He shook his head and squinted. “Huh? But, sir, I’m locked up. No bail. You heard. It’s not so bad. I get to read a lot.” He pointed at his do-it-yourself bomb book. “You know, sir, you can make a bomb out of almost anything.”
I gazed at the peeling ceiling and sighed. Wednesday was too long from now. And that was just a hearing. Go to the Judge Advocate General Corps? Those bureaucrats couldn’t spring a private from a stockade. In civilian court they would be worthless. My old benefactor, Judge March? If I could find him, maybe he could get Brumby sprung. Unlikely. The White House? President Lewis had ordered Ruth Tway to keep a sword over my head. If I could reach anyone in authority at the White House, they might be in no mood to help me. And Howard’s plan depended on us coming in under the bureaucratic radar. A general lobbying to get a former enlisted man out of a local pokey would pique curiosity. High-level scrutiny was the last thing we could stand.
The judge had told me long ago, “If the truth won’t set you free, lie your ass off.” But springing Brumby would take more than lies.
Brace blamed himself for leaving Earth defenseless. But he was getting a second chance, an opportunity to redeem himself. Around the world, soldiers scrambled, preparing for the worst with too little time and material to prepare.
Brumby and I dangled. If I couldn’t get Brumby out of here right now, his destiny and mine would be to make no difference in the coming battle. That was all we had left. The slim chance that we could make a difference.
I leaned close and whispered, “Brumby, there’s no time to argue with judges and lawyers. I’m busting you out.”
He drew his head back as his eyes widened. “Sir? If you get caught you’ll be in here with me. That would be a real career-bender for you.”
Brumby didn’t realize that I had no career. But it was because he thought about me, first, that I needed him. And that he deserved the chance to go down swinging, not in a cell.
I stabbed my hand through the bars and covered his mouth. “You coming or not, Brumby?”
The cop was the only other person in the building. My GI pool car sat curbside, fifty feet from the building entrance.
Beneath my uniform I wore my Eternad underblouse. It was nonconductive. If the cop could draw and fire his stunner before I could drop him, a torso shot would sting me like sticking a finger in a wall socket, but I would still be able to function. Like every other infantryman, I’d been hit with stunner shots during training, to build my confidence in my armor.
If I could get Brumby back onto any military reservation before the cops tracked us and pulled us over, red tape would protect him. Bureaucratic delay worked both ways. Possession was nine-tenths of the law. Or something. While Brumby was behind bars, the system allowed him to languish there. But if I could get him out, no matter how, it would take days for the system to reverse the process. In a few days, it wouldn’t matter, one way or the other.
I was pretty sure I could drop the cop with a sucker-punch chop to his windpipe, without killing him. However, in training only instructors like Ord had been authorized to demonstrate the blow because trainees routinely killed one another when they tried it. Murder was a problem I didn’t think red tape could make go away.
I ground my teeth while I self-debated.
Upholding the Rule of Law, as established by the Constitution I was sworn to uphold and defend, depended, at this moment, on my breaking the law. Brace would never do it.
I looked at Brumby and pressed a finger to my lips.
He nodded.
I pointed at the corridor across from Brumby’s cell door. “I’ll be out of the guard’s sight. When he walks back in, you hold his attention. Do something, anything. Just make him come to you.”
Brumby nodded, but his brow wrinkled. “Sir, are you sure this is a good idea?”
Masterminding a failed jailbreak would land me next to Brumby, behind the bars. And a violent felony conviction doesn’t build the ole résumé. But in days, nobody’s résumé would count for flea snot. The reason Brumby and I survived Ganymede, it now came clear, was to defend this planet to our deaths. We could only do that if he got out of the slammer.
I pressed my back against the opposite corridor’s cool wall. My breathing shallowed and I flexed my right hand. The instructors called it the killing hand.
Brumby yelled, “Hey! Help! I have to go to the bathroom!”
I looked into the cell and winced. An ivory commode was built into the far wall. Brumby was a born soldier but not a born liar.
Silence from the next room.
