Роберт Бюттнер - Orphan's Journey

The shapes were thin and ghostly. They were hunched and naked. But they were human beings.

I hung back away from the redwood trunk, as though the image I saw had punched me.

We always wondered whether the Slugs took prisoners. We would have taken Slug prisoners, if they had ever let us, just to better know our enemy. It stood to reason that the Pseudocephalopod would be curious, too.

I peered down, again. These people were as often women as men. Their hair tangled shoulder-long, not GI-short, and many seemed curled over with age. Here and there, a robust head thrust above the throng. There might be some of our troops, taken prisoners of war, sprinkled among this population. Some of the rest appeared to be civilians, likely captured at the Great Fair and made to transport Cavorite here. But most of these people had never been soldiers or civilians.

They shuffled on bare, shackled feet.

They had never been soldiers. For countless generations they had been slaves of the Pseudocephalopod.

Two hundred feet below me, Howard’s ’Bot whined into the clearing at the redwood’s base.

It lurched five-legged, its right center ambulator tucked up against its carapace, useless. Howard, his crimsons caked with dust, swayed and leaned to his right like a drunk.

I attenuated my radio range, and spoke in the clear. “Howard?”

SEVENTY

WHEN I REACHED THE GROUND and dragged Howard off the ’Bot’s back, he was conscious, but his right arm hung limp.

I popped his visor, and peered into his eyes. “What happened?”

“Slipped off a ledge six hours out. Damaged the ’Bot. My shoulder dislocated, I think.”

I clenched my teeth, and hissed. Thirty-two hours in the saddle pounding a dislocated shoulder.

“You reduce it? And drop Morph?”

He nodded. “Morph’s all gone. You wouldn’t have a cigarette on you?”

I shook my head, smiled, and slid both of my own MorphTabs under his tongue. He closed his eyes and sighed.

I waited three minutes, until the ’Tabs made him giggle, then slung him back aboard the ’Bot, as gently as I could. I swung up behind him, and moved the ’Bot out at a walk.

The ’Bot could still carry the two of us faster on five legs than I could run.

“Howard, those old stone sheds by that clearing next to the Troll. There must have been people in them. They just came out in the open. Thousands of ’em. Most of them look like they’ve been Slug slaves forever. What’s your hunch?”

Howard didn’t answer, he just giggled, then sang, “Ho, ho, ho…”

Howard was feeling no pain, so I kicked the ’Bot’s speed up.

Howard’s head lolled, and he sang again. “Down through th’ chim-un-ee comes old Saint Nick.”

I sighed.

One MorphTab would have been plenty. Howard had lost all touch with reality.

Or had he?

SEVENTY-ONE

THE FIRST MOON HAD RISEN by the time I got Howard back to Bassin’s HQ. Bassin and I lay side by side in the still, cold darkness, on a rock ledge that overlooked the Troll. I flipped out my Elephant Ear so Bassin could see what I saw through my snoopers, showing up in my helmet’s external flatscreen.

We peered down at the scene, and Bassin said, “The warriors that were guarding them before? The nearest warrior’s a thousand yards away from them, now.”

The moonlight lit the thronged slaves now, as they moved into the open space by the Troll, now clearly visible from our vantage.

I nodded. “But nobody looks inclined to run for it. No wonder the Slugs aren’t worried about keeping the Stones flowing if they eradicate this civilization. They know how to use slaves, and they can just keep a few more. You all accept slavery, and piling Stones on the devil’s doorstep, because it’s been beaten into you for thirty-five thousand years.”

“It’s consistent with our prehistory and our theology.”

Had the Slugs trained humans, then turned them loose on Bassin’s side of the wall? Like sheep that the Slugs came back and sheared annually? Or did humans escape, breed like lab rabbits loosed in the wild, then get domesticated? It didn’t matter. The question was—

Bassin frowned. “The question becomes, what do we do now?”

I pointed at the Troll. “If we shell that thing like we planned, we’ll kill all those people.”

Bassin frowned. “But—”

“Bassin, I hate sacrificing soldiers. There may even be POWs down there. But I will not deliberately sacrifice noncombatants. Period. Slugs may be the devil. I won’t be.”

Bassin was the future king of most of the troops around us, and they were under his operational command. If he ordered them to shell those people, they would.

I stabbed my finger at him. “You try it, it’s over my corpse!”

He raised his eyebrow and both palms. “Agreed! Jason, don’t you know me at all, by now?”

My finger trembled, and I lowered it. “Sorry.” Physical stress exhausts GIs, then inattention kills them. The added mental stress of command exhausts Generals faster. But if Generals succumb to stress, their slip-ups kill others.

Bassin said, “But every hour that we don’t shell that blue mountain, our enemy grows stronger. The odds that face Casus have already grown far longer than our supply lines. The Scouts we have dispersed in these woods could barely swoop into that position down there, before they’d be overwhelmed.”

Bassin was right. Moreover, if I was on edge enough to snap at Bassin, all our troops were on edge. We had to end this war now, or the Slugs would end it for us.

Behind us, a voice whispered, “Holy moly! Right on time.”

Howard, lucid again, crawled up alongside us, favoring his right arm. He stopped, then pointed at the sky.

From a foxhole in brush to our right came a soldier’s gasp.

I looked up, where Howard pointed, my eyes widened, and I muttered, “Holy moly is right.”

A silhouette drifted across the white moon. It was a slow-rotating, bulbous, black scorpion with a down-turned, glowing red stinger and six upturned claws.

The Firewitch half-eclipsed the moon.

Bassin gasped. “So that is a ship that flies among the stars. You arrived in one of those?”

The Slug vessel whispered above us, and its low hum shook the ground beneath my belly. Then the ship settled slowly, tail-first, into the clearing alongside the Troll.

Howard’s Santa came down the chimney as he had predicted.

I turned to Howard. “Why—”

He pointed below. A red, glowing human lava flow snaked from the stone buildings toward the descending Firewitch. The human slaves were hauling this year’s Cavorite harvest from temporary storage. Bins alongside the Firewitch glowed red like bonfires as Stones by the thousands filled them.

Howard said, “The only reason for the Pseudocephalopod to maintain human stock near this landing site was to handle Cavorite. The only reason for that stock to be released above ground was to load cargo. Cavorite gets harvested by the local population each summer, the locals trade and move it each fall, and a transport calls to pick up Cavorite once each year. Elegantly simple. Of course, this year, the Pseudocephalopod eliminated the middleman, permanently, because we arrived. Now, here’s the thing—”

I raised my palm, and the moonlight reflected off my gauntlet. “Howard, I don’t need elegance. I need to win this war, without killing those people. And I’m about out of time.”

Howard rolled his eyes. “I was getting to that.” He frowned. “But we are almost out of time.”

SEVENTY-TWO

AT FIRST LIGHT THE NEXT MORNING, I sat on one snorting wobblehead among fifty, in the trees a mile back from the clearing where the Troll rose, and where the Slug’s Stone transport ship had parked, perched atop triangular landing gear. Between us and the clearing was what Scout reconnaissance had identified as a sixty-yard gap in the Slug’s perimeter, where weather had crumbled an ancient stone wall.