Orphan's Triumph (Jason Wander) (28 page)

I hugged Jude, then Celline, then I stood still and looked at them.

The pilot shivered in his coverall, then turned to me. “General Wander, my ship’s a sitting duck on the ground like this. And we’ve still got work to do.”

SIXTY-FIVE

THE SCORPION’S CANOPY whined down and sealed me in alongside the pilot. The cockpit looked familiar, exactly like the modified ship in which Jude had given me my flying lesson back on Bren, before so much had changed.

The pilot scanned instruments, adjusted controls, and punched touch panels rowed across the canopy top like a concert pianist playing upside down.

The screens lit, the canopy seemed to disappear, and we drifted into the sky. As we rose, the pilot pivoted the Scorpion, so we gazed out across the Arctic wilderness, toward the black mountain wall that stretched for three hundred miles to the east, around which Celline and Jude would have to lead the malnourished army huddled below us. He whistled. “Quite a walk. But I wouldn’t bet against that lady.”

“The walk’s not the problem. The company is. There’s a Tressen infantry division ten miles behind them and gaining.”

When the altimeter read fifteen thousand feet, the pilot flipped back the hinged, red-striped shroud that covered the weapons console as he drifted the Scorpion south along the railroad. I pointed at the console. “You can’t fight this ship.”

He nodded. “Correct, sir. Engagement within the airspace of Tressel’s strictly forbidden. We weren’t even permitted to load defensive armament for this pickup.”

“Then what… ?”

“Admiral Duffy determined that the
Tehran
was carrying deteriorating stores.”

“Huh?”

“We can always jettison deteriorating stores that endanger the ship into nonorbital space or into deserted country.” He pointed below us. “Sir, could you have a look to assure that area below us is just deserted country?”

Below, a column of black specks stretched a hundred yards wide for a mile on either side of the railroad, as Forty-fifth Division gave chase to my godson, Celline, and their tiny band of innocents. My jaw hung slack. “Eddie’ll get relieved without pension for this.”

“The admiral said that, too, sir, to me and the four red jackets that volunteered to load the pod. He said to tell you the dental plan’s lousy, anyway.”

“Son, this is no joke.” However, as I said it I mentally retracted every curse I had placed on the head of Eddie Duffy.

“The admiral’s log will say deteriorating stores were jettisoned above the Arctic Circle of Tressel. Only me, the admiral, and the four red jackets can say different.”

“And me. Why am I here?”

“The admiral wanted somebody spotting who knows where the friendlies are, where the bad guys are, and the target characteristics.”

I jerked my thumb over my shoulder, toward the stinger pod. “What are you packing?”

“Radar-guided Area Denial Explosive. Basically bundled cluster bombs that arrange themselves as they fall. The radar identifies moving targets and shifts the cluster units for maximum efficiency.”

I pointed below as we hovered unheard and unseen high above Forty-fifth Division’s quick-marching GIs. “There are no friendlies down there.”

He nodded as he laid his hand on a selector dial. “They got any hard-shell vehicles or body armor?

RADE burst fragments behave like razor blades.”

I shook my head. “Dismounted light infantry. Cloth coats, steel helmets.”

“Then they’re toast.”

They weren’t toast. They were human beings, as cocky, imperfect, and mortal as he was. The targeting screen winked on, the pilot tipped the Scorpion up, and the fuselage shuddered as the cluster bombs released and began their tumble, three miles above the unsuspecting marchers. Onscreen, a wavering green rectangle materialized as the munition sized up its target. Then dozens of red lights swarmed like gnats within the rectangle as cluster-bomb units rearranged themselves in free fall, so their bursting bomblets would perforate every square foot of the target. I peered down at the undulating smudge on the snow that was thousands of infantrymen shuffling north while cursing their blisters.

Ting.

The only sound we heard, as the munition detonated three miles under us, was a chime from the Scorpion’s targeting ’Puter.

A silent, rectangular snow cloud snapped into sight below. Prevailing wind at the point of impact, which the targeting ’Puter read at sixteen miles per hour, blew away the snow. The smudge that remained on both sides of the railroad track didn’t undulate anymore. Among the bodies, at most a few dozen moved. They would freeze solid by the next morning.

