Orphan's Triumph

by Robert Buettner

  “Goddamit!” I reversed my rifle in my hands and jammed the stock into a smoking crevasse, as if I could pry the mountain apart.

  A bullet struck between my feet, and I looked up. A scout charged toward me along the ledge, screaming and firing. The sniper’s scope on my rifle probably earned me no love. Behind him four more scouts single-filed toward me.

  I had wedged my rifle immovably in the crevasse, but I still had Ord’s pistol, albeit bundled beneath layers of clothing. I needed to buy time.

  I released the rifle and raised my hands.

  The scout slowed and shuffled toward me, rifle trained on me from the hip.

  He stopped fifteen feet away, panting steam. He didn’t look like a Nazi. He looked like a thousand other soldiers I had known, a kid who needed nothing in this world but a shave and a three-day pass.

  It would never work, and this kid didn’t deserve it, but I was out of options. I lowered one hand slowly toward my jacket lapel, toward the pistol, while I sighed and cast my eyes to the sky. I said, “Crap,” as my plan became irrelevant.

  SIXTY-THREE

  THE DESCENDING MORTAR ROUND plummeted across my vision in less than a blink, silhouetted against the cloudless blue sky, then scraped the edge of the ledge behind the kid, and alongside one of the other four scouts, so hard that its steel sparked orange against the granite. Out of sight below the ledge, the round burst.

  For a moment, nothing happened. Then the kid’s eyes widened as they met mine. The ledge beneath him and the other four scouts sank like an elevator’s floor.

  He dropped his rifle and stretched out his hand.

  I reached for it, but he was gone, tumbling and flailing, staring up at the sky, along with the other four scouts and, all around them, the spinning shards and blocks of granite that had been the ledge, eight hundred feet to the canyon floor below.

  The rock beneath my feet sloughed away, too, and I fell on my back, scrabbling and grasping. Finally, I lay staring up past the canyon rim, sucking air and shaking.

  When my heart slowed a fraction, I rolled onto hands and knees and peered over the edge of the ledge that was now severed by the impassable gap completed by the mortar round’s explosion.

  Below, Aud’s former soldiers and his new ones struggled hand-to-hand atop the overturned sledges. He strode, chest out, dragging one bandaged leg behind him, along the makeshift battlement while shells burst around him, until he reached an object that protruded from beneath a new-fallen boulder.

  Aud Planck tugged my splintered sniper’s rifle from beneath the boulder, then turned and looked up, shading his eyes with one hand. He pointed the rifle north, in the direction I was supposed to go, then saluted with his other hand.

  I leaned out above the battle, returned his salute, then turned and started down the ledge.

  We stared at each other through the smoke, then we both turned away from one another for what we both knew would be the last time.

  I reached the junction where the down trail’s northern end joined the plain at sunset. From the canyon, the rumble of battle continued, without me. Unflanked, what remained of the unlikely three hundred fought on. I couldn’t save the shopkeepers who remained alive. But maybe I could help to make their sacrifice count for something.

  Blood trickled from one ear, an eardrum burst by the mortar round’s concussion, and from my cheek. A granite splinter had torn through my sleeve and lodged in my birth-equipment forearm. I hadn’t eaten in four days, nor drunk anything but melted snow. What wasn’t bruised, ached. I began walking north into the frigid darkness, on feet I could no longer feel, then shifted gears to an air-borne shuffle trot that would get me back to the camp by sunup.

  As I shuffled, I snorted to myself, “Some retirement.”

  In fact, at four a.m. I arrived at the southern wire that demarcated the camp. It had been visible for miles across the plain, as oil lanterns carried by meteorite pickers crisscrossed the snow like fireflies.

  A shopkeeper sentry saved my life by firing at me high and wide while intending anything but.

  It took until five a.m. before I reached Jude and Celline, who pored over a camp map penciled with a search grid.

  I reported the battle results like Pheidippides returning from the plain of Marathon, then asked, “How close are you?”

  Celline ran her fingers down a tally sheet as she handed me back my ’Puter. “Close enough. Call your vessel down now. We need every second.”

