Роберт Бюттнер - Orphan's Journey

Munchkin turned away, her head shaking, and sobbed. “I can’t.” I touched Metzger’s name for her.

She buried her face in my chest and we cried together. I don’t know how long.

I dried her tears with my lapel. “Come back to my cabin. There’s an old friend there who’ll cheer you up.”

My cabin befit a General, meaning I had a room with stall shower, fold-down bunk, and desk. And a robot cockroach, hanging from the ceiling.

I opened the hatch and whispered, “Company, Jeeb.”

Jeeb wasn’t part of the furniture. I held his title chip. He was an obsolete Tactical Observation Transport, bought at DOD auction.

Jeeb had once been brain-linked to a name on the Memorial Wall. Ari Klein; SP6; UNSF; Medal of Honor; Posthumous. Ari had been a TOT wrangler. More important, he had been my friend.

I bought Jeeb for scrap. If a Wrangler dies, or his linked TOT gets fried, it’s prohibitively expensive to rehabilitate the other. Really, I had adopted an orphan.

“Jeeb!” Munchkin squealed.

Jeeb flew into her arms like a thrown football. If footballs had six legs. J-series TOTs still had eye-shaped optics, and radar-absorbent fuzz for skin. Compared to puppies, TOTs creep people out, because they look like roaches as big as turkeys. But compared to cold modern Tacticals, Jeeb was an anthropomorphic teddy bear.

Jeeb folded his wings, then backflopped on my bunk, six legs flailing. Munchkin scratched his belly, and his diagnostics hummed.

That’s just the way it looked. It’s true that even an old TOT like Jeeb has more cognitive power than an Enhanced Australian Cattle Dog’s brain. But ’Bots were animate machines, nothing more.

The stuff about TOTs acquiring personalities from their wranglers was nonsense. Or so Jeeb’s technical manuals claimed.

Munchkin drew her finger across a scratch that diagonaled across the radar-absorbent fuzz that coated Jeeb’s back, and frowned. “He’s older.”

I rocked back. If Jeeb was old, I was old. “He’s old, but he’s combat-fit. If you want to map a battlefield, eavesdrop a thousand conversations at once, or learn Mandarin overnight, Jeeb’s still a TOT ready to trot.”

Jeeb rolled his whining carcass over, mooching a back-scratch from Munchkin. It just looked that way. The J-Series was programmed to preen its radar-absorbent skin against any non-abrasive object.

She stroked the scratch and smoothed it away. Jeeb purred.

Munchkin said, “I should have just taken a Mandarin lesson last night.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Last night? Do tell.” Munchkin got lucky rarely. Me even more rarely. Unfortunately, I was the only one of us two who was trying.

“Not that. I had a bad dream. About tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow’s cake.”

She shook her head. “Maybe. But after this, they can take my pension. Jude’s not coming back up here.”

“But Howard—”

“Howard’s a devious idiot.”

“Howard’s not really dishonest. He’s a smart kid who’s covered up to fit in since kindergarten.”

Munchkin raised her eyebrows. “Since when did you start having motivational insights?”

Including forcing my surrogate sister to face the reality that her husband was dead.

I cocked my head. Since, I guessed, Ord and Nat Cobb sent me up here for a cram course in family.

I chucked her chin. “I’ll be there tomorrow, too. I’m not an idiot.”

“You have your moments.”

Unlike me, Munchkin already had insight. It’s in female DNA. But, though I might have my idiot moments, history can’t blame what happened next on me.

TEN

HOWARD SCHEDULED THE LIVE TEST for dawn. In geosynchronous orbit, the sun still rises just once each day.

The only reason for Ord and me to remain on New Moon was Jude. After this morning, Jude would be gone. Surely, General Cobb could bury MAT(D)4 somewhere else harmless. If not, and I had to face the music over the lost GATr, so be it. I had Ord book us on the Down Clipper.

I slept late, then overspent per diem on a hotel breakfast.

By the time I reached the Firewitch’s big bay, Ord already had a ’Bot gaggle poised to haul our gear to Clipper check-in. Jeeb, who never slept, perched on a crate.

“All accounted for, Sergeant Major?”

He saluted. “To the last MUD, Sir.”

I sighed. “A deployment without Meals Utility, Dessicated is a day without sunshine.”

Ord stared toward the control room’s bustle. His gray eyes unfroze. “Soft deployment, true. But I rather enjoyed being part of it, Sir.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Who’s soft now, Sergeant Major?”

Ord shrugged. “When I was a boy…”

My eyebrows ticked up further. I had assumed Ord sprang from the womb in pressed fatigues, forty years old.

He continued, “We had discovered that the rest of the Solar System was cold rocks. Not worth a human trip. After Ganymede, I never thought I’d live to see mankind reach for the stars.”

It’s not that people ignore historic moments. It’s that they don’t know they’re in them. I said, “Shut down the ’Bots, Sergeant Major. Starting a starship’s engine’s a pretty short reach. But let’s go watch.”

Ord actually smiled at me.

When we got to the control chamber portal, the petite MP Corporal who had checked me and Munchkin in on my first day was working security. Even after six weeks of carding me daily, she rotated my ID in spotless, white-gloved hands. Maybe I fit the Chinese-Agent profile. Then she handed my ID back stone-faced, with a perfect salute.

Ord’s kind of gal.

Over the past six weeks, she must have carded Ord as often as she had me. But when he stepped up, her eyes lit, and I noticed they were blue.

She whispered to Ord behind her glove, “They accepted my App!”

Ord grinned at her, then shook her hand. “Outstanding! You’ll love it.”

She still carded him.

As we stepped through the portal, I asked Ord, “What was that about?”

“I recommended the Corporal for Drill Sergeant’s School, Sir.”

“Funny. She seemed so normal.”

Ord smiled at my joke. Two smiles in ten minutes broke his record. Maybe this tour really had grown me up.

I patted my breakfasted-but-solid-again belly.

Nothing could spoil a day that started this well.

ELEVEN

INSIDE THE CONTROL CHAMBER, every admin-bubble row glowed like strung pearls. Supervisors hovered behind each row, their eyes for once on Howard. Two hundred voices rumbled like an idling MagLev.

The vents were cranked to teeth-chatter cold. As the day wore on, two hundred tense bodies would make the chamber steam.

Howard stood in a hydraulically elevated basket that was raised up even with the empty control couch, like he was an orchestra conductor. Somebody had even pressed his uniform.

Ord and I stepped alongside Munchkin, who stood hugging herself against the chill. I poked her, then whispered, “Where’s Jude?”

Howard pointed to a side hatch. He said nothing, though he wore a lapel mike. Two Zoomies opened the hatch.

Suddenly, the only sound was vent whisper, and Howard’s breathing, magnified through his mike.

The figure who entered wore pilot coveralls, with “Metzger” stitched above his heart. Strawberry-blond, arrow-straight, with a fighter jock’s swagger.

My jaw dropped.

Ord said, “The resemblance is—”

Munchkin sobbed.

I swallowed, so I didn’t.

Jude stopped at the base of the stairs that led to the Pilot Couch, then lifted his arms while techs wired him.

Howard nodded. Jude climbed, and as he corkscrewed around the pedestal, he faced us.

He winked. Not arrogant, just supremely confident, like his father had been.

Twenty minutes later, Jude was hidden from us, down in the pedestal. The techs scurried off the platform and into the shadows.