Howard turned to the Intelligence colonel. “Show him.”
Mousetrap’s slowly rotating image replaced Howard’s document. The Intel colonel said, “We recovered this from one of Emerald River’s drones four months ago, after it passed through the Mousetrap. Apparently Emerald River sent the drone for a look-back after it withdrew to Tressel, but the Slugs chased the drone, so it popped out on the Earth side. It didn’t take us long to figure out what happened.”
I nodded. That explained Mimi’s missing drone, and why Earth had a plan by the time Howard and Ord got sent back here.
On the holo above the table’s center, the surface scars of the Slug attack looked minor, and a few solar panels hung askew. Firewitches swarmed the surrounding space like flies around a water buffalo. Four enormous Troll incubator ships drifted in the distance.
The Colonel said, “We sent in another drone, from our side, before we left, and recovered it on this side, when we arrived here. The other four Trolls are still drifting.”
I nodded.
I said, “Those other four Trolls wouldn’t be sitting there, backed off, for months, if the maggots had Mousetrap.”
The Colonel nodded. “Consensus inference is that Mousetrap may still be resisting.”
I said, “But all we can see is«€€ is a big rock. They could be fighting. They could be captives. They could be dead. What kind of radio traffic did the drone monitor?”
The Colonel shook his head. “None.”
“There are automated beacons, transponders all over Mousetrap. There had to be—”
“None. Not the first drone or the later one.”
I looked to Howard and he shrugged. “It doesn’t mean they’re all dead. Captives couldn’t transmit. Mobile guerrillas inside Mousetrap wouldn’t.”
But we weren’t limited to reliance on inference consensus, or on what we heard broadcast from Mousetrap. We could see what was inside. “Show me the interiors.”
“Sir?” The Intel colonel shook his head, slowly.
“The drones dropped TOTs. Show me what they found inside.” Tactical Observation Transports were the highly-evolved products of the robotic aircraft revolution of the turn of this century. Most were designed to support Earth ground forces, to fly in atmosphere, then crawl through windows or into caves or whatever it took to snoop. But I knew the Spooks had modified some of the latest models to operate in space.
Howard said, “Jason, TOTs have been nuclear powered for years.”
I nodded. “Crap.” One reason we cored Mousetrap from the inside out was that the initial, monster bores were made by Subterrenes—bullet shaped nuclear reactors that melted their way through rock. We had planned for the Subterrenes to start their work immediately, and to finish early, because if the Slugs showed up early, everything nuclear mankind had, from warheads to the nanoreactors that powered modern TOTs, would shut down.
We had learned that lesson the hard way clear back during the Blitz, when we tried to nuke incoming Projectiles. Howard’s Spooks called the technology “neutron damping.” That sounded informed, but the Spooks no more understood how the Slugs froze nuclear devices than I understood the female libido.
So we had no TOTs to snoop inside Mousetrap.
I said to the Intel colonel, “I understand we can’t just blow Mousetrap apart from space, even if we had workable nukes. We need Mousetrap more than the Slugs do. But I need to know the friendly status inside.”
If it came to it, strategic considerations would require that we go in blind. But if we were going in blind, it would be after a massive prep that would slaughter any friendlies as surely as it slaughtered Slug warriors. But fifty thousand possible friendlies was a big number. It was bigger to me because I had bled with Munchkin’s Tunnel Rats. I had seen Mimi cry over survivors she may have left behind.
I asked the Intel colonel, “Could we sacrifice a drone? Just barrel it in there?”
The Intel colonel shook his head. “Sir, you’ve seen the Slug fleet surrounding Mousetrap. Maybe if we mounted a massive diversion we could sneak something as small as a drone down to the surface, but it would be too big to get inside.”
“Other options?”
He shook his head, again. “Actually, an old, non- nuclear TOT would have been perfect. We even researched it. The last J-series in DOD inventory was dismantled for parts, eight years ago.” He shrugged. “They’re not the kinds of things somebody kept for war souvenirs.”
I turned to Howard and raised my eyebrows.
His eyes twinkled. “I stopped by your place before I came back here.”
FIFTY-FIVE
IN DOWNTOWN TRESSIA, Howard, Ord, and I bunked in with Jude. Unlike his Earth counterpart twenty-something junior officers, Captain Jude Metzger of the SR roughed it in an eight-bedroom, three-story townhome that overlooked a park. Breakfast was served each morning in a sunroom with floor-to-ceiling windows. The sunroom was furnished in gilt and crystal, except for a burgundy silk back wall, across which marched unfaded, picture-sized rectangles, each below a downlight that lit nothing.
The upstairs maid, who apparently came with the place along with the downstairs maid, the cook, and the gardener, refilled my tea cup, as I peeked around the table’s candelabra and asked Jude, “Whose place was this?”
“Not was. Is. A surgeon’s family. They’ll get it back as soon as their papers clear. Meantime, the SR is renting it from them at market plus ten percent. It’s practical. Walking distance to my office.”
“Which is convenient for your chauffeur. Where’s the surgeon’s family ’til their papers clear?”
Jude paused with a butter knife in one hand, and a muffin in the other. “Stop trying to make something out of everything. With the mobs after the Armistice, people were happy to leave town.”
