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 runners who'd brought the tale of the fall of the House of N'Jaa had also brought word of the terror of the humans' weapons. Hearing that, and fearing for the tribe in its already crippled state, the young warrior had argued against taking losses among the flower of their warriors, but his arguments had been rejected.

"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 biannual reproduction, normal death rates were taken care of. But the death rate the Kranolta had suffered in capturing the city hadn't been anything like "normal," and despite the increase in hunting range, child death rates hadn't declined since.

All of which meant that the clan was recovering very slowly, if at all, from its "victory."

"If we lose the greater part of the clan's warriors to these terrible weapons," Eske continued, holding up an arm cooked by plasma fire, "we shall be ended as a clan. Some few tribes might survive, but even this I doubt."

"Who shall speak to this?" Danal Far asked. He himself would have spoken against it, but an image of impartiality was important. Besides, the answer was a massed roar, and he pointed to one of the other veterans of Voitan. Let him put the young puppy in his place

"The only thing that the loss of Vum Dee shows is that they were and are gutless cowards, as proven by these words!" Gretis Xus shouted. The old warrior limped forward on painful scars won not just in the destruction of Voitan but in constant skirmishing against the other city-states that bordered his tribe. "Vum Dee has sat on its behind since the fall of Voitan. But the Dum Kai have continued to battle against the shit-sitters. We are not so weak and gutless as to accept this intrusion. I say that Vum Dee is no longer true Kranolta!"

Xus' words drew a roar of approval, not just from the gathered tribe chiefs, but from the ring of warriors behind them. Puvin Eske heard it, and bent his head in sorrow.

"I have spoken my words. As I spoke them to my father, who is no more. Puvin Shee, who was the first over the walls of Voitan; who wore the horns of the King of Voitan on his belt. And who I saw cut in half before my eyes by fire from warriors it was nearly impossible to see."

He raised his head and regarded the other tribes.

"Vum Dee will be eaten soon enough by other tribes and the jungle. But if the Kranolta go forth to battle the humans, so also shall the rest of the Kranolta be eaten. You say the Vum Dee, whose fathers led the Kranolta over the walls of Voitan, whose warriors were the spear of the Kranolta all the way out of our ancient tribal lands, whose own flesh was the clan-chief of the Kranolta for the war against Voitan, are not true Kranolta? Very well. Perhaps it is true. But tell me this five days hence, for then it shall indeed be true. For five days hence, there shall be no Kranolta!"

The warrior turned and walked out of the circle of hostile faces. Many glared, but none tried to stop him. None would dare even now to touch a chief at the clan meeting. Let them wait the days.

Danal Far took center place again as the Vum Dee chief and his decimated retinue left the circle.

"Are there any other objections?" he asked. "Seeing none, I call for an attack against these humans as soon as we can reach them. They will move out on the morrow, probably for Voitan, but we shall intercept them before they reach there. They move slowly through the jungle, and it will be easy. They are only shit-sitters, after all."

"Move!"

Julian shouldered the private aside, hit the sixth setting on his multitool, held it at arm's length as it flicked into a 130-centimeter blade, and grunted with effort as he brought the mono-machete down on the thick liana. The girder-thick vine parted with a crack and swung towards him, and he grunted again as it hit him in the stomach—then yelled in fear as he had to roll out of the way of a descending pack beast paw.

The point gave him a glance of thanks and hurried to get in front of the pack beast again.

The company moved through the jungle at a trot. It was virtually impossible to maintain that pace, but they were doing it anyway. For the most part, the flar-ta were breaking trail, but occasional larger obstacles had to be cleared the hard way. That meant the point squads were kept busy hacking through the thicker lianas and finding ways around the occasional deep valleys which had begun to appear, none of which was designed to make people who'd survived the first ambush happy at the distraction from keeping an eye out for future ambushes.

The ground was rising towards the hills they had glimpsed by the river. Somewhere on the edge of that range of low mountains were the ruins of the city of Voitan, perched, according to reports, on the shoulder of a small peak. And somewhere—either at those ruins, or in the jungle—they were going to be hit again by the Kranolta. Better for it to be in the ruins, where there were places to defend, than in these open, defenseless woods.

Roger leapt a small fallen trunk that hadn't yet been smashed to splinters by the caravan of flar-ta and helped the squad leader to his feet.

"No lying down on the job, Julian," he said, and continued on without a pause. Cord, who'd just caught up with the prince, clapped his hands in frustration and trotted off in pursuit.

Julian wasn't sure if the prince was joking or not. The tone had been dead serious, but it could have been a very dry joke. Very dry.

