Orphan's Alliance

by Robert Buettner

“A log, last I saw her.” A cruiser that had stopped rotating, and lay in space like a log, was usually dead. He cried, the console beside him clicked, clicked again, and dope sent him back to Shangri La.

  I looked around. The two of us lay in a narrow bay of the size common in cruiser infirmaries. Burn cases were normally segregated to minimize infection risk. If I was stacked alongside this kid, this flight was way overbooked. Or I was in worse shape than I felt. Or both.

  I looked down at my right hand. The fingertips were frostbite black, and white-taped to my palm, so my thumb rested above its button, was a Clikit. The bug-shaped wireless transmitter let a patient call up his own dope. It meant I was better off than the kid next to me, who got juiced automatically, but bad enough off that I needed Big Medicine.

  My left side began aching, and I ignored it for about an hour, though the wall ’Puter said it was three minutes. The ache metastasized into the conviction that someone had dumped a cutlery drawer into my rib cage, and now a linebacker in cleats was stomping on it. I gritted my teeth for another hour, which the ’Puter claimed was two minutes. Then I click–€o med my button, again and again, until life became just a bowl of peaches.

  Sometime later, Mimi’s face stared down at me.

  I said, “Will you marry me?”

  An orderly leaned between me and Mimi, so close that I could see the stubble on his chin, and said to Mimi, “Get in line, Admiral. He proposed to me an hour ago. I’m cutting his dosage.” A transparent IV bag swung across my field of vision, and I proposed to it.

  Twenty-two days after the Slugs greased Mousetrap, Emerald River settled in to parking orbit above Tressel. From conversations I overheard among the swabbies, the only thing more remarkable than the gentility with which Admiral Ozawa parallel parked was that she had backed Emerald River out of Mousetrap in one piece. It was impossible to slingshot a cruiser through a second jump without an intervening overhaul.

  I sat in a lounge of Emerald River’s infirmary, in a padded chair, wearing a peek-a-boo gown that barely reached my knees. I clutched a walkable medication stand that was tubed to my forearm. Across from me sat she who had done the impossible, crisp and perfect in Class A skirt and blouse. Her head was cocked, her arms and legs crossed. There was probably Visible Thigh, but I didn’t even notice.

  Mimi asked, “How’re you feeling?”

  “Bad.”

  “They tell me the ribs are mending. And the lung is regrowing nicely.”

  “It was the real one I had left, too.” I wheezed and consulted the medication timer on my walking stand. Two minutes until relief. Frostbite in the extremities, a dislocated shoulder, and “undifferentiated soft tissue trauma” rounded out the package. I said, “When you visited before, I said—”

  Mimi blinked. “Nothing anybody would remember.”

  I paused, and closed my eyes. “How bad was it? They won’t tell me squat here.”

  “They want you to concentrate on healing.”

  “Heal for what, Mimi?”

  She sighed. “I know. We lost Ike, Nimitz, and almost certainly Farragut. The Slugs control the Mousetrap. Emerald River won’t be jump-worthy again for months.”

  “There were survivors.”

  “Pilots and systems officers from orphan fighters. You’re the only floater we picked up.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut. Munchkin was gone. “What about Mousetrap?”

  Mimi shrugged. “We jumped a drone back into the Mousetrap last week. It hasn’t come back.”

  “Earth? Bren?”

  She shrugged again. “We’re five jumps out. Maybe we’ll know something in a couple months.” Maybe Ord and Howard and Earth were building and planning a comeback. Maybe Mousetrap would be just a setback. But maybe we here, on and above Tressel, were the last survivors of the human ›€€ererace. I longed for one of Howard’s hunches. Hell, I longed for Howard.

  I stared at the floor, and shook my head. “I should have done something.”

  “Stop feeling sorry for yourself.” Mimi’s eyes flared, and she pointed at the wall, in a direction that could have led light years to the Mousetrap, wherever in the crow-flies universe it actually was from us. “I abandoned my friends! I left our dead behind!”

  “You saved the strongest capital ship we have, maybe the only one, to fight another day. Dead and dumb wouldn’t have helped.” Swabbie rumor had it that Mimi would get decorated for her actions. That presumed there was somebody left to decorate her.

  She stared at the wall, with the fingers of both hands knit beside her thigh, and her eyes glistened. “Still. My heart feels like your lung.”

  My heart did too. “So, what do we do now?”

  Mimi pretended to scratch her nose so she could wipe her eyes. “Heal. Start over. Make it right.”

  Whatever was happening light years away, what had already happened on Tressel, one thousand miles below us, didn’t make healing easier.

  FIFTY-THREE

  I SAT TOGETHER with Jude in iron chairs beneath an arbor grown over with green vines that shaded us against the noon sun. A crystal pitcher of fern tea sat untouched on a table between us. Iridescent dragonflies buzzed in the near distance, above acres of cultivated, teal moss lawn.

  We sat silent for ten minutes, then Jude stretched. “Pretty place.”

  Sanitorium Iridine was Tressel’s finest convalescent center. Its grounds encompassed rolling countryside, five miles outside the Iridian capital. The main building looked like Versailles, and had escaped shelling during the war. The sun shone often, the staff anticipated a convalescent’s every need, and the chefs were terrific.

