David Weber - March Upcountry

"It takes two-thirds to impeach, Your Highness," the captain said darkly.

"Are you suggesting that the Saints could influence a third of Parliament?" Roger was beginning to think he'd stepped through a looking glass and into some sort of weird fantasy universe. There'd always been bodyguards around him, certainly, but no one had ever seriously suggested that he might be a target of another empire's designs. He'd always assumed that the guards were there mainly for show or to keep off the occasional overly smitten female fan. Now he suddenly realized that what they were there for was... sitting on his chest, waiting for the air to evacuate.

"Why?" he asked, quietly, wondering what would make people serve and protect someone that even he didn't like looking back at him in the mirror.

"Well," Pahner replied, not understanding the true question, "the Saints want to ensure that humanity doesn't expand further into uncontaminated worlds. It's a religion to them." He paused, unsure how to go on. "I'd assumed that you'd been briefed, Your Highness."

Actually, it was common knowledge. The Church of Ryback had a few outlets in the capital, all heavily financed by the Saints, and they ran regular commercials. For that matter, it was a common subject for discussion in civics and history classes, which made Pahner wonder about the prince's education. Asking what the Saints wanted made no sense at all, given that O'Casey had been Roger's tutor for years and she had a quadruple doctorate in, among other things, history.

"No. No, that's not what I meant. I meant..."

Roger looked into the bleak face of the Marine and realized that this was not a good time to get the question off his chest. And even if he asked it, Pahner—as most people seemed to do when Roger asked questions—would probably just provide some opaque answer that ensured deeper confusion.

"I meant, 'What.' What do we do now?"

"We're going to go for the longshot, Your Highness," Pahner said, nodding now that the question made sense again. He suspected that something else had gone on in that airhead, but what it had been he neither knew nor particularly cared. There was a mission to perform, and it looked to be a long one.

"We're going to reload the boats. With the cruiser topside, taking the port by assault is out. So we're going to have to land on the planet and make our way to the port on foot. We can't let anyone know we're there, or they'll slaughter us, so we're going to have to come in on a ballistic approach and land quite a way around the planet from the port. Marduk was an afterthought to the Empire, so it's never been fully surveyed, and there's no satellite net, so the port won't be able to detect us as long as we stay out of line of sight. Once we reach the port, we capture a ship and head for home."

It sounded easy put like that. Right.

"So we're going to land on the backside then take the shuttles across... um, I can't remember the term. Low to the ground so they don't get spotted?"

"Nape of the Earth," Pahner answered somberly. "No, Your Highness. Unfortunately, we're going to have to launch nearly five light-minutes out. We're going to put three platoons and a few support personnel from the ship in four assault shuttles: enough room for a reinforced company. The rest of the load is going to be fuel for deceleration. When we're down, if we have enough fuel to do a couple of klicks we'll be lucky."

"So how are we going to get to the port?" Roger asked, dreading the answer.

"We're going to walk, Your Highness," the captain said with a grim smile.

"It says here, 'Marduk has a mean gravity of slightly greater than Earth normal, and is a planet of little weather change,' " Sergeant Julian said, reading off his pad. He'd managed, along with Poertena, to get two more suits up and running before the call came to drop everything and change the loadout on the shuttles. Currently, they were unloading.

He was perched on one silver wing of an assault shuttle as his squad moved out nonessential materials. The space-to-ground assault craft's variable geometry wings could sustain in-air flight at speeds as low as a hundred KPH or as high as Mach three, but it also had hydrogen thrusters for space maneuvering. Similar to a ground support pinnace, it had lighter weapons and a single top-mounted quad-barreled bead cannon, and thus correspondingly more room for personnel and equipment.

" '... with a median temperature of thirty-three degrees and a median humidity of ninety-seven percent,' " he continued. There'd been nothing in the Marine databases on the planet, but it turned out that one of the corporals in Second Platoon had a Fodor's Guide to the Baldur Sector . Unfortunately, it offered only a limited amount of data on the planet... and what data there was only made a gloomy situation worse. "Jesus Christ, that's hot!"

"Oh, just fucking great," Lance Corporal Moseyev said as he trotted out of the shuttle with a case of penetrator ammunition in his hands. "I only had three weeks and I was transferring to Steel!"

" 'The native culture is at a stagnant level of low-grade firearms technology. Politically, the Mardukans—' Hey, there's a picture!"

The Mardukan native, a four-armed biped from a hexapedal evolutionary line, was pictured next to a human wiredrawing for size. From the scale, the Mardukan was the height of a grizzly bear, with broad, long feet on the ends of long, backcurved legs. The hands of the upper and lower arms were about the same size, with the upper shoulders wider than the lower, which were in turn wider than the hips. The upper arms ended in long, fine, three-fingered hands with one fully opposable thumb each. The hands of the shorter, lower arms were heavier and less refined, with a broad opposable pad and two dissimilar fingers. The face was wider and flatter than a human's, with a broad nose and small deep-set eyes. Two large horns curled up and back over the head. They were obviously functional weapons; the inner curve looked razor-sharp. The rubbery-looking skin was a mottled green and had an odd sheen to it.

"What's that?" Moseyev asked, pointing to the sheen.

"Dunno." Julian tweaked the cursor over the skin and rolled up the magnification. "'The skin of the Mardukan is covered in a polycy... polyss... in a something something coating that protects the species from casual cuts and the various harsh funguses of its native jungle home," he read, then thought about it for a second. "Ewww."

"It's covered in slime ," Moseyev laughed. "Yick! Slimies!"

"Scummies!" Sergeant Major Kosutic snapped from the hatchway, and strode into the launching day. "I thought you were told to get the extraneous equipment out of the shuttle, Julian?"

"We were getting updated on the mission, Sergeant Major!" Julian was suddenly at attention, the pad held alongside his trousers. "I was briefing my squad on the enemy and conditions!"

"The enemy are the fucking Saints or pirates or whatever-they-are that hold the port." Kosutic stalked up to stand so close to the braced sergeant that he could smell her breath mint. "The scummies are what we're going to have to cut our way through to get there. Your mission, right now, is to get the shuttle unloaded—not to sit around on your ass cracking wise. Clear?"

"Clear, Sergeant Major!"

"Now get your asses to work. We're on a tight time schedule."

"Moseyev!" Julian said, turning hastily back to his squad. "Get your team unloading that ammo. We don't have all day-cycle! Gjalski, your team on the powerpacks... ."

"Not the powerpacks," Kosutic said. "Leave all of them. We're going to add extra, as a matter-of-fact. Thank Vlad we don't have a heavy weapons platoon with us."

"Sergeant Major," Julian asked as the squad began to scurry around, "you called the Mardukans 'scummies.' Where'd you hear that?"