Orphan's Triumph Read online

  Twenty minutes later, I had crept and low-crawled to within fifty yards of the girl and she hadn’t spotted me. Downslope, I heard the twitter of Casuni devotion pipes. The warriors would all be head-down and praying for an hour, during which we could clean up this mess, before they rushed her. I kept behind a rock ledge as I cupped my hand to my mouth. “ Sandy?”

  “Who the hell’s out there?”

  “Jason Wander.”

  “Bite me. The old man’s pushing paper back in Marinus. Whoever you are, I can’t see you, but I can hear you well enough to lob a grenade into those rocks. So back off.”

  “Sandy, I really am General Wander. I came out from Marinus to award a unit citation. When I heard what happened, I came here. I’d like to talk to you.” I paused and breathed. “I’m going to stand up, so you can see me, see that I’m unarmed.”

  “I’ll drop a frag on your ass first!”

  Ting.

  The M40 is an excellent infantry weapon, except that it makes a too-audible “ting” sound when it’s switched between assault-rifle mode and grenade-launcher mode, as a grenade is chambered in the lower barrel.

  So far, so good. My heart thumped, and I drew a breath, then let it out.

  I stayed behind cover, levered myself up on my real arm, and glanced back to confirm where I was in relation to the sniper farther up the hillside. Then I got to my knees, spread my arms, palms out, and stood.

  The girl had swung around from facing the Casunis downslope and now faced me, her unhelmeted cheek laid along her rifle’s stock as she trained her M40 on my chest. She lifted her head an inch, and her jaw fell open. “General?”

  I nodded, then called, “Mind if I come closer? Then neither of us will have to yell. We won’t wake the baby.”

  The voice of the captain upslope hissed in my earpiece. “General! Sir, you need to move left or right a yard or two. You’re blocking the shot.”

  Which was the idea, though the captain hadn’t anticipated it until too late. They don’t teach enough sneakiness at West Point.

  The girl jerked her head, motioning me closer, but she kept her finger on the trigger. “Two steps! No more.”

  I took the two steps, which brought me within fifteen yards of her, then shuffled until the distance between us was down to ten yards.

  She poked her M40 forward, then growled, a pit bull with freckles. “I said two steps, dipshit! Sir.”

  In my ear, the captain said, “Sir, move left or right! Not closer! Now you’re obscuring her even more!”

  The rifle quivered in the girl’s hand.

  I swallowed. There’s a class in MP school that teaches how to talk jumpers down. I never took it. There was probably a series of soothing questions to ask, but I didn’t know what they were.

  So I said, “Tell me what happened, Sandy.”

  “The Blutos tried to kill the baby.”

  “And you’re tired of seeing things killed.” Even though her “baby” was a killing machine growing deadlier by the day. I kept my arms out, palms open toward her as I inched closer.

  “The other Blutos-the caravan raiders-killed my loader. I couldn’t do anything to stop it.”

  “I started out as a loader. I was there when my gunner died, too. It’s an empty feeling.”

  I wasn’t lying, either, about the feeling or the death. But my gunner’s death had come less than three years ago, though it had come in combat and while I watched, unable to prevent it.

  Her gun’s muzzle dropped an inch as she nodded. “It feels like there’s a hole in my gut.”

  “The hole heals. It takes time, but it heals.” I didn’t tell her how much time, or how disfiguring the scar could be.

  I stepped forward. The voice in my earpiece whispered, “Sir, the psyops people predict that she’ll shoot. Just kneel down and we’ll take her out.”

  She came up onto one knee, her M40 still trained on my chest. “What about the baby?”

  I could see the snapper infant now, curled up asleep, tail over snout, on a bed of leaves the girl had prepared for it among the rocks. Empty ration paks littered the ground, where the girl must have been hand-feeding the little beast. Regardless of the girl’s maternal instincts, within a week the snapper’s predatory instincts would take over, and the monster would snap the girl’s hand off at the wrist if she held out a snack. The exobiologists said snappers were the most implacable predators yet discovered on the fourteen planets of the Human Union.

  I said, “We’ll care for it for a while. When it’s old enough to fend for itself, we’ll release it into the wild.”

