Роберт Бюттнер - Orphan's Journey

“Never seen nothing like it!” A man slapped his knee.

People surged around us, shouting. “There’s one in the eye for the Slavers!”

“And for the Casuni!”

Someone said to us, “You’ll celebrate tonight, hey, boys?”

The Apprentice took Bassin’s Stones from him, pocketed the one that was the Auctioneer’s tip, then shouldered me aside, as he carried the remaining Stones to Blackbeard and the Lieutenant, as their respective profits.

Jude asked me, “Can we go back to the tent with the girls?”

“No!”

Howard stood beside me, shaking his head. “I don’t understand. If a handful of Stones is valuable enough to make a man rich, what happens to those piles of them that we cleaned?”

I turned, stood on tiptoe, and scanned the crowd, searching for Bassin. “And who the hell is my caveman friend, really?” Technically, Bassin owned us now, but he had vanished, and somehow a former slave didn’t seem like the slave owner type.

Jude tugged my sleeve. “Can I get drunk?”

“No.”

“Just one?”

“Maybe.”

Blee-Blee-Blee-Blee-Blee.

I tore out my earpiece. “Goddammit!”

Ord stood beside me, head cocked. “What’s wrong, Sir?”

I scanned the clear sky. “Jeeb’s up there with a fried chip or something. He’s been blipping for a half hour. Just now he kicked up to Threat Level Four.” I nodded toward the quiet green slope across the river, and snorted. “You’d think a thousand Slugs were gonna charge over that hill any minute now.”

I shuddered. I had been to war against the Slugs twice, and even tossing off their name in jest still spooked me.

I rested my eyes on the graceful wooden Traders nodding their sails out on the river. Between us and the ships rolled a green and gold fall meadow. We four were free men, and whatever my missteps, we were suddenly as okay as we could be, so far from home.

The four of us walked back to our gear, the crowd turned its attention back to the show up on The Block, and in the soft, windless afternoon we could finally talk to one another without shouting.

Jude cocked his head. “What’s that?”

“Huh?”

“Don’t you hear it? It’s like, boom-boom-boom, boom-boom-boom.”

Howard, Ord, and I looked at each other.

I said, “Uh-oh.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

BOOM-BOOM-BOOM.

I heard it, now. My blood coursed cold in my veins, and hair rose on my neck.

Jude was right. He was just a nanosecond ahead of us unmutated humans, as usual.

Boom-boom-boom. Louder still.

Howard’s Spooks guessed that Slug infantry could sustain eight miles per hour over obstacle-free terrain, at Earth gravity. Howard’s Spooks never guessed why Slugs on the march pounded their mag rifles against their body armor. Maybe to beat cadence, maybe to assist respiration, maybe to scare their enemies. Whatever the Slugs thought, I always thought it scared the crap out of me.

A few faces in the crowd turned up toward the clear sky, puzzled.

A woman near us asked her husband, “Did you furl the tent flaps?”

He told her, “It didn’t look like rain.”

Mostly, the crowd sunned themselves, or listened to the Auctioneer’s sing-song.

Slugs made war on humans the way humans made war on the common cold virus. Dispassionately and totally. No one who survived the experience forgot, and neither did their children, or their children’s children.

I turned to Howard with my jaw dropped. “The sledgehammer’s about to swat the fly, but these people have no idea what’s coming.”

Howard said, “The Pseudocephalopod’s contact with this planet must have happened very, very long ago. Or it’s current, but very restricted.”

Ord said, “Whatever it was, it’s changing.” He hopped on one leg as he pulled on his Eternad leggings. I realized that I had begun doing the same thing, reflexively. So had Howard.

“Jude!” I pointed at his crimsons. “Armor up!”

My godson’s eyes widened. “Is this gonna be cool?”

“No. Move it!”

Boom-boom-boom.

Now the thunder was so loud that people were turning to one another and scratching their heads. The Auctioneer paused in mid-rant. He looked over his shoulder, shrugged, and resumed.

I could have shouted a warning, but what? Anything I said would have been as meaningless as a stop sign to a walrus.

I twisted my earpiece back in my ear, then locked my helmet to the connecting ring. The ventilator clicked, and filtered air feathered my cheek for the first time in weeks.

More important, my visor visuals exploded to life like star shells. I was no longer limited to Jeeb’s basic audio feed.

I tasked Jeeb. “Show threat.”

As I said it, I chinned my optics to panoramic, and focused on the hilltops that bounded the river’s opposite side. “Oboy.” It suddenly became unnecessary for Jeeb to flash me aerial images of the threat.

The distant ridgeline slowly sprouted a line of black whiskers, like a holo for beard cream.

Boom-boom-boom. Now the sound rumbled, the way trains did in the years before ’levs.

People in the crowd pointed fingers at the hills, and visored their hands over their eyes as they stared in the direction of the rumble.

Someone shouted, “What sort of show is this?”

“A free one, I hope!”

The crowd laughed.

Zzzzeeee.

“Incoming!” I shoved Jude to the ground, and spread-eagled across him.

Slug weaponry is as simple, and as alien, as Slug physiology. Howard calls it the Pseudocephalopod equivalent of anthropomorphism. Whatever.

The Slugs use magnetic force to accelerate non- explosive projectiles of various sizes along rails to as high a speed as necessary to inflict the damage level they want. The big berthas mounted on a Firewitch look pretty much like the rifles Slug warriors tote, except for size. But size matters.

Ka-boom.

The Slugs hadn’t tossed many Heavys on Ganymede, but I recognized the impact thump. Heavys were long-range rounds, as big as a gallon milk jug and as heavy as a wall safe.

Silence. It had been just a single, ranging round.

I raised my head and looked around. “Jeez!” It had been a ranging round, but it had also been a Golden Beebe.

In the center of the field Blackbeard stood, the bag of stolen Stones that had bought our freedom clutched in his right hand.

He stared down at his armored breastplate, his eyes bulging. Where Blackbeard’s chest had been there now yawned a steaming hole, as large and round as a meat platter. The distant hills showed through the opening, bordered by the golden remains of his breastplate, as though a landscape painting hung around his neck.

Beneath me, Jude said, “What was—” and raised his head. I elbowed his helmet back into the dirt.

He squirmed. “I want to see!”

“You don’t.”

The bag slid from Blackbeard’s fingers, and the glowing red Stones bounced and rolled across the soil like solid fire.

Blackbeard wobbled on his boots, then toppled backward and lay staring at the sky. A severed artery pulsed a red arc a foot in the air above him. His blood glistened an instant in the sun, then rained back down on his face.

One woman screamed.

Then her voice got lost in a thousand others, and in the rumble of running feet.

The Auctioneer, his eyes wide, jumped from side to side on The Block, pumping his palms downward. “Stop! It’s some mistake! Peace of the Fair! Peace of the Fair!”

Boom-boom-boom.

The far ridge was black for a mile in each direction, as thousands of Slug warriors in body armor spilled across the crest and glided down the hillside toward The Fair.

I stood, and Jude scrambled up beside me. He peered through his helmet visor, jumping side to side, and pointing. “They’re real! They’re real!”