Orphanage jw-1 Page 9

Committed? To what? Why? Two days before, I had been ready to desert rather than continue in the army. If Grodt was as connected as he seemed to be, he could not only get me out of the army legally, he probably could square my departure with Judge March, too. The opportunity of a lifetime spread before me. So why was I wondering what to do?

  As I pondered, Crissy led me back into the house, up-stairs and down a carpeted hallway that seemed as long as a company street. Moans and the sweet smell of dope, the illegal kind, leaked from behind closed doors.

  “Aaron has, like, forty bedrooms. There’s anything you want.” At the moment, the one thing I wanted was to solve mysteries under her dress. She wobbled from the champagne as she opened a door and led me into a pink room with a canopy bed. She hopped on the bed, her Himalayas heaving, drained her champagne, and stretched to set the empty flute on a nightstand. Her hem rode halfway up her thigh, and she rolled on her back and patted the silk beside her. I sat and wondered why I doubted Grodt’s job offer.

  “Think about whatever it is tomorrow, Jason.” She reached up and traced my ear with her finger.

  I hadn’t so much as smelled a woman in months. And the last one who had touched my ear was a doctor when I had an earache before I turned twelve. I breathed faster. Think about what tomorrow?

  She breathed into my ear. “Very hard?”

  “Huh?”

  “Your training.”

  “It is. Was.”

  She scooted closer, slid up her dress, and snapped off tiny, pink lace undies with promising athleticism. I froze. If I moved, she might vanish.

  She drew back and pouted. “‘M I boring you?”

  “No. God, no!” I shrugged. “It’s just—I have responsibilities.”

  She fingered the ninety-day-service ribbon on my tunic. “Jason, get real! Metzger’s got responsibilities. You’re a grunt!”

  Then she cocked her head. “Unless—Are you going for The Force?”

  If The Force was anywhere between her knees and her collarbone, I surely was. “What?”

  “Didn’t you watch the news?”

  Not in the back of a truck.

  “It’s on everywhere.” She passed her palm above a remote, and Grodt’s holo fired with no hint of dust-induced static. One more thing money could buy.

  A newsreader stood on the carpet before us while the Holo News Network logo swirled around her.

  “Already, volunteer applications for the UN’s Ganymede Expeditionary Force are piling up. The world’s best soldiers are clamoring to be selected. Officials conceded only today that plans for a massive spaceship to transport thousands of Infantry troops and carry the fight to Jupiter’s largest moon are far advanced.”

  I shook my head and wished I wasn’t so drunk.

  The newsreader continued. “The ship’s keel may be laid as soon as next spring, at a location undisclosed for security reasons. Speculation centers on the Arizona desert or the Sahara.”

  Her coanchor nodded from the corner of the room. “Any timetable?”

  “Sources expect to embark trained Infantry troops within five years. Hopeful news.”

  The Vegas line was even money the human race would be extinct in four years. Hopeful, my ass.

  Crissy waved off the holo. “You’re upset, Jason.”

  My head spun as much from the news as from the champagne. Infantry. There was a chance for Infantry to make a difference in the world. There was a chance for me to make a difference. Or there had been until I screwed it up. Jacowicz had said I’d get crap assignments. The Ganymede Expeditionary Force was going to be the toughest ticket in military history. This was the Mother of All Screwings. I ground my teeth.

  “Jason?”

  “Huh?”

  Crissy grasped my zipper between manicured fingers and slid it down. “Whatever it is, I can make it better.”

  No, she couldn’t. The only thing that could was me getting assigned to the Ganymede Expeditionary Force, and that wasn’t her department.

  However, Little Jason was doing my thinking, and he had urgent ideas. I wrapped my arms around her waist and pulled her to me.

  She giggled. “Izzat a pistol in your pocket, soldier?”

  Her lines weren’t original, but her attitude was flawless.

  Rap! Rap!

  The door knocks barely died before it swung open.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Specialist Wander?” Two buck-sergeant MPs stepped through the doorway in black berets, shoulder bands with MP lettered in white, and plink white gloves.

  Crap. Crap, crap, crap. Caught in an opium den, drunk and underage. My fake ID lay in Ord’s personal-property envelope back at Indiantown Gap. And it had to be illegal to get lucky with a tanked woman this prime.

