Orphan's Destiny

by Robert Buettner

This wasn’t the time to lecture these old men. But as far as I could see, somebody’s failure to disperse our defense capability was about to end the human race.

  Someone said, “That’s wrong. There are twenty-four V-Star Interceptors in orbit right now.”

  Brace nodded. “I said ‘every vehicle on Earth.’ Not one of those twenty-four can stay up more than ten additional days. We have no present capacity to relieve or refuel them. The only strip that could land them intact was at Canaveral. A few of the pilots may make walk-away landings on shorter strips somewhere on Earth, if we get good weather. But the ships won’t be launchable again for weeks.”

  “We’re finished.”

  It seemed no one in the room breathed.

  Howard said, “There’s one substantial ship left. And twenty fighters.”

  Brace swiveled his head toward Howard. “The major’s right. Excalibur’s stored in lunar orbit. Twenty extra-orbital-variant Venture Stars are moored to her.”

  Howard said, “We know Excalibur’s up there. But we don’t have ships to get to her. Even if we had ships down here, we wouldn’t have a facility to launch them from.”

  A barrel-chested lieutenant general stood. He wore Infantry’s crossed rifles. “If interdicting the invasion fleet in space isn’t an option, we need to mobilize the population.”

  He wasn’t wrong. Mankind had no options. Fight or die.

  But in just days it was going to be villagers with pitchforks against swarming, black-armored Slug legions, armed, armored, disciplined, and coordinated like a slimy Bolshoi Ballet. None of these military men had faced Pseudocephalopod Combat Infantry. I had.

  Shooting the Slugs down with ground-based missiles as they tried to land on Earth seemed like a good idea. An invasion force is most vulnerable during landing. Especially coming down from the sky. A century ago, Rommel had fortified the European coast to throw the Allies back into the sea and nearly succeeded.

  Then I thought about the present situation. There were, I supposed, antiaircraft and antimissile systems in place around high-value targets around the world. If the Slugs tried to land on top of the White House or the Kremlin, we would probably ruin their whole day.

  But Earth is a big place to defend. If the Slugs were smart enough to land in the middle of Saskatchewan or the south side of Borneo, there wouldn’t be much we could do to stop them.

  We broke for twenty minutes. I cornered Brace before he left the auditorium stage. “Admiral?”

  Brace turned to me and frowned.

  I said, “Thanks. I owe you.”

  “For what?”

  “For pulling us through that hole before the building blew. You saved my life. And my godson’s.”

  He smiled as tightly as a walking cadaver. “Saved you for what? General, you’ll go down swinging. We all will. But any chance we had to keep that invasion fleet off this planet vanished when my command did. Do you know how many died at Canaveral?”

  A balloon seemed to swell in my chest. On Ganymede, I had felt like Brace felt. Now we both knew the emptiness of losing our troops in combat. I suppose if Ord hadn’t taught me better, I would have rubbed it in. I suppose I could have smirked. Could have asked Brace how smart his Annapolis education made him now.

  I said, “We do the best we can. We screw up. We come back and do the best we can again.”

  He smiled once more. “Infantry can do that. Infantry can fight with fixed bayonets, or throw rocks. But I don’t have anything to come back with.”

  He sighed as the sound of our footsteps rattled off granite tunnel walls. “If we had just one space-capable ship, we could get a skeleton crew aboard Excalibur. A few people could take her out and fight her V-Stars against that fleet,” he said.

  “One hundred twenty against twenty. Those are bad odds.”

  “They’re the only odds we have.”

  I had experienced those odds with Slugs before. I could still see them, black armor glistening, rear ranks swarming over fallen front ranks by the thousands.

  At the tunnel mouth, Howard stood, smoking. No one who hadn’t been on Ganymede really could visualize a Slug river surging up the national Mall, parting around the Washington Monument. I locked eyes with Howard.

  He saw that river as clearly as I did. The Slugs would land. As a species, we would fight. But as a species, we would die.

  And then it hit me. I turned back to Brace. “I said I owed you. If I could get you aboard Excalibur, would we be square?”

