March to the Stars Read online

  The seventh schooner was different—a much bigger, less agile, somehow unfinished-looking vessel with a far deeper hull and no less than five masts—and, at the insistence of Captain Armand Pahner, Imperial Marines, rejoiced in the name of Snarleyow. The smaller, more nimble ships seemed to regard their larger sister with mixed emotions. No one would ever have called Snarleyow anything so gauche as clumsy, perhaps, but she was clearly less fleet of foot, and her heavier, more deliberate motion almost seemed to hold the others back.

  All of the ships carried short-barreled cannon along their sides. Snarleyow mounted fifteen of them to a side, which gave her a quarter again the broadside armament of any of her consorts, but all of them carried a single, much larger cannon on a pivot mount towards the bow, as well. And every single one of them had ropes everywhere. Which was the problem.

  "Okay." Julian drew a deep breath, then continued in a tone of massive calm. "There's a line and a pu—block. So why isn't it a halyard?"

  "Halyard hauls up t'e sail. T'e stay, it hold t'e pocking mast up."

  The Pinopan had grown up around the arcane terminology of the sea. In fact, he was the only human member of the expedition (with the exception of Roger, who had spent summers in Old Earth's blue-water recreational sailing community) who actually understood it at all. But despite the impression of landsmen—that the arcana existed purely to cause them confusion—there was a real necessity for the distinct terminology. Ships constantly encounter situations where clear and unambiguous orders may mean the difference between life and death. Thus the importance of being able to tell hands to pull upon a certain "rope" in a certain way. Or, alternatively, to let it out slowly, all the while maintaining tension.

  Thus such unambiguous and unintelligible orders as "Douse the mainsail and make fast!" Which does not mean throw water on it to increase speed.

  "So which one's the halyard?" Julian asked plaintively.

  "Which halyard? Countin' t'e stays'ils, t'ere's seventeen pocking halyards on t'is ship. . . ."

  Hooker's design had been agreed upon as the best possible for the local conditions. She and her consorts had been created, through human design and local engineering, to carry Prince Roger and his bodyguards—now augmented by various local forces—across a previously unexplored ocean. Not that there hadn't, as always, been the odd, unanticipated circumstance requiring last-minute improvisation. The fact that a rather larger number of Mardukan allies than originally anticipated had been added to Roger's force had created the need for more sealift capacity. Especially given the sheer size of the Mardukan cavalry's mounts. Civan were fast, tough, capable of eating almost anything, and relatively intelligent. One thing they were not, however, was petite. Hardly surprising, since the cavalrymen who rode into battle on their backs averaged between three and three and a half meters tall.

  Carrying enough of them to sea aboard the six original schooners had turned out to be impossible once the revised numbers of local troopers had been totaled up. So just when everyone had thought they were done building, they—and somewhere around a quarter of the total shipbuilding force of K'Vaern's Cove—had turned to to build the Snarleyow. Fortunately, the local labor force had learned a lot about the new building techniques working on the smaller ships, but it had still been a backbreaking, exhausting task no one had expected to face. Nor had Poertena been able to spend as much time refining her basic design, which was one reason she was ugly, slabsided, and slow, compared to her smaller sisters. She was also built of green timber, which had never been seasoned properly and could be expected to rot with dismaying speed in a climate like Marduk's. But that was all right with Prince Roger and his companions. All they really cared about was that she last long enough for a single voyage.

  Although she was scarcely in the same class for speed or handiness as Poertena's original, twin-masted design, Snarleyow was still enormously more efficient than any native Mardukan design. She had to be. The nature of the local weather was such that there was an almost unvarying wind from the northeast, yet that was the very direction in which the ships had to sail. That was the reason for their triangular sails. Their fore-and-aft rig—a technology the humans had introduced—made it possible for them to sail much more sharply into the wind than any local vessel, with its clumsy and inefficient, primitive square-rigged design, had ever been able to do. Similar ships had sailed the seas of Earth all the way up to the beginning of the Information Age, and they remained the mainstay for water worlds like Pinopa.

