Orphan's Alliance (Jason Wander) (5 page)

“Oh.”

Planck said, “What you said, Jason—that we have to learn to keep a peace? It starts here. Now. This has been a dirty war.”

“They all are,” I said.

Planck nodded. “Those boys, and prisoners like them, can break the cycle. If we send them home with memories of decent treatment.” He shrugged. “That’s my contribution to politics.”

Planck handed the morning reports back to Erdec, and their fingers touched. The older man whispered,

“I thought we had lost you, sir.”

Planck clapped his sergeant major on the shoulder, and grinned. “Me, lost? I bet you thought so. You told us in basic training that the most dangerous thing in the army is an officer with a map.”

Erdec smiled. “That was long ago, General.”

Three pistol shots rang close by.

Planck’s brow furrowed.

Sergeant Major Erdec’s brow furrowed, too.

Then Planck’s eyes widened, he spun, and dashed around the command tent. I followed, as Erdec, limping like the old soldier he was, followed me. The dark-eyed intelligence captain stood fifty yards from us, alongside a shallow ditch, staring down at three piles of white cloth. He held his pistol down at his side, and it smoked. When I got closer, I recognized, sprawled on the ground, the baker’s boy from Veblen, and his two friends. Cheek-down in the mud, each boy’s eyes stared, and each bled from a bullet hole in the back of his head.

Planck reached the captain first. “What did you do? What the hell did you do?”

The captain stared at Planck. “What you told me to. End their war—”

Planck lunged at the captain, and twisted the pistol from the man’s hand. The captain stiffened. “We’re moving too fast to process prisoners! They were just cooks.”

Planck grabbed the captain by his lapel, pulled him nose-to-nose, then stabbed the pistol barrel into the captain’s cheek. “They were children!”

The captain’s eyes widened.

Erdec shook his head, and reached toward Planck. “General—”

Rain ran down the captain’s forehead, into his eyes, until he blinked. Planck’s gun hand quivered, and so did the captain.

Planck shoved him away, flung the captain’s pistol to the mud next to the three dead cooks, and stared down at them. “Sergeant Major, republish the Ge clublish neral Order regarding humane treatment of prisoners.” Planck looked up at the captain, and his gray eyes burned into the man. “Place the captain, here, under arrest. Confine him. Advise the Advocate General to prepare charges.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll arrange a burial detail, as well.”

When Aud Planck and I stood alone again, he rubbed his forehead. “We leveled this dead boy’s hometown and we didn’t bat an eye. Yesterday, we cremated a whole squadron of our own troops and to their families all I will be able to write is that I’m sorry. Is what that captain just did really so much more wrong?”

“It is where I come from, Aud.”

He sighed. “I suppose you’re looking forward to going home, Jason.”

It was my turn to sigh. “Not exactly.”

TWO MONTHS OF SWAMP-CROSSING, two hours of surface-to-orbit blasting and one day of

.66 light-speed cruising later, I tidied up the paperless paperwork alongside the two members of the Tressel expedition I knew best.

Another part of the expedition was the four hundred armor-branch techs beneath us, scurrying over the hovertanks’ hulls like camouflaged ants. The techs had performed all maintenance the Tressens couldn’t. The last part of the expedition, which remained behind on Tressel, was twenty State Department civilians, ten each in the Tressen and Iridian capitals, who were to establish consulates, and four contract security guards.

My Command Sergeant Major, my Intelligence Liaison, aka my resident Spook, and I sat in a bubble-shaped clear plex cab that hung from ceiling tracks as it rolled twenty feet above two hundred seventy-six gently pre-owned Lockheed Kodiaks. The hovertanks were packed hull-to-hull in the football-field long centerline bay of U.S. Space Force Heavy Cruiser
Dwight David Eisenhower
. The Kodiaks looked like factory-fresh Electrovans, aboard a wet-bottom freighter bound from China to the Port of Houston, rather than aboard a warship.

Semantically, the
Ike
was no warship. She was re-christened Human Union Consular Vessel
Charity
for the duration of the Tressel Expedition. The diplomats we left behind on Tressel notwithstanding, bludgeoning the Tressens and the Iridians to Armistice at cannon point had involved nothing consular and little charity.

As we glided above each Kodiak in the loadmaster’s pod, the pod’s downlooking sensor recorded the ID code of the hovertank, which was etched into its turret top.

