The Prince by Jerry Pournelle and S.M. Stirling

The Royal officer returned the gesture, grinning as he scanned the action below. His night-sight goggles were flipped up, and he was using a blocky pair of sensor-glasses; less efficient than the multitasking facemasks of the Legion, but Sparta was not a rich planet.

“Some of them are putting their hands up already,” he said. A signals tech came up behind him and put a handset into his outstretched palm. “First platoon,” he continued into it. “Deploy in skirmish order and advance. I want prisoners, but don’t take unnecessary casualties. If in doubt, shoot.” Men fanned out and began to filter into the scrub downslope.

“Well done, Sergeant,” he went on, nodding to Miscowsky.

* * *

“Next insertion, sir?” Miscowsky said hopefully.

The Royal Spartan Army helicopter was still turning over its turbines behind the SAS squad.

“That’s the last of them.” Legion Captain Jamey Mace, Scout Commander, twitched his thumb toward the column of enemy prisoners as they shambled past under guard down to the river docks.

The Tyndos flowed north from here into the Eurotas, the great river of the Serpentine Continent. McKenzie’s Landing was a riverside town, like most on this world; not much of one, which was also typical. There was an openpit rare-earth mine cut back into a smooth green hill, a geothermal plant and a kilometer of railway down to the loading docks. That and housing for a few hundred people, ranging from tufa-block Georgian houses for the mine-owner down to plastic-stabilized rammed earth for the miners’ barracks. A fuel station by the docks, stacked logs for steamers and peanut oil tanks for diesels. A bar, a seedy-looking hotel, a Brotherhood meeting hall, two churches—established and non-conformist—and a tiny Hindi temple, a three-man Mounted Police station-cum-post-office. . . .

Not many of the Spartan People’s Liberation Army—Helot—guerrillas had gotten to anywhere useful. Rosie’s Bar and Grill was burning, and one of the steamers down at the pier was sinking at its moorings. The rebel plan had probably been to overrun the settlement just long enough to wreck the mine—it brought the Royal government off-planet hard currency—kill the Citizens resident, harangue the convict-transportee section of the labor force. . . .

“Let me go after them, Cap’n.”

“Can’t do that.” Mace shook his head. “Back to training duty, Sergeant. We’re going to need every Royal up to the mark—”

“Yes, sir, but—”

“If I thought there was one chance in ten thousand she was still alive I’d order you to go look for her.”

“You wouldn’t have to order me or anyone else. Captain, dammit, I know she’s dead. But I want—”

“A head?”

“Balls would do.”

“You’ll have your chance,” Mace said. It was easy to see what Mace was thinking. Taras Hamilton Miscowsky came from a culture that took blood feuds seriously. “Right now we’ve got a war to win, Sergeant.”

‘Sir.” Miscowsky was silent; obedience, not agreement. Two months ago the war had stopped being a job to him; when Lieutenant Lefkowitz died. Lieutenant Deborah Lefkowitz, wife of Jerry Lefkowitz, who had been Miscowsky’s first officer in the Legion. Miscowsky would not have lived past his first battle if Lefkowitz had not put his men ahead of his personal survival. Deborah Lefkowitz had been an electronics tech, not a combat soldier; sheer bad luck had put her observation plane over enemy Skyhawk missiles, in the Dales campaign. Miscowsky hadn’t been able to rescue her, nobody had, after her plane augured in still spitting out data. Data that had probably saved the Legion’s detachment here on Sparta, but nobody had saved Deborah. They found her torn clothing and some blood, but nothing else, despite the efforts of the Legion’s best trackers.

That’s the official story, Miscowsky thought. But Mendota was there, and he’s not talking, and I think he found something more. Maybe the skipper has some reason to keep things to himself, but God damn—

Jerry Lefkowitz was far away, eight months interstellar transit, though only half that for the fastest messages, on New Washington with Colonel Falkenberg and the bulk of the Legion. Sparta had originally been intended as a quiet training assignment for the 5th Battalion and a haven for the noncombatants. He wouldn’t even have the news about his wife yet. Miscowsky scowled. At least he wouldn’t have to break the news. The chaplain-rabbi would do that. But I have to write him. And when I do I want an enclosure.

A man in the uniform of a Brotherhood militia captain came up. “Captain McKenzie, sir,” he said to Mace. “Did I hear something about pursuit?” He was a middle-aged man, stocky and sandy-haired. There was a wolfish eagerness in his tone.

