Orphan's Triumph

by Robert Buettner

  Stealth was our only option. I fingered the trench knife on my belt with numb fingers. “I know. On a normal Slug perimeter, the Warriors spread out twenty yards apart. I’ll low-crawl up to the perimeter, take one out, then we’ll tow the blob through the gap and disappear into the storm before they realize they’re down a maggot.”

  Howard jerked a thumb back at our prisoner, wobbling in the wind. “Even disconnected from the Ganglion, Warriors will react to the disturbance.”

  “They won’t notice a disturbance. They see in the infrared spectrum. They know human soldiers give off heat, and that’s what they look for. My armor’s stone-cold. And I’ll knife the maggot, so there won’t be any firearm heat flash.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then we’ll find shelter. When the storm breaks, they’ll find us by our transponders.”

  Through his visor, Howard frowned. “What if your plan goes wrong?”

  I shrugged inside my armor. Over the decades, I had salvaged more disasters than I had caused. However, including this fiasco, my track record with plans wasn’t so great. “Then we’ll do what we always do. Run like hell until we think of something. You have a better idea?”

  “If we break through the perimeter, we’ll be running through a blizzard for days. Our prisoner may not even survive. And your armor heater’s broken. We’re too old to try this, Jason.”

  “If we don’t try this, we won’t get older.”

  I cross-slung my rifle over my back, maxed my optics so I could see a yard in front of my face, and low-crawled through the snow.

  Twenty minutes later, I paused, panting, behind a drift. My arm and leg muscles burned, my knee and elbow joints throbbed, and I sucked wind so hard that my visor’s med readout flashed amber. According to the medic who had doped me before we landed, I was supposed to feel great. We were too old for this.

  The wind swirled snow away from the area fifteen yards to my front, and I glimpsed an angular black peak that rose a foot above the drifts. Hair stood on my neck. As expected, a Slug Warrior, faced away from me, was hunkered down in defense. Unlike GIs, Slug Warriors didn’t share fighting positions with another soldier. Slug Warriors were more like sophisticated white corpuscles than individual soldiers, and they needed neither companionship nor a buddy to take watch while they slept.

  I closed the gap between me and the Warrior to five yards, drew my knife, then chinned my comm bar. Behind me, Howard, presuming he hadn’t fallen asleep, would see the “go” light in his visor display, feel the vibrate alarm on his cheek, and crawl forward with the Ganglion in tow.

  I fingered my knife. There was no “book” on fighting mano-a-maggot. Few Earth troops had done it live, despite the Slug War’s duration. Slug body armor was easily penetrated by a bullet or a broadsword swung by a six-foot-five Casuni. But a knife wielded by a guy so old that his joints creaked when he rode an exercise bike?

  Slugs’ armor ended in a skirt at ground level, because they traveled on one bare foot, though they didn’t slime along like a true snail. There was an opening higher up in the armor through which the Warrior extruded a tentacle-like pseudopod to grasp its mag-rail rifle. And the armor was open at the anterior end so the Slug’s infrared sensory patches, on what one might call its head, could “see.”

  The biggest knife target would be exposed by bulldogging the Slug over, like a roped calf, then stabbing its underbelly, but that would also create the biggest commotion. The pseudopod hatch at the armor’s midriff was smaller than a saucer. The approach would have to be like cutting a sentry’s throat from behind.

  The Spooks say a Slug Warrior has no independent cognition, no sense of self, because it’s simply part of a single, physically separated organism. The Slugs killed my mother, killed the great love of my life, killed more friends than I could count. So I should have been spoiling to gut this one like a trout.

  Still, the knife tip trembled in my hand, neither from cold nor fear. My years had taught me how empty this universe was, and how unique life, any life, was within it. Even Slugs.

  I stopped, drew a breath, and waited a heartbeat until my hand steadied. Another thing my years had taught me was not to wax philosophic during knife fights.

  I paused again a yard behind the Warrior. It stood, the base of its armor buried in drifted snow, six feet long from armor crest to tapered tail, and five feet high. Its armor shone black in the storm’s dimness, the transverse plates on its back overlapping like an armadillo’s. Its pseudopod wrapped its rifle’s peculiar grip. Peculiar to a human hand, at least.

