“Well, well, Baby Prince—”
“This is Colonel Ford,” Peter said.
“Where’s the Prince?”
“Not here.” Jesus Alana says keep them talking. About anything. “Do you want to talk to the Prince? He’s coming, he’ll be here shortly.”
A nasty laugh. “No need to wait for him. We got the rancher’s boy,” the rebel said. “Give us twenty hours headstart, and we’ll let him go.”
“Twenty hours? That’s too much,” Owensford said.
“How long?”
“Well, not twenty hours—”
“Hell, you don’t mean to give us nothing,” the rebel said.
“Not true,” Owensford said. “Give up and you’ll be well treated. Killing hostages gets you hanged.”
“Yeah, well, worth just one try,” the guerrilla said. “OK, we’re sending him out.”
Like Hell you are. Owensford switched to his command channel. “All units, stand by. Section One. Section Two. Make ready. SAS One, stand ready.” Back to the enemy leader. “Don’t do anything rash.”
“Me? Rash? Nah, never.” A figure was pushed out from behind one of the jagged boulders. Owensford upped the gain to maximum, and the face sprang out at him. Lydia’s face, in a square-jawed male version. The hair was darker blond, plastered to the side of his head with blood, and one eye was swollen almost shut. The young man limped; his hands were bound behind him . . . with barbed wire.
“You see him, Cit?”
“Execute, all units execute,” Peter said. Then to the rebel, “No, see what?”
Demetrios Halleck was walking upright, with care, watching where he put his feet but moving as quickly as he could.
“You see him?”
“This is Crown Prince Lysander Collins. Stand by, Sergeant Cheung, I’m coming up to talk to you.”
“What the hell?” the rebel said. “Where? Show yourself—”
“I’m right over here, Sergeant.”
“I don’t see you—”
Mortar shells fell around the rebel position. The blast of a concussion grenade knocked the Halleck boy flat. Something moved in the shadows near where he fell.
“Pour it on,” Peter ordered. “Go for it, all units, go for it, go, go, go!”
“Go,” Lysander said. The sweat under his armor turned suddenly cold and gelid; like those nightmares where you waded through thick dank air, unable to turn and see what chased you.
Breaching charges flew through the air like blurring snakes; the soft whumps of their explosions across the minefield were lost in the hammer of the 76s and the thumping crash from the rocket howitzers. The Cataphract was tossing as they drove forward; out of the corner of one eye he saw the 6×6 truck pacing them. That wasn’t supposed to happen. They reached the rocks, and armored men leaped out among the rebels. Another flurry of shots. Then silence.
So quickly, Lysander thought. Silence fell, broken only by the crackling of small grass fires and shouts, and moans from the wounded. Lysander halted the Cataphract and climbed down slowly. Bodies everywhere.
“Hey Sarge, maps!” someone shouted.
“Don’t touch nothing! It’ll keep till morning.”
Shots and a grenade off to the left. Someone was running, and half a dozen Royals led by a sergeant gave chase.
Lysander carefully made his way back down the hill, out to where medics hovered over two figures.
Two. “Status?” Lysander asked.
“This one’s stable,” the medic said. He indicated the Halleck boy. “Broken ribs, but I think nothing internal. The other one will make it if we get him in the tanks in time, but it’s going to be close.”
“Who is he?” Lysander asked.
“Corporal Owassee,” a voice said from behind him. Lysander turned to see Sergeant Miscowsky. “Mine. He put his flak jacket over the kid, and they shot the shit out of him. Sir.”
Lysander touched his helmet. “Dustoff. Get in here now.”
“Already on the way,” the aerial dispatcher said.
“Sergeant, whatever that man wants, we’ll get it for him,” Lysander said. Rewards and risks. Statecraft. “We owe him. I owe him, big.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now. Where’s the rebel leader?” Lysander asked.
Sergeant Miscowsky jerked his head toward the row of boulders behind him. “We got him. Up yonder. Sir.”
Lysander started forward, but Miscowsky was in the way and didn’t move. For a moment Lysander stared at the man. “Let me by.”
“Well, sir—”
“Prince,” Owensford said from behind him.
“What’s going on?” Lysander demanded.
“Maybe you don’t want to know,” Owensford said. “You can go, Sergeant.”