  I nodded. Before the Forty-fifth Infantry and the burned-out oil supply had entered the picture, our plan had been to deliver the Cavorite, then return the survivors on the commandeered ice train as far south as possible, then abandon it. The newly numerous Iridian resistance would melt into the population and become, like Mao’s guerillas, fish in the sea.

  Jude unrolled another of the camp commandant’s maps. Now, with no transportation, and the pass south blocked by an advancing army, the survivors’ only hope was to outrun the Forty-fifth Infantry, east across the Arctic, until they reached the eastern end of the mountains, where they could turn south and make for the more hospitable climate of the north Iridian coast.

  An emaciated army of cellists and fishmongers and shopkeepers’ widows would flee battle-hardened troops, across four hundred miles of frigid wilderness.

  Jude shook his head. “I won’t tell these people, but the journey would be barely survivable even if we didn’t have an army chasing us.”

  Celline said, “But if we stand and fight, we die. And hope dies with us.”

  I pointed at my ’Puter in Jude’s hand. “You do it. Call down the ship. My fingers can’t work the buttons anymore.”

  Then I tugged off my boots and sat on the edge of a camp cot, kneading my toes with my fingers and feeling neither. “I think I’m gonna lie down here for a minute.”

  The next thing I knew, Jude stood shaking my shoulder. “Jason! The ship’s here!”

  SIXTY-FOUR

  THE HUMPBACKED SCORPION drifted down toward Tressel’s snow, a white ceramic teardrop against the steel-blue afternoon sky. Its pilot throttled back to subsonic to remain silent but jinked at right angles and sprinkled heat-seeker-fooling flares, though “hot” was the last adjective that described this landing zone.

  The hundreds of survivors healthy enough to gather stones that were spread across the vast white graveyard plain drew toward the alien ship like iron filings to a magnet. Most had seen newspaper drawings or grainy tintype photographs of the motherworld’s flying machines, but the reality must have shocked them like a flying saucer, which, essentially, the Scorpion might have been.

  The Scorpion dead-stopped and hovered three feet above the snow. The Scorpion’s hull, scorched by its passage through Tressel’s upper atmosphere, boiled off snow in a hissing steam cloud that rose into the scalded air shimmering above the ship.

  The Tressens formed a silent, spectating ring around the Scorpion as a rear ramp whined down from the modified Scorpion’s bulbous tail, lifting the former fighter’s weapons pod like a stinger.

  The forward canopy rose as the cargo ramp dropped, and the pilot extended the ship’s ladder above and across the hull, then clambered across and down. He splashed through the slush his ship had melted, straight-backed, chest out, comm and life support leads swinging in the breeze in time with the silk scarf that dangled around his neck.

  Jude, Celline, and I stepped forward out of the circle, and he stopped three feet in front of us. A “Whizard” call sign stencil painted his pilot’s helmet, and a multicolored, embroidered patch of a scowling pelican wearing boxing gloves crested the chest of his unzipped brown leather bomber jacket. He saluted and grinned. “Package pickup service!”

  It was only as I watched the grin melt into his smooth-shaven cheeks that I realized how gaunt, filthy, and emaciated we all were. Jude’s and Celline’s eyes peered from pits sunken in faces grayed by oil smoke and stretched by starvation. Their faces were scarved with rags, and their swollen coats were torn everywhere
they weren’t soiled. We no longer noticed how we stank.

  The kid’s eyes flicked around the silent hundreds who stared at him, who looked worse than we did. The face of war was softer when your enemy was a dot on a screen and physical hardship was wardroom coffee gone cold.

  I returned the young pilot’s salute by careerlong reflex. “Glad to see you. Jason Wander.”

  His jaw dropped. “General?”

  “Retired.”

  His eyes widened as he looked around again at the silent Tressens. “Sir-Mr. Wander-I just got the one ship. My orders are to pick up cargo. Quick and quiet. I can’t-”

  “I know. They know. We’re walking out.”

  He turned his ear toward me as though he hadn’t heard. “Sir?”

  I pointed at the ramp of his ship, where Tressens were already lining up, holding bulging sacks and bins piled high with stones. “Could you make sure they load your bay the way you want? We need to be out of here quick and quiet, too.”

