March To The Stars

'Hold what we've got. Nobody goes in, nobody comes out. Engineering?'

'Gunny Lai bought it there, so did Sergeant Angell. But Georgiadas has the situation under control; there's a security point there that they took, and they're covered in both directions. You're not, so hold on hard. Got it?'

'Got that in one, Sir. What's to stop them from taking off, Sir?'

'Nothing.' Julian could hear the grim humor behind that single word. 'Georgiadas reports that the drive is warming up under remote from the Bridge even as we speak.'

'Yes, Sir.' Julian licked his lips and cursed quietly. 'Sir, I'll be asked. What in the hell are we going to do? I think I'd rather face the Kranolta again.'

'I'm going to do the one thing that I swore to myself I would not, under any circumstances whatsoever, especially if things were bad, stoop to.'

* * *

'Go! Go! Go!'

'Your Highness, just wait!' Dobrescu snapped. 'Thirty more seconds to lift. That's the optimal window. So just sit the hell down and shut the hell up.'

'Goddamn it!' Roger almost punched the display, but he remembered all those centuries ago, the last time he'd been in a cramped little compartment like this one in powered battle armor and gently tapped a control panel. Yet it was hard to restrain himself. Hard. The display showed that the thirty Marines who'd lifted off to the 'tramp freighter' had been reduced to twenty-four already. At this rate, there wouldn't be anyone to rescue.

'Prepare for lift,' Dobrescu called over the all-hands circuit. 'Helmets on! You sc—Mardukans get ready. You're going to feel realll heavy. Three, two, one ...'

'Just hang on, Nimashet,' Roger whispered. 'Just hang on... .'

Four Marine assault shuttles, containing the Mardukan contingent of the Basik's Own, lifted skyward on pillars of flame.

* * *

'All units, hold what you've got,' Pahner called. 'The cavalry is on the way.'

'Satan, protect us,' Kosutic snapped as a team of commandos rolled across the corridor. She winged one, but the other three got away. 'We're getting outmaneuvered and outshot, Captain.'

'I've noticed,' Pahner said calmly. 'Suggestions?'

'Let Poertena and me take it to them,' Kosutic said. 'Having a mobile force will force them to react.'

'I'll have a mobile force here in—' He consulted his suit. 'Seven minutes.'

'Seven minutes is a lonnng time, Armand.'

Pahner sighed and nodded.

'That it is.'

* * *

'Aaaahhh!'

'Oh, calm down, Rastar,' Roger grunted. The shuttles still had the extra hydrogen tanks installed, and the plotted intercept had been calculated based upon that almost limitless fuel supply. So they'd lifted at three gravities and would hit a DV-Max of almost seven. For Roger and the pilots, that was simply very unpleasant. For the Mardukans, who had never experienced more than a couple of gravities during their limited micro-gravity familiarization flights, it was a nightmare.

They'd put all of them through at least one lift, but nothing like this. The humans had managed to convince themselves that there was no conceivable situation in which the Mardukans would actually be used for a combat assault, so they hadn't subjected them to the real stresses of such a launch. And now the Mardukans, and their allies, were paying the price for that complacent gentleness.

'All hands, remember, crunch!' Roger gasped. 'Squeeze your stomach like you're taking a dump, but plug your butt.' He glanced over at the telltales. 'There's only another ... three minutes.'

* * *

'I hate freefall,' St. John (M) said as he hugged the hull of the ship.

Their EVU packs were gone, and the two Marines were now flat on their faces behind a tiny exterior catwalk. The first emplacement, a missile launcher, had been undefended. But by the time they made it to the second and last, a heavy plasma cannon, the Saints had suffered a rush of common sense and sent one of their few 'free' heavy weapons to protect it. The ship-to-ship cannon itself couldn't depress far enough to engage the Marines, or they'd already have been reduced to constituent atoms, but the heavy bead gun that had popped out of the firing port had them well and truly pinned. Because of the angle it had, they couldn't even back up and swing around.

'Mom always said we'd come to a bad end,' St. John (J) said.

'Don't go all heroic on me, Bro,' Mark said. 'There's got to be a smart way out of this.'

'In about thirty seconds, the prince is going to come over the horizon, Mark.' John readied his plasma cannon. 'So you've got exactly twenty seconds to figure something out.'

'Oh, that's not hard,' Mark said ... and stood up.

The first bead took him in the left arm. The heavy projectile smashed the ChromSten armor like tissue paper, severing the limb just above the elbow in a spray of gas and body liquids.

'Pock, not again,' he gasped as he aimed his cannon one-handed at the base of the defensive platform and locked the trigger back.

* * *

'Pollution,' Giovannuci whispered as he turned away from the display. The armored form had taken three bead rounds before the plasma platform went up, but it was still firing. Whoever it was had to be dead. But he kept firing until Emerald Dawn' s last space defenses turned into floating bits of wreckage.

'What does it take to kill these people? Who the fuck are they? '

'Sir,' his com tech said, 'you have got to hear this.'

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

'Saint ship, this is His Highness Prince Roger MacClintock. Cease resistance to this legal boarding, and you will be detained for eventual repatriation as prisoners of war. Continue your resistance, and you'll be considered unlawful combatants under the laws of war. In two minutes, I will be performing a forced boarding with the remainder of Prince Roger's Own. You have until then to comply.'

* * *

'Is there any indication which shuttle that's coming from?'

'Negative, Colonel Giovannuci. It's being rebroadcast from all four.'

'Pity,' Emerald Dawn's commander murmured, then shrugged. 'Put me on.'

* * *

'Approaching shuttles, be aware that the prince is dead. He was killed in a shipwreck. So you're not him.'

Roger looked at the communicator and shrugged.

'Believe what you will, but the report of my demise was exceedingly exaggerated. One minute, twenty seconds.'

* * *

'If we surrender, they'll probably do what they say,' Beach said over the discrete command channel. 'These can't be jackers. Only Imperial Marines are this precise. Its Empies, all right.'

'And that means it might be the prince,' Colonel Giovannuci mused. 'But it doesn't really matter. If we surrender and they repatriate us, the clerics will send us to the wall. The only real