Throne of Stars

by David Weber

  “On the auspicious occasion of us almost getting off this mudball,” Roger said. “Sorry to all you people who were born here, by the way. But on this occasion, I think it’s fitting that we distribute a few mementos. Things to remember our trip by.”

  “Uh-oh,” Kosutic whispered. “Did you know about this?”

  “Yep.” Pahner grinned. “Or, rather, I found out just in time.”

  “Lessee,” Roger said, pulling out a piece of plastscrip and a small medallion. “Ah, yes. To St. John (J), and St. John (M). A silver ‘M’ and a silver ‘J,’ so that we can frigging tell you apart!”

  Roger beamed as the twin brothers made their way up to accept their gifts, then shook their hands (Mark’s had regenerated quite nicely since Kirsti) as he handed over the mementos.

  “Wear ’em in good health. Now, what else do we have? Ah, yes.” He reached into the sack and pulled out a wrench no more than three centimeters long. “To Poertena, a little pocking wrench, for beating up on little pocking bits of armor!”

  He continued in the same vein through the entire remaining unit of Marines and many of the Vashin and Diasprans, showing that he recognized their individual quirks and personality traits. It took almost an hour of mingled laughter and groans before he started wrapping up.

  “To PFC Gronningen,” he said, holding up a silver badge. “The unsleeping silver eye. Because you know Julian is going to get you, sooner or later.”

  He handed the badge to the grinning Asgardian and punched him on the shoulder.

  “You’re doomed. You know that, right?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Lessee. We’re getting near the bottom of the bag. . . . Oh, yes. To Adib Julian, a marksman’s badge with a ‘no’ symbol over it. The marksman’s bolo badge for always being second in any shooting match!”

  Julian accepted it with good grace, and the prince turned to the sergeant major, Pahner, and the senior Mardukans.

  “I’d considered the unsleeping eye for Rastar, as well,” Roger said, and the wave of human chuckles was swamped in grunting Mardukan laughter as the Marines and the Vashin alike recalled their first meeting and Roger’s ambush of the sleeping Rastar. “But in the end, I decided on this.” He reached into the bag and withdrew an elaborately chased set of Mardukan-sized bead pistols. “May you never run out of ammo.”

  “Thank you, Your Highness.” Rastar accepted the gift with a flourishing bow.

  “No rank in the mess,” Roger reminded him, and turned to his next victim. “For Krindi, a set of Zuiko binoculars. It seems you’re never able to fight at long range, but what the heck.”

  “Thank you, Y—Roger,” the Diaspran said, and took the imaging system with a slight bow of his own.

  “To Eva Kosutic, our own personal Satanist,” Roger said, with another grin, and handed her a small silver pitchfork. “The silver pitchfork medal. She was always there to prod buttock; now she has something to prod with. You can feel free to put it anywhere you like.”

  “And yours was always a nice buttock to prod, Roger,” she told him with a grin as she accepted the award. Roger laughed with everyone else, then turned to Cord.

  “Cord, what can I say? You’ve stuck with me through thick and thin, mainly thin.”

  “You can say nothing and sit back down,” the shaman replied.

  “Nah, not after I went to all this trouble,” the prince said, and winked at Pedi. “Okay, we have: a package of baby formula Dobrescu promises me will work for Mardukan kids just fine. A package of disposable diapers—I know you guys stick your kids in your slime, but when we get among humans, that might not always be an option. A set of four baby blankets—what can I say, do you always have to have quartets? And last, but most certainly not least, a set of earplugs. Just for Cord, though. He’s going to need them.”

  “Oh, thank you very much, Roger,” Cord said, accepting the items and sitting down.

  “Don’t think of it as a roast,” Roger told him. “Think of it as a baby shower.”

  “What is that?” Pedi asked Despreaux quietly.

  “Normally,” the Marine whispered back, “it’s when you give gifts that can help with an expected baby. In this case, though, Roger is twitting Cord.”

  “And here comes Dogzard,” Roger said, looking under the table.

  The beast raised her head as she heard her name, then she leapt to her feet when she saw her master’s body posture.

