Orphanage

by Robert Buettner

  I understood. She would be ready in months, not years. The biggest sucker punch in history.

  I looked again. The hundred fireflies must be supply barges, construction-crew transports, tugs. It was the greatest show on Earth. Well, not on Earth. I touched helmets. “Why build it up here?”

  “Hope’s transplanetary. She’s strong enough to travel between here and Jupiter but if we set her down on Earth, or even here on the moon, gravity would collapse her. Hope was born in vacuum. Someday she’ll die there. Her orbit’s calculated so the moon or Earth is always between her and Ganymede. Any observer out there won’t know she exists.”

  If nobody on Earth knew she existed, no spy—and no captured Spec Four—could give her away.

  In orbit, Hope dwindled to a speck above the lunar horizon.

  We zigzagged as we dropped toward the flat crater floor while another object grew against the moon’s black sky. A shuttle craft, looking much like the ones I had seen at Canaveral, powered down to the surface, its wings useless in vacuum.

  A hundred yards away the UN flag stood stiff, framed to keep it flying in the nonbreeze.

  We rolled past building after building. The building we stopped at was like every other building there, a white half tube you could fit a football field under, with a man-sized air lock sticking out one side. Two sergeants wrestled Sluggo loose as Metzger and Howard climbed down from their GOATs.

  My driver grasped my elbow, holding me in my seat. Crap. They were separating the Bad Boy from the heroes.

  Three buildings farther the GOAT halted. Stenciled on the building’s air lock door was “Detention.” Whether it was Judge March or Captain Jacowicz or the Grand Poobah of the Dark Side of the Moon everybody wanted me in the slammer.

  My cell was a windowless room eight feet on a side with a bunk, sink, and toilet. They gave me fresh coveralls, a shaving kit, and freeze-dried rations no worse than Meals-Ready-to-Eat.

  I planted my palms against the wall, hung my head, and shook it. I lay on the bunk and wondered why.

  The door clanked; an MP in coveralls like mine stepped in and waved me out of the cell with a white-gloved hand.

  He led me down into the tunnel system that linked Luna Base’s buildings. Our footsteps echoed down the rock tube. I asked him, “How’d they make the tunnels?”

  “Melted with lasers.”

  We walked for ten minutes, stopping at intersections to let electric trams pass. They shook the floor and bounced me in lunar gravity.

  Cargos of hull plates flexed and rumbled toward the shuttles that would lift them to orbit.

  Returning trams bore off-shift welders and riveters, swaying shoulder on shoulder and sound asleep with lunch therms in laps.

  I smirked. “Union labor, huh?”

  The MP glared at me. “Sixteen-hour shifts. Twenty-eight days every month. Quarter million miles from home.”

  One thing you had to say for war, it got people off their butts. A century ago, humans flew in canvas-covered airplanes. World War II started, and six desperate years later humanity had jets, radar, and nuclear power. The Slug War had pushed humanity farther into space in months man all the idealism of the post-Cold War had in fifty years.

  Finally, another MP at a desk looked over papers the first one gave him, then at me. He buzzed me in through a steel door behind him.

  I stepped into an operating room, all stainless steel, bright light, and white sheeting. Chill enough that I saw my breath. The lights brightened a pedestal operating table in the room’s center, and a couple rows of amphitheater seating rose behind the table.

  On the table was strapped my slimy sparring partner, Sluggo. He looked none the worse for wear after we’d dragged him from Mare Fecunditatis. Still short, green, and tapered.

  A guy stood behind him, skinny, bald, and beetle-browed. Civilian, because a last-century soul patch smudged his chin. He wore a white lab coat and a hands-free headset with a mike that cherry-stemmed around his cheek. His headset was wired to a Chipman that stuck from his coat’s breast pocket among a cluster of pens.

  He nodded at the Slug. “You did this?”

  I stuck out my chest. “Yeah.”

  “Tragic.” He snapped on latex gloves as he circled the operating table. “Our first meeting with extraterrestrial intelligence ends in violent death.”

  I nearly laughed. The Slugs had killed how many million people, and he wept for this one?