The NCO shrugged and reformatted his multitool to fit into its pouch. If they survived, he might figure it out; if they didn't, it wouldn't matter anyway.

Pahner nodded to himself as his toot flashed a time alert.

"Second Platoon, onto the pack beasts. First Platoon, point!"

Humans, especially Marines, could almost certainly have outrun the flar-ta over time and in open terrain. In the jungle, it would have been a toss-up, at best. The company already had several badly sprained or broken ankles, and the strain of jumping logs and dodging limbs slowed them badly.

But the Marines got a breather by cycling the platoons onto and off of the big beasts. It was hard on the flar-ta, and Pahner hadn't needed the mahouts to tell him that they would have to rest for at least a couple of days when they reached Voitan, but it was the only way to ensure that the troops would be in any reasonable sort of shape if it dropped into the pot.

Pahner saw the prince pull himself up the ropes onto the flar-ta he'd christened Patty, and nodded. Roger had stated that for purposes of rotation he was in Second Platoon, and he'd apparently stuck to that. Which was good. The kid was coming along.

"Captain!" Gunny Lai called. "We've got movement front!"

Cutan Mett heard the tramping sounds of a herd of flar-ta and waved his warriors to a halt. They were the vanguard of the Miv Qist tribe, and he felt their hungry anticipation as they realized that the honor of first contact with the invaders was about to be theirs.

"Fire on the contact," Pahner said. Normally, he would have waited for more than a sensor reading. That was not only doctrine, it was also common sense . . . normally. But not here. Whether it was a bolting damnbeast or the vanguard of the attackers, it was time to "plow the road."

"Roger," Lai responded.

The Imperial Marine M-46 was a forty-millimeter, belt-fed, gas-operated grenade launcher. The advanced composition of the grenades' filler gave them the destructive force of a pre-space twenty-kilo bomb, but despite any advances in explosive fillers, the chemical-powered launcher had an old-fashioned kick like that of a particularly irritated Terran mule. Ripping off an entire belt in a mass of fire, as the prince had done a few days before, was the action of an idiot or someone who was very good with the weapon and big enough to handle the recoil.

Lance Corporal Pentzikis was neither a fool nor particularly massive. So when given the order to "flush" the detected Mardukans, the experienced Marine settled the big weapon into her shoulder, made sure the forty-round belt fed over her shoulder without a kink, and started a slow, aimed fire.

The rounds impacted with a deep jackhammer sound that raised the hackles on experienced troopers' necks, and the remainder of First Platoon spread out around her as she fired grenades into the area where the sensors had detected movement. Moments later, the ground and trees flashed white.

Mett shouted as the trees around him started to come apart in eruptions of thunder and lightning, and splinters flayed the warriors of Miv Qist.

"Forward!" he bellowed. "This land is ours!"

There were times when Ima Hooker felt like a distilled potion of fury. Whether that was nature or nurture—the father who'd given her her name had been cruel in many other ways—she neither knew nor cared. All that she cared about were the occasional moments when the Imperial Marines gave her an outlet for it.

Like now.

As the scummies burst out of the concealing foliage, she snugged the bead rifle into her shoulder, placed the laser targeting dot on the body of the leader, and flicked her rifle to its three-round burst setting. Time to get some back from the universe.

Pahner glanced at his tactical display and made a decision.

"They're trying to close the route," he snapped over the command circuit. "First, stay in place, screening our flank. As we pass, roll in behind us. Everybody but sharpshooters off the pack beasts. Third to the point, Second in the body. Pick up the pace Marines. Let's go!"

Roger started to slide off Patty and got slapped on the leg by Sergeant Hazheir.

"Stay up there, Your Highness!" the acting platoon sergeant said. "You're probably who he meant by sharpshooters."

Roger laughed and nodded.

"Okay! " he yelled as the staff sergeant slid off the beast and trotted forward. "I'll try to remember who the good guys are!"

Corporal Hooker put another burst into the vegetation and cursed. The bastards were figuring out to stay behind cover.

"Behie! Flush those bastards for me!" she snapped, highlighting the cover with her target designator for the grenadier.

"Roger!" Pentzikis had just finished attaching a new belt and pivoted slightly, letting the launcher's sensors search for the target. "I need more grenades; I'm short."

"Roger," Edwin Bilali acknowledged. The NCO shot at a patch of gray and was rewarded by a scream. "Gelert! Get to the pack beasts and bring back three strings of grenades!"

"On my way, boss!" The newbie private put a burst into the vegetation in front of him and reared up to run for the passing beasts. He thought he knew where he could find the ammunition.

Ima Hooker popped out her first magazine and had just started to reload another of the half-kilo plastic packs when a scummy reared up from behind a log and hurled its javelin.

