Empire of Man

by David Weber

  He drew a deep breath, sent a command to his toot to bring up his communicator, and spoke.

  “Roger?”

  “Here,” the response came back, almost instantly, and the Marine felt his shoulders relax ever so slightly.

  “You sound better,” he said. “Are you?”

  “It comes and goes,” the prince said over the radio. “I’m tracking again, if that’s what you mean. Whose idea was it to send Nimashet?”

  “I felt that you were a bit too exposed,” the captain said. “So I augmented Corporal Beckley’s team with the rest of the squad. They’ll stay with you for the remainder of the operation.”

  “I see.” There was silence over the com for several seconds while both of them digested a great many things which hadn’t been said and probably never would be. “So, how’re we doing?”

  “Pretty much on schedule,” Pahner replied. “Eva is working with Rus on the preparation of the defenses. That only seemed to make sense, given her involvement with the artillerists. And Bistem and Bogess have their infantry fairly well organized on the approaches to the city, given that we’ve had to tap each regiment for a labor battalion to help out Rus’s engineers.”

  “And Rastar?” Roger asked.

  “So far, so good,” Pahner told him. “He’s having a bit more trouble than we’d hoped he would opening the distance between himself and their main force, and it’s pretty obvious that they’re trying to catch him between the pursuit from Sindi and forces from the other occupied city-states. So far, they haven’t been able to hit him with anything he couldn’t handle, and his ammunition supply seems to be in pretty good shape, but his whole diversion looks like turning into one big running battle.”

  “Are we going to have to go in after him?”

  “I don’t know. I hope not, and so far it looks like we can probably avoid it. But I’m keeping an eye on the situation.”

  “Good. And what do you want us to be doing?”

  “Pretty much what you are, Your Highness. From what Beckley and Despreaux told me yesterday evening, you’ve got your cavalry about where I want it on that southern flank. I’m going to peel the Carnan Battalion back off from Ther’s close cover force on the convoys and send it back to you. We’ll let the other cavalry cover him; I want those rifles back out there with you.”

  “Just to keep my precious hide intact?” Roger asked a bit tartly, and Pahner snorted.

  “I’m sure that’s somewhere in the back of my mind,” he said, “but it’s not foremost. Mainly, I just want to be sure that the anchor at the far end of my line isn’t going to come loose if somebody runs into it.”

  “I see. Well, in that case, Captain, we’re just going to have to see to it that we stay put, aren’t we?”

  Dna Kol swallowed a bite of parched barleyrice and leaned down to suck water from the stream.

  “If we don’t find these damned shit-sitters soon, we head back to the city. I’m out of food and patience,” he growled.

  “What are they doing?” one of the warriors asked. “First they head west, like they’re going back to wherever they crossed. Now they head east.”

  “They’re scattering to avoid us,” Dna Kol said. “And somewhere, they’re gathering again.”

  “How can they find each other out here in the woods?” the warrior asked. “I don’t know where I am. Oh, I could find the city easily enough if I headed in the right direction long enough, but I certainly couldn’t tell anyone else how to find me. So how do they know where they are? Or where to go to find the rest of them?”

  “Maps,” another of the warriors spat, drawing his head up out of the stream. “Damned shit-sitter maps. They map everything. They’ll know where every stream crossing is before they get to it.”

  “Which is how they’re managing to lead us around by the nose,” Kol agreed. “But we’ll track them down soon enough . . . and bring the whole host down on them when we do.”

  “I could do with some new armor,” the first warrior said. He pulled a throwing ax from its belt loop and made a chopping motion. “And I know just how to get some.”

  “Let’s move,” Kol said. “I can smell them. They’re near.”

  Rastar ran another patch through the barrel of one of his revolvers, examined the weapon carefully, and decided he was satisfied. In some ways, the last prince of Therdan missed Captain Pahner’s pistol. It held far more rounds than the seven-shot revolvers, its recoil was less, and it was a lot easier to clean. But for all that, he still preferred these new weapons. There was something about the spit of flame and the trailing smoke from gunfire that added a deeper dimension to the battle. And Pahner’s pistol had been too much like magic. These pistols were clearly the work of mortal hands, yet they spoke with all the sound and fury of a gunpowder thunderstorm.