  The Warrior swayed, more than the wind required, as though listening to music.

  I switched the knife to my natural hand, took a deep breath, then lunged.

  FIFTEEN

  MY RIGHT ARM wrapped the Slug’s midsection, where a human infantry soldier’s breastplate would have been. The Warrior lurched, thrashed, and twisted the mag-rail rifle toward me. In a fight, a single maggot’s no more effective than a ten-year-old throwing a tantrum.

  My gloved fingers found the lip of the armor’s anterior opening, and I stabbed the knife in with my opposite hand.

  There was no need for accuracy, no slashing the windpipe or carotid artery, because Slugs had neither. When punctured, they gushed like squeezed grapes and dropped like sacks.

  Howard panted up behind me, the Ganglion bouncing feathery in his wake, like a balloon on a string.

  I stared down at the Slug, an armored banana against green-stained whiteness, and toed it. In these few seconds, the dead Warrior’s lifeblood had jellied the snow.

  Howard was already past me. I ran, caught up, and dug in the snow for the other rope trailing from the Ganglion’s motility plate. The wind buffeted the floating saucer, but its own leveling systems whined, and kept it upright, as we towed it.

  Zzee. Zzee.

  I heard mag rifle fire behind us, over the wind. But nothing whizzed close.

  Howard said, “The Warriors are reacting without coordination! We really did isolate them from command and control.”

  “They won’t come after us, once the storm breaks?”

  Howard waved his free hand as we pulled our prisoner through the snow. “They will. But in a disorganized way.”

  “Howard, twenty thousand against two don’t have to be organized.”

  “It may not come to that.”

  “Why not?”

  “We could freeze to death first.”

  I put both hands on my rope and picked up the pace.

  Five hours later, the average wind speed had increased to one hundred thirty miles per hour, and we were reduced to crawling at, according to my ’Puter, a half mile per hour.

  Howard’s Eternads were keeping him warm and hydrated. “We” weren’t going to freeze to death.

  However, the heavy that had sheared my armor’s back left me with only my ’Puters. The basic principle of Eternad technology hadn’t changed since the start of the war. The energy of the wearer’s movement charged batteries that ran the suits ’Puters, air-conditioning, heater, and miscellaneous life-support systems. I didn’t miss the air-conditioning, and my exertions plus the armor’s passive insulation kept me warm, though feeling in my fingers and toes had gone AWOL hours ago.

  My biggest problem was the loss of those miscellaneous life-support systems. The dry cold of a Weichselan blizzard sucked an exercising human dry like he was crossing the Sahara. Scoops on Howard’s boots sucked snow in, melted it, ran it through his purifier, and stored the resultant drinking water.

  I had to stop periodically, pack snow into my helmet’s spare barf bag by hand, then tuck it inside my armor until my body heat melted it. The worst of it was that a crate full of Weichsel’s extra-dry powder melted down to just a glass of water.

  I had knelt to scoop snow into my bag with ice-cubed fingers. That left Howard, who flunked out of Cub Scouts, on point. He plodded ahead, like a tin Saint Bernard. While I scooped, I watched him, to gauge visibility. By the time he got ten yards
away from me, he had faded to a shadow.

  I panted into my mike, “Hold up, Howard. Don’t get too far-”

  He vanished. The Slug on the saucer, tied to him, disappeared an eye blink later.

  SIXTEEN

  ONE MINUTE AFTERWARD, I paddled through the powder to the spot where Howard had disappeared so fast that I nearly went over the edge myself.

  I jacked my optics and saw Howard, spread-eagled, face-down, fifteen feet below, at the base of a short cliff. The Slug saucer rested alongside him, bottom-up.

  “Howard?”

  Nothing.

  “Howard?”

  “I certainly didn’t see that coming!” Howard’s arms and legs flailed, scouring an inadvertent snow angel at the cliff’s base.

  “You okay?”

  “I think so.”

  I picked my way over the cliff lip. Ten feet above Howard, the lip turned under altogether, and I slid off into a half-ass parachute-landing fall alongside Howard.

