Orphan's Triumph

by Robert Buettner

  We sat in Howard’s office.

  I scowled at him. “From the armada around this place, I gather the final push is cranking up. You could have told me.”

  “You don’t have a clearance since this retirement business.”

  I rolled my eyes. “That was just a paper game to shock the Duck. I’m going up to AOPD and unretire as soon as we’re done here. When do we jump off?”

  Howard crossed his arms.

  “Howard. This is me.”

  He sighed. “Weaponization of the stones we brought back should take a month. The Tehran will refit in the meantime. The rest of the fleet’s been on alert for two months.”

  I nodded. “Good. I can use the rest.”

  Howard shrugged.

  I pointed at the deck beneath us, beyond which, out in the space of the Mousetrap, the great human fleet drifted. “Howard, when that fleet leaves, I leave with it. I will see the end of this war.”

  My next stop was on level twenty-nine, where the adjutant general’s office operated a branch of the Army Officer Personnel Directorate. The branch consisted of a compartment the size of a gang shower, occupied by one overweight, overworked, pug-nosed second lieutenant who was sufficiently junior that she was saddled with all administrative matters for the post.

  I sat in front of her desk, leaning forward in my chair.

  She ran her finger across a line on a flatscreen, then nodded. “Yes, Mr. Wander. Your paperwork came through from the Human Union Consulate on Tressel and was processed. Your initial pension check was direct deposited on the first, just before we locked down.”

  “It’s General Wander. I want to unretire. It was a mistake.”

  “It’s not that easy.”

  “What I mean is I just needed some time off to attend to something I couldn’t accomplish as an army officer.”

  She shook her head. “That’s not what your file says.”

  I squirmed. “I know what I intended.”

  “If you intended to abandon your post in the field during wartime, you intended to desert. Says here the judge advocate general’s office declined to prosecute only because Consul Muscovy included his sworn affidavit with your papers. The consul swore that he forced you to retire to avoid an interplanetary incident detrimental to diplomatic relations with the government of Tressen. You’re lucky you kept your pension.”

  “What do I have to do to unretire?”

  She cocked her head. “You’re too old to enlist again.” Then she brightened. “File a two-oh-two stroke seven. You might be reinstated at a reduced rank.”

  I exhaled and closed my eyes. “Yes! Print me one.”

  She shrugged again. “Sure. But it’s gotta be approved in Washington. And we’re on indefinite lockdown, so it can’t be transmitted off Mousetrap.”

  I leaned forward with my elbows on the desk. “What am I in the meantime?”

  She sighed, and swiveled her chair to face a different screen. “A ward of the Veterans Administration, Mr. Wander.”

  I stood, planted my fists on her desk, and leaned forward. “I’ve been in this war from the beginning. I’m going to be in it at the end. Even as a spectator. Can you get me on a ship? Any ship. As a dishwasher or something?”

  “Ships are classified areas. You aren’t cleared to enter a classified area. You can’t get cleared because-”

  I exhaled so my lips flapped and made a motorboat noise. “Clearances have to be approved through Washington, but we’re on indefinite lockdown.”

  She smiled. “I knew you’d understand. But as a retiree lawfully on a military post, you can access all unclassified areas.”

  “Being?”

  She rolled her eyes to the compartment ceiling and ticked off on her fingers. “This office. The post office. Bachelor Officers’ Quarters-you’re entitled to lodging there on a space-available basis. You have Officers’ Mess privileges. You can make purchases at the post exchange, including the package store if you’re of age.”

  “What can I do besides sleep, eat, shop, and buy booze?”

  “There’s the Mousetrap Library.”

  “Is it any good?”

  “It will be when I get time to start it.” She shrugged for the last time as she snatched a paper file off a stack. “Oh. And you can use the Officers’ Club.”

  I smiled. “Perfect!”

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  TWO HOURS AFTER I LEFT AOPD, I stepped through the hatch into Mousetrap’s consolidated Officers’ Club, with a brown paper bag under one arm. Mousetrap’s O Club served all branches of the Human Union Forces, which looked suspiciously like the U.S. Army and the U.S. Space Force, with a sprinkling of Brits of all stripes, Euros, Asians, Afros, and Outworlders.

