Imprimus, they nuked the spaceport.
The one-kiloton kinetic energy weapon was a chunk of iron
the size of a small aircar. He watched it burn on the
viewscreens of the captured Saint special operations ship
as it entered the upper atmosphere of the planet Marduk
and tracked in perfectly. It exploded in a flash of light
and plasma, and the mushroom cloud reached up into the
atmosphere, spreading a cloud of dust over the nearer
Krath villages.
The spaceport was deserted at the moment it turned into
plasma. Everything movable, which had turned out to be
everything but the buildings and fixed installations, had
been stripped from it. The Class One manufacturing
facility, capable of making clothes and tools and small
weapons, had been secreted at Voitan, along with most of
the untrustworthy humans, including all of the surviving
Saint Greenpeace commandos who had been captured with the
ship. They could work in the Voitan mines, help rebuild
the city, or, if they liked nature so much, they could
feel free to escape into the jungles of Marduk, teeming
with carnivores who would be more than happy to ingest
them.
Prince Roger Ramius Sergei Alexander Chiang MacClintock
watched the explosion with a stony face, then turned to
the small group gathered in the ship's control room, and
nodded.
"Okay, let's go."
The prince was a shade under two meters tall, slim but
muscular, with some of the compact strength usually
associated with professional zero-G ball players. His long
blond hair, pulled back in a ponytail, was almost white
from sun bleaching, and his handsome, almost beautiful,
classic European face was heavily tanned. It was also
lined and hard, seeming far older than his twenty-two
standard years. He had neither laughed nor smiled in two
weeks, and as his long, mobile hand scratched at the neck
of the two-meter black and red lizard standing pony-high
by his side, Prince Roger's jade-green eyes were harder
than his face.
There were many reasons for the lines, for the early
aging, for the hardness about his eyes and shoulders.
Roger MacClintock-Master Roger, behind his back, or simply
The Prince-had not been so lined and hard nine months
before. When he, his chief of staff and valet, and a
company of Marine bodyguards had been hustled out of
Imperial City, thrust into a battered old assault ship,
and sent packing on a totally nonessential political
mission, he had taken its as just another sign of his
mother's disapproval of her youngest son. He'd shown none
of the diplomatic and bureaucratic expertise of his older
brother, Prince John, the Heir Primus, nor of the military
ability of his older sister the admiral, Princess
Alexandra, Heir Secondary. Unlike them, Roger spent his
time playing zero-G ball, hunting big game, and generally
being the playboy, and he'd assumed that Mother had simply
decided it was time for him to steady down and begin doing
the Heir Tertiary's job.
What he hadn't known at the time, hadn't known until
months later, was that he was being hustled out of town in
advance of a firestorm. The Empress had gotten wind,
somehow, that the internal enemies of House MacClintock
were preparing to move. He knew that now. What he still
didn't know was whether she'd wanted him out of the way to
protect him ... or to keep the child whose loyalty she
distrusted out of both the battle and temptation's way.
What he did know was that the cabal behind the crisis his
mother had foreseen had planned long and carefully for it.
The sabotage of Charles DeGlopper, his transport, had been
but the first step, although neither he nor any of the
people responsible for keeping him alive had realized it
at the time.
What Roger had realized was that the entire crew of the
DeGlopper had sacrificed their lives in hopeless battle
against the Saint sublight cruisers they had discovered in
the Marduk System when the crippled ship finally managed
to limp into it. They'd taken those ships on, rather than
even considering surrender, solely to cover Roger's own
escape in DeGlopper's assault shuttles, and they'd
succeeded.
Roger had always known the Marines assigned to protect him
regarded him with the same contempt as everyone else at
Court, nor had DeGlopper's crew had any reason to regard
him differently. Yet they'd died to protect him. They'd
given up their lives in exchange for his, and they would
not be the last to do it. As the men and women of Bravo
Company, Bronze Battalion, The Empress' Own, had marched
and fought their way across the planet they'd reached
against such overwhelming odds, the young prince had seen
far too many of them die. And as they died, the young fop
learned, in the hardest possible school, to defend not
simply himself, but the soldiers around him. Soldiers who
had become more than guards, more than family, more than
brothers and sisters.
