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

I spit out the scraps, then spoke to him for the first time. “I’ll make it alone, Roy. But first I’ve got mail to read.”

SEVENTY-ONE

I FLOAT WEIGHTLESSin the observation blister on
Abraham Lincoln
’s prow. The spangled blackness glides around me, as the ship rotates. Dead ahead beckons the lightless disk of our next insertion point, its gravity already accelerating us forward. Invisible over my shoulder, the Fleet trails us, a single file of projected power that stretches behind this flagship, over a span longer than the distance between Earth and the moon.

My only companion in here, Jeeb, perches on the blister’s handrail alongside me, and one of his legs squeaks loud enough in the stillness that I wince. He stares up at me with polished optics, and I task him.

“Accelerate left third locomo®€ …tor replacement.”

In response, his internals click, so faintly that only I would notice, as he reprograms. I rest one hand on the rail beside Jeeb, and my replaced arm throbs. By now, Jeeb and I each resemble George Washington’s hatchet. One hundred percent original equipment, except for six new handles and four new heads.

But Jeeb, for all the humanity I see in him, is so immortal that he can survive a near-miss nuke, and is selfless in the way that only machinery can be. We humans are all too mortal and all too selfish. And that, my life has taught me, is the essence of being us. We understand our mortality, yet we sacrifice everything for others. Sometimes the calculus of sacrifice is simple, one life for six thousand, or for all mankind. Sometimes the calculus is one arm for nothing explicable. I believe that sacrifice won the Second Battle of Mousetrap for mankind. I fear that only more sacrifice will win this longest and broadest of wars for us. I believe that we will overcome the Pseudocephalopod because, in our best moments, we overcome our selfishness.

The Spooks and my life have taught me that our distant adversary is one, single, self-perpetuating unitary intelligence. As the Fleet gets closer and closer to It across the jumps, the Spooks gather their clues, and read their entrails. They say we will find at our enemy’s core sentient tissue so eternal, so massive, that it has filled an entire planet, the way that a hermit crab grows to fill a discarded shell. Despite the experience of most of a lifetime, that’s all I know of the future. I think I’ve earned answers, but all that my soldier’s life has rewarded me with are loved ones lost or barely known, and questions. What else does Howard know that he hasn’t told me? Can my old friend Bassin remake a world that exists half slave and half free? Are my godson and Audace Planck complicit in Tressel’s evil empire?

Does Jude blame me for his mother’s death? Can Mimi and I ever be more than interstellar pen pals?

And is this universe big enough for us and the Slugs?

From the speaker in the handrail, the bosun’s whistle disturbs Wander’s Philosophy 101. The whistle’s music lilts, but I grumble because it never stops calling me. I sigh, then I somersault, and float aft, in the direction from which I came. “Let’s go, Jeeb. We’re not done yet.”

Acknowledgments

Thanks to my editor, Devi Pillai, and to Orbit’s publishing director, Tim Holman, for support and wisdom in making the Jason Wander books possible. Thanks also to Kim Gonzalez for thoughtful copyediting, to Calvin Chu for yet another sparkling cover, to Alex Lencicki, guide to the Internet and fixer of tickets, to Jennifer Flax for perceptive editing and so much more, and to everyone at Orbit for their energy and great work.

Thanks particularly to the many readers who have served their countries around the world and who have written to tell me that my labors have in some small way lightened or validated theirs. Thanks also to Winifred Golden, agent to the stars and even to me, and, always, thanks to Mary Beth and the kids for sticking around.

Extras

¶€ …

Meet the Author

ROBERTBUETTNERis a former Military Intelligence Officer, National Science Foundation Fellow in Pale ontology and has been published in the field of Natural Resources Law. He lives in Georgia. His Web site iswww.RobertBuettner.com .

Introducing

If you enjoyed ORPHAN’S ALLIANCE, look out for

ORPHAN’S TRIUMPH

Book 5 of the Jason Wander series

by Robert Buettner

BLAM-BLAM-BLAM.

The assault rifle’s burst snaps me awake inside my armor, and the armor’s heater motor prickles me between the shoulder blades when I stir. The shots’ reverberation shivers the cave’s ceiling, and snow plops through my open faceplate, onto my upturned lips.

“Paugh!” The crystals on my lips taste of cold and old bones, and I scrub my face with my glove.

“Goddamit, Howard!”

Fifty dark feet from me, silhouetted against the pale dawn now lighting the cave’s mouth, condensed breath balloons out of Howard’s open helmet. “There are dire wolves out here, Jason!”

“Don’t make noise. They’re just big hyenas.”

“They’re slobbering!”

“Throw rocks. That’s what I did. It works.” I roll over, aching, on the stone floor and glance at the time winking from my faceplate display. I have just been denied my first hour’s sleep after eight hours on watch. Before that, we towed the third occupant of this cave across the steel-hard tundra of this Ice Age planet through a sixteen-hour blizzard until we found this shelter, more a rocky wrinkle in a shallow hillside than a cave.

I squint over my shoulder, behind Howard and me, at our companion. It is the first Pseudocephalopod Planetary Ganglion any Earthling has seen, much less taken alive, in the three decades of the Slug War. Like a hippo-sized, mucous-green octopus on a platter, the Ganglion quivers atop its Slug-metal blue motility disc, which hums a yard above the cave floor. Six disconnected sensory conduits droop bare over the disc’s edges, isolating the Ganglion from this world and, we hope, from the rest of Slug-kind. Two synlon ropes dangle, knotted to the motility plate. We used the ropes to drag our POW, not to hogtie it. A Slug Warrior moves fast for a man-sized, armored maggot, but the Ganglion possesses neither organic motile structures nor even an interface so it can steer its own motility plate. Howard was very excited to discover that. He was a professor of extraterrestrial intelli¾€ …gence studies before the war.

