Orphan's Alliance

by Robert Buettner

  “You think I’m the only person in Washington who read your report? Anyway, after you finish your presentation, just behave out of character for once.” He wagged his finger in my direction. “Meaning you shut your pie hole, except to follow my lead.”

  Nat Cobb fumbled behind himself until he found the edge of his desk, then leaned back against it.

  I sighed. I was back in Washington. Where there was nothing odd about following the lead of a blind man.

  TWELVE

  PEOPLE EXPECT THE Tank to be some subterranean Batcave, with 360-degree flatscreen animated wall maps, and battalions of field-grade officers pointing at holos of every trouble spot on Earth, and, lately, off it.

  Actually, the Tank in 2061 was what it had been, on and off, for a century: a large, soundproofed conference room on the first floor of the Pentagon, just inside the Potomac River entrance. In the Tank’s center stood a mahogany conference table that dated back one hundred years, now with a holo gen carpentered into its center. Military-subject oil paintings, which got changed out to suit the taste of the current chairman, hung on the walls. By tradition, one, a rendering of Eisenhower being knighted at Westminster Abbey, never changed.

  Batcave or not, with all the brass in the room, the armpits of my uniform shirt were damp by the time the chairman finished introducing the other Vh as whose elbows touched the mahogany. On my prior visit to the Tank, I had occupied a horse holder’s chair along the wall.

  Much in the room would have surprised Eisenhower. The holo gen, of course. And the addition to the Joint Chiefs of the Admiral commanding the United Nations Space Force, which was for practical purposes a branch-level U.S. outfit eye-to-eye with the Air Force and Navy.

  But Ike, who coined the phrase “military-industrial complex,” would have understood the makeup of the table’s placeholders for this meeting. The chief of each service branch got a seat, and the chairman, of course.

  A Defense undersecretary, who had been a lobbyist for Lockheed, the Kodiaks’ manufacturer, filled one seat.

  In another seat sat an undersecretary from the State Department, who had dreamed up the Kodiaks-for-Peace scheme in the first place. State had then negotiated with the United Nations to borrow the U.N. name for the mission. In return for which the U.S. would quietly bear the entire cost, and would take all the blame if things went wrong, for the “multinational effort.” But the U.N. would reap all praise and honors if the mission succeeded. If I can ever sell a used car to a State Department negotiator, I’ll be able to retire on the overpayment.

  In the three remaining chairs at the table sat the Headline Act: Howard Hibble, General Cobb, and me.

  When I finished my brief, the undersecretary of Defense asked me, “This operation has proved that Outworlders can be trained to operate modern weapons systems?”

  I cocked my head. “Depends on the Outworlders and the weapons systems. The Tressens are familiar with motor vehicles. A tank’s a tank, especially when it does the thinking, and we do the maintenance for them. But, say, aircraft, remotely piloted or manned? Too radical. Tressens haven’t even seen birds.”

  “But the advanced Outworlds can handle advanced weapons?” the undersecretary pressed. He had a law degree, and he was leading his witness. But witnesses can’t object.

  “The advanced Outworlds, yes.” The sad truth about the grandiose-sounding Human Union was that most of the Outworlds’ orphan humans, as my first grade teacher told my mother when they considered flunking me, needed “the gift of time to mature.” Lots of time.

  For example, Weichsel was a planet that the Slugs had abandoned millennia ago, leaving behind human strays. We stumbled across Weichsel three jumps out. Weichsel resembled Earth about 10,000 BC, complete with ice and mastodons, and its humans hadn’t progressed much beyond fire. The humans didn’t have a name for their place. They barely had names for fire and mastodons, so we called their planet after the Weichselan glaciation in Scandinavia. The Weichselans didn’t actually sign the Human Union Charter. The State Department sort of assumed they wanted to join the Union because nobody threw sticks at the survey ship.

