Роберт Бюттнер - Orphan's Journey

“Crap, Sarge,” I said.

He grinned as our five-animal caravan bounced away.

Our new minder paid out twenty feet of rope between him and us five. Then he turned his back on us as we rode, ignored us, and focused on eating his lunch while in the saddle.

After a day’s backseat driving, I knew how to steer a duckbill, and to distinguish the girls from the boys. I kicked my mount’s flanks, and she trotted forward, alongside Ord, Howard, and Jude, who rode three abreast.

Jude said, “We thought you were dead!”

I smiled. “I thought you were dead.” I asked Ord, “What happened?”

“Same as you, Sir, I expect. We survived the crash, found one another, gathered up the gear and anything we thought might be useful. Then we got engulfed by an overwhelming, more mobile force. A firefight would have been pyrrhic.”

“Our gear?”

Ord nodded toward the main body we were chasing across the prairie. “The ’Bots shut down and folded. The cavalry loaded them and everything else up on pack animals. I gather from what I just heard that Jeeb taught you their language, Sir.”

I nodded. “He’ll sleep-teach you all tonight.”

“The language barrier didn’t keep them from asking questions.” Beneath one eye, Ord wore a mouse the size and color of a plum.

“Bad?”

Ord shrugged. “Enthusiastic. Rudimentary.”

Jude said, “Jason, these are dinosaurs!”

Howard said, “Parallel-evolved dinosaur analogs. They aren’t dinosaurs. They resemble them.”

I steadied myself with my tied hands against my saddle, and turned to Howard. “If they’re dinosaur analogs, there shouldn’t be people analogs here for sixty million years, true?”

As we rode, Jude, Ord, and I swung in our saddles like metronomes. Duckbills rode easy once you caught the rhythm. Howard pogo’d up and down in his saddle, wincing and poking his glasses back up on his nose every few strides. “T-true.”

“Then who are all these guys that tied us all up and gave Sergeant Ord the analog of a shiner?”

Howard shook his head. “I have a theory about that. But it’s a little odd. I need more information.”

Ord nodded toward Bassin, who wide-eyed us as we spoke among ourselves in English. “Who’s this?”

“Bassin the Assassin. Harmless little guy. I thought he was a caveman. He’s a subsistence-level prospector, a cast-off from a Clan called the Tassini. These cavalry, the Casuni, don’t like Tassini.”

Ord asked, “Sir, you’ve been listening to the cavalry. What do they want with us?”

“They came to investigate the big bang when we crashed. They think we’re from another Clan they don’t like. ‘Marini.’ The Casuni cavalry call Marini ‘Fisheaters.’ The Marini are smarter than the Casuni. Everybody’s smarter than the Tassini.

“The Marini are smaller than the cavalrymen, and they look like us. The cavalry think we’re survivors of some Marini raiding party that snuck in here to poach valuables from their Clan. They assume the rest of our party got blown up when a powder wagon exploded. They’re taking us to some swap meet. To ransom us back to our fellow Fisheaters.”

Jude frowned. “What happens when the Fisheaters don’t want us?”

I shrugged. “These guys roast poachers alive.”

That night, Jeeb latched onto Ord, Jude, and Howard in turn and dumped each of them a language download. But they didn’t get to speak it much, because our minder was always struggling just to keep us in the main body’s dust cloud.

According to Jeeb’s mapping, during the four days after we Earthlings got back together, the Casuni cavalry traversed the interior prairie of Bren’s largest continent, from the Stone Hills to the navigable headwaters of the River Marin.

That was like traveling twelve hundred barren grassland miles east from the foothills of the Rockies to the Mississippi at St. Louis. Earth horse cavalry of the 1880s couldn’t have sustained a third of that speed. In fact, last-century Panzers couldn’t sustain that pace.

As we traveled, other Troops intersected our line, from north and south, with their own booty. The total column grew to four hundred in all, cavalry, spare mounts, and cargo duckbills.

We picked up information by eavesdropping as the column traveled. Prisoners like us were rare, especially since we were, obviously to them, Fisheaters. Mostly, the Casuni cavalry collected taxes in kind from Tassini prospectors all along the Stone Hills, then let the little guys go back to work. Poor Bassin became a cropper only because he was associated with us Fisheaters.

The new minder didn’t share Sergeant Yulen’s appreciation of the need for prisoner segregation. Once twilight, as we rode east, trailing the main body by two hundred yards, Jude said in English, “Jason, we should make a run for it.” He nodded at our minder, ahead. “The four of us can take this bozo.”

Howard said, “I don’t know. The other Clan may treat us better, Jason.”

Ord looked to me. “We’d have to retrieve our weapons and armor to sustain any escape, Sir. That would be difficult.”

I was pretty sure that the drafters of the U.S. military command structure hadn’t contemplated its application outside the Solar System, but everybody here seemed to think decisions were up to the ranking officer. Even though that was me.

I jerked my head back at Bassin. “Whatever we do, we don’t abandon my friend back there, if he wants to come.”

Ahead, the column halted, and so did we.

Commanders pointed off our left flank.

Five minutes later, three groups of five riders each separated from the column, and ran off at right angles to our line of march, until they disappeared into the darkness. Graceful in their saddles, they skimmed the prairie at an easy thirty miles per hour.

Jude breathed, “Cool!”

I walked my mare back to Bassin, who usually trailed us by twenty yards. He had been hearing snatches of our conversation for days, so it probably didn’t surprise him when I pointed at the outriders, then asked him in slowly pronounced Casuni, “Bassin. You know what these men do?”

He squinted ahead. The minder had his back to us, watching his comrades ride out.

Bassin answered in Casuni, “They’re flank-security outriders. Their armor and tack weigh 60 percent of a standard trooper’s, for better speed. Tonight, they’re thinning out predator packs. A column of five reinforced Troops like this one is as large as a migrating herd. The predators shadow large columns as they would herds, picking off stragglers.”

I sat back in my saddle and stared at Bassin like he’d grown horns while I watched. There was more to my prospector friend than he let on.

In the distance, yellow flashes bloomed.

The rattle of the shots echoed across the prairie a heartbeat later.

I stood in my stirrups, but in the darkness, I couldn’t see the fighting.

The cavalry pumped fists in the air, and roared like their team had won the World Bowl.

Our minder trotted back to us, jerked his head at me to get back to my place in line, and we moved out.

The outriders dragged back rib slabs so big that it was clear the predators would make short work of four Earthlings in long johns.

I said to Ord and the others, “As for escape, we’d never outrun Casuni regulars, much less the outriders. If we did get away, we don’t even know what the predators look like, much less how to fight them. None of us even knows where the waterholes are out here. We sit tight for now.”

Ord nodded.

Howard nodded, too. “I agree. What did Bassin have to say, back there?”

I cocked my head. “Not much we wouldn’t have guessed. But he said it the damnedest way.”

The rib slabs were enormous, and they got roasted and distributed later that night, but not to the five of us. We rationed the flatbread Sergeant Yulen had slipped me, and listened to our stomachs rumble.