David Weber & John Ringo - March Upcountry 03 - March to the Stars

March to the Stars

David Weber

and

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: 0-7434-3562-1

Cover art by Patrick Turner

First printing, January 2003

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Weber, David, 1952-

March to the stars / by David Weber & John Ringo.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-7434-3562-1

1. Life on other planets—Fiction. 2. Space warfare—Fiction. I. Ringo, John,

1963-

II. Title.

PS3573.E217 M354 2003

813'.54—dc21

2002034184

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

ALSO IN THIS SERIES

March Upcountry

March to the Sea

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 (upcoming)

Mutineers' Moon

The Armageddon Inheritance

Heirs of Empire

Empire From the Ashes (omnibus)

(upcoming)

Path of the Fury

The Apocalypse Troll

The Excalibur Alternative

Oath of Swords

The War God's Own

with Steve White:

Insurrection

Crusade

In Death Ground

The Shiva Option

with Eric Flint:

1633

BAEN BOOKS by JOHN RINGO

A Hymn Before Battle

Gust Front

When the Devil Dances

Hell's Faire (upcoming)

PROLOGUE

The body was in a state of advanced decomposition. Time, and the various insect analogues of

Marduk, had worked their way with it, and what was left was mostly skeleton with a few bits of clinging

tendon and skin. Temu Jin would have liked to say it was the worst thing he'd ever seen, but that would

have been a lie.

He turned over one of the skeletal hands and ran a sensor wand across it. The catacomblike tomb

was hot and close, especially with three more team members and one of the gigantic Mardukans packed

into it with him. The heat on Marduk was always bad—the "temperate" regions were a fairly constant

thirty-five degrees—but in the tomb, with the remnant stink of decomposition (not to mention the smell of

the unwashed assholes he'd arrived with), it was like an antechamber to Hell.

One that was already inhabited.

There was no question that its occupants had been Imperial Marines. Or, at least, people with

Marine nano packs. The trace materials and surviving nanites were coded, and the sensor practically

screamed "Imperials." But the questions were how they had gotten here . . . and why they were here. He

could think of several reasons, and he liked the stink of all of them even less than he did the stench in this

room.

"Ask them again, geek," Dara said in a tight voice. The survey team leader choked for a

second—again—then hawked, spat, and finished by blowing out his nose on the floor. Marduk was hell

on his sinuses. "Talk gook. Make sure this is all there was."

Jin looked up at the towering Mardukan and ran the translation through his "toot." The tutorial

implant, lodged just inside his mastoid bone, took his chosen words, translated them into the local

Mardukan dialect, and adjusted his speaking voice to compensate.

"My illustrious leader wishes to ensure, once again, that there were no survivors."

Mardukan expressions were not the same as those of humans. Among other things, their faces had

fewer muscles, and much of their expressiveness came from eloquent gestures of their four arms. But the

body language of this Mardukan was closed, as well. Part of that might be from the fact that he was

missing one arm from the elbow down. Currently, there was a rather nice prosthetic hook in its place,

razor-sharp on both sides. So Dara had to be either stupid, arrogant, or both to ask, for the fifth time, if

the Voitan representative was lying.

"Alas," T'Leen Targ said with a sorrowful but cautious sweep of his arms (and hook), "there were no

survivors. A few lasted a pair of days, but then they, too, succumbed. We did all we could for them. That

we had been only a day sooner! The battle was great; your friends warred upon more Kranolta than the

stars in the sky! They stacked them against the walls of the city and cut them down with their powerful

fire-lances! Had our relief force but been sooner, some might have survived! Woe! But we were too late,

alas. However, they did break the power of the Kranolta, and for that Voitan was and is eternally

thankful. It was because of that gratitude that we interred them here, with our own honored dead, in

hopes that someday others of their kind might come for them. And . . . here you are!"

"Same story," Jin said, turning back to the team leader.

"Where's the weapons? Where's the gear?" Dara demanded. Unlike the commo-puke's, his toot was

an off-the-shelf civilian model and couldn't handle the only translation program available. It was loaded

with the local patois used around the distant starport, but handling multiple dialects was beyond its

capability, and Jin's system couldn't cross load the translation files.

"Some of that stuff should have survived," the team leader continued. "And there were supposed to

be more of them at the last city. Where'd the rest of 'em go?"

"My illustrious leader asks about our dear friends' weapons and equipment," Jin said. The

communications technician had had fairly extensive dealings with the natives, both back at the distant

starport and on the hellish odyssey to this final resting place of the human castaways. And of them all, this

one made him the most nervous. He'd almost rather be in the jungles again. Which was saying a lot.

