Orphan's Alliance

by Robert Buettner

  All he was doing was grabbing at a piece of the Outworld pie for his service, which the Air Force had been trying to do for years. I sat back and swallowed a smirk. In the Tank, nobody would tell him he was wrong, of course. I waited for somebody to thank him for his suggestion, and take it under advisement, which was Washingtonese for calling him an idiot.

  General Cobb said to the idiot, “Burt, you’re right.”

  I turned to Nat Cobb and gaped.

  General Cobb tapped his fist on the mahogany table. “Fine idea. But Jason, here, knows the ground. What if we expand the delegation to two. Jason and an Air Force representative?”

  The Zoomie rocked back in his chair. He had got half of what he wanted, and twice what he deserved, without a fight. He felt for the hook, but couldn’t find it. So he nodded, and took the bait. “Makes sense, Nat.”

  The chairman, who earned his chair by never looking a compromise in the mouth, nodded, too, and said, “Done.”

  Wait a minute. General Cobb had told me to shut my pie hole. I had. The result was still that I was going off-world for years, which I didn’t want. Only now I would have to travel in the company of some Zoomie.

  I breathed harder. Nat Cobb had never jobbed me before, but there was a first time for everything.

  General Cobb tapped a message into his chippad, then slid it across the table. The chairman spun it so he could read the screen, then smiled and nodded. “Well, he’s only a captain, but he’s got off-world experience. His pedigree will impress the hosts. And Captain Metzger’s current assignment ends in a few days.”

  My jaw dropped. Then I hid a smile behind my hand.

  The Zoomie general crossed his arms, and pressed his lips together so hard they turned white. He felt the hook, now that it was set. Nat Cobb could have arm-twisted and plucked a junior officer from another service from a sensitive assignment, and shoehorned him into an equally sensitive mission, just to solve my personal problem. But that would have meant Nat would owe the Zoomies a favor, for doing what they should do anyway. Instead, Nat had manipulated Jude’s boss to insist on doing it.

  You don’t have to be blind to get around Washington, but it helps.

  The chairman said to me, “Your delegation leaves in two days.”

  “Yes, sir.” I cocked my head. “But two days? Is Earth suddenly more desperate for cheap company than a sailor on liberty?” I smiled at the Chief of Naval Operations.

  He didn’t smile back. Squids take a joke even worse than Zoomies.

  Howard said, “Well, there’s another thing.”

  The chairman raised his palm at Howard. The chairman glanced around the room, at the array of horse holders seated along the walls, then at his wrist ’Puter. “We’re out of time.”

  Hair rose on my neck. The chairman’s glance told me that Howard’s “thing” was so sensitive that the horse holders couldn’t be trusted to hear it. Even though the horse holders were all so senior that they could be trusted to deploy nuclear weapons.

  Washington keeps two kinds of secrets, secrets from its enemies and secrets from its friends.

  What Washington kept secret from its enemies was often good news for the U.S. An atomic bomb that would win the war, a code cracked. Mousetrap was that kind of secret, so we kept it from the Slugs. Howard said the Slugs probably didn’t bother to spy on us, any more than we spied on wasps. But we couldn’t assume that.

  What Washington kept secret from its friends was usually bad news. Like torture to preserve, in the estimation of the torturers, civil rights. Or like ballot boxes stuffed to save democracy.

  But sometimes Washington kept secrets from its friends because the truth was too awful, the way a parent might not tell a child about terminal cancer.

  The chairman shared Mousetrap with his horse holders, but not Howard’s “thing.” Therefore, Howard’s “thing” was almost certainly the second, bad kind of secret. Or worse, it was the last kind. And that was why a cold knot now swelled in my gut.

  The chairman adjourned the meeting, and as we all stood to leave, I leaned toward General Cobb. “Sir, this idea with the Kodiaks.”

  General Cobb whispered, “Take it up with Howard. They’re buried inside his budget. He’ll explain the ‘thing’ to you, too, on the trip out.”

  “Sir?”

