Orphan's Destiny Read online

  “Jason, this is the best day of my life.” Tears streamed down Munchkin’s cheeks and she sobbed so hard that Jude Metzger bounced on his mother’s belly like he was rafting class-three whitewater.

  I understood. But I thought that for me the best day would be the day we all left Ganymede.

  I was wrong.

  Three

  On the morning of our 224th day on Ganymede, measured in Earth days, Jude Metzger celebrated his one-week birthday under Jovian skies. But the Ganymede Gazette, the daily paper my guys published on the backs of old ration wrappers, had a bigger headline.

  For 223 days Ganymede’s skies didn’t change. The daily, orbit-induced windstorms whirled golden dust above the mountains. Beyond their peaks and the dust clouds shone stars and Jupiter’s visible lesser moons, Europa, Io, and Callisto, some days pink, some days pearlescent or violet against space’s indigo. Over all loomed ever-orange Jupiter, at each rise and set magnified by the artificial atmosphere’s lens so the gas giant filled the horizon.

  We all watched the sky every one of those days. Not because it was beautiful but because there lay home.

  On the morning of day 224, at five-zero-three Ganymede Standard Time, Brumby burst into the mess cave, binocular range finder in one freckled hand, the other pointing back over his shoulder.

  Brumby didn’t have to speak. Only one thing would excite any of us interplanetary castaways like that.

  Egg-scrambled (concentrated) tubes and therm cups clattered to the frozen lava floor. Before the echoes stopped rebounding off the cave walls and ceiling, three hundred combat-boot pairs thundered out into pale twilight.

  I let the men clear out, then followed them onto the rocky terrace that Brumby and the surviving engineers had blasted out of the mountainside. Architecture on Ganymede involved blowing things up, since we had three building materials to work with: rock, rock, and rock.

  By the time I got outside, someone, not Brumby who stood alongside me to avoid trampling, had picked it out. I simply let my eyes follow the pointing fingers.

  Just a luminous fly crawling toward us across the deep purple ceiling of our world, but the prettiest sight I had ever seen. The relief ship. Maybe.

  Brumby turned to me. “Sir, how long you figure before the first of us gets off the rock?”

  “First question is how we make sure we all get off, Brumby. Order alert status.”

  Brumby stiffened. “Sir? Alert?” Brumby and seven hundred cold, exhausted, lonely GIs figured it was party time, not jump-in-our-holes time.

  It may be no coincidence that “General” and “Grinch” begin with “G.” Alert status meant the troops dispersed to fighting positions. “Disperse” meant walk, crawl, and climb. Three things GIs had bitched about since Troy.

  Well, there were, historically, two schools of military thought here. Concentration of force, like the Romans huddling in phalanxes, shoulder-to-shoulder and shield-to-shield, or dispersal, spreading troops out so one grenade couldn’t get a whole squad. Short, the general in charge of the Army Air Corps at Pearl Harbor a hundred years ago, huddled all his aircraft together so they would be easier to guard. And created perfect targets for Japanese bombs.

  So I was a dispersal man, myself. Even if my grunts hated it. The sooner we fled this rock the sooner I could shed the stars on my shoulders and slide back to being a grunt, myself. Oh, I hoped they’d let me keep a lieutenant’s bar. But presiding by default over an accident had made me no general officer.

  “Brumby, all we know is that speck is somebody coming. Might be relief. Might be Slugs. Pass the word to the battalion COs.” The Ganymede Expeditionary Force’s surviving “battalions” weren’t much more than platoon-sized, maybe fifty soldiers each. Word-passing would take Brumby sixty seconds.

  Brumby half shook his head, denying the possibility that there might still be Slugs, more than questioning my order.

  “Brumby, if it’s our guys, they’ll be in field-strength radio range in a couple hours.” Generals—even field-promoted spec fours—didn’t need to justify orders to their aides. Maybe it was my way of telling him I wanted that speck to be our guys, too. “The men can break out the potato vodka then.”

  Brumby’s jaw sagged. Surely he had realized I knew about the still? During the six-hundred-day voyage out here from Earth, one of Howard’s lab techs had hidden his booze-making equipment and his potato raw material in a Hope escape pod, never expecting he, the pod, and his still would wind up dirtside, stranded among the embarked-division survivors.

