Throne of Stars (60 page)

“Entirely.” Beach’s voice was hoarse, and her eyes glittered with unshed tears. “And I’ll do whatever you need done to ensure that day comes. I swear.”

“Good,” Roger said, and smiled. “I’m glad I didn’t have to break out the thumbscrews.”

“Hey, ’Shara,” Sergeant Major Kosutic said, sticking her head into Despreaux’s stateroom. “Come on. We need to talk.”

Kosutic was a blonde now, too, if not nearly as spectacularly so as Despreaux. She was also her regular height, with equally short hair, and a more modest bosom. She was stockier than she had been—she looked like a female weightlifter, which was more or less how she’d looked before, actually—but her stride was a little more . . . feminine, now. Something about the wider hips, Despreaux suspected. The transformation hadn’t changed her pelvic bones, but it had added muscle to either side.

“What does Julian think of the new look?” Despreaux asked.

“You mean ‘Tom?’” the sergeant major said in tones of minor disapproval. “Probably about what Roger thinks of yours. But ‘Tom’ didn’t get the big bazoombas. I’ve detected just a hint of jealousy about that.”

“What is it with men and blonde hair and boobs?” Despreaux demanded angrily.

“Satan, girl, you really want to know?” Kosutic laughed. “Seriously, the theories are divergent and bizarre enough to keep conspiracy theorists babbling happily away to themselves for decades. ‘Mommy’ fixation was an early one—that men want to go back to breast-feeding. It didn’t last long, but it was popular in its time. My personal favorite has to do with the difference between chimps and humans.”

“What do
chimps
have to do with anything?”

“Well, the DNA of chimps and humans is really close. Effectively, humans are just an offshoot of chimpanzee. Even after all the minor mutations that have crept in since going off-planet, humans still have less variability than chimps, and on a DNA chart we just fall in as a rather minor modification.”

“I didn’t know that,” Despreaux said. “Why do you?”

“Face it, the Church of Armagh has to make it up as we go along.” Kosutic shrugged. “Understanding the real
why
of people makes it much easier. Take boobs.”

“Please!” Despreaux said.

“Agreed.” Kosutic smiled. “Chimps don’t have them. Humans are, in fact, the only terrestrial animal with truly pronounced mammary glands. Look at a cow—those impressive udders are almost all functional, milk producing plumbing. Tits? Ha! Their . . . visual cue aspect, shall we say, has nothing to do with milk production per se. That means there’s some other reason for them in our evolutionary history, and one theory is that they developed purely to keep the male around. Human females don’t show signs of their fertility, and human children take a long time, relatively speaking, to reach maturity. Having a male around all the time helped early human and prehuman females with raising the children. The males probably brought in some food, but their primary purpose was defending territory so that there was food to be brought in. In addition, human females are also one of the few species to orgasm—”

“If we’re lucky,” Despreaux observed.

“You want to hear this, or not?”

“Sorry. Go ahead.”

“So, that was a reason for the female to not be too upset when the male was always having a good time with her. And it was another reason for men to stick around. Tits were a visual sign that said: ‘Screw me and stick around and defend this territory.’ Can’t be proven, of course, but it fits with all the reactions males have to them.”

“Yeah,” Despreaux said sourly. “
All
the reactions. They’re still a pain in the . . . back.”

“Sure, and they’re effectively as useful as a vermiform appendix these days,” the sergeant major said. “On the other hand, they’re still great for making guys stupid. And
that
is what we’re going to talk about.”

“Oh?” Despreaux’s tone became decidedly wary. They’d reached the sergeant major’s stateroom, and she was surprised to see Eleanora waiting for them. The chief of staff had been modded as well and was now a rather skinny redhead.

“Oh,” Kosutic confirmed. She closed the hatch and waved Despreaux onto the folded-down bed next to Eleanora, who looked at her with an expression which mingled thoughtfulness and determination with something Despreaux wasn’t at all sure she wanted to see.

“Nimashet, I’m going to be blunt,” the chief of staff said after a moment. “You have to marry Roger.”

“No.” The sergeant stood back up quickly, eyes flashing. “If this is what you wanted to talk about, you can—”

“Sit down, Sergeant,” Kosutic said sharply.

