March Upcountry

He cocked his head and regarded his nominal commander steadily.

"If you order the Company, in addition to all these necessities, to carry your spare pajamas, morning clothes, evening clothes, and a dress uniform in case there's a parade, they will." The company commander smiled thinly. "But I find the idea extremely... ill advised."

The prince looked at the officer in shock and shook his head.

"But who's going to be carrying all that stuff for me?"

Pahner's face became closed and set as he leaned back in the station chair.

"Your Highness, I've already made arrangements for the support material for Doctor O'Casey to be distributed and field gear to be issued for Doctor O'Casey and Valet Matsugae." The captain regarded the prince steadily. "Am I to assume from that question that I should make the same arrangements for your personal gear?"

Before Roger could even think of a proper reply, he found his mouth, as usual, ru

"Of course you should!" he half-snapped, then nearly quailed as Pahner's face darkened. But he'd already climbed out on the limb; might as well saw with abandon. "I'm a prince, Captain. Surely you don't expect me to carry my own bags?"

Pahner stood and placed his hands flat on the tabletop. Then he drew a deep, calming breath, and let it out.

"Very well, Your Highness. I need to go make those arrangements. By your leave?"

For just a moment, the prince appeared to be about to say something, but finally he made a small moue of distaste and waved a hand in dismissal. Pahner gazed at him silently, then gave a jerky nod and strode around the table and out the hatch, leaving the prince to contemplate his "victory."

CHAPTER NINE

Captain Krasnitsky leaned back in his command chair and rotated his shoulders in his skin suit.

"All right. Let's bring the ship back to General Quarters, if you please, Commander Talcott."

The captain hadn't slept in thirty-six hours. He'd had a sonic shower before climbing back into the stinking skin suit, but the only thing keeping him going at this point was Narcon and stimulants. The Narcon was to keep him from going to sleep. The stimulants were to keep him thinking straight, since the only thing the Narcon did was prevent sleep.

Even with the combination, his brain felt wrapped in steel wool.

"Wait until they open fire, Commander," he repeated, for what seemed the thousandth time. "I want to get as close as possible."

"Aye, Sir," Talcott said, with rather less exasperation than Krasnitsky thought he would probably have shown in the commander's position.

The captain's mouth tried to quirk a smile, but his amusement was fleeting, and his mind flickered back over his options with a sort of feverish monotony.

DeGlopper was an assault ship, not a true warship, but she was a starship, out-massing the in-system cruiser by nearly a hundred to one, and had enormously heavy ChromSten armor. The combination of mass and armor meant she could take damage that would shatter her opponent. But she was also slower, and not only were her sensors damaged, but her entire tactical net had taken a hit from the sabotage. So like any blind, drunk bruiser faced with a clear-eyed and nimble, but much smaller, foe, she wanted to grapple. She only had a good right remaining, but one uppercut was all it would take.

The plan called for her to maintain the appearance of a damaged freighter, desperate to make landfall, for as long as possible. She was finally starting to decelerate, and the cruiser was piling on all the gravities of deceleration it could stand, as well, but the transport would still flash by the smaller ship at nearly three percent of light-speed. At those velocities, there would be a very, very limited envelope of engagement.

Which meant every shot had better hit.

"We're coming into radar and lidar detection range, Captain," Commander Talcott said a few minutes later. "Should we paint their hull?"

"No. I know we'd get better lockup, but let's play unarmed merchie as long as we can. Be ready to paint them the minute they do it to us, though. And we're going to be close enough that our antiradiation HARMs should be in range. When they paint us, launch a flight."

"Aye, Sir," Talcott said, and moved over beside the ship's defensive systems officer.

Now if the shuttles only came through it alive.

Prince Roger hunched closer to the tiny display, trying to discern anything from it, but the same flickering and distortion that had been evident on the bridge's tactical plot was even more pronounced on the smaller flat screen of the shuttle.

"Give it up, Your Highness," Pahner suggested, and there was actually an edge of humor in his voice. "I've tried to follow ship-to-ship battles on these things when the systems were all working. All you're going to do is strain your eyes."

Roger rotated in the station chair to face him, careful where he put his feet, arms, and hands. Nearly his first action on boarding the shuttle had been to smash a readout as the unfamiliar powered armor lived up to its reputation for strength. And for clumsiness in the hands of the untrained.

The station chairs were designed for use by armored or unarmored Marines, so they were hardened. The same could not be said for all the items surrounding them, and there wasn't much space in which to move. The simple fact was that a shuttle loaded with troops and supplies was always overcrowded.

The troops in the cargo bay sat packed like sardines in four rows, two back-to-back down the center of the bay, and one down either side, facing inward. The rows were composed of memory plastic cocoons, but the cocoons were thin walled to either side, so that their occupants were practically shoulder to shoulder, and each row faced another, so close that the Marines' knees intertwined. Their individual weapons and rucksacks were on their knees, piled on top of each other, and each cocoon top sprouted a combat helmet, currently configured to do service as a vac helmet for the chameleon suit of the trooper inside it.

Between a near-total inability to move their legs, the fact that the slightest movement resulted in punching a neighbor, and the fact that getting up or out required going through four layers of gear, it was no place for a claustrophobe. But at least troops in chameleon suits didn't have to worry about how to go to the bathroom. Since the suits were designed for space combat, they had all the comforts of home.

There were armored suits scattered through the cocoons as well, and halfway down the compartment the rows of troops were abruptly broken by a mass of hydrogen cylinders. The red painted battle steel ovals, each the size of an old-fashioned natural gas tank, were piled halfway to the shuttle roof and strapped down nine ways from Sunday. The shuttle might crash, a nuclear-tipped missile might detonate at point-blank range, but nothing was going to move those cylinders. Which was the point. If they kicked loose during the maneuvers of the shuttles or their mothership, the passengers might as well give up and open their suits to vacuum, because without the hydrogen in those tanks, the shuttles would never be able to make reentry.

Beyond the cylinders, which were placed just forward of the shuttle's center of gravity, was the rest of the armored squad and general cargo. In the case of this shuttle, putting the armored squad behind the cylinders, along with the cargo, which had a higher density than the troopers forward of the cylinders, balanced out the load. Since the ships were going to have to make a nearly "dead stick" atmospheric reentry, balance of the cargo was critical. But the whole setup made for terrific crowding.