Orphan's Alliance

by Robert Buettner

  Jude, Ord, and Howard stood alongside Aud and me. We stood in the building’s chandeliered foyer. Its street-side windows were sandbagged, but the offices that opened off on three sides were finished with polished granite.

  I shook Aud’s hand as I muttered, “We have met the enemy, and they are us.”

  Aud cocked his head. “Moltke wrote this?”

  “Aud, what happened? When I left here six months ago, the war was won. People on both sides were tired of fighting. Hopeful.”

  “The war was won too well. Iridia was made to cede the Plain of Veblen.”

  “Erdec said that always happens.”

  “This time it went further. Extensive additional territories were occupied. Even the former capital of Iridia is now part of Tressen. Reparations are to be paid for Iridian crimes.”

  “Iridian crimes? Are the Tressens paying for Veblen, too?”

  Aud glanced at his Tressen aide, who was writing in a notepad, out of earshot. Aud said, “The Tressens didn’t lose. In the Occupied Territories, everyone associated with the old Iridian government was turned out in every town. Not a bad thing. The Iridian party hacks are worse than the Tressen ones. But no one was left to collect trash or operate the water works.”

  “Threw the Nazis out with the bath water,” Howard said.

  Ord shot him the kind of look that only a senior non-comm can give an officer and get away with it. Howard looked down and fiddled with papers on a table.

  The Human Union Consul stepped out of his office, in pressed white shirt sleeves and a red silk tie, all peeking out beneath a woven Plastek flak vest. He was thin, and his white hair puffed out around his head so he looked like a Q-tip on feet. He shook hands all around. “There are only ten of us. There wasn’t much we could have done.”

  “You could have told us to bring our body armor.”

  “At least we told you to land here. It’s worse over in Iridia.”

  “So I heard. No indoor plumbing.”

  Q-tip sighed. “And no jobs. No wages. No bread. No feeling of self worth for the breadwinners. Starve a man and he’ll hate you. Starve his children and he’ll kill you.”

  I turned to Aud. “Where do you fit in to this bus wreck?”

  Aud shrugged. “Where a good soldier always fits in. Wherever civilian authority tells him to. Today, that means I’m to invite your party to attend a ceremony with me.”

  “For what?”

  “Reconciliation. Both sides will dedicate a memorial to the war dead. Iridian and Tressen.”

  I eyed Q-tip’s flak vest. “Is that safe in this town?”

  Aud sho»ize"4%ok his head. “No. That’s why the ceremony isn’t in town. The memorial will be at the site where the battle that ended the war began. Between the trench lines on the Barrens.”

  Jude furrowed his brow. “The Barrens?”

  I retrieved my luggage, all dress uniforms, medals, and nothing vaguely protective, and sighed. “It’s not as great as it sounds.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  PART OF THE MONUMENT project was to include a paved highway out into the Barrens, but we rode out on the same gravel paths that had served during the war. So it took a week to return to the vicinity of the Barrens trench lines by crawler caravan. Then it took hours after that to identify the trenches with precision.

  War’s bones get picked clean quickly. In the six months since the war’s end, tetra trappers passing through, scavengers, and souvenir hunters made short work of iron gun mounts that had been bolted to concrete pillbox floors, of copper field telephone wire, of brass shell casings, of discarded rucksacks, even of the bracing and planking that had shored up the trench systems against the eternal rain.

  Already, the trenches themselves were vanishing into soft-edged puddles, except in the survivors’ nightmares.

  And the scorpions had left few bodies to bury.

  The government had erected a tent village for the ceremony participants, netted off from scorpions, leveed against the swamp.

  The evening before the ceremony, there was a dinner for fifty, hosted in one long tent by the Prime Ministers of triumphant Tressen and of diminished Iridia.

  A model of the memorial, all heroic marble statues and somber brass plaques, centerpieced the banquet table. Considering the precarious states of the governments present, the conviviality was surprising. There was much toasting to the competence and bravery of this general, and of that one. Also to the wisdom and compassion of each statesman’s staff, and to the politicians of his party.

  Long after the formal dinner broke up, Planck, Erdec, Ord, Jude, and I remained clustered in our chairs at one end of the now-bare banquet table, defending the last, low-burning candle. We also defended four now-empty bottles, and two full ones, of Iridian red. The serving staff had tried to recapture them, but eventually abandoned us to do what soldiers with wine do.

  Erdec topped off glasses all around, lastly Ord’s and his own, as two a.m. rain drummed the tent roof. Ordinarily, officers and non-comms might have one drink together, then, for the sake of propriety, adjourn and get slobbering only in company of equivalent rank. But these were not ordinary times, and Ord and Erdec were not ordinary sergeants.

  Erdec burped, said, “The Iridians caused half this mess. But we Tressens forced an unjust peace.”

  Ord turned to his new friend, and said, “I thought you were four-eighths Iridian, Walder.”

  “Alright, Arthur, Iridia gets one-fourth of the blame.”

  After four bottles, who did math?

  I asked Planck, “The prime ministers—are they getting anything done?”

