Orphan's Triumph (Jason Wander) (27 page)

My panting smothered by the incessant, percussive rain of mortar rounds, I crabbed back across the narrowest fifty feet of the ledge, above the explosives-packed string of joints and crevasses that crisscrossed below the ledge.

From there, I could see down into the canyon, where lead elements of the Forty-fifth and the defenders had already engaged, rifle crackle intertwining with the constant crump of the mortars. I still had fifty rounds for the rifle, and I put forty to good use.

After an hour, a mortar round whistled clean between the canyon walls and burst in the center of the defender’s position. I counted thirty motionless bodies and heard more wounded than I could count. One silent, bleeding figure who remained defiant on the parapet was Aud Planck. The attack wave crested, then receded. But the defense was wearing ever more rapidly. If it were outflanked, or grenaded from above, the end would come too soon.

I tugged out a box of wooden kitchen matches and crept to the bunched fuses. I had test-burned some back at the camp and figured these would burn through in ninety seconds. Two hundred yards away, down the ledge, the first scout’s helmet peeked above the ledge. I struck my match, but it broke in my numbed fingers. I grabbed for it and spilled the rest of the box, the tiny sticks floating down the eight hundred feet to the canyon floor like dandelion seed.
Spang.
A scout’s bullet exploded granite six feet above my head, then sang away into the distance. I peered into the matchbox. One left.

My unpracticed fingers shook as I struck the match once, twice without result. I cursed my smoke-free lifestyle, then tried again. The match burst into yellow flame, and I cupped it with my other hand around it, then lit the fuses.

They spat and crackled as they burned toward the dynamite.

Another scout bullet struck the ledge, in front of me.

I spent a remaining round to keep the scouts’ heads down while I begged the fuses to burn faster. The count in my head reached ninety seconds.

Nothing.

I counted ten seconds more, then peeked out to see whether the fuses were burning.
Spang.

I earned a near-miss and a stone chip through my cheek for my curiosity.

Boom!

Boom! Boom! Booomm!

The explosions lifted me off the ledge, then belly-flopped me on the stone. Granite flew.

Acrid smoke billowed.

The noise level returned to the background sizzle of small arms and the drum of mortars. As I got to my feet, head lowered, and turned to pick my way north away from the battle, I muttered, “You cut that too close.”

I glanced back.

The smoke cleared. Jagged gaps had been torn in the granite.

But the ledge was still there.

SIXTY-TWO

“CRAP! CRAP, CRAP, CRAP.”

I swayed there on the ledge. I had no more dynamite, five more bullets, and no plan. The rational thing to do was escape before the scouts noticed. And leave Aud Planck’s shopkeepers hung out to dry.

I ran to the narrow ledge span, smoke still curling from its crevasses, up between my boots. I jumped up and down on the ledge but it remained as immovable as, well, granite.

“Goddamit!” I reversed my rifle in my hands and jammed the stock into a smoking crevasse, as if I could pry the mountain apart.

A bullet struck between my feet, and I looked up. A scout charged toward me along the ledge, screaming and firing. The sniper’s scope on my rifle probably earned me no love. Behind him four more scouts single-filed toward me.

I had wedged my rifle immovably in the crevasse, but I still had Ord’s pistol, albeit bundled beneath layers of clothing. I needed to buy time.

I released the rifle and raised my hands.

The scout slowed and shuffled toward me, rifle trained on me from the hip. He stopped fifteen feet away, panting steam. He didn’t look like a Nazi. He looked like a thousand other soldiers I had known, a kid who needed nothing in this world but a shave and a three-day pass. It would never work, and this kid didn’t deserve it, but I was out of options. I lowered one hand slowly toward my jacket lapel, toward the pistol, while I sighed and cast my eyes to the sky. I said,

“Crap,” as my plan became irrelevant.

SIXTY-THREE

THE DESCENDING MORTAR ROUND plummeted across my vision in less than a blink, silhouetted against the cloudless blue sky, then scraped the edge of the ledge behind the kid, and alongside one of the other four scouts, so hard that its steel sparked orange against the granite. Out of sight below the ledge, the round burst.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then the kid’s eyes widened as they met mine. The ledge beneath him and the other four scouts sank like an elevator’s floor.

He dropped his rifle and stretched out his hand.

