March To The Stars

'Gee, thanks.' She smiled.

'You told me a long time ago that we might not get to retire to Marduk. That Mother might have other plans for us. Well, the same goes for you. Unless we're all killed, I'm going to have things I need you to do. Only one of them involves marrying me, and we'll discuss that when the time comes. Okay?'

'Okay.'

'Does this mean I can't wrestle with you in the water?' he asked, running his hand up her side.

'If you get this cast wet and short it out, Dobrescu will kill you,' she pointed out.

'It's okay. I'm a faster draw than he is.'

'Well, since you put it that way,' she replied, and slid down into the water and leaned forward to kiss him.

'Your Highness,' Bebi said, leaning in the door. 'Captain Pahner's compliments, and he'd like to see you in his quarters.'

'I think I'm beginning to detect a pattern here,' Roger snarled under his breath.

'Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, and three times is enemy action,' Despreaux replied huskily. 'So far, it's just coincidence.

'So far,' Roger replied. 'But I have to wonder.'

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

'You are a cruel human, Adib Julian,' Kosutic said.

'It's an art,' he replied, tapping the pad. 'Despreaux's blood pressure and heart beat both increase, they're having an argument. Heart beat increases, and blood pressure drops, and they're ... not.'

'What about Roger?' the sergeant major asked.

'To tell you the truth, he's scary,' Julian said. 'The whole time, his heartbeat never changed within any sort of standard of variation. Steady fifty-two beats per minute. That's the lowest in the company, by the way. And his blood pressure barely flickered. You can't tell anything about what he's thinking or feeling from biometrics. Spooky.'

'He gets angry,' Kosutic said. 'I've seen it.'

'Sure,' the sergeant agreed, flipping the pad closed. 'And when he does, he's still got ice water running in his veins.'

'Hmmm. You know, I think we're just starting to understand why you don't want to pock with a MacClintock.'

* * *

Thousands of years before the coming of the race called Man, the mountain had been fire. Molten rock and ash spewed from the bosom of the world, laying down interleaving layers of each as the mountain grew higher and higher. Side openings occurred, and the red rock flowed from them like a steaming avalanche, occasionally breaking loose whole sides of the mountain in a semiliquid, fiery hot gel called pyroclastic flow.

Eventually, the fierce nuclear fire that was at the core of the local hotspot passed on, and the mountains began to cool. Water brought its beneficence of cooling to the steaming mountain, scouring its flanks and bringing growth where there had been molten rock. In time, the black, smoking wasteland became a fertile slope of trees and flowers.

Time passed, and the sun of the planet called Marduk flickered. For a time that was short for a sun, or a planet, the sun became cooler. To the sun itself, the effect was barely noticeable. But on the sole life-hugging planet that orbited it, the effect was devastating.

The rains stopped. Where there had been steaming jungles, there were sunbaked plains. Ice came. Where there had been liquid-drenched mountains, the water fell as snow and compressed, and compacted, and stayed and stayed, until it became mountains—walls of glacial ice.

Species died, and the nascent civilizations of the higher latitudes fell. Survivors huddled around hot springs while the white walls drew ever closer.

Along the side of the mountain, the white ice grew and grew. The hot spots to one side kept a continual melt in place, and the runoff water—dammed up behind the terminal moraine of the glacier—filled the valley from end to end. Regular floods laid down layers of lighter and darker materials on the valley floor, improving the already excellent soil. The glacier brought with it loess, the fine dust that was left when ice crushed its enemy rock. The glacier also brought massive boulders that it laid down in complex, swirling patterns that later residents would often use as roadbeds and quarry for building stone. And everywhere, it crushed the sides of the valley, hammering at the walls of the mountain and tearing at its stone and ash foundations.

Finally, in a short time for a star, the sun restarted and turned its thermostat all the way back to high. The rains came. Jungles regrew. And the ice ... melted.

It started slowly, with more floods each spring than there'd been the spring before. Then the glacier started to break up, and the terminal moraine, the dam at the head of the valley, became intermingled with chunks and blocks of the ice. For a time, the dam grew higher, as the floods carried the silt and debris of four thousand years of glaciation to it. But finally, inevitably, the dam at the head of the valley burst. First came a trickle, then a flood, then a cascade, and finally, a veritable tsunami of water, crashing down the gorge in a flash flood to end all flash floods. It scoured the gorge wider than a hundred thousand years of lesser floods. It wiped out the small village that had been recently founded at the base of the gorge. And it drained the Vale of the Shin, leaving a fertile pastureland that simply begged for colonization.

And the mountain slept.

* * *

Erkum Pol wielded the machete like a machine, hacking away at the undergrowth while holding on to the rope to prevent himself from sliding back down the slope. It was also wrapped around his waist; it was a very steep slope.

' 'Set a few charges,' he said,' Julian muttered as he slid sideways and stopped himself by grabbing a tree. Unfortunately, its bark was well provided with long spines, one of which jammed itself into his hand. 'Aarrrgh! 'Blow up the side of the mountain,' he said. 'No problem,' he said.'

'We have the explosives,' Fain said, sliding down the rope beside him. 'We have the 'shaped charges.' What's the difficulty?'

'Maybe emplacing them on a sixty-degree slope? We're going to have to dig out pits for the charges and hold them down with pins hammered into the rock. They have to have a bit of something holding them down. Usually, it's just the charge's case and the weight of the material, but in this case, we're going to have to anchor the cases, since they're pointing sideways. And I'm not sure any weight of cataclysmite is going to be enough to cut out from the bores.'

'A trench,' Roger said, coming hand-over-hand along the slope through the undergrowth. 'We'll dig a shallow trench and fire them directly down. From this height, we should get plenty enough material to seal the river.'

'We can do that,' Fain said. 'Like starting a new quarry.'

'Exactly. In fact, if you can scratch out a trench in the loam, we can put in a line of det-cord which will practically make it for us.'

'That will give away our position, Sir,' Julian pointed out. The top of the Krath citadel was vaguely visible from their position, or, its northern bastion was, at least.

'They'll spot us up here before long anyway,' Roger pointed out in return. 'And they'll definitely notice when we blow the shaped charges.'

The latter were waiting up the slope on the narrow track a local guide had 'found' over the mountain. It was obvious that despite the best efforts of both the Gastan and the local Krath to restrict all commerce between them to Trade Town, and thereby tax it, plenty of smugglers moved through the hills around it.

'Captain Fain, put out some security teams and let's get to work,' Roger said.

'Yes, Your Highness. It will be like old home week.'

* * *