Marduk was an incredibly hot, wet, and stable planet. The result was a nearly worldwide jungle,

filled with the most vicious predators in the known worlds. And it seemed that the search team—or

assassination team, depending on how one viewed it—had run into all of them on its journey here.

The starport's atmospheric puddle-jumpers had flown them to the dry lakebed where the four

combat shuttles had landed. There was no indication, anywhere, of what unit had flown those shuttles, or

where they had come from. All of them had been stripped of any information, and their computers

purged. Just four Imperial assault shuttles, totally out of fuel, in the middle of five thousand square

kilometers of salt.

There had, however, been a clear trail off the lakebed, leading up into the mountains. The search

team had followed it, flying low, until it reached the lowland jungles. After that it had just . . . disappeared

into the green hell.

Dara's request to return to base at that point had been denied. It was unlikely, to say the very least,

that the shuttle crews might survive to reach civilization. Even taking the local flora and fauna out of the

equation, the landing site was on the far side of the planet from the starport, and unless they had brought

along enough dietary supplements, they would starve to death long before they could make the trip. But

unlikely or not, their fate had to be known. Not so much because anyone would ever ask, or care, about

them. Because if there was any shred of a possibility that they could reach the base, or worse, get off

planet, they had to be eliminated.

That consideration had been unstated, and it was also one of the reasons that the tech wasn't sure he

would survive the mission. The "official" reason for the search was simply to rescue the survivors. But the

composition of the team made it much more likely that the real reason was to eliminate a threat. Dara was

the governor's official bully-boy. Any minor "problem" that could be fixed with a little muscle or a

discreetly disappearing body tended to get handed to the team leader. Otherwise, he was pretty useless.

As demonstrated by his inability to see what was right in front of his eyes.

The rest of the team was cut from the same cloth. All fourteen of them—there'd been seventeen . . .

before the local fauna got a shot at them on the trek here—were from the locally hired "guard" force, and

all were wanted on one planet or another. Aware that maintaining forces on Class Three planets was

difficult, at best, the distant Imperial capital allowed local governors wide latitude in the choice of

personnel. Governor Brown had, by and large, hired what were still known as "Schultzes," guards who

could be trusted to see, do, and hear nothing. Still, there were those special occasions when a real

problem cropped up. And to deal with those problems, he had secured a "special reaction force"

composed of what could graciously be called "scum." If, of course, one wanted to insult scum.

Jin was well aware that he was not an "official" member of the Special Force. As such, this mission

might be a test for entry, and in many ways, that could be a good thing. Unfortunately, even if it was an

entry test, there was still one huge issue associated with the mission: It might involve fighting the Marines.

He had several reasons, not the least of which was the likelihood of being blasted into plasma, to not

want to fight Marines, but the mission had been angling steadily that way.

Now, however, it seemed all his worry had been for naught. The last of the Marines had died here, in

this lonely outpost, overrun by barbarians before their friendly "civilized" supporters could arrive to save

them!

Sure they did, he thought, and snorted mentally. Either they wandered off and these guys are

covering for them . . . or else the locals finished them off themselves and are graciously willing to give

these "Kranolta" the credit. The only problem at this point is figuring out which.

"Alas," the local said yet again. He seemed remarkably fond of that word, Jin thought cynically as

Targ gestured in the direction of the distant jungle somewhere outside the tomb. "The Kranolta took all

their equipment with them. There was nothing left for us to give to their friends. That is, to you."

And you can believe as much or as little of that as you like, Jin thought. But the answer left a

glaring hole he had to plug. And hope his efforts never came to light.

"The scummy says the barbs threw all the gear into the river," he mistranslated.

"Poth!" Dara snarled. "That means it's all trashed. And we can't trace the power packs! Even

trashed, we could've gotten something for them."

What an imbecile, Jin thought. Dara must have been hiding behind the door when brains were given

out.

When a body is looted, the looters very rarely take every scrap of clothing. Nor was that the only

peculiarity. There was one clinging bit of skin on the corpse before him which had clearly been cut away

in an oval, as if to remove a tattoo after the person was dead . . . and there were no weapons or even

bits of weapons anywhere in sight. For that matter, the entire battle site had been meticulously picked

over to remove every trace of evidence. Some of the scars from plasma gun fire had even been covered

up. The barbarians, according to the locals' time line, could not possibly have swept the battlefield that

well, no matter how addicted to trophy-taking they might be, before the "civilized" locals arrived to finish

driving them off.

