Orphan's Journey Page 3

  Once the Clipper moored, and New Moon’s rotation gave us weight, Ord went to claim baggage.

  I walked through the disembarkation tube directly into the Happiness-Hyatt lobby. Across the lush bustle, through a quartz inboard wall, the Firewitch loomed. Its forward mag rifles were in-folded like alien squid tentacles, and it gleamed as blue as bruises. Breathtaking, if you like reminding about a war that killed sixty million people.

  I shuddered like Mrs. Tycoon.

  “Jason!” Sharia Munshara-Metzger ran across the lobby, then hugged me as hard as a four-foot-ten Egyptian woman can. If she’s a former infantry soldier, that’s hard enough to pinch a regrown lung. I winced.

  She sprang back, eyes wide. “I’m sorry. You looked fine.”

  A hospitality ’Bot glided by. I snatched free champagne from its tray and gulped. “You look better than fine.” Her eyes still shone huge and brown, her olive skin remained smooth, and she fit her tailored suit just as well as she had eleven years ago. I waved my glass at the hanging orchids and lacquered tables. “You all live fat up here, Munchkin.”

  Munchkin shrugged. “The Spook Ring’s more like base housing.”

  I glanced around. “Where’s my godson?”

  She stared into the carpet. “He didn’t come over with me.”

  “Howard keeps him busy?”

  Munchkin pointed to a tube signed “Shops and Entertainment” as she took my arm. “I’ll show you around. We’ll talk later.”

  I frowned. When Munchkin postponed talks, what came later was always bad.

  Five

  Munchkin led me down a boutique corridor where tourists browsed space-themed trinkets, as well as ordinary goods made extraordinary by shipping them twenty-three thousand miles.

  I had shared foxholes with Munchkin, patched her wounds, served my best friend as Best Man when Munchkin married him, and delivered her first and only child seven months after the Slug War widowed her. I knew Munchkin better than a brother knew his sister. Whatever was wrong with Jason Udey Munshara-Metzger, I would hear about it only when she was ready.

  At a kiosk in the corridor ahead of us, the tycoon from the Clipper and his wife eyed a zucchini-sized model Firewitch. The model’s stand held a blue-black cinder in a transparent vial.

  The wife bent and read the tag. “It says it’s a real fragment from the Pittsburgh Projectile.”

  The tycoon snorted and dragged her away. “At that price it should be real.”

  I bent and whispered to Munchkin, “Does anybody remember the real price, anymore, Munchkin?”

  Munchkin gripped my hand. “We asked the hotel not to sell souvenirs. But it’s been sixteen years since the Blitz. Everybody knows the Slugs bypassed Earth. Or they’re all dead.”

  Munchkin waved her wrist ID at the wall, a hatch irised open, and we stepped into an unlabeled tube Cap.

  “Where does this—”

  The hatch closed.

  Munchkin said, “To the Spook Ring.”

  I nodded. “Howard doesn’t need a toy space ship. He’s got his own life-sized Firewitch to play with.”

  The Cap shot through the tube and we both floated for a second.

  “He shares his toy with eight hundred other geeks.”

  “Who all report to him.”

  We stepped out of the Cap, and a live MP Corporal who looked too young to be wearing the sidearm on her belt—and too petite to be an MP—checked our ID. She looked back and forth at me, then at my image, then patted me down.

  Munchkin led me through another hatch into an admin bubble in which a slim man slouched, intent on his screens. Bubbles were paperless offices, but Howard’s bulged with ancient books that swung open like chipboards, charts, and scraps of rock and bone that he’d packratted, even into orbit.

  Sixteen years had changed only Colonel Howard Hibble’s rank. He was the same wrinkle-faced scarecrow I met at the height of the Blitz, when he was a new-minted Intelligence Captain, and I was the Army’s most expendable trainee.

  Howard’s uniform bagged over his bones, and he still wore turn-of-the-century plastic vision lenses. Wire replaced one missing temple piece. Before the Blitz, Howard had been a Professor of Extraterrestrial Intelligence Studies. Since only nuts believed in extraterrestrial intelligence, Howard’s job was as relevant as clog dancing. Then the Slugs greased Indy and Cairo faster than a sneeze.