  The O Club’s decor was early Neon Beer Sign, with a pool table and bowls of plausibly nonhydroponic cocktail peanuts on the tables, and the place was half-full of the swabbies who had flooded Mousetrap like a tsunami.

  My quarry, alone at a table with a neat whiskey and a paperbook history of the Boston Red Sox, looked up and smiled. “Jason!”

  He waved me over, and I sat.

  He pointed at the bag I held. “Whazzat?”

  “A congratulations present on the occasion of your new command, Eddie. And I owe you for Tressel.”

  “Nothing happened on Tressel.”

  “Of course not.” If there was a rule bender to be found on Mousetrap, it was Eddie Duffy.

  Eddie’s cheeks glowed redder than usual. “The Abraham Lincoln’s a great ship. But I’ll miss the Tehran .” Then he frowned. “Not as much as I suppose you miss things. I heard about the retirement.”

  I shrugged. “I miss not getting a ticket to the finale. I’ve earned my seat. I don’t miss the responsibility. I just want to see it, not be it.”

  “After what you’ve been through, I don’t blame you. If there was anything I could do…” He reached across the table, tugged at my brown paper bag, then raised his eyebrows and smiled. “Hewitt’s! How did you know?”

  “We killed the last bottle I bought you six years ago.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “You needed a favor then.”

  I stiffened and widened my eyes. “Surely you don’t think I-”

  “As long as it’s a small one.”

  I held my hand up between us, with the thumb and fore-finger so close together that a cocktail peanut wouldn’t fit between them. “Tiny.”

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  SIX WEEKS LATER, Eddie and I were still together, chasing a six-legged mechanical cockroach through intragalactic space, or at least through that part of space that hurtled along just forward of the Abraham Lincoln’s Bulkhead One Twenty.

  Whenever we had shipped together in the past, as admiral and embarked-division commander, Eddie Duffy and I jogged together every day. On this voyage, as admiral and his stowaway, we continued the routine because Eddie was my shipboard protector, because we were friends, and because we were the only people on this ship who either of us could keep up with.

  “Gimmee a minute.” Eddie raised his palm, panting in silence broken only by the metallic skitter of Jeeb’s six legs against the deck plates.

  The Abraham Lincoln was deserted from forward of Bulkhead One Twenty on forward to Bulkhead Ninety. Normally, Bulkhead Ninety back to Bulkhead One Twenty was overcrowded with the infantry division that a cruiser packed, in addition to the cruiser’s Space Force crew of twenty-two hundred.

  But the people back on Earth like my former boss General Pinchon had invited no infantry to the party that would, they were sure, win the Pseudocephalopod War.

  Just aft of Bulkhead One Twenty the launch bays made a belt around the ship.

  As a stowaway, albeit one vouched for by the skipper if anyone asked, I stayed between Bulkhead Ninety and Bulkhead One Twenty, except for meals. I puttered with equipment leftovers in the infantry armory, wrote letters to Mimi and to Jude, which weren’t going to be delivered for a long while, and played with Jeeb by the hour.

  Unlike Mousetrap, t
he Abraham Lincoln had an excellent library. Eddie had routed me through his own ’Puter via the ship’s net, so I could read from my stateroom and, for that matter, see what he and the ship were up to, without showing myself forward of Ninety.

  Each launch bay had a drinking fountain, and we stepped through the hatch into Bay One. So early in this mission, most of the flight deck’s thirty-six bays were as deserted as the infantry billets. Months from now, as we neared the Pseudocephalopod homeworld jump, the flight deck would bustle. But today, flight deck personnel tended the three Early Bird Scorpion interceptors, which every cruiser kept on alert 24-7, on the other side of the ship, and the very special Scorpion in Bay One.

  While Eddie rehydrated like a beached hippo, I stared at the Scorpion locked on to Bay One’s launch rails. Its canopy was raised, and a bay crew member helped one alert pilot out after his watch so another could strap in.

  I stood, puffing, hands on hips. “On that oversized watermelon seed ride the hopes of mankind, Eddie.”

