Orphan's Triumph

by Robert Buettner

  Within the old city, miles from us, an alarm bell sounded, then another, then more, until the night echoed with them.

  Bassin muttered, “This is impossible.”

  I shook my head slowly as I stared at the night sky of Bren, which for the first time in human experience held only one moon. “Expect the worst from the gods of war and they will seldom disappoint you.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  ORD’S FUNERAL PYRE had burned out by the time the White Moon set and the sun rose. Recent events considered, a wagering man could have cleaned up last night simply by betting that the sun would rise.

  Bassin had returned to the Summer Palace in the old city to show the flag of stability and, I supposed, to figure out how to explain the disappearance of the moon-disappearance of the moon!-to his subjects, before his enemies blamed it on him.

  As commander in chief, the last thing I could do under the circumstances was act like the sky had fallen, even though it had, in reverse. So I sat at the head of my conference table in my conference room, with my staff plus Howard and Jude, and conducted my daily staff meeting.

  When we arrived at new business, I turned to Howard. “What happened?”

  He removed his old-fashioned glasses and rubbed his eyes. “It took us years to figure out how to achieve a controlled breach in the containment of the Red Moon’s Cavorite. The difficulty and scope of the task was more complex to us at this state of human knowledge than the Manhattan Project, to develop nuclear fission bombs, was last century. It could have taken the Pseudocephalopod far longer to develop the process, for all we know. What we do know is that the Pseudocephalopod implemented the process within weeks of its occupation of the Red Moon.”

  Tierney, whom I had brevet promoted to sergeant major, asked, “Did they blow the Red Moon up?”

  Howard shook his head. “The Pseudocephalopod achieved a controlled breach of the Red Moon’s Cavorite. It harnessed the moon’s own ability to be pulled in one direction by the gravity of half of this universe. In effect, it made the Red Moon into a starship, a hot-rod engine of planetary proportions.”

  Somebody said, “Then the Slugs drove the hot rod off the lot at two-thirds the speed of light.”

  Tierney said, “The frigging moon just disappeared, Colonel Hibble. Why are things still so normal?”

  Howard said, “If Earth lost its moon overnight, the tidal consequences alone would be catastrophic. But the very property, disobedience to the so-called law of gravity, that makes the Red Moon able to act as its own power plant renders its departure an astrophysical nonevent.”

  I said, “No problems for Bren?”

  Howard shook his head. “Physically, no. Without the Red Moon to reflect sunlight, nights on Bren will be a little darker from now on. That’s about it.”

  My indigenous population liaison officer said, “But socioeconomically, it’s a handful. Bassin’s still a brand-new king, by Bren standards, and the first male monarch in six hundred years. His enemies are saying the moon’s disappearance is a bad omen. That abolition and personal freedom and toadying to us motherworlders are bringing Armageddon.”

  I set my jaw. “Without us, Bren would still be part of the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony, and their kids would still be dying of smallpox.”

  “Sir, we hear that Bassin’s cabinet is advising him to crack down on his dissenters. And they want us to do the dirty work. And take the blame.”

  I nodded. “He asked me to meet him at the palace in an hour. Let’s see what he wants.” I turned to Howard, again. “Okay. Let’s address our new situation. Obviously, we can’t retake the Red Moon the way we planned. Can we chase it down?”

  Howard shook his head. “With a head start, and a screen of protective spacecraft, all of which it’s willing to expend to keep us from following, the Red Moon’s effectively gotten away clean.”

  “To where?”

  “I dunno.”

  “What are the Slugs gonna do with it?”

  “I dunno.”

  “But the Red Moon could be used to reverse the course of the war, against us?”

  Howard shrugged. “By sabotaging Silver Bullet, it already has. But you mean, could the Pseudocephalopod use the Red Moon offensively? In some unimagined capacity? Yes, it could.”

  “Howard, are we out of options?”

