Orphan's Triumph

SIXTY-THREE

THE DESCENDING MORTAR ROUND plummeted across my vision in less than a blink, silhouetted against the cloudless blue sky, then scraped the edge of the ledge behind the kid, and alongside one of the other four scouts, so hard that its steel sparked orange against the granite. Out of sight below the ledge, the round burst.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then the kid’s eyes widened as they met mine. The ledge beneath him and the other four scouts sank like an elevator’s floor.

He dropped his rifle and stretched out his hand.

I reached for it, but he was gone, tumbling and flailing, staring up at the sky, along with the other four scouts and, all around them, the spinning shards and blocks of granite that had been the ledge, eight hundred feet to the canyon floor below.

The rock beneath my feet sloughed away, too, and I fell on my back, scrabbling and grasping. Finally, I lay staring up past the canyon rim, sucking air and shaking.

When my heart slowed a fraction, I rolled onto hands and knees and peered over the edge of the ledge that was now severed by the impassable gap completed by the mortar round’s explosion.

Below, Aud’s former soldiers and his new ones struggled hand-to-hand atop the overturned sledges. He strode, chest out, dragging one bandaged leg behind him, along the makeshift battlement while shells burst around him, until he reached an object that protruded from beneath a new-fallen boulder.

Aud Planck tugged my splintered sniper’s rifle from beneath the boulder, then turned and looked up, shading his eyes with one hand. He pointed the rifle north, in the direction I was supposed to go, then saluted with his other hand.

I leaned out above the battle, returned his salute, then turned and started down the ledge.

We stared at each other through the smoke, then we both turned away from one another for what we both knew would be the last time.

I reached the junction where the down trail’s northern end joined the plain at sunset. From the canyon, the rumble of battle continued, without me. Unflanked, what remained of the unlikely three hundred fought on. I couldn’t save the shopkeepers who remained alive. But maybe I could help to make their sacrifice count for something.

Blood trickled from one ear, an eardrum burst by the mortar round’s concussion, and from my cheek. A granite splinter had torn through my sleeve and lodged in my birth-equipment forearm. I hadn’t eaten in four days, nor drunk anything but melted snow. What wasn’t bruised, ached. I began walking north into the frigid darkness, on feet I could no longer feel, then shifted gears to an air-borne shuffle trot that would get me back to the camp by sunup.

As I shuffled, I snorted to myself, “Some retirement.”

In fact, at four a.m. I arrived at the southern wire that demarcated the camp. It had been visible for miles across the plain, as oil lanterns carried by meteorite pickers crisscrossed the snow like fireflies.

A shopkeeper sentry saved my life by firing at me high and wide while intending anything but.

It took until five a.m. before I reached Jude and Celline, who pored over a camp map penciled with a search grid.

I reported the battle results like Pheidippides returning from the plain of Marathon, then asked, “How close are you?”

Celline ran her fingers down a tally sheet as she handed me back my ’Puter. “Close enough. Call your vessel down now. We need every second.”

I nodded. Before the Forty-fifth Infantry and the burned-out oil supply had entered the picture, our plan had been to deliver the Cavorite, then return the survivors on the commandeered ice train as far south as possible, then abandon it. The newly numerous Iridian resistance would melt into the population and become, like Mao’s guerillas, fish in the sea.

Jude unrolled another of the camp commandant’s maps. Now, with no transportation, and the pass south blocked by an advancing army, the survivors’ only hope was to outrun the Forty-fifth Infantry, east across the Arctic, until they reached the eastern end of the mountains, where they could turn south and make for the more hospitable climate of the north Iridian coast.

An emaciated army of cellists and fishmongers and shopkeepers’ widows would flee battle-hardened troops, across four hundred miles of frigid wilderness.

Jude shook his head. “I won’t tell these people, but the journey would be barely survivable even if we didn’t have an army chasing us.”

Celline said, “But if we stand and fight, we die. And hope dies with us.”

I pointed at my ’Puter in Jude’s hand. “You do it. Call down the ship. My fingers can’t work the buttons anymore.”

Then I tugged off my boots and sat on the edge of a camp cot, kneading my toes with my fingers and feeling neither. “I think I’m gonna lie down here for a minute.”

The next thing I knew, Jude stood shaking my shoulder. “Jason! The ship’s here!”