Despite Eddie’s other misgivings, the
That, arguably, was overcautious.
We arrived two weeks after the Slugs did, but the Slugs still hadn’t attacked our bases on Bren. They hadn’t attacked the Stone Hills Cavorite mines. They hadn’t attacked our vessels, except any outnumbered Scorpions that attacked them first.
The Slugs’ only hostile action, other than crashing our party uninvited, had come upon arrival. The old cruiser that had orbited the Red Moon, serving as Silver Bullet’s base, was now a debris field in a loose and deteriorating orbit. Basically, the Slugs ignored us while they did the industrious little maggot things they always did.
All of this mystified everybody.
Except Howard.
TWENTY-NINE
THE NEXT DAY’S DAWN shrouded the River Marin’s delta in icy drizzle, so Howard stood gripping a temporary lectern set up in the Spook hangar at Human Union Camp Bren, outside the old city of Marinus. Behind him the prototype Scorpions that had been modified to deliver Silver Bullet perched like pearlescent roaches on their landing gear. On rowed Marini benches in front of Howard sat the three hundred members of the Scorpion ground crews and pilots, who were his command’s only survivors, by the chance of being dirtside when the Slugs arrived.
Representing Earth’s host and ally, Bassin the First, absolute monarch of Marin and nominal ruler of the fractious commonwealth plains nations of Bren, sat behind Howard, to one side. Bassin wore the simple brown uniform of a colonel of combat engineers. Alongside him, set back a pace per Marini protocol, sat Ord, Jude, and me.
As an infantry commander, I’ve presided over too many memorial services. As head Spook, this was Howard Hibble’s first.
A tombstone-sized flatscreen set up on an easel next to Howard scrolled a numbered list of names of the missing in action, as he read them aloud.
With telescopic optics, from drones sent to recon the Red Moon, we could make out frozen human bodies, limbs splayed like DaVinci’s Vitruvian Man. The kids cartwheeled amid the hull plates and mattresses of the destroyed Spook laboratory ship, eccentrically orbiting the Red Moon, barely held by its peculiar gravity. Officially, Howard’s kids weren’t even dead, just absent, a cruelty of war accentuated in space engagements. We lost eight Scorpions trying to get in and recover bodies before the effort was halted, though not for lack of pilots begging to try.
The name alongside missing soldier number one was “Applebite, R.,” the kid that Ord and I had ridden up with back before Weichsel, back when the best minds said the war was nearly won. When the last name, “Wyvern, A.,” scrolled by, the number alongside had swollen to 1,372.
Howard’s shoulders sagged, and he clung to the podium sides as he stared at the hangar floor.
Ord wore his Class-A topcoat over his uniform, more, I suspected, to insulate himself from sentiment than the chill. The first time I saw him, he had been strutting through a Pennsylvania winter in starched cotton drill sergeant’s fatigues while us trainees had shivered inside our civilian winter coats.
Howard stood mute and numb. His kids’ war had always been a holo arcade game, with the bleeding and dying done by other kids on the sharp point of the stick. He cleared his throat, then said, “They never expected this. I never expected this.”
Howard’s remarks were less than Churchillian, but they were honest, which mattered.
Alongside me, Ord wiped his nose and whispered to me, “Expect the worst from the gods of war and they will seldom disappoint you.”
I whispered back, “Did Churchill say that?”
“Why, no, sir. You did.”
“Really?”
Whatever else Howard had planned to say, it was apparent he wasn’t going to make it through. Bassin watched, then inclined his head toward the back of the hangar.
A lone Marini bandsman marched from the rear of the hangar, with exaggerated arm swings, spun an about- face, then stood alongside Howard. The bandsman’s black hat, bigger than a watermelon, could have passed for a British foot guard’s bearskin, though the skin was proto feathered dinosaur. Marini infantry were still piped to battle by skrillers. A skrill resembles a bagpipe, except its pipes are carved from the hollow bones of pterosaurs.
The bandsman unfolded a yellowed paper music sheet, fastened it to a wooden clip on the blowpipe, then played “Amazing Grace” like he had known it all his life.
It was the first time I saw Ord cry. Everybody cried.
It was the kind of day to go home, draw the blinds, and drink alone. But we couldn’t do that.
THIRTY
AN HOUR LATER, my staff officers, plus Howard, Ord, Jude, and me, sat in my conference room. Hail ricocheted off the windowpanes like shrapnel while we tried to paddle through the muck that the gods of war had ladled onto us.
I said, “Howard, what the hell are the Slugs doing? If they have enough of an alternate Cavorite source that they can drop two thousand Firewitches and sixteen Trolls on us, they don’t need to mine the Red Moon.”
Howard stared at a box of stationery on the corner of my desk. He had too many hard-copy letters to write. “The Red Moon is useless to them for that, anyway.”
I straightened in my chair. “What?”
“Cavorite is fragments-not really matter, as we think of it in this universe-that ‘rubbed off’ the boundary between this universe and the next one. Cavorite is antithetic to this universe, especially to one of this universe’s fundamental forces, gravity.”
“Which is why it’s useful.”
Howard nodded. “This universe reacts to this foreign material the way your finger reacts to a splinter. It cocoons Cavorite fragments at the interuniversal boundary, so they drift through this universe insulated, until something like us or the Pseudocephalopod gets hold of them.”
“Little Cavorite meteors fell on Bren. One big one orbits around it.”
Howard nodded. “The big one, the Red Moon, is too much of a good thing. Cavorite stones are toxic to the Pseudocephalopod, but not as toxic as the sort of Cavorite that makes up the Red Moon. That’s why, I suspect, the Pseudocephalopod bypassed the Red Moon originally and chose to use human miners to excavate the less toxic Cavorite fall in the Stone Hills. The Red Moon’s not the only place where we’ve seen the Pseudocephalopod bypass concentrated Cavorite. Besides, the Red Moon’s Cavorite is too powerful to harness. An impeller loaded with Stone Hills Cavorite can hurl a starship through space. But the sort of power locked up in the Red Moon could knock a whole planet out of orbit.”
“They’re going to knock Bren out of orbit?”
Howard shook his head. “No need. The Pseudocephalopod is perfectly capable of destroying a planet without help from a Cavorite bolide.”
I stared up at the ceiling. Every nine hours, the Red Moon, with its thousands of Slug outriders, passed north to south above some part of the Marini commonwealth, then, nine hours later, south to north above another part. Between the Slugs and us ghosted a defensive screen of Scorpions, but everybody knew that if the Slugs chose to, our defenders couldn’t prevent the maggots from raining destruction on this planet the way they had Earth during