“You’d
better
not use my
rank
when talking about something like this,
Sergeant Major
!” Despreaux snapped back angrily.

“I will when it affects the security of the Empire,” Kosutic replied icily. “Sit. Down. Now.”

Despreaux sat, glaring at the senior NCO.

“I’m going to lay this out very carefully,” Eleanora told her. “And you’re going to listen. Then we’ll discuss it. But hear me out, first.”

Despreaux shifted her glower to the chief of staff. But she also crossed her arms—carefully, given certain recent changes—and sat back stiffly on the bed.

“Some of this only holds—or matters—if we succeed,” Eleanora said. “And some of it is immediately pertinent to our hope of possibly pulling off the mission in the first place. The first point is for everything—current mission and long-term consideration, alike. And that point is that Roger literally has the weight of the Empire on his shoulders right now. And he loves you. And I think you love him. And he’s eaten up by the thought of losing you, which raises all sorts of scary possibilities.”

Desperaux’s surprise must have shown, because the chief of staff grimaced and waved one hand in the air.

“If he
fails
,” she said, “if we go with the government-in-exile program and he becomes just some guy who was
almost
Emperor, you’d marry him, wouldn’t you?”

Despreaux looked at her stony-eyed for two or three heartbeats, then sighed.

“Yes,” she admitted. “Shit. I’d do it in a second if he was ‘just some guy.’ And I’m setting him up
to
fail so I can do just that, aren’t I?”

“You’re setting him up to fail,” Eleanora agreed with a nod. “Not to mention contributing to the mental anguish he’s in right now. Not that I think for a moment that you’ve been doing either of those things intentionally, of course. You’re not manipulative enough for your own good, sometimes, and you certainly don’t think
that
way. But the effect is the same, whether it’s intentional or not. Right now, he has to be wondering, in the deeps of the night, if being Emperor—which he knows he’s going to loathe—is really worth losing
you
. I presented the alternate exile plan because I thought it was a good plan, one that should be looked at as an alternative. It was Julian and the sergeant major who pointed out, afterwards, the
consequences
of the plan. Do you
want
Prince Jackson on the throne? Or a six-way war, more likely?”

“No,” Despreaux said in a low voice. “God, what that would do to Midgard!”

“Exactly,” Kosutic said. “And to half a hundred other worlds. If Adoula takes the Throne, all the out-worlds are going to be nothing but sources of material and manpower—cannon fodder—he and his cronies will bleed dry. If they don’t get nuked in passing during the wars.”

“So he has the weight of the Empire on his shoulders,” Eleanora repeated, “and he’s losing you. And there’s a bolt-hole that he can go to that gets both of those problems off his back. It happens that that bolt-hole would mean very bad things for the Empire, but men aren’t rational about women.”

“That’s another thing I can lay out in black and white,” Kosutic said. “Lots of studies about it. Long-term rational planning drops off the chart when men are thinking about women. It’s how they’re wired. Of course,
we’re
not all that rational about
them
sometimes, either,”

“Now, let’s talk about what happens if we succeed,” Eleanora went on gently and calmly. “Roger is going to end up Emperor—probably sooner than he expects. I don’t know how bad the residual effects of whatever drugs they’re using on his mother are going to be, but I do know they’re not going to be good. And after what’s going on right now gets out, the public’s confidence in her fitness to rule is bound to drop. If the drugs’ effects are noticeable, it will drop even more. Nimashet, Roger could well find himself on the Throne within a year or less, if we pull this thing off.”

“Oh, God,” Despreaux said quietly. Her arms were no longer crossed, and her fingers twisted about one another in her lap. “God, he’ll really hate that.”

“Yes, he will. But there’s much worse,” Eleanora said. “People are neither fully products of their genetics, nor of their experiences, but . . . traumatic experiences can . . . adjust their personalities in various ways. And especially when they’re still fairly young and unformed. Fairly young. Roger is
fairly
young, and, quite frankly, he was also fairly
unformed
when we landed on Marduk. I don’t think anyone would be stupid enough to call him ‘unformed’ now, but the mold in which he’s been shaped was our march halfway around Marduk. Effectively, Roger MacClintock’s done virtually all of his ‘growing up’ in the course of
eight months
of constant, brutal combat ops without relief. Think about that.