Brumby stuck his fingers in his mouth and whistled ’til saliva sprayed. He snatched up a Plasteel chair and rattled it against his cell bars.
My right hand hung heavy alongside my body. Pulling a trigger with a Pseudocephalopod in my sights was one thing. Killing—no, I reminded myself, I wasn’t trying to kill him—an innocent police officer in cold blood was another. If I killed him, my life could end. If I didn’t, the world could end.
I peeked around the corner, my heart pounding.
At the corridor’s end, the doorknob rotated.
Thirty-One
I watched the cop, or rather his dull reflection, in the polished-metal mirror above the sink in Brumby’s cell.
Rubber cop soles squeaked on the floor tile. I tensed my arm.
Then I relaxed it. I couldn’t kill an innocent cop in cold blood. Some soldier I was. The mission should come first. Killing was my job.
I slumped against the wall. We were beaten.
“Mr. Brumby, after we have the conversation we’re about to have, just forget it.”
Huh? The cop stepped past me, waved his pass-card across Brumby’s cell’s lock and the door hissed open.
The cop turned to me and shook his head. “General, I don’t know why you think this guy can make a difference. I do know that we’re all in trouble. You wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t important. I figure I gotta exercise my discretion.”
My mouth hung open. I blinked, then said, “He’s free?”
“If he was anybody else, you could bail him out after a bar fight no problem. I put real bums back on the street every week. Doesn’t seem right Mr. Brumby should stay in jail just because he went to war for the rest of us.”
Brumby gathered up his clothes and kit and scurried into the corridor.
The cop pointed at the table holo. An anchorwoman stood in front of a holo showing Earth, the moon, and a distant, pulsing red dot that moved visibly closer to Earth as she spoke. The cop said, “I can draw up forms that say the ’puters misidentified Mr. Brumby. We automatically release the subject if that happens. You saw how this place works. We go by the book.”
The officer unlocked a wall locker, rummaged, then handed Brumby a personal effects envelope. “But sometimes you gotta go around the book.”
I could have kissed the cop for springing Brumby. But if he knew how far around the book Howard planned to go, the cop might have slapped me.
Thirty-Two
At eleven p.m. two weeks later, I buttoned up my gear, including Jeeb, and punched “checkout” on the bedroom screen in my Ritz suite.
A British-accented ’puter assured me that the Ritz looked forward to welcoming me back soon.
I snorted. “Fat chance!”
Two beats later the ’puter apologized and offered me a complimentary suite upgrade.
I said, “No. It’s just a scheduling problem.” A big one. Well, if one had to spend a last night on Earth, I supposed the Ritz was as good a place as any. Space Force’s latest estimate was that eight days from now the Slug invasion fleet would cross inside the orbit of the moon.
I detoured to the holo booths off the lobby, talked up contact info, and spent money I would never need on a Max-Qual link.
Munchkin faded in as clear as spring water. A fire crackled in the hearth behind her, real down to a spray of wood smoke smell. She wore a robe and juggled Jude, tousle-headed, on her hip. She draped a towel over his hair. “He wa
s in the tub. What’s wrong?”
“You mean besides the Slugs? Nothing.” I hated lying to her but she was a civilian, now. “We’ll be in the field a couple days so I thought I’d, y’know, check in with you.”
Mom or not, Munchkin was soldier enough to know this was the last call.
She stared while Jude squirmed. “Sure.”
I almost wished I hadn’t paid for the Max-Qual, because I could see the tears swell in her eyes. Jude touched a finger to her eyelid. “Mommy, you’re wet.” A heartbeat later Munchkin’s tears streamed down.
She stepped toward me and made a kiss on my forehead that I couldn’t really feel. The soap and water I smelled wasn’t really her but Max-Qual meant scent and by gosh AT&H delivered.
I broke the link before she saw my tears.
Under the hotel’s dimmed portico lights, the anonymous pickup car rolled up and its driver stepped out. I sucked in the chill, damp breeze off the Potomac, smiled, and closed my eyes. Simple pleasures delight when you’re living them for the last time.
