Orphan's Triumph Read online

  Orphan's Triumph

  Robert Buettner

  Extraterrestrial life has led Earth's population to the verge of extinction – and humanity's future hangs in the balance. It seems that only Jason Wander has the experience, and the guts, to do what must be done. But he will sure need some help…

  Robert Buettner

  Orphan's Triumph

  The fifth book in the Jason Wander series, 2009

  I stared where my godson was staring,

  up at the Red Moon, which seemed smaller.

  The Red Moon shrank in the sky, from basketball-size to melon-size.

  The murmur spread to the Casuni and Tassini ranks, then to the more worldly Marini soldiers, and finally to my troops.

  Overhead, the Red Moon, our key to victory, had become as tiny as a crimson pea.

  Then it winked out altogether.

  For our new boys, alphabetically,

  Evan, Grant, and Jereme

  Though Father of the great victory, I was laid upon the battlefield of Mantinea, bleeding from my wounds. I commanded my soldiers to lift me up, that I might see my orphans triumph, and I bade them make a lasting peace. But I died too soon to see these things, as all soldiers do.

  – Epaminondas’ Lament,

  attributed to Xenophon, ca. 364 BC

  ONE

  B LAM-BLAM-BLAM .

  The assault rifle’s burst snaps me awake inside my armor, and the armor’s heater motor, ineffectual but operating, prickles me between the shoulder blades when I stir. The shots’ reverberation shivers the cave’s ceiling, and snow plops through my open faceplate, onto my upturned lips.

  “Paugh!” The crystals on my lips taste of cold and old bones, and I scrub my face with my glove. “Goddamit, Howard!”

  I’m Lieutenant General Jason Wander, Colonel Howard Hibble is an intelligence Spook, and both of us are too old to be hiding in caves light-years from Earth.

  Fifty dark feet from me, silhouetted against the pale dawn now lighting the cave’s mouth, condensed breath balloons out of Howard’s open helmet. “There are dire wolves out here, Jason!”

  “Don’t make noise. They’re just big hyenas.”

  “They’re coming closer!”

  “Throw rocks. That’s what I did. It works.” I roll over, aching, on the stone floor and glance at the time winking from my faceplate display. I have just been denied my first hour’s sleep after eight hours on watch. Before that, we towed the third occupant of this cave across the steel-hard tundra of this Ice Age planet through a sixteen-hour blizzard. This shelter is more a rocky wrinkle in a shallow hillside than a cave.

  I squint over my shoulder, behind Howard and me, at our companion. It is the first Pseudocephalopod Planetary Ganglion any Earthling has seen, much less taken alive, in the three decades of the Slug War, since the Blitz hit Earth in 2036. Like a hippo-sized, mucous-green octopus on a platter, the Ganglion quivers atop its Slug-metal blue motility disc, which hums a yard above the cave floor. Six disconnected sensory conduits droop bare over the disc’s edges, isolating the Ganglion from this world and, we hope, from the rest of Slug-kind.

  Two synlon ropes dangle, knotted to the motility disc. We used the ropes to drag our POW, not to hog-tie it. A Slug Warrior moves fast for a man-sized, armored maggot, but the Ganglion possesses neither organic motile structures nor even an interface so it can steer its own motility disc. Howard was very excited to discover that. He was a professor of extraterrestrial intelligence studies before the war.

  I sigh. Everybody was somebody else before the war.

  Howard would like to take our prisoner to Earth alive, so Howard’s exobiology Spooks can, uh, chat with it.

  That means I have to get us three off this Ice Age rock unfrozen, unstarved, and undigested.

  I groan. My original parts awaken more slowly than the replaced ones, and they throb when they do. Did I mention that I’m growing too old for this?

  “Jason!” Howard’s voice quavers. He was born too old for this.

  I stand, yawn, wish I could scratch myself through my armor, then shuffle to the cave mouth, juggling a baseball-sized rock from palm to palm. Last night, I perfected a fastball that terrorized many a dire wolf.

