Orphan's Triumph

THIRTY

AN HOUR LATER, my staff officers, plus Howard, Ord, Jude, and me, sat in my conference room. Hail ricocheted off the windowpanes like shrapnel while we tried to paddle through the muck that the gods of war had ladled onto us.

I said, “Howard, what the hell are the Slugs doing? If they have enough of an alternate Cavorite source that they can drop two thousand Firewitches and sixteen Trolls on us, they don’t need to mine the Red Moon.”

Howard stared at a box of stationery on the corner of my desk. He had too many hard-copy letters to write. “The Red Moon is useless to them for that, anyway.”

I straightened in my chair. “What?”

“Cavorite is fragments-not really matter, as we think of it in this universe-that ‘rubbed off’ the boundary between this universe and the next one. Cavorite is antithetic to this universe, especially to one of this universe’s fundamental forces, gravity.”

“Which is why it’s useful.”

Howard nodded. “This universe reacts to this foreign material the way your finger reacts to a splinter. It cocoons Cavorite fragments at the interuniversal boundary, so they drift through this universe insulated, until something like us or the Pseudocephalopod gets hold of them.”

“Little Cavorite meteors fell on Bren. One big one orbits around it.”

Howard nodded. “The big one, the Red Moon, is too much of a good thing. Cavorite stones are toxic to the Pseudocephalopod, but not as toxic as the sort of Cavorite that makes up the Red Moon. That’s why, I suspect, the Pseudocephalopod bypassed the Red Moon originally and chose to use human miners to excavate the less toxic Cavorite fall in the Stone Hills. The Red Moon’s not the only place where we’ve seen the Pseudocephalopod bypass concentrated Cavorite. Besides, the Red Moon’s Cavorite is too powerful to harness. An impeller loaded with Stone Hills Cavorite can hurl a starship through space. But the sort of power locked up in the Red Moon could knock a whole planet out of orbit.”

“They’re going to knock Bren out of orbit?”

Howard shook his head. “No need. The Pseudocephalopod is perfectly capable of destroying a planet without help from a Cavorite bolide.”

I stared up at the ceiling. Every nine hours, the Red Moon, with its thousands of Slug outriders, passed north to south above some part of the Marini commonwealth, then, nine hours later, south to north above another part. Between the Slugs and us ghosted a defensive screen of Scorpions, but everybody knew that if the Slugs chose to, our defenders couldn’t prevent the maggots from raining destruction on this planet the way they had Earth during the Blitz in 2036. “So what the hell are they doing up there, Howard?”

“This.” Howard waved up a holo, visible-light drone imagery. It showed low-angle, high-resolution images from a skimmer that had flashed across the Red Moon, transmitted images, and then, no doubt, been shot down by the Slugs.

The image showed lumpy, asymmetric, wheelless machines gliding back and forth across a glassy red plain. Atop each machine bulged a leaden sphere. As we watched, one machine plucked off a sphere from its sibling, then replaced it with another.

Howard pointed at the discarded sphere. “Even with extensive shielding, the Pseudocephalopod workers operating this machinery don’t last long.”

Jude said, “Isn’t it obvious? They knew that we were about to destroy them. They took over the Red Moon to stop Silver Bullet.”

Howard shook his head. “The Pseudocephalopod is economical in its actions. It could more easily have stopped Silver Bullet by destroying our ground facilities, or the entire civilization of Bren. Or it could have simply stood off and bombarded the Red Moon with slow Projectiles or with fast Vipers, until it broke the Red Moon into vagrant fragments.”

I frowned. “Howard, you know plenty about what the Slugs aren’t doing. What are they doing?”

“I don’t know. But Silver Bullet is stalled until we stop them from continuing to do it.”

“How do we stop them?”

My Space Force liaison major shook her head. “We can’t win a fleet-against-fleet battle.”

Howard raised his index finger. “But if we stop them from doing whatever they’re doing on the Red Moon’s surface…”

Jude pointed at the holo image, which had cut off after just seconds. “That drone lasted two seconds once it pulled up. Even Scorpions can’t stay close enough long enough to smart-bomb them.”

Howard said, “And saturation bombing would leave the Red Moon useless to us.”

I closed my eyes and rubbed them with my fingers. “Okay. Howard, if we modified a bunch of Scorpions the way you modified yours for Silver Bullet, they could carry more, right?”

He nodded.

“So we could use them to land infantry on the Red Moon. Not just a raiding party. A force that could take the ground and hold it. Then we could keep the Scorpions down there, so they wouldn’t be exposed to fire.”

Ord raised his eyebrows. “Sir, light infantry taking and holding unfamiliar ground when the enemy enjoys air supremacy?”

I pointed at my Space Force liaison. “You can’t whip their fleet. But can you keep their fleet from ganging up on an exposed ground force?”

She frowned. “Maybe.”

“No maybe. Do it.”

There was more stone in the faces around my conference table than on Mount Rushmore. “I’m open to other options. Who’s got some?”

Even Ord looked pale. Nobody said anything.

I slapped my palms against the tabletop. “Tomorrow. Same time. Please present me a plan consistent with this concept for your respective areas of responsibility.”

Chairs pushed back amid thick silence.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is an opportunity. Please present it to your respective staffs as such, rather than as a problem.” I sounded so optimistic that I almost believed myself.