Throne of Stars (32 page)

“If you don’t mind, Captain,” Doc Dobrescu said, dropping down from one of the passing carts, “I have to agree. We’ve got a lot of wounded and injured, and these carts are pure hell on them. Give them a couple of days under a roof and warm, and they’ll be able to heal much faster.”

“All right,” Pahner said. “We’ll stay. Two days. Your Highness, I assume the Vashin are down from the cold as well?”

“They’re not doing well,” Roger agreed. “Actually, they’re more used to it than I expected, probably from being from the northern plains, but the most they can do is to maintain sentries.”

“We’ll let them rest as well,” Pahner decided. “We should be able to go down to about ten percent security. I’d really prefer to put out a sentry group down the valley, but we’ll settle for putting them up on the walls. Sergeant Major!”

“Yes, Sir,” Kosutic replied. The carts had reached the open bailey of the fortress and were now stopped in a line. Roger noticed that most of them were being driven by Marines, and the handful of native teamsters driving the rest had small charcoal braziers burning under their seats.

“We’re stopping here for a day or two,” Pahner told Kosutic. “Leave the carts mostly packed; there should be stores in the castle, and we’ll live off of them. Ten percent security, Marines only. Get everybody bunked down and working on gear.”

“Yes, Sir,” Kosutic repeated, making no effort to conceal her obvious relief. The sergeant major was like iron, but she knew when a unit was on its last legs. Now she looked up and shook her head.

“Speak of the devil,” she said, and grinned as Julian walked towards the command group. But the intelligence sergeant didn’t grin back, and her own smile faded as she absorbed his expression.

“Sirs,” he said, nodding at the officers, then held up a small device. “I found this in the commander’s quarters.”

Pahner accepted it, turned it over in his hands, and frowned at the maker’s mark.

“A Zuiko tri-cam?” he mused.

“I think they must have been in contact with the port,” Julian said darkly. “We may have a real problem, Sir.”

“Maybe,” Roger said. “And maybe not. We need to find out where it came from. Get some of the locals functional and find out.”

“Yes, Sir,” the sergeant said. He turned towards the fortress’ main entrance, then stopped. “Or, maybe not.”

One of Rastar’s Vashin was walking slowly towards them, trailing a plume of smoke. One of the ways the cavalry coped with the cold was by toting small braziers of charcoal around with them like incense censors.

“Captain Pahner,” the cavalryman said slowly when he finally reached the group, and saluted. “Marine. Gronningen. Has. Found. A human.” The sentence seemed to have taken everything he had, and he dropped his salute and stood like a statue.

“We have
got
to get lower. Soon,” Kosutic said to fill the gap in the conversation.

They’d all known that this moment would come, but this was the first “new” human they’d had contact with since crashing on the planet. And while the Mardukans
might
have stopped them from getting off-planet at any time, the humans
could
stop them if they realized what they faced. How to handle the local humans had been considered and debated at vast and exhausting length, but it had been impossible to make any clear plans without more information than they had. Now the moment of reckoning was upon them.

“Well, I guess we’d better go meet him,” Pahner said finally.

Harvard Mansul wished he had his camera. Of course, he might as well have wished he were back at Society headquarters on Old Earth, while he was at it. As a matter of fact, he
did
wish that, too, but he was a realist. He would have settled for getting the tri-cam back intact. The Zuiko was tough—it had to be, to survive around him—but it wasn’t invulnerable, and sooner or later they would open it up to find out how it worked.

At which point, it would stop. Working, that was.

When he wasn’t worrying about his tri-cam, he passed the time in his rather dank cell by wondering how long it would take the Society to mount a rescue. If they ever bothered. He’d reached the point of regretting his habit of disappearing for years at a time. Considering his stint on Scheherazade, the Society might not start looking for
decades
.

He sighed and banged on the door again. Usually the horned-ones roused before now, and he looked forward to the morning exercise time. But so far, there’d been virtually no sound filtering down to his little stone cube today.

“Hellooo! It’s
morning
!
Would you kind gentlemen mind letting me out?”

“I felt it was best to let you handle it, Sir,” the private said. “I didn’t know how you wanted to play it, or even if you wanted him to know we were here, so I sent one of the Vashin down to check on him. He’s been . . . kind of loud.”

