Orphan's Alliance (Jason Wander) (15 page)

Bassin gazed at the bulkheads. “The Stones move this mass?”

Howard splayed his fingers, and waggled his hand, palm down. “More or less. They allow gravity to move it.”

Bassin made a screwing motion, turning his hand. “As an opened valve allows gravity to empty a canal lock’s water.”

Bassin saw the universe as a civil engineering project, which was what we were counting on. He said,

“This Mousetrap. We would have the opportunity to sculpt an entire world.”

When Bassin said “we,” the Duck beamed.

All I had to do was, as Nat Cobb would say, keep my pie hole shut. Instead, I cleared my throat.

“Bassin, building the Locks on the Marin may have been difficult. You need to understand, this may be impossible.”

“When I took up the queen’s commission as a colonel of engineers, I learned a saying. ‘The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer.’ ”

Ord smiled at me. Combat engineers thought alike. Navy Seabees a starship flight away lived by the same slogan.

Bassin shook his head, smiling. “You really can show us how to cut rock with knives of light?”

Howard said, “The moonlet’s mostly iron and nickel, not precisely rock. But, yes, we can cut rock with light beams. Much of the tunneling will be labor intensive.”

Men still died digging sewers under Newark. Carving the Pearl Harbor of space in vacuum, light years from anybody’s home, before the scourge of the universe arrived on the doorstep, was going to be more than “labor intensive.” Yet Bassin was not just going our way, he was racing ahead of us, like a rich kid chasing new tinker toys.iv height="0%">

Bassin watched me frown. “Your concern touches me, my friend. But Jason, I’m a responsible adult. I understand the undertaking, and what it means for my nation. Don’t worry that you’ve cheated some bumpkin for the price of a baseboard cap.”

I said, “You don’t understand everything. And will the kids in the pits understand when outside their gloves the temperature is just above absolute zero? Will they understand when one of Howard’s light knives beheads a friend?”

The Duck’s eyes burned into me, and I clamped my jaw shut.

Bassin eyed the ribbons on my chest. “Will Sergeant Ord tell me you knew every single thing that those would cost when
you
enlisted? Jason, I find myself blessed with an unexpected peace, and cursed with an unalterable social contract. This project will provide work for freemen and freewomen who aspire to more than washing rich men’s clothing. Those who succeed in this adventure will return with self-respect and the gratitude of their society. They will create the core of what your books call a middle class. Owners who emancipate enlistees will be paid for it. Emancipations will rise. Your Mousetrap lets me begin to cut a cancer from Marin. If I’m doing you a service, you’re doing me one, too.”

I turned to the Duck, and raised my palms. “Fine. Howard’s rathole is now the Peace Corps. All I care about is we get it done before the Slugs come back.”

Whump
.
Whump
.
Whump
.
Ike
shook enough that coffee in Bassin’s decaled souvenir cup sloshed. He frowned. “What’s that?”

The Human Union couldn’t defend all the Outworlds. But it sure as hell could shuffle the fleet so that one locked and loaded cruiser was at all times orbiting above the sole source of propulsion-grade Cavorite known to mankind.

Therefore, every moment that we talked, a Starfire simmered in each of the three launch bays designated as
Ike
’s Hot Bays. Each fighter was fueled, armed, locked on the launch rails, and crewed by a pilot and systems officer so strap-down ready that they had to pee into bags.

“Early bird special.” Ord frowned, too. “All three launched at once.”

There was a rap on the wardroom hatch, but before we said anything, it opened, and a pop-eyed ensign poked his head in. “Sirs? The Captain sends his compliments. He requests that I escort you all to join him on the bridge.”

I was already out of my chair, but Ord beat me to the open hatch, with Bassin, the Duck, and Howard following in our wake.

The ensign race-walked ahead of us, as speakers in the passage ceiling oogahed general quarters. Three ratings dashed toward us, slowed, scooted sideways around us, then dashed aft. One kid looked back over his shoulder at Bassin.

The captain wanted the strangers on his ship where he could see them, not wandering around distracting his crew, when things got hairy. Which evidently they had.

THIRTY-FOUR

ALONGSIDE THE HATCHthat opened onto the bridge, a bosun fingered the little electronic whistle that hung around his neck. It squealed, then he announced, “Attention on deck! Visitors are on the Bridge!”