  “Only the good ones.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THE STREETS OF MARINUS usually resemble Paris with friendlier drivers. Earth electrics like the staff car that carried me to the Summer Palace, via the boulevards and crooked alleys of the old city, usually elicited smiles and waves from hack drivers and kids on the sidewalks. Silent electrics didn’t spook draft duckbill teams pulling wagons, the way Earth horseless carriages did at the beginning of the last century.

  But the day after the Red Moon was kidnapped, drivers in the streets were surly with one another and with me, and crowds picketed outside the palace gates.

  Picketing, or more specifically affording citizens the right to assemble freely and petition the government for redress of grievances, was a concept that had rubbed off on Bassin from translated history chipbooks I had given him. At the moment, he probably wanted to give them back.

  A sergeant of the Household Guard, plumed and armored and as stiff as his sword, led me to Bassin the First. I recognized him. He had been a platoon sergeant during the Expulsion-in fact I had decorated him myself.

  As we clattered up stone stairs, I asked, “What do you make of recent developments, Sergeant?”

  He snorted into his gray mustache. “If I may be blunt, General?”

  “One soldier to another, Sarge.”

  “This old world’s still turning today, ain’t she? If His Majesty would say the word, I’d drop a boiling oil cauldron on them bellyachers. We still got the old cauldrons in the gatehouse. That’s what the queen, may paradise spare her from allies, would have done already.”

  “Yep. That’s how we treat dissidents where I come from, Sarge.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Really, sir?” Then he smiled and nodded. He leaned back toward me and covered his mouth with his hand as he whispered, “I suggested it to His Majesty. Perhaps you could put in a word, as well?”

  I sighed. “If it comes up.”

  Bassin received me on a terrace outside his apartments, overlooking the distant crowds. We stood staring down, our hands on the terrace rail. Bassin smiled, his lips tight. “In my grandmother’s day-in my mother’s day-no one would have dared assemble to express dissatisfaction with monarchial stewardship.”

  I smiled back. “Second thoughts about reform?”

  “Daily. My grandmothers and my mother would be appalled at the state of the nation. The aristocrats and the western tribes are.”

  “Maybe even some of your household staff.”

  He smiled again. “Ah, yes. The boiling oil.”

  “You could go back to doing things the way your family always did them. Even that. You are the king.”

  The absolute monarch of Bren, who had lost a leg and an eye as a maverick crown prince opposed to slavery, crossed his arms. “I’d sooner be hanged and disemboweled by a mob.”

  I eyed the protestors beyond the gates. “Be careful what you wish for. I hear your advisers want us to pour the oil for you.”

  “They do. But I am king. Jason, if I resort to force at the first disagreement…” He shook his head. “We’ll stay the course of civil resolution here. We’ll assist the motherworld any way we can with the wider war, but you’re the ones with the starships.”

  “If you weren’t going to ask me to have my troops break some heads, then why did you ask me here?”

  “Not to ask anything of you, my friend. To ask how you’re managing. Ord was more to you than an exceptional noncommissioned officer.”

  I stared out across the city, at the slow-flowing River Marin. “I don’t know. How did you manage when your mother died?”

  “Badly at first. But they say a son isn’t fully realized unti
l his last parent is gone. I suppose that’s literally true for an heir to a throne. You lost your last parent long ago, but the sergeant major, I think, stepped into that role for you since. Now, Jason, we’re both orphans. There’s no one to point the way for us. Now it’s our job to point the way for others, and the only compass we have is within us.”

  Howard was waiting in my office when I got back from the Summer Palace.

  He looked up, a nicotine gum stick between his fingers. “Did Bassin need help?”

  I cocked my head. “No, I don’t think so. But he gave me some. What’re you doing here?”

  “You asked about options.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Howard, what haven’t you been telling me this time?”

  He scrunched up his face. “Can I just show you?”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  HOWARD WALKED ME BACK TO HIS OFFICE, two flights down. He pointed at an ancient black-and-white photograph, framed on his wall. A man in a wide-brimmed hat and broad-lapelled suit that accentuated his thinness stood staring at the camera, alongside a beefier, mustached man in the last-century uniform of a U.S. Army two-star. The caption set in the mat around the photo read “Oppenheimer with Groves. Los Alamos, 1944.”