  He trotted to the ramp.

  I turned to Jude and jerked a thumb at the Scorpion. “The second seat on that ship’s empty. You’re the best pilot we’ve got. Your place is in a cockpit. Finish this thing. For your family.”

  Jude put one arm around Celline and swept the other around at the queued and gritty little army. “This is my family.” He nodded toward the leather-jacketed pilot. “Jason, I could never be that guy again. There are plenty like him who can deliver Silver Bullet. The Slug War is your generation’s-it’s your war to finish. My war starts here. Now.”

  Ord’s last words echoed in my head. I was on my own now.

  I jerked my head south, toward the canyon where Aud Planck and three hundred shopkeepers had held back an infantry division. “The lookouts say the Forty-fifth is through the pass, route marching north, already. No head start will be enough.”

  The Scorpion’s cargo ramp whined as it clamshelled shut. The pilot walked to the three of us, peeling off his flight jacket. Beneath it he wore a Zoomie sidearm in a shoulder holster. “We’re loaded. General-Mr. Wander-Admiral Duffy said I’m to bring you back with me.”

  I said, “Why?”

  He shrugged. “Just in case, he said.”

  “In case of what?”

  “Can’t say, just now.”

  I shook my head. “Then fuck off.”

  “The admiral said you’d say that. Sir, the skipper gave me a direct order to get you into that cockpit. At gunpoint if necessary.” The kid didn’t smile.

  Jude said, “Go, Jason. You know this war can still be screwed up. You might not be able to prevent that up there. But you sure can’t prevent that from down here.”

  Celline touched my sleeve. “Iridians say that a thousand miles’ journey begins with one step. But if we falter, we need to know that we took that step for a purpose. You go, and be sure that these stones win your war. And tell the story of how we tried to win this one.”

  The pilot held out his jacket to Celline. “I got another one just like it upstairs, ma’am. Looks like somebody down here can use this.”

  The duchess took the jacket in a mittened hand and smiled. “A loan. Return for it in a few years, when we’ve won.”

  I hugged Jude, then Celline, then I stood still and looked at them.

  The pilot shivered in his coverall, then turned to me. “General Wander, my ship’s a sitting duck on the ground like this. And we’ve still got work to do.”

  SIXTY-FIVE

  THE SCORPION’S CANOPY whined down and sealed me in alongside the pilot. The cockpit looked familiar, exactly like the modified ship in which Jude had given me my flying lesson back on Bren, before so much had changed.

  The pilot scanned instruments, adjusted controls, and punched touch panels rowed across the canopy top like a concert pianist playing upside down.

  The screens lit, the canopy seemed to disappear, and we drifted into the sky.

  As we rose, the pilot pivoted the Scorpion, so we gazed out across the Arctic wilderness, toward the black mountain wall that stretched for three hundred miles to the east, around which Celline and Jude would have to lead the malnourished army huddled below us. He whistled. “Quite a walk. But I wouldn’t bet against that lady.”

  “The walk’s not the problem. The company is. There’s a Tressen infantry division ten miles behind them and gaining.”

  When the altimeter read fifteen thousand feet, the pilot flipped back the hinged, red-striped shroud that covered the weapons console as he drifted the Scorpion south along the railroad.

  I pointed at the console. “You can’t fight this ship.”

  He nodded. “Correct, sir. Engagement within the airspace of Tressel’s strictly forbidden. We weren’t even permitted to load defensive armament for this pickup.”

  “Then what…?”

  “Admiral Duffy determined that the Tehran was carrying deteriorating stores.”

  “Huh?”

  “We can always jettison deteriorating stores that endanger the ship into nonorbital space or into deserted country.” He pointed below us. “Sir, could you have a look to assure that area below us is just deserted country?”

  Below, a column of black specks stretched a hundred yards wide for a mile on either side of the railroad, as Forty-fifth Division gave chase to my godson, Celline, and their tiny band of innocents.

  My jaw hung slack. “Eddie’ll get relieved without pension for this.”

  “The admiral said that, too, sir, to me and the four red jackets that volunteered to load the pod. He said to tell you the dental plan’s lousy, anyway.”

