March Upcountry

"No problem." The Marine sergeant smiled. "I've heard it before. So what's with him? He's... what's the term? Asexual?"

"Not... that, either." Kostis shook his head, and there was a thoughtful, almost sad, look in his eyes. "I haven't discussed it with him, and I don't know anyone who has. But if you want the opinion of someone who probably knows him better than most, I would say it's a matter of control, not disinterest. Precisely why he should choose to exercise that control, I don't know, but that in itself tells me quite a bit." The valet shook his head. "There are many things Roger won't discuss with most people; I think there are very few he won't discuss with me, but this is one of them."

"This is... weird," the Marine said. Her own lovers hadn't exactly been as numerous as the stars in the sky, but she wasn't counting them on the thumbs of one hand, either.

"That's my Roger," Kostas told her with a smile.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

"Looks like it's just you and me again, Pat," Roger said, patting the pack beast just below the bandages swathing its side.

Pahner had the three most heavily injured flar-ta, shorn of the company's supplies, breaking trail. The pack beasts' individual reactions to the ambush had been remarkably variable. Most of them had run away from the fire and confusion of the attack, but two of them—the one Roger had coincidentally been riding and one in Third Platoon's sector—had charged the attacking Kranolta. For obvious reasons, these particularly aggressive beasts were two of the three breaking trail.

Roger, who'd decided that near a flar-ta was the place to be in an ambush, was walking beside "his." She reminded him of a "Patricia" he'd known in boarding school, and the name the mahouts gave her was nearly unpronounceable, toot or no toot. So "Pat" it was.

The company had been hit three more times, but not only had the additional ambushes been on a smaller scale, the wider path being forged by the trio of pack beasts had prevented the Mardukans from surprising them at such close quarters. Coupled with Pahner's decision to beef up his point team and push it further forward, the humans had escaped the attacks unscathed.

It would be nice if anyone had expected that to remain the case.

According to Cord, they were nearing the region Voitan had dominated in his father's day. Thus far they'd seen no sign of civilization, but neither had there been any sign of a Kranolta concentration against them, and the company was inclined to take the good with the bad.

Roger saw one of the point-guards raise a hand and drop to one knee. The mahouts drew the pack beasts to a stop instantly in response, and the prince trotted forward as the column accordioned behind them.

Dogzard looked up from where she'd been riding on Patty's rump. The dog-lizard raised her striped head as she sniffed the air and hissed. Matsugae wasn't cooking, and nothing was trying to eat anyone, so she jumped off her perch and followed Roger.

The point, Lance Corporal Kane from Third Platoon, was stopped at the lip of a marsh. The bank was short, barely a quarter of a meter of bare dirt, and then there was only water, covered with weeds.

The vista stretching into the distance wasn't encouraging. The swamp was choked with fallen trees and dead vines, and the live vegetation was gray and weirdly shaped, clearly different from the normal jungle foliage. Roger looked around, then walked over to a sapling and lopped it off with the sword he'd taken to carrying slung over his back.

He was probing the marsh with his stick while Dogzard sniffed at the water disdainfully when Pahner walked up behind him.

"You know, Your Highness," the captain said dryly, "sometimes there are things that eat people at the fringe of water like this." The Marine seemed to have at least partially forgiven Roger for blasting the company with a stick of grenades, but the prince was still inclined to watch his tongue with rather more care than usual.

"Yes, there are," he agreed. "And I've hunted most of them. This isn't exactly shallow," he continued, withdrawing the chopped off sapling and examining the sticky mud which coated the first meter of its length. A bubble of foul-smelling gas followed the probe to the surface.

"Or solid," he observed with a choking cough.

The company had spread out in a perimeter, and seeing that there was no immediate threat, Kosutic had wandered up behind Pahner. She looked at the black, tarry goo clinging to the stick, then at the swamp, and laughed.

"It looks like... the Mohinga," she a

"Oh, no!" Pahner said, with an uncharacteristic belly laugh. "Not... the Mohiiinga!"

"What?" Roger tossed the sapling into the swamp. "I don't get the joke."

Dogzard watched the stick land and considered going after it. But only briefly. She sniffed at the water, hissed at the smell, and decided that discretion was the better part of getting in there. Balked of any possibility of "fetch the stick," she looked up at the humans speculatively. None of them seemed to be up to anything interesting, though, so she trundled back to the flar-ta with her thickening tail waggling behind her.

"It's a Marine joke," Kosutic told the prince with a smile. "There's a training area in the Centralia Provinces on Earth, a jungle training center. It has a swamp that I swear the Incas must have used to kill their sacrifices. It's been drained a couple of times in the last few thousand years, but it always ends up back in the military's hands. It's called—"

"The Mohiiinga. I got that much."

"It's a real ball-buster, Your Highness," Pahner said with a faint smile. "When we'd get Raider units that were, shall we say... a little more arrogant than they should have been, we'd set up a land navigation course through the Mohinga. Without electronic aids." His smile grew, and his chuckle sounded positively evil. "They quite often ended up calling for a shuttle lift out after a couple of days of wandering around in circles."

"You were a JTC instructor, Sir?" Kosutic sounded surprised.

"Sergeant Major, the only thing I haven't instructed in this man's Marine Corps is Basic Rifle Marksmanship, and that was only because I skated out of it." Pahner gri

"All paths lead into the Mohiiinga," Kosutic quoted with horrified, quavering relish, "but... none lead ooout!"

"I won't say I wrote that speech," Pahner said with another chuckle, "because it was old when I got there. But I did add a few frills. And, speaking of the Mohinga..." The captain looked around and shook his head. "I certainly hope we can go around this one."

Cord walked up to look at the swamp as well, then walked over to where Roger and his group stood laughing in the human way. It was apparent that they didn't realize the full import of the marsh.

"Roger," he said with a human-style nod. "Captain Pahner. Sergeant Major Kosutic."

"D'Nal Cord," Roger replied with an answering nod. "Is there a way around this? I know it's been some time since you came this way, but do you remember?"

"I remember very clearly," the old shaman said, "and this wasn't here in my father's day. The fields of Voitan and H'Nar stretched outward through this region. But as I recall, they had been drained from a swamp that surrounded the Hurtan River." The shaman clapped his false hands in regret. "I fear that this may fill the valley of Voitan. It may stretch all the way to T'an K'tass."