Orphan's Journey

by Robert Buettner

  Howard rolled his eyes. “I was getting to that.” He frowned. “But we are almost out of time.”

  Seventy-Two

  At first light the next morning, I sat on one snorting wobblehead among fifty, in the trees a mile back from the clearing where the Troll rose, and where the Slug’s Stone transport ship had parked, perched atop triangular landing gear. Between us and the clearing was what Scout reconnaissance had identified as a sixty-yard gap in the Slug’s perimeter, where weather had crumbled an ancient stone wall.

  The Leader of the Troop I would ride with reined up his mount alongside me, and held up an empty ammunition sack. “Sir, what do we do with these?” His armored shoulders slumped, and his wobblehead panted.

  “Follow me. Do what I do.”

  There wasn’t time to explain the plan that had grown from Howard’s hunches, much less time to train Scouts, so exhausted they could barely stay in their saddles, to execute that plan.

  More battles have been lost by failure to seize opportunity than have ever been won by caution.

  Howard expected the Slugs to start their human laborers moving Stones out of the bins and into the transport ship as soon as the humans had enough visible light to work.

  Bassin estimated that it would take an hour, start to finish, for the slaves to shift the Stone volume from the bins into the transport. Once the Stones were loaded into the transport, our opportunity window would close.

  I checked my rifle for the fourth time, checked my ’Puter, and chinned my visor display to Jeeb’s overhead of the vast battle advancing slowly up the valley. Green bars showed Casus’s army, drawn up opposite the red bars of the Slug defending units.

  Two hundred thousand men and four hundred thousand maggots boiled in parallel lines, separated from each other by a mile, and waited for dawn.

  Since we had left the main body, Casus had defied logistics by force of will, pushing the Slugs back to within thirty miles of us.

  I had coordinated by radio, through Ord, what we needed from Casus. His troops and animals had to be dead on their feet, but in a few minutes he would challenge every one of them to throw everything into one more assault toward us. If we failed, they would fail. If we all failed, mankind would forever after exist on this planet only as naked slaves.

  My mouth went dry.

  Fast, improvised initiatives had throughout history won battles—and wars. But too many “brilliant” initiatives had proven to be almost brilliant instead. Lee hurled Pickett’s division against the Union Center at Gettysburg, and his mistake doomed the Confederacy. The Ardennes Offensive nearly expelled the Allies from Europe, but when it failed, Germany’s defense collapsed.

  Thump.

  The first Ordnance Rifle emplaced above and behind us fired. Seconds later, the rest of the battery rumbled.

  Six shells screamed by above the trees that hid us, and thundered, not into the Troll, nor into the humans massed around it, but into the Slug perimeter to our front.

  I swallowed and shook my head. We weren’t going to blow up the Troll, or the transport, and kill those thousands of innocents. But we had better not lose the battle and this world on that gamble.

  I checked Jeeb’s overhead. Down the valley, Casus’s troops responded to our guns’ distant rumble, and charged across the mile that separated them from the Slugs.

  After three minutes, the guns behind us fell silent, their ammunition expended destroying the Slugs to our front.

  The Troop leader next to me raised his rifle, and turned to his Scouts. “Forward!”

  We galloped through the perimeter breach before the Slugs could react. Six hundred more Scout wobbleheads followed us, before mag rounds began falling on our column.

  I spurred my wobblehead forward, as the lead Troop that I rode with crossed the open space toward the glowing red Stone bins.

  Bewildered slaves scattered, but no Slugs advanced to meet us. Howard’s Spooks had estimated that Cavorite killed a Slug in thirty seconds from five hundred yards. The little maggots kept their distance, as we had hoped.

  Now that we had gotten inside their lines, the maggots could turn their guns inward to potshot us, but they couldn’t advance on us, without killing themselves by Cavorite exposure. Individual Slug warriors weren’t afraid to die. If the ganglions in them thought independently at all, they probably thought—correctly—that since the overall organism survived they weren’t even dying. But individual warriors were smart enough to avoid dying without accomplishing anything.

  I reined up alongside a bin, dismounted, then scooped glowing Stones into the empty ammunition bag I carried, until I could barely heft it across my saddle.

