Роберт Бюттнер - Orphan's Journey

In its toothed jaws, the rhind vised the limp kraken that Jude had harpooned, like a wolf that had snatched a sparrow as it flew past. Seawater coursed off the kraken’s tentacles, and ran off the spear-point of its cone shell.

Howard called the rhind “tylosaurs,” air-breathing, aquatic lizards — like crocodiles with flippers.

The rhind’s body shot out of the sea until its snout was forty feet in the air, and its red eye burned down at the assault boat. The rhind’s foreflipper, bigger by itself than the boat, cleared the water.

Alongside me, Wilgan whispered, “Big feller. I make him a hundred fifty feet.”

I muttered, and pushed my hand at the air in front of me, like I was brushing back a dangling snake. “Get out of there!”

The monster toppled back to the sea with its fifty-foot prize, and its flipper carved Jude’s boat in two, like a cleaver splitting a bread loaf.

“No!” I whispered.

Oars, men, and rifles splintered and tumbled in silhouette across the brilliant moons.

Jude, armored limbs outstretched, cartwheeled across the sky like a five-pointed ruby.

SIXTY

I PUNCHED THE ZOOM ON MY OPTICS so hard that they retracted. I swore, tore off my helmet, and reset them manually with quivering fingers. By the time I got them back on, the frame in focus showed nothing at the spot where the rhind had crashed back into the sea but debris bobbing on the waves. Elsewhere, all up and down the six-fathom line, rhind and kraken struggled as our boats bobbed and dashed around and through them.

I switched my radio from command net to Eternad intercom, and spoke. “Fifteen Leader, this is Eagle joining your net, over.” Screw procedure and chain of command. “Jude? This is Jason!”

I repeated for three minutes, but only static hum answered.

I grabbed Ord’s arm. “Can you see him? Did you see—”

Ord lowered his binoculars, and shook his head. “His radio may have been damaged. You know those old Eternads…” He paused. “Nothing moving out there now, Sir. Another boat may have picked him up.”

The assault boats were to maintain a hundred yards’ separation, and to stop for nothing, double underscored. Ord knew that as well as I did. He had helped me edit the wording when the orders came across my desk for review.

My heart sank in my chest like an anvil.

“Sure. Probably.” I stared into the sand, and shook my head. Why had I stayed out of it? Why had I been so foolish? Why had I let a sixteen-year-old who knew nothing of his own mortality spend his life on a fool’s errand?

I blinked back tears.

Because if he didn’t, some other immortal sixteen-year-old would have died in his place.

The squeal of keels crossing wooden rollers echoed in the night, and I looked up and down the beach. The second-wave boats and crews moved into launch positions.

A Marini Signals runner, kicking up beach sand as he staggered, stopped, then stood to attention in front of me. He couldn’t have been older than fourteen. Not so much younger than my godson had been. No, I lied to myself. Not so much younger than my godson was.

Cheeks flushed, the boy saluted, then panted, “Sir, first reports.”

SIXTY-ONE

BY THE TIME THE FIRST REPORTS had become second, and third, and fourth reports, the moons had set, and sunrise had become a blinding sliver above the Sea of Hunters.

At the water’s edge, I stood beneath a dun-colored woven canopy, with Howard, Ord, and the Marini Admiral in charge of follow-on overwater transport.

Follow-on meant extracting survivors if we failed, or ferrying admin personnel across the Sea if the landings succeeded. The Admiral was the officer who, seven months before, at the Alliance’s first meeting, had asked the Queen to relieve me when I recommended an amphibious assault across the Sea of Hunters.

We stood around a camp table, and stared into the hologen’s image.

Howard pointed with a chewed yellow pencil at the overhead image that Jeeb was transmitting. A broad area of the sea below Jeeb boiled white, as animals struggled against one another like bucketed worms. Even as we watched, the area shifted north and broadened. Here and there, our boats darted untouched through and around the melee.

Howard said, “The feeding field now extends eight miles in widest dimension. A moveable feast, to borrow a phrase. The rhind and kraken have worn each other out. The smaller fry are pouncing on them. We should have forty-eight hours before the predator population recovers and reinfests this area enough to impede our movement.”

Ord folded back the top sheets of a sheaf of reports. “With the first and second waves ashore, and the third under way, casualties stand at less than 2 percent, Sirs. Some of those are missing in action, so the final total should go lower. The Scouts made landfall in disarray. But they encountered only half a dozen sentries along the entire landing beach front — and neutralized them all without loss. They’ve pushed a beachhead inland two miles already, without firing a shot.”

I closed my eyes, exhaled, then looked again at Ord.

He stared at me, pulled a single, folded taupe sheet from his breastplate pouch, then crumpled it in his fist. “We shouldn’t be needing this, General.”

The Marini Admiral stroked his white mustache. “It’s a miracle!”

I stared at the balled note in Ord’s hand, felt cold, and bit my lip. It would never be a miracle to the families of the dead. For every commander who had to write a condolence letter to one of those families, and for every family who received one of those letters, the casualty rate was 100 percent. But it was a miracle, nonetheless.

We waded out through the surf, and swabbies pushed and pulled us up into the bobbing boat that would finally take us to war.

As the crew loaded our gear, the Admiral tugged an oval silver flask from his pocket, flipped back its cap with his thumb, and toasted me. “Brilliant plan, Commander! The worst is over now, hey?”

Then he took a pull, and handed me the flask.

It was as empty as his head.

SIXTY-TWO

TEN MILES OUT into the Sea of Hunters, as we skirted the boiling melee of the feeding frenzy, I came eyeball to eyeball with my first rhind.

The exhausted black leviathan lolled at the surface, like a capsized freighter. Its exposed bulk towered twelve feet taller than our packet boat, and by the time our crew rowed us from the rhind’s flaccid tail to its snout, we had covered three times the boat’s fifty-foot length.

Every few seconds, a fin cut the surface, as a shark darted in, tore flesh from the rhind’s heaving flank, then flashed away. The beast’s heart thumped slowly, as though a bass drum lay muffled within its ribs, and its red eye, larger than a cannonball, stared down at me as we rowed past.

Perhaps I should have wondered whether this was the same monster that had crushed Jude’s boat. Perhaps I should have been outraged, or triumphant, as the rhind floated, dying.

What could the rhind have made of this fifty-headed creature that paddled past, scuttling over the sea in its own inverted shell?

For eons, the rhind and its kind had ruled Bren’s oceans. Neither the Slugs, which Earthlings called murderers, nor the Clans, which Earthlings would call barbarians, had disrupted the natural order of things. Now, in one morning, four Earthlings had inverted and bloodied this world. Once, I had asked Bassin whether rhind were the scariest thing on this planet. Maybe the Slugs were right. Maybe we were the disease, not them.

Howard stood alongside me as we ghosted past the rhind like mice past a cat.

Howard’s helmet cam crackled as he snapped images of the beast. “If I didn’t see this, I wouldn’t believe it was real. The Bunker Tylosaur was a third this long.”