Orphan's Triumph

TWO

“HAS SHE SHOT ANYBODY YET?” I picked my way through the scrub and scree of Bren’s Stone Hills, wheezing. The planetologists said the Stone Hills were analogous to Late Cretaceous cordillera on Earth, which didn’t make them easier to climb.

The infantry captain alongside me, burdened by his M40 and his Eternad armor, wasn’t even puffing. “No, General. But I’d keep my head down. She’s not very big, but she’s the best shot in my company.”

We ran, crouched, as we crested the ridge, to a sniper team prone on a rock ledge. Below us the Stone Hills dropped away to the east to the High Plains. In the early morning, moons hung in the sky like ghosts. One glistened white, the other blood red, with a drifting pterosaur silhouetted against it.

Six hundred yards downslope, pocketed in rocks but a clear and easy shot from our high ground position, a figure in camo utilities crouched among boulders. A hundred yards downslope from the soldier, a dozen Casuni tribesmen, sun glinting off their helmets and breastplates, half surrounded her, screened from her by scrub. Each Casuni carried four single-shot black-powder pistols huge enough to bring down a small dinosaur, and none would hesitate to use them. Really, the standoff just looked like a dot sprinkle to me, because I was wearing utilities myself, without the optics of Eternad armor’s helmet.

The sniper’s spotter had his helmet faceplate up and peered through a native brass spyglass. He passed the glass to me and pointed. “The Blutos chased her up there at sunset yesterday, General. You can see the snapper curled up alongside her.”

Through the spyglass, the dozen burly, black-bearded Casuni looked small. But the distant soldier looked about twelve years old, gaunt, with hair like straw and big eyes. Her file said she was twenty-one, a private fresh out of Earthside Advanced Infantry Training, with just two weeks on Bren. The snapper, its hatchling down as gray as the surrounding rock, was already the size of an adult wolf.

I rolled onto my side, toward the captain. “What set her off?”

“Last week bandits ambushed the convoy that was shipping replacements out here from Marinus. Her loader bought the farm. He’d been together with her since AIT. She took it hard.”

“He?”

“Nothing like that, sir. Infantry can be close without-”

I raised my palm. “I didn’t mean that, Captain. When I was a spec four, I was a loader for a female gunner. Just sounded familiar.”

The captain wrinkled his brow one millimeter. He was a West Pointer, and the notion that the commander in chief of offworld ground forces was a high-school dropout grunt typically ruffled Pointers’ feathers. But maybe his discomfort grew from the way I said it. Because I felt a catch in my throat. That long-ago female gunner and I had grown infantry-close, and in the years later, before her death, as close as family.

The captain continued, “An adult female snapper dug under a perimeter fence and maimed three Casuni at the sluice before the security Casunis brought her down. The private down there found the female’s cub wandering outside the wire. The private’s trying to make a pet of it. But the Casuni say it’s sacrilege to let the cub live.”

Grown snappers are ostrich-sized, beaked carnosaurs. They’re quicker than two-legged cobras, with toxic saliva and the sunny disposition of cornered wolverines. A snapper’s beak slices the duckbill-hide wall of a Casuni yurt like Kleenex, and Casuni mothers have lost babies to snappers for centuries. Nothing personal. Snappers are predators, and human babies are easy protein in a hard land. But in Casuni culture, even Satan is better regarded than snappers.

I sighed. “No animal-rights activists here.” Over the thirty thousand years since the Slugs snatched primitive Earthlings to slave on planets like Bren, humans had adapted to some strange environments, none harsher than the High Plains of Bren. The Casuni had evolved into flint-hard nomads, following migrating herds that resembled parallel-evolved duckbilled dinosaurs, across wind-scoured plains that resembled Siberia. I turned to the captain. “Why haven’t you puffed her?” On Earth, any suburban police department could neutralize a hostage situation by sneaking a roach-sized micro ’bot up close to the hostage taker, then snoozing the hostage taker with a puff of Nokout gas.

“A creep-and-peep team’s inbound from the MP battalion in Marinus, sir. But it’ll be six hours before they ground here and calibrate the Bug.”

As the captain spoke, two Casuni began low-crawling through a draw, screened from the girl’s sight, working their way around toward high ground off her left flank. One of the Casuni must’ve been careless enough to show an inch of skin, because the girl squeezed off a round that cracked off a rock a foot from the crawling man, exploding dust and singing off into the distance.

The girl called downslope in Casuni, her voice thickened by her translator speaker, “Stay away!”

I said, “We don’t have six hours.”

The captain shook his head. “No, sir, we don’t. That’s the only reason I set up a sniper to take her out. It makes me sick to do it. But I know a major incident with the Blutos could freeze the stone trade.”

He was right. If the Casuni killed an Earthling, it would be a major incident that could jeopardize the fuel supply of the fleet that stood between mankind and the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony. If the girl killed a Casuni, it would also be a major incident. And given her advantage in skills and equipment, she was probably going to kill a bunch of them as soon as the Casuni got in position, then rushed her.

But if we shot her, it would still be a major incident. The terms of the Human Union Joint Economic Cooperation Protocol, known in the history chips as the Cavorite Mining Treaty of 2062, reserved the use of deadly force to indigenous civilian law enforcement. Casuni civilian law enforcement resembled a saloon brawl, but I don’t write treaties, I just live by them.

I stood and brushed dust off my utilities.

The captain wrinkled his brow behind his faceplate. “Sir?”

“I’ll take a walk down there and talk to her.”

The captain stared at my cloth utilities, shaking his head. “General, I don’t-”

The sniper’s spotter swiveled his helmeted head toward me, too, jaw dropped. “That’s suicide. Sir.”