  “Dat’s a good Dogzard,” Roger told her, and pulled a huge leg of damnbeast off the table. “Who’s a good beastie, then?”

  The semi-lizard snatched the bone out of Roger’s hand and retreated back under the table. Her meter-and-a-half-long tail stuck well out from under it, lashing happily from side to side, and Roger waved his hand.

  “Ow, ow!” He counted his fingers ostentatiously, then sighed in relief while everyone laughed. But then the prince lowered his hands, and turned to the last person on his list.

  “And so we come to Armand Pahner,” he said seriously, and the laughter stilled. “What do you present to the officer who held you together for eight horrible months? Who never wavered? Who never faltered? Who never for one instant let us think that we might fail? What do you give to the man who took a sniveling brat and made a man of him?”

  “Nothing, for preference,” Pahner said. “It really was my job.”

  “Still,” Roger said, and reached into the now all but empty bag to pull out a small badge. “I present you the Order of the Bronze Shield. If I can, I’m going to have Mother turn it into an order of knighthood; we need at least one more. For service above and beyond the call of duty to the Crown. Thank you, Armand. You’ve been more than you’ve needed to be at every turn. I know we still have a long way to go, but I’m confident that we can get there, together.”

  “Thanks, Roger.” The captain stood to accept the gift. “And I have a little present for you, as well.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes.” The Marine cleared his throat formally. “Long before the ISU, before the Empire of Man, in the dawn of the space age, there was a mighty nation called the United States. As Rome before it, it rose in a pillar of flame and eventually fell. But during its heyday, it had a few medals to reckon with.

  “There were many awards and ribbons, but one, while common, perhaps surpassed them all. It was a simple rifle on a field of blue, surrounded by a wreath. What it meant was that the wearer had been where the bullets flew, and probably shot at people himself, and had returned from the fire. It meant, simply, that the wearer had seen infantry combat, and survived. All the other medals, really, were simply icing on that cake, and like the ISU before it, the Empire has maintained that same award . . . and for the same reasons.

  “Prince Roger Ramius Sergei Alexander Chiang MacClintock,” the captain said, as he took the newly minted badge from Sergeant Major Kosutic and pinned it onto the prince’s uniform, “I award you the Combat Infantryman’s Badge. You have walked into the fire again and again, and come out not unscathed, but at least, thank God, alive. If your mother gives you all the medals you deserve, you’re going to look like a neobarb world dictator. But I hope that you think of this one, sometimes, because, really, it says it all.”

  “Thank you, Armand,” Roger said quietly.

  “No, thank you,” Pahner replied, putting his hand on the prince’s shoulder. “For making the transition. For surviving. Hell, for saving all of our asses. Thank you from all of us.”

  The party had descended to the point at which Erkum Pol had to be dragged down before he hit someone with a plank, and Roger had gotten Despreaux off to one side. She’d been quiet all night, and he thought he knew why.

  “You’re still insisting that you can’t marry me, aren’t you?” he asked.

  “Yes, and I wish you’d quit asking,” she replied, looking down the hills to the Krath city in the valley. “I’m short, Roger. I’ll stick along to Earth, and I’ll do what I can to get your mother out of danger. But I won’t marry you. When we
’re settled, and things are safe, I’m putting in my discharge papers. And then I’ll take my severance bonus and go find me a nice, safe, placid farmer to marry.”

  “Court is just another environment,” Roger protested. “You’ve been through a hundred on this planet, alone. You can adjust!”

  “I probably could,” she said, shaking her head. “But not well enough. What you need is someone like Eleanora, someone who knows the rocks and shoals. Part of the problem is that we’re too alike. We both have a very direct approach, and you need someone who can complement you, not enhance your negative qualities.”

  “You’ll stay until Earth, right?” he asked. “Promise you’ll stay until then.”

  “I promise,” she said. “And now, I’m turning in, Roger.” She stopped and looked at him with a cocked head. “I’ll make an offer one last time. Come with me?”

  “Not if you won’t marry me,” he said.