  “Son, this is no joke.” However, as I said it I mentally retracted every curse I had placed on the head of Eddie Duffy.

  “The admiral’s log will say deteriorating stores were jettisoned above the Arctic Circle of Tressel. Only me, the admiral, and the four red jackets can say different.”

  “And me. Why am I here?”

  “The admiral wanted somebody spotting who knows where the friendlies are, where the bad guys are, and the target characteristics.”

  I jerked my thumb over my shoulder, toward the stinger pod. “What are you packing?”

  “Radar-guided Area Denial Explosive. Basically bundled cluster bombs that arrange themselves as they fall. The radar identifies moving targets and shifts the cluster units for maximum efficiency.”

  I pointed below as we hovered unheard and unseen high above Forty-fifth Division’s quick-marching GIs. “There are no friendlies down there.”

  He nodded as he laid his hand on a selector dial. “They got any hard-shell vehicles or body armor? RADE burst fragments behave like razor blades.”

  I shook my head. “Dismounted light infantry. Cloth coats, steel helmets.”

  “Then they’re toast.”

  They weren’t toast. They were human beings, as cocky, imperfect, and mortal as he was.

  The targeting screen winked on, the pilot tipped the Scorpion up, and the fuselage shuddered as the cluster bombs released and began their tumble, three miles above the unsuspecting marchers.

  Onscreen, a wavering green rectangle materialized as the munition sized up its target. Then dozens of red lights swarmed like gnats within the rectangle as cluster-bomb units rearranged themselves in free fall, so their bursting bomblets would perforate every square foot of the target.

  I peered down at the undulating smudge on the snow that was thousands of infantrymen shuffling north while cursing their blisters.

  Ting.

  The only sound we heard, as the munition detonated three miles under us, was a chime from the Scorpion’s targeting ’Puter.

  A silent, rectangular snow cloud snapped into sight below. Prevailing wind at the point of impact, which the targeting ’Puter read at sixteen miles per hour, blew away the snow. The smudge that remained on both sides of the railroad track didn’t undulate anymore. Among the bodies, at most a few dozen moved. They would freeze solid by the next morning.

  On a perpetually snow-covered graveyard i
solated at the top of this world, the bodies would soon be snow-covered thousands among already-dead thousands. The magnitude of the carnage, perhaps even the fact of it, much less its cause, wouldn’t be apparent for years.

  I turned my eyes north and let them rest on the tiny line of rebels that snaked its way east.

  The pilot pointed below, as the targeting ’Puter retracted. “Stick a fork in ’em. They’re done.”

  I suppose I should have congratulated him.

  Then the Scorpion shot upward toward the Tehran .

  SIXTY-SIX

  BY THE TIME THE TEHRAN CAME IN SIGHT of Mousetrap, so many cruisers, Scorpions, transports, and tenders drifted dispersed in space around the moonlet that Mousetrap seemed enveloped in light fog, the way Bren’s Red Moon had looked when the Slugs cordoned it off.

  Howard had returned with me on the Tehran , to shepherd the stones, and we split up when we off-shipped. The first thing I did when I off-shipped was check the port registry. The Emerald River was here, but her skipper was listed as a name I didn’t know. Mimi’s name appeared nowhere among the personnel of the vast fleet. Whatever had become of Mimi’s request for transfer back to a vessel command, it hadn’t landed her at Mousetrap. My next stop was Off-Station Communications, otherwise known as the post office. I had checked Jeeb’s doghouse there and reclaimed it.

  The clerk scrolled his screens. “Nothing, sir. Not under ‘General’ or ‘Mr.’ If you’ve got outgoing, I can take it in, but Mousetrap’s been on lockdown since the push started last month. Nothing in or out.”

  I toted Jeeb’s container with me to the Spook Penthouse on level forty-eight, to see Howard Hibble. The MP at the tube was the same one who had been on duty my last visit. He blocked my path.

  “What’s up, Corporal?”

  “Restricted area, sir.”

  “I’m cleared.”

  He shrugged, hand on his holstered sidearm. “Not in my ’Puter. Sir.”

  Howard eventually came out and vouched for me, which shouldn’t have worked, but did. Even a retired general has a certain avoirdupois.