Orphan's Triumph Page 9

  I spread my palms. “Jude’s been behind the new Iron Curtain. Mimi’s duty stations and mine have been light-years apart, and the human race is at war for its survival. What did you expect me to do, desert?”

  Nat said, “No. But maybe you could add a functional relationship to soothe the pain of the dysfunctional ones.”

  A female orderly, blonde and smiling, stepped onto the porch with a decanter and refilled our glasses.

  I watched her walk away. “You mean proposition cocktail waitresses half my age?”

  “I’m serious. There’s plenty you can do. Socialize more.”

  “Away from Earth I outrank my potential buddies by a couple of stars, sir.” I turned to President Irons. “You know the problem. You can’t even get people you’ve known for years to stop calling you Madame President. Poker’s no fun when the other guys let you win. And Ord’s idea of guys’ night out is ironing his battle dress uniforms.”

  A dachshund, Fritz the Fourth, if I remembered the press releases, waddled onto the porch and got scooped onto the former presidential lap. Maggie scratched her dog’s ear. “Animal companion holistic therapy’s been accepted practice for decades. Centuries, really.”

  I rolled my eyes. “A pet? There are no pugs in space. The poop issues alone-”

  Nat said softly, “You mothballed Jeeb after Second Mousetrap, didn’t you?”

  My chest softened inside. “He’s so old that maintenance cost would have been prohibitive, outworld.”

  Jeeb was a four-decade-old, J-series Tactical Observation Transport, a turkey-sized, six-legged mechanical flying cockroach. Nobody remembers brain-linked spy TOTs like Jeeb for two reasons. First, faster, smaller, stealthier, cheaper Autonomous Mechanicals obsoleted them by 2050. Second, the Department of Defense quietly swept everything about brain-link technology under the rug a decade after that.

  The combat intel value of brain-linking had been that instructions passed from wrangler to ’bot, and intercepted communications and images passed back from ’bot to wrangler, immune to interception and jamming, and at least as fast as the speed of light.

  The mutual link was so strong and transparent that TOTs, though the cyberneticists deny it to this day, permanently imprinted the personalities of their wranglers. But if combat or, for that matter, a bus wreck killed the wrangler or destroyed the TOT, the surviving partner effectively experienced its own death. The few wranglers who didn’t suicide lived out their days as vegetative guests of the Veterans Administration. Surviving TOTs just got scrapped.

  So, by dint of a Department of Defense salvage title, I “adopted” Jeeb when he was orphaned by the death of his wrangler, and my friend, at the Battle of Ganymede.

  Nat snorted into his bourbon until it bubbled. “Expense, my ass. All you do is bank your paycheck, anyway. Dust the little rascal off and take him with you.”

  I frowned. “If I agree to do this, can I finish my bourbon?” It wasn’t really a question. A former president and a former four-star were accustomed to having their “suggestions” followed. Besides, I missed the little roach.

  Maggie actually had the tilt-wing make an intermediate stop on its way to deliver me to New York, at the storage unit complex where I kept my Earthside worldly goods. The night ’bot didn’t know what to make of a visitor who didn’t enter through the main gate, but my ID checked out. Twenty minutes later, the ’bot tracked the tilt-wing as it took off, now laden with the crate within which nestled the night ’bot’s elderly, distant relative, plus spares and diagnostic ’Puter.

  I sat in the tilt-wing’s presidential-purple upholstered passenger compartment, staring at the crate. My reunion with Jeeb would require no more than unpacking baggage.

  I stared into the darkness as the tilt-wing bore me north. The reunion that awaited me in an hour, and the baggage, would be more complex.

  TWENTY-ONE

  IN MY LIFE, I’ve flown into many cities at night. Into Lhasa glowing under a Himalayan full moon. Into Marinus, its weapons forges painting drifting clouds red, in a two-mooned sky. Into Paris, sprawled like a glittering tapestry across the Seine. There are bigger cities. There are prettier cities. There are certainly friendlier cities. But no city in this galaxy quickens my heart like the boil of lights that is New York.

  The tilt-wing banked above the East River ’s silver ribbon, then feathered down onto the pad atop the shoreward tower of the United Nations-Human Union complex.

