced towards one another, the schooners moving much faster through the water than the clumsier raider vessels, and he frowned slightly. They were going to pass one another on opposite tacks, all right, but considerably more quickly than he had anticipated.
"I want to reduce sail as we pass through them, so we can get in more than one broadside."
"Agreed," Captain T'Sool said. Hooker's Mardukan captain stood beside the prince, eyes narrow as he, too, calculated the combined approach speed. "I think taking in the middle and topmast staysails should be enough. If it isn't, we can always drop the mainsail and the inner jib, as well."
Despite the tension, Roger smiled faintly. There'd been no terms for those types of sails in any Mardukan language before Poertena had introduced them, so the diminutive armorer had been forced to use the human ones. It had worked -- at least it precluded any possibility of confusing Mardukan words -- but it was more than a bit humorous to hear a Mardukan make a hash of pronouncing "topmast staysail" ... especially with a Pinopan accent. But T'Sool was almost certainly correct. What he'd suggested would reduce sail area significantly, and with it, Hooker's speed, but the foresail was the real workhorse of the topsail schooner rig. Even if they did have to drop the mainsail, as well, her agility and handling would be unimpaired.
"I think just the staysails should be enough," he responded. "Julian, send that to the other ships along with the word that we'll be engaging shortly."
"Yes, Sir." The NCO grinned. "I think we can all figure out that last part on our own, though!"
Another boom echoed from the oncoming ships, and the ball from the nearest bombard was clearly visible as it flew well above the Hooker. It was audible, as well, even over the sounds of wind and sea. Roger was almost too intent to notice, but several people flinched as the whimpering ball sliced away several lines overhead. The two sides were little more than two hundred meters apart, with Roger's vessels swooping down upon the Lemmar.
"I think we're in range," Roger observed dryly.
"Indeed?" D'Nal Cord's tone was even drier. He stood directly behind Roger, leaning on his huge spear while guarding the prince's back, as any proper asi should when battle loomed. "And as Sergeant Julian is so fond of saying, you think this because ...?"
Roger turned to smile fiercely up at his asi, but other people on Hooker's afterdeck had more pressing details to worry about.
"Srem Kol!" T'Sool shouted, and pointed upward when a Mardukan petty officer looked towards him. "Get a work party aloft and get those lines replaced! Tlar Frum! Stand by to reduce sail!"
Even as shouted acknowledgments came back to him, there was more thunder from the Lemmar line, and Roger heard a rending crash.
"Prince John just took a hit," Pahner said, and Roger looked over to see that the captain's gift for understatement hadn't deserted him. The third schooner in his own line had lost her foremast. It had plunged into the water on her starboard side, and the weight of the broken spars and sodden canvas was like an anchor. The ship swung wildly around to the right, exposing her broadside to the oncoming Mardukan raiders.
"Not much we can do about it now," Roger observed with a mildness which fooled neither Pahner nor himself. "Nothing except smash the shit out of the scummies, anyway. And at least anybody who wants her is going to have to come close enough for her carronades to do a little smashing of their own. Still - " He looked at the Marine standing beside Cord. "Julian, tell the Johnny to concentrate on Number Four's rigging. Sea Foam and Tor Col will have to hammer Number Three and Number Five to keep them off her."
"Got it," Julian acknowledged. The NCO had switched to a battle schematic on his pad and sent the updated plan to all five ships. "I've got a response from everyone except Prince John," he reported after a moment.
"I can see some damage aft." Pahner had the zoom dialed up on his helmet visor. "It looks like Number Four and Number Five were concentrating fire on her. She looks pretty beat up."
"I don't doubt it," Roger grunted. "Those are dammed big cannonballs." He shrugged. "But we'll settle their hash in a few minutes now. It's about time to open the ball. All ships -- run out!"
* * *
"Want do they think they're doing now?" Vunet demanded as Rage of Lemmar's bombard thudded again.
"Just at a guess, I'd say they're finally getting ready to shoot back at us," Cred Cies said bitingly as the smooth sides of the strange, low-slung ships were suddenly barbed with what certainly looked like stubby bombard muzzles.
"With those tiny things?" the mate made a derisive gesture of contempt.
"With those tiny things," Cies confirmed.
"My son could hurt us worse with a toy sword," Vunet scoffed.
* * *
Given its angle of approach, the K'Vaernian flotilla could have opened fire with its forward pivot guns even before the Lemmar did. Roger, however, had chosen not to do so. Powerful as the pivot guns were, it was unlikely that they could have incapacitated any of the raider vessels by themselves without using the explosive shells which would probably have destroyed their targets completely. Wooden ships waterproofed with pitch and covered with tarred rigging were tinderboxes, just waiting for any explosive shell to set them ablaze. And even if that hadn't been the case, Roger had had no interest in alerting the Mardukan pirates to the power of his vessels' weapons. The K'Vaernian Navy had been unimpressed by the carronades when they first saw them ... and with considerably less excuse, since the K'Vaernians had already seen human-designed artillery in action at Sindi. The longer these scummies remained in ignorance about their capabilities, the better.
But the time for ignorance was about over. Especially for Prince John. Roger could see axes flashing on her forward deck as her crew frantically chopped away at the rigging holding the wreckage of the foremast against her side. If things worked out the way he planned, the raiders would be too busy to bother with the Johnny anytime soon, but if things didn't work out, it was going to be a case of God helping those who helped themselves.
In the meantime....
* * *
"Fire as you bear!"
Ima Hooker and her consorts each carried a broadside of twelve guns. Once upon a time, on a planet called Earth, those guns would have been described as eighteen-pounder carronades -- short, stubby weapons with a maximum effective range of perhaps three hundred meters. Beside someone the size of a Mardukan, they looked even shorter and stubbier, and perhaps Cra Vunet could be excused for failing to grasp the menace they represented. Certainly Roger had done everything he could to keep the Lemmaran crews from doing so ... until now.