In the eight brutal months it had taken to cross the
planet, making alliances, fighting battles, and at last,
capturing the spaceport and the ship aboard which he stood
at this very moment, that young fop had become a man. More
than a man-a hardened killer. A diplomat trained in a
school where diplomacy and a bead pistol worked hand-in-
hand. A leader who could command from the rear, or fight
in the line, and keep his head when all about him was
chaos.
But that transformation had not come cheaply. It had cost
the lives of over ninety percent of Bravo Company. It had
cost the life of Kostas Matsugae, his valet and the only
person who had ever seemed to give a single good goddamn
for Roger MacClintock. Not Prince Roger. Not the Heir
Tertiary to the Throne of Man. Just Roger MacClintock.
And it had cost the life of Bravo Company's commanding
officer, Captain Armand Pahner.
Pahner had treated his nominal commander first as a
useless appendage to be protected, then as a decent junior
officer, and, finally, as a warrior scion of House
MacClintock. As a young man worthy to be Emperor, and to
command Bronze Battalion. Pahner had become more than a
friend. He'd become the father
Roger had never had, a mentor, almost a god. And in the
end, Pahner had saved the mission and Roger's life by
giving his own. Roger MacClintock couldn't remember the
names of all his dead. At first, they'd been faceless
nonentities. Too many had been killed taking and holding
Voitan, dying under the spears of the Kranolta, before he
even learned their names. Too many had been killed by the
atul, the low-slung hunting lizards of Marduk. Too many
had been killed by the flar-ke, the wild dinosauroids
related to the elephant-like flar-ta packbeasts. By
vampire moths and their poisonous larva, the
killerpillars. By the nomadic Boman, by sea monsters out
of darkest nightmares, and by the swords and spears of the
cannibalistic "civilized" Krath.
But if he couldn't remember all of them, he remembered
many. The young plasma gunner, Nassina Bosum, killed by
her own malfunctioning rifle in one of the first attacks.
Corpora Ima Hooker and Dokkum, the happy mountaineer from
Sherpa, killed by flar-ke almost within sight of Ran Tai.
Kostas, the single human being who'd ever cared for him in
those cold, old days before this nightmare, killed by an
accursed damncroc while fetching water for his prince.
Gronningen, the massive cannoneer, killed taking the
bridge of this very ship.
So many dead, and so far yet to go.
The Saint ship for which they'd fought so hard showed how
brutal the struggle to capture it had been. No one had
suspected that the innocent tramp freighter was a covert,
special operations ship, crewed by elite Saint commandos.
The risk in capturing it had seemed minor, but since
losing Roger would have made their entire epic march and
all of their sacrifices in vain, he'd been left behind
with their half-trained Mardukan allies when the surviving
members of Bravo Company went up to take possession of
the "freighter."
The three-meter-tall, horned, four-armed, mucus-skinned
natives of The Basik's Own had come from every conceivable
preindustrial level of technology. D'Nal Cord, his asi-
technically, his "slave," since Roger had saved his life
without any obligation to do so, though anyone who made
the mistake of treating the old shaman as a menial would
never live long enough to recognize the enormity of his
mistake-and Cord's nephew Denat had come from the X'Intai,
the first, literally Stone Age tribe they had encountered.
The Vasin, riders of the fierce, carnivorous civan, were
former feudal lords whose city-state had been utterly
destroyed by the rampaging Boman barbarians and who had
provided The Basik's Own's cavalry. The core of its
infantry had come from the city of Diaspra-worshipers of
the God of Waters, builders and laborers who had been
trained into a disciplined force first of pikemen, and
then of riflemen.
The Basik's Own had followed Roger through the battles
that destroyed the "invincible" Boman, then across demon-
haunted waters to totally unknown lands. Under the banner
of a basik, rampant, long teeth bared in a vicious grin,
they'd battled the Krath cannibals and taken the
spaceport. And in the end, when the Marines were unable to
overcome the unexpected presence of Saint commandos on the
ship, they'd been hurled into the fray again.
