These new Scorpions were shielded like cruisers, a nanotechnologic triumph that had been impossible even in the comparatively recent days when new cruisers like the Tehran came off the ways. That meant that if-if-we could shake the Tressens down for weapons-grade Cavorite, and if-if-Howard’s Spooks really had pinpointed the portal jump that would bring human ships within striking distance of the Slug homeworld, then we wouldn’t even have to send cruisers in harm’s way, or lose tactical surprise, by jumping them.
The tech asked Jude, “Sir, couldn’t we just send these in fire-and-forget? Like the old cruise missiles?”
The debate about the need for manned aircraft and spacecraft had raged since the turn of the century, when U.S. remotely piloted aerial ’bots had started whacking terrorists.
Jude shook his head. “Remote communication travels at light speed. A joysticker can dogfight on Earth, but at space distances what he sees lags a second, and so does his input.”
“I hear this won’t be a dogfight, sir. Just fly straight at a planet-sized target, then pull the trigger. With respect, sir, aren’t piloted aircraft just toys for generals who like to fly?”
Jude raised one finger. “When that trigger gets pulled, the only other intelligent species in the universe goes extinct. Would you trust that to a preset ’bot?”
The tech shrugged. “I suppose not.”
We had taken human decision making out of war more and more over the last century. We could’ve taken humans out of even more cockpits, and out of more tank hulls, and even off infantry point walking decades ago, in favor of ’bots. War would have been cheaper if we had just eliminated the option to be human. But I saw value in keeping human life at issue. As Robert E. Lee said, “It is well that war is so terrible, lest we grow too fond of it.”
The tech nodded, then said to Jude, “I guess you’ll be flying lead, then, sir?”
Jude shrugged. “Like you said, it’s not dogfighting.
Anybody who can handle a Scorpion can fly straight at a planet, then pull the trigger.”
I stiffened at Jude’s answer but held my tongue in front of the tech.
On the way back to the BOQ, we passed level twenty. It was sealed off, had been since the Second Battle of Mousetrap. Five thousand missing in action were entombed there, unrecoverable except at unacceptable risk to the excavators and to the fabric of Mousetrap. Jude’s mother was among them.
I pointed at the fused iron wall and the plaque inscribed with five thousand names. “Jude, your mother, and before her your father, gave their lives to this war! You’re going to let someone else pull the trigger that ends it?”
He stopped the Crawler, and he looked over at me as we hung there in Broadway’s vastness. “They did. And you’ve given most of yours to it, too, Jason. Ending this war may define their lives. It may define yours. But my life will be defined by something else, something out in my future. Something you found but I’m still looking for.”
I shook my head.
Jude leaned on the center console. “You can’t dictate what I make from my life, any more than Ord could dictate what you made of yours, Jason.”
“No. But I learned from him that I should do the right thing.”
“And I’ve learned that from you.”
“I hope so.”
Nevertheless, three days later we reboarded the Tehran , outbound for Tressel, where we both fully intended to make a deal with the devil.
FORTY
I SAT WITH A PLASTEEL CRATE IN MY LAP, on my bunk in my double-wide stateroom aboard the Tehran , outbound for Tressel. Tehran ’s accommodations were more generous than older cruisers’, some already mothballed relics like me.
“They don’t make ’em like they used to.” Howard leaned against my stateroom’s bulkhead and pointed at the object in the crate.
Jeeb stretched his ultratanium limbs like a waking, six-legged Siamese. A vintage Tactical Observation Transport looks like a turkey-sized metal cockroach, coated in radar-absorbent fuzz, with dual forward-directed optics that pass for eyes. Compared to cold, sleek modern surveillance ’bots, a TOT passes for cute.
Jeeb rolled onto his back and flailed all six legs like a newborn. According to the engineering texts, the machine was running through its joint-flexibility test program. According to me, and the other diehards who believed that TOTs imprinted their human wranglers’ personalities, he was glad to see me and begging for a belly scratch.
I said to Jeeb, “You’re fine. Knock it off.”
He kept wriggling.
I added, “Please.” He quit.
It’s ridiculous to program precatory language into commands to a mere machine. But Jeeb’s not a mere machine to me.
Howard sighed. “At least we won’t need him to translate.”
Like so much of what had once made Jeeb useful, translation of human language, on or off Earth, was now handled by personal clip-ons no bigger than an Oreo. Old TOTs like Jeeb, in their day, not only observed the battle-field, they intercepted and deciphered communication. A TOT could even teach a code or a language it had monitored, and then decrypted or learned, overnight.
“Howard, my worry isn’t that the Tressens won’t understand us. My worry is that they will.”
“The Pseudocephalopod threatens them as much as it threatens the rest of the human race.”
“Which won’t make them less pricks.”
“Aud Planck always struck me as a decent sort.”
“Aud’s only a third of the Chancellery. And his opinion probably counts for even less than a third because he is decent.”
Jeeb sat up, telescoped out his wings, then tested them by fluttering across my cabin and perching on Howard’s shoulder.
Howard scratched Jeeb behind his optics. “You have flexibility. Your orders are to secure permissions to prospect for and extract Cavorite. The price is open.”
“Howard, I’m the last person I’d give a blank check to.”
“No, the last person would be either of Aud Planck’s colleagues. Just do what you can. Talk it out with them.”
“What if I make a deal? How long until the prospecting starts?”
“I think we could start within a month.”
“Shouldn’t I know where the stuff is?”
“Of course. When negotiations reach the stage where you need to know.”
Frankly, Howard was right. I’ve never had a poker face, and if I betrayed the location of the deposits with a twitch, it could cost us if we ended up having to go in and take it.
Jude rapped on the hatch frame, then stepped through. He had changed back into his neo-Gestapo Tressen black. Nonetheless, Jeeb’s optics whined as they widened, and then he hopped from Howard onto the shoulder of another old friend.
Jude tickled Jeeb alongside the underside of the ’bot’s carapace. After years in a box, Jeeb was getting spoiled rotten. “Downship leaves from Bay Twenty-two in an hour.”
I set Jeeb’s Plasteel cage on the deckplates. “I’ll be dressed in twenty minutes.”
Jude smiled at Jeeb as the ’bot preened his antennae for the first time in three years. “In spite of everything, you must be looking forward to seeing Aud Planck, just like Jeeb. Old friends are old friends.”
We landed in the capital, Tressia, in a fern-grass town-center park tricked out with a yellow windsock that snapped in the breeze to aid our landing. Also snapping were two hundred Republican Socialist flags. The flags all flew at half-staff.
FORTY-ONE
THE TRESSENS GREETED US with one black-uniformed honor guard company, one chancellor, one military band, and one multilingual soloist.