Orphan's Triumph

by Robert Buettner

  All of this mystified everybody.

  Except Howard.

  TWENTY-NINE

  THE NEXT DAY’S DAWN shrouded the River Marin’s delta in icy drizzle, so Howard stood gripping a temporary lectern set up in the Spook hangar at Human Union Camp Bren, outside the old city of Marinus. Behind him the prototype Scorpions that had been modified to deliver Silver Bullet perched like pearlescent roaches on their landing gear. On rowed Marini benches in front of Howard sat the three hundred members of the Scorpion ground crews and pilots, who were his command’s only survivors, by the chance of being dirtside when the Slugs arrived.

  Representing Earth’s host and ally, Bassin the First, absolute monarch of Marin and nominal ruler of the fractious commonwealth plains nations of Bren, sat behind Howard, to one side. Bassin wore the simple brown uniform of a colonel of combat engineers. Alongside him, set back a pace per Marini protocol, sat Ord, Jude, and me.

  As an infantry commander, I’ve presided over too many memorial services. As head Spook, this was Howard Hibble’s first.

  A tombstone-sized flatscreen set up on an easel next to Howard scrolled a numbered list of names of the missing in action, as he read them aloud.

  With telescopic optics, from drones sent to recon the Red Moon, we could make out frozen human bodies, limbs splayed like DaVinci’s Vitruvian Man. The kids cartwheeled amid the hull plates and mattresses of the destroyed Spook laboratory ship, eccentrically orbiting the Red Moon, barely held by its peculiar gravity. Officially, Howard’s kids weren’t even dead, just absent, a cruelty of war accentuated in space engagements. We lost eight Scorpions trying to get in and recover bodies before the effort was halted, though not for lack of pilots begging to try.

  The name alongside missing soldier number one was “Applebite, R.,” the kid that Ord and I had ridden up with back before Weichsel, back when the best minds said the war was nearly won. When the last name, “Wyvern, A.,” scrolled by, the number alongside had swollen to 1,372.

  Howard’s shoulders sagged, and he clung to the podium sides as he stared at the hangar floor.

  Ord wore his Class-A topcoat over his uniform, more, I suspected, to insulate himself from sentiment than the chill. The first time I saw him, he had been strutting through a Pennsylvania winter in starched cotton drill sergeant’s fatigues while us trainees had shivered inside our civilian winter coats.

  Howard stood mute and numb. His kids’ war had always been a holo arcade game, with the bleeding and dying done by other kids on the sharp point of the stick. He cleared his throat, then said, “They never expected this. I never expected this.”

  Howard’s remarks were less than Churchillian, but they were honest, which mattered.

  Alongside me, Ord wiped his nose and whispered to me, “Expect the worst from the gods of war and they will seldom disappoint you.”

  I whispered back, “Did Churchill say that?”

  “Why, no, sir. You did.”

  “Really?”

  Whatever else Howard had planned to say, it was apparent he wasn’t going to make it through. Bassin watched, then inclined his head toward the back of the hangar.

  A lone Marini bandsman marched from the rear of the hangar, with exaggerated arm swings, spun an about-face, then stood alongside Howard. The bandsman’s black hat, bigger than a watermelon, could have passed for a British foot guard’s bearskin, though the skin was proto feathered dinosaur. Marini infantry were still piped to battle by skrillers. A skrill resembles a bagpipe, except its pipes are carved from the hollow bones of pterosaurs.

  The bandsman unfolded a yellowed paper music sheet, fastened it to a wooden clip on the blowpipe, then played “Amazing Grace” like he had known it all his life.

  It was the first time I saw Ord cry. Everybody cried.

  It was the kind of day to go home, draw the blinds, and drink alone. But we couldn’t do that.

  THIRTY

  AN HOUR LATER, my staff officers, plus Howard, Ord, Jude, and me, sat in my conference room. Hail ricocheted off the windowpanes like shrapnel while we tried to paddle through the muck that the gods of war had ladled onto us.

  I said, “Howard, what the hell are the Slugs doing? If they have enough of an alternate Cavorite source that they can drop two thousand Firewitches and sixteen Trolls on us, they don’t need to mine the Red Moon.”

