Empire of Man 01 - March Upcountry (58 page)

"Puissant warriors, indeed," he repeated, and glanced around at his own massed guards. "I ask you, Your Royal Highness, Prince Roger Ramius Sergei Alexander Chiang MacClintock, could your puissant warriors defeat all the guards in this room? Before you fell yourself?"

"Possibly," Roger replied calmly. "Quite probably. And I would be trying very hard to survive."

The king gazed at him for a moment, then glanced at one of his guards . . . who stepped forward, and, with a smooth motion, shoved his spear into the back of the representative from Pasule. Jedal Vel screamed in a froth of aspirated blood as the bitter steel spearhead emerged from his chest, but the guard only grinned cruelly and twisted his wrist as he jerked his weapon free once more and the envoy thudded to the floor.

"Are you so confident?" the king asked, grunting in humor.

"What?" Roger asked, with a smile he didn't feel, as O'Casey recoiled towards the Marines and away from the twitching corpse at her feet. "You think that the 'puissant warriors' who defeated the Kranolta have never seen blood?"

He booted up the assassin program he'd used in Q'Nkok, and as the aiming reticle appeared, superimposed on his vision, he dropped it onto the forehead of the laughter-grunting guard captain.

It required more than well-written software to be truly phenomenal with an assassin program. Even with hard encoding, it required smooth, practiced muscles that could handle the high twitch-rate strains placed upon them. But Roger
had
practiced, and the pistol came up with the blinding speed which had so surprised Pahner in the Q'Nkok banquet hall. The weapon simply
materialized
in his hand, and the supersonic crack of the bead's passage blended with a meaty thump as the decapitated guard captain hit the floor.

The king opened his mouth to shout, his face covered in the bright crimson spray of the captain's blood, then froze as he found himself looking down the barrel of the bead pistol.

"Now, there's an old term for this," Pahner said quietly, his own pistol out and trained as he transmitted furious orders to hold fast over his toot. The orders had to be in text, because the subvocalization equipment was part of the combat helmet he wasn't wearing at the moment, and his toot had to rebroadcast it through the systems of the bodyguards' helmets. That meant the orders were necessarily one-way, but he could imagine Kosutic's distant cursing just fine.

"It's called a 'Mexican standoff,' " he continued. "You try to kill us, and our company blows your little town to the ground. Not that you personally will care, Your Majesty, because you'll die right here, right now."

"I don't think so," the king said with a grunt as guards moved to interpose their bodies between him and Roger's weapon. "But I don't intend to kill any humans today. No, no. That was never my intent."

"You don't mind if we doubt your word, do you?" Roger asked, deflecting the pistol's point of aim to the ceiling as the tension eased slightly. "And, by the way," he added, nodding to the guards between him and Radj Hoomas, "we'll cut through those fucking bodies like they were so much cloth when we start. Bodies aren't going to stop us."

"But doing that would take time and prevent you from killing all the
other
guards that would be killing
you
," the king said. "But, again, that was never my intent."

"Ask him what his plan
is
," O'Casey hissed, now relatively safe between the bulks of Pahner and Roger. She was a fair negotiator, but these were not, in her opinion, optimal conditions. In fact, her mouth was dry with fear and her palms were sweating. She couldn't imagine how Roger and Pahner were staying so calm.

"All right, O King, what's your plan?" Roger asked, carefully not swallowing. If he did, it would be obvious his mouth was as dry as the lakebed they'd landed on.

"I have certain desires," the king said, with another grunt of laughter. "You have certain needs. I think we could come to mutually acceptable terms."

"All right," and Pahner said grimly. "I can see that. But why in hell did you choose to open negotiations like this?"

"Well," the king responded, with yet another grunt that this time turned into a belly laugh, "your need is food, supplies and weapons. Unfortunately, there is no great supply of either in Marshad. My desire, on the other hand, is to conquer Pasule, where it chances that both are readily available. I was fairly sure you wouldn't care to conquer Pasule for me, so it seemed advisable to discover an incentive to . . .
encourage
you."

"An incentive," Pahner repeated tonelessly.

