Роберт Бюттнер - Orphan's Journey

He frowned.

I said, “Well, that’s settled. Can you issue the Proclamation before lunch?”

He did. Sporadic friction continued between Tassini and Marini female soldiers, but no woman, of any Clan, was put in The Box thereafter. Coincidentally, ninety Headmen resigned just before the year ended. The following month, pilferage in those ninety Encampments dropped to zero, and stayed there.

Ord told me later that I handled the situation wisely. But nine-tenths of wisdom is being wise in time. Ord didn’t say that, Teddy Roosevelt did.

Two months afterward I woke at 3 A.M., and looked at my hands. Even in the dark, I saw that innocent girl’s blood on them, because I had not been wise in time.

She wasn’t the first soldier that died too young while under my command. She was far from the last. Perhaps one day I’ll grow so accustomed to such things that I’ll wake up and I won’t see that blood. On that day I will retire from command.

The next morning, I rode to one of the embarkation beaches for my morning run. I had covered two miles along the hardpacked sand, as the waves rumbled in and out. Another figure loomed out of the ground fog, closing on me from the shoreward dunes, and called, “We need to talk.”

FIFTY-SEVEN

JUDE SWUNG ALONGSIDE ME, and matched my pace.

I smiled at him. “Would the Lieutenant care for a little race?”

Jude had traded his pips for regular Lieutenant’s talons at a promotion ceremony the week before. I had stayed in the back row among the engineers while Bassin, himself, pinned them on.

Alongside me, in the mist, Jude looked as graceful as his father had looked when we ran together on pre-season early mornings. Even Metzger couldn’t match Jude as a rifle shot now, and Jude looked as hard and as fit as any soldier in this army.

He said, “I want out of the Engineers.”

I frowned as I huffed along. “Take it up with your CO. You know better than to jump the chain of command.”

“I already took it up with him. He’s good with it. So’s Bassin. R and D’s done, so the gearheads don’t need my math anymore.”

“So why talk to me?”

“I’m transferring to the Scouts.”

“No.” I shook my head.

The Scouts had emerged as our army’s fastest riders, best climbers, best shots, and most dashing elite. Rangers, SEALs, Green Berets, all rolled up in one outfit. But boats carrying the Tassini Scouts and their wobbleheads would be first across the Red Line. The survivors would be the first to hit the beaches. Gustus had Zill Jills quietly cranking out casualty estimates for me. They predicted the Scouts would take 70 percent casualties. No other unit was expected to take even 30 percent, unless everything went to hell.

I said, “You’re unqualified.”

“I can ride a wobblehead with any of them. And I can outshoot all of them.”

“Most of the Scouts have ridden together since they were kids. Shoehorning you in will destroy unit integrity.”

“I qualified as a Master Harpooner last night. That way the boat carries one more Scout, one less sailor. We waste less weight and space.”

Our boots crunched along the sand.

Jude said, “A Fifteenth Encampment Troop Leader broke his arm yesterday. The CO says the job’s mine if I want it.”

I stopped, panting, with hands on hips. “If you think I’m going to approve—”

Jude faced me in the gray morning, twisting the ring made from his father’s medal. “I’m not here to get your approval. I’m just asking you to stay out of it.” He toed the sand with his boot. “Look, I know what you tried to do. I appreciate it. I really do. But it’s my life. This is on me.”

Jude turned, then ran on down the beach, until the mist closed in, and he disappeared.

My sweats hung wet on my shoulders, and I stood in the mist until I shivered. The waves boomed behind me, as relentless as clock ticks.

I said to the place where Jude had stood, “No, it’s on me. It’s all on me.”

The remaining training weeks evaporated into a fog of reports, accidents, arguments, and exhaustion.

Ord’s hand touched my shoulder, and I sat up straight and awake on my cot in the darkness. I saw invisible blood on my hands, and my wrist ’Puter read midnight.

Ord whispered, “It’s time, Sir.”

FIFTY-EIGHT

I SLID MY TORSO PLATES DOWN over my shoulders by flickering lantern light, and asked Ord, “What are the counts?”

I had accelerated the D-Day morning reports. By sunrise I’d have no time to read them, and staff less to write them. And casualties would change the numbers for the worse with every heartbeat.

We stepped from my tent into the night as Ord read a handful of papers by his headlight. “First Wave, 50,262 available for duty. Follow-on waves, support units, and other admin, total, 454,006 reporting. We have 5,233 vessels seaworthy, 36,744 stock watered and healthy, and 620 artillery tubes tested and serviceable.”

I stared into the sky. Moons-rise remained an hour away, but the night was still, chill, and full of stars.

I muttered. “Good.”

I was talking about the sky, not the counts. A fiction of war is “the weather is always neutral.” Wind, high seas, rain, mud, heat, cold, ice, snow — they all favor the defense. This clear weather was a break, and we needed every break.

Ord said, “They’re reporting a front at the isthmus, moving south. Fog, sleet. It shouldn’t bother us here for three days.”

We deployed some of our scarce radios to make a relay net with our diversionary attack force five hundred miles north, up on the isthmus that separated the continents. The isthmus formed the obvious avenue for a human invasion into Slug Land. The Slugs believed that, or they wouldn’t have spent a thousand years walling Slug Land off there, like Hadrian walled off the Scots from Roman-occupied England.

To pin the Slug Legions defending the Millennium Wall, and to freeze their mobile reserve divisions two hundred miles north of the landing beaches, we trumped up an “army” of farm carts driven by old men to kick up lots of dust in the hills on the human side of the Slugs’ Millennium Wall each day, and light hundreds of “campfires” each night. A few buglers signaled to Brigades that didn’t exist, except for cannoneers that stood by every obsolete Marini blunderbuss we could scrape together.

At first light, today, the cannoneers would barrage the Millennium Wall like they were softening it up for the Meuse-Argonne Offensive.

Ord said, “For once, bad weather favors the offense, Sir. The longer the Slugs can’t see how little we really have deployed at the isthmus, the longer before they counterattack our beachhead.”

“We don’t have a beachhead yet, Sergeant Major.” I reached inside my armor, tugged out a single, folded taupe page, and handed it to Ord. “If necessary, have the Queen’s Secretary release this to the papers.”

Marinus and the larger towns had newspapers. We sent all their reporters up north, with the diversionary force. The New York Times would’ve howled about that, and I’ve taken bullets defending its right to howl, but free press is no issue in an absolute monarchy.

Ord unfolded the paper and read it. I’d longhanded it the night before, with a dinosaur-feather quill and blue-black cuttlefish ink. It read:

Our recent landings have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold, and I have withdrawn our troops. The decision to attack at this time and place was based on the best information available. The troops did all that bravery and devotion to duty could. If blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone.

— Jason Wander, Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Forces

I couldn’t bear to think that up myself. I cribbed it from a contingent note Eisenhower wrote before Normandy.