On a perpetually snow-covered graveyard isolated at the top of this world, the bodies would soon be snow-covered thousands among already-dead thousands. The magnitude of the carnage, perhaps even the fact of it, much less its cause, wouldn’t be apparent for years. I turned my eyes north and let them rest on the tiny line of rebels that snaked its way east. The pilot pointed below, as the targeting ’Puter retracted. “Stick a fork in ’em. They’re done.”

I suppose I should have congratulated him.

Then the Scorpion shot upward toward the
Tehran.

SIXTY-SIX

BY THE TIME THE
TEHRAN
CAME IN SIGHT of Mousetrap, so many cruisers, Scorpions, transports, and tenders drifted dispersed in space around the moonlet that Mousetrap seemed enveloped in light fog, the way Bren’s Red Moon had looked when the Slugs cordoned it off.

Howard had returned with me on the
Tehran,
to shepherd the stones, and we split up when we off-shipped. The first thing I did when I off-shipped was check the port registry. The
Emerald River
was here, but her skipper was listed as a name I didn’t know. Mimi’s name appeared nowhere among the personnel of the vast fleet. Whatever had become of Mimi’s request for transfer back to a vessel command, it hadn’t landed her at Mousetrap. My next stop was Off-Station Communications, otherwise known as the post office. I had checked Jeeb’s doghouse there and reclaimed it. The clerk scrolled his screens. “Nothing, sir. Not under ‘General’ or ‘Mr.’ If you’ve got outgoing, I can take it in, but Mousetrap’s been on lockdown since the push started last month. Nothing in or out.”

I toted Jeeb’s container with me to the Spook Penthouse on level forty-eight, to see Howard Hibble. The MP at the tube was the same one who had been on duty my last visit. He blocked my path.

“What’s up, Corporal?”

“Restricted area, sir.”

“I’m cleared.”

He shrugged, hand on his holstered sidearm. “Not in my ’Puter. Sir.”

Howard eventually came out and vouched for me, which shouldn’t have worked, but did. Even a retired general has a certain avoirdupois.

We sat in Howard’s office.

I scowled at him. “From the armada around this place, I gather the final push is cranking up. You could have told me.”

“You don’t have a clearance since this retirement business.”

I rolled my eyes. “That was just a paper game to shock the Duck. I’m going up to AOPD and unretire as soon as we’re done here. When do we jump off?”

Howard crossed his arms.

“Howard. This is me.”

He sighed. “Weaponization of the stones we brought back should take a month. The
Tehran
will refit in the meantime. The rest of the fleet’s been on alert for two months.”

I nodded. “Good. I can use the rest.”

Howard shrugged.

I pointed at the deck beneath us, beyond which, out in the space of the Mousetrap, the great human fleet drifted. “Howard, when that fleet leaves, I leave with it. I
will
see the end of this war.”

My next stop was on level twenty-nine, where the adjutant general’s office operated a branch of the Army Officer Personnel Directorate. The branch consisted of a compartment the size of a gang shower, occupied by one overweight, overworked, pug-nosed second lieutenant who was sufficiently junior that she was saddled with all administrative matters for the post.

I sat in front of her desk, leaning forward in my chair.

She ran her finger across a line on a flatscreen, then nodded. “Yes, Mr. Wander. Your paperwork came through from the Human Union Consulate on Tressel and was processed. Your initial pension check was direct deposited on the first, just before we locked down.”

“It’s
General
Wander. I want to unretire. It was a mistake.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“What I mean is I just needed some time off to attend to something I couldn’t accomplish as an army officer.”

She shook her head. “That’s not what your file says.”

I squirmed. “I know what I intended.”

“If you intended to abandon your post in the field during wartime, you intended to desert. Says here the judge advocate general’s office declined to prosecute only because Consul Muscovy included his sworn affidavit with your papers. The consul swore that he forced you to retire to avoid an interplanetary incident detrimental to diplomatic relations with the government of Tressen. You’re lucky you kept your pension.”

“What do I have to do to unretire?”

She cocked her head. “You’re too old to enlist again.” Then she brightened. “File a two-oh-two stroke seven. You might be reinstated at a reduced rank.”

I exhaled and closed my eyes. “Yes! Print me one.”

She shrugged again. “Sure. But it’s gotta be approved in Washington. And we’re on indefinite lockdown, so it can’t be transmitted off Mousetrap.”

I leaned forward with my elbows on the desk. “What am I in the meantime?”