  “Time to change civan again,” he announced as Honal rode up to him and reined in.

  “I’m not sure I can dismount,” his cousin groaned. “I used to think I was tough.”

  “I believe you mentioned that yesterday morning,” the Northern leader said. He finished loading cartridges into the cylinder, carefully plugged the mouth of each chamber with the heavily greased felt pad which prevented flash-over from detonating all seven rounds at once, and began fitting the copper caps over the nipples at the rear of the cylinder. “Change your mind?”

  “I think I’ve figured out a translation for that joke that bastard Pahner told us before we set out,” Honal said in indirect reply as he slid gracelessly out of the saddle and fell onto his back. The civan delicately stepped away as a groom came up to unsaddle it.

  “Oh?” The prince finished capping the cylinder and swung it back into place and looked up inquiringly. The humans’ toot translations were usually excellent, but they made a hash of jokes . . . which had been obvious in the case of Pahner’s statement.

  “You just have to make a terrible pun out of it, and it’s really quite funny,” the Sheffan cavalry commander said, still laid out flat on the ground. “If, of course, you haven’t spent three days at a fairly constant trot. Try it this way: ‘A Manual for Cavalry Operations, Forty Kolong a Day, by Princely Arseburns.’”

  “Ah!” The Therdan prince gave a grunting laugh. “Har! That’s pretty good, actually. Feel better?”

  “No,” his cousin said. “I have princely arseburns. I have armor chafe. I have dry-slime. And I think my legs just fell off.”

  “Nope,” Rastar said with another grunt. “They’re still there. Hey, think of how the civan must feel.”

  “Pock the civan,” the cavalry commander said with feeling. “When we get back to K’Vaern’s Cove, I swear I’m going infantry. If I never see another civan again in my life, it will be too soon. I’m going to personally eat every one of them I’ve ridden in the last three days. It’ll take a couple of seasons, and I think I’ve already killed two the cooks didn’t get gathered up, but I’ll get all of the others. I can do it. I have the determination.”

  “We have lost quite a few,” Rastar said softly. “A lot more than I’d like, in fact. But as long as they hold up for the last run, we’re golden.”

  “Not necessarily,” Honal said, finally sitting up with another groan. “One of my scouts caught a group on our back trail.”

  “Now you tell me?”

  “They’re a few hours back,” Honal told him unrepentantly. “But we do need to ready a reception.”

  Dna Kol paused at the edge of the clearing. The spot was a regular stopping place on the Sindi-Sheffan caravan trail, an open area created by a thousand years of caravans’ cutting undergrowth for firewood, and a medium-sized, fordable stream ran through it. A heavy rain was falling, reducing visibility, but it was still clear that more iron head cavalry than he ever wanted to see again waited on the far side of the clearing.

  “Crap,” he snorted. “I think we’ve been suckered.”

  “There’s more of them moving off to the right,” one of his followers said. “Let’s hammer this group befor
e the others get into position.”

  “I think we’re the ones who’re going to be hammered,” the subchief said. “But that does seem to be the only option.”

  Rastar grinned in the human fashion as the Boman burst from the tree line, screaming their tribal war cry. His only worry had been that they might move back into the trees, taking cover from the cavalry’s fire, but perhaps the pounding rain explained why they hadn’t. Surely, by now, the Boman must have realized that the League troopers’ new firearms were remarkably unaffected by precipitation! Still, he supposed the ingrained habits of decades of experience against matchlocks couldn’t be overcome in a mere three days.

  “Load up, but hold your fire!” he shouted as he spurred his civan into the clearing. “I want to try something.”

