by David Weber
Despreaux’s arms twitched as she listened to his ragged breathing, but she made herself pause and think very carefully about what she was going to do. The intensity of Roger’s emotions, and the jagged edges of his grief and self-hatred hit her like a fist, and she was more than a little frightened by the dark, pain-filled depths which stretched out before her. But fear was only a part of what she felt, and not the greatest part, and so, finally, she gave a slight shrug and gently took the rifle out of his hands and set it on the ground. Wordlessly, she wrapped her arms around him and pulled him down to lie with his head on her lap . . . and ran her fingers through his sweaty hair as he began, very quietly, to cry.
Her own eyes burned, and she wondered how many lonely years it had been since he had ever let anyone see him weep. Her heart ached with the need to reach out to him, but she was a Marine, a warrior. She knew what needed to be said, but not how to say it, and so she crooned wordlessly to him, instead, and somehow, he seemed to understand the words she couldn’t find.
“I don’t know what to do, Nimashet,” he told her. “I . . . I just can’t kill anybody else. I’ve killed so many of you already. I just can’t do that anymore.”
“You didn’t kill anybody, Roger,” she said gently, the words coming at last because she needed them so very badly. “We’re Marines. We all volunteered for the Corps, and we volunteered again for the Empress’ Own. We knew the score when we signed up, and we could’ve quit at any time.”
“You didn’t sign up to be marooned on a planet full of four-armed barbarians while trying to protect a deadbeat prince!”
She smiled, and if that smile was a bit misty, that was her own business.
“Not a deadbeat—more like a dead-shot. Your Highness, there are so many ways to die as a Marine that it’s not really funny. This is near the top of the list of odd places and ways, but it’s not clear at the top.”
“Kostas didn’t sign up to be a Marine,” he said softly. “He didn’t sign on to die.”
“People die all the time, Roger.” The sergeant combed the tangles out of his hair with her fingers. “They die in aircar accidents, and of old age. They die from too much parsan, and from falling in the shower. They die in shipwrecks, and from radiation poisoning, and by drowning. Kostas didn’t have a monopoly on dying.”
“He had a monopoly on dying from my mistake,” Roger said in tones of quiet, utter bitterness. “I made a simple request and didn’t think about the consequences. How many times have I done that—and not just to him? How many times on this march have you Marines been put in jeopardy—or killed—because of my stupid actions? My stupid unthinking actions?”
“Quite a few,” Despreaux said. “But I think you’re being a bit unfair to yourself. For one thing, I’ve talked to Turkol and Chim. You didn’t ask Kostas to get you water; he offered. I know, I know,” she said, laying one hand lightly across his mouth in what wasn’t quite a caress. “That doesn’t change what he was doing, or the fact that—just like always—he was doing it for you. But I think it does matter that it was his choice, not yours. And while we’re on the subject of fairness, do you really think Kostas didn’t know about the risks? Know the jungle is dangerous? Roger, he was along for every single step of the march. He was the one who oversaw the mahouts butchering the damncrocs when you and Julian had that shoot-off crossing the damned river before Voitan—you think he didn’t know they lived in rivers? For God’s sake, he’s the one who was on safari with you on all those godforsaken planets none of the rest of us ever even heard of!”
“What are you saying? That it was his fault?”
“I’m saying it wasn’t anyone’s fault. Not his, not yours. He went to perform a routine task—not just for you, but for Chim Pri—and somehow, for some reason, he was too distracted to pay attention. It happens, Roger. It happens all the time, every day of our lives. It’s just that here on Marduk, if your attention wanders at the wrong moment, you end up dead. You didn’t kill him, and he didn’t kill himself—the fucking planet did.”
“And the Marines? What about them?” Roger demanded in a harsh, almost spiteful tone.
