Роберт Бюттнер - Orphan's Journey

“You missed your Annual Live-Fire Small-Arms Qualification while you were hospitalized, Sir. The qualifying standard allows Virtual-Range makeup exams. But your deadline is midnight, tonight. I don’t think your taking the test will detract from this… important mission.”

“Oh.” Well, someday I would catch Ord in a screw-up. But Ord’s last remark puzzled me. It was as close as I’d ever heard him come to bitching about lawful orders.

“Wondering how you and me playing tourist defends the United States, Sergeant Major?”

He shrugged. “General Cobb always has his reasons, Sir.”

“Sure. I think it sucks, too. Colonel Hibble just told me what it’s really about. The Army shanghaied Commodore Metzger’s sixteen-year-old son up here.” I looked up eighty feet, to the Slug-metal ceiling. “The Spooks think Jude’s the only human who can switch this monstrosity on.”

Ord raised gray eyebrows. “Interstellar travel’s quite a prize. If the young man’s a chip off the Metzger block…”

“At the moment the chip’s acting like a teenage dick on the first day of Basic. His godfather’s supposed to talk him out of his attitude.”

Ord knelt beside another Plasteel crate, thumbed off its anti-tamper, and lifted out an assault rifle, while he narrowed his eyes and nodded. “I did agree with General Cobb that this assignment could give you time to mature.”

I snorted. The Pentagon made Byzantium look transparent. Not only had Cobb and Hibble cooked this up behind my back, Ord was an unindicted co-conspirator. “So you think I’m a lousy officer, too?”

Ord concentrated on the rifle. It was a decrepit Kalashnikov AK-47, but so taffy-appled in Cosmoline preservative that I barely recognized it. “Sir, war means people die until somebody wins. Once our country puts us in it, the way home is win it. A Commander too focused on saving his troops, and not on the mission, doesn’t win. In the end, defeat kills more soldiers than compassion saves.”

“I’m too soft?”

“You’re human. And young.”

“And twisting my godson’s arm will age me?”

Ord held out the gooey AK-47 in one hand, a Laser Simulation Adapter and cleaning kit in the other. “First things first, Sir.”

“You expect me to qualify with that?” I stared. The year before we left for Tibet, I made my Annual Qual on a range in the Pentagon subbasement. An Orderly helped me into goggles and earmuffs, then handed me a zeroed, white-glove-clean M-40. I rattled off a few rounds. I handed back the rifle, the Orderly handed back my coffee and my upchecked Qual form. I sat back down in my General’s swivel chair twenty minutes after I left it.

Ord smiled. The last time he smiled at me like that, I had ended up scrubbing a Basic-barracks latrine with a manual toothbrush. “Sometimes we learn our best lessons the simplest ways, General.”

We were a two-soldier unit, so Ord was my judge and jury for field-administered testing, just as I was his. If he downchecked me on Small Arms, I’d be stuck with six weeks’ reorientation. Even though I wore stars, and he wore chevrons.

I sighed, then grasped the tar baby and started cleaning.

Insurgents still choose the century-old Avtomat Kalashnikova Model 1947. It’s inaccurate, even with 2050s optics, but cheaper than rocks, unjammable even if it’s dragged through yak dung, and it makes human meat just as well as an M-40. However, an AK is wood and steel, and weighs more than two modern rifles.

Ord made me low-crawl between stations, like a rookie. I still fired expert, even dragging that old blunderbuss.

I lay on the deck wheezing while Ord eyed the score screen. “A couple more runs should do it, Sir.”

“What? I hit seventy-six of eighty!”

“I’ve seen the General fire seventy-eight.”

Two hours of crawling over Slug metal later, my knees and elbows throbbed and looked like pizza. But I fired seventy-nine.

Ord rewarded me by downloading the Rehab PT schedule that Bethesda had ’mailed up. I slapped the Reader. “This isn’t Rehab. It’s sadism!”

Ord relocked a tamperproof, eyeing my noodle-soft forearms. “As you say, Sir. Would the General care to join me for his prescribed morning run?”

No was not an option. “Okay.” I rolled sideways, so I could stand without using my knees, then slouched toward the exit tube. “I’m gonna shower, Sergeant Major.”

Then I was going to visit the only person aboard these hamster wheels who felt sorrier for himself than I did.

EIGHT

I FOUND THAT PERSON somersaulting around the Airpool.

Once they’ve gawked the Earthviews, the only thing people can really do in space that they can’t do dirtside is fly.

New Moon tacks people to its decks with rotational gravity, so tourists can’t even enjoy flying in the 90 percent of Pressurized Volume that makes up the outer rings.

New Moon’s specs describe the Airpool as pure utility, the auxiliary atmosphere reservoir. But those swooping, smiling models in the holo ads sure sell vacations.

Suspended from a hollow transfer tube that runs inboard from the hotel ring to the centerline, the Airpool dome is wider and taller than a dirtside hockey rink.

And more fun. On New Moon’s dead-centerline, everything weighs zero. Even at the Airpool’s rotating edge, a person weighs ten pounds. Give average goofs arm and leg paddles, helmets, and lessons, and they soar through the Airpool like eagles. Well, turkeys, at least.

I buckled my rental helmet while trophy wives jiggled overhead. In designer synlon that couldn’t have increased their weight one ounce. No wonder a sixteen-year-old male spent hours here.

Above the rental counter, a hundred helmeted novices flailed. Above them coasted two dozen experienced flyers, barely twitching custom-painted paddles.

Above them all, Jude soared and barrel rolled from one perch to the next. His father’s athleticism showed in every flip and rebound.

He looked down, spotted me, and waved me up.

I shook my head and shouted, “Doctor’s orders.” It was only half a lie. The last thing I wanted to do was jump a hundred feet up and crack an aching knee or elbow against some tourist’s paddle. Heights scared me even when I didn’t feel fragile.

“Wuss!” He grinned, then folded back arm paddles air-brushed with skull-and-crossbones. Then he plunged two hundred feet like a swooping Peregrine falcon. He flared his paddles at the last nanosecond and shot through a semi-private lesson group. Jude didn’t even mess anybody’s hair, but a woman screamed. Then my godson touched down beside me.

The group instructor glared at Jude and held up his index finger. “One more! One more and you’re gone, Metzger!”

Jude flicked a different finger at the instructor. “Pugger.” Then he turned to me and grinned. “You should have seen the losers I scared yesterday. That bozo sounds like Mom. ‘Jude! Language, please! Jude! Language, please!’”

“Your mother said you clipped somebody last month.”

“Utter pugger. He was in the wrong layer.”

In fact, my godson’s recklessness had broken an old man’s arm. So far, Jude hadn’t been banished to dirtside Juvie only through repeated interventions by Howard’s JAG officer. I began to share Munchkin’s parental pangs.

We bumped knuckles. I hadn’t seen Jude in three years, but sixteen-year-old thug-wannabes don’t hug.

I said, “I brought us real bacon.” I hadn’t known when I overpaid at duty-free, but the hotel sizzled up Genu-Swine on its breakfast buffet as lavishly as Fakon. Years ago, frying overloaded ship ventilation, so bacon was a delicacy, off-planet. Now, just pay Climate Offsets, certify you’ve added null-gravity diet supplements, then fry up a storm. What was space coming to?