Orphan's Triumph (Jason Wander) (24 page)

“Which is what you’re doing now.”

The ice train wasn’t slowing because we were almost there, it was slowing because it was going uphill. According to the Spooks’ mapping, the early mass graves continued for ten miles, then the single track climbed through a mountain pass and descended to another plain. On that next plain the newer barbed-wire enclosures resumed, the drifted snow low against them, and at that spot were garrisoned the troops who kept the survivors penned until exposure and starvation finished them. The presence of that military garrison had been the problem that had scuttled Howard Hibble’s plan to burgle Tressel’s Cavorite. Because beneath the snows of that new plain, amid the corpses, lay the fallen stars of Cavorite that controlled the fate of mankind. Spooks and the politicians they serve love covert ops. But politicians fall out of love quickly when covert ops go wrong. Within twenty minutes, the ice train crept slower than a walking man. It rolled through a dynamite-widened pass that was still so narrow that from the sledge I could have reached out and touched the vertical granite walls, and so deep that its shadows darkened the box like sundown. My ’Puter’s altimeter pegged the pass crest elevation at nine thousand feet, and the Spooks’

mapping said the canyon rim topped out fully one thousand feet higher. Growing up in Colorado, the rule of thumb had been climb a thousand feet and lose three degrees Fahrenheit. But it felt like we couldn’t get colder.

Forty minutes later, the thumps of the runners over the ice road had increased in frequency again, as gravity accelerated the ice train down the pass backside, toward our destination. I turned to the man next to me, dozing standing up with his arms crossed, and nudged him until he opened eyes that the last five days had sunken in their sockets.

I said, “Showtime!”

FIFTY-FOUR

AS SOON AS OUR SLEDGE ROLLED through the gate into the wire rectangle within which our train would unload, Aud and I began loading, then redistributing, the weapons our recruits had been dry-firing during the trip north. The pistols in our suitcases were obsolete Iridian single-action service revolvers. They were the only small, simple, plausibly deniable weapons that Bill the Spook could score in the Tressen black market on a few days’ notice.

My unmittened fingers were so numb that I dropped one round for every six I loaded. Then I passed each pistol to Aud, who in turn handed it off, so it could be passed to one of the prisoners whom we had trained to shoot.

“Trained” overstated things. It typically had taken Ord and me months as advisers to train partisans. Here and now we lacked that gift of time. Nonetheless, if things were running according to plan, the scene was being repeated in six other sledge cars. But there were risks in this that planning simply couldn’t help.

Few of the prisoners in this caravan had ever fired a weapon. The RS had long since exterminated most veterans who had served on the wrong side in the war. Most of the unfortunates who were rounded up and shipped from Tressia were city dwellers who had never plinked a tin can on the East Forty. We hadn’t risked handing out loaded weapons earlier, so there would be shooters scared to death the first time their pistols roared and kicked in their hands. There would be shooters who didn’t cock hammers, shooters who lost their pistols in snowdrifts, shooters who couldn’t hit a cow’s rump with a bat, and shooters who simply were too petrified to shoot.

On the positive side, the waiting camp guards were going to be less prepared than Bo Peep would have been if her sheep had gone postal.

With a thunk, then a hiss, the ice train stopped. After six days, the silence of the empty wilderness rang like an alarm between my ears.

I peered out between the iron wall slabs. Two hundred greatcoated, helmeted guards awaited us, drawn back a hundred feet on the featureless snow, rifles slung. They stamped feet, smoked, and batted their arms against their chests.

A thin cry echoed from one of the other sledges. “Dear God! Please! Let us out!”

A dozen guards, scarves to noses, rifles still slung, trudged to the cars, then unlatched and slid back each sledge’s door. They retreated to the line of their buddies, to escape not the prisoners’ wrath but their stench.

There was no need to order prisoners out of the iron boxes. After six subhuman days, those who remained ambulatory leapt, stumbled, crawled, and tumbled into the snow alongside the icy track. Many wept. A few crammed handfuls of snow between parched lips. Most were too weak even for that. After five minutes, a different dozen guards walked the train, peering into each box. If they found halt, lame, or dead inside, they wrenched prisoners from the snow and forced them to unload those unable to unload themselves.

