"Big . . . ummm," the Diaspran struggled for a word.
" 'Project' would be the human term. Like building a dam or a major dike. Yeah, it is, and a rush one, too. We're about out of time."
The Marine broke off as Captain Pahner stepped to the front. The Marine CO looked at the sketches on the wall and shook his head.
"Simpler, Rus, Dell. Simpler. This thing has too many parts. Every one of them will tend to break in the field, and every one has to be made, adding to cost and time. So look at something like this and say to yourself 'How can I get rid of parts?' "
The slight K'Vaernian with the piece of charcoal in his true-hand turned and looked at the Marine with his head cocked to one side.
"But your techniques of industry and mass production will cut the production time, surely?"
"True," Pahner said, "but they're not magic, and there's something called lead time to allow for. The more time we spend here, working out potential bugs in the designs, the less time we spend working them out in the foundries, and the fewer we get into the field. Don't forget, 'mass production' requires us to design and set up the production lines before we get to the 'mass' part of the equation, and the more parts we have to make, the more setup time we'll need. So cut down on the complexity and find some way to get rid of parts. You did a good job of that with the new breech design, so I know you can do it here, too. Let me show you what I'm thinking about."
The captain stepped forward, took the charcoal from the Mardukan's unresisting hand, and began marking on the wall.
"See this? You've got a double set of springs here. But if you move the lever to here, you can eliminate one spring entirely."
"Yes!" the K'Vaernian said, taking the charcoal back. "And eliminate this—what did you call it? Sear? Take this one out, and extend this lever . . ."
"As you can see," Julian whispered again, "we have our work cut out for us."
"Sergeant, how are we going to train on these if they're not even produced yet? And how long are we going to have? I mean, the Boman could move out at any time."
"That's somebody else's problem," the Marine said with an evil grin. "You concentrate on ours."
* * *
The long, low boat grounded on the mud of the riverbank, and D'Estrees slipped over the side and into the underbrush.
Gunnery Sergeant Lamasara Jin consulted his pad as he checked position before he inserted the last team. There were five more two-person teams scattered along the line of advance from D'Sley to Sindi, where the Boman main host supposedly was. This team was the furthest forward, and along with some local woodsmen, would probe still further forward until they reached Sindi or made contact with the Boman force.
Personally, the gunny really doubted that all of the Boman could be at Sindi, whatever the locals thought. The best premassacre population estimate Julian and O'Casey had been able to put together for Sindi gave the city a total population of only around seventy thousand. Which, Jin was willing to admit, was a really huge number, even allowing for the efficiency of Mardukan farmers, for a society which made virtually zero use of the wheel. It might not seem like much for the Empire, where that entire population could have been put into a single pair of residential towers in downtown Imperial City, but for a barb planet like Marduk, it was huge.
And it was also no more than a third of the total numbers people kept throwing around for the Boman.
Jin hoped like hell that the enemy force estimates were excessive, but he didn't really think they could be off by too much. Like all the Marines, he'd developed a pronounced respect for Rastar and Honal, neither of whom seemed at all inclined to inflate enemy numbers to excuse their own defeats, and they both insisted that the combined clans of the Boman could put at least a hundred thousand warriors into the field . . . which suggested a total population, including women and children, of at least half a million. And given that, like the Wespar, all of the Boman clans brought their women and children along rather than leaving them at home and undefended while the men were away, that meant one hell of a lot of scummies had descended on what used to be the League of the North and the other cities on the northern shore of the K'Vaernian Sea.
According to all reports, those scummies had been sitting more or less motionless for at least three or four months since taking Sindi, and that many mouths would have eaten the countryside around a city Sindi's size clean in far less time than that. Not to mention the fact that a city of seventy thousand could never provide even minimal housing for six or seven times that many invaders.
All of which suggested to the veteran noncom that—as always seemed to be the case—he and the rest of the company were about to find out that the backroom intelligence pukes had screwed up again. Fortunately, the captain had been a Marine long enough to be very cautious about how much trust he put in intelligence his own people hadn't confirmed. Un fortunately, there was only one way to confirm this intelligence.
Jin tapped the pad off and stepped ashore as D'Estrees reappeared and gave a thumbs-up. Normally, as Bravo Team leader, D'Estrees would have been teamed with Dalton, the team's plasma gunner. The only problem with that was that Dalton was now . . . dating Geno. If Jin put the gunner out on the point of the spear, everybody was going to think he was trying to kill his rival for Geno's affections. So instead, the plasma gunner was nice and safe and in the center of the deployment of the recon teams . . . and the overall commander of the insertion was taking point. Which, when Captain Pahner found out, would bring up words like stupid and suicidal. Instead of favoritism.
Damned if you do, and damned if you don't. But nobody was going to accuse Mamma Jin's boy of favoritism. Stupidity, though, okay, maybe.
But somewhere out there was the target, and right now he didn't care if that target was Saints or pirates or Boman. Because sooner or later, he was going to get a chance to kill something, and the closer he was to the action, the more likely that was to happen. And if he didn't kill something else soon, he just might start on one too-good-looking plasma gunner.
Two klicks to the track that ran from D'Sley to Sindi. It paralleled the river, so it never saw much traffic, since barges made so much more sense than land transport. But it was there, and if the Boman came to play, it would be along that track.
And if they didn't come out to play on their own, then they were just going to have to be called.
* * *
"I don't care if you do think it's a waste of time," Bistem Kar told the skeptical underofficer in a deceptively calm tone. General Bogess stood beside the K'Vaernian CO, but the Diaspran was being very careful not to involve himself in the conversation. "I don't even care if your men think it's a waste of time. I don't think it is, and this—" he tapped the ruby-set hilt of the sword at his side, the one only the commanding officer of the Guard Company was permitted to wear "—means that what I think is all that matters, now doesn't it?"
The underofficer closed his mouth and straightened both sets of shoulders. The thought of being ordered around by Diaspran "soldiers" so new they still had canal mud on their feet was enough to infuriate anyone, and he sympathized perfectly with his men. And even if the idea of being instructed by jumped-up common laborers hadn't been hard to swallow, the sheer stupidity of what they were supposed to be learning was almost intolerable. Damn it, they knew how to do their jobs, and they'd done them well enough for decades to make K'Vaern's Cove the most powerful city-state on the entire K'Vaernian Sea! And they hadn't done it by hiding behind any silly shields and refusing to come out and fight like men!
Even granting the incontestable truth of all of that, however, Kar's tone of voice had just forcibly reminded him that there were other considerations, as well. "The Kren" was a guardsman's guardsman, always willing to listen—to a point at least—to the opinions and concerns of his men, but anyone who'd ever been stupid enough to think that that mild tone was an invitation to further discussion never made the same mistake twice.