One crater-pocked moon orbited the planet’s equatorial belt line, in the plane of the ecliptic. If you think of the planets that orbit a sun as spinning like tops while circling the sun like meatballs around a tray, that tray is the plane of the ecliptic. All the planets and moons of the Solar System we had left behind spun in the plane of the ecliptic. According to Howard, most stars and their systems were arranged the same way.
The planet’s other moon was smaller, the bright red of arterial blood, and marble-smooth. Stranger still, it orbited slowly, north to south, over the poles. As Howard would say, its orbit was perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic.
Howard and I stood side by side on the toadstool’s platform in the bow, watching the scene come closer. I had my Eternad helmet on, so I could use the optics like binoculars. I narrowed my eyes. “We hit an Earth clone on the button. How convenient.”
Howard shook his head. “Of course it’s convenient. The Firewitch homed on this planet. The Pseudocephalopod would establish itself where it found worlds temperate enough to support life.”
“But we know the Slugs can just make a rock Earthlike. They were terraforming Ganymede.”
Howard looked away, at a rounded corner of the control chamber. “True. But why terraform if you find an Earthlike planet sitting right in front of you?”
I cocked my head. “But the Slugs did sit out on Ganymede when they found Earth. They bombed us from a distance, like a caveman would beat a rattlesnake with a long stick.”
Howard kept looking away. His Spook “need to know” paranoia was his least-endearing characteristic. “Rattlesnakes are dangerous, if you get too close.”
I narrowed my eyes. “But, Howard, the first time a caveman came across a rattlesnake, he wouldn’t have known it was dangerous. So the analogy doesn’t hold, does it?”
Beyond the transparent bow, we sped on above the ocean, but the inside of the Firewitch felt as still as houses.
Before Howard could answer me, the Firewitch dipped into the planet’s uppermost ionosphere, and red flames of incandescent plasma blossomed from the leading edges of the ship’s forward arms.
Howard pointed at the planet below. “If this were the Pseudocephalopod homeworld, we would have been challenged by now. This ship is going to land in an outpost of some kind.”
“Even if it’s just an outpost, a hundred thousand warriors will storm the ship and kill us,” I said.
Jude frowned up at me. He had clamped in to the pilot’s couch as soon as we reentered the traffic jam of interplanetary space.
Howard and I stood alongside Jude.
I asked Howard, “How much have we slowed?”
Howard rubbed his chin. “I’d guess we’re down to ten thousand miles per hour.”
The huge ship skipped like a stone across the top of the planet’s ionosphere, but we felt no motion. We might as well have been standing in the still gallery of an aquarium, watching a flaming ocean flow by.
I said, “So, in a couple minutes, we land. Then we die.”
Howard lunged past Jude, and thrust the control yoke full forward.
I grabbed Howard’s arm. “Are you nuts?”
Jude’s eyes widened, and I looked up, to see what he saw.
The horizon had disappeared. The Firewitch had been cruising like a Clipper reentering Earth’s atmosphere, parallel to the ground. Howard had plunged the Firewitch into a kamikaze dive straight down toward the planet’s surface.
Howard said, “Four thousand miles per hour. But slowing.”
I heard Jude’s rapid breathing, felt no motion.
Within two heartbeats, we shot low enough that I saw the rocky ridges of low mountains. In another blink, mossy, jagged boulders and scrub brush became clear.
Snow patches dusted the ground in the shadows under the brush.
I closed my eyes.
Everybody screamed at once.
We were still diving at two thousand miles per hour when the Firewitch splattered against the planet like a gnat against a speeder’s windshield.
Twenty
Someone had strapped a school bell to my head, and it wouldn’t stop clanging. My cheek was cold and all I could see was rock as grainy and gray as headstones.
Was I dead and buried?
Corpses didn’t feel icy wind.
I levered myself onto my knees, and looked around. I knelt on gray sandstone—grow up in Colorado, know your rocks—under gray clouds.
To figure out whether my eardrums had ruptured, I shouted out loud to myself over the ringing in my ears. “It’s not the twenty-story fall that kills you, it’s the sudden stop.”
