Роберт Бюттнер - Orphan's Journey

A middling tree to my front splayed flat beneath a monster’s foot.

I skidded to a stop, spun left, but that way another tree rustled.

I ducked right, and the barrel-chested, black-bearded warrior on the pinto crashed into sight ten yards from me. His mount reared. He reined it with one hand, drew one of his chest pistols, and I stared down a bore as wide as a carrot.

Blackbeard shouted at me.

I had no more clue what Blackbeard said than I had when Bassin spoke, but by Blackbeard’s tone and gestures, “Drop your spear” was a fair guess.

In that instant, a half dozen mounted warriors surrounded me, pistols drawn. Their mounts pranced, snorted, and stomped feet big enough to squash me.

I held my little sharp stick between my thumb and forefinger, away from my body, knelt, and laid it on the ground. I raised my empty hand, palm out, and said, “Friend.”

Six pistols fired as one.

TWENTY-FOUR

FEW ROUNDS CAN PENETRATE ETERNADS. But armor doesn’t insulate the wearer from physics like a Firewitch does. Six outsized bullets whacked my chestplate like a blindsiding linebacker, and the impact whiplashed my head forward. Without my helmet, my chin struck my helmet-connection ring, and I dropped like a boxer KO’d by a hard right.

I awoke strapped like a bedroll across a duckbill’s butt, face-down behind its rider, with my hands bound at the small of my back. This new guy had hair as coarse as Blackbeard’s, but as gray as the plain armor he was wearing — I’d been handed off to one of the lower ranks. He and the rest of the cavalry rode their mounts in unornamented, stirruped saddles. I was still in my armor, my face against the beast’s dapple-gray flank.

Branches slapped my face. The animal was lumbering through the foothills’ thick brush.

If you ever vacation here, bring nose plugs. Whatever I might estimate as a duckbill’s gut diameter, it’s big enough to ferment gas by the blimpful. And bring bug repellent. Ticks as big as quarters crabbed beneath my ride’s feather-like fur, inches from my eyes. I shuddered at what might already have crawled down my armor, then tried squeezing my sore chin against my suit’s neck ring to close the gap — but gave it up as a bad deal.

I craned my neck. The sun had sunk so low that hours must have passed.

The duckbill that carried me stopped, but I could hear others crashing through brush, and I heard rock slide.

I was warm enough under my armor, but I shivered at the sound. The cavalry had followed my trail back to Bassin’s valley, and now they were descending the scree slope into it.

Bam.

One gunshot.

I squeezed my eyes shut.

Bassin had warned me not to leave his valley. But I was smarter than he was. That simple little man had saved my life, and now my stupidity had cost him his.

An hour later, I heard shouts, then the sounds of snorting duckbills. I craned my neck.

Four cavalrymen spurred their mounts, as they scrabbled back up the valley’s steep slope. One man held high a lunch-bag-sized sack that dripped muddy water. They had pillaged Bassin’s pitiful homestead, killed him, and had even stolen his meager life savings.

I hung my head and felt a lump in my throat.

Whup.

Something pliant and heavy got slung across my duckbill’s back, forward of me, hard enough that the beast snorted. Probably a sack of muddy stones.

“Jason!”

I twisted toward the whisper.

Bassin lay belly-down across my duckbill, his hands bound behind his back, like mine were, his face a foot from mine. He smiled.

I could have kissed his muddy lips.

I said, “I’m sorry. This is my fault.”

One of the quarter-sized ticks crawled across the duckbill’s hide, toward Bassin’s chin. Before the bug could sink claspers into him, Bassin stretched his neck, bit the insect in two, then spit the pieces into the brush.

I said, “Suit yourself. But protein’s part of a balanced diet.”

He stared at me. Wherever we were going, it was going to be a quiet trip.

Two hours later, the posse had ridden down out of the hills, and made camp out on the plains.

My rider hefted Bassin off the duckbill, carried him like a flour sack to a flat rock, unbound Bassin’s hands, and handed him a water bag.

Then he did the same to me, but staked me down so far from Bassin that we couldn’t talk to one another. Segregating prisoners was standard procedure, but our captors evidently didn’t know that Bassin and I didn’t communicate well enough to escape if we had Houdini’s own lockpicks.

Our minder looked older than Blackbeard, and his bushy eyebrows were as gray as his long hair.

I drank, wiped my mouth on my gauntlet’s snozz pad, and said, “Thanks.”

He scowled, and tapped the sword hilt at his shoulder. “Friend” evidently translated in their language to fightin’ words. “Thanks” seemed little better. I shut up rather than press my luck.

He pointed at my leg armor and pantomimed.

I dropped trou and peed, as instructed. I watered the brown grass, inspected my tackle for giant ticks, then buttoned up. My minder re-bound my hands, slung me back on the rock like a duffel, and roped my leg hobbles to a driven stake. I sat up and looked across the twilight at the endless prairie. If I could get untied, where would I go, anyway?

Something flicked across the darkening sky. A bird? I looked closer, and my heart leapt. Jeeb hovered twenty feet away, barely visible, his carapace chameleoned to match the gray clouds.

I whispered, “Return after dark.”

The cavalry unloaded their mounts, hobbled them, then set them to graze. Downwind, mercifully.

Someone made a fire, from what looked like dried dino dung patties. The men sat around their fire, talking, laughing, and eating while sparks spiraled up into the cold night. A half dozen hide bags, which one of the animals had carried, the men kept close beside the fire.

Blackbeard tapped three men’s shoulders, pointed, and set them out as perimeter pickets.

The smell of roasting meat drifted to me and my mouth moistened. Evidently prisoners got water. Period.

Jeeb’s emergency default setting was to track me. But without my helmet antennae to boost my suit transponder’s signal, it was little wonder finding me had taken him days. Especially since my transponder had wasted days broadcasting straight up from the narrow funnel that was Bassin’s valley.

A TOT chassis will survive a Brilliant Bomb near- miss that would vaporize a GI in Eternads, and TOT electronics withstand even a nuke’s electromagnetic pulse. Still, Jeeb had survived, so the others could have, too.

Finally, Jeeb tiptoed to me through the dark on four of his six legs, and cocked his optics.

How to use him? Tomorrow, when the others might be active, I would send him to search for them.

But for now? A TOT’s manipulators couldn’t untie knots, even if I had somewhere to go. But a J-series TOT has many talents.

I pointed my hands toward my ear, then nodded toward the conversing horsemen. “Listen. Learn.” I pointed at my earpiece. “Teach.”

Jeeb scuttled toward the circled men, then hunkered down just beyond the firelight.

I lay on my back, not on my six-shot-sore chest, popped a Sedtab out of my breastplate dispenser, and swallowed it dry.

Within minutes, I felt my eyelids droop. I haven’t drugged, not even Sedtabs, since one terrible day, light years away, in Basic Training. But I had a busy night ahead.

By morning, Jeeb squatted six-legged alongside my head. He unplugged, then shut down in the grass, impersonating a local rock.

My minder rolled out of his bed robe, cocked a shaggy-browed eye my way, and muttered, “Sleep well, Fisheater?”

Overnight, Jeeb’s Nano’Puters took in, then decrypted, my captors’ language, based on frequency and recurrence of eavesdropped sounds and word groups. Then Jeeb had plugged into my communications ’Puter, and force-fed me the download through my earpiece while I slept.