“Sir.” Miscowsky ambled off into the dark.
“All right,” Lysander said quietly. “Just what is this? Mutiny?”
“Of course not, Your Highness. You’re in total command here. Anything you order will be done. Any question you ask will be answered,” Owensford said.
“The Laws of War—”
“A good officer knows what to see, and what not to see,” Owensford said. “And the Laws of War apply to prisoners of war. A status this group lost when they refused to surrender while holding hostages.”
“General—”
“Yes, your Highness?”
Lysander looked up the hill in time to see Miscowsky vanish behind one of the boulders. “I hate this war,” Lysander said.
“We all do.”
“Will they learn anything?”
“If there’s anything to learn. The important thing now is to keep him drugged so he can’t suicide before the Alanas can talk to him.”
“He called himself Sergeant Cheung—”
“Yeah. We think he’s a bit more than that,” Owensford said. “You may not know it, but Croser has a bodyguard named Lee Cheung.” Peter shrugged. “It’s not an uncommon name, but Lee Cheung is known to have a brother who’s a major in their equivalent of special forces. At the least we may find out how they knew you were out here, traitor or leak. You’ll notice he did ask for you.”
“I want to see that man,” Lysander said. “I want to talk to him, find out why—”
“In due time, Highness.” Owensford flashed a light on the trail. “Nothing more to do here, and the medics would rather we were out of the way. The cleared path is marked, stay on it and be careful.”
The sounds of battle had faded, and now came the inevitable aftermath, the smells of blood and death, screams and groans of wounded and dying. “They’ve done this to us,” Lysander said. “We can’t even walk in the forest without worrying about mines. The mines will be here for fifty years, a danger to foresters, children, animals—they don’t care. General, what do civilized people owe to barbarians?”
“Sir?”
“We owe them nothing, General Owensford. We owe them nothing.”
CHAPTER SIX
New York Times, May 17, 2094:
Luna Base. In a speech before the Grand Senate today, Grand Senator Adrian Bronson denounced anti-CoDominium partisans in both the United States and the Soviet Union.
“No man,” Grand Senator Bronson said, “has done more than I to curb the CoDominium’s excesses. No longer does the CoDominium pretend to be an omnicompetent government, a veritable interstellar empire. Therefore extreme measures such as this [referring to the proposed 50% cut in Fleet appropriations] are not appropriate at this time.”
In other matters, Grand Senator Bronson’s motion to instruct the CoDominium commander in the Sparta system to investigate terrorist activities against Fleet personnel and agents of the Bureau of Relocation was passed by acclamation. “We cannot tolerate such activities,” Bronson said. “They must be uncompromisingly suppressed.”
* * *
I love to see a lord when he is the first to advance on horseback, armed and fearless, thus encouraging his men to valiant service; then, when the fray has begun, each must be ready to follow him willingly, because no one is held in esteem until he has given and received blows. We shall see clubs and swords, gaily coloured helmets and shields shattered and spoiled, at the beginning of the battle, and many vassals all together receiving great blows, by reason of which many horses will wander riderless, belonging to the killed and wounded. Once he has started fighting, no noble knight thinks of anything but breaking heads and arms—better a dead man than a live one who is useless. I tell you, neither in eating, drinking, nor sleeping do I find what I feel when I hear the shout “At Them” from both sides, and the neighing of riderless horses in the confusion, or the call “Help! Help!,” or when I see great and small fall on the grass of the ditches, or when I espy dead men who still have pennoned lances in their ribs.
—Bertran de Born,
A Poem of Chivalry, 11th Century
* * *
” . . . and we’re not happy at all with the way things are going, Major Owensford,” Beatrice Frazer said.
There were nods down the table of the Battalion Council Meeting; the Legion commander sighed slightly and kneaded the bridge of his nose with thumb and forefinger. This was not a staff session. It was a meeting of the ruling body of the Fifth as an autonomous community, just as the Regimental Council governed Falkenberg’s Legion as a whole; still nothing resembling a democracy, but considerably more political than a strictly military meeting of the unit’s officers alone. Beatrice Frazer and Laura Bryant represented the civilian women and children; Sergio Guiterrez sat at the far end with the senior NCOs.