Orphan's Triumph

by Robert Buettner

  As I stepped, Pytr snatched up his rifle.

  Celline sat on a stool near the shanty’s front door, stripping off her armor.

  I pointed to the closed door. “The chancellor’s in here.” I hefted my pack. “I’ve brought medicine.”

  Celline cocked her head, made a small nod. “They said you motherworlders are fey. I never believed it.” Then, louder. “It’s all right, Pytr.”

  Pytr lowered his rifle, waved me to the door with its barrel.

  The place was more lodge than shanty, and I found Aud asleep in a bedroom at the end of a hallway. One of Aud’s legs had been splinted and elevated, a decent job. A bloodstained field dressing swelled from the side of his head.

  I sat on the bed edge and whispered, “Aud?”

  He stirred and muttered, eyes closed.

  I felt his forehead. Hot.

  I grasped his wrist, not to take his pulse but to admire his bugged watch. Without it, bless the Spooks after all, we wouldn’t have found Aud, and my friend would have died.

  I fished in my pack for tools, then removed the head wound’s dressing.

  The woman entered the room, stood behind me with arms folded while I worked. With a magnifying explorer, I located and then plucked out a metal splinter that had either been part of Aud’s car or of the bomb that blew it up.

  She said, “I thought you were a soldier, not a surgeon.”

  I lifted the magnifying explorer in my right hand. “Mag-ee makes every soldier a surgeon. Or at least a medic. As long as this little light shines green, I can poke around and pull out anything I find without hurting my patient. If things get hairy, the light turns amber and I back off. Motherworlders aren’t fey. We just have good tools.”

  Mag-ee also prescribed antibiotics. After I inserted the cartridge that it told me to, it administered them. Recent bitter experience with Ord on Bren notwithstanding, Tressel’s bugs croaked nicely after a shot of the right Earthmade stuff.

  “You have the tools to get rid of the RS. But you don’t.” She tossed her head in the direction of the fireplace room where Jude and Pytr waited. “The motherworld handed Tressel to the RS. You even let your young friend in there serve them.”

  I winced as I rummaged through the med kit Bill the Spook had provided. “The tilt? Tressen would have won the war eventually, regardless. And there would have been fewer of you left on both sides. Besides, my ‘young friend’ isn’t even sure all the stories about the RS are true.”

  “Then he’s naive.”

  “He is that. What does that make you?” I read Aud’s pulse off the Mag-ee. “You had a chance to kill off this big RS fish right here. Why didn’t you?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Try me.”

  “I told you. I may decide to use him as a hostage.”

  “Zeit doesn’t want him back. Zeit wants him dead. How’d you get hold of him, anyway?”

  “After the assassination attempt, the chancellor made his way here, to find Pytr. Planck was even more dead than you see him now. Planck saved Pytr’s life once. Pytr insists that Planck can’t possibly know what the RS has been doing. I find that hard to believe. But I’m taking a chance because Pytr’s been my brains and my conscience since I was a teenager. Do you know what it’s like to trust someone like that?”

  I nodded as I applied a fresh dressing. “I lost someone like that, not so long ago. I know how I got to be a general. How did a fisherman’s daughter come to be running the Iridian resistance?”

  She scuffed the floor cobbles with her toe, shrugged. “Nobody runs the resistance. It’s just pockets of survivors here and there. We keep our heads down and hope something will change for the better before the RS exterminates us all.”

  After I finished playing doctor, Jude and I got assigned a bedroom to share. If Pytr and Celline trusted us, they didn’t trust us to split watch with them. Celline took the first watch. Jude complained, out of chivalry. I didn’t, out of old age.

  Jude and I lay on rock-hard cots in the dark. He said, “What do you think of Celline?”

  “I think she’s smarter and tougher than most fishermen’s daughters.”

  “She’s beautiful, too.”

  I rolled over and faced the wall. “So’s the sunrise. Go to sleep and maybe you’ll see it.”

  Outside on the decking I heard footsteps as my godson’s beautiful crush padded around in the dark, armed to the teeth. Overnight, the tide had come in, so the sound of waves against the shanty’s pilings metronomed me to sleep.

