Orphan's Alliance

by Robert Buettner

  Five years ago, once we deciphered the Slugs’ C-drive, Earthlings started dropping out of the sky onto the human populations of the Outworlds like Tressel, where the Slugs had transplanted them from Earth 30,000 years ago. For presumably backward long-lost cousins, the Outworlders took us in stride. In stride compared to the panic you would have expected, if you watched the alien invasion stories that Holowood cranked out in the years before the Blitz. Of course, after the Blitz, holos about aliens were no longer escapism.

  I don’t know whether “race memory” is real. But the Cultural Behaviorist Spooks said the Outworlds accepted the truth of a home world their ancestors had left millennia before because the story was already embedded in the Outworlds’ myths. And then, as the Spooks put it, our arrivals “validated the myth by empirically verifiable demonstration.” I suppose if Jesus landed on the White House lawn, even agnostics like me would accept him as soon as He validated His credentials with a miracle.

  At dawn tomorrow, Audace Planck and Tressen would be on the good side of a miracle courtesy of Earth’s politicians.

  By 2059 Earth standards, Tressel’s warring great powers, Iridia and Tressen, were incompetent, despotic, and as benign as rabid pit bulls. And each had its teeth sunk in the other’s throat. Earth’s policy makers had decided to stop the fight before both of them bled to death. Unfortunately, that meant one dog would get petted while the other got kicked.

  Earth needed allies to win the Pseudocephalopod War, and couldn’t be picky. If the Slugs flood hell, the politicians will send the devil a bucket.

  The daily rain began in a rumble, coursing in instant waterfalls down the already-sodden trench walls. Drops splattered into my helmet through my open faceplate, then ran icy down my neck, and puddled above the neck seal. Aud jumped down off the firing step, motioned me to follow, then sloshed fifteen yards further down the yard-wide trench. He stopped at a canvas flap, black with rot, that hung over a dugout doorway cut in the trench wall. Planck ushered me past him, and I ducked beneath a hand-lettered sign that read, “Infirmary.”

  We stepped into a leaking, lantern-lit, shoulder-high room. The roots of trees, long-since decapitated, whiskered its mud walls, and it stunk of gangrene, like an open sore on the world. The infirmary contained a camp table, rough racks tall enough to lift a body above the floor’s ankle-deep puddles, and nothing else vaguely helpful to the infirm. My eyes dilated to match the flickering light of a single lantern on the table, while they watered at the stench.

  Planck breathed through his mouth, then his eyes darted beneath bushy brows below his helmet. “I’m a soldier and a Tressen, Jason. So I appreciate what the Motherworld is doing for Tressen. But if your Motherworld had decided to get these kids out of these holes by tilting toward the Iridians, I might . . .”

  Planck stepped to a canvas-bagged field telephone on the table, its cable curling down into the mud, out into the trench, then back two thousand yards to staging clearings. There his infantry waited, behind three hundred tarps that hid three hundred electrobus-sized objects from rain and from prying eyes. He cranked the phone, then spoke into its handset. “Go.”

  My eyebrows flickered, and my heart skipped. A good adviser knows how much he doesn’t know. Aud knew his troops, his enemy, and his planet in ways I never could. So I kept my mouth shut, even though Aud had just launched the offensive that would decide the fate of this planet sixteen hours early. I also kept my mouth shut because it was a brilliant, if risky, stroke. Average generals don’t accelerate offensives to jump off during driving rain. That’s why average opponents get surprised by generals who aren’t average. I sighed. What happened next wasn’t going to be miraculous for too many GIs, on both sides of the wire. But it would be a miracle, nonetheles. Ie, nones.

  By the time the two of us ducked back out into the trench and the drumming rain, a growing drone thrummed behind our trench line like hell’s bumblebees.

  THREE

  WE BOTH SCRAMBLED onto the slick firing step, this time with our backs to no-man’s land, and peered toward the Tressen rear. Shapes glided out of the rain no faster than infantry could trot, like black ships parting fog. The Kodiaks’ engines shook the ground beneath our boots now, as the Earth-made hovertanks slid toward us.