  Howard sprang from his chair, arms wide, as the screens retracted. “Jason!” He tugged the tooth-dented yellow stub of an antique wooden pencil from his mouth and waved it sadly. “The only smoking on New Moon’s the Cigar Lounge in the hotel.”

  “They wouldn’t let me start now, if I wanted to.”

  He frowned. “New lung?”

  “And Plasteel femurs. I’ve got enough Carbon9 in me to make a racing bike.”

  Howard winced. “You up to a tour?”

  “I’ve been resting for months. Lead on.” The truth was that just flying up on the Clipper, then following Munchkin around for a quarter hour, had left my knees trembling.

  Howard waved on a holo in the compartment’s center and conjured a shimmering image of the Spook Ring, surrounding a floating Firewitch. The display stretched longer than an Electrovan.

  Howard pointed to a tube that connected the Ring to the Slug ship, like a bike wheel connected to its hub by a single spoke. “We breached the hull here, amidships, four years ago. The Exit Tube was completed a year later. Wonderful engineering. The Tube’s both structural and umbilical. What we found once we got inside amazed us.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “It hasn’t amazed the public.”

  “If we publicized results, we’d have to publicize costs. You know how politicians get about costs.”

  “Not to mention how taxpayers get.”

  Howard crooked a finger and led me away from the holo compartment. “Besides, there are minor risks I’d as soon not dwell on.”

  Hair stood on my neck. “The last minor risk you didn’t dwell on almost extincted mankind.”

  “Nothing like that.”

  “Of course not.”

  Howard waved his hand as he led me past row after row of admin bubbles. Within them rank after rank of his technicians labored. He smiled and waved. They ignored him. As a full-bird Colonel, Howard had the command presence of dryer lint. But nobody on Earth knew Slugs like he did. Not even me.

  Howard stopped beside a lock-down hatch stenciled “Firewitch Portal. Cav 512 Monitors required beyond this point.”

  Howard unhooked three orange chest badges from a wall cabinet, handed one each to Munchkin and me, then clipped his own to a pocket flap.

  I clipped mine on, then asked him, “Cav 512?”

  “The atomic number’s a convenient fiction. It’s not really an element.” Howard passed his wrist across the entry plate, the hatch hissed open, and chill wind slapped my face.

  I shivered, but not from the cold. At the tube’s end lay an oval cross-section passage, barely tall enough to stand in. It corkscrewed away for fifty yards, suffused in purple light.

  Howard said, “How long since you boarded a Pseudocephalopod ship?”

  “Not long enough.”

  Six

  Munchkin pouted. “This thing still creeps me out.”

  Howard strode down the passage toward the Slug warship. “Oh, come on! The most dangerous thing in here now is the employee lunch cart.”

  I slid one foot across the threshold, fingering my orange badge. “What about this Cav 512?”

  “There’s nothing dangerous about properly shielded Cavorite.”

  My jaw dropped. “You’re joking.”

  Munchkin frowned, her face lavender under the Slug lighting. “Cavorite’s a joke?”

  I said to her, “Cavorite’s a nonexistent mineral H. G. Wells thought up. It blocked gravity, so his characters could fly to the moon.”

  Howard grinned. “Catchy name, huh?” He index-fingered his chest. “My idea.”

  “That’s how the Slugs could
approach light speed? A gravity shield?”

  Howard frowned. “More a graviton sponge. But that’s the least puzzling part of it.”

  Howard must have been the only one in his kindergarten class unpuzzled by graviton sponges.

  The passage widened into a chamber bigger than a concert hall, with walls as lumpy and purple as stomach ulcers. From the chamber floor’s center, a spot-lit stalk twisted upward thirty feet, then flattened and widened like a metal toadstool. All around the stalk, Howard’s geeks had erected a spiraling Aluminex scaffold.

  Howard motioned to me to follow him up the scaffold’s stairs. “We’ve identified this as the control ganglion. Pilot’s seat, if you will.”

  In the twilight spill around the stalk a hundred admin bubbles, with empty chairs and dark screens, lay in a ring. Hard wire bundles fatter than fire hoses ran across the floor from them to the stalk.

  We climbed toward the ganglion’s top. Our boots’ clatter echoed in the chamber’s emptiness. “Where are all your people, Howard?”

