"If we're lucky," Despreaux observed.
"You want to hear this, or not?"
"Sorry. Go ahead."
"So, that was a reason for the female to not be too upset when the male was always having a good time with her. And it was another reason for men to stick around. Tits were a visual sign that said: 'Screw me and stick around and defend this territory.' Can't be proven, of course, but it fits with all the reactions males have to them."
"Yeah," Despreaux said sourly. "All the reactions. They're still a pain in the... back."
"Sure, and they're effectively as useful as a veriform appendix these days," the sergeant major said. "On the other hand, they're still great for making guys stupid. And that is what we're going to talk about."
"Oh?" Despreaux's tone became decidedly wary. They'd reached the sergeant major's stateroom, and she was surprised to see Eleanora waiting for them. The chief of staff had been modded as well and was now a rather skinny redhead.
"Oh," Kosutic confirmed. She closed the hatch and waved Despreaux onto the folded-down bed next to Eleanora, who looked at her with an expression which mingled thoughtfulness and determination with something Despreaux wasn't at all sure she wanted to see.
"Nimashet, I'm going to be blunt," the chief of staff said after a moment. "You have to marry Roger."
"No." The sergeant stood back up quickly, eyes flashing. "If this is what you wanted to talk about, you can—"
"Sit down, Sergeant," Kosutic said sharply.
"You'd better not use my rank when talking about something like this, Sergeant Major!" Despreaux snapped back angrily.
"I will when it affects the security of the Empire," Kosutic replied icily. "Sit. Down. Now."
Despreaux sat, glaring at the senior NCO.
"I'm going to lay this out very carefully," Eleanora told her. "And you're going to listen. Then we'll discuss it. But hear me out, first."
Despreaux shifted her glower to the chief of staff. But she also crossed her arms—carefully, given certain recent changes—and sat back stiffly on the bed.
"Some of this only holds—or matters—if we succeed," Eleanora said. "And some of it is immediately pertinent to our hope of possibly pulling off the mission in the first place. The first point is for everything—current mission and long-term consideration, alike. And that point is that Roger literally has the weight of the Empire on his shoulders right now. And he loves you. And I think you love him. And he's eaten up by the thought of losing you, which raises all sorts of scary possibilities."
Desperaux's surprise must have shown, because the chief of staff grimaced and waved one hand in the air.
"If he fails," she said, "if we go with the government-in-exile program and he becomes just some guy who was almost Emperor, you'd marry him, wouldn't you?"
Despreaux looked at her stony-eyed for two or three heartbeats, then sighed.
"Yes," she admitted. "Shit. I'd do it in a second if he was 'just some guy.' And I'm setting him up to fail so I can do just that, aren't I?"
"You're setting him up to fail," Eleanora agreed with a nod. "Not to mention contributing to the mental anguish he's in right now. Not that I think for a moment that you've been doing either of those things intentionally, of course. You're not manipulative enough for your own good, sometimes, and you certainly don't think that way. But the effect is the same, whether it's intentional or not. Right now, he has to be wondering, in the deeps of the night, if being Emperor—which he knows he's going to loathe—is really worth losing you. I presented the alternate exile plan because I thought it was a good plan, one that should be looked at as an alternative. It was Julian and the sergeant major who pointed out, afterwards, the consequences of the plan. Do you want Prince Jackson on the throne? Or a six-way war, more likely?"
"No," Despreaux said in a low voice. "God, what that would do to Midgard!"
"Exactly," Kosutic said. "And to half a hundred other worlds. If Adoula takes the Throne, all the out-worlds are going to be nothing but sources of material and manpower—cannon fodder—he and his cronies will bleed dry. If they don't get nuked in passing during the wars."
"So he has the weight of the Empire on his shoulders," Eleanora repeated, "and he's losing you. And there's a bolt-hole that he can go to that gets both of those problems off his back. It happens that that bolt-hole would mean very bad things for the Empire, but men aren't rational about women."
"That's another thing I can lay out in black and white," Kosutic said. "Lots of studies about it. Long-term rational planning drops off the chart when men are thinking about women. It's how they're wired. Of course, we're not all that rational about them sometimes, either,"
"Now, let's talk about what happens if we succeed," Eleanora went on gently and calmly. "Roger is going to end up Emperor—probably sooner than he expects. I don't know how bad the residual effects of whatever drugs they're using on his mother are going to be, but I do know they're not going to be good. And after what's going on right now gets out, the public's confidence in her fitness to rule is bound to drop. If the drugs' effects are noticeable, it will drop even more. Nimashet, Roger could well find himself on the Throne within a year or less, if we pull this thing off."
"Oh, God," Despreaux said quietly. Her arms were no longer crossed, and her fingers twisted about one another in her lap. "God, he'll really hate that."
"Yes, he will. But there's much worse," Eleanora said. "People are neither fully products of their genetics, nor of their experiences, but... traumatic experiences can... adjust their personalities in various ways. And especially when they're still fairly young and unformed. Fairly young. Roger is fairly young, and, quite frankly, he was also fairly unformed when we landed on Marduk. I don't think anyone would be stupid enough to call him 'unformed' now, but the mold in which he's been shaped was our march halfway around Marduk. Effectively, Roger MacClintock's done virtually all of his 'growing up' in the course of eight months of constant, brutal combat ops without relief. Think about that.
"More than once, he's ended serious political negotiations by simply shooting the people he was negotiating with. Of course they were negotiating in bad faith when he did it. He never had a choice. But it's become... something of a habit. So has destroying any obstacle that got in his path. Again, because he didn't have a choice. Because they were obstacles he couldn't deal with any other way, and because so much depended on their being dealt with effectively... and permanently. But what that means is that he has... very few experiential reasons to not use every available scrap of firepower to remove any problems that arise. And if we succeed, this young man is going to be Emperor.
"There will probably be a civil war, no matter what we do. In fact, I'll virtually guarantee that there'll be one. The pressures were right for one—building nicely to one, anyway—when we left Old Earth, and things obviously haven't gotten any better. What with the problems at home, I'd be surprised if a rather large war doesn't break out—soon—and if it does, a man who has vast experience in killing people to accomplish what he considers are necessary goals is going to be sitting on the Throne of Man. I want you to think about that for a moment, too."