Orphan's Journey Read online

  He pointed at panels that curved across the sphere. “Open a shutter, and unshielded Cavorite weakens gravity in that direction. The mass of the universe pulls the ship in the other direction. Simple. Elegant. This chamber’s size keeps the poison at arm’s length.”

  “Slugs don’t have arms,” I said as Howard led us back into the main chamber.

  Howard said, “People do. Which brings us back to your stubborn godson.”

  “Manipulating people isn’t a GI’s job.”

  Munchkin said, “Leading people is a General’s job.”

  “I’m not that kind of General. And when did you jump on the government bandwagon?”

  “When I realized we can’t leave until Jude makes Howard’s stupid chair light up.” Munchkin pointed at the big toadstool.

  Behind us, a mechanical whine rose and echoed in the Firewitch’s vastness.

  I turned and saw Ord, pointing this way, then that. Behind him lurched a Cargo’Bot caravan, like spidery Sherpa porters.

  Howard said, “Your baggage is here.”

  Munchkin turned her chin up like a snippy little sister, and pointed at Ord. “Why don’t you ask your Command Sergeant Major what kind of General you are?”

  I pointed at her. “I will!”

  I did. I wished I hadn’t.

  Seven

  I walked toward Ord. Within twenty yards, my long-unused thigh muscles burned, even at Orbital Weight. By the time I reached him, he had decrypted the anti-tamper on a Plasteel crate, and two ’Bots were lifting out a V-Range’s holo generator.

  This assignment had as much to do with military advising as frogs had to do with fireworks. But General Cobb, bless him, had issued orders to Ord and me together as the Fourth Military Advisory Team (Detached). I hadn’t signed any gear in or out, so the lost GATr remained officially unlost. And I remained officially unbankrupt. But the taxpayers had shipped four tons of useless equipment to space like tycoon luggage.

  Ord saluted. “This is the only Pressurized Volume on New Moon large enough to deploy the Small-Arms Firing Simulator. Colonel Hibble suggested the location, Sir.”

  The sole resemblance between a Sergeant and anybody’s mommy is both can do six things at once. In the time it had taken Munchkin to walk me from the hotel through Howard’s tour, Ord had recovered our equipment from the Clipper, consulted the Spook Ring’s Commanding Officer on where to set it up, hired ’Bots, moved the gear, changed from civvies into pressed Utilities, and polished his old-style boots so they shone like glass.

  Ord held out a Chipboard and pointed to icons on the screen. “You thumb here, here, and here, Sir.” Ord had also completed our disembarkation forms, billeting vouchers, detached-duty per diem authorizations, and enough other documents to sink the Bismarck .

  I thumbed where he told me to.

  The Small-Arms Firing Simulator flickered as the ’Bots calibrated it. Once the SAFS was calibrated, Ord and I would be equipped to teach any lay civilians with IQs higher than bacteria to aim and fire any infantry weapon sold aftermarket anywhere on Earth at any time in the last century.

  But why uncrate the SAFS? I smiled inside and nodded to myself. Sane soldiers slept, overate, or chipped home during free moments. Ord low-crawled around the firing range, testing antique firearms he restored on his own nickel. This he misnamed fun.

  Sacrificing a few inconsequential hours of the SAFS’ useful life to satisfy Ord’s soldierly perversions didn’t bother me. I would commend any other soldier who was that devoted. But opportunities to rib Ord for anything, no matter how minor, had been few since the first day he roasted me in Basic.

  I looked away so he couldn’t see me smile. “We offering the tourists target practice, Sergeant Major?”

  “You missed your Annual Live-Fire Small-Arms Qualification while you were hospitalized, Sir. The qualifying standard allows Virtual-Range makeup exams. But your deadline is midnight, tonight. I don’t think your taking the test will detract from this . . . important mission.”

  “Oh.” Well, someday I would catch Ord in a screw-up. But Ord’s last remark puzzled me. It was as close as I’d ever heard him come to bitching about lawful orders.

  “Wondering how you and me playing tourist defends the United States, Sergeant Major?”

  He shrugged. “General Cobb always has his reasons, Sir.”

