Orphan's Triumph

by Robert Buettner

  Two hours later, my legs ached, people were swearing, and the smell of wet clothing mixed with sweat generated by shoulder-to-shoulder overcoated bodies had overpowered the ore box’s stink.

  Thump.

  The sledge rolled the first six inches north, and a man in a long black coat and a matching hat, which on Earth would be called a homburg, lurched against me. “Sorry.”

  “No problem.”

  “You don’t sound Iridian.”

  I said, “I’m not.”

  “I’m not, either. This is a mistake, you see. I’m a physician.”

  He didn’t know the half of it. Over the next six days, which was the one-way-trip time that Spook intel had predicted, we and the other pairs in other sledges would try to recruit and educate a little army in each of our moving prisons about what was really going on and what they could do to save their own lives.

  The ice train hissed into darkness.

  I dozed standing up.

  When I woke, thin gray daylight trickled between the ill-riveted wall plates, and the thump-thumps as the sledge runners crossed pressure ridges in the river ice had become a steady growl. The physician faced me, close enough that I smelled something like onion when he breathed out beneath a pencil-line black moustache. He stared at Aud, false-moustached in the daylight. The physician frowned, then his eyes brightened. “Chancellor?”

  Aud’s head swiveled toward the question, only a half inch, but it was enough.

  The physician’s face lit. “Yes! It is you! Thank God, it’s you!” The physician turned to a woman beside him. “You see? It is a mistake! If Chancellor Planck himself is in this box, it’s all a mistake!” He threw back his head and screamed at the ceiling, “Stop the train! Stop the train! It’s all a mistake! The chancellor is in here! Chancellor Planck is in here!”

  I hissed, “Shut up!”

  “Why? Don’t you see? They’ll let us go!” He threw his head back again and screamed so loud that his hat popped off his bald head, rolled off an adjacent shoulder, and disappeared onto the iron floor.

  I wrestled enough space to draw back my fist and cold-cock him.

  “No!” Aud caught my forearm.

  “Shut up down there!” The guard’s boot stomped the ceiling.

  “I tell you I know him! He’s right down here beside me!”

  “And Puck the Fairy is up here beside me! Shut the fuck up!”

  Two minutes later, the physician screamed out again. “Just look! That’s all I ask! Just look down here and see for yourself.”

  Boots thumped the car’s roof as every face in the car turned up toward its ceiling.

  I swallowed, but my mouth was dry. If the guards found Aud in here, our plan was done. Ord’s pistol nestled in my shoulder holster, but a shot now would solve nothing.

  The roof trapdoor creaked open, and daylight flooded in and blinded us.

  The physician pogoed up and down, staring up and pointing at Aud. “Here! He’s right here!”

  With my fingers splayed in front of my eyes to block the light I said to Aud, “Fuck! You should have let me slug him!”

  The guard’s helmeted head and greatcoated shoulders darkened the square of daylight above us as he peered down, broad nosed and scowling. His shoulder seemed to move.

  A breath tweaked my ear as something flew past it.

  Thump.

  The physician screamed. The brick struck him full on the forehead, and crushed brain and blood and bone sprayed the shoulders and faces that stared at the physician.

  The guard shouted, “I told you people to shut the fuck up! If I run out of bricks, I got a rifle!” He slammed the hatch and left us in the dark.

  People shrank away from the physician’s body until it slumped to the floor.

  In a distant corner, someone prayed. A woman sobbed.

  Beside me, Aud whispered, “What have I done? What have I done?”

  The physician’s bowels evacuated when he died, the harbinger of a problem that would not improve over the next six days.

  The next day, Aud and I began whispered recruiting.

  A woman beside me covered her ears and began reciting nursery rhymes to herself. Few of our car mates would even meet the eyes of either of us, or of anyone else.

  Before the sun set for the second time, someone found the physician’s hat, and people began using it to pass human feces from one person to another until they could be dumped, more or less successfully, outside the car through the openings between the wall slabs.

  The matter of the dead man’s hat, and the communication and cooperation that began with it, opened the doors between us and our fellow death-row inmates. And as we plotted, we didn’t have to worry about anyone ratting us out to the guard.

