Orphan's Triumph

I tug Howard deeper into the cave’s shadows and whisper, “Whatever they smell, we can’t see. The wind’s coming from upslope, behind us.”

As I speak, Howard clicks his rifle’s magazine into his palm and replaces it with a completely full one. I’ve known him since the first weeks of the Blitz, nearly three decades now, and Colonel Hibble is a geek, all right. But when the chips are down, he’s as infantry as I am.

Outside, the wolves retreat another fifty yards from the mouth of our cave as a shadow crosses it.

My heart pounds, and I squeeze off my rifle’s grip safety.

Eeeeerr.

The shadow shuffles past the cave mouth. Another replaces it, then more. As they stride into the light, the shadows resolve into trumpeting, truck-sized furballs the color of rust.

Howard whispers, “Mammoth.”

The herd bull strides toward the wolf pack, bellowing, head back to display great curved tusks. The wolves retreat again.

Howard says, “If we shot a mammoth out there, the carcass would explain the wolf pack. It could make an excellent distraction.”

He’s right. I raise my M40 and sight on the nearest cow, but at this range I could drop her with a hip shot.

Then I pause. “The carcass might attract those big cats.” Weichsel’s fauna parallels Pleistocene Earth’s in many ways, but our Neolithic forefathers never saw saber-toothed snow leopards bigger than Bengal tigers.

Really, my concern with Howard’s idea isn’t baiting leopards. Saber teeth can’t scuff Eternads any more than wolf teeth can. I just don’t want to shoot a mammoth.

It sounds absurd. I can’t count the Slugs that have died at my hand or on my orders in this war. And over my career I’ve taken human lives, too, when the United States in its collective wisdom has lawfully ordered me to.

It’s not as though any species on Weichsel is endangered, except us humans, of course. The tundra teems with life, a glacial menagerie. Weichsel wouldn’t miss one mammoth.

So why do I rationalize against squeezing my trigger one more time?

I can’t deny that war callouses a soldier to brutality. But as I grow older, I cherish the moments when I can choose not to kill.

I lower my rifle. “Let’s see what happens.”

By midmorning, events moot my dilemma. The wolves isolate a lame cow from the mammoth herd, bring her down two hundred yards from us, and begin tearing meat from her woolly flanks like bleeding rugs. The mammoth herd stands off, alternately trumpeting in protest at the gore-smeared wolves, then bulldozing snow with their sinuous tusks to get at matted grass beneath. For both species, violence is another day at the office.

Howard and I withdraw inside the cave, to obscure our visual and infrared signatures, and sit opposite our prisoner.

The Ganglion just floats there, animated only by the vibrations of its motility plate. After thirty years of war, all I know about the blob is that it is my enemy. I have no reason to think it knows me any differently. For humans and Slugs, like the mammoths and wolves, violence has become another day at the office.

Howard, this blob, and I are on the cusp of changing that. If I can get us off Weichsel alive. At the moment, getting out alive requires me to freeze my butt off in a hole, contemplating upcoming misery and terror. After a lifetime in the infantry, I’m used to that.

I pluck an egg-sized stone off the cave floor and turn it in my hand like Yorick’s skull. The stone is a gem- quality diamond. Weichsel’s frozen landscape is as full of diamonds as the Pentagon is full of underemployed lieutenant generals. Which is what I was when this expedition-become-fiasco started, three months ago, light- years away in a very different place.

TWO

“HAS SHE SHOT ANYBODY YET?” I picked my way through the scrub and scree of Bren’s Stone Hills, wheezing. The planetologists said the Stone Hills were analogous to Late Cretaceous cordillera on Earth, which didn’t make them easier to climb.

The infantry captain alongside me, burdened by his M40 and his Eternad armor, wasn’t even puffing. “No, General. But I’d keep my head down. She’s not very big, but she’s the best shot in my company.”

We ran, crouched, as we crested the ridge, to a sniper team prone on a rock ledge. Below us the Stone Hills dropped away to the east to the High Plains. In the early morning, moons hung in the sky like ghosts. One glistened white, the other blood red, with a drifting pterosaur silhouetted against it.

Six hundred yards downslope, pocketed in rocks but a clear and easy shot from our high ground position, a figure in camo utilities crouched among boulders. A hundred yards downslope from the soldier, a dozen Casuni tribesmen, sun glinting off their helmets and breastplates, half surrounded her, screened from her by scrub. Each Casuni carried four single-shot black-powder pistols huge enough to bring down a small dinosaur, and none would hesitate to use them. Really, the standoff just looked like a dot sprinkle to me, because I was wearing utilities myself, without the optics of Eternad armor’s helmet.

The sniper’s spotter had his helmet faceplate up and peered through a native brass spyglass. He passed the glass to me and pointed. “The Blutos chased her up there at sunset yesterday, General. You can see the snapper curled up alongside her.”

Through the spyglass, the dozen burly, black-bearded Casuni looked small. But the distant soldier looked about twelve years old, gaunt, with hair like straw and big eyes. Her file said she was twenty-one, a private fresh out of Earthside Advanced Infantry Training, with just two weeks on Bren. The snapper, its hatchling down as gray as the surrounding rock, was already the size of an adult wolf.

I rolled onto my side, toward the captain. “What set her off?”

“Last week bandits ambushed the convoy that was shipping replacements out here from Marinus. Her loader bought the farm. He’d been together with her since AIT. She took it hard.”

“He?”

“Nothing like that, sir. Infantry can be close without-”

I raised my palm. “I didn’t mean that, Captain. When I was a spec four, I was a loader for a female gunner. Just sounded familiar.”

The captain wrinkled his brow one millimeter. He was a West Pointer, and the notion that the commander in chief of offworld ground forces was a high-school dropout grunt typically ruffled Pointers’ feathers. But maybe his discomfort grew from the way I said it. Because I felt a catch in my throat. That long-ago female gunner and I had grown infantry-close, and in the years later, before her death, as close as family.

The captain continued, “An adult female snapper dug under a perimeter fence and maimed three Casuni at the sluice before the security Casunis brought her down. The private down there found the female’s cub wandering outside the wire. The private’s trying to make a pet of it. But the Casuni say it’s sacrilege to let the cub live.”

Grown snappers are ostrich-sized, beaked carnosaurs. They’re quicker than two-legged cobras, with toxic saliva and the sunny disposition of cornered wolverines. A snapper’s beak slices the duckbill-hide wall of a Casuni yurt like Kleenex, and Casuni mothers have lost babies to snappers for centuries. Nothing personal. Snappers are predators, and human babies are easy protein in a hard land. But in Casuni culture, even Satan is better regarded than snappers.

I sighed. “No animal-rights activists here.” Over the thirty thousand years since the Slugs snatched primitive Earthlings to slave on planets like Bren, humans had adapted to some strange environments, none harsher than the High Plains of Bren. The Casuni had evolved into flint-hard nomads, following migrating herds that resembled parallel-evolved duckbilled dinosaurs, across wind-scoured plains that resembled Siberia. I turned to the captain. “Why haven’t you puffed her?” On Earth, any suburban police department could neutralize a hostage situation by sneaking a roach-sized micro ’bot up close to the hostage taker, then snoozing the hostage taker with a puff of Nokout gas.