March To The Stars

Sir.'

'Maybe,' Roger said. 'And maybe not. We need to find out where it came from. Get some of the locals functional and find out.'

'Yes, Sir,' the sergeant said. He turned towards the fortress' main entrance, then stopped. 'Or, maybe not.'

One of Rastar's Vashin was walking slowly towards them, trailing a plume of smoke. One of the ways the cavalry coped with the cold was by toting small braziers of charcoal around with them like incense censors.

'Captain Pahner,' the cavalryman said slowly when he finally reached the group, and saluted. 'Marine. Gronningen. Has. Found. A human.' The sentence seemed to have taken everything he had, and he dropped his salute and stood like a statue.

'We have got to get lower. Soon,' Kosutic said to fill the gap in the conversation.

They'd all known that this moment would come, but this was the first 'new' human they'd had contact with since crashing on the planet. And while the Mardukans might have stopped them from getting off-planet at any time, the humans could stop them if they realized what they faced. How to handle the local humans had been considered and debated at vast and exhausting length, but it had been impossible to make any clear plans without more information than they had. Now the moment of reckoning was upon them.

'Well, I guess we'd better go meet him,' Pahner said finally.

* * *

Harvard Mansul wished he had his camera. Of course, he might as well have wished he were back at Society headquarters on Old Earth, while he was at it. As a matter of fact, he did wish that, too, but he was a realist. He would have settled for getting the tri-cam back intact. The Zuiko was tough—it had to be, to survive around him—but it wasn't invulnerable, and sooner or later they would open it up to find out how it worked.

At which point, it would stop. Working, that was.

When he wasn't worrying about his tri-cam, he passed the time in his rather dank cell by wondering how long it would take the Society to mount a rescue. If they ever bothered. He'd reached the point of regretting his habit of disappearing for years at a time. Considering his stint on Scheherazade, the Society might not start looking for decades.

He sighed and banged on the door again. Usually the horned-ones roused before now, and he looked forward to the morning exercise time. But so far, there'd been virtually no sound filtering down to his little stone cube today.

'Hellooo! It's morning! Would you kind gentlemen mind letting me out?'

* * *

'I felt it was best to let you handle it, Sir,' the private said. 'I didn't know how you wanted to play it, or even if you wanted him to know we were here, so I sent one of the Vashin down to check on him. He's been ... kind of loud.'

'Okay, come on,' Roger said. 'Let's find out what they caught.'

'I wonder if they were keeping him tucked away in the larder for munchies later?' Kosutic mused.

'I doubt it,' O'Casey said. 'I haven't seen a trace of any religious items here in the fortress. I think they probably just picked him up somewhere and stashed him until they were told what to do with him.'

'Given our own experience, I can guess what that would have been,' Roger snorted, leading the way down the flight of stone steps and along the narrow—for a Mardukan—passageway. They reached the cell door, and he threw back the bolt and pulled it open.

'And who might you be, Sir?' he asked cheerfully.

* * *

Mansul looked up at the human confronting him and frowned in puzzlement. Judging by the remains of the uniform, the person was an Imperial Marine. Given the rest of his appearance, he was probably also a deserter, because no Marine of Mansul's acquaintance who wasn't a deserter would ever have allowed his uniform to get into such a state.

The man in the cell door was not just a full head taller than Mansul. He was also either very clean-shaven, or had almost no facial hair. Good bone structure, a hint of pre-Diaspora Asian around the eyes, but otherwise very classically Northern European. Great hair falling in a golden mass, too. He'd make a wonderful picture all around, the photographer decided. Then there was the odd rifle—chemical propellant, by the look of it—and the long sword tossed over his back. Quite the neobarb. Absolutely perfect. Even the lighting was good.

It really made him wish those horned barbarians hadn't taken his camera.

Mansul took another look, and it was actually the family resemblance that caught him first. One of his last assignments before Marduk had been to cover the Imperial Family when Her Majesty had celebrated the Heir's birthday. Mansul couldn't remember having seen a shaggy, broad-shouldered, sword-toting barbarian standing around to help cut the cake or pour the punch, yet the young man before him had the distinctive MacClintock brow. So who—?

'Good God!' he heard himself exclaim. 'I thought you were dead!'

* * *

Roger couldn't help himself. The astonishment in the prisoner's expression and voice was simply too great, and a trace of his own recent classical reading came to mind. Despite the response heknew it would elicit from O'Casey, he simply couldn't resist.

'I am happy to say that the news of my demise was exceedingly exaggerated.' He waited for the groans to stop behind him, then held out his hand. 'I'm His Highness Prince Roger Ramius Alexander Chiang MacClintock. And you are?'

'Harvard Mansul,' the man replied in a voice which was still half stunned. 'Imperial Astrographic Society. You've been here the whole time?'

'I've been on Marduk, yes,' Roger said. 'The rest is a somewhat long story. And I believe we've gotten hold of some of your property.' He held out a hand to Pahner for the tri-cam, then passed it over.

Mansul gave the item for which he had so passionately longed for more than a week barely a glance, then flicked the lenses open.

'Smile.'

* * *

Roger knocked on the door, waited for the quiet voice from the other side to respond, then opened it, looked around, and grinned.

'Private room, I see,' he observed. 'Very nice.'

'Quite the little love nest,' Despreaux replied. She was propped up on a pile of cushions on the floor, her arm immobilized in the force-cast. Her face was slightly gray, she was still covered in mud from the trek, and bits of leaf and dirt were caught in her hair and on her pants. Any other woman would've looked like hell, Roger thought, but Nimashet Despreaux managed to come across like a tri-dee star made up to look like a maiden in distress.

'I'm really upset with you,' Roger said, sitting down and taking her good hand. 'You're supposed to take care of yourself better than this.'

'I tried,' she said, and leaned against him. 'God, I'm tired of this.'

'Me, too,' Roger said as he wrapped an arm carefully around her.

'Liar. You're dreading getting back to court, aren't you?'

Roger paused for a moment, then shrugged.

'Yes,' he admitted. 'Marduk is ... uncomplicated. We make friends, or we don't. We negotiate, or we kick ass. It's black and white, most of the time. Court is ... all negotiation. It's all gray. It's all who you pissed off last, and people jockeying for position. There's nobody to ...'

'To watch your back?' she finished for him, leaning into him. 'I will.'

'You've never had to deal with the court ladies as a 'person,' ' he replied. 'You were just a Marine; you didn't count.' He shook his head, eyes troubled. 'It'll be different now, and their knives go right through armor.'

'So do mine, love,' she said, twisting carefully around until she could look him in the eye. 'And, Roger, the