Orphan's Journey

Book 3: Jason Wander

by Robert Buettner

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

Synopsis

In the years since the last Slug War, Jason's command style hasn't made him any friends in the Army. Now, in an effort to keep him out of trouble, the Army has sent Jason to the vast, Earth-orbiting resort called New Moon. At the core of this enormous space station is a starship, a relic from the last war. When a test run of the ship goes wrong, Jason, along with a handful of others, will be torn from orbit and thrust into space. Now, stranded on an alien planet, Jason realizes that not only are his friends are looking to him for rescue, but an entire planet sees him as their only hope.

Release date: April 1, 2008

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 417

Sample

ONE

TEN YARDS SEAWARD from where I stand on the beach, the new-risen moons backlight our assault boats, outbound toward six fathoms. Beyond six fathoms lies hell.

Wind bleeds oily smoke back over me from lanterns roped to a thousand gunwales. Fifty soldiers’ churning paddles whisker each boat’s flanks. The boats crawl up wave crests, then dive down wave troughs, like pitching centipedes. For miles to my left and right, the lantern line winds like a smoldering viper.

I’m Jason Wander. Earthling, war orphan, high school dropout, infantryman, field-promoted Major General. And, on this sixth of August, 2056, accidental Commander of the largest amphibious assault since Eisenhower hurled GIs across the English Channel.

New century. New planet. Old fear.

An assault boat’s Platoon Leader stands bent-kneed amid his paddlers, waving his boat’s lantern above his head. He shouts to me, “We gladly die for you!”

I salute him, because I’m too choked to shout back. And shout what? That only fools die gladly? That he’d better sit down before his own troops shoot him for a fool? That someone should shoot me for one?

At my side, my Command Sergeant Major whispers, “They won’t shoot him, Sir.” I blink. Ord has read my mind since he was my Drill Sergeant in Basic.

The Bren may not shoot one another tonight, but the first Bren proverb we translated was “Blood feud is bread.” For centuries, Bren has suffered under the thumb—well, the pseudopod—Slugs are man-sized, armored maggots that have no thumbs—of the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony. Still, every Clan midwife gifts every male baby with a whittled battle axe. Not to overthrow the Slugs. To whack human neighbors who worship the wrong god.

But if the newly unified Clans fail at sunrise, the Slugs will peel humanity off this planet like grape skin. Because we four Earthlings arrived.

Did I say “unified”? Ha. We should’ve segregated every boat. Mixed Clans may brain each other with their paddles before the first Slug shows. The final toast at Clan funerals is “May paradise spare you from allies.”

Packed into twenty square miles of beach dunes, the Second and Third Assault Waves’ cook fires prick the night. Smells of wood smoke and the dung of reptilian cavalry mounts drift to me on the shifting wind, along with Clan songs.

Yet twenty-two miles across the sea, the Slugs sleep.

Actually, no human knows whether Slugs sleep. But I have bet this civilization’s life that tonight the Slugs have left the cross-channel beaches undefended. It seems a smart bet. No boatman in five hundred years has crossed the Sea of Hunters at full moons, and lived.

I chin my helmet optics. Two heartbeats thump before I get a focus. A mile out, faint wakes vee the water. The first kraken are rising, like trout sensing skittering water bugs.

Sea monsters mightier than antique locomotives are about to splinter those first boats, like fists pounding straw. But troops that survive the crossing should surprise the Slugs. Surprised or not, the Slugs will still be the race that slaughtered sixty million Earthlings, as indifferently as mouthwash drowning germs.

Waves explode against boat prows. Windblown brine spits through my open helmet visor, needling my cheeks. My casualty bookie says that, even before the moons set, four hundred boats and crews will founder. Because I ordered them out there. The brine hides my tears.

Is my plan brilliant? Hannibal crossing the Alps? Mac-Arthur landing at Inchon? I swallow. “What if I blundered, Sergeant Major?”