  Brumby grinned, then saluted. “Yes, sir.”

  While Brumby passed the word, I cupped a hand over one ear and radioed Howard. “Hotel, this is Juliet. Say your estimated time of arrival and position. Over.” Dispersal didn’t mean having half your force miles away.

  “Jason, it’s Howard. We’ll be back there in an hour. At least that’s what they tell me. I’m not sure where we are. Did you see it?”

  Howard land-navigated like a blind Cub Scout but I should have known he would have spotted anything that moved in space. I said, “You think it’s our guys? What if it’s Slugs?”

  “The Pseudocephalopod displaced between conventionally mapped spatial locations by transiting temporal-fabric folds.”

  “In English, Howard.”

  “Slugs jumped through worm holes that join points where space folds back on itself.”

  “Another hunch?”

  “It had to be that way. Stars with planetary systems are too far apart to be reached by conventional travel at sub-light speeds. Even if It lived a long time.”

  “Okay. So?”

  Howard continued. “So, if It still existed, for which we have no credible intelligence, It would most likely appear to us in a way we never expected, not by replicating tactics that failed It before.”

  “Why not? Human armies repeat mistakes all the time. Even the intelligent ones.”

  “It wasn’t a human intelligence.”

  I nodded, handset to my ear. Howard might be a professor but prudent soldiers didn’t survive by underestimating their opponents.

  “Jason, that’s Excalibur up there.”

  “Excalibur?”

  “Hope’s sister ship. She was under construction when we left home thirty-one months ago. I thought you knew.”

  Howard thought nothing of the kind. He might be a professor at heart but as an Intelligence officer he had bought into all the Spook need-to-know crap. The Spook rationale would have been that if none of the rest of us knew there was a follow-on assault ship, we couldn’t spill the beans if the Slugs captured us.

  “The trip from Earth takes almost two years with chemical-fuel technology. How do you think Excalibur got here seven months behind us if she didn’t leave while we were still under way?”

  I drew a breath, then let it leak out like I was about to squeeze off a round. No point scolding. Especially when the news was good. “Okay, Howard. That ship’s not Slugs.”

  “That would be obvious to any schoolchild. But one of my staff officers actually suggested we go on alert. Isn’t that ridiculous?”

  “I guess.”

  Two Earth days later Howard Hibble and I stood alongside a hand-cleared, two-mile-long runway. Another of Brumby’s better-living-through-explosives projects, he had sliced and relocated mountains with a diamond cutter’s precision, using plastique that looked as benign as cookie dough.

  We watched Excalibur’s first relief ship carve a red friction streak as it dropped across the sky from orbit. By the time it drew close enough to be bigger than a speck, its skin had cooled from the thousand degrees Fahrenheit of a ten-thousand-mile-per-hour descent. The ship spun a contrail like spider silk as it arced down through the artificial atmosphere.

  The relief ship touched down on Ganymede at two hundred miles per hour, then boomed down our runway past us. Our shoulders hunched, we turned and watched its landing run-out, as much to shelter from the wind-wash the ship sucked behind it as to see it.

  I
t looked like an old-fashioned clothes iron, squashed and with the handle cut off, a taupe wedge 128 feet long and just as wide, sprouting angled fins from its rear end.

  My jaw hung open and my stomach churned. “Howard, that heap is just a dropship!” We had assaulted Ganymede from orbit in dropships identical to the one that now shrank as it sped down our runway in a moon-dust cloud. Dropships were gliders. This tub couldn’t take off! Hell, our own dropships hadn’t even brought us down successfully. Every one had crash-landed.

  Howard patted my arm. “The original design was for a reusable space plane to shuttle down and up to low Earth orbit. It got shelved in 2001. The dropships had troop transport compartments in place of fuel tanks and engines. These ships are powered. This variant will carry fewer troops but it’ll take us up to the mother ship fine.”

  Adrenaline tingled my fingers. That was just one more thing the Army told Howard the Intelligence Spook but hadn’t told us grunts. One more thing we couldn’t have revealed if captured. Operational security makes perfect sense but I still hate being lied to.

