by David Weber
“Captain,” the prince said warily, “what are you talking about? Not only are we at peace with Raiden-Winterhowe, but taking them on would be stupid. They’ve got nearly as good a navy as we do.”
“In that case, Your Highness,” Pahner said with another smile, “what about the Empire’s conspiracy to enslave all the alien species we can find and to terraform planets that have been reserved because of their unique flora and fauna?”
“Captain Pahner, what are you talking about?” the prince demanded. “I’ve never heard of any of this! And that sounds like Saint rhetoric. . . .” He stopped. “Oh.”
“Or about how your imperial mother eats fetuses for breakfast, or about—”
“I get the point!” the prince snapped. “You’re saying that if they get their hands on me I’ll be their mouthpiece for all that bullshit they’re always spouting.”
“Whether you want to or not, Your Highness.” Pahner nodded. “And I don’t even want to think about what they’ll do with your big game hunting record. For that matter, it would make the lives of the rest of the Family worth less than a plugged millicred. If they could kill the rest of the Family, that would make you heir.”
“Parliament would impeach me,” Roger said with a bitter laugh. “Hell, Parliament would probably impeach me even if the Saints weren’t putting words into my mouth. Who the hell is going to trust Roger at the controls?”
“It takes two-thirds to impeach, Your Highness,” the captain said darkly.
“Are you suggesting that the Saints could influence a third of Parliament?” Roger was beginning to think he’d stepped through a looking glass and into some sort of weird fantasy universe. There’d always been bodyguards around him, certainly, but no one had ever seriously suggested that he might be a target of another empire’s designs. He’d always assumed that the guards were there mainly for show or to keep off the occasional overly smitten female fan. Now he suddenly realized that what they were there for was . . . sitting on his chest, waiting for the air to evacuate.
“Why?” he asked, quietly, wondering what would make people serve and protect someone that even he didn’t like looking back at in the mirror.
“Well,” Pahner replied, not understanding the true question, “the Saints want to ensure that humanity doesn’t expand further into uncontaminated worlds. It’s a religion to them.” He paused, unsure how to go on. “I’d assumed that you’d been briefed, Your Highness.”
Actually, it was common knowledge. The Church of Ryback had a few outlets in the capital, all heavily financed by the Saints, and they ran regular commercials. For that matter, it was a common subject for discussion in civics and history classes, which made Pahner wonder about the prince’s education. Asking what the Saints wanted made no sense at all, given that O’Casey had been Roger’s tutor for years and she had a quadruple doctorate in, among other things, history.
“No. No, that’s not what I meant. I meant . . .”
Roger looked into the bleak face of the Marine and realized that this was not a good time to get the question off his chest. And even if he asked it, Pahner—as most people seemed to do when Roger asked questions—would probably just provide some opaque answer that ensured deeper confusion.
“I meant, ‘What.’ What do we do now?”
“We’re going to go for the long shot, Your Highness,” Pahner said, nodding now that the question made sense again. He suspected that something else had gone on in that airhead, but what it had been he neither knew nor particularly cared. There was a mission to perform, and it looked to be a long one.
“We’re going to reload the boats. With the cruiser topside, taking the port by assault is out. So we’re going to have to land on the planet and make our way to the port on foot. We can’t let anyone know we’re there, or they’ll slaughter us, so we’re going to have to come in on a ballistic approach and land quite a way around the planet from the port. Marduk was an afterthought to the Empire, so it’s never been fully surveyed, and there’s no satellite net, so the port won’t be able to detect us as long as we stay out of line of sight. Once we reach the port, we capture a ship and head for home.”
It sounded easy put like that. Right.
“So we’re going to land on the backside then take the shuttles across . . . um, I can’t remember the term. Low to the ground so they don’t get spotted?”
“Nape of the Earth,” Pahner answered somberly. “No, Your Highness. Unfortunately, we’re going to have to launch nearly five light-minutes out. We’re going to put three platoons and a few support personnel from the ship in four assault shuttles: enough room for a reinforced company. The rest of the load is going to be fuel for deceleration. When we’re down, if we have enough fuel to do a couple of klicks we’ll be lucky.”
