Orphan's Triumph

they realized they had company, they would swoop in. At best, the Scorpions would scatter like quail and sneak back to the Abraham Lincoln, and the operation would crater. At worst, pieces of these kids and of me would be scattered across the snow a hundred light-years from home.

In my earpiece, over the beeps and chirps of telemetry, the Scorpion pilot’s intercom voice buzzed. “In a moment, our flight attendants will begin our beverage service for all of you back there in the main cabin. Correct change is always-”

I slept.

TWELVE

“-CONTACT WITH THE WEICHSEL stratosphere in forty seconds. Some heat will bleed through from the skin into the bay back there, but nothing your armor ventilators can’t handle.” The Scorpion’s pilot was speaking again. The loadmaster’s elbow jostled me as he checked static lines in the dark. I switched to the squad net and heard the Spooks all around me grumbling and puking into their helmet disposal tubes.

Evidently the younger Spooks had all been enjoying wakefulness longer than I had. Just as well. My head pounded between my temples, and risen bile seared my throat.

The pilot said, “Hang on back there. You must be taller than the mouse to board this ride.” Inside my helmet, I rolled my eyes. If they held a comedy contest for Zoomies and drill sergeants, nobody would win.

We dropped like the mother of all roller coasters, and six G of deceleration stuffed my stomach into my socks. Somebody moaned over the squad net. The Scorpion, and presumably thirty-five others arrayed around it, slowed from speeds measured in thousands of miles per second to a ten-thousand-mile-per-hour crawl. The Scorpion’s gravity cocoon kept us from being pulped like beefsteak tomatoes, but nobody was laughing.

Then we stopped.

A moment later, familiar, normal weight returned, then shifted as the Scorpion rotated until we hung in the darkness, inverted, like bats. Blood roared in my ears.

“Take care out there, guys.” There was no hint of stand-up comic in the pilot’s voice this time.

The loadmaster said, “First rank, prepare to down-rappel.”

Then the clamshells whined open, and above my head, forty feet below, the snowdrifts of Weichsel burst so bright white that my armor’s sensors darkened my visor to blast level.

The loadmaster said, “First rank out!”

I dangled from a synlon rappel line below the Scorpion’s tail, one hand paying out line through the carabiner at my waist, while I muttered about whose bright idea it was for me to be here.

I arrived on Weichsel in an explosion of snow and sank past my knees. Then a Spook landed on top of me, and pushed me beltline-deep.

A half-dozen voices grunted and swore.

Somebody said, “Holy moly! Isn’t this exciting?” That was Howard.

Somebody else said, “Goddamit, Howard! Get off me!” That was me.

I shoved Howard off into a drift, broomed snow off my visor with my gauntlet, and looked around. The infantry ringed us, galloping wide-legged atop the snow on the snowshoe webs that had jackknifed from their boot soles.

Each platoon net I listened in on rattled with necessary communication, with no word wasted. That indicated good training. There was also heavy breathing. That indicated that running in snowshoes isn’t for the flabby.

Above us hovered all thirty-six Scorpions, only ours and one other still reeling in rappel lines and closing their pod doors. The air above each scorching-hot fuselage shimmered. Vulnerable as they dangled like monstrous hummingbirds, the Scorpions would remain above us only until the ground commander released them.

For a hundred-yard radius around us, the top yard of snow had been blown away by the downdraft of air pushed by thirty-six Scorpions, as they had screamed down through a hundred miles of atmosphere like hypersonic bulldozers.

One thing I noticed was what wasn’t here. No blizzard. The sky was clear-not even a breeze stirred the snow-flakes. I smiled.

Also, there were no Slugs. No mag-rail rifles fired, no masses of armored Warriors maneuvered to assault us. Complete surprise!

Unless we had landed in the wrong spot. My heart skipped.

Next to me, Howard jumped up and down, knee deep in snow.

“Goddamit, Howard! What are you doing?”

He grinned at me through his visor. “Jump yourself, Jason! We’re standing right on top of the Ganglion!”

I jumped and was rewarded by a hollow bong as my boots struck metal. In all directions, the snow sloped away from the dome-shaped hummock we stood upon. A half-dozen drifts converged on the spot where Howard and I and the pile of flailing, armored arms and legs that was the Spook team stood.

I jumped again.

Bong.

“I’ll be damned.” I knew Rusty’s troops and the Abe’s pilots were good, but they had crossed millions of miles of space in three days, then hit a target no bigger than a backyard swimming pool, all without our enemy being the wiser.

The Spooks, assisted by GIs with wide manual snow shovels, were already foxholing down to each of the six radiating ribs through which, according to Howard, the Ganglion sent and received communication to and from the Warriors under its command.

Once we severed the Ganglion’s ability to communicate with its Warriors, the Slugs wouldn’t drop like marionettes with cut strings, but they wouldn’t fight and maneuver as units, either.

I waddled through the drifts to the nearest foxhole, then peered down at the Spook and GI below. They knelt on the hole’s floor, a convex patch of blue Slug metal, as the Spook fitted a charge to a seam in the Ganglion’s arm casing. Then they paddled up the snow and stood, the Spook fingering a black detonator while the GI called, “Fire in the hole” three times.

The charge flashed, hissed, and raised a steam cloud that hung in the frigid air. Within a fifty-yard radius, five more hisses sounded, and then five more steam clouds hung.

As we watched, the steam drifted together, coalesced into a single plume, and rose into the clear, still sky, past the hovering Scorpions. Beautiful. Perfect.

Howard said, “Uh-oh.”

THIRTEEN

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, wind whipped our helmet antennae and swirled a snow fog so strong that, even with enhanced optics, visibility was down to forty feet.

Howard shouted, his voice booming in my earpiece, “It was the atmospheric disturbance created by the Scorpions’ hypersonic passage. Now the storm’s building on itself.”

I winced. “Howard, we have radios. You don’t have to scream.”

Howard slapped at a rope that writhed in the growing gale as it dangled again from the Scorpions. “Jason, we can’t abort this now.”

Howard’s Spooks, working through the gathering blizzard, had cut through the Ganglion’s armored housing, and we had our first look at Slug royalty after three decades of war.

It was a blob as big as a two-seat urban electric and as green as snot. No evil eyes, flailing tendrils, or slobbery fangs. Just a blob with a half-dozen thigh-thick armored cables plugged in around its midsection. The cables, torched black by the Spooks’ cutting charges, now led nowhere.

The exposed Ganglion, free of its armored housing, hovered above the snow on a disk, presumably held up by Cavorite.