March Upcountry

He stepped up onto a liana-bound pile of masonry that had probably been the wall of a house, and looked around. A quick count showed him that all of the pack beasts had made it through, most of them with bead rifle or grenade launcher-armed Marines on top. Then he took another look at the riders.

"Where," he asked with deadly calm, "is Prince Roger?"

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Bilali triggered another burst and the group of scummies disappeared behind their log. He had them pi

"Sarge," Hooker called, "you got any ammo? I'm dry."

He cursed silently. Hooker always put her rounds on target, but she always used too many of them.

"I'm about out here, too," he answered.

"I've got some," Dobrescu said. "Take 'em."

The medic had the patient fully prepped and was working on a field expedient stretcher: the trunks of two stout young saplings with the wounded private's chameleon suit stretched between them. It would be heavy and awkward and nearly impossible to get up to the city, but it was the only chance the wounded trooper had.

"Shit!" Hooker spun to the west. "I've got movement between us and the Company!"

"Calm down, Hooker," came the prince's voice. "We're coming in."

Roger was positive that he'd killed not only himself, but Matsugae and O'Casey as well. Eleanora was shaking like a leaf, but she still managed to hold up her end of the heavily-loaded standard-issue stretcher. Matsugae was smiling, as usual, as he carried the other end, but the expression was a rictus.

"Roger," the valet told him, "this is quite insane."

"You keep saying that." Roger ducked down behind a tree. "Doc, you're going to have to take the other end for Eleanora on the way back."

He gripped the butt of the grenade launcher between his arm and rib cage, stood up, and ripped out a string of fifteen grenades. The end of the string traveled upward and off target, but most of them hammered into the area where the scummies had taken cover. The shrapnel and splinters of shattered branches scourged the cowering natives like flying knives, and drove them to their feet, screaming.

While Bilali and Hooker blew their flushed targets apart, Roger ejected the mostly-used belt and picked another off the stretcher. The stretcher was covered in belts, as were his shoulders, and more of them bulged his rucksack.

"We'd better move, Doc."

"Got it!" The warrant officer dumped the munitions off the stretcher. "Bilali, Hooker, Penti, get loaded."

Roger kept an eye on the woodline beyond the smashed lane where the flar-ta had thundered through the jungle while the remnants of the fire team gathered up the ammunition the civilians had humped in to them and Dobrescu got Gelert strapped into the stretcher.

"Thank you, Sir," Bilali said. "But this is goddamn stupid."

"My blood for yours, Sergeant," the prince replied. "Why the hell should you try to save my life if I'm not willing to reciprocate?"

"Break out the armor!" Pahner shouted furiously over the general circuit. "Roger, where the hell are you?!"

"Ah," Roger said as Matsugae and Dobrescu lifted the stretcher. "Our master's voice."

Pentzikis was so nervous that she broke into giggles and put a few rounds into the woodline from the twitch.

"We're fucking dead," she giggled. "If the goddamn scummies don't kill us, Captain Pahner will!"

"I don't think so." Roger lifted another belt of grenades out of his rucksack and draped it across the top. "Personally, I refuse to die today."

"Come on, you stupid hunk of crap!"

Julian watched the power levels rise in his helmet HUD. The suit wasn't even on completely, but he could feel the crash of grenades through the heels of his armored boots.

Despreaux hooked on his gloves, working with furious haste as the crack of bead rifles got closer. A moment later came the furious blast of another string of grenades in the distance, and she knew that Roger, at least, was still alive.

"You'll make it," she said.

"I know I'll make it. But will I make it before Pahner decides to just kill us and start over with scummies as bodyguards?"

"It's not our fault Roger went haring off!" Despreaux protested, furious with the prince.

"No, but after we save ourselves, Pahner is going to kill us. We were supposed to be watching the little shit."

"Now that's not fair," the female sergeant snapped as she hooked up the gravity feed to the stutter gun. The quad-barreled bead gun hooked to an ammunition storage box on the back of the armor, but despite the mass of rounds in the box, it could still run through its ammunition in a surprising hurry. And they had only so many boxes. "Roger was trying to save a wounded Marine," she went on. "And watch your ammo."

"I will," Julian said. "And he was. But he's still a little shit. If he gets killed, I'm go

"You're up!" Despreaux made the last co

"Still waiting for the God damned computer to settle down," Julian snarled. Why the damn thing took so long to load was always a mystery to the Marines. It was worse than a pad.

"Julian?" Pahner roared from his perch on the rubble.

"Waiting for warm-up to complete, Sir!" Julian yelled back, looking around his troops. He couldn't even do his status check until the damned computer completed dumping its memory or pulling its cheek or whatever took so... so... so modder pocking long. Finally, the damned light turned green.

"Up!" He shouted, and raised one hand, thumbs up. A moment later, two more hands came up, then a third. But that was it.

"What the fuck?" He'd lost Russell earlier, but that still left nine in his squad. "Status check!"

"Red lights," Corporal Aburia reported tersely, stepping up to Cathcart and looking into his helmet. The plasma gu

"We've only got four, Sir," Julian told Pahner over the captain's private cha

"Poertena!"

"How you doin' for ammo, Behie?" Roger yelled as he laid down another string and a screen of lianas vanished in the explosions. A javelin had come from beyond that screen, and Roger had become a major proponent of peace through superior firepower. A ghastly shriek sounded even through the thunder of grenades, and something thrashed and bled in the bushes. "Fuck with a MacClintock, will you?" he yelled.

"I've got five belts left, Sir!" The grenadier popped a single round into a suspicious looking bush, exercising an economy of ammunition expenditure His Highness seemed constitutionally unable to match. "You might want to conserve your ammunition a little, Sir."

"We can conserve ammo when we're dead," he retorted. "Move, I'll cover you."

The grenadier just shook her head and darted from behind the fallen tree she'd been using for shelter. The stretcher team—the struggling doc and Matsugae, with the prince's chief of staff holding a bottle of drip fluid—was nearly twenty meters ahead of them, closely protected by the bead gu

She ran to where Hooker sheltered behind another fallen tree. They'd cursed all day long at the obstacles the passage of the flar-ta had thrown down, but now they were lifesavers.