Orphan's Triumph

by Robert Buettner

“Then what?”

  “Then you’re on your own. In a few seconds radio waves won’t be able to reach-”

  SEVENTY-THREE

  I’VE JUMPED WITHIN THE GRAVITY COCOON of a captured Slug Firewitch, which hurt. I’ve jumped within the cocoons of a half-dozen different cruisers, which was always a nonevent. I don’t recommend jumping inside the cocoon of one of the only two Scorpions modified to jump a Temporal Fabric Insertion Point, unless you enjoy nosebleeds, blood in your urine, a head that feels like it’s been in a punch press, and nausea.

  On the other hand, the jump itself is over before you can blink.

  If the Pseudocephalopod had mined the backside of Its front door like it had the front, I should have been dead, or at least attracting attention the way the fleet had.

  But the way things were supposed to work, the Silver Bullet Scorpion was supposed to be too unexpected and too undetectably small to attract attention.

  I had the throttle wide open-why not? Never slow down, something might be gaining on you. The Scorpion flashed through the emptiness of new space at thousands of miles per second. Flying a Scorpion in atmosphere, as I had with Jude, was not only slower, and therefore easier, it provided a frame of reference. I didn’t know where I had been, or where I was going. However, I was making great time.

  Theoretically, I could turn this crate around, jump back through the T-FIP, and let the fleet figure out how to deliver the bomb that filled the bay behind me. But there was no way of knowing whether the jump-guidance box worked for a return trip, or how to work it, with no one to talk me through things. I didn’t know how many, if any, back-to-back jumps this Scorpion could withstand. I didn’t know whether the fleet, if there was anything left of it, could make use of this ship if I returned it.

  I clipped out of my harness, stripped out of the Eternads to make elbow room, then bent over the controls, searching for whatever a Scorpion carried that corresponded to the Navex in a rental car. I rooted around behind the pilot’s couch, under the second couch where Jeeb perched, and in the stores locker, for water and survival ration packs.

  A day later, I woke to Jeeb’s whistle. He stood tiptoed on all six locomotors while his optics bulged forward, toward the windscreen.

  I looked up and saw a pale yellow star, growing visibly brighter as we plunged toward it.

  Twenty-three hours later, the star looked as bright as Sol did from Mars, and a dark shape the size of two poppy seeds, one large and one small, became visible with the Scorpion’s forward optics, silhouetted as it inched across the star’s disk.

  Hair rose on my neck.

  It could be nothing. Or it could be the end of a journey that had begun for me as a civilian when the first Slug Projectile struck Earth in 2037 and that was now ending for me as a civilian four decades later.

  After another twenty hours, the Scorpion’s ranging optics measured the planet as ninety-six percent the size of Earth. Its equatorial mean temperature was fifty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, but the planet was cold enough at its poles to sport white polar ice caps. Its rotational period was twenty-four point four hours. North and south of the poles, blue ocean glistened beneath white cloud swirls. The continent that girdled the planet at the equator showed from space grass-green.

  It could be just another Earthlike planet. They were rare enough, but not every one was a guaranteed Slug nest.

  Except that the satellite that orbited the planet, in an orbit barely higher than the planet’s exospheric atmospheric shreds, was red, smooth, and familiar.

  I stared for thirty minutes as the Scorpion shortened the distance between me, the planet, and the transplanted Red Moon.

  The planet’s continent, eight thousand miles long, stretched four thousand miles from the planet’s arctic to antarctic circles. The Scorpion’s spectrometer said the whole thing, eight thousand miles long, four thousand miles wide, and at least a half mile deep, was all organic compounds.

  I shuddered. It was no continent. It was a living thing. It was the unseen enemy I had fought against all of my adult life.

  But more than frightened, I felt cheated. Howard’s Spooks had predicted that the organism at its center would look like this. But somehow I expected some Moby Dick-sized Slug in a cape, slouched on a throne. Something that I could stab through its black heart with a fixed bayonet. Or at least something that I could finally ask, “Why?”

  I didn’t know what plans lay within the Pseudocephalopod’s vast mind, now that It possessed the Red Moon. But I knew what mankind had in mind for the Pseudo-cephalopod. I whispered, as though It could hear me, “Hello after all these years, you bastard.”

