Orphan's Triumph

SIXTY-EIGHT

SIX WEEKS LATER, Eddie and I were still together, chasing a six-legged mechanical cockroach through intragalactic space, or at least through that part of space that hurtled along just forward of the Abraham Lincoln’s Bulkhead One Twenty.

Whenever we had shipped together in the past, as admiral and embarked-division commander, Eddie Duffy and I jogged together every day. On this voyage, as admiral and his stowaway, we continued the routine because Eddie was my shipboard protector, because we were friends, and because we were the only people on this ship who either of us could keep up with.

“Gimmee a minute.” Eddie raised his palm, panting in silence broken only by the metallic skitter of Jeeb’s six legs against the deck plates.

The Abraham Lincoln was deserted from forward of Bulkhead One Twenty on forward to Bulkhead Ninety. Normally, Bulkhead Ninety back to Bulkhead One Twenty was overcrowded with the infantry division that a cruiser packed, in addition to the cruiser’s Space Force crew of twenty-two hundred.

But the people back on Earth like my former boss General Pinchon had invited no infantry to the party that would, they were sure, win the Pseudocephalopod War.

Just aft of Bulkhead One Twenty the launch bays made a belt around the ship.

As a stowaway, albeit one vouched for by the skipper if anyone asked, I stayed between Bulkhead Ninety and Bulkhead One Twenty, except for meals. I puttered with equipment leftovers in the infantry armory, wrote letters to Mimi and to Jude, which weren’t going to be delivered for a long while, and played with Jeeb by the hour.

Unlike Mousetrap, the Abraham Lincoln had an excellent library. Eddie had routed me through his own ’Puter via the ship’s net, so I could read from my stateroom and, for that matter, see what he and the ship were up to, without showing myself forward of Ninety.

Each launch bay had a drinking fountain, and we stepped through the hatch into Bay One. So early in this mission, most of the flight deck’s thirty-six bays were as deserted as the infantry billets. Months from now, as we neared the Pseudocephalopod homeworld jump, the flight deck would bustle. But today, flight deck personnel tended the three Early Bird Scorpion interceptors, which every cruiser kept on alert 24-7, on the other side of the ship, and the very special Scorpion in Bay One.

While Eddie rehydrated like a beached hippo, I stared at the Scorpion locked on to Bay One’s launch rails. Its canopy was raised, and a bay crew member helped one alert pilot out after his watch so another could strap in.

I stood, puffing, hands on hips. “On that oversized watermelon seed ride the hopes of mankind, Eddie.”

Dripping sweat and bent forward hands on knees, he shook his head. “Not all of them.”

The Silver Bullet munition that Howard’s Spooks had fabricated essentially worked like a bundle of last-century MIRV warheads, the biggest cluster bomb in history. Bigger bombs split into smaller bombs and so on down to spherules smaller than sand grains. The grains would rain down evenly spaced Cavorite over an entire planet, in a pattern so uniform that it would kill a maggot that had the mass of the Eurasian Crustal Plate. That’s how big Howard’s Spooks had calculated that the Pseudocephalopod was, give or take Scandinavia.

The Scorpion was kept on alert even now, months away from the fleet’s objective, not so that it could attack or defend anything. The cruisers and clouds of Scorpions screening us took care of that. The Scorpion was on alert in case mechanical failure, mutiny, appearance of marauding gypsies, or anything else threatened the Scorpion’s mothership. If anything like that happened, the Scorpion could move to another cruiser. The Space Force and the Spooks had thought of everything.

The Spooks had even made two Silver Bullets, just in case. Half of the Tressel Cavorite we had worked so hard to get made this bomb. The other half was in a bomb in a Scorpion aboard the George Washington, with Howard babysitting.

I had picked up lots by eavesdropping on Eddie’s ’Puter. Still, I scratched my head. Stowaways don’t get briefed. “Eddie, the Abraham Lincoln and the George Washington are old designs. Why are the old warhorses carrying the heavy freight?”

He stood, rapped against a hull girder, and the sound of his knuckles echoed in the vast bay. “The newer cruisers can’t take a punch like these old girls. The rest of the fleet’s here strictly to keep the maggots off us, so we can deliver the two Scorpions to the last jump.”

The human race had put all its eggs into two sturdy baskets, then told the mightiest fleet in human history to watch those baskets. I didn’t have a better idea, and if I did, nobody cared what a retired general thought. “Eddie, you really think we’re gonna have to fight our way in to the last jump?”

He shrugged. “We planned for a fight. But we hope to be pleasantly surprised.”

We stepped back through the hatch and resumed our daily torture. I grimaced not so much from the exercise as from my concern that the maggots’ surprises were seldom pleasant.