“So how are we going to get to the port?” Roger asked, dreading the answer.
“We’re going to walk, Your Highness,” the captain said with a grim smile.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“It says here, ‘Marduk has a mean gravity of slightly greater than Earth normal, and is a planet of little weather change,’” Sergeant Julian said, reading off his pad. He’d managed, along with Poertena, to get two more suits up and running before the call came to drop everything and change the loadout on the shuttles. Currently, they were unloading.
He was perched on one silver wing of an assault shuttle as his squad moved out nonessential materials. The space-to-ground assault craft’s variable geometry wings could sustain in-air flight at speeds as low as a hundred KPH or as high as Mach three, but it also had hydrogen thrusters for space maneuvering. Similar to a ground support pinnace, it had lighter weapons and a single top-mounted quad-barreled bead cannon, and thus correspondingly more room for personnel and equipment.
“‘. . . with a median temperature of thirty-three degrees and a median humidity of ninety-seven percent,’” he continued. There’d been nothing in the Marine databases on the planet, but it turned out that one of the corporals in Second Platoon had a Fodor’s Guide to the Baldur Sector. Unfortunately, it offered only a limited amount of data on the planet . . . and what data there was only made a gloomy situation worse. “Jesus Christ, that’s hot!”
“Oh, just fucking great,” Lance Corporal Moseyev said as he trotted out of the shuttle with a case of penetrator ammunition in his hands. “I only had three weeks and I was transferring to Steel!”
“‘The native culture is at a stagnant level of low-grade firearms technology. Politically, the Mardukans—’ Hey, there’s a picture!”
The Mardukan native, a four-armed biped from a hexapedal evolutionary line, was pictured next to a human wiredrawing for size. From the scale, the Mardukan was the height of a grizzly bear, with broad, long feet on the ends of long, backcurved legs. The hands of the upper and lower arms were about the same size, with the upper shoulders wider than the lower, which were in turn wider than the hips. The upper arms ended in long, fine, three-fingered hands with one fully opposable thumb each. The hands of the shorter, lower arms were heavier and less refined, with a broad opposable pad and two dissimilar fingers. The face was wider and flatter than a human’s, with a broad nose and small deep-set eyes. Two large horns curled up and back over the head. They were obviously functional weapons; the inner curve looked razor-sharp. The rubbery-looking skin was a mottled green and had an odd sheen to it.
“What’s that?” Moseyev asked, pointing to the sheen.
“Dunno.” Julian tweaked the cursor over the skin and rolled up the magnification. “‘The skin of the Mardukan is covered in a polycy . . . polyss . . . in a something something coating that protects the species from casual cuts and the various harsh funguses of its native jungle home,” he read, then thought about it for a second. “Ewww.”
“It’s covered in slime,” Moseyev laughed. “Yick! Slimies!”
“Scummies!” Sergeant Major Kosutic snapped from the hatchway, and strode into the launching day. “I thought you were told to get the extraneous equ
ipment out of the shuttle, Julian?”
“We were getting updated on the mission, Sergeant Major!” Julian was suddenly at attention, the pad held alongside his trousers. “I was briefing my squad on the enemy and conditions!”
“The enemy are the fucking Saints or pirates or whatever-they-are that hold the port.” Kosutic stalked up to stand so close to the braced sergeant that he could smell her breath mint. “The scummies are what we’re going to have to cut our way through to get there. Your mission, right now, is to get the shuttle unloaded—not to sit around on your ass cracking wise. Clear?”
“Clear, Sergeant Major!”
“Now get your asses to work. We’re on a tight time schedule.”
“Moseyev!” Julian said, turning hastily back to his squad. “Get your team unloading that ammo. We don’t have all day-cycle! Gjalski, your team on the powerpacks. . . .”