  I woke before the others, at first light, because after a lifetime with Ord I had forgotten how to sleep late. I dressed, checked on Aud, whose fever had come down nicely, then tiptoed out onto the deck, where deaf Pytr snored with his rifle across his knees.

  I stretched out kinks that I didn’t have when the likes of Ord taught me to wake up too early, as I barefooted around the shanty’s deck. The tide had gone out again and was now running in, the sea lapping a foot up the shanty’s pilings. Ocean whisper coupled with the drone of rainbow-winged dragonflies skimming the swells like the birds that lay millennia in Tressel’s future. The serenity contrasted to Manhattan, or Mousetrap, or Marinus, or the Republican Socialist sterility of Tressia.

  My stomach reminded me that the dragonflies, like the pterosaurs and gulls that would usurp their ecological niche, were hunting breakfast among the waves.

  Our host and hostess had each been up half the night. The nearest chicken nested light-years away, so there would be no eggs to scramble on this crisp seaside morning. Like the thoughtful guest I was, I rolled my pantlegs above my knees, slipped a trident and a shellfish creel off a rail, and tiptoed down the shanty ladder to spear fresh trilobites for breakfast.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  COLD PRICKLED MY NAKED ANKLES as I waded against the incoming tide. Twenty yards seaward from the shanty, I reached the nearest tide pool, where the water deepened until it chilled my knees. Trident at port arms, like the fisherman we had passed in the estuary the previous afternoon, I peered down into water as clear as aquamarine gin. Multicolored invertebrates, some spiked, some tentacled, clung to the rock bottom like an animate English garden. Among them crabbed trilobites the size of flat shrimp. All crust and no filling, the little ones were also too quick to spear, and I bypassed them.

  It took me ten minutes to spot a six-pounder, fat and spiny. I slid to one side, so my long shadow thrown by the rising sun wouldn’t cross him, then drew back the trident.

  I held my breath, then lunged at breakfast. As the trident’s tines splashed into the water, the trilobite shot away. Into its place, where my trident’s tines struck, flashed a dull red streak.

  “Damn!” I lifted my trident two-handed, like a full pitchfork. Impaled on the three tines squirmed a three-foot-long replica of the lobe-finned giant that hung above Celline’s mantel. Fins as sturdy as stumpy legs, which enabled the lober to wriggle across rock from pool to pool and meal to meal at low tide, thrashed, and a mouth filled with needle teeth snapped. No wonder lober fishermen wore leather armor.

  My accidental catch weighed ten pounds if it weighed one, and lobers were better eating even than trills. The fish’s struggles subsided, and I cocked my head and said, loud as if the fish could hear me over the tidal rush, “See? If you hadn’t gone after the little fish, you wouldn’t be in this mess.”

  The tidal rush had not only grown louder, it had grown irregular, a rhythmic splashing behind me.

  I turned with the trident in my hands.

  Twenty feet away, a rhizodont as big as the twenty-footer that hung above Celline’s mantel eyed me head-on. With two-thirds of its body above the waterline, its mouth gulped like, well, a fish out of water, and its pincushion of teeth dripped seawater like it was salivating over a snack.

  Which it was.

  “Crap.” Slowly I turned toward the shanty. What had I just told my victim about the perils of pursuing little fish?

  The great fish lunged toward me, lurching on th
ick, lobed fins, flopping side to side like a GI low-crawling under barbed wire on his elbows. Semi-submerged bulk buoyed by knee-deep salt water, the fish closed the gap between us faster than a man can jog.

  I sprinted away like my hair was on fire, screaming. But high-kneed in the tide pool, I was moving slower than a man can jog.

  When the gap had narrowed to fifteen feet, I chucked the fish and trident back at the monster as a peace offering.

  The trident wedged between teeth in the beast’s lower jaw like a canapé on a toothpick but didn’t slow the rhiz.

  The shanty ladder was ten yards away, but the rhiz was now ten feet back.

  My bare foot came down through the water onto something that exploded pain into my arch like a land mine. I stumbled and fell face-first into the shallows.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  I THRASHED TO REGAIN MY FOOTING, gasping as I held my head above water. Salt water stung my nose and eyes, my foot burned, and I waited to hear the crunch as rhiz jaws closed around my torso.

