March Upcountry

watching the little shit.”

“Now that’s not fair,” the female sergeant snapped as she hooked up the gravity feed to the stutter gun. The quad-barreled bead gun hooked to an ammunition storage box on the back of the armor, but despite the mass of rounds in the box, it could still run through its ammunition in a surprising hurry. And they had only so many boxes. “Roger was trying to save a wounded Marine,” she went on. “And watch your ammo.”

“I will,” Julian said. “And he was. But he’s still a little shit. If he gets killed, I’m gonna frag his ass.”

“You’re up!” Despreaux made the last connection and flipped his visor up to give him some air. Until the things came online, the armored suits could be sweltering.

“Still waiting for the God damned computer to settle down,” Julian snarled. Why the damn thing took so long to load was always a mystery to the Marines. It was worse than a pad.

“Julian?” Pahner roared from his perch on the rubble.

“Waiting for warm-up to complete, Sir!” Julian yelled back, looking around his troops. He couldn’t even do his status check until the damned computer completed dumping its memory or pulling its cheek or whatever took so . . . so . . . so modder pocking long. Finally, the damned light turned green.

“Up!” He shouted, and raised one hand, thumbs up. A moment later, two more hands came up, then a third. But that was it.

“What the fuck?” He’d lost Russell earlier, but that still left nine in his squad. “Status check!”

“Red lights,” Corporal Aburia reported tersely, stepping up to Cathcart and looking into his helmet. The plasma gunner was yelling behind his visor, and the team leader lifted it just in time to hear “. . . motherfuckingcocksuck . . .”

“We’ve only got four, Sir,” Julian told Pahner over the captain’s private channel.

“Poertena!”

“How you doin’ for ammo, Behie?” Roger yelled as he laid down another string and a screen of lianas vanished in the explosions. A javelin had come from beyond that screen, and Roger had become a major proponent of peace through superior firepower. A ghastly shriek sounded even through the thunder of grenades, and something thrashed and bled in the bushes. “Fuck with a MacClintock, will you?” he yelled.

“I’ve got five belts left, Sir!” The grenadier popped a single round into a suspicious looking bush, exercising an economy of ammunition expenditure His Highness seemed constitutionally unable to match. “You might want to conserve your ammunition a little, Sir.”

“We can conserve ammo when we’re dead,” he retorted. “Move, I’ll cover you.”

The grenadier just shook her head and darted from behind the fallen tree she’d been using for shelter. The stretcher team—the struggling doc and Matsugae, with the prince’s chief of staff holding a bottle of drip fluid—was nearly twenty meters ahead of them, closely protected by the bead gunners as the grenadiers covered the retreat. She’d already tried to argue about who should move out first and who should stay behind in a movement. And lost. She was done arguing.

She ran to where Hooker sheltered behind another fallen tree. They’d cursed all day long at the obstacles the passage of the flar-ta had thrown down, but now they were lifesavers.

“Move, Sir!” Pentzikis shouted, and fired a round into another likely looking clump.

Roger pushed himself up with both hands and turned to run . . . just as a massive flight of javelins erupted out of the brush.

“Oh, fuck,” the grenadier said mildly. She’d become expert at judging the flight of the spears, and she realized they were all aimed at their previous positions. Hers . . . and the prince’s.

Roger didn’t even think—not consciously, anyway. He simply bolted straight towards the source of that massive flight, grenade launcher blazing. There was no way he could outrun the flock of javelins, but he might be able to run under them.

Their angle of flight, partially because of the slope of the ground, was high, and the speed he’d found so useful on soccer fields finally came into its own somewhere else. As the steel-tipped rain fell all around and behind him, he charged forward, grenade launcher spitting a metronome of fire.

Julian and his three armored companions passed the stretcher team, bounding by in run mode at nearly sixty kilometers per hour. They could have gone faster on better ground, but not on a track torn by flar-ta and covered in fallen trees.

“Man, Bilali,” Julian said as he passed. “You are fucked.”

“What the hell was I supposed to do?” the squad leader demanded, falling back to cover the stretcher team. “Knock him over the head and throw him on the stretcher?”

“Probably,” the squad leader snarled, then tripped over one of the fallen trunks and plowed into a tree that was still standing. “Shit!”

“You okay, boss?” Gronningen called. The big Asgardian had his M-105 plasma cannon trained outward. The company hadn’t expected to be using them so quickly, so they hadn’t been inspected with the same care as the M-98s. On the other hand, they were an older and more robust design which had never given any trouble. Yet.

“Yeah, yeah,” Julian growled, scrambling to his feet. The impact had done far more damage to the tree than to his now sap-coated armor. It would take more than a sixty kilometer per hour impact to damage ChromSten. “I’ll be right there,” he added as another flurry of grenades exploded ahead of them.

Roger dropped the empty grenade launcher and pulled his sword over his shoulder. The sensei in school was always talking about The Book of Five Rings, but the prince had never bothered to read it all. Another of those little acts of rebellion he was beginning to regret. Still, he remembered the technique for battling multiple opponents: reduce it to one at a time.

Nice to know, he thought, surveying the fifteen or twenty Mardukans filtering out of the brush with a variety of swords, spears, and other sharpened artifacts. Now, how the hell do you doit?

Some of them were wounded, a few quite seriously. Most of them, however, were just fine. And seemed really upset about something. Worse, the clear notes of hundreds of hunting horns sounded, coming up the hill behind them. All in all, it looked to be just a little dicey. Maybe they would leave him alone because his forehead didn’t offer any trophies? Right.

The first Mardukan charged, holding a spear at waist height and screaming to wake the dead. Roger parried the spear down and to the side, let the momentum carry him through a spin and took off one of the scummy’s arm as he passed. Then the rest of the group charged, and he picked out the weakest: a Mardukan with a bloody shrapnel wound on one leg.

Roger charged the wounded warrior, parrying another’s spear and carrying the sword into a high parry of the wounded Mardukan’s own blade. A butterfly twist, and the katana-like weapon came down and across, opening the Mardukan from shoulder to thigh as Roger passed through the closing circle.

He found himself several meters from his opponents, gazing at the group of warriors. He’d laid out two of them for nary a scratch, and the Kranolta seemed to be reevaluating the situation.

Roger was doing the same. He was fully aware that so far he’d survived on luck and a few tricks, but these Kranolta didn’t seem to be very well trained. There were standard counters for both of the attacks he’d used. Cord knew them, and he’d taught them to the prince, but none of these tribesmen seemed aware of them. If all of them were this inept, he might last, oh, five more minutes.

But realistically, unless something broke soon, he was dead. Unfortunately, if he turned tail and ran, those spears could fly faster than he could run. So far, nobody seemed inclined to simply pincushion him and be done with it, and as long as it was hand-to-hand and more or less one-on-one he had a chance, however small.

Let’s hear it for Homeric customs, he thought.

One of the scummies stepped forward and drew a line on the ground. Roger looked at it and shrugged; he had no idea what the gesture meant. He thought about it, then drew a line of his own.

The scummy clapped his false hands and stepped over his own line and fell into a guard position.

As he did, Roger thought of his pistol for the first time. There were only four spearmen; the others carried