“The 18th Brotherhood’s authorized to send fighting patrols into bandit country,” Mace said, nodding northwestward. There lay the Himalayan-sized Drakon range and the vast forest-and-prairie expanse of hill country known as the Illyrian Dales.

“Not your SAS?” McKenzie said. He looked admiringly at the mercenary troopers squatting stolidly in the rain and leaning on their weapons. “We’d have been royally screwed if you hadn’t spotted those terrorist scum massing up in the ravine country. We’ve only got an under strength company of the Brotherhood here; if they’d hit us without warning . . .”

Captain Mace pulled a pack of cigarettes out of a shoulder-pocket in his armor, offered one to the Spartan. They lit, sheltering their matches from the steady drizzle.

“That’s just it,” he said. “Look, the enemy never attack if they think we know they’re coming; they just call it off and split up and concentrate somewhere we’re not. And we can’t give you long warning . . .”

They both nodded. Legion communications were secure—mostly—but the Brotherhood comm lines were leaky, and there didn’t seem to be much that anyone could do.

Most of the three-million population of Sparta was spread out along the nearly ten thousand kilometers of the Eurotas. Most traffic moved at the pace of the riverboat, with the faster alternative being a blimp. There was very little high-tech transport; Sparta saved its money for building its industries, and imported little in the way of personal luxuries. Even military helicopters were still rare, just now starting to come off the lines in quantity. Away from the little towns and scattered ranches of the Valley were mountain, swamp, forest. Easy to hide in, now that the satellites were down. The Helots crept through it like rats in long grass, massing secretly, striking without warning and scattering before the Royalist forces could respond.

“It’s like stomping on bloody cockroaches,” the Spartan said in frustration. “Can’t find the buggers. When you do, there are always more of them.”

“Mm-hmm,” Mace said. “And the Legion doesn’t have enough SAS to make much of a difference. We’ve got to train your own Regulars, your SAS” —which in the Royal forces stood for Spartan Air Service— “to give you a broad-based capacity.”

McKenzie nodded unwillingly. “We’ll pursue anyway,” he said. More softly: “My boy Phyrros was in the Dales. He got the Star of Leonidas . . . posthumously.”

“Be cautious,” Mace said.

“Sir.” Miscowsky leaned forward. “Sir, I’ve been thinkin’.” His provincial accent roughened a little, the Anglic harshened with the tones of Haven, his home planet. “Either the enemy’s going downhill, or these were recruits. Prob’ly sent in for a little on-the-job training.”

“Yes?” Mace looked at the prisoners thoughtfully.

A lot of them did look a little raw, without the stripped-down appearance you got after six months or so in Sparta’s heavy gravity. Transportees. Convicts and political prisoners from Earth; most of the Helots were, like a majority of Sparta’s population. And they did break up a bit easily. Not much unit cohesion, as if they were just out of the enemy equivalent of basic training. The Spartan People’s Liberation Army probably hadn’t expected much resistance here.

“Well,” Miscowsky went on, “if this was a training exercise, they had a command group somewhere close watching. Might be worth going after, Cap’n. Maybe even that bastard nephew of Bronson’s, the one we got the voiceprint on in the Dales.”

That would be worth it, the mercenary officer thought. With Geoffrey Niles in our hands, we’d have more of a lever. Grand Senator Bronson was illegally backing the rebellion . . . not that anyone on Earth seemed to give a damn anymore about little things like the CoDominium’s Laws of War, or treaties, or anything else.

“No.” He shook his head. “Niles may be dead . . . or still wandering around the Dales looking for the Helot survivors. We’ve got orders; mount up, Sergeant.”

* * *

Crack. A branch broke underneath a boot.

Geoffrey Niles started awake and then crouched lower under the overhang of blue rock. It was screened by tall canes of witch hazel and thick crystalline snow, only feet from the little brook that purled down the shallow valley under a skin of ice.

He forced his breathing to calm, clenching his jaw as it tried to chatter with cold and the effects of malnutrition. The skin on his fingers was cracked where it gripped the rifle; his body felt like an arthritic seventy instead of the twenty-eight Terran years it actually bore. Few would have recognized the sleekly handsome blond Englishman of a scant half-year before in the scarecrow figure that crouched in this cave. The heavy gravity of Sparta dragged at him, as sleep dragged at his eyelids. The air smelled of wet limestone and muddy earth; beyond the stream the first buds were showing on the rock maples, and strands of green among the yellow stalks of grass.