Orphan's Journey

by Robert Buettner

  Checking what was actually in the ammunition carts was exactly the kind of thing that a supernumerary like me should have been doing. But I had been too worried about my next cliff ascent.

  Bassin, shoulders drooping, shook his head. “Load manifests must have gotten switched. Where could that ammunition be?”

  I stared at the Firewitch debris that some idiot had pack-ratted halfway across this planet, then I stood, and looked around Bassin’s HQ camp. “I think I know. Where’s your Prick?”

  Sixty-Eight

  Three minutes later, a Sapper set at my feet an olive-drab, twenty-three-pound metal box the size of a case of old aluminum soda cans. A flat three-foot spring-metal antenna like a carpenter’s rule poked from the box top. For a second after the Sapper set the AN/PRC-25 radio down, the antenna whipped back and forth.

  I bent over the Prick 25, twisted the squelch knob, then held the handset to my ear and thumbed the talk button. “Bear, this is Eagle, over.” I released the talk button, and listened. I repeated the call, over and over, for three minutes.

  Bren’s sky wasn’t just grayer than Earth’s, it was more transparent to our old radio’s transmissions. We had found the old radios’ range improved to four times what they could transmit on Earth, better even than our helmet radios. Both Bassin’s Headquarters and Casus’s Headquarters carried one. Still, I held my breath after each transmission I sent.

  No American military unit had been equipped with the AN/PRC-25 radio since the years when Berlin had a wall and the Rio Grande didn’t. But our Earthside Advisees had cheerfully used surplus Prick Twenty-Fives eighty years later.

  The same could not be said of Casus. My handset burbled with his voice. “—thing!”

  I could picture Casus, eyes bulging, standing in his HQ tent, holding his Prick Twenty-Five’s corded handset between his thumb and forefinger at arm’s length, like it was a talking roach.

  Casus’s voice grumbled across the gray sky of Bren. “Get Hibble! The tethered insect has captured Jason’s soul!”

  I muttered to myself, “Goddammit, Casus, take your thumb off the ‘talk’ button.”

  Four minutes later, Howard’s voice sounded in my ear. “Jason? Where are you?”

  I sighed. A full bird Colonel and decorated combat veteran had just identified the Supreme Allied Commander by name, then asked him to transmit his location, and broadcast it all over this operations area in clear, uncoded speech.

  We always doubted that the Slugs could monitor our radio traffic, or bothered to, anyway. But a good commander never underestimates his enemy.

  I said, “Where I’m supposed to be.” A good commander never overestimates his subordinates, either. “Put Falcon on.”

  “He can’t come to the phone right now. Ambush patrol.”

  Ord would be out of touch for an entire day.

  I drummed my fingers on the radio. “Owl, I need you to do something. Fast.”

  “I’m glad you called. You’ll never guess what happened.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You pulled back the cover on a supply wagon, and found Ordnance Rifle ammunition, instead of your junk.”

  Silence.

  “How did you know?”

  “Never mind. Load that ammunition on a Cargo’Bot. Ride the ’Bot to me.”

  “I hate riding. And you know I can’t read maps.”

  “Just dial the ’Bot to head west twenty degrees north from your location—don’t tell me where you are now!—and hang on. Call on your helmet radio at random intervals. Short transmissions. When you get close enough that I pick up your transmission, I’ll guide you in.”

  The ’Bot would beeline Howard and the ammo over thirty miles of mountains, which had taken us days to cross, in thirty-six hours. If we had a battalion of ’Bots, this war would have been won long ago.

  “Can’t somebody else do it?” Howard’s voice quavered.

  I smiled at my mental picture of the ’Bot spidering Howard up sheer cliffs, then dashing across mountain ledges, while Howard screamed like a bridesmaid handcuffed to a rodeo bull.

  My smile faded.

  The journey could kill or cripple even a young, fit Scout, even if the Slugs didn’t intercept the ’Bot.

  I said, “Nobody but you and Falcon’s willing to touch a ’Bot, even if they knew how to program it. You have a helmet radio, and nobody else but Falcon and I do. Pack animal transport is too slow, anyway.” I drew a breath. “You can do this. You have to do this.”