  Bang. A pause. Bang. Another pause, long enough for a trained soldier to work a rifle bolt. Bang.

  No crunch.

  I got to my hands and knees in the pool and looked back.

  The rhiz lay still as the tide surged around it. Blood coursed from a neat line of three bullet holes above its right eye and spread in crimson tendrils through the gin-clear sea.

  I staggered to my feet, balancing on one leg, and squinted up at the shanty deck. Another figure, balanced on one leg, stared down at me, old Pytr’s smoking rifle in his hands.

  “I thought that was you I heard! Do you visit this planet only to serve as bait?”

  I shaded my eyes with my hand. The face that peered down at me was sharp, silver-haired, and familiar. “Aud?”

  “Can you climb the ladder yourself, Jason? I’m afraid I can’t come down to help you up.” Audace Planck, soldier’s soldier turned co-chancellor, whose marksmanship had already saved me from one Tressen monster years before this, sagged against the deck rail, then collapsed.

  I knelt in the water to take weight off my foot as Celline, Jude, and old Pytr’s heads poked over the rail. Jude called down, “Stay there! I’ll give you a hand!”

  I looked back at the twenty-foot fish. “Good. I’m not cleaning this thing alone.”

  In fact, rhiz were sinewy and bony and tasted like muck, according to Pytr. The monster was left to the trilobites, who swarmed it like sailors chasing lap dancers. Pytr did, however, clean and sauté the lobe fin that I had landed fair and square, albeit accidentally. Pytr also removed three sea urchin spines the size of popsicle sticks from the arch of my foot, then packed the wounds with moss to draw out the poison. Meantime, my foot swelled to the size and color of an eggplant.

  Pytr’s treatment didn’t injure my appetite.

  After breakfast, Pytr put Aud back to bed while Celline, Jude, and I lingered over tea in front of the fireplace.

  Celline set down her mug and stared at me with her green eyes. “We brought you to the chancellor with few questions, because your people-the quiet ones in the consulate-have earned a small measure of trust by helping us in small ways. Now I must ask you what you want with Planck.”

  Pieces of another universe that eat gravity. A moon stolen by an evil empire of giant snails. Black ops line items in budgets on a world so far away that its sun was invisible in her sky. Explain that to a fisherman’s daughter. I sighed. “It’s complicated.”

  She smiled. “As you say, General, try me.”

  “Our government doesn’t like dealing with the RS butchers any better than you do.”

  She raised her hand. “Please. Your embargo has been hypocritical and meaningless. The truth is that a nation, a world, acts in its self-interest. As I see it, suddenly Tressel again has something that the motherworld wants. Your government sent you to get it from Planck, even though you’re as bad a diplomat as you are a fisherman. Your government expected you to trade on the sentimental bond between old soldiers. But now your friend is powerless. You’re farther out of water than that rhiz was.”

  Jude and I stared at her.

  I said. “Uh. That’s about it.”

  Pytr stepped back into the room and stood watching us, a hand cupped around one ear.

  Celline nodded, then said, “But I don’t understand everything. You risked your life to come here and to help Planck, because he’s your friend, even though a shrewd man would know your mission is futile. You seem an unlikely general.”

  My current boss, Pinchon, agreed. My previous boss, Nat Cobb, agreed. Hell, I agreed. I wasn’t a general, I was a historical accident.

  She said, “You’re not like Planck. Not like my father.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Your father was a fisherman.”

  Pytr snorted. “Fisherman? His Grace hated this lodge.”

  Jude’s jaw dropped as he stared at Celline. “Who are you?”

  Pytr made a little bow to Celline. “If I may, Miss?” Then he turned to Jude. “You have the honor of addressing Her Grace the Duchess Celline, daughter of the late Edmund, fifty-sixth Duke of Northern Iridia and Marshall of the Grand Army of the Realm.”

  I said, “Oh.”

  Jude frowned at Celline. “You lied to us.”

  She lifted her chin. “I did not! Arrogance assumes.”

  “Arrogant? Me?”

