Orphan's Journey

by Robert Buettner

  Bassin changed into a dress uniform that included a broad-brimmed suede hat with one side turned up, and plumes that looked like Howler feathers. He even traded his engineer’s axe for a gold one so dainty it couldn’t have cut prime rib.

  The Captain of the Queen’s Household Guard met us at a jetty railed with rhind teeth.

  I whispered to Bassin, “Did the Queen pull those?”

  The Captain commanded two dozen Householders, who wore polished armor, with helmets crested with purple feathers, and who carried Marini rifles with gold bayonets fixed.

  The Captain saluted Bassin, who returned it. “The Queen will receive you in the Morning Room.”

  The Morning Room of her Majesty’s Winter Palace stood far enough above the sea that a visitor climbed two hundred twelve stairs to reach it, with breath-catching intervals along corridors hung with tapestries.

  Along the way, we passed fifty more eyes-front Householders, each guarding a corridor junction or mammoth carved door, each armed with a gold-bayoneted rifle. Not one blinked at Jeeb, who skittered ahead of us, six legs crackling over the marble floors.

  We also passed one unsmiling woman. She wore a high-necked, floor-length dress as smooth as her skin, and as black as her skin was white. Scarlet feathers winged each sleeve, and crystalline jewels ruffed her collar and wrists. The dress fitted her so closely that she couldn’t have hidden a coin under it, and the material seemed to be leather as thin and supple as silk. Her dark hair swept up, gathered by combs that matched the sleeve feathers, and she carried her chin high and serene.

  I didn’t know whether she was a Countess or a chambermaid, but I bet on chambermaid, because she dropped her eyes as she passed Bassin.

  When she saw Jeeb, her sleepy eyes bulged, but she said nothing. Jude turned to watch her slink away, and tripped over Jeeb. I nearly stumbled into a Household Guard myself.

  We made one stop before we got to the Morning Room. Howard, Ord, and Jude were taken off through double doors into a two-story paneled room Bassin said was the Queen’s Library. Then Bassin took me and Jeeb and the holo generator to meet the Queen.

  The Winter Palace’s Morning Room turned out to be an awninged roof terrace long and wide enough to land a twelve-passenger bouncer, surrounded by rhind-tooth ivory rails. These teeth were carved with battle scenes and inlaid with gold.

  Like every proper castle since Beowulf’s day, the Winter Palace commanded all approaches to it. Beyond the terrace rails, and beyond battlements along which Householders marched, spun, and countermarched, I saw all the way across the Sea of Hunters.

  On the horizon, like a chalk line, rose the low coast of Bren’s other continent. That was a distance of twenty-two miles, according to Jeeb. The water was an epeiric sea, according to Howard. A salt water puddle that would shrink to nothing over the next few mere million years, barely worthy of the name “sea.” According to me, with its kraken and rhind, the Sea of Hunters was one more bad neighborhood on a planet lousy with them.

  To the north and west stretched green farmland, cut into facets by an irrigation-canal network that watered Marin’s southern breadbasket. To the south, beyond the canals, the land remained the wind-scoured red desert of Tassin.

  The Captain of Householders announced us, then backed off the terrace.

  The only object on the shaded terrace was one bentwood chair.

  Alongside it, her back to us as she gazed across the Sea of Hunters, stood the Deliverer of the Stones, Protector of the Clans of Marin, and Sovereign of the Near Seas of Bren.

  The Queen pivoted with her hands on a jeweled cane and faced us. She stood five foot three, and looked no heavier than two pounds more than a hundred. She also looked no younger than two decades less than a hundred. Her hair was white, her skin pale and creased, but her eyes shone as sharp as gray diamonds. Her dress was cut like the one on the younger woman, but silver, with ermine-white feathers, and brighter jewels.

  When she saw Bassin, her eyes widened, and she sucked in a breath.

  Then the Queen blinked and extended her hand. Bassin stepped to her, knelt, and kissed it. “Greetings to her Majesty on her seventy-second birthday.”

  The Queen waved him to stand. “Bassin, never remember a woman’s birthday unless you forget her age.” She appraised Jeeb, with his faceted optics that looked like onyx eyes, and she arched her eyebrows. “Or you bring her jewels.”