  Planck shrugged. “Everything I am told to do gets done.”

  “Is that much?”

  “There’s not much left to work with. We’re managing scarcity.”

  “First it was ‘I.’ Now it’s ‘we.’ But you’re not part of the government.”

  Aud lifted his glass to me. “Thanks for small favors.”

  “You won’t reconsider what we talked about on the trip out?”

  Aud shook his head. “If I’m not part of the government, I’m not part of the problem.”

  I sighed. There was some rejoinder to Aud’s argument that involved being part of the solution. Two bottles ago I could have articulated it.

  Jude, who had been quiet since we crashed, stood, swayed, and raised his own glass. There were times when he seemed to withdraw into himself, remembering, I supposed, the loss of his own soldiers, and his own captivity, during the Expulsion. He bore no external scars from his ordeal.

  Jude said, “Gentlemen. Tonight we have heard toasts to generals. We have heard toasts to ministers. We have heard toasts to battles . . .” He steadied himself against his chair back. “But we have not heard a toast to the man without whom your war could not have been won.”

  Planck frowned. Erdec smiled at his commanding officer. It was true. Every brass hat who survived the war, which was most of them, had been toasted, except Audace Planck. His charisma—I would have said his common sense—threatened the politicians as well as the generals who were trying to rebuild this dysfunctional, divided society.

  Jude said, “It’s always the same, on every world, in every war. I propose a toast to the one man nobody ever toasts. The common foot soldier.”

  Ord looked around at all of us, then at Jude, then he raised his glass, too. “God damn shame on the rest of us that it took you to remind us, Captain.”

  Erdec said, “Here, here!”

  Aud raised his glass, too. “Well said, Sergeant Major. And Captain Metzger.” Aud’s eyes glistened in the candlelight. Mine were moist, too.

  The next morning was mercifully dry, and given over to dress uniforms and more speeches. There was security—Planck’s Sergeant of the Guard was so old-school that he made Ord swoon—with some of them today doing double duty, decked out as an Honor Guard.

  Aud may have been a threat to the politicians, but even on Tressel, where photography had advanced barely past Mathew Brady,
they knew war heroes made great photo opportunities. And an apolitical general ruffled fewer feathers in either camp than the politicians jockeying for position.

  As scripted, General Planck, the legendary Quick- silver, was to lay a wà waposreath at the just-begun foundation of the Tressen Barrens Battlefield Monument. The foundation stones rose from the end of a land spit surrounded by silent swamp, and today even the swamp water seemed still and silver.

  The Tressen and Iridian military bands struck up a slow piece, to which Aud was to march out the spit, past a line composed of alternating, decorated Iridian and Tressen veterans drawn up at attention, and lay the wreath. The press would watch, photographic flash powder would pop. The Honor Guard would fire off a rifle salute, its rounds arcing out above the water.

  Aud grasped the wreath off its tripod stand with white gloved hands, and turned toward the monument foundation. As he began to walk along the line of veterans, Planck paused and turned to Erdec. He whispered something, then tugged his old mentor out of line to walk beside him.

  Some men are theatric by design. Theatrics came instinctively to Audace Planck. Sergeant Major Erdec wore a chestful of decorations, was half Iridian and half Tressen, and walked with enough of a limp that his pace was statesmanlike. Jude had pointed out the problem with this ceremony, the night before. It was about generals and politicians who started wars, and not about the soldiers like Erdec who fought them and died in them. Aud had just fixed the problem.

  I smiled. Erdec deserved the honor. His mixed blood symbolized reconciliation. And the gesture wouldn’t slow Aud’s rising star, either.

  Jude and I stood side-by-side at the end of the dignitary line, alongside the honor guards. Jude whispered out of the corner of his mouth. “I like Planck.”

  The bright young general and his aging mentor reached the monument, and the music stopped. Rifle bolts crackled as the honor guard shouldered and elevated its rifles to the sky.

  I swallowed as a lump filled my throat.

  Aud and Erdec knelt beside the water to lay the wreath.

  Water geysered in front of the two of them.

  The scorpion was enormous and glistening black. Its spinose forelimbs flashed and dripped as they closed around Aud and old Erdec.

  Before anyone could react, someone did.

  Jude was born with the fastest reflexes on Earth. Because he wasn’t born on Earth. He was the first human being conceived in space, aboard an unshielded troop transport halfway between the orbits of Earth and Jupiter. A heavy metal ion straying through space had sliced an embryonic DNA strand in the best possible place, or so the geneticists supposed.

  Before most of the crowd processed enough information to scream, Jude had snatched the rifle of the Honor Guard beside him and pumped a magazine into the scorpion.

  I followed Jude as he ran toward Aud and Erdec.

  The beast twitched and, from somewhere behind us, another volley tore into its body, as the rest of the Honor Guards reacted.

  By the time Jude reached the water’s edge, the scorpion lay still, its monstrous tail twitching in the shalloÃg i

  A bloodied, black spine as thick as a man’s wrist thrust a foot out of Erdec’s chest, spreading apart the medals on his lapel. Erdec’s eyes were wide and his mouth agape.

