CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Bilali triggered another burst and the group of scummies disappeared behind their log. He had them pinned for the time being, but he was also low on ammunition.

"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 gonna frag his ass."

"You're up!" Despreaux made the last connection and flipped his visor up to give him some air. Until the things came online, the armored suits could be sweltering.

"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 gunner was yelling behind his visor, and the team leader lifted it just in time to hear ". . . motherfuckingcocksuck . . ."

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

"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 gunners as the grenadiers covered the retreat. She'd already tried to argue about who should move out first and who should stay behind in a movement. And lost. She was done arguing.

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.

"Move, Sir!" Pentzikis shouted, and fired a round into another likely looking clump.

Roger pushed himself up with both hands and turned to run . . . just as a massive flight of javelins erupted out of the brush.

"Oh, fuck," the grenadier said mildly. She'd become expert at judging the flight of the spears, and she realized they were all aimed at their previous positions. Hers . . . and the prince's.

Roger didn't even think—not consciously, anyway. He simply bolted straight towards the source of that massive flight, grenade launcher blazing. There was no way he could outrun the flock of javelins, but he might be able to run under them.

Their angle of flight, partially because of the slope of the ground, was high, and the speed he'd found so useful on soccer fields finally came into its own somewhere else. As the steel-tipped rain fell all around and behind him, he charged forward, grenade launcher spitting a metronome of fire.

Julian and his three armored companions passed the stretcher team, bounding by in run mode at nearly sixty kilometers per hour. They could have gone faster on better ground, but not on a track torn by flar-ta and covered in fallen trees.

"Man, Bilali," Julian said as he passed. "You are fucked."

"What the hell was I supposed to do?" the squad leader demanded, falling back to cover the stretcher team. "Knock him over the head and throw him on the stretcher?"

"Probably," the squad leader snarled, then tripped over one of the fallen trunks and plowed into a tree that was still standing. "Shit!"

"You okay, boss?" Gronningen called. The big Asgardian had his M-105 plasma cannon trained outward. The company hadn't expected to be using them so quickly, so they hadn't been inspected with the same care as the M-98s. On the other hand, they were an older and more robust design which had never given any trouble. Yet.

"Yeah, yeah," Julian growled, scrambling to his feet. The impact had done far more damage to the tree than to his now sap-coated armor. It would take more than a sixty kilometer per hour impact to damage ChromSten. "I'll be right there," he added as another flurry of grenades exploded ahead of them.

Roger dropped the empty grenade launcher and pulled his sword over his shoulder. The sensei in school was always talking about The Book of Five Rings, but the prince had never bothered to read it all. Another of those little acts of rebellion he was beginning to regret. Still, he remembered the technique for battling multiple opponents: reduce it to one at a time.

Nice to know, he thought, surveying the fifteen or twenty Mardukans filtering out of the brush with a variety of swords, spears, and other sharpened artifacts. Now, how the hell do you do it? 

Some of them were wounded, a few quite seriously. Most of them, however, were just fine. And seemed really upset about something. Worse, the clear notes of hundreds of hunting horns sounded, coming up the hill behind them. All in all, it looked to be just a little dicey. Maybe they would leave him alone because his forehead didn't offer any trophies? Right.

The first Mardukan charged, holding a spear at waist height and screaming to wake the dead. Roger parried the spear down and to the side, let the momentum carry him through a spin and took off one of the scummy's arm as he passed. Then the rest of the group charged, and he picked out the weakest: a Mardukan with a bloody shrapnel wound on one leg.

Roger charged the wounded warrior, parrying another's spear and carrying the sword into a high parry of the wounded Mardukan's own blade. A butterfly twist, and the katana-like weapon came down and across, opening the Mardukan from shoulder to thigh as Roger passed through the closing circle.

He found himself several meters from his opponents, gazing at the group of warriors. He'd laid out two of them for nary a scratch, and the Kranolta seemed to be reevaluating the situation.

Roger was doing the same. He was fully aware that so far he'd survived on luck and a few tricks, but these Kranolta didn't seem to be very well trained. There were standard counters for both of the attacks he'd used. Cord knew them, and he'd taught them to the prince, but none of these tribesmen seemed aware of them. If all of them were this inept, he might last, oh, five more minutes.

But realistically, unless something broke soon, he was dead. Unfortunately, if he turned tail and ran, those spears could fly faster than he could run. So far, nobody seemed inclined to simply pincushion him and be done with it, and as long as it was hand-to-hand and more or less one-on-one he had a chance, however small.

Let's hear it for Homeric customs, he thought.

One of the scummies stepped forward and drew a line on the ground. Roger looked at it and shrugged; he had no idea what the gesture meant. He thought about it, then drew a line of his own.

