Empire of Man 01 - March Upcountry (45 page)

"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."