  Bassin shook his head. “I bring news.”

  She sniffed. “Bad news, if I know that tone. What’s bad enough to raise you from the dead?”

  The old woman inched toward Jeeb, in small steps, then bent forward, and eyed him through a round lens she held on a short gold stick.

  Jeeb’s optics swiveled up at her, like two jeweled Oreos, and he whined.

  The Queen’s eyes widened, then she straightened, shuffled back to her chair, and rested her hand on its arm. With her back to us, she rapped her cane on the marble floor. “Out with it, Bassin! Bad news doesn’t improve with age, and neither do I.”

  Bassin stepped alongside her and steadied her with a hand on her elbow. “The Receivers crossed the Wall. The Peace of the Fair was broken. The Fleet was destroyed. So many died that some bodies were burned on pyres, Casuni-fashion. The smoke turned the sky black to the horizon. The Stone Trade is shattered.”

  A leathery pterosaur glided above the sea and wailed. Wind flapped the terrace awning.

  The old woman’s shoulders sagged, until she seemed to shrivel inside her silver gown.

  Then she straightened, turned toward Bassin, and whacked his ear with her cane, so hard that the crack echoed across the water. “That’s a vile joke to scare an old woman on her birthday. I expect better from my only child.”

  Thirty-Seven

  My jaw dropped so far that I chinned my command-circuit audio alarm, and Ord’s voice came back. “Sir?” I chinned the alarm off.

  Bassin rubbed his ear. “It’s true, Mother.”

  The Queen stepped around her chair, and collapsed into it, trembling and rubbing her forehead. “How?”

  “The Fair went like it has three hundred times. Then the Receivers appeared without warning.”

  “Are you sure—”

  “They look like the old storytellers said they look. Worms in black armor. Once the Peace of the Fair was broken, we assembled troops, and counterattacked. Casus himself led a counterattack, simultaneously.”

  The Queen jerked her head toward Bassin, and narrowed her eyes. “You trusted that slobbering barbarian?”

  Bassin glanced over at me, paused, then continued, “Pure coincidence. But the black worms were wiped out. To the last one.”

  The Queen sighed, and stroked her temple. “For now.”

  “For now.” Bassin nodded.

  “Your spy play has brought the end of the world upon us.”

  Bassin shook his head, and ticked off on his fingers. “No! Mother, because of the census, I now know reserves, and I know deliverability. I have calculated percentage leaked to smugglers. Any fool can see it was the right thing—”

  “The only fool I see is the one whose adventuring has cost his eye and his leg. You could have ordered. . . . ” The Queen reached up and touched her son’s cheek, below the eye patch, and her eyes glistened with the beginning of tears.

  Bassin reached up, held her fingers, and said, “Mother, surely you never taught me that ordering others to die can be right?”

  The Queen stood, and sighed. “It can not. But it can be less wrong.”

  Bassin said, “Because of the census, I know we’ve delivered—”

  The Queen stiffened. “Of course we delivered! Your grandmother would strike me from her grave if we didn’t. And her grandmother before her, and so on, and so on.” The Queen’s eyes narrowed again. “Then what’s brought the end of the world upon us?”

  Bassin looked over at me, and waved me toward them.

  Crap. Why did this always happen to me? Bassin had brought me along to blame me for the end o
f the world.

  Following Bassin’s example, I popped my neck ring, tucked my helmet beneath my arm, and walked over and knelt before the Queen.

  Bassin said to her, “I present Major General Jason Wander.”

  The Queen tapped my cheek. “Stand with me, General.”

  General Cobb was right. The title got Advisees every time.

  After I stood, she stared up at me, then frowned at my half-breed eyelids. “You’re—ah—as young as my son.”

  She rapped her knuckles on my sleeve armor. “I know the forge of every armorer in Marin. Where did your mother bear you, General?”

  I sighed, and hoped that, for once, the truth would set me free. “Colorado.”

  The Queen’s eyes narrowed and she swayed. I braced for her to whack my ear with her cane.

  Bassin said, “Shall we sit, Mother?”