Ord pointed at the running tally winking on the pod’s screen. “Two lost to enemy action. Five to friendly fire.”

I looked away and blinked.

Ord continued, “The remaining sixteen units couldn’t be recovered, due to operator error or mechanical fault, and were verified to have been destroyed in place, per orders.”

“So my pension remains intact, Sergeant Major?”

Ord smiled. “As long as all of0%"„ these get back home with us.”

An officer’s most solemn responsibility is his mission. As solemn, though barely in second place, is his responsibility to his soldiers. But an officer is also directly responsible to the army, and indirectly to the taxpayers, for hardware under his command. Even a modern infantry platoon’s equipment costs more than its lieutenant could earn in three lifetimes. For me, just handwriting the total MSRP of the stuff I’ve signed for over the years would cramp my hand.

In the pod’s jump seat behind us, Howard Hibble leaned forward, sucking nicotine out of a stop-smoking lollipop until his wrinkled cheeks cupped inward like deflated balloons. “Actually, we’ll get home before them.”

I gritted my teeth. “You set up a pony? And didn’t tell me?” Howard’s rank was colonel, because the army didn’t have a rank of witch doctor. We had served together since the Blitz, when I was infantry’s most expendable trainee and he was an extraterrestrial intelligence professor turned intelligence captain. Now I outranked Howard, but he didn’t report to me. He reported up through the Spook chain of command until it disappeared from public view somewhere around the National Security Adviser level. That gave him the back-channel clout of a Washington lobbyist, coupled with a weasel streak most lobbyists envied.

Howard shrugged. “I thought you’d be pleased. It beats the Local.”

“The Local” was how most soldiers, goods, services, and people traveled among the planets of the Human Union. The Local was slow. If you could call travel at two-thirds the speed of light slow. Mankind had reverse-engineered enough Slug technology to build starships that could jump Temporal Fabric Insertion Points just like a Slug Firewitch. But even a Firewitch had to heal itself after the structural stress of slingshotting past a collapsed star whose gravity was strong enough to tack folded space together.

A Firewitch could heal in hours after a jump, if it could ground on a planet that had a few basics like oxygen and liquid water. However, human-engineered ships still needed month-long overhauls, orbiting above massive ground-based shipyards, after every jump. And Outworlds like Tressel lay five jumps away.

Each single jump took days or weeks getting to, then away from, the jump. Even at speeds close enough to light speed that onboard clocks lost a few ticks relative to Earth normal. In short, single-ship interstellar travel, also known as “the Local,” was slower than sailing Spanish galleons around Tierra del Fuego.

But with coordination and at great cost, small volumes of high-priority cargo could travel faster. The pony process took its name from Pony Express postal riders of the American West, and it was pretty simple. At each layover, the high priority cargo—in this case, Howard, Ord, and me—switched from a fatigued ship to a fresh one, with just hours spent transferring between ships. As simple as changing horses.

Simple, maybe, but hard on the high-priority cargo. A TFIP jump is basically diving a spaceship at an object the size of an invisible golf ball, into which is squeezed the mass of the Sun. The golf ball is invisible because its gravity is so strong that it sucks in even light. Gravity that strong also tacks together points that Cr pnviare light years apart in conventional space.

Howard says those with limited aptitude for non-Newtonian physics, meaning pretty much everybody but the Slugs and Howard, can best visualize this by imagining the universe as a folded newspaper page. But “folded” means crumpled into a ball, then glued together at random points where the paper touches. The glue being the intense gravity of collapsed stars. Jumping across at a glued-together point could take you all the way from the page’s upper right corner all the way to its lower left corner. Or the jump could take you from the “5” in a sports page score only as far as to the “2” right alongside it. Whatever. If the dive is sufficiently precise and fast and dodgy, the ship pops out in new space, light years away, without traveling the long way across the newspaper page. Otherwise, everybody dies. The gravity cocoon woven by Slug technology insulates the ship’s interior, more or less, but even a single jump beats human passengers like veal hammered into schnitzel. Back-to-back-to-back jumps wear humans down like the old Pony Express wore down the kid messengers who rode it. Recruiting ads for Pony Express riders specified “orphans preferred.”

