March to the Stars

by David Weber

  "Scruffy?! I'll give you scruffy!"

  "Enough!" the Gastan barked, and his guards banged the floor with their ceremonial spears. "Shem Cothal, Shem Sul. Taking Thirlot was considered and rejected. Sergeant Julian?"

  "We might be able to take Thirlot," Julian said, looking pointedly at the chieftain in the breastplate. His toot, taking its cue from the Gastan, flashed the name Shem Sul across his vision. "Certainly we could enter the city. With our aid, you could probably destroy the forces that the Gastan's spies indicate are in the city. Our non-plasma heavy weapons could smash the doors, our armor could open up any hole necessary to get you inside the walls, and a force of Shin and Marines could enter the city and roam almost at will."

  He held the eye of the more polished barbarian until the latter made a gesture of agreement.

  "What we could not do is hold it," he said then, turning to the other chieftain, Shem Cothal. "And if we can't hold it, we can't cut their supply lines. The Krath would turn their army to the rear and assault Thirlot by swarming the walls. Those walls are barely ten meters high; they could stand on each other's shoulders and come right over them. And they can march back down the road on the rations they have right here in camp—it's barely two days to Thirlot. When they got there, our force in the city would be overrun. It would certainly be forced out with severe casualties, possibly cut off and destroyed. Other plans involving putting a blocking force on the Queicuf-Thirlot road have also been rejected for the same reason. We simply don't have sufficient forces to hold anything other than Nopet Nujam against the Krath army."

  "All of that is no doubt true," Shem Sul said. "But I have to agree with my colleague." He gestured at the hologram. "You're discussing a spoiling attack, nothing more."

  "It's the best we can do at this time," Julian said. "And it's a spoiling attack we can replicate almost at will."

  "They're not so stupid," the other chieftain said. "They'll change their dispositions. 'Tis but a tithe of them that attack at anytime. All they have to do is pull some of their other troops back, and your raiders are going to be useless."

  "Then we'll change tactics," Roger said. "The point is to wear them down."

  "As opposed to us being frittered away," Sul replied. "You'll take casualties on each raid, and they will win a battle of attrition. I have to agree with Shem Cothal; we have to cut their supply lines. Cut those, and their army withers on the vine. Nothing else, short of a human superweapon, will work."

  "We can't use our superweapons until we've taken the port," Pahner said. "And you're correct, this is an attrition battle, with the addition of trying to break their will. At some point, we might take Thirlot, if only to burn it to the ground, but only if it helps with our objective, which isn't to beat them so much as to convince them to go away. We don't have the numbers to kill them all—our arms would fall off before we were done—so we're looking at ways to convince them victory would simply be too expensive. We'll look at other options, as well, but for the time being, we need to discuss the briefed plan."

  Roger had been listening carefully, but now he sat up straight, picked up his pad, and started rotating the hologram, zooming in and out on the region around Queicuf. He zoomed in on the road just to the east of the fortress, where the valley narrowed down to the gorge of the Shin River, pinching the road bed between the valley walls and the deep, broad river.

  "Julian, is this map to scale?"

  "No, Your Highness. The vertical exaggeration is at one to three."

  "Hmmm . . . fascinating . . ."

  "What, Your Highness?" Pahner asked. He eyed the prince thoughtfully, wondering what the youngster was up to now. Whether it was practical or not, it should at least be interesting as hell, the Marine thought, because at some levels, Roger was a much more devious tactician than he himself was.

  "There might just be an exploitable weakness here," the prince said, rotating the image again so that he was looking at the battlefield from ground level. "Captain Pahner, Lords of the Shin, we probably should try the briefed plan, if for no other reason than to put them a bit more on the defensive. But there might just be another way. Oh, my yes. Quite a weakness."

  * * *

  Cord turned back down the corridor, still leaning heavily on his spear for support, as the door closed on the prince. Pedi started to take his arm, then snatched her hand back as he jerked away.

  "I am not so weak that I need your support, benan," he said harshly.

