March To The Stars

But although he'd learned to be a "team player" in soccer, he'd never really had to perfect that in combat. Worse, perhaps, he tended to go his own way, as had been proven repeatedly on the long march from the shuttles' dry lakebed landing to K'Vaern's Cove. Roger was never one to integrate himself into a fire plan. Which made it a good thing that he always led from the front, since he also tended to kill anything that got in front of him.

"Your job, when we do an entry, is to watch my back! Not to watch where I am going! If I run into resistance, I will deal with it. But if I have to watch your sector at the same time, you are OFF THIS TEAM! Do I make myself perfectly clear?"

"CLEAR, SERGEANT MAJOR!" Roger hammered out his final push-up. "One fifty, Sergeant Major!"

"You just stay there in the front leaning rest position, Recruit MacClintock! I'll get to you when I'm ready."

"Yes, Sergeant Major!" the prince gasped.

The schooner Snarleyow's forward hold was hotter than the hinges of hell and reeked of decaying filth in the bilges. But it was also the largest concealed open space aboard any vessel of the flotilla, which, from Eva Kosutic's perspective, made it the best possible place for training. It still didn't offer as much unobstructed area as she would have liked—not by a long chalk—but the cavalry's civan had already consumed the fodder which had originally been piled into it. And unlike the upper cargo deck, there were no civan in the hold itself.

Which was a very good thing. Civan, and especially the trained war-civan Prince Rastar and his men favored, were much more intelligent than most humans might have thought upon meeting them for the first time. But what they most definitely were not was cute or cuddly. In fact, any civan tended to have the temper of an Old Earth grizzly bear with a bad tooth. The temperament—and training—of those selected as cavalry mounts only exacerbated that natural tendency. Which was why the civan stalled along the sides of Snarleyow's upper cargo deck were "tethered" (if that was the proper verb for it) not with halters or ropes, but with five-point chain tie-downs.

Even so, the Mardukans charged with their care and feeding were extremely careful about how close they got to the beasts' axlike jaws and razor-sharp, metal-shod fighting claws. For herself, Kosutic was delighted to have a training space, be it ever so hot, dank, and smelly, in which she didn't have to worry about losing a limb because she strayed too close to a civan in a worse mood than usual.

Of course, at the moment, she was in a worse mood than usual, and she shook her head, then gestured for the other two NCOs to follow her. She led them to the forwardmost end of the hold, then turned to face them.

"Options," she said quietly, and Julian wiped away a drop of sweat and shook his head.

"He's good, Smaj. Very good. But he won't stay focused on defense."

"He's too used to having us do that for him," Despreaux pointed out. "He's used to barreling through the opposition while we cover his back. Now you're barreling through the course, and he's supposed to cover your back." She shrugged ever so slightly. "He can't get used to it."

"Yeah, but a big part of it is that he's one aggressive son-of-a-bitch," Julian said with a quiet chuckle. "No offense intended to Her Majesty."

"There's that," Kosutic agreed, tugging at an earlobe. "I don't really want to switch him out for somebody else, either. He's got the moves to be better than just about anybody else in the company, if we can ever get them harnessed and coordinated, and only Macek might be able to equal him as it is. But I'm not going to get whacked because he's not covering his sector."

And that was exactly what had happened, three times so far.

When the helmet systems came on and their co

Something had to be done, and Despreaux furrowed her brow as all three of them considered the problem.

"We could ..." she said, then stopped.

"What?" the sergeant major asked.

"You won't like it," Despreaux replied.

"I've done a lot of stuff I don't like," Kosutic sighed. "What's one more thing, by His Evilness?"

"All right," Despreaux said with a shrug. "We could put Roger on point."

"Uh," Kosutic said.

"Hmmm." Julian rubbed his jaw. "She's got a point. I think he might do pretty well."

"But ..." the sergeant major said. "But—"

" 'But that's my spot!' " Julian finished for her with a faint, humorous whine.

Kosutic looked daggers at him for a moment, then shook her head sharply.

"It's more than that, Adib. Do you really think the captain isn't going to use us? He put us together for more than just to show how it's done. My guess is that he's thinking of using us for something, as a team."

"What? His company's sergeant major, two of his squad leaders, and the prince?" Julian laughed. "You're joking, right?"

"No, I'm not," the sergeant major said seriously. "Just take it as a given that that might happen. Then think about putting Roger on point."

"Oh," Julian said.

"I can see your objection, Sergeant Major," Despreaux said carefully. "But I'm not sure it matters. Perhaps we should get Macek or Stickles instead of the prince. But if we are going to use him, I still think he should be on point. Frankly, I think, with all due respect, that he might be ... a touch better even than you."

Despreaux gazed calmly at the sergeant major, waiting for the explosion, and Kosutic opened her mouth again. Then she closed it with a clop, fingered her earlobe for a moment, and shrugged.

"You might be right."

"I think she is, Smaj," Julian said with equal care. "The pocker is fast."

"Is that any way to talk about the Heir Tertiary to the Throne of Man?" Kosutic demanded with a grin. "But you're right. The pocker is fast. And he can shoot, too. But I hate to seem to ... reward him for screwing up."

"You think point is a reward?" Julian shook his head.

* * *

Roger stood with his right elbow just touching the wood of the bulkhead, his head and body hunched and turned to his left. The wood was real, but just to his right was a large doorway that had been cut into it only recently. In his helmet systems, the doorway was visible only as an outline sketched on the wall with explosives. And the wall wasn't wood; it was plascrete. And in just a moment, the "explosives" were going to go off and blow a new door through it. And they would be going off less than a half-meter from his arm.

It was going to be an unpleasant experience. Roger rather doubted that even the sergeant major appreciated the full capabilities of his own toot. All the Marines were accustomed to using their implanted computers as both combat enhancers and training devices, and their toots' abilities in those regards far exceeded those of the hardware available to most citizens of the Empire. But Roger's toot was at least as much more capable than theirs as theirs were than the average civilian model. Which meant that the training simulation was even more "real" for him than for anyone else in the team. He'd considered kicking in the filters in an effort to spare himself some of the sergeant major's simulation's ... energetic programming tricks, but he'd decided against it. He'd come to embrace the wisdom of another of Kosutic's beloved axioms: "Train like you're going to fight."