Despite the threat bearing down upon her, the Prince John did not fire first. Her guns, like those of every unit of the flotilla, had been loaded for a basically anti-personnel engagement, with a charge of grapeshot atop a single round shot. That was a marvelous combination for smashing hulls and slaughtering personnel at close range, but it left a bit to be desired in terms of long-range gunnery. The other schooners, continuing their race towards the enemy, were going to reach that sort of range far more quickly than any clumsy Lemmaran tub was going to claw far enough up to windward for her to reach. So the Johnny held her fire, waiting to see what -- if anything -- got by her sisters and into her effective range.
Of course, even with their superior weapons, four schooners might find themselves just a bit hard-pressed to stop six raiders from getting past them.
Or perhaps not.
* * *
Cred Cies watched in disbelief as the side of the nearest enemy vessel disappeared behind a billowing cloud of dirty-white smoke. Those short, silly-looking bombards obviously threw far heavier shot than he had believed possible. The quantity of smoke alone would have made that obvious, but the hurricane of iron slamming into his vessel made it even more obvious. Painfully obvious, one might almost have said.
Those low-slung, infernally fast ships slashed down into the Lemmaran formation, and as they did, they showed him exactly why they'd adopted the approach they had. The raiders' bombards might have gotten off three or four unanswered shots each as the strangers drove in across their effective range, but the accuracy of those shots had left much to be desired. One of the enemy vessels had been crippled, and had clearly taken casualties, as well, but the others were unscathed.
Now they swept into the intervals in his own formation, and his teeth ground together in frustration as he realized that even as they did, they were actually reducing sail. They were slowing down, sacrificing their impossible speed advantage, and the shriek and crash of shot -- the dreadful, splintering smash as round shot slammed into and through his own ship's timbers -- was like a hammer blow squarely between the horns as he realized why.
* * *
"All right!" someone shrieked, and it took Roger a moment to realize that it had been him. Not that he was alone in his jubilation.
The endless hours of drill which had been inflicted upon the K'Vaernian gunners had been worth it. The range to target was little more than fifty meters, and at that range, every shot went home. Jagged holes magically appeared in the stout planking of the raider ships. Grapeshot and splinters of their own hulls went through the massed troops, drawn up on the pirates' decks in obvious anticipation of a boarding action, like scythes. Bodies and pieces of bodies flew in grisly profusion, and the agonized shrieks of the wounded cut through even the thunder of the guns.
Roger wanted to leap to the rail to help serve one of the guns personally. The strength of the fierce, sudden temptation took him by surprise. It was as if the screams of his enemies, the sudden spray pattern of blood splashed across the lower edges of the square sails as wooden "splinters" two meters and more in length went smashing through the raider crews like ungainly buzz saws, closed some circuit deep inside him. It wasn't hunger ... not precisely. But it was a need. It was something all too much like a compulsion, and deep inside him a silent, observing corner of his brain realized that Nimashet had been right to worry about him.
But there was no time for such thoughts, and it wasn't fear of his own inner demons which kept him standing by Hooker's wheel as the artillery thundered and the enemy shrieked. It was responsibility. The awareness that he had accepted command for the duration of this battle and that he could no more abandon or evade that responsibility than Armand Pahner could have. And so he stayed where he was, with Julian poised at one shoulder and D'Nal Cord at the other, while someone else did the killing.
Hooker's carronades bellowed again and again. Not in the single, senses-shattering blast of the perfectly synchronized opening broadside but in ones and twos as the faster crews got off their follow-up shots. There was more thunder from overhead as sharpshooters -- Marines with their big bolt-action rifles, and Mardukans, with their even bigger breach-loaders -- claimed their own toll from the enemy.
The main "broadside" armament of the Lemmaran ships was composed of "swivel guns" which weren't much more than built up arquebuses. They were about fifty millimeters in caliber, and they had the range to carry to the K'Vaernian schooners slicing through the Lemmaran formation, but without rifling, they were grossly inaccurate. On the other hand, the already short range was going to fall to zero when the flotilla finally closed to board the raider ships, and the swivels could still wreak havoc among the infantry who would be doing the boarding. So the sharpshooters were tasked with taking out the gun crews, as well as any obvious officers they could spot.
Even with the much more accurate rifles, the shots weren't easy to make. The ships were tossing in the long swells of the Mardukan ocean and simultaneously moving on reciprocal headings, so the targets were moving in three dimensions. Since the sharpshooters were perched on the fighting tops at the topmast crosstrees or lashed into the ratlines with safety harnesses, they were not only moving in three dimensions, they were moving very broadly in three dimensions, swaying back and forth, up and down, in a manner which, had they not become inured to it already, would have guaranteed seasickness. There were enough Mardukans on the raiders' decks to give each rifle shot an excellent chance of hitting someone, but despite all of their endless hours of practice, the odds against that someone being the target they'd aimed at were even higher. The sharpshooters claimed their own share of victims, but their best efforts were only a sideshow compared to the carnage wreaked by the carronades.
Each of the four undamaged schooners was engaged on both sides as they drove down between the Lemmaran vessels. The thundering guns pounded viciously at the stunned and disbelieving raiders, and Roger shook his head grimly as the first Lemmaran foremast went crashing over the side. A moment later, the hapless ship's mainmast followed.
"That's done for that one, Captain," he observed to Pahner, and the Marine nodded.
