by David Weber
The Saint ship for which they’d fought so hard showed how brutal the struggle to capture it had been. No one had suspected that the innocent tramp freighter was a covert, special operations ship, crewed by elite Saint commandos. The risk in capturing it had seemed minor, but since losing Roger would have made their entire epic march and all of their sacrifices in vain, he’d been left behind with their half-trained Mardukan allies when the surviving members of Bravo Company went up to take possession of the “freighter.”
The three-meter-tall, horned, four-armed, mucus-skinned natives of The Basik’s Own had come from every conceivable preindustrial level of technology. D’Nal Cord, his asi—technically, his “slave,” since Roger had saved his life without any obligation to do so, though anyone who made the mistake of treating the old shaman as a menial would never live long enough to recognize the enormity of his mistake—and Cord’s nephew Denat had come from the X’Intai, the first, literally Stone Age tribe they had encountered. The Vasin, riders of the fierce, carnivorous civan, were former feudal lords whose city-state had been utterly destroyed by the rampaging Boman barbarians and who had provided The Basik’s Own’s cavalry. The core of its infantry had come from the city of Diaspra—worshipers of the God of Waters, builders and laborers who had been trained into a disciplined force first of pikemen, and then of riflemen.
The Basik’s Own had followed Roger through the battles that destroyed the “invincible” Boman, then across demon-haunted waters to totally unknown lands. Under the banner of a basik, rampant, long teeth bared in a vicious grin, they’d battled the Krath cannibals and taken the spaceport. And in the end, when the Marines were unable to overcome the unexpected presence of Saint commandos on the ship, they’d been hurled into the fray again.
Rearmed with modern weaponry—hypervelocity bead and plasma cannon normally used as crew-served weapons or as weapons for powered armor—the big Mardukans had been thrown into the ship in a second wave and immediately charged into the battle. The Vasin cavalry had rushed from position to position, ambushing the bewildered commandos, who could not believe that “scummies” using cannon as personal weapons were really roaming all over their ship, opening shuttle bay doors to vacuum and generally causing as much havoc as they could. And while the . . . individualistic Vasin had been doing that, the Diaspran infantry had taken one hard point after another, all of them heavily defended positions, by laying down plasma fire as if it were the rank-upon-rank musketry which was their specialty.
And they’d paid a heavy price for their victory. In the end, the ship had been taken, but only at the cost of far too many more dead and horribly injured. And the ship itself had been largely gutted by the savage firefights. Modern tunnel ships were remarkably robust, but they weren’t designed to survive the effect of five Mardukans abreast, packed bulkhead-to-bulkhead in a passage and volley-firing blast after blast of plasma.
What was left of the ship was a job for a professional space dock, but that was out of question. Jackson Adoula, Prince of Kellerman, and Roger’s despised father, the Earl of New Madrid, had made that impossible when they murdered his brother and sister and all of his brother’s children, massacred the Empress’ Own, and somehow gained total control of the Empress herself. Never in her wildest dreams would Alexandra MacClintock have closely associated herself with Jackson Adoula, whom she despised and distrusted. And far less would she ever have married New Madrid, whose treasonous tendencies she’d proven to her own satisfaction before Roger was ever born. Indeed, New Madrid’s treason was the reason she’d never married him . . . and a large part of the explanation for her distrust of Roger himself. Yet according to the official news services, Adoula had become her trusted Navy Minister and closest Cabinet confidant, and this time she had announced she did intend to wed New Madrid. Which seemed only reasonable, the newsies pointed out, since they were the men responsible for somehow thwarting the coup attempt which had so nearly succeeded.
The coup which, according to those same official news services, had been instigated by none other than Prince Roger . . . at the very instant that he’d been fighting for his life against ax-wielding Boman barbarians on sunny Marduk.