  As the hours inched by, the mass of people in the sledge orbited, so each would take a turn at the wall opening, to enjoy light and the fresh air sucked through the open sliver. As the ice train rumbled farther north, driven snow on the wall joint could be licked off, to supplement the buckets of snow that the guard periodically lowered through the hatch.

  When the rivers ended, the ice track continued, hewn from the frozen ground. The farther north we traveled, the less prized became the time a person spent exposed to the frigid wind that knifed between the wall slabs.

  The physician, and a frail woman in a cloth coat who didn’t wake up on the third day, were slid to the wind-ward side of the sledge, where their bodies froze and also provided useful windbreaks.

  After a lifetime, five days, twenty-two hours, and six minutes according to the wrist ’Puter hidden beneath my coat, Aud and I snapped out of sleep as the ice train slowed down.

  FIFTY-THREE

  I TUGGED UP THE MASK that shielded my face and pointed a mittened hand. “There!”

  The moments between thumps lengthened as Aud and I stood together squinting out through the side slits at endless white beneath a hard blue sky. Aud and I took longer turns standing at the frigid, windward wall of our sledge because, forewarned, we had come equipped with more effective cold-weather clothing than most of the others.

  In fact, the Spooks had forewarned us about much that we would see. Tressel’s North Polar region actually more closely resembled Earth’s South Pole, a wind-scoured continental plain bisected by razor-peaked mountains, its moisture so frozen in its ice and snow that its air was as dry as a desert.

  Bits of black appeared in the distance, peeking from snowy ridges.

  I said, “That must be the wire. Makes a lousy snow fence.”

  Parallel to and a mile from the trackway that knifed toward Tressel’s pole ran the barbed-wire boundaries of the first “resettlement camps.” Hidden beneath the wind-blown snows between us and the wire slept Iridian children, Tressen professors, homosexuals of all nationalities, and anyone else unfortunate enough to differ from or with Republican Socialism. The simple brutality of the scheme was more breathtakingly bleak than the Tressen Arctic.

  Aud spoke through his scarf as he shook his head. “I should have seen this. I should have seen this.”

  “Aud, Zeit wasn’t exactly advertising the truth. Good soldiers doing their duty have been fooled before. I sent you that biography, about the field marshall whom the Nazis poisoned for plotting against them.”

  Aud shook his head. “A soldier can hide behind his duty. I abandoned that excuse when I swore on the chancellor’s book. And at the last, your Rommel tried to do the right thing.”

  “Which is what you’re doing now.”

  The ice train wasn’t slowing because we were almost there, it was slowing because it was going uphill. According to the Spooks’ mapping, the early mass graves continued for ten miles, then the single track climbed through a mountain pass and descended to another plain. On that next plain the newer barbed-wire enclosures resumed, the drifted snow low against them, and at that spot were garrisoned the troops who kept the survivors penned until exposure and starvation finished them.

  The presence of that military garrison
had been the problem that had scuttled Howard Hibble’s plan to burgle Tressel’s Cavorite. Because beneath the snows of that new plain, amid the corpses, lay the fallen stars of Cavorite that controlled the fate of mankind. Spooks and the politicians they serve love covert ops. But politicians fall out of love quickly when covert ops go wrong.

  Within twenty minutes, the ice train crept slower than a walking man. It rolled through a dynamite-widened pass that was still so narrow that from the sledge I could have reached out and touched the vertical granite walls, and so deep that its shadows darkened the box like sundown.

  My ’Puter’s altimeter pegged the pass crest elevation at nine thousand feet, and the Spooks’ mapping said the canyon rim topped out fully one thousand feet higher. Growing up in Colorado, the rule of thumb had been climb a thousand feet and lose three degrees Fahrenheit. But it felt like we couldn’t get colder.

  Forty minutes later, the thumps of the runners over the ice road had increased in frequency again, as gravity accelerated the ice train down the pass backside, toward our destination.

