The Prince by Jerry Pournelle and S.M. Stirling

“Jeffi,” Skilly went on, “in case you not notice, mon, you working for SkiIly now, not Earth Prime.” She turned back to the Meijian. “Well?”

He shrugged. “Operational security in the combat zone is your responsibility,” he said.

Skilly shifted slightly; the Meijian did not tense, but the chilly air of the attic was fully of a coiled alertness.

“Yoshida was in command of that post,” the woman said. “He responsible, Murasaki; should have his head, too.”

“No,” Murasaki said flatly “I do not abandon my people.”

“Neither does Skilly,” the woman said. “Ones who offed the merc fucked up by not hiding de evidence, and they pay.” She smiled at the ghastly pun. “But Yoshida commander on site—he should have checked.”

“Field Prime,” Niles said. “If we just tightened the behavior of the troops up—”

“Jeffi, shut up,” Skilly said. She turned her head toward him; a slight trace of fear crept down the Englishman’s spine. “This the Revolution, Jeffi; we be fighting by your rabbiblanco rules, they kill us all in a month. That the reason their stinkin’ Code there at all.”

Niles fell silent; usually it was a teasing joke when Skilly referred to him as a rabbiblanco, white-ass. Not this time.

Murasaki chuckled softly. “Not the way our enemies would put it, but moral considerations aside, quite accurate. The Law of War certainly has a conservative effect, making it difficult to fight wars with large or radical aims. It favors established, regular forces.”

He turned his attention to Skilly once more. “I would remind you that Earth Prime’s main goal is to humiliate the Legion. Not merely to defeat it, but to make Falkenberg and its individual members suffer, to cause them pain and anguish. So I was ordered.”

“Good, OK, absolutemente, once we win you can have them all fucked to death by donkeys—but not while it can backfire on we. Mon, Falkenberg got influence! He winning his war, too. We get him mad enough before Helots holding the planet, we gets the Legion an’ twenty thousand mercs from Kali knows where, them riding down in CD assault boats pretty likely. Nobody off-planet except maybe Lermontov much care what we do to Spartans, not enough to do much, but the mercs be a different story.”

“Is it certain that won’t happen now?” Niles asked. “Those pictures. Properly used, they might get quite a few volunteers.”

“Why?” Skilly asked. “Not they fight.”

“Not everyone would agree,” Niles said.

“Jeffi, you crazy. Falkenberg, maybe he get mad enough, he talk them mercs around, but it not they fight unless they get paid.”

“Yoshida shall be reprimanded,” Murasaki said.

Skilly snorted. “And all you people, they out of the chain of command in my area,” she said flatly. “No operations without regular Helot clearance.”

“As you wish, Field Prime,” Murasaki said, inclining his head. The two leaders stared at each other with mutual respect and equally absolute lack of trust. The Meijian rose and left without further word.

Niles looked from the technoninja’s back to Skilly’s face. Alike, he thought with an inward shudder. How could I have missed it? What did that old book say about Kritias, the pupil of Socrates who had become one of the Thirty Tyrants?

“When a man is freed from the bonds of dogma and custom, where will he run? He has gotten loose, of the soul if you like the word, or from whatever keeps a man on two feet instead of four. And now Kritias too is running on the mountains, with no more between him and his will than a wolf has.”

When Niles was a child he had loved Turkish Delight; on a visit, Adrian Bronson had grown tired of his whining and bought him a whole box while they were at a county fair on the estate. Niles could remember the exact moment when pleasure turned to disgust, just before the nausea struck; he had never been able to eat the stuff again. No lessons like those you teach yourself, his grand uncle had said to his mother. . . .

“Sometimes Skilly think that one, he a sick puppy,” she said meditatively, looking after the Meijian. “Likes to hurt people. But terror only effective if it be used selective . . . Or maybe he not care so much who wins? Maybe he bossman doan care?” Then her gaze sharpened, fixing on the Englishman’s face.

