Orphan's Triumph (Jason Wander) (23 page)

Howard was standing on tiptoe, reading labels of shelved specimens, when I closed the door behind us and locked it.

Howard said, “What a great place! Couldn’t you just spend the day?”

“Howard, we have twenty minutes before your Ferrent tail figures out that isn’t you upstairs in the library.”

Howard reshelved a jar packed with trilobites the size of kosher dills, then sighed. “That’s not the only clock that’s running.”

“What have you heard?”

“Nothing. That’s the problem. We have no idea how the Pseudocephalopod will use its new Cavorite. Our best alternative is to do unto It before It does unto us.”

“Which we want to help you with.”

“We?”

“I’m retired now.”

“I heard that. They say the dental plan’s awful.”

“I take it that the Tressel Cavorite fall didn’t land in the middle of nowhere. If it had, you would have just snuck down here, mined what you needed, and snuck away. Without telling the Tressens a thing.”

Howard’s eyes widened. “You think I’d do that?”

“Not think. Know.”

He sighed. “The Joint Intelligence Directorate wouldn’t let me.”

“Assuming we can deal with the fall’s location, wherever it is, what will it take to get the meteorites out?”

“Weapons-grade Cavorite behaves like it’s less dense even than the Stone Hills Cavorite we mine on Bren. Each meteorite’s as light as a tennis ball, so they don’t burrow or burst on impact, like nickel-iron meteorites would. The fall took place forty thousand years ago, give or take. But the environment around it is static. We estimate that forty-two percent of the bolides remain at or near their individual points of impact, exposed on the surface. We designed these terrific ’bots that would scuttle around the surface and harvest them like tomatoes.”

“Where are your ’bots now?”

“Pasadena.”

“California?”

“Actually, there’s just the prototype. It cost as much as a main battle tank.”

I sighed. “Could people just go around and pick the rocks up off the ground?”

“That would be simpler, wouldn’t it?”

“How long would that take?”

He shrugged. “Depends on how many pickers you have. If you had a thousand pickers, a week or so. Once the bolides were gathered to a central point, one Scorpion could fly in, pick up the whole kaboodle, and be gone inside an hour.”

I narrowed my eyes. “That’s too easy.”

Howard sighed. “I haven’t told you where the Cavorite fell.”

FIFTY-TWO

TWO WEEKS LATER, pounded by a two a.m. downpour, Aud Planck and I carried cheap civilian suitcases down an alley in Tressia’s old town. Despite healing accelerants, Aud gritted his teeth as he disguised his limp, more so because he, like me, had to pretend his suitcase was no heavier than a normal traveler’s valise.

From other compass points, Jude and Celline, and six other groups of two, converged on our destination, with the modest objective of saving the human race and the more local benefit of beginning the end of Republican Socialism on Tressel.

We rounded a street corner and bent forward into the wind that drove the cold rain. Down the cobbled pavement of the dark street we entered snaked a double line of people bent like us, bundled like us, and carrying luggage like us.

We slipped into the line, and a shivering woman, clutching a scarf around her head, leaned out to peer toward the line’s head. “How much farther?”

A chubby soldier alongside the line motioned her back into her place. “Not far. Not far now. These coaches will be crowded, but when you get off, there will be stoves where you can dry your wet clothes.”

I leaned toward Aud. “What a crock!”

Aud shook his head and whispered, “Jason, the coaches just run a few hours north, to the Ice Line. That’s where it begins to dawn on these people. It’s brilliant. Not even these soldiers know what’s really going on.”

Neither that guard nor any of the other guards spaced every ten yards along the dutifully shuffling lines glanced at Aud or at me. We shuffled past them with all the others, and on toward the coaches. Breaking out of a death camp might be hard, but breaking in was a can of corn. The coaches had their seats removed, to hold more of us, and we shivered, standing packed together while they rolled north. At three a.m. the coaches halted and we spilled out onto a glassy, moonlit plain. Fifty yards from us, a blocky black wall ran until it disappeared into the night in both directions.

I blinked back tears pricked by the icy wind. It wasn’t a wall, it was a coupled train of iron-sided ore sledges. Each sledge stood fifteen feet high from runners to wood-plank roof, and a greatcoated soldier with a rifle paced atop each sledge.

