The Prince by Jerry Pournelle and S.M. Stirling

“Another, fragmentation,” Niles said. Skilly handed it to him as they scuttled backward into the stairwell; there was something of a surprised look on her face.

Niles let the door close, pulling a roll of electrical tape from a pocket of his new hidehunter leather costume. The door was a simple rectangle of pressed metal, with a frosted glass window and a U-shaped aluminum handle. Moving with careful speed, he taped the grenade inside the metal loop, then ran a strip of the tape from the pin to the top of the stair railing. Finally he drew his knife and used the point to straighten the split ends of the pin, where they bent back on the other side of the grenade’s lever; the slightest pressure would strip it out, now.

“Hoo, Skilly like that,” she said, with new-found respect, slapping him on the shoulder. He found himself smiling back.

A bellow from below. “Skilly! ¡Vamonos!”

They turned, taking the stairs a dozen at a time and whooping like children.

* * *

“They didn’t cut the line, sir,” the Legion electronics tech said, looking up from her equipment. The glowstrips blinked back on. “Something with the central power control computer; I’d say.” They had flown her in in one of the RSMP tiltrotors, along with the reaction company who were securing the area, and Fifth Battalion medics to help with the wounded.

There were enough that they still had to be triaged. Peter Owensford walked over to where someone was bandaging Prince Lysander’s shoulder. A nice romantic wound in the extremities, he thought. A demonstrator looked up as he passed; he recognized her, the pretty girl who had been grinning when the bottle hit the policeman. She was not smiling now, as she sat with her dead companion’s head in her lap, and her face was less pretty for the streaks of blood drying on it.

“Murderer!” she shrilled. “You’ll pay for this, you’ll pay—” Then she slumped, as a passing medic stopped to press a hypospray against the back of her neck.

Lysander had heard the exchange. “Somebody will pay,” he promised, looking around the street. Wreckage still smoldered, and bodies were lying in neat rows under blanket covers. “Somebody definitely will.”

“Bad?” Owensford said, nodding at the wound.

“Just a flesh wound,” he said. “What really hurts is that I was putting a field-dressing on it when the men with me charged down that corridor. The door was booby-trapped. Five of them died, and whoever it was got away. We’ll do better the next time, sir.”

“I call you sir, sir,” Owensford said. A squad of Legionnaires in synthileather battledress and nemourlon combat armor moved down the street.

“Major, the Field Force is going to be under your command, and right now the best service I can do Sparta is to be part of it. Sir.”

“As a beginning,” Owensford said. “We’ll create a Prince Royal’s Own, which you can command in the field long enough that the men learn to trust you. After that, it’s staff schools.” Peter grinned hollowly when Lysander winced. “Someone has to lead when all this is over.”

* * *

“Thank you,” Melissa said, across the body. “This one’s dead.”

“You’re welcome,” Ursula Gordon said, as they moved onto the next.

Pressure bandage, Melissa thought. They ripped the Milice trooper’s tunic free and wadded it over the long cut in his thigh, pressing the flesh closed and binding it with twists of cloth. The Spartan found herself breathing through her nose; it was not that the smell was unfamiliar, gralloching deer was pretty much like this, it was just that when she thought of it together with people—

“Out of the way, out of the way!” the paramedics shouted.

Melissa and Ursula jumped back; the white-coated team from the latest ambulance moved in, one setting up a plasma drip and slapping an antishock hypo on the man’s arm.

“I think—” Melissa started to brush a strand of hair back out of her eyes, then stopped; in the glowlight it looked as if she was wearing gloves to the elbow, of something dark and glistening. She swallowed. “I think that’s the last; they can handle it now.”

“Water,” Ursula croaked.

There was a fountain in the center of the Spartosky’s lobby. They pushed through the thinning crowd that still milled, some shocked-silent, some hysterical, some getting first aid for minor injuries while the professionals saved those on the edge of death. The kings were in one corner with a communications tech and a knot of uniforms, mercenary and RSMP, grimly busy. Water bubbled clear and cold from the fretted terracotta basin; Melissa and the woman in uniform rinsed their hands until they were clean enough to scoop up a handful. For a long minute they waited, letting stress-exhaustion slump their shoulders.