  Howard sighed. “Okay.”

  I transmitted, “Godspeed. Eagle out.”

  “Bye-bye.”

  For the next thirty hours, we all sat hidden in our observation post, and watched newly grown armored warriors pour out of the Troll. They formed into units, then boom-boom-boomed around the low stone buildings. Then they headed down the valley to reinforce the Slugs that Casus’s army was painfully, and too slowly, driving back this way. As long as the Troll remained intact, the Slugs were replacing more warriors than Casus could kill.

  Jeeb overhead here would have reassured me, but Casus’s army needed his tactical intelligence more. Besides, we had a screen of thousands of Scouts scattered through the forest that provided eyes and ears.

  On the next cloudy afternoon, thirty-eight hours after Howard departed from Casus’s headquarters, I paced a rise two miles further back from the Slug Troll than Bassin’s HQ. I checked my ’Puter again, and swore.

  Howard should have come within helmet radio range hours before. The rise was overgrown with a stand of redwoods bigger around than silos, and five times taller. From this vantage, I should have been better able to receive Howard’s transmissions, and Howard could spot the light of the Marini lantern I carried, so he could guide in on it.

  I worried for our missing ammunition, but I worried as much for Howard.

  I stomped around the redwood copse muttering to myself.

  “Eagle, this is Owl, over.”

  I grinned. “This is Eagle. How was the trip, over?”

  “Fair. Please show your position with colored smoke and I will identify, over.”

  Howard actually knew how to soldier. Whenever he started behaving like one was when I knew he was dead serious and dead tired. Smoke grenades had been a simple location marker on Earth for a century.

  But I wrinkled my forehead.

  If Howard was thinking straight, even he would have known we were on a different planet, and we didn’t have smoke grenades.

  “Sorry, Owl. I have no smoke. I say again, no smoke. I will mark my position with light, over.”

  I swung the lantern overhead in the gray, fading afternoon.

  “Eagle, I do not identify your light. I say again, please show . . . your light again, over.”

  “Owl, are you okay?”

  “Had a little fall . . . on the way.”

  My heart skipped. “Wait twenty, Owl. I will reposition my light, over.”

  Howard just breathed.

  I roped the lit lantern to my back, walked to the tallest redwood, and craned my neck toward its crown, three hundred feet above me.

  Then I popped the wrist and sole-plate crampons out on my Eternads. With my feet together, the tines touched each other and rattled, because I was shaking inside my Eternads.

  I took a step back, jumped against the tree, and my crampons nailed three-thousand-year-old bark. I hugged the redwood like I was an armored Koala, shinnied for the sky, and never looked down.

  By the time I cleared the shorter redwoods, which the trip altimeter in my visor called two hundred feet, the sun sat low on the horizon. My underlayer was sweat-soaked despite the suit ventilators, and I trembled, more from the altitude than the exertion.

  I looked up.

  I would shinny twenty feet higher, then call Howard again.

  Swoosh.

  Something shot past me, behind my back, and I flattened myself against the tree trunk. I panted inside my helmet, my cheekplate against bark.

  Neither Slug sniper rounds n
or friendly fire went “swoosh.”

  I inched my head around and peered between branches. A hundred yards away, a forty-foot pterosaur wheeled, then glided back for another pass. It wouldn’t be able to bite through my armor—theoretically—but it could sure knock me off my perch. I forgot about climbing twenty feet higher.

  I transmitted, “Owl, this is Eagle. Do you identify my light, over?”

  Swoosh.

  My right arm slipped. I tried to swallow, but my mouth had been dry for a half hour.

  “Eagle . . . I’m not sure. Can you shake your light?”

  “Goddammit, my light’s been shaking since I left the ground!”

  Swoosh.

  Something thumped the lantern on my back, as the flying lizard swept past, and I inched around to the other side of the tree trunk.

  Howard’s voice chirped in my headset. “Eagle, I identify yellow, I say again yellow, light.”

  “That’s me.”

  “Estimate arrival your position one-zero minutes. Owl out.”

