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

a jagged hull spar, and I dropped shoulder first onto the ceiling. Jude knelt there, wrapping a bandage around Howard’s arm. Ord peered at my chin, then wiped away blood and dressed the cut. “Scratch.”
    A knot swelled above his right eye.
    My neck was stiff, so I rotated my body toward the flight deck as I asked Ord, “The pilots?”
    He shook his head.
    I smelled the kerosene stink of RP9, and stiffened. “We have to get out—”
    “Yes, sir. But you’ve been unconscious for six minutes. If the fuel was going to go up, it probably would have happened before now.”
    The fuselage gaped where the right wing had torn free, and the four of us scrambled out into daylight. Three Tressen Army lorries chugged toward us, lurching over the desert pavement at twenty miles per hour. Tressen motor vehicles were Model-T boxy, and their internal combustion engines pocketa-pocked along on biofuel that was distžaveilled from algae scraped off rocks and seemed to burn barely hot enough to boil water. But a goggled machine gunner waist-deep in the roof hatch of each truck trained his gun in our direction as they approached.
    Jude asked, “Are those the bad guys?”
    The first truck was a hundred yards from us when its gunner opened fire.
    “Crap!” I turned to fling Jude to the ground, but he tackled me first. I lay facedown on hot rock and realized that ricochets weren’t sparking all around us. I looked behind us. Two more trucks, these unmarked, and half-again as far from us as the Tressen Army lorries, raced toward us, armed men hanging off the running boards, firing rifles at the Tressens. The Tressen machine gunners were firing back, and their rounds were buzzing ten feet above our heads. I shouted to Jude over the gunfire, “We slid a mile from where those guys behind us shot us down. We wound up closer to these good guys than those bad guys.”
    The two unmarked lorries burst into flame under fire, two hundred yards from us. The troops in the Army lorries cheered as they squealed to a stop beside us. A Tressen major wearing Signals collar brass dismounted, ran to me, and saluted. “General Wander. Sir, are you alright?”
    I tried to shake my head, but had to swivel my shoulders. “Our pilots—drivers—dead.”
    The major’s face fell and he muttered, “Bastards!”
    I asked him, “What the hell happened?”
    “We were to mark your landing place. By the time we saw them, it was too late.”
    “What was their problem with us?”
    “You sided with Tressen. They were Iridian separatists.”
    “Iridia was already separate when I left here, at the Armistice.”
    “General Planck said you’d be surprised. He extends his welcome.” The officer winced. “Such as it is.”
    Jude limped to the wreck, hefted a twisted, loose strut, and began to pry blackened ultratanium skin back from the flight deck, to recover the bodies of his fellow pilots. He called to the soldiers in the lorries, his translator restating his words in idiomatic Tressen, “Little help, here?”
    I turned, stared at the black smoke roiling into the clear sky as the separatists’ trucks burned, and sighed. It was going to take more than a little help to sort out this mess. Winning the war on Tressel had been easy. Winning the peace appeared to be a bitch.
    TWENTY-THREE
    THE SMOKE PLUMESand gunfire must’ve alerted the good citizens of Tressia of our arrival, but when our convoy of trucks and ambulances rumbled through the capital’s suburban villages, no heads showed in the wind®d cows, no kids ran out to dash alongside the trucks and beg the GIs for sweets. I rode in the cab of the second lorry in line, alongside the Signals Major, and said, “Your truck’s not taking point. There’s a reason for that. Convoys get ambushed?”
    He shrugged. “Out here in the villages, pretty safe. Once we get inside the old city’s walls, where the streets are narrow, one in three take fire.”
    “Got a spare rifle?”
    He reached behind our seatback,