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Roger laughed, then clutched at his chest in pain.
"Oh, my. May-December romance, indeed!" he got out, almost crying between the laughter and the pain.
"So now the Gastan has a new son-in-law, who's older than he is," Pahner acknowledged. "And from what Eleanora and I can figure out, it's even more complicated than that. Since the Gastan's oldest son, Thertik, managed to get himself killed, Pedi is his legal heir. But a benan can't inherit his position. There have been a handful of female Gastans in the history of the Shin, although they're very rare. It's more common for a female heir's consort to inherit the title. But a benan is required to follow his—or her—benai wherever that leads, so he can hardly stay home to rule the tribes. Unfortunately, a benan's children can inherit. So Cord's children—the Gastan's grand children—are the legal heirs to the overlordship of the Vales."
"And since Cord insists on following me off-planet ..."
"Precisely," the captain agreed with a thin smile. "I hope you'll pardon me for pointing this out, Your Highness, but the three of you have a positive talent for leaving chaos in your wake. Well, to be fair, I suppose I shouldn't include Cord in that. Not, at least, until we met the Lemmar and his sense of honor got him into all of this!"
"I think you're being too hard on him," Roger said with a laugh. "As far as I can tell, he fought the good fight to resist his attraction to Pedi. It's not his fault that he lost in the end—especially not with her taking such unscrupulous advantage of him when he was unconscious and unable to resist her advances!"
"You would come up with something like that," Pahner told him, shaking his head in resignation. "And I suppose it actually is sort of fu
"Oh, thank you very much, Captain," Roger said, and chuckled. Then grimaced as the chuckle claimed its own stab of pain.
"Or Julian and Kosutic. Or Berent and Stickles. Or, God forbid, Geno Macek and Gu
"I'm sorry, Armand." Roger reached out to his bodyguards' commander. "I know we've laid burdens on you that were u
The captain looked down at the hand on his arm, then patted it and shook his head.
"Command challenges just make life more interesting," he said with a faint smile. "Although, after a certain point, they do tend to drag you down." He shook his head again. "For example, I would really appreciate it if you could stay out of one-shot range for the foreseeable future."
"Sounds like a good idea to me," Roger acknowledged, settling back against his pillows and feeling very carefully of his chest. "Of course, it never occurred to me that the bastard might have one."
"It wouldn't have occurred to me, either," Pahner admitted. "And I can't say that the fact that he did makes me very happy. But at least he didn't drill you clean."
"I don't understand why he didn't," Roger said thoughtfully. "I thought once one of those things locked onto your breastplate, you were pretty much screwed."
"Pretty much," Pahner agreed. "But from the looks of your armor, you managed to twist sideways just as he hit the tractor-lock. It didn't lock squarely. Instead of depositing the explosive charge at right angles, it hit you obliquely and a lot of the force of the explosion leaked sideways across the face of the plate. It was still enough for the shock damage to break your ribs, disable about sixty percent of your armor systems, and knock you unconscious. But it never managed to blow a scab loose, and you were lucky, Your Highness. Your anti-kinetic systems lasted long enough to keep it from doing anything worse than pounding your ribs—hard. Doc Dobrescu wouldn't have been quite so cheerful about the state they were in if you didn't have an even better na
"I know I was lucky," Roger agreed, still exploring his chest gently. "It just doesn't feel that way."
"Maybe not," Pahner said somberly. "But if he'd manage to blast that scab loose, all the anti-k systems in the galaxy wouldn't have helped you. And if they'd failed, the concussion alone should have turned every bone in your torso into paste." He shook his head. "No, Your Highness. You definitely were lucky. That's all that saved you—well, that and those souped-up reflexes of yours. I don't know if anyone else could have turned enough to take it at a survivable angle."
"And what about Sor Teb?"
"He was lucky, too ... for a while," Pahner said. "The tractor must have gotten a good enough lock to at least stay put, instead of blasting right back through him. And the angle must have been oblique enough to direct the back blast away from him. I'm sure he figured you really were dead, since he had a second one-shot on him and he didn't use it on you to make certain. Unfortunately for him, he encountered Pedi on the parapet and suffered a mischief."
"God, I bet she enjoyed that!"
"You could put it that way. Especially since it was what pushed Cord into declaring his feelings for her," Pahner agreed with an evil chuckle.
"But to return to you and Sor Teb's little surprise," the Marine continued, "he may not have managed to kill you, but he certainly did manage to kill your armor."
"Which isn't good," Roger said with a grimace. "It's not like we had all that many operable suits to begin with."
"Oh, it isn't all that bad," Pahner reassured him. "In fact, Poertena ought to be able to take care of the problem without too much difficulty. Assuming, of course, that we take the spaceport before he implodes."
"Poertena?" Roger quirked an eyebrow. "What's his problem?"
"He just found out that Mountmarch has a complete Class One manufactory at the port," Pahner said, standing up. "Can you imagine Poertena with a full-scale manufacturing plant at his mercy?"
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Temu Jin picked up his cup and sipped. His attention—obviously—was entirely focused on the coffee, and he kept it that way as the timer clicked over to just past Mardukan noon.
There were normally two com techs on duty in the communications control center, but at lunchtime, they went off duty, one at a time, to get something to eat. There were still the two guards, of course, but they were stationed in the vestibule just inside the blast door that was the only possible way in, not in the center itself. On this particular day, it was the other tech's turn to go to lunch first, which left Jin as the only person actually in the room. Which worked out just fine for him. Especially since the com center also doubled as the control room for the security perimeter.
He watched the schematic from the corner of one eye and nodded internally as the first notation of a possible perimeter breach popped up on his screen. Right on time. It was nice to deal with professionals for a change.
* * *
The com center guards were supposed to be cycled off together just before noon, instead of one of them at a time going to get something to eat, but their relief was late. That wasn't particularly unusual—the relief wasusually late on Marduk, and they would be late in their turn. But it meant they were suffering just a tad from low blood sugar, which made them more surly than usual with the Mardukan messenger.
"What do you want, scummy?"
"I have a message from the governor," Rastar said, in carefully badly accented Imperial as he held his message up in front of the security cameras. He stood there in the poncholike garment the peasants in the area around the spaceport habitually wore, and made himself look as much like one of the local rubes as he could.