Orphan's Alliance (Jason Wander) (12 page)

The bright young general and his aging mentor reached the monument, and the music stopped. Rifle bolts crackled as the honor guard shouldered and elevated its rifles to the sky. I swallowed as a lump filled my throat.

Aud and Erdec knelt beside the water to lay the wreath.

Water geysered in front of the two of them.

The scorpion was enormous and glistening black. Its spinose forelimbs flashed and dripped as they closed around Aud and old Erdec.

Before anyone could react, someone did.

Jude was born with the fastest reflexes on Earth. Because he wasn’t born on Earth. He was the first human being conceived in space, aboard an unshielded troop transport halfway between the orbits of Earth and Jupiter. A heavy metal ion straying through space had sliced an embryonic DNA strand in the best possible place, or so the geneticists supposed.

Before most of the crowd processed enough information to scream, Jude had snatched the rifle of the Honor Guard beside him and pumped a magazine into the scorpion.

I followed Jude as he ran toward Aud and Erdec.

The beast twitched and, from somewhere behind us, another volley tore into its body, as the rest of the Honor Guards reacted.

By the time Jude reached the water’s edge, the scorpion lay still, its monstrous tail twitching in the shalloÃg i

A bloodied, black spine as thick as a man’s wrist thrust a foot out of Erdec’s chest, spreading apart the medals on his lapel. Erdec’s eyes were wide and his mouth agape.

I turned to Aud.

He stared at Erdec, gasping, eyes wide. I felt Aud’s torso and chest. Except for a spine that had grazed his right wrist, he was untouched, physically.

People mobbed us, shouting and tugging.

An hour later, Jude and I stood alongside Aud in a field hospital tent. He sat bare-chested, on a white-sheeted examining table while a medic bandaged his forearm.

The diplomats were in another tent, being hounded by the press, and displaying suitable shock and sadness.

Erdec’s body lay ten feet away, beneath a bloody sheet, and Aud stared at it. He shook his head and whispered. “Why? Why did I do it?”

“Aud, you didn’t do anything except make an appropriate gesture.”

He shook his head. “How could I have failed to see the lure? How could the Sergeant Major have failed to see it?”

“I didn’t see the lure when you and I were stranded out here last trip.”

Planck shook his head, as the medic held out a clean uniform shirt. “Jason, you saw the lure. You just didn’t know what it was. Every schoolchild here knows that flash of yellow. We react to it by reflex.”

“It was the last thing on your mind. On anyone’s mind.”

The Sergeant of the Guard stepped into the tent, braced at attention, and saluted Planck. The Sergeant hesitated, frowning. “If you’re well enough, General, there’s something you should see.”

TWENTY-SIX

WE FOLLOWED THEsergeant out of the tent as he turned toward the monument foundation. Planck asked him, “How did it get through the nets?”

“A hawser had worn through, sir. At least that’s what we thought.”

A rifleman joined us as we walked out onto the spit. His eyes never left the water, and he kept his rifle’s muzzle tracking where he looked.

The scorpion’s carcass had been rolled up onto the bank, two armored tons of spine-crusted evil. Jude’s eyes widened. “Jason, you told me about these. But I never really understood . . .”

Aud pointed out into the swamp, where two GIs were looping a braided cable that arced up out of the water, as thick as a forearm, around a scaly lycopod trunk three feet in diameter. “The nets are sound now?”

The sergeant nodded. “Yes, sir. But that’s not what I wanted you to see.” He walked around the carcass’ shoreward sÆiv>ide, stepping over the scorpion’s splayed rearmost paddle, then its middle limbs, like they were downed trees. The spiked pincer was too big to step over, so he walked around it. Six punctures, from Jude’s shots, snaked across the dead beast’s smooth, black head. One shot had struck one compound eye, so it looked like a shattered punch bowl. Shards of torn carapace, a half inch thick, curled up around the bullet holes. It reminded me of the hood of a shot-up limousine from a period-piece gangster holopic.

The sergeant pointed with his pistol between the two compound eyes. “This one’s lure’s gone.”

Planck nodded. “Shot away. I should have seen it, though.”

The sergeant knelt in the mud, and grabbed a fleshy stalk that rose from between the scorpion’s eyes, and pointed at its clean-sliced tip. “No, sir. The lure was cut off, here. Before this thing ever came at you.”

Planck narrowed his eyes. “What are you saying?”

