Read Orphan's Triumph (Jason Wander) for Free Online Page B

way, the Pseudo-cephalopod ignored us. I nodded to the kid.
    He pumped his fist and grinned. “Outstanding!”
    I sighed, and he shuffled on toward the Abe’ s intake hatch. The bluster of esprit de corps sometimes carries troops to victory, like wind in sails. But only those who haven’t seen war are fond of it. All these kids were about to learn that lesson.
    NINE
    SIXTEEN HOURS OUT FROM MOUSETRAP, the whisper of my boots against ladder rungs echoed in the deserted vastness of one of the thirty-six launch bays that belted the Abraham Lincoln’ s midsection. So did my rasping breath. The aft access platform perched between the launch rails, thirty feet above the launch bay deck plates, and heights terrify me.
    I reached the platform and clung to its handholds. The open-hatched ship poised above me was a Scorpion, a ninety-foot-long ceramic teardrop of a single-seat fighter and the current game changer in this war. The Slugs invented Cavorite drive, and we stole it from them fair and square. Then we adapted it not only to behemoths based on the Slugs’ own massive ships, like the Abraham Lincoln, but to the elegant gnat that was the Scorpion. Scorpions flitted and stung like no space vessel the Slugs had ever seen. That’s a poor turn of phrase, because the maggots don’t have eyes and are blind in the non-infrared spectrum. But to date, the Scorpion’s confirmed ship-to-ship kill ratio against the Slug Firewitch stood at two hundred twelve to zero. Also, a Scorpion could maneuver as easily, though more slowly, in a planet’s atmosphere as in a vacuum.
    “Mind if I join you, sir?” I clutched a railing, then looked down. Ord stood on the deck below, looking up at me, hands on hips.
    I had been reading inflections in Ord’s voice and posture for three decades, and I knew this was the time he had chosen to discuss the incident with the private on Bren. I wasn’t going to add to the unpleasantness by having the conversation thirty feet up. “I’ll come down.”
    My boots thumped the deck, and I turned and looked back up at the Scorpion’s stern, where the clamshell doors of the weapons pod stood open for loading, like the speed brakes on a conventional jet. A Scorpion in combat could hover dead still, but it could also fly faster than any rocket or bullet fired out of its front end. So Lockheed had designed it to drop “fire-and-forget” guided munitions out its back end, the way conventional jets ejected radar chaff and flares to confuse homing missiles. The Scorpion’s internal weapons bay stinger was twenty feet long.
    I pointed at it. “A squad in Eternads can pack in there. It’s gravity cocooned, like the cockpit. Ten thousand miles per hour to zero in one thousand feet. And inside the squad will feel six G, tops.”
    Ord nodded and sighed. “I remember when I saw the holonews from the Paris Air Show. Captain Metzger and the Scorpion shocked the world that day, sir.”
    So this was why Ord had sought me out here, alone in this bay. So he could segue the conversation to my godson. To avoid taking the bait, I cocked my head. “What do you think of my tactical concept, Sergeant Major?”
    He cocked his head back at me and wrinkled his forehead. “Potentially brilliant. High risk. If I may say so, sir, much like its creator.”
    Crap. There was no escaping the impending deluge. I sighed. “What’s on your mind, Sergeant Major?”
    One corner of Ord’s lip twitched up, as close to a smile of recognition as he ever came. Then it faded into a frown of concern. Ord wore concern proudly.
    “Sir, the general knows I have the highest regard for him as a soldier and as a human being.”
    Oboy. A senior NCO addressing an officer in the third person signaled an impending lecture, like a mother calling her kid by first, middle, and last names.
    Ord cleared his throat. “But your life view has worried me since Congresswoman Metzger’s death, sir.”
    Even after three years, to hear it said aloud that Munchkin