  I turned to the man next to me, dozing standing up with his arms crossed, and nudged him until he opened eyes that the last five days had sunken in their sockets.

  I said, “Showtime!”

  FIFTY-FOUR

  AS SOON AS OUR SLEDGE ROLLED through the gate into the wire rectangle within which our train would unload, Aud and I began loading, then redistributing, the weapons our recruits had been dry-firing during the trip north. The pistols in our suitcases were obsolete Iridian single-action service revolvers. They were the only small, simple, plausibly deniable weapons that Bill the Spook could score in the Tressen black market on a few days’ notice.

  My unmittened fingers were so numb that I dropped one round for every six I loaded. Then I passed each pistol to Aud, who in turn handed it off, so it could be passed to one of the prisoners whom we had trained to shoot.

  “Trained” overstated things. It typically had taken Ord and me months as advisers to train partisans. Here and now we lacked that gift of time. Nonetheless, if things were running according to plan, the scene was being repeated in six other sledge cars. But there were risks in this that planning simply couldn’t help.

  Few of the prisoners in this caravan had ever fired a weapon. The RS had long since exterminated most veterans who had served on the wrong side in the war. Most of the unfortunates who were rounded up and shipped from Tressia were city dwellers who had never plinked a tin can on the East Forty.

  We hadn’t risked handing out loaded weapons earlier, so there would be shooters scared to death the first time their pistols roared and kicked in their hands. There would be shooters who didn’t cock hammers, shooters who lost their pistols in snowdrifts, shooters who couldn’t hit a cow’s rump with a bat, and shooters who simply were too petrified to shoot.

  On the positive side, the waiting camp guards were going to be less prepared than Bo Peep would have been if her sheep had gone postal.

  With a thunk, then a hiss, the ice train stopped. After six days, the silence of the empty wilderness rang like an alarm between my ears.

  I peered out between the iron wall slabs. Two hundred greatcoated, helmeted guards awaited us, drawn back a hundred feet on the featureless snow, rifles slung. They stamped feet, smoked, and batted their arms against their chests.

  A thin cry echoed from one of the other sledges. “Dear God! Please! Let us out!”

  A dozen guards, scarves to noses, rifles still slung, trudged to the cars, then unlatched and slid back each sledge’s door. They retreated to the line of their buddies, to escape not the prisoners’ wrath but their stench.

  There was no need to order prisoners out of the iron boxes. After six subhuman days, those who remained ambulatory leapt, stumbled, crawled, and tumbled into the snow alongside the icy track. Many wept. A few crammed handfuls of snow between parched lips. Most were too weak even for that.

  After five minutes, a different dozen guards walked the train, peering into each box. If they found halt, lame, or dead inside, they wrenched prisoners from the snow and forced them to unload those unable to unload themselves.

  As each sledge was cleared, the guards padlocked its door shut. No shelter for the new arrivals. Then each sledge’s guard climbed stiffly down from his guardhouse and joined his colleagues.

  The emaciated prisoners, if any noticed, offered no more protest than so many pieces of frozen meat, which they would be soon enough.

  I scanned the milling, kneeling heaps of prisoners, until my heart thumped. Jude, and then Celline alongside him, saw me, too, and Jude nodded to me. I had never been so glad to see two people who looked like hell. I nodded back.

  The Spooks had flown a Mechanical up here to monitor ice train arrival procedure for us, so we knew what came next. By the time the engine crew, the guards, and the others had reassembled, the Arctic sun slid low along the horizon, at our backs, as a noncomm called roll of our jailers.

  Years of experience had taught these troops that there was nothing to fear from the hopeless, decimated “enemies of the state” who tumbled from each ice train into the snow. The only way a guard up here could get himself hurt was to wander off, then be left behind on the plain to freeze, like the prisoners he was guarding.

  When all the guards were accounted for, all of them, some with rifles slung, others with them over their shoulders, stocks backward like pickaxes, turned their backs on the people in the snow.