“Sir, I grew up on the coast. On the edge of the Barrens. When we were kids, scorpion pups would get caught in the family nets. Pups can only bruise you. We’d cut off the lures, just like this, then let the pups sneak up on other kids. Scared them to death.”

“You’re saying this was deliberate?”

“I’m saying you and Sergeant Major Erdec didn’t see this scorpion’s lure before it struck you because this scorpion had no lure to see. We found kitchen garbage in the water, sir. Scorpions swim to chum faster than Iridians steal. The cooks know that. They never throw garbage out in the Barrens.”

Planck ran his eyes from the beast’s head to its tail. “Someone made a gap in the nets, then attracted this beast? Improbable. But then they got in the water with this monster, and cut off its lure? Impossible!”

The sergeant reached into his pocket, drew out a coil of field telephone wire, and pinched a loop in it between two fingers. “Sir, we were fishermen’s kids, but we weren’t stupid enough to get in the water, even with a pup. Once we netted a scorpion, we just stood on the bank, lassoed the lure with a leader-wire loop, then pulled it tight until it cut through the stalk.”

Aud stood with his boots planted shoulder-width apart on the bank, his bandaged arm and his other crossed over his bare chest. “You’re saying someone deliberately killed Sergeant Major Erdec.”

The Sergeant shook his head. “No, sir. The only person scheduled to go near the water was you. It was you they wanted to kill.” The sergeant pointed at Jude. “And if the Captain, here, was a heartbeat slower on the trigger, they would have. And that male would have backswum you into the swamp in another heartbeat and disappeared. And it would all have been an unfortunate accident.”

Aud closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. “Yes, I suppose it could be. But where would that leave us? Was it separatist infiltrators? Some demented corporal I may have disciplined years ago? The prime minister himself?” Aud shook his head. “No. There’s no proof. Sergeant, this was no more than a frayed hawser, sloppy KP, and a hungry scorpion that got its lure shot off after the fact.”

“I’d agree, General. Except for this.” The sergeant straddled the scorpion’s flipper, reached down with both hands, and lifted it like a soggy log.

Tangled around the flipper leg’s middle segment was something like kinked thread. I bent, looked closer, and a shiver shot up my spine. The thread was copper field telephone wire. From a small noose twisted into the wire’s end dangled a dripping, fleshy mass. It was bright yellow. TWENTY-SEVEN

THE NEXT DAY, Aud and I sat on the rear-facing personnel bench of a Tressen crawler bound away from the Barrens, leaning with our forearms on the crawler’s iron tailgate. Jude rode behind us. Aud stared back at the crawler lurching along behind us, which served as the hearse bearing Sergeant Major Erdec home. “Erdec trained me, you know. I was younger than Jude is when I first made the sergeant major’s acquaintance.”

I nodded. “I made Ord’s acquaintance the same way. Nobody forgets their Drill Sergeant.”

Aud stretched a thin smile, then frowned. “What do I do now, Jason?”

“Find out who did it?”

He shook his head. “Separatist infiltrators, almost certainly. But it doesn’t matter. I can counterattack an army that attacks me. But this? I can’t make war on smoke.”

“Clausewitz said war is politics continued by other means. Make politics your war, continued by other means.”

“Me? A warlord?”

I shook my head. “Nobody said form a banana republic.”

My translator stumbled over “banana,” as I realized that people like Aud don’t resort to politics just because people tell them to. They go there only if their inner compass turns to point them there. My advice wouldn’t make Aud’s compass twitch, but Erdec’s death might.

Aud turned to Jude, and touched his shoulder with his bandaged hand. “I owe you my life.”

Jude shrugged. “You owe me nothing. I just reacted.” He leaned forward on his elbows. “But Jason’s right, sir. About politics. You have a chance to change this world for the better. You may not trust people, General, but people trust you. I barely know you, but already I trust you.”

In Jude’s life he had known plenty of admirable people who inspired trust, not least his mother. But I suppose heroes are easier to see minus the fog of familiarity. There was light in Jude’s eyes, like I hadn’t seen in too long.

The rest of the crawler ride was just another week in mechanized-infantry paradise. We threw a track in the midday heat. The crawler in front of us, which mounted a forward-facing cannon, lurched into a narrow stream bed, and stuck its gun tube in the opposite bank. The lead vehicle took a wrong turn. The trail vehicle took a wrong turn, and we had to double back, chain it up, and drag it out of a mudhole. Everything was sharp-edged iron and oily. Unless it was muddy. Either way, as you lurched along, what didn’t cut Îk, you bruised you.

