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  Orphanage

  ( Jason Wander - 1 )

  Robert Buettner

  Mankind's first alien contact tears into Earth: projectiles launched from Jupiter's moon, Ganymede, have vaporized whole cities. Under siege, humanity gambles on one desperate counter strike. In a spacecraft scavenged from scraps and armed with Vietnam-era weapons, foot soldiers like 18-year-old Jason Wander - orphans that no one will miss - must dare man's first interplanetary voyage and invade Ganymede. They have one chance to attack, one ship to attack with - and their failure is our extinction.

  Orphanage

  Robert Buettner

  For Senior Drill Sergeant DeArthur Burgess, wherever the winds of war carried him, and for all the other special ones.

  Acknowledgments

  For opportunity, wisdom and enthusiasm, thanks to my Editor, Devi Pillai and Editorial Director Jaime Levine. Kudos: for perfection, to Anna Maria Piluso; for stellar Art Direction, to Don Puckey; for telling the world, to Joy Saveriano; for copyediting, to Sara Schwager, and to all the others at Warner who contributed so much.

  Thanks to the best agent between the orbits of Mercury and Jupiter, Winifred Golden, for all that and more, and to the most brilliant, visionary cover artist inhabiting this planet, Fred Gambino.

  To the shy military and aerospace folks who kept me on the technologic straight-and-narrow, cheers. You know who you are.

  To the Capitol Hill Gang and the Boulder Bunch, past and present, whose flinty critiques made this book, thanks. Your turns are coming.

  To Robert A. Heinlein for inspiration and to Joe Haldeman for that and for his generous humanity, my gratitude forever.

  Most important, to Mary Beth, more than thanks for all of the above and for everything that matters.

  We crabbed shoulder to shoulder down cargo nets to our landing craft bucking in the Channel, each GI’s bilge-and-sea-soaked boots drenching his buddy below. In that moment I realized that we fight not for flags or against tyrants but for each other. For whatever remains of my life, those barely met strangers who dangled around me will be my only family. Strip away politics, and, wherever or whenever, war is an orphanage.

  —Anonymous letter fragment,

  Recovered on Omaha Beach,

  Normandy, June

  Chapter One

  “The sun will come out… tomorrow…” Our pilot hums through her open mike into zero-Fahrenheit cabin air fogged with four hundred GIs’ breath. And fat with smells of gun oil, vomit, and fear. The sun never comes out here. In Jupiter’s orbit, Sol is a pale dot. It’s joke enough that I smile even as my hands shake the rifle propped between my knees. I’m Specialist Fourth Class Jason Wander, one of the lucky orphans who in one hour will save the human race or die trying.

  We sit helmeted in paired, facing rows, so red cabin light paints us like eggs cartoned in the devil’s incubator. Eternad-battery-heated fatigues warm us against a cabin cooled to the surface temperature our enemy manufactures a hundred miles below.

  Our backs mold against the ship’s “pressure hull” that seals out space’s vacuum. “Ship” my ass. It’s a 767 fuselage looted from some airplane graveyard in the Arizona desert, tacked to a streamlined parachute and reinforced to drop us from the mother ship to the surface. Like most of the 1900s antiques we have to fight this 2040 war with, it was built when Annie was a live-acted musical, back before the Millennium turned.

  That red cabin light preserves night vision. A hundred miles below our parking orbit, it’s always night on Ganymede. Or so the astronomers say.

  We’ll be the first humans to see it. If our groaning hull doesn’t pop when we fall through vacuum or melt as we thunder through the artificial atmosphere the Slugs have slathered around the rock below. If we don’t slam into Ganymede like crash-test dummies. If our demothballed weapons can kill the Slugs waiting down there.

  And who knows, since I’m the only human who’s ever seen Slugs alive?

  My gunner shivers warm against my shoulder clicking her Muslim beads, praying like her hair was on fire. Yeah. My boss is a four-foot-eleven Egyptian girl. But Munchkin can shoot.