Ord nods back his helmet optics, then peers through binoculars older than he is. “Sir, Churchill said that war is mostly a catalogue of blunders.”

Ord told me exactly the same thing as we lay in the snow of Tibet, three years ago. If I’d listened, this ratscrew could’ve been avoided.

TWO

“SLIDERS, SIR!” Ord gripped my elbow and whispered over Himalayan wind as thin and sharp as ice picks. We lay together, hidden belly-down behind a storm-scoured boulder, as he pointed. A half mile below us, six Chinese hovertanks slid on their air cushions out of the tree line that bounded the Tibetan valley.

I shuddered, squeezed my suit temp up a degree against the gusts, then boosted my helmet optics’ magnification. Each Chinese hovertank’s commander swayed waist-deep in his open turret hatch. Chin high, each Slider’s commander was goggled and masked against snow fog billowing from each hovertank’s skirts as it slid across the snow.

I said, “They’re unbuttoned!”

Ord snorted. “In thirty seconds they’ll regret that.”

Engines droning like distant bumblebees, the hovertanks slid down the narrow valley single file.

I looked ahead of the armored column to where the Free Tibet Forces rebels we were advising lay hidden beneath snow-piled tarps. In fifteen seconds, the hovertanks’ light-armored flanks would come in range of our rebels’ old-but-deadly Rocket Propelled Grenades. When the ambush sprung, the infantry squad inside each hovertank would charge out, and our little Tibetan rebels would hose their Chinese tormentors with small-arms fire. Just the way we taught them.

Ord thumbed his old binoculars’ focus, then swore. “They’re riding high!”

I jerked my optics back to the hovertank column. The Chinese Leopard is just a bootleg-copied Lockheed Kodiak with a cheaper, manual cannon. Like the Lockheed, and every other Nano’Puter-stabilized hovertank, a Leopard slides over snow, swamp, or prairie faster than old, tracked tanks ever could. Like the Lockheed, the Leopard’s ass-end droops when its infantry squad is aboard. These sliders didn’t droop.

My heart skipped. “Then where are their—?”

Ord was way ahead of me, as ever. He pointed behind our rebel ambush party. Scurrying gray against the snow, dismounted Chinese infantry popped, one after another, over the knife-edged ridge behind the unsuspecting rebels.

On my advice, the rebel commander, Tensing, hadn’t covered his troops’ rear. Why waste combat power? The ridge’s backside dropped away in half-mile cliffs that I assumed were impassable. Like the Romans assumed the Alps were impassable to Hannibal. Like North Korea assumed the Inchon mud flats were impassable to Mac-Arthur. I shook my head. “With an adviser like me, Tibet doesn’t need enemies.”

Somehow, the Chinese had seen our rebels preparing our ambush, and had dropped off the Chinese infantry behind our rebels to ambush the ambush.

Officially, it wasn’t “our” ambush. Since mankind won the Slug War, global unity hadn’t crumbled back to “Cold War,” but U.S.-China relations were frosty. Within the borders of what China laughingly called the Tibet Autonomous Region, Ord and I supplied clandestine advice and back-channel equipment to Tibetan rebels. But combat participation was forbidden. Officially.

The hovertanks stopped short of the kill zone.

I chinned my radio to our rebels’ frequency. “Mouse, this is Ox—”

Nothing but static.

Hovertank turrets swiveled toward the hidden rebels.

“How did the Chinese know—” I asked.

Ord craned his neck at the blue sky. “Overhead surveillance. Must be.”

“The Chinese don’t use overhead ’Bots.”

Ord sighed. “So the Spooks claimed.”

Chinese hovertank cannons chattered, but the rounds thumped high and wide of the rebels.

Hidden beneath their tarps, our rebels returned fire with RPGs.

I pounded my fist on rock. “No! They aren’t close enough!”

The ancient rockets died fifty yards short of the hovertanks, then burrowed into the snow.

The RPGs’ back blast flapped the tarps and geysered snow, revealing our rebels’ positions.

