March To The Sea

* * *

'No gold?' Armand Pahner's voice was admirably composed, but he kept his head turned slightly away to hide his incipient grin.

'Nope.' Roger kicked one of the low tables. 'None. We found a few kilos of silver—hardly enough to outfit us, but maybe if we scrimp . . .' He shook his head angrily. 'We searched every mine, as far as we could with the way the groundwater's risen since Deb Tar's people's pumps shut down. Not a bit of gold anywhere.'

'Oh, great,' O'Casey said. 'Stop kicking the table, Roger. We can't afford to break any furniture.'

'The worst part is that I'm a laughingstock,' Roger said bitterly. 'Of course Deb Tar wasn't willing to pay us a red centicred, and the local courts won't touch it. Especially not after the way he kept accusing us of hiding the gold ourselves, as if that made any sense.'

'Oh, it's not that bad,' Kosutic said. 'It was a good op. It went down exactly as planned, and nobody got hurt. Hell, it was basically a training exercise, and a good one. And nobody faults you, Sir. Everybody thought the gold was there, and Deb Tar is furious.'

'But where did it go?' O'Casey asked.

'That's the million-credit question,' the sergeant major replied, 'and His Evilness only knows the answer. It was definitely in the storehouse when the Vasin slipped through the gates, and it's definitely not there now. And the Vasin did not carry it out. Unfortunately, none of that tells us what did happen to it, and where it went is a mystery. The storehouse was empty, and even the carts they kept the stuff in are gone.'

'Carts?' the chief of staff repeated.

'Yeah. They load the stuff into carts to carry it to the storehouse from the refinery, and they just shove the carts into the storehouse to save themselves the trouble of unloading it just so they can load it again when the time comes to haul it down to the city. But the carts weren't there—and they weren't in the refinery or anywhere else, either. We looked just to see if they'd been hidden in the smelters or something.'

'There's no way they could've gotten it out of the valley without taking it through the gate,' Roger said despairingly. 'Mardukans just can't climb that well.'

'Well, Your Highness,' Captain Pahner said with a smile, 'I'm sure we'll think of something. But maybe you want to get some sleep, or even go hit the taverns. Go blow off some steam.'

'With what? We're tapped!'

'We're not that tapped,' the CO said. 'Take the . . . platoon out and have a trooper blast. We can afford it, barely, and it's the best thing to do after a busted op.'

'Okay.' Roger shrugged. 'If you say so.'

'Go have some fun, Captain Sergei,' the captain told him with a smile.

'That particular ancestor wasn't very lucky,' Roger said, summoning a slight grin of his own in return. 'I think I'll pick a different moniker.'

Pahner chuckled in sympathy, and the prince turned and headed for the door. Behind him, Kosutic looked at the captain and lifted an eyebrow. He was planning something.

* * *

Roger was drunk. So was Nimashet Despreaux. And just at the moment, the prince was stone-cold positive that that was a Bad Thing.

The two of them had somehow ended up in a pool of silence in the middle of the roaringly successful party. The inn's owner had been only too happy to have the custom, but most of the Mardukan patrons had gone home early. The off-worlders were too drunk, too aggressive, and, by all means, too loud. A group of Marines in one corner was roaring out one of the dirtiest ditties Roger had ever heard in his life—something about 'Three-Ball Pete'—and in another corner, in competition with their theoretically musical efforts, was an arm-wrestling match, complete with chanting cheerleaders. Neither group could have carried a tune if you'd given them a hundred buckets, but everyone was far too plastered to care.

So the little pool of privacy that had formed around him and the sergeant had a queasy setup feel to the high-flying prince's somewhat befuddled instincts. He could feel the little prods from the group even through his wine-induced haze, and, in a way, it was gratifying. Despreaux was by no means ugly, after all. And if the company had decided it was a good thing for them to 'get together,' it meant a form of acceptance. On the other hand . . .

Roger cleared his throat as Despreaux, apparently oblivious to the little nods, winks, and maneuvers around them, poured him some more wine.

'Nima-sh-sh-shet?' he asked.

'Hmmm?' Her smile was warm, and his resistance wavered for a moment. She was, in fact, quite beautiful. And he'd had that thought any number of times before, he reminded himself, so it wasn't the several bottles of wine he'd consumed at this point.

'I . . . don' ge' involved wi' . . . uh . . .'

What he wanted to say was that he didn't get sexually involved at all. The consequences and ramifications for someone in his position were simply too great, and the two times he'd made the mistake of forgetting that, the public discussion of his sex life had hammered the point mercilessly home. No one outside the Imperial Family could possibly conceive of the intensity with which a public microscope examined the behavior of all MacClintocks, and anyone who thought Roger or his siblings could conduct even the most discreet love affair without the newsies finding out had to be a drug addict. The last thing the dynasty's 'bad boy' had needed was to hand the scandal faxes that kind of story!

That would have been more than sufficient reason for discretion on Roger's part, but he was honest enough—with himself, at least—to admit that there was another and much more personal reason. His mother had never married his father, and until Eleanora O'Casey had explained the actual train of events to him in Marshad, Roger had always believed deep in his heart that he must have been what had driven them apart and led to his father's banishment from court. Looked at logically, the notion that he could be to blame was ridiculous, but the wounded, lonely child to whom it had first occurred had scarcely been in a position to consider it rationally.

And one thing he was totally and bitterly certain of was that he would never put another child into the position of thinking the same thoughts and enduring the same pain. Oh, he knew perfectly well that the drugs and nanites that eliminated the monthly curse for the female Marines also eliminated any possibility of pregnancy, but engaging in a casual affair, especially under these conditions, was as impossible for the prince as it might have been for other scions of the 'nobility' to resist banging the servants. And even if it hadn't been, there was no way that he would damage the unit's cohesion that way—no way that he was going to damage his companion-at-arms relationship with the sergeant, one he'd literally shed blood to create, for an evening's romp in the sack.

No matter how badly his inebriated body yearned to throw itself onto the highly trained Marine, rip her uniform off, and bury his face in her high, firm breasts.

But he'd never been able to explain any of his tangled feelings and rational analyses to anyone in his life. Not even to Matsugae, who was, in many ways, the closest thing Roger had ever known to a genuine 'father.' His personal . . . quirks had led to problems ever since upper school, and he'd still never been able to articulate them. Not even when the commander of his mother's bodyguard had been standing in his bedroom, trying to understand why the stark-naked and raving daughter of a grand duke was calling him a eunuch.

He couldn't think of the way to do it now, either, however hard he tried. And he did try. His fuddled brain searched for something—anything—to say to take the sting out of his rejection, but what dropped from his lips was ' . . . associateatsh.'

* * *

Nimashet Despreaux blinked twice and tried to focus on the prince, but all she could see was the target zone just above his Adam's apple.

'Di' you jus' say what I thin' you said?' she enunciated carefully.

'Look, call me weird,' Roger said, gesturing with his cup. 'But I don' fool around with . . . assoc . . . ass . . . aizoaceae . . . . Look, not tha' it wouldn' be fun. You' gorgeous. Bu' I won'.'

'Wha' you mean is you don' fool 'round wi' the help. Tha's wha' you were gonna say, right?' the NCO demanded. 'I s'pose a sergeant from a ass en' o' nowhere planet isn' good enough for you!'

'No, is no' like that!' the prince protested vehemently, leaning forward to give