Orphan's Destiny
Page 24
Orphanage and Orphan’s Destiny engage readers in a future just forty years distant, where space shuttles and television are antiques, not ancient artifacts. Any passion and humor they muster, compared to Heinlein’s and Haldeman’s classics, grows from affection for foot soldiers, an affection those books share.
Readers familiar with Heinlein will detect a few covert tributes, as will Haldeman fans.
Orphanage and Orphan’s Destiny aren’t anti-communist or anti-war like their predecessors. They are just pro-foot soldier.
Introducing
If you enjoyed ORPHAN’S DESTINY, look out for ORPHAN’S JOURNEY Book 3 of the Jason Wander series by Robert Buettner
“Ten yards seaward from where I stand on the beach, the new-risen moons backlight our assault boats, outbound toward six fathoms. Beyond six fathoms lies hell.
Wind bleeds oily smoke back over me from lanterns roped to a thousand gunwales. Fifty soldiers’ churning paddles whisker each boat’s flanks. The boats crawl up wave crests, then dive down wave troughs, like pitching centipedes. For miles to my left and right, the lantern line winds like a smoldering viper.
I’m Jason Wander. Earthling, war orphan, high school dropout, infantryman, field-promoted Major General. And, on this sixth of August, 2056, accidental Commander of the largest amphibious assault since Eisenhower hurled GIs across the English Channel.
New century. New planet. Old fear.
An assault boat’s Platoon Leader stands bent-kneed amid his paddlers, waving his boat’s lantern above his head. He shouts to me, “We gladly die for you!”
I salute him, because I’m too choked to shout back. And shout what? That only fools die gladly? That he’d better sit down before his own troops shoot him for a fool? That someone should shoot me for one?
At my side, my Command Sergeant Major whispers, “They won’t shoot him, Sir.” I blink. Ord has read my mind since he was my Drill Sergeant in Basic.
The Bren may not shoot one another tonight, but the first Bren proverb we translated was “Blood feud is bread.” For centuries, Bren has suffered under the thumb—well, the pseudopod—Slugs are man-sized, armored maggots that have no thumbs—of the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony. Still, every Clan midwife gifts every male baby with a whittled battle axe. Not to overthrow the Slugs. To whack human neighbors who worship the wrong god.
But if the newly unified Clans fail at sunrise, the Slugs will peel humanity off this planet like grape skin. Because we four Earthlings arrived.
Did I say “unified”? Ha. We should’ve segregated every boat. Mixed Clans may brain each other with their paddles before the first Slug shows. The final toast at Clan funerals is “May paradise spare you from allies.”
Packed into twenty square miles of beach dunes, the Second and Third Assault Waves’ cook fires prick the night. Smells of wood smoke and the dung of reptilian cavalry mounts drift to me on the shifting wind, along with Clan songs.
Yet twenty-two miles across the sea, the Slugs sleep.
Actually, no human knows whether Slugs sleep. But I have bet this civilization’s life that tonight the Slugs have left the cross-channel beaches undefended. It seems a smart bet. No boatman in five hundred years has crossed the Sea of Hunters at full moons, and lived.
I chin my helmet optics. Two heartbeats thump before I get a focus. A mile out, faint wakes vee the water. The first kraken are rising, like trout sensing skittering water bugs.
Sea monsters mightier than antique locomotives are about to splinter those first boats, like fists pounding straw. But troops that survive the crossing should surprise the Slugs. Surprised or not, the Slugs will still be the race that slaughtered sixty million Earthlings, as indifferently as mouthwash drowning germs.
Waves explode against boat prows. Windblown brine spits through my open helmet visor, needling my cheeks. My casualty bookie says that, even before the moons set, four hundred boats and crews will founder. Because I ordered them out there. The brine hides my tears.
Is my plan brilliant? Hannibal crossing the Alps? MacArthur landing at Inchon? I swallow. “What if I blundered, Sergeant Major?”
Ord nods back his helmet optics, then peers through binoculars older than he is. “Sir, Churchill said that war is mostly a catalogue of blunders.”
Ord told me exactly the same thing as we lay in the snow of Tibet, three years ago. If I’d listened, this ratscrew could’ve been avoided.