Orphan's Triumph (Jason Wander) (2 page)

“He?”

“Nothing like
that
, sir. Infantry can be close without—”

I raised my palm. “I didn’t mean
that,
Captain. When I was a spec four, I was a loader for a female gunner. Just sounded familiar.”

The captain wrinkled his brow one millimeter. He was a West Pointer, and the notion that the commander in chief of offworld ground forces was a high-school dropout grunt typically ruffled Pointers’

feathers. But maybe his discomfort grew from the way I said it. Because I felt a catch in my throat. That long-ago female gunner and I had grown infantry-close, and in the years later, before her death, as close as family.

The captain continued, “An adult female snapper dug under a perimeter fence and maimed three Casuni at the sluice before the security Casunis brought her down. The private down there found the female’s cub wandering outside the wire. The private’s trying to make a pet of it. But the Casuni say it’s sacrilege to let the cub live.”

Grown snappers are ostrich-sized, beaked carnosaurs. They’re quicker than two-legged cobras, with toxic saliva and the sunny disposition of cornered wolverines. A snapper’s beak slices the duckbill-hide wall of a Casuni yurt like Kleenex, and Casuni mothers have lost babies to snappers for centuries. Nothing personal. Snappers are predators, and human babies are easy protein in a hard land. But in Casuni culture, even Satan is better regarded than snappers.

I sighed. “No animal-rights activists here.” Over the thirty thousand years since the Slugs snatched primitive Earthlings to slave on planets like Bren, humans had adapted to some strange environments, none harsher than the High Plains of Bren. The Casuni had evolved into flint-hard nomads, following migrating herds that resembled parallel-evolved duckbilled dinosaurs, across wind-scoured plains that resembled Siberia. I turned to the captain. “Why haven’t you puffed her?” On Earth, any suburban police department could neutralize a hostage situation by sneaking a roach-sized micro ’bot up close to the hostage taker, then snoozing the hostage taker with a puff of Nokout gas.

“A creep-and-peep team’s inbound from the MP battalion in Marinus, sir. But it’ll be six hours before they ground here and calibrate the Bug.”

As the captain spoke, two Casuni began low-crawling through a draw, screened from the girl’s sight, working their way around toward high ground off her left flank. One of the Casuni must’ve been careless enough to show an inch of skin, because the girl squeezed off a round that cracked off a rock a foot from the crawling man, exploding dust and singing off into the distance.

The girl called downslope in Casuni, her voice thickened by her translator speaker, “Stay away!”

I said, “We don’t have six hours.”

The captain shook his head. “No, sir, we don’t. That’s the only reason I set up a sniper to take her out. It makes me sick to do it. But I know a major incident with the Blutos could freeze the stone trade.”

He was right. If the Casuni killed an Earthling, it would be a major incident that could jeopardize the fuel supply of the fleet that stood between mankind and the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony. If the girl killed a Casuni, it would also be a major incident. And given her advantage in skills and equipment, she was probably going to kill a bunch of them as soon as the Casuni got in position, then rushed her. But if
we
shot her, it would still be a major incident. The terms of the Human Union Joint Economic Cooperation Protocol, known in the history chips as the Cavorite Mining Treaty of 2062, reserved the use of deadly force to indigenous civilian law enforcement. Casuni civilian law enforcement resembled a saloon brawl, but I don’t write treaties, I just live by them.

I stood and brushed dust off my utilities.

The captain wrinkled his brow behind his faceplate. “Sir?”

“I’ll take a walk down there and talk to her.”

The captain stared at my cloth utilities, shaking his head. “General, I don’t—”

The sniper’s spotter swiveled his helmeted head toward me, too, jaw dropped. “That’s suicide. Sir.”

THREE

AFTER FIFTEEN SECONDS, the captain swallowed, then said, “Yes, sir.”

The spotter scrunched his face, then nodded. “I think there will be time if we take the shot as soon as she turns and aims at you, General.”

“No shot, Sergeant.”

“Of course not, General. Until she turns and—”

“No shot. I’ll handle this.”

The spotter, the captain, and even the sniper stared at me.

Then the captain pointed downslope. “If the Casuni rush her, do we shoot? And who do we shoot?”

“The Casuni won’t rush her. That’s why I’m going now.” I shook my head, pointed at the sky. “It’s six minutes before noon. At noon the Casuni will pause an hour for daily devotions. That’s our window to talk her down.”