  My visor display showed the green bars of Casus’s army racing forward, now.

  As we expected, once the Slugs’ main army realized we were in their rear and threatening the Troll, their formations had to fall back to reinforce against our attack. The Slugs beat that retreat so fast that Casus’s troops could barely advance fast enough to maintain contact with them.

  Once two Troops of Scouts riding behind me had loaded their bags with Stones, I led them at a gallop southwest, down the valley, toward the Slugs retreating from Casus.

  As I approached the Slugs’ perimeter this time, I didn’t bother shooting. I chucked a couple Stones left and right. Slugs scattered or died.

  Thirty minutes later, our Scouts had sprinkled their Stones in a belt that spanned the valley, wall-to-wall. The retreating Slugs either had to turn, fight Casus’s army, and die, or keep retreating into the Stone barrier belt— and die.

  Slugs aren’t much for individual initiative, but a few made for the forests at the valley’s edge. Casus’s cavalry cut them down before they made two hundred yards.

  The Slug remnants squeezed between us and Casus could no longer win the war. I wheeled my duckbill, and stared back at the thirty-five-thousand-year-old mountain fortress that was the Troll. The defending Slugs that remained inside it couldn’t win the war, but they would fight to the last maggot. Worse, if they blew themselves and the Troll up, they would take the Scouts and the prisoners with it.

  I chinned my magnification. Bassin’s Sappers had blown a breach in the Troll’s hull at ground level, and it yawned big enough to swallow an airliner. But I could see Slugs boiling out of the breach, mag rifles spitting. Beyond them, the Scouts that were supposed to have charged through the breach and secured the Troll before the Slugs could blow it, hunkered, sheltering behind wobblehead carcasses that had been shot out from under them. One of the pinned troops wore old, Eternad crimsons. Howard was attached to those Scouts, to guide them through the Troll. I intercommed, “Owl, this is Eagle, over.”

  “This is Owl.”

  Good. Howard was still in military mind-set. “Owl, you need to get those people moving before the Slugs blow your objective to rutabagas.”

  “You know how it is, Eagle. They send out warriors faster than we can send out bullets to kill them, Eagle. We can’t go back. We can’t go forward.”

  “You were supposed to use Stones to drive the Slugs back.”

  “The Troop with the Stones never got here.”

  I scanned the battlefield. Five hundred yards from Howard and the pinned-down Scouts lay a bloody jumble of wobbleheads and Scouts, ripped apart by Slug Heavy rounds. Even in daylight I saw red Cavorite glow from Stones saddlebagged among the corpses.

  I spun my wobblehead, and gathered a half dozen mounted Scouts.

  In thirty seconds, we reached the Stone bags. Two minutes later, we began lobbing them, grenade-style, toward the Troll’s hull breach.

  Slug defensive fire slacked, but the pinned-down Scouts didn’t wait for it to stop before they were up, and charging forward. As they ran, dodging dead and dying Slugs, the Scouts scooped up thrown Stones, to throw again and clear their advance.

  The first man through the breach carried his rifle in one hand, and swung his free arm forward, in the follow-me gesture of the infantry. He wore Eternad crimson.

&
nbsp; By mid morning, Jeeb’s display showed no red bars of organized Slug units. Only scattered Slugs meandered around in the mile-wide belt that remained between our onrushing line and the Cavorite barrier.

  Meanwhile, the Scouts had wheeled, returned, and stormed the Troll and the Firewitch.

  My helmet radio sang. “Eagle, this is Falcon, over.”

  I smiled. “Eagle here, Falcon.” What the hell. There was nobody left to eavesdrop. I spoke in the clear. “Well done, Sergeant Major. My compliments to Casus.”

  “You’ll be able to deliver them yourself in a few minutes, Sir.”

  Twenty minutes later, the ground shook as Casus, on his white stallion, rode into view at the head of his cavalry. Rifles cracked no more often than the last kernels in a popcorn popper, mopping up the last Slugs.

  High atop the Troll, Scouts crawled out through the tops of the ventilators like summiting mountaineers. They shouted, took off their tunics, and swung them above their heads to announce victory. One of the figures waved a crimson Eternad breastplate.

