Orphan's Alliance

by Robert Buettner

  Which brings me back to the deserter and the stowaway, who were the same stubborn person.

  FORTY-FIVE

  “GOD, JASON!” Munchkin’s headlamp beam reflected off white spikes and splinters that had been one of her miner’s humeri. The skin through which they erupted glowed in the light, pale and bloody. A pulsing, baitbox-large nightcrawler wrapped around the bone shaft. It was a vein.

  Munchkin jerked away from where we knelt together, flung herself across a boulder as big as an old TV set, and vomited her guts out into the dark.

  When it was all gone she gasped, as I wiped tears from her eyes and drool strings from her lips.

  The Marini girl was conscious now and screaming so loud that I was afraid more of the roof would come down.

  Munchkin twisted back, and tried to smooth her palm across the girl’s forehead. “Easy, babe. You’re fine.”

  The girl thrashed her hand away, then squeezed her temples between her palms and whimpered. “Make it stop! Make it stop!” She sobbed. “Is my arm off?”

  Munchkin turned her light away from the girl’s face.

  “Is it?”

  Munchkin turned back again and drew a breath so her voice wouldn’t quaver. “It’s still on, babe.” That was the trouble. The angular iron boulder that had collapsed, crushed the girl’s arm, and now pinned it, was as thick as a heating duct. On Earth, it would have weighed more than a truck. On Mousetrap it weighed no more than a tree trunk, which was enough. The rubble that came down with it surrounded us.

  Munchkin shone her headlamp up into the blue-black cupola the rock fall had opened above us, glimpsed movement and flinched. Something whacked my helmet, then thumped my shoulder as it went by. I looked down. The toaster-sized boulder rocked on the drift’s floor. The roof creaked. The rest of it would come down in minutes. We had to get the girl out.

  The other crews were working a stope too far away. It was just the three of us.

  I knelt and pushed my shoulder on the boulder until my muscles quivered, and swore at myself for not wearing armor. This had begun as a casual visit so Munchkin could brag about her miners, the transferred objects of her maternal affections since Jude was light years away.

  Munchkin coiled back on her knees, growled and slammed herself against the boulder. It barely twitched. Rock rattled down. The girl screamed, then passed out.

  I slid my light along the boulder, to where it angled back into the wall, and swore. It was all connected. If the beam-shaped rock moved, everything came down.

  I crawled to the crew toolbox, rummaged, then sat back on my ankles. My breath made fog in the light while I heard the two of them breathe. Smells of machine oil, dust, and vomit mingled as I thought about what we had to do.

  A hand touched my shoulder, and I jumped.

  “You said the miners were staying away from the fracture cones.”

  She turned her head. “It was easy tonnage.”

  I pointed at the girl, and whispered. “That could be you! Screw your goddam tonnage!”

  “It’s bad enough I screwed up. Don’t yell like that.”

  The girl stirred and moaned.

  I took Munchkin’s arm, pulled her ten feet up the drift, and cupped my hand around her ear. “Her arm’s hamburger. And pinned. That boulder’s not budging. The roof won’t last ten minutes. The cavalry’s too far away.”

  I tilted my head, and my lamp beam glinted off the hacksaw’s blueã€hacksaw’-steel blade. “I got it from the toolbox. Bone’s softer than steel. I’ve got cord to make a tourniquet above the break.”

  Munchkin pushed the saw away. “She wants to be a surgeon, Jason.”

  Our breath puffed across our interlocked light beams.

  The girl sobbed.

  I dropped the saw, and sighed. “Go back up where this drift intersects the adit and get a jack. And cable. And those two sheets of corrugated.” I held my hand flat and level with my eyes. “The ones about yea high.”

  “A jack? You move that timber and that roof’s coming down on whoever’s jacking.” She punched her palm. “Bam! Right now!”

  I tilted my head, so my light painted her brown eyes. Ice cold.

  “Move!”

  She ran like hell in the dark.

  By the time Munchkin staggered back, the iron jack in one hand and the two rusty sheets of corrugated steel trussed with the cable across her bent back like a shawl, the roof was creaking worse. It was a constant forty Fahrenheit in here and still I sweated.

  I had been busy. A three-sided wall of stacked rock, open toward us, surrounded the girl where she lay, like a sarcophagus in a tomb. Another sarcophagus rose next to the fallen boulder.

  I looked up from where I knelt alongside the boulder and waved Munchkin forward with wiggled fingers. “Hand me the jack. Put one sheet of tin over her like a roof. Tie the cable under her armpits.”

  I tossed a last rock on my pathetic fort, straightened and gasped. “Once I get the jack snugged underneath the timber and I’m laid down alongside it put the other tin sheet over me. Then take the end of the cable and get back a safe distance. I’ll yell when I get her leg jacked free.”

  I pointed at her. “You haul like hell and don’t stop for God. Got it?”

  “Keep off a rock fall with tin sheets? And who hauls you out? What the hell kind of plan is that?”

  “The only one I got.” I lay down between my stubby stone walls and began setting the jack.

  Munchkin said, “You’re too big.”