“Two things,” Despreaux told him calmly. “One, every time you’ve ‘put us in jeopardy’ it was a relative danger. This planet is no place for a right-thinking Marine who wants to die in bed, preferably while getting a leg-over, but you didn’t pick it, and you certainly didn’t order us to come here. Second, a lot of those ‘stupid unthinking actions’ are the reason we love you. Looking at it sensibly, I guess it really isn’t very smart of you, but you just throw yourself at the enemy and keep moving forward until you come out on the other side, and in some ways, Marines aren’t all that different from Mardukans. We know the object is to kill the other guy and come home afterward, and we don’t have any use at all for officers who keep hanging themselves—and us—out just to prove what great big brass ones they have. But for all that, we respond to COs who lead us a thousand times better than we do to those who send us out ahead. And whatever other faults you may have, we’ve discovered on this shit ball of a planet that you’re one hell of a leader. You’ve got a lot to learn, maybe, about thinking your way through problems—I swear, if you ever faced a Rasthaus wartbeast, you’d throw yourself into its mouth and try to tunnel out the other end!—but you wouldn’t do the one thing a leader can never do in combat: hesitate.”
“Seriously?” Roger rolled over on his back and looked up at her, and she stroked his face and smiled.
“Seriously. The only thing a Marine truly hates is a coward. Hold still.” She leaned down and kissed him. It was a hell of a bend, but she was limber, and Roger released her lips reluctantly.
“What are we doing? And how did we get from Kostas to here?”
“What? They didn’t cover that in the Academy?” she asked with a soft laugh. “Call it the desire for life renewal in the face of death. A strong desire. The need to hold back the ferryman in the only way we know.” She paused and ran a hand down his side. “Ten years, huh?”
Roger sat up and wrapped his arms around her. As he did, he noted that his tactful bodyguards had discreetly withdrawn out of sight of himself and their squad leader. Which made him wonder what would happen if another damncroc, assuming there were any left in the entire river after his extermination efforts, slipped up out of the water while they were engaged. Which made him wonder where his cavalry detachment had gotten to. He remembered giving the infantry to Ther Ganau, which made him wonder who was covering the supply convoys.
Which made him groan.
“What?” Despreaux asked huskily.
“Oh, God, Nimashet. We just don’t have time. Where’s my cavalry? How are Rus From’s engineers doing at Sindi? What’s happening with Rastar? Are the barges all in place, and who in hell is covering Ther’s caravans?”
Her eyes flared, and she grabbed him by the front of his chameleon suit.
“Five minutes,” she ground out through gritted teeth.
“More like thirty seconds,” the prince told her with something almost like a laugh. “If we can get our clothes off in time, that is. But it’s thirty seconds we need to not take. I’ve already lost hours with this despair shit, and we don’t need to lose any more with the reverse.”
She stuck her hip into his and rolled him over onto his back with the grip on his chameleon suit.
“Listen to me, Prince Roger Ramius Sergei Alexander Chiang MacClintock!” she hissed. “I want a promise. You can make it on anything you care to name, but you will make it! And that promise is that as soon as we get somewhere safe, and all the crises are past, you will take me to bed. And take your time at it. And do it well.” She picked him up and pounded him lightly on the ground with each phrase. “Do you swear?”
Roger wrapped his legs around her, pulled her down on top of himself, and kissed her.
“When we’re back on Earth. When all of this is behind us, when we’re back in the Imperial Palace, and we can be sure it’s not the situation. When I’m s
ure that I love Nimashet Despreaux more than life itself, and that it’s not unbridled lust from all the pain and death and blood. Then I’ll take you—as my wife, if I can get away with it, or as a senior partner, if I can’t. And I will love you until the day I die. I swear it on my dead.”
She pounded her head into his breastbone.
“All I want to do is to screw you, you idiot! You’re supposed to be telling me you’ll love me and marry me to get me to bed—not telling me that to get you into bed I have to marry you. That’s my line!”
“Do you accept?” Roger asked.
“Of course I do!” she snapped. “I’d have to be an idiot not to. I love you so hard it hurts, and don’t think I’ll get over that just because we get back to Earth. Hell, I was so far gone I loved you when you were just an overblown, brainless, arrogant prick of a clotheshorse and I damned well should have known better!”
