Orphan's Triumph

FIFTY-FOUR

AS SOON AS OUR SLEDGE ROLLED through the gate into the wire rectangle within which our train would unload, Aud and I began loading, then redistributing, the weapons our recruits had been dry-firing during the trip north. The pistols in our suitcases were obsolete Iridian single-action service revolvers. They were the only small, simple, plausibly deniable weapons that Bill the Spook could score in the Tressen black market on a few days’ notice.

My unmittened fingers were so numb that I dropped one round for every six I loaded. Then I passed each pistol to Aud, who in turn handed it off, so it could be passed to one of the prisoners whom we had trained to shoot.

“Trained” overstated things. It typically had taken Ord and me months as advisers to train partisans. Here and now we lacked that gift of time. Nonetheless, if things were running according to plan, the scene was being repeated in six other sledge cars. But there were risks in this that planning simply couldn’t help.

Few of the prisoners in this caravan had ever fired a weapon. The RS had long since exterminated most veterans who had served on the wrong side in the war. Most of the unfortunates who were rounded up and shipped from Tressia were city dwellers who had never plinked a tin can on the East Forty.

We hadn’t risked handing out loaded weapons earlier, so there would be shooters scared to death the first time their pistols roared and kicked in their hands. There would be shooters who didn’t cock hammers, shooters who lost their pistols in snowdrifts, shooters who couldn’t hit a cow’s rump with a bat, and shooters who simply were too petrified to shoot.

On the positive side, the waiting camp guards were going to be less prepared than Bo Peep would have been if her sheep had gone postal.

With a thunk, then a hiss, the ice train stopped. After six days, the silence of the empty wilderness rang like an alarm between my ears.

I peered out between the iron wall slabs. Two hundred greatcoated, helmeted guards awaited us, drawn back a hundred feet on the featureless snow, rifles slung. They stamped feet, smoked, and batted their arms against their chests.

A thin cry echoed from one of the other sledges. “Dear God! Please! Let us out!”

A dozen guards, scarves to noses, rifles still slung, trudged to the cars, then unlatched and slid back each sledge’s door. They retreated to the line of their buddies, to escape not the prisoners’ wrath but their stench.

There was no need to order prisoners out of the iron boxes. After six subhuman days, those who remained ambulatory leapt, stumbled, crawled, and tumbled into the snow alongside the icy track. Many wept. A few crammed handfuls of snow between parched lips. Most were too weak even for that.

After five minutes, a different dozen guards walked the train, peering into each box. If they found halt, lame, or dead inside, they wrenched prisoners from the snow and forced them to unload those unable to unload themselves.

As each sledge was cleared, the guards padlocked its door shut. No shelter for the new arrivals. Then each sledge’s guard climbed stiffly down from his guardhouse and joined his colleagues.

The emaciated prisoners, if any noticed, offered no more protest than so many pieces of frozen meat, which they would be soon enough.

I scanned the milling, kneeling heaps of prisoners, until my heart thumped. Jude, and then Celline alongside him, saw me, too, and Jude nodded to me. I had never been so glad to see two people who looked like hell. I nodded back.

The Spooks had flown a Mechanical up here to monitor ice train arrival procedure for us, so we knew what came next. By the time the engine crew, the guards, and the others had reassembled, the Arctic sun slid low along the horizon, at our backs, as a noncomm called roll of our jailers.

Years of experience had taught these troops that there was nothing to fear from the hopeless, decimated “enemies of the state” who tumbled from each ice train into the snow. The only way a guard up here could get himself hurt was to wander off, then be left behind on the plain to freeze, like the prisoners he was guarding.

When all the guards were accounted for, all of them, some with rifles slung, others with them over their shoulders, stocks backward like pickaxes, turned their backs on the people in the snow.

The guards trudged, heads down against the wind, toward the distant barracks and machine-shop complex that lay outside the wire, toward warmth and beds and hot food. The more energetic among them opened wooden crates, plucked out dynamite sticks, then lit and flung them to explode snow fountains. Others tossed empty cartridge boxes up into the wind, ahead of them, while their buddies whooped and shot at the boxes like skeet clays. Disposal of deteriorated stores, perhaps.

Tressel’s civilization poised on that historic cusp where Earth’s had teetered almost two centuries before, proud to have invented dynamite, but not yet guilty enough to fund a peace prize with the profits of sale.

Bored, stupid, lazy commanders begat bored, stupid, lazy troops. Bored, stupid, lazy troops became dead troops. What we were about to attempt wouldn’t give these troops the benefit of a fair fight. But the last thing a good commander wants to give the enemy is a fair fight.

