Orphan's Destiny

by Robert Buettner

  The tech sergeant swung open the trailer doors. “Showtime, ladies and gentlemen.”

  Thirty-Three

  My heart thumped as the fifty of us walked across the Mall to the V-Star’s now-descending loading ramp. A pale red light wedge flooded from the V-Star’s interior across us. The thumping was partly because our puny human scraggle was all that stood between mankind and the end of the world as we knew it. Also, I was lugging 125 pounds of gear through Earth-normal gravity.

  As each of us stepped onto the V-Star’s cleated up-ramp, we opened our mouths and a medic popped in a lima-bean-sized pill. My last trip to the moon had been under sedation, too. It wasn’t just to keep us from jostling the fellow travelers with whom we would be stacked nose to nose and toes to toes. It would keep us from overloading V-Star life-support systems designed for half as many passengers and for shorter trips than from the Earth to the moon.

  Mimi Ozawa and her copilot would be the only ones aboard who stayed awake for the trip. If they couldn’t get us to orbit or couldn’t refuel us or screwed up some other way, I just wouldn’t wake up. Since my trips with Ozawa usually ended with her scolding me, sleeping through this one sounded fine.

  A Space Force rating wedged me into my travel tube, then wriggled his hand down the tube, alongside my breastplate, and connected the com and med-monitor leads.

  I yawned.

  “Sweet dreams, General.”

  Fat chance.

  Thirty-Four

  Three days later Howard, Brumby, and I sat in Excalibur’s officers’ mess sipping wake-up therm cup coffee and shivering in stale air that had been scarcely heated and unbreathed for months. We had the mess hall to ourselves. Each V-Star pilot had his or her own ship to check out and Brace and his twenty-five crew members had to get a ship bigger than Yankee Stadium under way.

  Unsurprisingly, despite this being the most important mission in human history, the three of us—four, counting Jeeb who perched on my shoulder—had nothing to do at the moment except conspire to wage our own private war.

  Brumby leaned back in his chair and nearly floated off it. Until Excalibur’s rotation fully spooled up, he weighed about eleven pounds. “What are the rest of them going to do?”

  Howard, who had never gotten the hang of movement in reduced gravity, nor of infantry equipment, wrestled his helmet off and set it on the table, its BAM blinking in the visor like a question mark. I reached across, inside, and fingered the chinplate off switch.

  Brumby and I knew Howard’s public version of our plans as well as his private one. If the Space Force pulled off its mission, though, we could return home sassy without executing either of our plans. I asked, “Howard, how can V-Stars hurt a Firewitch? V-Stars are hardly even fighters.”

  “The V-Star modifications were designed years ago. The parts are still stored here aboard Excalibur. Prefabricated. Installation doesn’t take long.” He pulled out a Chipboard and tapped its screen. The V-Star I saw there was hung with external plumbing, its sleek shape crusted with pipes, tanks, and nozzles.

  “Maneuvering thrusters. Those fins and that sleek shape are useless in space. And”—Howard pointed at a rack piggybacked on the V-Star’s middle—“they added weapons systems.”

  I squinted at white, finned arrow shapes. “Air-to-air missiles?”

  He nodded. “Their fins are useless to maneuver in vacuum. But they work fine as rockets. The pilot points the V-Star on-target and shoots. They’re unguided explosive bullets. Simple.”

  We’d learned years ago, within days of the start of the Blitz, that the Slugs had some way of neutralizing our nukes. Even an antiship missile’s thousand-pound warhead seemed puny against the Slug behemoths.

  “So’s throwing rocks, Howard. But it doesn’t accomplish much. And the Slugs can shoot those light-speed refrigerators at us.”

  A klaxon sounded and Excalibur’s main engines throbbed.

  The viewscreen on the bulkhead broadcast the view from a drone orbiting the mother ship. At that moment, Excalibur caught up with the lunar sunrise. A silver flash on the horizon spread into a crescent of fire. I squeezed my eyes shut against the dazzle. I opened them and saw Excalibur, afloat in full sunlight, hung majestic and silver against space and above the moon’s whiteness.

  Howard shook his head. “I’ll bet my pension that Projectile was one-of-a-kind.”