  I tapped the glass over the picture, a copy of which hung in every office I’d ever known Howard to make a mess of. “Your patron saints.”

  Howard stood beside me, arms crossed, staring into the gray and long-dead faces. “Silver Bullet is this century’s Manhattan Project, Jason.”

  If the Slugs hadn’t demonstrated the ability to neutralize our nukes from the get-go, the Manhattan Project could have been the Manhattan Project of this century.

  Howard always understated his case about Silver Bullet’s scope and importance. He did so less from modesty than from his Spook reflex to conceal the project and its cost. The concealment was more from the people who paid for it than from the Slugs, who really seemed to care less about us.

  Compared to Silver Bullet, the Manhattan Project had been the technological equivalent of plumbing. The Manhattan Project had also been cheaper to the society that funded it. Cheaper by the degree that a cheeseburger is cheaper than an ocean liner, and the Manhattan Project had produced not one but two atom bombs within three years. Howard’s Spooks had labored for three decades and counting without success.

  I said, “At least.”

  “You know, at first Oppenheimer’s physicists weren’t sure they could manufacture enough enriched uranium to make a working bomb. And the manufacturing facilities would consume one-sixth of the total amount of electricity generated in the United States. An alternate design used plutonium, which was easier to come by but toxic and dangerous to work with. General Groves chose additional expense over the risk of failure and developed both designs in parallel.” Howard stepped behind his desk, drew a grapefruit-sized object from a drawer, and tossed it to me.

  It was a rock, but with the apparent weight of a balloon.

  I whistled. “This is the biggest Cavorite stone in the history of Bren.”

  “Not only bigger, but as toxic to the Pseudocephalopod as the Red Moon’s Cavorite. Weapons-grade Cavorite, if you will. I told you we had discovered other Cavorite falls. Places where the Pseudocephalopod had bypassed meteorites of greater toxicity to it, in favor of the placer deposits in the Stone Hills.”

  My eyes bugged, and I pointed toward the empty sky beyond the ceiling. “Howard, you enlarged the national debt mining weapons-grade Cavorite in space. But you had it right here on Bren?”

  “I didn’t say that meteorite you’re holding was from Bren. If the Red Moon was our expensive uranium bomb alternative, this sample represents our dangerous plutonium bomb alternative.”

  “I thought Cavorite wasn’t dangerous to humans.”

  “In that form it isn’t. But the alternative was back-burnered in favor of the Red Moon due to political considerations.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning the Human Union refused to do sensitive business with Neo-Nazis.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Howard, the only Neo-Nazis I know are the Tressens.”

  He pointed at the rock in my hand. “That specimen was collected when we surveyed a fall of meteoric Cavorite forty miles long and twenty miles wide on our first pass over Tressel.”

  Howard, Spook to his core, didn’t say where on Tressel the Cavorite lay. I could have browbeaten it out of him, but something else chapped me more. “That’s why we changed the course of the war on Tressel? To get the Cavorite?”

  “Officially, to plant the seeds of peaceful democracy. Unfortunately, we didn’t control the political outcome very well.”

  Not even Earth’s politicians could stomach the junta that had taken over Tressel. The planet was cut off and stewing in its own totalitarian juices. If Jude hadn’t had the pedigree he did, son of two heroes, with a skill we sorely needed, his ties to Tressel would have disqualified him from so much as setting foot on any other planet in the union.

  “Besides, Jason, we had a source of weapons-grade Cavorite on Bren. Well, above Bren. And it was controlled by a progressive monarch whom the human-rights activists loved.”

  I sighed. “Now alternative two is the only one we have left. We have to make a deal with the devil to save our skin.”

  Howard sat in front of his screens while he decrypted a set of orders, then spun the screens so I could read them. They were addressed to me. “Not ‘we,’ Jason. You’ve saved Chancellor Planck’s life, fought alongside him. Your godson is his protégé. Your peculiar brand of personal diplomacy succeeded with Audace Planck in the past. The one who has to make a deal with the devil, with Jude’s help, is you.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  “SLOW DOWN!” I death gripped the grab bar ahead of my seat as Jude, piloting alongside me, skimmed a two-seat Wall Crawler along the nickel and iron wall of Mousetrap’s Broadway.