  “Howard’s going, too. And Ord. And enjoy your time with Jude.”

  Howard stepped alongside us. I said to both of them, “Thanks. For laying the ground work.”

  Both of them shrugged. Duplicity was legal tender in Washington, but insiders kept their mouths shut when they spent some.

  General Cobb patted my shoulder, then excused himself.

  As Howard and I watched him walk away, I shook my head and chuckled. “Speaking of ground work. When you told Munchkin you were messing with her only child, did she howl like a scalded cougar?”

  We stepped out of the Tank into the bustling corridor, as Howard studied his fingernails. “Actually, we left it for you to break the news to Congresswoman Metzger.”

  FIFTEEN

  SIX HOURS AFTER I left Howard at the Pentagon, and one hundred thirty-three years after Charles Lindbergh landed at Paris Le Bourget, I landed there, too.

  Lindbergh’s flight from the U.S. took thirty-three hours, via propellor-driven aeroplane. My flight took one hour and thirty-three minutes, via VIP scavenging combustion ramjet, funded by Howard.

  Lindbergh came to Paris to become a hero. I came to the Paris Air Show to pet a scalded cougar who might bite my head off.

  Munchkin was working the Paris Air Show as a celebrity spokesperson because she was a decorated veteran of the Ganymede campaign, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, who served on the House Armed Services Committee, and most of her constituents worked for or supplied Lockheed.

  Lockheed had chosen the Paris Air Show to debut to the aerospace industry a vehicle rumored to make scramjets more obsolete than scramjets had made propellor aeroplanes.

  I say “rumored” because what Lockheed called Scorpion was one of those good news secrets. Scorpion was the closest-held U.S. aircraft program since Lockheed rolled the Stealth Fighter out of the Skunk Works almost a century before.

  After my plane landed at Le Bourget, a gratuitously pretty hostess electricarted me across a runway, weaving through crowds who circulated among displayed jets, helicopters, and associated implements of destruction. The Paris Air Show had been the world’s premier aerospace bazaar since 1908. I had attended the show once before, as a celebrity greeter peddling U.S. fire control systems to third-world dictators, who needed them like pigs needed Peugeots.

  My hostess deposited me at Lockheed’s hospitality pavilion, which was a circus tent, with foie gras where the cotton candy should have been.

  Beneath the Big Top, Munchkin sat on a raised dais, behind a skirted table. A wireless mike the size of a raisin clung to the lapel of her lipstick-red suit, which set off her olive skin and gray-streaked raven hair like Chanel had sewn it just for her. Behind her on the dais, a holo of Lockheed’s Scorpion, sleek and prototype-pearlescent white, rotated in the air like a party balloon. In front of her, a dozen adults elbowed and waved like a kindergarten class.

  I listened as Munchkin pointed out a reporter, then leaned forward, finger behind one ear, to listen to a question in French. I stood watching and listening with my arms folded, and my chest puffed a little, watching my former foxhole mate take charge. French was Munchkin’s third language. Napoleon occupied Egypt for three years. The language he left behind occupied Egypt’s prep schools ever since.

  She answered first in French, then in Arabic, then said in English, “I won’t quote you performance numbers. Scorpion will speak for itself in a few minutes.”

  Munchkin had just blown o n itff the guy’s question, but he smiled broadly. Most males did in Munchkin’s presence.

  The next question came from a Brit. “Congresswoman Metzger, if this C-drive is so reliable, why is Scorpion also equipped with a jet
motor?”

  Munchkin the politician had dropped her hyphenated last name, “Munshara-Metzger,” at the insistence of the poll trolls. Munchkin was as sentimental as any daughter, but as pragmatic as any ex-machine gunner when traveling from point A to point B. If excess baggage jeopardized the mission, out it went. I told myself that Munchkin got elected for her smarts, hard work, and her own military record. But carrying the name of the hero who saved the human race had to have been worth a few votes.

