Orphan's Triumph

by Robert Buettner

  I made the range ninety yards and growing.

  More Slug Warriors had died beneath my hand than I could count, but they were, according to the Spooks, mere organic automatons. Human beings had died beneath my hand, too, when, as a soldier, lawful orders had required it.

  But this was my decision. Like Ord had said, I was on my own.

  The range opened to one hundred yards. I breathed, exhaled, paused, and fired.

  The broad-nosed guard ran for his life. Toward, perhaps, a wife, children, a place in the church choir.

  His arms spread wide, as if he was trying to fly like Puck the Fairy. His head snapped back so that his face turned toward the darkening sky. Then his body arced forward, fell in an explosion of snow, skidded, and stopped.

  The wind in my face pricked gun smoke into my eyes, and I holstered the.45, then wiped them.

  The prisoner with the dead pistol clapped my shoulder. “That was good!”

  Aud limped past me. “We must press our attack! But so far, so good.”

  The two of them left me standing alone, staring at the distant, dead soldier, facedown in the snow, then staring at the bodies all around me. So no one heard me say, “Goodness has nothing to do with us.”

  FIFTY-FIVE

  IN THE LONG DUSK OF ARCTIC AUTUMN, our accidental army redistributed ammunition, cannibalized rifles and clothing from the guards’ corpses, and moved out toward the garrison’s barracks with Aud Planck on the lead, as always. Or, as his troops had said of Erwin Rommel, an der Spitze.

  The flat buildings’ smoking chimneys and yellow-lit windows, promising warmth and life, drew not only our minutes-old veterans, but the rest of the prisoners who could walk or crawl. A ragged human wave rolled toward the barracks, its only sound the creak of thousands of numb hands and feet against dry snow.

  Aud’s point group reached the gate that led outside the twelve-foot-tall barbed-wire fence, to the barracks complex fifty yards beyond, before a clang like iron against a hung iron triangle alarmed the garrison.

  The gate, untended and unlocked, was swung aside as soldiers, pulling up suspenders and fumbling with rifles, tumbled out of barracks doors. The lucky ones were cut down by bullets poorly aimed but as numerous as hornets.

  The second engagement of the Battle of the Northern Terminus was no more a fair fight and no less a massacre than the first. In all, fourteen prisoners died of wounds sustained in the fighting, but mercy was an uncommon commodity among their peers. None of the five-hundred-man Interior Guard garrison survived.

  An hour later, Jude, Celline, and I walked the plain in the darkness beyond the barracks. The oil tanks that fueled the sledge trains and the barracks stoves, set alight in the fighting, painted the snow flickering orange. We plowed the drifts with shuffling feet. My foot struck an object that gave way easily, and I grunted.

  Jude said, “Another ration can?”

  I bent, felt for my boot toe, then grasped the object and stood. “Gotcha!”

  I turned the apple-sized meteorite in my hand, lit by the oil tanks’ flame. The rock felt as light as cork. “Doesn’t glow like a Stone Hills nugget. But it isn’t supposed to.”

  Celline said, “I know the next step is vital. But these people are half dead.”

  I said, “Some of them will bounce back by the morning. We should have plenty of hands to harvest in a couple days.”

  Jude said, “We’re ahead of schedule.”

  So far, the plan, horrible and bloody as it was, had exceeded even optimistic expectations.

  We had neutralized the hostile force that had sat atop Tressel’s weapons-grade Cavorite. We had moved a motivated workforce of nearly a thousand people above the Arctic Circle of Tressel by the only transport that existed to move them there. We had a week left before the Duck’s deadline, during which we would gather the meteorites together, then call down pickup.

  The call itself would be as easy as sending out for pizza on my wrist ’Puter.

  Cruisers that had visited Tressel over the years had quietly left behind geosynchronous-orbiting surveillance and communications satellites. CommSats were, as Howard put it, surprisingly affordable if you didn’t have to ground-launch them or opt for encryption. Since the Tressens had barely invented the telegraph, encryption for eavesdropping protection seemed a safe option to cheap out on.

