Orphan's Alliance (Jason Wander) by Robert Buettner Page A

receivers, for relay home. Diplomats make lousy air traffic controllers. Therefore, our pilots were being guided down by morse-style messages flashed by a Tressen heliograph, a hinged mirror on a tripod, operated by a Tressen Signals officer.
    Howard leaned across the aisle and touched Jude’s arm. “Lack of necessity is the mother of non-invention.”
    Jude wrinkled his forehead.
    After decades with Howard, I spoke fluent Hibble. He meant that Tressel’s continental interiors, like what we were now overflying, differed from its coastal swamps. The young ground was mostly bald rock, flatter than Kansas and dryer than Chad. Grasses, which would break rock into soil, and real trees, which would block men from seeing out to the horizon, lay millions of years in Tressel’s future. Inland from the Barrens’ swamps, line-of-sight communication worked fine on most days, and over long distances. In this world on which Tressen and Iridian civilization developed, men communicated better by heliograph than Teddy Roosevelt had been able to communicate by telegraph. What Howard meant was that Tressel probably had people smart enough to invent the wireless, it just had no people with a burning need to invent it.
    Ord, seated next to Howard, watched out his window through old-fashioned field glasses, and frowned.
    “We’re receiving flash from two locations, two miles apart.”
    The pilot intercommed us from the flight deck. “Sirs, are there two LZs?”
    Ord said, “Flash ’em back with your landing lights. Ask what’s up.”
    The intercom said, “Sergeant Major, tactical aircraft haven’t mounted landing lights since before the Blitz. We can listen, but we can’t talk back.”
    Combat aircraft didn’t advertise, when their pilots could see by ambient starlight like it was noon. I suppose there was a flashlight clipped to a bulkhead, somewhere.
    I said, “Can you make a pass low enough to see what’s going on?”
    “Roger.”
    Two heartbeats later my stomach tried to crawl up to my tonsils as my seat tried to drop out from under me, and my lap pressed up against my lap belt. “Crap.”
    Jude grinned at me. “He’s hardly even diving. Barely tactical.”
    I death gripped my seat arm. “I’ve ridden plenty of tactical. That doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
    We swooped low and slow, five hundred feet above the first of the two signal points, a rock clump. I leaned across Jude and looked down.
    As I watched, a forest of lights popped and twinkled below us among the rocks.
    “Christ!” The pilot’s voice exploded over the intercom, and suddenly I was looking down but seeing the sky.
    The transport’s airframe screamed as the pilot cranked it into a tactical, evasive barrel roll. Something thumped behind us, and the engines coughed. The pilot said, in a voice as flat as Death Valley, “Hang on. Somebody just shot us down.”
    TWENTY-ONE
    IT DOESN’T TAKElong to fall five hundred feet, but it feels like forever. I splayed my arm across Jude’s chest to restrain him, probably the most futile gesture in parenting but among the most frequent.
    The pilot kept us level, and did whatever pilots do to cut our speed, which I imagine is more difficult upside down. The transport’s roof thundered as we skipped across Tressel’s rocky surface at two hundred miles per hour, screeching like the world’s worst adjusted brakes. The Tressen high desert looks flat from forty thousand feet, but after a mere thousand yards the transport’s nose caught a boulder and we cartwheeled, throwing off sparking metal bits and pieces like a Mardi Gras float.
    Somewhere, Howard said, “Holy moly.”
    TWENTY-TWO
    I SMELLED HOT METAL, and I tasted blood, trickling from my chin into my mouth, which seemed wrong.
    I looked up, and saw black rock above my head, bulging through a rent in the transport’s dorsal plates. I hung upside down, seatbelted into place in the inverted wreck.
    Ord said, “Sir?” Then I felt him sawing at the belt with