Orphan's Journey

by Robert Buettner

  I breathed again.

  Yards seaward of Jude’s boat, a whitecap appeared on the sea, and grew, first into a black knob, and then into a black mountain that towered twenty feet taller than Jude, as he stood tiny and crimson in the bobbing boat.

  The rhind’s ebony head was wedge-shaped, as though the Titanic had surfaced bow-first from the abyss, and silver seawater rivers cascaded from a double row of shark-fin scutes down the beast’s back.

  In its toothed jaws, the rhind vised the limp kraken that Jude had harpooned, like a wolf that had snatched a sparrow as it flew past. Seawater coursed off the kraken’s tentacles, and ran off the spear-point of its cone shell.

  Howard called the rhind “tylosaurs,” air-breathing, aquatic lizards—like crocodiles with flippers.

  The rhind’s body shot out of the sea until its snout was forty feet in the air, and its red eye burned down at the assault boat. The rhind’s foreflipper, bigger by itself than the boat, cleared the water.

  Alongside me, Wilgan whispered, “Big feller. I make him a hundred fifty feet.”

  I muttered, and pushed my hand at the air in front of me, like I was brushing back a dangling snake. “Get out of there!”

  The monster toppled back to the sea with its fifty-foot prize, and its flipper carved Jude’s boat in two, like a cleaver splitting a bread loaf.

  “No!” I whispered.

  Oars, men, and rifles splintered and tumbled in silhouette across the brilliant moons.

  Jude, armored limbs outstretched, cartwheeled across the sky like a five-pointed ruby.

  Sixty

  I punched the zoom on my optics so hard that they retracted. I swore, tore off my helmet, and reset them manually with quivering fingers. By the time I got them back on, the frame in focus showed nothing at the spot where the rhind had crashed back into the sea but debris bobbing on the waves. Elsewhere, all up and down the six-fathom line, rhind and kraken struggled as our boats bobbed and dashed around and through them.

  I switched my radio from command net to Eternad intercom, and spoke. “Fifteen Leader, this is Eagle joining your net, over.” Screw procedure and chain of command. “Jude? This is Jason!”

  I repeated for three minutes, but only static hum answered.

  I grabbed Ord’s arm. “Can you see him? Did you see—”

  Ord lowered his binoculars, and shook his head. “His radio may have been damaged. You know those old Eternads . . .” He paused. “Nothing moving out there now, Sir. Another boat may have picked him up.”

  The assault boats were to maintain a hundred yards’ separation, and to stop for nothing, double underscored. Ord knew that as well as I did. He had helped me edit the wording when the orders came across my desk for review.

  My heart sank in my chest like an anvil.

  “Sure. Probably.” I stared into the sand, and shook my head. Why had I stayed out of it? Why had I been so foolish? Why had I let a sixteen-year-old who knew nothing of his own mortality spend his life on a fool’s errand?

  I blinked back tears.

  Because if he didn’t, some other immortal sixteen-year-old would have died in his place.

  The squeal of keels crossing wooden rollers echoed in the night, and I looked up and down the beach. The second-wave boats and crews moved into launch positions.

  A Marini Signals runner, kicking up beach sand as he staggered, stopped, then stood to attention in front of me. He couldn’t have been older than fourteen. Not so much younger than my godson had been. No, I lied to myself. Not so much younger than my godson was.

  Cheeks flushed, the boy saluted, then panted, “Sir, first reports.”

  Sixty-One

  By the time the first reports had become second, and third, and fourth reports, the moons had set, and sunrise had become a blinding sliver above the Sea of Hunters.

  At the water’s edge, I stood beneath a dun-colored woven canopy, with Howard, Ord, and the Marini Admiral in charge of follow-on overwater transport.

  Follow-on meant extracting survivors if we failed, or ferrying admin personnel across the Sea if the landings succeeded. The Admiral was the officer who, seven months before, at the Alliance’s first meeting, had asked the Queen to relieve me when I recommended an amphibious assault across the Sea of Hunters.

  We stood around a camp table, and stared into the hologen’s image.