  Dripping sweat and bent forward hands on knees, he shook his head. “Not all of them.”

  The Silver Bullet munition that Howard’s Spooks had fabricated essentially worked like a bundle of last-century MIRV warheads, the biggest cluster bomb in history. Bigger bombs split into smaller bombs and so on down to spherules smaller than sand grains. The grains would rain down evenly spaced Cavorite over an entire planet, in a pattern so uniform that it would kill a maggot that had the mass of the Eurasian Crustal Plate. That’s how big Howard’s Spooks had calculated that the Pseudocephalopod was, give or take Scandinavia.

  The Scorpion was kept on alert even now, months away from the fleet’s objective, not so that it could attack or defend anything. The cruisers and clouds of Scorpions screening us took care of that. The Scorpion was on alert in case mechanical failure, mutiny, appearance of marauding gypsies, or anything else threatened the Scorpion’s mothership. If anything like that happened, the Scorpion could move to another cruiser. The Space Force and the Spooks had thought of everything.

  The Spooks had even made two Silver Bullets, just in case. Half of the Tressel Cavorite we had worked so hard to get made this bomb. The other half was in a bomb in a Scorpion aboard the George Washington, with Howard babysitting.

  I had picked up lots by eavesdropping on Eddie’s ’Puter. Still, I scratched my head. Stowaways don’t get briefed. “Eddie, the Abraham Lincoln and the George Washington are old designs. Why are the old warhorses carrying the heavy freight?”

  He stood, rapped against a hull girder, and the sound of his knuckles echoed in the vast bay. “The newer cruisers can’t take a punch like these old girls. The rest of the fleet’s here strictly to keep the maggots off us, so we can deliver the two Scorpions to the last jump.”

  The human race had put all its eggs into two sturdy baskets, then told the mightiest fleet in human history to watch those baskets. I didn’t have a better idea, and if I did, nobody cared what a retired general thought. “Eddie, you really think we’re gonna have to fight our way in to the last jump?”

  He shrugged. “We planned for a fight. But we hope to be pleasantly surprised.”

  We stepped back through the hatch and resumed our daily torture. I grimaced not so much from the exercise as from my concern that the maggots’ surprises were seldom pleasant.

  SIXTY-NINE

  TWENTY-FIVE JUMPS, and more daily jogs than I cared to remember, later, I floated weightless in the deserted observation blister on Abraham Lincoln’s prow. Spangled blackness glided around me as the ship rotated. Dead ahead beckoned the lightless disk of the next, and presumed last, insertion point, its gravity already accelerating us forward. Invisible over my shoulder, and all around us, the fleet surrounded this ship, dispersed over spans longer than the distance between Earth and the moon.

  Jeeb perched on the blister’s handrail alongside me, and one of his legs squeaked loud enough in the stillness that I winced. He stared up at me with polished optics, and I tasked him. “Accelerate left third locomotor replacement.”

  In response, his internals clicked, so faintly that only I would notice, as he reprogrammed.

  I rested one hand on the rail beside Jeeb, and my replaced arm throbbed. By now, Jeeb and I each resembled George Washington’s hatchet. One hundred percent original equipment, except for six new handles and four new heads.

  But Jeeb, for all the humanity I saw in him, was so immortal that he could survive a near-miss nuke, and he was selfless in the way that only machinery can be. We humans were all too mortal and all too selfish. And that, my life had taught me, was the essence of being us. We understood our mortality, yet we sacrificed everything for others, the way Jude’s father and then his mother had, the way Audace Planck had, the way Bassin was prepared to, and the way countless others had over the course of this war.

  Sometimes the calculus of sacrifice was simple, one life for six thousand, or for all mankind. Sometimes the calculus was one arm for nothing explicable. I feared that only more sacrifice would win this longest and broadest of wars for us. I believed that we would overcome the Pseudocephalopod because, in our best moments, we overcome our selfishness.

  From the speaker in the handrail, the bosun’s whistle lilted. I grumbled because it never stopped calling me. I sighed, then somersaulted, and floated aft, in the direction from which I came. “Let’s go, Jeeb. We’re not done yet.”

