Orphan's Alliance (Jason Wander) (11 page)

The two unmarked lorries burst into flame under fire, two hundred yards from us. The troops in the Army lorries cheered as they squealed to a stop beside us. A Tressen major wearing Signals collar brass dismounted, ran to me, and saluted. “General Wander. Sir, are you alright?”

I tried to shake my head, but had to swivel my shoulders. “Our pilots—drivers—dead.”

The major’s face fell and he muttered, “Bastards!”

I asked him, “What the hell happened?”

“We were to mark your landing place. By the time we saw them, it was too late.”

“What was their problem with us?”

“You sided with Tressen. They were Iridian separatists.”

“Iridia was already separate when I left here, at the Armistice.”

“General Planck said you’d be surprised. He extends his welcome.” The officer winced. “Such as it is.”

Jude limped to the wreck, hefted a twisted, loose strut, and began to pry blackened ultratanium skin back from the flight deck, to recover the bodies of his fellow pilots. He called to the soldiers in the lorries, his translator restating his words in idiomatic Tressen, “Little help, here?”

I turned, stared at the black smoke roiling into the clear sky as the separatists’ trucks burned, and sighed. It was going to take more than a little help to sort out this mess. Winning the war on Tressel had been easy. Winning the peace appeared to be a bitch.

TWENTY-THREE

THE SMOKE PLUMESand gunfire must’ve alerted the good citizens of Tressia of our arrival, but when our convoy of trucks and ambulances rumbled through the capital’s suburban villages, no heads showed in the wind®d cows, no kids ran out to dash alongside the trucks and beg the GIs for sweets. I rode in the cab of the second lorry in line, alongside the Signals Major, and said, “Your truck’s not taking point. There’s a reason for that. Convoys get ambushed?”

He shrugged. “Out here in the villages, pretty safe. Once we get inside the old city’s walls, where the streets are narrow, one in three take fire.”

“Got a spare rifle?”

He reached behind our seatback, and tugged out a Tressen bolt action that looked like a 1903

Springfield, but with a stock the color and texture of potato skin where the hardwood should have been. He also fished out a helmet for me. He said, “I told the other drivers to give the other members of your party helmets, as well. If the separatists explode a building onto us, though, neither the helmet nor the rifle will help much.”

Just drop in on Planck, Jason. Chat him up to run for office, Jason. Take your godson along for the ride. Piece of cake, Jason. I swore under my breath.

In the event, we made it to the Human Union Consulate without incident. By without incident, I don’t just mean we didn’t get blown up. I mean not a soul risked looking out their window to watch us drive by. Maybe the separatists didn’t blow down a building on us because they couldn’t find one close to us within the old city that hadn’t been reduced to a brick heap already. The Human Union Consulate had been a bank, by the sign carved into its stone façade. It rose three stories, behind an iron fence twelve feet tall and a dead, brown front garden as deep and wide as a three-car garage. Tressen privates in dress uniforms strode the street in front of the fence gate, with their rifles carried across their bodies at port arms, while their heads swiveled to investigate every flicker of movement or sound.

Behind the gate, flanking the old bank’s heavy door, two contract guys in last-year’s model Eternad armor, carrying law enforcement rapid fires, stood guard.

I swore again, because my armor was two hundred miles above me, ghosting past every fifty-eight minutes, snug and polished, in
Kabul
’s armory. The diplomats had recommended we land in civvies, so as not to, heaven forbid, scare the citizens.

I thanked the Signals major for the lift, and as the convoy pulled out, he saluted me. I returned it, and called to him, “See you around.”

As I stepped through the Consulate door, an explosion a block away shook the building hard enough to shake rock dust out of the ceiling.

I never saw that major around.

But inside the Consulate I did see somebody I knew.

TWENTY-FOUR

AUD PLANCK DIDN’Tsmile when he saw us. He wore Tressen gray Class-A uniform, with a high-collared jacket and black-striped uniform trousers. Aud eyed my bandaged chin, and shook his head. “I’m sorry, my friend. We plan. The separatists counterplan. But as your Moltke wrote, ‘no plan survives¶ous contact with the enemy.’ ”

Jude, Ord, and Howard stood alongside Aud and me. We stood in the building’s chandeliered foyer. Its street-side windows were sandbagged, but the offices that opened off on three sides were finished with polished granite.

