Orphan's Triumph (Jason Wander) (3 page)

I started to cough. Through the dope, pain penetrated my chest like a dull ice pick twisting. I froze my shoulders and tried to refrain from breathing while I hissed, “Pleasure? You this compassionate with all your patients, Wally?”

He toggled through my overactive medical history with his thumb. “Oh, suck it up, Jason. A cracked sternum’s little potatoes for you.”

I asked, “What about the girl?”

“Your victim? The private won’t be playing the harmonica for a while. Jaw contusions and some dental work. She’s on the stockade ward. I might move you there, too.”

“Now you’re a criminologist?”

“No. But I’ve got an honorary degree in watching screwballs. If you threw yourself into that situation to save the girl, to balance the scales for your perceived inadequacy because Congresswoman Metzger died on Mousetrap, you’re a little nuts. But if you were trying to commit suicide by lunatic, you’re a lot nuts. In which case I’m required by regulation to decertify you for command.”

“I’m fine. Half the Pentagon and two-thirds of Congress are crazier than I am, and nobody decertifies them.”

Wally snorted.

I said, “Remember,
Colonel,
I’m the biggest stud duck within two billion cubic light-years. I could fire you before you could decertify me.”

Wally sighed. “If only. Then
I’d
be the one who got shipped back to Mousetrap, where the sports holos are only two weeks behind and a man can get plotzed on scotch instead of fermented groundfruit juice.”

I narrowed my eyes at him, about the only body parts I could move without wincing. “Who’s getting shipped back to Mousetrap?”

He raised bushy eyebrows. “Didn’t Ord tell you? You are. Ord got one of those hard-copy encrypted chips that Hibble insists on sending. Why do you think the Spooks pulled an orbit-capable ship away from shuttling back and forth to the Red Moon? And used it to double time Ord out to the Stone Hills to deliver your Spook-o-gram?”

I sighed. “Wally, not even I am supposed to know where those shuttles are going. So don’t spread that around.”

Wally leaned down to me and whispered, “I don’t need to. Everybody on this post knows that whole Moon’s a Cavorite nugget. Though it beats the fecal matter out of me why the Spooks care. The Stone Hills mines produce Cavorite faster than Mousetrap can build ships to use it.”

I changed the subject. Partly because I didn’t want to know how much other classified material was common knowledge in my command. Partly because I was curious about Howard Hibble’s summons to Mousetrap. “How soon can I travel?”

“Given the diminished recuperative powers of a man your age—”

“You’re as old as I am.”

“Exactly. It takes me three days to recuperate from shining my shoes.” Wally shook his head. “I can’t sign off that you’ll be ready to tolerate escape-velocity G forces for at least a week.”

Howard was a devious geek, but if he sent a Spook-o-gram, something was up that I couldn’t wait a week to hear about. “Release me to travel tomorrow and I’ll smuggle you back a case of scotch.”

Wally raised his eyebrows higher. “Single malt?”

I managed a shallow nod. “And if you don’t share your amateur shrinkology with Sergeant Major Ord, I’ll make it sixteen-year-old.”

“Done. I’ll shoot you up with healing accelerants, but I can’t immobilize that fracture, so don’t blame me when it hurts like hell. And the shrinkology was Ord’s in the first place, so don’t blame me if he brings it up.”

The next morning, Ord and I caught a lift aboard what everybody was supposed to think, but nobody actually believed, was a hop jet shuttling us to rendezvous with the
Abraham Lincoln,
in parking orbit above Bren. Wally was right about the fracture, which hurt like hell. I clamped my jaw while I blamed him anyway, every minute that the hopper boosted.

We shared the hopper with one passenger, who spun his seat to face Ord and me once the engines went silent. His nameplate read “Applebite.”

Like the rest of Howard Hibble’s freak show, also known as Military Intelligence Battalion Bren, Reinforced, our companion wore army utilities, topped with a twentysomething’s straw-colored chin and skull fuzz, which had no recent experience with a barber or a razor.

Ord eyed the kid’s crooked-pinned captain’s brass with the enthusiasm of a jockey aboard a pig. I asked, “How goes Silver Bullet, Applebite?”

Howard Hibble’s supergeeks had the military bearing of Cub Scouts, Mensa-level intellects, and the xenophobia of Cold War spies. Applebite’s eyes widened, because even the code name for the Cavorite weaponization project was classified. He slid his eyes to Ord and said nothing. I sighed. “The sergeant major’s clearance is higher than yours, Applebite. Besides, in about forty minutes, he and I are gonna watch you board a ship that’s not even supposed to exist.”

