Orphan's Triumph

He grinned back. “Keeping myself busy, too, sir. One thing about Mousetrap, there’s not a lot else to do.”

I motioned him to follow the three of us into a vacant umpire’s blind, where the four of us leaned against the dark consoles. I was about to cure Ready Brigade’s boredom, and the cure would be painful. I said to Rusty, “You’ve heard about the Weichsel incursion?”

He glanced at Howard, then said, “Unofficially, sir. Did Space Force grease the maggots yet?”

I glanced at Howard, myself, then said, “Not exactly.”

EIGHT

RUSTY LEFT HIS EXECUTIVE OFFICER in charge of brigade training, and then he, Ord, Howard, and I reconvened our little war council back on Spook level forty-eight, huddled around a conference table in a neat and tidy compartment adjoining Howard’s office.

I outlined the mission and my concept. It would have been unprofessional to betray my own reservations, and I don’t think I did.

Rusty shook his head slowly and his brow wrinkled. “I don’t know, sir.”

“Big rewards justify big risks, Rusty. How soon can you embark Ready Brigade?”

“The preparedness standard for a Ready Brigade is wheels-up in fourteen hours, sir. Last drill we did it in twelve hours, thirty-nine minutes-”

Ord raised his eyebrows at me and almost smiled. Wheels-up hearkened back to a time when troops deployed in fixed-wing aircraft with retractable landing gear. At the turn of the century, a crack light division like the Eighty- second Airborne would have needed sixteen hours to embark.

I said to the brigadier, “Last time I was at the Pentagon, a Marine claimed that the Marine Ready Brigade at Camp Pendleton once went wheels-up in twelve hours flat.”

Rusty smiled. “My command sergeant major gently suggested to the brigade after the last drill, sir, that twelve thirty-nine was a time even jarheads could beat. Ready Brigade will be embarked in eleven hours flat, if Space Force can warm up the bus that fast.”

Ten hours later, I watched as Ready Brigade’s three thousand troops crowded the hundred-foot-wide platform of South Forty D to which the Abraham Lincoln was moored. The soldiers shuffled toward the maglev-tunnelsized aft hatch in the Abe’s flank. Gravity on Broadway, near Mousetrap’s centerline, was low enough that the Eternad-armored soldiers easily carried individual loads of personal weapons, shelter, ammunition, rations, and unit- and mission-specific equipment in back and chest packs that made them look like cartoon Santas on Christmas Eve. On Weichsel, at ninety-eight percent Earth gravity, each soldier would cut down to a combat load within minutes after disembarkation but would still be loaded like an abused burro.

Into the Abe’s forward hatch slid the hovertanks of Ready Brigade’s armored cavalry battalion, their engines whispering at idle in the light gravity.

I walked alongside a specialist fourth, his freckled face pale inside his open-visored helmet. He was combat- fit-they all were-but he breathed in staccato gulps. “First combat deployment, Specialist?”

He turned to me and his eyes widened. Then he said, “Sir! I deployed with the Eighty-second to Korea after the quake, General.”

I nodded. Human Union Space-Mobile Division Mousetrap was this century’s equivalent to the old-time gunslingers of the United States’ Eighty-second Airborne Division, a razor-edged unit light on equipment, long on mobility, and ready to move anywhere within hours, improvising on the fly if necessary, whether the mission was disaster relief or stinging the scourge of the universe on the ankle. The ’Trap Rats were mostly volunteers seconded from crack Earth units like the Eighty-second, the Legion Etrangere, and even the Ghurka Rifles, with a sprinkling of offworld talent.

The kid asked me, “Is it true, sir? We really get to fight Slugs?”

Howard and the Spooks weren’t going to brief the brigade until the Abe had buttoned up and cleared Mousetrap’s south doors. But the fact was that after three decades of war, indications of Slug espionage or communication interception to discover human plans remained zero. The maggots didn’t spy on us any more than we spied on the common cold virus. If we got in the Pseudocephalopod’s way, it exterminated us, or fought to its last deployed Warrior trying. If we didn’t get in its way, the Pseudo-cephalopod ignored us. I nodded to the kid.

He pumped his fist and grinned. “Outstanding!”

I sighed, and he shuffled on toward the Abe’s intake hatch. The bluster of esprit de corps sometimes carries troops to victory, like wind in sails. But only those who haven’t seen war are fond of it.

All these kids were about to learn that lesson.

NINE

SIXTEEN HOURS OUT FROM MOUSETRAP, the whisper of my boots against ladder rungs echoed in the deserted vastness of one of the thirty-six launch bays that belted the Abraham Lincoln’s midsection. So did my rasping breath. The aft access platform perched between the launch rails, thirty feet above the launch bay deck plates, and heights terrify me.

I reached the platform and clung to its handholds. The open-hatched ship poised above me was a Scorpion, a ninety-foot-long ceramic teardrop of a single-seat fighter and the current game changer in this war. The Slugs invented Cavorite drive, and we stole it from them fair and square. Then we adapted it not only to behemoths based on the Slugs’ own massive ships, like the Abraham Lincoln, but to the elegant gnat that was the Scorpion. Scorpions flitted and stung like no space vessel the Slugs had ever seen. That’s a poor turn of phrase, because the maggots don’t have eyes and are blind in the non-infrared spectrum. But to date, the Scorpion’s confirmed ship-to-ship kill ratio against the Slug Firewitch stood at two hundred twelve to zero. Also, a Scorpion could maneuver as easily, though more slowly, in a planet’s atmosphere as in a vacuum.

“Mind if I join you, sir?” I clutched a railing, then looked down. Ord stood on the deck below, looking up at me, hands on hips.

I had been reading inflections in Ord’s voice and posture for three decades, and I knew this was the time he had chosen to discuss the incident with the private on Bren. I wasn’t going to add to the unpleasantness by having the conversation thirty feet up. “I’ll come down.”

My boots thumped the deck, and I turned and looked back up at the Scorpion’s stern, where the clamshell doors of the weapons pod stood open for loading, like the speed brakes on a conventional jet. A Scorpion in combat could hover dead still, but it could also fly faster than any rocket or bullet fired out of its front end. So Lockheed had designed it to drop “fire-and-forget” guided munitions out its back end, the way conventional jets ejected radar chaff and flares to confuse homing missiles. The Scorpion’s internal weapons bay stinger was twenty feet long.

I pointed at it. “A squad in Eternads can pack in there. It’s gravity cocooned, like the cockpit. Ten thousand miles per hour to zero in one thousand feet. And inside the squad will feel six G, tops.”

Ord nodded and sighed. “I remember when I saw the holonews from the Paris Air Show. Captain Metzger and the Scorpion shocked the world that day, sir.”

So this was why Ord had sought me out here, alone in this bay. So he could segue the conversation to my godson. To avoid taking the bait, I cocked my head. “What do you think of my tactical concept, Sergeant Major?”

He cocked his head back at me and wrinkled his forehead. “Potentially brilliant. High risk. If I may say so, sir, much like its creator.”

Crap. There was no escaping the impending deluge. I sighed. “What’s on your mind, Sergeant Major?”

One corner of Ord’s lip twitched up, as close to a smile of recognition as he ever came. Then it faded into a