March Upcountry

Despreaux walked over to him, and he nodded to her.

"Sergeant," he said, and she nodded back and tossed him the small object in her hand.

"Nice folks."

Roger caught the item and blanched. It was a very small Mardukan skull, one side crushed. The horns were barely buds.

"There's a big pile of bones over in the bastion," she continued. "That was part of it. It looks like the defenders made some sort of stand."

Roger looked over the wall at the crumbled city below. He had enough experience now to imagine the horrors the castle's defenders would have observed as the rest of their city went up in roaring flame and massacre. And to imagine their despair as the gate crumbled and the Kranolta barbarians poured through... .

"I'm not really very happy with these fellows," he said, setting the skull gently on the parapet.

"I've seen worse," Despreaux said coldly. "I made the drop on Jurgen. Pardon me if I'm humanocentric, but... it was worse."

"Jurgen?" Roger couldn't place the name.

Despreaux's sculpted profile hardened, and a muscle in her jaw twitched.

"No place that mattered, Your Highness. Just a stinking little fringe world. Bunch of dirt-poor colonists, and a single town. A pirate ship dropped in for a visit. It was a particularly unpleasant bunch. By the time we got there, the pirates were long gone. The results weren't."

"Oh," Roger said. The attacks on border worlds were so common that they hardly ever made the news in the Home Regions. "I'm sorry."

"Nothing for you to be sorry about, Your Highness. Just something to remember; there's bad guys out there all the time. The only people who usually see them are the Fleet and the Marines. But when things get screwed up enough, this isn't so uncommon. The barbs are always at the door."

She touched the skull gently, then gave him another cool nod and walked back to where her squad was digging in. Roger continued looking out over the city, stroking the skull with a thumb, until Pahner walked up.

"How's it going, Lieutenant?"

"Just fine... Sir," Roger said distractedly, still gazing out over murdered Voitan. "Captain, can I say something as 'His Highness' instead of 'Lieutenant'?"

"Certainly," Pahner said with a smile. "Your Highness."

"I don't think it would be a good idea to leave an existing force in our rear, do you?"

"You're talking about the Kranolta?" Pahner glanced at the skull.

"Yes, Captain. How are we fixed for power for the suits?"

"Well," Pahner grimaced, "since we only have four of them up, not bad. Days and days with just four of them. But we need to get the rest up to have a hope in hell of taking the spaceport."

"But we have enough for a pursuit, don't we?"

"Certainly." Pahner nodded. "And you have a point about leaving remnants in our rear. I don't want to have to fight off ambushes from here to the next city-state."

"Good." Roger turned and looked the captain in the eye. "I don't think that the cause of civilization on this world would be advanced by leaving a single Kranolta alive, Captain. I would prefer that that not be the case after tomorrow."

Pahner regarded him steadily, then nodded.

"So would I, Your Highness. So would I. I think tomorrow we'll be building a samadh. To the honor of the Corps."

CHAPTER FORTY

Roger looked out from the citadel wall as the first overcast light of dawn stole across the dead, jungle-devoured cityscape.

The company had been up for nearly an hour, getting breakfast and preparing for these first moments of early morning light. This time, Before Morning Nautical Twilight, had been considered the most dangerous time of all for mille

The Marines' answer was the same one armies had used for centuries: get up well before time and be awake and alert when the moment of "stand to" came. Naturally, as had also been the case for centuries, there were some complainers.

Roger wasn't one of them. He'd been up for hours the previous night, reviewing his actions of the day before and worrying about what was to come. For all that he'd been fighting monsters and the occasional skirmish or ambush all the way across the continent, this would be his first true battle. Today the Kranolta would come to kill the company, and someone would lose, and someone would win. Some of them would die, and some would live. While it seemed likely that casualties would be light, there was still a risk. There was even a risk that the humans would lose, and then word of the treachery aboard the DeGlopper would never reach Earth. Roger had smiled at himself when he reached that point in his ruminations. It was amusing to realize that the main thing he thought about was that the word wouldn't get back to his mother, not that he himself would be dead.

Sergeant Major Kosutic padded up silently behind him and leaned on the lip of the adjoining embrasure.

"Still quiet," she said, and glanced over at Cord who stood silently at Roger's back. Since the events of the day before, the old shaman had attached himself firmly to his "master," and was rarely to be found more than five meters away.

The sergeant major had been up from time to time the night before. Not worried, just ru

"I wish we had some razor wire," she said.

"Do you think it will come to that?" Roger asked in surprise. "They've only got spears; we have plasma ca

"Your Highness—I mean, Lieutenant," Kosutic said with a smile, "there's an old story, probably a space story, about a general and a captain. They were fighting some indigs and an air car came in with a spear sticking out of the side. The captain laughed and asked how they could lose against people armed only with spears. But the general looked at the captain and asked how she thought they could win against people willing to fight an air car with only a spear."

"And the moral is?" Roger asked politely.

"The moral, Lieutenant, is that there is no such thing as a deadly weapon. There are only deadly people, and the Kranolta—" her hand waved over the battlements at the broken city "—are fairly deadly."

Roger nodded and looked around, then back into the sergeant major's eyes.

"Are we?" he asked quietly.

"Oh, yeah," Kosutic said. "Nobody who gets through RIP is a slacker in a firefight. But... there's go

"We'll get the job done, Sergeant Major," the prince said confidently.

"Yeah." Kosutic looked at the sword hilt jutting up over his shoulder. "I suppose we will."

Captain Pahner strolled up, checking the positions, and looked out at the mists curling around the ruined city.

"Beautiful morning, fellas," he remarked, and Roger chuckled.

"It'd be even more beautiful if half 'my' platoon were in armor, Captain. What's the status?"

"Well," Pahner said with a grimace, "it isn't pretty, 'Lieutenant.' Poertena found the fault, which is a mold eating the contacts coating of the joint power conduits. You can't remove the coating; it's a dissimilar metallic contact. The problem seems to be in a new 'improved' version."