Jude swung onto the scaffold that led to the transport’s open belly hatch, with the athletic grace his father had displayed. “So Mom tells me. About twice every month.”
I followed him through the hatch. “Sorry.”
On the way forward, Jude paused in the dim troop bay, hands on hips, and sighed. “No. Jason, I’m sorry. I’ve always liked the stories. You’re my window to my father.” He stared down at the deckplates. “It’s not that I don’t care about that. I don’t care about anything.”
I laid a hand on his shoulder. “So let’s talk about all the things you don’t care about.”
He shrugged it off. “I didn’t need this so-called therapeutic scene change. I didn’t try to crash the prototype. That was bullshit.”
“I never believed you did. And if the shrinks really thought you did, you would never have gotten near the prototype again.”
He shrugged. “I don’t have to. Test cycle’s done. Now any decent pilot can fly Scorpion.”
We walked ahead, to the troop transport’s flight deck, and looked through the windscreen. “You miss flying? Did you climb into this tub because you want to fly us down to Tressel when we get there?”
He shook his head. “Just browsing. I’m not rated to fly these cattle cars. I’ll be as much a passenger as you will.” He leaned forward and pointed through the windscreen, up and out. The troop transport was loaded back-to-back with a sleeker fighter, in a two-slot scaffold that could be rotated, so either slot could engage with the exterior lock that opened to space.
Jude said, “I can fly a Starfire if we need one. But you need me here playing diplomat? That’s bullshit, too.”
I said, “We may need pilots more than diplomats.”
Starships were grandly called cruisers, but were interplanetary boxcars, too. They had to be. Building and operating one cruiser absorbed more resources than a turn-of-the-century U.S. aircraft carrier battle group, with its cruisers, destroyers, subs, aircraft, and support ships.
So a Metzger-class or Bastogne-class cruiser could stand off and launch munitions ship-to-ship, or ship-to-surface, like a wet navy cruiser or battleship. A cruiser could also embark an infantry division, with its equipment, and thirty-six transports to drop it all onto a planet’s surface, the way a wet navy troopship sent troops ashore in landing craft. And cruisers hauled everything else that moved among planets, from Cavorite to diamond miners.
Mostly, though, a cruiser was to war in space what an aircraft carrier was to wet navy war. It projected power via thirty-six Starfire fighter bombers, capable of defending Kabul in space, attacking other ships, and bombing targets on a planet’s surface, by descending into at least the upper reaches of the atmosphere.
The trouble, if the Slugs were coming back, was that a cruiser was one basket holding too many eggs. After the Blitz, the Slug Armada had destroyed Hope’s sister ship, Excalibur, and all save one of Excalibur’s rudimentary fighter aircraft, in an hour.
I leaned forward, so I could stare at the stub-winged, chemical-fueled Starfire across from us. It wasn’t much advanced from the crates that the Slugs had swept aside to get at Excalibur. I compared the Starfire to my mental picture of the pearlescent watermelon seed that had flashed above Le Bourget. With Scorpion, we would stand a chance. “What will it take to refit the revolvers to launch Scorpions?”
He shrugged. “Scorpion was designed from day one to fit a B-class hangar deck revolver. But it’s a bullshit question.”
“Is everything bullshit with you?”
He sighed. “No. Seriously. As of today there’s exactly one Scorpion. It only got built because Howard’s Spooks buried the prototype program. Mom’s Congressional buddies will never scare up appropriations for more.”
“Scaring may be no problem.” I gestured at the pilot’s seat, while I sank into the co-pilot’s seat. “Sit down, and let me tell you where we’re going and why.”
After I briefed him in, we sat in the parked troop transport for another hour, just talking. Like, the shrinks would have said, a father and son. Jude started spending less time in his bunk, and more time with us in the wardroom.
The next time we boarded the troop transport was five pony jumps later, when its crew delivered Howard, Ord, Jude, and me from orbit to Tressel’s surface. The crew reconfigured the cattle car rear compartment to VIP four-across seating, to make our entrance a bit grander. Kabul, which would have made a grand entrance indeed, would remain in orbit.
Kabul, like all cruisers, was assembled in zero gravity, in Earth or lunar orbit. Cruisers were designed to live and, eventually, die, in weightless vacuum, never leaving space. So cruisers were built with the structural strength of Dixie cups, and aerodynamics to match.
B-class cruisers like Kabul, because they manipulated gravity, weren’t confined to space by their lack of aerodynamics. They could theoretically sink gently and majestically down through the atmosphere, and land on a planet’s surface, like a bigger, fireproof version of the Hindenburg.
But a cruiser costs more than the gross domestic product of Peru. Therefore, the starship designers didn’t really want to test whether something as big and complex as a B-class was strong enough to sit on the ground without collapsing under its own weight like a wet Dixie cup.
However, our arrival on Tressel resembled the Hindenburg’s anyway.
TWENTY
JUDE, who was our only stranger to Tressel, sat in the window seat beside me, peering down as our transport overflew the Tressen capital at forty thousand feet, then banked and descended.