  I turned to Aud.

  He stared at Erdec, gasping, eyes wide. I felt Aud’s torso and chest. Except for a spine that had grazed his right wrist, he was untouched, physically.

  People mobbed us, shouting and tugging.

  An hour later, Jude and I stood alongside Aud in a field hospital tent. He sat bare-chested, on a white-sheeted examining table while a medic bandaged his forearm.

  The diplomats were in another tent, being hounded by the press, and displaying suitable shock and sadness.

  Erdec’s body lay ten feet away, beneath a bloody sheet, and Aud stared at it. He shook his head and whispered. “Why? Why did I do it?”

  “Aud, you didn’t do anything except make an appropriate gesture.”

  He shook his head. “How could I have failed to see the lure? How could the Sergeant Major have failed to see it?”

  “I didn’t see the lure when you and I were stranded out here last trip.”

  Planck shook his head, as the medic held out a clean uniform shirt. “Jason, you saw the lure. You just didn’t know what it was. Every schoolchild here knows that flash of yellow. We react to it by reflex.”

  “It was the last thing on your mind. On anyone’s mind.”

  The Sergeant of the Guard stepped into the tent, braced at attention, and saluted Planck. The Sergeant hesitated, frowning. “If you’re well enough, General, there’s something you should see.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  WE FOLLOWED THE sergeant out of the tent as he turned toward the monument foundation.

  Planck asked him, “How did it get through the nets?”

  “A hawser had worn through, sir. At least that’s what we thought.”

  A rifleman joined us as we walked out onto the spit. His eyes never left the water, and he kept his rifle’s muzzle tracking where he looked.

  The scorpion’s carcass had been rolled up onto the bank, two armored tons of spine-crusted evil.

  Jude’s eyes widened. “Jason, you told me about these. But I never really understood . . .”

  Aud pointed out into the swamp, where two GIs were looping a braided cable that arced up out of the water, as thick as a forearm, around a scaly lycopod trunk three feet in diameter. “The nets are sound now?”

  The sergeant nodded. “Yes, sir. But that’s not what I wanted you to see.” He walked around the carcass’ shoreward sÆiv>ide, stepping over the scorpion’s splayed rearmost paddle, then its middle limbs, like they were downed trees. The spiked pincer was too big to step over, so he walked around it.

  Six punctures, from Jude’s shots, snaked across the dead beast’s smooth, black head. One shot had struck one compound eye, so it looked like a shattered punch bowl. Shards of torn carapace, a half inch thick, curled up around the bullet holes. It reminded me of the hood of a shot-up limousine from a period-piece gangster holopic.

  The sergeant pointed with his pistol between the two compound eyes. “This one’s lure’s gone.”

  Planck nodded. “Shot away. I should have seen it, though.”

  The sergeant knelt in the mud, and grabbed a fleshy stalk that rose from between the scorpion’s eyes, and pointed at its clean-sliced tip. “No, sir. The lure was cut off, here. Before this thing ever came at you.”

  Planck narrowed his eyes. “What are you saying?”

  “Sir, I grew up on the coast. On the edge of the Barrens. When we were kids, scorpion pups would get caught in the family nets. Pups can only bruise you. We’d cut off the lures, just like this, then let the pups sneak up on other kids. Scared them to death.”

  “You’re saying this was deliberate?”

  “I’m saying you and Sergeant Major Erdec didn’t see this scorpion’s lure before it struck you because this scorpion had no lure to see. We found kitchen garbage in the water, sir. Scorpions swim to chum faster than Iridians steal. The cooks know that. They never throw garbage out in the Barrens.”

  Planck ran his eyes from the beast’s head to its tail. “Someone made a gap in the nets, then attracted this beast? Improbable. But then they got in the water with this monster, and cut off its lure? Impossible!”

  The sergeant reached into his pocket, drew out a coil of field telephone wire, and pinched a loop in it between two fingers. “Sir, we were fishermen’s kids, but we weren’t stupid enough to get in the water, even with a pup. Once we netted a scorpion, we just stood on the bank, lassoed the lure with a leader-wire loop, then pulled it tight until it cut through the stalk.”

  Aud stood with his boots planted shoulder-width apart on the bank, his bandaged arm and his other crossed over his bare chest. “You’re saying someone deliberately killed Sergeant Major Erdec.”

  The Sergeant shook his head. “No, si
r. The only person scheduled to go near the water was you. It was you they wanted to kill.” The sergeant pointed at Jude. “And if the Captain, here, was a heartbeat slower on the trigger, they would have. And that male would have backswum you into the swamp in another heartbeat and disappeared. And it would all have been an unfortunate accident.”

  Aud closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. “Yes, I suppose it could be. But where would that leave us? Was it separatist infiltrators? Some demented corporal I may have disciplined years ago? The prime minister himself?” Aud shook his head. “No. There’s no proof. Sergeant, this was no more than a frayed hawser, sloppy KP, and a hungry scorpion that got its lure shot off after the fact.”