Orphan's Alliance

Book 4: Jason Wander

by Robert Buettner

Genres: Action & Adventure; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Hard Science Fiction; Military Sci-Fi

Synopsis

From Arthur C. Clarke Award-nominated author Ken MacLeod, an action-packed space opera told against a backdrop of interstellar drone warfare, virtual reality, and an A.I. revolution. In deep space, ruthless corporations vie for control of scattered mining colonies, and war is an ever-present threat. Led by Seba, a newly sentient mining reboot, an AI revolution grows. Fighting them is Carlos, a grunt who is reincarnated over and over again to keep the "freeboots" in check. But he's not sure whether he's on the right side. Against a backdrop of interstellar drone combat Carlos and Seba must either find a way to rise above the games their masters are playing or die. And even dying might not be the end of it. The Corporation Wars The Corporation Wars: Dissidence The Corporation Wars: Insurgence The Corporation Wars: Emergence

Release date: October 10, 2008

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 324

Sample

ONE

“MOUSETRAP’S VISIBLE NOW, GENERAL.” My command sergeant major taps my armored shoulder, points through the Emerald River’s forward observation blister, and my heart skips. The two of us float shoulder-to-shoulder in infantry Eternads, like unhelmeted frogs in a gravityless fish bowl. Ord has been a jump ahead of me since he was my drill sergeant in Basic.

With my gauntlet’s snot pad, I mop condensed breath off the observation blister’s Synquartz, and cold stings through the glove. Fifty thousand frigid miles away spins Mousetrap. In two hours, on my orders, a hundred thousand kids plucked from fourteen worlds will arrive down there, innocent. None will leave innocent. Too many won’t leave at all.

The gray pebble Ord points to has just orbited out from a vast orange ball’s shadow. In the red sunlight that bathes the gas giant planet and its tiny moon, Mousetrap tumbles as small and as wrinkled as a peach pit.

Ord grunts. “The real estate hardly looks worth the price, does it, sir?”

“Location, location, location, Sergeant Major.” Mousetrap is the only habitable rock near the interstellar cross-road that linchpins the Human Union’s fourteen planets.

That’s why the Union fortified Mousetrap. That’s why the Slugs took it away from us. And that’s why we arrived here today to take Mousetrap back, or die trying. “We” are history’s deadliest armada, carrying history’s best army. My army.

I’m Jason Wander, war orphan, high-school dropout, Lieutenant General, Commanding, Third Army of the Human Union. And infantryman until the day I die. That day is now thirty years closer than when I enlisted at the start of the Slug War, in 2037.

Ord and I push back from the observation blister’s forward wall, to head aft to our troop transport. I glance at the Time-to-Drop Countdown winking off my wrist ’Puter. In two hours, Ord and I will be aboard a first-wave assault transport when compressed air thumps it out of one of Emerald River’s thirty-six launch bays. Kids embarked aboard Emerald River, and aboard the fleet’s other ships, will go with us.

Ord sighs. “A hundred thousand GIs don’t buy what they used to, General.”

Whump.

Emerald River’s vast hull shudders, tumbling Ord and me against the observation blister’s cold curve.

Hssss.

A thousand feet aft from our perch here at Emerald River’s bow, thirty-six launch bay hatches reseal as one.

A tin voice from the Bridge crackles in my earpiece. “All elements away.”

I turn to Ord, wide eyed. “What the hell, Sergeant Major?”

Ord turns his palms up, shakes his head.

Through ebony space, thirty-six sparks flash past us, from the bays that ring Emerald River’s midriff. In a blink, they disperse toward Mousetrap, leaving behind thirty-six silent, red streaks of drifting chemical flame.

For one heartbeat, Emerald River forms the hub that anchors those thirty-six fading, translucent wheel spokes. It is as though we spin at the center of a mute, exploding firework. To our port, starboard, dorsal and ventral, identical fireworks blossom, gold, green, blue, purple, as the Fleet’s other cruisers launch their own craft, each ship trailing its mothership’s tracer color.

I blink at the vanished silhouettes. The Army I command wasn’t scheduled to launch for Mousetrap for two hours. We expect that we will take lumps by landing with no aerial prep. And more lumps when we start digging the Slugs out of Mousetrap, one hole at a time. But landing without prep is the only way we can avoid killing the human POWs that the Slugs hold on Mousetrap.

