Orphan's Triumph (Jason Wander) (16 page)

I did, and we drank a toast to the sunrise with Marini pear nectar cooled by snow from the top of the world.

I said, “That’s something your father would have thought of. And something your mother would have loved.”

He smiled at me. “It’s only through you that I know that, Jason. I can ask you anything. Tell you anything.”

I turned my cup in my fingers and stared at it. “Then tell me which side of the fence you’re on. I mean between the union and Tressen.”

He stiffened. “What brought that up?”

“I didn’t tell you all of the last things your mother said to me. But I should. She asked me whether you were one of them. I told her no. Was I right?”

He rocked from side to side in his couch as the sun flooded into the cockpit and the screens darkened. “I don’t know how to answer that. If the Republican Socialists are doing what the camp rumors, the ones you believe, say, then, no. I’d never be one of them. But Aud Planck’s one-third of the chancellery. He’d never allow it.”

“If he knew. You’re spending all your time buried out on some aircraft test range. I hear Aud’s buried out pacifying the frontier.”

Jude squirmed. “I’d know if something that bad was going on. So would Aud.”

“You think it’s the kind of thing a propaganda ministry advertises?”

Jude stabbed his finger at me. “Look, I’ve made my stand for the union and against the Slugs, here and now. Tressen’s at the end of a jumpline, with no more Cavorite. Tressen politics couldn’t be less relevant to the problem at hand, which is kicking the Slugs off the Red Moon.”

I sighed, then nodded. “Fair enough. Which means I need to get back to work. Take me home.”

Jude sat still. “You drive.”

“What?”

He pointed at a set of paddles folded beneath the electronic countermeasures console. “The Wizzo’s got a redundant control set.”

“It’s idiotic. This thing costs more than Costa Rica.”

He snorted. “It’ll be the most fun you’ve had with your clothes on. You would have done it if my dad had asked you when you were teenagers. And I’m right here to override if you overcook it.”

I would have. He was. And my godson was also right about the fun.

When we got back, a total of one hour and fifteen minutes after I left my office, Jude parked the Scorpion out on the field, belly tiles high enough off the ground to avoid a prairie fire. A tech with a chipboard met us.

Jude reverted from godson to test pilot, speaking to the tech as we walked to the hangar through the early-morning cool. “It handles fundamentally identical to the original. No observable hull expansion problems with temperature variation. Well, I noticed a creak starboard rear, at the fairing.”

I left my godson to his Zoomie duties and walked back to my headquarters with a bounce in my step.

We were planning a high-risk operation, but the reward demanded it. I might end up defeated like Lee at Gettysburg as easily as victorious like MacArthur at Inchon. And the people who surrounded me would make it work, just like they had made so many other things work over the course of this decades-long trip through this now-brightening tunnel.

I stepped through the door to my offices at zero eight hundred, smiling. We had been open for business since zero seven hundred, and the aroma of strong Tassini coffee mixed with the smell of ink on the ribbons of Marini clerks clacking away on steel typing machines. An Earthling staff sergeant looked up from Ord’s desk. “Morning, General.”

As I passed him, I looked left and right, into adjacent, unoccupied cubicles and file aisles. “Where’s the sergeant major, Tierney?” Ord late for work was as improbable as the moons of Bren failing to rise at night.

I pushed open my office door as the staff sergeant shrugged. “Not here, sir. Put himself on sick call.”

I froze with my palm against the rough wood. In thirty years Ord had never put himself on sick call.

“Tierney, reset my morning schedule. I’ll be out of the office for an indeterminate period.”

He cocked his head. “What’s up, General?”

“I’ve got a case of scotch to deliver.”

THIRTY-THREE

I CHASED DOWN Hippocrates Wallace in an infirmary corridor between maternity and pathology. He glanced over his shoulder when I called, then turned and faced me with his rounds chipboard in one cocoa-colored hand.

I said, “There’s a case of Glenmorangie in the foot-well under your desk. Don’t drink it all in one place, Colonel.”

He grunted. “Took you long enough.”

“I brought it all the way from Earth. And I’ve been busy.”

“So I’ve heard.” He stared at me for two heartbeats. Then he said, “You didn’t come over here to deliver scotch.”

I shook my head.

He pointed at an empty double room across the hall, ushered me in, then closed the door behind us. My heart pounded. “I hear Ord put himself on sick call this morning.”

“DeArthur stopped by downstairs, two weeks before you got back here from Earth. Complained of persistent sniffles. Got loaded up with the usual complement of patent meds and a download advising rest and clear fluids.”