Cannons twitched as hovertank gunners adjusted aim toward the firing signatures.

The rebel commander already had his troops up and running. Clanking rocket tubes slung across their backs, they ran crouched behind a snow drift that concealed them from the hovertanks. At the drift’s end lay secondary firing positions, close enough for our rebels’ RPGs to reach the hovertanks.

The hovertanks’ second volley thundered harmlessly into our rebels’ emptied foxholes.

Ord pumped his fist. “Good boy, Tensing!”

But Tensing still hadn’t seen the infantry slipping ever-closer behind our rebels. The Chinese outnumbered his band six to one. He was brave and bright, but he had been the village schoolteacher until six months ago.

In minutes, the Chinese infantry would scramble far enough downslope to slaughter our rebels before they could get off a shot.

“Mouse this is Ox. Over.” Static answered.

I swore. “Why can’t we smuggle them decent radios, Sergeant Major?”

Ord blinked.

A handy thing about rank is subordinates have to answer your rhetorical questions. During the second that Ord was distracted, I levered myself up on one elbow, and locked my rifle into my GATr’s weapon bay.

“Sir? You can’t—”

Crack.

A cannon round whistled toward one rebel lurching behind the drift. Smiling Lobsang had always been a step slower than the others, limping on an ankle broken in childhood.

Whump.

The Chinese round bored through the snow drift, struck Lobsang’s chest, a Golden Beebe of a shot, then exploded. Lobsang became a twelve-foot-wide red-fog umbrella, drifting slowly on the wind.

My head snapped back inside my helmet, so hard that my optics blurred.

I breathed deep.

Ord whispered, “When I buy the farm, I want a quick sale, too.”

I thumbed the cover off my GATr’s starter button.

“You can’t go down there, Sir. We’re not legally in-country.”

“Let them die? Because I blundered?”

“War is a catalogue of blunders, Sir.”

“Tensing’s wife is pregnant. Did you know that?”

“Tensing knew the risks just like we did. He could have stayed home drinking buttered tea with his wife. But he chose to fight.”

“When I quartered with Tensing, he and his wife drank their tea without butter. I found out later they gave it all to me. Now I return the favor by doing nothing?”

A half mile below, the Chinese infantry unslung their weapons.

Ord laid his hand on my Plasteel forearm gauntlet, and shook his head. His gray eyes softened, but didn’t blink. “I understand. But we can’t, Sir. Rules of Engagement.”

“I know the Rules. No shooting. Unless we’re shot at first.” The first shot of the Slug War killed the remaining half of my parents. If the Chinese killed Tensing, and identified his body, his wife would be reeducated. After graduation, the heads of reeducated Tibetans showed up on roadside poles. Was I going to let Tensing’s baby become an orphan, too?

I pressed my GATr’s starter, then twisted the handgrip. Instantly, instead of lying on my belly on a Plasteel slab in the snow, I was floating on that slab above Ord, and above the rock that had hidden us. I looked like a body-armored kid, belly-flopped on the sled from hell. The GATr’s ’Puter bleeped in my earpiece, then said, “Maximum recommended altitude two feet. Current altitude seven feet.”

A Special Operations ground-effect assault transport rides on an air cushion, just like a recreational ground- effect toboggan a teenager might rent at Aspen or Malibu. Nano’Puter stabilization revolutionized ground-effect vehicles, from toboggans to hovertanks, like headlights revolutionized night driving. But a GATr is lots more. With its supertuned engine, Carbon9 chassis, and ThinkLink, its price would buy a pre-Blitz condominium.

GATrs also run as silent as field mice, unless the operator bypasses the suppressor. I toed the bypass, and my sled bellowed like a rutting moose. The roar echoed clear off the cliffs across the valley.

A GATr skims the ground, presenting a, well, alligator-low target silhouette. But that supertuned engine can blast enough downforce to bounce the sled into the air for a couple seconds, like a pronking antelope.

I blipped the throttle again, and pronked again.