  "I ask pardon, benai," she said. "I had not realized that contact with your benan was so beneath you."

  "Not beneath me," Cord sighed. "Perhaps I should not snap, but . . ."

  "But?" Pedi opened the door and checked the hallway beyond. The Gastan had placed guards along the corridor, and they nodded to her as she passed. She had known some of them for years, grown up with them. But she could feel the distance that now separated them, a gulf that was hard to define, yet as real as death itself. All that she knew was that either she had grown away from Mudh Hemh, or it was somehow rejecting her.

  "But . . ." Cord began, then inhaled deeply, and not just from the pain of moving with his partially healed wound. "I know that I'm your benai, not your father," he growled. "But in the asi bond, the master has certain responsibilities. Although in my culture, females cannot become asi, if they had . . . problems, it would be the . . . responsibility of the master to deal with them."

  "Problems?" Pedi asked archly as they came to their shared chamber. "What problems?" she asked as she opened the door and swept the room.

  "Don't play with me, Pedi Karuse," Cord said firmly as he lowered himself onto the pile of cushions within. The fact that he barely managed to stifle a groan as he settled into them said a great deal about how far from recovered he truly was. "I'm in too much pain to play games. I can see your condition clearly, as can anyone with eyes. It is only the humans who are confused. I would have expected your father to be fuming by now."

  "It is not my father's place to 'fume,' " she said sharply. "As benan, I am beyond the strictures of my family."

  "Then it is my responsibility to investigate the situation," Cord said. "I am furious about this, you know. No true male would do this and then leave you to bear the burden."

  Pedi opened her mouth, then shut it.

  "It is my burden to bear," she said, after a moment. "It was my choice."

  "It takes two to make such a choice," Cord pointed out, grimacing as he tried to find a comfortable position. "There is a male, somewhere, who has much explaining to do. A male who would impregnate you and then refuse to acknowledge that fact—such a male is without honor."

  "It's not his fault," Pedi said. "I cannot—I will not—say more. But this is my responsibility to bear."

  Cord sighed in exasperation, but made a gesture of resignation.

  "As you will. I cannot imagine you lying with a male without honor. But let it be your secret, your 'cross,' as the humans would say. I shall raise any of the brood as if they were my own."

  "I wouldn't hold you to that," Pedi said, getting the balm the human physician had made. "It is . . . It isn't your fault."

  "I, however, am a male of honor," Cord said, then sighed in relief as she rubbed the salve into the inflamed wound. "I thank you for that," he told her, then shook himself and looked at her sternly. "But to return to what truly matters, I will not let your children be raised as bastards, Pedi. I will not. It will be as if they were mine."

  "I understand, benai, but I can handle it," she said woodenly. "And the situation with the father is . . . complex. I wish that you would let me manage it in my own way."

  "As you wish," he said with another sigh. "As you wish."

  * * *

  "I wish this didn't look so easy," Julian muttered.

  "What?" O'Casey asked. "Something about this god-forsaken mess strikes you as 'easy'?"

  She sat up straight on the camp stool, rubbing her back, and grinned at the sergeant. It was a very crooked grin, because both of them had
been perusing their separate "slices" of the intelligence data from the IBI agent for the last couple of hours. While Julian concentrated on Marduk itself, she had been wading through the data about the coup, and she was coming to the conclusion that Julian was right about that information's reliability. And about the implications of that reliability.

  There was too much data on the disk, and it was too consistent, and from too many known sources, to have been entirely generated locally. But if it had been generated by a central authority, if either the Empire or the Saints knew that Roger was alive on Marduk, the planet would have been crawling with searchers. Since it wasn't, the data was probably genuine, and the IBI agent was probably on the level. In which case, whatever happened here on Marduk, "just going home" was no longer an option.

  "If you have good news, I could use some," she went on, leaning back from her own pad.

  "That's just it—I don't know if it is good news," Julian said. "The problem is that this governor is either a complete and total idiot . . . or else subtly brilliant. And I've been working on the premise of subtly brilliant, looking for the dastardly plan."

