Throne of Stars (78 page)

“No, but he was the one with the weapon and the training,” Toutain said, nodding. “Right?”

“Right,” Catrone said.

“Any chance it was a setup?” Marinau asked.

“Maybe,” Catrone conceded with a shrug. “But if so, what does that tell us about the Mardukans?”

“What do you mean?” Rosenberg said.

“If it was a setup, one of them took a heavy hit for him,” Catrone pointed out. “It didn’t kill him, but I bet it was touch and go. If they set it up, they did so
knowing
the thing could
kill them. Think about it. Would
you
do that if Alexandra asked you to?”

“Which one?” Marinau asked, his voice suddenly harsher with old memories and pain. He’d retired out of Princess Alexandra’s Steel Battalion less than two years before her murder.

“Either,” Catrone said. “The point’s the same. But I don’t think it was a setup. And Despreaux was interesting, too.”

“She usually is.” Rosenberg chuckled. “I remember when she joined the Regiment. Damn, that girl’s a looker. I’m not surprised the Prince fell for her.”

“Yeah, but she’s trained the same way we are. Protect the primary. And all she did was get ready to back him up. What does
that
tell you?”

“That she’s out of training,” Marinau said. “You said she’d implied she’d lost it.”

“She didn’t ‘lose it’ in the classical sense,” Catrone argued. “She stood her ground, unarmed, but she
knew
the best person to face the thing was Roger. And she
trusted
him. She didn’t run, and she didn’t go into a funk, but she also didn’t move to protect the primary. She let
him
handle it.”

“Just because he’s brave,” Marinau said, “and, okay, can handle a sword—which is a pretty archaic damned weapon—that doesn’t mean he’s suited to be Emperor. And that’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about being a Praetorian Guard, just what we’re not supposed to be. Choosing the Emperor is
not
our job. And if I did have a choice, Roger wouldn’t be it.”

“You prefer Adoula?” Catrone demanded angrily.

“No,” Marinau admitted unhappily.

“The point is, he
didn’t
do the deed. We already knew that.” Catrone said. “And he’s the
legitimate
heir, not this baby they’re fast-cooking. And if somebody doesn’t act, Alexandra’s going to be as dead as John and Alex.” His face worked for a moment, and then he shook his head, snarling. “You’re going to let Adoula get
away
with that?”

“You’re impressed,” Rosenberg said. “I can tell that.”

“Yeah, I’m impressed,” Catrone replied. “I didn’t know it was going to be him, just that something was fishy. And I wasn’t impressed when I met him. But . . . he’s got that MacClintock
thing
you know? He didn’t before—”

“Not hardly,” Marinau muttered grumpily.

“—but he sure as hell does now,” Catrone finished.

“Does he want the Throne?” Joceline Raoux asked. She was a former sergeant major of the Raiders, the elite insertion commandos who skirmished with the Saint Greenpeace Corps along the borders.

“We didn’t get into that, Jo,” Catrone admitted. “I put them off. I wasn’t going to give him an okay without a consult. But he was more focused on getting the Empress safe. That might have been a negotiating ploy—he’s got to know where our interests and loyalties lie—but that’s what we talked about. Obviously, though, if we secure the Throne, he’s the Heir.”

“And from our reports, he’ll be Emperor almost immediately,” Rosenberg pointed out gloomily.

“Maybe,” Catrone said. “I’m not going to believe it until I’ve seen Alexandra. She’s strong—I can’t believe she won’t get over it.”

“I want her safe,” Toutain said suddenly, his voice hard. “And I want that bastard Adoula’s head for what he did to John and the kids. The damned
kids
. . .” His face worked, and he shook his head fiercely. “I want that bastard
dead
. I want to do him with a knife. Slow.”

“No more than I want New Madrid,” Catrone pointed out. “I
am
going to take that bastard, if it’s the last thing I do. But Roger can give us more than just revenge—he can give us the Empire back. And that’s important.”

Rosenberg looked around at the group of senior NCOs, taking a mental headcount, based upon body language. It didn’t take long.

“Catrone, Marinau, and . . . Raoux,” he said. “Arrange to meet. Tell him we’ll back him if he’s got a real plan. And find out what it is.”

“It won’t include what we know,” Catrone said. “It won’t even include the Miranda Protocols.”

“How do we meet him?” Marinau asked.