  The Queen rapped her cane again, this time against her chair. Footmen in green silk livery appeared and set a table in front of her chair, and two more chairs alongside it.

  Bassin seated his mother at the table’s head, and as he stepped around to the table’s foot, he motioned me to fill the remaining side chair.

  A footman stepped forward with a covered tray, but Bassin waved him off, and motioned for me to set up the holo gen on the table.

  I waved it on, and the first shimmering image that popped was an overhead of the Fair, smoke, corpse piles, shipwrecks.

  The Queen’s eyes widened. “Dreams?” She snorted. “I don’t govern by sniffing janga. I leave that to Tassini Headmen.”

  Bassin sighed. “No, Mother. This is quite real. As though you were looking through the eyes of the six-legged machine.”

  The Queen stared at Jeeb, whose hydraulics hummed as he squatted on the terrace beside me and preened his antennae.

  “You miss my meaning, Bassin. Dreams can be more real than flesh. And this is no machine.” She stared down at Jeeb.

  Bassin rolled his eyes. “Mother, its bones are steel. It just looks—”

  The Queen looked in my eyes. “The little one belongs to you, General?”

  I held Jeeb’s Department of Defense salvage title. “Yes.”

  “And whatever the little one’s bones are made of, whatever hardheads like my son say, you believe the little one is alive?”

  Everybody knew the notion that TOTs imprinted their Wrangler’s personalities was anthropomorphic crap. Only an idiot would admit he believed otherwise.

  The Queen didn’t blink. “Well, General?”

  I breathed deep. “Yes. He reminds me of someone I was close to. A comrade in arms.”

  The Queen turned to Bassin and sniffed. “You see?”

  Bassin threw up his hands. “See what, Mother? I just explained for you how I can rely on what the machine may tell me. No more and no less.”

  The Queen stared at me. “And I am explaining for you, Bassin, how I can rely on what the General may tell me. A lie would have been expedient. The General, here, told me the truth, even though it made him look a fool. A man who lies about small things will certainly lie about large ones.”

  She turned back to her son. “Bassin, men only rule machines. Kings rule men. Pay attention. Learn how to do the job you’re born to, while I can still teach you!”

  I let out my breath.

  Not the first quiz I passed by dumb luck. If her Majesty wanted the truth . . .

  I cleared my throat. “Your Majesty, the truth is that we came here from another world. In a ship that sails in the sky. We captured it from the black worms. We’ve fought them before. And, because we know them, we think now you’re going to have to fight them, or they will wipe out every human being on this planet, most especially the four of us.”

  Bassin’s jaw dropped, and he muttered.

  The Queen shot a look at him, then at her cane, and Bassin clammed up. “General, if you tell me it is so, it is so.” Then she leaned forward on her elbows and stared into the holo gen. “You may brief me.”

  I sat back in my chair and exhaled. Now I was on familiar ground. I’d winged a hundred Advisee briefs, if I’d winged one. Sometimes even to royals doing a ceremonial stint in their country’s uniform, though Colonel Bassin was no toy soldier. I began, “As to Mission—”

  The Queen waved her hand. “Defer the Mission Statement. Please begin with Enemy Situation.”

  I raised my eyebrows. Her Majesty was no toy soldier, either. At least, she was no stranger to a logical military briefing format.

  I waved the generator to map view. Jeeb’s images from the last few days unreeled, beginning with a pull-back shot from the Fair.

  I said, “The Slugs—we call the black worms Slugs, because they look like small animals we find in our gardens—”

  The Queen nodded. “My Garden Master kills those with salt. The name is apt.”

  “These are tougher. We tracked this group back to where they came from.”

  I scrolled the map back along the Slugs’ approach, hundreds of miles north of Marinus, then back onto the fifty-mile-wide isthmus that joined the Clans’ continent to the other landmass to the east. The image showed in luminous green the path Jeeb’s sensors had identified as the Slug infantry’s axis of advance. Slugs didn’t normally have an axis of retreat. They always fought to the last maggot. But not this time.

  I froze the image, and pointed at the object center screen. “The remnants of their attacking force retreated behind this barrier. They don’t usually retreat.”

