David Weber & John Ringo - March Upcountry 04

We Few

David Weber

John Ringo

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are

fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

form.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN: 0-7434-9881-X

Cover art by Kurt Miller

First printing, April 2005

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

Printed in the United States of America

BOOKS IN THIS SERIES:

March Upcountry

March to the Sea

March to the Stars

We Few

BAEN BOOKS by DAVID WEBER

Honor Harrington:

On Basilisk Station

The Honor of the Queen

The Short Victorious War

Field of Dishonor

Flag in Exile

Honor Among Enemies

In Enemy Hands

Echoes of Honor

Ashes of Victory

War of Honor

edited by David Weber:

More than Honor

Worlds of Honor

Changer of Worlds

The Service of the Sword

Honorverse:

Crown of Slaves (with Eric Flint)

The Shadow of Saganami

Mutineers' Moon

The Armageddon Inheritance

Heirs of EmpireEmpire From the Ashes (Megbook)

Path of the Fury

The Apocalypse Troll

The Excalibur Alternative

Bolos!

Oath of Swords

The War God's Own

Wind Rider's Oath

with Steve White:

Insurrection

Crusade

In Death Ground

The Shiva Option

The Stars at War (Megabook)

The Stars at War II (Megabook)

with Eric Flint

1633

BAEN BOOKS by JOHN RINGO

A Hymn Before Battle

Gust Front

When the Devil Dances

Hell's Faire

The Hero (with Michael Z. Williamson)

Cally's War (with Julie Cochrane)

There Will Be Dragons

Emerald Sea

Against the Tide

Into the Looking Glass (forthcoming)

The Road to Damascus

(with Linda Evans)

Prologue

Of Alexandra VII's three children, the youngest, Roger Ramius Sergei Alexander Chiang

MacClintock—known variously to political writers of his own time as "Roger the Terrible," "Roger the

Mad," "the Tyrant," "the Restorer," and even "the Kin-Slayer"—did not begin his career as the most

promising material the famed MacClintock Dynasty had ever produced. Alexandra's child by Lazar

Fillipo, the sixth Earl of New Madrid, whom she never married, the then-Prince Roger was widely

regarded prior to the Adoula Coup as an overly handsome, self-centered, clothes-conscious fop. It was

widely known within court circles that his mother nursed serious reservations about his reliability and was

actively disappointed by his indolent, self-centered neglect of those duties and responsibilities which

attached to his position as Heir Tertiary to the Throne of Man. Less widely known, although scarcely a

secret, was her lingering distrust of his loyalty.

As such, it was perhaps not unreasonable, when the "Playboy Prince" and his bodyguard (Bravo

Company, Bronze Battalion, of the Empress' Own Regiment) disappeared en route to a routine

flag-showing ceremony only months before an attack upon the Imperial Palace, that suspicion should turn

to him. The assassination of his older brother, Crown Prince John, and of his sister, Princess Alexandra,

and of all of John's children, combined with the apparent attempt to assassinate his Empress Mother,

would have left Roger the only surviving heir to the throne.

What was unknown at the time was that those truly behind the coup were, in fact, convinced that

Roger and his Marine bodyguard were all dead, as his assassination had been the first step in their plans

to overthrow Empress Alexandra. By hacking into the personal computer implant of a junior officer

aboard the Prince's transport vessel, they were able, through their unwilling, programmed agent, to plant

demolition charges at critical points within the vessel's engineering sections. Unfortunately for their plans,

the saboteur was discovered before she could quite complete her mission, and the ship, although badly

crippled, was not destroyed outright.