  As I step alongside Howard at the cave mouth, he lobs an egg-sized stone with a motion like a girl in gym class. It lands twenty feet short of the biggest, nearest wolf. The monster saunters up, sniffs the stone, then bares its teeth at us in a red-eyed growl. The wolf pack numbers eleven total, milling around behind the big one, all gaunt enough that we must look like walking pot roast to them.

  But I’m unconcerned that the wolves will eat us. A dire wolf could gnaw an Eternad forearm gauntlet for a week with no result but dull teeth.

  I look up at the clear dawn sky. My concern is that the wolves are bad advertising. The storm we slogged through wiped out all traces of our passing and, I hope, kept any surviving Slugs from searching for us. But the storm has broken, for now. I plan for us to hide out in this hole until the good guys home in on our transponders.

  If any good guys survived. We may starve in this hole waiting for dead people.

  We don’t really know how Slugs track humans, or even if they do. We do know that the maggots incinerated Weichsel’s primitive human nomads one little band and extended family group at a time-not just by waxing the whole planet, which the Slugs are capable of. And the maggots had rude surprises for us less primitive humans when we showed up here, too.

  I wind up, peg my baseball-sized stone at the big wolf, and plink him on the nose. I whoop. I couldn’t duplicate that throw if I pitched nine innings’ worth. The wolf yelps and trots back fifty yards, whining but unhurt.

  Howard shrugs. “The wolf pack doesn’t necessarily give us away. We could just be a bear carcass or something in here.”

  I jerk my thumb back in the direction of the green blob in the cave. “Even if the Slugs don’t know how to track us, do you think they can track the Ganglion?”

  Disconnected or not, our prisoner could be screaming for help in Slugese right now, for all we know.

  Howard shrugs again. “I don’t think-”

  The wolf pack, collectively, freezes, noses upturned.

  Howard says, “Uh-oh.”

  I tug Howard deeper into the cave’s shadows and whisper, “Whatever they smell, we can’t see. The wind’s coming from upslope, behind us.”

  As I speak, Howard clicks his rifle’s magazine into his palm and replaces it with a completely full one. I’ve known him since the first weeks of the Blitz, nearly three decades now, and Colonel Hibble is a geek, all right. But when the chips are down, he’s as infantry as I am.

  Outside, the wolves retreat another fifty yards from the mouth of our cave as a shadow crosses it.

  My heart pounds, and I squeeze off my rifle’s grip safety.

  Eeeeerr.

  The shadow shuffles past the cave mouth. Another replaces it, then more. As they stride into the light, the shadows resolve into trumpeting, truck-sized furballs the color of rust.

  Howard whispers, “Mammoth.”

  The herd bull strides toward the wolf pack, bellowing, head back to display great curved tusks. The wolves retreat again.

  Howard says, “If we shot a mammoth out there, the carcass would explain the wolf pack. It could make an excellent distraction.”

  He’s right. I raise my M40 and sight on the nearest cow, but at this range I could drop her with a hip shot.

  Then I pause. “The carcass might attract those big cats.” Weichsel’s fauna parallels Pleistocene Earth’s in many ways, but our Neolithic forefathers never saw saber-toothed snow leopards bigger than Bengal tigers.

  Really, my concern with Howard’s idea isn’t baiting leopards. Saber teeth
can’t scuff Eternads any more than wolf teeth can. I just don’t want to shoot a mammoth.

  It sounds absurd. I can’t count the Slugs that have died at my hand or on my orders in this war. And over my career I’ve taken human lives, too, when the United States in its collective wisdom has lawfully ordered me to.

  It’s not as though any species on Weichsel is endangered, except us humans, of course. The tundra teems with life, a glacial menagerie. Weichsel wouldn’t miss one mammoth.

  So why do I rationalize against squeezing my trigger one more time?

  I can’t deny that war callouses a soldier to brutality. But as I grow older, I cherish the moments when I can choose not to kill.

  I lower my rifle. “Let’s see what happens.”

  By midmorning, events moot my dilemma. The wolves isolate a lame cow from the mammoth herd, bring her down two hundred yards from us, and begin tearing meat from her woolly flanks like bleeding rugs. The mammoth herd stands off, alternately trumpeting in protest at the gore-smeared wolves, then bulldozing snow with their sinuous tusks to get at matted grass beneath. For both species, violence is another day at the office.