“You’ve known Ord long enough to know he’d never visit the infirmary over sniffles.”

“I have. But he didn’t come to me, just saw a duty nurse.”

“And?”

“The next visit, which was just after you got back from Earth, he did come to me. I observed visible weight loss. He complained of flulike symptoms that persisted too long. I ordered some tests.”

I closed my eyes.

I heard Wally draw a deep breath.

I said, “Pneumonia?”

“Jason, we can’t beat all the bugs on Earth, much less the pathogens on fourteen alien planets.”

I opened my eyes. “I don’t understand.”

Wally pulled up two chairs, sat me in one, then sat down across from me and laid a hand on my knee. “We’ve seen this bug infect Earthborns on Bren before. Mostly picked up in the Highlands, maybe waterborne. Ord was out in the boonies a couple days while you were gone. The locals are resistant. In Earthborns, it mimics cold and flu, while it digs in.”

“Digs in. Where?”

“Jason, it’s a total bastard. Once it gets going, it fragments erythrocytes faster than we can transfuse the patient.”

“It’s eating his blood?”

“The red cells.”

“You have antibiotics.”

Wally shook his head. “In a few years, maybe.”

“The medic shot me up with a blood booster before the Weichsel raid. That would replace the red cells.”

Wally shook his head again.

“You can transplant bone marrow.”

Wally sighed. “That’s cancer. Cancer would be easier.”

I shook my head back at him. “No. Not Ord. No bug would dare—”

“DeArthur’s a tough customer. But he doesn’t have a younger man’s immune system, Jason.”

“Wally, listen up! I’m a fucking lieutenant general. I said no! Doesn’t that count for something?”

I walked to the window, shaking my head. Troops drilled in the sunlight, and in the distance, aircraft floated into the cloudless sky. I said into the windowpane, “No, no, no!”

Blood roared in my ears, and finally I knew that my rank and my rage counted for nothing. Ord was dying. Not cut down in combat like a soldier. Murdered by some fucking Mesozoic bacteria. I grasped the windowsill, then pounded my fists on it. I spun and pointed at Wally. “Goddamit! You call yourself a fucking doctor? I want the nurse who sent him home with two aspirin in my office in an hour! With her lawyer!”

“She could have shot him home to the Mayo Clinic on a cruiser and the result would be the same, Jason.”

I pounded the wall again, until my fists were sore, while Wally stood by, silent. Finally I turned to him. “How long?”

“Art’s in remarkable shape for his age. And we can transfuse the hell out of him.”

I blinked back tears. “How long?”

“Three weeks. Two quality.”

I stepped back until I steadied myself against the windowsill, then whispered, “Does he know?”

Wally nodded.

I wiped my eyes with the heel of my hand, then straightened my gig line. “Where is he?”

“I’ll take you to him.”

THIRTY-FOUR

WALLY LEFT ME IN THE HALL outside Ord’s room to suck it up. I got my game face on and stepped toward the door.

Dialogue I recognized, from a remastered holo of the last reel of a century-old flatscreen, trickled through the open door, out into the hallway. It was an Ord favorite. John Wayne, who played a U.S. Marine sergeant, was saying something about never feeling better in his life. As I recall, he said this during a lull in battle, while lighting up a cigarette, which shows you how times change.
Bang.
There was a shot, and the sergeant was dead. The end. Maybe times didn’t change.

I froze, then sagged against the doorjamb and recomposed myself, while I listened to music play over the end credits.

Silence.

I rapped on the doorjamb. “Sergeant Major?”

“Come! And close the door behind you, trainee!” It was an exchange Ord and I had shared decades ago, when I was the worst trainee he ever had, and he was to me, well, what he had been for as long as I had known him.

I stepped into the room, around the gauzy screen that shielded the rest of the hospital from his wrath. Ord lay on top of his sheets, cranked up to the angle of a poolside chaise. His arms and legs toothpicked out of a hospital smock, without his uniform the pale and fragile limbs of an old man. He smiled at me as midmorning sun angled across his torso. Now that I knew, the hollows in his cheeks seemed so obvious. He said, “Thought I might enjoy a vacation at taxpayer expense, sir!”

I nodded. “About time, Sergeant Major. Mind if I join you?”

He wrinkled his forehead. “Sir, our paperwork—”

“Is being handled by Staff Sergeant Tierney and Brigadier Hawkins. You have a problem with either of those gentlemen’s capacity?”

He stiffened. “Certainly not, sir.”

