Heirs of Empire

Tamman gazed back for several seconds while he wrestled with his own emotions. Damn it, he had seen this coming, and Harry had been his friend long before she’d become his lover! They’d both known the forced intimacy of their battleship-lifeboat was what had made them lovers, and he’d known it was going to end someday, yet for just an instant he felt a terrible, burning envy of Sean and Sandy.

But then he shook himself and drew a deep breath.

“I see,” he said again, holding out his hand, and Stomald took it with only the briefest hesitation. “I won’t pretend it does great things for my self-image, Stomald, but Harry’s always been her own person. And, much as it might pain me to admit it, you’re a pretty decent fellow yourself.” The priest smiled hesitantly, and Tamman chuckled. “It’s not as if I haven’t seen it coming, either,” he said more cheerfully. “Of course, she couldn’t tell you what she felt, but the way she’s talked about you to the rest of us—!”

“Tamman!” Harriet protested with a gurgle of laughter, and Stomald turned bright red for just an instant before he laughed.

“She’s been watching you like a kinokha stalking a shemaq for weeks,” Tamman said wickedly, and watched both of them blush, amazed that he could feel such genuinely unbitter pleasure in teasing Harriet.

“You’re riding for a fall, Tamman!” she warned, shaking a fist at him, and he laughed. Then she lowered her fist and stepped closer. She put her arms around him and hugged him tightly. “But you’re a pretty decent fellow yourself,” she whispered in his ear.

“Of course I am,” he agreed, and put his own arm around her, then looked back at Stomald. “You don’t need them, but you have my blessings, Stomald. And if you need a groomsman—?”

“I—” Stomald began, then stopped, blushed even brighter, and looked at Harriet appealingly.

“I think you’re getting a bit ahead of yourself,” she told Tamman, “but assuming we all get out of this in one piece and I get him home to Mom and Dad, we might just take you up on that.”

“Shit!”

No one understood the English expletive, but Sean’s officers understood the tone. All of them were splashed from head to toe in mud, and Sean stood in cold, thigh-deep water that rose nearly to the Pardalians’ waists. The rain had stopped, but the air was almost unbearably humid, and swarms of what passed for gnats whined about their ears. The column stretched out behind them, for Sean was leading the way now, since his implant sensors made it far easier for him to pick a route through the swamp—or would have if there’d been a way through it, he thought savagely.

He inhaled and made himself calm down before he opened his mouth again, then turned to his staff.

“We’ll have to backtrack,” he said grimly. “The bottom drops off ahead, and there’s some kind of quicksand to the right. We’ll have to cut further north.”

Tibold said nothing, but his mouth tightened, and Sean understood. Their original plans had called for passing the column’s head through the swamp in ten or twelve hours, and so far they’d been slogging around in it for over twenty. What had seemed a relatively simple, if unpleasant, task on the map had become something very different, and it was all his own fault. He had the best reco

“All right,” he said finally, sighing. “We won’t get anywhere standing here looking at the mud.” He thought for a few moments, calling up the map he’d stored in his implant computers on the way through, then nodded sharply. “Remember where we stopped for lunch?” he asked Tibold.

“Yes, My Lord.”

“All right. There was a spit of solider ground ru

“At once, My Lord,” Tibold agreed, and turned to slosh back along the halted column while Sean activated his com.

“Sandy?” he subvocalized.

“Yes, Sean?” She was trying to hide her own anxiety, he thought, and made his own tone lighter.

“We’re go

“I know. I had a remote tuned in.”

“In that case, you know where we’re headed, and I’m one dumb asshole not to have had you checking route for us already.” He sighed. “Tune up your sensors and see if you can map us a way through this slop.”

“I’m already working on it,” she said, “but, Sean, I don’t see a fast way through it.”

“How bad is it?”

“From what I can see, it’s going to take at least another full day and a half,” she said in a small, most un-Sandy-like voice.

“Great. Just fucking great!” Sean felt her flinch and shook his head quickly, knowing she was watching him through her remotes. “Sorry,” he said penitently. “I’m not pissed at you; I’m pissed at me. There’s no excuse for this kind of screwup.”

“No one else thought of it, either, Sean,” she pointed out in his defense, and he snorted.

“Doesn’t make me feel any better,” he growled, then sighed. “Well, I guess standing around pissing and moaning won’t make it any better, either. Let’s get this show back on the road—such as it is!”

He turned to slog off in Tibold’s wake, and the swarming clouds of gnats whined about his ears.

Even Sandy’s estimate turned out to have been overly optimistic. What Sean and Tibold had envisioned as a twelve-hour maneuver consumed over three of Pardal’s twenty-nine-hour days, and it was an exhausted, sodden, mud-spattered column of infantry that finally crawled out of the swamp proper into the merely “soft” ground south of it. Thank God Tibold had warned him against even trying to bring artillery through that muck, Sean thought wearily. Their five hundred dragoons had lost a quarter of their branahlks, and Lord only knew what would have happened to nioharqs. Given his druthers, he decided, he’d take Ha

Under the circumstances, he’d eased the “no miracles” rule, and Sandy and Harry had been busy using cutters to bring in fresh food. The cargo remotes had stacked it neatly to await his column’s arrival, and the troops gave a weary cheer as they saw it. There was even a little wood for fires, and the company cooks quickly got down to business.

“Sean?”

He turned and flashed a mud-spattered smile as Sandy walked out of the gathering evening. His officers and men saw her as well, and she waved to them as a soft, wordless murmur of thanks rose from them. She made a shooing gesture at the waiting rations, and the troops gri

“ ’Ow can you tell she’s an angel?” he murmured. ” ’Cause she’s not covered wi’ shit loike the rest of us!” he answered himself.

“Very fu

“The reinforcing column got on the road a day sooner than Ortak expected,” she said softly in English, “and it’s moving faster than we expected. They’ll reach Malz within four or five days.”

“Wi—?” Sean stared at her, then clamped his teeth hard. “And just why,” he asked after a moment, “is this the first I’m hearing of this?”