Роберт Бюттнер - Orphan's Destiny

The platoon stared at me.

I looked up, as poker-faced as I could, and waited a heartbeat. “One.” I smiled. “Forty-four!”

The soldiers whooped and slapped high-fives.

When the cheering trickled away, Ord said, “Outstanding! However, I heard a Marine platoon completed the exercise in one thirty-nine. Practice, ladies and gentlemen. We’ll try it again in ten.”

Ord led me around the corner into a platoon sergeant’s empty cabin, while the stunned platoon began breaking down their rifles yet again.

I said, “We never would have beat Brace if you hadn’t told me to pick noncoms, Sergeant Major. That was brilliant!”

Ord closed the hatch, then crossed his arms. He didn’t match my grin. “May I speak frankly to the general?”

Huh? “I wouldn’t want the sergeant major to speak any other way.”

Ord’s brow furrowed. “Beating Admiral Brace was not my objective. Nor should it have been yours. That tactic wasn’t brilliant. It was obvious! To any officer with a grain of sense and a few years’ experience! I think you have the grain of sense. Sir. I gave you the clue because you don’t have the experience, which isn’t your fault.”

“But Brace—”

“Admiral Brace should have seen it coming, too. But he’s a technocrat. Besides, he couldn’t have kept you from choosing noncoms.”

“You expected me to do it!”

Ord nodded. “I did, sir. Then I expected you to take the admiral aside, explain what the outcome would be, then use your advantage to work out an equitable solution. I did not expect you to undermine the relationship between the services, not to mention the relationship between you and the admiral.”

I jerked a thumb back toward the platoon bay, where rifles clattered. “You were just running down squids and jarheads!”

Ord paused, then nodded. “Fair point, sir. I’d have thought the general would understand the difference between a bit of fun and the absolute need for teamwork when the chips are down.”

Ord’s sergeantly idea of a bit of fun evidently extended as far as knocking out some squid’s teeth in a bar fight. But I took his point.

“Learn from this, sir. The next time you and Admiral Brace have to work together, lives may hang in the balance. Inter-service rivalry should end after the Army-Navy game.”

“Understood, Sergeant Major.” I said it solemnly. In fact, I believed it. But the truth was that once we got home Brace would swirl away from my ground-bound future like a gum wrapper down a flushed toilet. Ord had taught me a sound lesson, but an irrelevant one.

Other than that trial, the voyage home was what space travel really is: a boring, cramped prison sentence. Except convicts don’t have to inhale sour air that somebody else just exhaled.

Excalibur returned to her birthplace, orbit around the moon, 240 days later. She settled in like she had never left. I expected that whatever changes Earth had undergone during the five years I had been away wouldn’t faze me either, not after what I had been through.

I was as wrong as hogs in skirts.

TWELVE

TWO WEEKS AFTER EXCALIBUR RETURNED to lunar orbit, Howard and I stepped through Excalibur’s lock to board the V-Star Mimi Ozawa would pilot home. My troops had been first down, then Third Division, then Excalibur’s nonessential crew. Brace would be the last man off.

A red-haired Space Force enlisted man, using an old-fashioned bristle brush in the low-gravity, confined atmosphere, painted clear gel along the plasticine hatch seal.

“Does Admiral Brace ever get tired of making you folks paint?” I asked him.

The EM grinned. “The admiral is fond of his paint, sir. But this isn’t paint. It’s preservative. Once this V-Star clears this lock, we mothball the whole ship. When we go dirtside, Excalibur’s gonna have just enough power and brains left to park herself out here in lunar orbit.”

I shot Howard a glance.

He shrugged. “It’s no secret. You’ve been busy with division mustering-out paperwork.”

He was right. A twenty-four-year-old could no more keep up with even a skeleton division’s paperwork than a hamster could keep up with Yiddish. It was one more reason I looked forward to tagging dirt and getting shed of command.

We sidestepped through the umbilical companionway and over the hatch lip into the troop bay of Mimi’s V-Star.

Howard continued. “What did you expect them to do? It costs billions of dollars every month to keep a ship like this operational. Luna Base is getting mothballed, too.”

The fact was I had not expected one way or the other. I heaved my duffel into an overhead cargo net and shook my head. “What does it cost if the Slugs come back and we aren’t ready? How much is a city full of people worth?”

“It’s been almost three years since we destroyed the Pseudocephalopod presence on Ganymede. We have no evidence that anything’s lurking out there to be ready for.” He flopped into his seat. “Jason, you have more to get ready for back on Earth than the remote possibility of the continued existence, much less the hostile return, of the Pseudocephalopod.”

Mimi slid us away from Excalibur with bow thrusters, then she flew one lunar orbit, lit the main engine, and slingshot us toward home.

Three days later we dropped through the stratosphere, crossed the Pacific Coast thirty miles above Oregon, and burned east.

A V-Star isn’t the unmaneuverable bullet that the old space shuttles had been, but it’s no personal stunter. Mimi bent a turn south so wide that we overflew Niagara Falls, then arrowed toward Washington, D.C.

The Excalibur Venture Stars that had landed in the preceding days had all landed at Canaveral, the only extended runway specifically designed to receive them. Only Mimi Ozawa was pilot enough to be trusted to land a V-Star on a conventional runway like the one at Reagan.

Mimi greased us down like Pooh Hart would have. I stared at the hull and wished for a window. I was home, but the only way I knew it was because my liver and all the rest of my guts pressed down on top of one another with full Earth weight for the first time in five years.

The bulkhead viewscreen flicked to life and I pointed with a leaden finger. “Howard, it’s still gray!” I knew the planet hadn’t bounced back from the Projectile attacks but somehow I still expected green grass and blue skies.

Mimi rolled us to a stop on the Reagan runway and the ramp dropped with a hydraulic whine. Home at last, I unbuckled and jumped to my feet. Or tried to. My knees buckled. I sat back down and pressed my palms to my trembling thighs. “Crap!” I had worked out like a fiend, twice every day of the Jovian crossing, but still I could barely stand.

Howard just sat in his seat and grinned at me. “Wait for the medics.”

Minutes later two zoomie corpsmen gathered me up, one under each armpit like I was someone’s grandpa, and we trundled down the ramp.

I nearly drowned in thick air salted with smells I didn’t know I’d missed. Dust. Kerosene. Asphalt. For me, that was like orchids. I wobbled along, grinning.

I half expected a brass band, or at least someone to shake my hand, but the medics just loaded Howard and me and our duffels onto an Electruk no fancier than what you’d see in any mall and we whirred off across the tarmac to a hangar.

In the hangar sat a blue bus fleet. Formed up in front of the buses, at ease with hands clasped at the small of their backs, stood my seven hundred GEF survivors. We had left Ganymede a dirty band of Lost Boys, with me playing Peter Pan.

The seven hundred soldiers who gleamed before me stood as fully formed and disciplined as Roman legionnaires.

We hadn’t worn battle-rattle aboard Excalibur, so the quartermasters and armorers had spent two years repairing and reconditioning our Eternad armor.