Orphan's Triumph (Jason Wander) (18 page)

I said, “At least.”

“You know, at first Oppenheimer’s physicists weren’t sure they could manufacture enough enriched uranium to make a working bomb. And the manufacturing facilities would consume one-sixth of the total amount of electricity generated in the United States. An alternate design used plutonium, which was easier to come by but toxic and dangerous to work with. General Groves chose additional expense over the risk of failure and developed both designs in parallel.” Howard stepped behind his desk, drew a grapefruit-sized object from a drawer, and tossed it to me.

It was a rock, but with the apparent weight of a balloon.

I whistled. “This is the biggest Cavorite stone in the history of Bren.”

“Not only bigger, but as toxic to the Pseudocephalopod as the Red Moon’s Cavorite. Weapons-grade Cavorite, if you will. I told you we had discovered other Cavorite falls. Places where the Pseudocephalopod had bypassed meteorites of greater toxicity to it, in favor of the placer deposits in the Stone Hills.”

My eyes bugged, and I pointed toward the empty sky beyond the ceiling. “Howard, you enlarged the national debt mining weapons-grade Cavorite in space. But you had it right here on Bren?”

“I didn’t say that meteorite you’re holding was from Bren. If the Red Moon was our expensive uranium bomb alternative, this sample represents our dangerous plutonium bomb alternative.”

“I thought Cavorite wasn’t dangerous to humans.”

“In that form it isn’t. But the alternative was back-burnered in favor of the Red Moon due to political considerations.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning the Human Union refused to do sensitive business with Neo-Nazis.”

I rolled my eyes. “Howard, the only Neo-Nazis I know are the Tressens.”

He pointed at the rock in my hand. “That specimen was collected when we surveyed a fall of meteoric Cavorite forty miles long and twenty miles wide on our first pass over Tressel.”

Howard, Spook to his core, didn’t say
where
on Tressel the Cavorite lay. I could have browbeaten it out of him, but something else chapped me more. “That’s why we changed the course of the war on Tressel? To get the Cavorite?”

“Officially, to plant the seeds of peaceful democracy. Unfortunately, we didn’t control the political outcome very well.”

Not even Earth’s politicians could stomach the junta that had taken over Tressel. The planet was cut off and stewing in its own totalitarian juices. If Jude hadn’t had the pedigree he did, son of two heroes, with a skill we sorely needed, his ties to Tressel would have disqualified him from so much as setting foot on any other planet in the union.

“Besides, Jason, we had a source of weapons-grade Cavorite on Bren. Well, above Bren. And it was controlled by a progressive monarch whom the human-rights activists loved.”

I sighed. “Now alternative two is the only one we have left. We have to make a deal with the devil to save our skin.”

Howard sat in front of his screens while he decrypted a set of orders, then spun the screens so I could read them. They were addressed to me. “Not ‘we,’ Jason. You’ve saved Chancellor Planck’s life, fought alongside him. Your godson is his protégé. Your peculiar brand of personal diplomacy succeeded with Audace Planck in the past. The one who has to make a deal with the devil, with Jude’s help, is you.”

THIRTY-NINE

“SLOW DOWN!” I death gripped the grab bar ahead of my seat as Jude, piloting alongside me, skimmed a two-seat Wall Crawler along the nickel and iron wall of Mousetrap’s Broadway. The quickest way to travel from Mousetrap’s Bachelor Officers’ Quarters to the shipyards of North Broadway is by Wall Crawler, a subsonic aerial go-kart custom-designed for quick, unscheduled people-moving around Mousetrap. With a test pilot at the controls, a Wall Crawler’s more terrifying than quick.

Howard, Jude, and I had embarked for Tressel the day after I got my orders, laying over at Mousetrap while the
Tehran
put in for her overdue refit.

“Jason, relax.” Jude serpentined the Wall Crawler through the lumpy iron hummocks of Broadway’s mining midsection, then slowed as we picked our way amid the scaffold skyscrapers and half-completed cruisers of North Broadway. Jude slipped the Wall Crawler into a parking spot alongside a tubular hangar one-tenth the size of a cruiser dry dock.

Inside, a dozen bulge-bodied Scorpion variants floated three feet off the hangar’s deck. Jude ran his hand along one Scorpion’s flank while he and a tech walked alongside the ship. I followed.

Jude said to the tech, “This one made a jump and back?”