"What about supporting Prince John?" the captain asked, and Roger glanced at him. The Marine's tone made it clear that his question was just that -- a question, and not a veiled suggestion. But it was a reasonable one, the prince thought, as he looked astern at the cloud of powder smoke rising above the crippled schooner. From the sound of her guns, though, the Johnny was firing with steady deliberation, not with the sort of desperation which might have indicated a close action.
"We've got time to settle these bastards first," Roger said, nodding at the incipient melee, and Pahner nodded again.
"You're in command," he agreed, and Roger took time to give him a quick, savage smile before he turned his attention back to T'Sool.
"Put your helm a-lee, Captain!" he ordered, and T'Sool waved two arms at his helmsman.
"Hands to sheets!" the Mardukan captain bellowed through the bedlam. "Off sheets!" Seamen who had learned their duties the hard way during the voyage scampered through the smoke and fury to obey his orders even as the gunners continued to fire, and he watched as the line-handlers raced to their stations, then waved at the helmsman again.
"Helm a-lee! Let go the sheets - handsomely there!" he thundered, and the helmsman spun the wheel.
Hooker turned on her heel like the lady she was, coming around to port in a thunder of canvas, with a speed and precision none of the raiders would have believed possible. 
"Haul in and make fast!" T'Sool shouted, and the schooner settled onto her new heading, with the wind once more broad on her port beam. The sail-handlers made the sheets fast on the big fore-and-aft foresail, and her broadside spat fresh thunder as she charged back across her enemies' sterns.
There were no guns -- bombards or swivels -- to protect the raiders' sterns, and the carnage aboard the Lemmaran ships redoubled as the lethal grapeshot went crashing the entire length of the vessels. A single one of the iron spheres might kill or maim as many as a dozen -- or even two dozen -- of the raiders, and then the anti-col bead cannon mounted on Hooker's after rail opened fire, as well.
For the first time since the Marines landed on Marduk, their high-tech weapons were almost superfluous. The ten-millimeter, hyper-velocity beads were incredibly lethal, but the storm of grapeshot and the flying splinters of the ships themselves spread a stormfront of destruction broader than anything the bead cannon could have produced. The beads were simply icing on the cake.
"Bring us back up close-hauled on the port tack, Captain T'Sool!"Roger snapped, and Hooker swung even further to port, riding back along a reciprocal of her original course that took her back up between the battered raider ships towards Prince John's position. Both broadsides' carronades continued to belch flame with deadly efficiency, and Roger could clearly see the thick ropes of blood oozing from the Mardukan ships' scuppers.
The flotilla flagship broke back through the enemy's shattered formation with smoke streaming from her gun ports in a thick fog bank shot through with flame and fury. Another raider's masts went crashing over the side, and Roger sucked in a deep, relieved breath of lung-searing smoke, despite his earlier confident words to Pahner, as he saw Prince John.
The broken foremast had been cut entirely away; he could see it bobbing astern of her as she got back underway under her mainsail and gaff main topsail alone. It was scarcely an efficient sail combination, but it was enough under the circumstances. Or it should be, anyway. She wasn't moving very quickly yet, and her rigging damage had cost her her headsails, which meant the best she could do was limp along on the wind. But her speed was increasing, and at least she was under command and moving. Which was a good thing, since raider Number Four had somehow managed to claw her way through the melee.
The Johnny had seen her coming, and her carronades were already pounding at her opponent. The bigger, more heavily built raider vessel's topsides were badly shattered, and her sails seemed to have almost more holes in them than they had intact canvas, but she was still underway, still closing on the damaged schooner, and the big, slow-firing bombard protected by the massive timber "armor" of her forecastle was still in action. Even as Roger watched, it slammed another massive round shot into the much more lightly built schooner, and he swore viciously as splintered planking flew.
"It would be the Johnny," he heard Pahner say almost philosophically. He looked at the Marine, and the captain shrugged. "Never seems to fail, Your Highness. The place you least want to get hit, is the one you can count on the enemy finding." He shook his head. "She's got quite a few of the Carnan aboard, and they already took a hammering when we lost Sea Skimmer."
"Don't count your money when it's still sitting on the table," Roger replied, then turned to Julian. "All ships," he said. "Close with the pirates to leeward and board. We'll go to Johnny's assistance ourselves."
"Your Highness," Pahner began, "considering that our entire mission is to get you home alive, don't you think that perhaps it might be a bit wiser to let someone else go -- "
Roger had just turned back to the Marine to argue the point when Pahner's helmet visor automatically darkened to protect the captain's vision. Roger didn't know whether or not Prince John's Marine detachment had originally set up a plasma cannon for their anti-col defense system. If they had, he thought with a strange detachment, they were probably going to hear about it -- at length -- from Pahner and the sergeant major. But it was also possible that they'd switched out the bead cannon at the last minute while the rest of the crew worked on repairs to the schooner's crippled rigging. Not that it mattered. Raider Number Four had managed to get around behind Johnny's stern, where her deadly carronade broadside wouldn't bear. And in achieving that position of advantage, the pirate vessel had put itself exactly where the schooner's crew wanted it.
The Marines' plasma cannons could take out modern main battle tanks, and if Hooker's bead cannon hadn't seemed to add much to her carronades' carnage, no one would ever say that about Prince John's after armament. The round ripped straight down the center of the target ship, just above main deck level. It sliced away masts, rigging, bulwarks, and the majority of the pirates who had assembled on deck in anticipation of boarding. What was worse, in a way, was the thermal bloom that preceded the round. The searing heat touched the entire surface of the ship to flame in a tiny slice of a second, and the roaring furnace became an instant sliver of Hell, an inferno afloat on an endless sea that offered no succor to its victims. Those unfortunate souls below decks, "shielded" from the instant incineration of the boarding party, had a few, eternal minutes longer to shriek before the bombard's powder magazine exploded and sent the shattered, flaming wreck mercifully into the obliterating depths.