Finally, Applebite shrugged. “We’re close, sir. But…”

I smiled. From three decades of war, we knew that the man-sized armored-maggot Slug Warriors were as replaceable to the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony as fingernails were to us. The only way to win the war was going to be to destroy the single cognitive center that ran the organism. A center that was probably the size of a planet. But we had learned early in the war that the Slugs had a way to neutralize nukes. So for the last thirty years, the Spooks’ job had been to think up a silver bullet that could kill a brain bigger than Mars.

“But even if you make a silver bullet, you don’t know where to shoot it?”

Applebite scratched his chin fuzz and smiled. “We don’t. But finding the homeworld’s not my job.”

Even after almost four decades, now that we finally had ships numerous enough and good enough that we could chase down Slug ships like wolves on cattle, we couldn’t find the Slugs’ homeworld. If we could find it, we were, apparently, almost ready to pour Cavorite on it like salt on a garden snail. A simile that delighted me.

Our hopper shook, the broken edges of my breastbone rubbed against each other, and I stiffened like somebody had cabled an Electrovan battery to my chest. We decelerated and matched circumlunar orbit with an unmarked vessel that had once been a Metzger-class cruiser and was now Silver Bullet’s headquarters. Cavorite was less toxic to humans than to Slugs, but the Spooks still chose to orbit the Red Moon rather than set up camp on it. Applebite’s drop-off at the research ship wasn’t recorded by its Spook crew on the hopper’s flight log, and a half hour later Ord and I were piped aboard the
Abraham Lincoln
before her foremast watch finished breakfast.

Thereafter, we spent a steady week at .6 light speed, and my breastbone started to knit, thanks to Wally’s accelerants.

Less happily, Ord hadn’t heart-to-hearted me about my mental state. Nominally, commissioned officers outrank senior noncommissioned officers. But if a good sergeant hadn’t privately advised the Old Man, who was typically younger than the sergeant, after the Old Man screwed up, it meant the time bomb was still ticking.

I watched the stars around us stretch from light points into glowing spaghetti, then disappear altogether as their light, and the
Abe
’s mile-long mass, got sucked into the Temporal Fabric Insertion Point that would spit us out inside the Mousetrap interstellar crossroad. As we jumped, I muttered to myself, “Howard, you mendacious son of a bitch, this better be worth the trip.”

FIVE

ORD AND I WERE SPECTATORS on the
Abe
’s bridge when she popped out into the Mousetrap, light-years as the crow flies from the Bren II Insertion Point, where the
Abe
went in. Vacuum is vacuum to my untrained eye, so the new space we saw on the screens looked as black and starry as what we left behind. Except the
Abe
got lit by sixteen pings within its first three seconds in new space. All sixteen pings got instantaneous, correct electronic responses back from the
Abe
’s electronic countermeasures array. If they hadn’t, the
Abe
would have been trading real bullets with a Scorpion interceptor squadron. Scorpions were single-seat Cavorite-drive fighters, so small and stealthy compared to a conventional starship like the
Abraham Lincoln,
or like a Slug Firewitch, that they’re scarcely noticeable. Scorpions may be too delicate to survive a jump, but they sting, as the Slugs had learned the hard way.

The Mousetrap was a point of nothing in a universe mostly filled with nothing. But clustered in the Mousetrap, “close together” by astrophysical standards, were a double handful of the useful kind of black holes the Spooks called Temporal Fabric Insertion Points. A TFIP’s enormous gravity tacked together folds in the fabric of conventional space, so an object that could slingshot through a T-FIP

jumped out light-years away from where it went in.

The Mousetrap was the most strategically valuable crossroad in human history because every one of the fourteen warm, wet rocks that constituted the planets of the Human Union could be reached in just days or weeks by jumping a ship through one or another of the Mousetrap’s T-FIPs. Humans could easily colonize the Milky Way and defend ourselves via the Mousetrap’s shortcuts. Unfortunately, the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony, which viewed humans as a virus, could just as easily exterminate us via those same Mousetrap shortcuts.

Mankind guarded the Mousetrap like its collective life depended on it, because it did. So, ping challenges and visual confirmations notwithstanding, four Scorpions assumed station around the
Abe,
shadowing her like a potential Trojan horse. Well, the
Abe
’s crew knew that the Scorpions were there, even though the
Abe
couldn’t find them with its sensors. Ten escorted hours later, the great orange disk of the gas giant Leonidas filled the
Abe
’s visual displays, like Jupiter with blue stripes. One hour after that, Leonidas’s only satellite became visible, a spinning, twenty-mile-long nickel-iron mote against the planet’s glowing bulk.

