Роберт Бюттнер - Orphan's Journey

From our left, the duckbills that carried Ord, Jude, and Howard approached and slowed to our pace. Our ’Bots scurried in their wake.

We halted, and the man swung me down. Then he dismounted and led his frothed and panting duckbill by its reins.

A straggler scurried alongside us, his arms filled with blankets and crockery. He bowed as he passed. “M’Lord.”

The big man ignored him.

I said to the big man, “Thank you.”

“What?” He held his reins in hands clasped behind his back, as we walked side by side.

“You risked your life to save us.”

“Save you? I paid good money for that girl! Then you cut her loose!” He shook his head. “A hundred pissed away!”

I turned to him, and my jaw dropped.

He stared, too, then a grin spread out from the middle of his beard, and he threw his head back. He slapped my shoulder so hard I stumbled, then roared a laugh. “You’re gullible, for a half-Marini!”

We walked on, as he plucked huge cartridges from a bandolier, and reloaded each of his four single-shot pistols. Then he reached for the M-40 I had slung across my shoulder, and poked it with a finger as thick as a sausage. “Gullible, but a clever salesman. These guns that talk like women would make a Tassini wet himself. You know where I could buy a few, quietly?”

“How few?”

“A shipload.”

“Sure. Factory-direct, and cheap. But you won’t believe the freight.”

He shook his head, and rumbled a chuckle. “You gun runners always play the virgin. We’ll talk again.”

The others joined us. The big man pointed at the ’Bots, as they trundled along beside us. “Do those eat much?”

I said, “You have questions. So do we. But the devil, as you call the black worms, will be back on our tail as soon as those warriors regroup.” I jerked a thumb back toward the smoke plume that rose behind us. “They’ll catch up to you before your defenses are prepared. You need to select terrain and dig in.”

He snorted. “Holes are for the crap of snakes, and for the Marini who grow from crap. No offense.”

I pointed at the refugee throngs in front of us. “If you don’t dig in, the worms will overrun those civilians.”

“So? They’re Marini and Tassini. But, God willing, there will always be more fighting. I’ll regroup my Army.”

He swung up onto his white charger, then pointed at us and said to his men, “See no harm comes to these half-breeds. Or their weapons.”

“Where should we take them, Casus?”

“Where they want to go. But if they choose to go back to the Fisheaters, you don’t help them.” He spurred his mount, and galloped off, his duckbill spewing a storm of dirt clods.

Casus? Blackbeard had mentioned “Casus.” I stood with hands on hips and watched him ride off.

Jude walked up alongside me, adjusting his M-40’s sling to match mine. Ord had said Jude was a quick study. Munchkin hadn’t raised her boy to be a soldier. Neither had my mom, but suddenly and unexpectedly I had become one. Now events had made my godson a soldier, too.

Jude asked, “Who’s that guy?”

“Casus. He roasts poachers alive. He attacks the devil incarnate on a white charger, while all about him flee in terror. And he doesn’t care flea snot for any Clan on this planet but his own. The Casuni must be named for his bloodline.”

“He’s, like, King?”

“A king who can shoot.”

Ord stepped alongside us, reached over and tucked in the flapping tail of Jude’s sling. “The equipment survived. The rest of us made it through with bumps and bruises. You, Sir?”

“Same.”

“Sir, I took the liberty of retasking Jeeb to overfly the area, to assess damage and enemy dispositions.”

I nodded. “This was the weakest Slug force I’ve ever seen. Something’s screwy.”

An hour later, neither Jeeb nor Casus had returned. When the Slugs had attacked, Casus’s troops had cut the hobbles off all the duckbills they couldn’t ride. The animals smart enough or lucky enough to run away from the battle had been rounded up by Casus’s men later.

So I was reunited with Rosy, who actually honked when she sniffed me, and the other three Earthlings got mounts to ride as well.

Headed uphill this time, we returned to the base of the ten-foot escarpment that divided the barren Casuni steppes and the Tassini deserts, from the green, watered meadows of the Marini. Casus’s appointed bodyguards led us to a narrow gap in the long cliff, through which refugees from the Slug blitz still climbed, funneling up and crossing into Casus’s wind-scoured kingdom.

I stopped and swept my hand left and right at the north-south barrier, and said to Ord, “Casus should make a stand here. Now we know the Slugs can bridge rivers, but we’ve never seen ’em fly. This gap’s the only way up for miles. A platoon could hold it against a division. Then Casus could cover the rest of the escarpment with a few dug-in troops per mile.”

Ord frowned. “Casus and his cavalry aren’t built to dig in, physically or mentally, Sir.”

I nodded back. “Let’s stop at the top of the gap for lunch. If Casus comes back here, I’ll talk to him again.”

The bodyguards Casus assigned to us did double duty, setting up an aid station for any Casuni stragglers who staggered back. Their first-aid business was lousy. Slug rounds hit hard. Human casualties were mostly dead, few wounded.

The bodyguards also made a fire, and boiled a soup made with what looked like dried peppers.

I walked over to the pot, sniffed, and the odor watered my eyes. I coughed, and shook my head. “Smells great.” I patted my abdomen plate and grimaced. “But I’m coming off stomach surgery.” Which was not a lie.

He nodded. “Once a man’s eaten the janga, he never wants it again.”

Evidently, every man within sniffing distance had already eaten the Janga. The pot just sat there and boiled.

The foodstuffs MAT(D)4 carried were finite, but we had plenty of MUDs left. After weeks of eating nothing but groundfruit patties, I had Ord crack open a provisions Plasteel.

The four of us sat cross-legged in a circle, while our bodyguards grazed Rosy and the other duckbills.

I squirted water from a hide bag into the nipple on a MUD that Quartermaster’s comedians labeled “Spicy Chicken with Savory Chipati,” then waited while bagged glop swelled and warmed itself.

Howard gazed back across the smoke-shrouded valley of the River Marin, and shook his head. “Well, we no longer have to wonder whether the Pseudocephalopod maintains a presence on this planet. But these people seemed astonished to see those warriors, and more astonished to be attacked.”

I swallowed a MUD mouthful, tasty after weeks of groundfruit hardtack. “Especially during the ’Peace of the Fair.’ Something must’ve changed recently.”

Howard said, “The biggest thing that changed recently on this planet is we four arrived from outer space.”

I paused with the packet halfway to my lips, and shook my head. “We’re just four more humans. Why assume the Slugs even noticed the crash?”

Even as I said it, I didn’t believe it. If Bassin the one-eyed prospector — or whatever he was — noticed the crash, the Slugs certainly noticed when one of their ships went down.

Jude squeezed “Homestyle Beef Stew” into his mouth, then he stared down at the smoke in the valley.

He could only imagine the human carnage it hid, and Munchkin would want me to keep it that way. If it were only Ord and me, and even Howard, I would cowboy up and join the fight on our new neighbors’ side. But I had Jude to protect.

I said, “All Casus wants from us are automatic rifles, so he can grease his neighbors. Once he figures out we can’t manufacture more M-40s, he won’t want us at all. We have our gear. We can hole up anywhere on this continent for months. Our mission here is to survive. Period.”