"I thought we wanted to capture the ships intact," Roger said almost mildly.
"What would you have done, Your Highness?" Potter asked. "Yeah, we want to capture the ships, and recapture the convoy, if we can. But Prince John, obviously, would prefer to avoid being boarded herself."
"And apparently the Lemmar agree with that preference,"D'Nal Cord observed. "Look at that."
He raised an upper arm and pointed. One of the six raider vessels drifted helplessly, completely dismasted while the blood oozing down her side dyed the water around her. Her deck was piled and heaped with the bodies of her crew, and it was obvious that no more than a handful of them could still be alive. Three more raiders each had one of the flotilla's other schooners alongside, and now that Hooker's carronades were no longer bellowing, Roger could hear the crackle of small arms fire as the K'Vaernian boarders stormed up and over them. Prince John's plasma cannon had accounted for a fifth raider, but the sixth and final pirate vessel had somehow managed to come through the brutal melee with its rigging more or less intact, and it was making off downwind just as fast as its shredded canvas would allow.
"Do we let them go, or close with them?" the prince asked.
"Close," Pahner said. "We want to capture the ships, and I'm not a great believer in giving a fleeing enemy an even break. They either surrender, or they die."
* * *
"They're not letting us go," Vunet said.
"Would you?" Cies shot back with a grunt of bitter laughter as he looked around the deck.
The crew was hastily trying to repair some of the damage, but it was a futile task. There was just too much of it. Those damned bombards of theirs were hellishly accurate. Unbelievably accurate. They'd smashed Rage of Lemmar from stem to stern and cut away over half her running rigging, in the process. Coupled with the way they'd shredded the sails themselves, the damage to the ship's lines -- and line-handlers -- had slowed their escape to a crawl.
The bombards had done nearly as much damage to the crew, as well. The quarterdeck was awash in blood and bodies, and the crew had put a gang of slaves to work pitching the offal over the side. The enemy's round shot had been bad enough, but the splinters it had ripped from the hull had been even worse. Some of them had been almost two-thirds as long as Cies himself, and one of them had gutted his original helmsman like a filleted fish. Nor was that the only crewman who'd been shredded by bits and pieces of his own ship. Some of that always happened when the bombards got a clear shot, but Cies had never imagined anything like this. Normal bombard balls were much slower than the Hell-forged missiles which had savaged his vessel. Worse, he'd never seen any ship which could pour out fire like water from a pump, and the combination of high-velocity shot and its sheer volume had been devastating beyond his worst nightmares of carnage.
Now the Rage was trying to limp to the south and away from the vengeful demons behind her. He'd hoped that with one of their own crippled (by what, for all intents and purposes, had been a single lucky shot) the other four might have let his own ship go. But it appeared they had other plans.
"We could..." Vunet said, then paused.
"You were about to suggest that we surrender," Cies said harshly. "Never! No Lemmar ship has ever surrendered to anyone other than Lemmar. Ever. They may take our ship, but not one crewman, not one slave, will be theirs."
* * *
"They're not heaving to," Roger said with a grunt. "Captain Pahner?"
"Yes, Your Highness?" the Marine replied formerly.
"If we really want that ship intact, this is about to become a boarding action. I think it's about time to let the ground commander take over."
"You intend to take them on one-on-one?"
"I think we have to, if we don't want them to get away," Roger replied. Pahner gazed at him, and the prince shrugged. "Pentzikis, Tor Col, and Sea Foam already have their hands full. Prince John can probably take the fourth pirate -- I doubt there's more than a couple dozen of these Lemmar still alive aboard her, and she sure as hell can't get away with no masts at all. But this guy in front of us isn't just lucky. He's smart ... and good. If he weren't, he'd be drifting around back there with his buddies. So if you want him caught, we're the only one with a real shot at him."
"I see. And when we catch up with him, you'll be where, precisely, Your Highness?" Pahner asked politely.
"Like I say, Sir," Roger said, "it's time to let the ground commander take over."
"I see." Pahner gazed at him speculatively for several moments, considering what the prince hadn't said, then nodded with an unseen smile.
"Very well, Your Highness. Since boarding actions are my job, I'll just go and get the parties for this one assembled." 


Chapter Ten

"Come off the guns and rig the mortars!" Despreaux ordered, pulling gunners off the carronades as a she trotted down the line of the starboard battery. "We're going to be boarding from port!"
The Ima Hooker was slicing through the water once more, rapidly overhauling the fleeing pirate vessel. It would have been difficult to guess, looking at the sergeant's expression, just how unhappy about that she was. Not that she was any more eager than Captain Pahner to see the raiders escape, if not for exactly the same reasons. Nimashet Despreaux had a serious attitude problem where pirates -- any pirates -- were concerned, but she would have been much happier if at least one of the other schooners had been in position to support Hooker. There were still an awful lot of scummies aboard that ship, however badly shaken they must be from the effects of the carronades. And as good as the K'Vaernians and their Diaspran veterans were, hand-to-hand combat on a heaving deck was what the Lemmar did for a living. There were going to be casualties -- probably quite a lot of them -- if the raiders ever got within arms' reach, and a Mardukan's arms were very, very long.
And Despreaux was particularly concerned about one possible casualty which wouldn't have been a problem if any of the other schooners had been in Hooker's place.
