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!”
SIXTY-FOUR
THE HUMPBACKED SCORPION drifted down toward Tressel’s snow, a white ceramic teardrop against the steel-blue afternoon sky. Its pilot throttled back to subsonic to remain silent but jinked at right angles and sprinkled heat-seeker-fooling flares, though “hot” was the last adjective that described this landing zone.
The hundreds of survivors healthy enough to gather stones that were spread across the vast white graveyard plain drew toward the alien ship like iron filings to a magnet. Most had seen newspaper drawings or grainy tintype photographs of the motherworld’s flying machines, but the reality must have shocked them like a flying saucer, which, essentially, the Scorpion might have been.
The Scorpion dead-stopped and hovered three feet above the snow. The Scorpion’s hull, scorched by its passage through Tressel’s upper atmosphere, boiled off snow in a hissing steam cloud that rose into the scalded air shimmering above the ship.
The Tressens formed a silent, spectating ring around the Scorpion as a rear ramp whined down from the modified Scorpion’s bulbous tail, lifting the former fighter’s weapons pod like a stinger.
The forward canopy rose as the cargo ramp dropped, and the pilot extended the ship’s ladder above and across the hull, then clambered across and down. He splashed through the slush his ship had melted, straight-backed, chest out, comm and life support leads swinging in the breeze in time with the silk scarf that dangled around his neck.
Jude, Celline, and I stepped forward out of the circle, and he stopped three feet in front of us. A “Whizard” call sign stencil painted his pilot’s helmet, and a multicolored, embroidered patch of a scowling pelican wearing boxing gloves crested the chest of his unzipped brown leather bomber jacket. He saluted and grinned. “Package pickup service!”
It was only as I watched the grin melt into his smooth-shaven cheeks that I realized how gaunt, filthy, and emaciated we all were. Jude’s and Celline’s eyes peered from pits sunken in faces grayed by oil smoke and stretched by starvation. Their faces were scarved with rags, and their swollen coats were torn everywhere they weren’t soiled. We no longer noticed how we stank.
The kid’s eyes flicked around the silent hundreds who stared at him, who looked worse than we did. The face of war was softer when your enemy was a dot on a screen and physical hardship was wardroom coffee gone cold.
I returned the young pilot’s salute by careerlong reflex. “Glad to see you. Jason Wander.”
His jaw dropped. “General?”
“Retired.”
His eyes widened as he looked around again at the silent Tressens. “Sir-Mr. Wander-I just got the one ship. My orders are to pick up cargo. Quick and quiet. I can’t-”
“I know. They know. We’re walking out.”
He turned his ear toward me as though he hadn’t heard. “Sir?”
I pointed at the ramp of his ship, where Tressens were already lining up, holding bulging sacks and bins piled high with stones. “Could you make sure they load your bay the way you want? We need to be out of here quick and quiet, too.”
He trotted to the ramp.
I turned to Jude and jerked a thumb at the Scorpion. “The second seat on that ship’s empty. You’re the best pilot we’ve got. Your place is in a cockpit. Finish this thing. For your family.”
Jude put one arm around Celline and swept the other around at the queued and gritty little army. “This is my family.” He nodded toward the leather-jacketed pilot. “Jason, I could never be that guy again. There are plenty like him who can deliver Silver Bullet. The Slug War is your generation’s-it’s your war to finish. My war starts here. Now.”
Ord’s last words echoed in my head. I was on my own now.
I jerked my head south, toward the canyon where Aud Planck and three hundred shopkeepers had held back an infantry division. “The lookouts say the Forty-fifth is through the pass, route marching north, already. No head start will be enough.”
The Scorpion’s cargo ramp whined as it clamshelled shut. The pilot walked to the three of us, peeling off his flight jacket. Beneath it he wore a Zoomie sidearm in a shoulder holster. “We’re loaded. General-Mr. Wander-Admiral Duffy said I’m to bring you back with me.”
I said, “Why?”
He shrugged. “Just in case, he said.”
“In case of what?”
“Can’t say, just now.”
I shook my head. “Then fuck off.”
“The admiral said you’d say that. Sir, the skipper gave me a direct order to get you into that cockpit. At gunpoint if necessary.” The kid didn’t smile.
Jude said, “Go, Jason. You know this war can still be screwed up. You might not be able to prevent that up there. But you sure can’t prevent that from down here.”
Celline touched my sleeve. “Iridians say that a thousand miles’ journey begins with one step. But if we falter, we need to know that we took that step for a purpose. You go, and be sure that these stones win your war. And tell the story of how we tried to win this one.”
The pilot held out his jacket to Celline. “I got another one just like it upstairs, ma’am. Looks like somebody down here can use this.”
The duchess took the jacket in a mittened hand and smiled. “A loan. Return for it in a few years, when we’ve won.”
I hugged Jude, then Celline, then I stood still and looked at them.
The pilot shivered in his coverall, then turned to me. “General Wander, my ship’s a sitting duck on the ground like this. And we’ve still got work to do.”
SIXTY-FIVE
THE SCORPION’S CANOPY whined down and sealed me in alongside the pilot. The cockpit looked familiar, exactly like the modified ship in which Jude had given me my flying lesson back on Bren, before so much had changed.
The pilot scanned instruments, adjusted controls, and punched touch panels rowed across the canopy top like a concert pianist playing upside down.
The screens lit, the canopy seemed to disappear, and we drifted into the sky.
As we rose, the pilot pivoted the Scorpion, so we gazed out across the Arctic wilderness, toward the black mountain wall that stretched for three hundred miles to the east, around which Celline and Jude would have to lead the malnourished army huddled below us. He whistled. “Quite a walk. But I wouldn’t bet against that lady.”
“The walk’s not the problem. The company is. There’s a Tressen infantry division ten miles behind them and gaining.”
When the altimeter read fifteen thousand feet, the pilot flipped back the hinged, red-striped shroud that covered the weapons console as he drifted the Scorpion south along the railroad.
I pointed at the console. “You can’t fight this ship.”
He nodded. “Correct, sir. Engagement within the airspace of Tressel’s strictly forbidden. We weren’t even permitted to load defensive armament for this pickup.”
“Then what…?”
“Admiral Duffy determined that the Tehran was carrying deteriorating stores.”
“Huh?”
“We can always jettison deteriorating stores that endanger the ship into nonorbital space or into deserted country.” He pointed below us. “Sir, could you have a look to assure that area below us is just deserted country?”