Chubbi smiles, nods a half-assed bow. “I will be honored to go into battle at your side, Ethan.” Equines are barely domesticated here, but already Chubbi knows enough veterinary dentistry that he doesn’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
Thirty minutes later, the boy and I cross Chubbi’s front lines, in the direction of the Huppic encampment that lies three miles ahead, hidden by a low ridge.
I keep the boy on a twenty-foot leash for show, and realize that I haven’t heard from Barclay since I made my pact with Satan. “Barc? You still up there?”
Silence. My heart skips. Is it possible Barclay has pulled up all the ’bots and is going to abandon me over this? He could get away with it. Most Survey officer MIA are simply reported by their pod non-comm as “failed to make pick-up.”
Finally, he sighs. “Sir, what were you thinking?”
“That I needed to prevent an innocent’s murder, and I’d sort out the details later. Isn’t there a rule about that in the bible?”
“Sir, the good book has a rule for everything. One of those is to obey the law. For you and me, the law is the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which requires you to obey lawful general orders.”
“Barc, there’s a difference between changing history and doing one tiny little good deed. I fibbed to a sociopathic dictator about enlisting with him. Where’s the harm?”
Silence. Time to change the subject before Barclay tries to convene a personal court martial by radio. “I make the biologics a boring seven, Barc.”
I hear clicks as he toggles screens up there. Barclay loves his survey ’bots almost as much as he loves his good book. Subject change accomplished.
“Close, sir. The aerial ’bots returned an average of six point eight.”
The boy shuffles ahead of me, kicking up dust and flushing rat-sized mammalians and quail-like birds from brush that could be mesquite. I say, “We could be in West Texas, with hills.”
“I’d say coastal Mediterranean, sir.”
“Close enough.” The first axiom of planetology is that like conditions produce like results. The flora and fauna that evolve on a warm, wet rock like Earth is, well, Earthlike. But hardly identical. Earth, as it turns out, is in the biologic fast lane, due to “collision punctuation.” Simply put, since the Precambrian Era, Earth attracted an extinction-sized hunk of space junk every couple hundred million years. Each asteroid or comet impact put the evolutionary pedal to the metal, because each collision wiped out old species, and allowed new species to blossom and fill the vacant niches. Adios duck-billed grazing dinosaurs. Hello grazing wildebeest.
Once we had a sampling to compare with, we found that Earth was a planetary punching bag, compared to the galactic average. So-called “minimally punctuated” Earthlikes are the norm. They’re mostly still ruled by creatures that are more-or-less dinosaurs.
I was hoping Unclassified Earthlike 604 would have something exotic, at least saber toothed tigers. Wolves and quail have been a plain-vanilla disappointment.
I stop, untie the boy, and as he rubs his throat I shoo him toward his lines. “Go home—” I don’t even know his name. “What’s your name?”
“For now? Tiran. That means son of Tir the shepherd. Next year I get to choose my own name.” He cocks his head at me. “But if you let me go, how will you know whether I lied?”
“You didn’t lie.”
Tiran-for-Now nods. One nice thing about being regarded as a god is people think you know everything.
“Then you will fight with Chubbarian against us.”
“Nope. Not that it’s your business, but I only said that to keep him from killing you. I lied.”
“Then you lied for nothing. Even with swords, we’re shepherds and shopkeepers, not soldiers.” The boy points in a circle at the plain we stand on. “Tomorrow Chubbirian’s army will meet us on this plain and kill all of us in this place. I will stand, and I will fall, alongside my father and my brothers.”
I look away, in the direction of Chubbi’s army, now hidden behind a ridge. The black smoke tendrils of cook fires snake skyward as warriors by the thousand prepare their evening meals. Actually, tomorrow will be worse than the boy imagines. After Chubbi’s horde kills the combatants, they’ll kill their families, too, with all the attendant rape and pillage.
Behind my visor, I grind my teeth. Despite my efforts, Tiran-for-Now will be dead before he even has a permanent name, along with a boatload of other innocents. “Look, what I think is right and what I can make right are two different things. Be glad your head’s still attached.” For a while.
