Orphan's Alliance (Jason Wander) (4 page)

With me pincered, the scorpion swam backward, dragging me toward deep water. I dug in my heels, but they slid down the muddy bank. When the scorpion undulated, its spade-shaped tail fluke broke the surface. Its tail and head were fifteen feet apart. Water lapped around my chestplate as I tore at one pincer with both hands, and failed to budge it. I kicked the head, and something caught on my foot. Probably the monster’s open jaw. The water beneath me deepened, so I no longer could feel the muddy bank with my feet or fingers. Brown water closed over my faceplate.

Bang
.

The scorpion half-rolled, and my head came up out of the water for an instant.The„

Bang
.
Bang
.
Bang
.

The scorpion’s grip loosened, then re-tightened, with each shot.

Bang
.
Bang
.

My armor’s stress indicator faded back to green, and the pincers slipped away. I thrashed to the surface. Aud, smoking pistol in one hand, reached with his other hand and dragged me by my backpack loop onto the bank. Then he waded back out, grabbed the dead scorpion’s tail fluke, and wrestled it until the beast’s eight rear limbs lay anchored on the mud bank.

I sat, arms on my knees, in the mud, popped my faceplate and sucked air in ripping sobs. Aud staggered up next to me, sat and gasped, too.

Five minutes later, I croaked. “Thanks.”

“S’nothing.”

“Nothing?” I ran my eyes from the flat tail fluke down the segmented tail. Out in the shallows, the scorpion’s pincers poked above the water like giant broken-toothed combs. Aud shrugged. “Just a sixth-molt female. No reason for you to know that the yellow wiggler means ‘run away.’ But every Tressen child knows it from the time his parents start telling bedtime stories.”

“Why did you drag the body back up here?”

Aud waded out alongside the carcass, knee deep. Grunting, he heaved the tail section up like a rolled carpet, hacked at the beast with his trench knife, then stood and smiled. In one hand he raised what looked like a sack of translucent ping pong balls. “Egg roast tonight!”

Rain pattered the sodden vegetation again.

“Aud, we can’t make a fire.”

He pointed at his brush pile. “We can. Oilwood will burn even in a full rain barrel.”

Especially on Tressen. Like on late-Paleozoic Earth, Tressen’s swamp plants cranked out so much oxygen that the atmosphere was fire-friendly. I pointed back in the direction from which we had come. “I mean Iridians will spot a fire. I’d rather be a cold fugitive than a dead POW.”

“Jason, Iridians are our least worry.” Aud pointed at the carcass. “You saw the enormous eyes on that beast. Scorpions hunt submerged during daylight. At night, they hunt onshore.” He fingered his ammunition pouch. “I can wound perhaps two more. Without a fire’s light to discourage them, we’ll attract a dozen before the sun’s two hours down. How many can you wrestle?”

I rubbed the new row of dents in my chestplate, and swallowed.

Then I scooped an armload of brush onto Aud’s pile. “I’ll take my eggs over easy.”

An hour later I sat elbows-on-knees in the dark, with my back to our fire. Oilwood cracked and sizzled like bacon, while warmth soaked through my armor’s backplates.

Facing away from the fire, I chinned my optize=inned mcs to night passive and zoomed on the object on the bank, twenty yards away. The Barrens linked to the sea, and the outgoing tide had now completely exposed the scorpion that had nearly killed me. It slumped in the mud like a flattened lobster fifteen feet long. Longer if someone tugged its forelimbs out in front of it, like Superman holding pliers. I shuddered inside my armor. That someone wasn’t going to be me.

Aud tossed a pebble at the scorpion carcass. “Do you have these in your home?”

I wiggled my index finger. “Our biggest scorpions are this long.”

He poked me in my side, grinning. “And sergeants serve privates breakfast in bed.”

“No, really.” I tapped my earpiece. “I think there’s a translation problem. Our big scorpions are extinct. Actually, barely relatives of our little modern scorpions. Closer related to what we call horseshoe crabs.”

My earpiece ticked as the translator program hunted, then continued. Tressen had a word for “shoe,” of course, but not for “horse,” because horses were millions of years down Tressel’s evolution trail.

“We’d call scorpions like yours pterygotid eurypterids. Ours were big, but not
that
big.” This time, my translator didn’t tick. Most of the time, the translator worked so fast that you just talked and listened. I said, “Today, reptiles—animals like tetras, but bigger—have replaced eurypterids in the swamp predator niche.”