Instead of dying almost instantly in space, the "Playboy Prince" found himself marooned on the planet

of Marduk . . . a fate some might not have considered preferable. Although legally claimed by the Empire

and the site of an Imperial starport, it was obvious to the commander of his bodyguard, Captain Armand

Pahner, that the system was actually under the de facto control of the Cavazan Empire, the ruthless rivals

of the Empire of Man. The "Saints'" fanatical attachment to the principle that humanity's polluting,

ecology-destroying presence should be excised from as many planets as physically possible was matched

only by their burning desire to replace the Empire of Man as the dominant political and military power of

the explored galaxy. Their interest in Marduk was easily explainable by the star system's strategic

location on the somehwat amorphous boundary between the two rival star nations, although precisely

what at least two of their sublight cruisers were doing there was rather more problematical. But whatever

the exact details of their presence in the Marduk System might be, it was imperative that the Heir Tertiary

not fall into their hands.

To prevent that from happening, the entire crew of Roger's transport vessel, HMS Charles

DeGlopper, sacrificed their lives in a desperate, close-range action which destroyed both Saint cruisers in

the system without ever revealing DeGlopper's identity or the fact that Roger had been aboard. Just

before the transport's final battle, the Prince and his Marine bodyguards, along with his valet and his chief

of staff and one-time tutor, escaped undetected aboard DeGlopper's assault shuttles to the planet. There,

they faced the formidable task of marching halfway around one of the most hostile, technically habitable

planets ever claimed by the Empire so that they might assault the spaceport and seize control of it.

It was, in fact, as virtually all of them realized, an impossible mission, but the "Bronze Barbarians"

were not simply Imperial Marines. They were the Empress' Own, and impossible or not, they did it.

For eight endless months, they fought their way across half a world of vicious carnivores, sweltering

jungle, swamp, mountains, seas, and murderous barbarian armies. When their advanced weapons failed

in the face of Marduk's voracious climate and ecology, they improvised new ones—swords, javelins,

black powder rifles, and muzzle-loading artillery. They learned to build ships. They destroyed the most

terrible nomadic army Marduk had ever seen, and then did the same thing to the cannibalistic empire of

the Krath. At first, the horned, four-armed, cold-blooded, mucus-covered, three-meter-tall natives of

Marduk seriously underestimated the small, bipedal visitors to their planet. Physically, humans closely

resembled over-sized basiks, small, stupid, rabbit-like creatures routinely hunted by small children armed

only with sticks. Those Mardukans unfortunate enough to get in the Empress' Own's way, however, soon

discovered that these basiks were far more deadly than any predator their own world had ever

produced.

And along the way, the "Playboy Prince" discovered that he was, indeed, the heir of Miranda

MacClintock, the first Empress of Man. At the beginning of that epic march across the face of Marduk,

the one hundred and ninety Marines of Bravo Company felt nothing but contempt for the worthless

princeling whose protection was their responsibility; by its end, Bravo Company's twelve survivors would

have fixed bayonets to charge Hell itself at his back. And the same was true of the Mardukans recruited

into his service as The Basik's Own.

But having, against all odds, captured the spaceport and a Saint special operations ship which called

upon it, the surviving Bronze Barbarians and The Basik's Own faced a more daunting challenge still, for

they discovered that the coup launched by Jackson Adoula, Prince of Kellerman, had obviously

succeeded. Unfortunately, no one else seemed to realize Empress Alexandra was being controlled by the

same people who had murdered her children and her grandchildren. And, still worse, was the discovery

that the notorious traitor Prince Roger Ramius Sergei Alexander Chiang MacClintock was being hunted

by every member of the Imperial military and police establishments as the perpetrator of the attack on his

own family.

Despite that. . . .

—Arnold Liu-Hamner, PhD,

from "Chapter 27:The Chaos Years Begin,"

The MacClintock Legacy, Volume 17, 7th edition, © 3517,

Souchon, Fitzhugh, & Porter Publishing,

Old Earth

Imprimus, they nuked the spaceport.

The one-kiloton kinetic energy weapon was a chunk of iron the size of a small aircar. He watched it

burn on the view screens of the captured Saint special operations ship as it entered the upper atmosphere

of the planet Marduk and tracked in perfectly. It exploded in a flash of light and plasma, and the

mushroom cloud reached up into the atmosphere, spreading a cloud of dust over the nearer Krath

villages.