“Okay, come on,” Roger said. “Let’s find out what they caught.”

“I wonder if they were keeping him tucked away in the larder for munchies later?” Kosutic mused.

“I doubt it,” O’Casey said. “I haven’t seen a trace of any religious items here in the fortress. I think they probably just picked him up somewhere and stashed him until they were told what to do with him.”

“Given our own experience, I can guess what that would have been,” Roger snorted, leading the way down the flight of stone steps and along the narrow—for a Mardukan—passageway. They reached the cell door, and he threw back the bolt and pulled it open.

“And who might you be, Sir?” he asked cheerfully.

Mansul looked up at the human confronting him and frowned in puzzlement. Judging by the remains of the uniform, the person was an Imperial Marine. Given the rest of his appearance, he was probably also a deserter, because no Marine of Mansul’s acquaintance who
wasn’t
a deserter would ever have allowed his uniform to get into such a state.

The man in the cell door was not just a full head taller than Mansul. He was also either very clean-shaven, or had almost no facial hair. Good bone structure, a hint of pre-Diaspora Asian around the eyes, but otherwise very classically Northern European. Great hair falling in a golden mass, too. He’d make a wonderful picture all around, the photographer decided. Then there was the odd rifle—chemical propellant, by the look of it—and the long sword tossed over his back. Quite the neobarb. Absolutely perfect. Even the lighting was good.

It really made him wish those horned barbarians hadn’t taken his camera.

Mansul took another look, and it was actually the family resemblance that caught him first. One of his last assignments before Marduk had been to cover the Imperial Family when Her Majesty had celebrated the Heir’s birthday. Mansul couldn’t remember having seen a shaggy, broad-shouldered, sword-toting barbarian standing around to help cut the cake or pour the punch, yet the young man before him had the distinctive MacClintock brow. So who—?

“Good God!” he heard himself exclaim. “I thought you were
dead
!”

Roger couldn’t help himself. The astonishment in the prisoner’s expression and voice was simply too great, and a trace of his own recent classical reading came to mind. Despite the response he
knew
it would elicit from O’Casey, he simply couldn’t resist.

“I am happy to say that the news of my demise was exceedingly exaggerated.” He waited for the groans to stop behind him, then held out his hand. “I’m His Highness Prince Roger Ramius Alexander Chiang MacClintock. And you are?”

“Harvard Mansul,” the man replied in a voice which was still half stunned. “Imperial Astrographic Society. You’ve been
here
the whole time?”

“I’ve been on Marduk, yes,” Roger said. “The rest is a somewhat long story. And I believe we’ve gotten hold of some of your property.” He held out a hand to Pahner for the tri-cam, then passed it over.

Mansul gave the item for which he had so passionately longed for more than a week barely a glance, then flicked the lenses open.

“Smile.”

Roger knocked on the door, waited for the quiet voice from the other side to respond, then opened it, looked around, and grinned.

“Private room, I see,” he observed. “Very nice.”

“Quite the little love nest,” Despreaux replied. She was propped up on a pile of cushions on the floor, her arm immobilized in the force-cast. Her face was slightly gray, she was still covered in mud from the trek, and bits of leaf and dirt were caught in her hair and on her pants. Any other woman would’ve looked like hell, Roger thought, but Nimashet Despreaux managed to come across like a tri-dee star made up to look like a maiden in distress.

“I’m really upset with you,” Roger said, sitting down and taking her good hand. “You’re supposed to take care of yourself better than this.”

“I tried,” she said, and leaned against him. “God, I’m tired of this.”

“Me, too,” Roger said as he wrapped an arm carefully around her.

“Liar. You’re dreading getting back to court, aren’t you?”

Roger paused for a moment, then shrugged.

“Yes,” he admitted. “Marduk is . . . uncomplicated. We make friends, or we don’t. We negotiate, or we kick ass. It’s black and white, most of the time. Court is . . . all negotiation. It’s all gray. It’s all who you pissed off last, and people jockeying for position. There’s nobody to . . .”

“To watch your back?” she finished for him, leaning into him. “I will.”