  He bent and sidestepped alongside the slab, lifting, then plopping down the carcass like a gob of liver. “You killed it?”

  “He committed suicide.”

  He sneered. “An alien psychologist. Did it leave a note?” He stabbed his finger like a cross-examiner at the carcass. “This body bears bootprint bruises!”

  “He died before I made those.”

  His eyes narrowed.

  “We both got shot out of a cannon. I dropped on him.”

  He snorted. “This is no joke.”

  “Neither was that. We landed on a commissioned officer.”

  He pouted at me, then spoke into the mike. “Reported cause of death, self-inflicted.”

  “You think I killed a POW? Did you talk to Howard Hibble?”

  “I’ll ask the questions.” He adjusted his glasses, then sniffed. His eyebrows flew up, and he bent and sniffed the length of the carcass. He pulled his mike to his lips and his voice quivered. “Subject emits an unmistakable odor of urine! This suggests Earthlike excretory system and metabolism! An unexpected phenomenon!”

  “It’s mine.”

  “Don’t worry. You’ll get credit for your kill!” He snorted.

  “The urine. It’s mine. We zipped the body inside my EVA suit for the trip from Mare Fecunditatis. I kind of had an accident in the suit, before that.”

  “Oh.” He grumbled, then pressed the erase button on the Chipman in his pocket. “Anything else you haven’t shared with me?”

  “If you’re really interested in how it excretes, I think it was on the toilet when I first saw it.”

  He sneered. “Don’t tax your brain, killer. I’ll analyze behaviors.”

  I shrugged. “Just a hunch.”

  “Well then, let’s have a look, shall we?” He lifted the corpse’s tail end, peeked underneath, plopped it back, and smirked. “Nothing. And I know an anus when I see one.”

  I stared at him. “Me too.”

  The MP marched me back to detention after that.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The MP leaned against my cell doorframe while I sat, elbows on knees, on the side of the bunk. He was as bored as any GI. I told him I didn’t kill Sluggo.

  He shrugged. “It was a preliminary inquiry with a cryptozoologist, I’m guessing. And you wised off, I’m guessing.”

  “You guess. I guess. Is everything here secret?”

  “Not once you’re here. Nobody’s going anywhere. Unless we win the war.”

  “How the hell did this get here? How can they keep it secret?”

  He shrugged and sighed. “The impact dust Earthside is bad for jets, but the reason commercial air is grounded is most of the aircraft mechanics and aviation machine tools on Earth got diverted to build modified space shuttles to ferry stuff to the moon. Six weeks after the first Projectile hit, the first ship landed here. There are thirteen thousand people here now.” That was one thousand times as many people as had set foot on the moon during the course of human history before the war started.

  “Imminent genocide lit a fire under the human race.”

  He nodded.

  I snapped my fingers. “Static in the holos? It’s not Projectile dust.” We had diverted every communications-satellite repair and launch vehicle to hauling material and workers up here. Nobody found disappearing loved ones unusual. Not with millions of people missing.

  He nodded.

  I nodded back. “But still, you can’t cover up a project this massive completely. So we announce we’re building a ship, alright, but it’s going to be built on Ear
th and take five years. That way we can train troops openly.”

  He shrugged. “The spooks say that a good he has a basis in truth.”

  Sun Tzu wrote, “All warfare is based on deception.” He could have continued that it has to be if your side’s too weak to kick ass. I sat on my bunk, pressing into my mattress with one-sixth my normal weight and wondered what would come next.

  I knew history’s biggest secret. So did thirteen thousand others, at least. But the thirteen thousand were sequestered on the moon, where they couldn’t blab.

  It seemed like overkill. Especially now that we knew that a Slug couldn’t exactly slap on a false mustache and spy around Earth undetected.

  But there were other ways to spy. Eavesdrop on radio or holo or video. Look down with high-powered imagery systems. Remote-sensing intel was the one area of the military that had advanced in this century while weapons rusted. Even Infantry units, real ones, not training menag-eries like I had endured through Basic, had little observation drones that hovered above the battlefield like giant bugs.