"Precisely. I feel confident that your warband will take Pasule for me when I tell them it's a choice between that and the death of their leaders."

"Okay, okay," Kosutic said, waving for quiet. "Let's just stay cold here, people."

"We should extract them immediately," Jasco said. "I know those aren't our orders, but orders given under duress are invalid."

"Sure, Sir," Kosutic said. "Tell it to the Captain."

"Well . . ."

The conversation was taking place in the third-floor "officers' quarters" of the visitors' area. The pale yellow room where the prince had prepared for the fateful dinner party was now filled with the temporary command group.

"Lieutenant," Julian said, tapping his pad, "we have upwards of a battalion of scummies outside this building. They hold the high ground, and our pack beasts. We would have to fight our way out and up to the throne room."

"The Captain's right, Lieutenant Jasco," the sergeant major said. "We wait for the right moment, and play along in the meantime. We have to wait until the odds favor us, instead of the other way around. We have the time."

"This isn't right!" the exasperated officer said. "We should be taking down that throne room right now. This is a member of the
Imperial Family
!"

"Yep," Kosutic said equably. "Surely is. Dangerous one, too."

Roger listened calmly to the brand-new guard commander's bloodthirsty pronouncements about what would happen to any human who did not obey orders. The new, heavily-armored commander explained at considerable length, and when he finished, Roger bared his teeth in a smile.

"You're next," he said pleasantly.

The guard captain glared at the prince, but the Mardukan's eyes fell before Roger's did, and the scummy withdrew, closing the door behind him.

Roger turned from the door and looked around. The suite was large and airy, with several windows which overlooked the back side of the castle. The far curtain wall, he noticed, was covered with torch-bearing guards watching the shadows for any attempt to escape.

The floor was scattered with the ubiquitous pillows and low tables of the Hadur, and there were "chamber buckets" for relieving wastes. It was quite pleasant, all things considered.

"We have to get out of here," he muttered.

"And you propose to do that, how?" Pahner asked, handing Despreaux back her borrowed helmet. Unlike the prince, the captain was the very picture of sangfroid.

"Well, I feel like taking a rifle and killing a guard an hour until they either let us go or figure out to stay out of sight," Roger snarled, glaring at the guards manning the wall.

"Thereby suggesting retaliation," the captain said coolly. "Until we're actually in combat, we aren't decisively engaged. We should maneuver for room until then. Violence at this stage will only limit, rather than expand, our maneuver room."

"Do you have a plan?" O'Casey asked. "It sounds like you do."

"Not as such," Pahner said, glancing out the window. The lesser moon, Sharma, was rising, and its glimmer could be sensed rather than seen in the darkness beyond the windows. "On the other hand, I've often found that waiting for your opponent to move reveals the weakness in his own plans."

Kostas Matsugae watched the line of stooped figures carrying in the sacks of barleyrice. These Mardukans were the first females, outside their mahouts' families, the company had seen since Q'Nkok, and they were clearly being used for this task because they were both nonthreatening and of subnormal intelligence. They were also thin as rails.

The valet nodded and looked around as the last sack of grain was carried in. The area where the food supplies were being piled was out of sight of the Mardukan guards stationed outside the visitors' quarters, and he quickly opened up a pot and gestured to the Mardukans.

"This is stew with some barleyrice in it." He gestured to a stack of small bowls. "You can each have a bowl. Only one, please."

After the almost pathetically grateful females had left, he looked up and noticed Julian watching him from the doorway. The alcove to one side of the entrance was technically a guard room, but since there were nothing
but
guards in the building, it had been converted to storage.

"Do you have a problem with my charity, Sergeant?" Matsugae picked up one of the sacks and headed for the doorway; it was time to start work on dinner.

"No." The Marine plucked the twenty-kilo sack easily from the slight valet's grip and tossed it over his own shoulder. "Charity seems to be in short supply in this town. Nothing wrong with changing that."

"This is the most detestable town it has ever been my displeasure to visit," Matsugae said. He shook his head and grimaced. "It defies belief."

"Well," the sergeant said with a grim smile, "it's bad—I'll grant that. But it's not the worst in the galaxy. You ever read anything about Saint 'recovery worlds'?"