“Ah, Jeffi, Skilly think you maybe getting second thoughts, maybe think Skilly not been telling you everything,” she said, grinning at him. “Too late, me mon.” She stepped closer, over the piled trunks and boxes, puffing a hand under his chin. “River of fire and a river of blood between you and de old life now. You be Skilly’s now, Jeffi. Skilly’s and the Dreadful Bride’s. Come on, we got a long ride ahead and a battle to fight.”

* * *

“You know, George, I’m breaking the Code,” Barton said to the other officer beside him in the lounge of the blimp. “The unwritten sections, at least.”

“Oh?” The other man looked up from his laptop.

The sunlight was fading outside, even from two thousand meters altitude; below the oblong shadow of the lighter-than-air craft had faded as darkness fell. They were two hundred kilometers west of Mandalay now, angling north across the bend of the Eurotas to reach the lands north of Olynthos. Below them were the vast marshes around Lake Lynkestis, not a light showing in all the area from horizon to horizon. The lounge was walled in clear plastic, a warm bubble of light in the vast black stillness; somehow the throbbing of the diesels was a lonely sound as they leaned back in their chairs with tobacco and coffee and brandy. Behind them, the riding beacons of the other five aircraft were drifting amber spots.

“Yeah. Gettin’ emotionally involved with the clients.”

“I know how you feel,” Slater said. “Homelike here, isn’t it?”

Barton pulled on his cigarette and nodded; they had a lot in common, despite Slater being half a generation younger. Both from the American southwest, he by birth and Slater by heritage. Their families were from country areas that had changed little since the coming of the CoDominium; where as recently as their teen-age years it had still been possible to pretend they lived as free men in a free country. Barton had been born in Arizona, and George Slater had visited kin there often enough. Slater’s mother was a colonial from a largely American-settled planet as well.

“Better than home, if it weren’t for the war,” Barton said. “After we—there I go again, after the clients win—I’m giving serious thought about buying back my contract from the Legion and making a go of it in the Royal Army.”

“Can’t resist being a brigadier, eh?” Slater said, laughing silently. His face creased, leathery with long exposure to strange suns; he was a tall whipcord-lean man, brown hair sun-faded.

“It doesn’t hurt,” Barton said frankly. The pay isn’t spectacular, he reminded himself. No better than what he’d been getting as a Captain in the Legion, considerably less than he’d usually made as an independent merc commander with Barton’s Bulldogs, if you factored in the foreign-exchange difficulties. The opportunity to use his skills on a larger canvas was more important: it had not been easy, going back down the scale after having his own outfit. Before Falkenberg smashed it back on Tanith; that had been just business, of course. Business, and I was on the wrong side. Didn’t used to be so clear cut, right side, wrong side. Now—

Now it’s important.

“I’ll be hanging up my guns in another few years no matter what,” he went on, discarding a frayed toothpick and fishing another out of a pocket. He had picked that habit up on Thurstone, when tobacco was unavailable. “I’m damn near sixty, George. Long past time to think of settling down.” Even with regenn, it was half a lifetime.

“Me too,” Slater replied. Barton glanced over at him in surprise. “Cindy doesn’t think dragging the kids from one base to another is all that good an idea,” he explained. “Wants them to have a home before they leave the nest. I always wanted land of my own; anyway, it’s what I was raised to. Dad doesn’t talk about it much, but he still remembers losing the ranch.”

And you’d waited long enough, Barton thought, with a certain wistful envy. Slater’s father had been with Falkenberg since before he took over the 42nd CoDominium Marines, the unit that had followed him to become the Legion. His wife was a colonial, country-born. They had four children, from three to ten.

“For that matter,” Barton said, “I think Pete Owensford wouldn’t mind having a home. He may have found someone to share it with—”

“That Halleck girl?”

“Well, I notice he found reasons to visit the Halleck ranch, and now Lydia Halleck’s in Sparta City for a year at University—”