But what I just saw fly by weren’t chunky troop transports. They were sleek Scorpions, their bomb racks packed with liquid fire. The ships that made that fireworks display weren’t just an aerial prep force. The formations I just saw were powerful enough to incinerate every living thing on Mousetrap, Slug and human alike, three times over.

Before Ord and I paddled up to this observation blister for a final, weightless look at our objective, I inspected every launch bay myself. One of our troop transports filled every bay. But one order from the Bridge could rotate troop transports out of the bays in fifteen minutes, like cartridges in old-fashioned revolvers, and replace them with bombers.

I’m already torpedoing my weightless body hand-over-hand down the rungs that line the cruiser’s center tube, back toward the Cruiser’s Bridge. “If those bombers fry Mousetrap, our POWs die.” Mousetrap’s POWs are simple grunts, mostly, and that swells my throat even more.

But Army commanders are supposed to consider the Big Picture, as well as their kids. I shake my head at Ord. “The Outworlds already oppose this war. If this fleet kills Outworld POWs, the Union’s dead. If the Union dies, the Slugs will wipe mankind out. Did Mimi lose her mind?”

Ord paddles up alongside me, so fast that the slipstream seems to flatten the gray GI brush he calls hair. He shakes his head. “Admiral Ozawa wouldn’t launch bombers, sir. She wouldn’t even consider it without consulting you, first. But there is a ranking civilian authority aboard this ship. If he ordered her to do it, she couldn’t—”

The two of us tuck our legs, then swing into the first side tube like trapeze artists. Then we ’frog along toward the Bridge, gaining weight as we move away from the rotating Cruiser’s centerline.

“I know. But I warned them, Sergeant Major. That Alliance was a deal with the devil.” Lieutenant Generals don’t have tempers, especially while commanding invasions. But Ord and I are alone in the passage tube, and I’m angry enough that I could punch my fist against the tube’s wall until my knuckles bleed.

Not because our allies are cruel and stupid. Thirty years of war have taught me how to beat cruelty and stupidity. I pound out my frustration because my godson has become one of them. Worse, I know my godson is the only officer in this fleet who could be leading those bombers.

Ord closes two hands over my clenched fist. “Sir, Churchill said if Hitler invaded hell, Churchill would at least make a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.”

I know the quote. I talked myself into believing Churchill had the right attitude, so I could smile while diplomats pattered their white-gloved hands together, applauding a deal that I should have known would bring us to this. An infantryman’s life is talking himself into things that may kill him, or kill others.

Crack.

A side-tube pressure valve releases, like a rifle shot, and my heart skips. Just like it skipped four years ago, when this mess started.

TWO

CRACK.

I flinched, though my head was already a foot below the trench lip as the rifle round screamed yards above us. My mouth went dry. The bullet didn’t care that I was a non-combatant observing someone else’s war. It didn’t care that my Pentagon desk was light-years away from Tressel. It most certainly didn’t care that I had already paid my dues as an infantry grunt. But if the bullet knew what its side was in for tomorrow at dawn, it would’ve kept right on going, out of this theater of operations.

I tripped on a trench floor board, and splashed muddy water over my boots and Plasteel-armored knees.

Alongside me, Brigadier Audace Planck didn’t even blink at the tall shot, just rolled his iron-colored eyes beneath prematurely gray brows. “That’s one Iridian round that won’t hurt anyone.”

His shoulders filled the simplified cloth uniform of an army too long at war, while mine hid under Plasteel plates that his planet’s armorers wouldn’t dream of for a century. “Stay on your feet, Jason. Snipers can’t touch us. But that water might kill you.”

The Tressel Barrens’ water contained plenty to kill a man, even before three years of trench warfare. Tetras, a mixed bag of flat-headed, blubbery reptiles and amphibians bigger than swamp rats and dumber than frogs, populated the Barrens. The tetras’ intestinal bacteria, introduced into the brown soup of the great swamp by the usual means, spawned virulent dysentery in humans. However, tetra crap didn’t bother the crocodile-sized, aquatic scorpions that patrolled the mangroves, feasting on tetras as they sunned themselves on rotted logs.

The Barrens were a hundred thousand square miles of brackish coastal swamp that had mired the Tressen army when its General Staff tried to maneuver fifty divisions through the Barrens, to outflank the fortification the Iridians called the West Wall. Tressen and Iridian motorized vehicles could barely negotiate the Barrens, bogging down worse than 1900s French caissons and German trucks bogged in the mud of Flanders, a century earlier and light years away.

