Роберт Бюттнер: Orphan's Journey

“The Chinese don’t use overhead ’Bots.”

Ord sighed. “So the Spooks claimed.”

Chinese hovertank cannons chattered, but the rounds thumped high and wide of the rebels.

Hidden beneath their tarps, our rebels returned fire with RPGs.

I pounded my fist on rock. “No! They aren’t close enough!”

The ancient rockets died fifty yards short of the hovertanks, then burrowed into the snow.

The RPGs’ back blast flapped the tarps and geysered snow, revealing our rebels’ positions.

Cannons twitched as hovertank gunners adjusted aim toward the firing signatures.

The rebel commander already had his troops up and running. Clanking rocket tubes slung across their backs, they ran crouched behind a snow drift that concealed them from the hovertanks. At the drift’s end lay secondary firing positions, close enough for our rebels’ RPGs to reach the hovertanks.

The hovertanks’ second volley thundered harmlessly into our rebels’ emptied foxholes.

Ord pumped his fist. “Good boy, Tensing!”

But Tensing still hadn’t seen the infantry slipping ever-closer behind our rebels. The Chinese outnumbered his band six to one. He was brave and bright, but he had been the village schoolteacher until six months ago.

In minutes, the Chinese infantry would scramble far enough downslope to slaughter our rebels before they could get off a shot.

“Mouse this is Ox. Over.” Static answered.

I swore. “Why can’t we smuggle them decent radios, Sergeant Major?”

Ord blinked.

A handy thing about rank is subordinates have to answer your rhetorical questions. During the second that Ord was distracted, I levered myself up on one elbow, and locked my rifle into my GATr’s weapon bay.

“Sir? You can’t—”

Crack.

A cannon round whistled toward one rebel lurching behind the drift. Smiling Lobsang had always been a step slower than the others, limping on an ankle broken in childhood.

Whump.

The Chinese round bored through the snow drift, struck Lobsang’s chest, a Golden Beebe of a shot, then exploded. Lobsang became a twelve-foot-wide red-fog umbrella, drifting slowly on the wind.

My head snapped back inside my helmet, so hard that my optics blurred.

I breathed deep.

Ord whispered, “When I buy the farm, I want a quick sale, too.”

I thumbed the cover off my GATr’s starter button.

“You can’t go down there, Sir. We’re not legally in-country.”

“Let them die? Because I blundered?”

“War is a catalogue of blunders, Sir.”

“Tensing’s wife is pregnant. Did you know that?”

“Tensing knew the risks just like we did. He could have stayed home drinking buttered tea with his wife. But he chose to fight.”

“When I quartered with Tensing, he and his wife drank their tea without butter. I found out later they gave it all to me. Now I return the favor by doing nothing?”

A half mile below, the Chinese infantry unslung their weapons.

Ord laid his hand on my Plasteel forearm gauntlet, and shook his head. His gray eyes softened, but didn’t blink. “I understand. But we can’t, Sir. Rules of Engagement.”

“I know the Rules. No shooting. Unless we’re shot at first.” The first shot of the Slug War killed the remaining half of my parents. If the Chinese killed Tensing, and identified his body, his wife would be reeducated. After graduation, the heads of reeducated Tibetans showed up on roadside poles. Was I going to let Tensing’s baby become an orphan, too?

I pressed my GATr’s starter, then twisted the handgrip. Instantly, instead of lying on my belly on a Plasteel slab in the snow, I was floating on that slab above Ord, and above the rock that had hidden us. I looked like a body-armored kid, belly-flopped on the sled from hell. The GATr’s ’Puter bleeped in my earpiece, then said, “Maximum recommended altitude two feet. Current altitude seven feet.”

A Special Operations ground-effect assault transport rides on an air cushion, just like a recreational ground- effect toboggan a teenager might rent at Aspen or Malibu. Nano’Puter stabilization revolutionized ground-effect vehicles, from toboggans to hovertanks, like headlights revolutionized night driving. But a GATr is lots more. With its supertuned engine, Carbon9 chassis, and ThinkLink, its price would buy a pre-Blitz condominium.

GATrs also run as silent as field mice, unless the operator bypasses the suppressor. I toed the bypass, and my sled bellowed like a rutting moose. The roar echoed clear off the cliffs across the valley.

A GATr skims the ground, presenting a, well, alligator-low target silhouette. But that supertuned engine can blast enough downforce to bounce the sled into the air for a couple seconds, like a pronking antelope.

I blipped the throttle again, and pronked again.

Below, a slider turret traversed, away from the rebels, toward me. Its cannon snout lifted.

I swallowed hard.

Crack.

I flinched, even as the round screamed past, so high that it exploded against the cliff five hundred feet behind us.

I stuck my head over my sled’s side and forced my eyes wide. “Sergeant Major! Those bastards just shot at us!”

Ord, lying on his own GATr, just shook his head and muttered something that included the word “fool.”

I throttled forward, downhill. A GATr’s silhouette is so low that at full throttle over snow, the sled’s own snow spray masks it. The enemy has no idea where it is. Of course, that means the driver behind the windscreen has no idea where he is, either. The GATr Mark II would correct that, but, military production being military production, the Mark II was six months behind schedule.

I shot downhill, my chin a foot above the snow, as blind as justice — but faster.

The ’Puter bleeped. “Maximum recommended speed, eighty miles per hour. Current speed one hundred nine miles per hour.”

I squeezed the handgrips tighter.

With my rifle clamped in the weapon bay, I could fire wherever the GATr pointed. All it took was depressing a trigger in the right handgrip.

I slowed enough so the windscreen cleared itself. Tensing’s rebels had spotted the Chinese infantry, and now ran for their lives. But our rebels were picking their way across a boulder field. The Chinese infantry above them loped over a smooth, wind-bared downslope, and were gaining.

Tensing’s rebels raced on toward the distant trees.

I raced through the Chinese GIs close enough to see their wide-eyed faces.

My light-brigade charge slowed the Chinese as it carried my sled almost to the ridge top.

Meanwhile, Tensing’s rebels beat feet for the trees.

My GATr’s ’Puter scolded, “One hundred twenty-three miles per hour.”

Drive-by-wire Nano’Puters made all-terrain hover vehicles possible, but ’Puters can’t overcome physics, or human stupidity.

I peeked backward over my shoulder, to locate the Chinese.

When I looked forward again, a fridge-sized boulder jutted from the snow ahead. At eighty, even ninety, I might have steered around it.

Pow.

The ground-effect skirt clipped the boulder, and the GATr corkscrewed skyward. A ground-hugging GATr is unhittable. But an airborne GATr becomes a clay pigeon for a slider cannoneer.

I cranked back the throttle, but the GATr floated on above the ridge line, barrel-rolling for endless seconds against the clear Tibetan sky. The slider gunners down in the valley adjusted aim, and fired.

Proximity-fused cannon rounds detonated, the nearest forty feet behind me. My faceplate blackened against the flash, then the shock wave hammered the sled. Shrapnel crackled off my armor like tin rain.

The ridge’s backside was a cirque, the bowl from which a glacier begins. I tumbled through space, beyond the bowl’s vertical end cliff. Below me, boulders on the ice looked smaller than spilled pepper.