Orphan's Triumph (Jason Wander) Read Online Free PDF Page A

cruiser’s fender bender would dent even the national debt. Therefore, the Abe drifted, slow and nose-first, “down” toward Mousetrap’s north pole like a cherry toward the top of a sundae. The outer doors irised open on an airlock chamber bigger than a volcano crater. The Abe paused within the lock while the outer doors closed; then the inner doors opened and we crept forward into Broadway, Mousetrap’s centerline tunnel, at ten miles per hour.
    I’d been down Broadway before, but my jaw always drops. The Abe ’s forward screen showed us drifting through a rotating, man-made tunnel that seemed bigger than the Grand Canyon, its walls shimmering with the crisscross Widmanstätten crystal pattern of meteoric nickel iron. But most of North Broadway’s walls were obscured by a whiskering of docks and shipyards. We cruised for miles past keels and skeletons of new cruisers, frigates, transports, even Scorpion fighters, gnatlike compared to the rest. Beyond the shipyards lay miles of repair yards, every slot filled by ranks of fleet operational ships in for refit. The whole array flickered with sparks sprayed by welders and was lit by spotlights played on scaffold-wrapped hulls.
    Whenever I cruised North Broadway, I reflexively scanned the ranks of docked cruisers for the Emerald River. It wasn’t the cruiser I hoped to see, but her skipper, the estimable and lovely Admiral Mimi Ozawa. But Mimi had been rotated Earthside, after leading the Second Fleet across T-FIP jump after T-FIP jump, in a futile search for the Slugs’ homeworld. Sometimes with me aboard, mostly without. I sighed.
    Broadway’s middle miles were darker, pocked with adits and burrows that tapped pockets where raw materials, from aluminum to zinc, had concentrated within the moonlet’s nickel-iron mass. Boxcar-sized ore cars beetled back and forth from the mines to the smelters, where the fabric of Mousetrap was being transmuted into the building blocks that defended the Human Union. Farther on, South Broadway glittered, as windows of offices, training and living spaces spilled light into the vast tunnel.
    The Abe eased up to her mooring, one of a dozen ringing the tunnel, from which vessels transferred passengers and cargo to and from the south eight miles of Broadway.
    An hour later, Ord and I had separated. He signed us in to respective billets in the Officers and NCO’s quarters, while I tubed upweight—that is, feet-first out toward the surface of Mousetrap—to level forty-eight. I exited the tube as an MP saluted me, still checked my ID as though I might be a disguised Slug, then smiled. “Welcome back to the Penthouse, General.”
    Level forty-eight was the outermost of Moosetrap’s cylinders, all arranged concentric to Broadway. Level forty-eight was called the Penthouse, even though it was buried miles deep in Mousetrap’s nickel-iron mass, because it was the top—bottom, actually—tube stop and because, as the outermost ring, it had the least-curved floors and ceilings and the most Earthlike rotational gravity in Mousetrap. The Spooks monopolized the high-rent district because they were the ones who designed Mousetrap, but more importantly because they deserved the extra comfort. The Spooks didn’t rotate home every twelve months like Mousetrap’s GIs, civilian contract labor, and Space Force swabbies. Marginally nicer quarters were small compensation for the hardships of ’Trap Rat status.
    “Jason!” The king of the ’Trap Rats strode down level forty-eight’s main corridor toward me, arms wide. Like the rest of his geek subjects’, Colonel Howard Hibble’s uniform had wrinkles on its wrinkles. A smoker’s wrinkled skin had hung on his slim bones when I met him, and the years hadn’t smoothed or plumped anything.
    I met Howard during the Blitz, in 2036, when I was an infantry trainee and he was a professor of extraterrestrial intelligence who had, therefore, been assigned by the army to military intelligence. Howard’s