As the Spooks’ Mechanical had forecast, the prevailing wind howled toward the casual mob of guards, into their faces and ours.

Therefore, the guards didn’t hear us as we rose, in groups of twos and threes, and began walking mute toward the unsuspecting guards’ backs. Surprised shouts of other prisoners vanished in the wind and among the moans and delirium of others. We had formed a ragged skirmish line, ninety in all, forty-five on each side of Aud and me, and had come within twenty yards of the guards when I saw the first prisoner, stumbling forward, ten yards to my right, raise his pistol.

For these novices, the range remained too great. I had drawn Ord’s pistol and carried it muzzle-down at my side in my unmittened hand. I waved it at the guy as I stage whispered, “Not yet! Crap! No, no, no!”

Bang.

Even a blind pig finds an occasional acorn. The first shot of the prisoner’s life, and the first shot of the Battle of the Northern Terminus, struck the last guard in line in the nape of his neck, between the skirt of his helmet and his jacket collar. He went down noiselessly, like a flour sack, so that his buddies noticed neither his loss nor the pistol shot amid the skeet shoot ahead of them.

Within two heartbeats, nervous pistols crackled like popping corn, as the prisoners fired at will into a massed target too big for even novices to miss.

By the time the guards realized what was happening and stopped, the gap between prisoners and guards had closed to ten yards. Forty guards lay in the snow.

By the time the guards unslung rifles, the gap was five yards, and just a hundred of them remained standing. I, Jude, and Aud spent our effort running back and forth behind our skirmish line, screaming and tugging our shooters, trying to keep any from getting out ahead or from falling behind, so that no one would be shot by a buddy. I lunged for one man too late, and he took a round in the back of his thigh from another prisoner.

More guards fell, shot point-blank.

The remaining guards, blinded by the sun at our backs, reflexively standing and fighting when they should have run, were overrun before they could get off more than wild shots.

Prisoners fell on their tormentors three or four against one, firing pistols into screaming mouths, beating and kicking, pummeling guards with their own rifle butts, until guards’ heads cracked like dropped melons.

Then there was no sound but wind howl and the crying of wounded.

Two minutes had passed since the first shot.

I stood panting, hands on hips, facing back at the litter of bodies in the reddening snow.

Aud limped up alongside me. “I think we lost four.”

A prisoner beside me aimed his pistol ahead of us, cocked the hammer, and pulled the trigger. The hammer clacked on a spent cartridge. “Dammit!”

I turned and looked where the pistol’s muzzle pointed. A lone guard ran, bareheaded, coat flapping, toward the distant fence and the barracks beyond.

It was barely possible that with the wind, the oncoming darkness, the cover provided by the guards’ rowdy firing, and the sloppy state of this garrison that the troops remaining in the barracks complex could be surprised. In fact, we had half planned on it.

But not if the runner got to the garrison before we did.

I knelt in the snow, swung Ord’s pistol up, and sighted on the runner. In the fading light, he looked back over his shoulder as he ran. It was the broad-nosed boxcar guard who had killed the physician.

A decent shot with a service.45 can bring down a man at forty yards. An expert might stretch that to seventy-five yards. Liars claim one hundred.

Ord always claimed that, if I practiced more, I could be the best shot he had ever trained. He also claimed that his personally gunsmithed pistol was the most accurate.45 ever built.

I made the range ninety yards and growing.

More Slug Warriors had died beneath my hand than I could count, but they were, according to the Spooks, mere organic automatons. Human beings had died beneath my hand, too, when, as a soldier, lawful orders had required it.

But this was my decision. Like Ord had said, I was on my own.

The range opened to one hundred yards. I breathed, exhaled, paused, and fired.

The broad-nosed guard ran for his life. Toward, perhaps, a wife, children, a place in the church choir.

His arms spread wide, as if he was trying to fly like Puck the Fairy. His head snapped back so that his face turned toward the darkening sky. Then his body arced forward, fell in an explosion of snow, skidded, and stopped.

The wind in my face pricked gun smoke into my eyes, and I holstered the.45, then wiped them.

The prisoner with the dead pistol clapped my shoulder. “That was good!”

Aud limped past me. “We must press our attack! But so far, so good.”

The two of them left me standing alone, staring at the distant, dead soldier, facedown in the snow, then staring at the bodies all around me. So no one heard me say, “Goodness has nothing to do with us.”