March Upcountry

shouted as she leapt over the sprayed blood and past the ensign’s head, still accelerating.

Captain Pahner had just opened his mouth to repeat the sergeant major’s order when there were a whole series of thumps, and the world went sideways.

CHAPTER FOUR

Roger was never sure afterwards if it was the General Quarters alarm or the rough hands of the Marines that startled him awake.

The Marines’ faces were unfamiliar to his mostly sleeping brain in the dim red emergency lights, under the banshee howl of the alarm, and he reacted violently as he was slammed roughly into a bulkhead. As a member of the Imperial Family, his toot was equipped with several bits of software not available to the general public, including a complete “hardwired” hand-to-hand combat package and an “assassin” program which did several interesting things. Moreover, the prince had always been athletic. He held black belts in three separate “hard” martial arts, and his sensei(not surprisingly) was one of the best in the entire Empire of Man.

With all of that going for him, he was not a safe person to jump upon, without warning, in the dark, whatever Bravo Company might have thought of him. Even taken by surprise in a sound sleep, he managed to kick backward, trying for a knee strike as one arm was wrenched to the left and inserted in a sleeve. Considering his surprised, sleep-groggy state, it was a remarkably well-executed attempt . . . and accomplished absolutely nothing.

If the members of The Empress’ Own were surprised by his response, they had a surprise or two for him, as well. Like the fact that their toots offered hardwired booster packages of their own . . . and that all of them had spent even longer training in the martial arts than he had. He was spun around and struck in the solar plexus for his troubles.

The two Bravo Company privates seemed unconcerned by his chokes and gasps as they expertly stuffed him into an emergency vac suit, and once they had him in the suit, with his helmet on, they sat on him. Literally. He was pushed roughly to the deck, where the two bodyguards pinned him down and sat on him, weapons trained outward.

Due to the oversized cretin sitting on his chest, he couldn’t reach his suit controls, and since the com was in its default “off” mode, he couldn’t even call Captain Pahner and order him to get these slope-browed bruisers to let him up. Although he was technically their commander, the privates paid no attention to his first few queries, shouted through the plastron of the helmet. As soon as he realized his efforts were ineffective, he gave up. The hell if he was going to be ignored by these goons.

After what seemed an eternity, but couldn’t have been more than ten or fifteen minutes, the compartment hatch opened to reveal two Marines in battle armor. The guards sitting on him stood up, one of them giving him a hand to help him to his feet, and left the compartment. The two new guards, faceless nonentities behind the flickering visors of their powered armor, sat him on the bed and sandwiched him between them, weapons trained outward once again. But in this case, the weapons were a quad-barreled heavy bead gun and a plasma cannon trained, respectively, toward the door and toward the next compartment. If boarders came slicing through the wall, they were in for an uncomfortable surprise.

He now had time to examine the vac suit and found that—surprise, surprise—the com was limited to the emergency “Guard” frequency only. It was an unforgivable sin, roughly comparable to eating one’s own young, to use that frequency in anything but a true emergency. That was a lesson (one of the few) he’d learned quite painfully during his mandatory ordeal at the Academy, and since the troopers didn’t seem to be hostile—just very, very determined to keep him safe—this probably didn’t count as a “true” emergency. So no communicator.

Which left him to ponder what was going on with virtually no data. There was air, but the emergency lights were on. He reached for the latches on his suit to take the helmet off, but one of the armored Marines tapped his hand away from them. The tap was obviously intended to be polite but firm, but the pseudo-muscles of the armor turned it into a stinging slap.

Rubbing his knuckles, Roger leaned over until his helmet was in contact with the Marine’s.

“Would you mind telling me what the hell is going on?”

“Captain Pahner said to wait until he got here, Your Highness,” a female soprano, badly distorted by the helmets, responded.

Roger nodded and leaned back against the bulkhead, flipping his head inside the helmet to try to make his ponytail lie flat and smooth. So, either there’d been a coup, and Pahner was in on it, or there’d been some sort of emergency, and Pahner wanted to be able to give him a complete report rather than a garbled version second– or third-hand.

If the second scenario were correct, well and good. He would just cool his heels here for a while, then find out what the problem was. If it was a case of the first scenario . . . He looked at the armored Marine with the bead cannon pointed at the door. There was probably a snowball’s chance in hell that he could actually wrest it away from the Marine and kill Pahner with it, but if this was a coup, his life was worth less than spit anyway. Might as well go out like a MacClintock.

He walked mentally back over every step of the event, and noticed that the floor had stopped vibrating. The background hum of the various life-support and drive systems had become so familiar that it was unnoticed, but now, with it gone, its absence was obvious. If those systems were off-line, they were in deep trouble indeed . . . which at least militated against the coup theory.

Then he thought about the two troopers who’d dragged him out of bed. They’d suited him up and literally sat on him for a good ten minutes before anyone showed up to relieve them. And they hadn’t had suits. If the cabin had lost pressure, they would have died rapid and unpleasant deaths. So the privates, at least, thought he was worth keeping alive. Which also argued against the coup theory.

They’d also risked their lives to protect him, and while that willingness to risk or lose their lives to keep their charges alive was assumed on the part of the Imperial Family, Roger had never been in an emergency. There’d never been a situation in which his bodyguard’s life was threatened. Well, there’d been that one disastrous encounter on a vacation, but the bodyguard was never actually in danger, whatever the young lady had threatened. . . .

But in this case, two people whose names he didn’t even know had risked an awful death to protect his life.

It was a confusing thought.

Nearly two hours passed before “Captain” Pahner appeared, accompanied by Captain Krasnitsky. Pahner was in a chameleon suit, while the ship’s captain was in a Fleet skin suit, with his helmet flopped back out of the way.

Pahner nodded to the two guards, who left the cabin, closing the hatch behind them. Roger took a good look at Krasnitsky, and promptly waved him into the station chair at the small desk. While the Fleet captain collapsed into the seat, Pahner touched the stud to lock the hatch, then turned and faced the prince.

“We have a problem, Your Highness.”

“Oh, really, Captain? I hadn’t noticed.” The prince’s voice was muffled through the plastron of the helmet. After a moment’s fumbling, he released the standard catches and dumped the helmet on his bunk. “By the way,” he continued sourly, “there wouldn’t happen to be a skin-suit in my size on board, would there?”

“No, Your Highness, there wouldn’t,” Pahner answered stoically. “I’ve already checked. That detail was overlooked. As were others, apparently.” He turned to the miserable-looking captain. “If you’d care to continue, Captain Krasnitsky?”

The captain rubbed his face and sighed.

“We were sabotaged, Your Highness. Badly.”