  Howard and I withdraw inside the cave, to obscure our visual and infrared signatures, and sit opposite our prisoner.

  The Ganglion just floats there, animated only by the vibrations of its motility plate. After thirty years of war, all I know about the blob is that it is my enemy. I have no reason to think it knows me any differently. For humans and Slugs, like the mammoths and wolves, violence has become another day at the office.

  Howard, this blob, and I are on the cusp of changing that. If I can get us off Weichsel alive. At the moment, getting out alive requires me to freeze my butt off in a hole, contemplating upcoming misery and terror. After a lifetime in the infantry, I’m used to that.

  I pluck an egg-sized stone off the cave floor and turn it in my hand like Yorick’s skull. The stone is a gem-quality diamond. Weichsel’s frozen landscape is as full of diamonds as the Pentagon is full of underemployed lieutenant generals. Which is what I was when this expedition-become-fiasco started, three months ago, light-years away in a very different place.

  TWO

  “HAS SHE SHOT ANYBODY YET?” I picked my way through the scrub and scree of Bren’s Stone Hills, wheezing. The planetologists said the Stone Hills were analogous to Late Cretaceous cordillera on Earth, which didn’t make them easier to climb.

  The infantry captain alongside me, burdened by his M40 and his Eternad armor, wasn’t even puffing. “No, General. But I’d keep my head down. She’s not very big, but she’s the best shot in my company.”

  We ran, crouched, as we crested the ridge, to a sniper team prone on a rock ledge. Below us the Stone Hills dropped away to the east to the High Plains. In the early morning, moons hung in the sky like ghosts. One glistened white, the other blood red, with a drifting pterosaur silhouetted against it.

  Six hundred yards downslope, pocketed in rocks but a clear and easy shot from our high ground position, a figure in camo utilities crouched among boulders. A hundred yards downslope from the soldier, a dozen Casuni tribesmen, sun glinting off their helmets and breastplates, half surrounded her, screened from her by scrub. Each Casuni carried four single-shot black-powder pistols huge enough to bring down a small dinosaur, and none would hesitate to use them. Really, the standoff just looked like a dot sprinkle to me, because I was wearing utilities myself, without the optics of Eternad armor’s helmet.

  The sniper’s spotter had his helmet faceplate up and peered through a native brass spyglass. He passed the glass to me and pointed. “The Blutos chased her up there at sunset yesterday, General. You can see the snapper curled up alongside her.”

  Through the spyglass, the dozen burly, black-bearded Casuni looked small. But the distant soldier looked about twelve years old, gaunt, with hair like straw and big eyes. Her file said she was twenty-one, a private fresh out of Earthside Advanced Infantry Training, with just two weeks on Bren. The snapper, its hatchling down as gray as the surrounding rock, was already the size of an adult wolf.

  I rolled onto my side, toward the captain. “What set her off?”

  “Last week bandits ambushed the convoy that was shipping replacements out here from Marinus. Her loader bought the farm. He’d been together with her since AIT. She took it hard.”

  “He?”

  “Nothing like that, sir. Infantry can be close without-”

  I raised my palm. “I didn’t mean that, Captain. When I was a spec four, I was a loader for a female gunner. Just sounded familiar.”

  The captain wrinkled his brow one millimeter. He was a West Pointer, and the notion that the commander in chief of offworld ground forces was a high-school dropout grunt typically ruffled Pointers’ feathers. But maybe his discomfort grew from the way I said it. Because I felt a catch in my throat. That long-ago female gunner and I had grown infantry-close, and in the years later, before her death, as close as family.

  The captain continued, “An adult female snapper dug under a perimeter fence and maimed three Casuni at the sluice before the security Casunis brought her down. The private down there found the female’s cub wandering outside the wire. The private’s trying to make a pet of it. But the Casuni say it’s sacrilege to let the cub live.”