  In fact, the Casuni would insist the devil’s spawn be gutted on the spot and its entrails burned. And with three of their own maimed by the beast’s mother, we would have no choice but to turn the little snapper over to the Casuni like a POW.

  Harmonious interface with indigenous populations wasn’t all handing out Hershey bars. Sometimes it required tolerating customs we found barbarous. I used the moment to inch closer, within three yards of her. One step closer and I could lunge forward, grasp her rifle’s muzzle, and twist it away.

  Her rifle’s muzzle came up again and she snarled. “Liar!”

  Crap. I’ve always been a lousy liar.

  She fired, point-blank.

  FOUR

  “SIR?” The whisper was old, gravelly, and familiar. It came from close to my ear, so I heard it over jet-engine shriek.

  I opened my eyes, focused, and saw Ord, gray eyes unsmiling, and above him the interior fuselage ribs of a hop jet. I asked, “Sergeant Major? What happened to the girl?”

  Ord jerked his buzz-cut gray head, and I followed his eyes. A corpsman knelt beside the private, who lay strapped to the litter next to the one I lay on. Her eyes were closed; her chest slowly rose and fell. Joy juice from a suspended IV bag trickled down a transparent tube into her forearm. A purple streak began at the point of her jaw and traced halfway back to her ear.

  Ord said, “Her jaw’s not broken, but you dropped her with a right as you went down, then landed on top of her. That kept her outfit from shooting her and gave them time to get downslope and put cuffs on her.” Ord frowned. “Sir, if you don’t mind hearing my opinion…”

  I had minded hearing Ord’s opinion ever since he was my drill sergeant in infantry basic, but he never hesitated to share it with me anyway.

  “You took an unnecessary risk.”

  I shook my head. “No risk. I heard her shift her rifle to grenade mode. I never heard her shift back, and I talked my way to inside five yards from her.”

  Ord nodded. “An M40 grenade doesn’t arm for five yards. So all she did when she pulled the trigger was wallop you in the chest with a low-velocity lump of unexploded shrapnel.”

  I smiled a little at the cleverness of me.

  Ord, as usual when I did that, frowned. “She could have flicked the selector switch back to rifle in an instant and killed you. She could have shot you in the head, instead of the chest, and killed you. That would have decapitated the offworld chain of command. If your sucker punch hadn’t knocked her flat, the sniper would have killed her anyway. That would have precipitated a crisis with the indigenous population.”

  “But none of that happened. Now she gets a ride home. At worst, a Section Eight discharge. At best, administrative punishment and another chance in the army. The army gets a Band-Aid bill for me. I could see she was too distracted to realize she was still in grenade mode.”

  Ord stared at me. I suppose he stared the way the caveman who discovered fire stared at the first idiot who stuck his finger into the flame. “Even so, sir, you could have allowed someone in armor, her commanding officer, perhaps, to make the approach. Or waited until the creep-and-peep team could have neutralized the situation.”

  I glanced at the ’Puter on Ord’s wrist. A normal transport hauling a creep-and-peep team from Marinus would still be hours away. But only about an hour had passed since I stuck my chest in front of an almost-live grenade.

  �
�That captain said the creep-and-peep team was coming out on a tilt-wing. Six hours. Why did the Spooks divert a hop jet to get out here faster? And why did you come out here on it?”

  Ord peered at the IV bag alongside me, and the tube that ran from it into my forearm. “Sir, no need to get into that now. Your-ah-heroics left you with a hairline fracture of the sternum and related soft-tissue damage. The corpsman here just upped your dosage.” Ord smiled. Everybody in my platoon in basic knew an Ord smile meant that whatever the smile-ee thought was about to happen, he was sorely mistaken. Ord patted my shoulder. “Just relax for now, General.”

  “I feel fine. Sergeant Major, answer my-”

  The engine whine faded into nothing, and then another voice replaced it.

  “-pleasure to have a casualty that outranks me, for a change.” I woke to the voice of the light colonel who commanded the infirmary at Human Union Camp, Marinus. Cocoa-skinned, gray-haired, and clad in short-sleeved blue scrubs, he stood in a white-painted single-bed room, staring at the chart reader in his hand. Hippocrates Wallace bared his forearms even though they were slick and puckered with burn scar tissue. I was there when he got burned. He had been a flight surgeon during the First Battle of Mousetrap. He was the only person I knew who had earned a Harvard Med School degree and a Silver Star.

