Orphan's Alliance

by Robert Buettner

  With one hand along the cool, curved stone of the stairwell, I felt my way down. I counted steps as I went.

  Maybe she was just having a look around. Maybe she was searching for the ladies’ room. Maybe she just needed to adjust something. I had to stop and shake my head, to clear the image of Mimi hiking up her skirt to straighten a stocking.

  No. Her smirk about me cooperating was no flirt. Maybe Jimmy Wethers ratted us out? Jimmy had been a junior rating aboard Excalibur, one of the handful of survivors. He didn’t take chances where the Slugs were concerned. He had thrown in immediately. But would one cruiser commander keep secrets from another?

  By my count of steps, I reached fifty feet below the courtyard. The laundries were supposed to be down a hundred feet, but I really had no idea whether this stair even led to the laundry cavern. The Kodiaks had been hauled in through an old laundry wagon entrance I had never even seen.

  My heart seemed to echo in the stairwell as I descended.

  What if she knew? More probably, what if, for some reason she suspected, and at the bottom of these stairs her suspicions got confirmed?

  Talk her out of it? Mimi flout authority? There had been the business with the Armada, but it was a different time and a different imperative.

  No, Warden had a cruiser—Mimi’s cruiser—and he wasn’t afraid to use it.

  If I couldn’t talk her out of it, she was tough, but she was little. I could tie her up—I had to shake my head to clear away another image—until the panel left.

  Abduct the captain of a capital ship and expect no one to notice? Ridiculous. And even if they didn’t notice, the Emerald River wouldn’t take the panel away without her.

  The stairwell narrowed, and my sword scraped the rock wall.

  I stopped. Then I snorted, and said out loud to myself, “Don’t even think about it!”

  But I did. I lost count of the steps.

  It seemed like I had descended halfway to hell when dim light began to flicker off the wall stones.

  I paused. Silence. Maybe I would get to the Kodiaks, and she wouldn’t even be there. Maybe there had been a side passage and we had parted ways.

  Fifteen steps farther down, my forward foot met rock when it should have met emptiness, and a faint breeze stroked my cheek.

  I shuffled forward down a brightening passageway that opened into rank after rank of low-ceilinged vaults, divided by hewn-stone columns thick enough to support a castle. Flickering torches on wall sconces lit the rows of still, armored hovertanks, which faded to burly shadows in the distance.

  I blinked, even at the dim light, and saw no movement.

  Then, fifty feet away, a figure stepped into view from behind a hovertank hull. Mimi had her back to me, as she stepped out of the shadows, and stared at the nearest Kodiak.

  I stared down into the dimness, and realized that my hand rested on the pommel of my sword.

  FORTY-TWO

  “THE POINT OF the sword kills so personally,” Mimi said, without turning around.

  “What?”

  She ran her hand along the Kodiak’s armored flank. “Armored formations. The point of the sword. I never get closer to my enemy than lighted dots on a glass wall. You fight down in the mud. With these big, brutal things, and with rifles and bayonets and bloody fingers.”

  I stepped closer, as she turned and faced me.

  She said, “But I thought infantry could track people. I’ve been waiting for ten minutes.”

  “What?”

  “You saw me come down here.”

  “You knew these were here?”

  “I knew one was, at least. I just took the first available down staircase, to confirm what I think’s going on.”

  “And what do you think’s going on?”

  “When we unloaded cargo at home, we took on a load of enormous containers for us to bring back here. Unspecified supplies addressed to Xerxes Data Processing. Which has been a Spook cutout for years. I had a container opened. And what did we find but pieces of a disassembled Subterrene borer. Bren mines Cavorite, so fair enough. But the containers weren’t to be downshipped. The Eisenhower would send transports to tow the containers back to it. What was going on aboard Ike that Howard didn’t want anybody from our ship to see?”

  Her eyes shone in the torchlight. Mimi was adorable when she was curious, even if she was painting me into a corner.

  She said, “So I got us back here a few hours early. Our downlooking optics caught the last Kodiak sliding off the Ike’s transport and onto a ramp leading under the Palace. Howard—with help from you and Muscovy—is playing an illegal shell game, just so the Ike can get the Mousetrap project started right away, instead of waiting years for Warden to get clearance from Congress.”

  It raised my eyebrows a bit that Mimi knew about Mousetrap. “That’s not enough reason to you—”

  “Anybody who lies to Congress just to accelerate a construction project probably should go to jail.”

  “But—” Good secrets, like Mousetrap, which Mimi knew about, weren’t enough justification. And the bad secret of the Weichsel incursion she didn’t know about.

  She nodded. “But since the Slugs greased Weichsel, anybody who slows down Mousetrap should be shot for treason against the human race.”

  My jaw dropped. “You know about Weichsel?”

  “Otherwise you’d be in my brig already. And Howard, and probably Ord, and that duck-lipped State Department weasel Muscovy. So help me.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “What cruiser do you think found that De Beers dredge?”

  “Oh. So now you’re ready to bend the rules, again?”

  She said, “Weichsel changed the rules.”

  I felt myself relax, and Mimi breathed out. She said, “So the military business is finished, for the moment.”