  Audace Planck had lived up to his name again. The daring one was launching the biggest assault in three years when nobody expected it, foregoing artillery prep. His own troops and commanders might be more surprised than their enemy.

  I turned to Planck. “I know the rain cover will enhance surprise. But you and I were supposed to be with the lead squadron when the offensive jumped off.”

  He shrugged. “If subordinate commanders are trained properly, they take appropriate initiative. We’ll hitch a ride as your machines pass over this line.”

  I cocked my head. “Maybe.”

  Audace Planck had grasped the hovertank’s potential like Rommel had grasped Panzers. But he couldn’t grasp its nuts and bolts. Aud had seen his first Lockheed Kodiak sixty-one days ago. The ground effects and Nano’Puters that made a Kodiak tick were as black magic to a Tressen like him as the Slugs’ starship technologies were to me. Hitching a ride wouldn’t be easy.

  The Kodiaks slid toward us, riding cushions of downforced air, oblivious to the varied substrate below them, in this case swamp water, mud, and outcropped rock. Their wedged prow armor dripped rain, which their downdraft beat into ground fog, which swirled around their ventral skirting.

  In radar-absorbent midnight black, their cannon-snouted turrets hunting left then right, the hovertanks would seem like ghost elephants to the Iridians. Actually, Tressel’s transplanted humans couldn’t imagine elephants. Tressel’s evolution hadn’t yet produced mammals, or even land animals bigger than hogs. That would make bus-sized hovertanks all the more nightmarish to the GIs huddled in the opposing trenches.

  Kodiaks were largely overkill here. Iridia had no radar for a Kodiak’s outer shell to damp, no smart rounds for its electronic countermeasures to spoof. Tactical Observation Transports flitted above the onrushing formation, like tickbirds flitting above charging rhinos. But the TOTs intercepted no encrypted burst transmissions. Both armies were barely accustomed to the telephone. The Kodiaks brought to this party what armored formations from Hannibal’s elephants to Guderian’s Panzers brought: shock power and mobility. Here multiplied by a quantum technologic leap that would seem supernatural.

  The squad that had passed us sprinted back round the trench corner, eyes wide, pointing back at the oncoming Kodiaks. “General! The Iridians have got behind us with—”

  Planck halted them with a raised palm. “Stand fast. The Iridians have got nothing. Those are ours.”

  “Ours? Sir?” They stood, panting.

  One kid pointed at me. “They’re his!”

  Planck shook his head. “Every crewman in those vehicles is as Tressen as you are.”

  Planck told the truth. A Tressen GI was as tech-illiterate as a World War I Earth doughboy. But once the vehicle displays were translated and the Kodiak’s ’Puters learned voice commands in Tressen, a Tressen crew could roll and shoot a Kodiak well enough to whip the World War I-level army they were facing.

  So Earth’s strategists had decided to supply weapons, not soldiers. It would make for more cordial post-war relations with Tressel if us nice guys from the Motherworld didn’t have blood on our hands. At least, that’s what the diplomats told us.

  The infantry kids crept onto the quivering firing step, darting glances first at Planck and me, then at the hovertanks.

  The first Kodiak poked its snout over our trench, like a cloud across the sun. It blew a hurricane left and right, so violent that the kids grasped their strapped-on helmets.

  I leaned toward Aud and screamed, “Follow me!” Then I scrambled over the trench lip and sprinted for the Kodiak.

  Lockheed designed the Kodiak so nobody can board one when it’s moving. The outwash from under the skirting will blow a man away like Kleenex. And brea
k his legs if he isn’t wearing armor. But there’s a two-foot wide exhaust duct that exits the armor alongside the rear clamshell doors. It boils the upwash fog, because a Kodiak’s exhaust blows out hot enough to melt lead. But the duct blocks the outwash a little, and an access ladder is welded down the duct’s side.

