Роберт Бюттнер - Orphan's Journey

Jude said, “Jason, I just want to do the right thing.”

There wasn’t time to debate. And he was right. I pointed at The Block. “Okay. Keep down, behind the ’Bots.”

Ord tossed me a bound pack of Thermite sticks as we ran to The Block. Now the Slugs were close enough and thick enough that I thumbed my rifle to full automatic, and fired as we ran without fear that any shots would miss.

As we approached, the slaves scrabbled back away from us, throwing up their hands, wide eyed, and pleading.

With our visors down, in armor the like of which no Clansman of Bren had ever seen, we must have looked like demons to the slaves. Bren firearms were single shot, but our rifles were spitting seven hundred rounds per minute, like dragon fire. And at our sides crawled iron spiders as big as young duckbills.

No wonder we terrified the people we were trying to save.

I dodged out from behind the ’Bot that sheltered Ord and me, molded a Thermite stick around the first manacle I saw that had an animate foot in it, jammed an insulation pad under the manacle to shield the foot from the heat and flash. I yanked the starter ribbon.

Whoosh.

A red, forty-five-hundred-degree-Fahrenheit flash severed the manacle. I brushed the red-hot iron away with my gauntlet, pushed the man to his feet, and pointed toward the smoke. “Run!”

Ord had cut three slaves loose in the time it took me to free one.

He knelt beside me, firing, and shouted, “Sir, it’s taking too long!”

I said, “Retask the ’Bots. Have ’em break chains with their manipulators.”

Ord nodded, and moved out.

Howard and Jude saw what Ord was doing and Howard retasked their ’Bot, too.

I glanced up the hill and counted twenty freed slaves, stumbling and crawling for their lives. Farther up the slope, just in front of the smoke screen thrown by the burning of The Great Fair, was the only other Bren who had not fled the meadow in panic.

On a prancing, snow-white duckbill sat the huge, jewel-armored Casuni who had allowed Bassin to win the bid for us. He pressed a brass spyglass to one eye, watching the battle.

The Slug front line was thirty yards away, now.

A ’Bot snapped the last chain and freed the last slave on the for-sale side of the block.

Three slaves, four counting the young girl’s baby, remained imprisoned in the “sold” compound. I ran to them, and wrapped the first Thermite stick.

Ord knelt beside me again. “Sir, we’re about to be overrun.”

“Tell Howard and Jude to fall back.”

“I did, Sir. Colonel Hibble said he outranked me. Jude told me to pug myself.”

A Slug warrior leapt across the ’Bot that formed our final barrier, six feet from us. Ord shot him, point blank, then stood and hosed down a half dozen more, nearly as close.

The girl with the baby was the last chained slave. I knelt alongside her as she trembled in the dirt, her eyes as wide and white as hard-boiled eggs. Crimson stained her dress hem, where her ankle had bled as she tried to free herself from her chains.

I wiped blood off her chain, so the Thermite stick wouldn’t slip, then said to her, “Look away when I pull the ribbon, and don’t touch the manacle. I’ll pull it off. Then run up the hill and don’t stop.”

She stared at me.

I popped my visor, and made my speech again.

She nodded, pulled her crying infant to her chest, looked over my shoulder and screamed.

I spun, slapped a Slug warrior off my back, then clubbed him with my M-40, barrel first.

A GI can always take one Slug, hand-to-pseudopod. But he can’t take fifty.

I burned the girl’s leg iron, helped her to her feet, and shoved her toward the smoke screen.

Then I turned back to the fight.

Howard had retasked a ’Bot, so it flailed its manipulators like a Lawn’Bot, slicing through a Slug every second. Each Slug’s armor split, and green slop exploded onto Howard’s and Jude’s red Eternads. The two of them looked like Christmas elves from hell.

Ord stood literally knee-deep in dead Slug warriors, while he blazed away with a pistol, his own 1911-model.45 automatic, in one hand. His torso shook as he fired the M-40 he held in his other hand. He had fixed a bayonet to the rifle, and green slug blood dripped from it.

Beyond Ord and Jude and Howard, the ground was black with advancing Slugs. There was no outrunning the wave now.

The smells of burning canvas and flesh, and of cordite, swirled through my open visor. The incessant rattle of our weapons punctuated the unending sigh of thousands of Slug mag rail rifles.

I didn’t review my life, or think that we saved some slaves, or even think that my friends, and my godson, would die alongside me within two minutes.

What I thought of were all those oil paintings of last stands, in all those military museums, like Custer at Little Big Horn, or Chelmsford at Isandlwhana. The central figure always stood alone, surrounded, blazing or slashing away at his enemy, some flag flapping behind him, before he and all the troops around him got killed. They didn’t have Cam’Bots in those days, so who told the artist what the scene looked like at the end?

Something behind me struck my shoulder and knocked me face-down in the bloody meadow. That didn’t conform to the portrait model.

TWENTY-NINE

I TURNED MY HEAD, and saw, six inches from my face, a snow-white, clawed foot as big as my torso.

I rolled onto my back, aiming my rifle, and stared up at the jewel-armored Casuni who had spyglassed our battle, looming from on top of his mount.

The man held a pistol in each hand and his reins in his teeth. His black hair and beard swelled around the edges of a crested gold helmet with a metal nosepiece, and he wore the showy armor he had on at the Slave auction.

Blam. Blam.

The big man’s pistols flashed yellow, and two Slugs’ anterior armor exploded. The white duckbill trampled three more, while its rider holstered his two spent pistols at his waist. Then he reared his mount back, so it balanced for a heartbeat on its tail, and the huge animal pummeled two more Slug warriors with its hind feet, like a boxing kangaroo.

I scrambled to my knees, and sprayed a half dozen Slugs.

The cavalryman’s intervention had opened a tiny hurricane eye around us four Earthlings, our ’Bots, and himself.

He leaned down, and extended me a gauntleted hand. “Up with you! Be quick!” He tossed his head toward the massing Slugs, and grinned. “God defends the virtuous only while the devil rests.”

I looked around. Three more riders had already scooped up Ord, Jude, and Howard, who sat behind them on their duckbills.

Ord already had the four ’Bots quick-marching uphill.

I took the big man’s arm, and he swung me — Eternads, rifle, ammo, and all — up onto his saddle behind him like I was a kindergartner.

A Slug round glanced off his helmet, and he snorted. He reined his mount so it turned and faced the Slug that had fired the shot, then cross-drew the two pistols holstered across his breastplate.

As his duckbill reared, the pistols kicked in his huge hands, the armor of the Slug that had fired at him split like a peeled banana, and the bullet killed a following Slug as well. The other shot dropped a third Slug. Then he holstered the spent, smoking single-shot pistols, drew his sword, and slashed a warrior in half as though its armor was paper.

The man frowned. “I would have expected the devil to provide better sport.”

Then he turned, and we galloped until we crossed into the smoke and left the Slugs behind.

Five minutes later, we caught up to within a hundred yards of the ragged rear of the fleeing crowds. The big man glanced over his shoulder at the empty countryside we had opened between us and The Fair’s wreckage, then reined in his mount.