“Thank you again, for saving my life,” Melissa said. She shivered slightly, remembering it again; the roar of fire, the screams, the sudden flat crack of bullets.

“It’s my job,” Ursula said. Her eyes met the other woman’s; Melissa wondered how her own looked now. Glazed, probably. Not as steady as hers.

“I’m . . . sorry, I’ve been . . . impolite,” she continued. Her skin flushed, embarrassment and anger at having to say what honor demanded; the feeling was welcome, pushing away the sick knot of fear and disgust in her stomach.

“Miss von Alderheim,” Ursula said calmly. Her eyes moved to one side, ever so slightly. “It’s perfectly understandable. Lys—The Prince—goes to Tanith, nearly gets killed, and nearly gets snatched by a designing whore. Perfectly understandable that you should be angry, especially when she shows up here to remind everyone of it.”

“I never said you—”

“Well, I was. A whore, that is, if not designing. Not my career of choice, but there it is. My lady, I never had any slightest belief the Prince would stay with me. I wanted it, yes, but I never believed it. The Prince dreamed about it; he’s a romantic to his bones, but he knew better too.”

“But that’s it, isn’t it?” Melissa said with quiet bitterness. “He loves you, you love him, but he’ll marry me, out of duty.” Her mouth twisted in something that might have been a smile. “A designing woman and an infatuated Prince would have been much easier on my pride, I think. I may get what I want, but not the way I want it.”

Unexpectedly, Ursula smiled, an almost tender expression, and reached out to touch the Spartan on the shoulder. “He will, if you let him.” she said. “Love you, that is; he’s that sort of man. Besides, that’s not the important thing.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“Well no, actually, it’s rather difficult. But it’s true. We were in love, or thought we were, and that’s about all we had in common, apart from a few books. My mother was a drug addict and a prostitute and a petty thief, until they sent her to Tanith; who my father is or was, God only knows. I grew up on a prison-planet that lives from drugs grown by slaves, and it’s just the sort of place you’d expect it to be. All I was taught was enough to make me pleasant company. You grew up with him, you’ve got a shared world in common, the beliefs and the feelings and the little things like knowing the jokes and songs . . . and something important to work on together. Opposites may attract, but it’s the similarities keep people together.”

Melissa blinked at her and slowly sat on the coping of the fountain. “Now I really am sorry,” she said. “I forgot how difficult it must be for you.”

“I’ll heal,” Ursula said. “Mostly I already have. I’d have preferred to go somewhere else, but—” She touched the Legion crest on her shoulder. “There’s more choices in this business than in my old trade, but not a whole lot more. The Prince will heal too, if you help him, Miss von Alderheim.”

“Melissa,” the other said impulsively, holding out her hand. They clasped palms, smiling tentatively. “How old are you, Cornet Gordon?”

“Ursula. Eighteen standard years and six months. Going on fifty.”

“You certainly make me feel like a babe in the woods, Ursula!”

“Never had a chance for a childhood,” Ursula said. “But look at it this way: you’re still more grown-up than most men of fifty.” They shared a chuckle. “Not all, of course. Colonel Falkenberg’s quite adult—but then, he is fifty-odd.”

The chuckle grew into a laugh; a quiet one that died away as they grew conscious of a man standing near.

“Why, Lysander,” Melissa said, rising and taking his unwounded arm. “Ursula and I were just talking about you.”

The Spartan prince looked a little paler as they walked away; Harv followed, giving Ursula a glare as he passed.

The mercenary sighed, rising and looking down at the ruin of her dress uniform. Amazing, she thought, suddenly a little nauseated with herself. Twenty-odd people just killed, and we find time for emotional fiddlefaddle. That’s humanity, I guess. There was a line of caked, crusted blood under her fingernails, where she had had to clamp hard.