Orphan's Triumph (Jason Wander) (4 page)

“Jason!” The king of the ’Trap Rats strode down level forty-eight’s main corridor toward me, arms wide. Like the rest of his geek subjects’, Colonel Howard Hibble’s uniform had wrinkles on its wrinkles. A smoker’s wrinkled skin had hung on his slim bones when I met him, and the years hadn’t smoothed or plumped anything.

I met Howard during the Blitz, in 2036, when I was an infantry trainee and he was a professor of extraterrestrial intelligence who had, therefore, been assigned by the army to military intelligence. Howard’s rank decades later was only colonel, because he couldn’t lead troops to free beer. But Howard was the most powerful man nobody ever heard of, by virtue of his intuition about what made the Slugs tick. He controlled the Spook budget, which was buried in Defense Department line items that nobody ever heard of. He succeeded first because he was a genius and second because he played Washington politics like the intel paranoid he had become. Hence the MP guarding the tube exit onto level forty-eight.

I raised my palms as high as I could without separating my sore breastbone. “No hug!”

Howard frowned as he sucked a nicotine lollipop. “I heard. But you’re here.” He smiled.

“Mind telling me why?”

He ushered me back to his office, a large part of Mousetrap’s pressurized volume, which he kept as tidy as the inside of a trash compactor. He poked a pile of old paper books so that they toppled and revealed a chair. “Sit down, Jason.”

He sat across from me and swiveled his desk screens away so we could see each other while we talked.

I said, “The word is that Silver Bullet’s locked and loaded.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Where did you hear that?”

“From the kid we rode up to the
Abe
with.” I paused to watch him squirm, then said, “Howard, I’m C-in-C Off-world Forces. I see the Silver Bullet Weeklies before they get encrypted and sent to you.”

He closed his eyes, then nodded. “Oh. Yeah.”

No point mentioning what Wally had told me about what the Bren rumor mill was putting out. I shoved aside a sandwich wrapper, a dead frog floating in a specimen jar, and a chessboard that blocked my view across Howard’s desk. “Is your summons about Silver Bullet?”

“Not exactly. Assuming Silver Bullet is operational, what would you say is the biggest remaining obstacle to winning the war?”

“Finding a target for it. Mimi Ozawa was so many light-years away for so long that I can’t remember what it’s like to be horny.”

Howard wrinkled his brow. “Memory loss and diminished libido are natural results of aging.”

“Howard, I was kidding.”

“Oh.” He shrugged. “Well, normally, one way to develop intelligence to solve a problem like locating the homeworld would be to interrogate prisoners.”

“But Slug warriors have the independent intelligence of a white corpuscle.”

“And we’ve never captured any more sophisticated part of the organism. In fact, we’ve never even seen one.”

“But you have a plan?”

“I have an opportunity. I need you to make a plan.”

It was my turn to narrow my eyes. “Am I going to like this opportunity?”

Howard plucked a rock paperweight off his desk and stared into it. “You never do.”

SIX

HOWARD HELD THE ROCK between his thumb and fore-finger, then turned it so the crystalline faces within its translucent mass reflected the compartment light. “Weichselan diamond.”

I shrugged. “I hear they’re so common there that the Weichselans used to throw them at rabbits.”

Weichselans were the Human Union’s caveman country cousins, kidnapped from Earth by the Slugs thirty thousand years ago, then abandoned on a planet that looked like Earth during the Weichselan glaciation, complete with woolly mammoths. On many of the planets where the Slugs left humans behind, man had progressed and flourished. On Weichsel, man had just survived.

Howard nodded. “The Weichselans did use diamonds as throwing stones. But this one’s a souvenir collected by an Earthling diamond miner.”

“We reinhabited Weichsel?”

“Just a few diamond miners. We evacuated them back here eleven days ago.”

Hair stood on my neck. “Evacuated?”

Howard nodded. “A precaution, as soon as the cruiser group orbiting Weichsel detected the new Pseudocephalopod invasion force.”

I closed my eyes, then opened them. “The maggots are back.” I wasn’t surprised
that
the Slugs were back. The Human Union’s defense posture, so massive that it made the Cold War look like peewee football, was predicated on the assumption that they would return. I cocked my head at Howard. “But why Weichsel? Why a sideshow, and the same place where they feinted last time?”

