Orphan's Triumph

this.

The wind swirled snow away from the area fifteen yards to my front, and I glimpsed an angular black peak that rose a foot above the drifts. Hair stood on my neck. As expected, a Slug Warrior, faced away from me, was hunkered down in defense. Unlike GIs, Slug Warriors didn’t share fighting positions with another soldier. Slug Warriors were more like sophisticated white corpuscles than individual soldiers, and they needed neither companionship nor a buddy to take watch while they slept.

I closed the gap between me and the Warrior to five yards, drew my knife, then chinned my comm bar. Behind me, Howard, presuming he hadn’t fallen asleep, would see the “go” light in his visor display, feel the vibrate alarm on his cheek, and crawl forward with the Ganglion in tow.

I fingered my knife. There was no “book” on fighting mano-a-maggot. Few Earth troops had done it live, despite the Slug War’s duration. Slug body armor was easily penetrated by a bullet or a broadsword swung by a six-foot-five Casuni. But a knife wielded by a guy so old that his joints creaked when he rode an exercise bike?

Slugs’ armor ended in a skirt at ground level, because they traveled on one bare foot, though they didn’t slime along like a true snail. There was an opening higher up in the armor through which the Warrior extruded a tentacle-like pseudopod to grasp its mag-rail rifle. And the armor was open at the anterior end so the Slug’s infrared sensory patches, on what one might call its head, could “see.”

The biggest knife target would be exposed by bulldogging the Slug over, like a roped calf, then stabbing its underbelly, but that would also create the biggest commotion. The pseudopod hatch at the armor’s midriff was smaller than a saucer. The approach would have to be like cutting a sentry’s throat from behind.

The Spooks say a Slug Warrior has no independent cognition, no sense of self, because it’s simply part of a single, physically separated organism. The Slugs killed my mother, killed the great love of my life, killed more friends than I could count. So I should have been spoiling to gut this one like a trout.

Still, the knife tip trembled in my hand, neither from cold nor fear. My years had taught me how empty this universe was, and how unique life, any life, was within it. Even Slugs.

I stopped, drew a breath, and waited a heartbeat until my hand steadied. Another thing my years had taught me was not to wax philosophic during knife fights.

I paused again a yard behind the Warrior. It stood, the base of its armor buried in drifted snow, six feet long from armor crest to tapered tail, and five feet high. Its armor shone black in the storm’s dimness, the transverse plates on its back overlapping like an armadillo’s. Its pseudopod wrapped its rifle’s peculiar grip. Peculiar to a human hand, at least.

The Warrior swayed, more than the wind required, as though listening to music.

I switched the knife to my natural hand, took a deep breath, then lunged.

FIFTEEN

MY RIGHT ARM wrapped the Slug’s midsection, where a human infantry soldier’s breastplate would have been. The Warrior lurched, thrashed, and twisted the mag-rail rifle toward me. In a fight, a single maggot’s no more effective than a ten-year-old throwing a tantrum.

My gloved fingers found the lip of the armor’s anterior opening, and I stabbed the knife in with my opposite hand.

There was no need for accuracy, no slashing the windpipe or carotid artery, because Slugs had neither. When punctured, they gushed like squeezed grapes and dropped like sacks.

Howard panted up behind me, the Ganglion bouncing feathery in his wake, like a balloon on a string.

I stared down at the Slug, an armored banana against green-stained whiteness, and toed it. In these few seconds, the dead Warrior’s lifeblood had jellied the snow.

Howard was already past me. I ran, caught up, and dug in the snow for the other rope trailing from the Ganglion’s motility plate. The wind buffeted the floating saucer, but its own leveling systems whined, and kept it upright, as we towed it.

Zzee. Zzee.

I heard mag rifle fire behind us, over the wind. But nothing whizzed close.

Howard said, “The Warriors are reacting without coordination! We really did isolate them from command and control.”

“They won’t come after us, once the storm breaks?”

Howard waved his free hand as we pulled our prisoner through the snow. “They will. But in a disorganized way.”

“Howard, twenty thousand against two don’t have to be organized.”

“It may not come to that.”

“Why not?”

“We could freeze to death first.”

I put both hands on my rope and picked up the pace.

Five hours later, the average wind speed had increased to one hundred thirty miles per hour, and we were reduced to crawling at, according to my ’Puter, a half mile per hour.

Howard’s Eternads were keeping him warm and hydrated. “We” weren’t going to freeze to death.

However, the heavy that had sheared my armor’s back left me with only my ’Puters. The basic principle of Eternad technology hadn’t changed since the start of the war. The energy of the wearer’s movement charged batteries that ran the suits ’Puters, air-conditioning, heater, and miscellaneous life-support systems. I didn’t miss the air-conditioning, and my exertions plus the armor’s passive insulation kept me warm, though feeling in my fingers and toes had gone AWOL hours ago.

My biggest problem was the loss of those miscellaneous life-support systems. The dry cold of a Weichselan blizzard sucked an exercising human dry like he was crossing the Sahara. Scoops on Howard’s boots sucked snow in, melted it, ran it through his purifier, and stored the resultant drinking water.

I had to stop periodically, pack snow into my helmet’s spare barf bag by hand, then tuck it inside my armor until my body heat melted it. The worst of it was that a crate full of Weichsel’s extra-dry powder melted down to just a glass of water.

I had knelt to scoop snow into my bag with ice-cubed fingers. That left Howard, who flunked out of Cub Scouts, on point. He plodded ahead, like a tin Saint Bernard. While I scooped, I watched him, to gauge visibility. By the time he got ten yards away from me, he had faded to a shadow.

I panted into my mike, “Hold up, Howard. Don’t get too far-”

He vanished. The Slug on the saucer, tied to him, disappeared an eye blink later.

SIXTEEN

ONE MINUTE AFTERWARD, I paddled through the powder to the spot where Howard had disappeared so fast that I nearly went over the edge myself.

I jacked my optics and saw Howard, spread-eagled, face-down, fifteen feet below, at the base of a short cliff. The Slug saucer rested alongside him, bottom-up.

“Howard?”

Nothing.

“Howard?”

“I certainly didn’t see that coming!” Howard’s arms and legs flailed, scouring an inadvertent snow angel at the cliff’s base.

“You okay?”

“I think so.”

I picked my way over the cliff lip. Ten feet above Howard, the lip turned under altogether, and I slid off into a