I shook Aud’s hand as I muttered, “We have met the enemy, and they are us.”

Aud cocked his head. “Moltke wrote this?”

“Aud, what happened? When I left here six months ago, the war was won. People on both sides were tired of fighting. Hopeful.”

“The war was won too well. Iridia was made to cede the Plain of Veblen.”

“Erdec said that always happens.”

“This time it went further. Extensive additional territories were occupied. Even the former capital of Iridia is now part of Tressen. Reparations are to be paid for Iridian crimes.”

“Iridian crimes? Are the Tressens paying for Veblen, too?”

Aud glanced at his Tressen aide, who was writing in a notepad, out of earshot. Aud said, “The Tressens didn’t lose. In the Occupied Territories, everyone associated with the old Iridian government was turned out in every town. Not a bad thing. The Iridian party hacks are worse than the Tressen ones. But no one was left to collect trash or operate the water works.”

“Threw the Nazis out with the bath water,” Howard said.

Ord shot him the kind of look that only a senior non-comm can give an officer and get away with it. Howard looked down and fiddled with papers on a table.

The Human Union Consul stepped out of his office, in pressed white shirt sleeves and a red silk tie, all peeking out beneath a woven Plastek flak vest. He was thin, and his white hair puffed out around his head so he looked like a Q-tip on feet. He shook hands all around. “There are only ten of us. There wasn’t much we could have done.”

“You could have told us to bring our body armor.”

“At least we told you to land here. It’s worse over in Iridia.”

“So I heard. No indoor plumbing.”

Q-tip sighed. “And no jobs. No wages. No bread. No feeling of self worth for the breadwinners. Starve a man and he’ll hate you. Starve his children and he’ll kill you.”

I turned to Aud. “Where do you fit in to this bus wreck?”

Aud shrugged. “Where a good soldier always fits in. Wherever civilian authority tells him to. Today, that means I’m to invite your party to attend a ceremony with me.”

“For what?”

“Reconciliation. Both sides will dedicate a memorial to the war dead. Iridian and Tressen.”

I eyed Q-tip’s flak vest. “Is that safe in this town?”

Aud sho»ize"4%ok his head. “No. That’s why the ceremony isn’t in town. The memorial will be at the site where the battle that ended the war began. Between the trench lines on the Barrens.”

Jude furrowed his brow. “The Barrens?”

I retrieved my luggage, all dress uniforms, medals, and nothing vaguely protective, and sighed. “It’s not as great as it sounds.”

TWENTY-FIVE

PART OF THE MONUMENTproject was to include a paved highway out into the Barrens, but we rode out on the same gravel paths that had served during the war. So it took a week to return to the vicinity of the Barrens trench lines by crawler caravan. Then it took hours after that to identify the trenches with precision.

War’s bones get picked clean quickly. In the six months since the war’s end, tetra trappers passing through, scavengers, and souvenir hunters made short work of iron gun mounts that had been bolted to concrete pillbox floors, of copper field telephone wire, of brass shell casings, of discarded rucksacks, even of the bracing and planking that had shored up the trench systems against the eternal rain. Already, the trenches themselves were vanishing into soft-edged puddles, except in the survivors’

nightmares.

And the scorpions had left few bodies to bury.

The government had erected a tent village for the ceremony participants, netted off from scorpions, leveed against the swamp.

The evening before the ceremony, there was a dinner for fifty, hosted in one long tent by the Prime Ministers of triumphant Tressen and of diminished Iridia.

A model of the memorial, all heroic marble statues and somber brass plaques, centerpieced the banquet table. Considering the precarious states of the governments present, the conviviality was surprising. There was much toasting to the competence and bravery of this general, and of that one. Also to the wisdom and compassion of each statesman’s staff, and to the politicians of his party. Long after the formal dinner broke up, Planck, Erdec, Ord, Jude, and I remained clustered in our chairs at one end of the now-bare banquet table, defending the last, low-burning candle. We also defended four now-empty bottles, and two full ones, of Iridian red. The serving staff had tried to recapture them, but eventually abandoned us to do what soldiers with wine do.