The captain stood. “Then I’ll go, sir. I’m her commanding officer.” He rapped gauntleted knuckles on his armored chest. “And I’m tinned up.”

I pulled him aside, then whispered to him, “Son, you’re right. If I were in your boots I’d be pissed at me for pulling rank.” I tapped my collar stars. “But I need you up here to be sure your sniper doesn’t get the itch.”

I had given him a ginned-up reason, and he was smart enough to know it. But the captain was also smart enough and resigned enough that he just nodded his head. There was no percentage in arguing with the only three-star within one hundred light-years. Besides, he probably figured his sniper could take the shot before I could get myself killed, anyway.

Twenty minutes later, I had crept and low-crawled to within fifty yards of the girl and she hadn’t spotted me. Downslope, I heard the twitter of Casuni devotion pipes. The warriors would all be head-down and praying for an hour, during which we could clean up this mess, before they rushed her. I kept behind a rock ledge as I cupped my hand to my mouth. “Sandy?”

“Who the hell’s out there?”

“Jason Wander.”

“Bite me. The old man’s pushing paper back in Marinus. Whoever you are, I can’t see you, but I can hear you well enough to lob a grenade into those rocks. So back off.”

“Sandy, I really am General Wander. I came out from Marinus to award a unit citation. When I heard what happened, I came here. I’d like to talk to you.” I paused and breathed. “I’m going to stand up, so you can see me, see that I’m unarmed.”

“I’ll drop a frag on your ass first!”

Ting.

The M40 is an excellent infantry weapon, except that it makes a too-audible “ting” sound when it’s switched between assault-rifle mode and grenade-launcher mode, as a grenade is chambered in the lower barrel.

So far, so good. My heart thumped, and I drew a breath, then let it out.

I stayed behind cover, levered myself up on my real arm, and glanced back to confirm where I was in relation to the sniper farther up the hillside. Then I got to my knees, spread my arms, palms out, and stood.

The girl had swung around from facing the Casunis downslope and now faced me, her unhelmeted cheek laid along her rifle’s stock as she trained her M40 on my chest. She lifted her head an inch, and her jaw fell open. “General?”

I nodded, then called, “Mind if I come closer? Then neither of us will have to yell. We won’t wake the baby.”

The voice of the captain upslope hissed in my earpiece. “General! Sir, you need to move left or right a yard or two. You’re blocking the shot.”

Which was the idea, though the captain hadn’t anticipated it until too late. They don’t teach enough sneakiness at West Point.

The girl jerked her head, motioning me closer, but she kept her finger on the trigger. “Two steps! No more.”

I took the two steps, which brought me within fifteen yards of her, then shuffled until the distance between us was down to ten yards.

She poked her M40 forward, then growled, a pit bull with freckles. “I said two steps, dipshit! Sir.”

In my ear, the captain said, “Sir, move left or right! Not closer! Now you’re obscuring her even more!”

The rifle quivered in the girl’s hand.

I swallowed. There’s a class in MP school that teaches how to talk jumpers down. I never took it. There was probably a series of soothing questions to ask, but I didn’t know what they were. So I said, “Tell me what happened, Sandy.”

“The Blutos tried to kill the baby.”

“And you’re tired of seeing things killed.” Even though her “baby” was a killing machine growing deadlier by the day. I kept my arms out, palms open toward her as I inched closer.

“The other Blutos—the caravan raiders—killed my loader. I couldn’t do anything to stop it.”

“I started out as a loader. I was there when my gunner died, too. It’s an empty feeling.”

I wasn’t lying, either, about the feeling or the death. But my gunner’s death had come less than three years ago, though it had come in combat and while I watched, unable to prevent it. Her gun’s muzzle dropped an inch as she nodded. “It feels like there’s a hole in my gut.”

“The hole heals. It takes time, but it heals.” I didn’t tell her how much time, or how disfiguring the scar could be.

I stepped forward. The voice in my earpiece whispered, “Sir, the psyops people predict that she’ll shoot. Just kneel down and we’ll take her out.”

She came up onto one knee, her M40 still trained on my chest. “What about the baby?”

I could see the snapper infant now, curled up asleep, tail over snout, on a bed of leaves the girl had prepared for it among the rocks. Empty ration paks littered the ground, where the girl must have been hand-feeding the little beast. Regardless of the girl’s maternal instincts, within a week the snapper’s predatory instincts would take over, and the monster would snap the girl’s hand off at the wrist if she held out a snack. The exobiologists said snappers were the most implacable predators yet discovered on the fourteen planets of the Human Union.

