Orphan's Triumph (Jason Wander) (8 page)

He pointed through the snowflakes. “Just resistant limestone above eroded shale. Probably hundreds like it along this outcrop. I doubt there’s much depth to it.”

I wrapped my rope around my glove again and pulled toward the cave mouth. “There’s enough.”

Ten feet under the overhang, the wind gave way to calm, and the twilight outside gave way to blackness deep enough that I paused to let my optics adjust. The ceiling even opened up a bit, rising to fifteen feet by my ’Puter. My visor’s outside temp gauge shot up to a balmy thirty-four degrees Fahrenheit and continued to rise. I tugged off my gauntlets so I could rub circulation back into my fingers. Toes were next on my agenda. I popped my visor to enjoy the coziness.

I sniffed. I said to Howard, “Smells like—”

From the shadows, something rumbled.

I froze.

Howard said, “Uh-oh.”

On further listening, the rumble was more a growl, but a very large growl. A boulder along the cave’s back wall moved, then grew, as it resolved into something brown, furry, and grumpy. The exobiologists had briefed us about Weichselan fauna, observed as well as anticipated. They noted that no analogue to the cave bear of Ice Age Europe had yet been observed on Weichsel, but the probability that such an analogue had evolved calculated at seventy-two percent. The bear reared on hind legs and snarled at its uninvited guests. The largest modern Earth Kodiak bear mounted out fourteen feet tall. Paleontologists estimated Earth cave bears could have been thirty percent larger than Kodiaks.

I can only report that the first observed Weichselan cave bear bumped its head on the fifteen-foot-high cave ceiling. This just made it grumpier.

I backed out of the cave as I unslung my rifle.

“Howard, bears eat berries and salmon, right?”

“Not cave bears. Their remains are high in Nitrogen-15.”

“Meat eaters?”

“When available.”

Any Weichselan two-legged hunter that this bear had encountered up until now would have been very available. The bear dropped down on all fours, lowered its head, and snarled. I thumbed the selector switch on my rifle to three-round burst as we backed out, then tugged a smoke grenade from my thigh pouch. With personal transponders, smoke is obsolete as a position marker, and the cans are clunky to carry, but I carried them anyway. As Ord said, it was better to have and not need than to need and not have.

The bear stepped forward and bared its teeth.

I stepped backward as I popped the can and rolled it like hissing dice under the bear’s nose. When the can popped and hot crimson smoke billowed out, the beast yipped and jumped back into the shadows.

Howard and I ran like our hair was on fire.

An hour of exploring along the escarpment later, we probed another cave. This one wasn’t as deep or as warm as the first one, nor was it as crowded.

We bundled our prisoner in a corner where the temperature measured thirty-six degrees Fahrenheit. There the blob seemed as comfortable as a blob can seem. Then Howard and I sat facing each other on the cold stone, while he uncoiled a hose that connected his scapular vent to my foot vents. His batteries were fully charged, and the barely warmed air he trickled over might stave off frostbite for me, even though the throb of returning circulation made me grit my teeth.

Howard said, “You didn’t shoot the bear.”

I shrugged. “I didn’t have to.” I jerked my thumb at the Ganglion. “Will it survive?”

It was Howard’s turn to shrug.

“If it does, how much can it tell us?”

“Ask me again after we get it to Earth alive.”

I disconnected from Howard’s armor and tugged my boots and gauntlets back on. Howard said, “We could stay connected. That would be more comfortable for you.”

I shook my head. “One of us needs to stay at the cave mouth, on watch. I’ll take the first watch. While I’m warm.” A relative term.

A half hour later, I sat at the cave mouth with my rifle across my thighs. At two a.m. local, the sky cleared enough to show stars. Weichsel’s version of the North Star sits in a constellation that looks like a bear.

At three a.m., the first dire wolf came sniffing around the cave, its eyes glowing red through the dark. A rifle shot would wake Howard. More important, it would flash a heat signature unlike anything natural on Weichsel. The Slug Warriors might be as disorganized as Howard thought, but why take chances?

I gathered a little pyramid of throwing stones, then pegged one at the wolf. It bounced off his ribs, and he trotted into the darkness, more confused than hurt.

Later, I shook Howard awake, then turned in.

Blam-blam-blam.

The assault rifle’s burst snapped me awake inside my armor, and the armor’s heater motor, ineffectual but operating, teased me by prickles between the shoulder blades. The shots’ reverberation shivered the cave’s ceiling, and snow plopped through my open faceplate, onto my upturned lips.

“Paugh!” The crystals on my lips tasted of cold and old bones. There was no cave bear in here at the moment, but there had been. I scrubbed my face with my glove. “Goddamit, Howard!”

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

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

“They’re coming closer!”

“Throw rocks. That’s what I did. It works.” I rolled over, aching, on the stone floor and glanced at the time winking from my faceplate display. I just got wakened from my first hour’s sleep after eight hours on watch.

I squinted over my shoulder, behind Howard and me, at our companion. It remained a hippo-sized, mucous-green octopus on a platter, humming a yard above the cave floor.

Sleepy or not, I had to get us three off this Ice Age rock unfrozen, unstarved, and undigested. I groaned as my replaced parts awakened, more slowly than the rest of me.

“Jason!” Howard’s voice quavered.

I stood, yawned, wished I could scratch myself through my armor, then shuffled to the cave mouth, juggling a baseball-sized rock from palm to palm. Last night, I had perfected a fastball that terrorized many a dire wolf.