  Howard stared at a box of stationery on the corner of my desk. He had too many hard-copy letters to write. “The Red Moon is useless to them for that, anyway.”

  I straightened in my chair. “What?”

  “Cavorite is fragments-not really matter, as we think of it in this universe-that ‘rubbed off’ the boundary between this universe and the next one. Cavorite is antithetic to this universe, especially to one of this universe’s fundamental forces, gravity.”

  “Which is why it’s useful.”

  Howard nodded. “This universe reacts to this foreign material the way your finger reacts to a splinter. It cocoons Cavorite fragments at the interuniversal boundary, so they drift through this universe insulated, until something like us or the Pseudocephalopod gets hold of them.”

  “Little Cavorite meteors fell on Bren. One big one orbits around it.”

  Howard nodded. “The big one, the Red Moon, is too much of a good thing. Cavorite stones are toxic to the Pseudocephalopod, but not as toxic as the sort of Cavorite that makes up the Red Moon. That’s why, I suspect, the Pseudocephalopod bypassed the Red Moon originally and chose to use human miners to excavate the less toxic Cavorite fall in the Stone Hills. The Red Moon’s not the only place where we’ve seen the Pseudocephalopod bypass concentrated Cavorite. Besides, the Red Moon’s Cavorite is too powerful to harness. An impeller loaded with Stone Hills Cavorite can hurl a starship through space. But the sort of power locked up in the Red Moon could knock a whole planet out of orbit.”

  “They’re going to knock Bren out of orbit?”

  Howard shook his head. “No need. The Pseudocephalopod is perfectly capable of destroying a planet without help from a Cavorite bolide.”

  I stared up at the ceiling. Every nine hours, the Red Moon, with its thousands of Slug outriders, passed north to south above some part of the Marini commonwealth, then, nine hours later, south to north above another part. Between the Slugs and us ghosted a defensive screen of Scorpions, but everybody knew that if the Slugs chose to, our defenders couldn’t prevent the maggots from raining destruction on this planet the way they had Earth during the Blitz in 2036. “So what the hell are they doing up there, Howard?”

  “This.” Howard waved up a holo, visible-light drone imagery. It showed low-angle, high-resolution images from a skimmer that had flashed across the Red Moon, transmitted images, and then, no doubt, been shot down by the Slugs.

  The image showed lumpy, asymmetric, wheelless machines gliding back and forth across a glassy red plain. Atop each machine bulged a leaden sphere. As we watched, one machine plucked off a sphere from its sibling, then replaced it with another.

  Howard pointed at the discarded sphere. “Even with extensive shielding, the Pseudocephalopod workers operating this machinery don’t last long.”

  Jude said, “Isn’t it obvious? They knew that we were about to destroy them. They took over the Red Moon to stop Silver Bullet.”

  Howard shook his head. “The Pseudocephalopod is economical in its actions. It could more easily have stopped Silver Bullet by destroying our ground facilities, or the entire civilization of Bren. Or it could have simply stood off and bombarded the Red Moon with slow Projectiles or with fast Vipers, until it broke the Red Moon into vagrant fragments.”

  I frowned. “Howard, you know plenty about what the Slugs aren’t doing. What are they doing?”

  “I don’t know. But Silver Bullet is stalled until we stop them from continuing to do it.”

  “How do we stop them?”

  My Space Force liaison major shook her head. “We can’t win a fleet-against-fleet battle.”

  Howard raised hi
s index finger. “But if we stop them from doing whatever they’re doing on the Red Moon’s surface…”

  Jude pointed at the holo image, which had cut off after just seconds. “That drone lasted two seconds once it pulled up. Even Scorpions can’t stay close enough long enough to smart-bomb them.”

  Howard said, “And saturation bombing would leave the Red Moon useless to us.”

  I closed my eyes and rubbed them with my fingers. “Okay. Howard, if we modified a bunch of Scorpions the way you modified yours for Silver Bullet, they could carry more, right?”

  He nodded.

