Orphan's Triumph

by Robert Buettner

That was I. That was me. A historical footnote.

  The commandant turned back to her Corps of Cadets. “Today’s topic is a retrospective on the campaign for the liberation of Bren.” Mimi took a seat in the audience, leaving me alone center stage.

  I stepped alongside the chair placed there for me. My legs ached, as they always did in the mornings. So did every other part that the Slugs and the calendar had forced the army to rebuild.

  But I frowned down at the chair and said to the audience, “Everybody provides one of these for me, these days. Deference to rank, or age, I suppose. But infantry doesn’t sit.”

  Whoops and pumped fists erupted from the back rows, where the lousy students stood. When the first graduating class came to draw postgrad assignments in a few months, the top students would snatch the glam slots, like flight school and astrogation. The back row would become infantry lieutenants. It was natural selection. Infantry gets the sharp, dirty end of the stick from the beginning, so it learns to laugh about it.

  I smiled and pumped my fist back at them. Where they were going, whatever the war, they would need their sense of humor.

  I cleared my throat.

  PalmTalkers swiveled up alongside whispering lips. Personal ’Puter keyboards unfolded in hands. A few kids snatched pterosaur-quill pens and sheets of flat paper from hiding places beneath stiff shirtfronts. Different cultures, different study habits.

  I waved the devices away. “No notes. You get enough logistics and tactics at the puzzle factory next door.”

  Laughter.

  I said, “Bren wasn’t liberated by so-called military genius.”

  A kid in back raised his hand. “Then why do our chips teach the Bren campaign, sir?” He knew the answer. Every kid in the union knew it. He was just stretching the lecture.

  But I answered like they didn’t know. “Because it turned the tide of this war. We flew the transport we captured back to Earth, used that ship’s power plant for a template, used Bren’s Cavorite for fuel, and built the fleets that liberated, then unified, the planets of the union. My meaning was that wars are won by soldiers sacrificing for other soldiers. And by trial and blunder. And by which side got stuck in the mud least. And by commanders who learned to lead effectively while engulfed by chaos, and lunacy, and their own heartbreak.”

  Twenty minutes later, I took questions. The kids knew that Mimi wanted cadets who spoke their minds. I pointed at the raised hand of a shaved-headed kid with indigo-dyed eyebrows.

  She stood as straight and as hard as a Casuni broadsword and asked, “Sir, our poli-sci chips say the real liberation of Bren depends on Bassin the First.”

  I nodded. “They’re right. The uncivil ‘peace’ among the clans that’s followed the expulsion of the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony has killed more Marini, Casuni, and Tassini than the Slugs did.”

  With those indigo eyebrows, she was clearly Tassini. Probably second-generation emancipated. I guessed she was asking a rhetorical question, designed to educate classmates to whom slavery was just a word. If it hadn’t been for the changes that started on Bren with the Expulsion of the Slugs, she’d be bending over some landowner’s plow or washtub, like her grandparents did. Thanks to emancipation, she had traveled to the stars, here to the motherworld, where she had learned things like astrogation and comparative lit.

  She asked, “You agree with the chips that say the war was wrong, then?”

  “Creating freedom for people can’t be wrong. Even if some people create wrong out of freedom.”

  She half-smiled at the kid next to her.

  I pointed at his raised hand, and he said, “Maybe the war was right for Bren. And for the union. But on a galactic scale, since the Expulsion we haven’t seen the end of war. Soldiers are still dying.”

  He didn’t know that the end of this long and inglorious-is there any other kind?-war was imminent, and I couldn’t tell him.

  So I said, “‘Only the dead have seen the end of war.’ The chips attribute that quote to Plato. It’s still true twenty-five hundred years after Plato died. The lesson you’re here to learn is, never waste the life of any soldier you command.”

  He nodded.

  I said, “Even if you learn that lesson, you’ll hate it. Command is an orphan’s journey.”

  The kids milked question time for twenty minutes more, then the applause from the infantry gonna-bes in the back rows shook the Omnifoam floor tiles.

  As I stepped offstage, someone in Space Force blue grasped my elbow and steered me toward an exit.

  It was Jude.

  I stopped like I had walked into a Glasstic door. “What are you doing here?”

  “I hear you gave the same speech last year. They still applaud.”