Not only did I hear myself, I understood what Howard had done. The Firewitch had protected its payload from acceleration to two-thirds of light speed, and from gravity strong enough to squeeze the sun inside a golf ball. So protecting us when we hit a brick wall at two thousand miles per hour had been small beer.
Howard had crashed us on purpose, because he knew a crash was more survivable than a soft landing in a nest of a hundred thousand Slugs.
I looked around. The Firewitch, itself, didn’t land soft. Fist-sized Slug-Hull fragments lay impact-blasted across the scrub-covered rock over a radius so large that the fragments looked like poppy seeds. The War had taught us that when a Slug ship blew, it blew into nothing but junk. That’s why the intact Firewitch was so valuable. Had been so valuable.
My armor’s heaters kicked in as wind scuffed a twig across the rock of my new home. Mine alone?
My suit’s audio and ’Puter nested between my shoulder blades, formed into the Eternad underlayer, alongside the battery pack. But the antennae were mounted in my absent helmet. My earpiece was connected, but useful now only to block wind.
I shouted, “Jude?”
Nothing.
“Howard? Sergeant Major?”
I cupped my hands, then shouted over and over, turning through 360 degrees. Only wind screeched back.
I screamed so loud and so long for them that I panted and saw spots. I wore no helmet, but I seemed to be breathing fine. Much on this planet might kill me, though it seemed the atmosphere wouldn’t.
But my ears burned, numbed by the wind. I unfurled the weather hood from my armor’s neckring, tied the drawstrings beneath my chin, then turned round again.
The rock on which I stood sloped up behind me toward snow-capped mountains, and down toward flat prairie that stretched to the horizon. The Firewitch had blown itself to rutabagas against what on Earth would be called foothills.
I visored my hand over my eyes, scanned the landscape, and wished I still had my helmet optics. But there was little to see.
The watery sun had already dipped below the peaks at my back. Across the prairie, in a sliver of sky between clouds grayer than Earth clouds and the horizon, one of the moons rose, huge and pale.
The sun went down, and clouds snuffed the moonlight. I stumbled in the dark for an hour, calling for the others, as the temperature dropped. Finally, I found a wind- shadowed crevasse between boulders and tucked myself in to it.
During the final hours of our inbound voyage, Howard had Jeeb calculate this planet’s rotational period; he got 24.2 Earth hours per day. I recalibrated my wrist ’Puter, assumed the sun had set at eighteen hundred hours, and agreed with myself that where the sun set would be west, where it rose east, and north and south would be at right angles to those directions.
My body ached and my eyelids drooped. Eternads aren’t pajamas, but the underlayer is padded. The motion of breathing, and the occasional rollover during sleep, stores enough kinetic energy to recharge their batteries.
I fell asleep cold, and awoke colder, in the dark, when cold sleet stung my cheeks. It rattled off my armor, ricocheted off rock, and puddled in the bare depressions that pocked my new home. My head pounded from snot that packed my sinuses. The first night sleeping outdoors after a layoff always sucks.
I turned my face to shelter against the rock, then flashed my wrist ’Puter
. Zero three hundred.
At three in the morning human biorhythms hit low ebb. It’s a great time to catch your enemy napping by mounting a night attack, to attempt suicide, and to feel sorry for yourself.
I thought about my broken promise to Munchkin, that I would return Jude safe to her. I thought about failing once more to put mission ahead of troops, when it came time to blow the Exit Tube charges. I thought about the woman I didn’t get to marry, and about too many friends buried.
Mostly, I thought that I was now marooned for eternity, so far from home that I couldn’t find the sun if I had the Hubble Bubble, an orphan once again. I hugged my rock pillow, wiped my nose on my gauntlet’s snozz pad, and cried.
At four, the sleet quit, the clouds parted and the second moon—the blood-red one—shone down as it traveled among the unfamiliar stars, from north to south. If I was looking at Sol, somewhere among those billion sparks, the light I saw could have left the Solar System centuries ago.