  Howard radioed. “We captured the Stone freighter, too! Jason, we have a way home, again!”

  I blinked back tears. We had a ship. But we didn’t have my godson to pilot it.

  Ord rode up, dismounted, and saluted. I returned his salute, as we looked around the battlefield.

  In the acrid black-powder fog, infantrymen searched for wandering comrades that had become lost in battle, found them too seldom, and hugged them. Others bent forward, searching among the corpses, peering into cold faces, and found their comrades too often.

  I cleared my rifle, then slung it across my shoulder. “Eisenhower was right. There’s no glory in battle worth the blood it costs.”

  “But blood buys more than glory, Sir.”

  The thousands of slaves stared wordlessly at all that swirled around them, as blank as newborns. They might never become more. But blood had bought them a chance.

  The recent captives from the battle of the Great Fair wept, hugged one another, and hugged the soldiers that had freed them, regardless of Clan. The Clans had shed their blood together, and that bought them the chance to stop shedding it separately.

  In the crowds, the soldiers the Slugs had captured during our campaign were easy to distinguish from the liberators. The freed captives wore only occasional scraps of uniform or armor.

  “None of it changes what Wellington said.” I remembered it after every battle, and I cried.

  Ord said, “Sir?”

  I raised my visor, and wiped my eyes. “There is nothing so melancholy as a battle lost, except a battle won.”

  Far down the ragged rows of pale slaves, one pale, naked figure stood, taller than the others, and waved an object at me.

  I blinked away the blur of my tears, and stared. Then I ran forward.

  The pale, thin figure dropped the crimson breastplate he had waved, then Jude ran toward me, too.

  Seventy-Three

  I stand at parade rest on the lecture hall stage, and stare out across three thousand young faces, all eyes staring up at me. The Cadets’ uniforms are gray, impeccable, and indistinguishable one from another. The faces, however, are brown, white, and yellow, male and female. Tattoos curl around some faces, jewels dangle from others. They are badges of their human homeworlds, each spawned, and once ruled by, the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony. Some of those worlds I fought to free from the Hegemony. Some I fought to keep in the Union. The names of some I can barely pronounce.

  The Commandant stands to my right, then gives me a wink. She’s an old friend. Well, more than a friend.

  She grips the podium, and her words to her Cadets echo off the arched ’lume ceiling. “I’ll keep the intro brief. I know you don’t want Assembly to run long. That could shorten morning PT.”

  Three thousand throats boom a chuckle off the ceiling. Then silence returns.

  The ceiling ’lume dims, and a quote fades in on the flatscreen wall behind the Commandant. She turns, then reads aloud:

  Terracentric it may be to refer to “The Pseudocephalopod War,” much less to date its onset from “2037.” However, all history pivoted on those events in the Spiral Arm, as undeniably as conventional space folds around every Ultradwarf at every temporal fabric insertion point. Students of that time and place will find no truer account than in the warrior’s-eye view of Jason Wander.

  — Chronicles of the Galaxy, The Mobian Transliteration, Volume XXIII

  The Commandant turns back to the Corps of Cadets. “Today’s topic is a retrospective on the campaign for the liberation of Bren.” She takes a seat in the audience, leaving me alone center stage.

  I step alongside the chair placed there for me. My legs ache all the time, these days. So does every other part that the Slugs and the calendar have forced the Army to rebuild.

  But I frown down at the chair, and say to the audience, “Everybody provides one of these for me, these days. Deference to rank, or age, I suppose. But infantry doesn’t sit.”

  Whoops and pumped fists erupt from the back rows, where the lousy students stand. When the Cadet Corps draws for Post-Grad assignments, the top students will snatch the glam slots, like Flight School and Astrogation. The back row will become infantry Lieutenants. It’s natural selection, I guess. Infantry gets the sharp, dirty end of the stick from the beginning, so it learns to laugh about it.

  I smile, and pump my fist back at them. Where they’re going, they’ll need their sense of humor.

  I clear my throat.

  PalmTalkers swivel up alongside whispering lips. Personal ’Puter keyboards unfold in hands. A few kids snatch pterosaur-quill pens and sheets of flat paper from hiding places beneath stiff shirt fronts. Different cultures, different study habits.

