Orphan's Triumph

THIRTY-TWO

A SHAVE, SHOWER, and uniform change later, Jude’s footsteps and mine echoed in the Spook hangar, nearly lost in a din of metal against metal.

The space had become more factory floor than aircraft hangar, with a dozen Scorpions in various stages of conversion, each one’s belly tile floating three feet off the floor. Each giant watermelon seed of a craft, bigger than an old fixed-wing fighter-bomber, got pushed from station to station by two enlisted ratings as easily as if they were rolling an oversized shopping cart.

The only reason Scorpions even had landing gear was so they could be shut down completely to switch out peripheral systems or to conserve peripheral system batteries. Cavorite never got tired.

Jude led me to a shut-down Scorpion resting on landing gear just inside the hangar’s rolled-back main doors.

Modifying a single-seat Scorpion fighter to operate as a Silver Bullet bomber, or as our field-expedient troop carrier, essentially involved cannibalizing another Scorpion, then piggybacking the extra fuselage onto the existing one, with the nose of the cargo-passenger space faired in aft of the original ship’s cockpit. The overall look was not only graceless but indecent.

No paint in existence could withstand the skin temperatures a Scorpion generated while operating in atmosphere. So the nose art, which consisted of two angry eyes and a shark-tooth mouth, was merely temporary chalk. The slogan below the teeth read “The humping cockroaches. Payback is job one.”

Jude helped me negotiate the low-angled access ladder that bridged the Scorpion’s flank, then we dropped through the upturned clamshell canopy into the side-by-side couches for pilot and systems operator.

The rating at the ladder’s base cracked off a salute that Jude returned, then lifted the ladder away.

I turned to Jude. “What are you doing?”

He toggled a switch, the canopy clamped shut, then the visual screens that wallpapered the canopy lit, so that the opaque ceramic seemed transparent. “Taking her out for a spin. You’ll like it.”

“No, I-”

Jude powered the Scorpion on. There was no sensation of motion inside, but the scene outside bounced up and down as the landing gear retracted, leaving the Scorpion floating. The feeling was like playing a pre-holo video game, where the player sat in a chair watching the two-dimensional world ahead of him fly by.

Not that the old-style video experience bored me.

Jude nosed the ship out of the hangar at a walk, then drifted it above the city, left, right, canopy to the sky, canopy to the ground. Nose over, corkscrew, stall. I white-knuckled my couch arms, not because of what my gut felt, but because of what my eyes saw. And unlike a video game, I knew that what my eyes saw was true.

Jude glanced down at my death grips on my couch. “Just go with it, Jason.”

“Can we go straight?”

“You’re on.”

Marinus and the delta disappeared as we blistered along twenty feet above the Sea of Hunters. Jude sat back, smiling, hands off the paddles. “Just as stable as the original configuration.”

“How fast are we going?”

“It’s okay. We’re over the sea.”

“How fast?”

“Eight hundred.”

I death gripped the couch again. “Eight hundred miles per hour?”

“No.”

“Good.”

“Per second.”

We flashed across the opposite seacoast, and Jude nosed us up. The sky went black in a blink. “We can go faster now, Jason. No atmosphere.”

I craned my neck. “Where are the Slugs?”

“In an orbit a hundred thousand miles above us. And, at the moment, on the other side of the world.” Jude had inherited his father’s piloting aptitude and daring, his mother’s brains and marksmanship skills, and the bonus of having been the first person conceived and carried to term in space, where a stray ion had cut the right DNA strand and gifted him with the fastest reflexes in human history. He took us down, hovered the humping cockroach above the summit of Mons Marinus, the tallest peak on Bren, and on the other side of the world from where we began. Ahead of us the sun rose, spreading as a luminous crescent across the continent. Jude tugged a flask and two pewter cups from his pocket and unscrewed the cap.

My eyes widened. “Booze?”

“It’s five o’clock somewhere.” He poked my side. “Jason! It’s fruit juice.” He revolved the Scorpion so its canopy was two feet from the peak’s snow, then passed me the cups. “When I slip the canopy back, reach out and scoop snow with the cups. Be fast. The hull’s so hot the snow’ll melt before you can blink.”

I did, and we drank a toast to the sunrise with Marini pear nectar cooled by snow from the top of the world.

I said, “That’s something your father would have thought of. And something your mother would have loved.”

He smiled at me. “It’s only through you that I know that, Jason. I can ask you anything. Tell you anything.”

I turned my cup in my fingers and stared at it. “Then tell me which side of the fence you’re on. I mean between the union and Tressen.”

He stiffened. “What brought that up?”

“I didn’t tell you all of the last things your mother said to me. But I should. She asked me whether you were one of them. I told her no. Was I right?”

He rocked from side to side in his couch as the sun flooded into the cockpit and the screens darkened. “I don’t know how to answer that. If the Republican Socialists are doing what the camp rumors, the ones you believe, say, then, no. I’d never be one of them. But Aud Planck’s one-third of the chancellery. He’d never allow it.”

“If he knew. You’re spending all your time buried out on some aircraft test range. I hear Aud’s buried out pacifying the frontier.”

Jude squirmed. “I’d know if something that bad was going on. So would Aud.”

“You think it’s the kind of thing a propaganda ministry advertises?”

Jude stabbed his finger at me. “Look, I’ve made my stand for the union and against the Slugs, here and now. Tressen’s at the end of a jumpline, with no more Cavorite. Tressen politics couldn’t be less relevant to the problem at hand, which is kicking the Slugs off the Red Moon.”

I sighed, then nodded. “Fair enough. Which means I need to get back to work. Take me home.”

Jude sat still. “You drive.”

“What?”

He pointed at a set of paddles folded beneath the electronic countermeasures console. “The Wizzo’s got a redundant control set.”

“It’s idiotic. This thing costs more than Costa Rica.”

He snorted. “It’ll be the most fun you’ve had with your clothes on. You would have done it if my dad had asked you when you were teenagers. And I’m right here to override if you overcook it.”

I would have. He was. And my godson was also right about the fun.

When we got back, a total of one hour and fifteen minutes after I left my office, Jude parked the Scorpion out on the field, belly tiles high enough off the ground to avoid a prairie fire. A tech with a chipboard met us.

Jude reverted from godson to test pilot, speaking to the tech as we walked to the hangar through the early-morning cool. “It handles fundamentally identical to the original. No observable hull expansion problems with temperature variation. Well, I noticed a creak starboard rear, at the fairing.”

I left my godson to his Zoomie duties and walked back to my headquarters with a bounce in my step.

We were planning a high-risk operation, but the reward demanded it. I might end up defeated like Lee at Gettysburg as easily as victorious like MacArthur at Inchon. And the people who surrounded me would make it work, just like they had made so many other things work over the course of this decades-long trip through this now-brightening tunnel.

I stepped through the door to my offices at zero eight hundred, smiling. We had been open for business since zero seven hundred, and the aroma of strong Tassini coffee mixed with the smell of ink on the ribbons of Marini clerks clacking away on steel typing machines. An Earthling staff sergeant looked up from Ord’s desk. “Morning, General.”

As I passed him, I looked left and right, into adjacent, unoccupied cubicles and file aisles. “Where’s the sergeant major, Tierney?” Ord late for work was as improbable as the moons of Bren failing to rise at night.

I pushed open my office door as the staff sergeant shrugged. “Not here, sir. Put himself on sick call.”

I froze with my palm against the rough wood. In thirty years Ord had never put himself on sick call. “Tierney, reset my morning schedule. I’ll be out of the office for an indeterminate period.”

He cocked his head. “What’s up, General?”

“I’ve got a case of scotch to deliver.”