Orphan's Triumph

by Robert Buettner

  He glanced at Howard, then said, “Unofficially, sir. Did Space Force grease the maggots yet?”

  I glanced at Howard, myself, then said, “Not exactly.”

  EIGHT

  RUSTY LEFT HIS EXECUTIVE OFFICER in charge of brigade training, and then he, Ord, Howard, and I reconvened our little war council back on Spook level forty-eight, huddled around a conference table in a neat and tidy compartment adjoining Howard’s office.

  I outlined the mission and my concept. It would have been unprofessional to betray my own reservations, and I don’t think I did.

  Rusty shook his head slowly and his brow wrinkled. “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Big rewards justify big risks, Rusty. How soon can you embark Ready Brigade?”

  “The preparedness standard for a Ready Brigade is wheels-up in fourteen hours, sir. Last drill we did it in twelve hours, thirty-nine minutes-”

  Ord raised his eyebrows at me and almost smiled. Wheels-up hearkened back to a time when troops deployed in fixed-wing aircraft with retractable landing gear. At the turn of the century, a crack light division like the Eighty-second Airborne would have needed sixteen hours to embark.

  I said to the brigadier, “Last time I was at the Pentagon, a Marine claimed that the Marine Ready Brigade at Camp Pendleton once went wheels-up in twelve hours flat.”

  Rusty smiled. “My command sergeant major gently suggested to the brigade after the last drill, sir, that twelve thirty-nine was a time even jarheads could beat. Ready Brigade will be embarked in eleven hours flat, if Space Force can warm up the bus that fast.”

  Ten hours later, I watched as Ready Brigade’s three thousand troops crowded the hundred-foot-wide platform of South Forty D to which the Abraham Lincoln was moored. The soldiers shuffled toward the maglev-tunnelsized aft hatch in the Abe’s flank. Gravity on Broadway, near Mousetrap’s centerline, was low enough that the Eternad-armored soldiers easily carried individual loads of personal weapons, shelter, ammunition, rations, and unit- and mission-specific equipment in back and chest packs that made them look like cartoon Santas on Christmas Eve. On Weichsel, at ninety-eight percent Earth gravity, each soldier would cut down to a combat load within minutes after disembarkation but would still be loaded like an abused burro.

  Into the Abe’s forward hatch slid the hovertanks of Ready Brigade’s armored cavalry battalion, their engines whispering at idle in the light gravity.

  I walked alongside a specialist fourth, his freckled face pale inside his open-visored helmet. He was combat-fit-they all were-but he breathed in staccato gulps. “First combat deployment, Specialist?”

  He turned to me and his eyes widened. Then he said, “Sir! I deployed with the Eighty-second to Korea after the quake, General.”

  I nodded. Human Union Space-Mobile Division Mousetrap was this century’s equivalent to the old-time gunslingers of the United States’ Eighty-second Airborne Division, a razor-edged unit light on equipment, long on mobility, and ready to move anywhere within hours, improvising on the fly if necessary, whether the mission was disaster relief or stinging the scourge of the universe on the ankle. The ’Trap Rats were mostly volunteers seconded from crack Earth units like the Eighty-second, the Légion Étrangère, and even the Ghurka Rifles, with a sprinkling of offworld talent.

  The kid asked me, “Is it true, sir? We really get to fight Slugs?”

  Howard and the Spooks weren’t going to brief the brigade until the Abe had buttoned up and cleared Mousetrap’s south doors. But the fact was that after three decades of war, indications of Slug espionage or communication interception to discover human plans remained zero. The maggots didn’t spy on us any more than we spied on the common cold virus. If we got in the Pseudocephalopod’s way, it exterminated us, or fought to its last deployed Warrior trying. If we didn’t get in its way, the Pseudo-cephalopod ignored us. I nodded to the kid.

  He pumped his fist and grinned. “Outstanding!”

  I sighed, and he shuffled on toward the Abe’s intake hatch. The bluster of esprit de corps sometimes carries troops to victory, like wind in sails. But only those who haven’t seen war are fond of it.

  All these kids were about to learn that lesson.