“So I read in the Voice Republican.” I pointed my silver spoon at the newspaper on the tablecloth, then at the back wall. “Did the surgeon take his oil paintings along, to brighten up the barracks?”
Jude wiped his lips while he rolled his eyes. “The SR stored displaced persons’ valuables for them.”
“How thoughtful.”
Three stories below, we heard the Tressen door chime, which sounded like a music box with a bad cold.
Jude chucked his napkin onto the tablecloth. “I hope that’s Howard and the Sergeant Major. Because you’re a pain in the ass for a houseguest.”
It was. And I suppose I was. But I wasn’t sure whether Jude was naïve about his employer, or he wasn’t. The latter possibility scared me worse.
Jude and I met Howard in the townhome’s parlor, with their baggage. As we entered, the downstairs maid scurried out, eyes wide.
Howard, his uniform as wrinkled as his face, sucking a nicotine lollipop, was scary enough. But on his shoulder perched a six-legged Plasteel and Ultratanium cockroach as big as a turkey.
Jude elevated his elbow, and Jeeb telescoped out his wings and fluttered over to settle on Jude®€iv . Jeeb’s diagnostics purred as Jude stroked the antique TOT’s radar-absorbent ventral fuzz. Early TOTs were so expensive that the J-series numbered just six units, identified “A” through “F.” The second unit deployed was J-series B, thus and forever Jeeb.
Jeeb wasn’t obsolete just because he relied on solar panels for power. Brain link robotics got scrapped years ago, but not because they didn’t work. Their radio transmissions, TOT-to-Wrangler, were effectively unjammable. A Wrangler effectively saw and heard everything the TOT did, and the TOT responded to the Wrangler like a virtual extension of his body and mind. Which was the problem. A Wrangler who lost his TOT in combat was like a GI who lost a leg and a brain. The Wrangler suicided on the spot, or spent years in therapy.
All robotics texts will assure you that the relationship didn’t wash back the other direction. TOTs were non-self-aware machines, period. Claims that they imprinted their Wrangler’s personality were anthropomorphic rubbish. But I saw Ari Klein in Jeeb every day. When I overpaid the Department of Defense fo
r Jeeb’s salvage title, I was really adopting an orphan, and all that remained of my friend.
Jude scratched Jeeb behind his optics, which looked like a pair of shiny Oreos. “How could you leave him home, Jason?”
According to the texts, Jeeb couldn’t have cared less. But I had cried the day I left him, and the guy I left him with ’mailed me that Jeeb’s diagnostics whined for twenty-six hours straight.
I said, “The only person left on Earth who knows how to maintain a J-Series is a retired veteran in Philadelphia.”
Ord handed me a chipboard, which showed on its screen the manifest of personality transported aboard the Yorktown. “You have to thumb for Jeeb, sir.”
I did.
Ord scrolled down, then handed the reader back to me. “And for these.”
I read the line item, then glanced at Ord. “More of your antiques, Sergeant Major?”
“I believe they could be useful, sir.”
“Four hundred of them?”
Ord shrugged.
I thumbed, then I handed Ord back his reader.
I extended my own elbow, and Jeeb hopped from Jude’s shoulder to my bicep, using four of his six legs. I scratched the joint where his sensor lobe joined his carapace, like it was a kitten’s neck. Jeeb had no nerve endings that could feel my fingertips, as any wiring diagram proved. But when I scratched him, his diagnostics purred.
I smiled. “He looks good, Howard.”
“Ed in Philadelphia overhauled him before we left,” Howard said.
Jeeb preened his antennae with his forelimbs, as I sighed. “My friend, all things considered, you’d rather be in Philadelphia.”
My next task for that day considered, so would I.
<¶€fonfont size="6" face="sans-serif">FIFTY-SIX
“THERE WILL STAND the Prime Ministrate.” Later that morning, our guide, a scrubbed teen girl in the sunshine-yellow uniform of the Young Social Republicans, pointed across the fresh stone bowl of the Stadium of the Republic to a podium set above the opposite wall, and shouted over the murmur of a crowd of a half million. The Social Republicans needed a new venue for political rallies. The Voice Republican pointed out that all political parties would have equal access to the new stadium.
Jude, Howard, Ord, the Duck, and I leaned forward to hear her over the squeal of cranes lifting the SR insignia, a carved stone medallion twenty feet tall, into place behind the podium, which cast the equal-access rule in a different light.
The Slug War had forced each of mankind’s three developed worlds to remake itself. The new Earth sought for humans the very opportunity to be. The new Bren sought for humans the opportunity to be equal. The new Tressel sought opportunity for humans, by declaring Iridians less than human. Could this crowd, and perhaps my godson, distinguish the first two from the last?
The guide led us along the curving, stone top tier of the stadium, and I looked out across the treeless, blocky capital.
The guide led us downstairs into the dim corridors beneath the stadium.
The Duck and I brought up the rear. I said to him, “Look, do we really need Tressel?”
“It’s four jumps from anywhere. Isolated from our enemy, like the oceans isolated the U.S. last century. The arsenal of democracy.”
