Orphan's Triumph

by Robert Buettner

Howard whispered, “Mammoth.”

  The herd bull strode toward the wolf pack, bellowing, head back to display great curved tusks. The wolves retreated again.

  Howard said, “If we shot a mammoth out there, the carcass would explain the wolf pack. It could make an excellent distraction.”

  He was right. I raised my M40 and sighted on the nearest cow, but at this range I could have dropped her with a hip shot.

  Then I paused. “The carcass might attract those big cats.” Weichsel’s fauna paralleled Pleistocene Earth in many ways, but our Neolithic forefathers never saw saber-toothed snow leopards bigger than Bengal tigers.

  Really, my concern with Howard’s idea wasn’t baiting leopards. Saber teeth can’t scuff Eternads any more than wolf teeth can. I just didn’t want to shoot a mammoth.

  It sounded absurd. I couldn’t count the Slugs that had died at my hand or on my orders in this war. And over my career I had taken human lives, too, when the United States in its collective wisdom had lawfully ordered me to.

  It wasn’t as though any species on Weichsel was endangered, except us humans, of course. The tundra teemed with life, a glacial menagerie. Weichsel wouldn’t miss one mammoth.

  So why did I rationalize against squeezing my trigger one more time?

  I couldn’t deny that war calloused a soldier to brutality. But as I grew older, I cherished the moments when I could choose not to kill.

  I lowered my rifle. “Let’s see what happens.”

  By midmorning, events mooted my dilemma. The wolves isolated a lame cow from the mammoth herd, brought her down two hundred yards from us, and began tearing meat from her woolly flanks like bleeding rugs. The mammoth herd stood off, alternately trumpeting in protest at the gore-smeared wolves, then bulldozing snow with their sinuous tusks to get at matted grass beneath. For both species, violence was another day at the office.

  Howard and I withdrew inside the cave, to obscure our visual and infrared signatures, and sat opposite our prisoner.

  The Ganglion just floated there, animated only by the vibrations of its motility plate. After thirty years of war, all I knew about the blob was that it was my enemy. I had no reason to think it knew me any differently. For humans and Slugs, like the mammoths and wolves, violence had become another day at the office.

  Howard, this blob, and I were on the cusp of changing that. If I could get us off Weichsel alive. At the moment, getting out alive required me to freeze my butt off in a hole, contemplating upcoming misery and terror. After a lifetime in the infantry, I was used to that.

  Zzee.

  The sound came from somewhere behind the cave, and the mag rifle round struck a bull mammoth’s flank. The herd stampeded away, to our front, and after a hundred yards, another volley of Slug rifle fire dropped a half dozen of them.

  Slugs behind us. Slugs in front of us. It was coincidence. More likely, it was that they had picked up the signature of Howard’s rifle shots.

  I unsnapped my ammunition pouches, because when the maggots come, they come faster than a casual reload can bring them down.

  Howard did the same, shaking his head and muttering under his breath, “Oboy.”

  SEVENTEEN

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, the first movement of Slugs showed in my optics, around the distant mammoth carcasses. I couldn’t see the Slugs, but I saw curving, uplifted lines carving the snow like shark-fin wakes as the maggots tunneled closer.

  The little bastards never tired of coming up with surprises for us.

  “Bullfrog, this is Scorpion leader. Over.” My heart skipped. The voice in my earpiece was faint but welcome. I glanced at Howard, and he nodded as he tapped his own earpiece.

  I said into my helmet mike, “This is Bullfrog, Scorpion leader. You got a fix on our transponders? Over.”

  “No fix, Bullfrog. We’ve just been cruising and broadcasting. Can you say your position? Over.”

  Howard popped his visor and spoke to me. “Between the cave and the storm’s atmospherics, they can’t find us.”

  “I cannot provide my position, Scorpion leader. But can you see the Slugs to our front and rear? There must be thousands. Over.”

  “No visible Slugs, Bullfrog.” Of course not. The pilots were looking for traditional Slug massed Warriors, in black armor. But the maggots were burrowing beneath the snow.

  Zzee. Zzee. The second round cracked rock off the cave lip and shot it across the cave.

  “Look harder! They’re in our laps.”

  “Bullfrog, we can’t see jack squat from up here. Our combat floor is now fifteen thousand. Except for pickup. We can’t pick up what we can’t find.”