“You’ve never had to deal with the court ladies as a ‘person,’” he replied. “You were just a Marine; you didn’t count.” He shook his head, eyes troubled. “It’ll be different now, and their knives go right through armor.”

“So do mine, love,” she said, twisting carefully around until she could look him in the eye. “And, Roger, the Marines see
everything
, they
hear
everything. And you’re going to be supported in a way that I doubt even another MacClintock ever was.
We’re
going to be at your back.”

He picked a bit of leaf gently out of her hair.

“I love you,” he said.

“I look like hell,” she snorted. “You’re just trying to make me feel better.”

“You look great,” he said huskily. “Absolutely beautiful.”

She looked at him for a moment, then pulled his head down to hers. The kiss lasted a long time, while Roger ran his fingers up and down her back. But finally she drew back with a snort.

“So that’s it,” she said. “You just like me when I’m immobilized!”

“I
always
like you. I was in love the first time I saw you out of armor, although I’ll admit I was a bit . . .”

“Intimidated?” Despreaux supplied.

“Yes,” he admitted. “Intimidated is probably the right word. You’re a bit overpowering, and I really didn’t want to get into a relationship. But . . . you’re as good as it gets.”

“Your mother is going to go spastic,” Despreaux said. “I mean, completely ballistic.”

“I don’t really care about Mother’s reaction,” he replied. “Frankly, after what we’ve gone through, Mother is going to owe me, big time. And it’s not as if I were the heir, so I’m not exactly a great dynastic match. Mother can kiss my ass before I’ll give you up.”

“I love it when you talk dirty,” she said, and pulled him down for another kiss.

Roger ran his hands up her sides, leaving a trail of goosebumps in their wake. After a moment, the hands migrated around to the front, as if by their own accord, and ran across her midriff in subtle fingertip touches. She writhed to the side, pushing up her T-shirt, and—

There was a discreet knock on the door.

“
Shit,
” Roger muttered with intense feeling. Then he sighed, sat up, and raised his voice. “Yes?”

“Your Highness,” Corporal Bebi said from the far side of the door, “Captain Pahner wants a command conference in seven minutes in the fortress commander’s office. Sergeant Despreaux is excused on account of her injury.”

Roger didn’t have to see the private’s face. His tone alone made it eloquently clear that butter would never melt in his mouth.

“I told you the Marines know everything,” Despreaux whispered, pulling her top down with a moue of disappointment.

“
Seven
minutes?” Roger asked.

“It . . . took a few minutes to find you, Your Highness,” Bebi explained, and Despreaux took the opportunity to run her hands up Roger’s back.

“I’ll—” Roger cleared his throat. “I’ll be right there.”

“Yes, Your Highness.”

“Two minutes to run from here to the commander’s office,” Despreaux said. “Now, where were we?”

“If I turn up out of breath and rearranging my clothes, everyone will know where I was,” Roger said.

“Rogerrr,” Despreaux said dangerously.

“On the other hand,” he said, leaning back down towards her, “they can kiss my ass, too.”

She smiled in delight as he ran his hands up her back once more. He leaned even closer, her lips parted, and—

There was a discreet knock on the door.

“Bloody . . .
what?
”

“Your Highness,” Dobrescu said diplomatically, “I know you have a conference in a minute, but I’d like to talk to you about Cord.”

Roger shoved himself to his feet, shaking his head and breathing heavily, as Despreaux rearranged her clothes again.

“Come!” the Heir Tertiary to the Throne of Man said grimly.

“What now?” Sergeant Despreaux whispered.

Most of the supplies the Krath had laid in were stored in boxes of boiled
turom
leather. At first, going over the collection in the citadel’s storerooms had been a bit like a very leathery Christmas. But after a few hours of opening boxes and cataloging contents, Poertena and Denat were getting worn out.

“Dried and salted fish.” Denat slammed the top of the box closed and resealed it. “More damned dried and salted fish! I’m surprised these Krath didn’t grow gills.”

“T’ey needed to grow some damned brains,” Poertena said. The company was still chuckling about Julian’s find. “You scummies are frigging weird when it gets cold.”

“Well, at least we don’t go around bitching about a decently warm day,” Denat snapped back. “How many times have I seen one of you Marines writhing on the ground over a little heat?!”