But at least if they had to do it, it looked as if Roger intended to do it as smartly as possible. He was steering almost directly along the Lemmaran ship's wake, safely outside the threat zone of any weapon the raider mounted. Given Hooker's superior speed and maneuverability, Despreaux never doubted that Roger would succeed in laying her right across the other ship's stern. Nor did she doubt that he would succeed in raking the pirate's deck from end to end with grapeshot with relative impunity as he closed. After which, Hooker's crew and Krindi Fain's Diasprans would swarm up and over the shattered stern and swiftly subdue whatever survived from the Lemmaran crew.
Sure they would.
And Roger wouldn't be anywhere near the fighting.
And the tooth fairy would click her heels together three times and return all of them to Old Earth instantly.
She skidded to a halt beside another "new" device. The boarding mortar, one of three carried in each of Hooker's broadsides, was a small, heavy tube designed for a heavily modified grapnel, affixed to a winch and line, to fit neatly into its muzzle. Charged with gunpowder, it should be able to throw the grapnel further and more accurately than any human or Mardukan. Of course, that assumed it worked at all. The system had been tested before leaving K'Vaern's Cove, but that was different from trying to use it in combat for the very first time.
Despreaux pulled open the locker beside the mortar, dragged out the grapnel, and affixed the line to the snaphook on its head as one of the gun boys ran down to the magazine for the propelling charge. He was back in less than a minute with a bag of powder, and Despreaux watched one of the Mardukan gunners from the starboard battery slide the charge into the heavy iron tube. A wad of waxed felt followed, and then Despreaux personally inserted the grapnel shaft and used it as its own ramrod to shove the charge home. When she was certain it was fully seated, she stepped back and a hollow quill, made from the Mardukan equivalent of a feather and filled with fulminating powder, went into the touchhole, the firing hammer was cocked, and the mortar was ready.
All three of the portside weapons had been simultaneously loaded, and Despreaux spent a few seconds inspecting the other two, then activated her communicator.
"Portside mortars are up."
"Good," Roger replied. "We're coming up on our final turn."
Despreaux grabbed a stay and leaned outboard, careful to stay out of the carronade gunners' way as she peered ahead beyond the sails and the tapering bowsprit. Hooker was coming up astern of the Lemmaran ship rapidly, and she heard the rapidfire volley of orders as seamen scampered to the lines. One of the portside gunners rapped her "accidentally" on the knee with a handspike, and she looked up quickly. Mardukan faces might not be anywhere near as expressive as human ones, but she'd learned to read scummy body language in the past, endless months, and she recognized the equivalent of a broad grin in the way his falsehands held the handspike.
She gave him the human version of the same expression and got the hell out of his way as the gun captain squatted behind the carronade and peered along the stubby barrel. Then he cocked the firing hammer.
* * *
"Back all sails!"
Now that the battle had resolved itself into a series of ship-to-ship actions, Roger found himself an admiral with no commands to give. It was all up to the individual ship captains now, like T'Sool, and Roger decided that the best thing he could do was get out from underfoot.
And he was planning on sitting out the boarding, as well. Everyone's comments on the stupidity of his putting himself out on a limb were finally starting to hit home. If he took point, the Marines aboard Ima Hooker wouldn't be able to pay attention to taking the ship, or to keeping themselves alive, because they would be trying too hard to protect him. So he'd taken a position in the ratlines, where he could observe the fighting without participating.
Getting a good look required that elevated position, because the ships could hardly have been more unlike one another. The Lemmaran was a high-sided caravel-like vessel, fairly round in relation to its length, whereas the schooner was long, low, and lean. The result was a difference of nearly three meters from the top of the schooner's bulwarks to the top of her opponent's.
The boarders from Hooker would be led by some of the Diaspran veterans, under the command of Krindi Fain, with the human Marines -- led by Gunny Jin -- as emergency backup. The Diasprans weren't exactly experienced at this sort of combat, but the K'Vaernian seamen had explained the rudiments of shipboard combat to them before they ever set sail, and they'd practiced for it almost as much as they'd practiced their marksmanship. Given the disparity in the height of the two ships' bulwarks, even the Mardukans were going to find it an awkward scramble to get across the raider' s high stern, but at least the savage battering the carronades' grapeshot had delivered upon arrival gave them an opening to make the crossing.
On the other hand, not even the Mardukans had been able to actually see across to the other ship from deck level. That was one reason Cord had joined Roger, perching precariously in the ratlines, along with his nephew Denat. The other reason was to get them close enough to Roger to let them throw up their outsized shields in the event that the Lemmar decided to hurl their throwing axes at him.
Roger watched the Marines forming up behind the Mardukan boarders and was just as glad that Despreaux was in charge of the grapnel mortars. For better or worse, he worried more about her than about the other Marines. Managing the grapnels, and the fast winches they were attached to, she would be in no position to participate. Whether that was simply a happy coincidence or something Pahner and Kosutic had considered with malice aforethought when they detailed her to the job, he didn't know. Nor did he particularly care. Not as long as it kept her out of the firing line.
The final broadside roared, and Roger nodded in grim approval as the hurricane of grapeshot swept most of the pirate ship's afterdeck clear. It also did a splendid job of cutting away rigging and what was left of the ship's canvas. It looked like the spars themselves were still more or less intact, though. Re-rigging this prize would be an all-day task, but one that would be nowhere near as difficult as repairing the ships which had lost entire masts.
He watched as Despreaux ordered the mortars to fire and the lines flicked out across the enemy ship. The grapnels flew straight and true, arcing over the Lemmar ship's stern rail, and the Mardukan sailors on the fast winches started reeling them back in. The mortars appeared to have been a successful experiment, he observed, and allowed himself a certain smugness as the author of the idea. Trying to do the same thing with hand-thrown grapnels would have been a chancy process, at best.
* * *
Pedi Karuse refused to give in to despair. The worst had happened the moment the Krath raiding party hit the village. From there, it was only a matter of how long it took her to die.
