Orphan's Triumph

by Robert Buettner

  With Bill busy, I slipped up to the Duck’s corner office on the top floor.

  I buzzed myself in the Duck’s side door, bypassing his outer office. His inner sanctum was small for his GS grade, plain-furnished with a set of leather desk accessories he had toted over half of Earth and a smaller fraction of the Milky Way. He looked up from his screens and smiled. “Jason!” As he waddled around his desk and shook my hand, he frowned. “What happened? Where’s Jude? What about Planck?”

  “They’re both fine. The rest is complicated. Diplomatic progress with Zeit?”

  The Duck motioned me to a chair as he dropped back into his, crossed his ankles on his desk, laced his fingers behind his head, and sighed. “They’re slow-playing. They don’t know what we want, but they know we aren’t going to offer anything for it that would strengthen them relative to us. They don’t need much from us.”

  “While we wait for Zeit’s permission to mine Cavorite, the Slugs could fry ten planets, including this one. But we have a cruiser in orbit that could fry Zeit first.”

  The Duck swung his feet to the floor and leaned across his desk toward me. As he spoke, he poked his finger into his desk blotter. “We’ve been through this together before, Jason, on Bren. We’ve both been ordered to make a deal, not a war. If a public servant can’t carry out an order, his option is to resign, not to whine. You’ll never quit. So quit whining!”

  “That’s what I thought you’d say.”

  I reached inside my jacket, removed a paper sheaf and pen, signed the top sheet, then slid the sheaf across the desk.

  The Duck poked it like it was a dead rat. “What’s this?”

  I pointed at page one. “Acceptance of Relief and Retirement. Pre-signed by my boss. If retiree is posted outside the continental United States, Copy A of this document may be delivered to any United States Embassy or similar facility for transmittal to the Army Officer Personnel Directorate without charge for postage. Retiree’s separation will be backdated to the date of delivery to said facility.”

  The Duck snorted. “Jason, that just fixes your pension pay start date. You can’t quit.”

  “You just dared me to.”

  “We’re at war. You could be shot for desertion.”

  I reached beneath my jacket again, unholstered Ord’s.45, laid it on the Duck’s desk blotter, then stood back, hands on hips. “All you have to do is cock it. Then shoot me.”

  The Duck’s eyes bugged.

  I unbuttoned my jacket and stuck out my chest. “Go ahead!”

  “They were right to retire you. You’re nuts.” The Duck stared at the pistol in front of him with his palms on his desktop for thirty seconds. Then he sighed and closed his eyes. “Okay. What do you want?”

  “Recognize me as spokesperson for the legitimate government of Iridia.”

  “Jason, there is no Iridia. Zeit’s made it part of Tressen.”

  “Read the Armistice. Zeit’s police powers over Iridia are temporary until the indigenous government of Iridia chooses to restore itself.”

  “Jason, the indigenous government of Iridia can’t choose jack. The Armistice became a dead letter when Zeit’s goons killed the last Iridian duke a year ago.”

  I walked to Duck’s coatrack, tugged his coat off it, and chucked it at him. “Let’s take a walk.”

  The Duck covered his face with his palms and muttered through them. “ France. For this, I turned down France.” Then he stood and walked toward the door, slipping an arm into a coat sleeve.

  “Almost forgot!” I raised my index finger, then leaned across the Duck’s desk and scooped Ord’s pistol off the blotter.

  As we got to the office door, I fished an object out of my trouser pocket.

  I tapped the pistol’s clip back into its butt while the Duck stared at it, jaw dropped.

  I shrugged. “I’m not nuts. But you might have been.”

  Once the Duck gave the orders, it took only an hour for Bill the Spook to shuffle us out of the consulate and set us loose in the old town, free of Ferrent escort.

  FIFTY

  SUBVERSIVES IN DOWNTOWN TRESSIA were as likely to seek out the tenements on the north side as antelope were likely to seek out lion dens. The Ferrents knew it and ignored the neighborhood. That was why the gray three-story apartment building to which I led the Duck overlooked the departure point for “pioneers” bound north.