  I frowned. Evidently some other business remained unfinished.

  Then I pointed at her. “You were coming back from Weichsel when you picked us up from Bren last time. Carrying the news. That’s why you were mad at me for being late.”

  “Partly. I’ve been mad at you for a long time, Jason.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since you almost got yourself killed playing hero in that Troll.”

  It was an odd remark between professionals. “You were there, too, Mimi.” I paused, then swung my hand around the cavern, at the hovertanks. “So what about the Kodiaks?”

  She widened her eyes. “Kodiaks? All I see is a GI who looks good in a mess jacket.”

  My heart flickered. “Since when did you notice what I look like?”

  She looked into my eyes. “Since the first time I saw you. Jason, after the Armada business, why didn’t we . . .”

  The evening was taking another unexpected turn. Apparently for the better.

  I smiled, and stared down at my low cuts. “I don’t know. Ever since then, Munchkin’s been saying I should make a pass at you.”

  She stepped close enough to me to take my lapel, where it covered my straight-hanging medal row, in her fingers. I looked down at them, and noticed her medal row. Female officers’ medals don’t hang straight, and vive la différence. In fact, hers were rising and falling like a soft wave.

  She turned her face up to me as she stroked my lapel, and said, “But you haven’t.”

  “You might smack me.”

  She smelled like flowers. Orchids, I think.

  “I might not.” She closed her eyes.

  “Jason? Are you down here?” The voice, and clattering footsteps, echoed from the passage that led from the stairwell.

  Mimi’s eyes flashed open.

  I sighed, and said, “What is it, Howard?”

  FORTY-THREE

  AS HOWARD SCURRIED out of the passage and into the torchlight, his whisper boomed in the chamber. “Thank God you got down here! It sounds like Mimi Ozawa has been sticking her—”

  Mimi stepped in front of me, not so much to announce herself as to obscure developments south
of my cummerbund from Howard. It was the kind of intuitive reflex that made her the pilot she was. However, matters there were returning to normal rapidly, anyway.

  I waved my hand, palm down. “Pipe down! It’s okay, Howard. Mimi’s fine with it.”

  Howard stopped like he had walked into a plate glass window. “She is?”

  Mimi said, “I thought this through, Howard. You could have told Warden the whole truth as soon as we got here. But what if he shut you down anyway? For all you knew, I’d have backed him up. We could tell Warden now, but if he still objects, what do I do? Throw him in my brig? The safest thing is to keep the panel in the dark. We need to get them back aboard Emerald River before you two amateurs screw up another lie.”<΀…/p>

  I cocked my head. Nobody had ever accused Howard of being an amateur liar. Nor accused Mimi of being indecisive.

  Mimi pointed toward the stairwell. “Let’s go. I’ll tell them everybody needs to return to the Emerald River right away I’ll think of something. After all, it’s my ship.”

  The night was young, and Mimi smelled wonderful. But I knew she was right.

  I also knew that she was headed light years in one direction, while I was headed light years in another. And there was a war coming that neither of us might see the end of.

  The three of us climbed the stairs back to the palace courtyard in the dark, with Howard in the lead. Halfway up, I felt her hand feel for mine. She squeezed it, all the rest of the way. Once, she raised my hand, so my fingers touched her cheek. It was moist. So was mine.

  The next morning, the panel and Mimi, aboard the Emerald River, departed for Earth, minus one deserter. The day after that, the Eisenhower departed for Mousetrap, plus one stowaway.

  FORTY-FOUR

  ONE MONTH LATER, I floated in the Eisenhower’s observation blister again, along with two other people. Twenty hours earlier, Ike had completed the jump into the Mousetrap bottleneck.

  Ahead of us, like a poppy seed circling a beach ball, Mousetrap orbited Leonidas, an orange gas ball of a planet as big, and as useless for a human base, as Jupiter. Leonidas was named for the Greek general who blocked two hundred thousand Persians with three hundred Spartans, at the bottleneck of Thermopylae in 480 BC.

  “Planetoid” ill-describes Mousetrap because it sounds spherical and robust. “Moonlet” sounds too warm and fuzzy. Mousetrap was a nickel and iron lump, festooned in ice and rock leftovers from a Precambrian fender-bender with a comet. It looked like a twenty-mile long unshelled peanut that had rolled through curdled milk, though actually it had been captured by Leonidas’ gravity, the way Mars captured its moons. Mousetrap rotated around its long axis like a top, so the peanut’s ends formed Mousetrap’s north and south poles.

  Howard touched my uniform sleeve, as he pointed at the big planet. “I had you in mind when I named it Leonidas.”

  “Nobody cheers up a commander like you, Howard.” Earth history says Leonidas was a hero. However, at Thermopylae the Persians riddled him with arrows, beheaded him, then crucified his body.

  I turned to the other person in the bubble, who was blissfully ignorant of Earth history. “But you’re in command, Gustus.”

  After he died in 1232, Richard the Lionhearted, another hero, spent thirty-three years in purgatory. So said the Church of England, which Earth history presumes had inside info. Maybe Richard got hard time because he spent ninety-five percent of his reign crusading outside England.