The last city they'd passed through had also been remarkably reticent about the actions the objects of

the search team's curiosity had taken on their way through. The crews of the downed shuttles had

apparently swept into town, destroyed and looted a selected few of the local "Great Houses," and then

swept out again, just as rapidly. According to the local king and the very few nobles they'd been

permitted to question, at least. And in that town, the search team had been followed everywhere by a

large enough contingent of guards to make attempts to question anyone else contraindicated.

All of that proved one thing to Jin, and it took a sadistic, snot-filled idiot like Dara not to see it.

The bodies had been sterilized.

Somebody wanted to make damn sure no one could determine who these Marines had been without

a DNA database. The dead Marines' toots were already a dead issue, of course. Their built-in nanites

had obediently reduced them to half-crumbled wreckage once their owners were dead. That was a

routine security measure, but the rest of this definitely went far beyond "routine." Which meant these

particular people were something other than standard Marines. Either Raiders or . . . something else. And

since the locals were covering for them so assiduously, it was glaringly obvious that all of them hadn't

died.

All of which meant that there was a short company—from the number of shuttles, Jin had put their

initial force at a company—of an Imperial special operations unit out there wandering in the jungle. And

the only reasonable target for their wandering was a certain starport.

Lovely.

He pushed aside a bit of the current corpse's hair, looking for any clue. The Marine had been female,

with longish, dishwater blond hair. That was the only thing about the skeletal remains which would have

been recognizable to anyone but a forensic pathologist, which Jin was not. He had some basic training in

forensics, but all he could tell about this corpse was that a blade had half-severed the left arm. However,

under the cover of the hair, there was a tiny earring. Just a scrap of bronze, with one ten-letter word on

it.

Jin was unable to keep his eyes from widening, but he didn't freeze. He was far too well trained to do

something so obvious. He simply moved his hand in a smooth motion, and the tiny earring was ripped

from the decaying ear, a scrap of skin still dangling from it.

"I'm not finding anything," he said, getting to his feet as he willed his face to total immobility.

He looked at the native, who returned his regard impassively. The local "king" was named T'Kal

Vlan. He'd greeted the search team as long-lost cousins, all the time giving the impression that he wanted

to sell them a rug. For T'Leen Targ, though, it always seemed to be a toss-up between selling them a rug

and burying them in one. Now the local scratched his horn with his hook and nodded . . . in a distinctly

human fashion.

"I take it that you did not find anything," Targ said. "I'm so sorry. Will you be taking the bodies with

you?"

"I think not," Jin replied. Standing as they were, the team leader was behind the local. Jin reached out

with his left hand, and the Mardukan took it automatically, another example of acculturation to Terrans.

Jin wondered if the Marines had realized how many clues they were unavoidably leaving behind. Given

who they apparently were, it was probable, for all the proof of how hard they'd worked to avoid it. As

he shook the Mardukan's slime-covered hand, a tiny drop of bronze was left behind, stuck in the mucus.

"I don't think we'll be back," the commo tech said. "But you might want to melt this down so nobody

else finds it."

In the palm of the native's hand, the word "BARBARIANS" was briefly impressed into the mucus.

Then it disappeared.

CHAPTER ONE

"It's a halyard."

"No, it's a stay. T'e headstay."

The thirty-meter schooner Ima Hooker swooped closehauled into aquamarine swells so perfect they

might have been drawn from a painting by the semimythical Maxfield Parrish. Overhead, the rigging sang

in a faint but steady breeze. That gentle zephyr, smelling faintly of brine, was the only relief for the

sweltering figures on her deck.

Julian mopped his brow and pointed to the offending bit of rigging.

"Look, there's a rope—"

"A line," Poertena corrected pedantically.

"Okay, there's a line and a pulley—"

"T'at's a block. Actually, it's a deadeye."

"Really? I thought a block was one of those with cranks."

"No, t'at's a windlass."

Six other schooners kept formation on Hooker. Five of them were identical to the one on whose

deck Julian and Poertena stood: low, trim hulls with two masts of equal height and what was technically

known as a "topsail schooner rig." What that meant was that each mast carried a "gaff sail," a

fore-and-aft sail cut like a truncated triangle with its head set from an angled yard—the "gaff"—while the

foremast also carried an entire set of conventional square sails. The after gaff sail—the "mainsail," Julian

mentally corrected; after all, he had to get something right—had a boom; the forward gaff sail did not.

Of course, it was called the foresail whereas the lowest square sail on that mast was called the "fore

course," which struck him as a weird name for any sail. Then there were the "fore topsail," "fore

topgallant," and "fore royal," all set above the fore course.

