Orphan's Alliance (Jason Wander) Read Online Free PDF Page B

the sky, as a sprinkle of stars winked through a break in the clouds, then he stopped chuckling. “You would lie to me, if it was your duty, Jason.” He turned, and poked the fire with a stick. “You brought your machines to us across the stars. A great favor to Tressen. But every favor has a price.” It wasn’t a question, but a statement.
    “Aud, now it’s my turn to defer to the politicians.”
    “I’m not asking the price. Haggling is for politicians and pimps. I just don’t understand why a world so different that its scorpions are as small as pickles cares about Tressel.” He pointed at the scorpion he had killed to save my life. “You owe me that much truth.”
    “I do.” I nodded, scooped a handful of pebbles, and tossed them in my palm. “The Slugs brought your ancestors from Earth to Tressel because some of the rocks here on Tressel fell from the stars. More accurately, they fell from the boundary layer where this universe ends and another begins.”
    “This Cavorite your friends spoke about.”
    “A name we borrowed from an old bedtime story about men who flew to our moon. Cavorite let the Slugs, and now lets us, fly to the stars. Cavorite’s poison to the Slugs, but not to humans. Thirty thousand years ago, the Slugs realized that. So they exported Earthlings to mine it for them. When the Slugs exhausted the meteoric Cavorite from Tressel, they didn’t need to use your planet or your ancestors any t wncestormore.”
    Aud frowned. “Now it’s the Motherworld’s turn to use us?”
    I let out a breath, “It’s not like—”
    Out in the water, a black shape rose, glistening, and ghosted toward us. The eurypterid spidered onto the bank, water coursing silver off eight rear limbs, while its front limbs arced above its carapace like tree boughs. The beast’s forward-most mandibles probed the body of its dead cousin, and paused. Then it slithered up over the corpse like a pulled scarf. Twenty feet long if it was an inch. Click . Aud cocked his pistol.
    My heart pounded.
    The big predator curled around, then grasped, the carcass in the mud. The dead female weighed easily a ton, but within three heartbeats, the bigger one had dragged it back into the water like a laundry bag, leaving behind only furrows in the mud.
    I gulped, then turned to Aud. “Tell you what. Let’s build a bigger fire.”
EIGHT
    OVER THE NEXT SIX HOURS, eight scorpions cruised around our clearing, just beyond the firelight. One rushed us, forelimbs flailing. Aud pumped six rounds into the monster, until it staggered away, then collapsed into a shadowed heap just beyond the fire’s glow.
    Aud fingered his empty ammunition pouch. “That meat will distract them for a few hours, but I only have two rounds left. Jason, we won’t last the night.”
    Even on Earth, the firewood-per-night rule of thumb is figure all that you think you need, then gather five times that much. An hour before dawn, we had hacked and burned all the oilwood we could reach, and the fire had burned low enough that we could hear monsters respirating just beyond the firelight. A chugging noise echoed in the distance, and swelled. Then we heard shots, and shouts. With my night passive, I saw them before they saw us. “Aud, it’s a tracked vehicle with Iridian markings.” It lurched, slow and clumsy even for an Iridian vehicle, and it clanged and rattled like a frontier tinker’s wagon. “I can see three crew.”
    He smiled. “I don’t have to see. I can hear. Pots and pans banging. It’s an Iridian field kitchen transporter. The company messes were so far in the Iridian rear that their own infantry ran right by them. The field kitchen crawlers are so slow that these stragglers are just getting to us now. The Iridians assign new recruits as cooks. Not blooded infantry.”
    A yellow flash bloomed, a rifle crack echoed through the lycopods, then somebody swore. I raised my eyebrows. “They sound blooded to me.”
    “Probably a scorpion wandered close