“Not the powerpacks,” Kosutic said. “Leave all of them. We’re going to add extra, as a matter of fact. Thank Vlad we don’t have a heavy weapons platoon with us.”
“Sergeant Major,” Julian asked as the squad began to scurry around, “you called the Mardukans ‘scummies.’ Where’d you hear that?”
“Knew somebody that went through here once.” The sergeant major pulled at an earlobe. “Didn’t sound like much fun.”
“Are we really gonna have to walk all the way across the damn world?” Julian asked, aghast.
“There ain’t many choices, Sergeant,” the sergeant major snarled. “You just stick with the mission.”
“Roger, Sergeant Major.” The sergeant glanced at the “scummy” on the pad. It looked big and nasty . . . but, then, that also described the IMC. “Will comply.”
There weren’t a lot of options.
“Okay, I want options, people,” Pahner said, and looked around the briefing room. “First of all, let’s be clear about something: what’s the mission?”
The group was limited to the prince’s party: himself, Pahner, O’Casey, and the three lieutenants. O’Casey was panning through the limited data on Marduk on a pad. The old-fashioned academic always seemed to prefer holding data in her hand. Roger, for his part, had looked at it nine ways from Sunday already on his toot, and there wasn’t much good in it.
“Take the port while avoiding detection,” Lieutenant Sawato answered. The slight officer gestured at the limited-scale map depicted in the hologram over the table. It had been extracted from the Fodor’s, and, with the exception of the area around the port, offered virtually no detail. “Land on the northeast coast of this large continent, cross a relatively small ocean, and move inland to take the port.”
“Sounds easy,” Lieutenant Gulyas snorted. He was about to go on, but Pahner raised a hand.
“You forgot one thing, Lieutenant,” Pahner told Sawato mildly. “While ensuring the security of His Highness Prince Roger.”
Roger opened his mouth to protest, but was elbowed by O’Casey. He knew those elbows of old, and knew better than to try to go on.
“Yes, Sir,” Sawato said to Pahner, but with a nod to Roger. “That was, of course, assumed.”
“You know what they say about assumptions,” Pahner said. “Let’s not assume Prince Roger’s safety, okay? The Navy has a plan for getting us onto the planet, and there’s not a thing we can do to affect that. But we need to do everything we can to ensure that item above all else. His Highness’ security is job one.”
He looked around to make sure the other officers understood that and then nodded.
“In that case, I think we need to look at the conditions and threats next.” He turned to Lieutenant Gulyas. “Conall, normally that would be your brief. However, I’ve been talking to Doctor O’Casey, and she has some insights.” He turned to the civilian. “Doctor?”
“Thank you, Captain,” she replied formally, and tapped the display to bring up a picture of Marduk. “You are all, by now, familiar with the limited data we have on Marduk and its inhabitants.
“Marduk is classified as a Type Three world,” she continued, and tapped another control. This time the picture was a large beast of some sort, with six stumpy legs, an armored forehead, and a triangular, fang-filled maw. The human scale model next to it indicated that the creature was a bit larger than a rhinoceros.
“That, by the way, is probably the same classification Earth would have had at the same technological and development level. Marduk, however, has not only an unfriendly climate—it’s extremely hot and steamy, which will have a negative effect on electronics—but also unfriendly inhabitants and wildlife. This particular specimen, called a damnbeast, is a good example. The first survey crew ended up shooting several specimens. The planet is warm enough that the dominant species are all cold-blooded, which makes a higher ratio of predators to prey possible. Whereas a mammal this size would require half a million hectares to support, one of these has a territory of less than forty thousand hectares.” She smiled faintly. “And this is the only recorded carnivore species listed in our onboard databases. Further inquiries referenced the official Survey Service report.”
She smiled again at the general groan.
“The resident autochthons, the Mardukans, are at a pre-steam level of technology. Obviously, their tech level varies from area to area of the planet, but some of their most advanced cultures have discovered gunpowder, although that’s scarcely uniform and even the ones which have it don’t have anything resembling mass production or cartridge weapons.”