  I looked around. I had swept together every cobble and boulder within range, but she was right. My little fort was too small. I would be crushed.

  Munchkin pushed me aside, and laid down beside the jack. “I fit.”

  I nodded, then I stood, and tied the cable. As I laid the sheetmetal across the girl, her eyes widened like I was nailing the lid on her coffin.

  Munchkin had the jack in place below the elongated rock, and had her hands on the crank. I laid the tin sheet across her back. “Munchkin—”

  “Later.”

  I backed off, turned around and lã€d aroundooped the cable around my waist. Munchkin lay facedown in my flimsy, flat-roofed doll hut, the girl on her back in hers. Iron squealed as Munchkin cranked the jack.

  Rock pattered against the metal shields. Like the start of a storm. Clack. Clack clack.

  “Now! Now, Jason!”

  I leaned all my weight back on the cable. The girl moved inches and screamed.

  Falling rock thundered on the tin. I strained and my boots slipped against the smooth floor rock. The girl wasn’t moving. I yelled, and pulled harder.

  Munchkin swore in Arabic.

  The roof collapsed.

  FORTY-SIX

  IRON DUST BLINDED ME. I choked on the metallic taste of it and spat into the dark. My ears rang. The cable cut into my palms as tons of rock tried to tear it from me. I had told Munchkin not to stop for God. God didn’t seem to be here, anyway. I pulled my guts out. I had stumbled backward. One step. Two?

  The darkness got silent. I coughed a fit, and gradually tears washed out eyes I had no hand free to wipe. I kept inching backwards.

  My lamp penetrated farther and farther into settling dust. Where there had been space there was sharp-edged iron rock. Mountains of it.

  I pointed my light beam down. The girl lay in front of me. Her head. Her torso. Her hips. Her thighs. Then rock. I loosed the cable, staggered forward, tripped and swore.

  I tore rock away until I saw the girl’s leg. Then both legs. Her broken arm looked like a snapped, bloody Q-tip but it was still attached. I bent, laid a hand in front of the girl’s mouth, and breath tickled my palm. My plan had worked. Halfway.

  I looked back at the rockfall. “Munchkin?”

  Nothing.

  “Munchkin!”

  I stepped forward again, lifted rock and threw it aside. The big ones I levered with a shovel handle. I moved rock until my back screamed and inside my gloves my fingers slipped in blood and sweat.


  Even as I sweated, I trembled. I had torn away fallen rock like this a quarter of a century before, to reach a buried, crushed drop ship cockpit on Ganymede. And part of me had died there. It couldn’t be happening again.

  I panted, “Munchkin?” every few minutes but I no longer paused for the reply I knew wouldn’t come.

  I grabbed a dusty rock smaller than a bread loaf. It was attached to something and wouldn’t come loose. I looked closer. Munchkin’s boot!

  I threw and pushed and heaved rock until the edge of the sagging corrugated sheet became visible. I must have swallowed a pound of dust. I screamed, “Munchkin!”

  The boot moved. No, it didn’t.

  Yes. It wiggled. The other moved, too. Munchkin inched herself backward, belly down, from under the sagging, corrugated tin.

  She was out as far as her belt line when I heard her, muffled. “What took you so long?”

  I slapped her boot sole. “Goddamit!”

  Then I cried.

  Ten minutes later, from far up the adit, a voice echoed. “Hang on! We’re coming!”

  I played my light on the adit walls, their hewn surfaces reflecting with the plaid crisscross Widmanstatten crystalline pattern of meteoric iron. Solid.

  But the area of the rock fall resembled similar infirm spots the Rats had been finding. Mousetrap’s solid iron skin turned out to be pocked every few surface acres with hundred-foot deep, radiating conical scars, where the iron had fractured in place into shatter cones, as though the planetoid had suffered a drive-by shooting.

  I crawled toward Munchkin, but she coughed, and waved me toward the girl. As I adjusted the tourniquet that stopped the miner’s bleeding, I said to Munchkin, “I think they can save the arm.”

  Munchkin didn’t reply.

  I turned, and saw that she was crawling across the new rockfall, her light beam jerking from ceiling to floor as she moved. Above her, the ceiling opened huge, now. The iron that had filled the space lay in a heap, fractured into sharp-edged fragments.

  I shrugged as I said to her, “This could’ve turned out worse.”

  She stopped, and shone her helmet light beam at an iridescent, blue object atop the new-fallen rock. She said, “Maybe not.”

  FORTY-SEVEN

  HOWARD CAUGHT UP with Munchkin and me at the Eisenhower’s infirmary, where we sat, gowned and facing each other, on Plasteel tables in an examination bay.

  He raised his eyebrows at the bandages on our faces and exposed limbs. “Evidently peacetime doesn’t agree with either of you.”

  It certainly hadn’t agreed with Munchkin, who had jumped ship from the blue ribbon panel before it left Bren, half from boredom, and mostly because from Mousetrap she could hitch a jump to Tressel to see her baby.

  The surgeon who had been working on Munchkin’s miner stepped toward Munchkin. “She’s sedated. We’ve reduced the fracture.”