  We weren’t allowed to ring up the Spooks from my ’Puter until we were ready to have the Cavorite picked up. But by the week from now when the Ferrents would first notice that the return train from the Northern Terminus was overdue, the Cavorite would be long gone.

  Jude and Celline continued to scuff meteorites from the snow while I stared at a group that dragged stiff bodies to the tank farm fire to be cremated.

  I could tell myself that the broad-nosed guard whom I had killed had himself brutally, unnecessarily, and without remorse killed an innocent man. I could tell myself that, if the man I had killed had in fact left behind a widow and children, the greater good produced by his death would save their lives and all mankind. I could tell myself that he, as a soldier, had accepted the risk.

  But, finally, I would have to tell myself that I had arrogated to myself the right to take the life of another.

  “Jason!”

  I ran toward the sound of Aud’s shout, Jude alongside me.

  FIFTY-SIX

  AUD PLANCK STOOD IN THE DOORWAY of a room in the camp commandant’s quarters hut as I ran up. The windowless room wasn’t more than an oversized closet, and its only furnishings were a simple table, a chair, and a sputtering oil lamp suspended from a ceiling beam.

  A figure in Tressen colonel’s uniform slumped in the chair, head down across the table. One hand clutched a service revolver that had been inserted in his mouth, and what had been the back of his head splattered the far wall of the tiny room.

  Presiding over mass murder, in a frigid, forsaken outpost, would drive a normal human being near suicide, I supposed. Facing up to the reality that your sloppy command had gotten all your troops killed could drive a soldier the rest of the way. Or maybe he had been a fanatic, more afraid of having let down his RS bosses than of burning in hell.

  Aud said, “I wondered why we hadn’t found the camp commandant.” Aud stepped to the table, slipped his pistol’s barrel beneath the empty hand of the dead man, and lifted it. Beneath the hand was a wood slab with a pivoting brass arm six inches long fixed above it.

  Jude stared first at the body, then at the brass and wood device, then swore.

  Jude turned to Aud. “You think he transmitted anything?”

  Aud shrugged. “He could have been transmitting for the last hour.”

  “Or not at all.”

  I raised my palm. “The Tressens haven’t invented radio.”

  Jude pointed at the wood block, and at bright copper wires that curled away from it, then disappeared over the table’s real edge. “Telegraph. It’s so new that it’s more a parlor trick than a practical system. At least that’s what I thought.”

  “I looked out of that sledge for six days. I never saw one pole.”

  Jude shook his head. “Wood’s rare here. Insulated cable would be buried in the roadbed.”

  I shrugged at Aud. “It could be nothing.” I didn’t believe myself, but there was also nothing we could do now.

  An hour later I sat on the edge of a barracks bunk, cleaning Ord’s pistol. My wrist ’Puter vibrated. I scrolled through functions. It wasn’t an alarm. It was an incoming call.

  I picked up.

  “General Wander?” It was Bill the Spook. Howard’s bargain satellites delivered terrific sound quality.

  “Bill? I thought phone calls were off limits.”

  “Officially, they are.”

  “This contact is freelance? You could lose your pension.”

  “The dental’s awful anyway.” He paused. “That was a rough trip you took.”

  The Spooks may have been forbidden to help us, but that didn’t mean their overhead eyes weren’t watc
hing us while they tracked the ’Puters that Aud, Jude, and I wore.

  I shrugged, invisible to him. “I’ve had better.”

  “But it looks like your operation’s off to a good start.”

  “Successful’s a better word.” I shifted on the bunk.

  “You have company coming.”

  Hair stood on my neck.

  “Some local eyes reported that Forty-fifth Infantry started scrambling onto a sledge train pointed north thirty minutes ago.”

  The Forty-fifth Tressen Infantry, the Quicksilver Division, took its name from the commander that had made it into Tressen’s best outfit, prematurely silver-haired Audace Planck.

  I swore.

  Bill said, “I dunno what tipped them.”

  I did. The camp commandant had tapped out a warning that had also served as his suicide note. “Bill, there was a telegraph line running south from here.”