  The old UN Tower’s bustle made it glow like a Wheaties box, but the Human Union Tower stood dark, except for marker lights flashing on its roof pad. A young woman in a powder blue uniform met the tilt-wing and escorted me to ground level.

  I scuffed the elevator floor as we rode down. “Carpet’s like new.”

  She smiled. “Only the bottom three floors of this tower are occupied.”

  The Human Union Tower replicated its United Nations twin in size and in antique, Atomic Age slab architecture.

  It sounded inadequate that the diplomatic center of fourteen planets could be as small as the diplomatic center of just one. But most of the union’s populations, descended from Earthborn humans discarded by the Slugs, were preindustrial at best and Neolithic at worst. Earth sugar-daddyed the baby union the way the United States had the United Nations a century ago.

  My guide led me across the Human Union Tower ’s lobby, our footsteps echoing on marble, and out onto the plaza that overlooked the East River. Traffic rumbled beneath and around me, and beyond the police barricades that ringed the plaza, crowds buzzed.

  My guide pointed at the full moon as a shadow eclipsed it. “You see the holos, but…”

  Maybe Ganymede had been brought in at midnight to preserve its visual impact for the next day’s ceremony, but the buzz of the crowds beyond the barricades built like the roar of the monsoon cascading off the Tressel Barrens rainforest. New Yorkers have seen it all, but when they haven’t, they turn out like kids for a circus parade.

  I stared up, where my guide pointed, and let my jaw drop. Seeing a cruiser in space provides no sense of scale. Ganymede’s royal drift to Earth marked the first time a cruiser had ever tested its structural strength against Earth-normal gravity, though the shipwrights and physicists had insisted for years that a vessel shielded and strong enough to transit a Temporal Fabric Insertion Point could certainly withstand one puny planet’s gravity.

  When Ganymede’s hull fully eclipsed the moon, the assembled thousands gasped. When she dropped below the moon and settled noiselessly above the river, like a reeled-in parade balloon on Thanksgiving morning, they cheered.

  Ganymede was a blindingly white cylinder that hovered, oblivious to gravity, like a spidery, disaerodynamic dirigible, so close above the East River ’s chop that water splashed her hull. Yet the observation blister on her nose’s centerline nearly touched the top of the ancient iron suspension tower of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, three hundred fifty feet above the waves. A New Yorker who wanted to travel from Ganymede’s tip to view the Cavorite baffles on her tail booms would have to walk a mile, twenty blocks, from Fifty-ninth Street south to Thirty-ninth Street.

  My guide’s mouth hung open. “My. God.”

  “Your tax dollars had more to do with it than He did.” According to Maggie Irons, one reason for this extravaganza was to show the public what it had been paying for. And also to demonstrate that moving production to Mousetrap would free up unimaginably large manufacturing capacity on Earth, capacity that could be reconfigured to produce necessities like sports electrics and beach hoverboards.

  A City of New York fireboat, spraying water from its nozzles in hundred-foot arcs, skittered out to Ganymede like a roach chasing a bus. Ganymede rolled silently around her axis, until the door of Bay Six out of thirty-six midship bays stabilized ten feet above the river, and then its hatch rolled back up into the hull. An ant jumped from the hundred-foot-wide hatch opening to the fireboat’s deck; then the hatch closed.

  My guide asked, “Is that the guy you’re me
eting?”

  I nodded.

  “I hear he’s from Tressel. I’ve never seen a Tressen.”

  “He’s not Tressen. He’s Jude Metzger.”

  She wrinkled her brow. “I’ve heard that name someplace.”

  I sighed. Jude’s father had died saving the human race. Thirty years later, his mother had, too. But to this generation, they might as well have been Millard Fillmore and Clara Barton.

  The fireboat glided alongside the riverbank, and Jude jumped to the quay, then climbed the stairs to the moonlit table of the plaza. He was twenty-six now. As lanky as his father, Jude had strawberry-blond hair and his mother’s olive Egyptian complexion.

  He stepped onto the plaza in Tressen Class-A uniform, black and tailored.

