We Few

"NO!" Nimashet Despreaux screamed from the doorway.

"I have the right!" Roger spat, not looking at her, trying not to see her, the sword held over his head and catching the light. "Do you know what he's done?!"

"Yes, Roger. I do," Despreaux said quietly. She stepped into the room and walked over to stand between Roger and his father. "And I know you. You can't do this. If you push me aside—if you could do it—I'll walk. You said it. Carefully, quietly. No muss. No fuss. We try him, and sentence him, and then slip the poison into his arm. But you will not cut off his head in a presence room. No one will ever trust you again if you do. I won't trust you."

"Nimashet, for the love of God," Roger whispered, trembling, his eyes pleading with her. "Please, stand aside."

"No," she said, in a voice of soft steel that was as loving as it was inflexible.

"Roger," Eleanora said from the doorway, "the Prime Minister is going to be here in about... oh, ninety seconds." She frowned. "I really think it would be better, in both the short and the long run, if you didn't greet him covered in your father's blood."

"Besides," Catrone said, standing beside her in the door, "if anybody gets him, I do. And you told me I couldn't do him."

"I said you couldn't torture him," Roger replied, sword still upraised.

"You also said we'd do it by the Book," Catrone said. "Are you going back on your word?"

Silence hovered in the presence room, a silence broken only by the terrified whimpers of the man kneeling at Roger's feet. And then, finally, Roger spoke again.

"No," he said. "No, Tomcat. I'm not."

He lowered the sword, letting it fall to a rest-arms position, and looked at the cavalryman who'd handed it to him

"Vasin?"

"Your Highness?"

"May I keep this?" Roger asked, looking at the sword. "It's a blade from your homeland, a blade you carried beside your dead Prince—beside my friend—for more kilometers than any of your people had ever traveled before. I know what that means. But... may I keep it?"

The Mardukan waved both true-hands in a graceful gesture of acceptance and permission.

"It was the blade of my fathers," he said, "handed down over many generations. It came to Therdan at the raising of the city's first wall, and it was there when my Prince hewed a road to life for our women and children as the city died behind us. It is old, Your Highness, steeped in the honor of my people. But I think your request would have pleased my Prince, and I would be honored to place it and its lineage in the hand of such a war leader."

"Thank you," Roger said quietly, still gazing at the blade. "I will hang it somewhere where I can see it every day. It will be a reminder that, sometimes, a sword is best not used."

The Prime Minister stepped into the room and paused at the tableau which greeted him. The soldiers, watching a man holding a sword. New Madrid on his knees, sobbing, held in place by two of the Mardukans.

"I am looking for the Prince," the Prime Minister said, looking at the woman who claimed to be Eleanora O'Casey. "For the supposed Prince, that is."

Roger's head turned. The movement was eerily reminiscent of a falcon's smoothly abrupt motion, and the modded brown eyes which locked on the Prime Minister were as lethal as any feathered predator's had ever been.

"I am Prince Roger Ramius Sergei Alexander Chiang Mac-Clintock," he said flatly. "And you, I suppose, would be my mother's Prime Minister?"

"Can you positively identify yourself?" the Prime Minister said dismissively, looking at the man in the soiled cat-suit, holding a sword and balancing on one foot like some sort of neobarbarian. It looked like something out of one of those tacky, lowbrow so-called "historical" novels. Or like a comedy routine.

"It's not something a person would lie about," Roger growled. "Not here, not now." He hopped around to face the Prime Minister, managing somehow to keep the sword balanced as he did. "I'm Roger, Heir Primus. Face that fact. Whether my mother recovers from her ordeal or not—the ordeal she went through while you sat on your fat, spotty, safe, no-risk-taking ass and did nothing—I will be Emperor. If not soon, then someday. Is that clear?"

"I suppose," the Prime Minister said tightly, his lips thi

"And if I recall my civics lessons," Roger continued, glaring at the older man, "the Prime Minister must command not simply a majority in Parliament, but also the Emperor's acceptance. He serves, does he not, at the Emperor's pleasure?"

"Yes," the Prime Minister said, lip curled ever so slightly. "But the precedent for removal by an Emperor hasn't been part of our constitutional tradition in ov—"

Roger tossed the sword into the air. He caught it by the pommel, and his arm snapped forward. The sword flew from his hand and hissed past the Prime Minister's head, no more than four centimeters from his left ear lobe, and slammed into the presence chamber's wall like a hammer. It stood there, vibrating, and the Prime Minister's jaw dropped as Roger glared at him.

"I don't much care about precedent," Roger told him, "and I'm not very pleased with you!"

"God damn it!" Victor Gajelis snarled under his breath as the new icons appeared suddenly in his plot. He knew exactly what they were, not that the knowledge made him feel any better about it.

"CIC confirms, Sir," Commander Talbert told him. "That looks like every single one of CarRon 12's cruisers. Prokourov must've punched them twenty-five minutes ago, because they're already up to almost eleven thousand KPS."

Gajelis' mouth tightened as he considered the tactical situation. Frankly, in his considered opinion, it sucked.

By sending his cruisers in at reduced acceleration, Prokourov had managed to get their velocity up to almost two thousand kilometers per second more than CarRon 14's. They were still seven million kilometers—almost eight—further from Old Earth orbit, but their greater velocity meant they would actually arrive well before Carrier Squadron Fourteen. Of course, they were only cruisers, but there were ninety-six of them.

No fancy cruiser tricks were going to get Prokourov's carriers to the planet before Gajelis' own carriers, not with CarRon 14's twenty-minute head start. But CarRon 12's missiles would have the range to cover anything in orbit around the planet for over an hour before they actually reached the planet's orbital shell. Accuracy wouldn't be very good at such extended ranges, but to carry out his own mission orders, Gajelis had to get within no more than three or four hundred thousand kilometers of the planet. He couldn't guarantee the accuracy Gianetto and Adoula had specified from any greater range, even assuming that he could get missiles through the defensive fire of the ships already in planetary orbit. Besides, it was going to be difficult to make it look as if Prince Roger's adherents had done the deed if Moonbase had detailed sensor readings showing shipkillers from CarRon 14 hitting atmosphere. No, he had to get close enough to do it with KEW, and that meant advancing into Prokourov's carriers' missile envelope.

Unless...

He thought furiously. Almost two hours had passed since the attack on the Palace began. His communications sections were monitoring the confused babble of news reports and speculation boiling through the planetary datanet, and it was obvious that opinion was hardening behind the belief that it was, indeed, Prince Roger. At the moment, however, most of the commentary seemed to incline towards the belief that it was simply a case of the nefarious Traitor Prince returning for a second attempt. The notion that it was an attempt to rescue the Empress was still being greeted with skepticism, but that was going to change as soon as the first independent report of the Empress' condition got out. That was going to take time, but there was no way to know how much of it.