The driver’s hand brushed mine as he reached for my duffel. “In the back, sir?”
For a driver, the voice was too old, too commanding. Too familiar. I opened my eyes and my heart skipped. “Sergeant Ord!” He saluted and I returned it. “What—?”
“I’m over at the Pentagon, temporary duty, just now, sir. Happened to see you were scheduled to need a driver.”
Happened to use a command sergeant major’s security clearance to ’puter-dig through a couple million top-secret records until he matched my name with an assignment. I smiled. “Fortunate coincidence you came across me, Sergeant Major.”
“Indeed, sir.”
I climbed in the passenger side of the Pentagon pool car and looked around. Ord slid behind the wheel. “Car’s bug-swept and surveillance-insulated, sir. And we have a few minutes. If you want to talk.”
“How much do you know?”
“I know that orders and planning documents show that Major Hibble is supposed to be assembling a scientific exploration team to board any Slug vessel that may be captured in the battle.”
“What battle?” I smiled.
“Yes, sir. There can be no battle because we have no ships. I watch holo news like everyone else.” In the dimness I swear Ord smiled.
“However, sir, I also noted that Major Hibble’s command had recently requisitioned and taken delivery on six thousand pounds of Semtex-51. Why a lab would need the most powerful conventional explosive in history, in quantity great enough to blow up a small city, seemed problematic, sir. The lab also requisitioned a wheeled, tubular delivery canister that would be just large enough to hold three tons of S-51. Also enough Thermite to burn holes through several battleships. It seems a very unusual group of requisitions for a laboratory. Equally strange Table of Organization and Equipment for a post-battle inspection mission.”
I swallowed and squeezed my eyes shut. Howard was Military Intelligence Branch. He was supposed to be a spy, for crying out loud. But Ord, who was older than the Internet, had already hacked into Howard’s plot. We were going to be denied our lunatic chance to save the world because I hadn’t checked up on Howard’s cheating skills.
My heart thumped. Ord, by-the-book Ord, was onto our little mutiny. He would never let us get away with it.
Ord reached inside his uniform jacket. His hand came out holding an automatic.
I felt my eyes widen and I pushed my hands out, palms up. “Sergeant Major—?”
Ord shook his head. “Normally, sir, Pentagon Internal Security procedures would have picked up those aberrant requisitions during the normal forty-eight-hour scan.”
My heart sank. Ord had found them even sooner.
“However, Pentagon security procedures also require that individual personnel test the encryption technology of their workstations on file groups daily. I chose, purely at random, to move those files and backups to my workstation and encrypt that group.”
“So, Internal Security—?”
Ord nodded. “Will find them, eventually. But for the next seven days, as far as Internal Security or anyone else can tell, those requisitions and deliveries don’t exist. Fortuitous coincidence, sir.”
I realized my hand had been strangling the door handle. I released it. Fortuitous coincidence if some lunatic bunch was trying to conceal its plan to save the world. Ord had been saving my ass and calling it fortuitous coincidence for years, now.
“Thank you, Sergeant Major.” I furrowed my brow and pointed at the gun. “Then why the hand cannon?”
Ord turned in the driver’s seat, faced me, and held up the pistol. The slide was back. It was the blue-steel Service .45 I had seen him practice with two years before, aboard Excalibur, during our voyage home.
“This .45 is strictly nonstandard. Some might call it obsolete. But I carried it in combat and it always served me well.” He pointed at a scratch along the receiver. “I carried it in a shoulder holster. In the days before Eternad armor, this pistol earned that scratch deflecting a 7.62-millimeter round from my chest. So some might also call it lucky.”
He handed it across and I hefted it. “Doesn’t feel obsolete.”
“Neither do I, sir.” He smiled and pointed. “But they keep me behind a desk, now. Loaded with flechette, that old girl could be very effective in close-quarters battle in a confined space. Like aboard a Slug warship. If such a close-quarters battle were about to take place, which, we both know, it is not.”
I swallowed.
Ord’s voice dropped and he went hoarse. “If the general would consider doing me the honor of carrying the pistol? For luck?”