Below, a slider turret traversed, away from the rebels, toward me. Its cannon snout lifted.

I swallowed hard.

Crack.

I flinched, even as the round screamed past, so high that it exploded against the cliff five hundred feet behind us.

I stuck my head over my sled’s side and forced my eyes wide. “Sergeant Major! Those bastards just shot at us!”

Ord, lying on his own GATr, just shook his head and muttered something that included the word “fool.”

I throttled forward, downhill. A GATr’s silhouette is so low that at full throttle over snow, the sled’s own snow spray masks it. The enemy has no idea where it is. Of course, that means the driver behind the windscreen has no idea where he is, either. The GATr Mark II would correct that, but, military production being military production, the Mark II was six months behind schedule.

I shot downhill, my chin a foot above the snow, as blind as justice—but faster.

The ’Puter bleeped. “Maximum recommended speed, eighty miles per hour. Current speed one hundred nine miles per hour.”

I squeezed the handgrips tighter.

With my rifle clamped in the weapon bay, I could fire wherever the GATr pointed. All it took was depressing a trigger in the right handgrip.

I slowed enough so the windscreen cleared itself. Tensing’s rebels had spotted the Chinese infantry, and now ran for their lives. But our rebels were picking their way across a boulder field. The Chinese infantry above them loped over a smooth, wind-bared downslope, and were gaining.

Tensing’s rebels raced on toward the distant trees.

I raced through the Chinese GIs close enough to see their wide-eyed faces.

My light-brigade charge slowed the Chinese as it carried my sled almost to the ridge top.

Meanwhile, Tensing’s rebels beat feet for the trees.

My GATr’s ’Puter scolded, “One hundred twenty-three miles per hour.”

Drive-by-wire Nano’Puters made all-terrain hover vehicles possible, but ’Puters can’t overcome physics, or human stupidity.

I peeked backward over my shoulder, to locate the Chinese.

When I looked forward again, a fridge-sized boulder jutted from the snow ahead. At eighty, even ninety, I might have steered around it.

Pow.

The ground-effect skirt clipped the boulder, and the GATr corkscrewed skyward. A ground-hugging GATr is unhittable. But an airborne GATr becomes a clay pigeon for a slider cannoneer.

I cranked back the throttle, but the GATr floated on above the ridge line, barrel-rolling for endless seconds against the clear Tibetan sky. The slider gunners down in the valley adjusted aim, and fired.

Proximity-fused cannon rounds detonated, the nearest forty feet behind me. My faceplate blackened against the flash, then the shock wave hammered the sled. Shrapnel crackled off my armor like tin rain.

The ridge’s backside was a cirque, the bowl from which a glacier begins. I tumbled through space, beyond the bowl’s vertical end cliff. Below me, boulders on the ice looked smaller than spilled pepper.

The sled spent its momentum, so I hung momentarily in the sky, like a holotoon coyote.

The ’Puter slurred its last words. “Recommended maximum altitude two feet. Current altitude two thousand six hundred twenty feet.”

Silence turned to wind howl, louder and louder as I fell, until I heard nothing. Just as well. I screamed all the way down.

THREE

FOUR MONTHS LATER, I sat in my private room at New Bethesda Naval Hospital, while my Rehab chair flexed the hip and knee joints at both ends of my repaired femurs, and a nebulizing tube circulated antibiotic mist through my regrown lung. Eternad armor kept the fall in Tibet from killing me, Ord kept the Chinese infantry from killing me, and the State Department, of all people, sprung me from China before socialized medicine could kill me.

Things were looking up. Until my therapist decided I was well enough to receive visitors.

My second visitor was Lieutenant General Nathan M. Cobb. General Cobb was my commanding officer. For the second time in my career.

The first time had been fourteen years ago, during the Battle of Ganymede. Then, a Slug round had left him naturally blind, and had left me in temporary charge of saving the human race.

The last four years, tied by his wounds to a Pentagon desk, Nat Cobb dispatched me, and others under him at Army Advisory Command, to romantic foreign climes, all of which smelled like urine.

