Orphan's Alliance (Jason Wander) (20 page)

orphans. If
Farragut
survived, which seemed unlikely. Below me, Mousetrap itself offered a haven for the fighters, but they would have to fight their way to the North Pole inlet doors, and things on Mousetrap would have to remain stable enough that somebody could let them in when they knocked. As for me, Starfires were no more able to pluck a floater from space than an Earth jet fighter could pluck a castaway from the sea. I was going to die in a few hours. That was pretty clear. I switched off the fighter jocks’ frequency—they needed no distractions—and screamed incoherently into the rescue band for four minutes straight.

I wasn’t babbling, just mad as hell. It wasn’t like we hadn’t done what we could to protect Mousetrap. Of a dozen operational cruisers, two were in transit to relieve others on station. Three were dispersed around Mousetrap, a beefed-up two were orbiting Bren, a pair were laying for the Slugs near Weichsel, and three were arrayed above Earth. We finally had ship-to-ship thermobaric weapons that, as I had just seen, worked against Slug ships. Firewitches and Trolls are one, or a few, large chambers inside, filled with air at Earth sea level pressure. So one penetrating warhead that disperses, then ignites, flammables inside a Slug vessel scores a kill. Yet still, the little maggots had done it to us again. I cranked my thermostat down until I lost feeling in my toes, and tried to take smaller breaths, for no good reason.

Forty minutes later, Mousetrap looked about the size of a misshapen pumpkin. I couldn’t see any Starfires, except one drifting with a stub wing off. More Firewitches than I cared to count drifted in a loose cordon around slowly rotating Mousetrap. As I watched, more drifted up, from all directions, slow and lazy, moving no faster against the starry blackness of space than airliners on final. I twitched my arms every few seconds, to keep the Eternads kinetic energy capture system recharging the batteries. I shut off my heads-up display, to save a little more juice. All the news it could display was bad anyway.

When I flexed my arms this time, something crackled like cellophane. My armor’s pressure membrane was brittleizing in the cold. The end of my life was a pinhole away. I tumbled so my view changed again, from Mousetrap to space.

In the distance, a blue-black spider drifted toward me.

SURELY, the Firewitch would simply pass me.†€ 2 >

But the closer it got, the more heads-up it remained on me.

What were the odds? I was like a castaway in the mid-Atlantic, getting run down by the
Queen Mary
, approaching at five hundred knots.

The Firewitch had its array spread, so it really did look like a blue-black tarantula coming to gobble me up. The purple, visible-spectrum part of its inner illumination shone out through the hundred-foot wide, transparent blister centered between its six outstretched arms. At low speed, its array wouldn’t brush me aside, like debris it encountered near light speed. I would splat against its purple dome like a gnat on a windshield.

The Firewitch bore down on me, so close now that I could see crusty lumps in its array arms. I stared into the big purple eye, waited for the train wreck, and said, “Crap!”

The eye flashed yellow. Then it burst like a brittle balloon. Then the Firewitch exploded silently into pieces that tumbled in all directions, not least toward me. A metal triangle bigger than a piano pounded my gut, and I began to spin in another direction, twice as fast as I had been tumbling, so I couldn’t distinguish what I saw, except alternating dark and blinding brightness. I thought a voice said, “It’s over.”

Shadowy, curved pearly wings appeared around me, then slowly enfolded me. Then there was only darkness.

FIFTY-ONE

I DIDN’T FEEL DEAD. I felt with my chin, and restarted my visor display. Outside temperature had climbed to a toasty zero Fahrenheit. Outside pressure existed, equivalent to plus-one mile above sea level. I lit my helmet lamp, and saw ribs. Not Leviathan ribs, like I had been swallowed. Perforated, curved, metallic ribs like the inside of a fuselage.

“I said, your tumbling gave me fits. Over.”

I replied, “What?”

The voice seemed to speak to someone else. “I have the floater, over.” Then, to me, it said, “Who are you?”

“Who are you?”

“Lieutenant Kenneth Arroyo. But I asked you first.”

“Wander. Jason. Major General, United States Army.”

“No shit? Sir.”

I twisted around. The dark space I floated in was a tube six feet in diameter, and twenty feet long.

“Sir, there’s a weapons rack clamp on the top center of the bay, back there. You might want to feel around, then grab it tight.”