  Howard pointed with a chewed yellow pencil at the overhead image that Jeeb was transmitting. A broad area of the sea below Jeeb boiled white, as animals struggled against one another like bucketed worms. Even as we watched, the area shifted north and broadened. Here and there, our boats darted untouched through and around the melee.

  Howard said, “The feeding field now extends eight miles in widest dimension. A moveable feast, to borrow a phrase. The rhind and kraken have worn each other out. The smaller fry are pouncing on them. We should have forty-eight hours before the predator population recovers and reinfests this area enough to impede our movement.”

  Ord folded back the top sheets of a sheaf of reports. “With the first and second waves ashore, and the third under way, casualties stand at less than 2 percent, Sirs. Some of those are missing in action, so the final total should go lower. The Scouts made landfall in disarray. But they encountered only half a dozen sentries along the entire landing beach front—and neutralized them all without loss. They’ve pushed a beachhead inland two miles already, without firing a shot.”

  I closed my eyes, exhaled, then looked again at Ord.

  He stared at me, pulled a single, folded taupe sheet from his breastplate pouch, then crumpled it in his fist. “We shouldn’t be needing this, General.”

  The Marini Admiral stroked his white mustache. “It’s a miracle!”

  I stared at the balled note in Ord’s hand, felt cold, and bit my lip. It would never be a miracle to the families of the dead. For every commander who had to write a condolence letter to one of those families, and for every family who received one of those letters, the casualty rate was 100 percent. But it was a miracle, nonetheless.

  We waded out through the surf, and swabbies pushed and pulled us up into the bobbing boat that would finally take us to war.

  As the crew loaded our gear, the Admiral tugged an oval silver flask from his pocket, flipped back its cap with his thumb, and toasted me. “Brilliant plan, Commander! The worst is over now, hey?”

  Then he took a pull, and handed me the flask.

  It was as empty as his head.

  Sixty-Two

  Ten miles out into the Sea of Hunters, as we skirted the boiling melee of the feeding frenzy, I came eyeball to eyeball with my first rhind.

  The exhausted black leviathan lolled at the surface, like a capsized freighter. Its exposed bulk towered twelve feet taller than our packet boat, and by the time our crew rowed us from the rhind’s flaccid tail to its snout, we had covered three times the boat’s fifty-foot length.

  Every few seconds, a fin cut the surface, as a shark darted in, tore flesh from the rhind’s heaving flank, then flashed away. The beast’s heart thumped slowly, as though a bass drum lay muffled within its ribs, and its red eye, larger than a cannonball, stared down at me as we rowed past.

  Perhaps I should have wondered whether this was the same monster that had crushed Jude’s boat. Perhaps I should have been outraged, or triumphant, as the rhind floated, dying.

  What could the rhind have made of this fifty-headed creature that paddled past, scuttling over the sea in its own inverted shell?

  For eons, the rhind and its kind had ruled Bren’s oceans. Neither the Slugs, which Earthlings called murderers, nor the Clans, which Earthlings would call barbarians, had disrupted the natural order of things. Now, in one morning, four Earthlings had inverted and bloodied this world. Once, I had asked Bassin whether rhind were the scariest thing on this planet. Maybe the Slugs were right. Maybe we were the disease, not them.

  Howard stood alongside me as we ghosted past the rhind like mice past a cat.

 
; Howard’s helmet cam crackled as he snapped images of the beast. “If I didn’t see this, I wouldn’t believe it was real. The Bunker Tylosaur was a third this long.”

  “New planet, new reality. Just be glad reality didn’t bite your ass.” I mag’d my view of the landing grounds ahead of us. Boats, troops by the tens of thousands, cavalry mounts, cannon, and supply wagons jumbled on the beaches. “Yet.”

  Sixty-Three

  An hour later, I planted my feet in the sand of our expanding beachhead, and a handler brought up the dapple duckbill I would ride. As I grasped its reins, Casus thundered toward me on his white stallion, cape flying, and reined up.

  I squinted up at him, and asked, “You reform your Divisions yet?”

  He shook his head, pointing toward the dunes that bordered the beach. “Each Troop dashes inland as soon as its mounts recover from the janga.”

  I sighed. “You have no command and control of your units?”

  Casus stiffened. “We discussed this. We agreed!”