  I swore into the mike. “How many did you lose to the heavys yesterday?”

  “Six, Bullfrog. We gotta stay high or we won’t do you or us any good at all.”

  Zoomies never changed. Late in the last century, before the Second Afghan, even before the First Afghan, the old Soviet empire’s gunships had been chased back to altitudes that rendered them ineffective against ground targets by a few well-placed shoulder-fired missiles. Not that I blamed the Zoomies. Scorpions and their pilots were in short supply, especially to the pilots’ loved ones.

  I crawled to the cave mouth, raised my finger cam, and peeked. The burrows converging on us numbered in the hundreds, and the closest were a hundred yards away. And that was just in front of us. The noose was certainly drawing close on our flanks and rear, too.

  I dug in my thigh pocket, jerked out my last smoke canister, and lobbed it out into the open. As purple smoke billowed in a widening cone, I said, “Scorpion leader, I have marked my position with smoke. Do you identify? Over.”

  “I haven’t seen smoke since flight school, Bullfrog. Where the hell… Okay. I identify purple smoke. Over.”

  “I confirm. Purple smoke. Target is troops in the open. Under a foot of snow. What are you packing?”

  The closest burrows were fifty yards away now.

  “Antipersonnel CBUs. Where you want ’em? Over.”

  “Drop on smoke. I say again, drop on smoke.”

  “Bullfrog? I confirm we are prepared to deliver CBUs on purple smoke. Please say your position relative to smoke.”

  “Our position is danger close. I say again, danger close.”

  The first Slug popped out of the snow, ten feet away, mag rifle at the ready. I dropped it with an aimed shot. Then another came up behind it, and Howard peppered it with a three-round burst. There were a hundred more burrows just behind the first two. We couldn’t play whack-a-mole very long. We had overhead cover and Eternads. Our prisoner, however, wore no armor.

  Nobody is quick to fire on his own troops, even if his own troops tell him to.

  I said, “We’re being overrun! Bring the rain, Scorpion leader.”

  “Roger. Keep your head down, Bullfrog.”

  Howard and I scuttled as far back into our shallow cave as possible, then flipped our prisoner up on edge, belly out. The Ganglion’s Slug metal motility plate shielded all three of us as we waited three heartbeats.

  Scorpion leader’s voice crackled in my earpiece. “On the way. God, I hope you’re in a deep hole, Bullfrog.”

  If you believe, as certain outworld cultures do, that the ancestral human race of Earth is the spawn of Satan himself, the invention and widespread deployment over the last century of the cluster bomb unit may be the proof.

  CBUs are cylindrical big bombs that split open to release a spray of a half-ton or more of little bombs, each of which explodes and spews hundreds of individual darts or fragments. If the bomber is particularly sociopathic, nerve gas capsules, radioactive pellets, incendiary pills, or germs can be substituted.

  The worst of it, at least when used on humans, is that ten percent of the bomblets soft-land and don’t detonate. They fester for years, as gratuitous land mines. To aid ordnance recovery personnel, the bomblet balls are painted bright colors. Worst of all, this color also attracts children.

  However, at the moment, the morality of CBUs
concerned me less than their considerable efficacy at blowing the crap out of maggots.

  I curled my finger cam around the edge of our motility plate shield. A half-dozen Slug Warriors swayed, backlit by the dawn, in the cave mouth, like fat black cobras.

  Inside my helmet, I muttered, “Come on. Come on!”

  One warrior trained its rifle on the motility plate as twenty more darkened the cave mouth.

  Ccrraacck.

  The rock vibrated beneath my boot soles.

  A one-ton CBU weighs the same as a one-ton bunker buster, but a CBU’s concussion doesn’t lift, then drop you, like a thud does.

  The slugs in the cave mouth just went to pieces, chunks of armor and tissue splattering and ricocheting off the rock behind us, as well as off the Slug metal plate in front of us.

  I pulled back my finger cam and shut my eyes.

  Ccrraacck. Ccrraacck. Ccrraacck.

  The smell of cordite leaked through my ventilator and filled my helmet.

  The cave floor stopped vibrating. I counted to twenty, then peeked my finger cam out again.

  Nothing moved.

  “Bullfrog, this is Scorpion leader. Report fire mission effect, over.”