  Twenty-Eight

  We reassembled after our break. Earth’s military brain trust hid and plotted in a mildewed auditorium beneath a rock pile. I leaned toward Howard and whispered, “Could Brace fight the Slugs in space? If we could get him there?”

  He shrugged. “Better than trying to fight them here. If the Firewitch fights as poorly relative to our V-Stars as Pseudocephalopod warriors fight relative to human infantry, Brace might make a contest of it. One hundred twenty to one are quantitatively long odds. Not impossible. But even if we defeated 121 Firewitches, the Troll seems too massive to be destroyed by conventional missiles. Anyway, with no spacecraft, the odds are moot.”

  I shook my head. “No they aren’t. There’s a fully operational V-Star parked on the Mall, outside the Smithsonian. You saw it yourself.”

  Howard shook his head. “It’s a static museum display.”

  A colonel next to us frowned at me for whispering. I tugged Howard up from his seat and we bumped a few knee pairs sidestepping down the row.

  In the dank granite passageway, my voice echoed. “They wouldn’t have yanked that V-Star’s guts yet. That would have cost money. You want odds? I bet you a year’s pay that ship’s still flyable. It can jack itself up vertical and take off with no gantry. I saw it do that on Ganymede.”

  “That was in one-sixth Earth gravity. It would take some hot pilot to fly a Venture Star from the national Mall to lunar orbit.”

  “Mimi Ozawa’s some hot pilot.”

  “Then we’d have one ship.”

  “The V-Star could carry pilots to the moon. It already docked with Excalibur once. Then we’d have twenty-one fighters plus a big ship to support them.”

  “That V-Star could only carry fifty people, if we dope ’em up and then pack ’em in like sardines. Twenty of those would have to be pilots. That leaves thirty billets to fly Excalibur. Normal crew’s five hundred.”

  “Excalibur’s all run by ’puters. A skeleton crew could fly her for a while. She’d just be an aircraft carrier for the V-Stars, anyway.”

  Howard rolled his eyes to the ceiling and pursed his lips. “V-Stars were designed to reach low Earth orbit, not the moon. They can’t carry enough fuel to continue to the moon.”

  “Brace said we couldn’t get more fuel to the ships up in orbit now. Could we change that?”

  “Possibly we could refuel one V-Star in orbit by docking with an unmanned satellite launcher with a fuel tank for a payload. Possibly we could demothball Excalibur and her own V-Stars in time. Possibly we could devise a space-fighting strategy. Possibly—”

  “Possibly we’ll all die if you don’t stop saying possibly!”

  A plane ride later, I followed Howard around the Capitol Mall as he walked around the last operable manned spacecraft on Earth, his hands clasped behind his back.

  He pointed up at the hydraulic struts of the V-Star’s undercarriage. “It’s designed as a single-stage vehicle. And the Ganymede variant can lever itself vertical and take off with no gantry. But . . .” He shook his head.

  “But?”

  He said, “Refueling in orbit would be total improvisation. Assuming we can adapt a commercial satellite lifter as a tanker, rendezvous with it, refuel, then continue.”

  “Can we do that?”

  Howard shrugged. “We can’t, if you ask Brace. But Mimi Ozawa can.”

  Over the next twenty-four hours, the United Nations pulled together twenty astronauts and former pilots, including Mimi Ozawa, who had enrolled to finish a doctorate
, and called them a squadron.

  Brace and a tiny crew would try to fire up Excalibur, while the pilots did the same with the V-Stars.

  It was all very straightforward. It was all very desperate. It was all going to happen without me.

  I assigned myself to compile a militia handbook for the ground campaign. We’d send it online to the public. They’d have to learn from it and organize themselves to fight.

  Improvised explosive devices were an obvious chapter. And I knew just the guy to write it, Brumby.

  The following day, Howard sat in my Washington office in the zoology lab of the Smithsonian.

  He tapped a cigarette out of a pack.

  I stared at his lighter.

  “My office. My rules. For once!”

  “How’s the Space Force mission going?”

  He blew smoke at the ceiling. “Well, Admiral Brace has a plan. Excalibur will assume a blocking position between Earth and the Pseudocephalopod fleet. She will deploy, recover, refuel, and rearm Interceptors.”

  I shook my head. “Midway!”