  We paused on the building’s grimy stoop and looked back at barbed-wire enclosures filled with gray Tressen motor coaches waiting to be filled with lines of grayer people.

  “Just one smart suborbital down the Interior Ministry chimney, Duck? One?”

  He gritted his teeth as he stared at the coaches. “Don’t push the cuteness, Jason. Just show me whatever magic beans you’re peddling.”

  In the tenement’s stairwell, we passed an old man, head down, mopping the stone first-floor landing. As we passed, he moved his bucket and its rattle echoed upward.

  The second sentry’s hand was inside his jacket when we stepped to the door of the first apartment on the second floor.

  Pytr opened the apartment door while he held a pistol in one hand, an antique weapon even by Tressel standards.

  Aud and Jude stood in front of us, both in threadbare civvies, like defendants in the dock. Aud leaned on a cane.

  The Duck nodded to Jude. “Good to see you safe.” He made a little bow to Aud Planck. “Chancellor.”

  Aud made a smile. “Your courtesy is overstated, Consul. We both know there’s only one chancellor now. And I hope you believe that I am as appalled at what you can see from the stoop of this building as you are.”

  Jude said, “And so am I.”

  The Duck looked from Jude to Aud, and back to me. Then he shook his head. “Gentlemen, it doesn’t matter whether I believe you or whether I think you’re both gallows-converted hypocrites.”

  Both Jude and Aud drew back like they had been slapped. I stepped across and stood with my godson and my friend. Aud Planck had risen from his sickbed to save my life-yet again. He might have been too trusting, but he was no Nazi.

  The Duck pointed toward the barbed-wire pens beyond the building. “The reason it doesn’t matter is because that abomination out there is the internal affair of a duly constituted government recognized by the Human Union.” The Duck turned to me. “Jason, I’ve bent plenty of rules for you over the years. I’ve bent plenty more before you ever got here, for the sake of my own conscience. But I can’t pretend that Chancellor Planck here is the successor to the legitimate government of Iridia. The union won’t play king maker between squabbling generals. Which is what this looks like, no matter what my conscience tells me.”

  I crossed my arms. “Are you done?”

  The Duck crossed his arms. “Are you?”

  “Perhaps he is, Consul. But I am only beginning.” Celline stood in the doorway that led to the apartment’s second room.

  Clothes may not make the woman, but they make a duchess if she looks the part to start with. Celline was so pure-blood royal on both sides of her family tree that her rank survived her father’s death. Chin high, Celline, fifty-seventh Inheritrix of the Duchy of Northern Iridia, and last surviving successor to the common throne of the Unified Duchies of Iridia, lit the gritty tenement. Her business suit was the color of a fawn in autumn, and her blond hair was drawn back so that her eyes looked bigger and greener. Her jewels of rank, as if she needed any, were what the netbloids would call understated, a tiara set with grape-sized emeralds that matched her eyes.

  I held my breath, partly because, well, Celline merited it. Partly because we couldn’t produce jack squat in the way of credentials if the Duck didn’t believe Celline was the duchess.

  The Duck stared at her.

  My heart pounded.

  “Your Grace favors her mother.” The Duck bowed.

  I exhaled.

  Celline cocked her head and smiled. “You are too kind. Have we had the pleasure?”

  The Duck didn’t have to work
at smiling. “I would surely remember, Your Grace.”

  I leaned toward Jude and whispered, “She’s really good at this.”

  He whispered back, “I liked her better barefoot.”

  After ten minutes of diplomatic slap and tickle, Celline turned and motioned to two vacant chairs in the room’s corner. “Sit with us, Mr. Muscovy.” After they sat, she crossed her legs, then knit her fingers over her knee. “Consul, we must inquire as to the union’s intentions as a cosigning guarantor of the Armistice.”

  The Duck cocked his head. “Your Grace?”

  “We are not rabble. We are the duly constituted government of Iridia. We no longer require Tressen assistance to maintain order. We intend to expel Tressen by such force as required, as is our right.”

