Orphan's Triumph

FIVE

ORD AND I WERE SPECTATORS on the Abe’s bridge when she popped out into the Mousetrap, light-years as the crow flies from the Bren II Insertion Point, where the Abe went in. Vacuum is vacuum to my untrained eye, so the new space we saw on the screens looked as black and starry as what we left behind. Except the Abe got lit by sixteen pings within its first three seconds in new space.

All sixteen pings got instantaneous, correct electronic responses back from the Abe’s electronic countermeasures array. If they hadn’t, the Abe would have been trading real bullets with a Scorpion interceptor squadron. Scorpions were single-seat Cavorite-drive fighters, so small and stealthy compared to a conventional starship like the Abraham Lincoln, or like a Slug Firewitch, that they’re scarcely noticeable. Scorpions may be too delicate to survive a jump, but they sting, as the Slugs had learned the hard way.

The Mousetrap was a point of nothing in a universe mostly filled with nothing. But clustered in the Mousetrap, “close together” by astrophysical standards, were a double handful of the useful kind of black holes the Spooks called Temporal Fabric Insertion Points. A TFIP’s enormous gravity tacked together folds in the fabric of conventional space, so an object that could slingshot through a T-FIP jumped out light-years away from where it went in.

The Mousetrap was the most strategically valuable crossroad in human history because every one of the fourteen warm, wet rocks that constituted the planets of the Human Union could be reached in just days or weeks by jumping a ship through one or another of the Mousetrap’s T-FIPs. Humans could easily colonize the Milky Way and defend ourselves via the Mousetrap’s shortcuts. Unfortunately, the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony, which viewed humans as a virus, could just as easily exterminate us via those same Mousetrap shortcuts.

Mankind guarded the Mousetrap like its collective life depended on it, because it did.

So, ping challenges and visual confirmations notwithstanding, four Scorpions assumed station around the Abe, shadowing her like a potential Trojan horse. Well, the Abe’s crew knew that the Scorpions were there, even though the Abe couldn’t find them with its sensors. Ten escorted hours later, the great orange disk of the gas giant Leonidas filled the Abe’s visual displays, like Jupiter with blue stripes. One hour after that, Leonidas’s only satellite became visible, a spinning, twenty-mile-long nickel-iron mote against the planet’s glowing bulk.

The one thing in this universe more valuable to mankind than the empty space of the Mousetrap was the only habitable rock within the Mousetrap, from which the empty space could be defended.

Ord peered at the moonlet known as Mousetrap as the Abe drifted closer. Half of Mousetrap’s lumpy surface sparkled with silver solar arrays, even more than on our last trip through. He grunted, “Must make more electricity than Hoover Dam, these days.”

The Abe’s engineering officer, who stood watching the displays alongside us, inclined her head toward Ord. “Actually, Sergeant Major, Mousetrap generates enough power to lift the Hoover Dam into low Earth orbit. The smelting plants are power hogs.”

Too many miners, most of whom had been Bren slaves risking death for emancipation, had died boring a core out of Mousetrap’s centerline. From Mousetrap’s north pole to its south pole, sealed at each end with massive airlocks, ran a great tunnel that had been carved out. Into the tunnel’s walls had been carved vast living, mining, and manufacturing spaces, in concentric rings around the core canal.

A vessel like the Abe, or like the Slug vessels from which we copied Cavorite drive, could thunder up to Mousetrap at thousands of miles per hour, or even per second, then stop on a dime, without spilling coffee within the vessel’s gravity cocoon. Also without denting the ship or the moonlet. I had seen it done.

But a Bastogne-class cruiser’s fender bender would dent even the national debt. Therefore, the Abe drifted, slow and nose-first, “down” toward Mousetrap’s north pole like a cherry toward the top of a sundae. The outer doors irised open on an airlock chamber bigger than a volcano crater. The Abe paused within the lock while the outer doors closed; then the inner doors opened and we crept forward into Broadway, Mousetrap’s centerline tunnel, at ten miles per hour.

I’d been down Broadway before, but my jaw always drops. The Abe’s forward screen showed us drifting through a rotating, man-made tunnel that seemed bigger than the Grand Canyon, its walls shimmering with the crisscross Widmanstätten crystal pattern of meteoric nickel iron.

But most of North Broadway’s walls were obscured by a whiskering of docks and shipyards. We cruised for miles past keels and skeletons of new cruisers, frigates, transports, even Scorpion fighters, gnatlike compared to the rest. Beyond the shipyards lay miles of repair yards, every slot filled by ranks of fleet operational ships in for refit. The whole array flickered with sparks sprayed by welders and was lit by spotlights played on scaffold-wrapped hulls.