  The relief ship reached the end of its run-out and pivoted to taxi back in our direction. As if to prove Howard’s point that it was powered, its engines gunned and our creaky ticket home churned dust as it rolled back toward us.

  The Slug War had forced humankind to pick up manned spaceflight where it had left off back when cars burned gasoline, in the late 1990s. The seventy-year hiatus had given humanity budget enough to solve lots of social problems and time enough to pat itself on the back for achieving decades of world peace. Great accomplishments. They looked less great to an infantryman like me who had to ride into battle against the most destructive enemy in the universe in last-century antiques.

  The ship rolled up to us and braked, nosing down on her landing gear, engines whining and heat still rolling off her skin. Mean midday temperature on Ganymede still only rose to two degrees Fahrenheit, so that warmth felt good. Block-lettered “UNSF” decorated the ship’s fuselage in United Nations powder-blue. Designs on the friction-scorched vertical stabilizers looked like a black-and-white squirrel with an S-shaped tail. Below it I made out the lettering “Pride of the Skunk Works.”

  I pointed at the insignia and made head-scratching motions at Howard.

  Howard cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “It’s a Lockheed-Martin Venture Star.”

  The engines died.

  Howard dropped his voice. “In the last half of the twentieth century, we hid an aircraft factory in the Nevada desert. The ‘Skunk Works.’”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Nixon hid the defense plants from the hippies?”

  Howard smiled. “No. From the Russians, during the Cold War. The hippies melted into the mainstream after Vietnam. The Venture Star died on the drawing board in the early 2000s. Amilitarism fizzled the Skunk Works.”

  I nodded. I had spent my free time the last seven months completing downloaded correspondence courses toward bachelor’s and master’s degrees in military history. Americans made war only too well once we set our minds to it. But we resisted getting into wars, from Woodrow Wilson to Charles Lindbergh to Arnaud Welkie and the No-bots in the 2030s. And as soon as Americans could, we turned away from our wars to benign—or self-indulgent—pursuits. America had flipped between pacifist and gung ho for 150 years, now.

  The relief ship shuddered on wheeled landing gear, fuselage ten feet above Ganymede, then hydraulics whined and a ramp unfolded from its belly.

  The ramp reassured me that this ship represented a two-way ticket. Our dropships had been single-use assault vessels. The ships disembarked us by splitting apart like pea pods, blown open by explosive bolts, never again usable. A ramp was not only red-carpet treatment, it meant this ship was capable of flying us up to the mother ship and, in turn, home.

  I don’t know who I expected to see descend the ramp but it was never Division Sergeant Major DeArthur Ord.

  Ord’s Eternad body armor shone immaculate crimson, and he strode down that ramp as sharp and measured as machinery, helmet tucked under one arm, fingers wrapped precisely across the laser-designator bulge, embassy-duty style.

  His hair, what little Uncle Sam let him show, was as gray as gunmetal and so were his eyes, unchanged since I first met him, as my senior drill sergeant in Infantry Basic.

  Ord halted in front of me and saluted so crisply that his hand quivered. “Sir, Rear Admiral Brace extends his compliments.”

  I returned the salute. Ord’s eyes would never do anything so unmilitary as to twinkle, so let’s just say he must have polished them. My heart leapt. Ord was actually proud of me. It wasn’t every day a drill sergeant rescued a smart-ass enlistee from the court-martial scrap heap, then saw that enlistee go on to command the division that won the most desperate battle in the history of the human race.

  A Signal Corps holographer, who had followed Ord down the ramp, captured the scene for history with a Palmcorder.

  It swelled my heart when I saw Ord stride down that ramp. But when I thought about it I cocked my head. Ord was plenty senior enough to be first down that ramp. Noncommissioned officers ran every army. Division sergeant majors sat at the left hand of God.

  But Ord should report to the embarked-division commander, who would be an Army two-star. It sounded like Excalibur’s commander, a Navy-style rear admiral, was top dog, which was odd. But whoever was in charge, if that career officer was a political animal, and few officers made flag rank who weren’t, he would have led his troops down to Ganymede with holocams rolling. Admiral Brace had dodged a holo opportunity that carried no apparent risk. Why?

  Ord continued. “As do the Secretary-General of the United Nations and the President of the United States.”

