Orphan's Triumph (Jason Wander) (12 page)

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 I suppose I could have withdrawn cash and supplemented my per diem card out of pocket, but Nat Cobb had taught me by example that a commander shouldn’t live better than he expects his kids to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-service 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. He stared into his palms, then looked up. “The war’s been coasting downhill for a couple of years now.”

“I’ve been pedaling the bike too hard to notice, sir.”

He nodded, smiled again. “I understand. If propulsion-grade Cavorite wasn’t flowing from Bren, if Mousetrap wasn’t secure, if Bren wasn’t providing a stable staging area for Silver Bullet, and, most recently, if the Weichsel raid hadn’t yielded the last puzzle piece we need to exterminate the Slugs, the existence of mankind would still hang in the balance.”

“Aren’t you starting the victory party a little early, sir?”

“Like you said, you’ve been busy pedaling the bike. Mankind’s best minds think we entered the war’s end game months ago. We just have to play it out.”

I squirmed in my chair. “That’s great. I intend to play it out. So it doesn’t get screwed up. Sir.”

He pressed his lips together. “Jason, your contributions have been extraordinary, and so have your sacrifices. Do you feel that you’ve done enough?”

Hair rose on the back of my neck. “When we know the Slugs are gone, I’ll feel like I’ve done enough. Sir, what are you trying to say?”

“The end game—Silver Bullet—is a Space Force show. Basically it’s a reconnaissance to locate a target, followed by a bombing mission to deliver a single, outcome-determinative device.”

I straightened in my chair. “Every time we’ve thought we had the Slugs on the ropes since I’ve been in this war—and I’ve been in it from the beginning—we’ve been wrong, General Pinchon. Maybe Silver Bullet’s Hiroshima, maybe it isn’t.”

He nodded. “We have been wrong. And if it hadn’t been for people like you and Nat Cobb bailing us out, we wouldn’t stand today on the threshold of final victory, ready to move to new challenges.”

Stale doughnut congealed in my stomach. “Is this my golden handshake?”

Pinchon frowned. “Jason, by statute, the U.S. military is authorized three hundred twenty active-duty generals at a time. The math works out that there are currently slots for only a dozen army three-stars, like you.”

The numbers fluctuated, but even I knew that the brass ceiling had been the law since before the Cold War. It meant that just as perfectly competent senior general officers figured out how to do their jobs, they got squeezed out of the top of the officer corps, like used toothpaste out of a tube, so junior generals could move up.

I said, “Nat never got pushed out.”

“The war was different then. And Nat was different. He knew how to watch his own back in Washington.”

I smiled, even as my heart sank in my chest. “He watched mine, too.”

Pinchon sighed. “Frankly, Jason, given your record, Nat’s the only reason you got far enough that we’re having this conversation.”

I couldn’t argue. The army had been trying to fire me since basic training, and for good reasons. I was no MacArthur, no Eisenhower. I had stumbled through a career doing the wrong things for the right reasons, then scratching and clawing back from the brink of disaster only by the grace and intervention of people like Ord and Nat Cobb. That didn’t make the shock of this moment less electric.

“What about my command? My kids.”

“Our outworld presence will be reconfigured. We won’t need and can’t afford a ground army forward-deployed to meet a threat that’s about to disappear. Most of your command will be safely redeployed home with the gratitude of their respective nations. Any commander should be delighted with that outcome.”

Maybe so, but shock gave way to heat that flushed up from my gut. My fists balled at my sides.

“That’s it? You think I’m going to go quietly?”

“Jason, there’s nobody here to protect you this time. Nat’s gone. And you’ll be retired on a four-star’s pension. The defense industry will snap you up as a consultant, if the holo nets don’t hire you as an expert first. This isn’t a punishment, it’s a reward.”

“How long have I got?”