She tapped another control, bringing up a view of some odd weapons.
“These are the primary projectile weapons of the Mardukan societies which have mastered gunpowder: the matchlock arquebus and the hooped bombard. These weapons were used on Earth in the distant past, primarily in Europe, although the arquebus was rapidly superseded by flintlock muskets, and then rifles. The hooped bombard is a distant cousin of one of your Marine howitzers.”
She brought up another screen, this time a map of the Mediterranean.
“The Mardukan sociological climate has few direct counterparts in human history, but there are similarities to the Earth during the early Roman Republic. The Mardukans are broken up into city-states and small empires that are distributed along fertile river valleys, so these areas between the rivers are primarily barbaric. Although the barbarians do have a few gunpowder weapons, they rely primarily upon spear-hurlers and lances. The precise nature of the barbarian tribal structure is unknown.”
“Why is it unknown?” Lieutenant Gulyas asked, wondering where she’d gotten all this information.
“Well, probably because they ate the researchers,” O’Casey said deadpan, then grinned. “Or because it’s never been researched. From what I’ve been able to find, anything more than a thousand klicks or so from the spaceport is very much terra incognita. Either way, the data in my database stopped there.”
“Where did you have that?” Gulyas asked curiously.
“I always travel with my history and sociology databases,” O’Casey said with another smile. “I need them to work on papers.” She turned back to her pad.
“To continue, not only are the barbarians at war with each other—when they’re not raiding the borders of the city-states—but the city-states are continually at war with each other, as well. Any state of peace can be assumed to be a temporary truce, awaiting the slightest spark to ignite a war.” The smile she gave the officers of this time was grim. “I think that we can assume a Marine company is going to constitute a spark.”
She paused for a moment, then shrugged.
“That pretty much exhausts the primary data. I’ll make the full outtake available to you right after the meeting.”
“Thank you, Doctor,” Pahner said somberly. “That was a nice overview. I’m sure you also noticed that we can eat the food. The biochemistry’s a long way from Earth standard, but our nanites ought to be able to break down anything we can’t digest naturally, and they should keep anything in the local biosystem from actively poisoning us.
On the other hand, not even the nanites can put in what isn’t there, so we’ll require supplements, especially of vitamins C and E and several amino acids. Which means we’ll be humping those.” He looked up when there were no groans from the lieutenants. “No complaints? My, we must be feeling sobered.”
“We’ve been discussing it, Sir,” Lieutenant Sawato admitted. The XO shook her head. “I listed out all the parameters, but, as Lieutenant Gulyas indicated, there are tremendous problems.”
“True.” Pahner leaned back and rested his chin on his hand. “Tell me what they are.”
“First of all, Sir, there’s the matter of time. How long will it take us to cross a world?”
“A long time,” Pahner replied calmly. “Months.”
The entire compartment seemed to draw a deep breath as someone finally said the words. They were no longer talking about a short drop on the planet, but about an extended stay. They had all realized it, but no one had wanted to say it.
“Yes, Sir,” Lieutenant Jasco said into the silence after a moment. The tall, broad CO of First Platoon was in charge of logistics, and he shook his leonine head. “I don’t see it, Sir. We don’t have the food or the power. We carry combat rations for two weeks, and power for one week’s use of the armor, but we’re looking at three to six months to cross the planet. We may be able to forage, and our nanites will help with digestion problems, but if we’re going to be dealing with hostiles, foraging will be limited. And given the intensity of the threat, we need the powered armor to survive, but it won’t begin to last that long. With all due respect, and not wanting to be a quitter, I don’t see a way to do this mission, Sir.”
“All right.” Pahner nodded. “That’s your input. Does anyone see a way to accomplish the mission?”
“Well, we can strip the ship of spare power systems,” Lieutenant Gulyas suggested. “There are powerpacks all over the place.”
“How do we get them where we’re going?” Jasco shook his head. “It’s a situation of diminishing returns when you overload suits carrying stuff—”