Orphan's Triumph Read online

  The Mousetrap was the most strategically valuable crossroad in human history because every one of the fourteen warm, wet rocks that constituted the planets of the Human Union could be reached in just days or weeks by jumping a ship through one or another of the Mousetrap’s T-FIPs. Humans could easily colonize the Milky Way and defend ourselves via the Mousetrap’s shortcuts. Unfortunately, the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony, which viewed humans as a virus, could just as easily exterminate us via those same Mousetrap shortcuts.

  Mankind guarded the Mousetrap like its collective life depended on it, because it did.

  So, ping challenges and visual confirmations notwithstanding, four Scorpions assumed station around the Abe, shadowing her like a potential Trojan horse. Well, the Abe’s crew knew that the Scorpions were there, even though the Abe couldn’t find them with its sensors. Ten escorted hours later, the great orange disk of the gas giant Leonidas filled the Abe’s visual displays, like Jupiter with blue stripes. One hour after that, Leonidas’s only satellite became visible, a spinning, twenty-mile-long nickel-iron mote against the planet’s glowing bulk.

  The one thing in this universe more valuable to mankind than the empty space of the Mousetrap was the only habitable rock within the Mousetrap, from which the empty space could be defended.

  Ord peered at the moonlet known as Mousetrap as the Abe drifted closer. Half of Mousetrap’s lumpy surface sparkled with silver solar arrays, even more than on our last trip through. He grunted, “Must make more electricity than Hoover Dam, these days.”

  The Abe’s engineering officer, who stood watching the displays alongside us, inclined her head toward Ord. “Actually, Sergeant Major, Mousetrap generates enough power to lift the Hoover Dam into low Earth orbit. The smelting plants are power hogs.”

  Too many miners, most of whom had been Bren slaves risking death for emancipation, had died boring a core out of Mousetrap’s centerline. From Mousetrap’s north pole to its south pole, sealed at each end with massive airlocks, ran a great tunnel that had been carved out. Into the tunnel’s walls had been carved vast living, mining, and manufacturing spaces, in concentric rings around the core canal.

  A vessel like the Abe, or like the Slug vessels from which we copied Cavorite drive, could thunder up to Mousetrap at thousands of miles per hour, or even per second, then stop on a dime, without spilling coffee within the vessel’s gravity cocoon. Also without denting the ship or the moonlet. I had seen it done.

  But a Bastogne-class cruiser’s fender bender would dent even the national debt. Therefore, the Abe drifted, slow and nose-first, “down” toward Mousetrap’s north pole like a cherry toward the top of a sundae. The outer doors irised open on an airlock chamber bigger than a volcano crater. The Abe paused within the lock while the outer doors closed; then the inner doors opened and we crept forward into Broadway, Mousetrap’s centerline tunnel, at ten miles per hour.

  I’d been down Broadway before, but my jaw always drops. The Abe’s forward screen showed us drifting through a rotating, man-made tunnel that seemed bigger than the Grand Canyon, its walls shimmering with the crisscross Widmanstätten crystal pattern of meteoric nickel iron.

  But most of North Broadway’s walls were obscured by a whiskering of docks and shipyards. We cruised for miles past keels and skeletons of new cruisers, frigates, transports, even Scorpion fighters, gnatlike compared to the rest. Beyond the shipyards lay miles of repair yards, every slot filled by ranks of fleet operational ships in for refit. The whole array flickered with sparks sprayed by welders and was lit by spotlights played on scaffold-wrapped hulls.

  Whenever I cruised North Broadway, I reflexively scanned the ranks of docked cruisers for the Emerald River . It wasn’t the cruiser I hoped to see, but her skipper, the estimable and lovely Admiral Mimi Ozawa. But Mimi had been rotated Earthside, after leading the Second Fleet across T-FIP jump after T-FIP jump, in a futile search for the Slugs’ homeworld. Sometimes with me aboard, mostly without. I sighed.

  Broadway’s middle miles were darker, pocked with adits and burrows that tapped pockets where raw materials, from aluminum to zinc, had concentrated within the moonlet’s nickel-iron mass. Boxcar-sized ore cars beetled back and forth from the mines to the smelters, where the fabric of Mousetrap was being transmuted into the building blocks that defended the Human Union.

  Farther on, South Broadway glittered, as windows of offices, training and living spaces spilled light into the vast tunnel.

  The Abe eased up to her mooring, one of a dozen ringing the tunnel, from which vessels transferred passengers and cargo to and from the south eight miles of Broadway.

  An hour later, Ord and I had separated. He signed us in to respective billets in the Officers and NCO’s quarters, while I tubed upweight-that is, feet-first out toward the surface of Mousetrap-to level forty-eight. I exited the tube as an MP saluted me, still checked my ID as though I might be a disguised Slug, then smiled. “Welcome back to the Penthouse, General.”

  Level forty-eight was the outermost of Moosetrap’s cylinders, all arranged concentric to Broadway. Level forty-eight was called the Penthouse, even though it was buried miles deep in Mousetrap’s nickel-iron mass, because it was the top-bottom, actually-tube stop and because, as the outermost ring, it had the least-curved floors and ceilings and the most Earthlike rotational gravity in Mousetrap.

  The Spooks monopolized the high-rent district because they were the ones who designed Mousetrap, but more importantly because they deserved the extra comfort. The Spooks didn’t rotate home every twelve months like Mousetrap’s GIs, civilian contract labor, and Space Force swabbies. Marginally nicer quarters were small compensation for the hardships of ’Trap Rat status.

  “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 rema
ining 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?”