  We had to assume the Slugs knew whatever the human media knew. So since I knew about the massive deception of this base and this ship, they would lock me away here for the duration. If they didn’t just court-martial me and shoot me. My success in bringing back a dead Slug evidently was overshadowed by my failure to bring back a live one, not to mention that they thought I blew up his ship.

  I slept poorly.

  The next morning, the MP led me back to the floodlit operating room. Sluggo still lay on his table, but the amphitheater seats were filled with twelve silhouettes.

  I shaded my eyes to confront my jury.

  They wore officer’s uniforms of a half dozen armed forces. All theater-grade brass by their shoulder boards. Mr. I-know-an-asshole was absent. This crowd was way above his pay grade. Except one scrawny silhouette. That one stood.

  My heart pounded.

  Was he the jury foreman, about to sentence me to life imprisonment on the moon?

  The foreman stepped down to the operating-room floor and walked toward me, squinting. Unlike his spit-and-polish cronies, his boots looked like he shined them with a Hershey bar.

  “Jason? Did they feed you?”

  Howard Hibble pumped my hand. He now wore major’s oak leaves on his collar.

  “Howard? You need to tell them! I didn’t kick that Slug to death!”

  “That investigation? Bureaucratic humbug! It’s over and done.”

  He raised his hands in front of his chest.

  And applauded. The rest stood and clapped, too. Within ten minutes, I had been congratulated by generals from four nations.

  They and a panel of experts donned surgical masks and gowns, filed back into the seats, and oohed and ahhed while other experts sliced Sluggo up and asked me questions.

  During a break in the autopsy, Howard sidled up to me. He hacked a smoker’s cough, his fist to his surgical mask.

  “We never had a chance to talk. What was it like in there? How did they move? Did they display individualized characteristics?”

  “They oozed at me like green spaghetti. I ran for my life. I was so scared I wet my pants.”

  “I bet that was terrific!”

  Six hours later, the brain trust had decided that the Slugs see with the white patches near their heads, even though they don’t have what we’d call eyes. They don’t see visible light but infrared. They are cloned, not born. The hollow thing I tripped over was probably artificial body armor. They communicate with sound, but maybe they can project vague feelings, too. They have outsized neural ganglia but little cerebral capacity for independent thought. They stink to high heaven if you don’t keep dead ones frozen. And the experts agreed with me about the toilet.

  After my brain was picked as clean as Sluggo’s body, they filed out. Howard stayed. “You did say your family was killed at Indianapolis?”

  “My mom. She was all there was.”

  “The Ganymede Expeditionary Force will be organized like a light-infantry division. Ten thousand of the best, most experienced soldiers in the world. The volunteer lists were overwhelming. The UN decided to take only those who had lost their entire family to the Slugs.”

  What was Howard saying? “I’m a war orphan. But I’m not experienced.”

  “The hell! You’re the only human who’s ever seen Slugs alive!”

  “Huh?”

  “The Headquarters Battalion will have my Intelligence company attached. Our job is to tell the commander what to expect from the enemy. I told them I need your expertise.”

  “I’m no scientist. I barely passed precalc.”

  Howard waved his hand. “I handled that. Your records say you can shoot. I got you assigned to the commanding general’s personal security detachment.”

  I swallowed. “PSD have the shortest combat life expectancy of any military operational specialty!”

  He shrugged. “Take a bullet for the team. Mostly you’ll be a resource for me. That ship you saw, above us? You’re going to be on it!”

  My head spun. I’d gone from court-martial to the one thing I wanted more than anything in the world.

  Later, a Military Police corporal escorted me not to my cell but to the bachelor officers’ quarters.

  I entered the dark room and stumbled. Metzger waved the lights on and levered himself off his bunk on one elbow. “What happened?”

  I cocked my head. “Everything.”

  Metzger, Howard, and I left the moon the next morning. The Luna Base Shuttles landed at Canaveral at night, one after another, so no one would know there was all this traffic going into space and coming back. The crew let Metzger bring our shuttle in. A one-hundred-ton glider screaming down to a pitch-dark runway with landing lights off. What a rush.