  “So we could use them to land infantry on the Red Moon. Not just a raiding party. A force that could take the ground and hold it. Then we could keep the Scorpions down there, so they wouldn’t be exposed to fire.”

  Ord raised his eyebrows. “Sir, light infantry taking and holding unfamiliar ground when the enemy enjoys air supremacy?”

  I pointed at my Space Force liaison. “You can’t whip their fleet. But can you keep their fleet from ganging up on an exposed ground force?”

  She frowned. “Maybe.”

  “No maybe. Do it.”

  There was more stone in the faces around my conference table than on Mount Rushmore. “I’m open to other options. Who’s got some?”

  Even Ord looked pale. Nobody said anything.

  I slapped my palms against the tabletop. “Tomorrow. Same time. Please present me a plan consistent with this concept for your respective areas of responsibility.”

  Chairs pushed back amid thick silence.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, this is an opportunity. Please present it to your respective staffs as such, rather than as a problem.” I sounded so optimistic that I almost believed myself.

  THIRTY-ONE

  THREE WEEKS LATER, I sat in my office at sunrise, in the chair I had occupied the previous night and most of the other nights since I had set my army on this course. Action items choked my calendar flatscreen’s inbox, and paper reports related to the onworld aspects of the operation overflowed a wire basket on my desk corner, like a last-century cartoon.

  Jude rapped on my open office door’s jamb, then stepped in without waiting for me to ask him. “You look like crap.” He dropped into a chair across from me, then propped his crossed ankles on the far edge of my desk.

  I rubbed my chin. “I’m gonna shave in a minute.”

  He eyed the tight-blanketed cot I had staff set up in my office’s corner. “How long since you slept?”

  “I take catnaps. Edison took catnaps.”

  “ Edison was deaf, too. It didn’t make him better at his job. Ord’s not babysitting you like he should.”

  “I’m too old for a babysitter. And Ord’s too old to babysit.”

  Jude jerked his thumb at my outer office. “Tell me about it. When I saw him yesterday, he looked like he’d aged ten years in three weeks. You don’t look much better.”

  “So make me better. Tell me you’ve got the first modified Scorpion into flyable condition.”

  He grinned. “Why do you think I came by?”

  I stood, arched my back as I rubbed it with my palms, and groaned.

  He grinned again.

  I said, “The replacement parts work fine. It’s the original equipment that wakes up slow.”

  His grin disappeared, and he stood. “I’ll give you a hand.”

  I pushed his hand away. “I’m fine.”

  He said, “Come on over to the hangar with me. You need a break. I’ll make it worth your while.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  A SHAVE, SHOWER, and uniform change later, Jude’s footsteps and mine echoed in the Spook hangar, nearly lost in a din of metal against metal.

  The space had become more factory floor than aircraft hangar, with a dozen Scorpions in various stages of conversion, each one’s belly tile floating three feet off the floor. Each giant watermelon seed of a craft, bigger than an old fixed-wing fighter-bomber, got pushed from station to station by two enlisted ratings as easily as if they were rolling an oversized shopping cart.

  The only reason Scorpions even had landing gear was so they could be shut down completely to switch out peripheral systems or to conserve peripheral system batteries. Cavorite never got tired.

  Jude led me to a shut-down Scorpion resting on landing gear just inside the hangar’s rolled-back main doors.

  Modifying a single-seat Scorpion fighter to operate as a Silver Bullet bomber, or as our field-expedient troop carrier, essentially involved cannibalizing another Scorpion, then piggybacking the extra fuselage onto the existing one, with the nose of the cargo-passenger space faired in aft of the original ship’s cockpit. The overall look was not only graceless but indecent.

  No paint in existence could withstand the skin temperatures a Scorpion generated while operating in atmosphere. So the nose art, which consisted of two angry eyes and a shark-tooth mouth, was merely temporary chalk. The slogan below the teeth read “The humping cockroaches. Payback is job one.”

  Jude helped me negotiate the low-angled access ladder that bridged the Scorpion’s flank, then we dropped through the upturned clamshell canopy into the side-by-side couches for pilot and systems operator.

