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 announced in hushed, hollow tones which would have done a professional teller of horror stories proud.

"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 grinned at the NCO. Although the marksmanship course was critical to developing Marines, it was also one of the most boring and repetitive training posts in the Corps.

"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."

"And how far is that?" Kosutic asked.

"Days to the south," Cord replied. "Even weeks."

"And north?" Pahner asked, looking at the swamp and no longer chuckling.

"It stretches as far north as I have knowledge of," the Mardukan said. "The region to the north, even in the days of Voitan, was held by the Kranolta, and they didn't permit caravans through their lands."

"So," Roger said dubiously, "we have to make a choice between going several weeks out of our way to the south, getting hit by the Kranolta the whole way. Or we can go north, directly into their backyard. Or we can try to navigate the swamp."

"Well, your Marines and my people may have some problems," Cord admitted. "But not the flar-ta. They can easily make it through a swamp no deeper than this."

"Really?" It was Kosutic's turn to sound doubtful. "That thing that was chasing you was in a desert. These things—" she jerked a thumb over her shoulder at Patricia "—don't look that different."

"The flar-ta and the flar-ke are found everywhere," Cord pointed out. "They prefer the high, dry regions because of the absence of atul-grack, but they can be found in swamps as well."

Pahner turned and looked at D'Len Pah. The chief mahout had taken over Pat when her original mahout was killed in the first ambush, and now waited patiently for the humans to make up their minds.

"Do you think the pack beasts can cross this, Pah?" the captain asked skeptically.

"Certainly," the mahout said with a grunt of laughter. "Is that what you've been jawing about?"

He tapped the beast in a crease in the armor just behind her massive head shield to get her in gear, and the flar-ta whuffled forward. She moaned dolefully when she saw the black muck, but she stepped into it anyway.

The pack beast's feet each consisted of four toes with leathery bases. They were equipped with heavy digging claws, and their pads were broad and fleshy. They were also webbed, and now Patricia spread her toes wide, more than tripling the square area of her foot. That foot sank into the sloppy mud but found "solid" footing well before the belly of the creature touched the water.

"Hmmm." Roger watched thoughtfully. "Can she move out into the swamp?"

Pah prodded again, and the beast grumbled but moved out into the black water. Obviously, she was as at home in the swamp as in the jungle, but a moment later she burbled and started to back up hastily as a "V" ripple started towards her from deeper in the swamp.

Roger picked up his rifle from where he'd leaned it against a tree and flipped it off safe. Beads from Marine rifles started bouncing off the surface as the panicking beast lumbered back up out of the water, but the prince only drew a breath and led the approaching ripple.

Pahner flicked the selector switch on his bead rifle to armor-piercing as he realized that the lighter ceramic beads were simply skipping off the water, but just as he was about to fire, Roger's big rifle boomed, and the ripple turned into a whitewater of convulsions. The creature jerking and flopping at the center of the maelstrom was longer and narrower than a damnbeast but otherwise similar, with the same mucus-covered skin as a scummy. The green and black-striped beast thrashed a few more times as the huge hole blown through its shoulder and neck bled out, then rolled over to float belly-up on the surface.

"Dinner," Roger said calmly, jacking another round into the chamber.

"Well," Pahner observed with a sniff, "that's half the problem solved. We'll pile the rucksacks on the beasts and follow them through the swamp."

"It will make Kranolta attacks less likely, as well," Cord said ruminatively as the mahouts waded into the water to retrieve the kill. "Such swamps are useless to the forest people. They won't be as at home there as in the forest, and they'll never expect us to cross it here. But," he continued, gesturing into the swamp with his spear, "somewhere in there is the Hurtan River. And that the flar-ta will be unable to cross."

"We'll build that bridge when we come to it," Kosutic said with a laugh. "First, we have to deal with—"

"The Mohiiinga," Roger and Pahner chorused.

Poertena slipped and went under for a moment before Denat could pull him, puffing and spluttering, to his feet. The armorer spat out foul-tasting water, but he'd still managed to keep his bead rifle from going under.

"T'anks, Denat," he began, then broke off as his helmet started to pop and hiss.

"Shit!" He tore off the helmet as the earphones began to howl. "Modderpockers are suppose a be waterproof," he grumped. He'd deal with it later.

The company had been slogging through the waist- to chest-high swamp all the long Mardukan afternoon. The going was slow and hard, with the black mud sucking at their boots and chameleon suits, and hidden roots and fallen branches grabbing at their ankles. Most of them were coated in muck from top to bottom after repeated falls.

The only exceptions were the marksmen sitting on the flar-ta.

"Look at t'at stuck up prig sittin' up there," Poertena grumbled, glaring at the prince who was on the lead pack beast.

"You'd be up there, too," Despreaux said, moving forward to check on her Bravo Team, "if, of course, you could shoot as well as he can."

"Rub it in," the armorer muttered. "An' watch where you step. One o' these modderpocker swamp-beast eat you!"

Roger's head twitched to the right, tracking a ripple in the water, but it was small and heading away. The ride wasn't much different from normal, although it was perhaps a tad smoother. The flar-ta crushed most of the fallen limbs or trees they encountered without even breaking stride.

The swamp's flora ran to smaller species than in the jungle, and many of those he'd seen seemed relatively young. Cord had indicated that these areas had been fields in his father's day, so perhaps that explained their lack of age. Which, in turn, might explain their smaller size, now that he thought about it.

