Orphan's Triumph

FORTY-SIX

THE WOMAN SHOVED JUDE AWAY. “Get off me, you idiot!” Then she rolled back on her stomach and cupped a hand around her mouth. “Pytr, it’s Celline!”

The gun barrel didn’t waver.

She waved at the window slit.

“Ah. It’s you, Miss.”

She got to her knees, brushing sand off her armor. “Pytr, we’re coming up.”

Judging by the algae that painted the shanty stilts two-thirds of the way up their length, we had arrived at low tide. The woman scrambled up the slippery ladder to the broad deck that fringed the shanty, its rails hung with fishing gear, and we followed.

The room inside the shanty door was large enough to park a couple of medium-sized trucks and was furnished with old and simple wood pieces. A stone fireplace at the room’s opposite end ran the wall’s length. Above the fire-place mantel hung a twenty-foot-long fish that looked like a fat moray eel with a head as large as a kitchen dishwasher. The rhizodont’s low-hinged mouth gaped like the dishwasher door was open and had been mounted to display a forest of needle teeth.

Beneath the fish a man with shoulder-length gray hair, wearing a lober fisherman’s coarse cloth tunic, knelt with his back to us. An Iridian military rifle as old as he was leaned against the fireplace. He poked a peat fire, tiny upon the immense hearth, to life and shouted louder than necessary into the peat as it blossomed into flame, “Tea in a moment.”

I crossed the room to the rhizodont and ran my fingers over the cracked lacquer on its scales. “Your fish makes quite a centerpiece for your place, Pytr.”

The old man stood and turned toward me. Beneath the gray hair, his right ear was missing and a scar slashed his right cheek from eye socket to chin. He cocked his head as he tried to read my lips. I repeated myself, louder.

Finally, he nodded. “Not my fish. Not my place.” He pointed at the green-eyed woman who had called herself Celline. “Her grandfather built this place and caught the big fish.”

My wrist ’Puter had been vibrating, at closer and closer intervals, for the last five miles as we had approached the shanty. Two closed doors led off the main room. I stepped toward the left door, and the vibration became constant.

As I stepped, Pytr snatched up his rifle.

Celline sat on a stool near the shanty’s front door, stripping off her armor.

I pointed to the closed door. “The chancellor’s in here.” I hefted my pack. “I’ve brought medicine.”

Celline cocked her head, made a small nod. “They said you motherworlders are fey. I never believed it.” Then, louder. “It’s all right, Pytr.”

Pytr lowered his rifle, waved me to the door with its barrel.

The place was more lodge than shanty, and I found Aud asleep in a bedroom at the end of a hallway. One of Aud’s legs had been splinted and elevated, a decent job. A bloodstained field dressing swelled from the side of his head.

I sat on the bed edge and whispered, “Aud?”

He stirred and muttered, eyes closed.

I felt his forehead. Hot.

I grasped his wrist, not to take his pulse but to admire his bugged watch. Without it, bless the Spooks after all, we wouldn’t have found Aud, and my friend would have died.

I fished in my pack for tools, then removed the head wound’s dressing.

The woman entered the room, stood behind me with arms folded while I worked. With a magnifying explorer, I located and then plucked out a metal splinter that had either been part of Aud’s car or of the bomb that blew it up.

She said, “I thought you were a soldier, not a surgeon.”

I lifted the magnifying explorer in my right hand. “Mag-ee makes every soldier a surgeon. Or at least a medic. As long as this little light shines green, I can poke around and pull out anything I find without hurting my patient. If things get hairy, the light turns amber and I back off. Motherworlders aren’t fey. We just have good tools.”

Mag-ee also prescribed antibiotics. After I inserted the cartridge that it told me to, it administered them. Recent bitter experience with Ord on Bren notwithstanding, Tressel’s bugs croaked nicely after a shot of the right Earthmade stuff.

“You have the tools to get rid of the RS. But you don’t.” She tossed her head in the direction of the fireplace room where Jude and Pytr waited. “The motherworld handed Tressel to the RS. You even let your young friend in there serve them.”

I winced as I rummaged through the med kit Bill the Spook had provided. “The tilt? Tressen would have won the war eventually, regardless. And there would have been fewer of you left on both sides. Besides, my ‘young friend’ isn’t even sure all the stories about the RS are true.”

“Then he’s naive.”

“He is that. What does that make you?” I read Aud’s pulse off the Mag-ee. “You had a chance to kill off this big RS fish right here. Why didn’t you?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Try me.”

“I told you. I may decide to use him as a hostage.”

“Zeit doesn’t want him back. Zeit wants him dead. How’d you get hold of him, anyway?”

“After the assassination attempt, the chancellor made his way here, to find Pytr. Planck was even more dead than you see him now. Planck saved Pytr’s life once. Pytr insists that Planck can’t possibly know what the RS has been doing. I find that hard to believe. But I’m taking a chance because Pytr’s been my brains and my conscience since I was a teenager. Do you know what it’s like to trust someone like that?”

I nodded as I applied a fresh dressing. “I lost someone like that, not so long ago. I know how I got to be a general. How did a fisherman’s daughter come to be running the Iridian resistance?”

She scuffed the floor cobbles with her toe, shrugged. “Nobody runs the resistance. It’s just pockets of survivors here and there. We keep our heads down and hope something will change for the better before the RS exterminates us all.”

After I finished playing doctor, Jude and I got assigned a bedroom to share. If Pytr and Celline trusted us, they didn’t trust us to split watch with them. Celline took the first watch. Jude complained, out of chivalry. I didn’t, out of old age.

Jude and I lay on rock-hard cots in the dark. He said, “What do you think of Celline?”

“I think she’s smarter and tougher than most fishermen’s daughters.”

“She’s beautiful, too.”

I rolled over and faced the wall. “So’s the sunrise. Go to sleep and maybe you’ll see it.”

Outside on the decking I heard footsteps as my godson’s beautiful crush padded around in the dark, armed to the teeth. Overnight, the tide had come in, so the sound of waves against the shanty’s pilings metronomed me to sleep.

I woke before the others, at first light, because after a lifetime with Ord I had forgotten how to sleep late. I dressed, checked on Aud, whose fever had come down nicely, then tiptoed out onto the deck, where deaf Pytr snored with his rifle across his knees.

I stretched out kinks that I didn’t have when the likes of Ord taught me to wake up too early, as I barefooted around the shanty’s deck. The tide had gone out again and was now running in, the sea lapping a foot up the shanty’s pilings. Ocean whisper coupled with the drone of rainbow-winged dragonflies skimming the swells like the birds that lay millennia in Tressel’s future. The serenity contrasted to Manhattan, or Mousetrap, or Marinus, or the Republican Socialist sterility of Tressia.

My stomach reminded me that the dragonflies, like the pterosaurs and gulls that would usurp their ecological niche, were hunting breakfast among the waves.

Our host and hostess had each been up half the night. The nearest chicken nested light-years away, so there would be no eggs to scramble on this crisp seaside morning. Like the thoughtful guest I was, I rolled my pantlegs above my knees, slipped a trident and a shellfish creel off a rail, and tiptoed down the shanty ladder to spear fresh trilobites for breakfast.