Orphan's Triumph

FOUR

“SIR?” The whisper was old, gravelly, and familiar. It came from close to my ear, so I heard it over jet-engine shriek.

I opened my eyes, focused, and saw Ord, gray eyes unsmiling, and above him the interior fuselage ribs of a hop jet. I asked, “Sergeant Major? What happened to the girl?”

Ord jerked his buzz-cut gray head, and I followed his eyes. A corpsman knelt beside the private, who lay strapped to the litter next to the one I lay on. Her eyes were closed; her chest slowly rose and fell. Joy juice from a suspended IV bag trickled down a transparent tube into her forearm. A purple streak began at the point of her jaw and traced halfway back to her ear.

Ord said, “Her jaw’s not broken, but you dropped her with a right as you went down, then landed on top of her. That kept her outfit from shooting her and gave them time to get downslope and put cuffs on her.” Ord frowned. “Sir, if you don’t mind hearing my opinion…”

I had minded hearing Ord’s opinion ever since he was my drill sergeant in infantry basic, but he never hesitated to share it with me anyway.

“You took an unnecessary risk.”

I shook my head. “No risk. I heard her shift her rifle to grenade mode. I never heard her shift back, and I talked my way to inside five yards from her.”

Ord nodded. “An M40 grenade doesn’t arm for five yards. So all she did when she pulled the trigger was wallop you in the chest with a low-velocity lump of unexploded shrapnel.”

I smiled a little at the cleverness of me.

Ord, as usual when I did that, frowned. “She could have flicked the selector switch back to rifle in an instant and killed you. She could have shot you in the head, instead of the chest, and killed you. That would have decapitated the offworld chain of command. If your sucker punch hadn’t knocked her flat, the sniper would have killed her anyway. That would have precipitated a crisis with the indigenous population.”

“But none of that happened. Now she gets a ride home. At worst, a Section Eight discharge. At best, administrative punishment and another chance in the army. The army gets a Band-Aid bill for me. I could see she was too distracted to realize she was still in grenade mode.”

Ord stared at me. I suppose he stared the way the caveman who discovered fire stared at the first idiot who stuck his finger into the flame. “Even so, sir, you could have allowed someone in armor, her commanding officer, perhaps, to make the approach. Or waited until the creep-and-peep team could have neutralized the situation.”

I glanced at the ’Puter on Ord’s wrist. A normal transport hauling a creep-and-peep team from Marinus would still be hours away. But only about an hour had passed since I stuck my chest in front of an almost-live grenade.

“That captain said the creep-and-peep team was coming out on a tilt-wing. Six hours. Why did the Spooks divert a hop jet to get out here faster? And why did you come out here on it?”

Ord peered at the IV bag alongside me, and the tube that ran from it into my forearm. “Sir, no need to get into that now. Your-ah-heroics left you with a hairline fracture of the sternum and related soft-tissue damage. The corpsman here just upped your dosage.” Ord smiled. Everybody in my platoon in basic knew an Ord smile meant that whatever the smile-ee thought was about to happen, he was sorely mistaken. Ord patted my shoulder. “Just relax for now, General.”

“I feel fine. Sergeant Major, answer my-”

The engine whine faded into nothing, and then another voice replaced it.

“-pleasure to have a casualty that outranks me, for a change.” I woke to the voice of the light colonel who commanded the infirmary at Human Union Camp, Marinus. Cocoa-skinned, gray-haired, and clad in short-sleeved blue scrubs, he stood in a white-painted single-bed room, staring at the chart reader in his hand. Hippocrates Wallace bared his forearms even though they were slick and puckered with burn scar tissue. I was there when he got burned. He had been a flight surgeon during the First Battle of Mousetrap. He was the only person I knew who had earned a Harvard Med School degree and a Silver Star.

I started to cough. Through the dope, pain penetrated my chest like a dull ice pick twisting. I froze my shoulders and tried to refrain from breathing while I hissed, “Pleasure? You this compassionate with all your patients, Wally?”

He toggled through my overactive medical history with his thumb. “Oh, suck it up, Jason. A cracked sternum’s little potatoes for you.”

I asked, “What about the girl?”

“Your victim? The private won’t be playing the harmonica for a while. Jaw contusions and some dental work. She’s on the stockade ward. I might move you there, too.”

“Now you’re a criminologist?”

“No. But I’ve got an honorary degree in watching screwballs. If you threw yourself into that situation to save the girl, to balance the scales for your perceived inadequacy because Congresswoman Metzger died on Mousetrap, you’re a little nuts. But if you were trying to commit suicide by lunatic, you’re a lot nuts. In which case I’m required by regulation to decertify you for command.”

“I’m fine. Half the Pentagon and two-thirds of Congress are crazier than I am, and nobody decertifies them.”

Wally snorted.

I said, “Remember, Colonel, I’m the biggest stud duck within two billion cubic light-years. I could fire you before you could decertify me.”

Wally sighed. “If only. Then I’d be the one who got shipped back to Mousetrap, where the sports holos are only two weeks behind and a man can get plotzed on scotch instead of fermented groundfruit juice.”

I narrowed my eyes at him, about the only body parts I could move without wincing. “Who’s getting shipped back to Mousetrap?”

