Orphan's Journey Read online

  She stared down, too. “I wouldn’t know.”

  “You’ve been here five months.”

  “Then I guess it’s hard.”

  “It’s time. For both of us. We’ll go together. We’ve done harder things.”

  Munchkin looked up, her eyes glistening, and nodded.

  Few Earthlings ever actually see the Ganymede Memorial.

  But then, few Earthlings ever saw the ten thousand men and women who actually fought on and above Ganymede, either. We trained and embarked in secret. We were gone six years. The battle ended before most of Earth knew it began. Only seven hundred of us lived to come home aboard the relief ship.

  There were parades, but no loved ones welcomed or mourned us. The volunteers of the Ganymede Expeditionary Force were chosen from among orphans who had already lost their families to the Slugs.

  The Memorial abuts the hotel. Tours end at noon. But veterans can visit in silence, 24/7.

  It’s just a hollow marble cylinder, not much bigger than a dim-lit horse barn. That’s enough wall to carve 9,700 names. The clear window at the cylinder’s end looks down on the Firewitch, and on space.

  Our breathing echoed in the chamber.

  Munchkin’s lip quivered, then she stepped to the wall and touched the first name. “Abazan. Airman Second Class. I didn’t know many Zoomies.”

  We both knew two. I touched the letters. “Hart, Priscilla O., Cpt.; UNSF; Medal of Honor; Distinguished Flying Cross; both Posthumous.” Pooh Hart had been Munchkin’s Maid of Honor when Munchkin married Metzger. Munchkin never got to return the favor for Pooh and me.

  Munchkin turned away, her head shaking, and sobbed. “I can’t.” I touched Metzger’s name for her.

  She buried her face in my chest and we cried together. I don’t know how long.

  I dried her tears with my lapel. “Come back to my cabin. There’s an old friend there who’ll cheer you up.”

  My cabin befit a General, meaning I had a room with stall shower, fold-down bunk, and desk. And a robot cockroach, hanging from the ceiling.

  I opened the hatch and whispered, “Company, Jeeb.”

  Jeeb wasn’t part of the furniture. I held his title chip. He was an obsolete Tactical Observation Transport, bought at DOD auction.

  Jeeb had once been brain-linked to a name on the Memorial Wall. Ari Klein; SP6; UNSF; Medal of Honor; Posthumous. Ari had been a TOT wrangler. More important, he had been my friend.

  I bought Jeeb for scrap. If a Wrangler dies, or his linked TOT gets fried, it’s prohibitively expensive to rehabilitate the other. Really, I had adopted an orphan.

  “Jeeb!” Munchkin squealed.

  Jeeb flew into her arms like a thrown football. If footballs had six legs. J-series TOTs still had eye-shaped optics, and radar-absorbent fuzz for skin. Compared to puppies, TOTs creep people out, because they look like roaches as big as turkeys. But compared to cold modern Tacticals, Jeeb was an anthropomorphic teddy bear.

  Jeeb folded his wings, then backflopped on my bunk, six legs flailing. Munchkin scratched his belly, and his diagnostics hummed.

  That’s just the way it looked. It’s true that even an old TOT like Jeeb has more cognitive power than an Enhanced Australian Cattle Dog’s brain. But ’Bots were animate machines, nothing more.

  The stuff about TOTs acquiring personalities from their wranglers was nonsense. Or so Jeeb’s technical manuals claimed.

  Munchkin drew her finger across a scratch that diagonaled across the radar-absorbent fuzz that coated Jeeb’s back, and frowned. “He’s older.”

  I rocked back. If Jeeb was old, I was old. “He’s old, but he’s combat-fit. If you want to map a battlefield, eavesdrop a thousand conversations at once, or learn Mandarin overnight, Jeeb’s still a TOT ready to trot.”

  Jeeb rolled his whining carcass over, mooching a back-scratch from Munchkin. It just looked that way. The J-Series was programmed to preen its radar-absorbent skin against any non-abrasive object.

  She stroked the scratch and smoothed it away. Jeeb purred.

  Munchkin said, “I should have just taken a Mandarin lesson last night.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Last night? Do tell.” Munchkin got lucky rarely. Me even more rarely. Unfortunately, I was the only one of us two who was trying.

