chameleon cloth everyone else had changed into.
Roger watched the sergeant surreptitiously as he dressed. At first, he thought that she was wiggling her jaw to work a bit of food out of her teeth, but he eventually realized that she was having a long subvocal discussion or argument with someone. The throat microphone was almost invisible against her long, tanned neck, and the receiver, of course, was embedded in her mastoid bone.
Finally he was dressed, and he gave the multipocketed shirt a tug and flipped off a bit of lint.
“Ready.”
The sergeant touched the hatch control, but stayed behind as the prince left, escorted by the two guards in the passage outside. As the hatch closed, she turned to the armorer who was reassembling the suit on a mannequin rack.
“Poertena,” she said in severe tones, “did you do the hammer thing to the Prince?”
“Of course I didn’ do tee hammer ting,” the armorer said nervously. “I don’ do tee hammer ting no more.”
“Then what the hell is that wrench doing on the floor?”
“Oh, t’at. I don’ do tee hammer ting, I do tee wrench ting.”
“Poertena, you start fucking around with the Prince, and Pahner will have your ass for breakfast.”
“Pock Pahner,” the armorer snapped, gesturing around the compartment. “You see t’at? I got six pocking sets of pocking armor to get ready. You see Pahner helping? You see you helping? I gonna go get reamed by Pahner, or I gonna pix suits?”
“If you need help, ask!” The sergeant’s blue eyes flashed, and she crossed her arms and glared at the half-pint armorer. “We’re finished loading the boats. I’ve got two squads sitting around with their thumbs up their butts. They can be down here in a second.”
“I don’ need a buncha ham-fist clowns pocking up my suits,” the armorer said petulantly. “Every time I gets help, they pock up my suits.”
“Okay,” the sergeant said with a nasty smile. “Tell you what. I’ll get Sergeant Julian to help you.”
“Oh, nooo,” Poertena said as he realized that he’d put himself in a trap with his bitching. “Not Julian!”
“Hey, Troop!” Julian entered the weapons bay, walked up to the nearest trooper, who was a recent join from Sixth Fleet, put a hand on her shoulder, and grasped her hand for a firm handshake. “Glad you could make it.” He gestured with his chin at the plasma rifle the trooper was preparing to disassemble. “You need some help with that there plasma thingamajig?”
The plasma rifle was the IMC’s version of a squad automatic weapon. It weighed six kilos, and was supplied by external powerpacks which weighed two kilos each and were good for three to twelve shots, depending on the weapon’s discharge settings. The “basic load” for a plasma gunner was twelve packs, the gunners normally carried up to thirty packs in their rucksacks, and their squad mates usually distributed another thirty among them. If there was one thing in the universe a Marine squad hated, it was running out of plasma ammo.
This particular squad from First Platoon had gathered in the bay for one last cleaning of weapons, and since the plasma rifle had a mass of subcomponents, it was natural that the gregarious Julian, from Third Platoon, would offer to help. The new private had just started to smile when her fire team leader spoke up.
“Don’t do it, gal,” Corporal Andras said.
“What?” Julian affected a hurt expression. “You don’t think I can help this rookie trooper?”
The trooper, Nassina Bosum, had just spent six months in the Husan Action before reporting as a Bronze Barbarian. She opened her mouth to retort angrily that she was anything but a rookie, but was cut off by her team leader.
“Oh, you’ll help all right. . . .” Andras muttered.
“Seven seconds,” Julian said with a smile, and the corporal eyed him beadily.
“No way.” There were over forty subcomponents in the M-96 plasma rifle. There was no way to disassemble it completely in seven seconds. Not even for the legendary Julian.
Julian reached into a breast pocket and extracted a chip. “Ten creds says I can do it in seven seconds.”
“Impossible!” Bosum snapped, forgetting the implied insult. The standard was over a minute; nobody could disassemble a plasma rifle that fast.
“Put your money where your mouth is,” Julian said with a smile, and tossed the chip onto the table.
“I’ll take some of that,” a grenadier said from down the table, and the squad leader, Sergeant Koberda, pushed forward to manage the piles. Finally there were two chips on Julian’s side, and a pile of five– and ten-credit chips opposite.
“Who bet on Julian?”
“I did,” Andras said sourly. “He’s taken my money every other time.”
“We ready?” Julian asked, his hands hovering over the plasma rifle.
“Uh, hang on,” said one of the bead riflemen, pulling a helmet out from under his station chair and putting it on his head. “Okay,” he said, tapping a control so that the ballistic-protection visor extruded. “Fine by me.”
Sergeant Koberda touched the plasma gunner on the shoulder.
“You might wanna step back,” he said with a little warning wrinkle of the nose. He suited action to words himself, then put his arms over his head, and the gunner saw others do the same.
“Wha . . . ?” Bosum began, but the squad leader had already activated the timer in his toot and said: “
Removing the compression pin to begin the disassembly process took the longest, just over a third of a second. The new troop watched in awe until the first magneto ring bounced off her skull. Then she realized that pieces of the weapon were flying all over the compartment and started to yell for the sergeant to stop . . . just as the last bit of component flew across the open space and bounced off a bulkhead.
“
“Six point four-three-eight seconds,” Koberda announced morosely, consulting his toot as he kicked aside a capacitor.
“Thank you, thank you, ladies and gentlemen,” Julian said, bowing and splitting the heap of chips into two equal piles. He slid one across to Andras, picked up his own, extracted a bundle of other chips large enough to choke a unicorn, and added the squad’s offerings to the bundle. “Always a pleasure,” he added, and headed for the next compartment.
Corporal Bosum looked around the compartment, trying to figure out where all the pieces of her weapon had gotten to.
“Does he do this often?” she asked sourly.
“Every chance we give him,” Andras said. He picked up a capacitor ring and tossed it to her. “But sooner or later, he’s gotta lose.”
“Sergeant Julian to the Armor Bay,” chimed the intercom. “Sergeant Julian to the Armor Bay.”
“Oh, man,” Koberda said. “That was Despreaux. Despreaux, Poertena, and Julian all in the same compartment! I’d rather be on the bridge!”
Roger tugged down the skirts of his safari jacket and flipped off an imaginary bit of fluff before nodding at the guard to trigger the hatch command. The guard waited patiently, then tapped the green square and stepped through the hatch to do an automatic sweep for hostiles. What the sweep turned up was a massive amount of tension.
Roger stepped over the now tape– and padding-covered control runs and crossed to the tac center. He took a stance with his feet shoulder-width apart and his hands behind his back, nodded coolly at Krasnitsky and Pahner, and then glanced at the rippling tactical display. His cool demeanor vanished abruptly, and his hand flew forward to point at the red icon in the hologram.
“Look! There’s a—”
“We know, Your Highness,” Pahner said stonily. “Another cruiser.”
“It hasn’t moved out yet,” Krasnitsky said with a sigh. “It’s probably warming up its pulse nodes because we haven’t slowed down.” He rubbed his stubbly jaw and sighed again. “The XO has been hailing the first one. It wants us to begin decelerating to prepare for boarding. It’s claiming to be an imperial cruiser, HMS