Howard leaned back in his chair and stared up at the ceiling, and I leaned forward in my chair. The reason the army and the Congress and the UN put up with Howard and funded his clandestine programs was that his intuition about the Slugs had proven right so often over thirty years of off-and-on war. He said, “The Pseudocephalopod knows we reacted to the first feint at Weichsel only by stationing cruisers there and fighting it to a draw, out in space. It infers—correctly—that we don’t value Weichsel highly and that we defend it lightly.”

“So?”

“So the Pseudocephalopod reasoned that it could slip in and plant a small force on Weichsel easily.”

I turned my palms toward Howard. “Again. Why?”

“So we’ll mount a counterattack from here in the Mousetrap and drive it off Weichsel.”

“Another feint. To draw away our rapid-response forces, so the Slugs can attack us elsewhere.” I nodded.

Howard said, “Not a feint. Feints are intended to mislead. The Pseudocephalopod is direct in its tactics.”

“But we won’t take the bait.”

“Oh, yes, we will. Because it’s excellent bait.”

I stiffened. “Huh?”

Howard waved on a hologen in his compartment’s corner, and it flickered as he scrolled to an overhead, visible-light image of a flat snow-and-rock landscape. I could tell it was Weichsel because a half-dozen rust-orange mammoths ambled at the image’s far edge. At the image’s center, snow drifted against one side of a bulbous Slug-metal blue disk. Based on the size of the mammoths, the disk was ninety feet in diameter and twenty feet high. Six snow-covered ridges stretched away from the disk like wheel spokes.

I leaned toward the image. “We’ve never seen a Slug instrumentality that small, except for individual Warrior weapons and those booby-trap footballs they leave around. What do you think it is?”

Howard nodded. “Our collective hunch is that you’re looking at a hard-shell facility housing a control Ganglion, armored and with enough cognitive capacity to control operations on a planetary scale. A remote brain, if you will.”

“There’s no Troll?” Normally when the Slugs set up housekeeping on a planet, they dug in a transport ship as big as a small mountain, a “Troll” by United Nations phonetic designator. Trolls were purpose-built to incubate Slug Warriors by the millions.

Howard shook his head. “We’ve identified four Fire-witches orbiting Weichsel, and a force of fifty thousand Warriors, deployed in defensive positions around the Ganglion.”

I shook my head. “When the war started—hell, anytime up until the last two years—that was scary. But the war fighting balance has shifted. Four Firewitches? Today one Scorpion squadron will eat them alive. Then we can stand off and brilliant bomb the maggots and their brain from orbit.”

“But if we could capture the brain intact, we might be able to locate the Pseudocephalopod homeworld.”

I raised my eyebrows. We had captured a few Slug ships over the years, but the little maggots were regular kamikazes. The thinking parts always self-destructed before we could examine them. I pointed at the snow-covered-disk image. “What makes you think we could take this brain alive?”

“Two reasons. First, you can devise and execute a plan that will achieve tactical surprise. Second, the Pseudocephalopod fully expects that you will take the brain alive, as you put it.”

“So it’s a trap. By now, we’ve learned not to walk into Slug traps.”

Howard pulled his chessboard back between us, then moved a white pawn, undefended, into a center square. “It’s not a trap, it’s a gambit. A sacrifice of valuable material offered to gain time and space.” He slid a black bishop onto the center square and captured the white pawn. I cocked my head. “What time are the Slugs after? What space?”

“Well, I don’t know. But if you capture that brain intact, and if we can use it to develop the targeting intelligence we need, and if the fleet can deliver weaponized Cavorite on target, before the Pseudocephalopod completes its own plan, we win the war. Not win a battle every few years. Not wait until the technology pendulum swings back against us and toward the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony. We can win. Finally. Forever.”

I sighed. “So human beings can get back to beating each other’s brains in.”

“I prefer to think in terms of a lasting peace.”

“If we take the Slugs’ gambit, but all of your ‘ifs’ don’t come true, what happens?”

Howard shrugged. “Human extermination. The end of civilization. Stuff like that.”

I smiled and shook my head. “Fortunately, your superiors aren’t about to risk Armageddon to win some chess game.” My smile froze, and my eyes widened. I frowned at my old friend. “Howard, you haven’t sent this idea of yours up the line for approval yet. Have you?”

“No—”

I blew out a breath. Howard was a paranoid nerd, but he didn’t deserve to have his career ended because he pushed one idiotic idea. “Good. Because if you did, they’d relieve you in about two minutes.”

“It wasn’t my idea. It was sent down the line to us, already. From Earth. We are to attack Weichsel with all deliberate speed.” He pointed to an encrypted chip on the desk. “That’s your copy of the order.”