  I coughed at the smoke, wished my filters worked.

  The voice came again, higher-pitched. “Bullfrog, do you copy?” There are worse fears in combat than the fear of blue-on-blue, of firing on your own troops. But none make you feel colder and sicker.

  “We’re fine, Scorpion leader. Wait one for damage assessment. Over.”

  Outside the cave, wisps of purple marking smoke mixed with gray explosive smoke and with the white steam of snow vaporized by red-hot metal shards.

  The bombing had melted or blown back a foot of snow, and the black-armored carcasses of Slug Warriors, sprawled in pools of their own leaked green guts, dotted the remaining snow like boulders in a pasture. There were other carcasses, brown, in red pools. Dire wolves, mammoth, some razored beyond identity.

  In my earpiece I heard, “Waiting.” The voice croaked but was no longer shrill.

  “Cease fire. Target destroyed. Over.”

  “Bullfrog, this is Scorpion leader. You and the package ready for extraction?”

  I turned. Howard had already towed our prisoner, none the worse for wear, into the sunlight.

  I said, “Bullfrog ready for extraction. Send down the sling.”

  Only then did I realize how successful this fiasco had been. We had captured Howard’s first useful POW, mission one hundred percent accomplished. Our little raiding party had expected to take casualties for three days, holding off legions of Slug Warriors, until the rest of Ready Brigade could deploy from the Abraham Lincoln, then land in the Slugs’ rear and decimate them. In fact, we had taken minimal casualties, and most of Ready Brigade hadn’t even had to get its feet cold on Weichsel.

  I paused and swore at myself. Had my life numbed me to the point that I defined a minimal casualty as one I didn’t know personally?

  The Zoomies radioed, “Bet you’re glad to see the last of Weichsel.”

  I stared at a dead dire wolf and a cub-sized corpse, disemboweled beside it. Unexploded bomblets dotted the snow in the distance like spilled candy. “I’m sure the feeling’s mutual.”

  The Abraham Lincoln’s return voyage from Weichsel to Mousetrap was uneventful. Ready Brigade would disembark, mourning its casualties yet feeling a bit surly over a fight most of the brigade spoiled for but never got. Then the Abe would haul Howard and its precious cargo back to Earth. I would part company with the Abe and return to my post at my headquarters on Bren.

  I was in my cabin, packing my duffel to transship from the Abe to the next available transportation from Mousetrap to my headquarters when Howard rapped on my hatch frame, then stepped through, anyway.

  He asked, “Jason, why are you doing that?”

  “I packed my duffel when I was a spec 4. I haven’t gotten that old or that special since.” My rank entitled me to an orderly, my ego entitled me to refuse one.

  “I mean why are you packing at all?”

  “ Thermopylae ’s outbound to Bren ninety minutes after we dock.” As C-in-C, I could make them hold her for me, but delaying a cruiser for one VIP would cost taxpayers the price of Thanksgiving turkey for a battalion. Besides, it would make me feel and look like a prima ballerina.

  “I thought you were going on to Earth, to deliver the prisoner, with us.”

  I pointed with a handful of GI socks, in a general direction that I assumed was away from Earth. “Earth’s the last place I should go. You said yourself that the Slugs’ incursion on Weichsel was bait. My place is at my headquarters.”

  “Your headquarters operates fine without you. It’s operating fine without you right now. And you’ve been away from Earth a long time.”

  Howard was right, of course, about my staff. In a profession where unexpected death was part of the job description, only bad officers made themselves indispensable. He was wrong about the other. “I have fewer ties to Earth than a Weichselan. And I’ve spent thirty years trying to forget the Blitz, not remember it. That’s why I declined the Ganymede invitation.”

  Mankind’s first interplanetary capital ships had been the chemical-fueled, cobbled-together sister ships Hope and Excalibur. I had watched the war destroy both, Hope in the victory at the Battle of Ganymede, Excalibur tilting at the windmill that had been the Slug Armada.

  The first generation of starships followed, hybrids, propelled between planets by antimatter drive and between stars by Cavorite drive we pinched from the Slugs. This next class of cruisers was named for fallen human heroes, like the Abraham Lincoln. Not least among those heroes was my best friend, and father of my godson, the hero of Ganymede, for whom the Metzger class was named.

