Thanks also to the readers, whose enthusiastic feedback makes it easy to keep writing.
Finally, thanks also to Winifred Golden, agent par excellence, and, always, thanks to Mary Beth and the kids for putting up with me.
Meet The Author
Robert Buettner is a former Military Intelligence Officer, National Science Foundation Fellow in Paleontology and has published in the field of Natural Resources Law. He lives in Georgia. His Web site is www.RobertBuettner.com.
Introducing
If you enjoyed ORPHAN’S JOURNEY, look out for ORPHAN’S ALLIANCE Book 4 of the JASON WANDER series by Robert Buettner
“Mousetrap’s visible now, General.” My Command Sergeant Major taps my armored shoulder, points through UHSS Harmony’s forward observation blister, and my heart skips. The two of us float shoulder-to-shoulder in infantry Eternads, like unhelmeted frogs in a gravityless fishbowl. Ord has been a jump ahead of me since he was my drill sergeant in Basic.
With my gauntlet’s snozz pad, I mop condensed breath off the observation blister’s Synquartz, and cold stings through the glove. Fifty thousand frigid miles away spins Mousetrap. In two hours, on my orders, a hundred thousand kids plucked from fourteen worlds will arrive down there, innocent. None will leave innocent. Too many won’t leave at all.
The gray pebble Ord points to has just orbited out from a vast orange ball’s shadow. In the red sunlight that bathes the gas giant planet and its tiny moon, Mousetrap tumbles as small and as wrinkled as a peach pit.
Ord grunts. “The real estate hardly looks worth the price, does it, Sir?”
“Location, location, location, Sergeant Major.” Mousetrap is the only habitable rock near the interstellar crossroad that linchpins the Human Union’s fourteen planets.
That’s why the Union fortified Mousetrap. That’s why the Slugs took it away from us. And that’s why we arrived here today to take Mousetrap back, or die trying. “We” are history’s deadliest armada, carrying history’s best army. My army.
I’m Jason Wander, war orphan, high school dropout, Lieutenant General, Commanding, Third Army of the Human Union. And infantryman until the day I die. Which day is now thirty years closer than when I enlisted at the start of the Slug War, in 2037.
Ord and I push back from the observation blister’s forward wall, to head aft to our troop transport. I glance at the Time-to-Drop Countdown winking off my wrist ’Puter. In two hours, Ord and I will be aboard a first-wave assault transport when compressed air thumps it out of one of Harmony’s thirty-six launch bays. Kids embarked aboard Harmony, and aboard the fleet’s other ships, will go with us.
Ord sighs. “A hundred thousand GIs don’t buy what they used to, General.”
Whump.
Harmony’s vast hull shudders, tumbling Ord and me against the observation blister’s cold curve.
Hssss.
A thousand feet aft from our perch here at Harmony’s bow, thirty-six launch bay hatches reseal as one.
A tin voice from the Bridge crackles in my earpiece. “All elements away.”
I turn to Ord, wide-eyed. “What the hell, Sergeant Major?”
Ord turns his palms up, shakes his head.
Through ebony space, thirty-six sparks flash past us, from the bays that ring Harmony’s midriff. In a blink, they disperse toward Mousetrap, leaving behind thirty-six silent, red streaks of drifting chemical flame.
For one heartbeat, Harmony forms the hub that anchors thirty-six fading, translucent wheel spokes. It is as though we spin at the center of a mute, exploding firework. To our port, starboard, dorsal and ventral, identical fireworks blossom, gold, green, blue, purple, as the Fleet’s other cruisers launch their own craft, each ship trailing its mothership’s tracer color.
I blink at the vanished silhouettes. The Army I command wasn’t scheduled to launch for Mousetrap for two hours. We expect to take lumps by landing with no aerial prep. And more lumps when we start digging the Slugs out of Mousetrap, one hole at a time. But landing without prep is the only way we can avoid killing the fifty thousand human POWs that the Slugs hold on Mousetrap.
But what I just saw fly by weren’t chunky troop transports. They were sleek scorpions, their bomb racks packed with liquid fire. The ships that made that fireworks display weren’t just an aerial prep force. The formations I just saw were powerful enough to incinerate every living thing on Mousetrap, Slug and human alike, three times over.
Before Ord and I paddled up to this observation blister for a final, weightless look at our objective, I inspected every launch bay myself. One of our troop transports filled every bay. But one order from the Bridge could rotate troop transports out of the bays in fifteen minutes, like cartridges in old-fashioned revolvers, and replace them with bombers.
I’m already torpedoing my weightless body hand-over-hand down the rungs that line the cruiser’s center tube, back toward the Cruiser’s Bridge. “If those bombers fry Mousetrap, our POWs die.” Mousetrap’s POWs are infantry, and that swells my throat even more.
But Army commanders are supposed to consider the Big Picture, as well as their kids. I shake my head at Ord. “The Outworlds already oppose this war. If this fleet kills Outworld POWs, the Union’s dead. If the Union dies, the Slugs will wipe mankind out. Did Mimi lose her mind?”
Ord paddles up alongside me, so fast that the slipstream seems to flatten the gray GI brush he calls hair. He shakes his head. “Admiral Ozawa wouldn’t launch bombers, Sir. She wouldn’t even consider it without consulting you, first. But there is a ranking civilian authority aboard this ship. If ordered, the Admiral couldn’t—”
The two of us tuck our legs, then swing into the first side tube like trapeze artists. Then we ’frog along toward the Bridge, gaining weight as we move away from the rotating Cruiser’s centerline.
“I know. But I warned them, Sergeant Major. That Alliance was a deal with the devil.” Lieutenant Generals don’t have tempers, especially while commanding invasions. But Ord and I are alone in the passage tube, so I take the opportunity to punch my fist against the tube’s wall until my knuckles bleed.
Not because our allies are cruel and stupid. Thirty years of war have taught me how to beat cruelty and stupidity. I pound out my frustration because my godson has become one of them. Worse, I know my godson is the only officer in this fleet who could be leading those bombers.
Ord closes two hands over my fist, until I stop punching, and I stand panting. “Sir, Churchill said if Hitler invaded hell, Churchill would at least make a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.”
I know the quote. I talked myself into believing Churchill had the right attitude, so I could smile while diplomats pattered their white-gloved hands together, applauding a deal that I should have known would bring us to this. An infantryman’s life is talking himself into things that may kill him, or kill others.
Crack.
A side-tube pressure valve releases, like a rifleshot, and my heart skips; just like it skipped when this mess started eight years ago.
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