Orphan's Alliance

by Robert Buettner

  He turned his head to the sky, as a sprinkle of stars winked through a break in the clouds, then he stopped chuckling. “You would lie to me, if it was your duty, Jason.” He turned, and poked the fire with a stick. “You brought your machines to us across the stars. A great favor to Tressen. But every favor has a price.” It wasn’t a question, but a statement.

  “Aud, now it’s my turn to defer to the politicians.”

  “I’m not asking the price. Haggling is for politicians and pimps. I just don’t understand why a world so different that its scorpions are as small as pickles cares about Tressel.” He pointed at the scorpion he had killed to save my life. “You owe me that much truth.”

  “I do.” I nodded, scooped a handful of pebbles, and tossed them in my palm. “The Slugs brought your ancestors from Earth to Tressel because some of the rocks here on Tressel fell from the stars. More accurately, they fell from the boundary layer where this universe ends and another begins.”

  “This Cavorite your friends spoke about.”

  “A name we borrowed from an old bedtime story about men who flew to our moon. Cavorite let the Slugs, and now lets us, fly to the stars. Cavorite’s poison to the Slugs, but not to humans. Thirty thousand years ago, the Slugs realized that. So they exported Earthlings to mine it for them. When the Slugs exhausted the meteoric Cavorite from Tressel, they didn’t need to use your planet or your ancestors any t wncestormore.”

  Aud frowned. “Now it’s the Motherworld’s turn to use us?”

  I let out a breath, “It’s not like—”

  Out in the water, a black shape rose, glistening, and ghosted toward us. The eurypterid spidered onto the bank, water coursing silver off eight rear limbs, while its front limbs arced above its carapace like tree boughs. The beast’s forward-most mandibles probed the body of its dead cousin, and paused. Then it slithered up over the corpse like a pulled scarf. Twenty feet long if it was an inch.

  Click. Aud cocked his pistol.

  My heart pounded.

  The big predator curled around, then grasped, the carcass in the mud. The dead female weighed easily a ton, but within three heartbeats, the bigger one had dragged it back into the water like a laundry bag, leaving behind only furrows in the mud.

  I gulped, then turned to Aud. “Tell you what. Let’s build a bigger fire.”

  EIGHT

  OVER THE NEXT SIX HOURS, eight scorpions cruised around our clearing, just beyond the firelight. One rushed us, forelimbs flailing. Aud pumped six rounds into the monster, until it staggered away, then collapsed into a shadowed heap just beyond the fire’s glow.

  Aud fingered his empty ammunition pouch. “That meat will distract them for a few hours, but I only have two rounds left. Jason, we won’t last the night.”

  Even on Earth, the firewood-per-night rule of thumb is figure all that you think you need, then gather five times that much. An hour before dawn, we had hacked and burned all the oilwood we could reach, and the fire had burned low enough that we could hear monsters respirating just beyond the firelight.

  A chugging noise echoed in the distance, and swelled. Then we heard shots, and shouts.

  With my night passive, I saw them before they saw us. “Aud, it’s a tracked vehicle with Iridian markings.” It lurched, slow and clumsy even for an Iridian vehicle, and it clanged and rattled like a frontier tinker’s wagon. “I can see three crew.”

  He smiled. “I don’t have to see. I can hear. Pots and pans banging. It’s an Iridian field kitchen transporter. The company messes were so far in the Iridian rear that their own infantry ran right by them. The field kitchen crawlers are so slow that these stragglers are just getting to us now. The Iridians assign new recruits as cooks. Not blooded infantry.”

  A yellow flash bloomed, a rifle crack echoed through the lycopods, then somebody swore.

  I raised my eyebrows. “They sound blooded to me.”

  “Probably a scorpion wandered close to the crawler. Veterans wouldn’t waste a bullet. They know a crawler’s big enough, and loud enough, that scorpions won’t bother it.”

  Ten minutes later, the crawler had clanked within shoutire „ng distance.

  “Hello the fire! Friend or foe?”

  Aud called back, “We wish to negotiate.”

  Pause.

  I upped my magnification. A kid stood on the crawler’s deck, in stained cook’s whites. He steadied himself with one hand against a rack hung with pots that swung back and forth to the chug of the crawler’s engine. A white headcover, probably a bunched chef’s toque, peeked out beneath his crooked helmet. I could see him, but he couldn’t see me.

  He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Negotiate what?”

  Aud yelled, “Your surrender. I’m Brigadier Audace Planck, Acting Commander of the First Expeditionary Army of Tressen.”

  The crawler stopped, and chugged at idle, fifty yards from us. The kid laughed and called, “Quicksilver himself? Here in the mud? Then I’m the Brigadier of the Sixty-Eighth Iridian Fusiliers! You surrender, or we’ll surround your position and bombard it.”

  “You’re a single unarmed crawler. Not one of the three of you has ever fired a round in combat, you’re lost, and you’re running for your lives. By noon tomorrow the Tressen offensive will roll over you and blow you and that crawler to bits.” Aud handed me his pistol, and whispered. “I can’t see them, but can you put one round on their front plate?”