  I had been terrified that our troops and equipment would pile up in a restricted beachhead, where the Slugs could cut them to bits with heavy fire. The “miracle” of Dunkirk, and of the British and French that the German army had surrounded on its beaches, was that the Allies won the war in spite of it. Dispersal had been my obsession, if we got ashore.

  “I know. You’re right.” But I hung my head, and sighed again. “Keep pressing, but try to organize things on the fly.”

  I assigned Casus to command the dash across the three hundred open miles, from the beaches to the mountains, that lay between us and the Troll, precisely because he had more speed than judgment.

  He would press his soldiers mercilessly forward, wringing out their last sweat drops, because speed could win this war. Casus wouldn’t press because he was a bastard, though many of his soldiers surely would think he was. Caring about soldiers didn’t mean indulging them. A commander should always prefer live soldiers’ hatred over the affection of mothers who tell him their dead sons loved him.

  A century before, Eisenhower trusted an ivory-handled-pistol-toting, GI-slapping public-relations disaster to boot the Nazis across France. Patton routed the Germans so magnificently that his armies outran their gasoline trucks.

  I asked Casus, “Do you even know where your point units are? Whether they need supplies? Do they know whether our overhead imagery shows Slugs ahead of them? Or friendlies on their flanks?”

  Casus shrugged. “My men are like their mounts. They smell the way home, and it’s forward.”

  Command is choosing the right horse for the right course, then letting it run. But with a light hand still on the reins. Casus was the right horse for this course, but . . .

  I swung up onto my duckbill. “Change of plan. My headquarters will move with yours for a couple days.”

  A couple days turned out to be four weeks. The weather front from the north slammed us one morning later, then sat for days. Snow turned to rain, rain made mud, and Casus’s great dash forward stalled. Worse, the Slugs figured out where our main thrust was, and shifted their mobile reserve south to block us.

  Tassini Scout units made first contact with overwhelming Slug forces at night, in a driving rain. Light-armored and inexperienced, the Scouts got mauled, and fell back through Casus’s cavalry units in disarray.

  When first contact came, most kindergartens would have had better command and control than we did.

  Marini infantry hurled into the breach finally stabilized the front, thanks to Gustus’s assault rifles, a few Company-level commanders’ tactical brilliance, and, as a Marini infantry sergeant reminded me, “A few bayonets wif’ guts behind ’em!”

  The Slugs, who did always seem to go to school on human tactics, settled in to a mobile defense, blocking our front, jabbing, then defending every terrain obstacle until we flanked them. Then the Slugs gave ground, retreating behind the next obstacle. I felt as frustrated as Sherman marching south toward Atlanta.

  Unlike the Confederates who delayed Sherman, time was on the Pseudocephalopod’s side. The Slug army grew by fifty thousand warriors every week. Our army just grew weaker every day, as our supply lines stretched and frayed.

  The wobbleheads and duckbills ate whatever they found growing in front of them, which actually eased our logistic headache compared to, say, a diesel-powered Panzer army. Gustus devised a system of prepackaged cargo loads identified by manifests that cut supply wagon turnaround time in half.

  Nonetheless, Gustus’s wagoners rumbled forward twenty-four-point-two hours every day, through mud and sleet. The wagoners’ round trips lengthened two miles for every mile our point units advanced. The resultant exhaustion and haste meant point units sometimes tore tarps off prepackaged wagons and found saddles when they were short of bread, and bread when they needed cartridges.

  The Slugs weren’t winning, but they didn’t have to win. They just had to give us time to lose.

  Fifty-four days after we hit the beaches, Casus, Howard, Ord, Bassin, and I stood among field commanders, studying the holo gen map view in a tent that was still three hundred miles from our objective.

  Casus stabbed the map with his finger. “The Scouts will position themselves here, along the riverbank.” He glanced up at the Tassini Scout Commander. “Make a big show, as though you were an army.”

  The Tassini nodded. “Many campfires. Much patrolling.”

