Orphan's Alliance (Jason Wander) by Robert Buettner Page B
Authors: Robert Buettner
Tags: Fiction, General, Science-Fiction, adventure, Fiction - Science Fiction, Space Opera, Science Fiction And Fantasy, Science Fiction - Adventure, Space warfare, Wander; Jason (Fictitious character)
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blame if things went wrong, for the “multinational effort.” But the U.N. would reap all praise and honors if the mission succeeded. If I can ever sell a used car to a State Department negotiator, I’ll be able to retire on the overpayment.
In the three remaining chairs at the table sat the Headline Act: Howard Hibble, General Cobb, and me. When I finished my brief, the undersecretary of Defense asked me, “This operation has proved that Outworlders can be trained to operate modern weapons systems?”
I cocked my head. “Depends on the Outworlders and the weapons systems. The Tressens are familiar with motor vehicles. A tank’s a tank, especially when it does the thinking, and we do the maintenance for them. But, say, aircraft, remotely piloted or manned? Too radical. Tressens haven’t even seen birds.”
“But the advanced Outworlds can handle advanced weapons?” the undersecretary pressed. He had a law degree, and he was leading his witness. But witnesses can’t object.
“The advanced Outworlds, yes.” The sad truth about the grandiose-sounding Human Union was that most of the Outworlds’ orphan humans, as my first grade teacher told my mother when they considered flunking me, needed “the gift of time to mature.” Lots of time.
For example, Weichsel was a planet that the Slugs had abandoned millennia ago, leaving behind human strays. We stumbled across Weichsel three jumps out. Weichsel resembled Earth about 10,000 BC, complete with ice and mastodons, and its humans hadn’t progressed much beyond fire. The humans didn’t have a name for their place. They barely had names for fire and mastodons, so we called their planet after the Weichselan glaciation in Scandinavia. The Weichselans didn’t actually sign the Human Union Charter. The State Department sort of assumed they wanted to join the Union because nobody threw sticks at the survey ship.
I said, “Tressens, and to a lesser extent, the Bren, are teachable, and some contemporary machines don’t spook them. But they don’t have the infrastructure or technology to maintain, much less copy, hovertanks. Much less hurt one another with discarded ones.”
The undersecretary nodded.
eigight="0%" width="4%">I said, “If you don’t mind my opinion, after the Armistice, we should have left the Kodiaks on Tressel to rust in the rain. They’re expensive hardware. Shipping them to Tressel was even more expensive. But instead of re-orbiting two hundred thousand tons of vehicles, support equipment, and fuel, we would have saved the taxpayers a fortune if we had destroyed the equipment in place. And now the taxpayers are footing the additional bill to ship them the rest of the way home.”
Somebody asked, “Who said anything about shipping them back here?”
Before I had time to decipher that question, the commandant of the Marine Corps asked, “What kind of Officer Efficiency Report would you write for Planck, if you had to?”
“Promote ahead of contemporaries. Tops. He grasped the Kodiaks’ potential to reshape the battlefield faster and better than the Tressen General Staff.”
I stopped short of saying, “You know how General Staffs are.” But a few of the brass still scowled.
“How so?” the marine asked.
“The Tressen General Staff wanted to array the Kodiaks against the Iridian West Wall, as glorified artillery. That would have wasted their mobility. Planck realized that hovertanks have a disproportionate mobility advantage over terrain like the Barrens. He planned, organized, and executed a wheeling maneuver through the Barrens and around the West Wall, with the Kodiaks punching through like Panzers. Frankly, the German assaults through the Low Countries and around the Maginot Line in World Wars I and II weren’t done as well. The offensive ended a stalemated war in a month. Most Iridian units got pocketed, and surrendered. They weren’t slaughtered. That minimized Tressen casualties, too.”
“So he’s an intuitive tank
In the three remaining chairs at the table sat the Headline Act: Howard Hibble, General Cobb, and me. When I finished my brief, the undersecretary of Defense asked me, “This operation has proved that Outworlders can be trained to operate modern weapons systems?”
I cocked my head. “Depends on the Outworlders and the weapons systems. The Tressens are familiar with motor vehicles. A tank’s a tank, especially when it does the thinking, and we do the maintenance for them. But, say, aircraft, remotely piloted or manned? Too radical. Tressens haven’t even seen birds.”
“But the advanced Outworlds can handle advanced weapons?” the undersecretary pressed. He had a law degree, and he was leading his witness. But witnesses can’t object.
“The advanced Outworlds, yes.” The sad truth about the grandiose-sounding Human Union was that most of the Outworlds’ orphan humans, as my first grade teacher told my mother when they considered flunking me, needed “the gift of time to mature.” Lots of time.
For example, Weichsel was a planet that the Slugs had abandoned millennia ago, leaving behind human strays. We stumbled across Weichsel three jumps out. Weichsel resembled Earth about 10,000 BC, complete with ice and mastodons, and its humans hadn’t progressed much beyond fire. The humans didn’t have a name for their place. They barely had names for fire and mastodons, so we called their planet after the Weichselan glaciation in Scandinavia. The Weichselans didn’t actually sign the Human Union Charter. The State Department sort of assumed they wanted to join the Union because nobody threw sticks at the survey ship.
I said, “Tressens, and to a lesser extent, the Bren, are teachable, and some contemporary machines don’t spook them. But they don’t have the infrastructure or technology to maintain, much less copy, hovertanks. Much less hurt one another with discarded ones.”
The undersecretary nodded.
eigight="0%" width="4%">I said, “If you don’t mind my opinion, after the Armistice, we should have left the Kodiaks on Tressel to rust in the rain. They’re expensive hardware. Shipping them to Tressel was even more expensive. But instead of re-orbiting two hundred thousand tons of vehicles, support equipment, and fuel, we would have saved the taxpayers a fortune if we had destroyed the equipment in place. And now the taxpayers are footing the additional bill to ship them the rest of the way home.”
Somebody asked, “Who said anything about shipping them back here?”
Before I had time to decipher that question, the commandant of the Marine Corps asked, “What kind of Officer Efficiency Report would you write for Planck, if you had to?”
“Promote ahead of contemporaries. Tops. He grasped the Kodiaks’ potential to reshape the battlefield faster and better than the Tressen General Staff.”
I stopped short of saying, “You know how General Staffs are.” But a few of the brass still scowled.
“How so?” the marine asked.
“The Tressen General Staff wanted to array the Kodiaks against the Iridian West Wall, as glorified artillery. That would have wasted their mobility. Planck realized that hovertanks have a disproportionate mobility advantage over terrain like the Barrens. He planned, organized, and executed a wheeling maneuver through the Barrens and around the West Wall, with the Kodiaks punching through like Panzers. Frankly, the German assaults through the Low Countries and around the Maginot Line in World Wars I and II weren’t done as well. The offensive ended a stalemated war in a month. Most Iridian units got pocketed, and surrendered. They weren’t slaughtered. That minimized Tressen casualties, too.”
“So he’s an intuitive tank
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