The Prince by Jerry Pournelle and S.M. Stirling

The briefing continued, the officers mostly silent, scribbling an occasional note on their pads; there was a brief question-and-answer session period.

“So,” Skida said at last. “Now, you, Tenjiro.” The Meijian mercenary bowed slightly. “When we come in contact, they going know we fudging the recon satellite data if they got reports from their troops and the pictures doan show. You gets the Skysweepers ready. Niles,” she continued, “Tenjiro’s people feeding you the locations of the Royalist SAS teams as they reports. Niles, everyone, Skilly really upset if those teams make any contacts. Be ready to take them out just before we is engaged. Be sure to send enough stuff to do it right.”

“Do it right,” Niles said. “I can tell you those people are good.” They had driven Barton to distraction on Tanith. “We’re not going to take them out with any small units.”

“So send big ones. Skilly think they like those people, gonna hurt them when they die.”

Niles nodded assent.

“Field Prime,” one of the other officers said. “They’re going to know we’re in their communications link when we silence the SAS people. And once the satellites are down, we’re as blind as they are to further movement.”

“Balance of advantage to us,” Skilly said. She bent the pointer between strong brown fingers, looking down at the map with a hungry expression. “We gots their basic positions, and our fixed sensors. They going to be off-balance and hitting air.” She raised her head, met their eyes; Niles felt a slight shiver at the feline intensity of it.

“One last thing Skilly want clear: we not fighting for territory, that their game. This going to be a long war; unfair one, too. So long as we doan lose, we win; so long as they doan win, they lose. Hit them hard, hurt them—the Brotherhoods particular—but preserving your force is maximum priority.” A deep breath. “Let’s do it. Let’s go.”

* * *

“Ready to move out, sir,” Lysander said.

“All right, Prince Captain,” Owensford said, nodding. “Find them, laddie. We’ll be right behind if you run into trouble. Good hunting.”

Lysander saluted and turned. The men of his company rose to their feet silently, weapons cradled across their chests. One hundred and twenty, a fifth of them seconded Legionnaires, because this was point duty and crucial. Bulky and anonymous, the gray of their fleece-lined parkas and trousers and body-armor hidden by the mottled-white winter camouflage coveralls. Bulbous helmets framed their faces; the mercenaries and officers were wearing Legion gear, with its complex mapping and communications capacity, the sound and light amplifiers; the ordinary First RSI troopers made do with a built-in radio and nightsight goggles. Everyone had heavy packs, half their own mass or more, because no mules were coming with them.

Marius’s mules, he thought. That’s what Roman soldiers called themselves. After Gaius Marius reformed the Republic’s army around 100 BC, abolishing the cumbersome baggage trains and giving every legionnaire a bone-crushing load. Some things in war never change.

The dying didn’t change either.

You’ll be in tight-beam communication via the aircraft, and you can’t get lost, Lysander told himself. With aviation assets so sparse the seismic-mapping units were doing double and triple duty, reconnaissance and forward-supply as well. Still, they had satellite communications and navigation, and good photomaps.

I wonder how Falkenberg felt the first time he led troops out. Was he scared? Interesting. It’s worse this time than back on Tanith. On Tanith it was just me and Harv I’d kill if I mucked it up.

“Move it out,” he called; the platoon commanders and NCOs echoed him. The first platoon filed into the waiting woods, and in less than a minute were totally invisible. “Follow me. With our shields or on them, brothers.” Nothing ahead of us but the SAS teams, he thought; it was a lonely feeling, almost as lonely as the weight of command on painfully inexperienced shoulders. If there was anything big, the satellite’s IR scanners or the SAS would have caught it. And you’ve got a whole battalion of the Regiment behind you.

Harv closed up beside him, moving easily under the burden of pack and communications gear. He pulled the screen down before his face and keyed it to light-enhancement; they moved off into the deeper darkness under the trees, white shadows against the night.

* * *

Sergeant Taras Hamilton Miscowsky handed out the packets of pemmican, and the other members of his SAS squad huddled together in the lee of the fallen oak; his tarp had been rigged over the roots to cover the hollow made where the big tree had toppled. Doctrine said it was possible to light a well-shielded mini-stove buried in the earth, and God knew some coffee or tea would be welcome with the wet cold, but he was taking no chances right now.