He raised bushy eyebrows. “Didn’t Ord tell you? You are. Ord got one of those hard-copy encrypted chips that Hibble insists on sending. Why do you think the Spooks pulled an orbit-capable ship away from shuttling back and forth to the Red Moon? And used it to double time Ord out to the Stone Hills to deliver your Spook-o-gram?”

I sighed. “Wally, not even I am supposed to know where those shuttles are going. So don’t spread that around.”

Wally leaned down to me and whispered, “I don’t need to. Everybody on this post knows that whole Moon’s a Cavorite nugget. Though it beats the fecal matter out of me why the Spooks care. The Stone Hills mines produce Cavorite faster than Mousetrap can build ships to use it.”

I changed the subject. Partly because I didn’t want to know how much other classified material was common knowledge in my command. Partly because I was curious about Howard Hibble’s summons to Mousetrap. “How soon can I travel?”

“Given the diminished recuperative powers of a man your age-”

“You’re as old as I am.”

“Exactly. It takes me three days to recuperate from shining my shoes.” Wally shook his head. “I can’t sign off that you’ll be ready to tolerate escape-velocity G forces for at least a week.”

Howard was a devious geek, but if he sent a Spook-o-gram, something was up that I couldn’t wait a week to hear about. “Release me to travel tomorrow and I’ll smuggle you back a case of scotch.”

Wally raised his eyebrows higher. “Single malt?”

I managed a shallow nod. “And if you don’t share your amateur shrinkology with Sergeant Major Ord, I’ll make it sixteen-year-old.”

“Done. I’ll shoot you up with healing accelerants, but I can’t immobilize that fracture, so don’t blame me when it hurts like hell. And the shrinkology was Ord’s in the first place, so don’t blame me if he brings it up.”

The next morning, Ord and I caught a lift aboard what everybody was supposed to think, but nobody actually believed, was a hop jet shuttling us to rendezvous with the Abraham Lincoln, in parking orbit above Bren. Wally was right about the fracture, which hurt like hell. I clamped my jaw while I blamed him anyway, every minute that the hopper boosted.

We shared the hopper with one passenger, who spun his seat to face Ord and me once the engines went silent. His nameplate read “Applebite.”

Like the rest of Howard Hibble’s freak show, also known as Military Intelligence Battalion Bren, Reinforced, our companion wore army utilities, topped with a twentysomething’s straw-colored chin and skull fuzz, which had no recent experience with a barber or a razor.

Ord eyed the kid’s crooked-pinned captain’s brass with the enthusiasm of a jockey aboard a pig.

I asked, “How goes Silver Bullet, Applebite?”

Howard Hibble’s supergeeks had the military bearing of Cub Scouts, Mensa-level intellects, and the xenophobia of Cold War spies. Applebite’s eyes widened, because even the code name for the Cavorite weaponization project was classified. He slid his eyes to Ord and said nothing.

I sighed. “The sergeant major’s clearance is higher than yours, Applebite. Besides, in about forty minutes, he and I are gonna watch you board a ship that’s not even supposed to exist.”

Finally, Applebite shrugged. “We’re close, sir. But…”

I smiled. From three decades of war, we knew that the man-sized armored-maggot Slug Warriors were as replaceable to the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony as fingernails were to us.

The only way to win the war was going to be to destroy the single cognitive center that ran the organism. A center that was probably the size of a planet. But we had learned early in the war that the Slugs had a way to neutralize nukes. So for the last thirty years, the Spooks’ job had been to think up a silver bullet that could kill a brain bigger than Mars.

“But even if you make a silver bullet, you don’t know where to shoot it?”

Applebite scratched his chin fuzz and smiled. “We don’t. But finding the homeworld’s not my job.”

Even after almost four decades, now that we finally had ships numerous enough and good enough that we could chase down Slug ships like wolves on cattle, we couldn’t find the Slugs’ homeworld. If we could find it, we were, apparently, almost ready to pour Cavorite on it like salt on a garden snail. A simile that delighted me.

Our hopper shook, the broken edges of my breastbone rubbed against each other, and I stiffened like somebody had cabled an Electrovan battery to my chest. We decelerated and matched circumlunar orbit with an unmarked vessel that had once been a Metzger-class cruiser and was now Silver Bullet’s headquarters. Cavorite was less toxic to humans than to Slugs, but the Spooks still chose to orbit the Red Moon rather than set up camp on it. Applebite’s drop-off at the research ship wasn’t recorded by its Spook crew on the hopper’s flight log, and a half hour later Ord and I were piped aboard the Abraham Lincoln before her foremast watch finished breakfast.

Thereafter, we spent a steady week at.6 light speed, and my breastbone started to knit, thanks to Wally’s accelerants.

Less happily, Ord hadn’t heart-to-hearted me about my mental state. Nominally, commissioned officers outrank senior noncommissioned officers. But if a good sergeant hadn’t privately advised the Old Man, who was typically younger than the sergeant, after the Old Man screwed up, it meant the time bomb was still ticking.

I watched the stars around us stretch from light points into glowing spaghetti, then disappear altogether as their light, and the Abe’s mile-long mass, got sucked into the Temporal Fabric Insertion Point that would spit us out inside the Mousetrap interstellar crossroad. As we jumped, I muttered to myself, “Howard, you mendacious son of a bitch, this better be worth the trip.”