  My teeth grind, I close my hand over her beads, and she stops clicking. Divine help’s improbable for agnostic me. As improbable, I suppose, as Pseudocephalopod Slugs from beyond the Solar System camping on Jupiter’s largest moon and killing millions by bombing Earth from out here.

  They say that an infantryman’s life is boredom punctuated by intervals of sheer terror. After six hundred days traveling in the mother ship’s mile-long steel tube, finally being in the dropship liquefies my guts even though I asked to be here.

  We all asked. So many volunteered for the Ganymede Expeditionary Force that they only accepted ten thousand soldiers who’d lost entire families. Munchkin lost parents and six sisters to the Cairo Projectile. I’m an only child, and the Indianapolis Projectile took my living parent. Such things now pass for luck.

  So the media calls us the Orphans’ Crusade.

  Munchkin hates “Crusade” because she’s Muslim. So she calls us Humanity’s Last Hope.

  Our platoon sergeant’s seen combat. So he calls us meat. He says “Orphanage” is true because in combat your only family is these government-issued strangers.

  Intercoms crackle. “Begin drop sequence on my mark… now!”

  Somebody sobs.

  The mother ship releases all twenty dropships like dandelion seed. Red light flicks black for a skipped heartbeat as electricity switches to internal. Our cut umbilical scrapes our hull like a handcuff unlocked.

  Which is how this started for me three years ago, a week after my eighteenth birthday.

  Chapter Two

  “Judge don’ like ’cuffs in his chambers.” The bailiff of the juvenile court in and for the City and County of Denver bent and snapped metal bracelets off my wrists. He stared me down, dried blood still measling his lip where I’d coldcocked him.

  “I’m okay now.” I wasn’t in the mood to hit anybody anymore, but “okay” was a he.

  They’d backed me off sedatives this morning, except for Prozac n, of course, to polish me up for my hearing. It was two weeks since my mom, on a visit to Indianapolis, died when the city blew up. Also two weeks since I’d pounded the crap out of my homeroom teacher. Social Services, sharp as tacks, thought my loss and the pounding might be related.

  The bailiff knocked, then opened the door, waved me through, and I made the acquaintance of the Honorable Dickie Rosewood March. It was just me and the judge in his office. He wore a gray suit that matched his hair, stretched across wrestler’s shoulders. No robes. His furniture was antique, even down to a computer with one of those television-screen boxes and a keyboard. That must’ve been the zoo for him because his right sleeve was pinned up at the elbow. In his remaining hand he balanced a paper file. Mine?

  His chair creaked when he looked up. “Mr. Wander.”

  “Sir?”

  “Are you mocking me?”

  “Sir?”

  “Your generation doesn’t call veterans ‘sir.’”

  “I called my dad ‘sir,’ sir.” If the drugs had really worn off, I probably would have cried at that. Even though Dad was ten years dead.

  He looked at my file again. “I’m sorry. Your courtesy is appropriate, generous under your circumstances.”

  “How long have they had me sedated?”

  “Two weeks. Two weeks since that first Projectile hit Indianapolis. Why the hell did you go to school the next morning, son? You must have been in a state.”

  I shrugged. “Mom said not to cut while she was out of town. What do you mean ‘first Projectile’?”

  “Jason, since your episode with your teacher, we’re at war. New Orleans, Phoenix, Cairo, and Djakarta were also dest
royed. Smashed by Projectiles as big as the Chrysler Building. Not nuclear bombs. Everyone thought Indianapolis was a bomb, at first. Terrorism against America.”

  “That’s what my teacher said. That Americans in Indianapolis deserved to die for the way we treat the third world. That’s when I pounded her.”

  The judge snorted. “I’d have pounded her myself.

  These Projectiles came from space. Jupiter. More are coming.“ The old man choked and shook his head. ”Twenty million dead.“ He removed his glasses and wiped away tears.

  Twenty million ? I only knew one of them, but I teared up, too.

  His eyes softened. “Son, your problems are a drop in the bucket. But it’s your job and mine to deal with them.” He clung to my file like a life preserver and sighed. “You’re old enough to charge as an adult with assault. But your circumstances mitigate your conduct. Your home was in eviction proceedings before I ever heard of you. Now complete. Rent deficiency.”

