Orphan's Triumph

THIRTY-EIGHT

HOWARD WALKED ME BACK TO HIS OFFICE, two flights down. He pointed at an ancient black-and-white photograph, framed on his wall. A man in a wide-brimmed hat and broad-lapelled suit that accentuated his thinness stood staring at the camera, alongside a beefier, mustached man in the last-century uniform of a U.S. Army two-star. The caption set in the mat around the photo read “Oppenheimer with Groves. Los Alamos, 1944.”

I tapped the glass over the picture, a copy of which hung in every office I’d ever known Howard to make a mess of. “Your patron saints.”

Howard stood beside me, arms crossed, staring into the gray and long-dead faces. “Silver Bullet is this century’s Manhattan Project, Jason.”

If the Slugs hadn’t demonstrated the ability to neutralize our nukes from the get-go, the Manhattan Project could have been the Manhattan Project of this century.

Howard always understated his case about Silver Bullet’s scope and importance. He did so less from modesty than from his Spook reflex to conceal the project and its cost. The concealment was more from the people who paid for it than from the Slugs, who really seemed to care less about us.

Compared to Silver Bullet, the Manhattan Project had been the technological equivalent of plumbing. The Manhattan Project had also been cheaper to the society that funded it. Cheaper by the degree that a cheeseburger is cheaper than an ocean liner, and the Manhattan Project had produced not one but two atom bombs within three years. Howard’s Spooks had labored for three decades and counting without success.

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.”