Orphan's Triumph

“Given the diminished recuperative powers of a man your age-”

“You’re as old as I am.”

“Exactly. It takes me three days to recuperate from shining my shoes.” Wally shook his head. “I can’t sign off that you’ll be ready to tolerate escape-velocity G forces for at least a week.”

Howard was a devious geek, but if he sent a Spook-o-gram, something was up that I couldn’t wait a week to hear about. “Release me to travel tomorrow and I’ll smuggle you back a case of scotch.”

Wally raised his eyebrows higher. “Single malt?”

I managed a shallow nod. “And if you don’t share your amateur shrinkology with Sergeant Major Ord, I’ll make it sixteen-year-old.”

“Done. I’ll shoot you up with healing accelerants, but I can’t immobilize that fracture, so don’t blame me when it hurts like hell. And the shrinkology was Ord’s in the first place, so don’t blame me if he brings it up.”

The next morning, Ord and I caught a lift aboard what everybody was supposed to think, but nobody actually believed, was a hop jet shuttling us to rendezvous with the Abraham Lincoln, in parking orbit above Bren. Wally was right about the fracture, which hurt like hell. I clamped my jaw while I blamed him anyway, every minute that the hopper boosted.

We shared the hopper with one passenger, who spun his seat to face Ord and me once the engines went silent. His nameplate read “Applebite.”

Like the rest of Howard Hibble’s freak show, also known as Military Intelligence Battalion Bren, Reinforced, our companion wore army utilities, topped with a twentysomething’s straw-colored chin and skull fuzz, which had no recent experience with a barber or a razor.

Ord eyed the kid’s crooked-pinned captain’s brass with the enthusiasm of a jockey aboard a pig.

I asked, “How goes Silver Bullet, Applebite?”

Howard Hibble’s supergeeks had the military bearing of Cub Scouts, Mensa-level intellects, and the xenophobia of Cold War spies. Applebite’s eyes widened, because even the code name for the Cavorite weaponization project was classified. He slid his eyes to Ord and said nothing.

I sighed. “The sergeant major’s clearance is higher than yours, Applebite. Besides, in about forty minutes, he and I are gonna watch you board a ship that’s not even supposed to exist.”

Finally, Applebite shrugged. “We’re close, sir. But…”

I smiled. From three decades of war, we knew that the man-sized armored-maggot Slug Warriors were as replaceable to the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony as fingernails were to us.

The only way to win the war was going to be to destroy the single cognitive center that ran the organism. A center that was probably the size of a planet. But we had learned early in the war that the Slugs had a way to neutralize nukes. So for the last thirty years, the Spooks’ job had been to think up a silver bullet that could kill a brain bigger than Mars.

“But even if you make a silver bullet, you don’t know where to shoot it?”

Applebite scratched his chin fuzz and smiled. “We don’t. But finding the homeworld’s not my job.”

Even after almost four decades, now that we finally had ships numerous enough and good enough that we could chase down Slug ships like wolves on cattle, we couldn’t find the Slugs’ homeworld. If we could find it, we were, apparently, almost ready to pour Cavorite on it like salt on a garden snail. A simile that delighted me.

Our hopper shook, the broken edges of my breastbone rubbed against each other, and I stiffened like somebody had cabled an Electrovan battery to my chest. We decelerated and matched circumlunar orbit with an unmarked vessel that had once been a Metzger-class cruiser and was now Silver Bullet’s headquarters. Cavorite was less toxic to humans than to Slugs, but the Spooks still chose to orbit the Red Moon rather than set up camp on it. Applebite’s drop-off at the research ship wasn’t recorded by its Spook crew on the hopper’s flight log, and a half hour later Ord and I were piped aboard the Abraham Lincoln before her foremast watch finished breakfast.

Thereafter, we spent a steady week at.6 light speed, and my breastbone started to knit, thanks to Wally’s accelerants.

Less happily, Ord hadn’t heart-to-hearted me about my mental state. Nominally, commissioned officers outrank senior noncommissioned officers. But if a good sergeant hadn’t privately advised the Old Man, who was typically younger than the sergeant, after the Old Man screwed up, it meant the time bomb was still ticking.

I watched the stars around us stretch from light points into glowing spaghetti, then disappear altogether as their light, and the Abe’s mile-long mass, got sucked into the Temporal Fabric Insertion Point that would spit us out inside the Mousetrap interstellar crossroad. As we jumped, I muttered to myself, “Howard, you mendacious son of a bitch, this better be worth the trip.”

FIVE

ORD AND I WERE SPECTATORS on the Abe’s bridge when she popped out into the Mousetrap, light-years as the crow flies from the Bren II Insertion Point, where the Abe went in. Vacuum is vacuum to my untrained eye, so the new space we saw on the screens looked as black and starry as what we left behind. Except the Abe got lit by sixteen pings within its first three seconds in new space.

All sixteen pings got instantaneous, correct electronic responses back from the Abe’s electronic countermeasures array. If they hadn’t, the Abe would have been trading real bullets with a Scorpion interceptor squadron. Scorpions were single-seat Cavorite-drive fighters, so small and stealthy compared to a conventional starship like the Abraham Lincoln, or like a Slug Firewitch, that they’re scarcely noticeable. Scorpions may be too delicate to survive a jump, but they sting, as the Slugs had learned the hard way.

The Mousetrap was a point of nothing in a universe mostly filled with nothing. But clustered in the Mousetrap, “close together” by astrophysical standards, were a double handful of the useful kind of black holes the Spooks called Temporal Fabric Insertion Points. A TFIP’s enormous gravity tacked together folds in the fabric of conventional space, so an object that could slingshot through a T-FIP jumped out light-years away from where it went in.

The Mousetrap was the most strategically valuable crossroad in human history because every one of the fourteen warm, wet rocks that constituted the planets of the Human Union could be reached in just days or weeks by jumping a ship through one or another of the Mousetrap’s T-FIPs. Humans could easily colonize the Milky Way and defend ourselves via the Mousetrap’s shortcuts. Unfortunately, the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony, which viewed humans as a virus, could just as easily exterminate us via those same Mousetrap shortcuts.

Mankind guarded the Mousetrap like its collective life depended on it, because it did.

So, ping challenges and visual confirmations notwithstanding, four Scorpions assumed station around the Abe, shadowing her like a potential Trojan horse. Well, the Abe’s crew knew that the Scorpions were there, even though the Abe couldn’t find them with its sensors. Ten escorted hours later, the great orange disk of the gas giant Leonidas filled the Abe’s visual displays, like Jupiter with blue stripes. One hour after that, Leonidas’s only satellite became visible, a spinning, twenty-mile-long nickel-iron mote against the planet’s glowing bulk.

The one thing in this universe more valuable to mankind than the empty space of the Mousetrap was the only habitable rock within the Mousetrap, from which the empty space could be defended.

Ord peered at the moonlet known as Mousetrap as the Abe drifted closer. Half of Mousetrap’s lumpy surface sparkled with silver solar arrays, even more than on our last trip through. He grunted, “Must make more electricity than Hoover Dam, these days.”

The Abe’s engineering officer, who stood watching the displays alongside us, inclined her head toward Ord. “Actually, Sergeant Major, Mousetrap generates enough power to lift the Hoover Dam into low Earth orbit. The smelting plants are power hogs.”

Too many miners, most of whom had been Bren slaves risking death for emancipation, had died boring a core out of Mousetrap’s centerline. From Mousetrap’s north pole to its south pole, sealed at each end with massive