  The MPs gaped at Chrissy while the first one said, “You gotta report back, Specialist.”

  I shook my head. “I’m on leave.”

  MP Number One waved old-fashioned paper, unsmiling. “Canceled.”

  Crissy pulled a sheet across herself and pouted.

  “Report where?”

  “Nearest post. Canaveral.”

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  “Okay. Gimmee a few minutes.” I jerked my head toward Crissy.

  “ Now , Specialist!” The MP hooked a thumb in his belt He wore a sidearm.

  I spread my arms, palms open. “Guys! I’ve been sleeping in a barracks with fifty hairy-butt privates for three months! Ten minutes—”

  “The army doesn’t care if you sleep with yaks. Move!” He stepped forward.

  Quitting in wartime is desertion. The army can execute a GI summarily, ignoring trifles like the Bill of Rights. And I hadn’t exactly built a reservoir of goodwill lately. I looked once more at his pistol, sighed, tucked in, and zipped up.

  Crissy groaned and rolled on her side, facing the wall.

  I stood. “How’d you find me?”

  MP Number One tapped his chest with the index finger of one hand while he pointed skyward with the other. “Dogtag.”

  I nodded. At induction, every soldier gets an identity chip implanted beneath his or her breastbone. One purpose is graves registration. That’s why the implant goes in the middle of the biggest piece of meat likely to be intact. The chip’s also detectable by global-positioning satellites, just like everybody’s car and bike. The Thirty-Eighth Amendment forbids satellite-tracking of natural persons, but it’s just one more civil right GIs waive. I think they’re called “dogtags” because the army tested the implants on canines. I heard another explanation, but it was stupid.

  I glanced once more at Chrissy. She blew me a kiss, and my heart ached. Well, the ache was lower. The MPs flanked me, and three sets of clattering combat boots echoed as we wound down marble stairs, across Aaron Grodt’s entry hall, and to their butt-ugly, government-issue Chyota.

  The door was open, and Metzger sat in the backseat, head back, eyes closed. MP Number One put a hand on my head as he tucked me in beside Metzger.

  “You, too? Why?” I asked.

  Metzger rolled his head my way and opened one eye. “I get called back to alert every time they spot incoming. I don’t know why they want you.”

  “I thought it was for underage drinking.” The words sounded silly as they left my mouth.

  Metzger closed his open eye. “Rest. Whatever it is will be here too soon.”

  Like the end of my childhood.

  The battery sedan retraced Metzger’s route from Canaveral, but slower, so I dozed, numb from champagne, my mind bubbling with questions.

  I thought about Walter and Mom and a ship bound for Jupiter without me.

  At some point I realized how much I had changed. The loss of a gorgeous woman wearing no pants scarcely bothered me.

  A few months ago I would have stewed for hours about losing a quickie.

  I wished Crissy and not Metzger was snoring next to me, but all I really cared about was getting a berth on that Jupiter ship, somehow.

  The car crawled through
Canaveral’s main gate and floodlights woke me. The notion that expensive wine leaves no hangover is a he as big as “Meals Ready to Eat.” I moaned.

  The MPs stopped the car on a weedy, cracked-pavement apron in front of a windowless last-century building that stretched beyond the floodlights that lit its door.

  Metzger jumped out, and I followed.

  The Chyota whirred away as one MP slammed its door. I winced at the bang and stared at the building. “What’s this?”

  Metzger led me inside and into a room filled with banks of old-fashioned instrument consoles at which rows of shirt-sleeved men sat. Light came from the image on a screen covering the far wall. The men muttered into headset microphones straight out of a history holo.

  “Captain Metzger! Jason!”

  The voice I knew. I turned and saw the wrinkled geek Intelligence captain from Pittsburgh, Howard Hibble.

  Hibble shook our hands, then led us into a glassed-in conference room. He sat us at a table, sat himself, and folded his hands in front of him. “We would have found you eventually, of course.” He grinned at me. “But I didn’t expect you close by, Jason.”

