March To The Stars

'Yes, Sir,' Julian replied. 'That I do.'

'Poertena,' Pahner continued. 'Supplies.'

'Bad, Cap'n,' the Pinopan growled. 'T'e price of grain is ou'rageous—worse t'an anyt'ing since Ran Tai! An' t'ese pockers gots no barbarian armies to drive t'em up, either. Food has to be nearly half an annual income. Jus' feeding t'e civan is gettin' expensive. I been laying in supplies for t'e trip, but t'ey low, Sir. Low.'

'Julian, figure out what's stored in the area around us. Get with Poertena on that. Make up a list of targets.'

'These guys really have you exercised, Captain,' Roger said carefully. 'You don't normally think in terms of looting.'

'They have me nervous, Your Highness,' the Marine replied. 'Their invariable response has been at least passively hostile. They're very closed, in ways I don't care for, and we're looking at the possibility that they may be in contact with the port. All of those things tend to trip my professional paranoia circuit.'

'Mine, too,' Kosutic said. 'And that's not the only thing making me nervous. Or, rather, one of the ways they're 'closed' ... bothers me. I've been trying to keep from stepping on any toes by avoiding the subject of religion, and it's been remarkably easy.'

'I can tell from your tone that that does a lot more than just 'bother' you, Smaj,' Roger said. 'But why does it?'

'You've been to a theocracy, Your Highness,' the sergeant major replied. 'Think about Diaspra. Or about the Diaspran infantry. They're constantly discussing religion; it's their main topic of conversation. But these people don't talk about their religion at all. That isn't normal by any theocracy's viewpoint. In fact, it's frankly weird. They say that in Armagh, if you ask the price of a loaf of bread, the baker will tell you that His Wickedness proceeds from God. But if you ask the butcher for a steak, he'll tell you that God proceeds from His Wickedness. The best I can determine, these guys worship a fire god. That's it, Sir. The whole enchilada. The sum total of all I've been able to learn about a theocracy's doctrine and dogma, and I got most of that from discussions with Pedi.'

She shook her head.

'I don't trust theocrats who won't discuss theology, Your Highness. I have to wonder what they're hiding.'

'We'd still be better off with their support,' Pahner said. 'But in the event that it drops in the pot, that they inform the port of our presence and we have to deal with that, we should have plans in place for how to exit the town and how to obtain the supplies we need. Fortunately, we have a week or two to figure all of that out.'

'There's just one thing,' O'Casey said, her expression pensive. Pahner looked at her, and she shrugged. 'What if they're quicker than that? Quicker than twenty days up?'

'What do you mean?' Roger asked uncomfortably. 'They don't have civan, so I don't see how they can move much faster than a turom caravan.'

'I'm thinking about the Incas,' his chief of staff said with an unhappy grimace. 'They used to use teams of runners. You'd be surprised how much distance you can cover when each person is running, oh, twenty kilometers as fast as he can go. Or, rather, how much distance a message can cover in how little time if each relay is by someone who has to run only twenty kilometers as quickly as he can.'

'No, I wouldn't be surprised at all,' Pahner said with an even unhappier grimace. 'That's a lovely thought.'

'Yep,' Julian agreed. 'On that note, I guess I'd better get started on that order of battle,' he added. Then he laughed.

'What?' Pahner asked.

'Well, what's the worst case, Sir?' Julian asked with a decidedly manic grin. 'I mean, that's what we've got to think about, right?'

'Yes, it is, Sergeant,' Pahner agreed tightly. He cut the NCO a certain amount of slack, because pressure brought out two things in Julian: brilliance, and humor. 'The worst case? The worst case would be that the starport is fully under the control of the Saints, and that they're able to determine that the humans reported to them are being led by His Highness.'

'Yes, Sir. That is the worst case from our perspective,' Julian agreed. 'But now think about their reaction to the news.'

* * *

It was the worst tradecraft that Temu Jin had seen in all the thirty-plus years since he'd first left Pinopa.

The small gap in the security wall at the back side of the spaceport required the governor's 'secret contact' to cross the entire compound just to meet the native runner. And since the hike required the receiver to break his normal routine—usually with no advance warning to let him build a believable reason for him to be here— anyone investigating the governor's (many) illegal activities would have found it ludicrously easy to identify, analyze, and break the communications chain. All they'd have had to do would be to watch for the idiot marching back and forth at the most ridiculous time of day for the least logical reason.

Short of wearing an illuminated holo-placard saying 'Secret Courier!' in meter-high letters, Jin couldn't think of anything else he might have done to make the hypothetical analyst's job any easier.

There were only two saving graces to the incredibly stupid set up. The first was that it had been set up by a previous communications technician, so Jin didn't have to take responsibility for it. The other was that the person on the base responsible for trying to find the link was Jin.

It was also a 'hard contact.' That was, the people at both ends knew if there was a message to be exchanged. By way of comparison, his own tenuous communications with his control had been a soft-connect, and almost entirely 'one-way.' His outbound communications method—message chips passed via a dead-drop to well- paid tramp freighter pursers—had been cut out when all three of his contacts became victims of 'piracy' in the sector.

Inbound, it was easier. The local garrison received a variety of e-zines and carefully crafted personal ads passed all the information he needed to receive. He occasionally wondered, as he perused them, how many of the other messages were code. He especially did that after the last missive—the message for 'Irene' that told her it was over. That she should go on with her life.

The one that told him he was out in the cold.

It had been interesting, from a professional perspective, that there'd been at least twice as many personals as normal in that particular month's e-zines. The memory still brought a certain grim chuckle, and he wondered how many other people there'd been on how many other planets, looking at those messages and going 'What the ... ?'

The code had been the ultimate disaster message, telling him that 'the World' was gone, and he was to sever all contacts, trust no one, respond to nothing but personal contacts. For him, it had simply been one more nail in the coffin. Heck, bad news on Marduk was as expected as rain, right?

He took the leather satchel from the Mardukan and walked back into the bushes at the edge of the field. The entire set-up was just too asinine. So imbecilic. So amateurish he was embarrassed every time he went through the charade. The Mardukan, some unknown 'agent' of the Kirsti satrap, would now go back through a cleared passage in the minefields, through a portion of the mono-wire that had been changed out in favor of less lethal materials, and through an area where the sensors had been bypassed. The governor, whose life and limb, in the event of attack, depended on all those defenses, had ordered the changes so that these 'secret communiques' could slip through. Ordered it!

Jin shook his head and cracked the seal on the pouch. The governor could not, of course, read Krath, despite having been here for over fifteen years, and despite the fact that 'learning' it would require only an upload to his toot and a few minutes of his time. No, the governor had better things to do than learn enough of the language so that the minor messages—like, oh, secret communiques, for an example that just popped to mind—could be read by someone other than his communications technicians. Such as the governor.