March Upcountry

their legal majority and Parliament confirms their place in the succession, you —God help us all—are third in line for the Throne of Man! And whether you believe it or not, your family is the only damned glue holding the entire Empire of Man together, which is why it’s our job—the Regiment’s job—to protect that glue at any cost. Anything that stands in the way of that has to be ignored. Anything!” the captain snarled. “That’s our mission. That’s our only mission. I thought about it, and determined that I couldn’t persuade them to retreat and abandon Gelert. But the company probably would have been lost if we’d settled into a meeting engagement on that ground. So I ran,” he said softly.

“I abandoned them to certain death, cut my losses, and beat feet. For one reason only. And do you know what that was?”

“To keep me alive,” Roger said quietly.

“So how do you think I felt when I turned around and you weren’t there? After sacrificing all those people? And finding out it was for nothing?”

“I’m sorry, Sir,” Roger said. “I didn’t think.”

“No,” Pahner snapped. “You didn’t. That’s just fine, even expected, in a brand new, wet-behind-the-ears lieutenant. The ones who survive by luck and the skin of their teeth learn to think, eventually. But I can’t take the chance on your not making it. Is that clear?”

“Yes,” Roger replied, looking at the ground.

“If we lose you, we might as well all cut our throats. You realize that?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Roger, you’d better learn to think,” the Marine said in a softer tone. “You’d better learn to think very quickly. I nearly took the entire company back out to get you. And we would all have died on that slope, because we couldn’t have extracted you and then withdrawn successfully. We would have died right here. All of us. Bilali and Hooker and Despreaux and Eleanora and Kostas and all the rest of us. You understand?”

“Yes.” Roger’s voice was almost inaudible and he was looking at the ground again.

“And whose fault would that have been? Yours, or Bilali’s?”

“Mine.” Roger sighed, and Pahner looked at him unblinkingly for several moments, then nodded.

“Okay. As long as we have that straight,” he said, and waited again until Roger nodded back.

“Colonel,” he went on then, without a smile, “I think it’s time we gave you another ‘hat.’ ” He reached out again and tapped the prince on the forehead once more, more gently this time. “I think you need to take over as Third Platoon leader, Colonel. I know it will be a step down in rank, but I really need a platoon leader over there. Are you up for it, Colonel?”

Roger took his gaze off the ground at last, looked up at him, and nodded with slightly misty eyes.

“I’ll try.”

“Very well, Lieutenant MacClintock. Your platoon sergeant is Gunnery Sergeant Jin. He’s an experienced NCO, and I think you could learn a lot from listening to his advice. I remind you that platoon leader is one of the most dangerous jobs in the Corps. Keep your head down and your powder dry.”

“Yes, Sir,” Roger said, and produced another salute.

“You’d better get up there, Lieutenant,” the captain said soberly. “Your platoon is hard at work digging in. I think you should familiarize yourself with the situation as soon as possible.”

“Yes, Sir!” Roger saluted yet again.

“Dismissed,” Pahner said, and shook his head as the prince trotted up the ruined road towards the citadel. At least he finally had Roger unambiguously slotted into the chain of command, although he hated to think how the Regiment’s CO was going to feel about the expedient to which he’d been driven. Now if he could only keep the young idiot alive! Platoon leader really was the most dangerous post in the Corps; which didn’t mean that it wasn’t less dangerous than watching Prince Roger ricochet around like an unaimed rifle bead on his own.

He watched the prince for a few more moments, then decided that he should hurry himself. He couldn’t wait to see Jin’s face.

“Gunnery Sergeant Jin?”

“Yes, Your Highness?” The gunnery sergeant turned from specifying positions and fields of fire with Corporal Casset and glanced at the prince. “Can I help you?”

The city of Voitan had been vast, but the citadel was the simplest of constructions. It was built into the slope of the mountain, backed up to a cliff which had been quarried sheer, undoubtedly for building material for the rest of the city. A seven-meter curtain wall ran in a more or less semicircle from cliff to cliff and surrounded a three-story inner keep. The curtain wall was thick, three meters across at the top and tapered outward as it descended, with a heavy bastion built right into the cliff face at either end. The only entrances to the bastions were through small doors on the inner side at the level of the top of the wall. The original doors were long since gone, but temporary doors were already being constructed. The upper stories of the bastions had been of wood and had burned down long ago, as had the upper story of the keep, but the lower stories were built into the wall, and the interior partitions were stone. These had withstood not only the Kranolta assault but also the ravages of time and even the unceasing onslaught of the Mardukan jungle.

Slits for javelins and spears were arrayed on the “wall-level,” pointing outward. No inner first-story slits faced the top of the wall, but upper-level slits did just that, designed so that if the top of the wall were taken, fire could be poured into the attackers. There were also slits at the level of the bailey, so that if the attackers made it over the wall they could be attacked as they assaulted the keep.

The keep itself was a large, burned-out, vine-covered shell. The upper story, like those of the bastions, had been constructed of wood and was now charcoal. The rear of the keep, however, was dug deeply into the hillside, its roof supported by cleverly constructed stone buttresses, which provided a large, cavelike area that could be used to shield the pack beasts, wounded, and noncombatants. The flar-ta, kept from stampeding by chains stapled into the naked rock, were on the ground level, while the wounded and noncombatants waited on a raised shelf on the north side, along with Julian and the other power-armored Marines.

There were spear slits at the keep’s bailey level, but the only exterior door was on the second floor, up a staircase. Vines covered the walls, and trees had grown up through the flagstones of the bailey, but other than the vegetation and the damage to the gates, the gray stone of the fortress was intact.

Third Platoon, which was still more or less at full strength, had been assigned the left side of the wall, while First and Second shared the right. Teams from both groups were working feverishly to construct barricades to replace the broken and decayed gates, and Sergeant Jin had been noting the locations of the platoon’s troopers and their fields of fire. It was important to ensure that all possible approaches were covered and that the heaviest fire could be directed at the point where the enemy would be most likely to attack in force.

With that in mind, Jin had placed his grenadiers in locations covering the primary avenues of approach. He’d also pointed out to them the locations that the enemy was most likely to use for cover. There were, unfortunately, a lot of those. The citadel overlooked what had once been a densely populated city, and the shells of buildings still loomed above narrow, twisting streets. That would have been enough to mask the approach of any attackers by itself, but the ruins were also massively overgrown with vines, creepers, small trees, and jungle ferns, producing what were effectively well-screened trenches up to the foot of the citadel wall. Those would be the particular target of the grenadiers, since they were the only troopers whose weapons would allow them to drop indirect fire behind obstacles.

The platoon also had two plasma cannon. Given the failure of the power suits and the fact that this would be a stationary defense, the heavy cannon had been set up on their tripods. Jin intended to use them only against the heaviest concentrations of enemies, both because the Marines had developed a healthy distaste for the possible repercussions of firing them and because of the need to conserve their precious ammunition.

He was going to be without Julian and his team of suit-users. The inoperable suits had been lashed back onto the pack beasts, with their cursing users still trapped inside them, and carried out into the citadel. The gear was now scattered on one side of the bailey with Poertena working on it, but the personnel whose suits did work were going to be used as a reserve for the company as a whole. So it was with too few troops to man the section of wall he’d been given, with his heavy troopers missing, and the possibility, however remote, of losing half his platoon to exploding plasma cannon, that the gunnery sergeant found out he had a new responsibility.