The spaceport was deserted at the moment it turned into plasma. Everything movable, which had

turned out to be everything but the buildings and fixed installations, had been stripped from it. The Class

One manufacturing facility, capable of making clothes and tools and small weapons, had been secreted at

Voitan, along with most of the untrustworthy humans, including all of the surviving Saint Greenpeace

commandos who had been captured with the ship. They could work in the Voitan mines, help rebuild the

city, or, if they liked nature so much, they could feel free to escape into the jungles of Marduk, teeming

with carnivores who would be more than happy to ingest them.

Prince Roger Ramius Sergei Alexander Chiang MacClintock watched the explosion with a stony

face, then turned to the small group gathered in the ship's control room, and nodded.

"Okay, let's go."

The prince was a shade under two meters tall, slim but muscular, with some of the compact strength

usually associated with professional zero-G ball players. His long blond hair, pulled back in a ponytail,

was almost white from sun bleaching, and his handsome, almost beautiful, classic European face was

heavily tanned. It was also lined and hard, seeming far older than his twenty-two standard years. He had

neither laughed nor smiled in two weeks, and as his long, mobile hand scratched at the neck of the

two-meter black and red lizard standing pony-high by his side, Prince Roger's jade-green eyes were

harder than his face.

There were many reasons for the lines, for the early aging, for the hardness about his eyes and

shoulders. Roger MacClintock—Master Roger, behind his back, or simply The Prince—had not been so

lined and hard nine months before. When he, his chief of staff and valet, and a company of Marine

bodyguards had been hustled out of Imperial City, thrust into a battered old assault ship, and sent

packing on a totally nonessential political mission, he had taken its as just another sign of his mother's

disapproval of her youngest son. He'd shown none of the diplomatic and bureaucratic expertise of his

older brother, Prince John, the Heir Primus, nor of the military ability of his older sister the admiral,

Princess Alexandra, Heir Secondary. Unlike them, Roger spent his time playing zero-G ball, hunting big

game, and generally being the playboy, and he'd assumed that Mother had simply decided it was time for

him to steady down and begin doing the Heir Tertiary's job.

What he hadn't known at the time, hadn't known until months later, was that he was being hustled out

of town in advance of a firestorm. The Empress had gotten wind, somehow, that the internal enemies of

House MacClintock were preparing to move. He knew that now. What he still didn't know was whether

she'd wanted him out of the way to protect him . . . or to keep the child whose loyalty she distrusted out

of both the battle and temptation's way.

What he did know was that the cabal behind the crisis his mother had foreseen had planned long and

carefully for it. The sabotage of Charles DeGlopper, his transport, had been but the first step, although

neither he nor any of the people responsible for keeping him alive had realized it at the time.

What Roger had realized was that the entire crew of the DeGlopper had sacrificed their lives in

hopeless battle against the Saint sublight cruisers they had discovered in the Marduk System when the

crippled ship finally managed to limp into it. They'd taken those ships on, rather than even considering

surrender, solely to cover Roger's own escape in DeGlopper's assault shuttles, and they'd succeeded.

Roger had always known the Marines assigned to protect him regarded him with the same contempt

as everyone else at Court, nor had DeGlopper's crew had any reason to regard him differently. Yet

they'd died to protect him. They'd given up their lives in exchange for his, and they would not be the last

to do it. As the men and women of Bravo Company, Bronze Battalion, The Empress' Own, had marched

and fought their way across the planet they'd reached against such overwhelming odds, the young prince

had seen far too many of them die. And as they died, the young fop learned, in the hardest possible

school, to defend not simply himself, but the soldiers around him. Soldiers who had become more than

guards, more than family, more than brothers and sisters.

In the eight brutal months it had taken to cross the planet, making alliances, fighting battles, and at

last, capturing the spaceport and the ship aboard which he stood at this very moment, that young fop had

become a man. More than a man—a hardened killer. A diplomat trained in a school where diplomacy

and a bead pistol worked hand-in-hand. A leader who could command from the rear, or fight in the line,

and keep his head when all about him was chaos.