  “Okay,” she sighed. “God, we’re both stubborn.”

  “Yeah,” Roger said, as she walked away. “Stubborn’s one word.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  “We’ve never had a ‘health and welfare’ inspection before,” the voice said suspiciously.

  “Yeah, tell me something I don’t know.” Jin controlled his voice carefully, sliding just the right hint of exasperation into it. “We’ve got a task force with an IBI inspection team coming out, and we need to make a big show. Personally, I think they’re operating on the theory that everyone needs a good shaking up after the coup attempt, but what do I know? According to The Book, we’re supposed to do these things on every ship, not that anybody ever did it! But now we’re under the gun, so we’re trying to get a paper trail going.”

  There was a long pause, and Jin wished that he could see the other’s face, but the freighter had supplied only a voice channel.

  Emerald Dawn was a known ship. She’d passed through the system at least twice before, once since Jin had been inserted. She generally traded minor technological trinkets like fire-starters for local gems and artwork. In addition, she got a small fee for dropping electronic transfers in the system, which was the real reason for her visits. As a matter of fact, he’d talked with the ship on her previous run, and he hoped the familiarity of his voice would lull them to some extent.

  “Okay,” a new voice said finally. “This is Captain Dennis. One person can come aboard for your ‘health and welfare’ check. But this is the last time I’m coming to this port. I don’t need this aggravation for a handful of cheap-ass gems, a mail chit that barely covers our air loss, and a cargo of scummy art-shit.”

  “Whatever.” Jin let a bit of the peevish bureaucrat into his tone. “I’m just doing my job.”

  The shuttle was on autopilot, so he slid out of the pilot’s chair with a nod at Poertena, and pulled his way aft. This was made somewhat difficult by the fact that the small craft was crammed with Marines in battle armor. Most of them had clamped onto the walls and floors, but a few were drifting, more or less at random.

  He stopped opposite Captain Pahner, whose feet were stuck to the ceiling as he stood “head-down,” perusing the schematics for the target.

  “They’re not real happy,” the IBI agent said.

  “I don’t care if they’re happy,” Pahner said. “Just as long as they open their doors.”

  “One shot, and we’re all vapor,” Jin noted.

  “And as far as they know, they’re suddenly the most wanted ship in the Empire,” Pahner pointed out. “It would be very bad form for a tramp freighter to shoot up an official Imperial inspection craft. They’ll let us dock. After that, you just hit the deck.”

  “Why does this make my butt pucker?” Fiorello Giovannuci—known to the dirt-side com station as “Captain Dennis”—asked as he gazed at the viewscreen image of the approaching small craft.

  “Because your butt always puckers when we get boarded.” Amanda Beach, his first officer, shook her head in mock gravity. “Relax. It’s got all the codes for an Imperial customs ship. Really, it’s because your conscience isn’t pure. You need to spend some time on the planets, reacquiring your oneness with Gaia.”

  Giovannuci glanced at her, then shook his own head and sighed.

  “Your sense of humor is the reason you’re out here, you know. Just keep it up.” He leaned forward, as if the viewscreen could tell him more if he only stared hard enough, and rubbed his cheek. “And you’re wrong. There’s something very much not right here.”

  “You want me to go down to the airlock?” Beach asked as the CO fell silent, watching the shuttle make its final approach. He continued to say nothing for several more seconds, but, finally, he nodded.

  “Yes. And take Longo and Ucelli.”

  “My,” she said, pursing her lips as she got to her feet, “you are nervous. Isn’t that sort of overkill?”

  “Better over than under,” Giovannuci said. “Go. Fast.”

  Jin waited until all the telltales turned green, then opened the airlock door and swung forward through it cautiously. The three people waiting for him represented a fair percentage of the total crew for a tramp like this, and their presence in such numbers indicated just how uncomfortable they must be.

  He’d have been just as nervous in their shoes. The profit which could be made from “jacking” ships like this were enough to make them high-priority targets. Even a tramp as old and beat up as Emerald Dawn was worth nearly a billion credits. So anytime one was parked anywhere but at a fully secured port—which did not, by any stretch, describe Marduk—its crew was always on the lookout for pirates. And it wasn’t impossible to imagine the entire port being captured, or even that one Temu Jin would be in on it. Stranger things had transpired in the borderlands.