Whenever I cruised North Broadway, I reflexively scanned the ranks of docked cruisers for the Emerald River . It wasn’t the cruiser I hoped to see, but her skipper, the estimable and lovely Admiral Mimi Ozawa. But Mimi had been rotated Earthside, after leading the Second Fleet across T-FIP jump after T-FIP jump, in a futile search for the Slugs’ homeworld. Sometimes with me aboard, mostly without. I sighed.

Broadway’s middle miles were darker, pocked with adits and burrows that tapped pockets where raw materials, from aluminum to zinc, had concentrated within the moonlet’s nickel-iron mass. Boxcar-sized ore cars beetled back and forth from the mines to the smelters, where the fabric of Mousetrap was being transmuted into the building blocks that defended the Human Union.

Farther on, South Broadway glittered, as windows of offices, training and living spaces spilled light into the vast tunnel.

The Abe eased up to her mooring, one of a dozen ringing the tunnel, from which vessels transferred passengers and cargo to and from the south eight miles of Broadway.

An hour later, Ord and I had separated. He signed us in to respective billets in the Officers and NCO’s quarters, while I tubed upweight-that is, feet-first out toward the surface of Mousetrap-to level forty-eight. I exited the tube as an MP saluted me, still checked my ID as though I might be a disguised Slug, then smiled. “Welcome back to the Penthouse, General.”

Level forty-eight was the outermost of Moosetrap’s cylinders, all arranged concentric to Broadway. Level forty-eight was called the Penthouse, even though it was buried miles deep in Mousetrap’s nickel-iron mass, because it was the top-bottom, actually-tube stop and because, as the outermost ring, it had the least-curved floors and ceilings and the most Earthlike rotational gravity in Mousetrap.

The Spooks monopolized the high-rent district because they were the ones who designed Mousetrap, but more importantly because they deserved the extra comfort. The Spooks didn’t rotate home every twelve months like Mousetrap’s GIs, civilian contract labor, and Space Force swabbies. Marginally nicer quarters were small compensation for the hardships of ’Trap Rat status.

“Jason!” The king of the ’Trap Rats strode down level forty-eight’s main corridor toward me, arms wide. Like the rest of his geek subjects’, Colonel Howard Hibble’s uniform had wrinkles on its wrinkles. A smoker’s wrinkled skin had hung on his slim bones when I met him, and the years hadn’t smoothed or plumped anything.

I met Howard during the Blitz, in 2036, when I was an infantry trainee and he was a professor of extraterrestrial intelligence who had, therefore, been assigned by the army to military intelligence. Howard’s rank decades later was only colonel, because he couldn’t lead troops to free beer. But Howard was the most powerful man nobody ever heard of, by virtue of his intuition about what made the Slugs tick. He controlled the Spook budget, which was buried in Defense Department line items that nobody ever heard of. He succeeded first because he was a genius and second because he played Washington politics like the intel paranoid he had become. Hence the MP guarding the tube exit onto level forty-eight.

I raised my palms as high as I could without separating my sore breastbone. “No hug!”

Howard frowned as he sucked a nicotine lollipop. “I heard. But you’re here.” He smiled.

“Mind telling me why?”

He ushered me back to his office, a large part of Mousetrap’s pressurized volume, which he kept as tidy as the inside of a trash compactor. He poked a pile of old paper books so that they toppled and revealed a chair. “Sit down, Jason.”

He sat across from me and swiveled his desk screens away so we could see each other while we talked.

I said, “The word is that Silver Bullet’s locked and loaded.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Where did you hear that?”

“From the kid we rode up to the Abe with.” I paused to watch him squirm, then said, “Howard, I’m C-in-C Off-world Forces. I see the Silver Bullet Weeklies before they get encrypted and sent to you.”

He closed his eyes, then nodded. “Oh. Yeah.”

No point mentioning what Wally had told me about what the Bren rumor mill was putting out. I shoved aside a sandwich wrapper, a dead frog floating in a specimen jar, and a chessboard that blocked my view across Howard’s desk. “Is your summons about Silver Bullet?”

“Not exactly. Assuming Silver Bullet is operational, what would you say is the biggest remaining obstacle to winning the war?”

“Finding a target for it. Mimi Ozawa was so many light-years away for so long that I can’t remember what it’s like to be horny.”

Howard wrinkled his brow. “Memory loss and diminished libido are natural results of aging.”

“Howard, I was kidding.”

“Oh.” He shrugged. “Well, normally, one way to develop intelligence to solve a problem like locating the homeworld would be to interrogate prisoners.”

“But Slug warriors have the independent intelligence of a white corpuscle.”

“And we’ve never captured any more sophisticated part of the organism. In fact, we’ve never even seen one.”

“But you have a plan?”

“I have an opportunity. I need you to make a plan.”

It was my turn to narrow my eyes. “Am I going to like this opportunity?”

Howard plucked a rock paperweight off his desk and stared into it. “You never do.”