  “Not that. I had a bad dream. About tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow’s cake.”

  She shook her head. “Maybe. But after this, they can take my pension. Jude’s not coming back up here.”

  “But Howard—”

  “Howard’s a devious idiot.”

  “Howard’s not really dishonest. He’s a smart kid who’s covered up to fit in since kindergarten.”

  Munchkin raised her eyebrows. “Since when did you start having motivational insights?”

  Including forcing my surrogate sister to face the reality that her husband was dead.

  I cocked my head. Since, I guessed, Ord and Nat Cobb sent me up here for a cram course in family.

  I chucked her chin. “I’ll be there tomorrow, too. I’m not an idiot.”

  “You have your moments.”

  Unlike me, Munchkin already had insight. It’s in female DNA. But, though I might have my idiot moments, history can’t blame what happened next on me.

  Ten

  Howard scheduled the live test for dawn. In geosynchronous orbit, the sun still rises just once each day.

  The only reason for Ord and me to remain on New Moon was Jude. After this morning, Jude would be gone. Surely, General Cobb could bury MAT(D)4 somewhere else harmless. If not, and I had to face the music over the lost GATr, so be it. I had Ord book us on the Down Clipper.

  I slept late, then overspent per diem on a hotel breakfast.

  By the time I reached the Firewitch’s big bay, Ord already had a ’Bot gaggle poised to haul our gear to Clipper check-in. Jeeb, who never slept, perched on a crate.

  “All accounted for, Sergeant Major?”

  He saluted. “To the last MUD, Sir.”

  I sighed. “A deployment without Meals Utility, Dessicated is a day without sunshine.”

  Ord stared toward the control room’s bustle. His gray eyes unfroze. “Soft deployment, true. But I rather enjoyed being part of it, Sir.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Who’s soft now, Sergeant Major?”

  Ord shrugged. “When I was a boy . . .”

  My eyebrows ticked up further. I had assumed Ord sprang from the womb in pressed fatigues, forty years old.

  He continued, “We had discovered that the rest of the Solar System was cold rocks. Not worth a human trip. After Ganymede, I never thought I’d live to see mankind reach for the stars.”

  It’s not that people ignore historic moments. It’s that they don’t know they’re in them. I said, “Shut down the ’Bots, Sergeant Major. Starting a starship’s engine’s a pretty short reach. But let’s go watch.”

  Ord actually smiled at me.

  When we got to the control chamber portal, the petite MP Corporal who had checked me and Munchkin in on my first day was working security. Even after six weeks of carding me daily, she rotated my ID in spotless, white-gloved hands. Maybe I fit the Chinese-Agent profile. Then she handed my ID back stone-faced, with a perfect salute.

  Ord’s kind of gal.

  Over the past six weeks, she must have carded Ord as often as she had me. But when he stepped up, her eyes lit, and I noticed they were blue.

  She whispered to Ord behind her glove, “They accepted my App!”

  Ord grinned at her, then shook her hand. “Outstanding! You’ll love it.”

  She still carded him.

  As we stepped through the portal, I asked Ord, “What was that about?”

  “I recommended the Corporal for Drill Sergeant’s School, Sir.”

  “Funny. She seemed so normal.”

  Ord smiled at my joke. Two smiles in ten minutes broke his record. Maybe this tour really had grown me up.

  I patted my breakfasted-but-solid-again belly
.

  Nothing could spoil a day that started this well.

  Eleven

  Inside the control chamber, every admin-bubble row glowed like strung pearls. Supervisors hovered behind each row, their eyes for once on Howard. Two hundred voices rumbled like an idling MagLev.

  The vents were cranked to teeth-chatter cold. As the day wore on, two hundred tense bodies would make the chamber steam.

  Howard stood in a hydraulically elevated basket that was raised up even with the empty control couch, like he was an orchestra conductor. Somebody had even pressed his uniform.

  Ord and I stepped alongside Munchkin, who stood hugging herself against the chill. I poked her, then whispered, “Where’s Jude?”

  Howard pointed to a side hatch. He said nothing, though he wore a lapel mike. Two Zoomies opened the hatch.

  Suddenly, the only sound was vent whisper, and Howard’s breathing, magnified through his mike.

  The figure who entered wore pilot coveralls, with “Metzger” stitched above his heart. Strawberry-blond, arrow-straight, with a fighter jock’s swagger.