  Bassin was a hero, too, but he had a country to reform. So, unlike Richard the Lionhearted, Bassin delegateÖ€…d the crusade on Mousetrap to Gustus.

  Gustus the Armorer was the ranking Marini on this project. The Marini equivalent of a Major General, he was pug-nosed, with curly black hair, and wore gold wire spectacles. Gustus was more a logistical Henry Ford than a Leonidas.

  He shook his head as he floated, clinging to a side rail. “That object is in command of us, until we change it.”

  Six months later, Gustus and his engineers had changed Mousetrap, or at least made a beginning.

  The Spooks’ vision for Mousetrap, which Gustus and the Marini were making into reality, wouldn’t change its surface, much, at first. The massive mining machinery that Mimi’s ship had handed off to the Ike would bore enormous tunnels through Mousetrap from north pole to south, so starships could float through them to be reinforced after jumps, like Electrovans through a car wash. Then the engineers would core Mousetrap like an apple, from the inside out, and construct under the armor of its nickel-iron skin vast barracks and training grounds.

  But Mousetrap wouldn’t just shelter and nurture the Human Union’s war machine, Mousetrap would build it.

  At the turn of this century, Earth produced one thousand million metric tons of iron ore each year. At that rate, a single nickel-iron asteroid a fraction of the size of Mousetrap’s core would yield well over a million years’ worth of iron and associated structural and exotic metals. And most of Mousetrap’s metals would be scooped out of its gut nearly pure enough to hammer into swords and plowshares. Mousetrap’s rock and water “impurities” would provide the remaining needed building blocks.

  In the soon-to-bloom factories within Mousetrap, a shipwright could breathe. But in Mousetrap’s tiny gravity, he could lift a ton. A metallurgist could begin with purer materials, and manipulate them in as much vacuum as he cared to use. Mousetrap’s finished products would come off the line already out here on the frontier, where they were needed, and minus the cost of shipping them across a galaxy.

  So Gustus and the Marini were also constructing within Mousetrap smelters, shipyards, armaments factories, all the infrastructure necessary to build fleets and equip armies.

  Mousetrap would be more than mankind’s fortress and its crossroads. Mousetrap would be its forge and its armory.

  Subterrenes, smuggled from Earth by Howard, were U-boat-sized nuclear reactors that would melt their way through Mousetrap from pole to pole, like gargantuan moles.

  Lesser bores were to be made by colossal machines that the Marini had used for decades, to dig everything from aqueducts to castle basements. They resembled the massive monsters Earth’s engineers used to bore beneath the English Channel and under the skyscrapers of Manhattan. Marini tunnel borers were like steam-powered freight trains, two hundred yards long. Their locomotives were cylinders tipped with rotating, bladed disc cutters, and stood as tall as houses. On Bren and Earth, boring machines cut rock with carbide steel, scarcely harder than the nickel and iron fabric of Mousetrap, or with corundum.

  But Howard and Bassin designed cutters that used crushed industrial diamonds set in a matrix, which would Û€, which scour through Mousetrap’s nickel iron like it was lard. On Earth or Bren so much bort would have been a fantasy.

  But Weichsel’s first and perhaps last contribution to the Human Union changed that. The wrecked dredge that Mimi Ozawa and the Emerald River returned from De Beers’ camp to Earth contained ugly-but-abrasive industrial-diamond, “bort.” On Weichsel, a child could dig gem quality diamonds by the cup. But a test dredge could suck up bort by the ton.

  Much of the transformation of Mousetrap was being wrought by massive machines.

  But some was the product of down and dirty pick and shovel miners. During the first months, the miners had worked in pressure suits, to seal a billion years’ worth of nooks and crannies. Meanwhile, the engineers had installed a system of pressure tight doors, which could hold air in Mousetrap like a twenty-mile long submarine.

  The day that job was finished, a hundred of us, all dressed in pressure suits, gathered in a room on Level Twenty for the pressurization ceremony. From that control room, every door and hatch in Mousetrap could be opened, or, on this happy day, closed. Gustus, rotund in his pressure suit, depressed a red pad—I suppose more accurately a button—that sealed Mousetrap. We applauded, but made no sound. That underscores why pressurization was a big enough deal to merit a ceremony. But more importantly, we mounted a memorial plaque inscribed with the names of
the fourteen Marini who died during construction.

  After that, workers and machines could work in tunnels and caverns pressurized with an air mix extracted from Mousetrap’s cometary ice patches.

  Now, the mining crews dug more “delicate” passages, often up to just beneath Mousetrap’s surface. The miners bored conduits to carry power to be generated by solar arrays, dug anti-ship weapons emplacements, hacked out launch ports for defensive spacecraft. Hard rock mining is nasty work. Growing up in Colorado, I had a summer job as a gofer in a half-ass gold mine. It had almost been enough to make me study for SATs.

  Many of the crews comprised female soldiers, whose smaller size advantaged them in cramped, claustrophobic conditions, and whose lesser upper body strength scarcely disadvantaged them in Mousetrap’s low gravity. Female tunnel rat crews’ dug tonnage routinely exceeded the totals of male crews. The Head Rat would tell you that at the drop of a mead flagon.