  “It isn’t equipped with a jet.” Munchkin shook her head at the reporter, and smiled. She swiveled in her chair, toward the rotating Scorpion image. The Scorpion was flat and streamlined, a ceramic watermelon seed, tapering to a kicked-up rear boom like a scorpion tail, hence its name. It looked nothing like the image of the slightly smaller, conventionally-winged Lockheed fighter-bomber that turned with it, to show scale.

  Munchkin pointed at Scorpion’s tail boom. “The prototype mounted a jet engine in the stinger housing during testing. The jet kept it flying while its test pilot stopped and restarted the C-drive. For today’s demonstration, the stinger pod’s fitted with display pyrotechnics. Normally, the stinger pod will deploy weapons rearward, like a conventional combat aircraft deploys flares and radar chaff. Even when Scorpion’s operating in the mid-range of its performance envelope, it outruns conventional weapons like cannon rounds and missiles fired forward. It could literally shoot itself down.”

  The reporter smiled. “Faster than a speeding bullet. That’s why Superman is the test pilot, then?”

  The group laughed.

  A female reporter asked, “Are you nervous to have Captain Metzger at the controls?”

  Another reason Munchkin was in Paris was because Scorpion was going to be flown above Le Bourget by the best pilot on Earth, at least the best since his father had died saving Earth. Who happened to be Munchkin’s only child.

  Munchkin smiled again. “I’m as proud of my son as any mother.”

  Nicely sidestepped. Jude was the world to Munchkin. A son may mean more to a widow because he is all that’s left of his father, too. Of course she was nervous. As Jude’s godfather, I was nervous, too.

  The reporter waved her Stenobot for a follow-up question. “I meant nervous in light of the Captain’s mental difficulties. He tried to crash the prototype once, already.”

  Munchkin turned away from the reporter, as though she hadn’t heard the question, and her eyes found mine. Munchkin flicked me a smile, glanced at her ’Puter, then said to her audience, first in French, then in Arabic, finally in English, “We’ll have to cut this off. It’s showtime.” She pointed to her right. “At the bar, Claire has a pair of Zeiss MacroLenses for each of you, compliments of Lockheed and the United States, to help you enjoy the demonstration.”

  Munchkin wove through the crowd, hugged me, and said, “Welcome home!” selc="0Then she led me to the bar.

  Claire, who was more gratuitously pretty than my electricart driver, gifted me with a Zeiss set, in a glove leather presentation box, a glass of champagne, and earplugs. I tapped the champagne flute. Plastic. Maybe Lockheed had blown the entertainment budget on the binoculars.

  I glanced around at the champagne-lubricated arms dealers, reporters, and foreign military, then asked Munchkin, “Home. That’s what you call this carnival?”

  She shrugged. “I call this carnival good for the U.S. taxpayer, and better for the people I represent. The U.S. won’t sell C-drive technology, even to our allies, for years. But what Scorpion is about to do for Lockheed’s reputation is going to keep it exporting conventional aircraft ’til you retire.”

  I hefted the Zeiss case. “I could retire on what these cost the taxpayer.”

  She snorted. “At least our swag’s presentation- related. ChinAir’s handing out tennis bracelets set with Weichselan diamonds. Besides, if we get just one foreign fighter-bomber contract out of this party, that buys my constituents job security for a decade.”

  A live orchestra at the tent’s end, beneath a stadium-sized flatscreen, struck a fanfare. The tent’s roof canvas rolled back, exposing blue sky. It was the brightest, clearest day I had seen on Earth since before the Blitz. Of course, I’ve spent a lot of those days off Earth.

  The orchestra, and the crowd, hushed. Everybody screwed in their earplugs, craned their necks skyward, and pressed their zooty MacroLenses to their eyes, as if they were glass refraction binoculars.

  A red spark flashed in the sky, just left of the tent center pole. My lenses’ display ranged the distance to the spark as nine miles high. I zoomed on the spark and saw it was a red smoke plume, trailing behind a speck shadowed black by the sun.

  Two heartbeats later, the speck had flashed down faster than an object could fall, five thousand miles per hour according to the lenses, was one mile dead-center above me, and was still accelerating. Someone screamed, and the person alongside me gasped.

