Orphan's Triumph

by Robert Buettner

  As only one of seven hundred fifty survivors from the Ganymede Expeditionary Force, I remembered how, during the Blitz at the start of the war, infantry got hauled through space for days, sedated and stacked inside de-mothballed space shuttles, to save space and conserve life-support systems. I also remembered being hauled off the battlefield of the First Battle of Mousetrap like a flour sack, in the emptied weapons bay of a Scorpion, which up until then nobody had ever ridden in.

  Today, we had drugs that could knock a GI colder and revive him sharper.

  I put two and two together and figured that we could convert the fastest, stealthiest single-seat fighters in the universe into squad-carrying landing craft. Nobody had tried it yet, but it seemed to me like a terrific way to surprise the maggots.

  I gave myself a mental back pat for that particular application of my specialized expertise. Just one more example of why I should send myself in with the first wave. I stepped up to the medic.

  He pointed at the cap of my catheter, his eyes on a sedative syrette while he unpeeled it. “Open up, newbie. This doesn’t hurt.”

  It was actually easier for the medic to open the catheter cap from outside the suit, but forcing a newbie to reach around and unscrew it with his gauntleted fingers was a simple test to be sure the newbie had at least some fine-motor skills in armor.

  I said, “You go ahead, doc. I’ve done this before.”

  He jerked his gaze up from the syrette, and his eyes widened when he saw the stars stenciled above my helmet visor. “General Wander?”

  “Just along for the ride. What are you pouring, today, son?”

  He unscrewed my catheter cap, then plugged in the syrette. “Uh-thousand milligrams of timed-release Neobarbitol with a delayed amphetamine and caffeine chaser. And a hematopoietin to enhance red blood cell growth. Thirty minutes from now, you’ll drop out like you fell off a table, and when you wake up you’ll be ready to scrimmage the Chicago Bears for forty-eight hours straight.” He paused. “At least-”

  “At least that’s how it affects younger troops?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I hate drugs, but I hate missing a party worse. I patted his shoulder as he depressed the syrette’s plunger. “I’ll be fine, son.”

  The loadmaster also did a double take when he saw me shuffle into the bay. He and I would be rearmost in the pod, and thus first from this ship to exit onto Weichsel. He harnessed me, then helped me pack in alongside three young Spooks and boots-on-helmet to the trio behind us. Most were already purring along in the low-metabolism sleep that would allow all of us to live together in this oversized sewer pipe for three days.

  The loadmaster wriggled in alongside me. The medic dosed him, then toggled the ramp’s controls and backed out on it. That left us all hanging in the bay, heads down, like bananas on a stalk, with the deck plates thirty feet below us.

  I held my breath. Then the clamshell doors below whined closed and left us in absolute darkness. I exhaled. I don’t mind tight spaces as much as I mind heights.

  The way the first phase of this operation, the part I was about to sleep through, was supposed to work was that as soon as the two infantry companies and the Spooks were buttoned up inside their Scorpions, the Abraham Lincoln would make the jump from the Mousetrap and pop out three days’ travel from Weichsel.

  We didn’t know what kind of sensing the Slugs used to detect a ship, but it seemed to work as well-and as poorly-as ours. That meant the Slugs occupying Weichsel would know immediately that a human cruiser had appeared three days away from them. The Slugs also knew that in three decades of war we had staged every landing we had attempted by bringing capital ships like the Abraham Lincoln within low-orbital distance. So, Abraham Lincoln would carve obvious, loitering figure eights just beyond the Temporal Fabric Insertion Point it had popped out of, posing no threat.

  However, as soon as Abraham Lincoln popped out, she would launch all thirty-six Scorpions poised, like the one I hung within, on her launch rails. The Scorpions would make for Weichsel like scalded gnats, as invisible to the Slugs as Scorpions were to us, according to the Spooks.

  Two days and twenty hours later, the infantry inside the Scorpions would waken. Two days and twenty-three hours later, all thirty-six Scorpions would form up in space a hundred miles up, directly above Howard’s precious Slug brain. Then the Scorpions would dive straight down through Weichsel’s atmosphere at ten thousand miles per hour, stop on the proverbial dime at an altitude of forty feet, turn their stinger ends down toward the ground, and open their bay doors. Scorpions were less gravity-shielded than cruisers, so the troops would endure six G and arrive bruised and nauseated, but that was a price any GI would gladly pay to avoid being shot at.