I reached for it, but he was gone, tumbling and flailing, staring up at the sky, along with the other four scouts and, all around them, the spinning shards and blocks of granite that had been the ledge, eight hundred feet to the canyon floor below.

The rock beneath my feet sloughed away, too, and I fell on my back, scrabbling and grasping. Finally, I lay staring up past the canyon rim, sucking air and shaking.

When my heart slowed a fraction, I rolled onto hands and knees and peered over the edge of the ledge that was now severed by the impassable gap completed by the mortar round’s explosion. Below, Aud’s former soldiers and his new ones struggled hand-to-hand atop the overturned sledges. He strode, chest out, dragging one bandaged leg behind him, along the makeshift battlement while shells burst around him, until he reached an object that protruded from beneath a new-fallen boulder. Aud Planck tugged my splintered sniper’s rifle from beneath the boulder, then turned and looked up, shading his eyes with one hand. He pointed the rifle north, in the direction I was supposed to go, then saluted with his other hand.

I leaned out above the battle, returned his salute, then turned and started down the ledge. We stared at each other through the smoke, then we both turned away from one another for what we both knew would be the last time.

I reached the junction where the down trail’s northern end joined the plain at sunset. From the canyon, the rumble of battle continued, without me. Unflanked, what remained of the unlikely three hundred fought on. I couldn’t save the shopkeepers who remained alive. But maybe I could help to make their sacrifice count for something.

Blood trickled from one ear, an eardrum burst by the mortar round’s concussion, and from my cheek. A granite splinter had torn through my sleeve and lodged in my birth-equipment forearm. I hadn’t eaten in four days, nor drunk anything but melted snow. What wasn’t bruised, ached. I began walking north into the frigid darkness, on feet I could no longer feel, then shifted gears to an air-borne shuffle trot that would get me back to the camp by sunup.

As I shuffled, I snorted to myself, “Some retirement.”

In fact, at four a.m. I arrived at the southern wire that demarcated the camp. It had been visible for miles across the plain, as oil lanterns carried by meteorite pickers crisscrossed the snow like fireflies. A shopkeeper sentry saved my life by firing at me high and wide while intending anything but. It took until five a.m. before I reached Jude and Celline, who pored over a camp map penciled with a search grid.

I reported the battle results like Pheidippides returning from the plain of Marathon, then asked,

“How close are you?”

Celline ran her fingers down a tally sheet as she handed me back my ’Puter. “Close enough. Call your vessel down now. We need every second.”

I nodded. Before the Forty-fifth Infantry and the burned-out oil supply had entered the picture, our plan had been to deliver the Cavorite, then return the survivors on the commandeered ice train as far south as possible, then abandon it. The newly numerous Iridian resistance would melt into the population and become, like Mao’s guerillas, fish in the sea.

Jude unrolled another of the camp commandant’s maps. Now, with no transportation, and the pass south blocked by an advancing army, the survivors’ only hope was to outrun the Forty-fifth Infantry, east across the Arctic, until they reached the eastern end of the mountains, where they could turn south and make for the more hospitable climate of the north Iridian coast.

An emaciated army of cellists and fishmongers and shopkeepers’ widows would flee battle-hardened troops, across four hundred miles of frigid wilderness.

Jude shook his head. “I won’t tell these people, but the journey would be barely survivable even if we didn’t have an army chasing us.”

Celline said, “But if we stand and fight, we die. And hope dies with us.”

I pointed at my ’Puter in Jude’s hand. “You do it. Call down the ship. My fingers can’t work the buttons anymore.”

Then I tugged off my boots and sat on the edge of a camp cot, kneading my toes with my fingers and feeling neither. “I think I’m gonna lie down here for a minute.”

The next thing I knew, Jude stood shaking my shoulder. “Jason! The ship’s here!”

SIXTY-FOUR

THE HUMPBACKED SCORPION drifted down toward Tressel’s snow, a white ceramic teardrop against the steel-blue afternoon sky. Its pilot throttled back to subsonic to remain silent but jinked at right angles and sprinkled heat-seeker-fooling flares, though “hot” was the last adjective that described this landing zone. The hundreds of survivors healthy enough to gather stones that were spread across the vast white graveyard plain drew toward the alien ship like iron filings to a magnet. Most had seen newspaper drawings or grainy tintype photographs of the motherworld’s flying machines, but the reality must have shocked them like a flying saucer, which, essentially, the Scorpion might have been. The Scorpion dead-stopped and hovered three feet above the snow. The Scorpion’s hull, scorched by its passage through Tressel’s upper atmosphere, boiled off snow in a hissing steam cloud that rose into the scalded air shimmering above the ship.