  I said, “I hate it.”

  He smiled. “That’s the broken ribs talking. You just hate the guest list.” True, between morphine withdrawal and “undifferentiated soft tissue trauma,” I was still as irritable as if I was wearing broken glass, four months after Mousetrap. But the fact was that if you were a Social Republican, or vouchsafed by one, you convalesced at Sanitorium Iridine, at government expense. If you were Iridian, your accommodations differed. Few medical facilities in the former Iridia had been rebuilt since the Armistice. But few Iridians needed them. Most chose to live in government-established relocation camps. The government assisted them in making the choice.

  Jude shot the cuffs of the crisp uniform shirt beneath his black jacket. “Jason, Sergeant Major Erdec’s killing was just the beginning. The Iridians have tried to kill the members of the Prime Ministrate six times in the last year. They’re animals.”

  “The Iridians, or the Iridian separatists?”

  “Who can distinguish fish in the sea?”

  I flexed my shoulder, and rolled my eyes. “You even talk like them.”

  “Now who’s prejudging? You know Audace Planck. You know me. But what do you know about Tressel since the Armistice?”

  An orderly peeked around the arbor, pointed at the pitcher, and raised his eyebrows. Jude shook his head. I visited with the orderly every day. He was a physician by training, an Iridian by ethnicity, and an outcast by the “I” medallion on his smock.

  “I know Nazis when I see them.”

  “This nation was chaos when the Social Republicans formed a government. The highways are already better than they were before the war. So’s the opera. A man can have a job, now, if he wants it, and his paycheck won’t bounce. His kids can go to school without dodging street gangs.”

  “Unless he’s Iridian.”

  “The restrictions are temporary. Every day, Social Republicanism makes us freer.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Who writes that crap? Joseph Goebbels? You didn’t get chauffeured out here to brainwash me. Something’s up.”

  “I didn’t. Ord and Howard are here.”

  I looked around.

  “In orbit. Aboard the Yorktown. It’s a new B-class. It floats a full Scorpion wing.”

  I sat forward in my chair. “Well?” The very fact that a ship other than the Emerald River still existed was like a Christmas present.
But it wouldn’t have just brought back Ord and Howard from Earth, it would have brought the first news since Mousetrap.

  “Other than—you know—the only other place the Slugs came through was Weichsel, again. The Powell and the Marshall fought them to a draw.”

  “With Starfires? It was just a feint, then.”

  Jude nodded. “Considering what happened at Mousetrap, that’s obvious.”

  “I really meant, you know . . .”

  The silent, two-ton scorpion lurking at every conversation between Jude and me was Mousetrap. If we didn’t talk about his mother, she wasn’t gone.

  Jude shook his head. “I’m commissioned in an allied army, now. I only hear through the grapevine.” We were speaking English, translators off, and it was a joke. Tressel wouldn’t have grapes for a few hundred million years.

  I grasped my chair arm, set my jaw, and stood. I was ninety percent recovered, physically. I grimaced, and Jude jumped up, took my elbow. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Leaving.” I pointed at the pistol he wore on a broad, polished leather belt. “Unless I’m shot attempting to escape.”

  It was Jude’s turn to roll his eyes. “Stop it, Jason. My driver’s packing your stuff right now. We’re meeting Ord and Howard in Tressia.” He fitted his black cap with two hands. Above its visor was £€€p ia cast silver crest, a skull, wrapped by a twisted scorpion.

  We walked across the spongy moss to his car, long, low, and black, with segmented chromed side pipes as thick as a woman’s thigh. Jude’s driver held the rear door open for us.

  Jude was the closest thing to family remaining to me in this universe. He was young, impressionable, and, so far as I knew, he functioned strictly as a military-to-military liaison between Earth and Tressel. He knew, I hoped, no more about the SR’s “social reforms” than any of us gleaned by comparing SR propaganda sheets to what trickled off the grapevine. The drive to Tressia would take two days, even over the SR’s admittedly slick new highways. The journey with Jude could provide what the afternoon-holo shrinks called “quality time” with my godson. Unless we spent it staring out windows in opposite directions.

  I pointed at the limo, then at his cap, and forced a smile. “Why do the bad guys always get the cool stuff?”

  He shrugged. “Clothes make the man?”

  I settled into the backseat, taking my weight on my right hand. “I hope not.”

  FIFTY-FOUR

  THE U.S. CONSULATE in Tressia had moved into bigger quarters since the Armistice, an antiseptic stone box among the sterile limestone boxes with which the Social Republicans had reconstructed Tressia’s rubbelized West End. The box was as neat and tidy as the fresh-paved boulevard beside which it rose, and it housed the ten staff I knew from before the Armistice, plus twenty more the new Ambassador had brought with him.

  He needed the extra bodies, because not only had he been upgraded to Ambassador, and the facility to Embassy, the place served as the United Nations Mission to Tressel, and the local office of the Human Union. International lip service notwithstanding, the facility was as American, and as ambitiously misnamed, as the World Series.