I said, “We’ll care for it for a while. When it’s old enough to fend for itself, we’ll release it into the wild.”

In fact, the Casuni would insist the devil’s spawn be gutted on the spot and its entrails burned. And with three of their own maimed by the beast’s mother, we would have no choice but to turn the little snapper over to the Casuni like a POW.

Harmonious interface with indigenous populations wasn’t all handing out Hershey bars. Sometimes it required tolerating customs we found barbarous. I used the moment to inch closer, within three yards of her. One step closer and I could lunge forward, grasp her rifle’s muzzle, and twist it away. Her rifle’s muzzle came up again and she snarled. “Liar!”

Crap. I’ve always been a lousy liar.

She fired, point-blank.

FOUR

“SIR?” The whisper was old, gravelly, and familiar. It came from close to my ear, so I heard it over jet-engine shriek.

I opened my eyes, focused, and saw Ord, gray eyes unsmiling, and above him the interior fuselage ribs of a hop jet. I asked, “Sergeant Major? What happened to the girl?”

Ord jerked his buzz-cut gray head, and I followed his eyes. A corpsman knelt beside the private, who lay strapped to the litter next to the one I lay on. Her eyes were closed; her chest slowly rose and fell. Joy juice from a suspended IV bag trickled down a transparent tube into her forearm. A purple streak began at the point of her jaw and traced halfway back to her ear.

Ord said, “Her jaw’s not broken, but you dropped her with a right as you went down, then landed on top of her. That kept her outfit from shooting her and gave them time to get downslope and put cuffs on her.” Ord frowned. “Sir, if you don’t mind hearing my opinion…”

I had minded hearing Ord’s opinion ever since he was my drill sergeant in infantry basic, but he never hesitated to share it with me anyway.

“You took an unnecessary risk.”

I shook my head. “No risk. I heard her shift her rifle to grenade mode. I never heard her shift back, and I talked my way to inside five yards from her.”

Ord nodded. “An M40 grenade doesn’t arm for five yards. So all she did when she pulled the trigger was wallop you in the chest with a low-velocity lump of unexploded shrapnel.”

I smiled a little at the cleverness of me.

Ord, as usual when I did that, frowned. “She could have flicked the selector switch back to rifle in an instant and killed you. She could have shot you in the head, instead of the chest, and killed you. That would have decapitated the offworld chain of command. If your sucker punch hadn’t knocked her flat, the sniper would have killed her anyway. That would have precipitated a crisis with the indigenous population.”

“But none of that happened. Now she gets a ride home. At worst, a Section Eight discharge. At best, administrative punishment and another chance in the army. The army gets a Band-Aid bill for me. I could see she was too distracted to realize she was still in grenade mode.”

Ord stared at me. I suppose he stared the way the caveman who discovered fire stared at the first idiot who stuck his finger into the flame. “Even so, sir, you could have allowed someone in armor, her commanding officer, perhaps, to make the approach. Or waited until the creep-and-peep team could have neutralized the situation.”

I glanced at the ’Puter on Ord’s wrist. A normal transport hauling a creep-and-peep team from Marinus would still be hours away. But only about an hour had passed since I stuck my chest in front of an almost-live grenade.

“That captain said the creep-and-peep team was coming out on a tilt-wing. Six hours. Why did the Spooks divert a hop jet to get out here faster? And why did you come out here on it?”

Ord peered at the IV bag alongside me, and the tube that ran from it into my forearm. “Sir, no need to get into that now. Your—ah—heroics left you with a hairline fracture of the sternum and related soft-tissue damage. The corpsman here just upped your dosage.” Ord smiled. Everybody in my platoon in basic knew an Ord smile meant that whatever the smile-ee thought was about to happen, he was sorely mistaken. Ord patted my shoulder. “Just relax for now, General.”

“I feel fine. Sergeant Major, answer my—”

The engine whine faded into nothing, and then another voice replaced it.

“—pleasure to have a casualty that outranks me, for a change.” I woke to the voice of the light colonel who commanded the infirmary at Human Union Camp, Marinus. Cocoa-skinned, gray-haired, and clad in short-sleeved blue scrubs, he stood in a white-painted single-bed room, staring at the chart reader in his hand. Hippocrates Wallace bared his forearms even though they were slick and puckered with burn scar tissue. I was there when he got burned. He had been a flight surgeon during the First Battle of Mousetrap. He was the only person I knew who had earned a Harvard Med School degree and a Silver Star.