  The third-generation, all-Cavorite-drive cruisers were the Bastogne class, named for historic battles, like the Yorktown and the Tehran . The first cruiser named for a battle of the Slug War was the Emerald River . The second would be the Ganymede. As the then-breveted commander of the Ganymede Expeditionary Force, I had been asked to christen the ship that would memorialize the first human victory of the Pseudocephalopod War.

  “You know I think you should have accepted. Not for yourself. For all of us.” Howard’s eyes softened between his old-fashioned glasses. We were both among the seven hundred of ten thousand who survived the Battle of Ganymede.

  A lump swelled my throat. “Exactly. Any of you would be qualified to christen the ship. I don’t need the pomp and circumstance. I don’t need the pain of remembering.”

  Howard rested a hand on my shoulder. “Jason, your pain goes deeper than what you lost at Ganymede. Come back with me. Come back with us. Not to christen the ship. But you should be there.”

  I blinked. “Why?”

  Howard slipped out his microreader, punched up an entry on its screen, and turned it toward me. “They’ve decided on a replacement for you at the ceremony, someone else to christen the ship.”

  I read what glowed on the screen, which was a program for the ceremony.

  I stiffened. Then I stopped packing. “Why don’t you give me back those two packages I gave you? I’ll deliver them myself.”

  Howard nodded. “Good.” Then he narrowed his eyes. “Exactly when did you last spend time on Earth?”

  I stared at the ceiling, then ticked off on my fingers. “Not counting Pentagon meetings, hospitalization, and one academy speech…” None of which got one out on the economy. “Thirteen years.” I shrugged. “I doubt things have changed that much.”

  Howard frowned. “Maybe. But neither have you.”

  EIGHTEEN

  WE DEPARTED THE ABE IN EARTH ORBIT, and our shuttle landed at Reagan, inside Greater Washington, but on the military side of the field. We arrived a day ahead of schedule, on purpose, so the receiving personnel weren’t expecting us. Howard wore civvies and insisted I do the same, also, so no one would notice our arrival with the most important POW in human history. Howard h
ad a tarp stretched over the Ganglion, stenciled “rock samples,” so no one would notice. Maybe they wouldn’t, but they probably noticed the twenty plainclothes, assault-rifle-toting security Spooks that surrounded the “rock samples,” and the chain-gun equipped tilt-wing that hovered above them.

  A Spook convoy met Howard and our prisoner and hustled them off to Fort Meade, so the interrogation could begin. I had my own agenda.

  The Space Force staff sergeant at the disembarkation desk said, “We didn’t expect you, General. But I can call up a pool car and driver in a couple minutes.” I smiled at her. My first stop back here on Earth was personal, so I wasn’t entitled to a car at taxpayer expense, though VIPs in Washington rarely observed the demarcation. Besides, any infantryman who couldn’t carry his own duffel one lousy mile down a paved road might as well be a Squid. Or too old. I pointed out the window at the blue sky. “No, thanks. I’ve been away a long time. Looks like a nice day for an old infantryman to get reacquainted with home.”

  Outside, the day was Potomac-July steamy, a welcome change from the “Nuclear Winter” that the Slug Blitz had brought, so long ago. Beyond the port’s fence, pure electrics, sleeker and silenter than the hybrids I coveted as a teenager, whooshed silently along the guideway. Behind the nose-to-tail, ninety-mile-per-hour river of autodrivers, trees had leafed out greener even than I remembered from childhood. The air smelled of deciduous forest in summer and triggered my childhood memories like Proust’s madeleine. I squinted against the sun, and my chest swelled. It was good to reacquaint with home.

  Ten sweaty minutes down the perimeter road later, my duffel had gained twenty pounds. I was so reacquainted that I thumbed down an airfield-maintenance Elektruk. I tossed my duffel into the ’truk’s open back, climbed in alongside it, and got a dusty, windy lift across Reagan to the civilian terminal.

  The Elektruk stopped in front of the car rental pavilion. I waved to the Trukker, then hopped over the tailgate. When I brushed dust off my sport jacket, the twenty-year-old sleeve split from the shoulder at the seam. I stood alongside my duffel, sweating and muttering on the sidewalk outside the civilian terminal, wiping sweat off my upturned hat’s inner band.