She sighed, and swiveled her chair to face a different screen. “A ward of the Veterans Administration, Mr. Wander.”

I stood, planted my fists on her desk, and leaned forward. “I’ve been in this war from the beginning. I’m going to be in it at the end. Even as a spectator. Can you get me on a ship? Any ship. As a dishwasher or something?”

“Ships are classified areas. You aren’t cleared to enter a classified area. You can’t get cleared because—”

I exhaled so my lips flapped and made a motorboat noise. “Clearances have to be approved through Washington, but we’re on indefinite lockdown.”

She smiled. “I knew you’d understand. But as a retiree lawfully on a military post, you can access all unclassified areas.”

“Being?”

She rolled her eyes to the compartment ceiling and ticked off on her fingers. “This office. The post office. Bachelor Officers’ Quarters—you’re entitled to lodging there on a space-available basis. You have Officers’ Mess privileges. You can make purchases at the post exchange, including the package store if you’re of age.”

“What can I do besides sleep, eat, shop, and buy booze?”

“There’s the Mousetrap Library.”

“Is it any good?”

“It will be when I get time to start it.” She shrugged for the last time as she snatched a paper file off a stack. “Oh. And you can use the Officers’ Club.”

I smiled. “Perfect!”

SIXTY-SEVEN

TWO HOURS AFTER I LEFT AOPD, I stepped through the hatch into Mousetrap’s consolidated Officers’

Club, with a brown paper bag under one arm. Mousetrap’s O Club served all branches of the Human Union Forces, which looked suspiciously like the U.S. Army and the U.S. Space Force, with a sprinkling of Brits of all stripes, Euros, Asians, Afros, and Outworlders.

The O Club’s decor was early Neon Beer Sign, with a pool table and bowls of plausibly nonhydroponic cocktail peanuts on the tables, and the place was half-full of the swabbies who had flooded Mousetrap like a tsunami.

My quarry, alone at a table with a neat whiskey and a paperbook history of the Boston Red Sox, looked up and smiled. “Jason!”

He waved me over, and I sat.

He pointed at the bag I held. “Whazzat?”

“A congratulations present on the occasion of your new command, Eddie. And I owe you for Tressel.”

“Nothing happened on Tressel.”

“Of course not.” If there was a rule bender to be found on Mousetrap, it was Eddie Duffy. Eddie’s cheeks glowed redder than usual. “The
Abraham Lincoln’
s a great ship. But I’ll miss the
Tehran.
” Then he frowned. “Not as much as I suppose you miss things. I heard about the retirement.”

I shrugged. “I miss not getting a ticket to the finale. I’ve earned my seat. I don’t miss the responsibility. I just want to see it, not be it.”

“After what you’ve been through, I don’t blame you. If there was anything I could do…” He reached across the table, tugged at my brown paper bag, then raised his eyebrows and smiled.

“Hewitt’s! How did you know?”

“We killed the last bottle I bought you six years ago.”

He narrowed his eyes. “You needed a favor then.”

I stiffened and widened my eyes. “Surely you don’t think I—”

“As long as it’s a small one.”

I held my hand up between us, with the thumb and fore-finger so close together that a cocktail peanut wouldn’t fit between them. “Tiny.”

SIXTY-EIGHT

SIX WEEKS LATER, Eddie and I were still together, chasing a six-legged mechanical cockroach through intragalactic space, or at least through that part of space that hurtled along just forward of the
Abraham
Lincoln’
s Bulkhead One Twenty.

Whenever we had shipped together in the past, as admiral and embarked-division commander, Eddie Duffy and I jogged together every day. On this voyage, as admiral and his stowaway, we continued the routine because Eddie was my shipboard protector, because we were friends, and because we were the only people on this ship who either of us could keep up with.

“Gimmee a minute.” Eddie raised his palm, panting in silence broken only by the metallic skitter of Jeeb’s six legs against the deck plates.

The
Abraham Lincoln
was deserted from forward of Bulkhead One Twenty on forward to Bulkhead Ninety. Normally, Bulkhead Ninety back to Bulkhead One Twenty was overcrowded with the infantry division that a cruiser packed, in addition to the cruiser’s Space Force crew of twenty-two hundred.

But the people back on Earth like my former boss General Pinchon had invited no infantry to the party that would, they were sure, win the Pseudocephalopod War.