Jude blinked and turned away from the window. “That’s really how we’re getting landing instructions?”
Mankind could n–m tow navigate light years across the stars, but when it came to navigating the last few miles down from orbit to an Outworld’s surface, Alaskan bush piloting was more sophisticated.
Tressel had no aircraft, and so no runways, so we were to land in an unimproved field somewhere outside the city. That was no problem. Transports are built tough. But the only radios on Tressel were the two that Earth’s consulates used to talk to one another, and to send signals out toward loitering drone receivers, for relay home. Diplomats make lousy air traffic controllers. Therefore, our pilots were being guided down by morse-style messages flashed by a Tressen heliograph, a hinged mirror on a tripod, operated by a Tressen Signals officer.
Howard leaned across the aisle and touched Jude’s arm. “Lack of necessity is the mother of non-invention.”
Jude wrinkled his forehead.
After decades with Howard, I spoke fluent Hibble. He meant that Tressel’s continental interiors, like what we were now overflying, differed from its coastal swamps. The young ground was mostly bald rock, flatter than Kansas and dryer than Chad. Grasses, which would break rock into soil, and real trees, which would block men from seeing out to the horizon, lay millions of years in Tressel’s future.
Inland from the Barrens’ swamps, line-of-sight communication worked fine on most days, and over long distances. In this world on which Tressen and Iridian civilization developed, men communicated better by heliograph than Teddy Roosevelt had been able to communicate by telegraph. What Howard meant was that Tressel probably had people smart enough to invent the wireless, it just had no people with a burning need to invent it.
Ord, seated next to Howard, watched out his window through old-fashioned field glasses, and frowned. “We’re receiving flash from two locations, two miles apart.”
The pilot intercommed us from the flight deck. “Sirs, are there two LZs?”
Ord said, “Flash ’em back with your landing lights. Ask what’s up.”
The intercom said, “Sergeant Major, tactical aircraft haven’t mounted landing lights since before the Blitz. We can listen, but we can’t talk back.”
Combat aircraft didn’t advertise, when their pilots could see by ambient starlight like it was noon. I suppose there was a flashlight clipped to a bulkhead, somewhere.
I said, “Can yo
u make a pass low enough to see what’s going on?”
“Roger.”
Two heartbeats later my stomach tried to crawl up to my tonsils as my seat tried to drop out from under me, and my lap pressed up against my lap belt. “Crap.”
Jude grinned at me. “He’s hardly even diving. Barely tactical.”
I death gripped my seat arm. “I’ve ridden plenty of tactical. That doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
We swooped low and slow, five hundred feet above the first of the two signal points, a rock clump. I leaned across Jude and looked down.
As I watched, a forest of lights popped and twinkled below us among the rocks.
“Christ!” The pilot’s voice exploded over the intercom, and suddenly I was looking down but seeing the sky.
The transport’s airframe screamed as the pilot cranked it into a tactical, evasive barrel roll. Something thumped behind us, and the engines coughed. The pilot said, in a voice as flat as Death Valley, “Hang on. Somebody just shot us down.”
TWENTY-ONE
IT DOESN’T TAKE long to fall five hundred feet, but it feels like forever.
I splayed my arm across Jude’s chest to restrain him, probably the most futile gesture in parenting but among the most frequent.
The pilot kept us level, and did whatever pilots do to cut our speed, which I imagine is more difficult upside down. The transport’s roof thundered as we skipped across Tressel’s rocky surface at two hundred miles per hour, screeching like the world’s worst adjusted brakes.
The Tressen high desert looks flat from forty thousand feet, but after a mere thousand yards the transport’s nose caught a boulder and we cartwheeled, throwing off sparking metal bits and pieces like a Mardi Gras float.
Somewhere, Howard said, “Holy moly.”
TWENTY-TWO
I SMELLED HOT METAL, and I tasted blood, trickling from my chin into my mouth, which seemed wrong.
I looked up, and saw black rock above my head, bulging through a rent in the transport’s dorsal plates. I hung upside down, seatbelted into place in the inverted wreck.
Ord said, “Sir?” Then I felt him sawing at the belt with a jagged hull spar, and I dropped shoulder first onto the ceiling. Jude knelt there, wrapping a bandage around Howard’s arm.
Ord peered at my chin, then wiped away blood and dressed the cut. “Scratch.”
A knot swelled above his right eye.
My neck was stiff, so I rotated my body toward the flight deck as I asked Ord, “The pilots?”
He shook his head.
I smelled the kerosene stink of RP9, and stiffened. “We have to get out—”
“Yes, sir. But you’ve been unconscious for six minutes. If the fuel was going to go up, it probably would have happened before now.”
The fuselage gaped where the right wing had torn free, and the four of us scrambled out into daylight.
