around like anvils.
Ten minutes later, we sat in Captain Eddie’s wardroom while Howard briefed us.
Neither Jude nor Eddie knew about the facts that underlay Silver Bullet. I didn’t know what had just happened, but I knew that Silver Bullet had to be at its heart. Therefore, if mankind was going to put things right, Silver Bullet could no longer be the Spooks’ little secret.
Howard, as was his wont anyway, began at the beginning.
A Threedie schematic of Bren from space was the first visual up on the holo. Around the blue planet’s equator orbited the White Moon of Bren, an atmosphereless rock, crater-pocked a billion years ago, much like Earth’s single moon. From north to south over Bren’s poles orbited the Red Moon of Bren, smaller, faster moving, and as unmarked as a baby’s cheek.
Howard pointed at the Red Moon’s image as it circled Bren. “The Red Moon is an astronomic peculiarity. It orbits Bren north-south. Ordinary moons orbit roughly east-west, around their captor’s equator. That’s because ordinary moons and their planets coalesce from a disc of material spinning around their star, so a planetary system is shaped like marbles rotating on a tray.”
I nodded. “The plane of the ecliptic.” I’d heard this part of the lecture before, therefore I showed off before Howard went rocket science.
Howard said, “So we knew from the get-go that the Red Moon was a rarity. An interstellar wanderer, captured by Bren’s gravity, when the Red Moon penetrated the Bren system, at a right angle to the plane of the ecliptic.”
Howard waved up the holo’s magnification, and the Red Moon’s image swelled until it filled the holotank, like a red porcelain basketball. He rotated his hands around the image’s circumference. “The Red Moon’s second peculiarity is that, though it’s too small to trap a protective atmosphere, it isn’t pocked by impact craters, like its sibling, and like most ordinary moons. The Red Moon’s third peculiarity is observable indirectly. Unlike an ordinary moon, the Red Moon doesn’t measurably affect Bren’s tides, like an ordinary moon its size would.”
The captain shifted in his chair, nodding and spinning his hands like he was winding twine. “In the beginning, the Earth was without form. Please. I got deteriorating stores to deal with, Colonel.”
I turned to him and raised my palm. “Patience, Eddie. This is all connected.” Howard’s detective work had been impressive enough to deserve a hearing. Besides, “deteriorating stores” were simply munitions that got swapped out for newer ones, a throwback to the days when explosives became unstable over time. As a covert adviser I had spent a career thankful for every muddy case of plausibly deniable, sweating dynamite, so my sympathy was limited. Eddie, like Squids generally, wasn’t nearly as busy as he thought.
My godson squirmed, too, the way I did when the topic was the Slugs. They had cost Jude friends, and nearly his own life.
Howard frowned back at Eddie. “This is already an oversimplified presentation. Bren is very Earthlike. But Bren’s fauna avoided the mass extinctions that punctuated Earth’s natural history. Why?”
Eddie shot me a glance that said he didn’t care why.
Howard raised his index finger. “Because the periodic cosmic bolide strikes that have punctuated Earth’s prehistory missed Bren.”
“Cosmic bolides.” Eddie looked around like he was searching for a yardarm to hoist somebody from.
I raised my palm to cut Howard off, then gave Eddie the CliffsNotes version. “Comets and asteroids missed Bren because its gravity didn’t suck them in. Bren’s gravity didn’t suck them in because something near it affected its gravity. Eddie, the Red Moon is solid Cavorite. It barely stays in orbit around Bren, and it eats gravity, like the
Eddie was impatient, not dumb. His eyebrows rose, and he whistled. “Cavorite’s poison to the Slugs. If we could package enough Cavorite, we could end the war.”
Howard nodded. “Which is the threshold upon which we stood, until four days ago.” He waved up a new holo. This one showed the Red Moon, too, but it was a visible-light telescopic image, not a Threedie simulation.
The Red Moon looked grayer, as though obscured by fog.
Howard waved up the magnification, and I shuddered.