  "I haven't even looked," O'Casey admitted. "Who is the governor?"

  "Ymyr Brown, Earl of Mountmarch," Julian said, then looked up sharply as O'Casey let out a rippling peal of laughter before she slapped her hand over her mouth to restrain the follow-on giggles.

  "You know him?" Julian asked. She nodded, both hands over her mouth, and the sergeant's eyes glinted wickedly. "Okay, I can see from your reaction that you do know him, and that he's probably not all that great. But you have to give him a break—growing up with a name like 'Ymyr' couldn't have been all that much fun."

  "You're being much too kind to him," O'Casey assured him. Another giggle slipped out, and she shook her head. "And take my word for it, whatever you're looking at is not a deeply laid plan. However stupid it seems."

  "I almost wish it was," the sergeant said. "I just hate relying on the bad guys' stupidity. Even idiots have a bad habit of slipping up and doing something reasonably intelligent every so often, if only so Murphy can screw with your mind. Besides, nobody could really be this dumb."

  "What did he do?" O'Casey asked, looking over his shoulder at an indecipherable schematic. After a moment, it resolved itself into a map of the port.

  "Well, he set up an intelligence network in all the satraps of Krath," Julian said. He touched a control and brought up a picture of the continent, with data scrolling along the sides and political boundaries mapped in. "That much isn't dumb. But he has all these reports coming in, and he didn't want the spies just walking through his front gates. So he set up cleared lanes in the defenses!"

  O'Casey grinned again, this time at his expression. Disbelief mingled with professional outrage on the sergeant's face, until he ended up looking just plain disgusted.

  "That's Mountmarch all over," she said. "He's a brilliant media manipulator, and thinks his brilliance at that extends to everything. There's nothing in the world for which he doesn't have a better, and much more brilliant, plan. Of course, the reality is that the vast majority of them backfire—often badly."

  "Who is he?" Julian asked. "Other than the governor of the colony, that is?"

  "He used to be a power at court," O'Casey said as she leaned back. She hadn't bothered to store her files on the Earl of Mountmarch in her toot, so they'd been lost along with most of her reference works and papers when DeGlopper was destroyed. Now she delved deep into plain old, biochemical memory for as much as she could recall about the earl and frowned thoughtfully.

  "That was back in Roger's grandfather's later days," she went on. "There's not much question that he really was a brilliant example of a 'spin merchant,' and the old Emperor was very fixated on public opinion. Even though he wasn't elected, he felt that the will of the people should be observed. Which is all well and good, but ruling based on opinion polls, especially ones pushed by narrow agendas, is never a great idea. It's one of the reasons that the Empress is still having so many problems. Or was, before the coup, at any rate."

  Their eyes met grimly for a moment. Then she gave herself a shake and resumed once more.

  "The approach of the Imperial bureaucracy—that it's either completely untouchable, or that its function is solely to act in accordance with the will of opinion polls (which actually means at the will of skilled manipulators like Mountmarch who shape those polls)—is a tremendous drag on getting anything fixed," she said. "It's that holdover of bureaucratic and senior policy officer inertia, coupled with the iron triangle of senatorial interests, the interests of the bureaucracies, and the special interest groups and polls that combine to drive the senatorial agenda, that have made it nearly impossible for the Empress to get any real change enacted or to replace the worst of the bureaucrats with more proactive people.

  "But I digress," she said, pausing to inhale, then cocked her head as Julian broke out in laughter. "What?"

  "Well, to tell you the truth, I don't think I've heard you say that much about the situation back home this entire trip."

  O'Casey sighed and shook her head.

  "I'm familiar with preindustrial societies, and plots and plotters seem to be the same on Earth as on Marduk. But it's modern Imperial politics that are my real forte."

  "I can tell," Julian said with another chuckle. "But you were saying about Mountmarch?"

