Роберт Бюттнер: Orphan's Journey

U.S. tax dollars subsidized New Moon’s commercial window dressing, not the other way around. The deadbeat Chinese handled Firewitch research participation just like they handled technology development of everything from last-century submarine propellers to Drive-by-Wire Hover Nano’Puters. They let America finance the discovering, then tried to steal the results.

Therefore, New Moon crawled with more MSS agents than the Chinese Spook academy. This meant that the Firewitch, and bike tire number three, a.k.a. the Spook Ring, to which the Firewitch was joined, were off-limits to Happiness-Hyatt’s guests. As if they cared.

The tycoon’s wife shuddered. “I hate seeing that Slug thing.”

“You won’t. I sprung for outboard views. But we should visit the Memorial.” The tycoon shrugged. “History and all.”

His wife shuddered again. “I hope it’s just history.”

He patted her hand. “It’s been sixteen years. Even that kid general must be over thirty. Wonder where he wound up.”

The wife rummaged through her silk arrival kit, and fished out a real-glass lotion bottle. “Look, dear! Lily de Chine!” She cocked her head. “I’m sure he found a nice girl and they had a family.”

We passengers nodded forward as the Clipper bumped New Moon’s mooring collar. The nicest girl I ever knew was also the best pilot anybody ever knew. She would have flown the Clipper in without a nudge. But she died. No family.

Once the Clipper moored, and New Moon’s rotation gave us weight, Ord went to claim baggage.

I walked through the disembarkation tube directly into the Happiness-Hyatt lobby. Across the lush bustle, through a quartz inboard wall, the Firewitch loomed. Its forward mag rifles were in-folded like alien squid tentacles, and it gleamed as blue as bruises. Breathtaking, if you like reminding about a war that killed sixty million people.

I shuddered like Mrs. Tycoon.

“Jason!” Sharia Munshara-Metzger ran across the lobby, then hugged me as hard as a four-foot-ten Egyptian woman can. If she’s a former infantry soldier, that’s hard enough to pinch a regrown lung. I winced.

She sprang back, eyes wide. “I’m sorry. You looked fine.”

A hospitality ’Bot glided by. I snatched free champagne from its tray and gulped. “You look better than fine.” Her eyes still shone huge and brown, her olive skin remained smooth, and she fit her tailored suit just as well as she had eleven years ago. I waved my glass at the hanging orchids and lacquered tables. “You all live fat up here, Munchkin.”

Munchkin shrugged. “The Spook Ring’s more like base housing.”

I glanced around. “Where’s my godson?”

She stared into the carpet. “He didn’t come over with me.”

“Howard keeps him busy?”

Munchkin pointed to a tube signed “Shops and Entertainment” as she took my arm. “I’ll show you around. We’ll talk later.”

I frowned. When Munchkin postponed talks, what came later was always bad.

FIVE

MUNCHKIN LED ME DOWN a boutique corridor where tourists browsed space-themed trinkets, as well as ordinary goods made extraordinary by shipping them twenty-three thousand miles.

I had shared foxholes with Munchkin, patched her wounds, served my best friend as Best Man when Munchkin married him, and delivered her first and only child seven months after the Slug War widowed her. I knew Munchkin better than a brother knew his sister. Whatever was wrong with Jason Udey Munshara-Metzger, I would hear about it only when she was ready.

At a kiosk in the corridor ahead of us, the tycoon from the Clipper and his wife eyed a zucchini-sized model Firewitch. The model’s stand held a blue-black cinder in a transparent vial.

The wife bent and read the tag. “It says it’s a real fragment from the Pittsburgh Projectile.”

The tycoon snorted and dragged her away. “At that price it should be real.”

I bent and whispered to Munchkin, “Does anybody remember the real price, anymore, Munchkin?”

Munchkin gripped my hand. “We asked the hotel not to sell souvenirs. But it’s been sixteen years since the Blitz. Everybody knows the Slugs bypassed Earth. Or they’re all dead.”

Munchkin waved her wrist ID at the wall, a hatch irised open, and we stepped into an unlabeled tube Cap.

“Where does this—”

The hatch closed.

Munchkin said, “To the Spook Ring.”

I nodded. “Howard doesn’t need a toy space ship. He’s got his own life-sized Firewitch to play with.”

The Cap shot through the tube and we both floated for a second.

“He shares his toy with eight hundred other geeks.”

“Who all report to him.”

We stepped out of the Cap, and a live MP Corporal who looked too young to be wearing the sidearm on her belt — and too petite to be an MP — checked our ID. She looked back and forth at me, then at my image, then patted me down.

Munchkin led me through another hatch into an admin bubble in which a slim man slouched, intent on his screens. Bubbles were paperless offices, but Howard’s bulged with ancient books that swung open like chipboards, charts, and scraps of rock and bone that he’d packratted, even into orbit.

Sixteen years had changed only Colonel Howard Hibble’s rank. He was the same wrinkle-faced scarecrow I met at the height of the Blitz, when he was a new-minted Intelligence Captain, and I was the Army’s most expendable trainee.

Howard’s uniform bagged over his bones, and he still wore turn-of-the-century plastic vision lenses. Wire replaced one missing temple piece. Before the Blitz, Howard had been a Professor of Extraterrestrial Intelligence Studies. Since only nuts believed in extraterrestrial intelligence, Howard’s job was as relevant as clog dancing. Then the Slugs greased Indy and Cairo faster than a sneeze.

Howard sprang from his chair, arms wide, as the screens retracted. “Jason!” He tugged the tooth-dented yellow stub of an antique wooden pencil from his mouth and waved it sadly. “The only smoking on New Moon’s the Cigar Lounge in the hotel.”

“They wouldn’t let me start now, if I wanted to.”

He frowned. “New lung?”

“And Plasteel femurs. I’ve got enough Carbon9 in me to make a racing bike.”

Howard winced. “You up to a tour?”

“I’ve been resting for months. Lead on.” The truth was that just flying up on the Clipper, then following Munchkin around for a quarter hour, had left my knees trembling.

Howard waved on a holo in the compartment’s center and conjured a shimmering image of the Spook Ring, surrounding a floating Firewitch. The display stretched longer than an Electrovan.

Howard pointed to a tube that connected the Ring to the Slug ship, like a bike wheel connected to its hub by a single spoke. “We breached the hull here, amidships, four years ago. The Exit Tube was completed a year later. Wonderful engineering. The Tube’s both structural and umbilical. What we found once we got inside amazed us.”

I raised my eyebrows. “It hasn’t amazed the public.”

“If we publicized results, we’d have to publicize costs. You know how politicians get about costs.”

“Not to mention how taxpayers get.”

Howard crooked a finger and led me away from the holo compartment. “Besides, there are minor risks I’d as soon not dwell on.”

Hair stood on my neck. “The last minor risk you didn’t dwell on almost extincted mankind.”

“Nothing like that.”

“Of course not.”

Howard waved his hand as he led me past row after row of admin bubbles. Within them rank after rank of his technicians labored. He smiled and waved. They ignored him. As a full-bird Colonel, Howard had the command presence of dryer lint. But nobody on Earth knew Slugs like he did. Not even me.