As each sledge was cleared, the guards padlocked its door shut. No shelter for the new arrivals. Then each sledge’s guard climbed stiffly down from his guardhouse and joined his colleagues. The emaciated prisoners, if any noticed, offered no more protest than so many pieces of frozen meat, which they would be soon enough.

I scanned the milling, kneeling heaps of prisoners, until my heart thumped. Jude, and then Celline alongside him, saw me, too, and Jude nodded to me. I had never been so glad to see two people who looked like hell. I nodded back.

The Spooks had flown a Mechanical up here to monitor ice train arrival procedure for us, so we knew what came next. By the time the engine crew, the guards, and the others had reassembled, the Arctic sun slid low along the horizon, at our backs, as a noncomm called roll of our jailers. Years of experience had taught these troops that there was nothing to fear from the hopeless, decimated “enemies of the state” who tumbled from each ice train into the snow. The only way a guard up here could get himself hurt was to wander off, then be left behind on the plain to freeze, like the prisoners he was guarding.

When all the guards were accounted for, all of them, some with rifles slung, others with them over their shoulders, stocks backward like pickaxes, turned their backs on the people in the snow. The guards trudged, heads down against the wind, toward the distant barracks and machine-shop complex that lay outside the wire, toward warmth and beds and hot food. The more energetic among them opened wooden crates, plucked out dynamite sticks, then lit and flung them to explode snow fountains. Others tossed empty cartridge boxes up into the wind, ahead of them, while their buddies whooped and shot at the boxes like skeet clays. Disposal of deteriorated stores, perhaps. Tressel’s civilization poised on that historic cusp where Earth’s had teetered almost two centuries before, proud to have invented dynamite, but not yet guilty enough to fund a peace prize with the profits of sale.

Bored, stupid, lazy commanders begat bored, stupid, lazy troops. Bored, stupid, lazy troops became dead troops. What we were about to attempt wouldn’t give these troops the benefit of a fair fight. But the last thing a good commander wants to give the enemy is a fair fight.

As the Spooks’ Mechanical had forecast, the prevailing wind howled toward the casual mob of guards, into their faces and ours.

Therefore, the guards didn’t hear us as we rose, in groups of twos and threes, and began walking mute toward the unsuspecting guards’ backs. Surprised shouts of other prisoners vanished in the wind and among the moans and delirium of others. We had formed a ragged skirmish line, ninety in all, forty-five on each side of Aud and me, and had come within twenty yards of the guards when I saw the first prisoner, stumbling forward, ten yards to my right, raise his pistol. For these novices, the range remained too great. I had drawn Ord’s pistol and carried it muzzle-down at my side in my unmittened hand. I waved it at the guy as I stage whispered, “Not yet!

Crap! No, no, no!”

Bang.

Even a blind pig finds an occasional acorn. The first shot of the prisoner’s life, and the first shot of the Battle of the Northern Terminus, struck the last guard in line in the nape of his neck, between the skirt of his helmet and his jacket collar. He went down noiselessly, like a flour sack, so that his buddies noticed neither his loss nor the pistol shot amid the skeet shoot ahead of them. Within two heartbeats, nervous pistols crackled like popping corn, as the prisoners fired at will into a massed target too big for even novices to miss.

By the time the guards realized what was happening and stopped, the gap between prisoners and guards had closed to ten yards. Forty guards lay in the snow.

By the time the guards unslung rifles, the gap was five yards, and just a hundred of them remained standing. I, Jude, and Aud spent our effort running back and forth behind our skirmish line, screaming and tugging our shooters, trying to keep any from getting out ahead or from falling behind, so that no one would be shot by a buddy. I lunged for one man too late, and he took a round in the back of his thigh from another prisoner.

More guards fell, shot point-blank.

The remaining guards, blinded by the sun at our backs, reflexively standing and fighting when they should have run, were overrun before they could get off more than wild shots. Prisoners fell on their tormentors three or four against one, firing pistols into screaming mouths, beating and kicking, pummeling guards with their own rifle butts, until guards’ heads cracked like dropped melons.

Then there was no sound but wind howl and the crying of wounded.

Two minutes had passed since the first shot.

I stood panting, hands on hips, facing back at the litter of bodies in the reddening snow. Aud limped up alongside me. “I think we lost four.”

A prisoner beside me aimed his pistol ahead of us, cocked the hammer, and pulled the trigger. The hammer clacked on a spent cartridge. “Dammit!”