  The Duck nodded. “That is your right. That is what the union agreed to.” He glanced across the room, where deaf old Pytr stood guard at the window with a single-shot pistol. “But I’m not authorized to alter the current-ah-imbalance of force.”

  Celline shook her head. “We’re not asking for star-ships, Mr. Muscovy. Or for unrewarded charity.” Celline leaned toward the Duck and gave him a look that, I suspected, had been the last thing many a sea monster had seen. “Give us the tools to defeat these butchers and we’ll give the union Cavorite to choke on.”

  A smile and a tiara will get a girl only so far, even with a man of conscience. In the subsequent negotiation, the Duck insisted on Cavorite first, within a month, tools of revolution after. The Spooks would prime the pump with a sprinkling of weapons, communications gear, and intelligence dope. America had handed out under-the-table party favors like that since the Cold War. But there would under no circumstances be any military or Spook hands-on participation, not even real-time intelligence if things heated up, except to haul away Cavorite when and if my new boss and her “reformed government” delivered.

  Considering that my new boss’s negotiating muscle consisted of maybe a double handful of resistance fighters as fierce as old Pytr, we shouldn’t have expected any more generous terms. The Duck had no choice but to hedge his long-shot bet, which he was placing with his employer’s chips. If we failed, the Human Union needed to be able to plausibly deny connection with these misguided rebels when it knuckled under to the RS, and to knuckle under fast.

  So job one was to deliver Tressel’s weapons-grade Cavorite to the Human Union within a month. But a planet’s a big place, and I didn’t even know where to start. However, I knew who did.

  FIFTY-ONE

  WITH THE SPOOKS’ HELP, I met Howard Hibble the next day, at the Tressen National Museum of Natural History, a logical place for a person of Howard’s peculiar predilections to visit. I found him in a basement storage room that reeked of formaldehyde.

  Howard was standing on tiptoe, reading labels of shelved specimens, when I closed the door behind us and locked it.

  Howard said, “What a great place! Couldn’t you just spend the day?”

  “Howard, we have twenty minutes before your Ferrent tail figures out that isn’t you upstairs in the library.”

  Howard reshelved a jar packed with trilobites the size of kosher dills, then sighed. “That’s not the only clock that’s running.”

  “What have you heard?”

  “Nothing. That’s the problem. We have no idea how the Pseudocephalopod will use its new Cavorite. Our best alternative is to do unto It before It does unto us.”

  “Which we want to help you with.”

  “We?”

  “I’m retired now.”

  “I heard that. They say the dental plan’s awful.”

  “I take it that the Tressel Cavorite fall didn’t land in the middle of nowhere. If it had, you would have just snuck down here, mined what you needed, and snuck away. Without telling the Tressens a thing.”

  Howard’s eyes widened. “You think I’d do that?”

  “Not think. Know.”

  He sighed. “The Joint Intelligence Directorate wouldn’t let me.”

  “Assuming we can deal with the fall’s location, wherever it is, what will it take to get the meteorites out?”

  “Weapons-grade Cavorite behaves like it’s less dense even than the Stone Hills Cavorite we mine on Bren. Each meteorite’s as light as a tennis ball, so they don’t burrow or burst on impact, like nickel-iron meteorites would. The fall took place forty thousand years ago, give or take. But the environment around it is static. We estimate that forty-two percent of the bolides remain at or near their individual points of impact, exposed on the surface. We designed these terrific ’bots that would scuttle around the surface and harvest them like tomatoes.”

  “Where are your ’bots now?”

  “ Pasadena.”

  “ California?”

  “Actually, there’s just the prototype. It cost as much as a main battle tank.”

  I sighed. “Could people just go around and pick the rocks up off the ground?”

  “That would be simpler, wouldn’t it?”

  “How long would that take?”

  He shrugged. “Depends on how many pickers you have. If you had a thousand pickers, a week or so. Once the bolides were gathered to a central point, one Scorpion could fly in, pick up the whole kaboodle, and be gone inside an hour.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “That’s too easy.”

  Howard sighed. “I haven’t told you where the Cavorite fell.”