Now a million stalemated human infantry faced one another, in trenches separated by a hundred yards of shrapnel-scoured mud. The trenches zig-zagged from the north end of the West Wall to the sea, wherever the spongy ground was solid enough for GIs to dig.

Tetras didn’t sun often in the Barrens. The dug-in GIs couldn’t bail their holes fast enough to keep the daily rains from washing dysenteric slime, their own feces, and the occasional monster scorpion, back into the trenches that sheltered the troops from shrapnel and bullets.

Planck and I pressed ourselves back against the trench wall as a pasty-faced squad, heads down and rifles slung muzzles-down against the rain, limped toward us in sodden boots.

My armor probably puzzled them, but when they glanced up and saw Planck, every kid straightened, bug-eyed, and saluted.

One kid smiled, another waved Planck a weary thumbs up. Planck smiled back, patted each kid on the shoulder as they passed.

I chinned up my audio gain so I could hear them whisper to one another once they got a few yards down the trench.

“Did you see? That was Quicksilver, himself!”

In the war’s early days, Audace Planck’s Raiders had slipped around and through larger forces like mercury rolling on glass. The silver-haired young officer, whose given name meant “the daring one,” was every Field Marshal’s darling because he leapt where they wouldn’t dare. He was every mudfoot’s hero because he stepped alongside them, where they had to. Even to his enemies, “Quicksilver” was as legendary for his grace in victory as for his mercurial brilliance.

“No. Quicksilver in the mud at the front?”

“My brother was a Raider. He said, ‘Where you find Planck, there you find the front.’ ”

Another kid asked, “What was that with Quicksilver, in the crab shell armor?”

“Motherworlder.”

“They’re real, then?”

Their voices died as the trench zagged them out of sight.

In the seconds while I eavesdropped, Planck had hopped up on the firing step carved into the trench’s forward wall, rested his elbows on the lip sandbags, and raised brass field glasses to his eyes. “Let’s see whether the Iridians will be as surprised to see us as those boys were.”

I mounted the firing step alongside Planck, and wide angled my optics to view the shell-pocked, mined, and concertina-wired mud strip between the trench lines.

Nothing stirred but dirty orange tape, twisting in the wind atop aiming stakes driven crooked into the mud.

Gunners didn’t really need the stakes. When either side sent kids over the top, targets were too numerous to miss. And afterward, when the survivors on both sides crept out to retrieve the dead, the gunners held fire. Not from altruism. Bloating corpses attracted scavengers, polluted the water worse, and stank.

Beyond no-man’s land lay the Iridian lines. There, sentry’s periscope heads swiveled above the opposite trench lips like bored cobras. A slow tune, played on an Iridian bone pipe by some GI, drifted to us.

Under my helmet, hair stood on my neck. The Iridians had no idea. Neither did the Tressens alongside us in these trenches. Outside of the Tressen General Staff and political leadership, only Planck’s troops far behind us, Planck, and I, knew that dawn, tomorrow would change this world.

Five years ago, once we deciphered the Slugs’ C-drive, Earthlings started dropping out of the sky onto the human populations of the Outworlds like Tressel, where the Slugs had transplanted them from Earth 30,000 years ago. For presumably backward long-lost cousins, the Outworlders took us in stride. In stride compared to the panic you would have expected, if you watched the alien invasion stories that Holowood cranked out in the years before the Blitz. Of course, after the Blitz, holos about aliens were no longer escapism.

I don’t know whether “race memory” is real. But the Cultural Behaviorist Spooks said the Outworlds accepted the truth of a home world their ancestors had left millennia before because the story was already embedded in the Outworlds’ myths. And then, as the Spooks put it, our arrivals “validated the myth by empirically verifiable demonstration.” I suppose if Jesus landed on the White House lawn, even agnostics like me would accept him as soon as He validated His credentials with a miracle.

At dawn tomorrow, Audace Planck and Tressen would be on the good side of a miracle courtesy of Earth’s politicians.

By 2059 Earth standards, Tressel’s warring great powers, Iridia and Tressen, were incompetent, despotic, and as benign as rabid pit bulls. And each had its teeth sunk in the other’s throat. Earth’s policy makers had decided to stop the fight before both of them bled to death. Unfortunately, that meant one dog would get petted while the other got kicked.

Earth needed allies to win the Pseudocephalopod War, and couldn’t be picky. If the Slugs flood hell, the politicians will send the devil a bucket.

