Orphan's Triumph (Jason Wander) (7 page)

Red fog spat at us, mixed among the snowflakes. The fog trailed back thirty feet from Howard and me, to the neck ring of a Spook kid’s armor. A single heavy round, lobbed in here for ranging purposes, had decapitated him.

I said to Howard, “It called fire on its own position! We gotta get out of here.”

A surrounded human soldier might call artillery fire down on his own position, to take the bad guys with him, and save his buddies or his mission. Slugs behaved the same, but the altruism was missing. In this case, it was simple logic for the Slugs. The Ganglion wanted its troops to kill it, lest we be allowed to capture it. Also, of course, it wanted to kill us.

The commander of the infantry was already moving his troops off the Ganglion hummock. Four Spooks had fastened ropes to the Ganglion’s motility plate, so they could tow it away from this spot before the Slug heavy rounds began raining down on us.

Zzee. Zzeee. Zzee.

A battery volley of red-hot heavy rounds thudded around us.

Crump.

Above our heads, a heavy struck a Scorpion amidships. The Scorpion disappeared with a rumbling boom. It didn’t explode. It didn’t crash. It disappeared.

Howard said, “The round stripped the shielding off the Cavorite mass. The ship shot away from here at miles per second.”

Crump.
Another Scorpion disappeared.

Three of the Spooks who had been pulling the Ganglion out of harm’s way lay dead alongside it. In my earpiece, the Scorpion Squadron leader said, “Raiding party reembark! We’ll get you out of here!” He would also get his own ships out of here, before more of them got creamed. Another heavy volley rained in; a round struck a man, and he vanished.

The ground commander radioed Howard. “Colonel Hibble, we can’t get a sling on your brain plate in time.”

Howard said, “Get your troops out. The Ganglion weighs nothing. Two people can tow it out of the kill zone. You come back and pick us up after the storm.”

I sighed. I knew who those two people were going to be.

Howard was a devious geek, but under fire he developed a heroic streak.

Zzee.

I flinched, though I had no idea where the incoming was bound, and something knocked me faceplate-down in the snow. I lay there and felt around my shoulder. A Slug heavy had lawn-mowered down my back, stripping away my pack and my armor’s life-support systems. But except for a thump between my shoulder blades, I seemed to be unbroken.

I levered myself up to my knees and peered through the storm.

Troops snaked up ropes, back into the remaining Scorpions, as Slug rounds continued to pound our landing zone. Wounded were roped up before the able-bodied GIs, as, it appeared, were bodies. That would probably cost lives, but no Ready Brigade soldier was going to leave a buddy behind, even under an artillery barrage.

Howard and I grasped the tow ropes on the Ganglion and leaned forward as we towed it through howling snow and away from the zero point where the heavy rounds kept rattling down like hailstones. The remaining Scorpions, barely visible through the driven snow, buttoned up, then disappeared. The heavy rounds stopped. Silence, except for the wind, returned to Weichsel. By my visor display, Howard, our green POW, and I had already moved four hundred yards north of the landing zone. My display also said straight-line winds were gusting to one hundred six miles per hour.

I toggled through my visor display to Systems Check, then swore. My armor’s heater had quit. Actually, it hadn’t quit, it had left the premises, sheared off by the Slug heavy’s near miss. Already, despite my exertions, I shivered inside my armor.

According to our intel, two thousand yards from our landing zone, a perimeter defended by ten thousand Slug Warriors ringed the Ganglion hummock from which we fled with our kidnap victim. If we could slip through that perimeter under cover of the storm, we might find a place to hole up. If we remained inside the perimeter, when the storm blew out we would be dead meat, and our prisoner would be rescued or killed by its own troops.

We slogged on, completely blind now and crawling to stay beneath the worst gusts, until my visor display predicted that the northern segment of the Slug perimeter, populated with its share of ten thousand unfriendly, man-sized, armed, and armored maggots, lay two hundred yards to our front. Inside my armor, I shivered harder.

FOURTEEN

HOWARD AND I lay side by side in the snow while gusts now measuring one hundred thirty miles per hour rocketed snow above us, and the outside temperature remained two degrees below zero, Fahrenheit. The wind chill wasn’t worth checking, though my armor would have calculated it. My armor had lost its heater, not its brains.

Therefore, I heard Howard perfectly when he whispered over the intercom, “We won’t be able to shoot our way through the Pseudocephalopod lines.”