  The Ambassador met Jude and me in the lobby, grinning, and wearing no flak jacket. Social Republican society was orderly. So was Nazi Germany.

  I shook his hand and patted the shoulder padding of his suit jacket. “Congratulations on the promotion, Duck.”

  “You too.” Before I could ask what he meant, the Duck peeled Jude off, then waddled me to a conference room where Ord, Howard, and two colonels waited, seated around a polished stone table.

  After ten minutes of howdies, one colonel, wearing the striped-shield brass of the Adjutant General Corps, slipped a black velvet box the size of Howard’s cigarette pack from his briefcase. The colonel smiled as he said to me, “Sir, I was posted up here as Embassy staff military attaché. But my first job is to present you with these.” He flipped open the box. On the interior velvet lay three-star Lieutenant General’s brass.

  Most officers who survive to my age, possessed of my sparse formal training and of my lack of tact and common sense, were Majors. Events and misfortune had bounced me uphill from one exotic, screwball job to the next. Most recently, I had freelanced my simple, advisory assignment on Tressel, and then Bren, and t¦€bouhen Mousetrap, into a cluster hump of galactic proportion. To be fair, fate, the Slugs, and human stupidity had screwed things up more than I had.

  But handcuffs for me would have been more likely than promotion hardware. I frowned, and looked first to Ord.

  He said, “Consistent with your new assignment, sir.” He smiled, and an unsergeantly softness crinkled the skin around his eyes. “Congratulations.”

  Few Drill Sergeants saw a trainee of theirs, who barely graduated Basic, get a third star. For a moment, I got a lump in my throat.

  Then I narrowed my eyes at Howard. “What about Warden’s report? We lied to Congress.”

  Howard waved his hand. “Constitutionally, the executive branch has gotten away with worse in other wars. We worked matters out informally.”

  I stared at him. We both had taken an oath to support and defend the Constitution, not to weasel around it in the name of expedience. But the scourge of the universe was on mankind’s doorstep. I’d think about the Constitution tomorrow. I paused at my own thought. I was beginning to wonder whether the pressures of politics, of attacks from all sides, had driven Aud Planck down the slippery slope from soldier to Nazi. Was this how it started?

  The AG Colonel closed his briefcase and left.

  I looked back at Howard.

  He said, “We’re going back to Mousetrap. It’s your show.”

  Panic drowned my internal debate. “What?”

  Howard popped the conference table holo, loaded a chip from his briefcase, and summarized as the orders scrolled by. “A joint strike force of ten cruisers—”

  “We don’t have ten cruisers, anymore,” I said.

  “We will. And then some. Each cruiser will carry a full wing of Scorpions, and an embarked division.”

  I looked down at my hands. They quivered. Not with fear. They quivered the way, I supposed, a racehorse quivers in the starting gate.

  Mankind had come a long way back since the Blitz. We fought the Slugs on Ganymede with one ship, so crude that we painted the unfinished bulkheads during the trip out, with old-fashioned bristle brushes. We fought with cobbled-together antiques, and with a single division. After that, the Armada blew our ships into scraps. And we had kicked the Slugs off Bren with swords, last-century rifles, and armies of nomadic cavalry. For decades we had fought outgunned, outquicked, and outnumbered.

  I didn’t hate the Slugs. How could I demonize mindless blobs? I didn’t even fear them anymore, except in the way that I feared familiar but dangerous instrumentalities like chain saws or hot stoves. But the prospect of finally flat kicking the Slugs’ collective-minded ass made my heart pound.

  The strategic reason to embark divisions was sound. A fleet like Howard described could stand off and pummel a planetoid into pudding, but Mousetrap was valuable real estate to mankind, even as a fixer-upper. So, eventually, infantry«€€rib were going to have dig the Slugs out, hole by bloody hole, like we always did.

  Countries dispatch infantry for strategic reasons, and infantry believes in them, mostly. But I knew why I was going back, and so would every one of the kids who was going back with me, as soon as the first round flew. I asked Howard, “What about the people we left behind?”

  “The colonel will cover that.” Howard nodded to the remaining colonel, who wore the Intelligence rose and compass. Then Howard said, “Ten divisions is an Army. So you get the third star. It also evens your rank up with the Fleet Admiral.”

  It hadn’t been so long ago that I wasn’t fit to command one division. Now I was going to have responsibility for ten. I would need rank to hold my own with some aging, dirtside swabbie. “Does my counterpart have a clue what we’re up against?”


  “Absolutely. Specialized experience was a paramount selection criterion. Obviously it wasn’t maturity and management skills.”

  “Thanks, Howard.”

  “But Mimi has the whole package.”

  My jaw dropped even as my heart thumped. I hadn’t even seen Mimi in the four months since I downshipped from Emerald River to convalesce. But I had plenty of time to think about her, including parts of the package that Howard wasn’t talking about.

  I looked away, at the conference room’s granite wall. Mimi and I were obvious choices to command this operation. But mutual proximity could prove distracting. Not for Mimi, I supposed. The female libido is more easily controlled. At least my dates never seemed to have a problem.