  I raised the red-striped, hinged lid on the Scorpion’s weapons console.

  SEVENTY-FOUR

  I HAD STUDIED THE SCORPION’S modified weapons console for hours on the flight in. The normal controls to deploy weapons rearward, from the stinger pod, remained unchanged but were useless with no weapons in the pod.

  Three simple switches had been added to deploy the Silver Bullet munition. The first was a red one-finger toggle that armed the munition and opened the rear hatch. The second toggle, labeled “Deploy,” ejected the weapon. The third was a removable wedge, shaped like a grip exerciser or an oversized spring clothespin, labeled “Abort.”

  I flicked the first switch and armed the munition. Behind me, hydraulics whined as the bay opened and exposed the bomb cluster.

  Jeeb whistled, and in the same moment the “threat” buzzer sounded. Up from the planet’s surface, a half-dozen Firewitches hurtled toward me, growing from gnat-size to bird-size in a breath. The threat ’Puter crackled. “Defensive armament unavailable.” The Scorpion’s weapons pod was filled with Silver Bullet, instead of something that could shoot down an onrushing Firewitch.

  The ’Puter asked, “Commence auto evasive maneuvers?” Better than me trying to fly the ship.

  The first Firewitch rounds flickered up toward me.

  I thumbed the “Deploy” toggle before I auto-evaded.

  The Scorpion shuddered.

  The Silver Bullet munition burst into a swarm of subdividing cluster bombs too small for Slug technology to shoot or chase. Some would drop directly below the deployment point. Others would arc in decaying orbits toward the planet’s surface. In the planet’s stratosphere, each bomb would burst again, into smart bomblets that would rain evenly down on the surface, then count down before they burst, poisoning the only other intelligent species in the known universe.

  When the cluster bomb ejected, a bundle of satellites, really just little radio signal relays the size of tennis balls, ejected, too. Up until the bomblets detonated, the abort remote could transmit a signal through them and shut down the whole show. I snatched the abort remote from the console and tucked it in my coverall pocket. “Fat chance!”

  Whump.

  The first Slug round grazed the Scorpion. On the console, a button the size of a biscuit flashed “Commence auto evasion.”

  I pounded the button with my fist, and the Scorpion spiraled down toward the planet, with a half-dozen Fire-witches on its tail. In atmosphere, a Scorpion could out-maneuver portly Firewitches indefinitely.

  I said to Jeeb, “We can dodge around the sky until the bomb goes off-”

  A purple streak flashed beneath us as a Slug round barely-too barely-missed.

  On the overhead display, a new light flashed red. Its label read “Lift impeller slats.”

  Great. My tow pilot hadn’t been concerned about dinging this ship’s lift impeller slats, given the needs of the moment. But now, in atmosphere, we could dodge down, but we couldn’t dodge up. We were going to run out of sky.

  Six minutes later the Scorpion dodged five hundred feet above a landscape that looked like a neverending green sore, unreeling below us in a blur. Firewitches potshotted us from behind.

  The Scorpion juked left, clipped the surface below us, and cartwheeled.

  SEVENTY-FIVE

  THREE MINUTES LATER, the Scorpion came to rest, lis
ting to the right, its hot skin crackling. Crashing a gravity-shielded ship isn’t physically traumatic; it’s like watching a crash holo from an armchair. But this crash killed the auxiliary systems. The Scorpion’s canopy was as opaque to our surroundings as a coffin lid.

  I sighed to Jeeb, “The eagle has landed.” I shrugged back into my armor, drew Ord’s pistol, then triggered the manual canopy release.

  Outside, the sky was blue. According to my helmet displays the air was chilly Earth-normal, but too oxygen-poor to breathe for more than two minutes. The Scorpion rested on endless tissue that looked just like the Ganglion blob Howard Hibble and I had captured on Weichsel, about a million years ago. Surrounding us a thousand yards away stood a solid wall of Slugs, without Warrior armor. But some carried mag rifles.

  Of course. The Scorpion’s Cavorite impeller kept the Slug Warriors back the way a campfire discouraged wolves. But we sat on the One Big Slug like an unimaginably small flea biting an unimaginably big dog.