Barclay whispers, “Well said, sir. It’s a lousy deal to be a Survey puke sometimes. I hate it too. But a soldier can’t choose his war. Now just hole up somewhere, sleep the night, and wait for the drone in the morning.”
I pop my visor and bend at the waist, hands on knees, to say goodbye to Tiran.
He won’t look up at me and instead sits down, cross-legged in the dust. He unties a sack from his belt, dumps out round stones and lines them up in opposing rows in the dirt, like toy soldiers. “I always wanted to be a soldier. But my father’s a shepherd. My brothers and my uncles are shepherds. I thought I would die of boredom as a shepherd. Now I wish I could.”
“Really? I thought it was so dangerous that your father gave you a sword for wolves.”
He smiles. “I take care of wolves all the time. They don’t scare me.”
Maybe not. But as the local suns are going down, a wolf howls, and not too far away. If I leave, the boy will be alone in the darkness, without even the sword that Chubbi took from him to fend off the wolves.
Instead of walking away, I lay down across from the boy, propped on one elbow, in the middle of an alien desert. I can sleep here as well as someplace else.
I sigh. “I know how you feel. I was supposed to be a dentist.”
He keeps staring down at his little stone armies. “What’s a dentist?”
“Doesn’t matter. Except it’s what everybody in my family was, back where I come from. And it’s boring.”
He looks up and cocks his head. “Do you like being a soldier, instead?”
Survey Branch’s motto is nos succurro, “We help.” When I chose my branch, that sounded better to me than “We kick ass.” But I guess our motto should be “We catalogue and run.” I shrug. “‘Til now.”
He nods. “Me, too.”
I reach down and maneuver a stone. “Back where I come from, we have better toy soldiers than this.”
He wrinkles his forehead. “So do we. These aren’t soldiers.”
Two hours and a long talk with the boy later, I pass alone back through Chubbi’s lines. Thanks to my helmet’s snoops, I dodge his sentries easily.
It’s been a quiet walk back, and that worries me. I wasn’t able to raise Barclay. It could be a helmet malfunction due to my ham-fisted battery change. But if I try to fix it, given my clumsiness, I could lose the sensors, too. The pick-up drone doesn’t need audio, just a working beacon to home on, so that’s not what worries me. Barclay may have pulled back the drone after he eavesdropped on the conversation that I just finished with the boy.
When I duck silently into Chubbi’s tent, I find him leaning on his hands across a waist-high sand table. He studies a miniature terrain and crude lead soldiers laid out on the table, arrayed in tomorrow’s anticipated order of battle.
Chubbi looks up, sees me, and his head snaps back. I can’t blame him. Three millennia of evolution and nutrition have already made me six inches taller and forty fit pounds heavier than the average Iron Age male. Eternads weigh less than a linebacker’s uniform, but they bulk me up even more, in every dimension, and add another half foot to my height. Under most light conditions, my visor tint renders me faceless, and the iron swords that are this planet’s nuclear option can’t even scratch my matte black shell.
His eyes widen. “You have returned. Then it’s true? The rabble possess iron swords?”
“Yep.” I sit on the bench across t
he sand table from Chubbi, where his unit commanders must have sat minutes before, while he briefed them.
Chubbi smiles, then leans forward and points at the front center of the little figures that represent his army. “You will lead us into battle, here. Your iron staff will smite many, but still many of my men will fall. However, all of the rabble will fall. Then we will ravage their seed, as well.”
I remove my helmet and run a hand over my GI-buzz-covered scalp. “Sounds great.” Especially the seed ravaging. “But could I make a suggestion?”
Chubbi stands back from his table. “I’m listening, Ethan.”
I lean forward, point at his toy soldiers, and explain.
After four hours’ sleep, with still no word from Barclay, my helmet chime awakens me to a gray dawn.
Ten scratch-and-yawn minutes later, Chubbi’s battalions are arrayed on line as he and I march to the front center of the formation, and then turn back to face his army of eight thousand.