  FIFTY-TWO

  TWO WEEKS LATER, pounded by a two a.m. downpour, Aud Planck and I carried cheap civilian suitcases down an alley in Tressia’s old town. Despite healing accelerants, Aud gritted his teeth as he disguised his limp, more so because he, like me, had to pretend his suitcase was no heavier than a normal traveler’s valise.

  From other compass points, Jude and Celline, and six other groups of two, converged on our destination, with the modest objective of saving the human race and the more local benefit of beginning the end of Republican Socialism on Tressel.

  We rounded a street corner and bent forward into the wind that drove the cold rain. Down the cobbled pavement of the dark street we entered snaked a double line of people bent like us, bundled like us, and carrying luggage like us.

  We slipped into the line, and a shivering woman, clutching a scarf around her head, leaned out to peer toward the line’s head. “How much farther?”

  A chubby soldier alongside the line motioned her back into her place. “Not far. Not far now. These coaches will be crowded, but when you get off, there will be stoves where you can dry your wet clothes.”

  I leaned toward Aud. “What a crock!”

  Aud shook his head and whispered, “Jason, the coaches just run a few hours north, to the Ice Line. That’s where it begins to dawn on these people. It’s brilliant. Not even these soldiers know what’s really going on.”

  Neither that guard nor any of the other guards spaced every ten yards along the dutifully shuffling lines glanced at Aud or at me. We shuffled past them with all the others, and on toward the coaches. Breaking out of a death camp might be hard, but breaking in was a can of corn.

  The coaches had their seats removed, to hold more of us, and we shivered, standing packed together while they rolled north. At three a.m. the coaches halted and we spilled out onto a glassy, moonlit plain. Fifty yards from us, a blocky black wall ran until it disappeared into the night in both directions.

  I blinked back tears pricked by the icy wind. It wasn’t a wall, it was a coupled train of iron-sided ore sledges. Each sledge stood fifteen feet high from runners to wood-plank roof, and a greatcoated soldier with a rifle paced atop each sledge.

  Paleozoic Tressel was too young for coal, and its human colonizers had bypassed the age of steam and railroads, on the way to the industrial revolution. North of the Ice Line, the latitude above which rivers stayed frozen nine months of each year and nonnavigable the rest of the time, the Tressen mines were linked to the populous South by trains of sledges towed up and down the frozen rivers by spike-wheeled engines that ran on fu
el oil refined from algae.

  A man at my elbow, who carried a cello case swaddled in oilcloth, said, “Those have to be the luggage vans. They must be bringing up the passenger coaches after.”

  A sign between us and the ice train read “Resettlement buildings are well heated, but outside temperatures can be uncomfortable in winter. Don’t be concerned if you have underpacked. Suitable outerwear is available for loan at the Northern Terminus.” The beauty of this operation was that people believed the soothing whoppers because to believe otherwise was simply too horrible. The guards didn’t search bags. That would have been inconsistent with the lie. There would be ample opportunity to recover the dead’s valuables at “the Northern Terminus.”

  I set my suitcase down on the frozen river, and its contents clanked. Nobody noticed. Then I flexed my fingers as I whispered to Aud, “You see the others?”

  He nodded. “Jude and Celline just boarded the sledge forward of us. Freder and Maur are two coaches back.”

  The inside of the sledge stank already, and the fresh dry moss on its floor, dim in the narrow moonlight bars that penetrated the car’s ceiling slats, only looked inviting. A guardhouse like an ice-fishing shed sprouted from the roof of each sledge, with a helmeted guard seated in each, rifle between his knees, already shivering.

  When the crowd in our iron box had packed in shoulder to shoulder, a small man in a red moustache, who had told someone else that he was a shopkeeper, called, “Please! I’m claustrophobic!”

  A guard shouted in, “It’s just to keep you out of the wind while we couple to the main train. Move closer! Others are chilled out here.”

  How thoughtful. People, even the claustrophobic shopkeeper, shuffled closer together.

  Rumble.

  Our sledge’s door slid shut, then iron clanged on iron as it was latched. I swallowed. This was beginning to seem like a terrible plan.