  Howard glanced down at Munchkin. “There’s nothing left to do in here. For the moment.”

  “Meaning?”

  “We need cooperation.” Howard reached the metal platform atop the stairs, knelt, and panted.

  “From what?”

  Howard pointed at the stem’s top.

  I stared down into the toadstool’s cap. Its blue-black center dropped down in a depression. Within the depression an upholstered day-glo orange pilot’s couch was welded to Aluminex girders that suspended the couch in the middle of the depression. A control yoke curved in front of the couch.

  I nodded. “Okay. You fabricated a human interface. A pilot’s couch, so we can replace a Slug pilot with a human.” I sniffed disinfectant. “Was there a dead maggot in the seat when you got inside?”

  Howard shook his head. “We just did routine cleaning. Virtually nothing organic remained in the hull.”

  I shuddered. “A ghost ship?”

  “Nothing supernatural. The Pseudocephalopod maintained symbiotic disposal bacteria to deal with organic waste. In the four years after we captured the ship and before we got inside, the bacteria consumed all the organic matter, notably the crew’s corpses. When nothing else organic remained, the bacteria consumed each other, until the last few starved. Our microbiologists identified the residue.”

  “The Slugs got eaten by their recycling toilet?”

  “Basically. Turns out a Firewitch maintains itself. Like a car that changes its own oil and hammers out its own dents.” Howard pointed forward. “This section was battle-damaged and transparent when we captured the ship. By the time we started building New Moon around the ship, the section was repaired and solid.”

  “How did the Slugs fly this thing?”

  Howard tapped a blob that looked like a metal liver. “This converted visible-spectrum light to infrared for the pilot.”

  I nodded. “Slugs see infrared.” Every schoolchild knew that.

  Howard nodded. “But evidently, the Pseudocephalopod found infrared light inadequate for interstellar navigation.”

  Howard called Slugs “the Pseudocephalopod,” because they were a single organism with physically disparate parts.

  Howard stroked the couch. “Unfortunately, even though human vision bypasses the visible-light-infrared conversion, we haven’t been able to achieve an interface.”

  “You’ve owned the car four years and you can’t turn the key?”

  Howard shook his head. “A cockatoo has a better chance of starting a Cadillac. We’ve laid sixty-one different astronauts and test pilots and six custom-designed ’Bots in this couch. The Firewitch never responded.”

  “Then we can’t make this monstrosity fly?”

  “I didn’t say that. We think the ship is programmed to respond only if an organic pilot demonstrates adequately quick reflexes. Like the alcohol lockout on the family Electrovan.”

  “Reflexes?” I looked down at Munchkin. “Jude?”

  She nodded.

  My godson was the only human conceived and born in space. More specifically, conceived in a troop ship bound for the orbit of Jupiter. Jude was the gifted offspring of a supremely gifted pilot and a smart, sharpshooting female GI. But more than that, by age four Jude was quick enough to ’round on a fastball nanoseconds faster than a major-league shortstop. Arachnids do it too, detecting phenomena in the physical environment before other animals, or even ’Puter sensors, can.

  Why could Jude do it? Mutation. “Empty” space teems with heavy metal ions. Earth’s atmosphere soaks them up before they can pass through human embryos. But in space, those ions zip through a ship hull’s atomic fabric like dust through a window screen. New Moon had shielding, even the Clippers have shielding today, but the first troop ship of the Slug War didn’t. It had been as naked as an old-time space capsule. Astronauts used to see the ions, tiny light streaks flashing through their cabins.

  The Spooks figured an ion sliced one of Jude’s DNA strands in utero. The rest was natural history.

  I asked Munchkin, “How’d the Spooks talk you into this?”

  Once the Spooks deduced Jude’s “Apparent Precognition,” he became Space Medicine’s must-have toy.

  Unfortunately for Space Medicine, Munchkin wouldn’t let them use her only child as their lab rat. She had been winning the tug-of-war since Jude turned five.

  She stabbed her finger at Howard. “Ask him!”

  Howard unwrapped two nicotine gum sticks at once. His fingers shook a little. “I just offered. I objected to the rest of it.”

  Munchkin pointed at Howard. “Objected? You were a spineless, devious dork!”

