Роберт Бюттнер - Orphan's Journey

I glanced back over my shoulder, and saw that the wronk had paused knee-deep in the river. The beast swung its head side to side, and the gap between me and it had reopened to thirty yards. Twilight had deepened, and the paleo chips say tyrannosaurs, based on brain lobe size estimates, could smell dead meat miles away but couldn’t see well enough to get a driver’s license.

I rolled over and backstroked, wheezing, and catching my breath.

I had lost my pack and gear, but my M-40 was still across my back, and I realized that, if it had come to it, I still had one round, the one that I had pocketed after Casus had spit it out so many days ago. It might come in handy in the survival-mode days to come. Once the wronk wandered off, I’d recall Jeeb, relay word to Ord, and make my way downriver.

Snort.

The wronk sniffed in my direction, then paced out until the water got so deep that ripples lapped its belly. Then the monster flopped into the river, and swam straight for me, eyes and nostrils above water, lashing its tail back and forth like Captain Hook’s crocodile.

FIFTY-ONE

THE CARNOSAUR APPROACHED so fast that its snout cut a wake like a speedboat. I couldn’t really blame my error on the paleontologists. You wouldn’t think a hunting dog could swim after dead ducks, either, by studying its bones.

I swam, windmilling my arms like a shrub-trim ’Bot, but the race would end in two minutes, tops. I stroked with one hand, and fumbled with my waist seal, under-water, with the other.

If I could get the one bullet out of my pocket, hand-load the round into the M-40’s chamber, and hit the wronk squarely enough to penetrate its brain, I might survive. A fool’s option, but my only one.

The beast was so close now that I saw pupils in its eyes, which were as far apart as my shoulders were wide.

I wedged my hand inside my armor, and my fingers touched the bullet’s Teflite jacket.

I snuck one more glance, and the beast had gotten so close, so fast, that its open upper jaw and teeth showed above the waterline. I seemed to be swimming in glue. Something sloshed, and I realized that, with my hand stuffed through my waist seal, I was flooding my suit, and sinking myself.

Something scraped my boot heel beneath the surface. I kicked, and thumped something soft enough to be the carnosaur’s nose. I rolled over in the water, facing back toward the beast, prepared to go thrashing and screaming, like Rosy had.

The beast’s eye stared into mine, six feet away, softball-sized, black, and impassive. Then the head rotated sideways, so its jaws could open underwater.

After all the firefights and helicopter dust-offs, after amoebic dysentery and pneumonia, after going toe-to-pseudopod with Slugs at bayonet point, six hundred million miles from home, and again here so far from home that I didn’t even know the mileage; after surviving crushed bones, a transit through the very fabric of the universe, and a spaceship crash, I was about to die as reptile candy.

Brown water leaked around my faceplate, as I sank below the surface. I squeezed my eyes shut, clenched my jaw, and waited to feel teeth puncture my armor.

Boom.

I opened my eyes and saw a black rod protruding from the carnosaur’s eyesocket, an explosive-shredded pod swelling from its barb. Blood and black-powder smoke fountained up from the beast’s wound, and then river water exploded in a belch as the carnosaur exhaled, then sagged away from me.

I floated motionless and stunned, then paddled around and looked up.

From the rope basket that dangled below the Royal Barge’s fore spit, the Master Harpooner leaned out and reached his hand down toward me. I grabbed hold, and he clasped my gauntlet and lifted me, dripping, out of the river like I was a child.

As water poured from my armor’s heel vents, he thrust me back up toward the ship. Bassin and a crewman grabbed me, one on each arm, pulled me over the rail and onto the foredeck, then sat me on a rope locker.

I gasped, popped my neck ring, and let Bassin tug my helmet off.

The Master Harpooner stood in front of me, bent with hands on knees, and grinned. “You all right, Sir?”

I nodded, puked muddy water, and said to him as drops trickled down my chin, “Thank you.”

“No, General. Thank you! No other Harpooner’s ever stuck a wronk. I’ll drink free for a year!”

I turned to Bassin. “You were gone—”

“Actually, I disobeyed orders. We overstayed by fifteen hours, until we almost lost the tide. The Lookout thought he heard one shot.”

The Master Harpooner held up his spyglass. “We spotted you, and came about as fast as we could. Fast enough, hey?”

My forearms quivered, and I shivered so hard that my teeth chattered, though my suit heater whirred.

“No,” I said. “Too slow. Me, not you.”

Then I stood, walked to the rail, and stared out into the deepening twilight. A mile distant, as small as a beetle on dung, the big wronk still bent over Rosy, its head twisting side to side as it tore her apart.

My arms stopped shaking, and my teeth ceased chattering. My breath hissed in and out, in precise cadence, as I unslung my M-40.

Bassin touched my elbow. “Jason? Are you all right?”

I wasn’t all right. I shrugged him off, fished the round out of my pocket, and chambered it. Then I screwed the rifle’s optics to night passive, and captured the distant wronk in the green glow of the sight picture. I paused, checked windage, breathed, sighted on the monster’s eye, and squeezed the trigger.

I watched through the night sight for three heartbeats. The bullet sped downrange, an invisible, supersonic Teflite-jacketed assassin, then struck the wronk’s eye. The beast’s head snapped up, he thrashed, staggered, then fell.

Heartbeats later, the carnosaur’s dying bellow echoed back to us across the valley.

Water lapped our ship’s hull.

The Master Harpooner collapsed his spyglass between his palms, then turned to me, his eyes wide, and his mouth agape. “General, that was the finest shot I ever saw. I shall never forget it.”

My forearms trembled again, so violently this time that my rifle slipped from my fingers and clattered on the deck. I staggered back until I felt the solidity of the main mast, then slumped down with my legs sprawled on the deck.

The wronk had been acting out its role in the great play, a dumb, magnificent, living garbage disposal. I had killed it in an explosion of vengeful, cold rage, though the animal’s death came far too late to save Rosy, or even to spare her an eyeblink’s suffering.

I now commanded an army that would grow to a million soldiers, every one as susceptible to inhuman rage as I had just been. It would be my job to stoke that rage, to leash it, to watch it kill too many of them, and then to send the survivors home persuaded that they were still human. It would be even harder to persuade myself that I was.

I said to the Master Harpooner, “I hope I never forget it, either.” Then I cried.

The next morning, Bassin and I stood on deck after the Royal Barge had transited the Locks of the Marin. Jeeb swooped down out of the clouds, returned from his Cruise and Snooze. He buzzed the crow’s nest, looped around the ship like an albatross, then flared his wings and settled on the deck at my feet. He turned his optics up toward me, whined, then pogo’d up and down on all six legs.

Bassin raised his eyebrows. “You and my mother would say your machine is upset.”

Jeeb had reason to be. And his news wasn’t the worst of it.

FIFTY-TWO

TWO DAYS LATER, the Royal Barge eased alongside the stone quay at the University. Bassin and I, in fresh uniforms, jumped the last two feet between the deck and the quay, already late for the first meeting of Clan heads in three centuries.