  The guards trudged, heads down against the wind, toward the distant barracks and machine-shop complex that lay outside the wire, toward warmth and beds and hot food. The more energetic among them opened wooden crates, plucked out dynamite sticks, then lit and flung them to explode snow fountains. Others tossed empty cartridge boxes up into the wind, ahead of them, while their buddies whooped and shot at the boxes like skeet clays. Disposal of deteriorated stores, perhaps.

  Tressel’s civilization poised on that historic cusp where Earth’s had teetered almost two centuries before, proud to have invented dynamite, but not yet guilty enough to fund a peace prize with the profits of sale.

  Bored, stupid, lazy commanders begat bored, stupid, lazy troops. Bored, stupid, lazy troops became dead troops. What we were about to attempt wouldn’t give these troops the benefit of a fair fight. But the last thing a good commander wants to give the enemy is a fair fight.

  As the Spooks’ Mechanical had forecast, the prevailing wind howled toward the casual mob of guards, into their faces and ours.

  Therefore, the guards didn’t hear us as we rose, in groups of twos and threes, and began walking mute toward the unsuspecting guards’ backs. Surprised shouts of other prisoners vanished in the wind and among the moans and delirium of others. We had formed a ragged skirmish line, ninety in all, forty-five on each side of Aud and me, and had come within twenty yards of the guards when I saw the first prisoner, stumbling forward, ten yards to my right, raise his pistol.

  For these novices, the range remained too great. I had drawn Ord’s pistol and carried it muzzle-down at my side in my unmittened hand. I waved it at the guy as I stage whispered, “Not yet! Crap! No, no, no!”

  Bang.

  Even a blind pig finds an occasional acorn. The first shot of the prisoner’s life, and the first shot of the Battle of the Northern Terminus, struck the last guard in line in the nape of his neck, between the skirt of his helmet and his jacket collar. He went down noiselessly, like a flour sack, so that his buddies noticed neither his loss nor the pistol shot amid the skeet shoot ahead of them.

  Within two heartbeats, nervous pistols crackled like popping corn, as the prisoners fired at will into a massed target too big for even novices to miss.

  By the time the guards realized what was happening and stopped, the gap between prisoners and guards had closed to ten yards. Forty guards lay in the snow.

  By the time the guards unslung rifles, the gap was five yards, and just a hundred of them remained standing. I, Jude, and Aud spent ou
r effort running back and forth behind our skirmish line, screaming and tugging our shooters, trying to keep any from getting out ahead or from falling behind, so that no one would be shot by a buddy. I lunged for one man too late, and he took a round in the back of his thigh from another prisoner.

  More guards fell, shot point-blank.

  The remaining guards, blinded by the sun at our backs, reflexively standing and fighting when they should have run, were overrun before they could get off more than wild shots.

  Prisoners fell on their tormentors three or four against one, firing pistols into screaming mouths, beating and kicking, pummeling guards with their own rifle butts, until guards’ heads cracked like dropped melons.

  Then there was no sound but wind howl and the crying of wounded.

  Two minutes had passed since the first shot.

  I stood panting, hands on hips, facing back at the litter of bodies in the reddening snow.

  Aud limped up alongside me. “I think we lost four.”

  A prisoner beside me aimed his pistol ahead of us, cocked the hammer, and pulled the trigger. The hammer clacked on a spent cartridge. “Dammit!”

  I turned and looked where the pistol’s muzzle pointed. A lone guard ran, bareheaded, coat flapping, toward the distant fence and the barracks beyond.

  It was barely possible that with the wind, the oncoming darkness, the cover provided by the guards’ rowdy firing, and the sloppy state of this garrison that the troops remaining in the barracks complex could be surprised. In fact, we had half planned on it.

  But not if the runner got to the garrison before we did.

  I knelt in the snow, swung Ord’s pistol up, and sighted on the runner. In the fading light, he looked back over his shoulder as he ran. It was the broad-nosed boxcar guard who had killed the physician.

  A decent shot with a service.45 can bring down a man at forty yards. An expert might stretch that to seventy-five yards. Liars claim one hundred.

  Ord always claimed that, if I practiced more, I could be the best shot he had ever trained. He also claimed that his personally gunsmithed pistol was the most accurate.45 ever built.