  "Now I'm really confused," Julian moaned. "All right. Tying something down is 'making fast.' A rope attached to a sail is a 'sheet.' A rope tied to the mast is a 'stay.' And a bail is the iron thingamajig on the mast."

  "T'e boom," Poertena corrected, wiping away a drop of sweat. The day, as always, was like a steambath, even with the light wind that filled the sails. "T'e bail is on t'e boom. Unless you're taking on water. T'en you bail it out."

  "I give up!"

  "Don' worry about it," the Pinopan said with a chuckle. "You only been at t'is a few weeks. Besides, you got me an' all t'ose four-armed monstrosities to do t'e sailing. You jus' pull when we say 'heave,' and stop when we say 'avast.' "

  "And hold on when you say 'belay.' "

  "And hold on tight when we say belay."

  "I blame Roger for this," Julian said with another shake of his head.

  "You blame Roger for what?" a cool female voice asked from behind him.

  Julian looked over his shoulder and grinned at Nimashet Despreaux. The female sergeant was frowning at him, but it slid off the irrepressible NCO like water off a duck.

  "It's all Roger's fault that we're in this predicament," he replied. "If it wasn't for him, I wouldn't have to learn this junk!"

  Despreaux opened her mouth, but Julian held up a hand before she could retort.

  "Calmly, Nimashet. I know it's not Roger's fault. It was a joke, okay?"

  Despreaux's frown only underscored the classical beauty of her face, but it was dark with worry.

  "Roger's . . . still not taking Kostas' death very well, Adib. I just don't . . . I don't want anybody even joking about this being his fault," she said, and Poertena nodded in agreement.

  "T'e prince didn't maroon us here, Julian. T'e Saints an' whoever set t'at pocking toombie on us marooned us." The diminutive armorer shrugged. "I guess it wasn't very pocking punny."

  "Okay," a chagrined Julian said. "You've got a point. Roger has been sort of dragging around, hasn't he?"

  "He's been in a funk, is what you mean," Despreaux said.

  "Well, I'm sure there's some way you could cheer him up," Julian suggested with an evil grin.

  "Oh, pock," Poertena muttered, and backed up quickly. After a crack like that the fecal matter was about to hit the impeller.

  "Now this is a mutinous crew, if ever I've seen one." Sergeant Major Eva Kosutic said, joining them. She looked from Despreaux's furious face to Julian's "butter-wouldn't-melt-in-my-mouth" expression and frowned. "All right, Julian. What did you say this time?"

  "Me?" Julian asked with enormous innocence but little real hope of evading the consequences. The sergeant major had an almost miraculous sense of timing; she always turned up just as the action was hottest. Which come to think of it, described her in bed as well. "What would I have said?"

  Now he looked from the sergeant major to the fulminating Despreaux, decided that coming clean offered his best chance of survival, and shrugged with a repentant expression.

  "I just suggested that there might be a way to cheer Roger up," he admitted, then, unable to help himself, grinned again. "I guarantee I'm right. God knows I've been more cheerful lately."

  The sergeant major rolled her eyes and crossed her arms.

  "Well if that's your attitude, you'll damned well be less cheerful for a while!" She looked at the three noncoms and shook her head. "This is a clear case of His Evilness' finding work for idle hands. Poertena, I thought you were supposed to be conducting a class in rigging."

  "I was trying to get Julian up to speed, Sergeant Major," the Pinopan said, tossing a length of rope to the deck. "T'at's not going too good."

  "I've got all the stuff loaded in my toot," Julian said with a shrug. "But some of the data seems to be wrong, and the rest just seems to be hitting and bouncing. I mean, what's 'luff' mean?"

  "It's when the sail flaps," Kosutic replied, shaking her head. "Even I know that, and I hate sailing. I guess we should've known better than to try to teach Marines to be sailors."

  "We don't really need them, Sergeant Major," Poertena told her. "We've got plenty of Mardukans."

  "We need to work on our entry techniques, anyway," Julian pointed out. "We've been engaging in all these open-field maneuvers, but when we take the spaceport, it's going to be mostly close quarters. Whole different style, Smaj. And we haven't really done any of that since Q'Nkok."