Actually, with our M40s, the two of us, like any human infantry, could shoot our way through many times our weight in Slug Warriors. But once they realized where we were, the Slugs would pour onto our trail by the thousands, blizzard or no blizzard, brain-dead or not.

Stealth was our only option. I fingered the trench knife on my belt with numb fingers. “I know. On a normal Slug perimeter, the Warriors spread out twenty yards apart. I’ll low-crawl up to the perimeter, take one out, then we’ll tow the blob through the gap and disappear into the storm before they realize they’re down a maggot.”

Howard jerked a thumb back at our prisoner, wobbling in the wind. “Even disconnected from the Ganglion, Warriors will react to the disturbance.”

“They won’t notice a disturbance. They see in the infrared spectrum. They know human soldiers give off heat, and that’s what they look for. My armor’s stone-cold. And I’ll knife the maggot, so there won’t be any firearm heat flash.”

“Then what?”

“Then we’ll find shelter. When the storm breaks, they’ll find us by our transponders.”

Through his visor, Howard frowned. “What if your plan goes wrong?”

I shrugged inside my armor. Over the decades, I had salvaged more disasters than I had caused. However, including this fiasco, my track record with plans wasn’t so great. “Then we’ll do what we always do. Run like hell until we think of something. You have a better idea?”

“If we break through the perimeter, we’ll be running through a blizzard for days. Our prisoner may not even survive. And your armor heater’s broken. We’re too old to try this, Jason.”

“If we don’t try this, we won’t get older.”

I cross-slung my rifle over my back, maxed my optics so I could see a yard in front of my face, and low-crawled through the snow.

Twenty minutes later, I paused, panting, behind a drift. My arm and leg muscles burned, my knee and elbow joints throbbed, and I sucked wind so hard that my visor’s med readout flashed amber. According to the medic who had doped me before we landed, I was supposed to feel great. We
were
too old for this.

The wind swirled snow away from the area fifteen yards to my front, and I glimpsed an angular black peak that rose a foot above the drifts. Hair stood on my neck. As expected, a Slug Warrior, faced away from me, was hunkered down in defense. Unlike GIs, Slug Warriors didn’t share fighting positions with another soldier. Slug Warriors were more like sophisticated white corpuscles than individual soldiers, and they needed neither companionship nor a buddy to take watch while they slept. I closed the gap between me and the Warrior to five yards, drew my knife, then chinned my comm bar. Behind me, Howard, presuming he hadn’t fallen asleep, would see the “go” light in his visor display, feel the vibrate alarm on his cheek, and crawl forward with the Ganglion in tow. I fingered my knife. There was no “book” on fighting
mano-a-maggot.
Few Earth troops had done it live, despite the Slug War’s duration. Slug body armor was easily penetrated by a bullet or a broadsword swung by a six-foot-five Casuni. But a knife wielded by a guy so old that his joints creaked when he rode an exercise bike?

Slugs’ armor ended in a skirt at ground level, because they traveled on one bare foot, though they didn’t slime along like a true snail. There was an opening higher up in the armor through which the Warrior extruded a tentacle-like pseudopod to grasp its mag-rail rifle. And the armor was open at the anterior end so the Slug’s infrared sensory patches, on what one might call its head, could “see.”

The biggest knife target would be exposed by bulldogging the Slug over, like a roped calf, then stabbing its underbelly, but that would also create the biggest commotion. The pseudopod hatch at the armor’s midriff was smaller than a saucer. The approach would have to be like cutting a sentry’s throat from behind.

The Spooks say a Slug Warrior has no independent cognition, no sense of self, because it’s simply part of a single, physically separated organism. The Slugs killed my mother, killed the great love of my life, killed more friends than I could count. So I should have been spoiling to gut this one like a trout. Still, the knife tip trembled in my hand, neither from cold nor fear. My years had taught me how empty this universe was, and how unique life, any life, was within it. Even Slugs. I stopped, drew a breath, and waited a heartbeat until my hand steadied. Another thing my years had taught me was not to wax philosophic during knife fights.

I paused again a yard behind the Warrior. It stood, the base of its armor buried in drifted snow, six feet long from armor crest to tapered tail, and five feet high. Its armor shone black in the storm’s dimness, the transverse plates on its back overlapping like an armadillo’s. Its pseudopod wrapped its rifle’s peculiar grip. Peculiar to a human hand, at least.