Lunch was better than Meals, Utility, Dessicated. Barely. We watched
Sands of Iwo Jima
again, together. By the time the sergeant died again, late-afternoon shadows shrouded the room. I said, “I talked to Colonel Wallace.”

“I presumed as much, sir. If the general needs anything over the next week or two, I should still be able—”

I raised my palm. “What I need, Sergeant Major, is to come back again for the day, tomorrow. Maybe every day for a while. You okay with that?”

He tucked his chin against his chest. “If the general can spare the time.”

“I can lay my hands on
Sergeant York
by tomorrow. Not colorized. Vintage.”

He smiled. “I’d enjoy that, sir.”

I got up at three to handle morning reports, met staff an hour earlier than usual, and arrived in Ord’s hospital room before lunch. By that time, Wally’s vampires had him tubed up, so he was sucking whole blood like Bela Lugosi.

After
Sergeant York,
he cleared his throat. “Sir, Adjutant General’s Corps stopped by today before you got here. For my DR-663 CONUS Option Interview.”

I shook my head. “English, Sergeant Major?”

“Disposal of remains, sir. Next of kin of personnel deceased outside the Continental United States have the option of repatriation of remains to CONUS at government expense by first available transport.”

I pressed my lips together. “Damn generous of the government, isn’t it, Sergeant Major?”

“Sir, I identified you as next of kin—”

I shook my head. “I—”

“—and if it’s all the same to you, sir, I’d as soon not make the trip.”

I blinked, swallowed, then stretched a smile. “Always trying to save the taxpayers a buck, Sergeant Major?”

“Sir, it’s more that I’d like you to be there. And I’m told the Marini do military funerals up quite nicely.”

I mumbled, “Anything. Anything you want.”

“My will’s in my footlocker, upper right corner of the pull-up shelf. It’s up-to-date. Everything goes to the Noncommissioned Officers’ Orphan’s Fund.” He slid folded papers across his nightstand toward me. “GI life-insurance policy. Enough to get me buried, buy a round for everybody at the NCO Club, and—”

I hid my forehead behind my palm, then ran my hand across my hair. “Stop!”

Silence.

“Please. Sergeant Major, you don’t need to worry about that stuff. It will be taken care of. I swear.”

I breathed deep. “Do you want to talk about—I dunno—anything?”

He nodded. “There is something. One item of personalty I want to pass outside the will.” He rolled on his side, then reached into his nightstand’s drawer. He drew out a leather-holstered pistol. I smiled. “Ah. The forty-five.” Weapons had always been a busman’s holiday for Ord, the only

“personalty” he valued that hadn’t been issued to him by the government.

The pistol he cradled, in a hand that seemed to have withered even since the preceding day, was his own M1911 Colt automatic. The design was pushing two centuries old. Too heavy, too hard to fire accurately, but Ord wasn’t the only careerist who continued to carry a service .45 into combat as his sidearm. Ord’s was an aftermarket blue steel version that he had souped up with custom-carved grips and hand balancing. And one unique modification made the pistol worth what it cost—a scratch along the receiver where the steel of Ord’s .45 had stopped a bullet bound for his heart. He drew the pistol from its holster and turned it in his hands. “Saw me through the Second Afghan, sir. Saw
you
through the Armada business.”

I bowed as I sat, diplomat style. “A loan I was honored to receive. And lucky to repay.”

He gazed at the ceiling, then closed his eyes, nodding as he recited postings and battles. “The Relief of Ganymede. Sudan. Kazakhstan. Peru. Tibet. Headwaters of the Marin. Emerald River. The Tressen Barrens Offensive. Second Mousetrap…”

I eyed the insurance policy flimsy on the nightstand, and a coal-black, ancient trough of a scar on his forearm, a badge of some forgotten heroics, then sighed. “You didn’t get much for that life, Sergeant Major.”

Ord opened his eyes and smiled. “On the contrary, sir. Churchill said all we make by what we get is a living. We make a life by what we give.”

By delegating things I shouldn’t have, cutting out catnaps, and pounding ’Phets like I hadn’t since I was a teenager during finals, I managed to spend most of Ord’s waking hours with him. Our blood matched, so I gave him a pint, then lied to a different nurse about it so that she took another pint a day later. I wheedled a medic for precombat blood boosters, to fool my body into making more red cells, so I could be transfused again, though the medic told me they wouldn’t grow until it was too late. No matter. Over the next nine days, the bug silently ate Ord alive, from the inside out. On the tenth day, I sat with him for the last time.