  “They applaud because I talk so long that the commandant cancels PT. What’s going on?”

  Jude slid back his uniform sleeve, which was now Zoomie blue, not Tressen Nazi black, to show me the red-flashing screen on his wrist ’Puter. “Orders. We lift on next hour’s fleet orbital.”

  I frowned. The only thing that could transfer a Tressen officer into the service of the Human Union was clear and present danger from the common enemy.

  Jude said, “You won’t believe what the Slugs just did. Want to hear where we go next?”

  I shook my head. “Just so we go together.”

  After Mimi dismissed the corps, she stepped backstage, widened her eyes when she saw Jude, then hugged him.

  Then she frowned at both of us, hands on hips. “What the hell’s going on?”

  Jude said, “Nobody exactly knows. Something big on Bren.”

  I held Mimi at arm’s length, shrugged. “To be continued.”

  She touched my cheek, and her eyes glistened. “Someday.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  FORT MEADE IS A SHORT DRIVE FROM REAGAN, but a tilt-wing picked up Jude, Howard, and me, sped us above the guideway traffic, then delivered us to the tarmac fifty feet from where the hourly fleet orbital lingered, just for us.

  Also fifty feet from us a staff-driven pool car had parked. Pinchon stood, feet planted, arms crossed, in front of the shuttle’s extended belly ladder. His cheeks were more sunken, his lips more tightly drawn, than when I had met him at the Waldorf. I paused in front of him, and he cleared his throat.

  Before he could speak, I said, “I’ve got the retirement papers with me. Effective on my signature, you said? Because it may take me a while to get around to signing them. If that’s okay, General?”

  For a moment, he stiffened. Then he stood aside. “God-speed, General.”

  I laid my hand on the belly ladder’s rail and climbed aboard the shuttle.

  As we strapped in, Jude asked, “Who was pucker-face?”

  “My new boss.”

  “So he doesn’t know much about your job yet?”

  “He knows when to get out of the way.”

  Ninety minutes later, Jude, Howard, and I stepped out of the shuttle onto the arrival platform in a launch bay aboard the Tehran .

  The Tehran had been held in orbit for us, delaying its long-scheduled departure to Mousetrap for refit. Tehran ’s refit had also been pushed back, so she could barrel straight through the Mousetrap, jump again, then deliver us to Bren a couple of days faster. Normally priority-transport procedures would have cost a couple of days while we changed to a fresh outbound cruiser at Mousetrap.

  Tiny in the vast bay, between us and the exit hatch from the bay into the ship proper, stood Tehran ’s skipper.

  His chin thrust out, his feet were planted, and his arms were crossed, in a pose like the one Pinchon had assumed when we met in front of the up-shuttle’s ladder. But it was clear that the skipper wasn’t about to get out of the way.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE TEHRAN ’S CAPTAIN was actually a rear admiral, so I ranked him, but barely. Red-faced Boston Irish, he had, therefore, proven a competent drinking companion. Eddie Duffy stabbed a finger at my chest. “This bettah be good, Jason!”

  As the Ganymede’s
christening had recently proved, cruisers were built stronger these days, but the swabbie book still called for them to refit after enduring the stress of a T-FIP jump like the one the Tehran would make to deliver us into the Mousetrap. But Eddie Duffy had just been ordered to jump his baby, his only child, the ship he had nursed since it was a set of blueprints, back-to-back into Mousetrap and then out the other side, to get us to Bren sooner. He didn’t like it.

  I jerked my thumb over my shoulder at Howard. “This guy’ll explain it all, Eddie.”

  Howard forced his eyes wide. “Why do you think I know, Jason?”

  “Because you always do.” The branch insignia pinned crooked on Howard’s lapel was military intelligence, the people who renamed paranoia “need-to-know.” So, professorial geek though he was, Howard tossed information around like anvils.

  Ten minutes later, we sat in Captain Eddie’s wardroom while Howard briefed us.

  Neither Jude nor Eddie knew about the facts that underlay Silver Bullet. I didn’t know what had just happened, but I knew that Silver Bullet had to be at its heart. Therefore, if mankind was going to put things right, Silver Bullet could no longer be the Spooks’ little secret.

  Howard, as was his wont anyway, began at the beginning.