In a way, her capture by the Lemmar had actually stretched out her existence. They were probably going to sell her back to the Fire Priests, eventually. Or she might end up as a bond slave, or in the saltpeter mines. But at least she wasn't on a one-way ticket to Strem. Or already a Handmaiden of the God.
So she'd been prepared to look upon her current situation with a certain degree of detachment, biding her time and husbanding her strength against the vanishingly slim chance that she might actually find an opportunity to escape. That attitude had undergone a marked change in the past few hours, however.
The problem, of course, was the peculiarly Lemmaran method of dealing with boarding actions. The Lemmar had a simple answer to the possibility of capture: don't allow it. In part, their attitude stemmed from their dealings with Fire Priests; unlike the Shin, they flatly refused to let themselves be captured to face the Fire Priests' ... religious practices. But an even larger part of their attitude was the terror factor; no Lemmar would ever surrender under any circumstances, and they made certain all of their enemies knew it.
Generally, that meant that the Fire Priest's guards didn't bother trying to capture Lemmaran ships. They might sink them, but fighting a suicidal enemy hand-to-hand was a casualty-heavy proposition which offered minimal profit even if it was successful. Nor did the Priests raid the Lemmar islands. They might have taken Strem away from the Confederation, but the island itself was all they'd gotten. And if they wanted to keep it, they'd have to completely repopulate it, since the Lemmar had killed even their women and children, rather than have them captured.
What that meant for Pedi Karuse, and the half-dozen other captives chained on the deck of the Rage of Lemmar, was that having avoided the Fire Priests on Krath, having avoided being shipped to Strem, and having lived through the splinter-filled hell of the broadsides, they were about to be slaughtered by their captors.
Some days it just didn't pay to do your horns in the morning.
She flattened herself as close to the deck as her chains allowed, even though her brain recognized the futility of her instinctive reaction, as another enemy salvo hit. Most of this one was aimed high, something that whistled through the air with an evil sound and shredded the ship's rigging like a greg eating a vern. But some of it flew by lower, and a splinter the size of her horn took one of the other Shin slaves in the stomach. It was really a rather small splinter, compared to some of the others which had gone howling across the deck, but the slave seemed to explode under the impact, and his guts splashed across the red-stained deck . . . and Karuse.
Even over the screams and the thunder of the enemy guns, she could hear the prayers of the captured Guard next her, and the sound finally pushed her over the brink as her fellow clansman's blood sprayed over her.
"Shut up!" she shouted. "I hope you burn in the Fires for the rest of eternity! It was your stupid Guard that got me into this!"
There wasn't much she could do, with her arms chained behind her and coupled to the rest of the slaves, but she did her best - which was to lean sideways and snap-kick the stupid Krath in the head. It wasn't her best kick ever, but it was enough to send him bouncing away from her, and she grunted in delighted satisfaction as the other side of his skull hit a deck stanchion ... hard.
"Shin blasphemer!" He spat in her direction. "The Fire will purify your soul soon enough!"
"It will purify you both," one of the pirates said as he drew his sword. "Time to show these vern why you don't board the Lemmar."
"Piss on you, sailor!" the Shin female snarled. "Your mother was a vern and your father was a kren - with bad eyesight!"
"Piss on you, Shin witch," the Lemmar retorted, and raised his sword. "Time to meet your Fire." 
"That's what you think," Karuse said. She flipped her legs forward and both feet slammed home as she snap-kicked the pirate in the crotch. He bent explosively forward in sudden agony, and she wrenched herself as far upward as the chains allowed. It was just far enough. Their horns locked, and then, in a maneuver she knew would have left her bruised and sore for a week if she'd been going to live that long, she let herself fall backward and hurled the much larger male over her head and onto his back. Another wrench unlocked her horns just before he crashed down on the planking, and she flipped herself upward onto the back of her head, spun in place, and drove both heels down onto the winded pirate's throat.
The entire attack was over in a single heart beat, along with the pirate's life, and she bounced back up into a kneeling position on the deck to survey the remaining pirates, clustered to repel borders.
"Next?" she spat.
Several of the Lemmar swore, and two of them started toward her to complete the imperative task of killing their captives. But before they could take more than a single stride, a grapnel came flying through the air. It was only one of three, but this particular grapnel landed two meters in front of Karuse, with the line running between her and the Krath guards.
"Oh, Fire Priest shit," she whispered as the four-pronged hook began skittering rapidly back along the deck. It was headed for the after rail, gouging splinters out of the planking as it went ... and aiming directly for the chain binding all the slaves together.
It caught the chain and barely even slowed as it ripped away the forward most of the two heavy iron rings which had anchored it -- and the slaves -- to the deck.
"This is gonna hurt!" 
Karuse leaned forward and tightened her muscles against what was coming, but it was still incredibly painful when all four of her chained-together arms were wrenched backwards. Only one of the rings had come out of the planking, which made it even worse. Instead of dragging them all straight aft, the rampaging grapnel cracked the chain like a whip. Sparks flew as the grapnel's tines raked furiously down the heavy links, and someone's scream ended in a hideous, gurgling groan as the grapnel disemboweled him. She could hear the other slaves screaming as the whole group was snatched along the deck until the grapnel finally yanked entirely free of the chain. But not before it had slammed all of them brutally into the ship's starboard bulwark.
She felt as if her arms had been pulled out of their sockets, and when she looked sideways, she saw that that had literally happened to one of the other Shin. But she refused to let that stop her as she rolled over on her head again and slipped her legs between her arms.