Something, to say the least, was rotten in Imperial City. And whatever it was, it meant that instead of simply taking the spaceport and sending home a message “Mommy, come pick me up,” the battered warriors at Roger’s back now had the unenviable task of retaking the entire Empire from the traitors who were somehow controlling the Empress. The survivors of Bravo Company—all twelve of them—and the remaining two hundred and ninety members of The Basik’s Own, pitted against one hundred and twenty star systems, with a population right at three-quarters of a trillion humans, and uncountable soldiers and ships. And just to make their task a bit more daunting, they had a time problem. Alexandra was “pregnant”—a new scion had been popped into the uterine replicator, a full brother of Roger’s, from his mother’s and father’s genetic material—and under Imperial law, now that Roger had been officially attainted for treason, that fetus became the new Heir Primus as soon as he was born.
Roger’s advisers concurred that his mother’s life would last about as long as spit on a hot griddle when that uterine replicator was opened.
Which explained the still dwindling mushroom cloud. When the Saints came looking for their missing ship, or an Imperial carrier finally showed up to wonder why Old Earth hadn’t heard from Marduk in so long, it would appear a pirate vessel had pillaged the facility and then vanished into the depths of space. What it would not look like was the first step in a counter coup intended to regain the Throne for House MacClintock.
He took one last look at the viewscreens, then turned and led his staff off the bridge towards the ship’s wardroom. Although the wardroom itself had escaped damage during the fighting, the route there was somewhat hazardous. The approaches to the bridge had taken tremendous punishment—indeed, the decks and bulkheads of the short security corridor outside the command deckhead been sublimed into gas by plasma fire from both sides. A narrow, flexing, carbon-fiber catwalk had been built as a temporary walkway, and they crossed it carefully, one at a time. The passageway beyond wasn’t much better. Many of the holes in the deck had been repaired, but others were simply outlined in bright yellow paint, and in many places, the bulkheads reminded Roger forcibly of Old Earth Swiss cheese.
He and his staffers picked their way around the unrepaired holes in the deck and finally reached the wardroom’s dilating hatch, and Roger seated himself at the head of the table. He leaned back, apparently entirely at ease, as the lizard curled into a ball by his side. His calm demeanor fooled no one. He’d worked very hard on creating an image of complete sang-froid in any encounter. It was copied from the late Captain Pahner, but Roger lacked that soldier’s years of experience. The tension, the energy, the anger, radiated off him in waves.
He watched the others assume their places.
D’Nal Cord squatted to the side of the lizard, behind Roger, silent as the shadow which in many ways he was, holding himself up with the long spear that doubled as a walking stick. Theirs was an interesting bonding. Although the laws of his people made him Roger’s slave, the old shaman had quickly come to understand that Roger was a young nobleman, and a bratty one at that. Despite his official “slave” status, he’d taken it as his duty to chivvy the young brat into manhood, not to mention teaching him a bit more of the sword, a weapon Cord had studied as a young man in more civilized areas of Marduk.
Cord’s only clothing was a long skirt of locally made dianda. His people, the X’Intai, like most Mardukans the humans had met, had little use for clothing. But he’d donned the simple garment in Krath, where it was customary to be clothed, and continued to wear it, despite the barbarism of the custom, because humans set such store by it.
Pedi Karuse, the young female Mardukan to his left (since there was no room for her behind him), was short by Mardukan standards, even for a woman. Her horns were polished and colored a light
honey-gold, she wore a light robe of blue dianda, and two swords were crossed behind her back. The daughter of a Shin chieftain, her relationship with Cord was, if anything, even more “interesting” than Roger’s.
Her people shared many common societal customs with the X’Intai, and when Cord saved her from Krath slavers, those customs had made her the shaman’s asi, just as he was Roger’s. And since Roger had been squared away by that time, Cord had taken up the training of his new “slave,” only to discover an entirely new set of headaches.
Pedi was at least as headstrong as the prince, and a bit wilder, if that were possible. Worse, the very old shaman, whose wife and children were long dead, had found himself far more attracted to his “asi” than was proper in a society where relations between asi and master were absolutely forbidden. Unfortunately for Cord’s honorable intentions, he’d taken a near-mortal wound battling the Krath at about the same time he entered his annual “heat,” and Pedi had been in charge of nursing him. She’d recognized the signs and decided, on her own, that it was vital he be relieved of at least that pressure on his abused body.