  A scrubs-clad medic stepped into the room carrying a vitals ‘puter. Hibble nodded toward me. The medic wrapped my biceps with a blood-pressure cuff hooked to his little assistant and read its display. “Low-normal,” he muttered.

  I looked at Hibble. “I’m fine.” Were they drug-testing?

  The medic poked a temp-infection probe in my ear and grunted at the readout

  While the medic worked my knee joints, I looked back and forth at Metzger, then at Hibble. “What’s with this museum?”

  Metzger smirked. “Museum?”

  I pointed through the glass conference-room panel at the wall screen. It showed a flat video of a NASA rocket. The old crate stood gleaming white in floodlights, liquid-oxygen clouds boiling from its base. I used to collect spaceflight trading holos, mostly to get the gum. “That’s a Saturn booster.” I squinted at the nose. “With an Apollo module. Three hundred sixty feet tall. It launched manned missions to the moon in the 1960s.” There was a certain sadness to the truth that the seventy-year-old Apollo program marked high tide for manned space exploration. I pointed. “Which mission was this?”

  “That’s a live image.”

  “You mean it was live when they videoed it.”

  Metzger broke in. “The old jigs and assembly equipment still existed, Jason. The frame and engines were rebuilt pretty much like the old design, with antique materials. But with updated computers, one pilot can fly it.”

  I looked closer at the vehicles crawling antlike around the Saturn’s base. Electrovans. The first Electro hit pavement in 2032. My jaw dropped. We really had rebuilt an Apollo rocket! Just like we had demothballed Indiantown Gap and C-rations and the space shuttles Metzger and the other Rocket Jocks flew to intercept Projectiles.

  I realized then how desperate the human race was, and my heart sank.

  A century ago, in 1939, Polish horse cavalry attacked German tanks with lances. In the Insurrection of 2020, Tibetan rebels threw rocks at Chinese helicopter gunships.

  Since the twenty-first century began, humanity had whipped AIDS, nurtured human rights, and back-burnered antimatter engines and death rays. Those had been dandy priorities. But they left us reduced to throwing a 360-foot-tall rock at our enemy.

  Then it hit me. Humans had big rocks. For the first time, I was proud of us for inventing H-bombs. The Ganymede Expeditionary Force was a diversionary hoax. Why send Infantry into space when we could plaster the enemy with nuclear weapons?

  Relief, hope, and a little disappointment, because Infantry wasn’t going to lead the way after all, flooded me.

  I smiled at Hibble. “I get it That Saturn’s going to carry a nuke big enough to crack Ganymede like a walnut!”

  Hibble frowned. “I can understand why you’d think that. We probably could adapt a Saturn to launch an interplanetary payload. Logical enough mistake.”

  Mistake?

  Metzger said, “The first nuclear warhead we fired to knock a Projectile off course didn’t detonate. We thought it was a dud. Nobody’s actually tested nukes since the late 1900s.”

  Hibble said, “The next four didn’t explode, either. We tried conventional warheads. They worked. The enemy seems to be able to neutralize nuclear weapons. Our best guess is they permeate space with a subatomic particle that slows down neutrons. You can visualize how that would impede a chain reaction, of course.”

  “Of course.” I had no earthly clue. Metzger, Hibble, and Einstein knew what that meant, but not me. Yet when I looked in their eyes I knew it was true. Humanity was screwed.

  Hopelessness dripped through me as I realized that for some reason those MPs had dragged Metzger and me here like North America’s Most Wanted.

  I pointed again at the oversized antique fueling up on the wall screen. “So why us? Why the rocket ship?”

  Hibble looked up at the medic, who had ran out of body parts to abuse. The medic wrapped wires around his machine as he walked out. “He’s good to go, Captain Hibble.”

  “Go where?” I asked.

  Howard waited until the door closed behind the medic, then unlocked a drawer in the table and pulled out a paper book. Actually, it was bigger than the books I had read in the day room, the dimensions of an old laptop computer, or more accurately, a stack of them.

  Yellow letters across its top read top secret. Howard let it thud on the tabletop, granted, then laid his palm over the letters. “This notebook details every artifact we’ve recovered from Projectile detonation sites worldwide. Learning what we’re fighting might turn the war. This book doesn’t tell us enough. We’ve mostly recovered cinders the size of rutabagas.”

