Роберт Бюттнер - Orphan's Destiny

I turned from the sink without shaving off my eyebrow, waved off the running water and stood barefoot and bare-chested in fatigue trousers. “Late for what?”

Jeeb perched on the sink edge, clucking like an electric chicken. Howard said it was just diagnostics. A TOT, according to Lockheed, did not, could not, imprint its wrangler’s personality. But Ari had always fussed whenever I left whiskers in the sink. Not that Ari had always been critical. One night when we were both tired and scared and lonely, he had told me that greatness was my destiny.

Tway stared at Jeeb. TOTs were so rare and so expensive that people did that. But TOTs didn’t look so different from the swarms of dumber utility ’bots that vacuumed everybody’s carpets and pulled everybody’s weeds. And I’d have expected somebody with Tway’s chutzpah had seen it all.

Howard sat up in bed and coughed a phlegmy barrage. It subsided and he swung his feet to the floor and into slippers with duct-tape-wrapped toes. Yawning, he flapped plaid-pajamaed arms above the nightstand until he found his glasses. “You the flack?”

“I’m Ruth Tway. I report directly to the President of the United States. You can call me Ms. Tway, Major Hibble.”

Howard grunted, then creaked to his feet and shuffled to the latrine.

Fwop-fwop-fwop.

Howard’s rubber slipper soles flapped with each step. He had only duct-taped the toes. He closed the door behind him, sparing Tway and me further sound effects.

Tway poked me above my trouser pocket with her Chipboard’s corner, then frowned. “Love handles gotta go. Holocam adds ten pounds already. Heroes aren’t fat.”

I straightened. Maybe I sucked in my gut a little. What did she expect? I’d been cooped up in a spaceship or a cave most of the last five years. “Heroes aren’t heroes because of how they look.”

She squinted at my chin while she tugged something from a pocket. “Manual shaving’s impractical on tour. You’ve gotta be as shiny-cheeked at dinner as at breakfast. And”—she wiped a finger across my chin and it came away red-streaked—“no nicks.” She slapped a pressurized plasti into my palm. “Dipil cream. Lasts longer. All the holo stars use it.”

I shook my head. “I look fine!”

Her lip curled. “Sure.”

“My orders say I’m assigned to the joint media liaison command. Does that mean I report to you?”

She bent and rummaged on my wall locker’s floor and dug out my boots. “We’ll put lifts in these. No time to make you slim. But we can make you tall.”

“I thought we were going to explain post-war defense spending to the taxpayers.”

“Yeah. But you gotta look good doing it.”

The latrine door opened and Howard returned, hair combed, hands thrust into robe pockets. He held out his hand to Ruth Tway, like an old flatscreen hero. “Hibble. Howard Hibble.”

Except James Bond never fwop-fwop’ed when he walked.

Tway moved us out of the infirmary that afternoon, to a still-open hotel in Georgetown so fancy that a maid turned down your bed each night. Breakfast the next day was in the dining room, with tablecloths and linen napkins, each thick enough to stop shrapnel.

“You’ll do a half-dozen live spots each morning, moving east to west with the time change. Local news and morning shows,” Tway said.

I spread preserves, oozing hunks of fresh strawberry, on a muffin, still bakery-warm in my fingers. “How can we be—”

Tway snatched my muffin and replaced it with a brown rectangle that felt like plywood. “Protein bar. You’ll lose six pounds the first week and you won’t spill jelly on your uniform.”

I bit the bar, then spit it into my napkin. “It tastes like dung.”

“I told you you’d lose weight.” She broke a piece off my muffin and popped it in her mouth. “The morning appearances are all holo. You’ll be in a studio, say in New York. The interviewer sits in a chair in Detroit and it looks like you’re sitting in the chair alongside her. And to the homers, you’re both sitting on their living-room rug.”

I stared at my vanishing breakfast. “Why are you doing this with us?”

“Because fresh-grown food is too valuable to waste.”

“I mean this PR circus. We’re cutting defense spending but I’m staying in this palace?”

“America wants to give back.”

“Then give back my muffin.”

Tway frowned, then glanced at her ’puter. “Eat your protein bar. We’ve got thirty minutes to prep before your first interview.”

Twenty-eight minutes later I slouched in a blue Plastine chair, in a hotel conference room converted to a holo studio. That meant an echoing, bare room, with daybrites on spider stands glaring into my eyes, a refrigerator-sized holo generator to the left of the lamp bank and a tripod-mount holocam. Black cables pythoned between them. The holo operator and the show’s director stood in the cable snakepit.

Tway stood behind me, pounding my shoulder blades as she puckered my uniform jacket’s back with duct tape. “Your lapels gap.”

“If I turn around the tape will show.”

“Don’t! We’ll have a tailor here before lunch. In five. four. ” She brushed a protein-bar crumb off my tie and backed out of camera range.

Pop.

I’d never seen holo produced before. When the image flickers up, the generator makes a pop like uncorked champagne. That’s why newbies like me look wide-eyed when the viewer first sees them.

The interviewer sat in a maroon leather armchair, just like the one that now seemed to surround me. The arms on my real chair were the same height, so my elbows didn’t disappear. Not only that, if I moved an elbow, the generator inserted a tiny, cloth-across-leather squeak in the delayed soundtrack.

The anchor was already speaking to the holocam, her head turned away from me. “—news for the Sox, Eddie. Next, we have someone truly special for Boston to meet. General Jason Wander, the hero of the Battle of Ganymede.”

I leaned forward, nodding, like Tway had coached me, prepared and focused.

She turned to me, blond with jewel-blue eyes. Her pale pink lapels didn’t gap. Imagining duct tape under there evaporated my focus.

“It’s an honor, General.”

“Uh. Yeah. ”

Next to the holocam, Tway pointed at a cue card, held by the show’s headsetted director.

I read off the card, “Tawny.”

Two minutes later, Tawny had expressed to me the sorrow, pride, and gratitude of the entire Greater Boston viewing area. Then she vanished while emotional file footage of returning troops entertained the home audience.

Tway bent beside me and spoke in a strawberry-preserve-scented whisper. “Next segment coming up. The threat is over. If there were Slugs left, my command would handle them just like it handled the last bunch.”

The lovely Tawny reappeared, wiping away a tear, or stray mascara. “General, is this episode behind us?”

Tway’s words spewed from me like a Pavlovian poodle.

Tawny nodded thoughtfully. “Then the Lewis budget makes sense?”

“Excuse me?”

“Drastic defense cuts make sense?”

Alongside the holocam’s red light, Tway nodded like an antique bobblehead doll.

I swallowed a snort. “If the Slugs are gone.”

Tawny’s smile fluttered, then dropped, like a table-bred turkey chucked from a plane. Behind her tinted, lased lenses welled dark terror. “They’re not?”

“They are. I mean, as far as we know.”

Tway leaned toward the director and whispered. Tawny fingered her earpiece. We went to commercial and she vanished.

Tway pounced. “What the hell was that?” She glanced at the holo producer and twirled a wrap-up motion with one hand while she guided me out to the hall with the other.