Erdec topped off glasses all around, lastly Ord’s and his own, as two a.m. rain drummed the tent roof. Ordinarily, officers and non-comms might have one drink together, then, for the sake of propriety, adjourn and get slobbering only in company of equivalent rank. But these were not ordinary times, and Ord and Erdec were not ordinary sergeants.

Erdec burped, said, “The Iridians caused half this mess. But we Tressens forced an unjust peace.”

Ord turned to his new friend, and said, “I thought you were four-eighths Iridian, Walder.”

“Alright, Arthur, Iridia gets one-fourth of the blame.”

After four bottles, who did math?

I asked Planck, “The prime ministers—are they getting anything done?”

Planck shrugged. “Everything
I
am told to do gets done.”

“Is that much?”

“There’s not much left to work with. We’re managing scarcity.”

“First it was ‘I.’ Now it’s ‘we.’ But you’re not part of the government.”

Aud lifted his glass to me. “Thanks for small favors.”

“You won’t reconsider what we talked about on the trip out?”

Aud shook his head. “If I’m not part of the government, I’m not part of the problem.”

I sighed. There was some rejoinder to Aud’s argument that involved being part of the solution. Two bottles ago I could have articulated it.

Jude, who had been quiet since we crashed, stood, swayed, and raised his own glass. There were times when he seemed to withdraw into himself, remembering, I supposed, the loss of his own soldiers, and his own captivity, during the Expulsion. He bore no external scars from his ordeal. Jude said, “Gentlemen. Tonight we have heard toasts to generals. We have heard toasts to ministers. We have heard toasts to battles . . .” He steadied himself against his chair back. “But we have not heard a toast to the man without whom your war could not have been won.”

Planck frowned. Erdec smiled at his commanding officer. It was true. Every brass hat who survived the war, which was most of them, had been toasted, except Audace Planck. His charisma—I would have said his common sense—threatened the politicians as well as the generals who were trying to rebuild this dysfunctional, divided society.

Jude said, “It’s always the same, on every world, in every war. I propose a toast to the one man nobody ever toasts. The common foot soldier.”

Ord looked around at all of us, then at Jude, then he raised his glass, too. “God damn shame on the rest of us that it took you to remind us, Captain.”

Erdec said, “Here, here!”

Aud raised his glass, too. “Well said, Sergeant Major. And Captain Metzger.” Aud’s eyes glistened in the candlelight. Mine were moist, too.

The next morning was mercifully dry, and given over to dress uniforms and more speeches. There was security—Planck’s Sergeant of the Guard was so old-school that he made Ord swoon—with some of them today doing double duty, decked out as an Honor Guard.

Aud may have been a threat to the politicians, but even on Tressel, where photography had advanced barely past Mathew Brady, they knew war heroes made great photo opportunities. And an apolitical general ruffled fewer feathers in either camp than the politicians jockeying for position. As scripted, General Planck, the legendary Quick-silver, was to lay a wà waposreath at the just-begun foundation of the Tressen Barrens Battlefield Monument. The foundation stones rose from the end of a land spit surrounded by silent swamp, and today even the swamp water seemed still and silver. The Tressen and Iridian military bands struck up a slow piece, to which Aud was to march out the spit, past a line composed of alternating, decorated Iridian and Tressen veterans drawn up at attention, and lay the wreath. The press would watch, photographic flash powder would pop. The Honor Guard would fire off a rifle salute, its rounds arcing out above the water.

Aud grasped the wreath off its tripod stand with white gloved hands, and turned toward the monument foundation. As he began to walk along the line of veterans, Planck paused and turned to Erdec. He whispered something, then tugged his old mentor out of line to walk beside him. Some men are theatric by design. Theatrics came instinctively to Audace Planck. Sergeant Major Erdec wore a chestful of decorations, was half Iridian and half Tressen, and walked with enough of a limp that his pace was statesmanlike. Jude had pointed out the problem with this ceremony, the night before. It was about generals and politicians who started wars, and not about the soldiers like Erdec who fought them and died in them. Aud had just fixed the problem.

I smiled. Erdec deserved the honor. His mixed blood symbolized reconciliation. And the gesture wouldn’t slow Aud’s rising star, either.

Jude and I stood side-by-side at the end of the dignitary line, alongside the honor guards. Jude whispered out of the corner of his mouth. “I like Planck.”