Роберт Бюттнер: Orphan's Journey

I signaled a Tassini Scout down from the cliff, made sure he wasn’t the only Tassini on Bren who couldn’t shoot, and assigned him to plug the next critter that flew near our rope highway.

Then I rubbed my temples, and muttered to myself. “At least it can’t get worse.”

My Tassini sharpshooter stood alongside me scanning the cliffs. He said, “You going up free-climb or roped, Sir?”

“What?”

He pointed at the two-thousand-foot acrophobe’s nightmare that rose in front of us.

I stared at the dangling climbing ropes, and slapped my forehead. How had I expected to get to the top? Fly up in the Supreme Commander’s helicopter?

I said, “Crap.”

SIXTY-SIX

IN FACT, I WASN’T THE ONLY part of this expedition that was afraid of heights. The surefooted wobbleheads would be invaluable on the narrow ledges to come, but the Sappers had to sedate them, rig a basket, and haul them one at a time up the vertical face like flour sacks.

I rode up dangling in the same basket, but I didn’t sniff any janga, first. I cursed myself, trembling, every foot of the two-thousand-foot journey for skipping it.

Fortunately for command and control, since I was a literal basket case, operational command was really Bassin’s. The mélange of two thousand Tassini Scouts, the Sappers, and pretty much everybody but me and the last supply carts was gone down the first backslope by the time I reached the mountaintop.

When I arrived up top, I didn’t kiss the granite, but I did kind of hug it with quivering arms.

Over the next few days, I repeated the funhouse experience four times, once for each new cliff. Then I low-crawled silently, alongside Bassin, through brush to a rock lip, just over the military crest of the peak our task force had just ascended.

Bassin tapped my shoulder, then pointed ahead at the next mountain, two miles down a forested slope to our front.

It was iridescent blue and alien, and I nearly wept for joy.

SIXTY-SEVEN

I LOOKED DOWN ACROSS FORESTS to the Troll and the cleared land around it, and relaxed. All that remained of this war was the end game.

Thirty-five thousand Slug warriors, according to Jeeb’s last reconnaissance, made up the defense garrison dug into a perimeter around the Troll. Roughly one warrior for each thousand years the perimeter had gone unchallenged. It was a small force, as Slug forces went, but it outnumbered the Scouts, Sappers, and artillerymen that had survived our mountain odyssey ten to one.

The Scouts had borne the brunt of battle from the Red Line in the sea to the landing beaches. They had been battered and shifted ever since, as Casus dashed across the continent. Now, they could barely have forced a temporary breach in the Slug perimeter if Bassin massed them and hurled them at a single point. Then they would have been slaughtered.

Only the cannon batteries that the Scouts and Bassin’s Sappers had dragged across the mountains changed the odds in our favor.

Two hours after Bassin and I first saw the Troll, we looked out across the forest and saw only trees.

I said, “The Scouts are deployed down there in an outpost line?”

Bassin nodded. “If the Slugs patrol these forests, they’ll encounter Scouts before they discover our guns. The Scouts could only hold them off for a couple of days, if we’re discovered.”

Alongside us, Sappers and cannoneers laid our guns.

I said, “We only need a couple of hours more. I can tell you from experience, that incubator’s a bomb waiting to happen. Once we start shelling, that thing will blow and take out everything around it, including every warrior on that perimeter. Casus will hear the explosion clear down the valley.”

I drew a breath. We were about to win this war with scarcely another casualty.

As Bassin’s Sappers reassembled and emplaced our artillery, Bassin and I stood alongside the ammunition carts. The Sappers cut the cords that held the tarps that protected the rounds with which we would shell the Troll.

A Sapper said, “What?”

The first cart was loaded with four-inch cannonballs, not the rifled shot required by the guns we had sweated blood to drag over mountains. The cargo was useless.

Swearing, I ran to the next cart, as a Sapper peeled back its cover. Worse than useless, the cart contained the debris Ord, Howard, and Jude had salvaged from our crashed Firewitch, seemingly a million years ago, which Howard had been toting across Bren ever since. Nobody had checked to be sure these pre-packed wagon loads matched their paperwork.

I squatted on a rock, head in hands, and moaned. “War is a catalogue of blunders.”

This operation had been conceived in hours, executed under the most extreme duress of weather and terrain, by soldiers who had neither trained for it, nor trained with each other. Under the circumstances, any fair-minded person would grade it ninety-eight out of a possible one hundred. But, in war, often even ninety-nine is failing.

Checking what was actually in the ammunition carts was exactly the kind of thing that a supernumerary like me should have been doing. But I had been too worried about my next cliff ascent.

Bassin, shoulders drooping, shook his head. “Load manifests must have gotten switched. Where could that ammunition be?”

I stared at the Firewitch debris that some idiot had pack-ratted halfway across this planet, then I stood, and looked around Bassin’s HQ camp. “I think I know. Where’s your Prick?”

SIXTY-EIGHT

THREE MINUTES LATER, a Sapper set at my feet an olive-drab, twenty-three-pound metal box the size of a case of old aluminum soda cans. A flat three-foot spring-metal antenna like a carpenter’s rule poked from the box top. For a second after the Sapper set the AN/PRC-25 radio down, the antenna whipped back and forth.

I bent over the Prick 25, twisted the squelch knob, then held the handset to my ear and thumbed the talk button. “Bear, this is Eagle, over.” I released the talk button, and listened. I repeated the call, over and over, for three minutes.

Bren’s sky wasn’t just grayer than Earth’s, it was more transparent to our old radio’s transmissions. We had found the old radios’ range improved to four times what they could transmit on Earth, better even than our helmet radios. Both Bassin’s Headquarters and Casus’s Headquarters carried one. Still, I held my breath after each transmission I sent.

No American military unit had been equipped with the AN/PRC-25 radio since the years when Berlin had a wall and the Rio Grande didn’t. But our Earthside Advisees had cheerfully used surplus Prick Twenty-Fives eighty years later.

The same could not be said of Casus. My handset burbled with his voice. “—thing!”

I could picture Casus, eyes bulging, standing in his HQ tent, holding his Prick Twenty-Five’s corded handset between his thumb and forefinger at arm’s length, like it was a talking roach.

Casus’s voice grumbled across the gray sky of Bren. “Get Hibble! The tethered insect has captured Jason’s soul!”

I muttered to myself, “Goddammit, Casus, take your thumb off the ‘talk’ button.”

Four minutes later, Howard’s voice sounded in my ear. “Jason? Where are you?”

I sighed. A full bird Colonel and decorated combat veteran had just identified the Supreme Allied Commander by name, then asked him to transmit his location, and broadcast it all over this operations area in clear, uncoded speech.

We always doubted that the Slugs could monitor our radio traffic, or bothered to, anyway. But a good commander never underestimates his enemy.

I said, “Where I’m supposed to be.” A good commander never overestimates his subordinates, either. “Put Falcon on.”

“He can’t come to the phone right now. Ambush patrol.”