Orphan's Alliance (Jason Wander) (21 page)

I rolled my eyes. “Who writes that crap? Joseph Goebbels? You didn’t get chauffeured out here to brainwash me. Something’s up.”

“I didn’t. Ord and Howard are here.”

I looked around.

“In orbit. Aboard the
Yorktown
. It’s a new B-class. It floats a full Scorpion wing.”

I sat forward in my chair. “Well?” The very fact that a ship other than the
Emerald River
still existed was like a Christmas present. But it wouldn’t have just brought back Ord and Howard from Earth, it would have brought the first news since Mousetrap.

“Other than—you know—the only other place the Slugs came through was Weichsel, again. The
Powell
and the
Marshall
fought them to a draw.”

“With Starfires? It was just a feint, then.”

Jude nodded. “Considering what happened at Mousetrap, that’s obvious.”

“I really meant, you know . . .”

The silent, two-ton scorpion lurking at every conversation between Jude and me was Mousetrap. If we didn’t talk about his mother, she wasn’t gone.

Jude shook his head. “I’m commissioned in an allied army, now. I only hear through the grapevine.” We were speaking English, translators off, and it was a joke. Tressel wouldn’t have grapes for a few hundred million years.

I grasped my chair arm, set my jaw, and stood. I was ninety percent recovered, physically. I grimaced, and Jude jumped up, took my elbow. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Leaving.” I pointed at the pistol he wore on a broad, polished leather belt. “Unless I’m shot attempting to escape.”

It was Jude’s turn to roll his eyes. “Stop it, Jason. My driver’s packing your stuff right now. We’re meeting Ord and Howard in Tressia.” He fitted his black cap with two hands. Above its visor was £€€p ia cast silver crest, a skull, wrapped by a twisted scorpion.

We walked across the spongy moss to his car, long, low, and black, with segmented chromed side pipes as thick as a woman’s thigh. Jude’s driver held the rear door open for us. Jude was the closest thing to family remaining to me in this universe. He was young, impressionable, and, so far as I knew, he functioned strictly as a military-to-military liaison between Earth and Tressel. He knew, I hoped, no more about the SR’s “social reforms” than any of us gleaned by comparing SR

propaganda sheets to what trickled off the grapevine. The drive to Tressia would take two days, even over the SR’s admittedly slick new highways. The journey with Jude could provide what the afternoon-holo shrinks called “quality time” with my godson. Unless we spent it staring out windows in opposite directions.

I pointed at the limo, then at his cap, and forced a smile. “Why do the bad guys always get the cool stuff?”

He shrugged. “Clothes make the man?”

I settled into the backseat, taking my weight on my right hand. “I hope not.”

FIFTY-FOUR

THE U.S. CONSULATEin Tressia had moved into bigger quarters since the Armistice, an antiseptic stone box among the sterile limestone boxes with which the Social Republicans had reconstructed Tressia’s rubbelized West End. The box was as neat and tidy as the fresh-paved boulevard beside which it rose, and it housed the ten staff I knew from before the Armistice, plus twenty more the new Ambassador had brought with him.

He needed the extra bodies, because not only had he been upgraded to Ambassador, and the facility to Embassy, the place served as the United Nations Mission to Tressel, and the local office of the Human Union. International lip service notwithstanding, the facility was as American, and as ambitiously misnamed, as the World Series.

The Ambassador met Jude and me in the lobby, grinning, and wearing no flak jacket. Social Republican society was orderly. So was Nazi Germany.

I shook his hand and patted the shoulder padding of his suit jacket. “Congratulations on the promotion, Duck.”

“You too.” Before I could ask what he meant, the Duck peeled Jude off, then waddled me to a conference room where Ord, Howard, and two colonels waited, seated around a polished stone table. After ten minutes of howdies, one colonel, wearing the striped-shield brass of the Adjutant General Corps, slipped a black velvet box the size of Howard’s cigarette pack from his briefcase. The colonel smiled as he said to me, “Sir, I was posted up here as Embassy staff military attaché. But my first job is to present you with these.” He flipped open the box. On the interior velvet lay three-star Lieutenant General’s brass.

Most officers who survive to my age, possessed of my sparse formal training and of my lack of tact and common sense, were Majors. Events and misfortune had bounced me uphill from one exotic, screwball job to the next. Most recently, I had freelanced my simple, advisory assignment on Tressel, and then Bren, and t¦€ bouhen Mousetrap, into a cluster hump of galactic proportion. To be fair, fate, the Slugs, and human stupidity had screwed things up more than I had.