  I said, “Tressens, and to a lesser extent, the Bren, are teachable, and some contemporary machines don’t spook them. But they don’t have the infrastructure or technology to maintain, much less copy, hovertanks. Much less hurt one another with discarded ones.”

  The undersecretary nodded.

  eigight="0%" width="4%">I said, “If you don’t mind my opinion, after the Armistice, we should have left the Kodiaks on Tressel to rust in the rain. They’re expensive hardware. Shipping them to Tressel was even more expensive. But instead of re-orbiting two hundred thousand tons of vehicles, support equipment, and fuel, we would have saved the taxpayers a fortune if we had destroyed the equipment in place. And now the taxpayers are footing the additional bill to ship them the rest of the way home.”

  Somebody asked, “Who said anything about shipping them back here?”

  Before I had time to decipher that question, the commandant of the Marine Corps asked, “What kind of Officer Efficiency Report would you write for Planck, if you had to?”

  “Promote ahead of contemporaries. Tops. He grasped the Kodiaks’ potential to reshape the battlefield faster and better than the Tressen General Staff.”

  I stopped short of saying, “You know how General Staffs are.” But a few of the brass still scowled.

  “How so?” the marine asked.

  “The Tressen General Staff wanted to array the Kodiaks against the Iridian West Wall, as glorified artillery. That would have wasted their mobility. Planck realized that hovertanks have a disproportionate mobility advantage over terrain like the Barrens. He planned, organized, and executed a wheeling maneuver through the Barrens and around the West Wall, with the Kodiaks punching through like Panzers. Frankly, the German assaults through the Low Countries and around the Maginot Line in World Wars I and II weren’t done as well. The offensive ended a stalemated war in a month. Most Iridian units got pocketed, and surrendered. They weren’t slaughtered. That minimized Tressen casualties, too.”

  “So he’s an intuitive tank jockey,” somebody grunted.

  I shook my head. “I think he’s more. He was a junior officer when we arrived, so he had to sell his plan, too. A lot of battlefield geniuses lack that tact. On the other hand, he’s no politician. Long on courage and integrity, short on blarney.”

  The State Department guy furrowed his brow. “But could a leader like Planck stabilize the new government?”

  I’ve spent enough time in this puzzle palace that I’ve learned to smirk invisibly. But these people in Washington really did think the Easter Bunny brought Cavorite. “Mr. Undersecretary, the Armistice was barely signed when the Ike deorbited Tressel. I don’t know that there is a new government. I don’t know that it needs stabilizing. And I certainly don’t know whether Audace Planck has a role in it. Later news from our Consulates has to make its way through five jumps and layovers. It travels almost as slowly as the Ike and those Kodiaks have to.”

  The State Department guy raised his eyebrows, then turned to the chairman, while he pointed at me. “He doesn’t know about the Mousetrap?”

  The chairman scowled at Howard. “You didn’t tell him?”

  Howard shrugged. “He didn’t need to know.”

  The chairman said, “He does now.”

  THIRTEEN

  I SAT THERE feeling my face burn. Howard was a professorial geek, but once the Army commissioned him as a Spook, he burrowed into the Intel need-to-know mentality like a beetle into dung. And, as always, the result for me was that I was the slow kid in class.

  Howard shrank inside his uniform like a turtle, then cleared his throat. “Jason, we’re discovering new Temporal Fabric Insertion Points all the time, nowadays.”

  I nodded. That much everybody knew. “Wormholes” or “black holes” are examples of TFIPs, though most of them lead nowhere, and some of them even drift around. But not all TFIPs are even a
s detectable as wormholes or black holes. Before a captured Slug ship spit us through the first TFIP, astronomers identified black holes as distant and almost theoretical rarities in the vastness of space. Turns out TFIPs are neither distant nor rare.

