Orphan's Triumph Page 8

  A middle-aged woman in a business suit clicked by in heels, toward the entrance. Her makeup was the color of new chalk, and her hair spiked like a turn-of-the-century goth. As she passed me, she tossed two coins into my hat.

  I sighed and stared down at my vintage civvies. They looked fine to me.

  I stepped into the terminal’s cool and was ten feet from the first of a dozen Hertz kiosks when the holotendant popped on and smiled. “Welcome, new Hertz customer! Please-”

  “I’ve had an account for years.”

  The holotendant turned a palm toward the thumbreader. “-Identify yourself.”

  I pressed my sweaty thumb against the reader’s platen.

  The holotendant’s smile replicated. “Welcome, new Hertz customer.”

  “Yeah. I guess it’s been a while.” I commanded, “Create new account.”

  Pause. She flickered as she smiled. “Your identity does not appear in the TWD. You must be in the TWD to create an account.”

  I rolled my eyes. “What’s the TWD?”

  The holo flickered into a professor wearing a Hertz-yellow mortarboard. “To register for the Tracking Waiver Database, please contact your local law-enforcement agency. Thank you for visiting Hertz.”

  Professor Mortarboard vanished, and the kiosk darkened. I stepped back four paces, then forward. The kiosk flashed alive again and ran me through the same routine. I said, “I have to be in Pennsylvania by dinnertime. Look, I’m a lieutenant general-”

  The kiosk winked dark again.

  Behind the middle of the kiosk row was one single kiosk. The attendant seated there was either live or a theater-quality holo.

  I walked to her, hat in hand, dropped my cloth duffel off my shoulder. Sweat dripped off the tip of my nose, and I panted. “Can you help me get to Pennsylvania?”

  She was probably nineteen, as chalky and spiky as the businesswoman had been, and her eyes were downcast at a flatscreen from which canned laughter rippled. She looked me up and down, her eyes narrowed, and she pointed at the public-announcements flatscreen above baggage claim.

  A message scrolled across the screen: “To assure a pleasant experience for Reagan InterUnion’s travelers, solicitation is prohibited on the terminal grounds.”

  I tugged my torn jacket sleeve back up to my shoulder. “I’m not panhandling. I just haven’t rented a car in a long time.”

  She eyed my dusty shoes. “Apparently.” But she flipped up a keyboard and poised her fingers above it. “Home address?”

  “I don’t have one. At the moment. On Earth.”

  “Somehow, I’m not surprised.” She flipped the keyboard back down and whispered into the bud mike on her lapel.

  Forty seconds later, a cop stepped alongside us. He cocked his head and read the name and rank stenciled on the duffel at my feet.

  He turned to the girl as he pointed at me. “This is your vagrant?”

  She shrugged, rolled her eyes, and waved her sitcom back up on her flatscreen.

  The cop said to me, “How can I help you, General?”

  “I need to rent a car. Personal business. But I’m not in this TWD thing, apparently.”

  He nodded. “For a citizen to drive on a guideway, he has to waive his Thirty-eighth Amendment right of freedom from satellite tracking.”

  I snorted. “What idiot would waive that right?” Even tracking off-duty soldiers’ dog-tag chips had been curtailed years ago.

  He shrugged. “Every idiot who wants autodrive commuting. Which is all of us. Anyway, no waiver, no rental. And it takes a day to register in the database, sir.”

  I sighed. If you sell poison cheap enough, democracy will find suicide an irresistible bargain. “I have to be in Pennsylvania tonight.”

  The Hertz girl looked up. “I’m allowed to rent you a manual drive with no tracker. But you can only drive back roads. And the mobile recharge coverage costs extra, because nobody knows where you are.”

  I smiled. “Actually, I’d prefer that.” But looking old and shabby didn’t make me an easy mark. “And I’ll decline the extra coverage.”

  Her jaw dropped. “Nobody declines the mobile recharge coverage.”

  “I do.”

  She pointed at my wrist ’Puter. “If that’s not registered, I’m required to offer to rent you a temporary, so you can access the net.”

  “And the temporary has a tracker?” I shook my head. “Just the car, thanks.”