On the voyage back from Tressel, we three left the Kodiaks behind after Jump One. We changed ponies three more grueling times. By our last pony switch point we were so Jump Thumped that even Howard had the presence of mind to schedule us for an overnight, which happened to be on Bren. The State Department profile about Bren highlights four things.

One, Bren is the first-discovered Outworld. It is the place where modern man learned that, about the time our human ancestors learned to use stone tools, the Slugs had shipped Earth humans across the Milky Way, like Africans to the New World. Our species infested some planets that the Slugs visited, like rats that escaped down the conquistadors’ anchor hawsers.

Two, Bren is the sole remaining source of propulsion-grade Cavorite known to mankind. Three, Bren resembles Earth at the end of the Cretaceous period, but with bigger dinosaurs. Four, the Expulsion of the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony from Bren sparked the formation of the Human Union.

With Tressel in my memory, and explaining it all at the Pentagon looming in my future, all l wanted from my layover was to forget everything for a night.

I had a minor role in kicking the Slugs off Bren. Therefore, I could have spent my overnight layover relaxing with old friends in high places. But I’m infantry enough that I relax better with old friends in low places.

A GI can forget plenty during one night on the Marinus waterfront, for a price. Part of the price is the morning after.

Therefore, after I changed and shaved, I was late for the upship. The ship squatted like a droop-winged manta ray out of water, in a cleared field next to a carriage depot. Carriages behind teams of duckbilled dinosaurs stood ranked alongside boarding platforms crowded with travelers. A dozen years before that morning, no human on Bren imagined ships that flew Chipide, much less ships that flew among the stars. Now, only the children on the platforms stared at the upship. I overtipped my cabbie, patted his team as I passed them, then jogged the hundred yards toward the upship.

The upship’s pilot, in powder-blue Space Force Utilities, paced back and forth near the boarding ladder, glancing down at a wrist ’Puter, head shaking. Another head, on uniformed shoulders, poked out of the hatch at the top of the ladder.

As I got close enough to identify the poking head as Howard’s, I realized that the pilot was a head shorter than me, with raven hair cut helmet-short, and she wore Rear Admiral’s shoulder boards. I slowed to a walk, and groaned.

TEN

THE PILOT DIDN’Tturn around as I stopped at the foot of the ladder. She crossed her arms, then studied the upship’s belly tiles. “You’re late. We missed the docking window. You know the cost of turning a
Metzger
-class Cruiser for an extra orbit, Jason?”

I stretched a smile. “Pleasure to see you again, too, Mimi.”

Actually, Mimi Ozawa in a pilot’s unitard
was
a pleasure to see. The view even improved when she faced me. Women of a certain age just get more attractive, at least to men of a certain age. Mimi still had porcelain skin and brown eyes I could fall into.

“Since when does a Cruiser Commander fly shuttle milk runs?” My question was rhetorical. Mimi was a fighter jock who got kicked upstairs to command a capital ship that was steered by committee. She never missed a chance to grasp the yoke of anything she could fly by herself.

“You’re always late,” she said.

“You always wait.”

“I haven’t had a choice, yet.”

I scuffed the ground with my boot toe. “I’m sorry. It’s been a tough few months. So last night I had a few.”

She sniffed. “A few what?”

The Marinus waterfront resembles Gomorrah, with tighter alleys and looser women.

“Meads,” I said. Bren’s Highland Casunis export three commodities; Cavorite, fortified wine, and mayhem. All three give me headaches.

Mimi and I had never shared a hug, much less a bed. But I swear her posture softened. “Oh.” She nodded toward the ladder. “Get aboard.”

“I’d be just as happy to follow you.”

She rolled her eyes. “Move. Pretend you’ve outgrown puberty.”

I wormed into the seat alongside Howard, and strapped in.

He said, “Did you notice that was Mimi Ozawa?”

“I noticed.”

“She’s commanding the
Emerald River
now.” Howard wrinkled his nose. “What did you do last night?

You smell like grain alcohol.”

“She noticed. What did
you
do last night?”

“Worked on my draft report.” Radio waves could no more transit a Temporal Fabric Insertion Point than light could. They moved through normal space at the speed of light. Therefore, phoning home from an Outworld a hundred light years from Earth would take exactly one hundred years. Once a ship made its last Jump, it could send data ahead of it that would beat the ship to its destination by a little bit. But, for practical purposes, Howard and I would be bringing our commanders the first report of our mission to Tressel, like human carrier pigeons.