There we trained partisans—and regular troops—aligned with American interest. Meaning we fomented or unfomented revolutions, coups d’état, or insurrections, wherever the United States deemed justice needed serving. Proving that justice was blind, though Nat Cobb now read faster with his Virtulenses than a naturally sighted English major.

Before General Cobb arrived, my first visitor was a Quartermaster Colonel. Thin and bald, he wore a chestful of non-combat ribbons. He inquired after my health, then commented on the weather.

I said, “What’s up, Colonel?”

He sat down, flicked on a lap display, and kept his eyes on it. “General, you are Commander of the Fourth Military Advisory Team (Detached).”

I nodded. MAT(D)4 was actually Ord and me, but it sounded like the Army of the Potomac.

“Sir, before you enplaned en route to Nepal—”

“Tibet.” I pointed at my slowly flexing legs. “All this happened after the Zoomies pushed us out over Tibet.”

“Tibet is part of the People’s Republic of China, Sir. You weren’t there.”

I rolled my eyes. “Whatever. I don’t suppose you know what happened to a Sherpa named Tensing, then?”

“I have no information on Chinese Nationals, Sir.” The Colonel whispered a recall code and a document flashed up in the air between us.

“Tensing thought he was a Tibetan, not a Chinese National.”

“At all events, before you enplaned en route to—shall we say, your previous duty station—as MAT(D)4’s Commanding Officer, you thumbed for the standard equipment load.” He pointed at a scrolling form.

“Sure. That’s my name under my thumbprint.”

“As you know, what a Commander can’t sign back in, he reimburses the Army for. Normal wear and tear excepted.”

“So?”

The Colonel squirmed in his chair, then red-clicked a serial-numbered document line. “The Inspector General’s office has brought to our attention that a ground-effect attack transport signed out to you may have suffered abnormal wear.”

I tried to shrug. “If you call cliff-diving abnormal.”

He scowled.

I said, “It was a combat loss.”

“You were non-combatants in a non-combat zone.”

My eyes bulged. “Me? Pay? You know what GATrs cost?”

“To the dime.”

My monitor beeps sped up, as I pointed at the IV tube curling from my forearm. “You want my blood? Line up. The test orderly already sucked today’s pint.”

The Colonel switched off his audio recorder. “Take it easy, General. Show’s over.” He leaned forward, elbows on knees. “I had to give you the lecture. Now listen up. Sir.” He was twenty years my senior, but I wore stars. “As of now, you’re thumbed out for that GATr.”

“I never denied that.”

“It won’t officially show up missing until you thumb MAT(D)4’s load back in, and the inventory turns up light.”

“So?”

“Where MAT(D)4 goes, that equipment goes. As long as MAT(D)4 is field-deployed, Quartermaster never inventories. Just keep MAT(D)4 in the field for a year and a half.”

I rolled my eyes. “Stay of execution?”

“Better. The first GATr Mark IIs are already coming off the production lines. In eighteen months, the Mark I you wrecked will be obsolete.” He waved a hand, and his display vanished like a magician’s rabbit. “Once the GATr Mark I is declared obsolete, we’ll write its book value down, and declare ’em all surplus.”

“That’s stupid. They’ll still be top-drawer weapons.”

“Of course. But Military Advisory Command is authorized to resell surplus abroad, cheap. India will buy anything, if it’s cheap enough. India badly wants Tibet as its Himalayan buffer from China. So India will buy, then quietly resell, the GATrs, at India’s cost. Which is?”

“Cheap?”

He smiled. “Who to? To those Tibetan rebels you’re so concerned about. Result? Your rebels will get top-drawer weapons. Coincidentally, your bill for that wrecked GATr will drop to less than a week’s pay.”

I cocked my head. “Why are you doing me favors?”

“I’ve never been shot at. I respect soldiers who have. The Army’s a big family, General.”

“We are a family. Sorry I got pissy.”