Paleozoic Tressel was too young for coal, and its human colonizers had bypassed the age of steam and railroads, on the way to the industrial revolution. North of the Ice Line, the latitude above which rivers stayed frozen nine months of each year and nonnavigable the rest of the time, the Tressen mines were linked to the populous South by trains of sledges towed up and down the frozen rivers by spike-wheeled engines that ran on fuel oil refined from algae.

A man at my elbow, who carried a cello case swaddled in oilcloth, said, “Those have to be the luggage vans. They must be bringing up the passenger coaches after.”

A sign between us and the ice train read “Resettlement buildings are well heated, but outside temperatures can be uncomfortable in winter. Don’t be concerned if you have underpacked. Suitable outerwear is available for loan at the Northern Terminus.” The beauty of this operation was that people believed the soothing whoppers because to believe otherwise was simply too horrible. The guards didn’t search bags. That would have been inconsistent with the lie. There would be ample opportunity to recover the dead’s valuables at “the Northern Terminus.”

I set my suitcase down on the frozen river, and its contents clanked. Nobody noticed. Then I flexed my fingers as I whispered to Aud, “You see the others?”

He nodded. “Jude and Celline just boarded the sledge forward of us. Freder and Maur are two coaches back.”

The inside of the sledge stank already, and the fresh dry moss on its floor, dim in the narrow moonlight bars that penetrated the car’s ceiling slats, only looked inviting. A guardhouse like an ice-fishing shed sprouted from the roof of each sledge, with a helmeted guard seated in each, rifle between his knees, already shivering.

When the crowd in our iron box had packed in shoulder to shoulder, a small man in a red moustache, who had told someone else that he was a shopkeeper, called, “Please! I’m claustrophobic!”

A guard shouted in, “It’s just to keep you out of the wind while we couple to the main train. Move closer! Others are chilled out here.”

How thoughtful. People, even the claustrophobic shopkeeper, shuffled closer together.
Rumble.

Our sledge’s door slid shut, then iron clanged on iron as it was latched. I swallowed. This was beginning to seem like a terrible plan.

Two hours later, my legs ached, people were swearing, and the smell of wet clothing mixed with sweat generated by shoulder-to-shoulder overcoated bodies had overpowered the ore box’s stink.
Thump.

The sledge rolled the first six inches north, and a man in a long black coat and a matching hat, which on Earth would be called a homburg, lurched against me. “Sorry.”

“No problem.”

“You don’t sound Iridian.”

I said, “I’m not.”

“I’m not, either. This is a mistake, you see. I’m a physician.”

He didn’t know the half of it. Over the next six days, which was the one-way-trip time that Spook intel had predicted, we and the other pairs in other sledges would try to recruit and educate a little army in each of our moving prisons about what was really going on and what they could do to save their own lives.

The ice train hissed into darkness.

I dozed standing up.

When I woke, thin gray daylight trickled between the ill-riveted wall plates, and the thump-thumps as the sledge runners crossed pressure ridges in the river ice had become a steady growl. The physician faced me, close enough that I smelled something like onion when he breathed out beneath a pencil-line black moustache. He stared at Aud, false-moustached in the daylight. The physician frowned, then his eyes brightened. “Chancellor?”

Aud’s head swiveled toward the question, only a half inch, but it was enough. The physician’s face lit. “Yes! It is you! Thank God, it’s you!” The physician turned to a woman beside him. “You see? It is a mistake! If Chancellor Planck himself is in this box, it’s all a mistake!” He threw back his head and screamed at the ceiling, “Stop the train! Stop the train! It’s all a mistake! The chancellor is in here! Chancellor Planck is in here!”

I hissed, “Shut up!”

“Why? Don’t you see? They’ll let us go!” He threw his head back again and screamed so loud that his hat popped off his bald head, rolled off an adjacent shoulder, and disappeared onto the iron floor. I wrestled enough space to draw back my fist and cold-cock him.

“No!” Aud caught my forearm.

“Shut up down there!” The guard’s boot stomped the ceiling.

“I tell you I know him! He’s right down here beside me!”

“And Puck the Fairy is up here beside me! Shut the fuck up!”

Two minutes later, the physician screamed out again. “Just look! That’s all I ask! Just look down here and see for yourself.”