I sigh. Everybody was somebody else before the war.

Howard would like to take our prisoner to Earth alive, so Howard’s exobiology Spooks can, uh, chat with it.

That means I have to get us three off this Ice Age rock unfrozen, unstarved, and undigested. I groan. My replaced parts awaken more slowly than the rest of me, and they throb when they do. I’m growing too old for this.

“Jason!” Howard’s voice quavers. He was born too old for this.

I stand, yawn, wish I could scratch myself through my armor, then shuffle to the cave mouth, juggling a baseball-sized rock from palm to palm. Last night, I perfected a fastball that terrorized legions of dire wolves.

As I step alongside Howard at the cave mouth, he lobs an egg-sized stone with a motion like a girl in gym class. It lands twenty feet short of the biggest, nearest wolf. The monster saunters up, sniffs the stone, then bares its teeth at us in a red-eyed growl. The wolf pack numbers eleven total, milling around behind the big one, all gaunt enough that we must look like walking pot roast to them. But I’m unconcerned that the wolves will eat us. A dire wolf could gnaw an Eternad forearm gauntlet for a week with no result but dull teeth.

I look up at the clear dawn sky. My concern is that the wolves are bad advertising. The storm we slogged through wiped out all traces of our passing, and, I hope, kept any surviving Slugs from searching for us. But the storm has broken, for now. I plan for us to hide out in this hole until the good guys home in on our transponders.

If any good guys survived. We may starve in this hole waiting for dead people. We don’t really know how Slugs track humans, or even if they do. We do know that the maggots were able to incinerate Weichsel’s primitive human nomads one little band and extended family group at a time. And the maggots had rude surprises for us less-primitive humans when we showed up here, too. I wind up, peg my baseball-sized stone at the big wolf, and plink him on the nose. I whoop. I couldn’t duplicate that throw again if I pitched nine innings’ worth. The wolf yelps and trots back fifty yards, whining but unhurt.

Howard shrugs. “The wolf pack doesn’t necessarily give us away. We could just be a dead bear or something in here.”

I jerk my thumb back in the direction of the green blob in the cave. “Even if the Slugs don’t know how to track us, do you think they can track the Ganglion?” Disconnected or not, our prisoner could be screaming for help in Slugese right now, for all we know.

Howard shrugs again. “I don’t think—”

The wolf pack collectively freezes, noses upturned.

Howard says, “Uh-oh.”

I tug Howard deeper into the cave’s shadows, and whisper, “Whatever they smell, we can’t see. The wind’s comË€€…ing from upslope, behind us.”

As I speak, Howard clicks his rifle’s magazine into his palm, and replaces it with a completely full one. I’ve known him since the first weeks of the Blitz, nearly three decades now, and Colonel Hibble is a geek, alright. But when the chips are down he’s as infantry as I am. Outside, the wolves retreat another fifty yards back from the mouth of our cave, as a shadow crosses it. My heart pounds, and I squeeze off my rifle’s grip safety.

Eeeeerr
.

The shadow shuffles past the cave mouth. Another replaces it, then more. As they stride into the light, the shadows resolve into trumpeting, truck-sized furballs the color of rust. Howard whispers, “Mammoth.”

The herd bull strides toward the wolf pack, bellowing, head back to display great, curved tusks. The wolves retreat again.

Howard says, “If we shot a mammoth out there, the carcass would explain the wolf pack. It could make an excellent distraction.”

He’s right. I raise my M-40 and sight on the nearest cow’s shoulder, but at this range I could drop her with a hip shot.

Then I pause. “The carcass might attract those big cats.” Weichsel’s fauna parallels Pleistocene Earth in many ways, but our neolithic forefathers never saw sabre-toothed snow leopards bigger than Bengal tigers.

Really, my concern with Howard’s idea isn’t baiting leopards. Sabre teeth can’t scuff Eternads any more than wolf teeth can. I just don’t want to shoot a mammoth.

It sounds absurd. I can’t count the Slugs that have died at my hand or on my orders in this war. And over my career I’ve taken human lives, too, when the United States in its collective wisdom has lawfully ordered me to.

It’s not as though any species on Weichsel is endangered, except us humans, of course. The tundra teems with life, a glacial menagerie. Weichsel wouldn’t miss one mammoth. So why do I rationalize against squeezing my trigger one more time?

I can’t deny that war callouses a soldier to brutality. But as I grow older, I cherish the moments when I can choose not to kill.

I lower my rifle. “Let’s see what happens.”

By mid-morning, events moot my dilemma. The wolves isolate a lame cow from the mammoth herd, bring her down two hundred yards from us, and begin tearing meat from her wooly flanks like bleeding rugs. The mammoth herd stands off, alternately trumpeting in protest at the gore-smeared wolves, then bulldozing snow with their sinuous tusks to get at matted grass beneath. For both species, violence is another day at the office.

Howard and I withdraw inside the cave, to obscure our visual and infrared signatures, and sit opposite our prisoner.

The Ganglion just floats there, animated only by the vibrations of iË€€…ts motility plate. After thirty years of war, all I know about the blob is that it is my enemy. I have no reason to think it knows me any differently. For humans and Slugs, like the mammoths and wolves, violence has become another day at the office.

Howard, this blob, and I are on the cusp of changing that. If I can get us off Weichsel alive. At the moment, getting out alive requires me to freeze my butt off in a hole, contemplating upcoming misery and terror. After a lifetime in the infantry, I’m used to that.

I pluck an egg-sized stone off the cave floor and turn it in my hand like Yorick’s skull. The stone is a gem quality diamond. Weichsel’s frozen landscape is as full of diamonds as the Pentagon is full of underemployed Lieutenant Generals. Which is what I was when this expedition-become-fiasco started.