  She shrugged, then sighed, and a contract form appeared on her flatscreen. “Thumb here, here, and here.”

  Four hours later, I sat behind the wheel of my rental car as it rolled to a silent stop on a dirt road somewhere in southeastern Pennsylvania.

  The car slightly changed the whine it had been reciting for the past twenty miles. “My motive batteries are now fully depleted, except for emergency flasher power. If you have not already arrived at a charging station, mobile recharge is on the way. If you do not have prepaid mobile recharge service, you may purchase it on the net. Thank you for choosing Hertz.” The car shut down, and its flashing dash light turned from amber to red but kept winking.

  I slammed my palms against the wheel, then exhaled and eyed the unconnected ’Puter on my wrist. I slid the door back manually, stepped out into the road, and surveyed my situation, hands on hips.

  The country I could see was forested and silent but for insect drone. The only hints of the hand of man beyond the road itself were weathered, cut stumps amid the second-growth trees. I kicked a tire, cursed the car, cursed 2067 Earth, cursed the Hertz girl, and, finally and most appropriately, cursed my own stubborn stupidity.

  According to the Navex, before it went Benedict Arnold on me with the rest of the car, the backside of my destination was just over the rise to my front, two hundred yards away. I stripped off my sport jacket, rolled up my shirtsleeves, lifted the first of my packages out of my duffel, then locked my duffel in the car.

  Then I sighed and hiked up and over the rise. As predicted, a hundred yards past the rise’s crest, dull in the late slant of early-evening sun, I came to a locked metal farm gate astride the road, flanked by three-strand wire fencing. A metal sign on the gate read “National Historic Site. Authorized access only.”

  I sighed, stepped to the gate, and swung a leg over.

  A shadow flickered across my shoulders and forearms, then a tin voice above me said, “Halt and be recognized.”

  NINETEEN

  I FROZE ASTRIDE THE GATE.

  A surveillance ’bot whirred around to face me, a dragonfly with a six-foot Plasteel wingspan.

  Unlike a county-mountie surveillance ’bot, the turret on this one, which followed my every twitch, in unison with the ’bot’s optic sensors, mounted a six-barrel micro-gun in place of a nonlethal dazer.

  A voice boomed from the ’bot’s speaker. “Get off the fence, raise your hands, then back away twenty feet.”

  I did.

  “Why are you here?”

  “I’m invited for dinner.”

  Pause.

  “Why didn’t you come to the front gate?”

  “I had to rent a manual-drive car, so I couldn’t use the guideway. The car ran out of juice back over the hill.” I jerked my thumb back down the road. “You can check.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Lieutenant General Jason Wander. My ID’s in the car.”

  Pause.

  It seemed neighborly to fill the silence. “I declined the mobile recharge coverage.”

  The ’bot’s turret whined, and I heard the microgun’s safety click off. “Nobody declines the mobile recharge coverage.”

  The ’bot hovered, I sweated, and my upraised arms grew heavy.

  During the pause, I could hear my interrogator breathe through his open mike, and his voice came through faintly. “Yes, ma’am. That’s who he claims to be. The car checks out, a rental… completely discharged.”

  Pause.

  “He says he declined it, ma’am.”

  Another pause.
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  “Yes, ma’am. Only an idiot.”

  My interrogator sighed, more loudly, then spoke to me. “She says it can only be you, General.” The ’bot’s safety clicked back on. “Sit tight, sir. A tilt-wing will be out to pick you up in three minutes. We’ll tow your vehicle in and charge it. Welcome to Eisenhower Farm.”

  TWENTY

  ON THE APPROACH TO EISENHOWER FARM, the tilt-wing overflew the pastoral hills that had once run with the blood of the Battle of Gettysburg. Eisenhower bought the farm during his presidency, as a retirement place, because he had been a soldier and the land overlooked the ghosts of Lee’s lines along Seminary Ridge. The Eisenhowers passed the farm to the National Park Service in 1967, a century ago, and ten acres had been retransferred a few years back, by act of Congress, to the two least likely cohabiting VIPs on Earth.

  Margaret Irons and Nat Cobb stood arm in arm, heads down against the tilt-wing’s downwash, as I ran to them, stooped beneath the thumping props. The tilt-wing lifted, returning to whatever secret place the Secret Service kept it in, and the gale and roar faded.

