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

just got wakened from my first hour’s sleep after eight hours on watch.
    I squinted over my shoulder, behind Howard and me, at our companion. It remained a hippo-sized, mucous-green octopus on a platter, humming a yard above the cave floor.
    Sleepy or not, I had to get us three off this Ice Age rock unfrozen, unstarved, and undigested. I groaned as my replaced parts awakened, more slowly than the rest of me.
    “Jason!” Howard’s voice quavered.
    I stood, yawned, wished I could scratch myself through my armor, then shuffled to the cave mouth, juggling a baseball-sized rock from palm to palm. Last night, I had perfected a fastball that terrorized many a dire wolf.
    As I stepped alongside Howard at the cave mouth, he lobbed an egg-sized stone with a motion like a girl in gym class. It landed twenty feet short of the biggest, nearest wolf. The monster sauntered up, sniffed the stone, then bared its teeth at us in a red-eyed growl. The wolf pack numbered eleven total, milling around behind the big one, all gaunt enough that we must have looked like walking pot roast to them.
    The wolves couldn’t eat us. A dire wolf could gnaw an Eternad forearm gauntlet for a week with no result but dull teeth.
    I looked up at the clear dawn sky. The wolves were, however, bad advertising. The storm had wiped out all traces of our passing and, I hoped, would retard any search by the decapitated Slug Legion.
    I planned for us to hide out in this hole until the good guys homed in on our transponders. If any good guys survived. We might starve in this hole waiting for dead people. I wound up, pegged my baseball-sized stone at the big wolf, and plinked him on the nose. I whooped. I couldn’t duplicate that throw if I pitched nine innings’ worth. The wolf yelped and trotted back fifty yards, whining but unhurt.
    Howard shrugged. “The wolf pack doesn’t necessarily give us away. We could just be a bear carcass or something in here.”
    I jerked my thumb back in the direction of the green blob in the cave. “Even if the Slugs don’t know how to track us, do you think they can track the Ganglion?”
    Disconnected or not, our prisoner could have been screaming for help in Slugese at that moment, for all we knew.
    Howard shrugged again. “I don’t think—”
    The wolf pack, collectively, froze, noses upturned.
    Howard said, “Uh-oh.”
    I tugged Howard deeper into the cave’s shadows and whispered, “Whatever they smell, we can’t see. The wind’s coming from upslope, behind us.”
    Outside, the wolves retreated another fifty yards from the mouth of our cave as a shadow crossed it. My heart pounded, and I squeezed off my rifle’s grip safety.
    Eeeeerr.
    The shadow shuffled past the cave mouth. Another replaced it, then more. As they strode into the light, the shadows resolved into trumpeting, truck-sized furballs the color of rust. Howard whispered, “Mammoth.”
    The herd bull strode toward the wolf pack, bellowing, head back to display great curved tusks. The wolves retreated again.
    Howard said, “If we shot a mammoth out there, the carcass would explain the wolf pack. It could make an excellent distraction.”
    He was right. I raised my M40 and sighted on the nearest cow, but at this range I could have dropped her with a hip shot.
    Then I paused. “The carcass might attract those big cats.” Weichsel’s fauna paralleled Pleistocene Earth in many ways, but our Neolithic forefathers never saw saber-toothed snow leopards bigger than Bengal tigers.
    Really, my concern with Howard’s idea wasn’t baiting leopards. Saber teeth can’t scuff Eternads any more than wolf teeth can. I just didn’t want to shoot a mammoth.
    It sounded absurd. I couldn’t count the Slugs that had died at my hand or on my orders in this war. And over my career I had taken human lives, too, when the United States in its collective wisdom had lawfully ordered me to.
    It wasn’t as though any species on Weichsel was endangered, except us humans, of