  I righted the Slug saucer. Our friend shivered there on the vibrating plate, betraying no hostility and less inclination to flee. The cliff broke the wind down to a sixty-mile-per-hour swirl and stretched away to the limits of vision in both directions. Most significantly, in the cliff face directly behind us, over which Howard and I had tumbled, loomed a black opening twenty feet wide and ten high. “Howard, you found a cave.”

  He pointed through the snowflakes. “Just resistant limestone above eroded shale. Probably hundreds like it along this outcrop. I doubt there’s much depth to it.”

  I wrapped my rope around my glove again and pulled toward the cave mouth. “There’s enough.”

  Ten feet under the overhang, the wind gave way to calm, and the twilight outside gave way to blackness deep enough that I paused to let my optics adjust. The ceiling even opened up a bit, rising to fifteen feet by my ’Puter. My visor’s outside temp gauge shot up to a balmy thirty-four degrees Fahrenheit and continued to rise. I tugged off my gauntlets so I could rub circulation back into my fingers. Toes were next on my agenda. I popped my visor to enjoy the coziness.

  I sniffed. I said to Howard, “Smells like-”

  From the shadows, something rumbled.

  I froze.

  Howard said, “Uh-oh.”

  On further listening, the rumble was more a growl, but a very large growl. A boulder along the cave’s back wall moved, then grew, as it resolved into something brown, furry, and grumpy.

  The exobiologists had briefed us about Weichselan fauna, observed as well as anticipated. They noted that no analogue to the cave bear of Ice Age Europe had yet been observed on Weichsel, but the probability that such an analogue had evolved calculated at seventy-two percent.

  The bear reared on hind legs and snarled at its uninvited guests. The largest modern Earth Kodiak bear mounted out fourteen feet tall. Paleontologists estimated Earth cave bears could have been thirty percent larger than Kodiaks.

  I can only report that the first observed Weichselan cave bear bumped its head on the fifteen-foot-high cave ceiling. This just made it grumpier.

  I backed out of the cave as I unslung my rifle.

  “Howard, bears eat berries and salmon, right?”

  “Not cave bears. Their remains are high in Nitrogen- 15.”

  “Meat eaters?”

  “When available.”

  Any Weichselan two-legged hunter that this bear had encountered up until now would have been very available. The bear dropped down on all fours, lowered its head, and snarled.

  I thumbed the selector switch on my rifle to three-round burst as we backed out, then tugged a smoke grenade from my thigh pouch. With personal transponders, smoke is obsolete as a position marker, and the cans are clunky to carry, but I carried them anyway. As Ord said, it was better to have and not need than to need and not have.

  The bear stepped forward and bared its teeth.

  I stepped backward as I popped the can and rolled it like hissing dice under the bear’s nose.

  When the can popped and hot crimson smoke billowed out, the beast yipped and jumped back into the shadows.

  Howard and I ran like our hair was on fire.

  An hour of exploring along the escarpment later, we probed another cave. This one wasn’t as deep or as warm as the first one, nor was it as crowded.

  We bundled our prisoner in a corner where the temperature measured thirty-six degrees Fahrenheit. There the blob seemed as comfortable as a blob can seem. Then Howard and I sat facing each other on the cold stone, while he uncoiled a hose that connected his scapular vent to my foot vents. His batteries were fully charged, and the barely warmed air he trickled over might stave off frostbite for me, even though the throb of returning circulation made me grit my teeth.

  Howard said, “You didn’t shoot the bear.”

  I shrugged. “I didn’t have to.” I jerked my thumb at the Ganglion. “Will it survive?”

  It was Howard’s turn to shrug.

  “If it does, how much can it tell us?”

  “Ask me again after we get it to Earth alive.”

  I disconnected from Howard’s armor and tugged my boots and gauntlets back on.

  Howard said, “We could stay connected. That would be more comfortable for you.”

  I shook my head. “One of us needs to stay at the cave mouth, on watch. I’ll take the first watch. While I’m warm.” A relative term.

  A half hour later, I sat at the cave mouth with my rifle across my thighs.

  At two a.m. local, the sky cleared enough to show stars. Weichsel’s version of the North Star sits in a constellation that looks like a bear.