  I glanced at my helmet display. Distributing a cluster bomb across an entire planet took time. Detonation of the bomblets was hours away.

  To my front, a dozen Slugs inched forward. If they came too close, the Cavorite in the impeller would kill them, but Slug Warriors didn’t care. I raised Ord’s pistol, fired, and dropped the lead Slug like a punctured water balloon.

  I fingered the two clips in the ammunition pouch on Ord’s holster as the Slugs drew closer. Give or take, at one round per Slug, I was short a minimum of fifty thousand rounds.

  Twenty minutes later, kamikaze maggots swarmed the Scorpion, Jeeb, and me three deep while I pounded on them with Ord’s empty pistol.

  Nobody really knew what happened to GIs who had been overrun by Slugs over the course of the war. But these didn’t shoot me with their mag rifles, nor stab me with the blades on their rifles’ edges, though they could have.

  When poisoned Warriors fell away, others replaced them, until they had dragged me, with Jeeb on my shoulder, squealing and flailing his locomotors at them, out onto their big daddy’s skin. When they were far enough away from the Scorpion that the new Warrior crop could surround me without poisoning themselves, they drew back fifty yards, then just sat there.

  Jeeb sat alongside me. My helmet timer ticked down, too slowly. Eleven hours before the bomblets went off. I smiled a little. The bomblets strewn across this planet would kill the Pseudocephalopod. The Slugs couldn’t stop that onrushing train, even if they knew they were stuck on the tracks.

  My smile faded. With my ship wrecked, and on the wrong side of a black hole anyway, I would be marooned here on my enemy’s corpse, with Jeeb, my ’Bot Friday, until I starved. But I still wanted to be the last species standing.

  “Brrrruuummm!” The rumble knocked me over, and I bounced on the Pseudocephalopod like a kid on a mattress.

  “Brrruuu. Mmmm. Uuuummm.”

  I stared down alongside me. The vibration was real enough. But the noise was coming from Jeeb’s audio output. A TOT, a Tactical Observation Transport, was designed as a battlefield snoop. In one turkey-sized package, it incorporated sensors not just to see the enemy from above or from ground level, but to hear the enemy. It eavesdropped on communications, decrypted ciphers, translated foreign languages, even ones it didn’t know, then spat out what it processed, like a spaniel retrieving an old print newspaper for its master.

  In forty years, no TOT had ever intercepted Slug-to-Slug communication, though Howard’s Spooks had tried.

  So the Pseudocephalopod wasn’t talking to its minions that held us at mag-rifle point. It wasn’t talking to itself.

  It was talking to me.

  SEVENTY-SIX

  AS HISTORIC STANDOFFS GO, this didn’t look like much. For the next ten hours I sat, pistol holstered, arms clasped around my armored knees, in the center of a mass of motionless Slug Warriors, which were no more separate from the organism I sat on than white corpuscles.

  Meantime, as the timer counted down toward Slug Armageddon, Jeeb’s circuits chittered back and forth with the Pseudocephalopod as Jeeb deciphered the communication he monitored.

  Above, the captive Red Moon orbited around the planet’s equator, south of us. The Red Moon had set when syllables began to trickle from Jeeb’s audio, then words. Finally, I heard the Pseudocephalopod, its voice a flat, mechanical simulation.

  “Man. You have come to harm me.”

  A Slug of few words. After another few hundred thousand exchanges, the translation would be smooth and idiomatic. For the moment, the meaning was plain enough. The Big Slug was on to us, more or less.

  “You already harmed us. Many of us.”

  “I have not harmed man.”

  “There is more than one man. You have not harmed all of man. But you have harmed man.” By the millions. Without remorse.

  “I have learned this. Man has many…” Jeeb’s translator stumbled. “Identities.”

  The Spooks had always thought that this unitary intelligence couldn’t understand the concept of mankind, or any other kind, as multiple individuals.