He pointed at my rebuilt legs, and smiled. “I’d get pissy too.”

I smiled back. “I respect what you put up with, too, Colonel. Paper pushing’s the hell of command.”

He stood with his display, then raised his eyebrows. “Really, Sir? I’d have thought the hell of command was ordering your family to die.”

An hour later, my therapist led General Cobb in. He sat in a padded turquoise hospital chair across from me, Class-A’s crisp across his thin shoulders, chin high, lenses humming as they echo-located. “You look good, son.”

After four months on my butt, I looked like unbaked bread.

“Spoken like a blind man. Sir.”

Nat Cobb chuckled. “Both of us are high-mileage units now, Jason.” His smile faded. “Leave us, please, Lieutenant.”

General Cobb spoke to the room, but my therapist nodded, fluffed my pillows, and warned me to avoid sudden movements and emotional upset.

She stepped out and pulled the door shut behind her.

Nat Cobb adjusted his lenses.

Then he sighed. “What were you thinking?”

“Sir?”

“Are we at war with China?”

“Americans don’t know how China raped Tibet for the last century. Or we might be.”

The general turned his head to the ceiling. “Americans know Greater China is two billion people. People who build 76 percent of our cars, and 94 percent of our holosets! Did Congress delegate its war powers to you?”

I swallowed. “I guess you’re not here to pin a Purple Heart on my pillow.”

“Your pillow?” He stood, turned, and stuck out his butt, bony as ever under his uniform trousers. “Last six months, the Foreign Relations Committee’s chewed this ass nine times. It’s me should be sitting on a pillow!”

I gulped. Nat Cobb was a plain-spoken GI’s general. I’d never heard him raise his voice to a subordinate before.

“The Chinese shot first, Sir. Ask Ord.” I leaned forward. “I heard he—”

“He’s fine. Except for the case of Dumbass he caught from you. He told me you provoked the Chinese.”

I studied a bandaged finger. “Sort of.”

“I didn’t pair you with the best Non-Com in the Army so he could dig you out of some hole I can’t even pronounce.”

“Bergschrund. It’s the crevasse where a glacier pulls away from its head wall.”

“Whatever. If Ord hadn’t held off the Chinese, you’d be wolf shit now.”

“What kind of shit am I now?”

General Cobb stabbed the air in my general direction. “Don’t get smart!” He sat back, then sighed again. “Jason, what do I do with you now?”

“We both know I’m not General Officer material. I’m a mediocre Company-Grade officer, with rank for show.”

General Cobb pointed between my eyes. “Moose shit! I had you snuck into Command and General Staff College twice. You weaseled.”

“My aptitude scores—”

“Are so high you can define bergschrund! You just think administration and logistics are boring.”

“No. I just think they’re hypocrisy. You wouldn’t believe the scheme some Quartermaster weasel laid on me an hour ago.”

“I would. You’re not the first pup I’ve had that weasel bail out.”

“Oh.”

He sighed again. “Yes, command requires bureaucratic hocus-pocus. And you’re half right about your rank. You kept your field promotion because the world owed you—”

“The world owed the soldiers who died, not me.”

“And because a hero Major-General Adviser impresses Host Advisees. They usually get a middling Captain.”

“Which is what I really am. So let me keep doing what I’m suited for.”

“Suited for? Peru?”

“He was a butcher.”

“Kazakhstan?”

“They were going to stone those women to death.”

“That shoot-out in Sudan?”

“Okay. Maybe I’m not suited for advising.”

“The Pentagon thinks you’ve cowboyed up once too often. They think you’re suited for forced retirement.”

I stiffened. Most people would think retirement on a Major General’s pension would suit a thirty-something bachelor. But the Slug War had cost me my family, the woman I loved, and more friends than I could count. The Army was the only family I had.

I leaned forward. “No!” Something hissed in my chest. I coughed, which felt like gargling tacks. The monitor howled.

My therapist tore the door open, like a first-grade teacher policing a food fight. She pointed, fi. . .