But handcuffs for me would have been more likely than promotion hardware. I frowned, and looked first to Ord.

He said, “Consistent with your new assignment, sir.” He smiled, and an unsergeantly softness crinkled the skin around his eyes. “Congratulations.”

Few Drill Sergeants saw a trainee of theirs, who barely graduated Basic, get a third star. For a moment, I got a lump in my throat.

Then I narrowed my eyes at Howard. “What about Warden’s report? We lied to Congress.”

Howard waved his hand. “Constitutionally, the executive branch has gotten away with worse in other wars. We worked matters out informally.”

I stared at him. We both had taken an oath to support and defend the Constitution, not to weasel around it in the name of expedience. But the scourge of the universe was on mankind’s doorstep. I’d think about the Constitution tomorrow. I paused at my own thought. I was beginning to wonder whether the pressures of politics, of attacks from all sides, had driven Aud Planck down the slippery slope from soldier to Nazi. Was this how it started?

The AG Colonel closed his briefcase and left.

I looked back at Howard.

He said, “We’re going back to Mousetrap. It’s your show.”

Panic drowned my internal debate. “What?”

Howard popped the conference table holo, loaded a chip from his briefcase, and summarized as the orders scrolled by. “A joint strike force of ten cruisers—”

“We don’t have ten cruisers, anymore,” I said.

“We will. And then some. Each cruiser will carry a full wing of Scorpions, and an embarked division.”

I looked down at my hands. They quivered. Not with fear. They quivered the way, I supposed, a racehorse quivers in the starting gate.

Mankind had come a long way back since the Blitz. We fought the Slugs on Ganymede with one ship, so crude that we painted the unfinished bulkheads during the trip out, with old-fashioned bristle brushes. We fought with cobbled-together antiques, and with a single division. After that, the Armada blew our ships into scraps. And we had kicked the Slugs off Bren with swords, last-century rifles, and armies of nomadic cavalry. For decades we had fought outgunned, outquicked, and outnumbered. I didn’t hate the Slugs. How could I demonize mindless blobs? I didn’t even fear them anymore, except in the way that I feared familiar but dangerous instrumentalities like chain saws or hot stoves. But the prospect of finally flat kicking the Slugs’ collective-minded ass made my heart pound. The strategic reason to embark divisions was sound. A fleet like Howard described could stand off and pummel a planetoid into pudding, but Mousetrap was valuable real estate to mankind, even as a fixer-upper. So, eventually, infantry«€€rib were going to have dig the Slugs out, hole by bloody hole, like we always did.

Countries dispatch infantry for strategic reasons, and infantry believes in them, mostly. But I knew why I was going back, and so would every one of the kids who was going back with me, as soon as the first round flew. I asked Howard, “What about the people we left behind?”

“The colonel will cover that.” Howard nodded to the remaining colonel, who wore the Intelligence rose and compass. Then Howard said, “Ten divisions is an Army. So you get the third star. It also evens your rank up with the Fleet Admiral.”

It hadn’t been so long ago that I wasn’t fit to command one division. Now I was going to have responsibility for ten. I would need rank to hold my own with some aging, dirtside swabbie. “Does my counterpart have a clue what we’re up against?”

“Absolutely. Specialized experience was a paramount selection criterion. Obviously it wasn’t maturity and management skills.”

“Thanks, Howard.”

“But Mimi has the whole package.”

My jaw dropped even as my heart thumped. I hadn’t even seen Mimi in the four months since I downshipped from
Emerald River
to convalesce. But I had plenty of time to think about her, including parts of the package that Howard wasn’t talking about.

I looked away, at the conference room’s granite wall. Mimi and I were obvious choices to command this operation. But mutual proximity could prove distracting. Not for Mimi, I supposed. The female libido is more easily controlled. At least
my
dates never seemed to have a problem. Howard turned to the Intelligence colonel. “Show him.”

Mousetrap’s slowly rotating image replaced Howard’s document. The Intel colonel said, “We recovered this from one of
Emerald River
’s drones four months ago, after it passed through the Mousetrap. Apparently
Emerald River
sent the drone for a look-back after it withdrew to Tressel, but the Slugs chased the drone, so it popped out on the Earth side. It didn’t take us long to figure out what happened.”