“Tiny scorpions. Ferocious tetras!” He shook his head and chuckled. “I needed a laugh.”

“We call them crocodiles. I can show you pictures. I wouldn’t lie to you, Aud.”

He turned his head to the sky, as a sprinkle of stars winked through a break in the clouds, then he stopped chuckling. “You would lie to me, if it was your duty, Jason.” He turned, and poked the fire with a stick. “You brought your machines to us across the stars. A great favor to Tressen. But every favor has a price.” It wasn’t a question, but a statement.

“Aud, now it’s my turn to defer to the politicians.”

“I’m not asking the price. Haggling is for politicians and pimps. I just don’t understand why a world so different that its scorpions are as small as pickles cares about Tressel.” He pointed at the scorpion he had killed to save my life. “You owe me that much truth.”

“I do.” I nodded, scooped a handful of pebbles, and tossed them in my palm. “The Slugs brought your ancestors from Earth to Tressel because some of the rocks here on Tressel fell from the stars. More accurately, they fell from the boundary layer where this universe ends and another begins.”

“This Cavorite your friends spoke about.”

“A name we borrowed from an old bedtime story about men who flew to our moon. Cavorite let the Slugs, and now lets us, fly to the stars. Cavorite’s poison to the Slugs, but not to humans. Thirty thousand years ago, the Slugs realized that. So they exported Earthlings to mine it for them. When the Slugs exhausted the meteoric Cavorite from Tressel, they didn’t need to use your planet or your ancestors any t wncestormore.”

Aud frowned. “Now it’s the Motherworld’s turn to use us?”

I let out a breath, “It’s not like—”

Out in the water, a black shape rose, glistening, and ghosted toward us. The eurypterid spidered onto the bank, water coursing silver off eight rear limbs, while its front limbs arced above its carapace like tree boughs. The beast’s forward-most mandibles probed the body of its dead cousin, and paused. Then it slithered up over the corpse like a pulled scarf. Twenty feet long if it was an inch.
Click
. Aud cocked his pistol.

My heart pounded.

The big predator curled around, then grasped, the carcass in the mud. The dead female weighed easily a ton, but within three heartbeats, the bigger one had dragged it back into the water like a laundry bag, leaving behind only furrows in the mud.

I gulped, then turned to Aud. “Tell you what. Let’s build a bigger fire.”

OVER THE NEXT SIX HOURS, eight scorpions cruised around our clearing, just beyond the firelight. One rushed us, forelimbs flailing. Aud pumped six rounds into the monster, until it staggered away, then collapsed into a shadowed heap just beyond the fire’s glow.

Aud fingered his empty ammunition pouch. “That meat will distract them for a few hours, but I only have two rounds left. Jason, we won’t last the night.”

Even on Earth, the firewood-per-night rule of thumb is figure all that you think you need, then gather five times that much. An hour before dawn, we had hacked and burned all the oilwood we could reach, and the fire had burned low enough that we could hear monsters respirating just beyond the firelight. A chugging noise echoed in the distance, and swelled. Then we heard shots, and shouts. With my night passive, I saw them before they saw us. “Aud, it’s a tracked vehicle with Iridian markings.” It lurched, slow and clumsy even for an Iridian vehicle, and it clanged and rattled like a frontier tinker’s wagon. “I can see three crew.”

He smiled. “I don’t have to see. I can hear. Pots and pans banging. It’s an Iridian field kitchen transporter. The company messes were so far in the Iridian rear that their own infantry ran right by them. The field kitchen crawlers are so slow that these stragglers are just getting to us now. The Iridians assign new recruits as cooks. Not blooded infantry.”

A yellow flash bloomed, a rifle crack echoed through the lycopods, then somebody swore. I raised my eyebrows. “They sound blooded to me.”

“Probably a scorpion wandered close to the crawler. Veterans wouldn’t waste a bullet. They know a crawler’s big enough, and loud enough, that scorpions won’t bother it.”

Ten minutes later, the crawler had clanked within shoutire „ng distance.

“Hello the fire! Friend or foe?”

Aud called back, “We wish to negotiate.”

Pause.

I upped my magnification. A kid stood on the crawler’s deck, in stained cook’s whites. He steadied himself with one hand against a rack hung with pots that swung back and forth to the chug of the crawler’s engine. A white headcover, probably a bunched chef’s toque, peeked out beneath his crooked helmet. I could see him, but he couldn’t see me.

He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Negotiate what?”

Aud yelled, “Your surrender. I’m Brigadier Audace Planck, Acting Commander of the First Expeditionary Army of Tressen.”