But that transformation had not come cheaply. It had cost the lives of over ninety percent of Bravo

Company. It had cost the life of Kostas Matsugae, his valet and the only person who had ever seemed to

give a single good goddamn for Roger MacClintock. Not Prince Roger. Not the Heir Tertiary to the

Throne of Man. Just Roger MacClintock.

And it had cost the life of Bravo Company's commanding officer, Captain Armand Pahner.

Pahner had treated his nominal commander first as a useless appendage to be protected, then as a

decent junior officer, and, finally, as a warrior scion of House MacClintock. As a young man worthy to

be Emperor, and to command Bronze Battalion. He had become more than a friend. He'd become the

father Roger had never had, a mentor, almost a god. And in the end, Pahner had saved the mission and

Roger's life by giving his own.

Roger MacClintock couldn't remember the names of all his dead. At first, they'd been faceless

nonentities. Too many had been killed taking and holding Voitan, dying under the spears of the Kranolta,

before he even learned their names. Too many had been killed by the atul, the low-slung hunting lizards

of Marduk. Too many had been killed by the flar-ke, the wild dinosauroids related to the elephant-like

flar-ta packbeasts. By vampire moths and their poisonous larva, the killerpillars. By the nomadic Boman,

by sea monsters out of darkest nightmares, and by the swords and spears of the cannibalistic "civilized"

Krath.

But if he couldn't remember all of them, he remembered many. The young plasma gunner, Nassina

Bosum, killed by her own malfunctioning rifle in one of the first attacks. Dokkum, the happy mountaineer

from Sherpa, killed almost within sight of Ran Tai. Kostas, the single human being who'd ever thought he

was worth a damn in those cold, old days before this nightmare, killed by an accursed damncroc while

fetching water for his prince. Gronningen, the massive cannoneer, killed taking the bridge of this very

ship.

So many dead, and so far yet to go.

The Saint ship for which they'd fought so hard showed how brutal the struggle to capture it had been.

No one had suspected that the innocent tramp freighter was a covert, special operations ship, crewed by

elite Saint commandos. The risk in capturing it had seemed minor, but since losing Roger would have

made their entire epic march and all of their sacrifices in vain, he'd been left behind with their half-trained

Mardukan allies when the surviving members of Bravo Company went up to take possession of the

"freighter."

The three-meter-tall, horned, four-armed, mucus-skinned natives of The Basik's Own had come

from every conceivable pre-industrial level of technology. D'Nal Cord, his asi—technically, his "slave,"

since Roger had saved his life without any obligation to do so, though anyone who made the mistake of

treating the old shaman as a menial would never live long enough to recognize the enormity of his

mistake—and his nephew Denat had come from the X'Intai, the first, literally Stone Age tribe they had

encountered. The Vasin, riders of the fierce, carnivorous civan, were former feudal lords whose

city-state had been utterly destroyed by the rampaging Boman barbarians and who had provided The

Basik's Own's cavalry. The core of its infantry had come from the city of Diaspra—worshipers of the

God of Waters, builders and laborers who had been trained into a disciplined force first of pikemen, and

then of riflemen.

The Basik's Own had followed Roger through the battles that destroyed the "invincible" Boman, then

across demon-haunted waters to totally unknown lands. Under the banner of a basik, rampant, long

teeth bared in a vicious grin, they'd battled the Krath cannibals and taken the spaceport. And in the end,

when the Marines were unable to overcome the unexpected presence of Saint commandos on the ship,

they'd been hurled into the fray again.

Rearmed with modern weaponry—hyper-velocity bead and plasma cannon normally used as

crew-served weapons or as weapons for powered armor—the big Mardukans had been thrown into the

ship in a second wave and immediately charged into the battle. The Vasin cavalry had rushed from

position to position, ambushing the bewildered commandos, who could not believe that "scummies" using

cannon as personal weapons were really roaming all over their ship, opening shuttle bay doors to vacuum

and generally causing as much havoc as they could. And while the . . . individualistic Vasin had been

doing that, the Diaspran infantry had taken one hard-point after another, all of them heavily defended

positions, by laying down plasma fire as if it were the rank-upon-rank musketry which was their

specialty.