  A Threedie schematic of Bren from space was the first visual up on the holo. Around the blue planet’s equator orbited the White Moon of Bren, an atmosphereless rock, crater-pocked a billion years ago, much like Earth’s single moon. From north to south over Bren’s poles orbited the Red Moon of Bren, smaller, faster moving, and as unmarked as a baby’s cheek.

  Howard pointed at the Red Moon’s image as it circled Bren. “The Red Moon is an astronomic peculiarity. It orbits Bren north-south. Ordinary moons orbit roughly east-west, around their captor’s equator. That’s because ordinary moons and their planets coalesce from a disc of material spinning around their star, so a planetary system is shaped like marbles rotating on a tray.”

  I nodded. “The plane of the ecliptic.” I’d heard this part of the lecture before, therefore I showed off before Howard went rocket science.

  Howard said, “So we knew from the get-go that the Red Moon was a rarity. An interstellar wanderer, captured by Bren’s gravity, when the Red Moon penetrated the Bren system, at a right angle to the plane of the ecliptic.”

  Howard waved up the holo’s magnification, and the Red Moon’s image swelled until it filled the holotank, like a red porcelain basketball. He rotated his hands around the image’s circumference. “The Red Moon’s second peculiarity is that, though it’s too small to trap a protective atmosphere, it isn’t pocked by impact craters, like its sibling, and like most ordinary moons. The Red Moon’s third peculiarity is observable indirectly. Unlike an ordinary moon, the Red Moon doesn’t measurably affect Bren’s tides, like an ordinary moon its size would.”

  The captain shifted in his chair, nodding and spinning his hands like he was winding twine. “In the beginning, the Earth was without form. Please. I got deteriorating stores to deal with, Colonel.”

  I turned to him and raised my palm. “Patience, Eddie. This is all connected.” Howard’s detective work had been impressive enough to deserve a hearing. Besides, “deteriorating stores” were simply munitions that got swapped out for newer ones, a throwback to the days when explosives became unstable over time. As a covert adviser I had spent a career thankful for every muddy case of plausibly deniable, sweating dynamite, so my sympathy was limited. Eddie, like Squids generally, wasn’t nearly as busy as he thought.

  My godson squirmed, too, the way I did when the topic was the Slugs. They had cost Jude friends, and nearly his own life.

  Howard frowned back at Eddie. “This is already an oversimplified presentation. Bren is very Earthlike. But Bren’s fauna avoided the mass extinctions that punctuated Earth’s natural history. Why?”

  Eddie shot me a glance that said he didn’t care why.

  Howard raised his index finger. “Because the periodic cosmic bolide strikes that have punctuated Earth’s prehistory missed Bren.”

  “Cosmic bolides.” Eddie looked around like he was searching for a yardarm to hoist somebody from.

  I raised my palm to cut Howard off, then gave Eddie the CliffsNotes version. “Comets and asteroids missed Bren because its gravity didn’t suck them in. Bren’s gravity didn’t suck them in because something near it affected its gravity. Eddie, the Red Moon is solid Cavorite. It barely stays in orbit around Bren, and it eats gravity, like the Tehran ’s Cavorite impellers do.”

  Eddie was impatient, not dumb. His eyebrows rose, and he whistled. “Cavorite’s poison to the Slugs. If we could package enough Cavorite, we could end the war.”

  Howard nodded. “Which is the threshold upon which we stood, until four days ago.” He waved up a new holo. This one showed the Red Moon, too, but it was a visible-light telescopic image, not a Threedie simulation.

  The Red Moon looked grayer, as though obscured by fog.

  Howard waved up the magnification, and I shuddered.

  It wasn’t fog, it was Slug ships, each Firewitch as big as a domed stadium, each Troll as big as Mount Rushmore. The cordon the maggots had thrown around the Red Moon looked more like a mosquito swarm.

  I asked, “Where did they come from?”

  Howard shrugged. “Not through the Mousetrap.”

  Eddie said, “So much for the strategic crossroad theory.”

  Howard shook his head. “Nobody ever said the Mousetrap was the only way to reach the union planets, just the most efficient. We have no idea how many jumps this new armada had to cross to come in the back door. I suspect this was a Long March for the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony.”