The second mast (called the "mainmast" rather than the "aftermast," for some reason Julian didn't

quite understand, given that the ship had only two masts to begin with and that it carried considerably less

canvas than the foremast) carried only a single square topsail, but compensated by setting a triangular "leg

of mutton" fore-and-aft sail above the mainsail. There were also staysails set between the masts, not to

mention a flying jib, outer jib, and inner jib, all set between the foremast and the bowsprit.

The seventh schooner was different—a much bigger, less agile, somehow unfinished-looking vessel

with a far deeper hull and no less than five masts—and, at the insistence of Captain Armand Pahner,

Imperial Marines, rejoiced in the name of Snarleyow. The smaller, more nimble ships seemed to regard

their larger sister with mixed emotions. No one would ever have called Snarleyow anything so gauche as

clumsy, perhaps, but she was clearly less fleet of foot, and her heavier, more deliberate motion almost

seemed to hold the others back.

All of the ships carried short-barreled cannon along their sides. Snarleyow mounted fifteen of them

to a side, which gave her a quarter again the broadside armament of any of her consorts, but all of them

carried a single, much larger cannon on a pivot mount towards the bow, as well. And every single one of

them had ropes everywhere. Which was the problem.

"Okay." Julian drew a deep breath, then continued in a tone of massive calm. "There's a line and a

pu—block. So why isn't it a halyard?"

"Halyard hauls up t'e sail. T'e stay, it hold t'e pocking mast up."

The Pinopan had grown up around the arcane terminology of the sea. In fact, he was the only human

member of the expedition (with the exception of Roger, who had spent summers in Old Earth's

blue-water recreational sailing community) who actually understood it at all. But despite the impression of

landsmen—that the arcana existed purely to cause them confusion—there was a real necessity for the

distinct terminology. Ships constantly encounter situations where clear and unambiguous orders may

mean the difference between life and death. Thus the importance of being able to tell hands to pull upon a

certain "rope" in a certain way. Or, alternatively, to let it out slowly, all the while maintaining tension.

Thus such unambiguous and unintelligible orders as "Douse the mainsail and make fast!" Which does

not mean throw water on it to increase speed.

"So which one's the halyard?" Julian asked plaintively.

"Which halyard? Countin' t'e stays'ils, t'ere's seventeen pocking halyards on t'is ship. . . ."

Hooker's design had been agreed upon as the best possible for the local conditions. She and her

consorts had been created, through human design and local engineering, to carry Prince Roger and his

bodyguards—now augmented by various local forces—across a previously unexplored ocean. Not that

there hadn't, as always, been the odd, unanticipated circumstance requiring last-minute improvisation.

The fact that a rather larger number of Mardukan allies than originally anticipated had been added to

Roger's force had created the need for more sealift capacity. Especially given the sheer size of the

Mardukan cavalry's mounts. Civan were fast, tough, capable of eating almost anything, and relatively

intelligent. One thing they were not, however, was petite. Hardly surprising, since the cavalrymen who

rode into battle on their backs averaged between three and three and a half meters tall.

Carrying enough of them to sea aboard the six original schooners had turned out to be impossible

once the revised numbers of local troopers had been totaled up. So just when everyone had thought they

were done building, they—and somewhere around a quarter of the total shipbuilding force of K'Vaern's

Cove—had turned to to build the Snarleyow. Fortunately, the local labor force had learned a lot about

the new building techniques working on the smaller ships, but it had still been a backbreaking, exhausting

task no one had expected to face. Nor had Poertena been able to spend as much time refining her basic

design, which was one reason she was ugly, slabsided, and slow, compared to her smaller sisters. She

was also built of green timber, which had never been seasoned properly and could be expected to rot

with dismaying speed in a climate like Marduk's. But that was all right with Prince Roger and his

companions. All they really cared about was that she last long enough for a single voyage.

Although she was scarcely in the same class for speed or handiness as Poertena's original,

twin-masted design, Snarleyow was still enormously more efficient than any native Mardukan design.

She had to be. The nature of the local weather was such that there was an almost unvarying wind from

the northeast, yet that was the very direction in which the ships had to sail. That was the reason for their

triangular sails. Their fore-and-aft rig—a technology the humans had introduced—made it possible for

them to sail much more sharply into the wind than any local vessel, with its clumsy and inefficient,

primitive square-rigged design, had ever been able to do. Similar ships had sailed the seas of Earth all the

way up to the beginning of the Information Age, and they remained the mainstay for water worlds like

Pinopa.

"Now I'm really confused," Julian moaned. "All right. Tying something down is 'making fast.' A rope

attached to a sail is a 'sheet.' A rope tied to the mast is a 'stay.' And a bail is the iron thingamajig on the

mast."