And they'd paid a heavy price for their victory. In the end, the ship had been taken, but only at the

cost of far too many more dead and horribly injured. And the ship itself had been largely gutted by the

savage firefights. Modern tunnel ships were remarkably robust, but they weren't designed to survive the

effect of five Mardukans abreast, packed bulkhead-to-bulkhead in a passage and volley-firing blast after

blast of plasma.

What was left of the ship was a job for a professional space dock, but that was out of question.

Jackson Adoula, Prince of Kellerman, and Roger's despised father, the Earl of New Madrid, had made

that impossible when they murdered his brother and sister and all of his brother's children, massacred the

Empress' Own, and somehow gained total control of the Empress herself. Never in her wildest dreams

would Alexandra MacClintock have closely associated herself with Jackson Adoula, whom she despised

and distrusted. And far less would she ever have married New Madrid, whose treasonous tendencies

she'd proven to her own satisfaction before Roger was ever born. Indeed, New Madrid's treason was

the reason she'd never married him . . . and a large part of the explanation for her distrust of Roger

himself. Yet according to the official news services, Adoula had become her trusted Navy Minister and

closest Cabinet confidant, and this time she had announced she did intend to wed New Madrid. Which

seemed only reasonable, the newsies pointed out, since they were the men responsible for somehow

thwarting the coup attempt which had so nearly succeeded.

The coup which, according to those same official news services, had been instigated by none other

than Prince Roger . . . at the very instant that he'd been fighting for his life against ax-wielding Boman

barbarians on sunny Marduk.

Something, to say the least, was rotten in Imperial City. And whatever it was, it meant that instead of

simply taking the spaceport and sending home a message "Mommy, come pick me up," the battered

warriors at Roger's back now had the unenviable task of retaking the entire Empire from the traitors who

were somehow controlling the Empress. The survivors of Bravo Company—all twelve of them—and the

remaining two hundred and ninety members of The Basik's Own, pitted against one hundred and twenty

star systems, with a population right at three-quarters of a trillion humans, and uncountable soldiers and

ships. And just to make their task a bit more daunting, they had a time problem. Alexandra was

"pregnant"—a new scion had been popped into the uterine replicator, a full brother of Roger's, from his

mother's and father's genetic material—and under Imperial law, now that Roger had been officially

attainted for treason, that fetus became the new Heir Primus as soon as he was born.

Roger's advisers concurred that his mother's life would last about as long as spit on a hot griddle

when that uterine replicator was opened.

Which explained the still dwindling mushroom cloud. When the Saints came looking for their missing

ship, or an Imperial carrier finally showed up to wonder why Old Earth hadn't heard from Marduk in so

long, it would appear a pirate vessel had pillaged the facility and then vanished into the depths of space.

What it would not look like was the first step in a counter coup intended to regain the Throne for House

MacClintock.

He took one last look at the view screens, then turned and led his staff off the bridge towards the

ship's wardroom. Although the wardroom itself had escaped damage during the fighting, the route there

was somewhat hazardous. The approaches to the bridge had taken tremendous damage—indeed, the

decks and bulkheads of the short security corridor outside the command deckhead been sublimed into

gas by plasma fire from both sides. A narrow, flexing, carbon-fiber catwalk had been built as a

temporary walkway, and they crossed it carefully, one at a time. The passageway beyond wasn't much

better. Many of the holes in the deck had been repaired, but others were simply outlined in bright yellow

paint, and in many places, the bulkheads reminded Roger forcibly of Old Earth Swiss cheese.

He and his staffers picked their way around the unrepaired holes in the deck and finally reached the

wardroom's dilating hatch, and Roger seated himself at the head of the table. He leaned back, apparently

entirely at ease, as the lizard curled into a ball by his side. His calm demeanor fooled no one. He'd

worked very hard on creating an image of complete sang-froid in any encounter. It was copied from the

late Captain Pahner, but Roger lacked that soldier's years of experience. The tension, the energy, the

anger, radiated off him in waves.