  “You’ve only been in the Army six years. You have no pension.”

  Howard frowned at me. “The fast-mover was linked to The Football, which was its homing beacon. The fast-mover probably loitered along behind Excalibur all the way from Jupiter, then accelerated to ramming speed as soon as it got a signal from the beacon that the beacon might be destroyed.”

  “Destroyed when the PTR technocrats started to saw it open at Canaveral.” I settled into my chair as my weight grew to fifty pounds. “You think the Slugs are that tricky?”

  He shook his head again. “I don’t think the Pseudocephalopod is tricky at all where the human race is concerned. I think It sees the subjugation of mankind as no more than a vermin hunt. For the Pseudocephalopod, the fast-mover was just a smart-mine system. We just made the mine look even smarter because we put the homing beacon where it could do us the most harm. I think the Firewitches will defend the Troll with weapons firing conventional objects at conventional speeds.”

  “Because the fast-movers are too scarce?”

  “Because the Pseudocephalopod thinks it doesn’t need to do anything more to defeat us. Why swat us flies with a sledgehammer?”

  Brumby shook his head and blinked. “Admiral Brace has some pretty mean flies, Major.” In the drone’s-eyeview on the bulkhead, V-Stars dangled at Excalibur’s docking bays. Twenty bays, twenty fighters.

  Mean flies or not, the pickets’ telescopes had counted 120 Slug Firewitch escorts protecting the Troll troopship. We were outnumbered six to one. And each Firewitch was to a V-Star as a grizzly was to a hummingbird.

  Excalibur’s docking bays ringed her midsection. Forward of that encircling belt stretched another, of hemispheres that roughened her massive skin like metallic goose bumps.

  Howard pointed. “Mercury Mark Twenty. Each turret houses an auto-directed rapid-fire cannon system.”

  “Eight thousand rounds per minute.”

  “You think the Slugs will let Excalibur get within cannon range of them?”

  He shook his head. “It’s a defensive weapons system. More designed to disable whatever they fire at us. Adapted from wet-Navy ship-defense systems. But there’s no reason we couldn’t hit a target thousands of miles away, if we led it properly. The rounds just keep on flying through vacuum until they hit something.”

  I shrugged. That seemed like throwing salt at a charging rhino. But the defensive possibilities encouraged me.

  We each picked a cabin, stowed our gear, and then, as the embarked contingent, headed to the bridge to pay compliments to the commanding officer, like old-fashioned Royal Marines.

  We actually found Brace in Fire Control, not on the bridge. Red-lit like Excalibur’s bridge, Fire Control was a long, tubular room that housed along its edges fifty controller stations, one for each Mercury battery. Only one station was manned, the gunner hanging in a fighting chair within a gimballed cage like a gyroscope. The other cages would be slaved to whatever the gunner did in the occupied cage. If Excalibur had a normal crew aboard, each cage would be manned by gunners who could override the system’s computer direction.

  The main battle-management holotank ran the length and breadth of the room’s middle. Excalibur’s image floated centered in the holo field’s pale green representation of surrounding space, as small as a silver pencil. Flies orbited the pencil at a distance. Patrolling V-Stars.

  Brace returned our salutes, his eyes tired.

  The deck plates shook beneath my feet. When a Hope-class fires her main engines, you feel it a mile away. But you experience no sense of going forward. She doesn’t accelerate even like an old city bus, at first. Aft
er all, it’s like setting a small village in motion.

  From what Howard had said, Slug ships seemed to be able to maneuver in ways that defied our ideas of physics. However, if Excalibur couldn’t turn faster than an iceberg, I couldn’t visualize that Troll transport, as big as Terre Haute, zigging and zagging.

  Brace nodded as he conversed with an invisible someone at the other end of his earpiece. “Very well. Take her out, First Officer.”

  Brace turned to the fire-control officer, seated inside the cage of the Mercury fighting chair. “Underway stations, Mr. Dent.”

  “Aye, sir.” The gunner strapped in.