  Lockheed could have designed in a safety cage to keep personnel away from the exhaust, but didn’t. Sane personnel wouldn’t risk third-degree burns and mangling by trying to board a moving hovertank, just to avoid walking. Would they? Lockheed’s designers never met an infantryman.

  In the day, I could spot a Kodiak ten yards, catch it up in twenty, and swing aboard with one hand, wearing a day pack.

  The Spooks claim Tressel gravity is .99 Earth normal and the air has more oxygen, but that can’t be right. Because after forty yards, I was wheezing and falling behind the hovertank. I lunged, caught the bottom rung with one hand, and got dragged through the rain like a fallen water skier. Finally, I got both hands on the rung, and boarded. Then I reached back, and pulled Aud up alongside me.

  We slipped and slid along the Kodiak’s Plasteel spine until we knelt behind the turret.

  Aud tugged goggles over his eyes, against the wind and rain. His sleeve flapped in smoking, black tatters where it had brushed the exhaust. Blistered skin showed on his forearm.

  I pointed at his arm and shouted, “You okay?”

  He glanced down and shrugged. “S’nothing.” Then, one fist round a handhold, he swung his free hand at the squadron of five Kodiaks flanking us, then at the Commander’s pennant stenciled yellow on our turret’s flank. “You caught us the lead vehicle of thed tehicle lead element, Jason.” He smiled. “Perfect.”

  I frowned, and peered behind us. “Yeah. Perfect.” Our own wire obstacles already lay behind us. Lanes had been cleared through our own wire, so Planck’s fresh infantry, advancing through their weary, startled buddies minding the trenches, could trot in the Kodiaks’ wakes. To our front, partly obscured by the turret, the Iridian concertina wire trembled in the rain, row stacked on row, like rusted tumbleweed.

  Beyond the Iridians’ wire lay their minefields, through which the second-wave Kodiaks would clear lanes by dragging lengths of heavy chain as they advanced, to detonate the mines they overflew.

  Thump.

  An Iridian cannon round screamed by five feet left of us, then burst somewhere in the Tressen rear.

  In response, electric motor whine vibrated the deckplates beneath us, as our Kodiak’s turret traversed toward the Iridian pillbox from which the round had flashed. The turret twitched, then locked, while the Kodiak’s cannon tube depressed.

  I chinned down my audio gain as Aud clapped one hand over one ear, while he gripped his handhold tighter with the other.

  Foom.

  Flame flashed sideways from the brake on our cannon’s muzzle like an incandescent mustache, and the Kodiak tried to buck us both off into the mud as it absorbed the cannon’s recoil. Before I could blink, the Iridian pillbox disappeared in an orange flash.

  A sound like pots and pans clanked beneath us. The hovertank slid on across the battlefield while it extracted the spent shell, stored it, selected the type of round its commander chose for his next shot, and reloaded its main gun.

  Sliders, except for their propulsion system, hadn’t evolved far beyond the tracked main battle tanks of the early 2000s. Why mess with success? Modern fire control systems demand of the gunner just that he point and shoot. If he loaded smart rounds, they even homed on their targets after he fired them. Even Planck’s gunners, who thought gas turbine power was high tech and ’Puters were witchcraft, routinely got first-round hits.

  The squadron flashed across the Iridian forward trenches, raking them with machine gun fire and flechette cannon rounds that peppered steel darts into the Iridians like old fashioned grapeshot.

  In all directions, Iridians died, but far more broke and ran. Which was the idea.

  This squadron’s commander, unaware that his boss rode topside, acted like a typical Planck subordinate, aggressive and independent. He knew his job was to split the Iridian line, and drive into the Iridian rear, disrupting communication, sowing panic, and igniting a rout. We bypassed and ignored thousands of fleeing Iridian infantry, who barely glanced up at us as they splashed through the driving rain. They looked back over their shoulders as they ran, at orange cannon flashes. They heard the tidal wave of our main formation, a mix of engine roar and screaming infantry, as it rumbled forward to drown them.