  Excalibur was going to function as a naked aircraft carrier in space, deployed to block a vastly superior invasion fleet. After Pearl Harbor, American planes, operating from aircraft carriers stripped of proper escorts by the attack on Pearl, intercepted the Japanese fleet and sank four Japanese carriers. Brace planned to replicate the naval battle that had won the greatest maritime victory in American history.

  I cocked my head. “What if the Slugs don’t come in on the moon’s orbital plane?” I asked. “Brace is planning for a two-dimensional surface-naval battle. But space is three-dimensional. The Slugs could just loop around Excalibur. That’s not just a plan for the last war, it’s eight wars behind!” Footsoldiers had learned the value of small, dispersed units the hard way, from the American Revolution to Vietnam to the Tibetan Insurrection of 2020.

  But Swabbie officers still saw combat in terms of set-piece battles, as though Admiral Mahan was still in charge.

  Howard shook his head and lit another cigarette. “On Ganymede, the Pseudocephalopod could have evaded us or waited us out. Instead it attacked. Frontally, in waves, with no regard for its losses. The Pseudocephalopod will seek out and engage Excalibur to destroy it, not because Excalibur forces the issue.”

  “So, no matter what Brace and the UN think, as far as you’re concerned, Excalibur is just bait?”

  Howard stood and looked around his office. “I need an ashtray. I’ll be back.” He left and pulled the door shut behind him.

  It didn’t occur to me to ask Howard what he hoped to catch using a mile-long spaceship for bait.

  My mistake.

  Twenty-Nine

  I stared at the closed door for twenty seconds, trying to figure out what Howard meant. That was typically futile.

  I sighed and turned back to the business at hand, compiling a primer on homemade bombs. On the off-chance that Brace and his space cowboys failed to destroy a force ten times their size and eons more technically advanced. In which case Earth would have to kill Slugs on our mud.

  I talked up a desktop screen. Drugs or no drugs, my hand throbbed and I was glad I didn’t have to keyboard.

  Finding Brumby would be cake. The Domestic Defense Command was a vestige of the War on Terror, exempt from the Bill of Rights. DDC was prohibited by constitutional amendment from satellite tracking of natural persons but that didn’t mean DDC couldn’t track anyone if the law could be, um, neutralized.

  Brumby had mustered out under the Gratitude Act and was for practical purposes a civilian. Nobody could track a civilian, legally. But he was at the moment still on the rolls as active-duty Army. The tracking chip implanted behind every soldier’s breastbone at induction was still in Brumby.

  I patched through on my ’puter to Department of Defense Central Records. A ’puter spoke, throaty and feminine. “Coordinates or place name, please?”

  “Um. Place.”

  “Level of detail, please?”

  “I dunno. City. And an audio phone number.”

  Pause. The ’puter purred. “Your subject may be found in, in”—pause—“Falls Church, Virginia. Connecting your audio phone link now. Please remain close by.”

  I leaned on my elbows. Where else did my silicon-chip friend think I would remain? But the news was great. I glanced at my ’puter. I could be with Brumby in an hour or less.

  I thought as I waited to learn his location. Brumby, blinky and jittery as he was, was now a civilian. Had he found his destiny? A reason to live out the rest of the life with which fate had gifted him?

  A ’puter voice answered, this one male and priggish. “You have reached”—click, pause—“the Falls Church Municipal Jail. Please select from the following options—”

  I straightened in my chair. Before I got to option one, Howard stuck his head and torso back in my door. In one hand, he held an ashtray. “I have a plan. But it’s fly by the seat of the pants. The military won’t like it. Somebody like Brace would say it’s insane.”

  “Did you ever have a plan the military liked?”

  Howard knit his brows. “It will present you with Hobson’s choice. Would you rather die an infantryman or a mutineer? Of course, it could save the world.”

  I disconnected from the jail. “Talk to me, Howard.”

  Thirty

  The first thing Howard’s plan required was that I assemble a combat team. Well, an assistant. Three people was the most we could swing. We needed demolitions expertise and I needed a noncommissioned officer who functioned like an extension of myself, someone whose combat reactions I knew and who knew mine just as well.

  That meant I had to spring Brumby.

