March To The Stars

having some trouble with an influx of workers fleeing the war in the south, which sounded something like the worst of the city-state wars in ancient Italy, but given the shortage of labor with which the reborn city had started, the influx was mostly to the good.

Q'Nkok was flourishing as a side benefit of the rebirth of Voitan. In many ways, the first town the Marines had visited was the least changed by their passage. It supplied raw materials from the mountains and jungles to its west and north to Voitan and the other, larger city-states, and the only real change seemed to be the increased clearing on both sides of the river. With the shift of the People to materials suppliers, rather than hunter/gathers, their need for extensive forests had dwindled, and a new treaty for extended lands had been signed, ending for the time being any rationale for conflict between the two groups.

The shuttles were virtually untouched. All they needed for liftoff was fuel, and on the way back the team stopped to pick up Denat, along with T'Leen Sena, who had accepted his proposal of marriage.

The shuttles, and the port's other aircraft, had also sufficed to pick up the Vashin and Diaspran dependents, along with spare civan and even a few flar-ta, including Patty. They'd found that they could just fit one flar-ta to a shuttle, and as long as they kept the beasts sedated, the trip was a piece of cake.

In addition to all that, the Mardukan members of The Basik's Own had been put through a brief course in shipboard combat. They'd been taken into orbit aboard the assault shuttles and shown how to move in free-fall. After a brief period of total disorientation, most of them had taken to it well, and it turned out that the locals' four arms were incredibly helpful in zero-gravity combat.

After their initial exposure to micro-gravity, they were put through a few maneuvers and finally exposed to vacuum in their new uniforms. After that, there wasn't much more to do. The best the humans could do with the materials at hand was to familiarize the locals with space combat in its most basic sense. If it came down to it, the Mardukans would have to learn the ins and outs as they went, which was rarely a path to long-term survival.

Cord had not joined them in their training. Despite the old Shaman's sulfurous protests, Roger had decided that his asi had no business in any potential boarding actions. It looked more and more as if Cord would be at least partly disabled permanently from his wound, despite all Dobrescue could do. Even if he'd been in perfect health, Roger had pointed out ruthlessly, nothing Cord could have done in battle would make much difference one way or the other to the protection of someone already in powered armor. But he wasn't in perfect health, and that was that.

What Roger very carefully had not mentioned was his conviction that his asi had no business in combat under any circumstances when he stood on the brink of finally becoming a parent. Pedi had been equally careful to stay out of the entire discussion, but Roger had recognized her gratitude when Cord finally grumpily accepted that his 'master's' decision was final.

With the Mardukans' training as close to complete as it was going to get, they'd hidden the assault shuttles away, reloaded with fuel and ammunition, in the jungle on the edge of the Shin lands and settled down to wait for the right ship. When the time came, the main force would loft in one of the port shuttles, suitably stealthed, while the Mardukan 'backup' waited on the ground in the much more threatening assault shuttles.

One ship had come and gone already, but since it was a tramp freighter flagged by Raiden-Winterhowe, they'd passed it up. Hijacking ships under the protection of one of the other major interstellar empires wasn't a good idea. What they were looking for was a ship flagged by the Empire, or even better, one that was owned by an Imperial company but under a flag of convenience. They might be returning to attempt a counter-coup, but they didn't want to start an interstellar war in the process.

It had been a hectic two weeks, but now, with all the preparations in place, all they had to do was wait and train. And if a ship didn't come soon, they'd either have to cut back on the Vashin ammunition allotment—which might lead to a mutiny—or else find a new hill for them to shoot up.

Pahner chuckled at the thought, then keyed his helmet com in response to a call from the com center. He listened for a moment, then nodded, and turned to Kosutic.

'All right, Sergeant Major. Tell the troops to quit their fun and suit up.'

'Ship?'

'Yep. A tramp freighter owned by Georgescu Lines. Due in thirty-six hours. I doubt they can detect plasma bursts from more than twenty hours out, but I think we should start shutting down the ranges and getting our war faces on.'

'Georgescu? That's a New Liberia Company, isn't it, Sir?' Kosutic asked, and Pahner frowned. He understood the point she was making, because New Liberia definitely wasn't a part of the Empire of Man.

'Yes,' he said, 'but the company's owners appear to be Imperial. Or maybe a shell corporation. And it's not like New L is going to go to war with the Empire, even if we do cop one of their ships.'

'No, I don't guess so,' Kosutic agreed.

New Liberia belonged to the Confederation of Worlds, which was a holdover from the treaties which had ended the Dagger Wars. The Confederation was a rag-picker's bag of systems none of the major powers had wanted badly enough to fight each other for, and the treaties had set it up primarily as a buffer zone. Despite the centuries which had passed since, however, it had never progressed much beyond subsistence-level neobarb worlds, most of them despotisms, of which New Liberia was by far the most advanced. Which wasn't saying much. Even that planet wasn't much more than a convenient place to dump an off-planet shell corporation, or register a ship at a minimum yearly cost. As for New Liberia itself, the planet had a population under six million—most of them dirt poor—and a few in-system frigates that were play-toys for whatever slope-brow bully-boy had come out on top in the most recent coup. They were unlikely to charge the Empire with piracy, especially of a freighter which was owned by an Imperial corporation skating around the tax laws.

'We'll call on them to surrender, try to keep casualties to a minimum, and pay Georgescu off when we get back,' the captain said. 'I suppose we could simply say that we're commandeering the ship and ask the captain to come down to the surface to surrender, but then there's the little issue of there being a price on our heads.

'If I thought there was a chance in hell that we'd do anything but get ourselves disappeared when we returned, I'd turn us over to the first authorities we found,' he continued with a frown. 'But there isn't one. Jackson couldn't afford not to make us disappear.'

'Do you think he was the one who put the toombie on DeGlopper?' Kosutic asked. They'd lost so many Marines on the trip that she had a hard time even coming up with all the names, but she remembered shooting Ensign Guha as if it had happened yesterday. Killing a person who was acting under his own volition was one thing. Shooting that toombie—a good junior officer who'd desperately wanted to do anything but what the chip in her head was telling her to do—still made her sick to her stomach. Even if the shot had saved the ship.

'Probably,' Pahner sighed. 'As the head of the Military Committee in the Lords, he had the contacts and the knowledge. And he was no friend of the Empress.'

'Which means he also killed the rest of the Family,' the sergeant major said. 'I'd like some confirmation, but I think that he's one person I'll take active pleasure in terminating with as much prejudice as humanly possible.'

'We will require confirmation that the Empress isn't in full and knowing agreement with his handling of the situation,' Pahner said. 'I don't think there's any doubt that she isn't, but getting hard proof of that will be ... interesting. I have a few ideas on the subject—where to begin, at least—but before we can do anything about it one way or the other, we need a ship.' He waved to Honal, who'd been overseeing the training. 'Round them up, Honal. We're expecting company.'

'Good!' the Vashin said. 'I'm looking forward to ship combat. And I like the thought of seeing all those other worlds you keep talking about.'

'So do I,' Pahner said quietly. 'And especially to seeing one that's not Marduk.'

* * *

'Captain.' Roger nodded in greeting as the Marines walked into the command center. 'It looks like everything is prepared to receive visitors.'

'It had better be,' Pahner growled. 'We've only been getting ready for the last two weeks.'

'I was thinking. You have any major plans between now and when we launch the shuttles?'

'Nothing I'd classify as major,' the Marine said. 'Why?'