  Maggie was the first of them I got to, slender as wire, no taller than my shoulder, with hair that clung in ermine ringlets against her mahogany skin. She hugged me, and only gingerly did I hug back, keeping one eye on her Secret Service detail. A former president is a former president, after all.

  Nat Cobb, my boss since before the Battle of Ganymede, was as thin as Maggie and as pale as the snows of his Maine birthplace. His sparse hair was clipped in a retired four-star’s brush, as white as his female companion’s. He patted my back. “Good to see you, Jason.”

  Like many people who saw through Virtulenses, Nat said that to remind new acquaintances that blind was a relative term. He made the remark to me from reflex. Nat Cobb had breveted me to succeed him in command in battle when a Slug heavy splinter took his natural sight, and I had long since thereafter learned that he saw what was going on in Washington better through Virtulenses than others saw it twenty-twenty.

  I stood back from the second U.S. president to resign her office and the longest-serving U.S. Army four-star.

  It warmed me that the only two Washington survivors I knew well enough to admire chose to spend their retirement in each other’s company. Though the physical aspect was creepier than visualizing my parents having sex.

  Nat said to me, “How you feeling, son?”

  President Irons and General Cobb were old enough for me to be their son. But “old” has been a moving target, lockstepped to medical progress, throughout human history. Alexander the Great died of disease or boredom with life at thirty-two. Even in Eisenhower’s day, a century ago, people still aged so rapidly that the government paid them to retire at age sixty-five, so they could rest a few months before they croaked.

  I shrugged. “Pretty good. You two?”

  It was Nat’s turn to shrug. “We’ll be better if Howard’s POW spills some beans.”

  Neither Nat nor Maggie had ever been much for small talk. I smiled as I shook my head. Howard’s secrecy about the Ganglion’s capture was impenetrable, except by Maggie and Nat’s back-channel network.

  The two of them toured me around their place before dinner. I walked, as, at a discreet distance, did Maggie’s Secret Service minders. Maggie and Nat rode little scooters that floated six inches off the ground. They were Cavorite-powered prototypes, in effect parallel machines to the saucer we dragged the Ganglion around on. Spin-off technology no more justified war than full employment for cops justified burglary. But plenty of swords had been beaten into better plowshares for centuries.

  Nat’s voice graveled as he pointed out landmarks of the great battle that had forever marked this place. Maggie remarked about her predecessor, Lincoln, his few words at Gettysburg, and the great battle for civil rights that he began, which historians said didn’t fully end until she was elected president. I told them about the outworlds, in particular about the recent dustup on Weichsel.

  After a dinner punctuated with old war stories and new Beltway gossip, the three of us creaked in wooden rockers, on a porch lit by the flicker of oil lanterns, as distant frogs sang.

  I pulled out the package I had brought and presented it to Nat. “Sorry I missed your Relief and Retirement ceremony.”

  Nat waved his hand. “Penguin-suit hoo-hah.”

  Margaret Irons raised her chin. “It was lovely and dignified, Nathan. You looked very distinguished.”

  Nat lifted my retirement gift to him from its case, and the Cavorite stones on its scabbard glowed with their own crimson light.

  I said, “From Ord and me. He says a Marinus-forged broadsword’s finer than the best Japanese koto.”

  Nat smiled as he drew the blade and turned it so it flashed in the lantern light. “You might want to borrow this when you meet your new boss.”

  Nat’s commission, as well as his retirement date, had been extended six times by act of Congress. I had been commanded by-and protected against my own inexperience and blundering by-the same mentor for decades.

  I grimaced. “So I hear. We powwow tomorrow, after the christening.”

  War stories and gossip had been exhausted, and only the tyrannosaur in the corner, which I knew was the real reason I had been invited, was left to discuss. Ice rang against crystal as Margaret Irons sipped her bourbon. “You can go see him tonight, you know, Jason. The tilt-wing can land you in New York in an hour. The staff will take care of your rental car.”

  I furrowed my brow in the dark. Maggie wasn’t talking about my new commanding officer, but my estranged godson.

