Orphan's Triumph (Jason Wander)
rank decades later was only colonel, because he couldn’t lead troops to free beer. But Howard was the most powerful man nobody ever heard of, by virtue of his intuition about what made the Slugs tick. He controlled the Spook budget, which was buried in Defense Department line items that nobody ever heard of. He succeeded first because he was a genius and second because he played Washington politics like the intel paranoid he had become. Hence the MP guarding the tube exit onto level forty-eight.
    I raised my palms as high as I could without separating my sore breastbone. “No hug!”
    Howard frowned as he sucked a nicotine lollipop. “I heard. But you’re here.” He smiled.
    “Mind telling me why?”
    He ushered me back to his office, a large part of Mousetrap’s pressurized volume, which he kept as tidy as the inside of a trash compactor. He poked a pile of old paper books so that they toppled and revealed a chair. “Sit down, Jason.”
    He sat across from me and swiveled his desk screens away so we could see each other while we talked.
    I said, “The word is that Silver Bullet’s locked and loaded.”
    He narrowed his eyes. “Where did you hear that?”
    “From the kid we rode up to the Abe with.” I paused to watch him squirm, then said, “Howard, I’m C-in-C Off-world Forces. I see the Silver Bullet Weeklies before they get encrypted and sent to you.”
    He closed his eyes, then nodded. “Oh. Yeah.”
    No point mentioning what Wally had told me about what the Bren rumor mill was putting out. I shoved aside a sandwich wrapper, a dead frog floating in a specimen jar, and a chessboard that blocked my view across Howard’s desk. “Is your summons about Silver Bullet?”
    “Not exactly. Assuming Silver Bullet is operational, what would you say is the biggest remaining obstacle to winning the war?”
    “Finding a target for it. Mimi Ozawa was so many light-years away for so long that I can’t remember what it’s like to be horny.”
    Howard wrinkled his brow. “Memory loss and diminished libido are natural results of aging.”
    “Howard, I was kidding.”
    “Oh.” He shrugged. “Well, normally, one way to develop intelligence to solve a problem like locating the homeworld would be to interrogate prisoners.”
    “But Slug warriors have the independent intelligence of a white corpuscle.”
    “And we’ve never captured any more sophisticated part of the organism. In fact, we’ve never even seen one.”
    “But you have a plan?”
    “I have an opportunity. I need you to make a plan.”
    It was my turn to narrow my eyes. “Am I going to like this opportunity?”
    Howard plucked a rock paperweight off his desk and stared into it. “You never do.”
    SIX
    HOWARD HELD THE ROCK between his thumb and fore-finger, then turned it so the crystalline faces within its translucent mass reflected the compartment light. “Weichselan diamond.”
    I shrugged. “I hear they’re so common there that the Weichselans used to throw them at rabbits.”
    Weichselans were the Human Union’s caveman country cousins, kidnapped from Earth by the Slugs thirty thousand years ago, then abandoned on a planet that looked like Earth during the Weichselan glaciation, complete with woolly mammoths. On many of the planets where the Slugs left humans behind, man had progressed and flourished. On Weichsel, man had just survived.
    Howard nodded. “The Weichselans did use diamonds as throwing stones. But this one’s a souvenir collected by an Earthling diamond miner.”
    “We reinhabited Weichsel?”
    “Just a few diamond miners. We evacuated them back here eleven days ago.”
    Hair stood on my neck. “Evacuated?”
    Howard nodded. “A precaution, as soon as the cruiser group orbiting Weichsel detected the new Pseudocephalopod invasion force.”
    I closed my eyes, then opened them. “The maggots are back.” I wasn’t surprised that the Slugs were back. The Human Union’s defense posture, so massive that it made the Cold War
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