"Heads up!" she shouted, seating the magazine, and took aim.

The spinning HE grenade beat her to the shot, exploding a meter above the Mardukan's head and turning it into red jelly, but the burst also threw two more targets into her view. The fury within her howled like an enraged beast, for she'd seen the result of her momentary distraction, and she unleashed her rage and flicked the three-millimeter bead gun onto full automatic and cut the unfortunate natives in half.

"Bastards!" she screamed, and swept the muzzle onward, seeking still more targets and fresh vengeance.

Sergeant Bilali ran to the rifleman, but he knew he was too late. The private from St. Augustine scrabbled at the muck and loam of the jungle floor, choking on the blood that poured out of his mouth. Bilali pulled off the private's helmet and tried to roll him over, but the javelin pinned him to the forest floor, and the movement jerked a scream through the bright, scarlet flood.

"Ah, Christ, Jeno!" The NCO's hands fluttered helplessly over the wounds. Bullets didn't transfix their targets like specimens in some alien entomologist's collection, so all his training meant nothing. "Ah, God, man."

"Move!" Dobrescu was suddenly at his side. The warrant officer had already learned all he cared to know about wounds like this one. He figured the kid had about one chance in twenty, max, but it was worth going for.

"It's got to come all the way through," the medic went on as he pulled out a monomolecular bone cutter. The scissorlike device sliced open the chameleon suit and snipped the javelin shaft flush with the private's back effortlessly, with absolutely minimal movement, yet even that tiny twitch evoked another scream.

"Now comes the fun part," Dobrescu added through gritted teeth. "Gelert," he said firmly, applying a self-sealing bandage. "Listen to me. I got one way to save your life, and its gonna have to go quick. We are going to flip you onto your back. You're probably going to pass out from the pain, but don't scream. Don't."

Even as he spoke, he was running a drainage tube with frantic haste. The wound was going to have to drain somewhere, and if it drained into the lungs, nanites or no nanites, the kid was going to drown in his own blood.

Gelert was twitching and the blood was going everywhere as the company passed them by. Stopping for one casualty would get them all killed, but if Dobrescu couldn't get this kid evacuated soon, the company's advance was going to leave him behind the caravan.

"Bilali, I'm gonna need a stretcher party."

"Who the fuck is going to carry it?" the NCO demanded as fresh firing started to the front and another cry of "Medic!" cut through the bedlam. "We're getting hammered."

"Find someone!" the warrant officer barked. He wondered for a moment if he should just write the kid off and get him lashed to a pack beast until they could bag and burn him. But if he could get the holes patched and the bleeding slowed, the fast-heal nanites sometimes could perform miracles. Fuck it.

"And while you're finding somebody, we're going to need security!"

"Roger," Kosutic answered. "Shit!" She looked over her shoulder. "Captain!"

"What?" Pahner never looked away from his HUD. Second Platoon had just passed through in the leapfrog and reported that they were hitting signs of buildings and rock outcroppings. If they made it into the city, it was going to be by the skin of their teeth, and he could hear the howling of the Kranolta horns behind him. It was as if the Huntsmen of Hell had been loosed on their trail.

"Dobrescu is trying to get Gelert stabilized to move. He's already out of Third's coverage!"

That was enough to pull the captain away from his display, and he looked up in disbelief. The sergeant major looked as royally pissed as he felt, not that being in agreement made either of them feel any better.

"Dobrescu!" Pahner keyed his communicator. "Get your ass out of there—now!"

"Captain, I have Gelert stabilized. I think I can save him."

"Mr. Dobrescu, this is in order. Get your ass out of there!" He checked his HUD and realized that none of the private's fire team had moved out. "Bilali!"

"Sir, we're pulling out as fast as we can rig a stretcher," the NCO responded.

"Sergeant—!"

The company CO chopped off his furious command. Long, long ago at the Corps NCO combat leadership school, he'd been told something which had stood him in a good stead for fifty-plus Standard years: Never give an order you know won't be obeyed. He never had, and he didn't intend to start today.

"We'll be waiting for you in Voitan, Sergeant."

He knew he'd just written off their only medic, who was also an irreplaceable pilot, and a full fire team, but that was better than losing the entire company trying to cover them.

The line of flar-ta was pounding up a slope and through a ruined gateway partially choked by the rubble of the gatehouse. The area beyond was too large to hold for long—a fifty-meter-wide plaza surrounded by overgrown heaps of masonry—but it was a good place to rally.

"Hold it up on the other side," he called over the general company frequency. "Third Platoon on the gate, First and Second in support. I want a headcount."

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?"