We Few

"It is true," Tchock Ral rumbled. "We are aware of it."

"I'm in way over my head," Mordas Dren said fervently. "I know you guys thought you needed a human in the room, but this is so far out of my league I wish I could have a brain scrub and wash it out. Jesus!" His face worked for a moment, and he squeezed his eyes shut. "Adoula is a snake. His fingers are in every corporation that's trying to kick in our doors. Him as Emperor... That's what you're talking about, right?"

"Eventually," Roger said. "What's worse, we don't think it will work. More likely, the Empire will break up into competing factions. And without the Empress to stabilize it..."

"And this would be bad how?" the Althari admiral asked. Then she twitched her massive head in a human-style shake. "No. I agree, it would be bad. The Saints would snap up territory, increasing their already formidable resource base. If they managed to get some of your Navy, as well, we'd be looking at heavy defense commitments on another border. And it's my professional opinion that the Empire would indeed break up. In which case, chaos is too small a word."

"The effect on trade would be... suboptimal," Sreeetoth said. "But if you try to place your mother back upon the Throne and fail, the results will be the same. Or possibly even worse."

"Not... exactly." Roger looked back and forth between the three Alphane representatives. "If we try and fail, and are discovered to be who we are, then Adoula's tracks are fully covered. Obviously, it was me all along, in which case, he'd be much more likely to be able to hold things together. The reputation of House MacClintock would be severely damaged, and that reputation would have been one of the things that stood against him. If I'm formally saddled with responsibility for everything, he'll actually be in a better position to supplant my House in terms of legitimacy and public support."

"Only if no word of where you really were at the time of the initial coup attempt ever gets out," the Phaenur pointed out.

"Yes."

Tchock Ral leaned forward and looked at Roger for a long time.

"You are telling us that if you fail, you intend to cover up the fact that you are not guilty of staging the first coup?" the Althari said. "That you would stain the reputation of your House for all time, rather than let that information be exposed."

"Yes," Roger repeated. "Letting it out would shatter the Empire. I would rather that my House, with a thousand years of honorable service to mankind, be remembered only for my infamy, than allow that to happen. Furthermore, your Alliance—you three individuals, and whoever else is let in on the secret—will have to hold it, if not forever, then for a very long time. Otherwise..."

"Chaos on the border," Dren said. "Jesus Christ, Your Highness."

"I asked for senior policymakers," Roger said, shrugging at the engineer. "Welcome to the jungle."

"How will you conceal the truth?" Sreeetoth asked. "If you're captured? Some of you, no matter what happens, will be captured if you fail."

"It would require a concerted effort to get the information out in any form that would be believed, past the security screen Adoula will throw up if we fail," Roger captured. "We'll simply avoid the concerted effort."

"And your people?" the Althari asked, gesturing at the staff. "You actually trust them to follow this insane order?"

Roger flexed a jaw muscle, and was rewarded by a heel landing on either foot. Despreaux's came down quite a bit harder than O'Casey's, but they landed virtually simultaneously. He closed his eyes and breathed for a moment, then reached back and pulled every strand of hair into line.

"Admiral Tchock Ral," he said, looking the Althari in the eye. "You are a warrior, yes?"

Eleanora was too experienced a diplomat to wince; Despreaux and Julian weren't.

"Yes," the admiral growled. "Be aware, human, that even asking that question is an insult."

"Admiral," Roger said levelly, meeting her anger glare for glare, "compared to the lowest ranking Marine I've got, you don't know the meaning of the word."

The enormous Althari came up out of her chair with a snarl like crumbling granite boulders, and the guard in the corner straightened. But Roger just pointed a finger at Sreeetoth.

"Tell her!" he snapped, and the Phaenur jabbed one hand in an abrupt, imperative gesture that cut off the Althari's furious response like a guillotine.

"Truth," it hissed. "Truth, and a belief in that truth so strong it is like a fire in the room."

The lizardlike being turned fully to the bearlike Althari and waved the same small hand at its far larger companion.

"Sit, Tchock Ral. Sit. The Prince burns with the truth. His —soldiers—even the woman who hates to be one—all of them burn with the truth of that statement." It looked back at Roger. "You tread a dangerous path, human. Altharis have been known to go what you call berserk at that sort of insult."

"It wasn't an insult," Roger said. He looked at the trio of visitors steadily. "Would you like to know why it wasn't?"

"Yes," the Phaenur said. "And I think that Tchock Ral's desire to know burns even more strongly than my own."

"It's going to take a while."

In fact, it took a bit over four hours.

Roger had never really sat down and told the story, even to himself, until they'd worked out the presentation, and he'd been amazed when he truly realized for the first time all they'd done. He'd known, in an intellectual way, all along. But he'd been so submerged in the doing, so focused on every terrible step of the March as they actually took it, that he'd truly never considered its entirety. Not until they'd sat down to put it all together.

Even at four hours, it was the bare-bones, only the highlights—or low-lights, as Julian put it—of the entire trip.

There was data from the toombie attack on the DeGlopper; downloaded sensor data from the transport's ferocious, sacrificial battle with the Saint cruisers and her final self-destruction after she'd been boarded, to take the second cruiser with her. There were recorded helmet views of battles and screaming waves of barbarians, of Mardukan carnivores and swamps and mud and eternal, torrential rain until the delicate helmet systems succumbed to the rot of the jungle. There were maps of battles, descriptions of weapons, analyses of tactics, data on the battle for the Emerald Dawn from the Saints' tactical systems, enemy body counts... and the soul-crushing roll call of their own dead.

It was the after-action report from Hell.

And when it was done, they showed the Alphane delegation around the ship. The admiral and her guard noted the combat damage and fingered Patty's scars. The engineer clucked at the damage, stuck his head in holes which still hadn't been patched over, and exclaimed at the fact that the ship ran at all. The admiral nearly had a hand taken off by a civan—which she apparently thought was delightful—and they were shown the atul and the basik in cages. Afterward, Rastar, stony-faced as only a Mardukan could be, showed them the battle-stained flag of the Basik's Own. The admiral and her guard thought it was a grand flag, and, having seen an actual basik, got the joke immediately.

Finally, they ended up back in the wardroom. Everyone in the command group had had a part in the presentation, just as every one of them had had a part in their survival. But there was one last recorded visual sequence to show.

The Althari admiral leaned back in the big station chair and made a clucking sound and a weird atonal croon that sent a shiver through every listener as Roger ran the file footage from the bridge's internal visual pickups and they watched the final actions of Armand Pahner. The Prince watched it with them, and his brown eyes were dark, like barriers guarding his soul, as the last embers of life flickered out of the shattered, armored body clasped in his arms.