  The quickest way to travel from Mousetrap’s Bachelor Officers’ Quarters to the shipyards of North Broadway is by Wall Crawler, a subsonic aerial go-kart custom-designed for quick, unscheduled people-moving around Mousetrap. With a test pilot at the controls, a Wall Crawler’s more terrifying than quick.

  Howard, Jude, and I had embarked for Tressel the day after I got my orders, laying over at Mousetrap while the Tehran put in for her overdue refit.

  “Jason, relax.” Jude serpentined the Wall Crawler through the lumpy iron hummocks of Broadway’s mining midsection, then slowed as we picked our way amid the scaffold skyscrapers and half-completed cruisers of North Broadway. Jude slipped the Wall Crawler into a parking spot alongside a tubular hangar one-tenth the size of a cruiser dry dock.

  Inside, a dozen bulge-bodied Scorpion variants floated three feet off the hangar’s deck.

  Jude ran his hand along one Scorpion’s flank while he and a tech walked alongside the ship. I followed.

  Jude said to the tech, “This one made a jump and back?”

  The tech swung his chipboard to point at all dozen Scorpions. “They all have, sir. Every one came back solid, and none of the pilots got so much as a nosebleed.”

  For once, we were trying not to refight the last war, but to win the next one. We had surprised the Slugs on Weichsel by jumping a cruiser, then launching undetectable Scorpions while the cruiser stayed put, and the tactic had worked.

  But we couldn’t count on it to work again. The Scorpions now in the Spook hangar we had left back on Bren had been enlarged so that they could deliver a planet-killing dose of weaponized Cavorite. Otherwise, they were “stock,” meaning they could shield their cargo-including humans-from G-forces of maneuver at extreme hypersonic speeds. But if they tried to jump through a Temporal Fabric Insertion Point outside the belly of a gravity-cocooned cruiser, they would be squashed into particles smaller than dandruff.

  These new Scorpions were shielded like cruisers, a nanotechnologic triumph that had been impossible even in the comparatively recent days when new cruisers like the Tehran came off the ways. That
meant that if-if-we could shake the Tressens down for weapons-grade Cavorite, and if-if-Howard’s Spooks really had pinpointed the portal jump that would bring human ships within striking distance of the Slug homeworld, then we wouldn’t even have to send cruisers in harm’s way, or lose tactical surprise, by jumping them.

  The tech asked Jude, “Sir, couldn’t we just send these in fire-and-forget? Like the old cruise missiles?”

  The debate about the need for manned aircraft and spacecraft had raged since the turn of the century, when U.S. remotely piloted aerial ’bots had started whacking terrorists.

  Jude shook his head. “Remote communication travels at light speed. A joysticker can dogfight on Earth, but at space distances what he sees lags a second, and so does his input.”

  “I hear this won’t be a dogfight, sir. Just fly straight at a planet-sized target, then pull the trigger. With respect, sir, aren’t piloted aircraft just toys for generals who like to fly?”

  Jude raised one finger. “When that trigger gets pulled, the only other intelligent species in the universe goes extinct. Would you trust that to a preset ’bot?”

  The tech shrugged. “I suppose not.”

  We had taken human decision making out of war more and more over the last century. We could’ve taken humans out of even more cockpits, and out of more tank hulls, and even off infantry point walking decades ago, in favor of ’bots. War would have been cheaper if we had just eliminated the option to be human. But I saw value in keeping human life at issue. As Robert E. Lee said, “It is well that war is so terrible, lest we grow too fond of it.”

  The tech nodded, then said to Jude, “I guess you’ll be flying lead, then, sir?”

  Jude shrugged. “Like you said, it’s not dogfighting.

  Anybody who can handle a Scorpion can fly straight at a planet, then pull the trigger.”

  I stiffened at Jude’s answer but held my tongue in front of the tech.