  The adrenaline of rage surged through me. “My mother. My lover. My friends. Infants. Old people. You harmed them all.” I kicked the vast skin beneath my feet as though the thing could feel it. “Have you learned that I-this identity of man-can kill you now? I’m bringing the rain on you.” The green numbers of my helmet display timer winked down to nine minutes. “And you can’t stop me. Then I’ll beat feet out of here.” The last was bravado. This was a one-way journey for me. But at least it was ending at a worthwhile destination.

  “I have learned this. But I have the…” Jeeb’s translator stumbled. “Cavorite.”

  I frowned and glanced again at the timer as it spun down. “You’ve had Cavorite for a long time before this. What’s changed?”

  “As I am immersed deeper in this universe I suddenly understand more.”

  I snorted. “You and Archimedes.”

  “What is Archimedes, man?”

  “Not what, who. Archimedes was the name of a separate identity of man. He immersed himself in a water tub and then suddenly understood a great truth about the universe. Each separate identity of man has a name, so we can communicate.”

  Pause.

  “I wish to communicate, man. Say your name.”

  “Lieutenant General Jason Wander, retired” would require explanation of socioeconomic designators, surnames, and given names, which was pushing the envelope with a hermit. “Jason.”

  “Jason, you will call me Archimedes.”

  “I’ll call you whatever I want to. Murderer. Dead Slug walking. Archimedes already took that name.”

  “Then bring Archimedes.”

  “I can’t. He’s dead.”

  “What is dead?”

  I snorted again. “Harmed. No longer able to immerse. Returned to dust. Like what you did to sixty million of man’s identities. And now like you, Archie.”

  “Man can still immerse. Therefore Man is not dead. Archie can still immerse. Therefore Archie is not dead.”

  My jaw dropped so far that I blipped my helmet’s chin control. This thing really didn’t get it. One day a half-million years ago, Archie had realized that he existed. Over the half-million years since that day, he had never seen any other of his kind die, because there were no others of his kind. So he couldn’t understand the difference between dead and alive. As far as he was concerned, he had done no more than trim mankind’s fingernails.

  What if he wasn’t going to use the Red Moon to exterminate mankind?

  “Archie, why did you take the Red Moon?”

  “Archie is fully immersed in this universe. Archie wishes to immerse in another universe. Only the Red Moon will allow Archie to beat feet.”

  I nodded to myself. After a half-million years alone, in one place, even a big, interesting place, I might yearn for new challenges. In fact, I did, in a lot shorter time.

  Archie wanted a change of scene. But Archie had no feet, no wheels, no cruise liner.
He was like a curious infant who had grown up on a desert island. The only life raft he possessed was what he had stumbled onto in his youth, Cavorite. And because Archie had developed a serious weight problem in middle age, he needed lots of it in order to travel.

  I said, “You’ve rebuilt the Red Moon to transport you to the edge of this universe.”

  “No. To transport Archie to the adjacent universe.”

  I rocked back on Archie’s skin, surrounded by his white corpuscles. The scourge of mankind was telling me that he wanted to cede the field of battle to us after thirty thousand years. Blow town? Catch the 3:10 to Yuma? I shifted my weight and felt the abort remote in the cover-all pocket beneath my armor. Then, inside my helmet, I shook my head. “How dumb do you think I am?”

  “Archie does not understand.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “What is lying, Jason?”

  I smirked at the speaker on Jeeb’s carapace. “Okay. I’ll play. Not telling the truth.”

  “What is truth?”

  “Come off it. You’ve enslaved a galaxy. But you don’t understand truth?”

  Archie didn’t answer.

  Inside my helmet, I cocked my head. What would Howard Hibble say about this?

  Logically, it takes a minimum of two separate identities to lie, the liar and the lie-ee. So Archie didn’t know truth, at least as opposite to untruth. He shouldn’t have developed the capacity to lie. Howard had always said, and it was true, that the Slugs, that this simple-talking monster, didn’t deceive us. The Slugs approached us head-on. Push, they pushed back, harder. Deceive, they bought our deceptions. A liar would have learned.

  I said, “Archie, truth is saying what is, instead of what isn’t.”

  “There is only what is, Jason.”

  Archie had seven minutes to live. I had seven minutes to decide whether to kill the sworn enemy that had consumed my life, or to risk the future of mankind on a conversation so bizarre that it could be a figment of my imagination.