  I death gripped my lenses, and held my breath. I’m no physicist, but the Blitz had taught me plenty about kinetic energy. Scorpion was no bigger than an airliner. But if my godson suicided it into this crowd at five thousand miles per hour, the impact would obliterate Le Bourget, and wag the Eiffel Tower like a wheat stalk.

  SIXTEEN

  TWO HUNDRED FEET above the tent peak, Scorpion froze nose-down in mid-air, as silent and silky white as a toe-pointed ballet slipper.

  Whoom!

  Air displaced by Scorpion’s nine-mile dive hurricaned down on the crowd, flapping ties and scarves, as Scorpion’s sonic boom caught up with it. Earplugs or not, people winced. From somewhere beyond the tent, I heard shattered glass tinkle.

  I squeezed my unshattered plastic champagne flute and smiled. Jude wasn’t grandstandi v

  It was a risky and expensive script. Lockheed’s bill for this blockbuster opening was going to include reglazing half the windows in Northeast Paris.

  The Brit reporter whispered, “I’ve wet myself!” Then he chuckled. “Fine bloody theatre, though!”

  Two hundred feet above us, Scorpion somersaulted silently in place, tail over nose.

  The stinger pod’s smoke generator shifted from squirting red smoke to red, white, and blue. But rearranged French tricolor style, as bleu, blanc, et rouge. Then Scorpion spelled out, in smoke script, with precision so effortless that it floated back and dotted the “i”s, “Bienvenue à Paris. Welcome to Paris. Lockheed introduces the future of aerospace flight.”

  Actually, Scorpion didn’t fly, at least not in the way that Lindbergh’s aeroplane, or even a scramjet, flew. Scorpion didn’t fight Earth’s gravity by thrusting a bird-wing airfoil forward through the atmosphere to generate lift.

  Howard, who was privy to every secret dating back to the Kennedy assassinations, had clued me in about Scorpion before he VIP-jetted me to Paris. Scorpion’s C-drive was unfamiliar to this crowd, but was really no more exotic than the Cavorite drive of a Metzger-class cruiser like the Eisenhower. Scorpion was just streamlined and strengthened, so it could fly not only in vacuum, but also in atmosphere. Scorpion had to withstand getting pulled forward, or sideways, or backward, by the gravitational pull of one side of the universe, when the Cavorite it carried absorbed the gravity on the opposite side.

  Scorpion’s accelerations and decelerations within an atmospheric envelope were limited only by its airframe’s ability to endure heat generated by atmospheric friction, to absorb mechanical stress, and by the fragility of Scorpion’s cargo.

  The human cargo of the Eisenhower, by comparison, rode inside a Slug-technology gravity cocoon that we had learned to mimic, but not yet to understand. So the Ike could slingshot human cargo through black hole gravity at 120,000 miles per second, undamaged except for a few bloodshot eyeballs.

  But Scorpion compromised cocooning for lower cost, higher mobility, and manageable size, and had to fly slower as a result. Sort of Eisenhower lite. Scorpion protected a human pilot from gravity at the relatively low speeds Scorpion could endure in atmosphere without melting itself, or frying it
s pilot. Maneuvering at twenty thousand miles per hour, the shielded pilot had to endure maximum loads of “only” six gees, which were “manageable.” And once Scorpion reached space’s vacuum, it could ramp up to enormously faster speeds.

  Scorpion sped up to six hundred miles per hour, faster than an airliner, slow enough to break no more windows. Then, without slowing, it turned right-angle corners like a caroming billiard ball. It left L-shaped smoke signatures drifting across the sky, to prove its path to those spectators who couldn’t believe their eyes. Which was all of them.

  One of Lockheed’s top-of-the-line contemporary fighters joined Scorpion above the runway. The jet swooped and thundered through aerobatic paces that had drawn oohs and aahs in past years. Scorpion literally {piounw flew silent rings around the jet every step of the way. Then Scorpion shot straight up and disappeared.