  My jaw dropped.

  Ord said, “The resemblance is—”

  Munchkin sobbed.

  I swallowed, so I didn’t.

  Jude stopped at the base of the stairs that led to the Pilot Couch, then lifted his arms while techs wired him.

  Howard nodded. Jude climbed, and as he corkscrewed around the pedestal, he faced us.

  He winked. Not arrogant, just supremely confident, like his father had been.

  Twenty minutes later, Jude was hidden from us, down in the pedestal. The techs scurried off the platform and into the shadows.

  Ord asked, “Now what?”

  Munchkin whispered, like a mother watching her son at a high-school gym foul line, “They clamp Jude into the couch, so the Firewitch senses an organic presence. Jude performs an operating sequence. If the Firewitch senses a pilot with reflexes that won’t crash it, its systems activate. The Spooks record everything. Then Jude climbs out, the ship shuts down, and we get to go home.”

  Munchkin’s scenario was boring enough.

  I put a hand over my mouth to cover a yawn. Nobody said it, but the other possibility was a bigger snore. If Jude was too slow, absolutely nothing would happen. Jude would just be one more princess the pea couldn’t feel.

  And Howard would think up Plan B.

  Meanwhile, Howard pointed at a bubble bank.

  The toadstool’s top whined and vibrated. Silver clamp wings enfolded Jude.

  Two hundred people held their breath.

  Thirty seconds passed. People started to exhale.

  Nothing happened.

  Thirty seconds more without result, and technicians started muttering.

  “Son of a bitch!” I whispered. The Army put up with Howard Hibble because his hunches about the Slugs were always right.

  But this time Howard had been—

  The chamber went black.

  Twelve

  Then the ventilators thunked, and stopped.

  Munchkin lurched forward in the dark. “Jude?”

  I grabbed her arm. “Don’t just go—”

  The lights flickered back on. The ventilators whumped to life.

  Then the walls glowed purple, then red.

  Techs in the bubbles craned their necks.

  Beneath my boots, the floor trembled.

  Munchkin gripped my arm.

  The toadstool had twisted and thrust itself toward the Firewitch’s bow. The platform that held Jude had thrust Howard’s cherry picker aside, and Howard had turned and faced the chamber wall that was the Firewitch’s bow.

  The whole forward hemisphere of chamber wall disappeared.

  Beyond us, five hundred yards dead ahead, the Airpool dome hung like a lollipop on a stick. Beyond the dome lay black space. And beyond that, stars.

  “Holy moly!” Howard’s amplified whisper boomed in the chamber. “Were the ’corders back up? Did we get that?”

  I realized that I was clinging like death to a stanchion. I waited for tornadic decompression to suck us all into space through the hole that now gaped in the Firewitch’s bow.

  But nothing tugged at me except Munchkin’s fingers.

  Jude had brought the Firewitch’s alien machinery to vibrating life. The forward wall was intact. It had just turned transparent to visible light.

  All around us, along the opaque sections of the ship’s skin, blue light veins spread and pulsed. Animated light spangled the control chamber, floor to roof, as though the place was an ancient disco club.

  Someone cheered.

  Then applause spattered the chamber, first a drizzle, then a deluge.

  His face spangled reflected blue, arms upraised, Howard jumped up and down in the cherry picker, so hard it shook.

  I said, “Wow.”

  Ord whispered, “Wow.”

  Munchkin said, “My son did this!”

  Ten minutes later, things settled down.

  Howard faced a different bubble row, and his voice boomed again. “Commence shutdown.”

  In the opposite bubble row, techs whose jobs were done for now stretched, shook hands, and back-slapped.

  I would have liked to high-five Howard, but he would be playing band leader all day. So would Jude. I would see my godson dirtside soon enough. And I could holo Howard anytime.

  I eyed my ’Puter. “Guess that’s a wrap, Sergeant Major. Let’s wake those Cargo’Bots.” I took Munchkin’s arm and turned her toward the exit, while the ship’s blue veins pulsed. “Come see us off, Munchkin.”

  Munchkin, Ord, and I stood ten yards behind the nearest tech row.

  I heard the row Supervisor say, “Reboot and retry.” Pause. “Well, do it again.”

