Роберт Бюттнер: Orphan's Journey

I shook my head. “So why—”

“I thought it over. Then I just thumbed the contract.” She dropped her eyes and stared down into the Firewitch’s lumpy deckplates. “Jason, Jude needed a change.”

“Change what? He’s a great kid.”

“You haven’t seen him for three years. He’s sixteen, now. Suddenly, adults are all—” She paused. For former infantry, Munchkin cursed rarely.

“Puggers?”

“Every fifth word is the ‘P’ word. Even around girls.” Munchkin rolled her eyes. “And the girls he was hanging around…”

“Ah.” I nodded. Metzger had saved the human race, and he’d been my best friend since preschool, but at Jude’s age we had both been jerks bound for nowhere good. “His father and I survived sixteen. And then we found nice girls.”

I bit the words off. Even after all the years, it was as bad a joke to Munchkin as to me.

Munchkin swallowed, blinked, then shook her head. “Maybe. But he won’t listen to me.”

“He’s your minor child. Tell him he’d better fire up this ship. Or he doesn’t get to fire up the Electrovan on Saturday night. That always got my attention, even if it ticked me off.”

Howard frowned. “It’s not as simple as physically starting the family car. Pseudocephalopod control systems are more like brain link robotics, extrapolated to next century.”

“He has to want to drive this van?”

Howard nodded. “But he won’t even talk to any of us. Not even my younger techs.”

I smiled. “He’s always talked to me.” The shrinks said Jude saw me like a father. Of course, they said I saw Ord that way, too, which was bent.

We walked toward the Firewitch’s midships, down another oval corridor. Howard smiled back. “That’s what we thought.”

I stopped, and held up my hand. “What we?”

“Me, the psychologists, and Nat Cobb.”

“I got pulled off important military duty for this? To manipulate a teenager?”

Howard chewed his gum faster. “This is important. The Firewitch project’s stopped dead, but the meter’s running. New Moon’s daily operating budget exceeds Finland’s. Besides, Nat said your people skills needed work.”

I hung my hands on my rebuilt hips. “The Army can make me fight. But it can’t make me manipulate my own godson.”

“Just think it over.” It would never occur to Howard that I had no right to think it over. Unlike sixteen-year-olds, soldiers obey lawful orders. But it occurred to me.

Howard cleared his throat, then waved his arms at the ship around us. He was a geek, but he knew how to change subjects. “You never saw this aspect of a Pseudocephalopod vessel, Jason.”

I stared. I’d crawled through an inbound Projectile during the Blitz, and a Troll-class incubator ship four years later, but always with Slugs chasing me.

The passage widened. Not only was a Firewitch as big as a domed stadium on the outside, it was as open as one inside. I couldn’t have hit a nine iron to the far end of the chamber we now stood in. At the chamber end opposite us grew another lump, like the pilot chamber we had left. It took us five minutes to walk to the opposite lump. “Why all this empty space, Howard?”

“Buffer zone.” Howard handed each of us dark goggles that hung on a rack placed alongside a passage into the lump, then in we wriggled.

The passage widened into a chamber like the inside of a fifty-foot-wide purple egg. At its center floated a thirty-foot-tall glassy sphere, which seemed to be filled with boiling ruby fog.

Howard stepped under the sphere, reached up, and rapped it with his knuckles. “That glowing miasma inside this shielding is raw Cavorite. An unprotected Pseudocephalopod warrior would have dropped dead before it entered the passage we just crawled through.”

“Howard, we aren’t protected.”

“No need. Shielded Cavorite has no discernible effect on humans. Though you wouldn’t want to swallow any. But Pseudocephalopod tissue we preserved after the Ganymede campaign decomposed like fat in a blast furnace at this range.”

He pointed at panels that curved across the sphere. “Open a shutter, and unshielded Cavorite weakens gravity in that direction. The mass of the universe pulls the ship in the other direction. Simple. Elegant. This chamber’s size keeps the poison at arm’s length.”

“Slugs don’t have arms,” I said as Howard led us back into the main chamber.

Howard said, “People do. Which brings us back to your stubborn godson.”

“Manipulating people isn’t a GI’s job.”

Munchkin said, “Leading people is a General’s job.”

“I’m not that kind of General. And when did you jump on the government bandwagon?”

“When I realized we can’t leave until Jude makes Howard’s stupid chair light up.” Munchkin pointed at the big toadstool.

Behind us, a mechanical whine rose and echoed in the Firewitch’s vastness.

I turned and saw Ord, pointing this way, then that. Behind him lurched a Cargo’Bot caravan, like spidery Sherpa porters.

Howard said, “Your baggage is here.”

Munchkin turned her chin up like a snippy little sister, and pointed at Ord. “Why don’t you ask your Command Sergeant Major what kind of General you are?”

I pointed at her. “I will!”

I did. I wished I hadn’t.

SEVEN

I WALKED TOWARD ORD. Within twenty yards, my long-unused thigh muscles burned, even at Orbital Weight. By the time I reached him, he had decrypted the anti-tamper on a Plasteel crate, and two ’Bots were lifting out a V-Range’s holo generator.

This assignment had as much to do with military advising as frogs had to do with fireworks. But General Cobb, bless him, had issued orders to Ord and me together as the Fourth Military Advisory Team (Detached). I hadn’t signed any gear in or out, so the lost GATr remained officially unlost. And I remained officially unbankrupt. But the taxpayers had shipped four tons of useless equipment to space like tycoon luggage.

Ord saluted. “This is the only Pressurized Volume on New Moon large enough to deploy the Small-Arms Firing Simulator. Colonel Hibble suggested the location, Sir.”

The sole resemblance between a Sergeant and anybody’s mommy is both can do six things at once. In the time it had taken Munchkin to walk me from the hotel through Howard’s tour, Ord had recovered our equipment from the Clipper, consulted the Spook Ring’s Commanding Officer on where to set it up, hired ’Bots, moved the gear, changed from civvies into pressed Utilities, and polished his old-style boots so they shone like glass.

Ord held out a Chipboard and pointed to icons on the screen. “You thumb here, here, and here, Sir.” Ord had also completed our disembarkation forms, billeting vouchers, detached-duty per diem authorizations, and enough other documents to sink the Bismarck.

I thumbed where he told me to.

The Small-Arms Firing Simulator flickered as the ’Bots calibrated it. Once the SAFS was calibrated, Ord and I would be equipped to teach any lay civilians with IQs higher than bacteria to aim and fire any infantry weapon sold aftermarket anywhere on Earth at any time in the last century.

But why uncrate the SAFS? I smiled inside and nodded to myself. Sane soldiers slept, overate, or chipped home during free moments. Ord low-crawled around the firing range, testing antique firearms he restored on his own nickel. This he misnamed fun.

Sacrificing a few inconsequential hours of the SAFS’ useful life to satisfy Ord’s soldierly perversions didn’t bother me. I would commend any other soldier who was that devoted. But opportunities to rib Ord for anything, no matter how minor, had been few since the first day he roasted me in Basic.

I looked away so he couldn’t see me smile. “We offering the tourists target practice, Sergeant Major?”