“Slipping our tethers will be harder than finding him.” Catrone shrugged. “I know I’m being monitored. But finding him won’t be hard; there’s only a couple of places he can be.”

“Meet him, again. Get a reading on him,” Rosenberg said. “If you’re all in agreement, we’ll initiate the Miranda Protocols and gather the clans.”

“Honal,” Roger smiled tightly, controlling his gorge through sheer force of will, “the idea is to
survive
flying in a light-flyer.”

The sleek, razor-edged aircar, a Mainly Fantom, was the only sports model large enough to squeeze a Mardukan into. It was also the fastest, and reportedly the most maneuverable, light-flyer on the market.

At the moment, Honal was proving that both those claims were justified, weaving in and out of the Western Range at dangerously high speeds. He had his lower, less dexterous, hands on the controls, and his upper arms crossed nonchalantly. There were some tricky air currents, and Roger closed his eyes as one of them caught the flyer and brought it down towards an upthrust chunk of rock. The flyer banked, putting the passenger side down, and Roger opened his eyes a crack to see the rocks of the mountainside flashing by less than a meter from the tip of the aircar’s wing.

The car suddenly flipped back in the other direction, banking again, and stood up on its tail. Roger crunched his stomach, feeling himself beginning to gray out, as Honal left out a bellow.

“I
love
this thing!” the Mardukan shouted, rolling the car over on its back. “Look at what it can
do
!”

“Honal,” Roger shook his head to clear it, “if I die, this plan goes to shit. Could we land, please?”

“Oh, sure. But you wanted to make sure we knew what we were doing, right?”

“You have successfully demonstrated that you can fly an aircar,” Roger said carefully. “Most successfully. Thank you. The question of whether or not you can fly a stingship still remains; they’re
not
the same.”

“We’ve been working with the simulators.” Honal shrugged all four shoulders. “They’re faster than this, but a bit less maneuverable. We can fly stingships, Roger.”

“Targeting is—”

“The targeting system is mostly automatic.” Honal banked around another mountain, this time slower and further away from the rocks, and landed the car beside the more plebeian vehicle Roger had flown out to the site. “It’s a matter of
choosing
the targets. Human pilots use mainly their toots, with the manual controls primarily for backup, but obviously, we can’t do that. On the other hand—you should pardon the expression—humans only have one set of hands.
We’re
training to fly with the lower hands . . . and control the targeting with the upper. I’ve ‘fought’ on the net with a few humans, including some military stingship pilots. They’re good, I give you that. But one-on-one, I can take any one of them, and a couple of the rest of the team are nearly as good. Where they kick our ass is in group tactics. We’re just getting a feel for those; it’s not the same thing as riding a
civan
against the Boman. Go in against them wing-to-wing, and we just get shot out of the sky. The good news is that the squadron at the Palace isn’t trained in group tactics, either. But they’ve got some pretty serious ground-based air defenses, and taking those out is another thing we’re not great at, yet.”

“Anything to do about it?” Roger asked.

“I’ve been reading up on everything I can get translated on stingship doctrine. But we’ve got a lot of studying to do, and I’m not sure what’s relevant and what’s not. We’re not as far along as I’d hoped. Sorry.”

“Keep working on it,” Roger said. “That’s all we can do for now.”

“They’re using Greenbrier,” Raoux said. The sergeant major no longer looked like herself. Like the Saint commandos, Raiders often had to modify their looks, and she’d gotten a crash retraining in old skills since the coup. “He’s on his way there at the moment.”

“Why Greenbrier?” Marinau asked. “It’s just about the smallest of the dispersal facilities.”

“Probably the only one Kosutic knew about,” Catrone said. “Pahner would’ve known more, but—” He shrugged. “We’ll shift the base to Cheyenne quick enough if it goes well.”

“You ready?” Raoux asked.

“Let’s get our mission faces on.”

“All right,” Roger said, looking at the hologram of the Palace. “Plasma cannon here, here, here, and here. Armored and embedded. ChromSten pillboxes.”

“Won’t take them out with a one-shot,” Kosutic said. “But they can only be activated by remote command from the security bunker.”

“Autocannon here and here,” Roger continued.

“Ditto,” Kosutic replied. “Both of them are heavy enough to take out armor, which we can’t get into the area in the first assault anyway, because the sensors all over the City would start screaming, and the Palace would go on lock-down.”

“Air defenses,” Roger said.