The crawler stopped, and chugged at idle, fifty yards from us. The kid laughed and called, “Quicksilver himself? Here in the mud? Then I’m the Brigadier of the Sixty-Eighth Iridian Fusiliers!
You
surrender, or we’ll surround your position and bombard it.”

“You’re a single unarmed crawler. Not one of the three of you has ever fired a round in combat, you’re lost, and you’re running for your lives. By noon tomorrow the Tressen offensive will roll over you and blow you and that crawler to bits.” Aud handed me his pistol, and whispered. “I can’t see them, but can you put one round on their front plate?”

Rank and experience aside, we were two middle-aged men sharing one pistol and two bullets. We were facing an armored vehicle, and three enemy soldiers with rifles. Yet Audace Planck was demanding their surrender. The daring one indeed.

I dialed up my optics, sighted, then squeezed one off. The bullet struck the iron crawler one foot below the kid’s boots, and spit an orange spark as it sang off into the night. Now we were down to one bullet. The kid grabbed his helmet with one hand as he leapt down inside the crawler, swearing. Pause. Whispering.

From inside the crawler, the kid yelled, “What if we do surrender?”

“Lay your rifles on the top deck where we can see them. We’ll board your crawler and wait out the night with you. When my troops overtake us tomorrow, you’ll be treated well. You have my word.”

“You’re really him? Quicksilver?”

Beyond the firelight, a huge, multi-legged shadow lumbered. Too close. I shouted, “It’s him. Hurry up.”

“Who are you?”

I turned to Aud and shrugged. Officially, I didn’t exist, but the fiction wasn’t going to survive any better than we would if we didn’t get inside that crawler in the next ten minutes. I called out into the darkness.

“I’m the marksman who put a round one foot below your boots. The next shot goes one foot below that white hat you’re wearing under your helmet.”

A half hour later, Aud and I sat inside a rattling iro>

The ranking corporal, the negotiator, removed his helmet, fluffed his toque, and held out a bread loaf to his captors. “Go ahead. One thing we have is food.”

Planck tore off a chunk, chewed, then smiled. “Extraordinary!”

The kid shrugged. “My family are bakers.”

Planck raised his eyebrows and smiled. “Where?”

“Veblen.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“My father lost his leg in the shelling. If I don’t come home, my mother won’t be able to rebuild the shop alone.”

Planck reached across the crawler, and patted the kid’s knee, “Don’t worry. This war’s over for you. This war will be over for everyone in a month.”

By twenty minutes after sunrise the next morning, the scorpions had retreated to deep water, or so Aud assured me. We ran a white cook’s apron up the crawler’s signal mast, then we all hid twenty yards away, in the weeds, in case some Kodiak plinked the crawler anyway.

Thirty minutes later, a surprised Kodiak squadron commander saluted the hell out of Planck, then detached one of his sliders to speed Planck, me, and our prisoners to Planck’s constantly-displacing HQ. We rejoined Planck’s staff outside a quick-pitched canvas tent, sides rolled up, which sheltered map tables and signals gear. There were smiles and handshakes all around. Then the staff officers got back to the business of winning the war.

Erdec, Planck’s command sergeant major, who was as gray, leathery, and professional as Ord, stayed with us and with the three kid cooks. So did an Intel captain.

The captain, dark-eyed, intense, and, by his service ribbons combat-blooded, waved his sidearm at the kids. “What about these three, General?”

Planck hardly glanced up from the morning reports his sergeant major handed him, drawing his index finger across a line here and there as he read. “No need to interrogate cooks, Captain. But get their bread recipe. Then this war’s over for them.”

Once the captain marched the three kids away, I said to Planck, “Last night, you didn’t say much when that kid said he was from Veblen.”

Planck’s sergeant major, Erdec, said, “Veblen sits on an island bounded by two rivers. Every war over the past three centuries, the winner took Veblen. And Vebleners changed citizenship. My grandmother called herself Iridian. My parents called themselves Tressen. But when the war started, Veblen was part of Iridia.”

I said, “But you’re in the Tressen army.”

Erdec shrugged, smiled. “I’m a soldier. I’m a Veblener. For a Veblener, nations come and go.” He sighed. “One night, six months into the war, Tressen rolled 6,000 artillery pieces up on the plain outside Veblen, then pounded the towe sunded tn to rubble while the residents slept in their beds. The idea was to break the will of the Iridian people. And to retaliate for Iridian atrocities.”