That contortion would have been difficult enough for a human; most Mardukans would have found it virtually impossible, but the same training which had saved Karuse's life against the first pirate came to the fore once more. She folded practically in half and slipped first one, then the other leg out until she could lie with her arms bound in front of her. Of course, they were now flipped around, falsehands above truehands, but her wrists slid in the manacles to let her relieve the pressure on her elbows and shoulders, and even with falsehands high, she was happier this way. Besides, it was also an insulting hand gesture, which suited her frame of mind perfectly.
* * *
Roger had been paying strict attention to the preparations for the attack. Despite his concentration on other things, he'd been vaguely aware of the low-voiced conversation between D'Nal Cord and Denat, but the hadn't paid it very much attention. Not until Cord suddenly snapped an angry retort at his nephew. The deep, sharp-edged sentence was short, pungent, and spectacularly obscene.
"What?" Roger's head whipped around at the highly atypical outburst from his asi.
"They appear to be attempting to kill their prisoners," Denat said with a gesture towards the other ship.
Roger followed the waving truehand and saw half a dozen Mardukans chained to the deck near the center line. One of them was only too obviously dead, clearly a victim of Hooker's broadsides. A chain, stretched between two raised iron rings, joined them all together, running up through a complex four-point restraint behind each Mardukan to hold his arms behind him. As Roger watched, one of the grapnels caught the chain, and he winced in sympathetic pain as it ripped one of the chain's anchoring rings out of the planking and yanked the prisoners across the deck. It also killed another of them, and then the rest of the captives were slammed into the ship's bulwarks with more than enough force to kill anyone who hit awkwardly. Indeed, it looked to Roger as if all but one of them had been injured, possibly severely. But that didn't prevent several more of the Lemmar from advancing on them with swords ready just as Hooker's boarders started over the side of their own ship.
* * *
Pedi Karuse rose on her knees once more, examined her situation, and allowed herself one vicious curse. The grapnel had only managed to rip out one ring; the other one remained firmly fixed to the deck, still holding her prisoner. Worse, the other slaves chained to her had fared far worse than she had as they were hurled against the side of the ship and lay about like so many more inert anchors. Aside from having her arms in front of her again, she was as helplessly chained as before, and she looked aft, where the first of the boarders were coming over the stern. At first, she thought they might be Shin, for they wore bright blue harnesses, like those common to the Fardar Clan. But in the next instant, she realized that it couldn't be her people. The boarders were using weapons she had never seen before, and their tactics were unlike any Shin.
The first wave over the transom formed a shield wall, more like the sort of thing Krath heavy infantry would do, which held off the pirates while reinforcements swarmed aboard behind them. The second rank bore something like long-barreled arquebuses. Unlike any arquebus Karuse had ever heard of, however, these had no problem with water or weather -- as they demonstrated with the very first volley. At least some of that many normal arquebus would have had their priming soaked during the crossing, but all of these weapons fired successfully into the mass of pirates hammering at the shield wall.
The long-barreled arquebuses also had knives on the ends, and after the first volley the entire group charged forward. They wielded the guns more like spears than firearms, but they did so with a discipline and purpose that was decidedly un-Shin-like. They strode forward in step and struck in unison, while the shield bearers stabbed forward with short spears, sliding the thrusts upward from below their shields.
Unfortunately, she didn't have long to contemplate this new mode of warfare before some of the pirates recalled their duty as Lemmar and decided that killing bound captives was a better use of their time than fighting the boarders. She finally knew despair as four of the pirates approached, one of them slicing down to kill the mostly unconscious Guardsman while two more approached her warily.
"Lemmar slime! I'll eat your tongues for my breakfast!"she shouted, bouncing up to spin a kick into the nearest one's belly. He flew backwards, but so did she, and as she slammed down on her back, the one she hadn't kicked sprang forward, sword upraised.
* * *
Roger lost track of the prisoners as he watched the boarding party foam across onto the other ship's deck's under Krindi Fain's direction. Once again, the young Mardukan was proving his stuff, first sending over a small team of assegai-and-shield troops, then following it up with a double line of rifles. A command rang out, the assegai troops squatted instantly and simultaneously, with their shields angled, and the riflemen fired a double volley over their heads. The massive bullets smashed into the tight-packed Lemmar, and the Diasprans followed up immediately with a bayonet charge that was a beautiful thing to see. The combination scattered the remaining Lemmar defenders on the pirate ship's afterdeck, and the boarders stormed ahead towards the surviving clumps of raiders further forward.
"Yes!"
Even as Roger yelled in triumph, he felt rather than saw Cord leave his side. His head snapped around, and his eyes widened in a moment of pure shock as the shaman bounded down the ratlines. The huge Mardukan moved with unbelievable speed and agility, and then he flung himself through the air, onto the enemy deck.
He landed, absolutely unsupported, half-way up the ship from Hooker's boarders. And as if that hadn't been enough, he'd thrown himself in front of what must have been the largest single remaining group of Lemmar still on their feet -- a cluster of about twelve, with four in the lead and six or eight more following.
Roger couldn't believe it. In every battle, from the day he had first saved Cord's life, his asi had always been at his side, guarding his back. The only time he hadn't been, it was because he'd been too seriously wounded in the previous battle to stay on his feet. It was an unheard of violation of his asi's responsibilities for him to desert his "master" at such a time!
The prince didn't even curse. Cord had backed him too often for him to waste precious seconds swearing. He just checked to ensure that his revolvers were secure in their holsters and his sword was sheathed across his back.
Then he leapt outward in Cord's wake.
* * *
The Lemmar with the sword snarled at Karuse and brought his weapon flashing down . . . only to be flung violently backwards by the enormous, leaf-bladed spear which suddenly split his chest.
Karuse didn't know where the fellow, frankly dangling, above her came from, but he was the best sight she'd ever seen in her life. Even from this angle.