  He drew up, turned his civan to present its flank to the barbarian line, and pulled out four of his eight pistols as the Boman charged to get into throwing ax range. His true-hands pointed right and left, to the outside of the charging barbarian line, while the false-hands pointed at its center. He let all four eyes defocus, drew a deep breath, and opened fire.

  The astonished barbarians’ charge shattered as all four pistols blazed simultaneously and the accurate, massed fire piled up a line of bodies for the following warriors to stumble over.

  The prince’s grin was a snarl through the thick fog of rain-slashed gunsmoke as he spun his civan and galloped back through the positions of his waiting cavalry.

  “Okay,” he called, smoking pistols held high, “now you can try!”

  He holstered two weapons and started reloading the other two as the cavalry about him began to fire.

  “Wyatt who?” he grunted.

  “Are you going to get all the supplies out?” Roger asked over his helmet com.

  “I sure hope so,” Pahner replied with a snort. “Although we’re retaining a good bit more than I’d originally planned. Got to feed these women and children something.”

  “I’m surprised the troops are staying in hand so well,” Roger said, studying the video feed from the captain’s helmet and taking in the orderliness of the city’s occupiers.

  “Me, too,” Pahner admitted. “I’d assumed at least a twenty-five percent loss rate from AWOLs in the city, but we’re at nearly one hundred percent present as of the morning report.”

  “That high?” Roger sounded surprised, and Pahner chuckled.

  “Bistem Kar gave them an incentive,” the Marine explained. “Before he released the troops to glean, he paraded them in front of the huge piles of stuff from the main storerooms and promised each of them a share on return. Some of them never even left—why go hunting through the city, when you can be handed a bag of gold and silver for staying put?—and the rest came back soon enough.”

  “That Kar is one smart cookie,” Roger observed with a chuckle.

  “That he is,” the captain agreed. “And there’s an important lesson here, Roger. Smart allies are worth their weight in gold.”

  “So what’s the game plan at your end?” the prince asked.

  “Rus’s people are recovering from their engineering efforts. As soon as they have, I’m sending half of them back to Tor Flain to man the D’Sley defenses for him and help Fullea cross load the Sindi loot from the river barges and caravans to the seagoing vessels for transit to the Cove. The other half will move over and begin helping to load the barges from this end.”

  “And Bistem and Bogess?”

  “I’m putting half of their people on the stores, and the other half on security. We’re going to have Boman filtering back from the north soon, and I want a good security screen dug in to deal with them until we’re ready.”

  “And after that, we wait,” Roger said.

  “And after that, we wait,” Pahner confirmed.

  Kny Camsan’s head went up as he heard the firing to the north.

  “Another skirmish, while all the time this group gets smaller and smaller and further and further away,” he growled.

  “What else can we do?” one of the subchiefs asked. “We have to run them to ground.”

  “Of course we do,” the war leader said, “and we can. I have yet to find a group of civan that can outlast the Boman over the long run. But they’re scattered all over the landscape, and we’ve been letting them dictate where we go by chasing directly after them. No more! Tell the warriors to spread out and head back towards the southeast. Instead of chasing them, we’ll sweep on a broad front while the other clans join up with us. When our full strength is assembled, we’ll be a wall, moving through the jungle, and whenever we encounter one of these accursed groups of theirs, we’ll hammer them into the earth!”

  “That sounds better than chasing along their back trail day after day,” the subchief agreed. “But we’re running low on food.”

  “We are the Boman,” Camsan said dismissively. “The host can go for days without, and when we’ve run them down, we’ll fill our bellies on the meat from their civan and go back to Sindi in triumph.”

  “Some of the host have tired of the chase. They’re already going back to Sindi.”

  “Fine by me,” Camsan grunted. “I didn’t want to chase these shit-sitters in the first place, but be damned if I’ll head back now until I have that Therdan pussy’s head on a spear!”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  “Armand?”

