"I hadn't fired at all!" she snapped. "Not even when that bastard almost took your head off on the back stair!"
"But—" Roger stared at her, stunned by the revelation. Then he shook himself. "Kosutic had me covered," he said. "Besides, what does that have to do with never seeing me again?"
"Nothing," she admitted. "Except that you're not going to just let bygones be bygones. You're going to go charging back to Imperial City with blood in your eye. And you'll either overthrow Jackson, or die trying. Right?"
"Damned right!"
"So, you're either going to be dead, or the Emperor, right?"
"Well, Mother is probably competent—"
"But when she dies, or abdicates, you're the Emperor, right?"
"Oh."
"And do you think that the Emperor can just marry any old rube farm girl from the back of beyond?" she asked. "Sure, when you were just Prince Roger, it was like a dream come true. I figured I'd be a nine-day celebrity, and then we'd find some out of the way place to... be Roger and Nimashet. But now you're going to be Emperor, and Emperors have dynastic marriages, not marriages to girls from the out-planets."
"Oh," he repeated. "Oh, Nimashet—"
"You know I'm right," she said, wiping at her eyes. "I saw the way O'Casey was looking at me. I'm willing to be your wife. I'm even willing to be your girlfriend. I'm not willing to be your mistress, or your concubine. And those are the choices available to Emperor Roger and Sergeant Nimashet Despreaux."
"No," he said, wrapping his arms around her knees. "Nimashet, I'll need you. Even if we succeed, and that's not a given, I'll need you to be there. I... you're always at my back. Maybe you're not shooting anymore, but you're still there. Even when Cord isn't, you're there. You're like my right arm. I can't make it without you."
"Hah," she snorted through the tears. "You'd still be cursing your enemies with both arms and legs hacked off. And drown them in blood to kill them. You don't know when to quit. Me? I do. I quit. When we get back and everything is done, I'm turning in the uniform. And until then, I'm going to see Sergeant Major Kosutic about putting me on noncombat duties. It's beyond combat fatigue, Roger. I just can't focus anymore. I may be at your back, but that's because you're wiping everything out in front of you, and at your back is the safest place to be. The only problem is that I'm supposed to be your bodyguard, not the other way around."
"You've saved my life..." He thought about it. "Three times, I think."
"And you've saved mine as many," she replied. "It's not a matter of keeping score. Just, let it go, okay? I can't marry the Emperor, I can't guard you worth a damn, and I'm not much good for anything else. I'll head back to Midgard, buy a farm, find a nice stolid husband, and... try not to think about you. Okay?"
"No, it's not 'okay'! I can see your logic, sort of. But if you think I'm going to release you to go hide on a farm, you've got another think coming. And unless there's a clear reason for a dynastic marriage, I'm still going to marry you, come hell or high water. Even if I have to drag you into the church, kicking and screaming!"
"You and what army, Mister?" she asked dangerously. "If I say no, I mean no."
"Look, none of this is settled until we get to Terra," Roger said. "Let's just... bank it right now. We'll pull it out and look at it again when things settle down. But I don't care if you're not one hundred percent in close combat. Who's making the shaped charges?"
"Me," she sighed.
"And who's going to be managing the demolitions?"
"Me."
"And when we get back to Terra, can I trust you to hang in there and do whatever needs to be done to the best of your ability, as long as you don't have to kill anyone?"
"Yes," she admitted.
"Can I go get any old joker off the street that I can trust? Or any of the Marines on Terra? No. I'll need every single body I can trust. And you're a body that I can both trust and admire," he finished with a leer.
"Gee, thanks." She smiled.
"You told me a long time ago that we might not get to retire to Marduk. That Mother might have other plans for us. Well, the same goes for you. Unless we're all killed, I'm going to have things I need you to do. Only one of them involves marrying me, and we'll discuss that when the time comes. Okay?"
"Okay."
"Does this mean I can't wrestle with you in the water?" he asked, running his hand up her side.
"If you get this cast wet and short it out, Dobrescu will kill you," she pointed out.
"It's okay. I'm a faster draw than he is."
"Well, since you put it that way," she replied, and slid down into the water and leaned forward to kiss him.
"Your Highness," Bebi said, leaning in the door. "Captain Pahner's compliments, and he'd like to see you in his quarters."
"I think I'm beginning to detect a pattern here," Roger snarled under his breath.
"Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, and three times is enemy action," Despreaux replied huskily. "So far, it's just coincidence.
"So far," Roger replied. "But I have to wonder."
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
"You are a cruel human, Adib Julian," Kosutic said.
"It's an art," he replied, tapping the pad. "Despreaux's blood pressure and heart beat both increase, they're having an argument. Heart beat increases, and blood pressure drops, and they're... not."
"What about Roger?" the sergeant major asked.
"To tell you the truth, he's scary," Julian said. "The whole time, his heartbeat never changed within any sort of standard of variation. Steady fifty-two beats per minute. That's the lowest in the company, by the way. And his blood pressure barely flickered. You can't tell anything about what he's thinking or feeling from biometrics. Spooky."
"He gets angry," Kosutic said. "I've seen it."
"Sure," the sergeant agreed, flipping the pad closed. "And when he does, he's still got ice water running in his veins."
"Hmmm. You know, I think we're just starting to understand why you don't want to pock with a MacClintock."
Thousands of years before the coming of the race called Man, the mountain had been fire. Molten rock and ash spewed from the bosom of the world, laying down interleaving layers of each as the mountain grew higher and higher. Side openings occurred, and the red rock flowed from them like a steaming avalanche, occasionally breaking loose whole sides of the mountain in a semiliquid, fiery hot gel called pyroclastic flow.
Eventually, the fierce nuclear fire that was at the core of the local hotspot passed on, and the mountains began to cool. Water brought its beneficence of cooling to the steaming mountain, scouring its flanks and bringing growth where there had been molten rock. In time, the black, smoking wasteland became a fertile slope of trees and flowers.
Time passed, and the sun of the planet called Marduk flickered. For a time that was short for a sun, or a planet, the sun became cooler. To the sun itself, the effect was barely noticeable. But on the sole life-hugging planet that orbited it, the effect was devastating.
The rains stopped. Where there had been steaming jungles, there were sunbaked plains. Ice came. Where there had been liquid-drenched mountains, the water fell as snow and compressed, and compacted, and stayed and stayed, until it became mountains—walls of glacial ice.
Species died, and the nascent civilizations of the higher latitudes fell. Survivors huddled around hot springs while the white walls drew ever closer.
Along the side of the mountain, the white ice grew and grew. The hot spots to one side kept a continual melt in place, and the runoff water—dammed up behind the terminal moraine of the glacier—filled the valley from end to end. Regular floods laid down layers of lighter and darker materials on the valley floor, improving the already excellent soil. The glacier brought with it loess, the fine dust that was left when ice crushed its enemy rock. The glacier also brought massive boulders that it laid down in complex, swirling patterns that later residents would often use as roadbeds and quarry for building stone. And everywhere, it crushed the sides of the valley, hammering at the walls of the mountain and tearing at its stone and ash foundations.