Fifty feet away, at the opposite end of the
Eisenhower
’s red-lit bridge, between two facing rows of swabbies bent over control consoles, the captain stood, his back to us, arms folded. He watched the floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall forward display.

The red light was a hangover from the days when it was thought to preserve night vision, in case the crew had to step off the Bridge, into the salt night air, or at least the bathroom. The whistle was even older. Navies, wet or vacuum, clung to their traditions. Churchill understated when he said those traditions were limited to rum, sodomy, and the lash.

The captain turned a shoulder in response to the bosun’s pipe, saw us, then waved us to him, through the aisle between the consoles.

“What you got, Jimmy?” I asked.

A flashing red dot near the screen’s top crawled toward a solid green dot in the screen’s center. Three flashing green dots, labeled EB 1, 2, and 3 crawled away from the solid one, toward the red one, but so slowly by comparison that they scarcely seemed to move.

“Inbound bogey winked as we rounded. We popped the early birds. Sorry to disturb your meeting.”

Behind me, Ord whispered to Bassin, “As this ship circled Bren, an unknown approaching object appeared, no longer obscured from view by the planet’s mass. That’s the red dot. The three moving green dots are smaller ships we’ve launched—those launches were the lurches you felt—to investigate, and defend us if necessary.”

Bassin nodded.

I asked, “Trash?”

The captain shook his head. “Point six.”

Ord whispered, “The object is traveling too fast to be a shooting star or similar natural object. Almost two thirds as fast as the flash from a lightning bolt.”

I said, “Too slow for a Viper. Trolls crawl, and there’d be a spread.”

“Yep.”

Ord said, “The object is moving too slowly to be a particularly destructive type of high-velocity Pseudocephalopod projectile. And if the object were a Pseudocephalopod invasion transport, it would be moving much slower than this ship, and it would have deployed protective escort vessels ahead of it.”

I asked, “Spoofing?”

The captain pointed at a large red set of numerals in the screen’s lower right, spinning down toward zero, then shrugged. “Closure in two.”

Ord again. “Two minutes from now, the distance between the first of our small investigating ships and the approaching object will have closed enough that the small ship can determine whether the object is a Pseudocephalopod vessel, imitating the speed and movement pattern of a cruiser like this one.”

Bassin asked, “What if it is an enemy warship?”

I faced Bassin. “Based on our historical performance versus the Slugs, your reign will be very short.”

THIRTY-FIVE

THE DUCK WHISPEREDover my shoulder, “Can we get His Majesty into a downbound transport?”

I shook my head. “First thing I thought of. The three hot birds were Starfires. Fine in space, but bricks land better. All the other bays will have Starfires loaded, too, by now.”

Whether it was a flaw, or a deliberate pistol at the troops’ back, a cruiser’s design forced its captain to choose early whether to stand and fight, or to man the lifeboats. Not that it mattered. Jimmy Wethers was a gunfighter, not a lifeboat coxswain.

“That Scorpion thing I heard about would come in handy,” said the Duck. Not so long ago I had been watching my godson fly rings around Paris. Now I was watching a gunfight that might kill me.

The countdown timer reached zero.

The Bridge fell so silent that I thought I could hear hearts beating. In addition to my own, which seemed to boom.

The captain asked a swabbie who sat at a console, shoulders scrunched, “Well?”

“Pings are away, sir. Waiting.”

The timer started counting up, now, in red numerals. It reached plus fifty seconds when the tight shouldered swabbie pressed his earpiece with his fingers, and held it. The swabbie’s head tilted back, and he exhaled. Then he said, “It’s
Emerald River
, sir.”

“You’re sure?”

“It’s Mean Green alright, Captain. Early One pinged her twice.”

The captain sighed, then he looked up at the ceiling and spoke to nobody. “What the hell are they doing here? And wouldn’t it have been nice to let us know they were coming?”

The swabbie, who didn’t seem to know a rhetorical question when he heard one, said, “I guess you can ask Admiral Ozawa that yourself, sir, in a couple hours.”