I twisted further, until my light flicked across an angular metal arm. A yellow canvas telltale ribbon, the sort that remained after a weapon had been released, dangled with one end free, in zero gee. I inched tŽ€ gulo it, twisted the telltale around my wrist like a subway straphanger, and said, “Done. Why am I doing this?”

“I assume this is your first Scorpion ride, sir. It gets a little hairy, even
with
a gee suit.” The voice rose an octave. “We got company. Hang on, sir.”

I blacked out before I puked.

FIFTY-TWO

I SMELLED RUBBING ALCOHOL. The next thing I saw was a cocoa-skinned man with salt-and-pepper hair, who bent above me as he fingered the touchscreen of a monitor alongside me. He wore medical scrubs, embroidered with a frog clenching a threaded needle between its cartoon teeth, and with the words “Mean Green Sewing Machine.” His name plate read “Wallace.” Red-brown stained the surgeon’s scrubs, and his eyelids drooped like he hadn’t slept in a week. I noticed that burn dressings covered his forearms. I found out later that Doctor Wallace had crawled into an orphaned fighter that had limped into one of
Emerald River’
s launch bays, through flames, then dragged the fighter’s unconscious pilot to safety. Then, the surgeon had crawled back in, and dragged out the wounded Wizzo, too.

Doctor Wallace whispered into a Stenobot mike pinned to the scrubs, then said to me, “Aren’t you a little old for this sort of thing?” Then he patted my shoulder, and was gone. I turned my head, and saw, on a Plasteel-framed bed alongside me, a kid in a transparent burn bag that enveloped him neck-to-toes. Through the gel, I could make out his limbs, legs, and torso, all angry red and purple and black. His pilot buzz cut had been shaved on the left side, around a stitch row that marched across his skull like a line of ants.

I said, “What’s your ship?”

“
Nimitz
. Was. Bastards caught
Ike
with all her eggs in the basket.”

“The
Farragut
?”

“A log, last I saw her.” A cruiser that had stopped rotating, and lay in space like a log, was usually dead. He cried, the console beside him clicked, clicked again, and dope sent him back to Shangri La. I looked around. The two of us lay in a narrow bay of the size common in cruiser infirmaries. Burn cases were normally segregated to minimize infection risk. If I was stacked alongside this kid, this flight was way overbooked. Or I was in worse shape than I felt. Or both.

I looked down at my right hand. The fingertips were frostbite black, and white-taped to my palm, so my thumb rested above its button, was a Clikit. The bug-shaped wireless transmitter let a patient call up his own dope. It meant I was better off than the kid next to me, who got juiced automatically, but bad enough off that I needed Big Medicine.

My left side began aching, and I ignored it for about an hour, though the wall ’Puter said it was three minutes. The ache metastasized into the conviction that someone had dumped a cutlery drawer into my rib cage, and now a linebacker in cleats was stomping on it. I gritted my teeth for another hour, which the

’Puter claimed was two minutes. Then I click–€ o med my button, again and again, until life became just a bowl of peaches.

Sometime later, Mimi’s face stared down at me.

I said, “Will you marry me?”

An orderly leaned between me and Mimi, so close that I could see the stubble on his chin, and said to Mimi, “Get in line, Admiral. He proposed to me an hour ago. I’m cutting his dosage.” A transparent IV

bag swung across my field of vision, and I proposed to it.

Twenty-two days after the Slugs greased Mousetrap,
Emerald River
settled in to parking orbit above Tressel. From conversations I overheard among the swabbies, the only thing more remarkable than the gentility with which Admiral Ozawa parallel parked was that she had backed
Emerald River
out of Mousetrap in one piece. It was impossible to slingshot a cruiser through a second jump without an intervening overhaul.

I sat in a lounge of
Emerald River
’s infirmary, in a padded chair, wearing a peek-a-boo gown that barely reached my knees. I clutched a walkable medication stand that was tubed to my forearm. Across from me sat she who had done the impossible, crisp and perfect in Class A skirt and blouse. Her head was cocked, her arms and legs crossed. There was probably Visible Thigh, but I didn’t even notice. Mimi asked, “How’re you feeling?”

“Bad.”

“They tell me the ribs are mending. And the lung is regrowing nicely.”

“It was the real one I had left, too.” I wheezed and consulted the medication timer on my walking stand. Two minutes until relief. Frostbite in the extremities, a dislocated shoulder, and “undifferentiated soft tissue trauma” rounded out the package. I said, “When you visited before, I said—”

Mimi blinked. “Nothing anybody would remember.”