  When he saw me, his eyes widened. “I was expecting to see General Cobb. When they invited me, they said you wouldn’t christen the ship.”

  “I wouldn’t. I came to see you.”

  Amid the crowd noise, a silence swelled in the space between my godson and me.

  My guide swallowed. “Do you need anything else, General?”

  I kept staring at Jude. “No, thanks.”

  She left the two of us.

  I shrugged, said to my godson, “You eat on the way down?”

  He shook his head. “But I’m okay.”

  “Join me, then?”

  He opened his mouth, then closed it.

  I stood in the middle of a city of twenty-eight million, as alone as I’ve ever felt.

  Then he shrugged back. “Sure.”

  I turned and led him to a cab rank beyond the barricades. “We have a lot to talk about.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  EVEN IN NEW YORK, a stormtrooper outfit draws stares in a deli at one a.m.

  I sipped coffee. “You transshipped from the Powell to the Ganymede out at Luna?”

  Jude bit a dill pickle spear that he held between thumb and forefinger, then smiled. Tressel’s plant life was mired back in the pre-angiosperm mid-Paleozoic. “You always liked pickles. Been a long time?”

  He nodded. “I’m staying at the Tressen consulate. The rest of the delegation’s bunking aboard Ganymede. Captain’s guests.”

  Ganymede wouldn’t be in service for months, but her captain had been assigned to watch over her, and get to know her, since her keel was laid. He would know every rivet and plate in her, know her better than a father knew his daughter.

  “Your father didn’t get command of Hope until two weeks before we embarked for Ganymede.”

  “Poor war planning.”

  “We didn’t plan on this war.”

  “It’s been thirty years. Does anyone have a plan to end it?”

  I bit my corned beef on rye, chewed, then swallowed. Jude was my godson. He was also an officer in the armed services of a nation that was not precisely an ally. “Maybe.” I changed the subject. “I hear you’re building an air force.”

  He grinned. “Someday. Tressel’s materials technology is still stretching canvas across wood fuselages to make air mail carriers. It’s amazing how far we’ve come, so fast. I feel like a Wright brother.”

  Maybe he really didn’t know how efficiently the bastards for whom he was speeding up the mail were quietly exterminating half of Tressel. Or maybe the rumors I had heard about the camps were false. But I couldn’t force myself to begin the debate.

  We talked sports, and about our common acquaintances, and about New York, until the deli closed. Then I walked with him to his billet at the Tressen consulate, which was near my hotel, according to Navex.

  The moon had set while sparse traffic trickled down the deserted streets.

  Jude turned his collar up against the chill as our footsteps echoed off the brownstones that flanked us. “You think I blame you, don’t you, Jason?”

  Like his mother, he said what he thought. “Do you?” I asked.

  “Nobody told me! I was right there, and nobody even told me she was still alive.”

  “Jude, you know the Slugs were jamming the radios. And there was nothing you could have done.”

  He stuffed his hands in his uniform jacket pockets as we walked. “I was mad at the world. And you were part of the world.”

  “I was doped up for weeks,” I said.

  He eyed my regrown arm. “I’m sorry that you lost your arm. But they did a nice job on this one.”

  I shrugged. “I didn’t even know about the blockade for months.”

  “I should’ve gotten in touch with you. I could’ve snuck a chip offworld through the consulate.”

  I stopped and faced him beside trash cans lined up beside a front stoop. We could talk past each other for another ten blocks, or we could communicate. “The last thing she said-” My throat constricted as the moment flooded back. I blinked, took a breath. “The last thing she asked was that I take care of you. Take care of her baby, she said.”

  Jude blinked back tears, nodded. “You always have.”

  I shook my head.

  “Jason, just because we didn’t walk down to the fishing hole together every afternoon doesn’t mean you weren’t there for me.”

  Bong.

  A guy sat up between two trash cans, grimy and smelling like old wine. “You two wanna keep it down?” Then he cocked his head. “Spare any change?”

  Jude shifted his feet, and the man’s eyes widened at Jude’s uniformed silhouette. The man extended his arms, palms waving. “Not for booze! A loan. To get me home.”