The guy was old and naked as a slith, without even a harness, much less a bardouche, but he wielded his huge spear with a deft touch that reminded her of her father's armsman back home. That old armsman had seen more battles than she'd seen breakfasts, and could whip any three young bucks while simultaneously drinking a cup of wine. And it looked like this fellow was cut from the same cloth.
Nor was he by himself, although she'd never seen anything weirder than the creature beside him. It looked like a two-sren-tall vern. It had only two arms, long yellowish head tendrils, similar in color to her own horns, dangling down its back and gathered together with a leather band, and a most peculiar pistol in either hand. Right behind the two of them came another odd creature that looked like a cross between a sorn and an atul. It was longer than she was tall, about knee-high on the old guy with the spear, equipped with a most impressive set of fangs, and striped in red and black. The . . . striped thing hit the deck, took one look around, and charged into the pirates with a keening snarl.
Definitely the oddest threesome she'd ever seen, she thought with an oddly detached calm.
The older fellow took out two more of the pirates with his spear -- another thrust to the chest, and the second with a really economical throat slash that was a pleasure to watch -- and the striped creature dragged another down with jaws that took the pirate's head neatly off. But the rest of the Lemmar had formed up to charge, and they'd attracted at least another dozen of their fellows to assist them. The fresh cluster of assailants caught the attention of the red-and-black whatever-it-was, and the creature looked up from its initial victim to lunge forward in a counter-charge . . . just as the maybe-vern cocked his pistols.
Karuse considered pointing out that there was no way two pistols, especially pistols as puny as those, were going to stop two dozen pirates. Fortunately, he opened fire before she could. Her father had told her often enough to observe before she opened her mouth, and he turned out to have been right once more as the pistols spat shot after shot. They were accurate, too, as was the shooter. Each round hit one of the pirates just below the armoring horn prominence in a thundering cascade of explosions. After a few moments, all that was left was a drifting pall of gunsmoke and dead pirates with shattered, brain-leaking skulls.
Beauty.
* * *
Captain Pahner nodded in approval as the Diaspran infantry swept across to the enemy ship. Fain was no officer to let the enemy get the upper hand, and the young captain had thrown his assegai troops across the instant the vessels touched, even before Pahner could pass the order, then followed up with his rifles in an evolution so smooth it was like silk. Effective subordinates were a treasure, and Krindi Fain was as good as any the Marine had met since Bistem Kar.
Everything rikky-tik, he thought.
In days to come, Armand Pahner would reflect upon the premature nature of that thought. He would ponder it, as a sinner pondered the inexplicable actions of an irritated deity. He would wonder if perhaps, by allowing himself to think it, he had angered the God of Perversity, and Murphy, who is His Prophet. It was the only offense he could think of which might have explained what happened next.
Even as he allowed himself to enjoy Fain's success, something flickered at the corner of his eye, and he turned his head just in time to see Roger take a flying leap off of the ratlines, catch the hanging end of a severed Lemmar shroud, and go swinging through the air like some golden-haired ape to land square-footed on the enemy deck.
Pahner just . . . looked for a moment. He was that shocked. The prince, with Dogzard right on his heels, had landed next to his asi . . . in exactly the right spot to draw the last remaining formed groups pirates like a magnet. There was no way in hell for Pahner to support them, either. Even if he told the sharpshooters to cover the noble idiot, the Lemmar would be on the pair before the snipers could understand the order and redirect their fire.
Cord took down one of the group, which appeared to be intent on slaughtering the captives who'd been chained to the deck. Dogzard dragged down a second pirate, and the shaman dispatched another pair with ruthless efficiency as Roger drew both pistols, and then the prince opened fire. The revolvers -- considerably smaller than the monsters Rastar favored, but still firing a twelve-millimeter round with a recoil sufficient to dislocate many human's wrists -- were double-action. Roger's rate of fire was far slower than he could have managed with his off-world bead pistol, but it was impressive, nonetheless. Especially to pirates from a culture which had never been exposed to the concept of repeating firearms at all. The deck of the Lemmar ship was already heavily obscured by the gunsmoke from the Diaspran rifles and Hooker's final broadside, but visibility abruptly deteriorated still further under the clouds of smoke pouring from His Highness's pistols.
It was fortunate that, once again, good subordinates were coming to Pahner's rescue, as at least two of the sharpshooters began engaging the group attacking the prince on their own. The captain could hardly see what was going on aboard the other ship, but it was also obvious that Fain had spotted the action and ordered his assegai troops to advance, as well. The Diasprans were going to have to be somewhat cautious, though, since they were advancing more or less directly into Roger's fire.
The deck of the Lemmar ship had been cleared, but there seemed to still be plenty of the pirates below decks. Some of them were attempting to fight their way up through the hatches, while others were defending still other hatches Diasprans were trying to fight their way down through. With, of course, Roger squarely in the middle of it all.
Whatever had happened to the now fully obscured prince, Pahner somehow doubted that Roger was dead. Whatever severely overworked deity had dedicated his full time and effort to keeping the young blockhead alive would undoubtedly have seen to that. On the other hand, what might happen to him when one Armand Pahner got his hands on him was a different matter.
He'd promised he wasn't going to do this sort of . . . shit anymore.
* * *
A sudden, ringing silence filled Karuse's ears, and she realized she was on a deck clear of (living) pirates, still chained, lying on her back, and looking up at this old fellow . . . dangling . . . above her. And while the sight had been welcome, in one way, the angle could have been better. Not to mention the fact that her neck and shoulders hurt like hell.
"Ahem," she said as sweetly as she possibly could under the circumstances. "I don't suppose you could be convinced to take these chains off me?"

End