Orphan's Destiny Page 3

  I picked my way, still puffing, across rock fields and down to the crater floor.

  Ganymede had been a terrible place to fight a war. It was a more terrible place to bury the woman I loved.

  I slipped and slid the last hundred vertical feet, then caught my breath again. Beneath my boots began a six-mile-long, eight-foot-wide causeway. Jury-rigged from prefabricated fiberglass shelter panels, it bridged the volcanic-dust sea.

  The dust plain remained flat and featureless. If a tombstone rose here for each Slug warrior that had died and sunk beneath the dust, LZ Alpha would have made Arlington Cemetery look as empty as a village churchyard. The Slugs had charged us in waves, fifty thousand at a time. A man would sink in the dust as though into quicksand, but the Slug warriors glided across it like flat pebbles across pond water. Until we killed them. Then they sank like stones.

  And kill them we had. At first, impersonally with precision-guided munitions. Then with rifles. Then with our bayonets. Then, finally, with our rifles again, swung stock-first like clubs until they shattered.

  Our own dead now clustered near and upon the distant central peak, where the dropships crash-landed.

  I checked my ’puter while I paused for a blow, then turned back and scanned the sky, perpetually twilight under one-thirtieth of Earth’s sunlight. It was still hours before the upship would even arrive.

  I should just have stood still a moment, remembered them all, then turned back. Instead, I bounded onto the causeway.

  I paused halfway to the mountain at a makeshift gravestone, constructed from torso shells of Eternad body armor, lashed to the causeway’s edge three miles distant from the central peak. Eternad armor stops assault-rifle rounds, but it weighs no more than cardboard, so the shells twitched in the rising wind. A plaque hammered from duralumin ammunition boxes and riveted to a chestplate read, “Two hundred feet beneath this monument rest four hundred men and women of the Combat Engineer Battalion, Ganymede Expeditionary Force, and the crew of United Nations Space Force Assault Ship Two. Killed in Action Third April, 2040.”

  With the nearest living soldier ten miles away I allowed myself to draw a breath and blink back tears. They died. I lived. Why me?

  “Action” in the gung-ho sense hadn’t even killed them. Simple human error had. Intel hadn’t dropped probes on the LZ to preserve surprise—they thought. The flat lava plain that Earth’s best minds believed they recognized from millions of miles away had proven to be volcanic dust as deep as the sea. Those kids, most older than I was, died as unaware of their fate as us grunts in the follow-on dropships had been.

  Someone wrote that war is an orphanage and the soldiers with whom you fight become your only family. The GEF troop-selection process, picking only from among those who had lost entire families to the Slugs, meant we were literal orphans, as well.

  The Battle of Ganymede had orphaned me for the second time.

  I shuffled the rest of the way to the mountain’s base, more from respect for the fallen than from fear of falling.

  I had barely met most of them. I ached not for lifetimes unlived but for anecdotes unfinished, jokes untold.

  Ten minutes later I drew alongside the carcass of UNSF Assault Ship One, its skin tiles charred to charcoal by atmospheric friction. The ship’s wedge shape remained intact, though plowed into knee-deep dust.

  I never knew the copilot. I would never again know anyone like the pilot.

  Priscilla Olivia Hart had stood barely five feet tall even when she swaggered. And the self-proclaimed world’s best pilot always swaggered.

  So the stones beneath which she lay made a grave as small as a child’s, compared to the sea of others. We had all come in here as children. Sometimes it seemed those who never had to grow up were the lucky ones.

  I tugged off a mitten and touched the stones, so cold they burned my flesh. But I kept my hand there. Once I drew my hand away from her, away from this place, away from these people, I would be alone again. Being alone is the worst part of being an orphan. “Why, Pooh? Why you? Why me?”

  I reached inside my armor’s yoke, unpinned my collar brass, and laid the stars across her grave. I needed to leave something of myself, something so she wouldn’t be alone. I couldn’t leave the ring because I hadn’t kept it. The ring she refused from me because my job was too risky and I would widow her when I did something noble and stupid and died.

  I leaned against her grave and let myself weep.

  When I looked up, Sol’s pale dot hung just above the crater rim. I read my ’puter as I tugged my mitten over numb fingers. Had I really stood here that long?