The scummy clapped his false hands and stepped over his own line and fell into a guard position.

As he did, Roger thought of his pistol for the first time. There were only four spearmen; the others carried only swords. He could draw his pistol and kill all of his missile-armed opponents before the first spear could fly—he'd proven that conclusively in Q'Nkok—and he almost did it. It was the right thing to do, and he knew it. The idea of a prince of the Empire of Man fighting some four-armed barbarian with a sword on a neo-barb planet on the ass-end of nowhere was something from a really bad adventure novel. And if, by some fluke, he survived the experience, Captain Armand Pahner would personally break his neck for it.

He stepped over the line.

As he did, the scummy charged, sword held over his right shoulder. The weapon was one of the Mardukan two-handers and weighed nearly ten kilos. If Roger tried to block it, it would smash through his parry as if it weren't even there, so he waited patiently, sword at low guard, until the scummy began his swing. Then he darted in close to his towering foe, his sword held practically overhead.

The clash of steel was frighteningly loud as Hooker pounded into view. At every step, she'd expected to see the prince's dead body, for the ground was a pincushion of javelins. Instead, she found him in the midst of a half-circle of yelling scummies. She nearly tripped over a dead Mardukan as she skidded to a stop, but she managed to keep her feet . . . and not open fire as a dozen more scummies trotted up to join the shouting crowd. She knew instinctively that if she fired, the prince was dead.

Roger panted and looked at the next scummy in line. Already, three bodies had been pulled out of the de facto arena, and he was beginning to learn the rules. The line he'd drawn was a safe point. As long as he stayed on "his" side of it, they wouldn't attack, and if they were on the other side of their line, he couldn't attack in turn. However, the one time he'd waited too long to come out to meet an opponent, they'd gotten agitated. Obviously, he couldn't just sit and wait for rescue.

He didn't look around as he heard running feet behind him, but from the stiffening of some of the Mardukans, it had to be a Marine.

"There's a line behind me on the ground. Don't cross it!"

"Yes, Sir." He recognized Hooker's voice and hoped the angry little Marine would keep her cool. "Armor's on its way."

Roger nodded and flexed his shoulders. He'd long since dropped his rucksack, ammunition harness, and anything else that threatened to weigh him down. His sparring with Cord had taught him much that had, so far, kept him alive. As a mass, these scummies might be the most terrifying thing on this part of the planet, but as individuals, they were almost woefully ill-trained. On the other hand, it had been a long day already, and he was getting tired.

"Tell them to get here fast, but keep their cool," he said as another set of boots pounded up behind him. Then he looked at the scummy. "Come on, you four-armed bastard. I'm getting bored."

Julian passed the Mardukan shaman, hurrying towards Roger's position. The NCO wasn't sure exactly what the old scummy was saying, but it sounded a lot like cursing. The old geezer, who was fast enough on open ground, was having a bunch of trouble with the fallen trees, which was obviously the reason Roger hadn't included him on this little jaunt.

"Glad to see you're as happy with him as we are," the Marine yelled over his external speakers as he thundered by.

"I'll kill him," Cord snarled. "Asi or no asi, I swear I will!"

"Okay by me, but you'll have to get in line," Julian said as he passed out of sight. "A long line."

"I'm gonna kill him," Pahner said, almost calmly, as Bilali and the stretcher team pounded into view.

"Bilali?" Kosutic asked rubbing her ear.

"Roger. Maybe Bilali, too."

The team leader marched up to the company commander and saluted.

"Sir, Sergeant Bilali reporting with party of one."

"And that one isn't the Prince, I see," Pahner said coldly. "I am far too enraged at the moment to deal with this. Get out of my sight."

"Yes, Sir." The sergeant walked over to where the medic was working on Gelert.

"Don't go ballistic, Armand," Kosutic whispered. "We have a long way to go."

"I keep telling myself that," Pahner replied. "And I'm trying not to. But if we lose the Prince, finishing the journey is next to pointless."

Kosutic could only nod at that.

Roger stepped back across his line and turned around.

"Who is the leader here?" he asked.

Over a hundred scummies had gathered to watch the contest by now. So far, Roger had won each match handily. A gouge on his helmet indicated the closest anyone had come to hitting him, and several of his own supporters—including Julian and his armored companions—had assembled with Hooker behind him. So far, the scummies had left his cheering section strictly alone while they concentrated on the main event.

A handful of seconds passed, and then a single Mardukan stepped carefully onto the blood-soaked ground. He was older than most of the others, much scarred, and wore a necklace of horns around his neck.

"I am the senior tribe chief. I am Leem Molay, chief of the Kranolta Du Juqa."