  I’d never seen a rutabaga, but I gathered it wasn’t very big. I shook my head. “So? Why me?”

  Howard batoned an unlit cigarette with bony, yellowed fingers. “What science can’t explain, it calls luck or coincidence. Historically, certain humans have displayed a knack for attracting alien contact. I never had the knack. But in Pittsburgh you beelined to the single most significant alien artifact ever found. I don’t understand why that happened. I expect you don’t know either. But I flagged your records in our database. You’re attached temporary duty to my platoon for the next two weeks.”

  Me an Intel weenie? Still, my chest swelled. I was the Chosen One. But chosen for what?

  “So I’m an artifact bloodhound?” Hair stood on my neck.

  Howard shrugged. “That’s my hunch. Besides…”

  “Besides, what?”

  Howard looked at his hands. “The scientist who trained for the slot you’re taking was tracking fragments in Nigeria when she came down with dysentery.”

  “Oh.” I had been chosen by the runs. “What do you expect me to find?”

  “Nothing. We already found it. A Projectile crashed, largely intact, four days ago. You’ve already signed the requisite secrecy paperwork—”

  My heart skipped. “You want me to go with you to the wreck!” I was going to make history. This was almost better than going to Jupiter. My head spun. I saw myself hacking through jungle with a machete, leading Howard to his prize, vine-smothered like a ruined temple. But something was wrong with my picture.

  The conference-room door opened again and a corporal wearing well-cut utilities with Quartermaster Branch collar brass came in. Hibble nodded at me again.

  A yellow tape measure hung around the corporal’s neck. He made me stand and wrapped the tape around my chest while I talked.

  “Okay. I’m the second-string artifact bloodhound.” I jerked my thumb at Metzger. “But why’s he here?”

  Hibble paused while the Quartermaster corporal held out my arm and taped it, then my inseam, speaking measurements into a wrist ‘puter. He left.

  Howard answered. “Captain Metzger is one of two pilots checked out to fly the Apollo Mark II The other guy’s on alert at Lop Nor in China.”

  “Pi
lot?” A knot grew in my stomach. “To where?”

  “The Projectile crash-landed at ten degrees, two minutes south latitude and fifty-five degrees, forty minutes east longitude—”

  “That’s in—” I wrinkled my forehead, visualizing a globe.

  “The middle of Mare Fecunditatis.” Howard looked at his watch. “At ten tomorrow morning, we three leave for the moon.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  A day later, they walked us three out on the gantry in baggy, white space suits. The one I’d been measured for actually fit. We carried little air-conditioner suitcases, just like old movies. Real old. They hadn’t used Canaveral’s launchpads since satellites went private. I shouldn’t have been surprised at the rusty girders. I shook. I hate heights. The narrow bridge to the capsule was latticed steel, so when I looked down between my feet the ground was 350 feet away.

  In three days the ground would be 250,000 miles away. I stared ahead at the open capsule hatch, squeezed the bridge rail harder with shaking hands, and shuffled toward the capsule.

  The Apollo capsule itself had just been built so it smelled like a new car inside. But it looked as old-fashioned as a laptop computer. I lay there flat on my back while technicians snapped fishbowl helmets over our heads, Howard on my right and Metzger on my left.

  A tech patted my head, shot me a thumbs-up, then ducked back outside and sealed the hatch. Gray sky shone through the little capsule window. I scrunched my shoulders, hands at my sides, and tried to remember all the things I’d been taught over the last twenty-four hours, mostly what not to touch. The trip to the moon would last three days, but they had crammed me with three months’ training since yesterday. I had been nervous about learning my flight duties until they explained that I had none.

  My trainer assured me, “The first American astronaut was just a monkey. He did fine.” Then my trainer eye-balled the Infantry tab on my file. “A really dumb monkey.”

  My trainer taught me that the monkey wore a little space vest and diapers. My trainer never taught me how to pee in space.

  Metzger’s voice and the ground controller’s rang inside my helmet. We had more room in the capsule than the old pioneers had because the old-fashioned instruments that had filled much of the capsule had been replaced by a wireless ‘puter Metzger held. It was not much bigger than a Playstation Model-40.