Three Tressen Army lorries chugged toward us, lurching over the desert pavement at twenty miles per hour. Tressen motor vehicles were Model-T boxy, and their internal combustion engines pocketa-pocked along on biofuel that was distžaveilled from algae scraped off rocks and seemed to burn barely hot enough to boil water. But a goggled machine gunner waist-deep in the roof hatch of each truck trained his gun in our direction as they approached.
Jude asked, “Are those the bad guys?”
The first truck was a hundred yards from us when its gunner opened fire.
“Crap!” I turned to fling Jude to the ground, but he tackled me first.
I lay facedown on hot rock and realized that ricochets weren’t sparking all around us. I looked behind us. Two more trucks, these unmarked, and half-again as far from us as the Tressen Army lorries, raced toward us, armed men hanging off the running boards, firing rifles at the Tressens. The Tressen machine gunners were firing back, and their rounds were buzzing ten feet above our heads.
I shouted to Jude over the gunfire, “We slid a mile from where those guys behind us shot us down. We wound up closer to these good guys than those bad guys.”
The two unmarked lorries burst into flame under fire, two hundred yards from us.
The troops in the Army lorries cheered as they squealed to a stop beside us.
A Tressen major wearing Signals collar brass dismounted, ran to me, and saluted. “General Wander. Sir, are you alright?”
I tried to shake my head, but had to swivel my shoulders. “Our pilots—drivers—dead.”
The major’s face fell and he muttered, “Bastards!”
I asked him, “What the hell happened?”
“We were to mark your landing place. By the time we saw them, it was too late.”
“What was their problem with us?”
“You sided with Tressen. They were Iridian separatists.”
“Iridia was already separate when I left here, at the Armistice.”
“General Planck said you’d be surprised. He extends his welcome.” The officer winced. “Such as it is.”
Jude limped to the wreck, hefted a twisted, loose strut, and began to pry blackened ultratanium skin back from the flight deck, to recover the bodies of his fellow pilots. He called to the soldiers in the lorries, his translator restating his words in idiomatic Tressen, “Little help, here?”
I turned, stared at the black smoke roiling into the clear sky as the separatists’ trucks burned, and sighed. It was going to take more than a little help to sort out this mess. Winning the war on Tressel had been easy. Winning the peace appeared to be a bitch.
TWENTY-THREE
THE SMOKE PLUMES and gunfire must’ve alerted the good citizens of Tressia of our arrival, but when our convoy of trucks and ambulances rumbled through the capital’s suburban villages, no heads showed in the wind®d cows, no kids ran out to dash alongside the trucks and beg the GIs for sweets.
I rode in the cab of the second lorry in line, alongside the Signals Major, and said, “Your truck’s not taking point. There’s a reason for that. Convoys get ambushed?”
He shrugged. “Out here in the villages, pretty safe. Once we get inside the old city’s walls, where the streets are narrow, one in three take fire.”
“Got a spare rifle?”
He reached behind our seatback, and tugged out a Tressen bolt action that looked like a 1903 Springfield, but with a stock the color and texture of potato skin where the hardwood should have been. He also fished out a helmet for me. He said, “I told the other drivers to give the other members of your party helmets, as well. If the separatists explode a building onto us, though, neither the helmet nor the rifle will help much.”
Just drop in on Planck, Jason. Chat him up to run for office, Jason. Take your godson along for the ride. Piece of cake, Jason. I swore under my breath.
In the event, we made it to the Human Union Consulate without incident. By without incident, I don’t just mean we didn’t get blown up. I mean not a soul risked looking out their window to watch us drive by. Maybe the separatists didn’t blow down a building on us because they couldn’t find one close to us within the old city that hadn’t been reduced to a brick heap already.
The Human Union Consulate had been a bank, by the sign carved into its stone façade. It rose three stories, behind an iron fence twelve feet tall and a dead, brown front garden as deep and wide as a three-car garage. Tressen privates in dress uniforms strode the street in front of the fence gate, with their rifles carried across their bodies at port arms, while their heads swiveled to investigate every flicker of movement or sound.
Behind the gate, flanking the old bank’s heavy door, two contract guys in last-year’s model Eternad armor, carrying law enforcement rapid fires, stood guard.
I swore again, because my armor was two hundred miles above me, ghosting past every fifty-eight minutes, snug and polished, in Kabul’s armory. The diplomats had recommended we land in civvies, so as not to, heaven forbid, scare the citizens.
I thanked the Signals major for the lift, and as the convoy pulled out, he saluted me
. I returned it, and called to him, “See you around.”
As I stepped through the Consulate door, an explosion a block away shook the building hard enough to shake rock dust out of the ceiling.
I never saw that major around.
But inside the Consulate I did see somebody I knew.
TWENTY-FOUR
AUD PLANCK DIDN’T smile when he saw us. He wore Tressen gray Class-A uniform, with a high-collared jacket and black-striped uniform trousers. Aud eyed my bandaged chin, and shook his head. “I’m sorry, my friend. We plan. The separatists counterplan. But as your Moltke wrote, ‘no plan survives¶ous contact with the enemy.’ ”
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