The tech swung his chipboard to point at all dozen Scorpions. “They all have, sir. Every one came back solid, and none of the pilots got so much as a nosebleed.”

For once, we were trying not to refight the last war, but to win the next one. We had surprised the Slugs on Weichsel by jumping a cruiser, then launching undetectable Scorpions while the cruiser stayed put, and the tactic had worked.

But we couldn’t count on it to work again. The Scorpions now in the Spook hangar we had left back on Bren had been enlarged so that they could deliver a planet-killing dose of weaponized Cavorite. Otherwise, they were “stock,” meaning they could shield their cargo—including humans—from G-forces of maneuver at extreme hypersonic speeds. But if they tried to jump through a Temporal Fabric Insertion Point outside the belly of a gravity-cocooned cruiser, they would be squashed into particles smaller than dandruff.

These new Scorpions were shielded like cruisers, a nanotechnologic triumph that had been impossible even in the comparatively recent days when new cruisers like the
Tehran
came off the ways. That meant that if—if—we could shake the Tressens down for weapons-grade Cavorite, and if—if—Howard’s Spooks really had pinpointed the portal jump that would bring human ships within striking distance of the Slug homeworld, then we wouldn’t even have to send cruisers in harm’s way, or lose tactical surprise, by jumping them.

The tech asked Jude, “Sir, couldn’t we just send these in fire-and-forget? Like the old cruise missiles?”

The debate about the need for manned aircraft and spacecraft had raged since the turn of the century, when U.S. remotely piloted aerial ’bots had started whacking terrorists. Jude shook his head. “Remote communication travels at light speed. A joysticker can dogfight on Earth, but at space distances what he sees lags a second, and so does his input.”

“I hear this won’t be a dogfight, sir. Just fly straight at a planet-sized target, then pull the trigger. With respect, sir, aren’t piloted aircraft just toys for generals who like to fly?”

Jude raised one finger. “When that trigger gets pulled, the only other intelligent species in the universe goes extinct. Would you trust that to a preset ’bot?”

The tech shrugged. “I suppose not.”

We had taken human decision making out of war more and more over the last century. We could’ve taken humans out of even more cockpits, and out of more tank hulls, and even off infantry point walking decades ago, in favor of ’bots. War would have been cheaper if we had just eliminated the option to be human. But I saw value in keeping human life at issue. As Robert E. Lee said, “It is well that war is so terrible, lest we grow too fond of it.”

The tech nodded, then said to Jude, “I guess you’ll be flying lead, then, sir?”

Jude shrugged. “Like you said, it’s not dogfighting.

Anybody who can handle a Scorpion can fly straight at a planet, then pull the trigger.”

I stiffened at Jude’s answer but held my tongue in front of the tech.

On the way back to the BOQ, we passed level twenty. It was sealed off, had been since the Second Battle of Mousetrap. Five thousand missing in action were entombed there, unrecoverable except at unacceptable risk to the excavators and to the fabric of Mousetrap. Jude’s mother was among them. I pointed at the fused iron wall and the plaque inscribed with five thousand names. “Jude, your mother, and before her your father, gave their lives to this war! You’re going to let someone else pull the trigger that ends it?”

He stopped the Crawler, and he looked over at me as we hung there in Broadway’s vastness. “They did. And you’ve given most of yours to it, too, Jason. Ending this war may define their lives. It may define yours. But my life will be defined by something else, something out in my future. Something you found but I’m still looking for.”

I shook my head.

Jude leaned on the center console. “You can’t dictate what I make from my life, any more than Ord could dictate what you made of yours, Jason.”

“No. But I learned from him that I should do the right thing.”

“And I’ve learned that from you.”

“I hope so.”

Nevertheless, three days later we reboarded the
Tehran,
outbound for Tressel, where we both fully intended to make a deal with the devil.

FORTY

I SAT WITH A PLASTEEL CRATE IN MY LAP, on my bunk in my double-wide stateroom aboard the
Tehran,
outbound for Tressel.
Tehran’
s accommodations were more generous than older cruisers’, some already mothballed relics like me.

“They don’t make ’em like they used to.” Howard leaned against my stateroom’s bulkhead and pointed at the object in the crate.

Jeeb stretched his ultratanium limbs like a waking, six-legged Siamese. A vintage Tactical Observation Transport looks like a turkey-sized metal cockroach, coated in radar-absorbent fuzz, with dual forward-directed optics that pass for eyes. Compared to cold, sleek modern surveillance ’bots, a TOT passes for cute.