Swelling nearly closed my throat. Ord wanted to do something to protect me. An automatic pistol seems an odd good-luck totem to civilians. But steel makes a combat soldier’s luck. Ord wanted something of himself to take part in the battle to save the human race, though duty buried him pushing Pentagon paper.
I looked down, so he couldn’t see the tear sheen in my eyes, and slipped the pistol and holster into my duffel. I sucked a breath. “The honor is mine, Sergeant Major. Anything else I should know?”
He cocked his head. “You and Admiral Brace seem to understand one another better now. Combat makes us family. But when the chips are down, the admiral will fall back on the book. And in combat there often is no book.”
Ord dropped me off at midnight. Howard, Brumby, and I, all dressed in old civilian jackets and stocking caps, meandered in the dark down the Capitol Mall, pushing rattling wire shopping carts filled with plastic trash bags. To a casual observer, three homeless derelicts. Which wasn’t so far from true.
If the area hadn’t been sealed to vehicular traffic, a casual drive-by observer might also have noticed that there were more delivery vans and tractor-trailers than usual parked overnight along the Mall, each humming and plugged into a recharge post, but each far enough from the dark Venture Star displayed outside the Smithsonian that launch backwash wouldn’t damage it. And the dead grass for hundreds of yards around stunk of something acrid that the observer might recognize as fire retardant.
As for the glazing trucks parked at the base of the Washington Monument, a story in tomorrow’s Washington Post would detail a vandalism spree that shattered windows all along the Mall, and another would reveal a gas main explosion in central Washington that explained the enormous fireball visible as far away as Bethesda.
It was typical military operational security—overdone and scarcely credible. But, like most Opsec, it only had to fool any Slugs listening for a couple of days.
One by one, Howard, Brumby, and I came alongside, then darted into a grocery-delivery truck trailer parked in front of the National Air and Space Museum.
Inside, everything smelled of overripe bananas, because it really was just a grocery trailer, except that its single naked ceiling lightbulb had been replaced with a night-vision-friendly red one.
Howard and Brumby were already stripping down, then slipping on infantry-crimson
Eternad armor, their weapons and equipment rucksacks, freed from their plastic bags, at their feet.
Suiting up took longer with three fingers, more because I babied the stumps than anything. Jeeb popped his head out of my rucksack, wriggled free, then perched on my shoulder. There he hummed cyclically, like a gnat was flying laps inside my helmet, as his diagnostics cycled, then recycled and ran again.
By the time I buttoned up, I could barely move in the trailer. Forty-seven other bums, night watchmen, and street sweeps had joined our costume party and had also changed, now wearing V-Star pilot flight suits or Space Force orbital-transit uniforms.
I whispered to Howard, “Is Ozawa on board?”
“She’s been pre-flighting the V-Star for hours.”
“I meant—”
“That too. I spoke with her ten days ago.”
One figure in orbital-transit uniform moved our way, others shrinking back to make him a hole.
Brace wrinkled his brow at the three of us. “Hibble, I do not understand why the Pentagon wants you three and that gear taking up lift tonnage on this mission.”
Howard retracted his faceplate and Battlefield Awareness Monocle, so he could focus both eyes on Brace. “You’ve seen the orders. If your force disables a Pseudocephalopod warship, we’re to board it and gather intelligence. That gear of ours may be worth its weight in gold.”
Like most good Spook lies, it had enough basis in truth to persuade someone who thought as linearly as Brace. It would seem like a logical extension of the Pseudocephalopod Technology Recovery Program. Like the Opsec explosion story, the lie only had to hold for a couple of days. We were maybe the three biggest Slug experts on Earth. Who else would be sent? Obviously, the story had won over the rest of the chain of command. “Won over” was too strong. Howard had lied his ass off to them. In a few days, it wouldn’t matter.
A Space Force tech sergeant poked his head in the trailer’s door. “Embarkation, one minute!”
For sixty seconds the only sound in the trailer was the clatter of gear buckles being checked, breathing, and, somewhere, the Lord’s Prayer.
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