Boots thumped the car’s roof as every face in the car turned up toward its ceiling. I swallowed, but my mouth was dry. If the guards found Aud in here, our plan was done. Ord’s pistol nestled in my shoulder holster, but a shot now would solve nothing. The roof trapdoor creaked open, and daylight flooded in and blinded us.

The physician pogoed up and down, staring up and pointing at Aud. “Here! He’s right here!”

With my fingers splayed in front of my eyes to block the light I said to Aud, “Fuck! You should have let me slug him!”

The guard’s helmeted head and greatcoated shoulders darkened the square of daylight above us as he peered down, broad nosed and scowling. His shoulder seemed to move.

A breath tweaked my ear as something flew past it.

Thump.

The physician screamed. The brick struck him full on the forehead, and crushed brain and blood and bone sprayed the shoulders and faces that stared at the physician.

The guard shouted, “I told you people to shut the fuck up! If I run out of bricks, I got a rifle!” He slammed the hatch and left us in the dark.

People shrank away from the physician’s body until it slumped to the floor. In a distant corner, someone prayed. A woman sobbed.

Beside me, Aud whispered, “What have I done? What have I done?”

The physician’s bowels evacuated when he died, the harbinger of a problem that would not improve over the next six days.

The next day, Aud and I began whispered recruiting.

A woman beside me covered her ears and began reciting nursery rhymes to herself. Few of our car mates would even meet the eyes of either of us, or of anyone else.

Before the sun set for the second time, someone found the physician’s hat, and people began using it to pass human feces from one person to another until they could be dumped, more or less successfully, outside the car through the openings between the wall slabs.

The matter of the dead man’s hat, and the communication and cooperation that began with it, opened the doors between us and our fellow death-row inmates. And as we plotted, we didn’t have to worry about anyone ratting us out to the guard.

As the hours inched by, the mass of people in the sledge orbited, so each would take a turn at the wall opening, to enjoy light and the fresh air sucked through the open sliver. As the ice train rumbled farther north, driven snow on the wall joint could be licked off, to supplement the buckets of snow that the guard periodically lowered through the hatch.

When the rivers ended, the ice track continued, hewn from the frozen ground. The farther north we traveled, the less prized became the time a person spent exposed to the frigid wind that knifed between the wall slabs.

The physician, and a frail woman in a cloth coat who didn’t wake up on the third day, were slid to the wind-ward side of the sledge, where their bodies froze and also provided useful windbreaks. After a lifetime, five days, twenty-two hours, and six minutes according to the wrist ’Puter hidden beneath my coat, Aud and I snapped out of sleep as the ice train slowed down.

FIFTY-THREE

I TUGGED UP THE MASK that shielded my face and pointed a mittened hand. “There!”

The moments between thumps lengthened as Aud and I stood together squinting out through the side slits at endless white beneath a hard blue sky. Aud and I took longer turns standing at the frigid, windward wall of our sledge because, forewarned, we had come equipped with more effective cold-weather clothing than most of the others.

In fact, the Spooks had forewarned us about much that we would see. Tressel’s North Polar region actually more closely resembled Earth’s South Pole, a wind-scoured continental plain bisected by razor-peaked mountains, its moisture so frozen in its ice and snow that its air was as dry as a desert. Bits of black appeared in the distance, peeking from snowy ridges.

I said, “That must be the wire. Makes a lousy snow fence.”

Parallel to and a mile from the trackway that knifed toward Tressel’s pole ran the barbed-wire boundaries of the first “resettlement camps.” Hidden beneath the wind-blown snows between us and the wire slept Iridian children, Tressen professors, homosexuals of all nationalities, and anyone else unfortunate enough to differ from or with Republican Socialism. The simple brutality of the scheme was more breathtakingly bleak than the Tressen Arctic.

Aud spoke through his scarf as he shook his head. “I should have seen this. I should have seen this.”

“Aud, Zeit wasn’t exactly advertising the truth. Good soldiers doing their duty have been fooled before. I sent you that biography, about the field marshall whom the Nazis poisoned for plotting against them.”

Aud shook his head. “A soldier can hide behind his duty. I abandoned that excuse when I swore on the chancellor’s book. And at the last, your Rommel tried to do the right thing.”