March To The Stars

mouth, instead.

Kosutic frowned contemplatively. Then she nodded.

'We'll ... introduce you to it, at least. It's more than just being able to shoot straight. Some people who aren't much good at other fighting are very good at close-quarters work, and vice versa. If you do well in the preliminary training, you'll participate in the final demonstration. If not, not.'

'Fine,' Roger said with a nod. 'How long to set this up?'

'Start in the morning,' Pahner said. 'Captain T'Sool and I will get with Snarleyow's skipper and have Hooker's main deck set up to duplicate the conditions in Snarleyow's hold. You do your prep down there, then do the assault on the deck. That way we can all watch.'

'And make rude comments, I'm sure,' Kosutic snorted.

'So are we going to play shirts and skins?' Julian ogled Despreaux luridly. 'If so, I say we take skins.'

The sergeant major's palm-strike would have been a disabling or even killing blow if it had landed a few inches farther forward on the side of his head, or if she'd used the base of her palm instead of the side. As it was, it just hurt like hell.

'You're toast, buddy,' she said, chuckling as he rubbed the side of his head.

'Man,' he protested. 'Nobody around here can take a joke!'

'And don't let this interfere with your discussions with the Mardukans,' Pahner reminded the sergeant major, ignoring the byplay. 'I'm not sure that either takes precedence over the other.'

The captain was still unsure and unhappy about the relationship between his senior NCO and his intel sergeant. They were discreet, and there wasn't a hint of favoritism, but small unit command was about managing personalities, and sex was one of the biggest destabilizers around. There were strict rules against the type and degree of fraternization the two of them were engaged in, and they knew it just as well as he did. But, he reminded himself yet again, none of the rules had contemplated a unit being cut off from all outside contact for over six months.

'Got it,' the sergeant major nodded, noting his dark expression.

'Should we load anything else onto the list?' Roger asked, deliberately trying to reclaim a less serious mood. 'I don't think Sergeant Major Kosutic has enough on her plate, yet.'

'Ah, you just wait, Your Highness,' the NCO told him with an evil smile. 'As of tomorrow, you're just 'Recruit MacClintock.' You just keep right on joking.'

'What's the worst that can happen?' Roger said with a smile. 'Going back to Voitan?'

CHAPTER FIVE

'ARE YOU GOING TO KEEP AN EYE ON YOUR OWN SECTOR NEXT TIME, RECRUIT?'

'One hundred and twenty-seven. YES, SERGEANT MAJOR!'

There were several axioms, handed down from generation to generation by the noncommissioned officers who were the true keepers of the tribal wisdom, in which Sergeant Major Eva Kosutic firmly believed. 'No plan survives contact with reality.' 'In battle, His Wickedness always has a hole card.' 'If the enemy is in range, so are you.' All of them were rules the military forgot at its own peril, but the one that was currently paramount in her own mind was 'The more you sweat, the less you bleed.'

And at the moment, some people obviously needed to do a little more sweating than others, she thought bitingly.

Roger MacClintock had several things going for him when it came to close combat. He had been gifted, both naturally and through long ago manipulation of the MacClintock genotype, with the reactions of a pit viper. He was a natural-born shot, with the hand-eye coordination of a master marksman, and he had spent many a lonely hour building on that platform to perfect his aim. And he had a good natural combat awareness; in a fight, he always knew 'where' he was and had a good feel for where the enemies and friendlies were around him. That was an often underrated ability, but it was crucial in the sort of high-violence and sudden-death environment for which they were training.

But although he'd learned to be a 'team player' in soccer, he'd never really had to perfect that in combat. Worse, perhaps, he tended to go his own way, as had been proven repeatedly on the long march from the shuttles' dry lakebed landing to K'Vaern's Cove. Roger was never one to integrate himself into a fire plan. Which made it a good thing that he always led from the front, since he also tended to kill anything that got in front of him.

'Your job, when we do an entry, is to watch my back! Not to watch where I am going! If I run into resistance, I will deal with it. But if I have to watch your sector at the same time, you are OFF THIS TEAM! Do I make myself perfectly clear?'

'CLEAR, SERGEANT MAJOR!' Roger hammered out his final push-up. 'One fifty, Sergeant Major!'

'You just stay there in the front leaning rest position, Recruit MacClintock! I'll get to you when I'm ready.'

'Yes, Sergeant Major!' the prince gasped.

The schooner Snarleyow's forward hold was hotter than the hinges of hell and reeked of decaying filth in the bilges. But it was also the largest concealed open space aboard any vessel of the flotilla, which, from Eva Kosutic's perspective, made it the best possible place for training. It still didn't offer as much unobstructed area as she would have liked—not by a long chalk—but the cavalry's civan had already consumed the fodder which had originally been piled into it. And unlike the upper cargo deck, there were no civan in the hold itself.

Which was a very good thing. Civan, and especially the trained war- civan Prince Rastar and his men favored, were much more intelligent than most humans might have thought upon meeting them for the first time. But what they most definitely were not was cute or cuddly. In fact, any civan tended to have the temper of an Old Earth grizzly bear with a bad tooth. The temperament—and training—of those selected as cavalry mounts only exacerbated that natural tendency. Which was why the civan stalled along the sides of Snarleyow's upper cargo deck were 'tethered' (if that was the proper verb for it) not with halters or ropes, but with five-point chain tie-downs.

Even so, the Mardukans charged with their care and feeding were extremely careful about how close they got to the beasts' axlike jaws and razor-sharp, metal-shod fighting claws. For herself, Kosutic was delighted to have a training space, be it ever so hot, dank, and smelly, in which she didn't have to worry about losing a limb because she strayed too close to a civan in a worse mood than usual.

Of course, at the moment, she was in a worse mood than usual, and she shook her head, then gestured for the other two NCOs to follow her. She led them to the forwardmost end of the hold, then turned to face them.

'Options,' she said quietly, and Julian wiped away a drop of sweat and shook his head.

'He's good, Smaj. Very good. But he won't stay focused on defense.'

'He's too used to having us do that for him,' Despreaux pointed out. 'He's used to barreling through the opposition while we cover his back. Now you're barreling through the course, and he's supposed to cover your back.' She shrugged ever so slightly. 'He can't get used to it.'

'Yeah, but a big part of it is that he's one aggressive son-of-a-bitch,' Julian said with a quiet chuckle. 'No offense intended to Her Majesty.'

'There's that,' Kosutic agreed, tugging at an earlobe. 'I don't really want to switch him out for somebody else, either. He's got the moves to be better than just about anybody else in the company, if we can ever get them harnessed and coordinated, and only Macek might be able to equal him as it is. But I'm not going to get whacked because he's not covering his sector.'