  Another Iridian cannon round splattered as harmlessly as a snowball off the prow armor of the slider on oun l sliderr right. Harmless to a Kodiak. Shrapnel buzzed around us like hornets and rattled off our slider’s turret.

  Eternad personal armor stops shrapnel like a roof stops snow. But Aud might as well have been wearing pajamas. In addition to the shrapnel hazard, one Iridian infantryman with the presence of mind to take a potshot at the commander of this offensive could still change this battle and this war.

  I pointed at the command hatch, up the turret’s sloping side, and shouted to Aud. “The plan was for you to be inside the slider, not on it!”

  Aud sniffed. “What would that say to the men about their commander?”

  “That he wasn’t a fool. Aud, this ‘follow me’ crap can be overdone.”

  He frowned, shrugged. “Perhaps.”

  Before we could rap on the hatch and talk our way inside, our lead element outran the Iridian retreat. We drove thousands of yards beyond the battlefront, so deep into the Iridian rear that we might as well have been Iridians. Around us was just tree-studded swamp, dim and sizzling with late-afternoon rain. The unfriendly fire that had threatened Aud became irrelevant.

  But on a battlefield where one side possesses overwhelming superiority, unfriendly fire can be the least of a GI’s problems.

  FOUR

  THE SQUADRON HALTED in a clearing, dispersed, and the sliders sank down on their skirting, rumbling at idle. Aud and I peered back through the rain and listened to the cannon thunder behind us, while he tugged his canteen from his belt and offered it to me. “A toast to victory, I think.”

  I shook my head. “You save yours. There’s a water nipple inside my helmet. But you’re right about victory. Your formations will have to regroup, eventually. But I wouldn’t advise you to slow down before nightfall.”

  Planck nodded, smiled. “Your Eisenhower said ‘relentless and speedy pursuit is the most profitable action in war.’ I enjoyed the books. There is so much we can learn from you about war.”

  Antique paper books made great gifts for Tressens. FlatReaders creeped them out. “Learn about peace, too, Aud.”

  His smile faded, and he shook his head. “I’m a soldier. The politicians will make the peace.”

  “We had a war a lot like this one, a hundred fifty years ago. After it, our politicians made a peace so harsh that we had a second world war twenty years later. It made the first one look like a pie fight. Eisenhower entered politics after that one.”

  He nodded. “With malice toward none, with charity for all.”

  “Different president. Different war. Good idea.”

  A cannon round whistled from the battle behind us, invisible in the low clouds overhead. It struck in the swamp a hundred meters beyond us, geysering tree trunks and brown water.

  Aud frownedcon„. “My gunners don’t understand your guns. A stray round.”

  A Kodiak’s main gun was typically used for line-of-sight, direct fire, when it fired rounds that pierced other armored vehicles or targets like pillboxes. But a squadron could easily function like an artillery battery, lobbing high-explosive shells like nine-iron shots at unseen target coordinates called to it by a spotter.

  I frowned, too. “Or a ranging round.”

  Hair stood on my neck. Old soldiers survive by seeing things that can’t be seen. A neophyte artillery spotter, in the confusion of battle, might phone in wrong map coordinates for a target he was observing. A simple m
istake. He might then mistake another, unrelated detonation for the first, ranging round we just witnessed impact a hundred yards to our front. Also simple. He might then direct all five tubes of a Kodiak squadron to drop their aiming point a hundred yards and fire for effect. He would think his adjustment was going to bring the Big Rain on top of the target he was watching. But, in fact, he would be bringing fire down directly on us. Expect the worst from the gods of war, and they will seldom disappoint you.

  I flicked my eyes to the sky in time to see a flash of motion as the rounds rained from the low cloud that ceilinged the clearing.

  When those high-explosive rounds burst on the ground, or in the air above us, they might damage the Kodiaks some. But troops in the open, like Aud, and even me in hard shell armor, would be concussion-hammered like flank steak, then shrapnel-gutted like sushi.