  It only then occurred to me that a Space Force pilot would be more concerned about protecting his ship and crew by staying in his launch window than about whether he left one AWOL dirt-grubber behind, regardless of that grubber’s acting rank. Had I really been stupid enough to think the last ship would wait for me? At midday, minutes meant little. But Ganymede’s sunset brings artificial atmosphere contraction and hurricane-plus wind.

  To that pilot, every minute’s delay meant stronger launch crosswinds. After his mission, his first responsibility was his ship, just as my troops were mine. If I stood in that pilot’s boots I would leave me behind in a heartbeat.

  Crap!

  I bounded back along the causeway, got blown over by the crosswind, and nearly turned an ankle. That slowed me to a shuffle.

  In the distant sky crawled the firefly that was the last upship, inbound at eleven thousand miles per hour. Crap, crap, crap. I sped up.

  By the time I crested the crater rim, the V-Star touched down in the distance. I stopped watching it and concentrated on dodging boulders as I descended.

  When I rounded the last house-sized boulder between me and the takeoff apron, nothing remained on the apron but footprints and the V-Star. Its elevation-pylon doors whined open as it prepared to jack itself vertical for launch.

  I sucked air like a vacuum ’bot set for deep-pile synwool as I ran. Sweat soaked the long johns beneath my armor. Seventy-mile-per-hour wind sizzled dust against my helmet visor.

  I looked up at the V-Star and saw Howard’s helmeted head poking out of the hatch like a bespectacled hunting trophy nailed on a wall. He waved me toward him.

  I sprinted and leapt through the hatch. Pneumatics hissed and it slammed and locked twenty seconds later.

  My earpiece beeped as the V-Star pilot spoke to Howard. Her voice rasped over the Command Net, heard only by Howard, her copilot, and me. “If waiting for your general costs us this ship, I’ll make hell a lot hotter for that asshole, Hibble!”

  I smiled. Pilots.

  Panting, heart pounding, I strapped in alongside Howard and realized that my panicked dash had saved me a broken heart. I’m not sure I could have left them all if I had had to think about it as I marched away. I wondered whether I had lingered on purpose. The ache of loneliness sank into my chest even as GI breathing fogged the air around me.

  Hydraulics whined as the V-Star pointed its nose to the sky and I sank into my seat back. The Space Force troop bay technician across the aisle had touched his boots to Ganymede for all of ten minutes. All his buddies, all his family, were where he was going, not where he had been.

  The fuselage shuddered as pumps fueled the engines. The technician glanced at my harness, to be sure I was strapped in, then nodded at me, one soldier to another.

  The space between our eyes was thirty inches. But the gulf between our lives was light-years.

  Then I settled back into my seat and felt like I had just shrugged out of a field pack. The irate pilot had called me “General,” but now, in the nurturing womb of a ship somebody else was driving, I would be free to be just a GI. I would shed the temporary rank that forced me to be the daddy of soldiers older than I was. I would be slid back to a lieutenancy, where I belonged.

  The intercom squawked. “Ignition!”

  I closed my eyes and let the grumpy pilot fly me toward home. My worries were over.

  I th
ought.

  Five

  V-Star troop bays lack windows but the troop bay technician had duct-taped a cheap plasma flatscreen to the forward bulkhead, then hard-wired it. Therefore, we saw the same feed as the pilot’s camera while she slid our upship alongside Excalibur’s majestically rotating, mile-long bulk, like a snowflake landing on a polar bear.

  Excalibur looked like Hope, except for the addition of defensive weapons systems that were, like Excalibur herself, mere surplus, now that Slugs were extinct.

  I lay back in my seat until the last of my men were safely through the lock, then unbuckled. I stood in that odd centrifugal-force gravity I had never expected to feel again and faced the exit hatch.

  “General? May I have a word, please?” The pilot’s Texanese twanged through the intercom.

  I turned and stared toward the flight deck. The V-Star flight deck connects to the troop bays through a shoulder-width tube that corkscrews through the avionics. Negotiating the tube requires some delightfully unladylike contortions, so female pilots usually entered and exited while the troop bay was empty of GIs.

  Pooh had told me the pilots were acutely aware they were putting on a show for their passengers. She had also told me she would demonstrate the flight-deck worm for me privately, anytime I wanted.