But every time we hit a snag, Jude was out in front of the problem, pulling, hauling, leading, joking with the tankers, and with Aud.

We reentered the capital after sunset. The street lamps were dark, but the crawlers were able to steer by the light of fires mobs had set in the streets. By the time the convoy dropped us off at the Consulate, I was never so glad for the opportunity to flop on a camp bed in a sandbagged cellar masquerading as Bachelor Officers’ Quarters.

Q-tip, the consul, met us in the foyer, wearing his flak jacket and pajama bottoms. “The city’s going to hell out there. Worse in Iridia. The only person people aren’t mad at is your friend Planck. The assassination attempt’s made him Elvis. Immortality’s a draw these days.”

A half hour later, Jude lay on the bunk next to me, hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling beams.

“That was fun, wasn’t it, Jason? Not what happened to Erdec. Not the riots. The rest of it.”

“No, it wasn’t fun. Getting paid to drive a flying saucer is fun.”

“I can’t make a difference doing that.” I smiled in the lamplight. Jude’s gifts made him look like Superman to us mere mortals, but in the mirror he saw someone who wasn’t making a difference. Jude said, “Planck is going to change this world for the better.”

“He’s decided to go into politics? How do you know?”

“He told me. That day when I rode up front with him. He says he needs people around him who aren’t burdened by old allegiances. Jason, this is a frontier.”

“You’re saying you want to stay here?”

“The only thing back home for me is Mom.”

“That’s a big thing.”

“It is. But so is changing the world.” Jude rolled onto one elbow, and blew out the oil lantern on the low table that separated us.

I lay awake, staring up into the dark for a long time, smiling, but at the same time my heart swelled in my chest like a stone.

The next day, Ord and I took our morning run along the bank of the canal that wound through the capital. Every minute or so, a distant rifle shot echoed off the stone apartment walls that rose on both sides of us. Ord had borrowed Plastek flak vests and steel toed boots for us. That made things as uncomfortable as practicable for me, which had been Ord’s mission in life since he was my drill sergeant in infantry basic.

As we ran, I scanned the shrapnel-scarred rooftops of the riverside tenements for snipers. “You really think this is a good idea, Sergeant Major?”

“During the seige of Kabul, our Platoon softball team was two and six without flak vests, undefeated with.”

I looked over at him, his eyes twinkled, and he shook his head. “I checked with the Consul, sir. He jogs this route every day. No problems.”

“You thiÓze=chenk if Planck went into politics he could reverse this mess, the way we reversed the Second Afghan?”

“The general’s an aggressive commander. He wouldn’t be afraid to change things.”

“Jude seems to think change is what this place needs.”

“Of course he does, sir. If a man is twenty and not a liberal, he has no heart. If he’s forty and not a conservative, he has no brain.”

I said, “Planck’s offered Jude a position on his personal staff.”

We slowed to a walk, the cobblestone path to our front wiped out by a shell crater. The crater made a half-bowl filled in by the river.

Ord said, “If the general will permit me a personal observation that will be hard on Congresswoman Metzger.”

“It will be hard on
me
. I thought I had lost Jude on Bren. I was just getting him back again. Now this.”

On the canal, a canopied barge chugged by. Its wake pushed waves that lapped into the crater, then receded. Ord pointed down at the water. “The relation between parent and child is like waves on a shore, sir. Adolescence, marriage, more children, perhaps divorce. A constant cycle of pulling away, then returning.”

The barge moved on, and the waves diminished, then vanished.

I said, “But the cycle ends, eventually.”

“Always, sir. In the meantime all we can do is stay afloat.”

A week later, a general strike shut down the capital of Tressen, and a bomb destroyed a wing of the Iridian parliament building. Ten days later, the Iridian currency collapsed, and paramilitary gangs made up of unemployed veterans warred openly in the streets of Tressen’s largest port. Three days later, the Iridian prime minister was lynched from a lamp post by a mob.

Eleven days after that, the Imperator of Tressen and the Regent of Iridia met in the Tressen capital. The following afternoon, the monarchs summoned the Acting Iridian Prime Minister, as well as the sitting Tressen P.M., and accepted their resignations with extreme regret.