  The Slugs, knowing that the Abraham Lincoln remained a safe three days’ journey away, would be tactically astonished. At least, that was the assumption.

  But if this first-wave landing went wrong, the Scorpions’ bays were clogged with useless troops, not weapons to defend themselves ship-to-ship. The four Firewitches patrolling above Weichsel weren’t nimble, but as soon as they realized they had company, they would swoop in. At best, the Scorpions would scatter like quail and sneak back to the Abraham Lincoln, and the operation would crater. At worst, pieces of these kids and of me would be scattered across the snow a hundred light-years from home.

  In my earpiece, over the beeps and chirps of telemetry, the Scorpion pilot’s intercom voice buzzed. “In a moment, our flight attendants will begin our beverage service for all of you back there in the main cabin. Correct change is always-”

  I slept.

  TWELVE

  “-CONTACT WITH THE WEICHSEL stratosphere in forty seconds. Some heat will bleed through from the skin into the bay back there, but nothing your armor ventilators can’t handle.” The Scorpion’s pilot was speaking again. The loadmaster’s elbow jostled me as he checked static lines in the dark. I switched to the squad net and heard the Spooks all around me grumbling and puking into their helmet disposal tubes.

  Evidently the younger Spooks had all been enjoying wakefulness longer than I had. Just as well. My head pounded between my temples, and risen bile seared my throat.

  The pilot said, “Hang on back there. You must be taller than the mouse to board this ride.” Inside my helmet, I rolled my eyes. If they held a comedy contest for Zoomies and drill sergeants, nobody would win.

  We dropped like the mother of all roller coasters, and six G of deceleration stuffed my stomach into my socks. Somebody moaned over the squad net. The Scorpion, and presumably thirty-five others arrayed around it, slowed from speeds measured in thousands of miles per second to a ten-thousand-mile-per-hour crawl. The Scorpion’s gravity cocoon kept us from being pulped like beefsteak tomatoes, but nobody was laughing.

  Then we stopped.

  A moment later, familiar, normal weight returned, then shifted as the Scorpion rotated until we hung in the darkness, inverted, like bats. Blood roared in my ears.

  “Take care out there, guys.” There was no hint of stand-up comic in the pilot’s voice this time.

  The loadmaster said, “First rank, prepare to down-rappel.”

  Then the clamshells whined open, and above my head, forty feet below, the snowdrifts of Weichsel burst so bright white that my armor’s sensors darkened my visor to blast level.

  The loadmaster said, “First rank out!”

  I dangled from a synlon rappel line below the Scorpion’s tail, one hand paying out line through the carabiner at my waist, while I muttered about whose bright idea it was for me to be here.

  I arrived on Weichsel in an explosion of snow and sank past my knees. Then a Spook landed on top of me, and pushed me beltline-deep.

  A half-dozen voices grunted and swore.

  Somebody said, “Holy moly! Isn’t this exciting?” That was Howard.

  Somebody else said, “Goddamit, Howard! Get off me!” That was me.

  I shoved Howard off into a drift, broomed snow off my visor with my g
auntlet, and looked around. The infantry ringed us, galloping wide-legged atop the snow on the snowshoe webs that had jackknifed from their boot soles.

  Each platoon net I listened in on rattled with necessary communication, with no word wasted. That indicated good training. There was also heavy breathing. That indicated that running in snowshoes isn’t for the flabby.

  Above us hovered all thirty-six Scorpions, only ours and one other still reeling in rappel lines and closing their pod doors. The air above each scorching-hot fuselage shimmered. Vulnerable as they dangled like monstrous hummingbirds, the Scorpions would remain above us only until the ground commander released them.

  For a hundred-yard radius around us, the top yard of snow had been blown away by the downdraft of air pushed by thirty-six Scorpions, as they had screamed down through a hundred miles of atmosphere like hypersonic bulldozers.

