Orphan's Alliance (Jason Wander), page 22
The herd bull strides toward the wolf pack, bellowing, head back to display great, curved tusks. The wolves retreat again.
Howard says, “If we shot a mammoth out there, the carcass would explain the wolf pack. It could make an excellent distraction.”
He’s right. I raise my M-40 and sight on the nearest cow’s shoulder, but at this range I could drop her with a hip shot.
Then I pause. “The carcass might attract those big cats.” Weichsel’s fauna parallels Pleistocene Earth in many ways, but our neolithic forefathers never saw sabre-toothed snow leopards bigger than Bengal tigers.
Really, my concern with Howard’s idea isn’t baiting leopards. Sabre teeth can’t scuff Eternads any more than wolf teeth can. I just don’t want to shoot a mammoth.
It sounds absurd. I can’t count the Slugs that have died at my hand or on my orders in this war. And over my career I’ve taken human lives, too, when the United States in its collective wisdom has lawfully ordered me to.
It’s not as though any species on Weichsel is endangered, except us humans, of course. The tundra teems with life, a glacial menagerie. Weichsel wouldn’t miss one mammoth. So why do I rationalize against squeezing my trigger one more time?
I can’t deny that war callouses a soldier to brutality. But as I grow older, I cherish the moments when I can choose not to kill.
I lower my rifle. “Let’s see what happens.”
By mid-morning, events moot my dilemma. The wolves isolate a lame cow from the mammoth herd, bring her down two hundred yards from us, and begin tearing meat from her wooly flanks like bleeding rugs. The mammoth herd stands off, alternately trumpeting in protest at the gore-smeared wolves, then bulldozing snow with their sinuous tusks to get at matted grass beneath. For both species, violence is another day at the office.
Howard and I withdraw inside the cave, to obscure our visual and infrared signatures, and sit opposite our prisoner.
The Ganglion just floats there, animated only by the vibrations of iË€€…ts motility plate. After thirty years of war, all I know about the blob is that it is my enemy. I have no reason to think it knows me any differently. For humans and Slugs, like the mammoths and wolves, violence has become another day at the office.
Howard, this blob, and I are on the cusp of changing that. If I can get us off Weichsel alive. At the moment, getting out alive requires me to freeze my butt off in a hole, contemplating upcoming misery and terror. After a lifetime in the infantry, I’m used to that.
I pluck an egg-sized stone off the cave floor and turn it in my hand like Yorick’s skull. The stone is a gem quality diamond. Weichsel’s frozen landscape is as full of diamonds as the Pentagon is full of underemployed Lieutenant Generals. Which is what I was when this expedition-become-fiasco started.
Ê€„
About this Title
This eBook was created using ReaderWorks®Publisher 2.0, produced by OverDrive, Inc. For more information about ReaderWorks, please visit us on the Web at www.overdrive.com/readerworks
Robert Buettner, Orphan's Alliance (Jason Wander)