  I smiled. “I bet she does!” The Ganymede Expeditionary Force had paid a terrible price but the President, our commander-in-chief, had to feel the same gratitude toward my soldiers that America and the world did.

  Ord blinked. “He, sir.”

  “Huh?” Not a general-like response but Ord’s remark made no sense.

  “The President resigned before her term expired. It is President Lewis who sends his greetings.”

  “Resigned?” No American President had resigned in nearly a century. The Palmcorder technician played his lens across us. The V-Star’s cooling fuselage creaked.

  “Things changed while you were up here, sir.”

  Beneath my helmet, hair stood on my neck.

  Four

  Two days later Howard and I again stood side by side on the Ganymede plains watching a V-Star fly. But this one was bound skyward. It jacked itself vertical on hydraulic struts angling from its belly, then Ganymede quaked as the V-Star’s engines lit and rumbled.

  Howard shouted in my ear, “That’s fourteen, Jason.”

  The most expensive hundred miles in the universe are from dirt to low planetary orbit. Ganymede’s gravity was more like the moon’s than Earth’s, but these V-Stars still packed lots of fuel. That meant there was room for only fifty GIs in each upship. Gliding down without engines or fuel tanks seven months ago, the same-size air frames had carried four hundred troops each.

  Munchkin and Jude had ridden upship number one, along with the other medicals. As CO, I waited for the last ship off the rock, upship number fifteen. Howard, Brumby, and a half-dozen staff, stoop-shouldered from potato-vodka hangovers, waited with me.

  I was younger than most of them and at least as fond of getting zogged. But I had hoisted one cup with them, then excused myself like a good CO, so they could party like it was 2099 while I sacked early. Command is sobering. Literally.

  Today, except for Howard, they sat cross-legged in a circle, reclining on their packs and playing cards. Brumby sat on a neoplast crate packed with Howard’s precious Slug Football.

  Howard claimed he hadn’t heard me tell him to leave it, but he probably would have brought it anyway. Howard argued it was the single most extraordinary artifact recovered in world history. But the reason I let hi
m keep his Slug-metal stray puppy was that it hadn’t shown any propensity to bite anybody.

  The V-Star gathered speed and dwindled to a speck. It would rendezvous with Excalibur one hundred miles above us, then the last V-Star, refueled and refreshed, would scream down to pluck us from this most foreign place. Ganymede once again would host no living things.

  In the sudden silence, Howard adjusted old-fashioned glasses on his wrinkled face, read his wrist ’puter, then caught me looking back, over my shoulder, at the low crags behind us. “We only have three hours. You’re not going back over the rim?”

  The landing strip and takeoff apron were built across solid rock and water-ice, on a plain beyond the rim of the crater where GEF had arrived on Ganymede. That flat crater floor had proven to be volcanic dust deep enough to swallow dropships whole. Hundreds of soldiers got buried alive without the chance to fire a shot. In the days that followed, thousands more fell in combat.

  Landing Zone Alpha, beyond the jagged hills behind Howard and me, was a graveyard. Hallowed and consecrated by unanimous act of the General Assembly of the United Nations and by the blood of nine thousand orphans. My only family.

  I nodded at Howard. “I can make it over the rim and back in an hour.”

  Howard had known I couldn’t leave this place without saying good-bye.

  I Ganymede-galloped toward the crater rim, covering twenty paces with each low-gravity stride.

  Howard shouted after me, “It’s a long wait ’til the next bus!”

  I scrambled to the crater-rim crest in fifteen minutes and paused to let my heart slow down. Howard’s warning was sound advice, but even Space Force blue-suit weenies would hardly leave behind the stud-duck acting commanding general.

  I dialed up my oxygen generator. Ganymede’s artificial, Slug-generated atmosphere had grown to four percent oxygen. But Earth-normal was over twenty percent. And this atmosphere was still as thin as the air at Everest’s summit.

  Beyond the opposite crater rim, through the surface dust already rising from late-afternoon winds, the sun flickered like a distant porch light, fifteen degrees above the jagged horizon. I looked out across the crater floor to the impact-rebound structure at its center. The peak rose two thousand feet, like a medieval castle. It had been our fortress when Slugs and GIs had battled to control its parapets.