  Nat leaned on the arm of his rocker closest to me. “Jude arrived from Tressel with the rest of the Tressen delegation at Luna Base. They’re coming down from Luna aboard the Ganymede. She lands at midnight. Bringing her down in daylight would’ve stolen the visual thunder for tomorrow.”

  Since the Blitz, human ships of the line had been fabricated in lunar orbit, then lived and died in vacuum. With Mousetrap’s shipyards now humming, Ganymede would be the end of her line. She was the last starship scheduled to be built within the Solar System, as production shifted to a nickel-iron asteroid captured as a moonlet by a planet light-years away. In that, Ganymede was like a tyrannosaur just before the Chixulub Impact, the mightiest of her kind, a race about to be extincted by a lump of interstellar trash.

  Yet none of the billions of humans who never left Earth, whose taxes and sweat had built the great ships for all the decades of the war against the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony, had ever seen a cruiser in its mile-long, Plasteel flesh.

  So the politicians had decided to christen the Ganymede in New York.

  “He’s the right person to do it, you know.” I swallowed. “But what about the blockade?”

  Tressel, home to my godson since his altruistic enlistment there, had also become the most repressive society in the Human Union. The Human Union had accordingly severed ties with Tressel to punish its leadership.

  Maggie snorted. “The blockade blocks emigration and trade, not diplomatic contact. Democracies talk to dictatorships because talk sells better to voters than war.”

  “That’s a bad thing, Madame President?”

  She frowned. Not at my “youthful” impertinence, but because she had been instructing me to call her just plain Maggie for years. She said, “Sometimes. Our diplomats were talking to the Japanese when they bombed Pearl Harbor.”

  Nat Cobb rocked forward, then touched my thigh with a bony hand. “Jason, we didn’t ask you out here to debate politics. You’ve never been spit for politics, anyway. You’ve been an unhappy boy.”

  I stiffened. “I haven’t been a boy since the Blitz, sir.”

  General Cobb had also tried to get me to stop calling him sir.

  “You know what I mean. You never thought like conventional military, even as a trainee. In an unconventional war, your temperament had its place. You matured on Bren, during the Expulsion. By First Mousetrap, people thought your judgment was catching up to your
experience and ingenuity. But since Second Mousetrap, people think you’ve changed. I hear.”

  “People” meant Ord. Ord and Nat Cobb had nursed me up since infantry basic. Ord had ratted me out, as usual.

  I sighed. “If I hadn’t landed with the Spooks, the Weichsel raid might have failed.”

  Nat raised his palm. “We didn’t ask you here to debate strategy and tactics, either. Jason, it’s time for you to become a whole human being.”

  I flexed my prosthetic arm, drew breath into my re-grown lungs, and rubbed my Plasteel-femured thighs. “Too late for that.”

  It was Maggie’s turn to lean forward and touch me, on my shoulder. “No. You need to resolve the issues between yourself and Jude. And you can. If not for your own sake, for the sake of your troops. A depressed commander can be a bad commander.”

  “Why do you think I’m here for the ceremony? As soon as I saw Jude was going to christen the Ganymede, I came.” Jude was the closest thing I had to a son, and I was the closest thing he had to a father. But it was the unavoidable curse of the military parent to be an occasional visitor to one’s children.

  Nat nodded. “It will be a start. But awkward.”

  Maggie said, “Mimi Ozawa joined us for dinner, too, just after she took over at the academy. Were you planning to look her up while you were here?”

  I rolled my eyes. “She’s invited me to address the Cadet Corps during Commandant’s Time, two days after the christening. I’m taking a day’s leave in between, to see her. Okay?” I braced myself for one of them to ask me whether I needed to borrow the family car, so I could take that nice Ozawa girl out to the drive-in for a milk shake, like some flatscreen situation comedy the two of them had grown up with.

  Nat looked at Maggie, then back at me. “One more thing.”

  I sighed. I was too old for lectures, but also too old to argue with people even older.

  Nat leaned forward on his elbows. “I’m not your shrink. I’m not your commanding officer anymore. But I am your friend. Jason, you’re disconnected from the people you love. Worse, you’re uncertain whether they love you back.”