The Lost War, Karl Gallagher [recommended reading txt] 📗

tent, but he stopped and reached for the object the other hunter tossed across the lane. It was a good catch, but the feel of it against his skin shocked him into knocking it up in the air.

“What the hell? Where did you find ice?”

He caught the irregular chunk again and slid it from hand to hand. His palms grew wet as the ice melted from his body heat.

Deadeye laughed. “Plane is handing them out.”

“Where the hell is he finding ice?” The cold made Newman remember life on Earth, and everything else there: showers, plentiful food, safe houses. He shivered from the flash of homesickness, not the cold.

“He’s making it, dude. Plane’s the newest wizard.”

“Huh. How’d that happen?” Newman tossed the ice back to Deadeye while it was still big enough to throw.

“He burned himself. Was warming some venison when it fell off his dagger into the fire. Burned his fingers getting it back. Poured some water on the burn and it became ice.” Deadeye’s grin had a sardonic twist.

“Nice trick. Pity he didn’t come up with something useful for killing orcs.” Newman wiped the cold water off on his shirt and locked away the thoughts of civilization.

***

“Milady? We have the bodies you wanted.”

Lady Burnout brought two baskets of gear to examine the orc corpses. She made the young fighter carry the heavier one.

The dead orcs still lay on the travois they’d been dragged here on.

Burnout chose the one on the left. She placed a chisel above the eyebrows and gave it a firm whack with her mallet. It went in just enough to crack the bone. She moved it over two inches and struck again.

Continuing the crack around the back of the skull required a break to sever the neck. Fortunately her subject had bled out while being dragged through the woods so that wasn’t nearly as messy as she’d feared. When the chisel marks connected around to the forehead she used a tent stake to pry up the top of the skull. It popped right off.

Opening the torso had no surprises. After looking over the organs she began taking slices and examining them under her microscope.

The testicles were the only organ she sampled on all four bodies.

A gate guard brought Autocrat Sharpquill at her command. He kept his annoyance at the interruption down to a “this better be important” frown.

“Thank you for coming, my lord,” said Lady Burnout. “I’ve made some interesting finds.”

She led the Autocrat to the right-hand corpse. She pointed at its crotch. “This is a penis.”

“You know, I was going to guess that.”

She pointed at the next one. “This is an ovipositor.”

“An ovi-what?”

“It lays eggs. The gametes I found in it were twenty times the size of the sperm the other one produced. They’re mobile, they have a tail to push with, but they’re definitely eggs.”

“You’re saying this one is female?” Sharpquill was no longer amused.

“Yes.”

“It looks identical to the male.”

Burnout shrugged. “Sexual dimorphism isn’t mandatory. It doesn’t even apply to all primates.”

“I’m trying to figure out what this means.”

“It’s obvious. What they did to Belladonna, and to, to the deer, it’s not a dominance display. It’s their life cycle. Catch something about their own size, inject the gametes into the prey, then let it go. The gametes merge, the fetuses fight to be the sole survivor, then it eats its way out of the host. Then I guess the baby orc looks for a band to join.”

Sharpquill vomited.

“That’s—that’s horrible,” he said. “What a monstrous world we’ve been exiled to.”

“There are wasps back home that breed that way. They’re predators in both feeding and reproduction.”

“They don’t do it to us.” He spat to clear his mouth.

Examples from her tropical disease rotation leapt to mind, but she didn’t want to distract him.

“Let me show you the brain.” She called over a guard to bring the severed head. “See, it’s about the size of a human brain and has complex convolutions like ours. I’d say they’re roughly equivalent to our intelligence.”

“Just what we need. Wait—there was a report. A patrol said they saw an orc who looked pregnant. It ran off at the start of the fight.”

Burnout thought a moment. “They probably have some sort of dominance hierarchy. The orc on the bottom—well. It has to be bad to be the orc on the bottom.”

***

Goldenrod reached through the flap of the smoking tent. Prying a strip of fish off the line by feel was annoying, but it beat getting a blast of smoke in the face. She bit an end off the strip and chewed it.

“Can I try one?” asked Pinecone from across the clearing. It was his turn to tend the charcoal mound.

She underhanded the strip to him.

Pinecone popped it in his mouth. “That tastes good,” he mumbled around it.

“Yeah. It’s too moist to last. I need to dry it completely.”

“Like jerky? Yuck.”

“Jerky lasts. We don’t know how long winter is here. We might need tons of stored food to make it through.”

Pinecone stomped on the mound. A section settled in, sending a puff of smoke out the top. “Are we even going to have a winter?”

“The trees look temperate, not tropical,” she said. “So probably. But until we’ve been here a year—or can ask some natives—we have to prepare for the worst.”

He laughed. “That’s it. We need to take orcs prisoner and interrogate them. ‘Recite your calendar! What’s today’s date? Confess!’”

Goldenrod added more damp wood to her fire. “They’re stone age. Probably not good at astronomy.”

“There were stone age humans who were good at it. That’s it! We need to quest for Orchenge.”

***

“Come in, Strongarm,” said Lady Burnout. She waved him to a chair instead of the examining table.

He sat cautiously. “New