Роберт Бюттнер - Orphan's Destiny

A GI in polished, crimson Eternads with visor retracted and decoration ribbons arrayed across the breastplate is truly a knight in shining armor. Seven hundred knights make a crusade.

Munchkin, being Muslim, always hated that comparison, but there she was, on the left flank, the second-smallest troop in ranks. The smallest troop, in crimson pajamas and a cut-down breastplate, sat in an Eternad-crimson Earth-bought stroller alongside her. I caught Munchkin’s eye, winked, and grinned, then my grin faded.

Jude wasn’t the only one seated. Slug weapons made mostly corpses, not wounded, but a dozen wheelchaired amputees sprinkled the ranks.

Earthside medtech would rebuild each man and woman among them with organic prosthetics, but for now they were reminders that these shiny recruiting posters had been to hell.

So this was our welcome home. One final formation, then dismissed. Heat rose in me from anger, sorrow, relief, and all the emotions that come with a parting. And a pang because I was here and thousands as good and as brave as I was were not.

The Electruk slid up behind Brumby, who, as division sergeant major, faced the troops, front and center.

I swung my legs over the ’truk’s side to touch the hangar floor. One medic grabbed my arm and whispered, “Sir, you shouldn’t—”

I shrugged off his hand and pointed at my division. “They’re standing!”

“They’re acclimated,” the medic hissed.

It was my last moment as a general, a farewell to comrades-in-arms. Acclimated, schmaclimated. I choked back tears and thrust myself off the seat. My legs trembled. Not as bad as back aboard the V-Star, though. I caught myself and hobbled forward.

Brumby sang, “Division!”

The preparatory command echoed back through shrunken brigades, battalions, companies, and platoons and bounced off the hangar walls.

“Atten-shun!” At the command of execution, the division snapped to attention like statuary.

We were young and we were beat-to-crap but we were professionals.

Brumby faced about and saluted. “Sir! The division is formed!”

I returned his salute, then leaned forward. “A few words, then dismissed, hey, Brumby?”

Brumby’s right eyelid fluttered as he shook his head. “Sir, the parade—”

“Huh?” For an omniscient leader, I said that a lot.

“You got the Chipmemo, sir. It’s why you flew into D.C., instead of Canaveral. The division marches from the Capitol, up Constitution Avenue to the Washington Monument. You present them to the President and the UN Secretary-General.”

A division commander, even of a shrunken division, plows through four hundred Chipmemos each day. I skimmed over too many of them. One more reason I wasn’t General Staff material.

“So what do I have to do, Brumby?”

He slid his eyes left, to a windowless bus. “You go in there, sir, while the division mounts the buses and heads into D.C.” He looked at the windowless bus like a mallard looking down a twelve-gauge barrel.

How long had my soldiers been standing in armor? I sighed. “Okay, Brumby. Dismiss ’em, mount ’em up. Get ’em off their feet.”

Amid the clatter of fourteen hundred armored legs, I shuffled to the bus, dragged myself inside, and flopped on a purple crushed-velvet sofa.

Sofa? I looked around. The bus was tricked out like a pop star’s tour vehicle, with a bar, multiple holo tanks, and bolted-down furniture that must have been bought at a turn-of-the-century pimp’s estate sale. I would have thought that for a Washington parade the vehicles would be brand new.

The bus lurched forward and pulled up to the tail end of our bus convoy.

Space Force ratings wearing Signals collar brass swarmed me. By the time we crossed the Potomac into the District of Columbia I had been reshaved, stripped to my underwear, and refitted into my Eternad armor, which had been patched, polished, and smelled like pine inside. It was mine, alright, down to the pale blue Medal of Honor ribbon on the breastplate.

A female in a well-cut black business suit bustled up, Chipboard in hand. Pencil-slim, Howard’s age, she wore her black hair spiky. The effect was witch and broomstick wrapped up in one package. “General Wander? Ruth Tway.” She shook my hand while she reached across and straightened my ribbons.

Tway read her Chipboard screen. “I’m with the White House. Today, you ride and wave. No speeches. No interviews.”

Each of the three holotanks across the bus aisle from me played a different news net. Each anchorperson stood with emptied Constitution Avenue in their background, crowds lining the sidewalks.

“Fine by me, ma’am. But we’re infantry. Why are we riding buses in this parade?”

Tway shook her head. “Just to the parade staging area. Your troops march. You sit in an open limousine and wave to adoring crowds.”

Our bus stopped on the Mall, near the Capitol. My troops were already forming up. We would be led by a band, Marine Corps by the look of it, and followed by Third Division and then Excalibur’s Space Force swabbies. Behind the band parked an open Daimler limousine, with a red two-starred front plate. I turned to Tway. “You think I’m riding in that while my troops walk?”

She pressed her lips into a thin line. “Of course. It gets you up high. The holo crews are coordinated to close up on you every two hundred yards.”

“No. I’ll walk. Put a couple of the amputees in the limo.”

“It’s a global hookup holocast. It’s more tightly choreographed than Worldbowl Halftime. The holos—”

“Holos are for heroes. The amputees are bigger heroes than I’ll ever be.”

Tway drummed a finger against her Chipboard. “General, even if we could do it that way, you’re just off the ship. It took most of your soldiers days before they could walk two hundred yards, much less this parade route. What’s the big deal?”

I folded my arms. “My troops walk. I walk. I command this unit.”

She snapped an audiophone wafer off her belt and held it to her ear. “I’m calling the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He commands you.”

I swallowed while she whispered a dial code. Crap, crap, crap. I wore stars but I was a spec four at heart. I had only had my boots on dirt for twenty minutes and I was in trouble with authority just like I was back in Basic.

At the parade’s head, a holo-director type wearing neon-orange gloves glanced at his ’puter, spoke into an audio wafer, then pointed an orange finger at the band. They struck up “Stars and Stripes Forever” and stepped off.

Tway turned and watched them. A gap grew between the band rear drummers’ rank and the still-empty limo.

“You’re losing your tight choreography, Ms. Tway.”

Ruth Tway apparently had the stroke to phone the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. But she was evidently also political enough to cut her losses.

She shook her head and let her breath hiss out between her teeth. Then she dropped her audiophone hand to her side and pointed from the corpsmen behind the wheelchairs to the limo. “Wander, were you such a butt-pain when you were a spec four?”

I grinned. “Worse.”

One hundred yards later I didn’t feel clever. My butt wasn’t the only pain. My thighs burned and quivered, and my grin was pasted on. Tway may have been a bitch, but on this point she was a bitch who was right.

My pain went beyond my leg throbs. D.C. looked and sounded and smelt as healthy as cancer. The Slug Blitz had missed Washington and so many other cities. The familiar buildings still rose all around me. Crowds lined the street. But the sky was so gray, the air so chill, the faces in the shivering crowd so pale that it scarcely mattered. Loss and effort had sucked mankind dry.

Still, as we marched, I heard cheers, both ahead of GEF and behind us.