  NINE

  SIXTEEN HOURS OUT FROM MOUSETRAP, the whisper of my boots against ladder rungs echoed in the deserted vastness of one of the thirty-six launch bays that belted the Abraham Lincoln’s midsection. So did my rasping breath. The aft access platform perched between the launch rails, thirty feet above the launch bay deck plates, and heights terrify me.

  I reached the platform and clung to its handholds. The open-hatched ship poised above me was a Scorpion, a ninety-foot-long ceramic teardrop of a single-seat fighter and the current game changer in this war. The Slugs invented Cavorite drive, and we stole it from them fair and square. Then we adapted it not only to behemoths based on the Slugs’ own massive ships, like the Abraham Lincoln, but to the elegant gnat that was the Scorpion. Scorpions flitted and stung like no space vessel the Slugs had ever seen. That’s a poor turn of phrase, because the maggots don’t have eyes and are blind in the non-infrared spectrum. But to date, the Scorpion’s confirmed ship-to-ship kill ratio against the Slug Firewitch stood at two hundred twelve to zero. Also, a Scorpion could maneuver as easily, though more slowly, in a planet’s atmosphere as in a vacuum.

  “Mind if I join you, sir?” I clutched a railing, then looked down. Ord stood on the deck below, looking up at me, hands on hips.

  I had been reading inflections in Ord’s voice and posture for three decades, and I knew this was the time he had chosen to discuss the incident with the private on Bren. I wasn’t going to add to the unpleasantness by having the conversation thirty feet up. “I’ll come down.”

  My boots thumped the deck, and I turned and looked back up at the Scorpion’s stern, where the clamshell doors of the weapons pod stood open for loading, like the speed brakes on a conventional jet. A Scorpion in combat could hover dead still, but it could also fly faster than any rocket or bullet fired out of its front end. So Lockheed had designed it to drop “fire-and-forget” guided munitions out its back end, the way conventional jets ejected radar chaff and flares to confuse homing missiles. The Scorpion’s internal weapons bay stinger was twenty feet long.

  I pointed at it. “A squad in Eternads can pack in there. It’s gravity cocooned, like the cockpit. Ten thousand miles per hour to zero in one thousand feet. And inside the squad will feel six G, tops.”

  Ord nodded and sighed. “I remember when I saw the holonews from the Paris Air Show. Captain Metzger and the Scorpion shocked the world that day, sir.”

  So this was why Ord had sought me out here, alone in this bay. So he could segue the conversation to my godson. To avoid taking the bait, I cocked my head. “What do you think of my tactical concept, Sergeant Major?”

  He cocked his head back at me and wrinkled his forehead. “Potentially brilliant. High risk. If I may say so, sir, much like its creator.”

  Crap. There was no escaping the impending deluge. I sighed. “What’s on your mind, Sergeant Major?”

  One corner of Ord’s lip twitched up, as close to a smile of recognition as he ever came. Then it faded into a frown of concern. Ord wore concern proudly.

  “Sir, the general knows I have the highest regard for him as a soldier and as a human being.”

  Oboy. A senior NCO addressing an officer in the third person signaled an impending lecture, like a mother calling her kid by first, middle, and last names.

  Ord cleared his throat. “But your life view has worried me since Congresswoman Metzger’s death, sir.”

  Even after three years, to hear it said aloud that Munchkin was dead struck me like a slap. Munchkin and I, both orphaned by the Slug Blitz in 2036, had soldiered together as gunner and loader. We had both found and lost the great loves of our lives during the battle that followed, and I had delivered her son, my godson, in a cold cave on a moon of Jupiter. The army is a big family, but Munchkin had grown close
r to me than a sister, and her son had grown up like my own.

  I blinked, then cleared my throat. “My life view is fine, Sergeant Major.”

  Ord’s gray eyes softened. “Have you heard from Captain Metzger, sir?”

  I shrugged. “Since the embargo, nothing but propaganda gets out of Tressel. I read one that says he’s the air vice marshall.” Meaning no, my godson hadn’t contacted me since his mother’s death. Not so much as a happy-birthday holo chip.

  “He must be quite busy, sir. The aircraft test ranges are remote. Perhaps he’s been out of touch.”

  I snorted. “He must be out of touch if he’s still working for those Nazis.”