  “How’s the arm?”

  He shrugged. “Lot of rehab. But little fine motor loss, long term, I think.” He shook Munchkin’s hand, then left the three of us.

  Howard watched him go, then frowned as he turned to me. “You’re sure?”

  I nodded. “It’s a Football, alright. What’s it mean?”

  The Slugs might use a million different complex machines, but we only knew about a handful. As Howard would say, the Slugs didn’t need to invent much. If the Cro-Magnons had discovered Cavorite, mankind might not have bothered to invent the wheel. So far as we knew, they had no toasters, sportscars, or lawnmowers. What they had included one kind of gun that came in three sizes, from anti-personnel rifle to a cannon big enough to thump a cruiser. They had two kinds of starships, U.N. phonetic designators Troll and Firewitch. They had big kinetic projectiles to blow up cities, and smaller, faster ones to blow up towns. And, finally, they had indestructible little early warning sensors that looked like iridescent blue footballs, which they sprinkled on, or shot into, planetary surfaces.

  Howard said, “Well, the first thing it means is that the Pseudocephalopod knows where Mousetrap is. But the fact that all It did was fire a few hundred sensors into the planetoid in passing suggests that It doesn’t actively watch Mousetrap. We’re lucky you two were there. Marini miners might have ignored the Football. Far as we know, this is the first Football we’ve disturbed. We were lucky again, that we worked from the inside of Mousetrap outward.”

  “Right. Lucky.” As far as we knew, Footballs weren’t all that smart. Unless you disturbed one pretty good, it just sat there. But once you woke a Football up, things went to hell fast.

  “You think it sent a signal?”

  Howard chewed his nicotine-substitute gum. “Yep. We monitored a microburst.” Add one more invention. The Slugs apparently understood radio. They didn’t use it much, so far as we knew. Howard pointed out that a unitary organism wasn’t too concerned about talking to itself.

  “How long do we have?”

  “The Pseudocephalopod’s a creature of this universe. It’s bound by the same physics we are. It can’t communicate faster than light, so it probably communicates across Temporal Fabric Insertion Points about the way we do. It depends on how many jumps exist between the Mousetrap and its central ganglion. Likely months or years.”

  “So we keep working?”

  “Faster, harder. It will know we’re here. It could still come via Weichsel, but now more likely straight here.”

  “Boom? Just blow Mousetrap up, with Projectiles or Vipers?”

  Howard shrugged. “The Pseudocephalopod didn’t blow up Ganymede, Earth, Bren, or even Weichsel. It preserves physical environments in which it perceives value. It may soften us up first, but then expect It to try to take Mousetrap in one piece.”

  So we sent the bad news to Earth by drone mail and redoubled our efforts.

  Digging, then digging some more, for months, when it’s too hot, too cold, too dangerous, too lonely, and too boring is part of being infantry.

  The other part is worse.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  “WHOA!” Munchkin tugged herself along ö€…in vacuum, floating ten feet above Mousetrap, as she hand-over-handed along a line strung between stanchions screwed into Mousetrap’s smooth, black iron surface. Her suit was tethered to the pull line, and to mine, so neither of us would be spun off into space.

  Mousetrap was dense enough and big enough that it originally had tiny natural gravity, enough to hold you down, unless you sneezed inside your suit. But that was before Howard and Gustus, with a boost from Cavorite, goosed Mousetrap’s rotation a little, so people and things would stick to the skinward-facing floors of the spaces we were creating inside.

  Correspondingly, if a person was now on Mousetrap’s outside, up was the new down. A person not tethered to the surface would be flung out into space, to become a floater. It wasn’t a death sentence. We were wearing Eternad armor. Eternads look like what people expect of a spacesuit, and can serve as one in a pinch. A patrol from one of the cruisers on station above Mousetrap would retrieve a floater, theoretically. But if the pull line in my hands had been a snake, it would have been strangled long ago.

  In the blackness above our heads, the Eisenhower showed as white as a tiny moon. Equidistant from Mousetrap, the Nimitz, another Metzger-class cruiser, hung in space, a black dot silhouetted against Leonidas, as the planet rose huge and orange above Mousetrap’s tiny horizon, which seemed to curve as sharply as a watermelon’s skin.

  Ahead of me, Munchkin paused, her legs paddling in nothing, and pointed at the engineer crew a hundred yards away. Her voice panted in my earpiece. “Almost there.”

  “Munchkin, we are there.” In the sense of “complete,” for the mining phase.

  Therefore, as we did for the pressure-up phase, we convened a short ceremony to mark the end of the digging phase. The crew was installing a plaque on the surface, a memorial to the miners who lost their lives over the past eighteen months of construction. Today the primary excavation phase ended.

  I tugged my tether
to be sure I was fastened to Mousetrap, then pointed at the Eisenhower. “When Ike gets relieved, you need to be on it.”

  “I don’t report to you. Combat Engineers report through Gustus.”

  I raised my palm as we floated. “You’re a supernumerary volunteer. Gustus can’t give you orders either. You can leave whenever you want.”