  “Sure. I think it sucks, too. Colonel Hibble just told me what it’s really about. The Army shanghaied Commodore Metzger’s sixteen-year-old son up here.” I looked up eighty feet, to the Slug-metal ceiling. “The Spooks think Jude’s the only human who can switch this monstrosity on.”

  Ord raised gray eyebrows. “Interstellar travel’s quite a prize. If the young man’s a chip off the Metzger block . . . ”

  “At the moment the chip’s acting like a teenage dick on the first day of Basic. His godfather’s supposed to talk him out of his attitude.”

  Ord knelt beside another Plasteel crate, thumbed off its anti-tamper, and lifted out an assault rifle, while he narrowed his eyes and nodded. “I did agree with General Cobb that this assignment could give you time to mature.”

  I snorted. The Pentagon made Byzantium look transparent. Not only had Cobb and Hibble cooked this up behind my back, Ord was an unindicted co-conspirator. “So you think I’m a lousy officer, too?”

  Ord concentrated on the rifle. It was a decrepit Kalashnikov AK-47, but so taffy-appled in Cosmoline preservative that I barely recognized it. “Sir, war means people die until somebody wins. Once our country puts us in it, the way home is win it. A Commander too focused on saving his troops, and not on the mission, doesn’t win. In the end, defeat kills more soldiers than compassion saves.”

  “I’m too soft?”

  “You’re human. And young.”

  “And twisting my godson’s arm will age me?”

  Ord held out the gooey AK-47 in one hand, a Laser Simulation Adapter and cleaning kit in the other. “First things first, Sir.”

  “You expect me to qualify with that?” I stared. The year before we left for Tibet, I made my Annual Qual on a range in the Pentagon subbasement. An Orderly helped me into goggles and earmuffs, then handed me a zeroed, white-glove-clean M-40. I rattled off a few rounds. I handed back the rifle, the Orderly handed back my coffee and my upchecked Qual form. I sat back down in my General’s swivel chair twenty minutes after I left it.

  Ord smiled. The last time he smiled at me like that, I had ended up scrubbing a Basic-barracks latrine with a manual toothbrush. “Sometimes we learn our best lessons the simplest ways, General.”

  We were a two-soldier unit, so Ord was my judge and jury for field-administered testing, just as I was his. If he downchecked me on Small Arms, I’d be stuck with six weeks’ reorientation. Even though I wore stars, and he wore chevrons.

  I sighed, then grasped the tar baby and started cleaning.

  Insurgents still choose the century-old Avtomat Kalashnikova Model 1947. It’s inaccurate, even with 2050s optics, but cheaper than rocks, unjammable even if it’s dragged through yak dung, and it makes human meat just as well as an M-40. However, an AK is wood and steel, and weighs more than two modern rifles.

  Ord made me low-crawl between stations, like a rookie. I still fired expert, even dragging that old blunderbuss.

  I lay on the deck wheezing while Ord eyed the score screen. “A couple more runs should do it, Sir.”

  “What? I hit seventy-six of eighty!”

  “I’ve seen the General fire seventy-eight.”

  Two hours of crawling over Slug metal later, my knees and elbows throbbed and looked like pizza. But I fired seventy-nine.

  Ord rewarded me by downloading the Rehab PT schedule that Bethesda had ’mailed up. I slapped the Reader. “This isn’t Rehab. It’s sadism!”

  Ord relocked a tamperproof, eyeing my noodle-soft forearms. “As you say, Sir. Would the General care to join me for his prescribed morning run?”

  No was not an option. “Okay.” I rolled sideways, so I coul
d stand without using my knees, then slouched toward the exit tube. “I’m gonna shower, Sergeant Major.”

  Then I was going to visit the only person aboard these hamster wheels who felt sorrier for himself than I did.

  Eight

  I found that person somersaulting around the Airpool.

  Once they’ve gawked the Earthviews, the only thing people can really do in space that they can’t do dirtside is fly.

  New Moon tacks people to its decks with rotational gravity, so tourists can’t even enjoy flying in the 90 percent of Pressurized Volume that makes up the outer rings.

  New Moon’s specs describe the Airpool as pure utility, the auxiliary atmosphere reservoir. But those swooping, smiling models in the holo ads sure sell vacations.

  Suspended from a hollow transfer tube that runs inboard from the hotel ring to the centerline, the Airpool dome is wider and taller than a dirtside hockey rink.