  I watched him grasp the gun controls and my heart rate sped a beat. I had found a certain sport in laying my cheek against an M-60 model 2017’s receiver, then arcing rounds into a distant target while the gun bucked against my shoulder. The old girl was a throwback design. The Army could have chosen instead any one of a dozen more modern automatic weapons designs. But it chose to redo the M-60 in Plasteel. I was no gun nut, but I’d come to like her.

  The thought of a Mercury on manual, rumbling out eight thousand rounds a minute under my hand, made my fingers tingle.

  “—but my primary mission remains to close with and destroy the enemy.”

  Brace was speaking, Howard was nodding and frowning.

  “Capture and examination of a Pseudocephalopod vessel—and live crew if we get lucky—is our best hope of turning this war. Or ending it.”

  Brace nodded at Howard. Howard barely knew how to engage the safety on his M-20. But he was the right person to carry this debate.

  Brace snapped, “You get one of the reserve Venture Stars, one pilot, billets and training space for the boarding party. Beyond that, I need every resource on this ship.” He stared at me and Brumby for the first time while he said it.

  Brace didn’t like the plan he had just debated with Howard, a plan that only kicked in if and when Brace’s zoomies had won the battle. If he knew the truth, he would have thought our real plan was insane.

  Which it was.

  Thirty-Five

  Later that day Howard, Brumby, Mimi Ozawa, and I huddled around a holotank in a conference room aft of bulkhead ninety—embarked-division country—where the swabbies, who were busy anyway, wouldn’t disturb our plotting. Disturb us? There were only twenty-five of them and the space we had to ourselves had been designed to house a ten-thousand-soldier division. They probably couldn’t have even found us.

  We all stared into a green, translucent, three-dimensional image of the Slug Troll that was as big as a beachball.

  Up here in space we were back in no-smoking land, so Howard pointed a licorice whip at the display. “This represents our best estimate of the interior layout.”

  Ozawa tapped her chin. I wasn’t sure how much of Howard’s plot she had been told to lure her in. She asked, “Based on what?”

  I had asked Howard the same thing. She wore a baggy flight jacket over her flight suit, for me the day’s initial disappointment.

  “We extrapolated the layout of the Projectile Jason explored on the moon five years ago, plus Jeeb’s experience inside the Pseudocephalopod base on Ganymede.”

  George Washington said that the need for procuring good intelligence is apparent. That had been easy for George to say.

  But intel errors had screwed up more war plans over the centuries than all the swords and bullets in history. I swallowed and crossed the fingers on my good hand.

  Howard waved his palm at what looked like a belt of raisins stuck around the Troll’s belly. “The Troll carries its Firewitch escorts tethered, like Excalibur carries the V-Stars. We count one hundred twenty-one Firewitches moored to the transport. That suggests It counts on a base-eleven system, by the way. Our base ten likely arose from our appendages, ten fingers and ten toes. Since It has no fixed appendages, that invites fascinating speculation—”

  I shot Howard a glance.

  He cleared his throat. “Anyway, we assume the escorts will attack when Excalibur approaches.” He looked up at Brumby and pointed at a ridge near the Troll’s tail. “We want to make entry here.”

  Brumby shook his head, slowly. “I can burn our way in any place you tell me, Major. Thermite will melt Slug metal. But there will be three of us and that thing’s the size of a mountain range.”

  Howard shrugged. “Exactly why we should be too small to notice or care about. An amoeba on an elephant. A pilot of Mimi’s ability should be able to slip us through the confusion of the initial dogfight to that point of entry. We believe that’s where the propulsion system is. That should be a flammable or explosive location. If we can locate a vulnerable point to set the charge, we should be able to blow the whole thing up.”

  “What about the Firewitches? Maybe we do blow up the Troll, and a few Firewitches held close to it in reserve. That will still leave over a hundred warships.”

  “Here, we take a leaf from Admiral Brace’s naval history book. If we board the Troll in the early stages of battle, then neutralize Pseudocephalopod resistance aboard for a time, the Firewitches should be returning to the Troll to refuel and rearm. At the Battle of Midway, the U.S. caught the Japanese planes on deck when they returned. We’ll get the Firewitches, too, when you blow the big ship.”

  “Where are we when the Troll blows?” Brumby asked.