As I stepped alongside Howard at the cave mouth, he lobbed an egg-sized stone with a motion like a girl in gym class. It landed twenty feet short of the biggest, nearest wolf. The monster sauntered up, sniffed the stone, then bared its teeth at us in a red-eyed growl. The wolf pack numbered eleven total, milling around behind the big one, all gaunt enough that we must have looked like walking pot roast to them.

The wolves couldn’t eat us. A dire wolf could gnaw an Eternad forearm gauntlet for a week with no result but dull teeth.

I looked up at the clear dawn sky. The wolves were, however, bad advertising. The storm had wiped out all traces of our passing and, I hoped, would retard any search by the decapitated Slug Legion.

I planned for us to hide out in this hole until the good guys homed in on our transponders. If any good guys survived. We might starve in this hole waiting for dead people. I wound up, pegged my baseball-sized stone at the big wolf, and plinked him on the nose. I whooped. I couldn’t duplicate that throw if I pitched nine innings’ worth. The wolf yelped and trotted back fifty yards, whining but unhurt.

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

I jerked 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 have been screaming for help in Slugese at that moment, for all we knew.

Howard shrugged again. “I don’t think—”

The wolf pack, collectively, froze, noses upturned.

Howard said, “Uh-oh.”

I tugged Howard deeper into the cave’s shadows and whispered, “Whatever they smell, we can’t see. The wind’s coming from upslope, behind us.”

Outside, the wolves retreated another fifty yards from the mouth of our cave as a shadow crossed it. My heart pounded, and I squeezed off my rifle’s grip safety.

Eeeeerr.

The shadow shuffled past the cave mouth. Another replaced it, then more. As they strode into the light, the shadows resolved into trumpeting, truck-sized furballs the color of rust. Howard whispered, “Mammoth.”

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

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

He was right. I raised my M40 and sighted on the nearest cow, but at this range I could have dropped her with a hip shot.

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

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

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

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

I couldn’t deny that war calloused a soldier to brutality. But as I grew older, I cherished the moments when I could choose not to kill.

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

By midmorning, events mooted my dilemma. The wolves isolated a lame cow from the mammoth herd, brought her down two hundred yards from us, and began tearing meat from her woolly flanks like bleeding rugs. The mammoth herd stood 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 was another day at the office.

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

The Ganglion just floated there, animated only by the vibrations of its motility plate. After thirty years of war, all I knew about the blob was that it was my enemy. I had no reason to think it knew me any differently. For humans and Slugs, like the mammoths and wolves, violence had become another day at the office.

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

Zzee.

The sound came from somewhere behind the cave, and the mag rifle round struck a bull mammoth’s flank. The herd stampeded away, to our front, and after a hundred yards, another volley of Slug rifle fire dropped a half dozen of them.

Slugs behind us. Slugs in front of us. It was coincidence. More likely, it was that they had picked up the signature of Howard’s rifle shots.

I unsnapped my ammunition pouches, because when the maggots come, they come faster than a casual reload can bring them down.

Howard did the same, shaking his head and muttering under his breath, “Oboy.”

SEVENTEEN

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, the first movement of Slugs showed in my optics, around the distant mammoth carcasses. I couldn’t see the Slugs, but I saw curving, uplifted lines carving the snow like shark-fin wakes as the maggots tunneled closer.

The little bastards never tired of coming up with surprises for us.

“Bullfrog, this is Scorpion leader. Over.” My heart skipped. The voice in my earpiece was faint but welcome. I glanced at Howard, and he nodded as he tapped his own earpiece. I said into my helmet mike, “This is Bullfrog, Scorpion leader. You got a fix on our transponders?

Over.”

“No fix, Bullfrog. We’ve just been cruising and broadcasting. Can you say your position? Over.”

Howard popped his visor and spoke to me. “Between the cave and the storm’s atmospherics, they can’t find us.”

“I cannot provide my position, Scorpion leader. But can you see the Slugs to our front and rear?

There must be thousands. Over.”

“No visible Slugs, Bullfrog.” Of course not. The pilots were looking for traditional Slug massed Warriors, in black armor. But the maggots were burrowing beneath the snow.
Zzee. Zzee.
The second round cracked rock off the cave lip and shot it across the cave.

“Look harder! They’re in our laps.”

“Bullfrog, we can’t see jack squat from up here. Our combat floor is now fifteen thousand. Except for pickup. We can’t pick up what we can’t find.”

I swore into the mike. “How many did you lose to the heavys yesterday?”

“Six, Bullfrog. We gotta stay high or we won’t do you or us any good at all.”

Zoomies never changed. Late in the last century, before the Second Afghan, even before the First Afghan, the old Soviet empire’s gunships had been chased back to altitudes that rendered them ineffective against ground targets by a few well-placed shoulder-fired missiles. Not that I blamed the Zoomies. Scorpions and their pilots were in short supply, especially to the pilots’ loved ones. I crawled to the cave mouth, raised my finger cam, and peeked. The burrows converging on us numbered in the hundreds, and the closest were a hundred yards away. And that was just in front of us. The noose was certainly drawing close on our flanks and rear, too.

I dug in my thigh pocket, jerked out my last smoke canister, and lobbed it out into the open. As purple smoke billowed in a widening cone, I said, “Scorpion leader, I have marked my position with smoke. Do you identify? Over.”

“I haven’t seen smoke since flight school, Bullfrog. Where the hell… Okay. I identify purple smoke. Over.”

“I confirm. Purple smoke. Target is troops in the open. Under a foot of snow. What are you packing?”