  One thing I noticed was what wasn’t here. No blizzard. The sky was clear-not even a breeze stirred the snow-flakes. I smiled.

  Also, there were no Slugs. No mag-rail rifles fired, no masses of armored Warriors maneuvered to assault us. Complete surprise!

  Unless we had landed in the wrong spot. My heart skipped.

  Next to me, Howard jumped up and down, knee deep in snow.

  “Goddamit, Howard! What are you doing?”

  He grinned at me through his visor. “Jump yourself, Jason! We’re standing right on top of the Ganglion!”

  I jumped and was rewarded by a hollow bong as my boots struck metal. In all directions, the snow sloped away from the dome-shaped hummock we stood upon. A half-dozen drifts converged on the spot where Howard and I and the pile of flailing, armored arms and legs that was the Spook team stood.

  I jumped again.

  Bong.

  “I’ll be damned.” I knew Rusty’s troops and the Abe’s pilots were good, but they had crossed millions of miles of space in three days, then hit a target no bigger than a backyard swimming pool, all without our enemy being the wiser.

  The Spooks, assisted by GIs with wide manual snow shovels, were already foxholing down to each of the six radiating ribs through which, according to Howard, the Ganglion sent and received communication to and from the Warriors under its command.

  Once we severed the Ganglion’s ability to communicate with its Warriors, the Slugs wouldn’t drop like marionettes with cut strings, but they wouldn’t fight and maneuver as units, either.

  I waddled through the drifts to the nearest foxhole, then peered down at the Spook and GI below. They knelt on the hole’s floor, a convex patch of blue Slug metal, as the Spook fitted a charge to a seam in the Ganglion’s arm casing. Then they paddled up the snow and stood, the Spook fingering a black detonator while the GI called, “Fire in the hole” three times.

  The charge flashed, hissed, and raised a steam cloud that hung in the frigid air. Within a fifty-yard radius, five more hisses sounded, and then five more steam clouds hung.

  As we watched, the steam drifted together, coalesced into a single plume, and rose into the clear, still sky, past the hovering Scorpions. Beautiful. Perfect.

  Howard said, “Uh-oh.”

  THIRTEEN

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, wind whipped our helmet antennae and swirled a snow fog so strong that, even with enhanced optics, visibility was down to forty feet.

  Howard shouted, his voice booming in my earpiece, “It was the atmospheric disturbance created by the Scorpions’ hypersonic passage. Now the storm’s building on itself.”

  I winced. “Howard, we have radios. You don’t have to scream.”

  Howard slapped at a rope that writhed in the growing gale as it dangled again from the Scorpions. “Jason, we can’t abort this now.”

  Howard’s Spooks, working through the gathering blizzard, had cut through the Ganglion’s armored housing, and we had our first look at Slug royalty after three decades of war.

  It was a blob as big as a two-seat urban electric and as green as snot. No evil eyes, flailing tendrils, or slobbery fangs. Just a blob with a half-dozen thigh-thick armored cables plugged in around its midsection. The cables, torched black by the Spooks’ cutting charges, now led nowhere.

  The exposed Ganglion, free of its armored housing, hovered above the snow on a disk, presumably held up by Cavorite.

  I leaned into the wind, toward Howard. “It’s mute and blind now?”

  “I think so. But it could have-”

  Zzeee.

  Someone screamed.

  I said, “Heavys!” The Slugs waged war more like Neanderthals than like a millennial master race. If something they didn’t like got in their way, they threw an object at it. Slug Warriors’ magnetic-rail rifles were just scaled-down versions of the Slug artillery piece, which tossed a projectile the size and weight of a wall safe.

  Red fog spat at us, mixed among the snowflakes. The fog trailed back thirty feet from Howard and me, to the neck ring of a Spook kid’s armor. A single heavy round, lobbed in here for ranging purposes, had decapitated him.

  I said to Howard, “It called fire on its own position! We gotta get out of here.”

  A surrounded human soldier might call artillery fire down on his own position, to take the bad guys with him, and save his buddies or his mission. Slugs behaved the same, but the altruism was missing. In this case, it was simple logic for the Slugs. The Ganglion wanted its troops to kill it, lest we be allowed to capture it. Also, of course, it wanted to kill us.

