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.
THIRTY-ONE
THREE WEEKS LATER, I sat in my office at sunrise, in the chair I had occupied the previous night and most of the other nights since I had set my army on this course. Action items choked my calendar flatscreen’s inbox, and paper reports related to the onworld aspects of the operation overflowed a wire basket on my desk corner, like a last-century cartoon.
Jude rapped on my open office door’s jamb, then stepped in without waiting for me to ask him. “You look like crap.” He dropped into a chair across from me, then propped his crossed ankles on the far edge of my desk.
I rubbed my chin. “I’m gonna shave in a minute.”
He eyed the tight-blanketed cot I had staff set up in my office’s corner. “How long since you slept?”
“I take catnaps. Edison took catnaps.”
“ Edison was deaf, too. It didn’t make him better at his job. Ord’s not babysitting you like he should.”
“I’m too old for a babysitter. And Ord’s too old to babysit.”
Jude jerked his thumb at my outer office. “Tell me about it. When I saw him yesterday, he looked like he’d aged ten years in three weeks. You don’t look much better.”
“So make me better. Tell me you’ve got the first modified Scorpion into flyable condition.”
He grinned. “Why do you think I came by?”
I stood, arched my back as I rubbed it with my palms, and groaned.
He grinned again.
I said, “The replacement parts work fine. It’s the original equipment that wakes up slow.”
His grin disappeared, and he stood. “I’ll give you a hand.”
I pushed his hand away. “I’m fine.”
He said, “Come on over to the hangar with me. You need a break. I’ll make it worth your while.”
THIRTY-TWO
A SHAVE, SHOWER, and uniform change later, Jude’s footsteps and mine echoed in the Spook hangar, nearly lost in a din of metal against metal.
The space had become more factory floor than aircraft hangar, with a dozen Scorpions in various stages of conversion, each one’s belly tile floating three feet off the floor. Each giant watermelon seed of a craft, bigger than an old fixed-wing fighter-bomber, got pushed from station to station by two enlisted ratings as easily as if they were rolling an oversized shopping cart.