I looked around at Howard. As usual in situations like this, he looked away. THIRTY-SIX

WE REMAINED ABOARD
Ike
so Bassin and the Duck could enjoy the show from the observation blister, as the three Early Bird Starfires returned, spun a few vacubatics to burn off fuel, then snuggled back into their launch bays. Howard waxed eloquent about the red moon, its uniqueness as a polar-orbiting intragalactic stranger, and any other irrelevant curiosity that might divert attention from what he knew about
Emerald River
’s unannounced appearŽ€…ance. But Mean Green was enough of a distraction all by herself.
Emerald River
was the newest of the new
Bastogne
-class cruisers, and the only one named for a military victory that occurred
off
Earth. And on Bassin’s planet, to boot.

Nickname aside, she wasn’t green, but reflective white, which made her look as big as Monaco, with both Bren’s white moon and its red one inching, at right angles to one another, across the blackness behind her. Bren spun by, slow and blue beneath us, but Mean Green hung dead still, relative to
Ike
, and a safe two miles away. It normally took hours for cruisers to match orbits, but Mean Green had a woman driver who could parallel park.

We swam down from the blister, which was a bubble on
Ike
’s prow, at the zero gee centerline. Then we made our way back to rotational gravity, and then to a launch bay that was being cleared to receive a transport from Mean Green. Ord towed Bassin, and I towed the Duck. Some people puke their first time swimming in zero gee, but they both grinned like kids in the baby pool. When we reached the wardroom again, I pulled Howard aside by the elbow, and pressed him against the bulkhead with my forearm across his chest. “What the hell is going on, Howard?”

“I don’t know. Honest.”

I rolled my eyes. Howard plus honest created an oxymoron. “But you suspect.”

“There was some talk before we left Washington.” He eyed the far hatch like a roach spotting a baseboard. “Shouldn’t we catch up with the others?”

I pressed my forearm harder against his chest. “Howard, I have ways of making you talk. Just tell me it isn’t Slugs.”

“Worse. It’s politicians.”

THIRTY-SEVEN

TWENTY MINUTES AFTERHoward and I rejoined our group in
Ike
’s cleared receiving bay, the inner bay doors slid open, and
Emerald River
’s transport hissed down the rails and locked. The transport had slid up in
Ike
’s shadow, so it was cold enough that frost had condensed on its hull, and cracked off when its hatch opened.

Twenty-one passengers wearing VIP coveralls wobble-kneed out of the hatch onto the receiving platform. Twenty of them started to mince one at a time down the thirty-foot left-hand ladder, toward the deck.

The twenty-first passenger swung onto the right-hand ladder, then straddled the ladder rails with her feet along their outboard sides, and slid the thirty feet to the deck, swabbie style, like a firefighter down a pole. When she touched the deck, she turned, grinned at me, and said, “It’s like riding a bike.” Munchkin hugged me, then pulled back. “Aren’t you surprised?”

“Almost.” Howard had told me a half hour before, in the wardroom, under threat of an Indian burn, that a Joint House-Senate Task Force, a blue ribbon panel, had been charged to investigate “certain undifferentiated and/or restricted line items” in the Defense Department budget. In other words, they were going to pry up or crawl under the loose floorž€…boards, rocks, and mattresses beneath which Howard hid the Spook money.

The rest of the delegation trickled onto the bay floorplates, and got introduced around. Every single one was a household-word–famous former senator, representative, or governor. Former because not even a senior sitting senator can take as much time off as a boondoogle like this “fact-finding mission” would take. And not even famous politicians turn down the equivalent of a taxpayer-financed round-the-world cruise that included live tyrannosaurs.

Munchkin and I stood aside together while the legislators got presented to Bassin. I whispered to her, “They all look sick. The transport ride was only two miles.”

“They didn’t expect the local monarch to meet their plane. This was supposed to be a surprise inspection. They’re worried somebody leaked.”

“Oh, it was a surprise. Jimmy Wethers launched three hot birds. Mimi knows better than to risk a friendly fire incident.”

Munchkin widened her eyes, and poked my belly. “You used hot, Mimi, and friendly within ten words. That’s Freudian.”

“Don’t start.”

The flight deck hatch opened, and the pilot swung onto the ladder, then slid down like Munchkin had. Mimi was a rear admiral, so she had to salute me first. Then she knuckle-bumped with former Congresswoman Munchkin. Fighter jocks and machine gunners don’t hug and kiss the air. I began with a charming pleasantry. “Jimmy Wethers launched three hot birds. Are you on dumb pills?”