He looked out into the night-black woods. Dark as a tax-farmer’s soul, he thought.

The forest around him would have looked half familiar and oddly strange to someone used to the temperate zone of Earth; the trees were of too uniform an age, none more than seventy or eighty years. Too thickly grown with an undergrowth that included everything from briars to feral rosebushes, and an occasional patch of native pseudomoss with an olive-gray tint fighting its losing battle against the invading grass. Many of the trees had fallen, grown too high and spindly to bear a gravity a fifth again as high as that for which their genes prepared them. Chaotic ecology, was what the briefing veedisks had said.

None of it bothered Sergeant Miscowsky; he had been born on Haven, where it was always cold and almost always very dry and all forests were equally alien to him, problems to be learned and solved.

What was bothering him was the fact that he had discovered nothing in a week’s scouting. Nothing, zip, nada, zilch. He looked at his wrist. 0130 hours, coming upon time to report.

“Andy, rig the tightbeam,” he said.

Andy Owassee was a Legion veteran, who’d made the SAS just before they left Tanith. The other two were locals. Good men, outbackers who’d done a lot of hunting, but he wished he had more veterans with him, the men who’d gone with the bulk of the Legion to New Washington.

“Isn’t that a risk?” one of the RSI newlies asked; in a whisper, mouth pointed down.

“Not much,” Miscowsky said. “Line of sight from the blimp.” There were several patrolling along the Eurotas northeast of here. “Nothin’ sent back or forth except clicks, until they lock in—feedback loop. And it’s all coded anyway.” Tightbeam to the blimp, blimp to satellite, then satellite to whoever needed to hear it.

Out in the dark something yowled. Something big and hungry, Miscowsky thought. At that, at least the local predators didn’t hide in mudholes to sink their fangs in your ass as you stepped over like the ones on Tanith. Earth stock anyway, and Earth carnivores were all descended from a million years of ancestors with the sense to avoid humans.

“Got it, Sarge,” Owassee said, handing the noncom a thread-thin optical fiber link; he plugged it into a socket on the inside rim of his helmet, and then ducked back outside to the watch position.

“Close the tarp,” Miscowsky ordered. They made sure it was light-tight, and then the sergeant touched the side of his helmet. It projected a low-light map of the terrain on the poncho folded over the uneven dirt floor of the hollow.

“Cap’n Mace? Mic-four-niner, location”—he touched the map his helmet was projecting, automatically sending the coordinates—”over.”

“Reading you, Mic-four-niner. Signs of life?”

“Nothin’, sir, and I’m stone worried. Plenty of animals”—they had blundered almost into a deeryard with a hundred or so whitetails—”and sign, shod hooves and old fires, might be hunters or if it’s enemy then they police up real careful.” They had found a body at the bottom of a sinkhole, about a year dead and looking as if nothing had gotten to it but the ants; the leg bones were broken in four places, and there were a few empty cans around it.

“This place is like a Swiss cheese for caves and holes, sir,” Miscowsky went on. He paused. “Yes, sir, I know it’s a big search zone but it’s as if we’re moving in an empty bubble. I think it’s a dance, Skipper. They’re playing with us.”

“What’s your situation?”

“Camped high. Dug in. Perimeter gear out. I been running scared all week, and—”

“Sarge. Sound.”

All three men froze, only Miscowsky’s hand going to the tarp. He touched his helmet to cycle the audio pickups to maximum gain and background filter; the officer at the other end had caught the alarm and waited, silent on the circuit. The noncom closed his eyes to focus his senses.

Creaking, wind, somewhere far off the thud of animal hooves. Then a crackle . . . might be a branch breaking in the wind. Rubbing sounds, and a tear of cloth. A muffled metallic click; some dickhead waiting until too late to take off the safety. “Got something on pickup. Three hundred forty meters bearing two-nine-five. There’s another. Four hundred forty-five bearing one-seven-five.”