  Rank and experience aside, we were two middle-aged men sharing one pistol and two bullets. We were facing an armored vehicle, and three enemy soldiers with rifles. Yet Audace Planck was demanding their surrender. The daring one indeed.

  I dialed up my optics, sighted, then squeezed one off. The bullet struck the iron crawler one foot below the kid’s boots, and spit an orange spark as it sang off into the night. Now we were down to one bullet.

  The kid grabbed his helmet with one hand as he leapt down inside the crawler, swearing.

  Pause. Whispering.

  From inside the crawler, the kid yelled, “What if we do surrender?”

  “Lay your rifles on the top deck where we can see them. We’ll board your crawler and wait out the night with you. When my troops overtake us tomorrow, you’ll be treated well. You have my word.”

  “You’re really him? Quicksilver?”

  Beyond the firelight, a huge, multi-legged shadow lumbered. Too close.

  I shouted, “It’s him. Hurry up.”

  “Who are you?”

  I turned to Aud and shrugged. Officially, I didn’t exist, but the fiction wasn’t going to survive any better than we would if we didn’t get inside that crawler in the next ten minutes. I called out into the darkness. “I’m the marksman who put a round one foot below your boots. The next shot goes one foot below that white hat you’re wearing under your helmet.”

  A half hour later, Aud and I sat inside a rattling iro>

  The ranking corporal, the negotiator, removed his helmet, fluffed his toque, and held out a bread loaf to his captors. “Go ahead. One thing we have is food.”

  Planck tore off a chunk, chewed, then smiled. “Extraordinary!”

  The kid shrugged. “My family are bakers.”

  Planck raised his eyebrows and smiled. “Where?”

  “Veblen.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  “My father lost his leg in the shelling. If I don’t come home, my mother won’t be able to rebuild the shop alone.”

  Planck reached across the crawler, and patted the kid’s knee, “Don’t worry. This war’s over for you. This war will be over for everyone in a month.”

  By twenty minutes after sunrise the next morning, the scorpions had retreated to deep water, or so Aud assured me. We ran a white cook’s apron up the crawler’s signal mast, then we all hid twenty yards away, in the weeds, in case some Kodiak plinked the crawler anyway.

  Thirty minutes later, a surprised Kodiak squadron commander saluted the hell out of Planck, then detached one of his sliders to speed Planck,
me, and our prisoners to Planck’s constantly-displacing HQ.

  We rejoined Planck’s staff outside a quick-pitched canvas tent, sides rolled up, which sheltered map tables and signals gear. There were smiles and handshakes all around. Then the staff officers got back to the business of winning the war.

  Erdec, Planck’s command sergeant major, who was as gray, leathery, and professional as Ord, stayed with us and with the three kid cooks. So did an Intel captain.

  The captain, dark-eyed, intense, and, by his service ribbons combat-blooded, waved his sidearm at the kids. “What about these three, General?”

  Planck hardly glanced up from the morning reports his sergeant major handed him, drawing his index finger across a line here and there as he read. “No need to interrogate cooks, Captain. But get their bread recipe. Then this war’s over for them.”

  Once the captain marched the three kids away, I said to Planck, “Last night, you didn’t say much when that kid said he was from Veblen.”

  Planck’s sergeant major, Erdec, said, “Veblen sits on an island bounded by two rivers. Every war over the past three centuries, the winner took Veblen. And Vebleners changed citizenship. My grandmother called herself Iridian. My parents called themselves Tressen. But when the war started, Veblen was part of Iridia.”

  I said, “But you’re in the Tressen army.”

  Erdec shrugged, smiled. “I’m a soldier. I’m a Veblener. For a Veblener, nations come and go.” He sighed. “One night, six months into the war, Tressen rolled 6,000 artillery pieces up on the plain outside Veblen, then pounded the towe sunded tn to rubble while the residents slept in their beds. The idea was to break the will of the Iridian people. And to retaliate for Iridian atrocities.”

  “Oh.”

  Planck said, “What you said, Jason—that we have to learn to keep a peace? It starts here. Now. This has been a dirty war.”

  “They all are,” I said.

  Planck nodded. “Those boys, and prisoners like them, can break the cycle. If we send them home with memories of decent treatment.” He shrugged. “That’s my contribution to politics.”

  Planck handed the morning reports back to Erdec, and their fingers touched. The older man whispered, “I thought we had lost you, sir.”

  Planck clapped his sergeant major on the shoulder, and grinned. “Me, lost? I bet you thought so. You told us in basic training that the most dangerous thing in the army is an officer with a map.”

  Erdec smiled. “That was long ago, General.”

  Three pistol shots rang close by.

  Planck’s brow furrowed.

  Sergeant Major Erdec’s brow furrowed, too.

  Then Planck’s eyes widened, he spun, and dashed around the command tent.

  I followed, as Erdec, limping like the old soldier he was, followed me.

  The dark-eyed intelligence captain stood fifty yards from us, alongside a shallow ditch, staring down at three piles of white cloth. He held his pistol down at his side, and it smoked.

  When I got closer, I recognized, sprawled on the ground, the baker’s boy from Veblen, and his two friends. Cheek-down in the mud, each boy’s eyes stared, and each bled from a bullet hole in the back of his head.

