Orphan's Triumph

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.