  Silence. A good Spook took a failure of combat intelligence personally.

  “Sorry.”

  “So we got, what, six days?”

  “They’re loading on a streamliner, not a slow freight like you came on. And the Forty-fifth is garrisoned on the northern frontier to begin with. The only good news is it’s a passenger train. They’re leaving their artillery at home.”

  Why bother? Artillery to quell a mere prison riot?

  “That’s a small favor. You got an ETA?”

  “The best eight thousand infantry on this planet are gonna land on your doorstep in forty-eight hours, ready to rumble.”

  “Can you bring the rain?”

  “The Duck’s been ragging the Tehran ’s skipper for an hour. But the rules are set. No fire support. No nothing. No exceptions. It stinks, but you’re all hung out to dry.”

  I stared at my ’Puter, numb. “Thanks for the heads-up, Bill. Tell the Duck thanks for trying. And tell Admiral Duffy thanks for nothing. See you around, Bill.”

  Silence. Then he said, “Sure.”

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  IN THE NEXT MORNING’S SPARSE DAWN, Aud, Jude, Celline, and I stood together in the wind shadow cast by the train that had brought us, which had been reversed on a spur overnight, so that it pointed back toward the spiked black mountain range through which we had come, ten miles to the south. Smoke from the smoldering oil fire overhung the plain like dirty gauze in the pre-sunrise calm.

  Around us by twos and threes, those of our companions who had been revived by a meal and a night in barracks bunks that their captors no longer needed already scoured the snows. They bent, gathered meteorites, then stuffed them into knapsacks and into the pockets of coats for which their captors also had no further need. Periodically, someone gasped as, beneath the snow, they touched the frozen corpse of an earlier and less fortunate arrival.

  In the midst of the vast and unmarked graveyard, Aud knelt in the snow and pointed at his makeshift sand table map. A line of stones bisected the flat, swept area that represented the plains south and north of the mountains. A red string, laid south to north, represented the ice road line. The string snaked across the stone “mountain range” wedged into Aud’s paper-narrow “mountain pass” like dental floss.

  He pointed at the north end of the red string. “We’re here. Without the refueling oil we planned on, this ice train can barely reach here.” His finger slid along the string, then stopped above the “pass” that ran north to south through the mountains.

  He swung his arm around the plain at the stone gatherers. “We need to buy time to finish this work. The mountains are impassable. If we overturn this ice train in the pass, we’ll force Forty-fifth Division to dismount their train and advance toward the pass on foot. A small force using the sledges and engine as breastworks can hold the pass even against a division.”

  I asked Celline and Jude, “Assuming volunteers, how many can you spare from gathering and still meet the deadline?”

  They looked at each other. Jude shrugged. “We planned on a thousand pickers. Could you manage with two hundred?”

  “There were three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae,” I said. But there were eighty thousand Persians on the other side.

  Celline frowned. She knew Thermopylae like I knew how to stir trilobite bisque. But she said, “We’ll manage with a hundred less, then.”

  I didn’t tell her that the three hundred had been the finest troops in their world, maybe in any world, not starved, frostbitten shopkeepers. I also didn’t tell her that the Spartans lost. Big.

  There was another similarity to Thermopylae. I shaded my eyes with my hand as I pointed at the eastern shoulder of the distant mountain pass. “The Spooks mapped this. There’s a way around the canyon. A ledge a goat could walk, eight hundred feet above the canyon floor, along the east wall. It’s a long way ’round, but once the Persians outflanked the Spartans the battle was lost. If the Quicksilver Division can move a battalion over that goat track, it can swing in behind the bottleneck in a day.”

  Aud shook his head. “I know the Forty-fifth. But I also know the commander who succeeded me. Folz is deliberate. Unimaginative. He’ll pound away at the pass frontally for days before he resorts to maneuver. But you’re right. Eventually…”

  I pointed at the “shoulder” of the pass on Aud’s sand table map. “They widened the main route through the canyon with dynamite when they built the railroad. There’s still one case left in the machine shop, even after the GIs played with it. It’s not enough to close the main pass, but it might be enough to drop a narrow spot on that ledge, cut that path. Your old troops are good, Aud. But they can’t fly.”