The Tressens formed a silent, spectating ring around the Scorpion as a rear ramp whined down from the modified Scorpion’s bulbous tail, lifting the former fighter’s weapons pod like a stinger. The forward canopy rose as the cargo ramp dropped, and the pilot extended the ship’s ladder above and across the hull, then clambered across and down. He splashed through the slush his ship had melted, straight-backed, chest out, comm and life support leads swinging in the breeze in time with the silk scarf that dangled around his neck.

Jude, Celline, and I stepped forward out of the circle, and he stopped three feet in front of us. A

“Whizard” call sign stencil painted his pilot’s helmet, and a multicolored, embroidered patch of a scowling pelican wearing boxing gloves crested the chest of his unzipped brown leather bomber jacket. He saluted and grinned. “Package pickup service!”

It was only as I watched the grin melt into his smooth-shaven cheeks that I realized how gaunt, filthy, and emaciated we all were. Jude’s and Celline’s eyes peered from pits sunken in faces grayed by oil smoke and stretched by starvation. Their faces were scarved with rags, and their swollen coats were torn everywhere they weren’t soiled. We no longer noticed how we stank.

The kid’s eyes flicked around the silent hundreds who stared at him, who looked worse than we did. The face of war was softer when your enemy was a dot on a screen and physical hardship was wardroom coffee gone cold.

I returned the young pilot’s salute by careerlong reflex. “Glad to see you. Jason Wander.”

His jaw dropped. “General?”

“Retired.”

His eyes widened as he looked around again at the silent Tressens. “Sir—Mr. Wander—I just got the one ship. My orders are to pick up cargo. Quick and quiet. I can’t—”

“I know. They know. We’re walking out.”

He turned his ear toward me as though he hadn’t heard. “Sir?”

I pointed at the ramp of his ship, where Tressens were already lining up, holding bulging sacks and bins piled high with stones. “Could you make sure they load your bay the way you want? We need to be out of here quick and quiet, too.”

He trotted to the ramp.

I turned to Jude and jerked a thumb at the Scorpion. “The second seat on that ship’s empty. You’re the best pilot we’ve got. Your place is in a cockpit. Finish this thing. For your family.”

Jude put one arm around Celline and swept the other around at the queued and gritty little army.

“This is my family.” He nodded toward the leather-jacketed pilot. “Jason, I could never be that guy again. There are plenty like him who can deliver Silver Bullet. The Slug War is your generation’s—it’s your war to finish. My war starts here. Now.”

Ord’s last words echoed in my head. I was on my own now.

I jerked my head south, toward the canyon where Aud Planck and three hundred shopkeepers had held back an infantry division. “The lookouts say the Forty-fifth is through the pass, route marching north, already. No head start will be enough.”

The Scorpion’s cargo ramp whined as it clamshelled shut. The pilot walked to the three of us, peeling off his flight jacket. Beneath it he wore a Zoomie sidearm in a shoulder holster. “We’re loaded. General—Mr. Wander—Admiral Duffy said I’m to bring you back with me.”

I said, “Why?”

He shrugged. “Just in case, he said.”

“In case of what?”

“Can’t say, just now.”

I shook my head. “Then fuck off.”

“The admiral said you’d say that. Sir, the skipper gave me a direct order to get you into that cockpit. At gunpoint if necessary.” The kid didn’t smile.

Jude said, “Go, Jason. You know this war can still be screwed up. You might not be able to prevent that up there. But you sure can’t prevent that from down here.”

Celline touched my sleeve. “Iridians say that a thousand miles’ journey begins with one step. But if we falter, we need to know that we took that step for a purpose. You go, and be sure that these stones win your war. And tell the story of how we tried to win this one.”

The pilot held out his jacket to Celline. “I got another one just like it upstairs, ma’am. Looks like somebody down here can use this.”

The duchess took the jacket in a mittened hand and smiled. “A loan. Return for it in a few years, when we’ve won.”