  I fished in my trouser pockets until I assembled a wad of bills, and I tucked them into his breast pocket and patted it. “Don’t decline the mobile recharge coverage.”

  He wrinkled his face, then smiled at Jude while pointing at me. “This here’s a good fella.”

  Jude said, “I know.”

  SleepExpress was the only alternative in midtown Manhattan that flashed up when I had narrowed my booking search to government per diem or less. It turned out to be a century-old parking structure redivided into cubicles the size of an embarked division commander’s cruiser stateroom, meaning a bed, Sanolet, and desk, with room left over to stand a frozen pizza on edge. At SleepExpress the stateroom desk was replaced by a pay-per-view porn hologen, a bonus I was too tired and too old to appreciate. But I’ve slept in places that made SleepExpress feel like the Waldorf Astoria. I suppose I could have withdrawn cash and supplemented my per diem card out of pocket, but Nat Cobb had taught me by example that a commander shouldn’t live better than he expects his kids to live.

  Morning dawned clear and cool. After years in places where pork and maple trees lay in the evolutionary future, I went looking to sit down and breakfast on pancakes, real maple syrup, and bacon. After six blocks of menu reading, I realized that the balance remaining on my per diem chip would cover only coffee in a therm cup and a doughnut eaten standing up at a counter.

  At Ganymede’s christening I greeted old comrades, all of whom, unlike me, of course, had turned older, fatter, and grayer. Jude’s speech would have made his mother and father proud. Then the starship circled above Manhattan like a thunderhead, or more accurately, like an advertising dirigible, for the rest of the morning, while pedestrians craned their necks.

  After the ceremony, I caught a cab to 100 East Fiftieth Street, the address where I was to meet my new boss, who had traveled up from Washington to meet me. Despite Nat Cobb’s advice, I didn’t take along a sword.

  TWENTY-THREE

  WHEN THE CAB DROPPED ME OFF, it said, “We have arrived at 100 East Fiftieth Street. Welcome to your destination…”

  The cab paused, then clicked.

  “The Waldorf Towers.” General Galen Pinchon was toughing it out in the discreet and separately addressed part of the Waldorf-Astoria that served those for whom the Waldorf offered insufficient exclusivity.

  According to a hallway plaque outside Pinchon’s suite, Douglas MacArthur had occupied the suite for years after he retired.

  Pinchon’s aide met me at the door and steered me around a room-serv
ice trolley, its linens upturned to shroud the remains of what smelled like bacon and real maple syrup.

  The aide swung a hand around at the silk-papered walls as he rolled his eyes. “Thank heavens general officers are exempt from per diem!”

  “They are?”

  He flapped his hand at me. “You know that, General! If you tried to live on per diem in Manhattan, you’d probably have to sleep in a garage and eat stale doughnuts.”

  “Probably.”

  Pinchon sat reading a holoscreen, behind a marble-topped desk that would have looked at home in the Summer Palace of Marin.

  I had finished my own reading about Pinchon aboard Maggie’s tilt-wing on the way to New York. Pinchon had gone straight from ROTC to the Pentagon and, they said, never left. His commission was in the Adjutant General’s Corps. AG’s most vital role, to the average GI, was mail delivery. AG’s other roles included administration of military bands, awarding medals, and personnel matters. AG’s roles did not include shooting, nor getting shot at.

  Nonetheless, Pinchon had been chosen to succeed Nat Cobb as commander of all of the army’s unconventional ground forces. Unconventional forces, which encompassed both Earthbound snake eaters and everything offworld, had done most of the army’s shooting and getting shot during the near-century that had passed since the Cold War ended.

  Pinchon looked up at me. He looked ten years older than I was, with sunken cheeks and lips that puckered like he had sucked a lemon and never recovered.

  He smiled and waved me to a chair across from him. “Glad to be home?”

  I could still smell the bacon. “Some things are hard to get used to, General.”

  He smiled again. “Me being one of those things, I suppose. You probably wonder why someone with a non-combat, personnel background got Nat Cobb’s slot.”

  Pinchon was going to tell me why, even if I said I didn’t wonder, so I sat mute.