Description:

From Publishers Weekly

In the thoroughly satisfactory fourth and final installment in the interplanetary bildungsroman that Weber (_The Shadow of Saganami_) and Ringo (_When the Devil Dances_) began with March Upcountry (2001), Prince Roger and his Marine bodyguards, who've been struggling on the primitive planet Marduk, manage to obtain a starship. Later, they discover not only that Roger's Royal Mother's person and power have been co-opted in a palace coup but that the sabotage that marooned them on Marduk was designed to implicate the prince. Roger and friends devise a clever Trojan Horse strategy that allows them to contact potential recruits to their cause surreptitiously. Alas, most of their new allies remember Roger as the young snot he was and not as the formidable leader he has become. Meanwhile, Roger's human advisers wrestle with the implications these changes suggest about his possible leadership of a constitutional monarchy. Whereas the first three volumes dealt with how the humans adapted to conditions on Marduk, this book shows how the alien Mardukians cope with human society, often with humorous results. (Apr.)
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From

Prince Roger MacClintock is coming home with, besides the handful of survivors of the Bronze Battalion company he led across Marduk, a substantial number of four-armed Mardukans. First, however, he has to get help, in the form of a ship, from a planet inhabited by two different alien races. Then he has to convince the Sixth Fleet of the Empire of Man that, even though he is disguised down to the genetic level, he is really who he says he is, and that he wasn't responsible for the putsch against his mother, the empress. Winning Sergeant Nimashet Despreaux to become his empress-mate is almost a bagatelle in comparison. Furthermore, a whole new set of problems arrives when he and his hardy band hit Earth and begin operations under the cover of a Mardukan restaurant. Real villains the earl of New Madrid and the prince of Kellerman are only part of his worries, and offsetting organized crime are loyalists like Sergeant Major Catrone. Roland Green
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