It wasn’t fog, it was Slug ships, each Firewitch as big as a domed stadium, each Troll as big as Mount Rushmore. The cordon the maggots had thrown around the Red Moon looked more like a mosquito swarm.
I asked, “Where did they come from?”
Howard shrugged. “Not through the Mousetrap.”
Eddie said, “So much for the strategic crossroad theory.”
Howard shook his head. “Nobody ever said the Mousetrap was the only way to reach the union planets, just the most efficient. We have no idea how many jumps this new armada had to cross to come in the back door. I suspect this was a Long March for the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony.”
“Armada” was what history had come to call the last Slug invasion fleet to threaten a human-inhabited planet. The Armada of 2043 had destroyed virtually Earth’s entire defensive capability at that time, and the Armada had numbered “only” one hundred twenty-one Firewitches and a single Troll incubator ship.
It was unclear that our acceptance of the Slug’s Weichsel gambit had helped them sneak up on Bren. But the timing convinced me that the Slugs had coordinated their Weichsel feint with this much larger move. The maggots had snookered us again, not by deceiving us but by laying their cards on the table and allowing us to misplay ours. Would we ever learn? I rested my forehead against my palm and closed my eyes. “How many this time, Howard?”
“The force visible in this image comprises two thousand four Firewitches and sixteen Trolls.”
Jude, Eddie, and I rocked back as one. My own eyes’ evidence notwithstanding, I shook my head. The Human Union, fully mobilized on a war footing for decades, had finally built up its strength to levels that made the forces of the Warsaw Pact look like a Brownie troop. Yet our cruisers plus far-more-numerous Scorpion fighters, even projected out two more years, totaled less than seven hundred. “Howard, that’s impossible.”
“Jason, we have no idea how long the Pseudocephalopod has exerted hegemony over this galaxy, or even whether its reach is confined to this galaxy. We know Cavorite originates at the boundary of this universe. For all we know, the Pseudocephalopod’s reach extends that far.
This manifestation, which seems massive to us, could be a tiny part of its strength.”
Eddie shook his head. “I don’t buy it. The Red Moon’s the biggest threat we’ve ever posed to them. This is the maggots’ last hurrah. They just threw in the kitchen sink, because it’s all they’ve got left.”
Jude wrinkled his brow, then asked a fighter pilot’s question. “Howard, you said there are two thousand Fire- witches visible in this image. We must’ve had cruisers on station around Bren. How many did their Scorpions destroy ship-to-ship?”
“Plenty. Our kill ratio of Firewitches by Scorpions remains prohibitively high, by our standards.”
Eddie asked, “What intelligence do you make of that information, Colonel Hibble?”
In intel-speak, “information” is raw data. The picture the Spooks weave from information is “intelligence.” George Washington said that “the necessity of procuring good intelligence is apparent & need not be further urged.” When it came to the Slugs, nobody in the decades of this war had ever woven more good intelligence pictures than Howard Hibble.
Howard cocked his head. “The Pseudocephalopod has a history of solving problems with force, rather than guile. No new tactics or weapons. Just more of them here.”
I nodded. So far as we knew, for all their longevity and omniscience, Slugs hadn’t even invented the wheel. Why bother if you can beat gravity in another way? Based on what we were seeing now, we had encountered every type of ship the Slugs had during the war’s early years.
There were the Troll and Firewitch, and the interplanetary Projectile. There was a fourth type, a small, hypervelocity version of the Projectile that was so rare that we had never really seen one, just the streaks it left and the damage it did.
Howard said to Eddie Duffy, “The bad news is that I disagree with your interpretation of this incursion, Admiral Duffy. This force isn’t the kitchen sink. The Pseudocephalopod probably has much more where that came from. Still, it could be worse.”
Eddie stared at the wall of enemy warships that now quarantined mankind from the weapons project that was supposed to win the war, and he cradled his chin in his upturned palm. “Two thousand ships isn’t the kitchen sink? Christ on a crutch, Colonel! It is worse.”