  At three a.m., the first dire wolf came sniffing around the cave, its eyes glowing red through the dark. A rifle shot would wake Howard. More important, it would flash a heat signature unlike anything natural on Weichsel. The Slug Warriors might be as disorganized as Howard thought, but why take chances?

  I gathered a little pyramid of throwing stones, then pegged one at the wolf. It bounced off his ribs, and he trotted into the darkness, more confused than hurt.

  Later, I shook Howard awake, then turned in.

  Blam-blam-blam.

  The assault rifle’s burst snapped me awake inside my armor, and the armor’s heater motor, ineffectual but operating, teased me by prickles between the shoulder blades. The shots’ reverberation shivered the cave’s ceiling, and snow plopped through my open faceplate, onto my upturned lips.

  “Paugh!” The crystals on my lips tasted of cold and old bones. There was no cave bear in here at the moment, but there had been. I scrubbed my face with my glove. “Goddamit, Howard!”

  Fifty dark feet from me, silhouetted against the pale dawn that lit the cave’s mouth, condensed breath ballooned out of Howard’s open helmet. “There are dire wolves out here, Jason!”

  “Don’t make noise. They’re just big hyenas.”

  “They’re coming closer!”

  “Throw rocks. That’s what I did. It works.” I rolled over, aching, on the stone floor and glanced at the time winking from my faceplate display. I just got wakened from my first hour’s sleep after eight hours on watch.

  I squinted over my shoulder, behind Howard and me, at our companion. It remained a hippo-sized, mucous-green octopus on a platter, humming a yard above the cave floor.

  Sleepy or not, I had to get us three off this Ice Age rock unfrozen, unstarved, and undigested.

  I groaned as my replaced parts awakened, more slowly than the rest of me.

  “Jason!” Howard’s voice quavered.

  I stood, yawned, wished I could scratch myself through my armor, then shuffled to the cave mouth, juggling a baseball-sized rock from palm to palm. Last night, I had perfected a fastball that terrorized many a dire wolf.

  As I stepped alongside Howard at the cave mouth, he lobbed an egg-sized stone with a motion like a girl in gym class. It landed twenty feet short of the biggest, nearest wolf. The monster sauntered up, sniffed the stone, then bared its teeth at us in a red-
eyed growl. The wolf pack numbered eleven total, milling around behind the big one, all gaunt enough that we must have looked like walking pot roast to them.

  The wolves couldn’t eat us. A dire wolf could gnaw an Eternad forearm gauntlet for a week with no result but dull teeth.

  I looked up at the clear dawn sky. The wolves were, however, bad advertising. The storm had wiped out all traces of our passing and, I hoped, would retard any search by the decapitated Slug Legion.

  I planned for us to hide out in this hole until the good guys homed in on our transponders.

  If any good guys survived. We might starve in this hole waiting for dead people.

  I wound up, pegged my baseball-sized stone at the big wolf, and plinked him on the nose. I whooped. I couldn’t duplicate that throw if I pitched nine innings’ worth. The wolf yelped and trotted back fifty yards, whining but unhurt.

  Howard shrugged. “The wolf pack doesn’t necessarily give us away. We could just be a bear carcass or something in here.”

  I jerked my thumb back in the direction of the green blob in the cave. “Even if the Slugs don’t know how to track us, do you think they can track the Ganglion?”

  Disconnected or not, our prisoner could have been screaming for help in Slugese at that moment, for all we knew.

  Howard shrugged again. “I don’t think-”

  The wolf pack, collectively, froze, noses upturned.

  Howard said, “Uh-oh.”

  I tugged Howard deeper into the cave’s shadows and whispered, “Whatever they smell, we can’t see. The wind’s coming from upslope, behind us.”

  Outside, the wolves retreated another fifty yards from the mouth of our cave as a shadow crossed it.

  My heart pounded, and I squeezed off my rifle’s grip safety.

  Eeeeerr.

  The shadow shuffled past the cave mouth. Another replaced it, then more. As they strode into the light, the shadows resolved into trumpeting, truck-sized furballs the color of rust.