  I started to cough. Through the dope, pain penetrated my chest like a dull ice pick twisting. I froze my shoulders and tried to refrain from breathing while I hissed, “Pleasure? You this compassionate with all your patients, Wally?”

  He toggled through my overactive medical history with his thumb. “Oh, suck it up, Jason. A cracked sternum’s little potatoes for you.”

  I asked, “What about the girl?”

  “Your victim? The private won’t be playing the harmonica for a while. Jaw contusions and some dental work. She’s on the stockade ward. I might move you there, too.”

  “Now you’re a criminologist?”

  “No. But I’ve got an honorary degree in watching screwballs. If you threw yourself into that situation to save the girl, to balance the scales for your perceived inadequacy because Congresswoman Metzger died on Mousetrap, you’re a little nuts. But if you were trying to commit suicide by lunatic, you’re a lot nuts. In which case I’m required by regulation to decertify you for command.”

  “I’m fine. Half the Pentagon and two-thirds of Congress are crazier than I am, and nobody decertifies them.”

  Wally snorted.

  I said, “Remember, Colonel, I’m the biggest stud duck within two billion cubic light-years. I could fire you before you could decertify me.”

  Wally sighed. “If only. Then I’d be the one who got shipped back to Mousetrap, where the sports holos are only two weeks behind and a man can get plotzed on scotch instead of fermented groundfruit juice.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him, about the only body parts I could move without wincing. “Who’s getting shipped back to Mousetrap?”

  He raised bushy eyebrows. “Didn’t Ord tell you? You are. Ord got one of those hard-copy encrypted chips that Hibble insists on sending. Why do you think the Spooks pulled an orbit-capable ship away from shuttling back and forth to the Red Moon? And used it to double time Ord out to the Stone Hills to deliver your Spook-o-gram?”

  I sighed. “Wally, not even I am supposed to know where those shuttles are going. So don’t spread that around.”

  Wally leaned down to me and whispered, “I don’t need to. Everybody on this post knows that whole Moon’s a Cavorite nugget. Though it beats the fecal matter out of me why the Spooks care. The Stone Hills mines produce Cavorite faster than Mousetrap can build ships to use it.”

  I changed the subject. Partly because I didn’t want to know how much other classified material was common knowledge in my command. Partly because I was curious about Howard Hibble’s summons to Mousetrap. “How soon can I travel?”

  “Given the diminished recuperative powers of a man your age-”

  “You’re as old as I am.”

  “Exactly. It takes me three days to recuperate from shining my shoes.” Wally shook his head. “I can’t sign off that you’ll be ready to tolerate escape-velocity G forces for at least a week.”

  Howard was a devious geek, but if he sent a Spook-o-gram, something was up that I couldn’t wait a week to hear about. “Release me to travel tomorrow and I’ll smuggle you back a case of scotch.”

  Wally raised his eyebrows higher. “Single malt?”

  I managed a shallow nod. “And if you don’t share your amateur shrinkology with Sergeant Major Ord, I’ll make it sixteen-year-old.”

  “Done. I’ll shoot you up with healing accelerants, but I can’t immobilize that fracture, so don’t blame me when it hurts like hell. And the shrinkology was Ord’s in the first place, so don’t blame me if he brings it up.”

  The next morning, Ord and I caught a lift aboard what everybody was supposed to think, but nobody actually believed, was a hop jet shuttling us to rendezvous with the Abraham Lincoln, in parking orbit above Bren. Wally was right about the fracture, which hurt like hell. I clamped my jaw while I blamed him anyway, every minute that the hopper boosted.

  We shared the hopper with one passenger, who spun his seat to face Ord and me once the engines went silent. His nameplate read “Applebite.”

  Like the rest of Howard Hibble’s freak show, also known as Military Intelligence Battalion Bren, Reinforced, our companion wore army utilities, topped with a twentysomething’s straw-colored chin and skull fuzz, which had no recent experience with a barber or a razor.

