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

dead cooks, and stared down at them. “Sergeant Major, republish the Ge clublish neral Order regarding humane treatment of prisoners.” Planck looked up at the captain, and his gray eyes burned into the man. “Place the captain, here, under arrest. Confine him. Advise the Advocate General to prepare charges.”
    “Yes, sir. I’ll arrange a burial detail, as well.”
    When Aud Planck and I stood alone again, he rubbed his forehead. “We leveled this dead boy’s hometown and we didn’t bat an eye. Yesterday, we cremated a whole squadron of our own troops and to their families all I will be able to write is that I’m sorry. Is what that captain just did really so much more wrong?”
    “It is where I come from, Aud.”
    He sighed. “I suppose you’re looking forward to going home, Jason.”
    It was my turn to sigh. “Not exactly.”
NINE
    TWO MONTHS OF SWAMP-CROSSING, two hours of surface-to-orbit blasting and one day of
    .66 light-speed cruising later, I tidied up the paperless paperwork alongside the two members of the Tressel expedition I knew best.
    Another part of the expedition was the four hundred armor-branch techs beneath us, scurrying over the hovertanks’ hulls like camouflaged ants. The techs had performed all maintenance the Tressens couldn’t. The last part of the expedition, which remained behind on Tressel, was twenty State Department civilians, ten each in the Tressen and Iridian capitals, who were to establish consulates, and four contract security guards.
    My Command Sergeant Major, my Intelligence Liaison, aka my resident Spook, and I sat in a bubble-shaped clear plex cab that hung from ceiling tracks as it rolled twenty feet above two hundred seventy-six gently pre-owned Lockheed Kodiaks. The hovertanks were packed hull-to-hull in the football-field long centerline bay of U.S. Space Force Heavy Cruiser Dwight David Eisenhower . The Kodiaks looked like factory-fresh Electrovans, aboard a wet-bottom freighter bound from China to the Port of Houston, rather than aboard a warship.
    Semantically, the Ike was no warship. She was re-christened Human Union Consular Vessel Charity for the duration of the Tressel Expedition. The diplomats we left behind on Tressel notwithstanding, bludgeoning the Tressens and the Iridians to Armistice at cannon point had involved nothing consular and little charity.
    As we glided above each Kodiak in the loadmaster’s pod, the pod’s downlooking sensor recorded the ID code of the hovertank, which was etched into its turret top.
    Ord pointed at the running tally winking on the pod’s screen. “Two lost to enemy action. Five to friendly fire.”
    I looked away and blinked.
    Ord continued, “The remaining sixteen units couldn’t be recovered, due to operator error or mechanical fault, and were verified to have been destroyed in place, per orders.”
    “So my pension remains intact, Sergeant Major?”
    Ord smiled. “As long as all of0%"„ these get back home with us.”
    An officer’s most solemn responsibility is his mission. As solemn, though barely in second place, is his responsibility to his soldiers. But an officer is also directly responsible to the army, and indirectly to the taxpayers, for hardware under his command. Even a modern infantry platoon’s equipment costs more than its lieutenant could earn in three lifetimes. For me, just handwriting the total MSRP of the stuff I’ve signed for over the years would cramp my hand.
    In the pod’s jump seat behind us, Howard Hibble leaned forward, sucking nicotine out of a stop-smoking lollipop until his wrinkled cheeks cupped inward like deflated balloons. “Actually, we’ll get home before them.”
    I gritted my teeth. “You set up a pony? And didn’t tell me?” Howard’s rank was colonel, because the army didn’t have a rank of witch doctor. We had served together since the Blitz, when I was infantry’s most expendable trainee and he was an extraterrestrial intelligence professor turned intelligence