  Besides, now that he thought about it, that was actually a pretty fair description, in a slightly skewed way, of what was actually going to happen.

  The threesome had obviously been chosen with some care. According to her collar tabs, the woman was senior, a merchant lieutenant, so probably she was Emerald Dawn’s second-in-command. She looked a bit long in the tooth for that, and fairly beat up. Regen healed almost perfectly, but scars were inevitable—at least when a limb hadn’t had to be completely regrown—and this one, for all her striking looks, had plenty. She’d been in more than one fight, and a couple of them must have been with knives.

  The second most notable was the largest of the group, a hulking figure which outmassed even the redoubtable Gronningen. But something about him told Jin that he was one of those big, fast men people tended to underestimate on the theory that anyone that big had to be too slow to be dangerous. He would bear watching.

  For that matter, so would the little guy. He was the calmest seeming of the lot as he leaned nonchalantly against a bulkhead, but the low-slung double pistols sort of said it all.

  And all three of them wore light body armor.

  Jin stepped forward carefully, keeping his hands in view at all times, and extended the pad.

  “Pax, okay?” He tabbed the controls and gestured around. “All I want is a thumbprint saying that the ‘inspection’ was complete, and that you have no complaints. I’ll put in all sorts of stuff checked, basically half the stuff on your manifest. And we’re all happy. I’m happy, you’re happy, the IBI asshole is happy, and everybody can go back to business as usual.”

  Beach took the pad and glanced at the document on its display. As the bullet-sweating geek had suggested, it showed a detailed inspection of an imaginary ship conforming to their class, with a list of cargo opened and checked. It was quite an artistic forgery, a masterpiece of the genre.

  “Why, thank you,” she said, giving him a thin smile as she annotated and thumbprinted the pad. “What’s wrong? You look nervous.”

  “Yeah? Well, Mr. Gun-Happy over there looks like he’s remembering the last baby he ate, and I ain’t even gonna comment on Mr. Troll,” Jin said with a nervous laugh.

  “I don’t eat babies,” the gunman whispered. �
�They stick in your teeth.”

  “Ha. Ha,” the IBI agent said.

  “Done,” Beach said, and handed him the pad.

  “Thanks,” Jin replied with a relieved sigh. His hand was unaccountably clumsy as he accepted the pad, and it slipped out of his fingers. He swore, grabbed for it, then followed it to the deck, and as he did, he noted with the cool, professional detachment available only to the truly frightened that the threesome had reacted to the little ruse as if such things happened to them every day.

  The fabric of his suit hardened under the kinetic impact of the first round just as the shuttle doors exploded open behind him.

  “Shit,” Giovannuci said, and hit the alarm button with a fist as he erupted from his seat. “Jackers!”

  They couldn’t simply announce that they were Marines who were commandeering the vessel in the name of the Empire. First, no one would have believed them, and, second, they were all wanted for treason. Somehow, they were pretty sure that “No, really. It was all a big mistake,” wouldn’t fly. So the plan was to secure the “welcome party” and try to keep casualties to a minimum in the assault.

  The “plan,” clearly, was a bust even before Gronningen did a flying leap out of the airlock. The undersized gun-boy was pumping rounds into Jin as the IBI agent rolled across the deck to spread the hits across the protective surface of his uniform. The big guy, on the other hand, had produced a cut-down flechette cannon—from where was a mystery—and was filling the airlock with flechettes, while the leader type had produced a heavy bead pistol and had Gronningen perfectly targeted.

  “Don’t fire until fired upon” obviously wasn’t going to work under these circumstances.

  Gronningen hit the deck sliding, and targeted the little gunner first, but the gunman had taken one look at the Marine battle armor and decided the odds were against the home team. The heavy bead round clove through the bulkhead, but the gunner was already gone. Gronningen’s next round, however, flipped the heavy gunner over backwards in a spray of red.