He turned to look behind him at the Marines sliding through the swamp and patted the snoring Dogzard on her head. The poor bastards were covered in the thick black mud and looked as worn and dragged as he'd ever seen them. The necessity of holding their rifles up out of the muck and pushing their way through it was obviously telling on them. It was particularly hard on the grenadiers, who had their boxes and bandoliers of grenades piled on their heads and shoulders with the heavy grenade launchers held up out of the slop. All in all, it made him feel like a shit to be sitting on Patricia's back.

The only consolation was that he'd been contributing. The caravan had attracted a host of carnivores as it passed through the swamp, and the Marines' bead rifles, even when switched to the heavier tungsten-cored armor piercing rounds, weren't as effective in the water as his big 11-millimeter magnum "smoke-pole." The lower velocity, heavier slugs punched into the water, rather than tending to come apart on the surface.

But he wasn't happy about it, especially with night coming on.

Pahner moved forward, pushing against the drag of the swamp as he responded to a call from the lead mahouts. He sloshed up alongside, and D'Len Pah looked down from the slow-moving reptiloid and pointed his goad stick in the direction of the descending sun.

"We must rest the beasts soon," he said. "And it will be very difficult to move in the dark."

Pahner had recognized the inevitability an hour before. There was no end to the swamp in sight, and apparently no island-forming uplands. And even if there'd been islands, they would have been inhabited by something.

"Agreed," he said. "We're going to have to stop somewhere."

"And we need to unload the packs," the mahout said. "The flar-ta will sleep standing up, but we must unload them. Otherwise, they will be useless tomorrow."

Pahner looked around and shook his head in resignation. It was the same wet, weird vista as it had been for the last few hours, so he supposed here was as good as anywhere.

"Okay, hold up here. I'll go get started on unloading them."

"We can't just dump the stuff in the swamp," Roger said. It was meant as an observation, but his tone made it sound like a protest.

"I know that, Your Highness," Pahner said testily. Just when the prince started to get a grip, he said the wrong thing at the wrong time. "We're not going to dump it in the swamp."

"Going vertical?" Lieutenant Gulyas asked. Because he was a couple of months senior to Jasco, he'd taken over as XO when Sawato was killed, turning his platoon over to Staff Sergeant Hazheir, its senior surviving NCO. It didn't really require more. Second Platoon had been hit hard, both in the ambush and before, and was already down to half its original complement.

"Yep," Pahner responded, looking up. The trees in the area weren't the giants of the rain forest they'd traveled under for weeks. They were lower, more like large cypresses, with branches that spread out to choke the light and red vinelike projections that reached up from their roots to search for oxygen.

"Start setting up slings. We'll sling the armor off one piece at a time, then sling the rest of the gear in bundles." The company had plenty of issue climbing-rope. The lines were rated to support an eighty-ton tank, but the forty-meter length that each team leader carried weighed less than a kilo. There was more than enough to lift all the gear.

"What about the troops?" Roger asked. "Where are they going to sleep?"

"Well, that's the tough part, Your Highness," Kosutic told him with a grin. "This is how you separate the Marines from the goats."

"Besides the usual method—with a crowbar," Gulyas said, completing a joke as old as armies.

"T'is really suck." Poertena didn't even bother to try to get comfortable.

"Oh, it's not all that bad," Julian said as he adjusted the strap across his chest. The ebullient NCO was coated from head to toe in black, stinking mud, and exhausted from the day's travel, so his manic grin had to be false. "It could be worse."

"How?" Poertena demanded, adjusting his own rope. The two Marines, along with the rest of the company, were tied with their backs to trees. Since they had no choice but to sleep on their feet, the ropes around them were designed to keep them from slipping down into the chest-deep muck. As tired as they were, there was a distinct possibility that they wouldn't wake up if they did.

"Well," Julian replied thoughtfully as the skies opened up in a typical Mardukan deluge, "something could be trying to eat us."

Pahner had the sentries walking the perimeter and shining red flashlights on each individual. It was hoped that a combination of the movement and the light would drive off the vampire moths. Of course, there were also the swamp beasts to worry about, and it was always possible that movement and light would attract them, but there wasn't a great deal he could do about that.

All in all, it looked like being a very bad night for the Marines.

"No, Kostas," Roger said, shaking his head at the item Matsugae had produced. "You use it."

"I'm fine, Your Highness," the valet said with a tired smile. The normally dapper servant was covered in black slime. "Really. You shouldn't sleep in this muck, Sir. It's not right."

"Kostas," Roger said, adjusting his chest rope so that he could keep his rifle out of the muck but still get to it quickly, "this is an order. You will take that hammock and sling it somewhere and then climb into it. You will sleep the entire night in it. And you will get some goddamned rest. I'm going to be on the back on that damned pack beast again tomorrow, and you won't, so I can damned well spend a night sitting up. God knows I've seen enough `white nights' carousing. One more won't kill me."

Matsugae touched Roger on the shoulder and turned away so that the prince wouldn't see the tears in his eyes. Without even realizing it, Roger had started to grow up. Finally.

"Now that was something I never thought I'd see," Kosutic said quietly.

The sergeant major had managed to rig a line so that she was out of the water, dangling in her combat harness. She didn't know how long she could manage it, but for the time being at least she was off her legs. If she did sleep, she figured she was going to look like something from a bad horror holovid: a dead body dangling on a meat hook.

"Yep," Pahner said, just as quietly. He'd slung himself against a tree like the rest of the company. He had a hammock packed as well, but he'd bundled O'Casey into it. There was no way he was going to use it unless every member of the company had one. And Roger, apparently without prompting, had come to the same decision.

Amazing.