  I felt dizzy. “Our house is gone?”

  “Personal goods are in storage for you. Do you have relatives you could live with?”

  Mom’s great-aunt sent an annual Christmas letter, the old, copied-paper kind that always ended “Yours ‘til Niagara Falls,” followed by “Ha-ha” in parentheses. Last year’s came from a nursing home. I shook my head.

  He reached across his body with his huge, good hand, hugged his pinned-up sleeve like a bear, and glared. “Do you know how I lost this arm?”

  I froze. Beating a juvenile defendant snotless? I realized he didn’t expect me to know the answer. I relaxed. “No, sir.”

  “Second Afghan Conflict. The military could channel your anger, and the discipline wouldn’t hurt you, either. The court has broad sentencing discretion. And this is a just war. Have you considered enlisting?”

  He sat back and fingered a paperweight. It was some kind of bullet. It might as well have been a dinosaur tooth. For years now the military, especially the ground forces, had become like plumbing. Necessary, unpleasant, and out of sight. Not that you could blame people. The terrorism years had given way to Pax Americanum . Everybody wanted to buy new holosets and to travel on cheap airfares and to be left alone. In the contest between guns and butter, butter finally won. The army? Not me.

  “What do you think, Jason?”

  My eyes narrowed. Since organic prosthetics, nobody had to display a stump. Was Judge March’s a recruiting poster or a warning?

  “I think I don’t want to go to jail.”

  “I’ll take that as a ‘no’ to enlistment. Jason, do you think your violent episodes are over?”

  “I dunno. I don’t feel like hitting anybody now.” I had a nice float on from the Prozac II and whatever else they’d been pumping into me. Or else I was just numb from what he’d told me.

  He nodded. “Your file says you’ve never been in trouble before. That’s true?”

  I supposed he meant like armed robbery, not the cafeteria pudding fiasco with Metzger. I nodded.

  “Jason, I’m going to dismiss this matter. You’re too old for foster care, but I’ll backdate papers and sneak you in with a family. It’s a roof over your head.”

  I shrugged while he wrote with a pen in my file.

  He buzzed, and the bailiff returned and led me out. I reached the door as Judge March called, “Good luck and God bless you, Jason. Don’t let me see you again.”

  Three weeks later Judge March saw me again but not because I let him. No office visit this time. The bailiff called “All rise!” when Judge March swept black-robed into his courtroom. He sat between two American flags and scowled at me over his glasses.

  I looked out the window at leafless trees. Weeks ago the difference between the day sky and the night was blue compared to black. Now the Projectiles had vomited impact dust up into the stratosphere and day and night were just different shades of gray. They said rain and crops might disappear for years. People were hoarding broccoli.

  We were at war with somebody we didn’t know, who wanted us dead for reasons we couldn’t understand, and all we could do about it was slow down the End of the World. And cling to stupid rituals of civility.

  “You broke the windows out of your foster family home with a bat? And slugged the arresting officer?”

  “The world sucks.”

  Judge March rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “So does a cell down at Canon City, Mr. Wander.”

  Mr. Wander. What happened to the judge’s pal, Jason?

  I swallowed.

  The courtroom door tapped shut behind me, and I turned to see who’d come in. A guy in a board-stiff green uniform whose chin and skull were shaved so shiny they looked blue stood at attention in the aisle with a recruiting brochure under one arm.

  Judge March peered down from the bench. “Your choice, son.”

  Chapter Three

  It took five minutes for Judge March to assure me that if I chose to enlist, then quit the army, he would have my ass.

  Then the recruiting sergeant and I sat on a bench, in a courthouse hallway awash in disinfectant smell. He spoke up to be heard while the whines of handcuffed crack heads echoed off puke pink marble walls. “You sign here, here, and here, Jason. Then we’ll talk about branch preference.”

  Branch, schmanch. My preference was that Judge March didn’t jail me with mother-rapers and father-stabbers and throw away the key. I took the pen, signed, and eyed the sergeant’s chest. Ribbons, silver jump wings. He actually looked pretty wick.

