Empire of Man 01 - March Upcountry (43 page)

"I knew Poertena could swim that river," Kosutic told the prince. "But I wasn't about to tell him that I knew he was an Olympic-class swimmer," she added with a laugh.

"You mentioned Corporal Hooker," Pahner said soberly. "Ima Hooker was an air car thief before a judge gave her a choice between the Marines and a long jail sentence."

"What the hell is
she
doing in The Empress' Own?" O'Casey asked with a gasp as she choked on a mouthful of wine.

"She can open and be driving an air car she's never seen as fast as you can open your own and drive away with a key," Kosutic said seriously. "If you think that's not a skill the Empress might need someday, you're sadly mistaken."

"She is also
utterly
loyal to the Empress," Pahner told the chief of staff. "She actually has one of the most stable loyalty indexes I've ever seen. Better than yours, I might add, Ms. O'Casey. The Marines took her out of a hellish existence and gave her back her honor and purpose. She's somehow transferred that . . . redemption to the
person
of the Empress. She's definitely one of the ones who's going to end up in Gold."

"How strange," the academic murmured. She felt as if she'd stepped through the ancient Alice's looking glass.

"So what's
your
skill, Captain?" Roger asked.

"Ah, well." The CO smiled as he leaned back in the camp chair. "They make exceptions for captains."

"He's taught himself to be a pretty fair machinist, and he can rebuild an air car from the ground up," Kosutic said with a grin at the captain. "You only thought they made an exception for you. He also does decent interior work."

"Hmph! Better than yours."

"What is yours, Sergeant Major?" O'Casey asked after a moment had passed and it was obvious that the sergeant major wasn't going to be forthcoming.

"Well, the main one is . . ." Kosutic paused and glared balefully at Pahner ". . . knitting."

"
Knitting?
" Roger looked at the grim-faced warrior, unable to keep the laugh completely out of his voice. "Knitting? Really?"

"Yes. I like it, okay?"

"It just seems so . . ."

"Feminine?" O'Casey suggested.

"Well, yeah," the prince admitted.

"Okay, okay." Pahner grin. "Let me point out that it's not just knitting. The Sergeant Major is from Armagh. She can take a hunk of wool, or anything similar, and make you an entire suit, given time."

"Oh," Roger said. The planet Armagh was a slow-boat colony of primarily Irish descent. Like many slow-boat colonies, it had backslid after reaching its destination and stabilized at a preindustrial technology level before the arrival of the tunnel drive. And unfortunately, also like many, it had broken down into factional warfare. The arrival of the first tunnel drive ships and the subsequent absorption of the planet into the Empire of Man had reduced the blood feuds, but it hadn't eliminated them. It had been suggested that nothing short of carpet bombing the surface with nukes and sowing it with salt would get the residents of Armagh to stop fighting amongst themselves. It was practically a genetic imperative.

"Hey, it's not that bad," Kosutic protested. "You're safer in downtown New Belfast than you are walking around in Imperial City. Just . . . stay out of certain pubs."

"Some
other
time, I'll ask you what it was like being a priestess of the Fallen One on Armagh. Everywhere I turn there are fascinating stories like this," Roger said. "It's like taking off blinders." He yawned and patted Dogzard on the head. "Get up, you ugly beast." The sauroid lifted her red- and black-striped head off his lap with a disturbed hiss and headed for the tent door. "Folks, I'm exhausted. I'm for bed."

"Yes," Pahner said, standing up. "Long day tomorrow. We should all rest."

"Tomorrow," Roger said, getting up to follow Dogzard.

"Tomorrow," O'Casey said.

"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.