  Ord eyed the kid’s crooked-pinned captain’s brass with the enthusiasm of a jockey aboard a pig.

  I asked, “How goes Silver Bullet, Applebite?”

  Howard Hibble’s supergeeks had the military bearing of Cub Scouts, Mensa-level intellects, and the xenophobia of Cold War spies. Applebite’s eyes widened, because even the code name for the Cavorite weaponization project was classified. He slid his eyes to Ord and said nothing.

  I sighed. “The sergeant major’s clearance is higher than yours, Applebite. Besides, in about forty minutes, he and I are gonna watch you board a ship that’s not even supposed to exist.”

  Finally, Applebite shrugged. “We’re close, sir. But…”

  I smiled. From three decades of war, we knew that the man-sized armored-maggot Slug Warriors were as replaceable to the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony as fingernails were to us.

  The only way to win the war was going to be to destroy the single cognitive center that ran the organism. A center that was probably the size of a planet. But we had learned early in the war that the Slugs had a way to neutralize nukes. So for the last thirty years, the Spooks’ job had been to think up a silver bullet that could kill a brain bigger than Mars.

  “But even if you make a silver bullet, you don’t know where to shoot it?”

  Applebite scratched his chin fuzz and smiled. “We don’t. But finding the homeworld’s not my job.”

  Even after almost four decades, now that we finally had ships numerous enough and good enough that we could chase down Slug ships like wolves on cattle, we couldn’t find the Slugs’ homeworld. If we could find it, we were, apparently, almost ready to pour Cavorite on it like salt on a garden snail. A simile that delighted me.

  Our hopper shook, the broken edges of my breastbone rubbed against each other, and I stiffened like somebody had cabled an Electrovan battery to my chest. We decelerated and matched circumlunar orbit with an unmarked vessel that had once been a Metzger-class cruiser and was now Silver Bullet’s headquarters. Cavorite was less toxic to humans than to Slugs, but the Spooks still chose to orbit the Red Moon rather than set up camp on it. Applebite’s drop-off at the research ship wasn’t recorded by its Spook crew on the hopper’s flight log, and a half hour later Ord and I were piped aboard the Abraham Lincoln before her foremast watch finished breakfast.

  Thereafter, we spent a steady week at.6 light speed, and my breastbone started to knit, thanks to Wally’
s accelerants.

  Less happily, Ord hadn’t heart-to-hearted me about my mental state. Nominally, commissioned officers outrank senior noncommissioned officers. But if a good sergeant hadn’t privately advised the Old Man, who was typically younger than the sergeant, after the Old Man screwed up, it meant the time bomb was still ticking.

  I watched the stars around us stretch from light points into glowing spaghetti, then disappear altogether as their light, and the Abe’s mile-long mass, got sucked into the Temporal Fabric Insertion Point that would spit us out inside the Mousetrap interstellar crossroad. As we jumped, I muttered to myself, “Howard, you mendacious son of a bitch, this better be worth the trip.”

  FIVE

  ORD AND I WERE SPECTATORS on the Abe’s bridge when she popped out into the Mousetrap, light-years as the crow flies from the Bren II Insertion Point, where the Abe went in. Vacuum is vacuum to my untrained eye, so the new space we saw on the screens looked as black and starry as what we left behind. Except the Abe got lit by sixteen pings within its first three seconds in new space.

  All sixteen pings got instantaneous, correct electronic responses back from the Abe’s electronic countermeasures array. If they hadn’t, the Abe would have been trading real bullets with a Scorpion interceptor squadron. Scorpions were single-seat Cavorite-drive fighters, so small and stealthy compared to a conventional starship like the Abraham Lincoln, or like a Slug Firewitch, that they’re scarcely noticeable. Scorpions may be too delicate to survive a jump, but they sting, as the Slugs had learned the hard way.

  The Mousetrap was a point of nothing in a universe mostly filled with nothing. But clustered in the Mousetrap, “close together” by astrophysical standards, were a double handful of the useful kind of black holes the Spooks called Temporal Fabric Insertion Points. A TFIP’s enormous gravity tacked together folds in the fabric of conventional space, so an object that could slingshot through a T-FIP jumped out light-years away from where it went in.