  "Mountmarch," she repeated. "Well, he excelled at taking the interests that were brought to him—whatever they were, but they tended to be on the 'Saints' end of the political spectrum—and turning molehills into mountains. He knew just about everyone in the media, and no matter who paid him, or for what, before you could say 'it's for the children,' whatever was going to end the universe this time would be the number one headline on all the e-casts and mags. And suddenly, with remarkable speed, there'd be committees, and blue ribbon panels, and legislation, and opinion polls, and nongovernmental charity organizations—all of them with lists of contacts and almost identical talking points, sprouting up like mushrooms. It really was quite an industry.

  "And the leaks! He had access to everyone in the upper echelons of His Majesty's Government, either because they were afraid of him, or else because they wanted him to do the same thing for them. And whenever there was a tidbit of information that worked for the interest he was pushing at the moment, it would be major news the day he got it. Then along came Alexandra.

  "Roger's mother had been watching him basically push her father around for years, and she didn't care for it one bit. In general, Alexandra tends towards the socialistic and environmentalist side of the political spectrum herself, but she's also aware of the dangers to society of going too far. So when the newest item Mountmarch was pushing was over the Lorthan Cluster, she pushed back—hard."

  "Lorthan?" Julian asked. "You mean the Lorthan Incident?"

  "The very same," she said. "Mountmarch was given the information that a task force had been sent out to lie doggo and try to catch the Saints red-handed raiding the Lorthan colonies. They'd been insisting that it was nothing but pirates, and offering 'military assistance in our need,' but all the indications were that it was a Saint force or forces that were trying to drive humans, and their 'contamination,' off of the Lorthan habitables."

  "So was it Saints, or pirates?"

  "Well, officially, no one knows," O'Casey said. "The task force was the ambushee rather than the ambusher, and officially, there was no information one way or the other on whether it was Saints or pirates. Of course, a pirate fleet that could take on an Imperial task force is pretty unlikely. And then there were the two Muir-class cruisers that were captured nearly intact."

  "I hadn't heard that," Julian said.

  "And you still haven't. But when we get back and I get situated, I'll take you out to Charon Base and you can see them. The point is that the leak cost nearly fourteen hundred Fleet lives, and Alexandra was not pleased."

  "So she pinned it on Mountmarch?"

 
"He was the most common facilitator of such things. Whether he did it, or someone else, she really didn't care. She used administrative actions to remove most of his titles, but as a sop she must have posted him to Marduk. The most out of the way, barren, forsaken, and useless post in the Empire. And he's under Imperial law, so if he so much as sneezed, he'd be dealing with IO and the IBI, instead of local officers and the IC Authority. He can manipulate those; he still has people who, for some godforsaken reason, think he has a clue. But the Inspectorate and the IBI are another thing entirely."

  "Remind me not to get on her bad side," Julian said. "Of course, I think that with a little training, Roger's going to be nearly as nasty. Maybe nastier. The tough part will be keeping him from killing anyone who pisses him off. But for right now, at least I can give him some good news—the local commander is an idiot, if a good manipulator of the media, and it looks like the port is going to be a cakewalk."

  "Let's not get cocky," she said warningly.

  "Oh, we won't," Julian said. "Two of the plasma cannon are listed as off line, but Item Number One will be to take them out anyway, just to be on the safe side. We'll send the armor in first to remove the wire, in case it's really there, then the mines. There's other bits. We'll get it right."

  "And then grab a ship and go home," she said.

  "To what?" Julian asked. "That's not going to be so easy."

  "No," she admitted. "Everything in this download is hanging together, so I think Temu Jin is on the up and up. All the usual suspects in something like the 'attempted coup' are saying all the usual things. In fact, they're being so 'normal' that I've got the very definite feeling of either excellent information management, or pressure from behind the scenes. Although the Imperial Telegraph has called for a 'full and independent medical review of Her Majesty' with 'all due deference to the Throne.' On the other hand, they're being castigated by most of the major news outlets for 'pressuring her in her grief.' "