  I glanced around, toward the control stalk. Silhouetted against newly visible space, dappled in the wall veins’ pulsing blue light, the cherry picker’s arm had moved alongside the stalk. Howard’s basket at the arm’s end quivered, empty.

  From below, all I could see of what was going on atop the toadstool was a waggling shock of mussed, gray Hibble hair.

  “Jason?” Munchkin turned back toward me, then sucked in a breath.

  Crap. She saw it too.

  I made it to the stairs at the toadstool’s base in five strides.

  Munchkin ran a step behind me, sputtering Arabic. I caught the word “Howard.” From her tone, I think the rest would have embarrassed an angry camel herder.

  I clambered onto the platform alongside the pilot couch. Opposite me, Howard bent over Jude’s reclined body.

  Munchkin elbowed past me. When she saw Howard and Jude, she dove on her son. “Jude!”

  Howard said, “It’s all right. He isn’t—”

  Munchkin ran her hands over my godson. “Oh God! Oh God!”

  “Mom! Take a breath, huh?”

  Munchkin straightened, her hands shaking. “You’re all right?”

  “Fine.”

  As a machine gunner, Munchkin was the coolest soldier I knew. As a mother—well, I’d never accuse her of underreacting.

  “Mom, I’m just stuck.”

  The Spook-engineered couch clamps fit Jude’s form like cosmic modeling clay. He shrugged as much as he could. “It’s no big deal. Like being buried in the sand at the beach.”

  So far. I frowned at Howard. “He can’t lie there forever. How long before you can unbury him?”

  “We’re working on it.”

  I pointed at the pulsating and still-transparent walls. “But until you spring Jude, the motor keeps idling?”

  Three Zoomies in orange-and-yellow firefighter Eternads dragged a toolbox onto the platform. Two were Airman Seconds, and the third was a Tech Sergeant.

  One of the Seconds—I am not making this up—took out a bar of soap and started rubbing it along the junction between Jude’s shoulder and the couch clamp. He looked down at Jude and said, “See if that loosens you up.”

  My godson had become an orbiting cat stuck in a tree,
firemen and all. I rolled my eyes at Howard. “I bet this never happened to NASA.”

  He made a face and waved his hand. “Improvisation is the soul of—”

  A rumble echoed through the chamber. The toadstool shook so hard that Munchkin stumbled against the guy rubbing soap on Jude.

  The rumble’s pitch rose, and became the squeal of bending metal.

  A Supervisor on the Chamber floor screamed up through cupped hands. “We have displacement!”

  I bugged my eyes at Howard. “Displacement? This thing’s moving?”

  Howard shook his head at me, his brows knit. “It can’t move. It’s tethered to the station.”

  Howard thought the Firewitch couldn’t move, but it was sure trying. A row of admin bubbles slid across the chamber floor, caught an edge, and cartwheeled like a crashed snowboard. Somebody screamed.

  Cables snapped, sparks fountained. Consoles toppled. In moments, smoke blanketed the chamber floor, and the smell of charred insulation filled the bottled air.

  Behind Howard, through haze, and through the transparent wall, the hotel ring inched into view as the Firewitch’s nose swung.

  I pointed over Howard’s shoulder. “Can’t move?”

  Howard turned. “Holy moly!” He frowned, then scuttled around the platform until he stood beside me. “Jason, this may be bad.”

  Munchkin grabbed Howard’s lapels and shook him until his glasses popped off his nose. “May be? May be?”

  I pushed her away from him. “Worst case, Howard. Quick.”

  Footsteps thundered on the deckplates as techs ran screaming toward the Exit Tube. Someone tripped. Squirming bodies piled one upon another.

  Howard pushed his glasses back onto his nose, then stared down at the melee. “Worst case? The Firewitch will pull at this mass until New Moon’s orbit destabilizes. Finally, the umbilical tether’ll fatigue and separate. The Firewitch will break free. But New Moon has no maneuvering capability to restabilize itself. Its orbit will decay. Finally, it will enter the atmosphere, and burn up.”

  “How long?”

  He shrugged. “Depends. How far and in what direction will New Moon be displaced? It could take days, or weeks. But New Moon could incinerate within hours from now.”

  I shook my head. “You can’t risk five thousand people. Tell management to abandon ship.”