Each foot soldier wears a simple leather helmet and carries in one hand a woven wicker shield that extends from his knees to his neck. In his other hand each man carries a short iron sword. Every man wears leather sandals, so the unit’s uniform pace isn’t slowed by barefoot troops. Basic stuff, but state of the martial art, here.
Each battalion’s commander wears a jacket over his armor and a plumed helmet, each colored to match the unit colors that flutter from a staff carried by a flag bearer at the commander’s side.
On a modern battlefield, a sniper or a hunter-killer drone would wax a target like that in a heartbeat. But in this particular iteration of the early Iron Age, where even the long bow remains to be invented, a slung rock constitutes long range weaponry. Battlefield visibility, so orders can be given and received, matters more. To say that Chubbi’s brand of military science isn’t rocket science overstates its sophistication.
Chubbi, like his commanders, wears a short, gold-emboidered jacket over his armor and a cloth cover over his helmet, for battlefield visibility. Befitting his status, his and only his battle dress is vibrant scarlet. It’s supposed to look regal, but as he stands beside me we look like an organ grinder with his monkey.
I snort inside my helmet and Chubbi looks up at me and frowns. “What?”
“Nothing. Let’s go.”
Chubbi exhorts his men with a raised sword wave, and then turns on his heel.
They reply with a rumbling roar, and the formation moves out at a deliberate and more-or-less coordinated walk beneath low, boiling clouds.
Thirty minutes later, we have crossed the ridge behind which we sheltered and we halt on the plain six hundred yards away from the Huppic army, which was early to the party and already is arrayed across our front.
I use the term “army” loosely. I max my optics and scan their lines. The counter in my visor display numbers the Huppics at four thousand. They’re half the strength of Chubbi’s army, just in simple numeric terms.
Modern armies factor in “force multipliers” to measure combat power. In this case it’s more appropriate to apply “force long division” to the Huppics. They all do have swords, but it’s downhill from there. Perhaps one in five carries some kind of shield, and none wear helmets. A third of them are barefoot. Nobody’s foaming at the mouth or snarling to get at us. In fact they look like they’d rather be elsewhere, which seems rational to me under the circumstances.
Finally, at the Huppic line’s center, I spot their commander, a bearded old man whose sole qualifications for command seem to be his age and the bright yellow sash around his waist.
My heart skips, because everyone around him is as tall as he is.
Finally, I spot the boy, Tiran.
He’s peeking out from behind the old man, and clinging to the yellow sash. But the fact that he’s there at the commander’s side, where I expected him to be, indicates that my message got through.
I look down at Chubbi, he nods, and I step off toward the Huppic lines.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
After fifteen paces, Chubbi’s boys get the rhythm and begin pounding their swords against their shields in time with my footsteps, but they hold their positions.
I look up and down the Huppic line. The shield beating’s so loud now that some of the shopkeepers wince every time my foot strikes the ground, but they hold their positions too.
Halfway to the Huppics, three hundred yards from each of the opposing armies, I stop, unsling my rifle, and trigger a full-auto magazine into the sky. The Huppics cringe. Then the thunderous echoes die and the plain falls silent, except for wind sighing through brush.
I cycle my suit’s diagnostics to make sure my beacon’s sending, and then I chin my audio back on. “Barc?”
Nothing.
“Barc, I got no pingback from the drone.” My heart pounds so hard that I imagine that inside my helmet it is as loud as the shield pounding was outside.
Tiran steps out from behind the Huppic commander and runs toward me. The Huppics stand fast.
After two hundred yards, the boy is close enough to Chubbi’s army that they can make him out.
A murmur rises in eight thousand throats behind me. When Tiran gets close enough that Chubbi’s soldiers can make him out, the murmur changes to laughter.
I look up at the scudding clouds. The meteorologic display pegs the ceiling at three hundred feet. Drones don’t home optically, so that shouldn’t matter. “Barc, I still got no pingback down here.”
Has Barclay abandoned me?
Tiran stops twenty feet from me, panting.
I pop my visor. “Well?”
He nods. “They think it’s stupid, but they say I may as well try.”
I look around for the drone, one more time, as if I could see through clouds, and then I drop my visor again and sigh. “Okay, let’s do this.”