  I swallowed back tears even as I smiled.

  From emotion, not good manners, I turned my head away as the rasp of this pilot’s synlon flight suit against aluminum echoed in the bay. Finally, her boots tapped the deck plates.

  “Politeness doesn’t make infantry less stupid.”

  Smart-ass was even more a pilot trait than a Texan one. I turned back to face her, then looked around for the Texan pilot.

  The woman who stood, feet planted shoulder-width apart, in front of the flight-deck hatch, was tiny and as Japanese as cherry blossoms. Her eyes were enormous, brown almonds set in porcelain. Her hair was ebony silk and she combed it with her fingers, taming helmet-head spikes. Almonds or not, her eyes burned at me.

  I flicked my eyes across the shoulder loops of her flight suit. I didn’t really feel like I outranked a doorman, but part of being an officer is demanding military courtesy. I tried to burn my eyes back at her. “Major, did the Space Force teach you the difference between Stars and an Oak Leaf?” Every zoomie should be required to spend a month with a real drill sergeant.

  “General, we’re still aboard my ship. Hero of the Battle of Ganymede or not, you endangered my ship and my crew. I don’t care cowshit what’s on your shoulders.”

  I paused. I’d kind-of skipped over the military justice part of my correspondence courses. There was something somewhere about a vessel master’s absolute authority.

  The name tape stitched to her flight suit, over her heart, read Ozawa.

  The name tape was the second thing I noticed.

  Pilot attire had changed while I was gone. Pooh’s flight suit had been UN powder-blue, floppy coveralls. Major Ozawa’s was diagonal-striped rescue-me orange and yellow. More significantly, it was stretch synlon, tight enough that there wasn’t much question about how Major Ozawa would look without it. And the answer to that question was “terrific.”

  It’s not like I hadn’t seen a woman for seven months. Munchkin wasn’t the only surviving female soldier in GEF, and a few of them were cream. But an officer doesn’t think about his soldiers that way. They say it’s professional detachment, like being a gynecologist. But Major Ozawa wasn’t even in the Army, so I felt undetached stirrings.

  “Whenever you’ve seen enough, General.”

  I jerked my eyes back up to hers. “Uh.”

  I blinked and felt myself flush. It is just barely possible that I might have been staring.

  She folded her arms across her chest. “I held this ship twenty minutes for you. Relive your glory. Strand yourself and your Medal of Honor if you want. But you jeopardized my ship.”

  She was right. “You don’t understand—”

  She chopped the air with a hand as delicate as a sparrow’s wing. “I understand hundred-knot crosswinds! Do you? You almost killed fifteen of your own people!”

  I blinked back tears and swallowed. Then I whispered, “I already killed nine thousand of them.”

  Her mouth froze open like a pink Cheerio.

  We stood like fence posts until a boot scraped metal and Sergeant Major Ord poked his head through the exit hatch. “General Wander? Admiral Brace requests to welcome you aboard, sir!”

  Ozawa avoided my eyes, craning her neck at gauges and recording end-of-mission data on a Chipboard.

  Ord led me through the lock into brightness, warmth, and the womblike thrum of ship machinery for the first time in seven months.

  In the embarkation corridor, Brumby dismissed the men and whispered, “Shower!” It sounded like a four-letter word. In point-six gravity, it would be more a sponge bath, but anticipation of warm, soapy water cascading over my skin made it tingle. An orderly led my troops off to clean fatigues and showers and cheeseburgers while I followed Division Sergeant Major Ord toward Excalibur’s bridge.

  Excalibur’s layout seemed just like Hope’s, where I had lived for nearly two years. I probably could have found my own way through the onion-peel deck layers to the bridge. But traveling behind Ord had entertainment value. We reached a stairwell, what the swabbies called a ladder. A pair of starched, enlisted Space Force ratings knelt on the deck plates, blocking the ladder, while they polished away grime that had been imaginary for the last hundred million miles.

  “Make a hole!” Ord’s command bellow seemed to physically blow the swabbies to stand at attention. The female was cute. As we passed them, their backs plastered against the bulkhead, her eyes were wide but her nose wrinkled. I became acutely aware of the Ganymede grit packed into every wrinkle in my uniform and every crevasse of my body. Seven months in the same armor was no way to impress a lady and generals didn’t date enlisted ratings.