"Not much," the valet admitted. "Rather, I've heard of them, but I don't really 'know' about them. On the other hand, I believe the overall concept that the Saints espouse has some justice. Many planets
have
been damaged beyond recovery by overzealous terraforming and unchecked mining. That doesn't make me a SaintSymp," he added hastily.

"Didn't think you were. You couldn't have made it past the loyalty tests if you were. Or, at least, I hope you couldn't have. But have you ever read any reports about 'recovery worlds'? Unbiased ones?"

"No," Matsugae replied as they reached the kitchen area. A blaze had already been started in the large fireplace at one end of the guard room, and a pot hung from a swing arm, ready to be put into the fire. The room was amazingly hot, like an entrance to Hell, and Matsugae started gathering the ingredients of the evening meal. "Should I have?"

"Maybe." The sergeant set the bag of grain on the floor. "You know the theory?"

"They're former colonized planets that the Saints are trying to return to 'pristine' condition," the valet said as he began measuring ingredients into the pot. "They're trying to erase any evidence of terrestrial life on them." He smiled and gestured at the pot. "It's stew and barleyrice tonight, for a change."

Julian snorted, but didn't smile.

"That's the theory, all right," he agreed. "But how are they actually doing it? How are they 'unterraforming' those worlds? And what worlds are they? And where are the colonists who lived on them?"

"Why the questions, Sergeant?" Matsugae asked. "Should I assume that you know the answers, whereas I don't?"

"Yeah." Julian gave a mildly angry nod. "I know the answers. Okay. How are they 'unterraforming' the planets? They started with the colonists. Dirt poor farmers, mostly—none of these are worlds that produce anything the Saints give a damn about. That's why they're willing to drop them. So they have these people rounded up and put to work undoing the 'damage' that a couple of generations have done to the planets. Since they were farmers and terraformers—or the descendants of farmers and terraformers, anyway—before they were picked up, they were,
de facto
, guilty of 'ecological mismanagement.' "

"But . . . ?" the valet began in a puzzled tone.

"Hang on." The sergeant held up a hand. "I think I'll answer your question in a bit. Anyway, they put them to work 'reversing' the process. Mostly with hand tools, 'to minimize the impact.' And since humans, just by their excretions, if nothing else, tend to change the environment around them, the 'Saints' have to make sure that any fresh damage is minimized. Which they do by reducing the food supplies of the workers to under one thousand calories per day."

"But that's—"

"About half the minimum necessary to sustain life?" the sergeant said with a vicious smile. "Really? Gee."

"Are you saying that they're starving their own colonists to death?" Matsugae asked in a disbelieving tone. "That's hard to believe. Where's the Human Rights Commission report?"

"These are planets near the center of the Saints own empire," Julian pointed out. "HRC teams aren't let anywhere near the recovery planets. According to the Saints, they're completely abandoned and quarantined, so what interest could the HRC possibly have in them? Besides," he added bitterly, "they worked their way through the colonists years ago."

"My God, you're serious," the valet said quietly. He accepted the help of the obviously angry NCO to fill the pot with water and swung it over the fire. "That's insane!"

" 'Insane' describes the Saints to a 'T,' " Julian snarled. "Of course, the job is never really 'complete,' " he added with a ghastly smile.

"Oh?" Matsugae said warily.

"Sure. I mean, there's always some damned humanocentric weed cropping up somewhere on these pristine beauties," the sergeant said lightly. "That's why they still have to send humans down there to root them out."

"And where do they get those humans?"

"Well, first there's political prisoners," Julian said, ticking off the groups on his fingers. "Then there are other 'environmental enemies,' such as smokers. And there are general prisoners that are just going to be a bother to keep around. Last, but most certainly not least, there are nationals from other political systems that have, in the opinion of the Saint higher-ups, no utility," he finished with a snarl.

"Like?" Matsugae asked even more warily.

"Raider insertion teams, for starters," the Marine said bitterly. "We've lost three in the last year, and all we get out of the Saints is 'we have no knowledge of them.' "