The boy reaches into the sack at his waist, draws out a round stone, and then pockets it in the pouch of his leather sling.
“You sure you can hit me from there?”
He snorts. “I hit wolves every day at three times this distance.”
Pong.
The slingshot stone cracks off my helmet visor like a rock off a windshield, but both the visor and I are unaffected.
Beep.
“—Lieutenant, but I’ll keep sending ’til we get you retrieved. I say again—”
“Barc?”
“Ethan?” Pause. “Praise be! The lost is found!”
I was wrong. The stone’s impact did have an effect. It jostled a loose audio connector in my helmet back into place.
“Wait one, Barc. The lost is also busy.”
I stagger like a drunk, or, more accurately, like a mortally-wounded giant, and then flop onto my back.
I would have made a lousy dentist, but a hell of an actor.
Through my external audio I hear a collective gasp escape twelve thousand throats. Chubbi’s eight thousand being the loudest among them.
“Sir, what the hoorah’s going on down there?”
“Where’s the drone?”
“Thirty seconds out. You should start getting pingback momentarily, sir.”
Ping.
I stare up at the clouds and smile.
The boy bends over me, brows knit. “Did I hurt you?”
“I’m fine. Now it’s your turn to do the acting.”
He raises his replacement sword above his head, then hacks the ground alongside me.
“Now take off my helmet, and hold it up over your head.”
Among those watching, only Chubbi and the boy know that my helmet’s not my head.
So when the boy raises my helmet, the collective gasp from Chubbi’s side of the battle changes to a moan, and the Huppics cheer.
The drone’s pingback turns to solid tone, and it breaks through the cloud ceiling like a silver angel.
The boy stands back, my helmet in his hand. The drone hovers, four feet above me, senses that I’m prone, and the pick-up litter whines down from its belly.
The boy asks, “What do I do now?”
The truth is that I don’t know. I don’t trust Chubbi to keep his bargain that if the Huppic’s champion defeated his champion, he would leave them in peace. But his whole army just saw a skinny Huppic kid fell, and behead, a giant. That may tamp down Chubbi’s appetite to attempt genocide again. It may inspire the Huppics to resist if he does. If they can find a leader.
Barclay thinks the Old Testament’s a history book. I still don’t. And the planetologic axiom about like conditions producing like results on Earthlikes doesn’t apply to historical events, anyway, or so they say. But the way this little story fell into place makes me wonder. Regs or no regs, I’m proud of the bloodless way this turned out, and I think Barclay will be, too. I can probably persuade him to wipe a few records that would otherwise get me court-martialed.
I could climb aboard the drone, but I remain prone and let the drone’s casualty cradle slide beneath me and lift. This whole playlet from the slingshot to the angel whisking away the giant’s decapitated corpse has taken thirty seconds, but the twelve thousand witnesses will never forget it.
The story will be exaggerated in the retelling for centuries, down here. Only the boy knows the truth, and he can make of it whatever he wants. He can be anything he chooses now. A shepherd, this planet’s first dentist, or a warrior king.
As the drone’s belly doors close around me I say to the boy, “When you pick your name next year, try David.”
Robert Buettner’s bestselling debut, Orphanage, a 2004 Quill Award nominee for Best SF/Fantasy/Horror novel, was called the Post-9/11 generation’s Starship Troopers and has been adapted for film by Olatunde Osunsanmi (The Fourth Kind) for Davis Entertainment (Predator, I Robot, Eragon). Robert’s books have been translated into five languages, and he was a 2005 Quill nominee for Best New Writer. In 2011 Baen released Undercurrents, his seventh novel. He wrote the afterword for Baen’s re-issue of Heinlein’s Green Hills of Earth/Menace From Earth short story collection. Robert was a U.S. Army intelligence officer and National Science Foundation Fellow in Paleontology. As attorney of record in some three thousand cases, he practiced in the U.S. federal courts, before courts and administrative tribunals in no fewer than thirteen states, and in five foreign countries. (Six, if you count Louisiana.) He lives in Georgia with his family and more bicycles than a grownup needs.
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