  And more fun. On New Moon’s dead-centerline, everything weighs zero. Even at the Airpool’s rotating edge, a person weighs ten pounds. Give average goofs arm and leg paddles, helmets, and lessons, and they soar through the Airpool like eagles. Well, turkeys, at least.

  I buckled my rental helmet while trophy wives jiggled overhead. In designer synlon that couldn’t have increased their weight one ounce. No wonder a sixteen-year-old male spent hours here.

  Above the rental counter, a hundred helmeted novices flailed. Above them coasted two dozen experienced flyers, barely twitching custom-painted paddles.

  Above them all, Jude soared and barrel rolled from one perch to the next. His father’s athleticism showed in every flip and rebound.

  He looked down, spotted me, and waved me up.

  I shook my head and shouted, “Doctor’s orders.” It was only half a lie. The last thing I wanted to do was jump a hundred feet up and crack an aching knee or elbow against some tourist’s paddle. Heights scared me even when I didn’t feel fragile.

  “Wuss!” He grinned, then folded back arm paddles air-brushed with skull-and-crossbones. Then he plunged two hundred feet like a swooping Peregrine falcon. He flared his paddles at the last nanosecond and shot through a semi-private lesson group. Jude didn’t even mess anybody’s hair, but a woman screamed. Then my godson touched down beside me.

  The group instructor glared at Jude and held up his index finger. “One more! One more and you’re gone, Metzger!”

  Jude flicked a different finger at the instructor. “Pugger.” Then he turned to me and grinned. “You should have seen the losers I scared yesterday. That bozo sounds like Mom. ‘Jude! Language, please! Jude! Language, please!’”

  “Your mother said you clipped somebody last month.”

  “Utter pugger. He was in the wrong layer.”

  In fact, my godson’s recklessness had broken an old man’s arm. So far, Jude hadn’t been banished to dirtside Juvie only through repeated interventions by Howard’s JAG officer. I began to share Munchkin’s parental pangs.

  We bumped knuckles. I hadn’t seen Jude in three years, but sixteen-year-old thug-wannabes don’t hug.

  I said, “I brought us real bacon.” I hadn’t known when I overpaid at duty-free, but the hotel sizzled up Genu-Swine on its breakfast buffet as lavishly as Fakon. Years ago, frying overloaded ship ventilation, so bacon was a delicacy, off-planet. Now, just pay Climate Offsets, certify you’ve added null-gravity diet supplements, then fry up a storm. What was space coming to?

  “Mom’ll love that.” Munchkin hadn’t practiced Islam since the Slug War. What kind of God lets big snails slaughter sixty million people? But childhood habits die hard.

  I pointed at Jude’s helmet decal. It showed a clinically detailed Het couple doing rudies, with paddles on. “Does she love the hat?”

  He tugged off his helmet, and grinned. “She says it’s disgusting.”

  At Jude’s age, his father and I actually would have loved the hat, but I wasn’t about to tell my godson that.

  Under his helmet, Jude sprouted his father’s strawberry- blond hair, too. But Jude’s hair had overgrown into a last-century afro, with peach-fuzz muttonchops. And he had dyed it green, like his face.

  Before I joined the Army, when I was Jude’s age, I shaved my head and lasered skulls onto my fingernails. But that was beside the point. “You look like broccoli.”

  “I look bump. Check the ’zines.”

  I sighed. “Why do sixteen-year-olds mimic every sixteen-year-old within a thousand miles—and call it individuality?”

  Jude swung his hand at the middle-aged vacationers crowding the exit lobby. “Jason, look around. I’m the only pugging sixteen-year-old within twenty-three thousand miles.”

  I slid my paddles back to the rental attendant, while Jude lockered his. “Fair enough. That sucks. You want back dirtside? Do what Howard says.”

  “Hibble? Give me one reason I should listen to a bag-face nicotine addict. He’s never even heard of Raging Phlegm.”

  It seemed to me that last was a great reason. But I said, “Colonel Hibble served with your father.”

  Jude snorted. “Bag-face? He’s a Spook. My father was a pilot.”

  “If Howard hadn’t fought Slugs on the ground until he broke his rifle stock over one, your father couldn’t have saved the world.”