  Tressel’s civilization had evolved from slaves kidnapped from Earth by the Slugs to mine Cavorite thirty thousand years ago. Tressel resembled Earth, but stunted back in the mid-Paleozoic, and Tressel’s humans lagged Earth technologically by a hundred fifty years. Socially, they could have passed for Germany in the last-century thirties.

  The Slugs’ Tressel mines had played out thirty thousand years ago, and Tressel didn’t have anything else we wanted. Therefore, Earth’s politicians could afford to be shocked-shocked!-at Tressen human-rights abuses, so they embargoed trade with Tressel.

  Tressel remained a member of the union, and so an ally, “in the event of a clear and present threat from a common enemy,” meaning if the Slugs came back.

  Ord said, “Sir, I think Jude’s loyalty is to General Planck, not to the party. Neither of them are Nazis. And I don’t think Jude…”

  I cocked my head. “Blames me for his mother’s death?”

  “Sir, he knows you literally gave your right arm attempting to save her.”

  I flexed my organic prosthetic. Guaranteed by the surgeon general to be better than original equipment or Uncle Sam gets his money back, and I get my stump back. “Then why are we having this discussion?”

  “Sir, I think you blame you for her death.”

  “I spent six months in the special-needs ward at New Bethesda listening to shrinks tell me not to blame myself, Sergeant Major. I’m past it.”

  Ord opened his mouth, then closed it, then said, “As you say, General.”

  I walked beneath the Scorpion’s open stinger and squinted up into its shadowed interior. “You think we can anchor fast ropes to those weapons racks?”

  “A mountaineering team’s already working up a fast-rope descent technique in Bay Nine, sir.” He paused. “Sir, how is Admiral Ozawa? If I may ask.”

  I sighed. Ord wasn’t going to let go of my personal problems. Mimi Ozawa and I had met early in the war, and it had taken us only about twenty years to figure out that we had the hots for each other as badly as a het couple our age can. Fortunes of war being what they were, by the time we figured it out, we were constantly light-years apart.

  I awaited eagerly the hard-copy letters Mimi wrote daily, which arrived in bunches aboard each jumped cruiser. I awaited even more eagerly the holos she sent. I will note that because these passed from a space force admiral to a general, they were uncensored. Beyond that, use your imagination.

  “You may ask, Sergeant Major. She’s chafing at a dirtside assignment.” Mimi was a fighter jock kicked upstairs to command cruisers, and she was generally regarded as the best-excepting only my godson-driver in the Human Union of any flying object in the human inventory. She was also too smart, too uniquely knowledgeable, and had hogged too many years of the shipboard command time that flag officers coveted. So Space Force had rotated her to Earth ten months before to serve as the first commandant of the Human Union Military Academy. I hadn’t seen Mimi live for three years, and Ord’s question made me ache.

  “If I may say so, Admiral Ozawa is a fine officer and an even better woman, sir.”

  “No argument.” We walked from the launch bay, our steps echoing in the vastness. “If I did have a problem, which I don’t, Mimi would be part of the solution, wouldn’t she?”

  “Yes, sir. But an unmatured relationship may be a source of anxiety, rather than a source of strength.”

  I stopped, then turned to face Ord. If Ord weren’t as much surrogate father to me as my command sergeant major, I would have told him he was getting into areas that were none of a subordinate’s business. The potential trouble with my relationship with Mimi was the trouble with most service personnel’s relationships. Contact was so infrequent that the person you left behind had grown into someone else by the time you returned to them. And so had you.

  At best, the anxieties caused a tense blind date after every separation. At worst, one or the other of you couldn’t stand the new person, or the stress of reacquaintance, or both, and the relationship crumbled.

  “Sergeant Major, Admiral Ozawa and I aren’t close enough for me to be anxious.” Actually, I pined for Mimi every moment that I wasn’t preoccupied by my job. But those idle moments were few, and Ord, by his nod, knew it.

  We stepped out into the companionway, headed for a preliminary briefing. A couple of swabbies painting bulkheads straightened as we passed, and the extra sets of ears ended the discussion, for the time being.

  One day later the Abe stood poised to jump through the Temporal Fabric Insertion Point that would pop us out three days of starship travel away from Weichsel.