I nodded. That explained Mimi’s missing drone, and why Earth had a plan by the time Howard and Ord got sent back here.

On the holo above the table’s center, the surface scars of the Slug attack looked minor, and a few solar panels hung askew. Firewitches swarmed the surrounding space like flies around a water buffalo. Four enormous Troll incubator ships drifted in the distance.

The Colonel said, “We sent in another drone, from our side, before we left, and recovered it on this side, when we arrived here. The other four Trolls are still drifting.”

I nodded.

I said, “Those other four Trolls wouldn’t be sitting there, backed off, for months, if the maggots had Mousetrap.”

The Colonel nodded. “Consensus inference is that Mousetrap may still be resisting.”

I said, “But all we can
see
is«€€ is a big rock. They could be fighting. They could be captives. They could be dead. What kind of radio traffic did the drone monitor?”

The Colonel shook his head. “None.”

“There are automated beacons, transponders all over Mousetrap. There had to be—”

“None. Not the first drone or the later one.”

I looked to Howard and he shrugged. “It doesn’t mean they’re all dead. Captives couldn’t transmit. Mobile guerrillas inside Mousetrap wouldn’t.”

But we weren’t limited to reliance on inference consensus, or on what we heard broadcast from Mousetrap. We could see what was inside. “Show me the interiors.”

“Sir?” The Intel colonel shook his head, slowly.

“The drones dropped TOTs. Show me what they found inside.” Tactical Observation Transports were the highly-evolved products of the robotic aircraft revolution of the turn of this century. Most were designed to support Earth ground forces, to fly in atmosphere, then crawl through windows or into caves or whatever it took to snoop. But I knew the Spooks had modified some of the latest models to operate in space.

Howard said, “Jason, TOTs have been nuclear powered for years.”

I nodded. “Crap.” One reason we cored Mousetrap from the inside out was that the initial, monster bores were made by Subterrenes—bullet shaped nuclear reactors that melted their way through rock. We had planned for the Subterrenes to start their work immediately, and to finish early, because if the Slugs showed up early, everything nuclear mankind had, from warheads to the nanoreactors that powered modern TOTs, would shut down.

We had learned that lesson the hard way clear back during the Blitz, when we tried to nuke incoming Projectiles. Howard’s Spooks called the technology “neutron damping.” That sounded informed, but the Spooks no more understood how the Slugs froze nuclear devices than I understood the female libido. So we had no TOTs to snoop inside Mousetrap.

I said to the Intel colonel, “I understand we can’t just blow Mousetrap apart from space, even if we had workable nukes. We need Mousetrap more than the Slugs do. But I need to know the friendly status inside.”

If it came to it, strategic considerations would require that we go in blind. But if we were going in blind, it would be after a massive prep that would slaughter any friendlies as surely as it slaughtered Slug warriors. But fifty thousand possible friendlies was a big number. It was bigger to me because I had bled with Munchkin’s Tunnel Rats. I had seen Mimi cry over survivors she may have left behind. I asked the Intel colonel, “Could we sacrifice a drone? Just barrel it in there?”

The Intel colonel shook his head. “Sir, you’ve seen the Slug fleet surrounding Mousetrap. Maybe if we mounted a massive diversion we could sneak something as small as a drone down to the surface, but it would be too big to get inside.”

“Other options?”

He shook his head, again. “Actually, an old, non-nuclear TOT would have been perfect. We even researched it. The last J-series in DOD inventory was dismantled for parts, eight years ago.” He shrugged. “They’re not the kinds of things somebody kept for war souvenirs.”

I turned to Howard and raised my eyebrows.

His eyes twinkled. “I stopped by your place before I came back here.”

FIFTY-FIVE

IN DOWNTOWN TRESSIA, Howard, Ord, and I bunked in with Jude. Unlike his Earth counterpart twenty-something junior officers, Captain Jude Metzger of the SR roughed it in an eight-bedroom, three-story townhome that overlooked a park. Breakfast was served each morning in a sunroom with floor-to-ceiling windows. The sunroom was furnished in gilt and crystal, except for a burgundy silk back wall, across which marched unfaded, picture-sized rectangles, each below a downlight that lit nothing. The upstairs maid, who apparently came with the place along with the downstairs maid, the cook, and the gardener, refilled my tea cup, as I peeked around the table’s candelabra and asked Jude, “Whose place was this?”