  Grown snappers are ostrich-sized, beaked carnosaurs. They’re quicker than two-legged cobras, with toxic saliva and the sunny disposition of cornered wolverines. A snapper’s beak slices the duckbill-hide wall of a Casuni yurt like Kleenex, and Casuni mothers have lost babies to snappers for centuries. Nothing personal. Snappers are predators, and human babies are easy protein in a hard land. But in Casuni culture, even Satan is better regarded than snappers.

  I sighed. “No animal-rights activists here.” Over the thirty thousand years since the Slugs snatched primitive Earthlings to slave on planets like Bren, humans had adapted to some strange environments, none harsher than the High Plains of Bren. The Casuni had evolved into flint-hard nomads, following migrating herds that resembled parallel-evolved duckbilled dinosaurs, across wind-scoured plains that resembled Siberia. I turned to the captain. “Why haven’t you puffed her?” On Earth, any suburban police department could neutralize a hostage situation by sneaking a roach-sized micro ’bot up close to the hostage taker, then snoozing the hostage taker with a puff of Nokout gas.

  “A creep-and-peep team’s inbound from the MP battalion in Marinus, sir. But it’ll be six hours before they ground here and calibrate the Bug.”

  As the captain spoke, two Casuni began low-crawling through a draw, screened from the girl’s sight, working their way around toward high ground off her left flank. One of the Casuni must’ve been careless enough to show an inch of skin, because the girl squeezed off a round that cracked off a rock a foot from the crawling man, exploding dust and singing off into the distance.

  The girl called downslope in Casuni, her voice thickened by her translator speaker, “Stay away!”

  I said, “We don’t have six hours.”

  The captain shook his head. “No, sir, we don’t. That’s the only reason I set up a sniper to take her out. It makes me sick to do it. But I know a major incident with the Blutos could freeze the stone trade.”

  He was right. If the Casuni killed an Earthling, it would be a major incident that could jeopardize the fuel supply of the fleet that stood between mankind and the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony. If the girl killed a Casuni, it would also be a major incident. And given her advantage in skills and equipment, she was probably going to kill a bunch of them as soon as the Casuni got in position, then rushed her.

  But if we shot her, it would still be a major incident. The terms of the Human Union Joint Economic Cooperation Protocol, known in the history chips as the Cavorite Mining Treaty of 2062, reserved the use of deadly force to indigenous civilian law enforcement. Casuni civilian law enforcement resembled a saloon brawl, but I don’t write treaties, I just live by them.

  I stood and brushed dust off
my utilities.

  The captain wrinkled his brow behind his faceplate. “Sir?”

  “I’ll take a walk down there and talk to her.”

  The captain stared at my cloth utilities, shaking his head. “General, I don’t-”

  The sniper’s spotter swiveled his helmeted head toward me, too, jaw dropped. “That’s suicide. Sir.”

  THREE

  AFTER FIFTEEN SECONDS, the captain swallowed, then said, “Yes, sir.”

  The spotter scrunched his face, then nodded. “I think there will be time if we take the shot as soon as she turns and aims at you, General.”

  “No shot, Sergeant.”

  “Of course not, General. Until she turns and-”

  “No shot. I’ll handle this.”

  The spotter, the captain, and even the sniper stared at me.

  Then the captain pointed downslope. “If the Casuni rush her, do we shoot? And who do we shoot?”

  “The Casuni won’t rush her. That’s why I’m going now.” I shook my head, pointed at the sky. “It’s six minutes before noon. At noon the Casuni will pause an hour for daily devotions. That’s our window to talk her down.”

  The captain stood. “Then I’ll go, sir. I’m her commanding officer.” He rapped gauntleted knuckles on his armored chest. “And I’m tinned up.”

  I pulled him aside, then whispered to him, “Son, you’re right. If I were in your boots I’d be pissed at me for pulling rank.” I tapped my collar stars. “But I need you up here to be sure your sniper doesn’t get the itch.”

  I had given him a ginned-up reason, and he was smart enough to know it. But the captain was also smart enough and resigned enough that he just nodded his head. There was no percentage in arguing with the only three-star within one hundred light-years. Besides, he probably figured his sniper could take the shot before I could get myself killed, anyway.