The one thing in this universe more valuable to mankind than the empty space of the Mousetrap was the only habitable rock within the Mousetrap, from which the empty space could be defended. Ord peered at the moonlet known as Mousetrap as the
Abe
drifted closer. Half of Mousetrap’s lumpy surface sparkled with silver solar arrays, even more than on our last trip through. He grunted,

“Must make more electricity than Hoover Dam, these days.”

The
Abe
’s engineering officer, who stood watching the displays alongside us, inclined her head toward Ord. “Actually, Sergeant Major, Mousetrap generates enough power to lift the Hoover Dam into low Earth orbit. The smelting plants are power hogs.”

Too many miners, most of whom had been Bren slaves risking death for emancipation, had died boring a core out of Mousetrap’s centerline. From Mousetrap’s north pole to its south pole, sealed at each end with massive airlocks, ran a great tunnel that had been carved out. Into the tunnel’s walls had been carved vast living, mining, and manufacturing spaces, in concentric rings around the core canal. A vessel like the
Abe,
or like the Slug vessels from which we copied Cavorite drive, could thunder up to Mousetrap at thousands of miles per hour, or even per second, then stop on a dime, without spilling coffee within the vessel’s gravity cocoon. Also without denting the ship or the moonlet. I had seen it done.

But a
Bastogne
-class cruiser’s fender bender would dent even the national debt. Therefore, the
Abe
drifted, slow and nose-first, “down” toward Mousetrap’s north pole like a cherry toward the top of a sundae. The outer doors irised open on an airlock chamber bigger than a volcano crater. The
Abe
paused within the lock while the outer doors closed; then the inner doors opened and we crept forward into Broadway, Mousetrap’s centerline tunnel, at ten miles per hour.

I’d been down Broadway before, but my jaw always drops. The
Abe
’s forward screen showed us drifting through a rotating, man-made tunnel that seemed bigger than the Grand Canyon, its walls shimmering with the crisscross Widmanstätten crystal pattern of meteoric nickel iron. But most of North Broadway’s walls were obscured by a whiskering of docks and shipyards. We cruised for miles past keels and skeletons of new cruisers, frigates, transports, even Scorpion fighters, gnatlike compared to the rest. Beyond the shipyards lay miles of repair yards, every slot filled by ranks of fleet operational ships in for refit. The whole array flickered with sparks sprayed by welders and was lit by spotlights played on scaffold-wrapped hulls.

Whenever I cruised North Broadway, I reflexively scanned the ranks of docked cruisers for the
Emerald River.
It wasn’t the cruiser I hoped to see, but her skipper, the estimable and lovely Admiral Mimi Ozawa. But Mimi had been rotated Earthside, after leading the Second Fleet across T-FIP jump after T-FIP jump, in a futile search for the Slugs’ homeworld. Sometimes with me aboard, mostly without. I sighed.

Broadway’s middle miles were darker, pocked with adits and burrows that tapped pockets where raw materials, from aluminum to zinc, had concentrated within the moonlet’s nickel-iron mass. Boxcar-sized ore cars beetled back and forth from the mines to the smelters, where the fabric of Mousetrap was being transmuted into the building blocks that defended the Human Union. Farther on, South Broadway glittered, as windows of offices, training and living spaces spilled light into the vast tunnel.

The
Abe
eased up to her mooring, one of a dozen ringing the tunnel, from which vessels transferred passengers and cargo to and from the south eight miles of Broadway.

An hour later, Ord and I had separated. He signed us in to respective billets in the Officers and NCO’s quarters, while I tubed upweight—that is, feet-first out toward the surface of Mousetrap—to level forty-eight. I exited the tube as an MP saluted me, still checked my ID as though I might be a disguised Slug, then smiled. “Welcome back to the Penthouse, General.”

Level forty-eight was the outermost of Moosetrap’s cylinders, all arranged concentric to Broadway. Level forty-eight was called the Penthouse, even though it was buried miles deep in Mousetrap’s nickel-iron mass, because it was the top—bottom, actually—tube stop and because, as the outermost ring, it had the least-curved floors and ceilings and the most Earthlike rotational gravity in Mousetrap. The Spooks monopolized the high-rent district because they were the ones who designed Mousetrap, but more importantly because they deserved the extra comfort. The Spooks didn’t rotate home every twelve months like Mousetrap’s GIs, civilian contract labor, and Space Force swabbies. Marginally nicer quarters were small compensation for the hardships of ’Trap Rat status.