  “Mimi should have us clear by hundreds of miles by then. It’s an elegant plan.”

  Brumby frowned. “Neutralize the Slugs inside. How many warriors you figure that thing carries?”

  Howard glanced at me. It was another question I’d asked. “The Troll is mainly a replication platform, an incubator if you will. The number of warriors actually combat-ready at the time of entry we estimate will be relatively small.”

  Brumby leaned forward. “How small, sir?”

  “Give or take, maybe one hundred thousand.”

  Mimi and Brumby rocked back in their chairs.

  Howard waved his palms. “No, it’s fine! We won’t have to deal with them all.”

  It wasn’t fine, but Howard needed support here or half our team would bolt. I leaned forward. “A Projectile’s like a spaghetti bowl inside. Narrow passages. We can isolate ourselves by you blowing some choke points, Brumby. That should give us time enough to figure where to plant the Bomb. If they even notice us.”

  I winced internally at that fantasy. Notice us? Based on my experience, the Slugs would be on us like rottweilers on pot roast.

  Silence hung in the cabin air.

  Brumby turned to me. “Sir, you think this is worth the risk?”

  I nodded.

  “Then I’m in.”

  Three pairs of eyes focused on Ozawa.

  Finally, she spoke. “Howard, you told me the plan was to board the Troll to steal technology. This plan is stupid. No, it’s worse than stupid. It’s suicidal. And it’s criminal. Brace and the command structure don’t know what you really plan, do they?”

  Howard’s gaze drifted to a corner of the cabin. “Its success probability computed rather low. The war planners preferred not to divert even your one ship from conventional combat.”

  “So you’re asking me to mutiny, desert, and commit treason. All in one convenient package.”

  “You knew when we talked before that the plan I outlined was not exactly the plan I was asking you to join in.”

  Ozawa snorted. “I didn’t think it would turn out to be such a dumb-ass plan.”

  I asked her, “You’re a pilot. How dumb-ass is it for twenty V-Stars to attack six times their number, and a hundred times their weight, in Firewitches?”

  Ozawa’s answer to that had to be “pretty damn dumb-ass.” But Ozawa’s frown told me I needed a little more to nudge her over to our side.

  If it had been Pooh Hart sitting there, she would already have been thinking about how to fly the mission. What was in Ozawa’s head?

  I said, “Your problem isn’t with disobeying orders. You’re just afraid you can’t outfly the Slugs.�
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  Ozawa stiffened. Then her eyes narrowed. She pointed at the green Troll holo. “If—when—I get you in there, you better make this work!”

  A man rarely manipulates a woman successfully, especially this man. But the mindset that drove women combat pilots made them behave like men. I smiled, reached across the table, through the green holo, and shook her hand. “Done.”

  We spent the rest of the day brainstorming.

  Howard’s holo generator projected a Slug-ship passageway. Well, it was a purple-lit tunnel that looked enough like a Slug ship’s gut to make my skin crawl beneath my armor.

  Howard said, “The Pseudocephalopod reacts slowly to significant threats. We believe a ship-sized ganglion lacks much independence to react to unexpected situations.”

  “So, if we break down the door, the word has to go to Planet Zircon and back before they react?”

  Howard nodded. “Crudely stated.”

  “They reacted pretty good on Ganymede.”

  “I didn’t say It lacked reflexes. I think we’ll have three minutes after we breach the ship before we encounter organized resistance.”

  My own excursion through a Slug Projectile flooded back over me. Claustrophobic passages lit in dim purple corkscrewed and swirled in no pattern obvious to men. At intervals, slots no wider than a man’s palm cut the passage walls. The slots were doorways, from which amorphous Slugs could pounce on a man and suffocate him. Or they could kill him human-style, with a round from one of those twisted mag-rail rifles they carried, wrapped in a tentacular pseudopod. And somehow the slimy little bastards, clumsy as they were at close quarters, always seemed a jump ahead.

  Brumby asked, “We won’t know what’s inside ’til we get there?”

  “Not for sure,” I said.

  Brumby said, “Wish we had a Siegebot.”

  Human SWAT teams had stopped taking down urban criminal hideouts decades ago. ’Bots had saved many a cop.