Cord, semiconscious and delirious at the time, had remembered nothing about it. It had taken him some time to recognize what was changing about his asi, and he’d only been aware that he was going to be a father again for a handful of weeks.
He was still adjusting to the knowledge, but in the meantime, Pedi’s father had become one of Roger’s strongest allies on the planet. After a futile protest on the shaman’s part that he was far too old to be a suitable husband for Pedi, the two had been married in a Shin ceremony. If the other Shin had noticed that Pedi was showing signs of pregnancy—developing “blisters” on her back to hold the growing fetuses—they had politely ignored it.
Despite the marriage, however, Pedi’s honor as Cord’s asi still required her to guard the shaman’s back (pregnant or no), just as he was required to guard Roger. So Roger found the two almost constantly following him around in a trail. He shook them off whenever he could, these days, but it wasn’t easy.
Eleanora O’Casey, Roger’s chief of staff and the only surviving “civilian” from DeGlopper’s passengers, settled into the seat to his right. Eleanora was a slight woman, with brown hair and a pleasant face, who’d had no staff to chief when they landed on Marduk. She’d been given the job by the Empress in hopes that some of her noted academic skills—she was a multidegree historian and specialist in political theory—would rub off on the wastrel son. She was a city girl, with the flat, nasal accent of Imperial City, and at the beginning of the march across the planet, Roger and everyone else had wondered how long she would last. As it had turned out, there was a good bit of steel under that mousy cover, and her knowledge of good old-fashioned city-state politics had proven absolutely vital on more than one occasion.
Eva Kosutic, Bravo Company’s Sergeant Major and High Priestess of the Satanist Church of Armagh, took the chair across from Eleanora. She had a flat, chiseled face and dark brown, almost black hair. A deadly close-in warrior and a fine sergeant major, she now commanded Bravo Company’s remnants—about a squad in size—and functioned as Roger’s military aide.
Sergeant Adib Julian, her lover and friend, sat next to her. The onetime armorer had always been the definitive “happy warrior,” a humorist and practical joker who got funnier and funnier as things looked worse and worse. But his laughing black eyes had been shadowed since the loss of his best friend and constant straight man, Gronningen.
Across from Julian sat Sergeant Nimashet Despreaux. Taller than Kosutic or Julian, she had long brown hair and a face beautiful enough for a high-class fashion model. But where most models had submitted to extensive body-sculpting, Despreaux was all natural, from her high forehead to her long legs. She was as good a warrior as anyone at the table, but she never laughed these days. Every death, friend or enemy, weighed upon her soul, and the thousands of corpses they’d left behind showed in her shadowed eyes. So did her relationship with Roger. Despite her own stalwart resistance and more than a few “stumbles,” she and Roger could no longer pretend—even to themselves—that they hadn’t fallen hard for each other. But Despreaux was a country girl, as lower-class as it was possible to be in the generally egalitarian Empire, and she’d flatly refused to marry an emperor. Which was what Roger was inevitably going to be one day, if they won.
She glanced at him once, then crossed her arms and leaned back, her eyes narrowed and wary.
Next to her, in one of the oversized station chairs manufactured to fit the Mardukans, sat Captain Krindi Fain. Despreaux was tall for human, but the Mardukan dwarfed her. The former quarryman wore a Diaspran infantryman’s blue leather harness and the kilt the infantry had adopted in Krath. He, too, crossed his arms, all four of them, and leaned back at ease.
Behind Fain, looming so high he had to squat so his horns didn’t brush the overhead, was Erkum Pol, Krindi’s bodyguard, senior NCO, batman, and constant shadow. Not particularly overburdened intellectually, Erkum was huge, even by Mardukan standards, and “a good man with his hands” as long as the target was in reach of a hand weapon. Give him a gun, and the safest place to be was between him and the enemy.