  In Launch Bay Fourteen, I stood alongside Ord, both of us armored up in the uniform of the day. We watched as Howard Hibble, nine of his Spooks, and a loadmaster who would handle their disembarkation on Weichsel stood in line on a makeshift steel-lattice access ramp that led into the poised Scorpion’s wide-open stinger pod.

  The Spooks, who were flabby or pencil-skinny in street clothes, lurched up the ramp looking like albino gorillas in Eternad winter-camo armor. Unlike the armored grunts now loading in the other bays, each Spook carried a fraction of an infantry soldier’s basic load, just a sidearm and a mission-specific gear pack no bigger than a turn-of-the-century laptop bag.

  Ord frowned. “I wish we weren’t going in meteorologically blind, sir.”

  Ord always found something to frown about. It’s in a sergeant major’s genes. But I agreed with him. Weichsel was at the moment light-years away, across an impenetrable black hole. Even after we popped out, we would be committed to landing with little idea of current and impending weather conditions at our landing zone.

  Weather is a greater peril for an attacker than a defender even in the best of circumstances. Weichsel was not the best of circumstances. It looked like Earth in winter, but the planet was prone to hurricane-force blizzards. Worse, the storms arose suddenly from nothing. Or at least nothing the weather weenies could identify in advance.

  I shrugged. “Calculated risk.” Well, actually, my exometeorology officer had thrown up his hands and said the risk was incalculable. He did note that the first two Earth survey parties to land on Weichsel had perished in flash blizzards.

  Ord’s finger bobbed as he counted Spooks. Then he flipped down his visor, checked his display, and frowned. “Odd. The intel landing party’s one body short.”

  I said, “So it is.”

  Ord swiveled his head toward me, jaw slack.

  TEN

  ORD STARED AT ME as hydraulics hissed the upper ladder scaffold away from the Scorpion. “Sir, you aren’t thinking of landing with the assault troops?”

  “As a consultant. A resource. Not in the chain of command. The last thing the company commanders on the ground need is brass looking over their shoulders. That’s why I’m not on the manifest.”

  Ord’s mouth formed an “O” as his back straightened an additional half inch. “A theater commander in the first wave of a two-company raiding party? You could get killed! Sir. It’s completely…”

  Reckless. Immature. And so on. But history recorded that Churchill, one of Ord’s favorite quote sources, tried to hitch a ride on a landing craft on D-day. Churchill got talked out of it at the last minute, but my situation wasn’t comparable, because Churchill was a civilian, and also he had nothing to add to the battle.
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  “Sergeant Major, I was the first modern human being to see a Slug alive. Colonel Hibble and I are the only people left alive who’ve been inside a working Troll incubator ship. This is a hasty operation, with the war at stake.

  This plan, more than most, won’t survive contact with the enemy. Improvisation, based on intuitive knowledge of the Slugs, may decide the result. No human in this galaxy has fought more Slugs in more venues than I have. If I didn’t apply my specialized expertise on the ground, where it could do some good, I’d fire myself.” My chest puffed a bit. I doubt that Churchill made as good a speech when he argued his case.

  Ord chewed his lip. Real-time battlefield communication had made leading from the front obsolete since Rommel, and we both knew it.

  I pointed at the Spooks as they gawked and dawdled. “If Rusty’s two best infantry companies can protect that bunch until the cav lands, they can sure protect me.”

  Ord crossed his arms, frowned, but nodded. “I want the general to know that I question the true rationale behind his decision.”

  “But it is my decision?” Generals don’t need to persuade sergeants. Maybe I was really persuading myself.

  “Indubitably, sir.”

  I nodded and harrumphed.

  “Then may I accompany the general?”

  “No. There isn’t room, and you’re too valuable here.” Both reasons were more or less true.

  I locked down my visor, then stepped toward the loading ramp.

  “General?” Ord’s voice crackled in my earpiece.

  I turned back toward him as he saluted. “Keep the maggots off your ass, sir.”

  I returned his salute and smiled through my visor. “Always, Sergeant Major. This one should be easy.”

  ELEVEN

  FOUR MINUTES LATER, I stood tail-end-Charlie on the ramp behind the Spooks as a medic plugged in to the meds catheter on each man’s armored thigh, then handed the troop off to the loadmaster to be fitted into the Scorpion’s weapons bay like a breathing log with Plasteel bark.