  I wave the devices away. “No notes. You get enough Logistics and Tactics at the Puzzle Factory next door.”

  Laughter.

  I say, “Bren wasn’t liberated by so-called military genius.”

  A kid in back raises his hand. “Then why do our chips teach the Bren campaign, Sir?” He knows the answer. Every kid in the Union does. He’s just stretching the lecture.

  But I answer like they don’t know. “Because it turned the tide of this war. We flew the transport we captured back to Earth, used that ship’s power plant for a template, used Bren’s Cavorite for fuel, and built the fleets that liberated, then unified, the planets of the Union. My meaning was that wars are won by soldiers sacrificing for other soldiers. And by trial and blunder. And by which side got stuck in the mud least. And by commanders who learned to lead effectively while engulfed by chaos, and lunacy, and their own heartbreak.”

  Twenty minutes later, I take questions. The kids know the current Commandant wants cadets to speak their minds. I point at the raised hand of a shave-headed kid with indigo-dyed eyebrows.

  She stands as straight and as hard as a Casuni broadsword and asks, “Sir, our poli sci chips say the real liberation of Bren only came years later, when Bassin the First, Casus, and the Council of Headmen signed the Treaty of Marinus and ended slavery on Bren.”

  I nod. “They’re right. The uncivil ‘peace’ among the Clans that followed the Expulsion of the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony killed more Marini, Casuni, and Tassini than the Slugs did.”

  With those indigo eyebrows, she’s Tassini. Probably second-generation emancipated. I’m guessing she’s asking a rhetorical question, designed to educate those of her classmates to whom slavery is just a word. If it hadn’t been for the changes that started on Bren with the Expulsion of the Slugs, she’d be bending over some landowner’s plow or washtub today, like her grandparents did. Thanks to Emancipation, she’s traveled to the stars, here to the Motherworld, where she’s learning things like Astrogation and Comparative Lit.

  She asks, “You agree with the chips that say the war was wrong, then?”

  “Creating freedom for people can’t be wrong. Even if some people create wrong out of freedom.”

  She half-smiles at the kid next to he
r.

  I point at his raised hand, and he says, “Maybe the war was right for Bren. And for the Union. But on a galactic scale, since the Expulsion we haven’t seen the end of war. Soldiers are still dying.”

  “‘Only the dead have seen the end of war.’ The chips attribute that quote to Plato. It’s still true twenty-five hundred years after Plato died. The lesson you’re here to learn is this: Never waste the life of any soldier you command.”

  He nods.

  I say, “Even if you learn that lesson, you’ll hate it. Command is an orphan’s journey.”

  The kids milk question time for twenty minutes more, then the applause from the infantry gonnabes in the back rows shakes the Omnifoam floor tiles.

  As I step offstage, Jude grasps my elbow and steers us toward an exit.

  Jude’s a Zoomie now. A better pilot than his father, they say. On invasion morning Jude’s buoyant Eternads helped him swim to another boat when that rhind shattered his own. In the melee on the landing beach, Jude caught on with another unit, moved inland, and was captured in the first battle of the campaign. Jude doesn’t speak about his captivity much. It changed him. Since Bren, too much else has changed, too. Jude and I have grown apart in too many ways. But we still follow orders, and we still have each other.

  He shakes his head. “You gave the same speech last year. They still applaud.”

  “They applaud because I talk so long that the Commandant cancels PT. What’s your hurry?”

  Jude slides back his Zoomie-blue uniform sleeve, to show me the red-flashing screen on his wrist ’Puter. “Orders. We lift on next hour’s Fleet Orbital. You won’t believe what the Slugs just did. Want to hear where we go next?”

  I shake my head. “Just so we go together.”

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to my editor, Devi Pillai, and to Orbit’s publishing director, Tim Holman, for support and wisdom in making Orphan’s Journey, and the series that surrounds it, possible. Thanks also to Hilary Powers for thoughtful copyediting; to Calvin Chu for a cover that pops; to Alex Lencicki for telling the world about it all; to Jennifer Flax for all things great and small; and to everyone at Orbit for their energy and great work.