Rastar Komas Ta’Norton, once Prince of Therdan, sat across from Krindi, wearing the leathers of the Vasin cavalry. His horns were elaborately carved and bejeweled, as befitted a Prince of Therdan, and his harness bore four Mardukan-scaled bead pistols, as also befitted a Prince of Therdan who happened to be an ally of the Empire. He’d fought Roger once, and lost, then joined him and fought at his side any number of other times. He’d won all of those battles, and the bead pistols he wore were for more than show. He was probably the only person in the ship who was faster than Roger, despite the prince’s cobralike reflexes.
The outsized chair next to Rastar was occupied by his cousin, Honal, who’d escaped with him, cutting a path to safety for the only women and children to have survived when Therdan and the rest of the border states fell to the Boman. It was Honal who had christened their patched-together mixed force of humans and Mardukans “The Basik’s Own.” He’d chosen the name as a joke, a play on “The Empress’ Own” to which the Bronze Battalion belonged. But Roger’s troopers had made the name far more than a joke on a dozen battlefields and in innumerable small skirmishes. Short for a Mardukan, Honal was a fine rider, a deadly shot, and even better with a sword. He was also insane enough to win one of the battles for the ship by simply turning off the local gravity plates and venting the compartment—and its defenders—to vacuum. He was particularly fond of human aphorisms and proverbs, especially the ancient military maxim that “If it’s stupid and it works, it ain’t stupid.” Honal was crazy, not stupid.
At the foot of the table, completing Roger’s staff and command group, sat Special Agent Temu Jin of the Imperial Bureau of Investigation. One of the countless agents sent out to keep an eye on the far-flung bureaucracy of the Empire, he had been cut off from contact by the coup. His last message from his “control” in the IBI had warned that all was not as it appeared on Old Earth and that he was to consider himself “in the cold.” He’d been the one who’d had to tell Roger what had happened to his family. After that, he’d been of enormous assistance to the prince when it came time to take the spaceport and the ship, and now he might well prove equally vital to regaining the Throne.
Which was what this meeting was all about.
“All right, Eleanora. Go,” Roger said, and sat back to listen. He’d been so busy for the last month handling post-battle cleanup chores and the maskirova at the spaceport that he’d been unable to devote any time to planning what came next. That had been the job of his staff, and it was time to see what they’d come up with.
“Okay, we’re dealing with a number of problems here,” Eleanora said, keying her pad and preparing to tick off points on it.
“The first one is intelligence, or lack thereof. All we have in the way of information from Imperial City is the news bulletins and directives that c
ame in on the last Imperial resupply ship. Those are nearly two months old, so we’re dealing with an information vacuum on anything that’s happened in the interim. We also have no data on conditions in the Navy, except for the announced command changes in Home Fleet and the fact that Sixth Fleet, which is normally pretty efficient, was last seen apparently unable to get itself organized for a simple change of station move and hanging out in deep space. We have no hard reads on who we might be able to trust. Effectively, we’re unable to trust anyone in the Navy, especially the various commanders who’ve been put in place post-coup.
“The second problem is the security situation. We’re all wanted in the Empire for helping you with this supposed coup. If any one of the DeGlopper’s survivors goes through Imperial customs, or even a casual scan at a spaceport, alarm bells are going to ring from there to Imperial City. Adoula’s faction has to believe you’re long dead, which makes you the perfect bogeyman. Who better to be wanted for something he didn’t do, covering up the fact that they were the real perps, than someone who’s dead? But the point remains that without significant disguise mod, none of us can step foot on any Imperial planet, and we’re going to have real problems going anywhere else that’s friendly with the Empire. Which means everywhere. Even the Saints would grab us, for any number of reasons we wouldn’t like.
“The third problem is, of course, the actual mission. We’re going to have to overthrow the current sitting government and capture your mother and the uterine replicator, without the bad guys making off with either. We’re also going to have to prevent the Navy from interfering.”
“‘Who holds the orbitals, holds the planet,’” Roger said.
“Chiang O’Brien.” Eleanora nodded. “You remembered that one.”
“Great Gran’s former Dagger Lord daddy had a way with words,” Roger said, then frowned. “He also said ‘One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.’”