  Even as I shook, I smiled, and relaxed. The pterosaur, puzzled by an unappetizing intruder, swung into view again, but now two hundred yards out and receding.

  Magnificent, free, and soaring, it looked nothing like its cousin’s tangled corpse, crushed by our dropped Ordnance Rifle. Collateral damage. Us four Earthlings had, in our short time on this planet, butchered every sort of animal that walked, flew, or swam on it, polluted rivers with alien blood, and forced our enemy to burn the land itself.

  War is cruelty, and there is no refining it. Sherman said that to the Mayor of Atlanta, then demolished the city’s rail yards, so Sherman’s enemy couldn’t use them to move troops against him. The rest of the city burned, despite Sherman’s contrary orders. The cruel and unrefined collateral damage I had ordered befell a resilient ecology bigger than we were. At least killing animals was better than killing noncombatant humans.

  I moved my left foot down, and began descending, when I realized that from up here I could not only see the Troll. I could see the Troll from a different heading and elevation than we got from our observation posts.

  In the dusk, I upped the magnification and switched to night passive.

  “No.”

  I zoomed my snoopers, then shook my head inside my helmet.

  “No, no, no!”

  Sixty-Nine

  Miles away, across the artificial green dusk of my visor display ghosted pale, spindly shapes. They poured from the long, low, windowless ancient stone buildings that surrounded the vast clearing alongside the mountain that was the Troll.

  I toggled my threat counter, and it spun into the thousands. I zoomed my optics, and my eyes widened against the surrounds.

  The shapes were thin and ghostly. They were hunched and naked. But they were human beings.

  I hung back away from the redwood trunk, as though the image I saw had punched me.

  We always wondered whether the Slugs took prisoners. We would have taken Slug prisoners, if they had ever let us, just to better know our enemy. It stood to reason that the Pseudocephalopod would be curious, too.

  I peered down, again. These people were as often women as men. Their hair tangled shoulder-long, not GI-short, and many seemed curled over with age. Here and there, a robust head thrust above the throng. There might be some of our troops, taken prisoners of war, sprinkled among this population. Some of the rest appeared to be civilians, likely captured at the Great Fair and made to transport Cavorite here. But most of these people had never been soldiers or civilians.

  They shuffled on bare, shackled feet.

  They had never been soldiers. For countless generations they had been slaves of the Pseudocephalopod.

  Two hundred feet below me, Howard’s ’Bot whined into the clearing at the redwood’s base.

  It lurched five-legged, its right center ambulator tucked up against its carapace, useless. Howard, his crimsons caked with dust, swayed and leaned to his right like a drunk.

  I attenuated my radio range, and spoke in the clear. “Howard?”

  Seventy

  When I reached the ground and dragged Howard off the ’Bot’s back, he was conscious, but his right arm hung limp.

  I popped his visor, and peered into his eyes. “What happened?”

  “Slipped off a ledge six hours out. Damaged the ’Bot. My shoulder dislocated, I think.”

  I clenched my teeth, and hissed. Thirty-two hours in the saddle pounding a dislocated shoulder.

  “You reduce it? And drop Morph?”

  He nodded. “Morph’s all gone. You wouldn’t have a cigarette on you?”

  I shook my head, smiled, and slid both of my own MorphTabs under his tongue. He closed his eyes and sighed.

  I waited three minutes, until the ’Tabs made him giggle, then slung him back aboard the ’Bot, as gently as I could. I swung up behind him, and moved the ’Bot out at a walk.

  The ’Bot could still carry the two of us faster on five legs than I could run.

  “Howard, those old stone sheds by that clearing next to the Troll. There must have been people in them. They just came out in the open. Thousands of ’em. Most of them look like they’ve been Slug slaves forever. What’s your hunch?”

  Howard didn’t answer, he just giggled, then sang, “Ho, ho, ho . . .”

  Howard was feeling no pain, so I kicked the ’Bot’s speed up.

  Howard’s head lolled, and he sang again. “Down through th’ chim-un-ee comes old Saint Nick.”

  I sighed.

  One MorphTab would have been plenty. Howard had lost all touch with reality.

  Or had he?

