David Weber - March Upcountry

"On a scale from one to ten," Captain Krasnitsky muttered, "I give this trip a negative four hundred."

He coughed and shook his head to clear the mist of blood the cough brought up. The instructions on the box were fairly clear. Now if he could just hold together long enough to enter the codes.

Finding the keys for this particular device had been tough. Talcott, who'd had one, had been cut in half on his way back from Engineering. And, of course, the third had been in the suit of the acting engineer. He'd felt awful about having to cut it off of her to get to the device, but he'd had no choice. Tactical had had the fourth, and Navigation the fifth; those two had been easy to snag after the hit on the bridge.

Somewhat to his surprise, the ship had held together. And now, the Saints, after receiving the surrender transmission and the recording of the prince ordering Krasnitsky to surrender, were practically salivating. Capturing the prince would set every member of the ship's crew up for life, even in the austere Saint theocracy.

There was no plot here in the armory, but he didn't need one to know what was happening. He could hear the parasite cruiser docking onto the larger ship, and the concussion as the Saint Marines forced the airlocks for boarding.

Lessee. If I have all five keys, but only one activator, I have to set a delay. Okay. Makes sense.

"Captain Delaney, this is Lieutenant Scalucci." The Caravazan Marine paused and looked around the bridge. "We've taken the bridge but no prisoners. We are encountering resistance from the crew. So far, no prisoners. They're fighting hard—some of them in powered armor—and not surrendering as I would've expected. We have yet to encounter the Prince's bodyguards." He paused and looked around again. "There's something about this I don't like."

"Tell him to keep his opinions to himself!" Chaplain Panella snapped. "And find the Prince!"

Captain Delaney glanced at the chaplain, then keyed his throat mike.

"Continue the mission, Lieutenant," he said. "Be careful of ambushes. They apparently haven't surrendered after all, whatever their captain said."

"It doesn't appear that way, Sir. Scalucci, out."

The captain turned to face the chaplain squarely.

"We'll find the Prince, Chaplain. But losing people doing it is stupid. I wish we'd had a pinnace to send the Marines over." An unlucky hit to the boat bay, unfortunately, had settled that. "If the Prince weren't on board, I'd put this down as a trap!"

"But he is," the chaplain hissed, "and there's no way they'd risk his life playing some sort of ambush game!" He grinned like a rabid ferret. "Although, if they had any sense, they'd cut his throat themselves to keep him out of our hands. Imagine what we can do with a member of the Imperial Family of that damned 'Empire of Man'!"

"Captain!" It was Lieutenant Scalucci. "The shuttle bays are empty! The shuttles must have already punched!"

The Saint captain's eyes flew wide.

"Oh, pollution!" he swore.

"The Saint is matching the last known accel of the DeGlopper ," Pahner said.

"How can you tell?" Roger asked, eyes aching from the strain of staring at the tiny screen. "I can't tell a thing from this."

"Bring up the data records, instead," Pahner advised. "I've always said there's no reason we couldn't have larger screens in these things. But the command station was an afterthought in the design, and nobody's ever changed it."

"Well, we will!" the prince smiled as he banged the side of the recalcitrant instrument. "Oops."

He'd forgotten the power of the armor, and he withdrew his hand carefully from the fist-sized hole driven into the side of the workstation.

Pahner spun his own chair around and typed commands on the secondary keyboard at the prince's station. The now flickering monitor switched from a wider view of power sources in near space to a list of data.

"There's the last known velocity and position of the DeGlopper ," the captain said. "And there's her current probable position and velocity." He sent a command through his toot, and a different screen came up. "And this is the Saint data."

"So they're alongside?" Roger asked, noting the obvious similarities in the data.

"Yep. They've matched course and speed with the DeGlopper . Which means they fell for Krasnitsky's little deception hook, line, and sinker."

Roger nodded and tried to reflect some of the Marine's satisfaction, but it was hard. It was odd, he thought. Pahner was military, like Krasnitsky, and he knew as well as Roger that the Fleet captain and his entire crew were committing suicide to cover their escape. Somehow, the prince would have expected that to produce more emotion in the Marine. He'd always suspected that people who chose military careers had to be a little less... sensitive than others, but Pahner had been quick to let him know, however respectfully, whenever he stepped on one or another of the Marines' precious traditions or attitudes. So why was Pahner so detached and clinical over what was about to happen when he himself felt a hollow void of guilt sucking at his stomach?

This wasn't the way things were supposed to happen. People weren't supposed to throw away their lives to protect him —not when even his own family had never seemed quite certain he was worth keeping. And when gallant bodyguards and military personnel offered to lay down their lives for their duty, weren't they supposed to get something out of it besides simply dying ?

The questions made him acutely uncomfortable, and so he decided not to think about them just at the moment and reached for some other topic.

"I didn't sound all that good on the recording," Roger said sourly.

"I think you sounded perfect, Your Highness," Pahner said with a grin. "It certainly suckered the Saints."

"Uh-huh," Roger acknowledged even more sourly. Until he'd heard the edited playback of him ordering the officers to surrender which Krasnitsky had sent to the Saint cruiser, he hadn't realized how truly childish he'd sounded. "Surrender with honor." What poppycock.

"It worked, Your Highness," Pahner's voice was much colder, "and that's all that matters. Captain Krasnitsky has them right where he wants them."

"If there's anyone left to detonate the charge."

"There is," Pahner said firmly.

"How do you know? Everybody could be dead. And unless there's at least one officer left who knows the codes..."

"I know, Your Highness." There was no doubt at all in Pahner's reply. "How? Well, the Saint cruiser is still alongside. If it had captured one of the crew and made him talk, it would be accelerating away at top speed. It isn't; so the plan has to be working."

And God bless, Captain , the Marine thought quietly, allowing no trace of his inner anguish to show as he watched the data codes and thought of the men and women about to die. You've done your part; now we'll do ours to make it worth something. He's a pain in the ass, but we'll keep him alive somehow.

"It's not working," O'Casey said to herself.

The sergeant major had drifted into the troop bay to buck up the troops, leaving the civilian to fend for herself. Which was ironic, because Eleanora was feeling seriously in need of bucking up herself. Of course, even the sergeant major might have gotten tired of the smell, which could help explain whose morale she'd decided to improve.

To take her mind off the situation, O'Casey had started reviewing the plan—if it was really fair to call it that. From the moment the second cruiser had been spotted, there'd been no time for anything as deliberate and orderly as formulating anything Eleanora O'Casey would have called "a plan." Everything had been one frantic leap of improvisation after another, and she'd been sure something vital had to have been overlooked. For that matter, she still was, but she'd never had time to stop and reflect, and now she was feeling so out of sorts and woozy that her brain was scarcely in shape for critical analysis.