  Jude snorted harder. “Tug me, Jason.”

  “I was there.”

  We waited in the emptied lobby for the next Cap, in silence. The Moon gleamed through the Panoramic, silver against spangled black.

  I hadn’t lied. In fact, I had so told the truth that I had to blink back tears. Howard was no more hero than I was. But when it comes down to it, GIs don’t fight to save the world. They fight for each other.

  As Jude stared out at space, he twisted his finger ring. Munchkin had it made from Metzger’s Distinguished Flying Cross, Posthumous. Jude cleared his throat. “Mom says he loved flying. Not this Airpool stuff. Real flying.”

  I nodded. “Since he could walk. It wouldn’t kill you to try it.”

  Jude blinked at the Moon.

  Then he grinned, and punched my arm. “If it does, Mom will so whack you.”

  Nine

  Two days later, in the Spook Ring’s amphitheater, twenty feet below Howard, Munchkin, and me, Jude lay in a Firewitch control chamber mock-up, complete with toadstool, hardwired cables, and bubbles filled with staring, chattering technicians.

  Howard leaned, elbows on the railing that ringed the test bay, sucking a lollipop in lieu of a cigarette. “It took life three billion years to leave Earth. Less than a century later, here we stand on the threshold of the first step toward leaving the Solar System.”

  Munchkin frowned. “It’s still too long. Jude’s already missed soccer season. SATs are next month.”

  Howard said, “Tomorrow we go live. He lies down in the real couch. The Firewitch powers up. We take readings. Then we shut down. You and Jude will be on the afternoon Clipper.”

  “And then?”

  “We’ll analyze the data. We’ll replace the rigid tube that you’ve been coming and going through with an umbilical that can be disconnected from New Moon, so the Firewitch can move. All that will take two years. Then, and only then, if we still need him, Jude will come back up here. At that time, we think we might actually get the Firewitch to move a couple of feet. Baby steps.”

  Munchkin was spooled too tight. I poked her. “Come on! It’s just rocket science.”

  Howard said, “Actually, rockets have nothing to do with it. Reaction propulsion is too slow to fly us to the stars.”

  I waved my hand. “You already told me. We need anti-matter drive.”

  “No. Anti-matter drive’s just another reaction propulsion system. Slap anti-matter against matter. Squirt the explosion out the ship’s back end.”

  “You said Cavorite was anti-matter.”

  “No. I said Cavorite wasn’t even matter. Not as we conceive of matter as occupying the four dimensions of space and time that define this universe.”
r />   “Oh.” I leaned back against the rail and crossed my arms and ankles. Ord’s PT had rejuvenated me enough to risk a round of Hibble baiting. “Then what is Cavorite?”

  “A piece that broke off of what’s beyond the end of the universe. Obviously.”

  “Why obviously?”

  “Because it consumes whatever it contacts in this universe. Especially gravity.”

  “Howard, there can’t be something beyond the end of the universe.”

  “No. There can’t be nothing.”

  Munchkin rolled her eyes.

  Below us, the hourly break chime echoed. Techs stood and stretched.

  Enlisted Zoomies lifted away the control yoke that sandwiched Jude against the mock-up. He sat up, shook his head at me, then wiped sweat off his forehead.

  Howard said, “Jason, he’s a changed kid.”

  Jude and I had finally cruised the Airpool a couple of times. It scared the crap out of me, but it was good PT, and it helped with my fear of heights. I helped him with homework, at least the non-math stuff, and we went to a holo together. Unbidden, Jude cut his hair pilot-short and washed out the green dye. He spoke when spoken to with minimal profanity, and hadn’t heard, “Jude, language please!” from his mother in days.

  More important, he regularly showed up for his “job,” which consisted of being taped with electrodes, then poked and prodded by Spooks.

  I said, “He’s the same kid. He wants to go home. There are girls his age down there. You remember girls, Howard?”

  “Still, I credit your influence.”

  “I want to go home, too.”

  The break chime sounded again, and Howard’s minions strapped Jude back in. Today’s cycle had four hours to run.

  Munchkin stepped away from the rail, arms folded. “So, tomorrow we leave. What are you doing tonight?”

  I smiled, then I scuffed the deck. “I thought I’d visit the Memorial. I dunno. Is it too hard to take?”