March Upcountry

"She can open and be driving an air car she's never seen as fast as you can open your own and drive away with a key," Kosutic said seriously. "If you think that's not a skill the Empress might need someday, you're sadly mistaken."

"She is also utterly loyal to the Empress," Pahner told the chief of staff. "She actually has one of the most stable loyalty indexes I've ever seen. Better than yours, I might add, Ms. O'Casey. The Marines took her out of a hellish existence and gave her back her honor and purpose. She's somehow transferred that... redemption to the person of the Empress. She's definitely one of the ones who's going to end up in Gold."

"How strange," the academic murmured. She felt as if she'd stepped through the ancient Alice's looking glass.

"So what's your skill, Captain?" Roger asked.

"Ah, well." The CO smiled as he leaned back in the camp chair. "They make exceptions for captains."

"He's taught himself to be a pretty fair machinist, and he can rebuild an air car from the ground up," Kosutic said with a grin at the captain. "You only thought they made an exception for you. He also does decent interior work."

"Hmph! Better than yours."

"What is yours, Sergeant Major?" O'Casey asked after a moment had passed and it was obvious that the sergeant major wasn't going to be forthcoming.

"Well, the main one is..." Kosutic paused and glared balefully at Pahner "... knitting."

"Knitting?" Roger looked at the grim-faced warrior, unable to keep the laugh completely out of his voice. "Knitting? Really?"

"Yes. I like it, okay?"

"It just seems so..."

"Feminine?" O'Casey suggested.

"Well, yeah," the prince admitted.

"Okay, okay." Pahner grin. "Let me point out that it's not just knitting. The Sergeant Major is from Armagh. She can take a hunk of wool, or anything similar, and make you an entire suit, given time."

"Oh," Roger said. The planet Armagh was a slow-boat colony of primarily Irish descent. Like many slow-boat colonies, it had backslid after reaching its destination and stabilized at a preindustrial technology level before the arrival of the tu

"Hey, it's not that bad," Kosutic protested. "You're safer in downtown New Belfast than you are walking around in Imperial City. Just... stay out of certain pubs."

"Some other time, I'll ask you what it was like being a priestess of the Fallen One on Armagh. Everywhere I turn there are fascinating stories like this," Roger said. "It's like taking off blinders." He yawned and patted Dogzard on the head. "Get up, you ugly beast." The sauroid lifted her red- and black-striped head off his lap with a disturbed hiss and headed for the tent door. "Folks, I'm exhausted. I'm for bed."

"Yes," Pahner said, standing up. "Long day tomorrow. We should all rest."

"Tomorrow," Roger said, getting up to follow Dogzard.

"Tomorrow," O'Casey said.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

"We have found the nest of the basik outlanders!" Danal Far shouted. "Tomorrow we shall sweep down upon them and rid our lands of them forever! This land is ours!"

The shaman clan-chief of the Kranolta raised his spear in triumph, and the horns of defeated enemies clattered against the steel shaft. It had been long years since the Kranolta gathered in anything like the numbers in this valley. The crushing of the invasion by these "humans" would be the high point of his time as clan-chief.

"This land is ours!" the clan gathering echoed with a blare of horns. Many of them dated from the fall of Voitan, when the horns of champions had been common.

"I wish to speak!"

The statement took no one by surprise, and Danal Far grunted silently in laughter as the limping warrior stepped to the front. Let the young fool say his piece.

Puvin Eske was now the "chief" of the Vum Dee tribe of the Kranolta. As such, he was the representative of the tribe which had supplied the majority of the mercenaries to the N'Jaa of Q'Nkok. But now his tribe consisted only of many hungry females and a handful of survivors of their ambush of the human caravan. The tribe would be gone before the next full moon; the jungle and its competitors would see to that.

Puvin Eske was half the age of most of the leaders gathered for the council. Many of them had participated in the battles to take Voitan, long, long ago, and they remembered those days of high glory for the clan clearly. Few of them, however, saw the truth of the clan as it was, despite their complaints over the loss of spirit among their younger warriors.

"We face a grave decision," the young chieftain said. Only a few days before, he would have been far too hesitant, too aware of his youth, to speak in opposition to the clan elders. Now he'd looked into the face of Hell. After fighting Imperial Marines, no circle of weak, old men would bother him. "Our clan, despite its high standing, has faltered in my years. Every year, we have become fewer and fewer, despite the fertile lands we took from Voitan—"

"What is this 'we,' child?" one of the elders interrupted in a scoffing tone. "You weren't even a thought in your weakling father's head when Voitan fell!"

There were rough chuckles at the jest, but Danal Far raised his Spear of Honor to call for order.

"Let the 'chief' speak," the old shaman said. "Let the words be spoken in public, not in the darkness at the back of huts."

"I asked," the scarred and burned young chief continued, "are we not fewer? And the answer is, 'Yes, we are.' And I tell you this: the reason we are fewer is the fall of Voitan. We lost many, many of the host in the battle against Voitan. Now we recover slowly. Indeed, we seem to be faltering rather than recovering. I had many playmates in my years, but my son plays alone.

"Now the Vum Dee and Cus Mem are a memory. We brought the pride of our tribe against these 'humans,' and the warriors of Cus Mem joined us. We attacked them all unawares, with no warning."

He had, in fact, argued with his own father against the decision to attack. The ru

"Yes, we surprised them," he continued, "yet still we lost a set of sets while the humans might have lost a hand pair."

The Kranolta's problems, although Puvin Eske didn't know it, were dispersion and death rate. The native sophonts had only two reproductive periods per Mardukan year. With the dispersion of the Kranolta to fill a huge hunting area very sparsely, the males of the tribe had been able to range at will in their hunting quests. Unfortunately, this meant that they weren't always around brooder females when their seed quickened.

Coupled with these missed opportunities to breed were the tremendous casualties taken in capturing Voitan. A single male could only implant a single female with eggs during mating season. With the multiple "pups" that this normally produced and a bia