Orphan's Triumph

FORTY-EIGHT

I THRASHED TO REGAIN MY FOOTING, gasping as I held my head above water. Salt water stung my nose and eyes, my foot burned, and I waited to hear the crunch as rhiz jaws closed around my torso.

Bang. A pause. Bang. Another pause, long enough for a trained soldier to work a rifle bolt. Bang.

No crunch.

I got to my hands and knees in the pool and looked back.

The rhiz lay still as the tide surged around it. Blood coursed from a neat line of three bullet holes above its right eye and spread in crimson tendrils through the gin-clear sea.

I staggered to my feet, balancing on one leg, and squinted up at the shanty deck. Another figure, balanced on one leg, stared down at me, old Pytr’s smoking rifle in his hands.

“I thought that was you I heard! Do you visit this planet only to serve as bait?”

I shaded my eyes with my hand. The face that peered down at me was sharp, silver-haired, and familiar. “Aud?”

“Can you climb the ladder yourself, Jason? I’m afraid I can’t come down to help you up.” Audace Planck, soldier’s soldier turned co-chancellor, whose marksmanship had already saved me from one Tressen monster years before this, sagged against the deck rail, then collapsed.

I knelt in the water to take weight off my foot as Celline, Jude, and old Pytr’s heads poked over the rail. Jude called down, “Stay there! I’ll give you a hand!”

I looked back at the twenty-foot fish. “Good. I’m not cleaning this thing alone.”

In fact, rhiz were sinewy and bony and tasted like muck, according to Pytr. The monster was left to the trilobites, who swarmed it like sailors chasing lap dancers. Pytr did, however, clean and sauté the lobe fin that I had landed fair and square, albeit accidentally. Pytr also removed three sea urchin spines the size of popsicle sticks from the arch of my foot, then packed the wounds with moss to draw out the poison. Meantime, my foot swelled to the size and color of an eggplant.

Pytr’s treatment didn’t injure my appetite.

After breakfast, Pytr put Aud back to bed while Celline, Jude, and I lingered over tea in front of the fireplace.

Celline set down her mug and stared at me with her green eyes. “We brought you to the chancellor with few questions, because your people-the quiet ones in the consulate-have earned a small measure of trust by helping us in small ways. Now I must ask you what you want with Planck.”

Pieces of another universe that eat gravity. A moon stolen by an evil empire of giant snails. Black ops line items in budgets on a world so far away that its sun was invisible in her sky. Explain that to a fisherman’s daughter. I sighed. “It’s complicated.”

She smiled. “As you say, General, try me.”

“Our government doesn’t like dealing with the RS butchers any better than you do.”

She raised her hand. “Please. Your embargo has been hypocritical and meaningless. The truth is that a nation, a world, acts in its self-interest. As I see it, suddenly Tressel again has something that the motherworld wants. Your government sent you to get it from Planck, even though you’re as bad a diplomat as you are a fisherman. Your government expected you to trade on the sentimental bond between old soldiers. But now your friend is powerless. You’re farther out of water than that rhiz was.”

Jude and I stared at her.

I said. “Uh. That’s about it.”

Pytr stepped back into the room and stood watching us, a hand cupped around one ear.

Celline nodded, then said, “But I don’t understand everything. You risked your life to come here and to help Planck, because he’s your friend, even though a shrewd man would know your mission is futile. You seem an unlikely general.”

My current boss, Pinchon, agreed. My previous boss, Nat Cobb, agreed. Hell, I agreed. I wasn’t a general, I was a historical accident.

She said, “You’re not like Planck. Not like my father.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Your father was a fisherman.”

Pytr snorted. “Fisherman? His Grace hated this lodge.”

Jude’s jaw dropped as he stared at Celline. “Who are you?”

Pytr made a little bow to Celline. “If I may, Miss?” Then he turned to Jude. “You have the honor of addressing Her Grace the Duchess Celline, daughter of the late Edmund, fifty-sixth Duke of Northern Iridia and Marshall of the Grand Army of the Realm.”

I said, “Oh.”

Jude frowned at Celline. “You lied to us.”

She lifted her chin. “I did not! Arrogance assumes.”

“Arrogant? Me?”

She waved her hand like she was swatting flies. “The title doesn’t matter. It is manure now, anyway.”

Pytr sucked in a breath. “Miss! Your father would be-”

She pointed at the old man, and her finger quivered. “My father would be alive but for the RS. The only thing that matters now is to gut them all.”

Jude said, “The house where we met you. You knew where the fish hid-”

“That was our family’s home for six hundred years.”

“Your father-”

“Your RS shipped him north as an enemy of the state when they stole our house.”

Pytr made another of those little six-inch bows to Celline. “Shall I see to the chancellor, Miss?”

Celline nodded, like she had been giving servants their leave all her life, which apparently she had.

I nodded after Pytr. “How long has he taken care of you?”

Celline smiled. “All my life. But you say it wrong. Pytr is like my family. Now he’s old. I take care of him, and I will until one of us dies.”

“The rest of your family-”

“There is no rest. Since the war, my old soldier is the nearest to family I have left.”

I stared at Jude, and he at me. Wherever or whenever, war is an orphanage, and now there were three of us.

We three talked for another hour. She told us about the hierarchy of Iridia, and about the pitiful Iridian resistance, which she nominally led. I told her about Jude, about his family, which were as close to royalty as America ’s peculiar meritocracy came. Jude told her stories about me that made me sound better than I was.

At noon, Jude accompanied me on a rehabilitative limp, with a cane Pytr provided, inshore from the ducal fishing lodge. Pytr assured us the route was rhiz-free. Jude carried a pistol anyway.

“Jason, all these people can’t be lying. What I’ve seen since I’ve been back on Tressel is no illusion. I’ve been criminally stupid.”

I shook my head as we picked along the rocks. “You’re not the first soldier who was too busy to look over his shoulder. Honest men believe other men are honest.”

“I think Aud made the same mistake.”

“I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.”

“Do you think Celline would give me the benefit of the doubt?”

“You could ask her.”

“No. After what she’s seen of the RS, I need to show her who I am.”

“You like her a lot.”

“No.”

I swiveled my head toward my godson and raised my eyebrows.

“Jason, I love her.”

“Don’t you think that’s a big word? You’ve barely met her.”

“How long after Dad met Mom, did he know?”

My eyes moistened, and I swallowed, then smiled. “About the time he barely met her.”

That night, we three sat together again, staring into Pytr’s tiny fire. Celline asked me, “What is it that the motherworld needs from Tressel?”

I told her the whole thing. She knew about the Slugs and the Slug War in an abstract way, like any Tressen or Iridian who knew her world’s legends and kept up with current affairs. When I finished, she looked at us. “Will the motherworld give Zeit a free hand if necessary, in order to get at this Cavorite?”

I sighed. “That’s not our opening position.”

“Even provide him more weapons? To use on anyone the RS chooses?”

“Again, that’s not-”

“But you have to if he insists. You know Zeit will insist.”

Jude said, “Celline, you don’t understand. It’s not just our world at stake. It’s Tressel, too.”

“I do understand.” She cocked her head and cast her green eyes toward the ceiling beams. “But what if Chancellor Zeit were not the only game in town? It’s an Iridian expression.”

I smiled at the duchess. “It’s an American expression, too.”