  Planck reached the captain first. “What did you do? What the hell did you do?”

  The captain stared at Planck. “What you told me to. End their war—”

  Planck lunged at the captain, and twisted the pistol from the man’s hand.

  The captain stiffened. “We’re moving too fast to process prisoners! They were just cooks.”

  Planck grabbed the captain by his lapel, pulled him nose-to-nose, then stabbed the pistol barrel into the captain’s cheek. “They were children!”

  The captain’s eyes widened.

  Erdec shook his head, and reached toward Planck. “General—”

  Rain ran down the captain’s forehead, into his eyes, until he blinked.

  Planck’s gun hand quivered, and so did the captain.

  Planck shoved him away, flung the captain’s pistol to the mud next to the three dead cooks, and stared down at them. “Sergeant Major, republish the Ge clublish neral Order regarding humane treatment of prisoners.” Planck looked up at the captain, and his gray eyes burned into the man. “Place the captain, here, under arrest. Confine him. Advise the Advocate General to prepare charges.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll arrange a burial detail, as well.”

  When Aud Planck and I stood alone again, he rubbed his forehead. “We leveled this dead boy’s hometown and we didn’t bat an eye. Yesterday, we cremated a whole squadron of our own troops and to their families all I will be able to write is that I’m sorry. Is what that captain just did really so much more wrong?”

  “It is where I come from, Aud.”

  He sighed. “I suppose you’re looking forward to going home, Jason.”

  It was my turn to sigh. “Not exactly.”

  NINE

  TWO MONTHS OF SWAMP-CROSSING, two hours of surface-to-orbit blasting and one day of .66 light-speed cruising later, I tidied up the paperless paperwork alongside the two members of the Tressel expedition I knew best.

  Another part of the expedition was the four hundred armor-branch techs beneath us, scurrying over the hovertanks’ hulls like camouflaged ants. The techs had performed all maintenance the Tressens couldn’t. The last part of the expedition, which remained behind on Tressel, was twenty State Department civilians, ten each in the Tressen and Iridian capitals, who were to establish consulates, and four contract security guards.

  My Command Sergeant Major, my Intelligence Liaison, aka my resident Spook, and I sat in a bubble-shaped clear plex cab that hung from ceiling tracks as it rolled twenty feet above two hundred seventy-six gently pre-owned Lockheed Kodiaks. The hovertanks were packed hull-to-hull in the football-field long centerline bay of U.S. Space Force Heavy Cruiser Dwight David Eisenhower. The Kodiaks looked like factory-fresh Electrovans, aboard a wet-bottom freighter bound from China to the Port of Houston, rather than aboard a warship.

  Semantically, the Ike was no warship. She was re-christened Human Union Consular Vessel Charity for the duration of the Tressel Expedition. The diplomats we left behind on Tressel notwithstanding, bludgeoning the Tressens and the Iridians to Armistice at cannon point had involved nothing consular and little charity.

  As we glided above each Kodiak in the loadmaster’s pod, the pod’s downlooking sensor recorded the ID code of the hovertank, which was etched into its turret top.

  Ord pointed at the running tally winking on the pod’s screen. “Two lost to enemy action. Five to friendly fire.”

  I looked away and blinked.

  Ord continued, “The remaining sixteen units couldn’t be recovered, due to operator error or mechanical fault, and were verified to have been destroyed in place, per orders.”

  “So my pension remains intact, Sergeant Major?”

  Ord smiled. “As long as all of0%"„ these get back home with us.”

  An officer’s most solemn responsibility is his mission. As solemn, though barely in second place, is his responsibility to his soldiers. But an officer is also directly responsible to the army, and indirectly to the taxpayers, for hardware under his command. Even a modern infantry platoon’s equipment costs more than its lieutenant could earn in three lifetimes. For me, just handwriting the total MSRP of the stuff I’ve signed for over the years would cramp my hand.

  In the pod’s jump seat behind us, Howard Hibble leaned forward, sucking nicotine out of a stop-smoking lollipop until his wrinkled cheeks cupped inward like deflated balloons. “Actually, we’ll get home before them.”

  I gritted my teeth. “You set up a pony? And didn’t tell me?” Howard’s rank was colonel, because the army didn’t have a rank of witch doctor. We had served together since the Blitz, when I was infantry’s most expendable trainee and he was an extraterrestrial intelligence professor turned intelligence captain.

  Now I outranked Howard, but he didn’t report to me
. He reported up through the Spook chain of command until it disappeared from public view somewhere around the National Security Adviser level. That gave him the back-channel clout of a Washington lobbyist, coupled with a weasel streak most lobbyists envied.

  Howard shrugged. “I thought you’d be pleased. It beats the Local.”

  “The Local” was how most soldiers, goods, services, and people traveled among the planets of the Human Union. The Local was slow. If you could call travel at two-thirds the speed of light slow.

  Mankind had reverse-engineered enough Slug technology to build starships that could jump Temporal Fabric Insertion Points just like a Slug Firewitch. But even a Firewitch had to heal itself after the structural stress of slingshotting past a collapsed star whose gravity was strong enough to tack folded space together.