Orphan's Triumph (Jason Wander) by Robert Buettner

said, “You go ahead, doc. I’ve done this before.”
    He jerked his gaze up from the syrette, and his eyes widened when he saw the stars stenciled above my helmet visor. “General Wander?”
    “Just along for the ride. What are you pouring, today, son?”
    He unscrewed my catheter cap, then plugged in the syrette. “Uh—thousand milligrams of timed-release Neobarbitol with a delayed amphetamine and caffeine chaser. And a hematopoietin to enhance red blood cell growth. Thirty minutes from now, you’ll drop out like you fell off a table, and when you wake up you’ll be ready to scrimmage the Chicago Bears for forty-eight hours straight.” He paused. “At least—”
    “At least that’s how it affects younger troops?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    I hate drugs, but I hate missing a party worse. I patted his shoulder as he depressed the syrette’s plunger. “I’ll be fine, son.”
    The loadmaster also did a double take when he saw me shuffle into the bay. He and I would be rearmost in the pod, and thus first from this ship to exit onto Weichsel. He harnessed me, then helped me pack in alongside three young Spooks and boots-on-helmet to the trio behind us. Most were already purring along in the low-metabolism sleep that would allow all of us to live together in this oversized sewer pipe for three days.
    The loadmaster wriggled in alongside me. The medic dosed him, then toggled the ramp’s controls and backed out on it. That left us all hanging in the bay, heads down, like bananas on a stalk, with the deck plates thirty feet below us.
    I held my breath. Then the clamshell doors below whined closed and left us in absolute darkness. I exhaled. I don’t mind tight spaces as much as I mind heights.
    The way the first phase of this operation, the part I was about to sleep through, was supposed to work was that as soon as the two infantry companies and the Spooks were buttoned up inside their Scorpions, the Abraham Lincoln would make the jump from the Mousetrap and pop out three days’
    travel from Weichsel.
    We didn’t know what kind of sensing the Slugs used to detect a ship, but it seemed to work as well—and as poorly—as ours. That meant the Slugs occupying Weichsel would know immediately that a human cruiser had appeared three days away from them. The Slugs also knew that in three decades of war we had staged every landing we had attempted by bringing capital ships like the Abraham Lincoln within low-orbital distance. So, Abraham Lincoln would carve obvious, loitering figure eights just beyond the Temporal Fabric Insertion Point it had popped out of, posing no threat. However, as soon as Abraham Lincoln popped out, she would launch all thirty-six Scorpions poised, like the one I hung within, on her launch rails. The Scorpions would make for Weichsel like scalded gnats, as invisible to the Slugs as Scorpions were to us, according to the Spooks. Two days and twenty hours later, the infantry inside the Scorpions would waken. Two days and twenty-three hours later, all thirty-six Scorpions would form up in space a hundred miles up, directly above Howard’s precious Slug brain. Then the Scorpions would dive straight down through Weichsel’s atmosphere at ten thousand miles per hour, stop on the proverbial dime at an altitude of forty feet, turn their stinger ends down toward the ground, and open their bay doors. Scorpions were less gravity-shielded than cruisers, so the troops would endure six G and arrive bruised and nauseated, but that was a price any GI would gladly pay to avoid being shot at.
    The Slugs, knowing that the Abraham Lincoln remained a safe three days’ journey away, would be tactically astonished. At least, that was the assumption.
    But if this first-wave landing went wrong, the Scorpions’ bays were clogged with useless troops, not weapons to defend themselves ship-to-ship. The four Firewitches patrolling above Weichsel weren’t nimble, but as soon as they realized they had company, they would swoop in.