  She waved her hand like she was swatting flies. “The title doesn’t matter. It is manure now, anyway.”

  Pytr sucked in a breath. “Miss! Your father would be-”

  She pointed at the old man, and her finger quivered. “My father would be alive but for the RS. The only thing that matters now is to gut them all.”

  Jude said, “The house where we met you. You knew where the fish hid-”

  “That was our family’s home for six hundred years.”

  “Your father-”

  “Your RS shipped him north as an enemy of the state when they stole our house.”

  Pytr made another of those little six-inch bows to Celline. “Shall I see to the chancellor, Miss?”

  Celline nodded, like she had been giving servants their leave all her life, which apparently she had.

  I nodded after Pytr. “How long has he taken care of you?”

  Celline smiled. “All my life. But you say it wrong. Pytr is like my family. Now he’s old. I take care of him, and I will until one of us dies.”

  “The rest of your family-”

  “There is no rest. Since the war, my old soldier is the nearest to family I have left.”

  I stared at Jude, and he at me. Wherever or whenever, war is an orphanage, and now there were three of us.

  We three talked for another hour. She told us about the hierarchy of Iridia, and about the pitiful Iridian resistance, which she nominally led. I told her about Jude, about his family, which were as close to royalty as America ’s peculiar meritocracy came. Jude told her stories about me that made me sound better than I was.

  At noon, Jude accompanied me on a rehabilitative limp, with a cane Pytr provided, inshore from the ducal fishing lodge. Pytr assured us the route was rhiz-free. Jude carried a pistol anyway.

  “Jason, all these people can’t be lying. What I’ve seen since I’ve been back on Tressel is no illusion. I’ve been criminally stupid.”

  I shook my head as we picked along the rocks. “You’re not the first soldier who was too busy to look over his shoulder. Honest men believe other men are honest.”

  “I think Aud made the same mistake.”

  “I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.”

  “Do you think Celline would give me the benefit of the doubt?”

  “You could ask her.”

  “No. After what she’s seen of the RS, I need to show her who I am.”

  “You like her a lot.”

  “No.”

  I swiveled my head toward my godson and raised my eyebrows.

  “Jason, I love her.”

  “Don’t you think that’s a
big word? You’ve barely met her.”

  “How long after Dad met Mom, did he know?”

  My eyes moistened, and I swallowed, then smiled. “About the time he barely met her.”

  That night, we three sat together again, staring into Pytr’s tiny fire. Celline asked me, “What is it that the motherworld needs from Tressel?”

  I told her the whole thing. She knew about the Slugs and the Slug War in an abstract way, like any Tressen or Iridian who knew her world’s legends and kept up with current affairs. When I finished, she looked at us. “Will the motherworld give Zeit a free hand if necessary, in order to get at this Cavorite?”

  I sighed. “That’s not our opening position.”

  “Even provide him more weapons? To use on anyone the RS chooses?”

  “Again, that’s not-”

  “But you have to if he insists. You know Zeit will insist.”

  Jude said, “Celline, you don’t understand. It’s not just our world at stake. It’s Tressel, too.”

  “I do understand.” She cocked her head and cast her green eyes toward the ceiling beams. “But what if Chancellor Zeit were not the only game in town? It’s an Iridian expression.”

  I smiled at the duchess. “It’s an American expression, too.”

  FORTY-NINE

  FOUR WEEKS LATER, Aud Planck was sufficiently recovered to travel. During those weeks, I honed my trident skills without further incident and swapped war stories with Pytr. Meanwhile, the duchess of Northern Iridia and my godson talked late into every night, walked the pools together every day. Eventually and inevitably the two orphans of very different wars became an item.

  Our return trip was less eventful than our trip out.

  I parted with the others at an Iridian safe house, then reentered the consulate the old-fashioned way, in an upturned-collar coat and turned-down-brim hat, walking like a garden-variety passerby, then abruptly ducked up the steps and buzzed myself in the door before the Ferrents could cross the street and snatch me.

  That earned me a lecture from Bill the Spook, which was cut short when the Ferrents showed up demanding that the consulate disgorge the defector and Bill had to go lie to them.