Read Orphan's Alliance (Jason Wander) for Free Online

to the crawler. Veterans wouldn’t waste a bullet. They know a crawler’s big enough, and loud enough, that scorpions won’t bother it.”
    Ten minutes later, the crawler had clanked within shoutire „ng distance.
    “Hello the fire! Friend or foe?”
    Aud called back, “We wish to negotiate.”
    Pause.
    I upped my magnification. A kid stood on the crawler’s deck, in stained cook’s whites. He steadied himself with one hand against a rack hung with pots that swung back and forth to the chug of the crawler’s engine. A white headcover, probably a bunched chef’s toque, peeked out beneath his crooked helmet. I could see him, but he couldn’t see me.
    He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Negotiate what?”
    Aud yelled, “Your surrender. I’m Brigadier Audace Planck, Acting Commander of the First Expeditionary Army of Tressen.”
    The crawler stopped, and chugged at idle, fifty yards from us. The kid laughed and called, “Quicksilver himself? Here in the mud? Then I’m the Brigadier of the Sixty-Eighth Iridian Fusiliers! You surrender, or we’ll surround your position and bombard it.”
    “You’re a single unarmed crawler. Not one of the three of you has ever fired a round in combat, you’re lost, and you’re running for your lives. By noon tomorrow the Tressen offensive will roll over you and blow you and that crawler to bits.” Aud handed me his pistol, and whispered. “I can’t see them, but can you put one round on their front plate?”
    Rank and experience aside, we were two middle-aged men sharing one pistol and two bullets. We were facing an armored vehicle, and three enemy soldiers with rifles. Yet Audace Planck was demanding their surrender. The daring one indeed.
    I dialed up my optics, sighted, then squeezed one off. The bullet struck the iron crawler one foot below the kid’s boots, and spit an orange spark as it sang off into the night. Now we were down to one bullet. The kid grabbed his helmet with one hand as he leapt down inside the crawler, swearing. Pause. Whispering.
    From inside the crawler, the kid yelled, “What if we do surrender?”
    “Lay your rifles on the top deck where we can see them. We’ll board your crawler and wait out the night with you. When my troops overtake us tomorrow, you’ll be treated well. You have my word.”
    “You’re really him? Quicksilver?”
    Beyond the firelight, a huge, multi-legged shadow lumbered. Too close. I shouted, “It’s him. Hurry up.”
    “Who are you?”
    I turned to Aud and shrugged. Officially, I didn’t exist, but the fiction wasn’t going to survive any better than we would if we didn’t get inside that crawler in the next ten minutes. I called out into the darkness.
    “I’m the marksman who put a round one foot below your boots. The next shot goes one foot below that white hat you’re wearing under your helmet.”
    A half hour later, Aud and I sat inside a rattling iro>
    The ranking corporal, the negotiator, removed his helmet, fluffed his toque, and held out a bread loaf to his captors. “Go ahead. One thing we have is food.”
    Planck tore off a chunk, chewed, then smiled. “Extraordinary!”
    The kid shrugged. “My family are bakers.”
    Planck raised his eyebrows and smiled. “Where?”
    “Veblen.”
    “Oh. I’m sorry.”
    “My father lost his leg in the shelling. If I don’t come home, my mother won’t be able to rebuild the shop alone.”
    Planck reached across the crawler, and patted the kid’s knee, “Don’t worry. This war’s over for you. This war will be over for everyone in a month.”
    By twenty minutes after sunrise the next morning, the scorpions had retreated to deep water, or so Aud assured me. We ran a white cook’s apron up the crawler’s signal mast, then we all hid twenty yards away, in the weeds, in case some Kodiak plinked the crawler anyway.
    Thirty minutes later, a surprised Kodiak squadron commander saluted the hell out of Planck, then detached one of his sliders to speed Planck,