March To The Sea

attention wanders at the wrong moment, you end up dead. You didn't kill him, and he didn't kill himself—the fucking planet did.'

'And the Marines? What about them?' Roger demanded in a harsh, almost spiteful tone.

'Two things,' Despreaux told him calmly. 'One, every time you've 'put us in jeopardy' it was a relative danger. This planet is no place for a right-thinking Marine who wants to die in bed, preferably while getting a leg- over, but you didn't pick it, and you certainly didn't order us to come here. Second, a lot of those 'stupid unthinking actions' are the reason we love you. Looking at it sensibly, I guess it really isn't very smart of you, but you just throw yourself at the enemy and keep moving forward until you come out on the other side, and in some ways, Marines aren't all that different from Mardukans. We know the object is to kill the other guy and come home afterward, and we don't have any use at all for officers who keep hanging themselves—and us—out just to prove what great big brass ones they have. But for all that, we respond to COs who lead us a thousand times better than we do to those who send us out ahead. And whatever other faults you may have, we've discovered on this shit ball of a planet that you're one hell of a leader. You've got a lot to learn, maybe, about thinking your way through problems—I swear, if you ever faced a Rasthaus wartbeast, you'd throw yourself into its mouth and try to tunnel out the other end!—but you wouldn't do the one thing a leader can never do in combat: hesitate.'

'Seriously?' Roger rolled over on his back and looked up at her, and she stroked his face and smiled.

'Seriously. The only thing a Marine truly hates is a coward. Hold still.' She leaned down and kissed him. It was a hell of a bend, but she was limber, and Roger released her lips reluctantly.

'What are we doing? And how did we get from Kostas to here?'

'What? They didn't cover that in the Academy?' she asked with a soft laugh. 'Call it the desire for life renewal in the face of death. A strong desire. The need to hold back the ferryman in the only way we know.' She paused and ran a hand down his side. 'Ten years, huh?'

Roger sat up and wrapped his arms around her. As he did, he noted that his tactful bodyguards had discreetly withdrawn out of sight of himself and their squad leader. Which made him wonder what would happen if another damncroc, assuming there were any left in the entire river after his extermination efforts, slipped up out of the water while they were engaged. Which made him wonder where his cavalry detachment had gotten to. He remembered giving the infantry to Ther Ganau, which made him wonder who was covering the supply convoys.

Which made him groan.

'What?' Despreaux asked huskily.

'Oh, God, Nimashet. We just don't have time. Where's my cavalry? How are Rus From's engineers doing at Sindi? What's happening with Rastar? Are the barges all in place, and who in hell is covering Ther's caravans?'

Her eyes flared, and she grabbed him by the front of his chameleon suit.

'Five minutes,' she ground out through gritted teeth.

'More like thirty seconds,' the prince told her with something almost like a laugh. 'If we can get our clothes off in time, that is. But it's thirty seconds we need to not take. I've already lost hours with this despair shit, and we don't need to lose any more with the reverse.'

She stuck her hip into his and rolled him over onto his back with the grip on his chameleon suit.

'Listen to me, Prince Roger Ramius Sergei Alexander Chiang MacClintock!' she hissed. 'I want a promise. You can make it on anything you care to name, but you will make it! And that promise is that as soon as we get somewhere safe, and all the crises are past, you will take me to bed. And take your time at it. And do it well.' She picked him up and pounded him lightly on the ground with each phrase. 'Do you swear?'

Roger wrapped his legs around her, pulled her down on top of himself, and kissed her.

'When we're back on Earth. When all of this is behind us, when we're back in the Imperial Palace, and we can be sure it's not the situation. When I'm sure that I love Nimashet Despreaux more than life itself, and that it's not unbridled lust from all the pain and death and blood. Then I'll take you—as my wife, if I can get away with it, or as a senior partner, if I can't. And I will love you until the day I die. I swear it on my dead.'

She pounded her head into his breastbone.

'All I want to do is to screw you, you idiot! You're supposed to be telling me you'll love me and marry me to get me to bed—not telling me that to get you into bed I have to marry you. That's my line!'

'Do you accept?' Roger asked.

'Of course I do!' she snapped. 'I'd have to be an idiot not to. I love you so hard it hurts, and don't think I'll get over that just because we get back to Earth. Hell, I was so far gone I loved you when you were just an overblown, brainless, arrogant prick of a clotheshorse and I damned well should have known better!'

'Speaking of clotheshorses,' he said, fingering the placket of her chameleon suit, 'these uniforms could use some work. That's the second thing I'm going to do when we get back to Earth.' He looked into her eyes. 'So we wait?' he asked in a quieter voice. 'You're okay with that?'

'I wouldn't use the term 'okay,' ' she said. ' 'Okay' is definitely not the adverb, or whatever. As a matter of fact, if there's a direct opposite of 'okay' for this situation, that's about where I am. I'm not exactly 'bad' with it, I guess, but I'm definitely sort of 'anti-okay.' On the other hand, I'm a big girl. I'll live.'

Roger rolled over, then stood, and pulled her to her feet.

'You ready to go?'

'Sure,' she answered sharply. 'Let's go find something for me to kill before you start looking any better.'

'Okay,' Roger said with a smile. 'I want you to know, I really do want you. But I don't get any easier with time.'

'I've noticed,' the sergeant muttered darkly. 'Stubborn as a Mardukan day is long.' She shook her head. 'I have never had this much trouble getting a man to bed. For that matter, I've never had any trouble getting a man to bed. It was always the other way around.'

'Frustration is good for the soul,' Roger said. 'Look at what it's done for me!'

'Yeah,' Despreaux said with a sigh. 'No wonder you're so dangerous. Ten years?'

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Armand Pahner stood on the walls of Sindi and gazed out over the muddy, trampled fields. Work crews, wagon trains, and infantry pickets marching out to relieve other pickets stretched as far as the eye could see with a helmet visor set to max, but even as he gazed at them, the activities outside the walls weren't what occupied his mind.

He was thinking about women and children.

The Boman host traveled with all the (limited) comforts of home, including its women and young . . . and Kny Camsan's ambitions had concentrated over half the total host's dependents right here in the city. In fact, it was that bit of intelligence, discovered by Gunny Jin's LURPs and confirmed by reports from a handful of the primitive woodsmen who continued to linger in the forests, despite the Boman's presence, which had shaped the captain's entire strategy.

Pahner had given the strictest orders that every one of those dependents was to be taken into custody, and that none of them were to be molested in any way. The biannual 'heat' of the Mardukans eliminated, for all practical purposes, the issue of rape from the local art of war, which—given humans' history—he thought was a very good thing. But that didn't necessarily make war nice and sanitary, and the Boman's depredations and the sheer, horrifying scale of the massacres they had perpetrated had left the locals perfectly willing to slaughter their women and children in return and be done with it. K'Vaernians didn't have the expression 'nits make lice,' but there was general agreement that the only good Boman was a dead Boman, and the age or sex didn't matter.

Those qualities did, however, matter to Pahner. Leaving aside the clear proscription in imperial regulations against atrocities, leaving aside even his own personal repugnance for unnecessary slaughter, he needed those dependents. He needed them alive, and in good condition.