He watched the others assume their places.

D'Nal Cord squatted to the side of the lizard, behind Roger, silent as the shadow which in many

ways he was, holding himself up with the long spear that doubled as a walking stick. Theirs was an

interesting bonding. Although the laws of his people made him Roger's slave, the old shaman had quickly

come to understand that Roger was a young nobleman, and a bratty one at that. Despite his official

"slave" status, he'd taken it as his duty to chivvy the young brat into manhood, not to mention teaching

him a bit more of the sword, a weapon Cord had studied as a young man in more civilized areas of

Marduk.

Cord's only clothing was a long skirt of locally made flax-silk. His people, the X'Intai, like most

Mardukans the humans had met, had little use for clothing. But he'd donned the simple garment in Krath,

where it was customary to be clothed, and continued to wear it, despite the barbarism of the custom,

because humans set such store by it.

Pedi Karuse, the young female Mardukan to his left (since there was no room for her behind him),

was short by Mardukan standards, even for a woman. Her horns were polished and colored a light

honey-gold, she wore a light robe of blue flax-silk, and two swords were crossed behind her back. The

daughter of a Shin chieftain, her relationship with Cord was, if anything, even more "interesting" than

Roger's.

Her people shared many common societal customs with the X'Intai, and when Cord saved her from

Krath slavers, those customs had made her the shaman's asi, just as he was Roger's. And since Roger

had been squared away by that time, Cord had taken up the training of his new "slave," only to discover

an entirely new set of headaches.

Pedi was at least as headstrong as the prince, and a bit wilder, if that were possible. Worse, the very

old shaman, whose wife and children were long dead, had found himself far more attracted to his "asi"

than was proper in a society where relations between asi and master were absolutely forbidden.

Unfortunately for Cord's honorable intentions, he'd taken a near-mortal wound battling the Krath at

about the same time he entered his annual "heat," and Pedi had been in charge of nursing him. She'd

recognized the signs and decided, on her own, that it was vital he be relieved of at least that pressure on

his abused body.

Cord, semi-conscious and delirious at the time, had remembered nothing about it. It had taken him

some time to recognize what was changing about his asi, and he'd only been aware that he was going to

be a father again for a handful of weeks.

He was still adjusting to the knowledge, but in the meantime, Pedi's father had become one of

Roger's strongest allies on the planet. After a futile protest on the shaman's part that he was far too old to

be a suitable husband for Pedi, the two had been married in a Shin ceremony. If the other Shin had

noticed that Pedi was showing signs of pregnancy—developing "blisters" on her back to hold the growing

fetuses—they had politely ignored it.

Despite the marriage, however, Pedi's honor as Cord's asi still required her to guard the shaman's

back (pregnant or no), just as he was required to guard Roger. So Roger found the two almost

constantly following him around in a trail. He shook them off whenever he could, these days, but it wasn't

easy.

Eleanora O'Casey, Roger's chief of staff and the only surviving "civilian" from DeGlopper's

passengers, settled into the seat to his right. Eleanorawas a slight woman, with brown hair and a pleasant

face, who'd had no staff to chief when they landed on Marduk. She'd been given the job by the Empress

in hopes that some of her noted academic skills—she was a multi-degree historian and specialist in

political theory—would rub off on the wastrel son. She was a city girl, with the flat, nasal accent of

Imperial City, and at the beginning of the march across the planet, Roger and everyone else had

wondered how long she would last. As it had turned out, there was a good bit of steel under that mousy

cover, and her knowledge of good old-fashioned city state politics had proven absolutely vital on more

than one occasion.

Eva Kosutic, Bravo Company's Sergeant Major and High Priestess of the Satanist Church of

Armagh, took the chair across from Eleanor. She had a flat, chiseled face and dark brown, almost black

hair. A deadly close-in warrior and a fine sergeant major, she now commanded Bravo Company's

remnants—about a squad in size—and functioned as Roger's military aide.

David Weber & John Ringo - March Upcountry 04 - We Few

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