  Howard straightened. “I was never spineless!”

  Munchkin sniffed, then said to me, “I turned Howard down. So the Army ‘discovered’ that I was six months short of requirements to keep my pension and Metzger’s dependent carry-forward. But if I accepted a civilian contract up here under Howard for six months, and by-the-way brought my minor child along, they would tack on the time. All forgiven.”

  “That’s extortion. Get a lawyer.”

  “I did. Well, I asked Judge March. He said any decent lawyer could beat the government on it.”

  I shook my head. “So why—”

  “I thought it over. Then I just thumbed the contract.” She dropped her eyes and stared down into the Firewitch’s lumpy deckplates. “Jason, Jude needed a change.”

  “Change what? He’s a great kid.”

  “You haven’t seen him for three years. He’s sixteen, now. Suddenly, adults are all—” She paused. For former infantry, Munchkin cursed rarely.

  “Puggers?”

  “Every fifth word is the ‘P’ word. Even around girls.” Munchkin rolled her eyes. “And the girls he was hanging around . . . ”

  “Ah.” I nodded. Metzger had saved the human race, and he’d been my best friend since preschool, but at Jude’s age we had both been jerks bound for nowhere good. “His father and I survived sixteen. And then we found nice girls.”

  I bit the words off. Even after all the years, it was as bad a joke to Munchkin as to me.

  Munchkin swallowed, blinked, then shook her head. “Maybe. But he won’t listen to me.”

  “He’s your minor child. Tell him he’d better fire up this ship. Or he doesn’t get to fire up the Electrovan on Saturday night. That always got my attention, even if it ticked me off.”

  Howard frowned. “It’s not as simple as physically starting the family car. Pseudocephalopod control systems are more like brain link robotics, extrapolated to next century.”

  “He has to want to drive this van?”

  Howard nodded. “But he won’t even talk to any of us. Not even my younger techs.”

  I smiled. “He’s always talked to me.” The shrinks said Jude saw me like a father. Of course, they said I saw Ord that way, too, which was bent.

  We walked toward the Firewitch’s midships, down another oval corridor. Howard smiled back. “That
’s what we thought.”

  I stopped, and held up my hand. “What we?”

  “Me, the psychologists, and Nat Cobb.”

  “I got pulled off important military duty for this? To manipulate a teenager?”

  Howard chewed his gum faster. “This is important. The Firewitch project’s stopped dead, but the meter’s running. New Moon’s daily operating budget exceeds Finland’s. Besides, Nat said your people skills needed work.”

  I hung my hands on my rebuilt hips. “The Army can make me fight. But it can’t make me manipulate my own godson.”

  “Just think it over.” It would never occur to Howard that I had no right to think it over. Unlike sixteen-year-olds, soldiers obey lawful orders. But it occurred to me.

  Howard cleared his throat, then waved his arms at the ship around us. He was a geek, but he knew how to change subjects. “You never saw this aspect of a Pseudocephalopod vessel, Jason.”

  I stared. I’d crawled through an inbound Projectile during the Blitz, and a Troll-class incubator ship four years later, but always with Slugs chasing me.

  The passage widened. Not only was a Firewitch as big as a domed stadium on the outside, it was as open as one inside. I couldn’t have hit a nine iron to the far end of the chamber we now stood in. At the chamber end opposite us grew another lump, like the pilot chamber we had left. It took us five minutes to walk to the opposite lump. “Why all this empty space, Howard?”

  “Buffer zone.” Howard handed each of us dark goggles that hung on a rack placed alongside a passage into the lump, then in we wriggled.

  The passage widened into a chamber like the inside of a fifty-foot-wide purple egg. At its center floated a thirty-foot-tall glassy sphere, which seemed to be filled with boiling ruby fog.

  Howard stepped under the sphere, reached up, and rapped it with his knuckles. “That glowing miasma inside this shielding is raw Cavorite. An unprotected Pseudocephalopod warrior would have dropped dead before it entered the passage we just crawled through.”

  “Howard, we aren’t protected.”

  “No need. Shielded Cavorite has no discernible effect on humans. Though you wouldn’t want to swallow any. But Pseudocephalopod tissue we preserved after the Ganymede campaign decomposed like fat in a blast furnace at this range.”