  “Armada” was what history had come to call the last Slug invasion fleet to threaten a human-inhabited planet. The Armada of 2043 had destroyed virtually Earth’s entire defensive capability at that time, and the Armada had numbered “only” one hundred twenty-one Firewitches and a single Troll incubator ship.

  It was unclear that our acceptance of the Slug’s Weichsel gambit had helped them sneak up on Bren. But the timing convinced me that the Slugs had coordinated their Weichsel feint with this much larger move. The maggots had snookered us again, not by deceiving us but by laying their cards on the table and allowing us to misplay ours. Would we ever learn? I rested my forehead against my palm and closed my eyes. “How many this time, Howard?”

  “The force visible in this image comprises two thousand four Firewitches and sixteen Trolls.”

  Jude, Eddie, and I rocked back as one. My own eyes’ evidence notwithstanding, I shook my head. The Human Union, fully mobilized on a war footing for decades, had finally built up its strength to levels that made the forces of the Warsaw Pact look like a Brownie troop. Yet our cruisers plus far-more-numerous Scorpion fighters, even projected out two more years, totaled less than seven hundred. “Howard, that’s impossible.”

  “Jason, we have no idea how long the Pseudocephalopod has exerted hegemony over this galaxy, or even whether its reach is confined to this galaxy. We know Cavorite originates at the boundary of this universe. For all we know, the Pseudocephalopod’s reach extends that far.

  This manifestation, which seems massive to us, could be a tiny part of its strength.”

  Eddie shook his head. “I don’t buy it. The Red Moon’s the biggest threat we’ve ever posed to them. This is the maggots’ last hurrah. They just threw in the kitchen sink, because it’s all they’ve got left.”

  Jude wrinkled his brow, then asked a fighter pilot’s question. “Howard, you said there are two thousand Fire-witches visible in this image. We must’ve had cruisers on station around Bren. How many did their Scorpions destroy ship-to-ship?”

  “Plenty. Our kill ratio of Firewitches by Scorpions remains prohibitively high, by our standards.”

  Eddie asked, “What intelligence do you make of that information, Colonel Hibble?”

  In intel-speak, “information” is raw data. The picture the Spooks weave fr
om information is “intelligence.” George Washington said that “the necessity of procuring good intelligence is apparent & need not be further urged.” When it came to the Slugs, nobody in the decades of this war had ever woven more good intelligence pictures than Howard Hibble.

  Howard cocked his head. “The Pseudocephalopod has a history of solving problems with force, rather than guile. No new tactics or weapons. Just more of them here.”

  I nodded. So far as we knew, for all their longevity and omniscience, Slugs hadn’t even invented the wheel. Why bother if you can beat gravity in another way? Based on what we were seeing now, we had encountered every type of ship the Slugs had during the war’s early years.

  There were the Troll and Firewitch, and the interplanetary Projectile. There was a fourth type, a small, hypervelocity version of the Projectile that was so rare that we had never really seen one, just the streaks it left and the damage it did.

  Howard said to Eddie Duffy, “The bad news is that I disagree with your interpretation of this incursion, Admiral Duffy. This force isn’t the kitchen sink. The Pseudocephalopod probably has much more where that came from. Still, it could be worse.”

  Eddie stared at the wall of enemy warships that now quarantined mankind from the weapons project that was supposed to win the war, and he cradled his chin in his upturned palm. “Two thousand ships isn’t the kitchen sink? Christ on a crutch, Colonel! It is worse.”

  Despite Eddie’s other misgivings, the Tehran transited the two jumps across the Mousetrap without so much as a popped rivet and, with a screen of Scorpions deployed and spoiling for a fight, set up in an orbit around Bren that kept the planet always between it and the Slug fleet.

  That, arguably, was overcautious.

  We arrived two weeks after the Slugs did, but the Slugs still hadn’t attacked our bases on Bren. They hadn’t attacked the Stone Hills Cavorite mines. They hadn’t attacked our vessels, except any outnumbered Scorpions that attacked them first.

  The Slugs’ only hostile action, other than crashing our party uninvited, had come upon arrival. The old cruiser that had orbited the Red Moon, serving as Silver Bullet’s base, was now a debris field in a loose and deteriorating orbit. Basically, the Slugs ignored us while they did the industrious little maggot things they always did.