The Warrior swayed, more than the wind required, as though listening to music. I switched the knife to my natural hand, took a deep breath, then lunged.

FIFTEEN

MY RIGHT ARM wrapped the Slug’s midsection, where a human infantry soldier’s breastplate would have been. The Warrior lurched, thrashed, and twisted the mag-rail rifle toward me. In a fight, a single maggot’s no more effective than a ten-year-old throwing a tantrum.

My gloved fingers found the lip of the armor’s anterior opening, and I stabbed the knife in with my opposite hand.

There was no need for accuracy, no slashing the windpipe or carotid artery, because Slugs had neither. When punctured, they gushed like squeezed grapes and dropped like sacks. Howard panted up behind me, the Ganglion bouncing feathery in his wake, like a balloon on a string. I stared down at the Slug, an armored banana against green-stained whiteness, and toed it. In these few seconds, the dead Warrior’s lifeblood had jellied the snow.

Howard was already past me. I ran, caught up, and dug in the snow for the other rope trailing from the Ganglion’s motility plate. The wind buffeted the floating saucer, but its own leveling systems whined, and kept it upright, as we towed it.

Zzee. Zzee.

I heard mag rifle fire behind us, over the wind. But nothing whizzed close. Howard said, “The Warriors are reacting without coordination! We really did isolate them from command and control.”

“They won’t come after us, once the storm breaks?”

Howard waved his free hand as we pulled our prisoner through the snow. “They will. But in a disorganized way.”

“Howard, twenty thousand against two don’t have to be organized.”

“It may not come to that.”

“Why not?”

“We could freeze to death first.”

I put both hands on my rope and picked up the pace.

Five hours later, the average wind speed had increased to one hundred thirty miles per hour, and we were reduced to crawling at, according to my ’Puter, a half mile per hour. Howard’s Eternads were keeping him warm and hydrated. “We” weren’t going to freeze to death. However, the heavy that had sheared my armor’s back left me with only my ’Puters. The basic principle of Eternad technology hadn’t changed since the start of the war. The energy of the wearer’s movement charged batteries that ran the suits ’Puters, air-conditioning, heater, and miscellaneous life-support systems. I didn’t miss the air-conditioning, and my exertions plus the armor’s passive insulation kept me warm, though feeling in my fingers and toes had gone AWOL hours ago. My biggest problem was the loss of those miscellaneous life-support systems. The dry cold of a Weichselan blizzard sucked an exercising human dry like he was crossing the Sahara. Scoops on Howard’s boots sucked snow in, melted it, ran it through his purifier, and stored the resultant drinking water.

I had to stop periodically, pack snow into my helmet’s spare barf bag by hand, then tuck it inside my armor until my body heat melted it. The worst of it was that a crate full of Weichsel’s extra-dry powder melted down to just a glass of water.

I had knelt to scoop snow into my bag with ice-cubed fingers. That left Howard, who flunked out of Cub Scouts, on point. He plodded ahead, like a tin Saint Bernard. While I scooped, I watched him, to gauge visibility. By the time he got ten yards away from me, he had faded to a shadow. I panted into my mike, “Hold up, Howard. Don’t get too far—”

He vanished. The Slug on the saucer, tied to him, disappeared an eye blink later.

SIXTEEN

ONE MINUTE AFTERWARD, I paddled through the powder to the spot where Howard had disappeared so fast that I nearly went over the edge myself.

I jacked my optics and saw Howard, spread-eagled, face-down, fifteen feet below, at the base of a short cliff. The Slug saucer rested alongside him, bottom-up.

“Howard?”

Nothing.

“Howard?”

“I certainly didn’t see that coming!” Howard’s arms and legs flailed, scouring an inadvertent snow angel at the cliff’s base.

“You okay?”

“I think so.”

I picked my way over the cliff lip. Ten feet above Howard, the lip turned under altogether, and I slid off into a half-ass parachute-landing fall alongside Howard.

I righted the Slug saucer. Our friend shivered there on the vibrating plate, betraying no hostility and less inclination to flee. The cliff broke the wind down to a sixty-mile-per-hour swirl and stretched away to the limits of vision in both directions. Most significantly, in the cliff face directly behind us, over which Howard and I had tumbled, loomed a black opening twenty feet wide and ten high. “Howard, you found a cave.”