  The commander of the infantry was already moving his troops off the Ganglion hummock. Four Spooks had fastened ropes to the Ganglion’s motility plate, so they could tow it away from this spot before the Slug heavy rounds began raining down on us.

  Zzee. Zzeee. Zzee.

  A battery volley of red-hot heavy rounds thudded around us.

  Crump.

  Above our heads, a heavy struck a Scorpion amidships. The Scorpion disappeared with a rumbling boom. It didn’t explode. It didn’t crash. It disappeared.

  Howard said, “The round stripped the shielding off the Cavorite mass. The ship shot away from here at miles per second.”

  Crump. Another Scorpion disappeared.

  Three of the Spooks who had been pulling the Ganglion out of harm’s way lay dead alongside it.

  In my earpiece, the Scorpion Squadron leader said, “Raiding party reembark! We’ll get you out of here!” He would also get his own ships out of here, before more of them got creamed.

  Another heavy volley rained in; a round struck a man, and he vanished.

  The ground commander radioed Howard. “Colonel Hibble, we can’t get a sling on your brain plate in time.”

  Howard said, “Get your troops out. The Ganglion weighs nothing. Two people can tow it out of the kill zone. You come back and pick us up after the storm.”

  I sighed. I knew who those two people were going to be.

  Howard was a devious geek, but under fire he developed a heroic streak.

  Zzee.

  I flinched, though I had no idea where the incoming was bound, and something knocked me faceplate-down in the snow. I lay there and felt around my shoulder. A Slug heavy had lawn-mowered down my back, stripping away my pack and my armor’s life-support systems. But except for a thump between my shoulder blades, I seemed to be unbroken.

  I levered myself up to my knees and peered through the storm.

  Troops snaked up ropes, back into the remaining Scorpions, as Slug rounds continued to pound our landing zone. Wounded were roped up before the able-bodied GIs, as, it appeared, were bodies. That would probably cost lives, but no Ready Brigade soldier was going to leave a buddy behind, even under an artillery barrage.

  Howard and I grasped the tow ropes on the Ganglion and leaned forward as we towed it through howling snow and away from the zero point where the heavy rounds kept rattling down like hailstones.

  The remaining Scorpions, barely visible through the driven snow, buttoned up, then disappeared.

  The heavy rounds stopped. Silence, except for the wind
, returned to Weichsel.

  By my visor display, Howard, our green POW, and I had already moved four hundred yards north of the landing zone. My display also said straight-line winds were gusting to one hundred six miles per hour.

  I toggled through my visor display to Systems Check, then swore. My armor’s heater had quit. Actually, it hadn’t quit, it had left the premises, sheared off by the Slug heavy’s near miss. Already, despite my exertions, I shivered inside my armor.

  According to our intel, two thousand yards from our landing zone, a perimeter defended by ten thousand Slug Warriors ringed the Ganglion hummock from which we fled with our kidnap victim.

  If we could slip through that perimeter under cover of the storm, we might find a place to hole up. If we remained inside the perimeter, when the storm blew out we would be dead meat, and our prisoner would be rescued or killed by its own troops.

  We slogged on, completely blind now and crawling to stay beneath the worst gusts, until my visor display predicted that the northern segment of the Slug perimeter, populated with its share of ten thousand unfriendly, man-sized, armed, and armored maggots, lay two hundred yards to our front.

  Inside my armor, I shivered harder.

  FOURTEEN

  HOWARD AND I lay side by side in the snow while gusts now measuring one hundred thirty miles per hour rocketed snow above us, and the outside temperature remained two degrees below zero, Fahrenheit. The wind chill wasn’t worth checking, though my armor would have calculated it. My armor had lost its heater, not its brains.

  Therefore, I heard Howard perfectly when he whispered over the intercom, “We won’t be able to shoot our way through the Pseudocephalopod lines.”

  Actually, with our M40s, the two of us, like any human infantry, could shoot our way through many times our weight in Slug Warriors. But once they realized where we were, the Slugs would pour onto our trail by the thousands, blizzard or no blizzard, brain-dead or not.