Pinchon smiled, as gently as I suppose he knew how. “You make retirement sound like a tumor.” He waved the holo screen so it faced me. “Before you leave, I’ll print out your retirement forms for you. They become effective when you sign them. Meantime, let’s run through your ongoing benefits and privileges…”

He talked for, as my ’Puter read later, forty-four more minutes. I didn’t hear one word. Finally, I found myself standing beside the elevator, with a breast pocket full of army paper, in silence broken only by hollow ringing in my ears, as though an eight-inch howitzer shell had detonated alongside me. I stared back at the MacArthur plaque on the hallway wall. There was a quote, from MacArthur’s address to a joint session of Congress, after Truman rightly canned him for trying to start World War III in Korea. MacArthur had quoted a barracks ballad: “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.”

I stared at the quote for a long time before I pressed the down button.

At a kiosk down in the Waldorf’s lobby, I rented another manual drive, including mobile recharge coverage.

Five minutes later the car whispered up to the curb, and as I pressed a bill into the live doorman’s white-gloved hand, I said to him, “Fade away, my ass!”

Then I slipped the renter out, between the yellow nose of one cab and the tail of another, and told my car to give me directions to Maryland.

TWENTY-FOUR

FORT MEADE, MARYLAND, wasn’t the only place Howard’s Spooks infested, but it was the place where they had for years maintained facilities to hold a Slug smart enough to tell them anything—if, like a dog that chased cars, they ever caught one.

Howard buzzed me in through the doors of a three-story black glass cube with a sign out front that read “International Communicable Disease Research Center. Protective clothing required beyond this point.”

He was wearing slacks, sandals, and a T-shirt that announced “On my planet, I’m normal.” The most military thing about him was an old-style ID badge he wore on a lanyard around his chicken-wattle neck. The army had long ago come to terms with the need to let Howard run his Spooks the way he wanted to. The honeymoon had lasted because his methods allowed him to recruit persons who thought outside the box. Way outside.

We stepped into the elevator, and Howard poked his badge into a slot for a subbasement level five stories down. Alongside the slot, someone had taped a hand-printed sign that read “Dungeon. Quiet please! Torture in progress.”

The elevator opened to a desk labeled “Security,” behind which sat a girl wearing farmer’s bib jeans over bare shoulders, with corporal’s chevrons pinned to the strap of an empty leather shoulder holster. She made one of those waves where the hand remains still while the fingers wiggle. “Hi, Howard. Who’s your friend?”

I sighed. Ord’s head would have exploded.

We passed by her, then through a set of double doors. Howard said, “Her IQ is one ninety-five.”

“One would hope.”

The room we entered was big enough to garage three buses, and at its center floated my green traveling companion from Weichsel, under a cone of soft blue overhead light. A cable thicket ran from plates taped to the Ganglion’s hide to consoles along all four walls, behind which sat a hundred Spooks. I pointed at the cables and frowned. “Is that how you make it talk? Electric shock?”

Howard’s eyes widened. “The sign in the elevator was a joke!”

“I got that, Howard.”

“Jason, the Pseudocephalopod has no concept of withholding information from another because it’s never known another. It’s the only one of its kind. There’s no need to coerce anything, any more than you coerce a book to let you read it. We simply had to synthesize an algorithm that translated the information stored in this Ganglion.”

“Had. You’ve already done it?”

“We’ve been preparing for this moment for years.”

“Did it know where it came from?” I had come to see Howard from curiosity, but after Pinchon made me walk the plank, a half-hope had formed in a selfish corner of my mind. If Howard’s prisoner didn’t possess the navigational information we needed, we couldn’t end the war soon. If the war wasn’t ending, Pinchon might not send me to the glue factory. Perversely, during the entire drive down from New York, I had hoped the Ganglion would prove to be a bust.

Howard grinned. “Absolutely! Last night we deciphered a sequence of twenty-six jumps that lead from Weichsel to the homeworld system. Simple, really. We’re just tidying up now.”

“Great.” It was. In fact, it was the greatest news of the war. Somehow, I couldn’t get as excited as I should have been.

Behind Howard, Spooks had lined up to get their pictures taken standing in front of the Ganglion. Some hammed it up, holding a magazineless pistol, presumably borrowed from the corporal in coveralls, and snarling. Most smiled, whooped, and pumped fists overhead.