  Seventy-One

  The first moon had risen by the time I got Howard back to Bassin’s HQ. Bassin and I lay side by side in the still, cold darkness, on a rock ledge that overlooked the Troll. I flipped out my Elephant Ear so Bassin could see what I saw through my snoopers, showing up in my helmet’s external flatscreen.

  We peered down at the scene, and Bassin said, “The warriors that were guarding them before? The nearest warrior’s a thousand yards away from them, now.”

  The moonlight lit the thronged slaves now, as they moved into the open space by the Troll, now clearly visible from our vantage.

  I nodded. “But nobody looks inclined to run for it. No wonder the Slugs aren’t worried about keeping the Stones flowing if they eradicate this civilization. They know how to use slaves, and they can just keep a few more. You all accept slavery, and piling Stones on the devil’s doorstep, because it’s been beaten into you for thirty-five thousand years.”

  “It’s consistent with our prehistory and our theology.”

  Had the Slugs trained humans, then turned them loose on Bassin’s side of the wall? Like sheep that the Slugs came back and sheared annually? Or did humans escape, breed like lab rabbits loosed in the wild, then get domesticated? It didn’t matter. The question was—

  Bassin frowned. “The question becomes, what do we do now?”

  I pointed at the Troll. “If we shell that thing like we planned, we’ll kill all those people.”

  Bassin frowned. “But—”

  “Bassin, I hate sacrificing soldiers. There may even be POWs down there. But I will not deliberately sacrifice noncombatants. Period. Slugs may be the devil. I won’t be.”

  Bassin was the future king of most of the troops around us, and they were under his operational command. If he ordered them to shell those people, they would.

  I stabbed my finger at him. “You try it, it’s over my corpse!”

  He raised his eyebrow and both palms. “Agreed! Jason, don’t you know me at all, by now?”

  My finger trembled, and I lowered it. “Sorry.” Physical stress exhausts GIs, then inattention kills them. The added mental stress of command exhausts Generals faster. But if Generals succumb to stress, their slip-ups kill others.

  Bassin said, “But every hour that we don’t shell that blue mountain, our enemy grows stronger. The odds that face Casus have already
grown far longer than our supply lines. The Scouts we have dispersed in these woods could barely swoop into that position down there, before they’d be overwhelmed.”

  Bassin was right. Moreover, if I was on edge enough to snap at Bassin, all our troops were on edge. We had to end this war now, or the Slugs would end it for us.

  Behind us, a voice whispered, “Holy moly! Right on time.”

  Howard, lucid again, crawled up alongside us, favoring his right arm. He stopped, then pointed at the sky.

  From a foxhole in brush to our right came a soldier’s gasp.

  I looked up, where Howard pointed, my eyes widened, and I muttered, “Holy moly is right.”

  A silhouette drifted across the white moon. It was a slow-rotating, bulbous, black scorpion with a down-turned, glowing red stinger and six upturned claws.

  The Firewitch half-eclipsed the moon.

  Bassin gasped. “So that is a ship that flies among the stars. You arrived in one of those?”

  The Slug vessel whispered above us, and its low hum shook the ground beneath my belly. Then the ship settled slowly, tail-first, into the clearing alongside the Troll.

  Howard’s Santa came down the chimney as he had predicted.

  I turned to Howard. “Why—”

  He pointed below. A red, glowing human lava flow snaked from the stone buildings toward the descending Firewitch. The human slaves were hauling this year’s Cavorite harvest from temporary storage. Bins alongside the Firewitch glowed red like bonfires as Stones by the thousands filled them.

  Howard said, “The only reason for the Pseudocephalopod to maintain human stock near this landing site was to handle Cavorite. The only reason for that stock to be released above ground was to load cargo. Cavorite gets harvested by the local population each summer, the locals trade and move it each fall, and a transport calls to pick up Cavorite once each year. Elegantly simple. Of course, this year, the Pseudocephalopod eliminated the middleman, permanently, because we arrived. Now, here’s the thing—”

  I raised my palm, and the moonlight reflected off my gauntlet. “Howard, I don’t need elegance. I need to win this war, without killing those people. And I’m about out of time.”