"Well," Roger flipped the sword sideways to flick off the blood pooling on it, "I am Prince Roger Ramius Sergei Alexander Chiang MacClintock, of the House MacClintock, Heir Tertiary to the Throne of Man. And I finally have enough firepower to turn your pissant little tribe into meat for the atul." He took a rag from Hooker and began wiping down his blade as Cord came scrambling across the fallen tree trunks at last. "I don't intend to kill you one by one until I'm exhausted, and I don't intend to stand here jawing until darkness. So I propose a truce."

"Why should we let you live?" the chief scoffed.

"Julian?" Roger hadn't been able to see who was in the suits, and he'd long before turned his radio off. Listening to Pahner bitch had gotten on his nerves.

"Yep," one of the suits answered over its external speakers.

"Leem Molay, how many of your warriors do you want slaughtered to prove that you should let us walk away?" Roger sheathed his cleaned sword and took his reloaded grenade launcher from Pentzikis, but his icy eyes never left the Kranolta chieftain.

"Let me ask it this way," he went on calmly, tilting his head to the side. "Which half do you want us to kill to prove our point?"

"If you could truly kill us all, you would!" the chief retorted. "We are the Kranolta! Even Voitan could not stand before us! We will wipe your pissant little tribe from these lands!"

Roger inhaled sharply through his nostrils. The stench of dead Mardukans barely affected him at this point; he was far too deep into that dark world of battle.

"Watch carefully, old fool," he hissed.

The impromptu challenge matches had occurred on an open spot on the southern edge of the main battle zone. The Mardukans, for the most part, had been appearing from the northern woodline, so the southern one would make a better neutral target zone.

"Sergeant Julian." The prince gestured to the south. "Demonstration, please."

"Yes, Your Highness," the squad leader replied over his external speakers. He'd directed the response at the Kranolta, and his toot automatically translated it into the local dialect. "Gronningen, make these fine people a clearing to bury their dead in."

"Aye," Gronningen acknowledged, and turned to the south. "Shaman Cord, you might want to cover your ears."

The M-105 was a much heavier system than the M-98. That meant that, despite the all-pervasive, humid dampness of the jungle, the first shot from the plasma cannon left a trail of flickering fires on a ruler-straight line from the big Asgardian to the plasma bolt's impact on a tree in the middle of the area Roger had indicated. Where it shattered a divot into the woods.

The cannon's "CRAAACK!" was the loudest sound any of the Mardukans, even the survivors of the first brush with the company, had ever heard. It set their ears ringing, and the thermal pulse dried the surface of their mucus-covered skin, burning several of them painfully. And that was just from the secondary effects.

Twenty meters of the jungle giant which had been the gunner's target simply vanished as a lightning bolt carved from the heart of a star devoured it. The massive trunk shredded explosively for another five to ten meters above the impact point, and splinters longer than Roger was tall shrieked through the air far more lethally than any Kranolta javelin. The top of the tree flipped away into the burning jungle beyond, and the vegetation around it was turned into a finely divided, drifting ash surrounded by a dozen other burning, fallen trees.

And then Gronningen fired another round. And a third.

With those three rounds, he'd cleared a section of jungle fifty meters on a side and ringed with smoldering vegetation. Within that semicircle of hellfire, the ground steamed and smoked.

After a moment's stunned reflection, the chieftain turned from the destruction and asked the question.

"Why?"

"Because I don't intend to fight my way into Voitan. We walk into the city unmolested, or we kill every scummy in sight. Your choice."

"And on the morrow?" Molay was beginning to understand Puvin Eske's objections to this attack.

"On the morrow, you do your damnedest to kill all of us. Good luck. You had your chance to kill me as an individual . . . and couldn't. I suggest that you go home. If you do, we . . . I, Prince Roger Ramius Sergei Alexander Chiang MacClintock, will let you live."

The Kranolta chieftain laughed, although, even to himself, the sound was hollow. Or perhaps it was only the ringing in his ears.

"You think much of yourselves, humans. We are the Kranolta! I myself was one of the first over the walls of Voitan! Don't think to impress me with your threats!"

"We are The Empress' Own," Roger replied in a voice of iron, "and The Empress' Own does not know the meaning of failure." He smiled grimly, baring his teeth in that way which bothered most species except humans. "We rarely know the meaning of mercy, either, so count your blessings that I'm willing to show it to you this once."

The Mardukan glanced again at the flaming clearing and clapped his true-hands.

"Very well. We will let you go."

"Unmolested," Roger said. "To the city."

"Yes," the old Mardukan said. "And on the morrow, we will come, Prince Roger Ramius Sergei Alexander Chiang MacClintock. And the Kranolta will kill you all!"

"Then you'd better bring a bigger army!" Roger snarled, turning his back, and switched on his radio. "Julian, take the back door."

"Oh, yeah," the squad leader said. "Bet on it."