Five A.M. brought red-glowing dawn in the east.
By sunrise, I had scooped puddled sleet into a rock depression, and melted it with meager Eternad exhaust. Alien bacteria might kill me, but dehydration certainly would, so I drank until I belched.
I peeled off my armor and washed, shivering, with the remaining water. Eternad padding is anti-microbial, but after a few days, you don’t care for the smell of yourself in Eternads. I re-dressed, then I blew my nose like a saxophone until I could breathe through it again.
My ablutions were no hot shower and coffee, but an infantryman learns after many nights on cold ground that if your body feels beaten, your mind does, too.
I stood at the edge of the debris circle that marked the Firewitch’s remains. The circle seemed centered downslope from me. Anything or anyone else that had been saved by the ship’s gravity cocoon likely also lay along or within the debris perimeter. I picked my way along that perimeter, stooping to examine every cinder for life signs.
I also broke twigs, laid stone cairns, and generally tried to mark my trail, so that if the others crossed my path, they could follow it and find me.
An hour later, the debris-field edge had turned me east, downslope. The lower I descended through boulder fields toward the plain, the thicker the vegetation grew. To me, the brush looked like mesquite; scrawny twigs with scabrous green leaves withering to brown, mixed among gnarled pines with stunted needles. This far from ground zero, the mesquite had had a few leaves blown off by our explosive arrival, but remained intact enough that I couldn’t see through it.
I wove through the brush and swore to myself. Back at the barren spot where I’d landed, I had been able to see clear to the horizon. But here, farther downslope, the head-high scrub kept me from seeing twenty feet ahead.
That meant I could walk right past significant wreckage. Worse, I couldn’t see trouble, from Slugs to something that might eat me, until it was on top of me.
I had seen no hint of animate life on this planet yet, but I’d picked up a fist-sized rock for a weapon, anyway. In my thigh pocket, next to my Aid pouch, I carried a single-shot .22 caliber toy of a survival pistol that Advisers joked was issued to allow suicide before capture. I decided to save it for signaling. With no rifle, I felt like a Neanderthal with no spear. And with no helmet audio or optics, I felt deaf and blind.
What happened next shows you how much our species traded away as we depended more and more on our tools.
With a climate-controlled helmet, I could see and hear better. But I couldn’t smell much.
Now, without a helmet, I tilted my head back, sniffed the wind, and wished I hadn’t.
Twenty-One
Vented headgear or not, an infantryman who has survived combat knows the smell of death.
The stench on the wind wasn’t like any corpse I’d experienced, but this place wasn’t like any battlefield I’d experienced. This stunk like meat that had rotted for a semester.
I followed the scent upwind, no longer snapping twigs or kicking rocks, but my heart pounded so loud that I must have been audible twenty feet away.
I stopped and listened. Close ahead, something buzzed.
I elbowed back a pine bough, and there, in a rock-floored clearing, it was.
Looking left and right, like I was jaywalking through a tennis game, I crept forward until I knelt alongside it.
I’m no hunter, but four years before, I took a course at Ft. Bragg called “Patrol Craft.” We spent a whole morning studying spoor. Spoor is crap.
I knelt beside a turd the size of a bed pillow.
Based on a rudimentary gut-diameter estimate, whatever deposited it was twenty to forty feet long.
The buzz I had heard was a cloud of winged beetles. They hovered over their feast, but hadn’t burrowed in yet. So it was fresh spoor.
I poked the turd with a twig.
The brown mass lacked plant fiber, like horse dung had, and was more like pudding in consistency. A carnivore’s calling card.
Steam curled up from the blob where I had poked it. Very fresh.
Across the clearing, brush rustled.
I backed away from the noise, slowly, clutching my rock, scanning the ground for another, and wondering whether to dig out the little .22 pistol.
Movement flickered beyond the brush, twenty yards from me, and something snorted like a steam engine. The beetle buzz stopped as though cut by a knife.