  Casus turned to the Marini Colonel of Charioteers. “Position your chariots and my cavalry here, in the woodline of these hills along the river, downstream from the Scouts. The morning fog will hide you even if the trees don’t. The Slugs will believe our Scouts are our entire army. So they will advance across your front, along the river, toward the Scouts.” Casus slid his finger upstream, in the direction of his Scout decoys.

  Bassin nodded and smiled. “Ah! When the Slugs are strung out along the riverbank, the Chariots and cavalry will charge downhill. They will crush the Slugs against the river, like a hammer against an anvil.”

  Casus nodded.

  I smiled. War waged without flying machines hadn’t changed much over the centuries. Casus never got within light years of the Command and General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth, but he had just diagramed the tactics Hannibal used to annihilate the Romans against the shores of Lake Trasemine in 217 B.C.

  The Pseudocephalopod was as logical as the Romans, but more naive. I suppose if Howard was right, and the Pseudocephalopod was just a single being, it would never understand that the other guy might try to fool it.

  Bassin said, “Then my sappers will push pontoon bridges across the river immediately.”

  “And my men will put them to good use,” Casus said.

  The next morning, I hid in the mist that wrapped the pines upslope of Casus’s planned killing ground. Arrayed to my left and right were so many cavalry and Charioteers that the nervous scuffing of heavy claws made a constant buzz.

  This would be the first time many Tassini and Casuni units that had been fragmented on the landing grounds rejoined. Two hundred thousand of us, two hundred thousand Slugs. It was our chance to break the stalemate of indecisive probes and Slug retreats that had tilted the campaign against us. It was also our chance to lose everything.

  Boom-boom-boom.

  I heard the Slugs, though I couldn’t see them, and they couldn’t see us. I flicked my visor display and in front of me I saw through Jeeb’s passive infrared optics the marching Slugs below him, their Legion stretched out alongside the river in a thinned black line.

  A bugle echoed, and the cavalry buzz became a rumble. Upstream, the Scouts charged the Slug column’s head, and collapsed it back into the Slug main body. Downstream, Casus’s cavalry swung in behind the Slug column’s rear, and drove it forward into the Slug main body.

  Another bugle sounded. Wronks and duckbills thundered down the slope through the mist, into the Slug traffic jam below, as soldiers and monsters roared.

  I held my duckbill as he pranced. He w
as younger than Rosy. Younger and more prone to stick his nose where it would buy trouble.

  Like Jude. My heart sank. The constant movement, and the detail of running an army of nearly half a million, had submerged the pain of loss. But every now and then the pain spiked to the surface like an attacking rhind’s snout.

  The rattle of assault rifles and the zing of answering mag rails echoed to me live through the mist, while I concentrated on the visual of the battle unfolding in my visor display.

  An hour after the bugles began the battle, the mist burned off, and I watched live as well as listened. Casus’s plan unfolded flawlessly, and his troops executed it magnificently. The Slug elements that his troops backed against the river could do nothing but wheel, fight, and die.

  I switched my view to panoramic. Wronks trampled armored Slug warriors like roaches. Tassini on wobbleheads slashed in and out among the warriors. Casuni hacked—and fired point-blank automatic bursts at—packed-in Slugs. So many dead Slugs lay in the muddy shallows that their green lifeblood curled out into the stream and changed its color.

  The Slugs rushed reinforcements from their rear up to the opposite bank. Slug Heavys pot-shot Bassin’s pontoon bridges, and the spans shattered and sank, as his engineers struggled to bolt their sections together.

  But, for once, Gustus’s logisticians got it right, and new bridge sections appeared from our rear faster than the Slugs could sink them.

  By afternoon, the first Tassini Scouts dashed across the first completed bridge span, while Marini infantry massing along the near riverbank cheered.

  The Slugs pulled back, and our rout of them resumed. Eisenhower said, “Relentless and speedy pursuit is the most profitable action in war,” and Casus was proving it.

  I stood dismounted at a bridgehead as Marini infantry followed the Casuni cavalry that rumbled across the water. Our mercifully few dead would travel with us, until we could inter them honorably, but the Slugs cared less than we did about their own casualties. Slug corpses lay so thick along the river’s banks that already, scavenging inland pterosaurs circled high above the battlefield, anvil-headed gliders whose angular wings spanned nearly forty feet.