  Jeeb and I drifted, then walked, back to infantry territory. As I stepped through the Bulkhead Ninety hatch, it slammed me in the back like a bulldozer.

  SEVENTY

  DEPRESSURIZATION KLAXONS HOOTED. I shook my head to clear it. Behind my back, the hatch locked down, separating Bulkhead Ninety and aft from areas forward. Had I been in the hatch, instead of through it, it would have snipped me in two like a salami.

  I was still breathing, so the problem had to be with the deck forward, not with where I was. I swiveled around, then laid my cheek against the hatch. That way, I could peer through the eye-level quartzite peephole in the hatch to see what was wrong on the other side, between Bulkhead Ninety and Bulkhead Eighty-nine.

  I swore and wiped the peephole, but it was black. Something on the other side had smeared the peephole so I couldn’t see through it.

  I blinked, then squinted through again. Little points of light swam in the blackness, and something the size and shape of an old beer can with its top peeled back tumbled, weightless.

  I blinked, then squinted again. “Crap.”

  The Abraham Lincoln forward of Bulkhead Ninety rolled slowly in space, a mile away and drifting farther from me by the second.

  “Crap, crap, crap.” I ran to my cabin and punched up my wireless library patch to Eddie Duffy’s computer. “Eddie?”

  Silence.

  “Goddamit, is anybody left up front?”

  “Jason? Where are you?” Eddie!

  “In my cabin. What the hell happened?”

  “Dunno. Viper, maybe.”

  I swore. As little as we understood about Slug tools and motives, we understood the Viper least of all. The Spooks figured that Vipers were dense lumps of Cavorite-powered matter, maybe no bigger than refrigerators, that the Slugs left loitering in space near things they thought were important, like mines afloat in vacuum. Vipers were triggered by sensors that looked like Slug-metal footballs that also were sprinkled around strategic points, like electronic trip wires. When a football sensed something it was programmed to dislike, the Viper accelerated to a speed in excess of.66 C, being two-thirds the speed of light, homed on the little football sensor, then smashed the living crap out of whatever the football had detected.

  Kinetic energy is a product of velocity and mass, so a single refrigerator-sized Viper can put a hole in central Florida bigger than Cape Canaveral. In fact, one had, and I still bore the physical and mental scars.

  “Then why are we still here, Eddie?”

  During the First Battle of Mousetrap’s opening moments, a Viper had smashed headlong int
o the Nimitz and vaporized it.

  “The Viper took us abeam, not head-on. Sliced us clean. I dunno how many we lost. Gotta go.”

  The Slugs hadn’t figured out what cheap human gangsters had figured out centuries ago. A high-velocity bullet may pass through a body wreaking less havoc than a fat bullet, or than a bullet that fragments. So, I was alive, albeit a castaway, because the Slugs weren’t diabolical enough to invent the dum-dum bullet.

  An hour later, while Eddie Duffy tended to the catastrophe that afflicted his crew of over two thousand, most of whom had been forward of Ninety when the Viper split the Abraham Lincoln, I inspected the life raft upon which I had been cast adrift in space.

  My first discovery was the worst. I ran, Jeeb clattering across the deckplates in my wake, until I reached the flight deck. The starboard launch bays, where all the Early Birds and their crews had been, had been crushed. The port side was little better. The red lockdown light flashed above Bay One’s hatch.

  I peered through the hatch peephole. The Abraham Lincoln’s hull, and the bay bulkheads, had peeled away, so the bay deck and the Silver Bullet Scorpion on its launch rails stood naked against space’s blackness, like a house chimney left standing after a Kansas tornado. There was no sign of the bay crew, the Scorpion’s canopy was up, and the harness straps of the empty pilot’s couch dangled up in a windless vacuum.

  I pounded my fist on the sealed hatch. The Viper had struck during watch change, when the bay crew were milling around, and both incoming and outgoing pilots were exposed.

  Whether it was Rommel on D-day eve, traveling home for his wife’s birthday, or Nagumo’s aircraft caught on deck rearming and refueling at Midway, or a Hessian picket who might have been satisfying a natural need when he should have been looking for Washington crossing the Delaware, military history often turned because somebody took an ill-timed break.