  The rating at the ladder’s base cracked off a salute that Jude returned, then lifted the ladder away.

  I turned to Jude. “What are you doing?”

  He toggled a switch, the canopy clamped shut, then the visual screens that wallpapered the canopy lit, so that the opaque ceramic seemed transparent. “Taking her out for a spin. You’ll like it.”

  “No, I-”

  Jude powered the Scorpion on. There was no sensation of motion inside, but the scene outside bounced up and down as the landing gear retracted, leaving the Scorpion floating. The feeling was like playing a pre-holo video game, where the player sat in a chair watching the two-dimensional world ahead of him fly by.

  Not that the old-style video experience bored me.

  Jude nosed the ship out of the hangar at a walk, then drifted it above the city, left, right, canopy to the sky, canopy to the ground. Nose over, corkscrew, stall. I white-knuckled my couch arms, not because of what my gut felt, but because of what my eyes saw. And unlike a video game, I knew that what my eyes saw was true.

  Jude glanced down at my death grips on my couch. “Just go with it, Jason.”

  “Can we go straight?”

  “You’re on.”

  Marinus and the delta disappeared as we blistered along twenty feet above the Sea of Hunters. Jude sat back, smiling, hands off the paddles. “Just as stable as the original configuration.”

  “How fast are we going?”

  “It’s okay. We’re over the sea.”

  “How fast?”

  “Eight hundred.”

  I death gripped the couch again. “Eight hundred miles per hour?”

  “No.”

  “Good.”

  “Per second.”

  We flashed across the opposite seacoast, and Jude nosed us up. The sky went black in a blink. “We can go faster now, Jason. No atmosphere.”

  I craned my neck. “Where are the Slugs?”

  “In an orbit a hundred thousand miles above us. And, at the moment, on the other side of the world.” Jude had inherited his father’s piloting aptitude and daring, his mother’s brains and marksmanship skills, and the bonus of having been the first person conceived and carried to term in space, where a stray ion had cut the right DNA strand and gifted him with the fastest reflexes in human history. He took us down, hovered the humping cockroach above the summit of Mons Marinus, the tallest peak on Bren, and on the other side of the world from where we began. Ahead of us the sun rose, spreading as a luminous crescent across the continent. Jude tugged a flask and two pewter cups from his pocket and unscrewed the cap.

  My eyes widened. “Booze?”

  “It’s five o’clock somewhere.” He poked my side. “Jason! It’s fruit juice.” He revolved the Scorpion so its canopy was two feet from the pea
k’s snow, then passed me the cups. “When I slip the canopy back, reach out and scoop snow with the cups. Be fast. The hull’s so hot the snow’ll melt before you can blink.”

  I did, and we drank a toast to the sunrise with Marini pear nectar cooled by snow from the top of the world.

  I said, “That’s something your father would have thought of. And something your mother would have loved.”

  He smiled at me. “It’s only through you that I know that, Jason. I can ask you anything. Tell you anything.”

  I turned my cup in my fingers and stared at it. “Then tell me which side of the fence you’re on. I mean between the union and Tressen.”

  He stiffened. “What brought that up?”

  “I didn’t tell you all of the last things your mother said to me. But I should. She asked me whether you were one of them. I told her no. Was I right?”

  He rocked from side to side in his couch as the sun flooded into the cockpit and the screens darkened. “I don’t know how to answer that. If the Republican Socialists are doing what the camp rumors, the ones you believe, say, then, no. I’d never be one of them. But Aud Planck’s one-third of the chancellery. He’d never allow it.”

  “If he knew. You’re spending all your time buried out on some aircraft test range. I hear Aud’s buried out pacifying the frontier.”

  Jude squirmed. “I’d know if something that bad was going on. So would Aud.”

  “You think it’s the kind of thing a propaganda ministry advertises?”

  Jude stabbed his finger at me. “Look, I’ve made my stand for the union and against the Slugs, here and now. Tressen’s at the end of a jumpline, with no more Cavorite. Tressen politics couldn’t be less relevant to the problem at hand, which is kicking the Slugs off the Red Moon.”