I turned and looked where the pistol’s muzzle pointed. A lone guard ran, bareheaded, coat flapping, toward the distant fence and the barracks beyond.

It was barely possible that with the wind, the oncoming darkness, the cover provided by the guards’

rowdy firing, and the sloppy state of this garrison that the troops remaining in the barracks complex could be surprised. In fact, we had half planned on it.

But not if the runner got to the garrison before we did.

I knelt in the snow, swung Ord’s pistol up, and sighted on the runner. In the fading light, he looked back over his shoulder as he ran. It was the broad-nosed boxcar guard who had killed the physician. A decent shot with a service .45 can bring down a man at forty yards. An expert might stretch that to seventy-five yards. Liars claim one hundred.

Ord always claimed that, if I practiced more, I could be the best shot he had ever trained. He also claimed that his personally gunsmithed pistol was the most accurate .45 ever built. I made the range ninety yards and growing.

More Slug Warriors had died beneath my hand than I could count, but they were, according to the Spooks, mere organic automatons. Human beings had died beneath my hand, too, when, as a soldier, lawful orders had required it.

But this was my decision. Like Ord had said, I was on my own.

The range opened to one hundred yards. I breathed, exhaled, paused, and fired. The broad-nosed guard ran for his life. Toward, perhaps, a wife, children, a place in the church choir.

His arms spread wide, as if he was trying to fly like Puck the Fairy. His head snapped back so that his face turned toward the darkening sky. Then his body arced forward, fell in an explosion of snow, skidded, and stopped.

The wind in my face pricked gun smoke into my eyes, and I holstered the .45, then wiped them. The prisoner with the dead pistol clapped my shoulder. “That was good!”

Aud limped past me. “We must press our attack! But so far, so good.”

The two of them left me standing alone, staring at the distant, dead soldier, facedown in the snow, then staring at the bodies all around me. So no one heard me say, “Goodness has nothing to do with us.”

FIFTY-FIVE

IN THE LONG DUSK OF ARCTIC AUTUMN, our accidental army redistributed ammunition, cannibalized rifles and clothing from the guards’ corpses, and moved out toward the garrison’s barracks with Aud Planck on the lead, as always. Or, as his troops had said of Erwin Rommel,
an der Spitze.
The flat buildings’ smoking chimneys and yellow-lit windows, promising warmth and life, drew not only our minutes-old veterans, but the rest of the prisoners who could walk or crawl. A ragged human wave rolled toward the barracks, its only sound the creak of thousands of numb hands and feet against dry snow.

Aud’s point group reached the gate that led outside the twelve-foot-tall barbed-wire fence, to the barracks complex fifty yards beyond, before a clang like iron against a hung iron triangle alarmed the garrison.

The gate, untended and unlocked, was swung aside as soldiers, pulling up suspenders and fumbling with rifles, tumbled out of barracks doors. The lucky ones were cut down by bullets poorly aimed but as numerous as hornets.

The second engagement of the Battle of the Northern Terminus was no more a fair fight and no less a massacre than the first. In all, fourteen prisoners died of wounds sustained in the fighting, but mercy was an uncommon commodity among their peers. None of the five-hundred-man Interior Guard garrison survived.

An hour later, Jude, Celline, and I walked the plain in the darkness beyond the barracks. The oil tanks that fueled the sledge trains and the barracks stoves, set alight in the fighting, painted the snow flickering orange. We plowed the drifts with shuffling feet. My foot struck an object that gave way easily, and I grunted.

Jude said, “Another ration can?”

I bent, felt for my boot toe, then grasped the object and stood. “Gotcha!”

I turned the apple-sized meteorite in my hand, lit by the oil tanks’ flame. The rock felt as light as cork. “Doesn’t glow like a Stone Hills nugget. But it isn’t supposed to.”

Celline said, “I know the next step is vital. But these people are half dead.”

I said, “Some of them will bounce back by the morning. We should have plenty of hands to harvest in a couple days.”

Jude said, “We’re ahead of schedule.”

So far, the plan, horrible and bloody as it was, had exceeded even optimistic expectations. We had neutralized the hostile force that had sat atop Tressel’s weapons-grade Cavorite. We had moved a motivated workforce of nearly a thousand people above the Arctic Circle of Tressel by the only transport that existed to move them there. We had a week left before the Duck’s deadline, during which we would gather the meteorites together, then call down pickup.