“More than once, he’s ended serious political negotiations by simply shooting the people he was negotiating with. Of course they were negotiating in bad faith when he did it. He never had a choice. But it’s become . . . something of a habit. So has destroying any obstacle that got in his path. Again, because he didn’t have a choice. Because they were obstacles he couldn’t deal with any other way, and because so much depended on their being dealt with effectively . . . and permanently. But what that means is that he has . . . very few experiential reasons to
not
use every available scrap of firepower to remove any problems that arise. And if we succeed, this young man is going to be Emperor.

“There will probably be a civil war, no matter what we do. In fact, I’ll virtually guarantee that there’ll be one. The pressures were right for one—building nicely to one, anyway—when we left Old Earth, and things obviously haven’t gotten any better. What with the problems at home, I’d be surprised if a rather large war doesn’t break out—soon—and if it does, a man who has vast experience in killing people to accomplish what he considers are necessary goals is going to be sitting on the Throne of Man. I want you to think about
that
for a moment, too.”

“Not good,” Despreaux said, licking her lips.

“Not good at all,” Eleanora agreed. “His advisers,” she added, touching her own chest, “can mitigate his tendency to violence, to a degree. But only if he’s amenable. The bottom line is that the Emperor can usually get what he wants, one way or another. If he doesn’t like our advice, for example, he could simply fire us.”

“Roger . . . wouldn’t do that,” Despreaux said positively. “No one who was on the March is ever going to be anyone he would fire. Or not listen to. He might not take the advice, though.”

“And the armed forces swear an oath to the Constitution
and
the Emperor. He’s their commander-in-chief. He can do quite a bit of fighting even without any declaration of war, and if we manage to succeed in this . . . this—”

“This forlorn hope,” Kosutic supplied.

“Yes.” The chief of staff smiled thinly, recognizing the ancient military term for a small body of troops sent out with even smaller hope of success. “If we succeed in this
forlorn hope
, there’s automatically going to be a state of emergency. If a civil war breaks out, the Constitution equally automatically restricts citizens’ rights and increases the power of the sitting head of state. We could end up with . . . Roger, in his present mental incarnation, holding as much power as any other person in the history of the human race.”

“You sound like he’s some bloody-handed murderer!” Despreaux shook her head. “He’s not. He’s a
good
man. You make him sound like one of the Dagger Lords!”

“He’s not that,” Kosutic said. “But what he is is damned near a reincarnation of Miranda MacClintock. She happened to be a political philosopher with a strongly developed sense of responsibility and duty, which, I agree, Roger also has. But if you remember your history, she also took
down
the Dagger Lords by being a bloody-minded bitch at least as ruthless as
they
were.”

“What he is, effectively,” Eleanora continued in that same gentle voice, “is a neobarbarian tyrant. A ‘good’ tyrant, perhaps, and as charismatic as hell—maybe even on the order of an Alexander the Great—but still a tyrant. And if he can’t break out of the mold, putting him on the Throne will be as bad for the Empire as disintegration.”

“What’s your point?” Despreaux demanded harshly.

“You,” Kosutic said. “When you joined the Regiment, when I was interviewing you on in-process, I damned near blackballed you.”

“You never told me that.” Despreaux frowned at the sergeant major. “Why?”

“You’d passed all the psychological tests,” Kosutic replied with a shrug. “You’d passed RIP, although not with flying colors. We knew you were loyal. We knew you were a good guard. But there was something missing, something I couldn’t quite put a finger on. I called it ‘hardness,’ at the time, but that’s not it. You’re damned hard.”

“No,” Despreaux said. “I’m not. You were right.”

“Maybe. But hardness was still the wrong word.” Kosutic frowned. “You’ve always done your job. Even when you lost the edge and couldn’t fight anymore, you contributed and sweated right along with the rest of us. You’re just not . . .”

“Vicious,” Despreaux said. “I’m not a killer.”

“No.” Kosutic nodded in acknowledgment. “And I sensed that. That was what made me want to blackball you. But in the end, I didn’t.”

“Maybe you should have.”

“Bullshit. You did your job—more than your job. You made it, and you’re the key to what we need. So quit whining, soldier.”