Orphan's Triumph

and the ship were up to, without showing myself forward of Ninety.

Each launch bay had a drinking fountain, and we stepped through the hatch into Bay One. So early in this mission, most of the flight deck’s thirty-six bays were as deserted as the infantry billets. Months from now, as we neared the Pseudocephalopod homeworld jump, the flight deck would bustle. But today, flight deck personnel tended the three Early Bird Scorpion interceptors, which every cruiser kept on alert 24-7, on the other side of the ship, and the very special Scorpion in Bay One.

While Eddie rehydrated like a beached hippo, I stared at the Scorpion locked on to Bay One’s launch rails. Its canopy was raised, and a bay crew member helped one alert pilot out after his watch so another could strap in.

I stood, puffing, hands on hips. “On that oversized watermelon seed ride the hopes of mankind, Eddie.”

Dripping sweat and bent forward hands on knees, he shook his head. “Not all of them.”

The Silver Bullet munition that Howard’s Spooks had fabricated essentially worked like a bundle of last-century MIRV warheads, the biggest cluster bomb in history. Bigger bombs split into smaller bombs and so on down to spherules smaller than sand grains. The grains would rain down evenly spaced Cavorite over an entire planet, in a pattern so uniform that it would kill a maggot that had the mass of the Eurasian Crustal Plate. That’s how big Howard’s Spooks had calculated that the Pseudocephalopod was, give or take Scandinavia.

The Scorpion was kept on alert even now, months away from the fleet’s objective, not so that it could attack or defend anything. The cruisers and clouds of Scorpions screening us took care of that. The Scorpion was on alert in case mechanical failure, mutiny, appearance of marauding gypsies, or anything else threatened the Scorpion’s mothership. If anything like that happened, the Scorpion could move to another cruiser. The Space Force and the Spooks had thought of everything.

The Spooks had even made two Silver Bullets, just in case. Half of the Tressel Cavorite we had worked so hard to get made this bomb. The other half was in a bomb in a Scorpion aboard the George Washington, with Howard babysitting.

I had picked up lots by eavesdropping on Eddie’s ’Puter. Still, I scratched my head. Stowaways don’t get briefed. “Eddie, the Abraham Lincoln and the George Washington are old designs. Why are the old warhorses carrying the heavy freight?”

He stood, rapped against a hull girder, and the sound of his knuckles echoed in the vast bay. “The newer cruisers can’t take a punch like these old girls. The rest of the fleet’s here strictly to keep the maggots off us, so we can deliver the two Scorpions to the last jump.”

The human race had put all its eggs into two sturdy baskets, then told the mightiest fleet in human history to watch those baskets. I didn’t have a better idea, and if I did, nobody cared what a retired general thought. “Eddie, you really think we’re gonna have to fight our way in to the last jump?”

He shrugged. “We planned for a fight. But we hope to be pleasantly surprised.”

We stepped back through the hatch and resumed our daily torture. I grimaced not so much from the exercise as from my concern that the maggots’ surprises were seldom pleasant.

SIXTY-NINE

TWENTY-FIVE JUMPS, and more daily jogs than I cared to remember, later, I floated weightless in the deserted observation blister on Abraham Lincoln’s prow. Spangled blackness glided around me as the ship rotated. Dead ahead beckoned the lightless disk of the next, and presumed last, insertion point, its gravity already accelerating us forward. Invisible over my shoulder, and all around us, the fleet surrounded this ship, dispersed over spans longer than the distance between Earth and the moon.

Jeeb perched on the blister’s handrail alongside me, and one of his legs squeaked loud enough in the stillness that I winced. He stared up at me with polished optics, and I tasked him. “Accelerate left third locomotor replacement.”

In response, his internals clicked, so faintly that only I would notice, as he reprogrammed.

I rested one hand on the rail beside Jeeb, and my replaced arm throbbed. By now, Jeeb and I each resembled George Washington’s hatchet. One hundred percent original equipment, except for six new handles and four new heads.

But Jeeb, for all the humanity I saw in him, was so immortal that he could survive a near-miss nuke, and he was selfless in the way that only machinery can be. We humans were all too mortal and all too selfish. And that, my life had taught me, was the essence of being us. We understood our mortality, yet we sacrificed everything for others, the way Jude’s father and then his mother had, the way Audace Planck had, the way Bassin was prepared to, and the way countless others had over the course of this war.

Sometimes the calculus of sacrifice was simple, one life for six thousand, or for all mankind. Sometimes the calculus was one arm for nothing explicable. I feared that only more sacrifice would win this longest and broadest of wars for us. I believed that we would overcome the Pseudocephalopod because, in our best moments, we overcome our selfishness.

From the speaker in the handrail, the bosun’s whistle lilted. I grumbled because it never stopped calling me. I sighed, then somersaulted, and floated aft, in the direction from which I came. “Let’s go, Jeeb. We’re not done yet.”

Jeeb and I drifted, then walked, back to infantry territory. As I stepped through the Bulkhead Ninety hatch, it slammed me in the back like a bulldozer.

SEVENTY

DEPRESSURIZATION KLAXONS HOOTED. I shook my head to clear it. Behind my back, the hatch locked down, separating Bulkhead Ninety and aft from areas forward. Had I been in the hatch, instead of through it, it would have snipped me in two like a salami.

I was still breathing, so the problem had to be with the deck forward, not with where I was. I swiveled around, then laid my cheek against the hatch. That way, I could peer through the eye-level quartzite peephole in the hatch to see what was wrong on the other side, between Bulkhead Ninety and Bulkhead Eighty-nine.

I swore and wiped the peephole, but it was black. Something on the other side had smeared the peephole so I couldn’t see through it.

I blinked, then squinted through again. Little points of light swam in the blackness, and something the size and shape of an old beer can with its top peeled back tumbled, weightless.

I blinked, then squinted again. “Crap.”

The Abraham Lincoln forward of Bulkhead Ninety rolled slowly in space, a mile away and drifting farther from me by the second.

“Crap, crap, crap.” I ran to my cabin and punched up my wireless library patch to Eddie Duffy’s computer. “Eddie?”

Silence.

“Goddamit, is anybody left up front?”

“Jason? Where are you?” Eddie!

“In my cabin. What the hell happened?”

“Dunno. Viper, maybe.”

I swore. As little as we understood about Slug tools and motives, we understood the Viper least of all. The Spooks figured that Vipers were dense lumps of Cavorite-powered matter, maybe no bigger than refrigerators, that the Slugs left loitering in space near things they thought were important, like mines afloat in vacuum. Vipers were triggered by sensors that looked like Slug-metal footballs that also were sprinkled around strategic points, like electronic trip wires. When a football sensed something it was programmed to dislike, the Viper accelerated to a speed in excess of.66 C, being two-thirds the speed of light, homed on the little football sensor, then smashed the living crap out of whatever the football had detected.