  Pahner looked up in surprise as Eva Kosutic stepped into his commandeered office in the Despot’s Palace of Sindi. He hadn’t actually seen her face-to-face since their arrival here. They’d stayed in touch through their coms, of course, but the sergeant major had been buried in her own portion of the preparations for the “Sindi Surprise Party,” as most of the army was calling the battle plan, which had kept her busy with the engineers and the artillery corps. It wasn’t her physical presence that surprised the captain, though; it was the tone of her voice and her expression. He hadn’t seen a grin that huge since well before Bravo Company ever heard of a planet called Marduk.

  “Yes?” he replied, arching his eyebrows, and her grin got even bigger.

  “Just got off the radio with Doc Dobrescu,” she said, and laughed. She didn’t chuckle—she laughed, with a bright, almost girlish delight that deepened his surprise even further. “He’s got some . . . interesting news,” she added.

  “Well, would you care to share it with me, or are you just going to stand there with that stupid grin all day?” he asked just a bit tartly, and she laughed again.

  “Sorry, Boss. It’s just that I’ve always known His Evilness had a really perverse sense of humor, and now He’s gone and proved it!”

  “And how, if you ever intend to get around to it, has he done that?”

  “You know that little job you gave the Doc? The one that’s had him running everything he could get his hands on through the analyzers?”

  “Yesss,” Pahner said slowly, leaning further back in the camp chair behind his desk.

  “Well, he just hit pay dirt,” the sergeant major told him. “He’s found something the nanites can process into the protein supplements we’ve got to have.”

  “He has?” Pahner snapped back upright in the chair.

  “Yep, and you’ll never guess where he found it,” Kosutic said with another huge grin. Pahner cocked his head demandingly, and she laughed once more. “You remember that poison gland in the coll fish? The one that’s absolutely lethal to any Mardukan, no ifs, ands, or buts?” Pahner nodded, and she snorted. “Seems the Doc remembered how Radj Hoomis failed to poison us and said, what the hell, let’s check it, too. And when he did—”

  She shrugged, and Pahner stared at her.

  “Let me get this straight,” he said slowly. “This deadly poison no one else on Marduk can eat is like . . . like cod liver oil for humans?”

  “Not a bad analogy at all,” she agreed with a nod. “From what he’s saying, it tastes just as bad—or even worse. But all his tests say it’s the real stuff. Of course, it won’t work for anyone who doesn�
�t have the full nanite loadout, but when you couple it with apsimons, the troops—and Roger—are good to go almost indefinitely. And we’ve got enough regular supplements to keep everyone who doesn’t have the full spectrum nanites going for a good year or more, as well. Which is what I meant about His Evilness and His sense of humor.”

  “Hmmm?” Pahner was still too busy grappling with how Dobrescu’s announcement had changed his constraints to realize what she was saying for several seconds, but then he laughed harshly. “I see what you mean,” he said, shaking his head slowly. “We agreed to kick off this entire operation, built the damned army, pissed off every merchant in the Cove, turned K’Vaernian society on its ear, pushed the training, drove everyone into the field, and set up this whole trap just because we were running out of supplements and couldn’t afford to wait around. And now we find out we’ve got all the time in the fucking world!”

  “Absolutely,” she agreed with a laugh of her own.

  The two of them stared at one another for almost a full minute without saying another word, and then Pahner sighed.

  “I wish we’d known sooner,” he said slowly. “Kostas would be alive right now if we hadn’t had to go back into the field, for one thing. But at the same time, maybe it’s for the best. If I’d known about this, I would’ve been a lot more willing to sit things out and look for other options as the safer way to get Roger home, and if I’d done that, there wouldn’t have been a K’Vaern’s Cove in another six months.”

  “From what we’ve seen of these Boman bastards since we actually hit the field, I think you’re probably right,” Kosutic said more somberly, “and I wouldn’t like that. I’ve decided I can really get along with these K’Vaernians, almost as well as with Rastar and his civan boys. So I guess I’m glad we didn’t leave them in the lurch, too. And speaking of Rastar,” she went on, changing the subject, “just how are he and Honal doing?”