  The police officer at the Falls Church jail visitors’ desk wore his hair GI-short, but his eyelids drooped. I supposed catching bad guys was more invigorating than watching them pace in their cells.

  He sat behind a gray metal desk while, on a tabletop holo in the corner, daytime news showed endless images of destroyed Canaveral and civilians fleeing presumably targeted cities. I figured the holo also had a channel to monitor the prisoners’ cells, but it looked like nobody bothered. The cop flicked his eyes up from my visit request form to the ribbons on my uniform blouse. Then he looked at my face and his eyes widened. “You’re Jason Wander!” He stood and stuck out his hand. He jerked a thumb at a locked, reinforced door. “You? You’re here to visit that guy, Brumby?”

  In the corner, commercials hummed.

  I nodded. “That guy and I served together.”

  The cop nodded, smiled, and reached for his belt key card. His belly hung over his belt. Another downside of not chasing bad guys, I supposed. But the nightstick and holstered stunner on his belt announced he could make springing Brumby difficult if he had to.

  Brumby sat on a cell bunk, engrossed in a book titled A Brief History of Explosives.

  The Army had made Brumby fit to be a soldier.

  But when it discarded him, it left him fit to be little else.

  He leapt to attention when he saw me through his cell bars, civilian or not. I looked around. Currently, Brumby was the Falls Church jail’s sole guest. He looked healthy so I figured the vomit smell was the gift of a prior tenant.

  I waved him to “At ease.”

  “Sir!” Unconsciously, Brumby reached to his waist and straightened his gig line, though his orange “detainee” smock didn’t even have a belt buckle. He twitched. “Good to see you, sir. But why—?”

  “You’re the one in the slammer, Brumby. I ask ‘why’ first.” I raised my eyebrows at the cop.

  The cop flipped on a Chipboard display attached to the cell door and read aloud, his finger tracing print on the screen. “‘Detainee is charged with five counts of assault, malicious property damage, resisting arrest, and reckless endangerment.’ And that’s just in one saloon!”

  Brumby winced.

  I fingered the credit chip in my pocket. I had back pay to burn and I didn’t figure to be spending it once th
e Slugs landed. “What’s his bail?”

  The cop pointed at the display, again. “‘RMD.’ RMD means Recidivist, Mandatory Detention. He evidently had a record of violent episodes in the service. No bail. That saloon was the third place he busted up in one night.”

  Brumby hung his head.

  I tugged out my credit chip. “I know it’s gonna be steep—”

  The cop raised his palm. “Read my lips. No. Bail.”

  I straightened. “But the Army needs him.”

  “Maybe so, General. From the holos, it looks like the Army needs everybody. But it’s not up to me. You can schedule a hearing.” The cop shrugged. “The magistrate calendars a motions day every Wednesday. Next one’s in six days.”

  “In six days, it’ll be too late!”

  The cop hooked a thumb in his belt, alongside his stunner holster, as he turned away. “You’re a soldier, sir. You know we gotta go by the book, just like you all do. There’s a Department of the Army release form you could get, I think. They process through in a couple of weeks.”

  “In a couple of weeks the Department of the Army will be hip-deep in Slugs! Cops aren’t so different from soldiers. You never went around the book?”

  He paused and looked from me to Brumby. Then he sighed and walked backward toward the cell-block door. “Your visit limit’s ten minutes, sir.”

  The slammed door echoed while Brumby grasped the bars and rested his forehead on them. “Sir, I’m sorry. I don’t sleep good. When I sleep, I see it. I see it all. Then I’m tired.” He looked up and grinned. “You know how I am when I’m tired.”

  I nodded. “You go to the VA?”

  “Since I got back. They made me take Prozac II. So I quit going.”

  Drugs were wonderful things, I supposed. At the moment I was functioning after a traumatic amputation only because of them. But I had done ’Zac when the Slugs killed my mother. It made me stupid. Stupid enough that I had cost a friend his life. Should have been my life. The memory made me squeeze my eyes shut.

  I opened them and touched my hand to Brumby’s. “I don’t blame you.” I kept pressing his fingers until he looked up, then I leaned forward. “Brumby, I need you to reenlist.”