  I pointed the pen at his badge, long and skinny and powder blue, with an old-fashioned musket stamped in the middle. “What’s that one?”

  “Only one that matters. CIB. Combat Infantryman’s Badge. Means you’ve seen combat.”

  “You have to be Infantry to get it?”

  He shook his head. “You have to see combat. But the way to do that’s Infantry.”

  “Isn’t that like marching and stuff?”

  “Everybody marches. Infantry marches for a reason. It’s my branch. The Queen of Battle.”

  He really did look wick with his beret tucked under his shoulder loop. Unless the army had a sex-and-rock ‘n’roll branch, it was all olive drab to me. And I liked hiking as much as the next Coloradan. I checked the “Infantry” box and the sarge and the Queen and I shared a special moment. The moment lasted as long as it took for him to tear off and fold my yellow copies.

  I had a month to jerk off before my orders said report for Basic. The only foster family that would take me were the Ryans. Mr. Ryan spent hours in the yard watching his trees. He’d planted them around the turn of the century, and they’d grown old and brittle like him. Their leaves fell after the dust darkened the sky.

  Every Sunday morning Mrs. Ryan clicked down their walk in high heels and off to church while Mr. Ryan hunkered in their living room glued to the pregame. They seemed very normal.

  Mrs. Ryan held a turn-of-the-century-style bowl, probably virgin plastic, across the kitchen table. “More peas, Jason? They’re the last of the fresh. From tomorrow it’s all frozen.” She wrinkled her brow. “After that I don’t know.”

  I shook my head. She poked the peas at Mr. Ryan.

  He grunted and kept watching TV. Yeah, TV. The dust in the atmosphere was screwing up holo signals, but the land lines from Cablevision days were still buried in place. So if you had an old cathode-ray-tube television box—and what the Ryans didn’t have only the Smithsonian did—you could still watch news.

  TV’s like a holo, only flat. You get used to it.

  The anchorman asked a professor, “Ganymede?”

  The professor wagged a pointer at a studio holo, hanging over the desk between them, of a slow-rotating rock. “Jupiter’s largest moon. Bigger than our moon yet with less gravity than Earth. The only other place in the solar system with liquid water. Of course, Ganymede’s is in a layer far below its surface. This image was taken by the Galileo Probe thirty-seven years ago, in two thousand. Ganymede looks hard edged. It had no surrounding halo back
then. No atmosphere but wisps of released ozone and oxygen.” He spun his chair and pointed at the twin to the image alongside the first. The twin had blurred edges. “This telescopic image is a week old. Voila ! Atmosphere!”

  “And that means, Doctor?”

  “These aliens have set up a forward base on Ganymede. They’ve generated an atmosphere for an entire world.”

  “And what does that tell us?” The anchorman knit his brow.

  “They covet a world with water and an atmosphere. Which is why these Projectiles are being fired at us instead of nuclear warheads. Precisely large enough to slowly strangle us but clean and small enough to allow Earth to escape true ‘Nuclear Winter.’”

  “They don’t want permanendy damaged goods?”

  The TV professor nodded.

  Mr. Ryan waved his fork. “So fly the Marines up there! They’ll permanently damage some goods!”

  Mr. Ryan was very upset about his trees. But the human race couldn’t fly a gerbil to Jupiter. We hadn’t had the hardware or the will to send a person as far as our own moon since the 1970s, much less attack some super-race that could air-condition a whole planet.

  “Walter, two wrongs don’t make a right.” Mrs. Ryan tweezed individual peas into Tupperware like pearls.

  Mr. Ryan clamped his jaw as he’d done it for a lifetime.

  The anchorman faced the screen. “When we return. Military unpreparedness. Worse than Pearl Harbor?”

  Mr. Ryan clicked off the TV box. “I’ll just read the paper.”

  They were actually publishing daily news on paper again. The Greens didn’t bitch since the trees were already dying.

  Mr. Ryan turned to me. “What branch did you pick?”

  “The Queen of Battle.” It sounded so cool.

  “Christ on a crutch! Not In fantry?”

  Uh-oh. “The sergeant recommended it.”