The daily rain began in a rumble, coursing in instant waterfalls down the already-sodden trench walls. Drops splattered into my helmet through my open faceplate, then ran icy down my neck, and puddled above the neck seal. Aud jumped down off the firing step, motioned me to follow, then sloshed fifteen yards further down the yard-wide trench. He stopped at a canvas flap, black with rot, that hung over a dugout doorway cut in the trench wall. Planck ushered me past him, and I ducked beneath a hand-lettered sign that read, “Infirmary.”

We stepped into a leaking, lantern-lit, shoulder-high room. The roots of trees, long-since decapitated, whiskered its mud walls, and it stunk of gangrene, like an open sore on the world. The infirmary contained a camp table, rough racks tall enough to lift a body above the floor’s ankle-deep puddles, and nothing else vaguely helpful to the infirm. My eyes dilated to match the flickering light of a single lantern on the table, while they watered at the stench.

Planck breathed through his mouth, then his eyes darted beneath bushy brows below his helmet. “I’m a soldier and a Tressen, Jason. So I appreciate what the Motherworld is doing for Tressen. But if your Motherworld had decided to get these kids out of these holes by tilting toward the Iridians, I might . . .”

Planck stepped to a canvas-bagged field telephone on the table, its cable curling down into the mud, out into the trench, then back two thousand yards to staging clearings. There his infantry waited, behind three hundred tarps that hid three hundred electrobus-sized objects from rain and from prying eyes. He cranked the phone, then spoke into its handset. “Go.”

My eyebrows flickered, and my heart skipped. A good adviser knows how much he doesn’t know. Aud knew his troops, his enemy, and his planet in ways I never could. So I kept my mouth shut, even though Aud had just launched the offensive that would decide the fate of this planet sixteen hours early. I also kept my mouth shut because it was a brilliant, if risky, stroke. Average generals don’t accelerate offensives to jump off during driving rain. That’s why average opponents get surprised by generals who aren’t average. I sighed. What happened next wasn’t going to be miraculous for too many GIs, on both sides of the wire. But it would be a miracle, nonetheless.

By the time the two of us ducked back out into the trench and the drumming rain, a growing drone thrummed behind our trench line like hell’s bumblebees.

THREE

WE BOTH SCRAMBLED onto the slick firing step, this time with our backs to no-man’s land, and peered toward the Tressen rear. Shapes glided out of the rain no faster than infantry could trot, like black ships parting fog. The Kodiaks’ engines shook the ground beneath our boots now, as the Earth-made hovertanks slid toward us.

Audace Planck had lived up to his name again. The daring one was launching the biggest assault in three years when nobody expected it, foregoing artillery prep. His own troops and commanders might be more surprised than their enemy.

I turned to Planck. “I know the rain cover will enhance surprise. But you and I were supposed to be with the lead squadron when the offensive jumped off.”

He shrugged. “If subordinate commanders are trained properly, they take appropriate initiative. We’ll hitch a ride as your machines pass over this line.”

I cocked my head. “Maybe.”

Audace Planck had grasped the hovertank’s potential like Rommel had grasped Panzers. But he couldn’t grasp its nuts and bolts. Aud had seen his first Lockheed Kodiak sixty-one days ago. The ground effects and Nano’Puters that made a Kodiak tick were as black magic to a Tressen like him as the Slugs’ starship technologies were to me. Hitching a ride wouldn’t be easy.

The Kodiaks slid toward us, riding cushions of downforced air, oblivious to the varied substrate below them, in this case swamp water, mud, and outcropped rock. Their wedged prow armor dripped rain, which their downdraft beat into ground fog, which swirled around their ventral skirting.

In radar-absorbent midnight black, their cannon-snouted turrets hunting left then right, the hovertanks would seem like ghost elephants to the Iridians. Actually, Tressel’s transplanted humans couldn’t imagine elephants. Tressel’s evolution hadn’t yet produced mammals, or even land animals bigger than hogs. That would make bus-sized hovertanks all the more nightmarish to the GIs huddled in the opposing trenches.

Kodiaks were largely overkill here. Iridia had no radar for a Kodiak’s outer shell to damp, no smart rounds for its electronic countermeasures to spoof. Tactical Observation Transports flitted above the onrushing formation, like tickbirds flitting above charging rhinos. But the TOTs intercepted no encrypted burst transmissions. Both armies were barely accustomed to the telephone. The Kodiaks brought to this party what armored formations from Hannibal’s elephants to Guderian’s Panzers brought: shock power and mobility. Here multiplied by a quantum technologic leap that would seem supernatural.

The squad that had passed us . . .