My eyes on the spot where the brush moved, I backed away until my hand touched brush at the back of the clearing, where I had entered it. My heart hammered. Make my stand here, or run for it?
Behind me, something clamped my arm.
Twenty-Two
I bit off a scream as I jumped and pulled away.
I spun, raised the rock in my hand, and saw what had grabbed me.
A man knelt in the brush.
I blinked, looked again. Dirty. Emaciated. But a two-arms-two-legs-one-head man as human as I was.
One gray eye blazed up at me. The other was just a slit in scar tissue. Thin lips were drawn back from clenched, yellowed teeth, and dirty hair tangled down below his ears.
He spun a hand, as thin as mahogany wire, beckoning me toward him, while he hissed something I couldn’t make out.
I glanced back across the clearing, then said, “I don’t understand you.”
He cocked his head, stood and grabbed my hand again, this time with both of his. His clothing was crude-cut hide that covered his torso and legs.
I leaned back away from him.
He took one hand off mine, pointed across the clearing, then clamped and unclamped his fingers and thumb, pantomiming snapping jaws.
Something snarled, across the clearing, and I caught a whiff of animal, in addition to the dung, on the breeze. The only reason we hadn’t been noticed was that whatever predator lurked in the distant brush was upwind from us. If the wind shifted, we’d be snacks.
Glancing over my shoulder, I pointed in the direction the man was backing, nodded, and whispered, “Lead the way.”
He sprang into the brush, hobbling. A rough wood stump replaced his left leg below the knee.
On one whole leg and his stump, he zigzagged silently through the brush as fast as I could sprint.
We ran for five minutes, then he dropped to one knee, panting, and tugged me down beside him. He cupped his hands to his ears, turned his head, then moistened a finger and held it in the air.
We waited another five minutes. There was no sound but the wind and our heavy breathing. Then he stood, grunted, and stumped off into the brush.
Five paces on, he turned back to me and spoke.
I shrugged. “I don’t understand.”
He held up his hand again, this time to his lips, and made chewing motions. Then he patted the slack belly beneath his hide tunic and smiled. He windmilled his hand, then walked on.
My stomach growled, and I stood and followed him.
Twenty minutes later, he began side-crabbing, as we descended a scree slope into a steep vall
ey. Distant rumbling grew.
My one-eyed, one-legged friend made his home alongside rocky rapids through which a creek dropped from the mountains. His home was a shelter woven of brush laid over logs as thick as my arm. It sat on a rock shelf that looked to be above flood stage.
I looked around for a stone pit, or some evidence that he possessed fire, but saw nothing.
He sat me on a flat stone beside the water, scuttled into his hut, then returned with a grainy brown patty as large as a dinner plate. He broke it, and offered me half.
I stared at it.
He broke a bit off his half, chewed it, and smiled.
I said, “Thanks.” I tapped my breastplate. “Jason.”
He tapped his chest, and said, “Bassin.”
I still hadn’t bitten Bassin’s bread.
He frowned, reentered his hut, and returned this time with a stone two feet long, chipped sharp along one edge. He stood in front of me, and raised the dagger in two hands.
I leaned back. “Easy! I’ll try the bread.”
Before I could raise the patty to my lips, he stabbed down.
“Jesus!” I jumped, and threw my armored forearm across my face to deflect his blow.
Bassin’s blade dug into the ground between my boots, then he dropped to his knees, and dug furiously with the knife.
After thirty seconds, he dropped the tool, and dug with his fingers, until he tugged out, and shook dirt from, a shiny, chestnut brown root as round as a grapefruit. He made chopping motions with his hand over the tuber, then pointed at the patty in my hand.
I tore off a piece of the patty with my teeth, then smiled. “I understand. No additives or preservatives. Very tasty.”
It was, if you enjoy hemp rope seasoned with frigid water. My stomach growled.
An hour later, the sun set. Bassin the Assassin beckoned me to share his shelter’s matted grass floor.
By the time I snuggled in, he had unstrapped the stump from his left leg, laid it at his side, and snored like a gasoline-powered motorcycle.
Orphan's Journey Page 8