  Aud shook his head again. “We’ll just have to take our chances. I can’t spare a man. And none of these people can handle dynamite.”

  I said, “I can.”

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  “ON THREE!” Aud and I, in line with twenty others, strained against a cable spooled through a block and tackle stripped from the camp machine shop, tied to an eyelet on an ice sledge. The sledge’s runners squealed, then groaned as the great iron box crashed onto its side like a dying mammoth. The echoes died against the canyon’s stone-cold walls, even as other cars toppled by others of the three hundred volunteer shopkeepers fell into place.

  We were overturning sledges so that their iron floors became parapets that blocked the canyon bottleneck from vertical stone wall to vertical stone wall. Aud set the first line of our barricade six hundred yards up the canyon, near its crest, where the thousand-foot-high walls bottle-necked down to a twenty-yard width.

  That way the front line of an entire division of attacking troops, even shoulder to shoulder, could never amount to much more than sixty soldiers. And those sixty would be advancing uphill, unprotected, for six hundred yards. Meanwhile, our guys, even if they weren’t marksmen, would hunker behind cover and mow their attackers down, then mow down the ranks behind them, until we ran out of ammunition or the attackers ran out of enthusiasm.

  There’s a schoolyard simplicity to infantry tactics once you remove air power from the equation.

  Boom.

  The last sledge toppled across the canyon like a beached whale as Aud stepped alongside me, batting dust off his long coat with mittened hands. He craned his neck, up along the canyon’s east wall, where the narrow ledge overlooked both us and the plain to the south from which the attack would come. He sighed. “There’s no point in placing marksmen above. We have no marksmen but you.”

  “I’m taking a rifle and a hundred rounds up on the ledge with me.”

  Aud shook his head. “Your most vital job is to destroy the flanking route, not to play at target practice. Just set the charges, light the fuses, and run. Live to fight another day.”

  I looked around. Men stacked rocks on the parapets. Others cleaned weapons or unboxed cartridges. Each shopkeeper busied himself to avoid the reality that they would die in this canyon. “Nobody else seems to have an exit strategy.”

  I knelt, then swung up the pack with the dynamite. Aud grasped the pack’s handle, centered t
he load on my back. “Jason, I know you. You intend to return from the pass, then rejoin us here. You return to the camp. If the stones aren’t delivered, this sacrifice will count for nothing. Honor me, and these men, by making sure we all died for something. Promise me that.” He laid a hand on my shoulder.

  I laid my hand over his, stared up at the late afternoon sky. “I better go. The only thing I hate worse than heights is climbing them in the dark.”

  It might once have taken me a few hours to make my way back north along the canyon, then east to the steep, narrow route that switched back and forth toward the ledge that overlooked the canyon, then up the trail that climbed a fifth of a mile.

  By the time I not only made it to the trailhead, then climbed to the ledge, my skinned knees and elbows trembled beneath my coat’s sweaty bulk, and the cotton that had once been saliva crusted my lips, and it was midnight, according to the Tressen pocket watch I carried. The only Spooknet-capable ’Puter the Spooks would allow us I had left behind with Jude, so that he could call for pickup of the Cavorite in case I didn’t make it back.

  I lay on the ledge in the dark, too exhausted to fear the sheer drop that began inches from the blisters inside my boots.

  I had no heated armor to keep my fingers and toes from going numb, no helmet water nipple, no padding when I slipped and fell, and no optics to keep the dark from blinding me. I huddled in a crevasse, snugged my clothes up to keep as warm as I could, and dozed.

  I woke at four a.m.

  The moonless Tressel night was frigid, black, and still.

  Except for a faint glow on the southern horizon that shifted position back and forth. Like a train winding north.

  FIFTY-NINE

  WITHOUT NIGHT-VISION EQUIPMENT, I had to wait for dawn to begin my work. I was in no hurry. Among the things that had terrified me since childhood were heights and explosives.