“Isolated? Mousetrap’s one jump from Tressel.”
“That won’t matter once you recapture Mousetrap.”
“Then Mousetrap can be the arsenal of democracy.”
“Democracy needs a bigger arsenal.”
“Arsenal of democracy loves totalitarian dictatorship. You’re a regular cupid, Duck.”
The Duck faced me, hands on hips. “Were you this sarcastic at the Pentagon?”
“More.”
Planck was at this new stadium to dedicate it, later that day. We met with Aud Planck, one-third of the ruling triumvirate of Tressel, in a conference room beneath the Stadium. Even the Duck, an Ambassador, got frisked by Planck’s bodyguards before we got within fifty feet of Aud.
Aud Planck was fifteen pounds heavier, and wearier in the eyes, than when I last saw him. We shook hands, then he pulled me to him, and patted my back. “It’s good to see a friendly face.”
Aud’s comment was as upside down as everything else since the Armistice. When I left Tressel, most faces on the planet were friendly to Aud Planck. Now, theoretically, they all were. In the last election, ninety-nine point six percent of the electorate voted Social Republican, according to the Voice. If so, there weren’t enough opponents left to throw a decent assassination.<»€€ eldiv height="0%">
Aud motioned us to sit, then turned to the Duck. “You requested this meeting, Ambassador?”
The Duck nodded, then folded his hands in front of him. “Sir, the Human Union has appreciated your government’s cooperation in military affairs—”
Aud waved his hand. “You mean you’re here to present the bill for ending the war in Tressen’s favor.”
I hid a smile. If Aud had patience with anything, it wasn’t with diplomacy.
The Duck made a tiny shoulder shrug. “If you like. Sir, we are preparing an operation—”
“To retake the Mousetrap. You may stage the operation from Tressel. We will contribute two infantry divisions. You will train them. General Wander will have operational control of embarked forces, including the Tressen divisions. Overall control will reside with Tressel.”
The Duck’s mouth hung just a bit. Staging rights. Two divisions. Exactly what he was supposed to ask for. Gentlemen don’t read other gentlemen’s mail, except in police states. The Duck stiffened, then cleared his throat. “Sir, I don’t have authority to cede overall control.”
Maybe the Duck didn’t have authority, but it wasn’t so odd for the tail to wag the dog in coalition operations. Rommel had run the North African theater during World War II, even though much of his army and logistic support was Italian, and even though Rommel reported through the Italian Commando Supremo. During the same war, the British accepted Eisenhower as the supreme commander of the invasion of Europe, even though the invasion was mounted from their soil, and the Brits committed more ships and troops to the landings than the Americans. Aud had been my friend. But based on the society that had festered under his leadership, I wasn’t so sure Tressel should be in charge.
Aud smiled at the Duck. “Of course. It’s a question that doesn’t need answering today.” Aud stood. “I have to make a speech.” He shook hands all around, then was gone.
The stadium walls, even its ceiling, shook all around us with the crowd’s roar.
The Duck chuckled. “He’s a better politician than you give him credit for, Jason. He could have received us at the Capitol. He wants us to know that Tressel’s strong enough that it doesn’t need us. We need it.”
“You think your bosses will agree to Tressen control?”
“I know they will. I already have that authority, off the written guidelines. I just wanted Planck to think he got lagniappe.” The Duck shrugged. “You said he’s a good general. So is there a problem?”
FIFTY-SEVEN
EIGHTEEN MONTHS AFTER THAT DAY, the Human Union had built up not only new cruisers, but Scorpions for the cruisers to carry into battle. These had made their way around the horn via Bren and the other jumps to what we hoped was the safe harbor of Tressel.
Troops, my troops, were trained and embarked. Aud Planck got the control he wanted, an¾€nt>d decided to lead from the front, as always. Mimi and I remained at arm’s length. Jude was detached from the SR to command the Scorpions.
We built, we planned, we worried. We worried that if we went too soon, we would fail. We worried that if we went too late, the Slugs would beat us to the punch.
When the fleet finally jumped off for Mousetrap, we weren’t ready to go. But we weren’t ready to stay, either.
FIFTY-EIGHT
WHAT’S IN A NAME? If the name is Union Humane Star Ship Emerald River, everything, and nothing. To maintain harmony with the French aerospace industry back home, the
diplomats changed the primary spelling of “Human Union” to “Union Humane.”
On Emerald River’s Bridge, harmony was real enough. Mimi, Aud Planck, Howard, Ord, and I stared into the Bridge’s holo display. The older Metzger-class cruisers made do with flatscreens, which seems strange since every living room in America’s had holo for years. But what you see in your living room, or at the Holoplex, lacks the reliability and freedom from linear distortion required in a modern combat display. Whatever. All I know is that I would love to watch the WorldBowl from Mean Green’s Bridge.
Mean Green’s display filled the Bridge’s center space, ten numbered, winking red dots hovering in front of a purple doughnut. Actually, they tell me that if you put the dots under a microscope, you would see the ship itself at the center, so perfect that you could read hull numbers. The doughnut was the Temporal Fabric Insertion Point that would spit the ten red dots of the fleet out, a few hours’ flight away from Mousetrap.
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