Orphan's Triumph (Jason Wander) by Robert Buettner Page B

Warriors maneuvered to assault us. Complete surprise!
    Unless we had landed in the wrong spot. My heart skipped.
    Next to me, Howard jumped up and down, knee deep in snow.
    “Goddamit, Howard! What are you doing?”
    He grinned at me through his visor. “Jump yourself, Jason! We’re standing right on top of the Ganglion!”
    I jumped and was rewarded by a hollow bong as my boots struck metal. In all directions, the snow sloped away from the dome-shaped hummock we stood upon. A half-dozen drifts converged on the spot where Howard and I and the pile of flailing, armored arms and legs that was the Spook team stood. I jumped again.
    Bong.
    “I’ll be damned.” I knew Rusty’s troops and the Abe’ s pilots were good, but they had crossed millions of miles of space in three days, then hit a target no bigger than a backyard swimming pool, all without our enemy being the wiser.
    The Spooks, assisted by GIs with wide manual snow shovels, were already foxholing down to each of the six radiating ribs through which, according to Howard, the Ganglion sent and received communication to and from the Warriors under its command.
    Once we severed the Ganglion’s ability to communicate with its Warriors, the Slugs wouldn’t drop like marionettes with cut strings, but they wouldn’t fight and maneuver as units, either. I waddled through the drifts to the nearest foxhole, then peered down at the Spook and GI below. They knelt on the hole’s floor, a convex patch of blue Slug metal, as the Spook fitted a charge to a seam in the Ganglion’s arm casing. Then they paddled up the snow and stood, the Spook fingering a black detonator while the GI called, “Fire in the hole” three times.
    The charge flashed, hissed, and raised a steam cloud that hung in the frigid air. Within a fifty-yard radius, five more hisses sounded, and then five more steam clouds hung.
    As we watched, the steam drifted together, coalesced into a single plume, and rose into the clear, still sky, past the hovering Scorpions. Beautiful. Perfect.
    Howard said, “Uh-oh.”
    THIRTEEN
    TWENTY MINUTES LATER, wind whipped our helmet antennae and swirled a snow fog so strong that, even with enhanced optics, visibility was down to forty feet.
    Howard shouted, his voice booming in my earpiece, “It was the atmospheric disturbance created by the Scorpions’ hypersonic passage. Now the storm’s building on itself.”
    I winced. “Howard, we have radios. You don’t have to scream.”
    Howard slapped at a rope that writhed in the growing gale as it dangled again from the Scorpions.
    “Jason, we can’t abort this now.”
    Howard’s Spooks, working through the gathering blizzard, had cut through the Ganglion’s armored housing, and we had our first look at Slug royalty after three decades of war. It was a blob as big as a two-seat urban electric and as green as snot. No evil eyes, flailing tendrils, or slobbery fangs. Just a blob with a half-dozen thigh-thick armored cables plugged in around its midsection. The cables, torched black by the Spooks’ cutting charges, now led nowhere. The exposed Ganglion, free of its armored housing, hovered above the snow on a disk, presumably held up by Cavorite.
    I leaned into the wind, toward Howard. “It’s mute and blind now?”
    “I think so. But it could have—”
    Zzeee.
    Someone screamed.
    I said, “Heavys!” The Slugs waged war more like Neanderthals than like a millennial master race. If something they didn’t like got in their way, they threw an object at it. Slug Warriors’ magnetic-rail rifles were just scaled-down versions of the Slug artillery piece, which tossed a projectile the size and weight of a wall safe.
    Red fog spat at us, mixed among the snowflakes. The fog trailed back thirty feet from Howard and me, to the neck ring of a Spook kid’s armor. A single heavy round, lobbed in here for ranging purposes, had decapitated him.
    I said to Howard, “It called fire on its own position! We gotta get out of