My eyebrows rose so far that the skin on top of my head wrinkled. “You’re kidding.”

I read the order. He wasn’t.

SEVEN

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Howard, Ord, and I had changed into Eternad armor, and we exited a tube down-weight, at level six, the small-unit maneuver range. The range had a seventy-five-foot-high ceiling and a twenty-acre floor set with obstacles and targets that the range umpires could move to simulate varied tactical situations.

Holo training has its place, and Ready Brigade spent hours each week in the simulators. But there’s no substitute for sweat, noise, chaos, and physical exhaustion.

As we arrived, platoons from Ready Brigade Mousetrap maneuvered, squads in full tactical Eternad armor advancing at a crouching run while others covered them, then leapfrogged past their buddies. Detonation simulators shook the floor; hot smoke confused visible and infrared images. Squad leaders suddenly found their radios cut off by the umpire, forcing them to pop their visors and shout commands over the chatter of blanks and the screams of “wounded.”

The brigadier general who commanded Ready Brigade stood fifty yards from us. When he spotted us, he popped his helmet visor open, waved, then jogged toward us.

Howard said to me, “Jason, it would take us weeks to send objections back to Earth and get a response.”

Ord, his own visor open, leaned toward me. “In the meantime, sir—”

I sighed. “An order is an order.” From the first day I wised off as a trainee, I’ve bent plenty of rules. But even if I was now prepared to disobey a lawful order, my superiors would just relieve
me,
and my replacement would have to execute the order, but at the disadvantage of being new to the job. Which could get more GIs killed and increase the chance of failure. There would be time later to vent. For now, my job was to do the job I was sworn to do.

Ready Brigade’s commander arrived, in Eternad armor, helmet tucked under one arm, sweating. He saluted. I returned it and smiled. “Keeping them busy, Rusty?”

He grinned back. “Keeping myself busy, too, sir. One thing about Mousetrap, there’s not a lot else to do.”

I motioned him to follow the three of us into a vacant umpire’s blind, where the four of us leaned against the dark consoles. I was about to cure Ready Brigade’s boredom, and the cure would be painful. I said to Rusty, “You’ve heard about the Weichsel incursion?”

He glanced at Howard, then said, “Unofficially, sir. Did Space Force grease the maggots yet?”

I glanced at Howard, myself, then said, “Not exactly.”

EIGHT

RUSTY LEFT HIS EXECUTIVE OFFICER in charge of brigade training, and then he, Ord, Howard, and I reconvened our little war council back on Spook level forty-eight, huddled around a conference table in a neat and tidy compartment adjoining Howard’s office.

I outlined the mission and my concept. It would have been unprofessional to betray my own reservations, and I don’t think I did.

Rusty shook his head slowly and his brow wrinkled. “I don’t know, sir.”

“Big rewards justify big risks, Rusty. How soon can you embark Ready Brigade?”

“The preparedness standard for a Ready Brigade is wheels-up in fourteen hours, sir. Last drill we did it in twelve hours, thirty-nine minutes—”

Ord raised his eyebrows at me and almost smiled. Wheels-up hearkened back to a time when troops deployed in fixed-wing aircraft with retractable landing gear. At the turn of the century, a crack light division like the Eighty-second Airborne would have needed sixteen hours to embark. I said to the brigadier, “Last time I was at the Pentagon, a Marine claimed that the Marine Ready Brigade at Camp Pendleton once went wheels-up in twelve hours flat.”

Rusty smiled. “My command sergeant major gently suggested to the brigade after the last drill, sir, that twelve thirty-nine was a time even jarheads could beat. Ready Brigade will be embarked in eleven hours flat, if Space Force can warm up the bus that fast.”

Ten hours later, I watched as Ready Brigade’s three thousand troops crowded the hundred-foot-wide platform of South Forty D to which the
Abraham Lincoln
was moored. The soldiers shuffled toward the maglev-tunnelsized aft hatch in the
Abe’
s flank. Gravity on Broadway, near Mousetrap’s centerline, was low enough that the Eternad-armored soldiers easily carried individual loads of personal weapons, shelter, ammunition, rations, and unit-and mission-specific equipment in back and chest packs that made them look like cartoon Santas on Christmas Eve. On Weichsel, at ninety-eight percent Earth gravity, each soldier would cut down to a combat load within minutes after disembarkation but would still be loaded like an abused burro.