“Speaking of clotheshorses,” he said, fingering the placket of her chameleon suit, “these uniforms could use some work. That’s the second thing I’m going to do when we get back to Earth.” He looked into her eyes. “So we wait?” he asked in a quieter voice. “You’re okay with that?”
“I wouldn’t use the term ‘okay,’” she said. “‘Okay’ is definitely not the adverb, or whatever. As a matter of fact, if there’s a direct opposite of ‘okay’ for this situation, that’s about where I am. I’m not exactly ‘bad’ with it, I guess, but I’m definitely sort of ‘anti-okay.’ On the other hand, I’m a big girl. I’ll live.”
Roger rolled over, then stood, and pulled her to her feet.
“You ready to go?”
“Sure,” she answered sharply. “Let’s go find something for me to kill before you start looking any better.”
“Okay,” Roger said with a smile. “I want you to know, I really do want you. But I don’t get any easier with time.”
“I’ve noticed,” the sergeant muttered darkly. “Stubborn as a Mardukan day is long.” She shook her head. “I have never had this much trouble getting a man to bed. For that matter, I’ve never had any trouble getting a man to bed. It was always the other way around.”
“Frustration is good for the soul,” Roger said. “Look at what it’s done for me!”
“Yeah,” Despreaux said with a sigh. “No wonder you’re so dangerous. Ten years?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Armand Pahner stood on the walls of Sindi and gazed out over the muddy, trampled fields. Work crews, wagon trains, and infantry pickets marching out to relieve other pickets stretched as far as the eye could see with a helmet visor set to max, but even as he gazed at them, the activities outside the walls weren’t what occupied his mind.
He was thinking about women and children.
The Boman host traveled with all the (limited) comforts of home, including its women and young . . . and Kny Camsan’s ambitions had concentrated over half the total host’s dependents right here in the city. In fact, it was that bit of intelligence, discovered by Gunny Jin’s LURPs and confirmed by reports from a handful of the primitive woodsmen who continued to linger in the forests, despite the Boman’s presence, which had shaped the captain’s entire strategy.
Pahner had given the strictest orders that every one of those dependents was to be taken into custody, and that none of them were to be molested in any way. The biannual “heat” of the Mardukans eliminated, for all practical purposes, the issue of rape from the local art of war, which—given humans’ history—he thought was a very good thing. But that didn’t necessarily make war nice and sanitary, and the Boman’s depredations and the sheer, horrifying scale of the massacres they had perpetrated had left the locals perfectly willing to slaughter their women and children in return and be done with it. K’Vaernians didn’t have the expression “nits make lice,” but there was general agreement that the only good Boman was a dead Boman, and the age or sex didn’t matter.
Those qualities did, however, matter to Pahner. Leaving aside the clear proscription in imperial regulations against atrocities, leaving aside even his own personal repugnance for unnecessary slaughter, he needed those dependents. He needed them alive, and in good condition.
They were bait.
Normally, the Boman didn’t besiege a city the same way a “civilized” army might have. If they failed—or chose not to—overrun its walls with their first, concerted rush, they fell back on their own sort of investment. They didn’t call up the engineers to dig trench lines, and they made no effort to batter down walls or tunnel under them. Nor did they encamp outside a city’s walls to hold it under a close envelopment. Instead, they just . . . existed, like some vast, slowly swarming sea which had inundated all of the lands about their enemies yet offered no fixed camps which might be assaulted to force them into battle. Their presence, and overwhelming numbers, prevented any organized movement on the part of the besieged city. Anyone trying to break out or escape was caught and overrun. Laborers trying to work the fields were massacred, draft animals were slaughtered or run off. If large forces sortied against them, they avoided their foes until enough barbarians gathered to pull them down and destroy them. If a city was weak enough, they were willing to simply pile up to the wall and assault it, but in general, they took their time and let it fester and rot . . . then assaulted it.