Rearmed with modern weaponry-hypervelocity bead and plasma
cannon normally used as crew-served weapons or as weapons
for powered armor-the big Mardukans had been thrown into
the ship in a second wave and immediately charged into the
battle. The Vasin cavalry had rushed from position to
position, ambushing the bewildered commandos, who could
not believe that "scummies" using cannon as personal
weapons were really roaming all over their ship, opening
shuttle bay doors to vacuum and generally causing as much
havoc as they could. And while the ... individualistic
Vasin had been doing that, the Diaspran infantry had taken
one hard point after another, all of them heavily defended
positions, by laying down plasma fire as if it were the
rank-upon-rank musketry which was their specialty.
And they'd paid a heavy price for their victory. In the
end, the ship had been taken, but only at the cost of far
too many more dead and horribly injured. And the ship
itself had been largely gutted by the savage firefights.
Modern tunnel ships were remarkably robust, but they
weren't designed to survive the effect of five Mardukans
abreast, packed bulkhead-to-bulkhead in a passage and
volley-firing blast after blast of plasma.
What was left of the ship was a job for a professional
space dock, but that was out of question. Jackson Adoula,
Prince of Kellerman, and Roger's despised father, the Earl
of New Madrid, had made that impossible when they murdered
his brother and sister and all of his brother's children,
massacred the Empress' Own, and somehow gained total
control of the Empress herself. Never in her wildest
dreams would Alexandra MacClintock have closely associated
herself with Jackson Adoula, whom she despised and
distrusted. And far less would she ever have married New
Madrid, whose treasonous tendencies she'd proven to her
own satisfaction before Roger was ever born. Indeed, New
Madrid's treason was the reason she'd never married
him ... and a large part of the explanation for her
distrust of Roger himself. Yet according to the official
news services, Adoula had become her trusted Navy Minister
and closest Cabinet confidant, and this time she had
announced she did intend to wed New Madrid. Which seemed
only reasonable, the newsies pointed out, since they were
the men responsible for somehow thwarting the coup attempt
which had so nearly succeeded.
The coup which, according to those same official news
services, had been instigated by none other than Prince
Roger ... at the very instant that he'd been fighting for
his life against ax- wielding Boman barbarians on sunny
Marduk.
Something, to say the least, was rotten in Imperial City.
And whatever it was, it meant that instead of simply
taking the spaceport and sending home a message "Mommy,
come pick me up," the battered warriors at Roger's back
now had the unenviable task of retaking the entire Empire
from the traitors who were somehow controlling the
Empress. The survivors of Bravo Company-all twelve of them-
and the remaining two hundred and ninety members of The
Basik's Own, pitted against one hundred and twenty star
systems, with a population right at three-quarters of a
trillion humans, and uncountable soldiers and ships. And
just to make their task a bit more daunting, they had a
time problem. Alexandra was "pregnant"-a new scion had
been popped into the uterine replicator, a full brother of
Roger's, from his mother's and father's genetic material-
and under Imperial law, now that Roger had been officially
attainted for treason, that fetus became the new Heir
Primus as soon as he was born.
Roger's advisers concurred that his mother's life would
last about as long as spit on a hot griddle when that
uterine replicator was opened.
Which explained the still dwindling mushroom cloud. When
the Saints came looking for their missing ship, or an
Imperial carrier finally showed up to wonder why Old Earth
hadn't heard from Marduk in so long, it would appear a
pirate vessel had pillaged the facility and then vanished
into the depths of space. What it would not look like was
the first step in a counter coup intended to regain the
Throne for House MacClintock.
He took one last look at the viewscreens, then turned and
led his staff off the bridge towards the ship's wardroom.
Although the wardroom itself had escaped damage during the
fighting, the route there was somewhat hazardous. The
approaches to the bridge had taken tremendous damage-
indeed, the decks and bulkheads of the short security
corridor outside the command deckhead been sublimed into
gas by plasma fire from both sides. A narrow, flexing,
carbon-fiber catwalk had been built as a temporary
walkway, and they crossed it carefully, one at a time. The
passageway beyond wasn't much better. Many of the holes in
the deck had been repaired, but others were simply
outlined in bright yellow paint, and in many places, the
bulkheads reminded Roger forcibly of Old Earth Swiss
cheese.
He and his staffers picked their way around the unrepaired
holes in the deck and finally reached the wardroom's
dilating hatch, and Roger seated himself at the head of
the table. He leaned back, apparently entirely at ease, as
the lizard curled into a ball by his side. His calm
demeanor fooled no one.