  Howard said it was like looking at the Pacific Ocean through a telescope from space. If you didn’t know there were ping pong balls floating in the ocean, because you didn’t even know ping pong balls existed, much less what they looked like, you wouldn’t notice them. Now, the astronomers knew what to look for, and they were identifying TFIPs as fast as floating ping pong balls. But if a particular TFIP didn’t lead to a populated outworld, or at least a habitable layover planet, it was as useless to us as a ping pong ball.

  I said, “I remember that.”

  “Well, you probably should forget most of what I’m about to tell you.” Howard popped the table’s holo, and the image of a little metal spider appeared, floating alongside a cruiser for scale. “For the past three years, we’ve been inserting expendable drones like this one across newly identified TFIPs. The drones were programmed to survey their exit points, then return with the data. A TFIP’s a stressful environment. Most of the drones didn’t return. But two years ago, astronomers at the Mount Evans observatory identified a TFIP a week’s normal-space travel from the Solar System. The survey drone we sent across returned. On the other side, it found a cluster of other TFIPs just days’ travel from the first one. I had a hunch, so we funneled every drone we had through that TFIP. Then we sent the drones on ahead, through the other TFIPs beyond the new one.”

  “You built drones that can survive two jumps out, and two jumps back?” I whistled.

  “It was a little pricy.”

  I covered my mouth to stifle a snort. When he was spending tax dollars, Howard thought a thirty dollar coffee was a little pricy. Someday that would come back to haunt him.

  Howard sawed the air in front of him with his palms. “Jason, at the Mousetrap we found TFIPs that link Earth to every Outworld within a single Jump.”

  I whistled again, even as I fought the impulse to leap across the table and wring Howard’s scrawny, mendacious neck. I wouldn’t have told me, either. The Mousetrap’s importance, and the need to keep its location secret, was as obvious as the derivation of its name. The Mousetrap had been a high-traffic freeway junction in Old Denver, east of the Mount Evans observatory. It had also been Ground Zero for the Denver Projectile. If the Slugs ever found this cer eanew Mousetrap, they could plaster it, too.

  The State Department guy said, “So, that’s why we have fresher news than you have, General. We can transmit high-priority data to a drone outside the Mousetrap, the drone jumps, travels across the Mousetrap, jumps again, then retransmits as it falls apart. We can communicate in weeks, not months.”

  Howard nodded. “In days, between some worlds.”

  I said to Howard, “But the real jackpot would be a layover planet.”

  Howard shook his head. “There’s one planetary system within useful range. But the system consists of one gas giant planet. We can no more establish a layover base on that planet than we could on the surface of Jupiter.”

  The chairman said to me, “But there is a workable layover base within the Mousetrap crossroads. Not a planet. A small, airless moon orbiting the gas giant that Colonel Hibble just mentioned. We call the moon Mousetrap, too.”

  Howard said, “As a commercial and military waypoint, that moon’s Gibraltar, Pearl Harbor, Hong Kong, and the Port of New York all in one place.”

  The chairman frowned. “There are problems. Developing Mousetrap will be the most massive civil engineering project in human history. The shipping required to build and utilize it, and the fleet to defend it, are beyond the industrial and military capacities of all the nations on Earth, combined.”

  I nodded. The slow kid was coming up to speed. “But there are nations off Earth, too, now. Tressel at peace can afford to contribute.”

  The State Department guy leaned forward. “And the military phase—your part—went brilliantly. But since the Armistice, the situation is deteriorating.”

  “Now there’s a surprise!” I bit my tongue too late, and the chairman frowned. But the fact was that U.S. nation-building historically resembled Halloween. Military phase, treat. Reconstruction, trick.

  Howard said, “There’s an additional complication.”

  I sighed. “With you, there always is.”

  Howard said, “Cavorite.”

  I turned up one palm. “Bren exports more than we can use.”

  “Not anymore.” The State Department guy said, “The Marini, Tassini, and Casuni kept Cavorite flowing to the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony for thirty thousand years. When they, as you say, kicked the Slugs off Bren, we became the Unified Clans’ new buyer. Tidy.”