Part of the reason for that was logistical. The Boman were herdsmen, of a sort, which helped sustain their population levels, but they also depended on large areas for hunting and gathering, like other Mardukan barbarians. Even without the need for hunting, their flocks of meat animals—the closest to “farming” they came—required vast grazing areas. At home, they moved their flocks constantly, allowing the grazing in any one area to recover between visits, and they were generally forced to do exactly the same thing when they went to war, assuming they intended to actually feed their warriors. There was no way they could organize a supply train, so staying put for any extended period wasn’t really practical, except for the times—like Sindi—when they were able to capture supplies someone else had stockpiled.
True, they had chosen to begin this war with a series of frenzied, massive assaults which had suffered huge casualties, but that had been because this time they were working to a comprehensive strategy which had been designed to annihilate all of the southern city-states, not simply to take a single town. They had recognized their need to smash the Northern League quickly, before it could recover from Sindi’s treachery and its cities could come to one another’s aid as they always had in the past.
The sheer surprise of their coordinated tactics had done almost as much to defeat the League as anything agents from Sindi might have accomplished, Pahner suspected, although he had no intention of suggesting anything of the sort to Rastar or their other Northern allies. After generations of fighting Boman in the same old way, no one in the League had anticipated such an overwhelming onslaught . . . and neither had the Southern city-states behind it. The terror effect of the League’s sudden collapse, coupled with the sheer size of the Boman host and the fact that most of the Southerners, secure in the League’s protection, had settled for modest defensive works of their own, had made it relatively simple to storm each successive city in turn, and Camsan had done just that. Sindi had been a tougher nut, but the war leader had made no real effort to restrain his warriors’ enthusiasm in Sindi’s case. He couldn’t have, given the reason the war had been decreed in the first place, but casualties in the storm of Sindi had actually been worse than they had in the attack on Therdan. The Northerners had been far tougher opponents, but Sindi had been much larger, and its authorities had been given sufficient time to prepare before the hurricane howled down upon it.
But after Sindi, the Boman had reverted to their more normal tactics rather than attempt an extremely unwise storm of K’Vaern’s Cove. The only real difference was that their capture of Sindi gave them a powerful, heavily defended forward base, and—coupled with their conquest of the other Southern city-states—enough captured food to st
ay in place for several months. Eventually, of course, they would eat their captured larders bare and have to begin thinking about more aggressive ways to take the war to the Cove, but until the humans and their Diaspran allies arrived, Camsan’s strategy of letting the K’Vaernians rot and deplete their already limited food supplies feeding the floods of refugees had been working quite nicely. It had been almost certain that, assuming he could hold the Boman together as a cohesive force, he could have sat where he was long enough to reduce the Cove to starving near impotence and then poured his warriors over the walls the Guard would be too weakened to defend.
Which was the whole reason Pahner was out here now. Whether or not the Cove would be fatally weakened before starvation forced the Boman to move themselves, he couldn’t wait to see the outcome. He needed to bring the barbarians to decisive battle now, so that he and his Marines could get the heck out of Dodge before their food supplements ran out, and to do that he needed to do two other things. First, he needed to present them with a threat which appeared less formidable than it actually was, and, second, he needed to give them a reason to attack that threat.
A reason like rescuing all of their women and children.
The captain didn’t much like his own strategy, but it was the only one he could think of which had a chance of working within the time constraints he faced. And if there were things about it that he didn’t like, he wasn’t the one who had decided to level every city-state north of the Diaspra Plateau and the Nashtor Hills.
He snorted, once more amused by his own perversity. Here he was, protecting thousands of women and children from massacre at the hands of his own allies, and all he could think about was how despicable of him it was to use them as bait to lure their menfolk into battle. On the other hand, he suspected he was also dwelling upon that thought to avoid considering one that worried him even more, and it was probably time he stopped doing that. He shook his head, then checked the time and decided that he couldn’t put it off any longer.