  Bassin said, “We call it the Millennium Wall. The Receivers—the black worms, your Slugs—built it long ago, at least a thousand years. And the old stories go that it took a thousand years before that to build it.”

  I said, “We don’t know what your measurements are, but we measure it as seventy miles long across the isthmus, counting the wings that extend out into the sea.” I pointed. “Dense as granite, and three hundred feet high, along all five walls.”

  Bassin frowned. “Five walls?”

  I pointed. “Behind the first one, each separated from the one behind it by an obstacle belt two miles deep.”

  Bassin leaned forward, stared at the fortification, and shook his head slowly.

  I asked, “Don’t your measurements agree with ours?”

  Bassin said, “We have no measurements, beyond this first barrier. No one who went over the wall ever came back.”

  The Queen stared, too. “We have never seen beyond the Wall. We deliver the Stones to the Gate.” She pointed at a road that wound down the isthmus’ center spine, then ended against the Wall. “When the Stones have been removed, that is our signal to deliver more.”

  I scrolled the map east, on across the isthmus, then on into the eastern continent’s center. I pointed. “Then you’ve never seen this.”

  Centered in a cleared area bigger than the Cairo Crater rose an iridescent blue egg-shaped mountain.

  I raised my eyebrows at Bassin.

  He turned his palms up as he shook his head. “No.”

  I said, “We’ve seen one. It’s an incubator ship. We call it a Troll-class. Inside a Troll, the Slugs can grow a new army in ten months.”

  Bassin said, “We just defeated an army of theirs. We can defeat a new one every ten months forever, if we have to.”

  I shook my head. “What we defeated was one tenth of a normal Slug assault force. Probably just what could be spared on short notice from the skeleton garrison that has operated this outpost for centuries. Until now, all these Slugs had to do was sit behind the Wall they built to keep you out, retrieve the Stones you left at the Gate, and, probably, load cargo ships when they called to pick up the Stones.”

  I zoomed in on the Troll, and pointed at the forest belt that surrounded the Troll’s mile-wide base, and long, low stone buildings that curved around a stone pad big enough to land a Firewitch. “From the height of the redwoods grown up around it, and the deteriorated surrounding stoneworks, we think this ship’s been dug in for centuries. Probably millennia.”

>   Bassin shook his head. “So, the Slugs didn’t retreat. They came to get something. My census counters say the Stones at the Fair disappeared. Perhaps the Slugs got what they came for, then left. And that will be the end of it.”

  The zoomed image of the Troll resembled a swollen beehive. I pointed at openings that ringed its top, and shook my head back at him. “But these vents opened during our overflight. We think that means the Slugs are starting up the incubator. If they intended to let you stay around and keep delivering, they wouldn’t need a new army. And they wouldn’t have attacked you in the first place.”

  The Queen nodded.

  I looked from Bassin to the Queen. “Let me be clear. We believe those reinforcements will number in the millions. Slug warriors are—” I paused, and cocked my head. Howard’s Spook autopsies showed that a Slug warrior was a single-purpose element of one enormous organism, more white corpuscle than independent-minded GI. The Marini barely had microscopes, much less a word for “corpuscle.”

  I said, “To explain Slug warriors, I need a word you can understand.”

  The Queen said, “‘Evil’ will suffice.”

  I nodded. “Slug warriors never disobey orders. They never complain about the food. They retreat only tactically, and they never surrender. We believe that new army’s mission will be to eradicate human life from Bren. And that army won’t rest until it accomplishes that mission, or its last warrior is dead.”

  The Queen closed her eyes, and frowned. Then she looked at me and asked, “Do you believe that army will succeed?”

  “If the Clans fight separately, yes.”

  The Queen tapped a finger on the table. “You speak from experience?”

  “I’ve fought them twice.”

  “To what result?”

  “We killed all of them that came at us, and they haven’t come back since.”

  I didn’t say that we had won the war. I had always believed that we had won only in the way that the American Colonies had beat the British, and North Vietnam beat the United States. We were too far away and too much trouble, so the Slugs left us alone.

  I continued, “But Bassin tells me all the Clans together number twenty million people. Our world’s losses alone were sixty million. And, with all respect to Marin’s armorers, our weapons were more advanced than yours.”