  “Sure.”

  “Until three months ago. While you were tidying things up on Tressel, the Casuni and Tassini started intercepting the Stone Hills caravans. We’re going to need a ten-fold production increase to supply Mousetrap’s construction, commercial, and defense traffic. But what we have today is disunified Clans at war again, and zero exports.”

  I sighed. “The Clans hated each other for centuries. Can we broker a peace?”

  “We can’t wait for that. Marin’s receptive to assistance.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “That’s why the Kodiaks aren’t coming home? They’re going to Bren, to rig another war? You’re going to give them to the Marini, to flog the Casuni and the Tassini.”

  “Not us, General. You.”

  I shook my head. “I rode with Tassini scouts. I lit the funeral pyres of Casuni sergeants. Fight against troops I led in combat? Against allies? Is that what you expect me to do?”

  “Advise against, not fight against. Alliances change. Policies change. What we expect you to do is follow lawful orders, General.”

  I would never vote for that policy. But this wasn’t a democracy. If I was going to air my disagreement at all, it wouldn’t be after thirty seconds’ consideration, in the middle of the Tank. I said, “Yes, sir.” Then I folded my chippad.

  The chairman raised his palm. “We aren’t finished, General. Tressel owes us a favor, thanks to you. But Tressel won’t be sharing any external burdens with us if it dissolves into anarchy.”

  I turned my palms up. “Sir?”

  The undersecretary of State said, “Our Consulates have identified General Planck as a potential unifier. Just as you have. They say you’ve bonded with him personally. That makes you the perfect choice to encourage him to enter politics. So on your way to Bren, you’ll stop by Tressel, and pay your respects to General Planck.”

  The chairman’s aide interrupted the meeting to get the chairman to thumb documents, and we broke for five minutes. I leaned toward General Cobb and whispered, “Sir, I understand why I’m getting the Bren advisory assignment, even if I don’t like it. But I’m the last person I’d send to advise Aud Planck, or anybody else, about politics. I stink at diplomacy.”

  “Jason, there are two kinds of diplomacy. The kind you stink at is the tea-party stuff, like pretending the shape of the negotiating table matters. Parties resort to that stuff if they don’t trust each other. The best diplomacy is based on trust. Trust is based on personal relationships. Planck trusts you and you trust him.”

  Still, I almost guffawed. The State Department trusted me to jigger intragalactic politics. But Nat Cobb wouldn’t let me talk to the Lions Club. Until that moment, I had forgotten my earlier discussion with my boss. This tour meant I would be bouncing around outer space again, for years. I was due for rotation in one lousy month. Just hours before, I had specifically asked General Cobb for a non-separation tour. My heart rate sped up.

  I had never ducked a dirty job. But now I had asked for just one dirtside assignment, and this was the thanks I got? I just wanted to spend time with Jude, before I bought the farm. It was the one lousy thing I had ever asked of the Army, after all it had asked of me. Who could say I woul
dn’t have a stroke tomorrow, like Stump Peavey? The hell with Washington. Maybe I’d retire early, too, like Stump.

  I felt the adrenaline pump, the chairman reconvened the meeting, and I started to stand. Then, below the table, I felt General Cobb’s hand tug me back down by my jacket hem.

  He had told me, before the meeting, to shut my pie hole if it came to this.

  But, like he said, I stink at that kind of diplomacy.

  FOURTEEN

  BEFORE I COULD insert boot in mouth, the Air Force Chief of Staff cleared his throat and smiled. “I can see General Wander’s upset. No living officer has sacrificed more over the years. If I were in his shoes, I’d prefer a dirtside tour. The Air Force would be willing to dig in and handle these missions.”

  I was grateful to him for his remarks. For a nanosecond. He was calling me a crybaby. Besides, what could the Air Force do, other than bomb Tressel and Bren back to the Stone Age? Which was ridiculous because they were already halfway there.