March To The Stars

was still one huge issue associated with the mission: It might involve fighting the Marines. He had several reasons, not the least of which was the likelihood of being blasted into plasma, to not want to fight Marines, but the mission had been angling steadily that way.

Now, however, it seemed all his worry had been for naught. The last of the Marines had died here, in this lonely outpost, overrun by barbarians before their friendly 'civilized' supporters could arrive to save them!

Sure they did, he thought, and snorted mentally. Either they wandered off and these guys are covering for them ... or else the locals finished them off themselves and are graciously willing to give these 'Kranolta' the credit. The only problem at this point is figuring out which.

'Alas,' the local said yet again. He seemed remarkably fond of that word, Jin thought cynically as Targ gestured in the direction of the distant jungle somewhere outside the tomb. 'The Kranolta took all their equipment with them. There was nothing left for us to give to their friends. That is, to you.'

And you can believe as much or as little of that as you like, Jin thought. But the answer left a glaring hole he had to plug. And hope his efforts never came to light.

'The scummy says the barbs threw all the gear into the river,' he mistranslated.

'Poth!' Dara snarled. 'That means it's all trashed. And we can't trace the power packs! Even trashed, we could've gotten something for them.'

What an imbecile, Jin thought. Dara must have been hiding behind the door when brains were given out.

When a body is looted, the looters very rarely take every scrap of clothing. Nor was that the only peculiarity. There was one clinging bit of skin on the corpse before him which had clearly been cut away in an oval, as if to remove a tattoo after the person was dead ... and there were no weapons or even bits of weapons anywhere in sight. For that matter, the entire battle site had been meticulously picked over to remove every trace of evidence. Some of the scars from plasma gun fire had even been covered up. The barbarians, according to the locals' time line, could not possibly have swept the battlefield that well, no matter how addicted to trophy-taking they might be, before the 'civilized' locals arrived to finish driving them off.

The last city they'd passed through had also been remarkably reticent about the actions the objects of the search team's curiosity had taken on their way through. The crews of the downed shuttles had apparently swept into town, destroyed and looted a selected few of the local 'Great Houses,' and then swept out again, just as rapidly. According to the local king and the very few nobles they'd been permitted to question, at least. And in that town, the search team had been followed everywhere by a large enough contingent of guards to make attempts to question anyone else contraindicated.

All of that proved one thing to Jin, and it took a sadistic, snot-filled idiot like Dara not to see it.

The bodies had been sterilized.

Somebody wanted to make damn sure no one could determine who these Marines had been without a DNA database. The dead Marines' toots were already a dead issue, of course. Their built-in nanites had obediently reduced them to half-crumbled wreckage once their owners were dead. That was a routine security measure, but the rest of this definitely went far beyond 'routine.' Which meant these particular people were something other than standard Marines. Either Raiders or ... something else. And since the locals were covering for them so assiduously, it was glaringly obvious that all of them hadn't died.

All of which meant that there was a short company—from the number of shuttles, Jin had put their initial force at a company—of an Imperial special operations unit out there wandering in the jungle. And the only reasonable target for their wandering was a certain starport.

Lovely.

He pushed aside a bit of the current corpse's hair, looking for any clue. The Marine had been female, with longish, dishwater blond hair. That was the only thing about the skeletal remains which would have been recognizable to anyone but a forensic pathologist, which Jin was not. He had some basic training in forensics, but all he could tell about this corpse was that a blade had half-severed the left arm. However, under the cover of the hair, there was a tiny earring. Just a scrap of bronze, with one ten-letter word on it.

Jin was unable to keep his eyes from widening, but he didn't freeze. He was far too well trained to do something so obvious. He simply moved his hand in a smooth motion, and the tiny earring was ripped from the decaying ear, a scrap of skin still dangling from it.

'I'm not finding anything,' he said, getting to his feet as he willed his face to total immobility.

He looked at the native, who returned his regard impassively. The local 'king' was named T'Kal Vlan. He'd greeted the search team as long-lost cousins, all the time giving the impression that he wanted to sell them a rug. For T'Leen Targ, though, it always seemed to be a toss-up between selling them a rug and burying them in one. Now the local scratched his horn with his hook and nodded ... in a distinctly human fashion.

'I take it that you did not find anything,' Targ said. 'I'm so sorry. Will you be taking the bodies with you?'

'I think not,' Jin replied. Standing as they were, the team leader was behind the local. Jin reached out with his left hand, and the Mardukan took it automatically, another example of acculturation to Terrans. Jin wondered if the Marines had realized how many clues they were unavoidably leaving behind. Given who they apparently were, it was probable, for all the proof of how hard they'd worked to avoid it. As he shook the Mardukan's slime-covered hand, a tiny drop of bronze was left behind, stuck in the mucus.

'I don't think we'll be back,' the commo tech said. 'But you might want to melt this down so nobody else finds it.'

In the palm of the native's hand, the word 'BARBARIANS' was briefly impressed into the mucus.

Then it disappeared.

CHAPTER ONE

'It's a halyard.'

'No, it's a stay. T'e headstay.'

The thirty-meter schooner Ima Hooker swooped closehauled into aquamarine swells so perfect they might have been drawn from a painting by the semimythical Maxfield Parrish. Overhead, the rigging sang in a faint but steady breeze. That gentle zephyr, smelling faintly of brine, was the only relief for the sweltering figures on her deck.

Julian mopped his brow and pointed to the offending bit of rigging.

'Look, there's a rope—'

'A line,' Poertena corrected pedantically.

'Okay, there's a line and a pulley—'

'T'at's a block. Actually, it's a deadeye.'

'Really? I thought a block was one of those with cranks.'

'No, t'at's a windlass.'

Six other schooners kept formation on Hooker. Five of them were identical to the one on whose deck Julian and Poertena stood: low, trim hulls with two masts of equal height and what was technically known as a 'topsail schooner rig.' What that meant was that each mast carried a 'gaff sail,' a fore- and-aft sail cut like a truncated triangle with its head set from an angled yard—the 'gaff'—while the foremast also carried an entire set of conventional square sails. The after gaff sail—the 'mainsail,' Julian mentally corrected; after all, he had to get something right—had a boom; the forward gaff sail did not. Of course, it was called the foresail whereas the lowest square sail on that mast was called the 'fore course,' which struck him as a weird name for any sail. Then there were the 'fore topsail,' 'fore topgallant,' and 'fore royal,' all set above the fore course.

The second mast (called the 'mainmast' rather than the 'aftermast,' for some reason Julian didn't quite understand, given that the ship had only two masts to begin with and that it carried considerably less canvas than