  The sergeant major frowned, then nodded. She was sure Julian had come up with that because it was more fun than learning to sail. But that didn't mean he was wrong.

  "Okay. Concur. If we wanted sailors, we should've left you on the DeGlopper and brought Navy pukes. I'll talk the change over with the Old Man. If he approves, we'll start working on close combat techniques for the rest of the voyage."

  "Besides," Poertena pointed out gloomily, "we might need them before t'en. I've never seen a place like t'is t'at didn't have pirates."

  "And then there's the 'fish of unusual size.' " Julian chuckled and gestured out over the emerald waters. "So far, so good, right?"

  "Don't laugh," Despreaux muttered. "I read that log. I do not want to tangle with something big enough to bite a boat in half, even a small one."

  "Well," Kosutic said, with a tug on her earlobe. "If worse comes to worst, we can always give Roger a pocket knife and throw him at it."

  "Ooooo!" Julian shook his head. "You haven't even met one of these little fishies and you hate them that much?"

  * * *

  Prince Roger Ramius Sergei Alexander Chiang MacClintock, Heir Tertiary to the Throne of Man, turned away from the creaming waves to look across the shipboard bustle. The sergeant major had just broken up the huddle around Julian, and the four NCOs were headed in four different directions. He took a moment extra to watch Despreaux make for the fo'c'sle. He knew his depression was beginning to affect her, and that he needed to snap out of it. But the loss of Kostas was the one wound that would not seem to heal, and he'd had too much time to think about it since the frenetic haste of getting all seven ships built had eased into the voyage itself. For the first time in what seemed forever, he wasn't engaged in frantic efforts to train native troops, fight barbarian armies, build ships, or simply hike through endless jungle. For that matter, nothing was actively attempting to kill him, devour him, assassinate him, or kidnap him, and a part of him was distantly amazed to discover just how much having that respite depressed him. Having time to think, he had learned, was not always a good thing.

  He supposed he could pull up the list of casualties on his implanted toot. But there wouldn't be much point. When they'd first landed, the Marines of Bravo Company, Bronze Battalion of the Empress' Own Regiment, had been just so many faces. And the officers and crew of the Assault Ship DeGlopper, long since expanding plasma, had just been blurs. But since some time after the pilots of the shuttles had brought them to deadstick landings on this backward hell, some time between the internecine fighting that had erupted at the first city they'd visited and the furious battles with the Kranolta barbarians, the Marines had become more than faces. In many ways, they had become more than family—as close as a part of his own body.

  And each loss had been like flaying skin.

  First the loss of half the company in Voitan, fighting the Kranolta. Then the constant low-level seepage as they battled their way across the rest of the continent. More good troops killed in Diaspra against the Boman, and then a handful more in Sindi against the main Boman force. The ones who fell to the damnbeasts and the vampire moths. And the crocs. The ever-be-damned damncrocs.

  And one of those fallen had been Kostas.

  Kostas. Not a Marine, or even one of the Navy shuttle pilots. Not one of the Mardukan mercenaries who had become welded to the Bronze Barbarians. Roger could, to an extent, justify their losses. The entire purpose of Bravo Company, and of the mercenaries, was to protect the once lily-white skin of Prince Roger Ramius Sergei Alexander Chiang MacClintock, and they'd all known it when they signed on. But that wasn't Kostas' purpose. He was just a valet. A nobody. A nonentity. Just . . . Kostas.

  Just the man who had stood by Roger when the rest of the universe thought he was a complete loss. Just the man who, thrown the responsibility for feeding and clothing the company on its march, had taken it on without a qualm. Just the man who had found food where there was none, and prepared sumptuous dishes from swamp water and carnivores. Only the man who had been a father figure to him.

  Only Kostas.

  And not even lost to enemy action. Lost to a damn croc, five meters of rubbery skin and teeth. One of the innumerable hazards of the damned jungles of Marduk. Roger had killed the croc almost immediately, but it had been too late. He'd killed dozens of them since, but all of them were too late for Kostas. Too late for his . . . friend.