"T'e boom," Poertena corrected, wiping away a drop of sweat. The day, as always, was like a

steambath, even with the light wind that filled the sails. "T'e bail is on t'e boom. Unless you're taking on

water. T'en you bail it out."

"I give up!"

"Don' worry about it," the Pinopan said with a chuckle. "You only been at t'is a few weeks. Besides,

you got me an' all t'ose four-armed monstrosities to do t'e sailing. You jus' pull when we say 'heave,' and

stop when we say 'avast.' "

"And hold on when you say 'belay.' "

"And hold on tight when we say belay."

"I blame Roger for this," Julian said with another shake of his head.

"You blame Roger for what?" a cool female voice asked from behind him.

Julian looked over his shoulder and grinned at Nimashet Despreaux. The female sergeant was

frowning at him, but it slid off the irrepressible NCO like water off a duck.

"It's all Roger's fault that we're in this predicament," he replied. "If it wasn't for him, I wouldn't have to

learn this junk!"

Despreaux opened her mouth, but Julian held up a hand before she could retort.

"Calmly, Nimashet. I know it's not Roger's fault. It was a joke, okay?"

Despreaux's frown only underscored the classical beauty of her face, but it was dark with worry.

"Roger's . . . still not taking Kostas' death very well, Adib. I just don't . . . I don't want anybody

even joking about this being his fault," she said, and Poertena nodded in agreement.

"T'e prince didn't maroon us here, Julian. T'e Saints an' whoever set t'at pocking toombie on us

marooned us." The diminutive armorer shrugged. "I guess it wasn't very pocking punny."

"Okay," a chagrined Julian said. "You've got a point. Roger has been sort of dragging around, hasn't

he?"

"He's been in a funk, is what you mean," Despreaux said.

"Well, I'm sure there's some way you could cheer him up," Julian suggested with an evil grin.

"Oh, pock," Poertena muttered, and backed up quickly. After a crack like that the fecal matter was

about to hit the impeller.

"Now this is a mutinous crew, if ever I've seen one." Sergeant Major Eva Kosutic said, joining them.

She looked from Despreaux's furious face to Julian's "butter-wouldn't-melt-in-my-mouth" expression and

frowned. "All right, Julian. What did you say this time?"

"Me?" Julian asked with enormous innocence but little real hope of evading the consequences. The

sergeant major had an almost miraculous sense of timing; she always turned up just as the action was

hottest. Which come to think of it, described her in bed as well. "What would I have said?"

Now he looked from the sergeant major to the fulminating Despreaux, decided that coming clean

offered his best chance of survival, and shrugged with a repentant expression.

"I just suggested that there might be a way to cheer Roger up," he admitted, then, unable to help

himself, grinned again. "I guarantee I'm right. God knows I've been more cheerful lately."

The sergeant major rolled her eyes and crossed her arms.

"Well if that's your attitude, you'll damned well be less cheerful for a while!" She looked at the three

noncoms and shook her head. "This is a clear case of His Evilness' finding work for idle hands. Poertena,

I thought you were supposed to be conducting a class in rigging."

"I was trying to get Julian up to speed, Sergeant Major," the Pinopan said, tossing a length of rope to

the deck. "T'at's not going too good."

"I've got all the stuff loaded in my toot," Julian said with a shrug. "But some of the data seems to be

wrong, and the rest just seems to be hitting and bouncing. I mean, what's 'luff' mean?"

"It's when the sail flaps," Kosutic replied, shaking her head. "Even I know that, and I hate sailing. I

guess we should've known better than to try to teach Marines to be sailors."

"We don't really need them, Sergeant Major," Poertena told her. "We've got plenty of Mardukans."

"We need to work on our entry techniques, anyway," Julian pointed out. "We've been engaging in all

these open-field maneuvers, but when we take the spaceport, it's going to be mostly close quarters.

Whole different style, Smaj. And we haven't really done any of that since Q'Nkok."

The sergeant major frowned, then nodded. She was sure Julian had come up with that because it was

more fun than learning to sail. But that didn't mean he was wrong.

"Okay. Concur. If we wanted sailors, we should've left you on the DeGlopper and brought Navy

pukes. I'll talk the change over with the Old Man. If he approves, we'll start working on close combat

techniques for the rest of the voyage."

"Besides," Poertena pointed out gloomily, "we might need them before t'en. I've never seen a place

like t'is t'at didn't have pirates."

"And then there's the 'fish of unusual size.' " Julian chuckled and gestured out over the emerald

waters. "So far, so good, right?"

David Weber & John Ringo - March Upcountry 03 - March to the Stars

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: