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  Ord looked back at me as we walked. His eyes had that twinkle again, like he was watching a baby’s first stumbles.

  “Admiral Brace was top-twenty at Annapolis, sir. That let him pick a Naval Aviation slot. He pulled temporary astronaut duty with old NASA, then back to wet-Navy carriers. Commanded the Tehran. He knows space and he knows how to manage big ships.” Ord stopped at a stateroom door and laid his hand on the latch. “Your quarters, sir.”

  “And you know how to dodge questions, Sergeant Major.”

  The corners of Ord’s mouth twitched up one millimeter, then he nodded. “He’s one solid-brass asshole, twenty-four/seven, sir.”

  I stepped into a private room with my own shower for the first time since I was a suburban teenager with a living biological parent. Before the war, a million years ago. I motioned Ord to follow.

  “Sit, Sergeant Major?” I was a general officer. He was a noncom. I didn’t need to make it a question. But Ord was Ord and I was a kid.

  Ord nodded, then sat, as though his back rested on bayonet points.

  My officer cabin’s wall had a built-in thermcab. Now, that was living wick! I pulled two coffee plastis, popped their therm tabs, then handed one, steaming and black, to Ord. No noncom turned down coffee. Few took it other than black.

  Ord may have relaxed one millimeter.

  “Sergeant Major, I’ve never met Brace before. What’s his problem with me?”

  Ord hooked his helmet over one armored knee. “Sir, technically, you outrank the admiral.”

  I sipped coffee, scalded my tongue, and nodded. “Even though I’m a kid who doesn’t have the education to swab an Annapolis toilet?”

  Ord swallowed coffee like it was a milkshake. “It’s beyond that, sir. You’ve led troops in combat. Few contemporary officers have. As a military man, the admiral respects that. But as a man who’s trained his whole life to do what you’ve done before you turned twenty-five, he’s jealous, too.”

  “Grown-ups deal with that.”

  “Yes, sir. But the emotion’s still there. The general needs to be aware of it. There’s also a fundamental personality difference between successful infantry officers and technical-branch officers.”

  “You’re telling me infantry doesn’t have assholes?”

  “Sir, there are many effective leadership styles. I’m saying you and the admiral have styles compatible with your missions and environment, but incompatible with each other.”

  I unsnapped my breastplate and let it slide to the deck, then shrugged out of my scuffed arm tubes and stretched.

  Ord nodded at them. “Infantry functions in a less structured environment.”

  “Mud and chaos?”

  Ord nodded. “Flexibility regarding uniform requirements and the like may strengthen an infantry commander’s performance. But naval and flight officers benefit from more rigid attitudes.”

  “They sleep under sheets. But if they miss a checklist item, a nuke goes off. They follow the book.”

  Ord cocked his head and shrugged.

  I pointed at his spotless armor. “You didn’t teach us to be slobs in Basic.”

  “I’m not referring to baseline habits, sir. Their maintenance forms the backbone of military discipline. I’m talking about adaptability when they can’t be maintained.”

  I nodded. “Okay. Thanks, Sergeant Major. Not just for the advice. For the baseline that got me back here.”

  Ord stood and slid his empty plasti into the disptube. “Sir, it’s me, it’s all of us, that should do the thanking. To you and the rest of GEF. You did good, sir.” He saluted and I returned it as he faced about. Which was just as well. It wouldn’t have done for him to see a general cry.

  I showered, as much as you can in point-six Gee, until my skin pruned, then lay down on my bunk and felt warm sheets against my skin for the first time in memory, closed my eyes, and let Excalibur’s engine vibration massage me to sleep.

  I had earned a sweet, boring six-hundred-day cruise home.

  I didn’t get it.

  Six

  A month after Excalibur boosted out of Jupiter’s orbit, Jude Metzger learned to roll over in point-six Gee. I cornered Ord again and learned things, too.

  Artificial dawn dimmed empty training-deck corridors and my ankle-weights’ slaps echoed as I jogged laps in point-six Gee. As awkward as those weights were, after months toting the burden of Eternad-armor battle-rattle, I felt as free as a falcon on an updraft. The red “Caution Firing” light alongside the Live-Fire Pistol Range glowed and I stopped, panting, hands on hips. It was Sunday, limited duty. Who would be firing pistols at oh-five-hundred, or even awake, except watch and crew?

  The Caution light flicked black, so I pulled up my T-shirt hem, toweled off forehead sweat, and twisted through the hatch.

  The range’s sole occupant stood at one firing line booth, his back to me, silhouetted in gunsmoke fog painted red by range lighting. Ord’s ear protectors were in place not, I supposed, because mere pistol fire could make him flinch but because protectors were regulation. Ord would sooner break his arm than regs.

  I touched his starched utility sleeve and he turned his head, his pistol, empty with the slide locked back, still pointed downrange.

  “Up early for Sunday, Sergeant Major.”

  He nodded at my sweaty shirt as he peeled off his ear protectors. “As is the general.”

  I looked at the pistol and cocked my head.

  “Project of mine, sir.”

  It was an ancient, blocky automatic, a .45-caliber M-1903. Blue steel, with walnut custom grips.

  “Been a while since that’s been regulation.” Not 150 years, though. A Service .45 was hell to aim, kicked like a mule, but it hit hard, so some specialized units had used it well into this century.

  Ord passed his hand over the booth remote and his target groups popped onscreen three feet in front of us. The center of each Slug silhouette was completely shot away, but ragged pinpricks also ringed the hit zone.

  Ord popped a round from the fresh magazine clipped to his shoulder holster and plopped it in my palm. Instead of the blunt, coppery bullet I expected, the cartridge’s business end was a lengthwise-striated cylinder, like a brass wheat shock. I raised my eyebrows.

  “Flechette round, sir.” Ord pointed at the round’s tip. “Ninety-five brass needles in a heat-intolerant matrix. The matrix vaporizes as the round travels down the barrel. At ten yards”—he traced the target’s vanished center with his index finger—“the pattern spreads to eight inches wide. Effective at close quarters against massed Pseudocephalopods.”

  I shrugged. “Or it would have been.” I fingered the pinprick sprinkle that surrounded the grouping. “Good thing it’s for shooting Slugs. One of these needles wouldn’t stop a man.”

  “Exactly, sir. In close-quarters battle, GIs in Eternad armor wouldn’t need to worry much about hitting one another, but Slug armor’s glorified cardboard. Besides, sir, the kinetic energy in one of those needles at a .45’s muzzle velocity is considerable. Small object, but high speed.”

  I trampolined the round in my palm. “Did we ever get flechette for the M-20?”

  Ord nodded, then flicked the slide lever and broke the .45 into cleanable pieces. “The round wasn’t ready when Hope embarked, but our division rifleman’s basic load is flechette every fourth magazine. Once the chemists perfected the matrix, even a cook like me could hand-load rounds for other weapons like this.”

  I sighed. Professional soldiers like Ord actually liked guns. I had the same off-duty interest in designer bullets as I had in needlepoint. How could Judge March and Ord and General Cobb think I was born to be a soldier? “Sergeant Major, what do we do now?”

  Ord stroked his baby with a bore brush. “I plan a bit more PT, a leisurely breakfast. An excellent holo remastery of Sergeant York begins at oh-nine-hundred on the recreation deck. And of course there’s duty paperwork—”

  I tossed my head at the ship all around us. “I mean all of us. Now that
the war’s over.”

  He cradled his .45 into its Neoplast travel box. “What soldiers always do, sir. Whatever our country needs.”

  “That’s my point. There’s no war. Who needs us? My troops feel it, too. Half of ’em have gained fifteen pounds, no matter how much PT we schedule. The other half have lost fifteen pounds.”

  Ord nodded. “The gainers are rewarding themselves for surviving. The losers are depressed, guilty that they survived when their buddies died. Some of the depressed ones will suffer long-term Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.” He eyed my T-shirt and arched an eyebrow. “The general has a foot in both camps.”

  I tugged my shirt hem down over my navel. “I’ve put on five.” I also lay awake for hours wondering why I had survived, and self-flagellated with extra PT to punish myself for it, which was probably why I had only gained five pounds. But as a commander I hadn’t discussed my angst with anyone. I frowned. Ord read minds. “So, what do I do with the guilty ones?”

  “Keep them busy. This long crossing is a blessing. Most of them will get over their disorientation before they butt up against reality.”

  “And those who don’t?”

  Ord blinked. Then he stared at my blooming love handles. “If the general cares for company, we can double-time to the gym together.”

  Perhaps because he read trainees’ minds, Ord always gave me credit for reading his. This time, as usual, it took me too long to catch his drift.

  Seven

  One troop I didn’t have to keep busy was Howard Hibble’s. Not when his Spooks had more dead, frozen Slugs to poke and slice than Texas had chili.

  We were ten months out from Jupiter. Jude Metzger had learned to stand, if he had something to lean on.

  Howard and I shivered in a classroom-sized compartment, while I leaned against its stainless-steel plating. It was designed as a trauma center for the battlefield casualties that Excalibur’s embarked division had been spared. So we peered over cheekbone-high red rubber masks that filtered formaldehyde stink, as much as filtered any Slug germs, and through the chill fog of our own breath in the bright-lit, operating-room chill. In each compartment corner, a dead Slug lay on a stainless-steel morgue slab. Lab-coated, surgical-masked Spooks hunched over each corpse.

  Howard led me to the closest one and spoke to a scalpel-wielding woman who bent over a Slug, slit open nose to tail, like a cleaned trout. Howard said, “What have you got this morning?”

  She wiped her hands on a towel, then handed him a Chipboard. I hoped she was wearing contact lenses because her pupils were neon orange. They matched her lip gloss. Soldiers didn’t call Howard’s Intelligence soldiers Spooks for nothing. He and his work lured people with unique skills to the military. The military, in turn, allowed him to manage them uniquely.

  Tangerine Woman said, “This one was immature. If we can apply that terminology to new sub-parts of a Pseudocephalopod organism that was probably older than dinosaurs. First time we’ve really identified one fresh from the incubator. Nitric acid traces on the epidermis.” She pointed at white glop on the Slug’s skin. A slit-open tube, like a purple flower stem, wound through the green jelly of the Slug’s innards.

  Howard pointed. “Gut contents?”

  “Ammonia. Nitrates.”

  He handed her back the Chipper. “Metabolic rate?”

  “Fast. It must have taken a battalion of cooks to feed a Slug army.”

  Conversations at the other tables yielded similarly fascinating factoids about our extraterrestrial former neighbors.

  Out in the companionway, Howard and I stripped off our synwool-lined lab coats and I rubbed cold from my fingers. “Anything interesting?”

  Howard’s eyes gleamed. “Well, the young one, as you would call it. That’s fascinating.”

  “Oh, yeah. Ammonia. My curiosity knew no bounds. So what?”

  “The Pseudocephalopod nurtured its new tissue in fertilizer.”

  “Slugs were plants?”

  “Slugs, as you call It, were alien. The Linnean hierarchy we use to categorize life on Earth may have no application elsewhere. Shoe-horning alien life-forms into our kingdoms and phyla is nonsense.”

  Not only nonsense but as useless for humanity’s future as invertebrate paleontology. “What about your Slug Football?” Slug hardware might actually teach us something we could use. We knew the Slugs had technology that stifled our nukes. That’s why we had to send infantry to Ganymede in the first place, instead of just smearing that rock with a few zillion megatons. Howard called what the Slugs did “neutron damping.” Whatever.

  Since the turn of the century, the spread of democracy had obsoleted terrorism. At least, the theory was that if citizens were free to finance minivans and Sony RoomHolos they would be too busy to blow up others. It had worked. But “one maniac with the wrong suitcase” still terrified any rational human. If The Football turned out to be a device we could replicate in every city, and neutralize nukes, now that would be worth The Brick.

  Howard’s lips curled like he’d sucked a lemon. “Hardware research jurisdiction is with Space Force. Brace had the crate stored. With the Pseudocephalopod gone, the artifact is beyond price.”

  I made my own sour face. “Howard, is it possible the Slugs aren’t gone?”

  “Oh, the Pseudocephalopod presence on Ganymede is eradicated, alright. Seven months of patrolling, satellite recon, and Tactical Observation Transport surveys are pretty conclusive.”

  “You know what I mean. This idea that in the whole galaxy there was just this one roving pack of slinking green worms and we exterminated them. That’s crap.”

  Howard shrugged. “Science reacts to observable data. One hundred fifty years ago, geophysicists said the continents could never have drifted apart because there was no observable energy source big enough to have moved them. Any schoolchild who looked at the jigsaw puzzle on a classroom globe could see that was balderdash. But we lack any data that the Pseudocephalopod still exists. Pseudocephalopod extinction is a soothing faith. Like heaven. The memories of this war are enough nightmare for the next ten generations. Worrying about repeating it could paralyze reconstruction.” Howard unwrapped a nicotine gum stick with shaking, yellowed fingers. Spouting a party line he didn’t believe made Howard long for a cigarette. But he couldn’t have one aboard a spaceship.

  He chewed, then sighed. “Besides, we don’t really have the tools aboard to examine The Football non-invasively. We’ll do it Brace’s way.”

  Aboard Excalibur, everybody did everything Brace’s way.

  Which brings me to Captain’s Breakfast and my role in yet another court-martial. I attract those like lint.

  Eight

  If there was one thing Atwater Nimitz Brace valued more highly than his own reflection, it was tradition. So he had instituted Captain’s Breakfast, a magnanimous social throwback. Brace invited all who signed up, even embarked enlisted infantry, to be his guests each Sunday morning for white-linen buffet brunch in the officers’ mess. The officers’ mess swabbie cooks were Brace’s hand-picks, and they got first crack at stores. So, much as it pains an infantryman to admit it, Brace’s Navy set the best table between Jupiter and the orbit of Mars.

  However, GIs prize sack time above rubies and they could sleep in Sundays. There was just one reason that my troops had crowded the sign-up sheets for Captain’s Breakfast at each of the fifty Sundays since we had left Jupiter.

  Since the truly old times, not just before the hydrofoil Navy but before diesel oil, sailors traditionally received a daily rum ration.

  The modern military had no truck with recreational drugs, injected, inhaled, or ingested. But booze is “different,” and a ship’s captain is a demigod. Brace was permitted “Captain’s Stores,” and he could dispense them as he pleased.

  At Captain’s Breakfast each diner hoisted two, no more, no less, thimblefuls of rum from the Captain’s Stores in toasts to John Paul Jones or the Navy Goat or whatever naval icon took Brace’s fancy that morning.

>   Trust the infantry to sniff out, within four hundred billion cubic miles of vacuum, the only open bar.

  On that Sunday, I took advantage of the table reserved for the embarked-division commanding officers, me and the Third Division CO. The truth was us seven hundred survivors were baggage. The ten thousand undamaged troops of Third Division were the embarked division, but Third’s CO played squash on Sunday mornings. The remaining two hundred gluttons crowding the officers’ mess included my soldiers, Third Division troops, swabbies, and Brace with his staff.

  And the lone civilian aboard, who stood less than three feet tall and drooled.

  Jude Metzger may have been a civilian but that Sunday he was decked out in cut-down Space Force dress blues the quartermaster had sewn for him. Jude’s little uniforms weren’t some cradle-robbing military brainwash. The Toddler Department at Tykes-’r-Us was still a hundred million miles away. We improvised with what we had aboard.

  With years of travel to fill, the quartermaster’s tailors weren’t Jude’s only adoptive parents. Cooks baked him zwieback when he was teething and pureed carrots when he wasn’t. Machinists mates fabricated little medal replicas for his uniforms. Munchkin stopped using those after Jude ate the Victoria Cross.

  I suppose GIs dote on kids from guilt because our job is to slaughter parents we’ve never met. Or we seek the childhood we lost.

  My division commander’s table sat four: Munchkin, Howard, Jude in a high chair improvised from ladder rails, and me.