  He hadn't had many friends growing up. Even as the least little scion of the Imperial Family, Roger had faced a future of power and wealth. And from the youngest age, there had been sycophants aplenty swarming around the prince. The innumerable Byzantine plots of Imperial City had sought constantly to co-opt one self-absorbed prince. And from the time he was a teenager, it had been Kostas—cautious, mousey Kostas—who had helped him thread the rocks and shoals. Often without Roger ever knowing it.

  And now, he was gone. Just . . . gone. Like Hooker and Bilali and Pentzikis and . . . gods. The list went on and on.

  Oh, they'd left a few widows on the other side in their wake. They'd made alliances when and where they could, even passed without a ripple in a few places. But more often than not, it had been plasma guns and bead rifles, swords and pikes and a few thousand years of technical and tactical expertise, blasting a swath of destruction a blind man could track because they had no choice. Which created its own problems, because they scarcely needed to be leaving any bread crumb trails behind them. Especially when they already knew they didn't face only "casual" enemies on the planet. True, there were more than enough foes who had become dangers solely because they felt . . . argumentative when the company had needed to cross their territory, but beyond them, Roger and the Barbarians faced the sworn enemies of the Empire and the Imperial House.

  The planet Marduk was, technically, a fief of the Empire of Man. In fact, officially it was personally held by the Empress herself, since it had been discovered a few hundred years before by the expanding Empire and promptly claimed in the name of the House of MacClintock. For over a century, the planet had been no more than a notation on a survey somewhere, though. Then, early in the reign of Roger's grandfather, plans had been advanced for the Sagittarius Sector. Settlers were going to be sent out to the planets in the region, and a "new day of hope" would dawn for the beleaguered poor of the inner worlds. In preparation for the projected wave of expansion, outposts had been established on several of the habitable planets and provided with bare-bones starports. The Imperial government had put some additional seed money into establishing a limited infrastructure and offered highly attractive concessions to some of the Empire's biggest multistellar corporations to help produce more, but by and large, the planets in this sector had been earmarked strictly as new homes for the "little people" of the Empire.

  Roger supposed the plans had spoken well for his grandfather's altruistic side. Of course, it was that same misplaced altruism and his tendency to trust advisers because of what he thought their characters were that had created most of the problems Roger's Empress Mother had been dealing with, first as Heir Primus and then as Empress, for longer than Roger had been alive. And it had also been an altruism whose hopes had been frustrated more often than not.

  As they had been in the case of the Sagittarius Sector project.

  Unfortunately for Grandfather's plans, the "poor" of the inner worlds were relatively comfortable with their low-paid work or government stipends. Given a choice between a small but decent apartment in Imperial City or Metrocal or New Glasgow or Delcutta and a small but decent house in a howling wilderness, the "poor" knew which side of their bread was buttered. Especially when the howling wilderness in question was on a planet like Marduk. For one thing, even in Delcutta, people rarely had to worry about being eaten.

  So, despite all of the government's plans (and Emperor Andrew's), the sector had languished. Oh, two or three of the star systems in the area had attracted at least limited colonization, and the Sandahl System had actually done fairly well. But Sandahl was on the very fringe of the Sagittarius Sector, more of an appendage of the neighboring Handelmann Sector. For the most part, the Sagittarius planetary outposts and their starports had discovered that they were the designated hosts for a party no one came to. Except for the Saints.

  One of the less altruistic reasons for the effort to colonize the sector in the first place had been the fact that the Cavaza Empire was expanding in that direction. Unfortunately, the plan to build up a countervailing Imperial presence had failed, and eventually, as the Saints continued their expansion, they had noticed the port installed on the small, mountainous subcontinent of Marduk.

  In many ways, Marduk was perfect for the Saints' purposes. The "untouched" world would require very little in "remedy" to return it to its "natural state." Or to colonize. With their higher birthrate, and despite their "green" stand, the Saints were notably expansionist. It was one of the many little inconsistencies which somehow failed to endear them to their interstellar neighbors. And in the meantime, the star system was well placed as a staging point for clandestine operations deeper into the Empire of Man.