I paused, and closed my eyes. “How bad was it? They won’t tell me squat here.”

“They want you to concentrate on healing.”

“Heal for what, Mimi?”

She sighed. “I know. We lost
Ike
,
Nimitz
, and almost certainly
Farragut
. The Slugs control the Mousetrap.
Emerald River
won’t be jump-worthy again for months.”

“There were survivors.”

“Pilots and systems officers from orphan fighters. You’re the only floater we picked up.”

I squeezed my eyes shut. Munchkin was gone. “What about Mousetrap?”

Mimi shrugged. “We jumped a drone back into the Mousetrap last week. It hasn’t come back.”

“Earth? Bren?”

She shrugged again. “We’re five jumps out. Maybe we’ll know something in a couple months.” Maybe Ord and Howard and Earth were building and planning a comeback. Maybe Mousetrap would be just a setback. But maybe we here, on and above Tressel, were the last survivors of the human ›€€ererace. I longed for one of Howard’s hunches. Hell, I longed for Howard.

I stared at the floor, and shook my head. “I should have done something.”

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself.” Mimi’s eyes flared, and she pointed at the wall, in a direction that could have led light years to the Mousetrap, wherever in the crow-flies universe it actually was from us. “I abandoned my friends! I left our dead behind!”

“You saved the strongest capital ship we have, maybe the only one, to fight another day. Dead and dumb wouldn’t have helped.” Swabbie rumor had it that Mimi would get decorated for her actions. That presumed there was somebody left to decorate her.

She stared at the wall, with the fingers of both hands knit beside her thigh, and her eyes glistened. “Still. My heart feels like your lung.”

My heart did too. “So, what do we do now?”

Mimi pretended to scratch her nose so she could wipe her eyes. “Heal. Start over. Make it right.”

Whatever was happening light years away, what had already happened on Tressel, one thousand miles below us, didn’t make healing easier.

FIFTY-THREE

I SAT TOGETHERwith Jude in iron chairs beneath an arbor grown over with green vines that shaded us against the noon sun. A crystal pitcher of fern tea sat untouched on a table between us. Iridescent dragonflies buzzed in the near distance, above acres of cultivated, teal moss lawn. We sat silent for ten minutes, then Jude stretched. “Pretty place.”

Sanitorium Iridine
was Tressel’s finest convalescent center. Its grounds encompassed rolling countryside, five miles outside the Iridian capital. The main building looked like Versailles, and had escaped shelling during the war. The sun shone often, the staff anticipated a convalescent’s every need, and the chefs were terrific.

I said, “I hate it.”

He smiled. “That’s the broken ribs talking. You just hate the guest list.” True, between morphine withdrawal and “undifferentiated soft tissue trauma,” I was still as irritable as if I was wearing broken glass, four months after Mousetrap. But the fact was that if you were a Social Republican, or vouchsafed by one, you convalesced at
Sanitorium Iridine
, at government expense. If you were Iridian, your accommodations differed. Few medical facilities in the former Iridia had been rebuilt since the Armistice. But few Iridians needed them. Most chose to live in government-established relocation camps. The government assisted them in making the choice.

Jude shot the cuffs of the crisp uniform shirt beneath his black jacket. “Jason, Sergeant Major Erdec’s killing was just the beginning. The Iridians have tried to kill the members of the Prime Ministrate six times in the last year. They’re animals.”

“The Iridians, or the Iridian separatists?”

“Who can distinguish fish in the sea?”

I flexed my shoulder, and rolled my eyes. “You even talk like them.”

“Now who’s prejudging? You know Audace Planck. You know me. But what do you know about Tressel since the Armistice?”

An orderly peeked around the arbor, pointed at the pitcher, and raised his eyebrows. Jude shook his head. I visited with the orderly every day. He was a physician by training, an Iridian by ethnicity, and an outcast by the “I” medallion on his smock.

“I know Nazis when I see them.”

“This nation was chaos when the Social Republicans formed a government. The highways are already better than they were before the war. So’s the opera. A man can have a job, now, if he wants it, and his paycheck won’t bounce. His kids can go to school without dodging street gangs.”

“Unless he’s Iridian.”

“The restrictions are temporary. Every day, Social Republicanism makes us freer.”