  A day later, I left to report. Even though my Slug battle was secret, and I had signed another secrecy agreement to prove it, my GEF billet meant no more military hitchhiking for me. I rode for two days in a Space Force blue bus with reclining seats. An orderly brought me sandwiches, I caught up on months of sleep, and I watched rural America pass.

  Closed businesses squatted alongside deserted highways as we headed northwest across gray, cold Oklahoma. There was no agriculture left to speak of, so roadside businesses had no customers.

  I slumped in my seat and watched flat Oklahoma dirt turn to flat Colorado dirt by Act of Congress. On my previous car trips from back East, the Rockies usually rose on the horizon while we were well out on the plains.

  This time, the mountains never came into sight through the twilight. Humanity didn’t have much time. The ship couldn’t be ready too soon. Neither could the division I was about to join.

  In Denver, I boarded a helicopter headed deep into the Front Range.

  And I thought the moon was cold.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The Slugs were remaking Ganymede just the way they liked it. That meant they had so far warmed it to zero Fahrenheit in the twilight that passed for day way out there. The atmosphere they breathed was 2 percent oxygen, not 16 percent like Earth. Gases trapped in Sluggo’s tissues confirmed remote spectroscopy. Ganymede’s artificial atmosphere was also as thin as the air miles above sea level.

  So when the UN looked for a place to train the Infantry division that was going to fight on Ganymede, it needed a place where the air was cold and thin but that had enough infrastructure to move troops in and out and house ten thousand of them plus trainers and alternates.

  Camp Hale, Colorado, was old, like Indiantown Gap. It sat two miles above sea level on the western slope of the Rockies, six miles north of the old silver-mining town of Leadville. Built during World War II to train and house ski troops, it had been knocked down to nothing but foundations in the snow.

  But you wouldn’t have known that as the helicopter drifted over the base carrying me and a dozen other GEF selectees.

  Luna Base had been built from nothing a quarter million miles from Earth in short months. Camp Hale’s snow
y foundations were closer to home, but the sprawled prefab structures, roads, and bustling troops and vehicles were equally startling.

  Mountains around Camp Hale thrust up another half mile higher, the peaks above tree line as gaunt as ax blades.

  As an early arrival, I drew modern gear and humped it all to my billet, which was a double room in the barracks complex that housed Headquarters Battalion of GEF. I had stowed my gear in my locker when my roomie arrived.

  He rapped on the doorjamb. “You Wander?” He stuck out his hand. “Ari Klein.”

  He wore civvies, but I knew already that my roomie was part of Howard Hibble’s Military Intelligence company. Ari Klein was rostered as our TOT-Wrangler, so I expected weird.

  Ari’s black hair reached such unmilitary length that it curled like wool. Over it perched a knit yarmulke. His eyes were dark beneath bushy brows, but his smile was broad. The TOT-Wrangler scars showed faint at each temple. “Howdy.”

  He wore a plaid shirt, jeans, and ostrich-skin boots. Intelligence Branch. My roommate was a Jewish cowboy.

  “Don’t let the outfit fool you. I’m not a real cowboy. I’m from North Dallas.”

  Ari was a surprise, but his duffel was astonishing. It wriggled. He set it on his bunk, unsnapped it, and stood back while I stared.

  A six-legged, black velvet football wriggled out and stared back at me with eyes the size of gray Oreos.

  “Jason, meet Jeeb.”

  Everybody has heard about Tactical Observation Transports, but few people have been as close to a TOT as I was to Jeeb.

  Theoretically, a TOT’s just a sophisticated version of the police surveillance drones seen over every American neighborhood day in and day out. Except that a drone has a four-foot wingspan and costs a couple hundred thousand. Ari’s tin friend cost as much as a tank battalion. So even division-size units like GEF only got one.

  A TOT, even with wings spread, can fly through the average window with six inches to spare. It can crawl on six legs faster than a cheetah can run, has a velvet-texture skin invisible to radar and infrared, can change color to blend with its surroundings like a chameleon. Its ultra-tanium chassis is hardened against small-arms rounds, fire, water, and the electromagnetic pulse of a nuclear blast