  If Ozawa was any indication, women were going to be a problem. Like any twenty-two-year-old male het, a nerve as thick as a jumper cable linked my eyeballs to my groin. But moments after I looked at an eligible female, the thought of being with any woman other than Pooh Hart washed over my brain like a stain.

  I sighed and just followed Ord as our bootsteps echoed along one corridor, then another.

  Ten minutes later we got piped onto Excalibur’s bridge. Hope’s bosun had just keyed an electronic recording—Excalibur’s bosun actually blew a little silver whistle. Either way, it was for me as a general officer.

  The bridge was the size of a low-ceilinged schoolroom, dim-lit in red so the flatscreen wall displays glowed brighter. In front of the screens, twenty swabbies sat at twenty consoles, each whispering data and instructions to the ship through cherry-stem microphones.

  The master holo, Excalibur in iridescent miniature, floated centered amid the pilots and contollers like a translucent giant squid. The ship’s pressurized payload and fuel-storage sections were forward and the propulsion booms trailed aft like tentacles. All along the master holo, colored-light streaks and blips winked on, crawled, then faded up and down the holo as the ship’s vital signs changed. Every elevator that moved, every hatch that opened or closed, made a spark that a seasoned vessel commander could read like a living, three-dimensional book.

  The holo would have dominated the room, except for the figure who stood staring into it, head bowed, feet spread shoulder width apart, hands clasped in the small of his back.

  Rear Admiral Atwater N. Brace had chosen Class-A uniform for this day, Space Force powder-blue and more coverall than suit. A service-ribbon rainbow plated the space over his heart. Not a combat decoration among them. His chin thrust forward as outsized and steel-smooth as an aircraft carrier’s bow. His skin shone crimson, reflecting the master holo’s glow.

  Ord and I waited at attention, helmets tucked under our left arms, swallowing, blinking, and listening while the console operators’ whispers made elevator music on the great ship’s bridg
e.

  I counted to three hundred while Brace let us dangle. His ship, his rules.

  Brace raised his head and faced us. Ord and I saluted. Brace returned a crisp one. Space Force officers who came up through any country’s Air Force saluted with that fly-boy limp wrist. Brace had to have been wet-Navy.

  “Sir, Acting Major General Wander commanding United Nations Expeditionary Force Ganymede requests permission to come aboard.”

  “Granted, Acting General.”

  Brace forgot to give Ord and me “At ease.” But he didn’t forget to emphasize “Acting.”

  I thought the console jockey seated nearest us inclined his head a millimeter to listen.

  Brace stretched a smile, showing polished teeth. “We’re cleaning up your troops, Wander.”

  Philistine grunts couldn’t bathe themselves.

  “Field hygiene was tough. The water down there’s been ice since the Pre-Cambrian.” Bathing had been cold, ineffective, and just frequent enough to keep soldiers from getting sick.

  Brace’s small blue eyes squinted as they flicked up and down my body armor. The infrared-absorbent crimson coating had scuffed down to bare Neoplast at the wear points and the torso had taken a few Slug-round hits. Plenty to gig there.

  “Obviously.” He turned to Ord. “Sergeant Major, show Acting General Wander to his quarters.”

  Ord saluted. “Aye-aye, sir!”

  Hearing Ord say “aye-aye” instead of “yes, sir” was like watching a rhino polka. Brace was driving this bus and even Ord knew it.

  Ord led me down a short corridor to my quarters. Unlike aboard Hope, when I was a specialist, fourth class, I was billeted forward, in officer country.

  “Is he always an asshole, Sergeant Major?”

  “Who, sir?”

  “Who? I’m not a Basic trainee anymore, Sergeant Major. I may not be in your chain of command. These stars may not stay on my collar past this evening’s chow. But at this moment I command seven hundred GIs who’ve been through hell. For the next two years they’re gonna slack off and feel sorry for themselves. They’ll pick fights like six-year-olds with people on this ship who haven’t watched nine thousand friends die. But they’re my six-year-olds until somebody takes them away. I need to know what kind of ship Brace runs. I need candor from an NCO. From another combat infantryman.”