“The minute stingers get near the Capital,” Kosutic said, “air defenses all over the place go live. Civilian traffic’s grounded, and the air becomes a free-fire zone. Police have IFF; we might be able to emulate that to spoof
some
of the defenses. It’s going to be ugly, though. And that ignores the fact that we don’t
have
stingships. We might have to mount weaponry on those aircars Honal is using for training.”

“Wouldn’t
that
be lovely.” Roger grimaced and shook his head. “A formation of Mainly Fantoms going in over the parade . . .”

“We make the assault in the middle of the parade, and we’re going to cause enormous secondary casualties,” Despreaux pointed out unhappily.

“It’s still the best chance we have of getting close to the Palace,” Roger replied.

“And every scenario we’ve run shows us losing,” Kosutic said.

“And if you ran a scenario of our making it across Marduk?” Roger asked.

“Different situation, Your Highness,” Kosutic replied firmly. “There, we had zip for advance information on the tactical environment. Here we know the relative abilities, the mission parameters, and most of the variables, and, I repeat,
every single model we’ve run
ends up having us lose.”

“I guess you need a new plan, then,” Catrone said from the doorway. Heads snapped around, and his lips curled sardonically as he stripped off the mask he’d been wearing. The two people with him were doing the same.

“And how did
you
get in here?” Roger asked calmly, almost conversationally, then glanced at Kosutic. “Son of a
bitch
, Kosutic!”

“I’d like to know that, too,” the sergeant major said tightly.

“We got in the through a well-shielded secret passage . . . the same way we’re getting into the Palace,” Catrone told her. “
If
you can convince us we should back you.”

“Sergeant Major Marinau,” Roger said with an extremely thin smile. “What a
pleasant
surprise.”

“Hey, dork.” The sergeant major waved casually.

“That’s Your Highness the Dork, to you, Sergeant Major,” Roger replied.

“Glad to see you’ve a gotten a sense of humor.” The sergeant major sat at the table. “What happened to Pahner?” he continued, coming right to the point.

“Killed by Saint commandos,” Kosutic answered as Roger worked his jaw.

“Now that hasn’t been part of the brief,” Raoux said. “Greenpeace?”

“Yeah,” Roger said. “The tramp freighter we were jacking turned out to be one of their damned insertion ships . . . and we weren’t exactly at full strength, anymore. Thirty remaining marines. They all got pinned down in the first few minutes. We didn’t know who
they
were; they didn’t know who
we
were. It was a pocking mess.”

“
You
were there?” Marinau’s eyes narrowed.

“No,” Roger said flatly. “I was in the assault shuttles, with the Mardukans. Arm—Captain Pahner had pointed out that if I bought it, the whole plan was through. So I was sitting it out with the reserve. But when they found out it was commandos, I had to come in. So, by the end, yeah, I was there.”

“You took Mardukans in against Greenpeace?” Raoux asked. “How many did you lose?”

“Fourteen or fifteen,” Roger replied. “It helped that they were all carrying bead and plasma cannon.”

“Ouch.” Marinau shook his head. “They can handle them? I wouldn’t put them much over being able to use rocks and sticks.”

“Do
not
underestimate my companions,” Roger said slowly, each word distinct and hard-edged. “All of you are veteran soldiers of the Empire, but the bottom line is that the Empire hasn’t fought a major war in a century. I don’t know you.” He jabbed a finger at Raoux.

“Joceline Raoux,” Kosutic told him. “Raiders.”

“You’re Eva?” Raoux asked. “Long time, Sergeant.”

“Sergeant Major, Sergeant Major,” Kosutic said with a grin. “Colonel, according to His Highness, but we’ll let that slide.”

“The point,” Roger said, “is—”

He paused, then looked at Kosutic.

“Eva, how many actions did you have, prior to Marduk?”

“Fifteen.”

“Sergeant Major Catrone?” Roger asked.

“A bit more,” the sergeant major said. “Twenty something.”

“Any pitched battles?” Roger asked. “A battle being defined as continuous or near continuous combat that lasts for more than a full day?”

“No, except one hostage negotiation. But that wasn’t a battle, by any stretch. Your point?”

“My point,” Roger said, “is that during our time on Marduk we had, by careful count,
ninety-seven
skirmishes and
seven
major battles, one of which had us in the field, in contact, for three days. We also had over two hundred attacks by
atul, atul-grack
, damncrocs, or other hostile animals which penetrated the perimeter.”