Orphan's Triumph

“We reinhabited Weichsel?”

“Just a few diamond miners. We evacuated them back here eleven days ago.”

Hair stood on my neck. “Evacuated?”

Howard nodded. “A precaution, as soon as the cruiser group orbiting Weichsel detected the new Pseudocephalopod invasion force.”

I closed my eyes, then opened them. “The maggots are back.” I wasn’t surprised that the Slugs were back. The Human Union’s defense posture, so massive that it made the Cold War look like peewee football, was predicated on the assumption that they would return. I cocked my head at Howard. “But why Weichsel? Why a sideshow, and the same place where they feinted last time?”

Howard leaned back in his chair and stared up at the ceiling, and I leaned forward in my chair. The reason the army and the Congress and the UN put up with Howard and funded his clandestine programs was that his intuition about the Slugs had proven right so often over thirty years of off-and-on war.

He said, “The Pseudocephalopod knows we reacted to the first feint at Weichsel only by stationing cruisers there and fighting it to a draw, out in space. It infers-correctly-that we don’t value Weichsel highly and that we defend it lightly.”

“So?”

“So the Pseudocephalopod reasoned that it could slip in and plant a small force on Weichsel easily.”

I turned my palms toward Howard. “Again. Why?”

“So we’ll mount a counterattack from here in the Mousetrap and drive it off Weichsel.”

“Another feint. To draw away our rapid-response forces, so the Slugs can attack us elsewhere.” I nodded.

Howard said, “Not a feint. Feints are intended to mislead. The Pseudocephalopod is direct in its tactics.”

“But we won’t take the bait.”

“Oh, yes, we will. Because it’s excellent bait.”

I stiffened. “Huh?”

Howard waved on a hologen in his compartment’s corner, and it flickered as he scrolled to an overhead, visible-light image of a flat snow-and-rock landscape. I could tell it was Weichsel because a half-dozen rust-orange mammoths ambled at the image’s far edge. At the image’s center, snow drifted against one side of a bulbous Slug-metal blue disk. Based on the size of the mammoths, the disk was ninety feet in diameter and twenty feet high. Six snow-covered ridges stretched away from the disk like wheel spokes.

I leaned toward the image. “We’ve never seen a Slug instrumentality that small, except for individual Warrior weapons and those booby-trap footballs they leave around. What do you think it is?”

Howard nodded. “Our collective hunch is that you’re looking at a hard-shell facility housing a control Ganglion, armored and with enough cognitive capacity to control operations on a planetary scale. A remote brain, if you will.”

“There’s no Troll?” Normally when the Slugs set up housekeeping on a planet, they dug in a transport ship as big as a small mountain, a “Troll” by United Nations phonetic designator. Trolls were purpose-built to incubate Slug Warriors by the millions.

Howard shook his head. “We’ve identified four Fire-witches orbiting Weichsel, and a force of fifty thousand Warriors, deployed in defensive positions around the Ganglion.”

I shook my head. “When the war started-hell, anytime up until the last two years-that was scary. But the war fighting balance has shifted. Four Firewitches? Today one Scorpion squadron will eat them alive. Then we can stand off and brilliant bomb the maggots and their brain from orbit.”

“But if we could capture the brain intact, we might be able to locate the Pseudocephalopod homeworld.”

I raised my eyebrows. We had captured a few Slug ships over the years, but the little maggots were regular kamikazes. The thinking parts always self-destructed before we could examine them.

I pointed at the snow-covered-disk image. “What makes you think we could take this brain alive?”

“Two reasons. First, you can devise and execute a plan that will achieve tactical surprise. Second, the Pseudocephalopod fully expects that you will take the brain alive, as you put it.”

“So it’s a trap. By now, we’ve learned not to walk into Slug traps.”

Howard pulled his chessboard back between us, then moved a white pawn, undefended, into a center square. “It’s not a trap, it’s a gambit. A sacrifice of valuable material offered to gain time and space.” He slid a black bishop onto the center square and captured the white pawn.

I cocked my head. “What time are the Slugs after? What space?”

“Well, I don’t know. But if you capture that brain intact, and if we can use it to develop the targeting intelligence we need, and if the fleet can deliver weaponized Cavorite on target, before the Pseudocephalopod completes its own plan, we win the war. Not win a battle every few years. Not wait until the technology pendulum swings back against us and toward the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony. We can win. Finally. Forever.”

I sighed. “So human beings can get back to beating each other’s brains in.”

“I prefer to think in terms of a lasting peace.”

“If we take the Slugs’ gambit, but all of your ‘ifs’ don’t come true, what happens?”

Howard shrugged. “Human extermination. The end of civilization. Stuff like that.”

I smiled and shook my head. “Fortunately, your superiors aren’t about to risk Armageddon to win some chess game.” My smile froze, and my eyes widened. I frowned at my old friend. “Howard, you haven’t sent this idea of yours up the line for approval yet. Have you?”

“No-”

I blew out a breath. Howard was a paranoid nerd, but he didn’t deserve to have his career ended because he pushed one idiotic idea. “Good. Because if you did, they’d relieve you in about two minutes.”

“It wasn’t my idea. It was sent down the line to us, already. From Earth. We are to attack Weichsel with all deliberate speed.” He pointed to an encrypted chip on the desk. “That’s your copy of the order.”

My eyebrows rose so far that the skin on top of my head wrinkled. “You’re kidding.”

I read the order. He wasn’t.

SEVEN

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Howard, Ord, and I had changed into Eternad armor, and we exited a tube down- weight, at level six, the small-unit maneuver range. The range had a seventy-five-foot-high ceiling and a twenty- acre floor set with obstacles and targets that the range umpires could move to simulate varied tactical situations.

Holo training has its place, and Ready Brigade spent hours each week in the simulators. But there’s no substitute for sweat, noise, chaos, and physical exhaustion.

As we arrived, platoons from Ready Brigade Mousetrap maneuvered, squads in full tactical Eternad armor advancing at a crouching run while others covered them, then leapfrogged past their buddies. Detonation simulators shook the floor; hot smoke confused visible and infrared images. Squad leaders suddenly found their radios cut off by the umpire, forcing them to pop their visors and shout commands over the chatter of blanks and the screams of “wounded.”

The brigadier general who commanded Ready Brigade stood fifty yards from us. When he spotted us, he popped his helmet visor open, waved, then jogged toward us.

Howard said to me, “Jason, it would take us weeks to send objections back to Earth and get a response.”

Ord, his own visor open, leaned toward me. “In the meantime, sir-”

I sighed. “An order is an order.” From the first day I wised off as a trainee, I’ve bent plenty of rules. But even if I was now prepared to disobey a lawful order, my superiors would just relieve me, and my replacement would have to execute the order, but at the disadvantage of being new to the job. Which could get more GIs killed and increase the chance of failure. There would be time later to vent. For now, my job was to do the job I was sworn to do.

Ready Brigade’s commander arrived, in Eternad armor, helmet tucked under one arm, sweating. He saluted. I returned it and smiled. “Keeping them busy, Rusty?”