Orphan's Triumph

TWENTY-FOUR

FORT MEADE, MARYLAND, wasn’t the only place Howard’s Spooks infested, but it was the place where they had for years maintained facilities to hold a Slug smart enough to tell them anything-if, like a dog that chased cars, they ever caught one.

Howard buzzed me in through the doors of a three-story black glass cube with a sign out front that read “ International Communicable Disease Research Center. Protective clothing required beyond this point.”

He was wearing slacks, sandals, and a T-shirt that announced “On my planet, I’m normal.” The most military thing about him was an old-style ID badge he wore on a lanyard around his chicken-wattle neck. The army had long ago come to terms with the need to let Howard run his Spooks the way he wanted to. The honeymoon had lasted because his methods allowed him to recruit persons who thought outside the box. Way outside.

We stepped into the elevator, and Howard poked his badge into a slot for a subbasement level five stories down. Alongside the slot, someone had taped a hand-printed sign that read “Dungeon. Quiet please! Torture in progress.”

The elevator opened to a desk labeled “Security,” behind which sat a girl wearing farmer’s bib jeans over bare shoulders, with corporal’s chevrons pinned to the strap of an empty leather shoulder holster. She made one of those waves where the hand remains still while the fingers wiggle. “Hi, Howard. Who’s your friend?”

I sighed. Ord’s head would have exploded.

We passed by her, then through a set of double doors. Howard said, “Her IQ is one ninety-five.”

“One would hope.”

The room we entered was big enough to garage three buses, and at its center floated my green traveling companion from Weichsel, under a cone of soft blue overhead light. A cable thicket ran from plates taped to the Ganglion’s hide to consoles along all four walls, behind which sat a hundred Spooks.

I pointed at the cables and frowned. “Is that how you make it talk? Electric shock?”

Howard’s eyes widened. “The sign in the elevator was a joke!”

“I got that, Howard.”

“Jason, the Pseudocephalopod has no concept of withholding information from another because it’s never known another. It’s the only one of its kind. There’s no need to coerce anything, any more than you coerce a book to let you read it. We simply had to synthesize an algorithm that translated the information stored in this Ganglion.”

“Had. You’ve already done it?”

“We’ve been preparing for this moment for years.”

“Did it know where it came from?” I had come to see Howard from curiosity, but after Pinchon made me walk the plank, a half-hope had formed in a selfish corner of my mind. If Howard’s prisoner didn’t possess the navigational information we needed, we couldn’t end the war soon. If the war wasn’t ending, Pinchon might not send me to the glue factory. Perversely, during the entire drive down from New York, I had hoped the Ganglion would prove to be a bust.

Howard grinned. “Absolutely! Last night we deciphered a sequence of twenty-six jumps that lead from Weichsel to the homeworld system. Simple, really. We’re just tidying up now.”

“Great.” It was. In fact, it was the greatest news of the war. Somehow, I couldn’t get as excited as I should have been.

Behind Howard, Spooks had lined up to get their pictures taken standing in front of the Ganglion. Some hammed it up, holding a magazineless pistol, presumably borrowed from the corporal in coveralls, and snarling. Most smiled, whooped, and pumped fists overhead.

Howard said, “Want to get your picture taken with the Ganglion? Before the war ends?”

I shook my head. “I’ve got another stop to make.”

Fort Meade, like many military reservations, is big enough, and has enough excess, mothballed, built-out space, that it hosts activities in addition to those connected with its primary mission. Often, those activities are temporary, pending completion of permanent facilities.

The temporary location of the three-year-old Human Union Military Academy was in a sixty-year-old complex four miles from Spook Castle.

HUMA’s commandant lived in a government-provided house on the temporary academy grounds, like a university president. I parked at the curb, lifted a package the size of a Kleenex cube off the seat beside me, then carried it to the front door and rang the bell. As I waited, I looked around. The place was more bungalow than house, walled in peeling stucco, with a roof of cracked red tile and a dropcloth-sized lawn baked to steel wool by summer.

I thought it was the most beautiful home I had ever seen.

Clack.

The door’s deadbolt rattled, then the door swung inward, squealing on unoiled hinges.