Jeeb rolled onto his back and flailed all six legs like a newborn. According to the engineering texts, the machine was running through its joint-flexibility test program. According to me, and the other diehards who believed that TOTs imprinted their human wranglers’ personalities, he was glad to see me and begging for a belly scratch.

I said to Jeeb, “You’re fine. Knock it off.”

He kept wriggling.

I added, “Please.” He quit.

It’s ridiculous to program precatory language into commands to a mere machine. But Jeeb’s not a mere machine to me.

Howard sighed. “At least we won’t need him to translate.”

Like so much of what had once made Jeeb useful, translation of human language, on or off Earth, was now handled by personal clip-ons no bigger than an Oreo. Old TOTs like Jeeb, in their day, not only observed the battle-field, they intercepted and deciphered communication. A TOT could even teach a code or a language it had monitored, and then decrypted or learned, overnight.

“Howard, my worry isn’t that the Tressens won’t understand us. My worry is that they will.”

“The Pseudocephalopod threatens them as much as it threatens the rest of the human race.”

“Which won’t make them less pricks.”

“Aud Planck always struck me as a decent sort.”

“Aud’s only a third of the Chancellery. And his opinion probably counts for even less than a third because he
is
decent.”

Jeeb sat up, telescoped out his wings, then tested them by fluttering across my cabin and perching on Howard’s shoulder.

Howard scratched Jeeb behind his optics. “You have flexibility. Your orders are to secure permissions to prospect for and extract Cavorite. The price is open.”

“Howard, I’m the last person I’d give a blank check to.”

“No, the last person would be either of Aud Planck’s colleagues. Just do what you can. Talk it out with them.”

“What if I make a deal? How long until the prospecting starts?”

“I think we could start within a month.”

“Shouldn’t I know where the stuff is?”

“Of course. When negotiations reach the stage where you need to know.”

Frankly, Howard was right. I’ve never had a poker face, and if I betrayed the location of the deposits with a twitch, it could cost us if we ended up having to go in and take it. Jude rapped on the hatch frame, then stepped through. He had changed back into his neo-Gestapo Tressen black. Nonetheless, Jeeb’s optics whined as they widened, and then he hopped from Howard onto the shoulder of another old friend.

Jude tickled Jeeb alongside the underside of the ’bot’s carapace. After years in a box, Jeeb was getting spoiled rotten. “Downship leaves from Bay Twenty-two in an hour.”

I set Jeeb’s Plasteel cage on the deckplates. “I’ll be dressed in twenty minutes.”

Jude smiled at Jeeb as the ’bot preened his antennae for the first time in three years. “In spite of everything, you must be looking forward to seeing Aud Planck, just like Jeeb. Old friends are old friends.”

We landed in the capital, Tressia, in a fern-grass town-center park tricked out with a yellow windsock that snapped in the breeze to aid our landing. Also snapping were two hundred Republican Socialist flags. The flags all flew at half-staff.

FORTY-ONE

THE TRESSENS GREETED US with one black-uniformed honor guard company, one chancellor, one military band, and one multilingual soloist.

The band maestro jerked his baton, and the band played the Human Union Anthem, which was actually “O Canada” expanded to include a verse for each planet of the Human Union, in the planet’s principal language. French, Russian, and Chinese stood in for planets like Weichsel that hadn’t developed a principal language. If you think standing through two anthems before an international soccer game is long, try fourteen verses of the same song.

Jude stood to my right, in Tressen dress blacks. Howard and I wore our own Class-A’s, and our host wore his, while he stood facing us at attention as his nation’s band played. However, Berbek Zeit’s black jodphur-pants uniform differed from the ground up. I had studied a Spook intel report during the trip to Tressel, a few weeks old and prepared by the Spook who fronted as Human Union cultural attaché in Tressia. Chancellor Zeit’s black jackboots were custom-made to add three inches to his five-foot, six-inch height. How the Spooks got into Zeit’s closet I didn’t need to know. The Spooks also reported that the decorations on Chancellor Zeit’s chest were phony, except for one he got for taking an enemy position in a one-room school. The position was defended by an old man armed with a cane and two dozen children. The defenders perished after the school doors were sealed from the outside and a fire accidentally broke out. In nine places simultaneously. The Spook report concluded that Zeit “suffers from megalomania and multiple latent antisocial pathologies, exacerbated by adolescent trauma, presently manifested in authoritarian behaviors and trappings.”