Роберт Бюттнер - Orphan's Destiny

Before we lost Earth-uplink five months ago, the legislatures of our various nations sprinkled us with medals and promotions in absentia and promised us relief was on the way.

So, as acting commander, I was thinking up stuff for my remnant division to do while the cavalry rode four hundred million miles.

“Sir? Major Hibble on Command Net.” A shadow flicked across my view as my acting division sergeant major ducked into the cave behind me.

“Busy, here, Brumby.” I shifted my torso between Brumby and Munchkin’s privates. Stretched to nine centimeters, drained by eight hours’ labor, however, Munchkin could have cared less if she was appearing live on the frontscreen of the New York Times.

“They found something, sir.”

I turned. “What?” There were no more live Slugs. Certain of that, I had sent half of our force, including our surviving medic — the bastard had assured me Munchkin’s due date was two weeks away — with Howard Hibble to search for clues to what had made our now-extinct enemy tick.

To date we knew that Slugs had been a communal organism that originated somewhere outside the Solar System and turned up four years ago on Ganymede, using it as an advance base to bomb the human race out of existence city by city. We assumed the Slugs were galactic nomads, traveling in their entirety from planetary system to planetary system, sucking each system dry, then moving on.

The Slugs never confirmed or denied anything, they just killed people.

Every Slug warrior fought like hell until killed or cornered, then dropped dead to avoid capture. We’d been outsmarted, outnumbered, and slaughtered.

We won only because Metzger sent his crew to the lifeboats, then kamikazed Hope into the Slugs’ base in an impact so violent that Howard’s astroseismologists said Ganymede still twitched seven months later.

I’d agreed with Howard to march troops halfway around Ganymede not to find live Slugs. Metzger had killed them all off and wrecked their cloning incubators and destroyed their central brain. It — Howard insisted on referring to the Slugs as “It,” a single organism with physically disparate parts — was gone, over, obliterated.

Howard thought some of their hardware might have survived the impact. Somehow, these glorified garden snails had known how to air-condition a planet-sized moon, fly between star systems, and raise armies of infinite size and perfect discipline. They understood everything they needed to defeat us.

Except the perverse propensity of separate, individual humans to sacrifice ourselves for one another, by which Metzger had turned defeat into victory, for the price of his own life.

Brumby waved the handset at me, strawberry-blond eyebrows raised. Brumby looked like a freckled neoclone of a cowboy marionette I saw on a history chip, from the pre-holo TV days, named Doody Howdy or something. “TOT-uplink’s gone in two minutes, sir.”

I glanced at Munchkin. She lay still between contractions and nodded. Her husband had given his life to win this war. She understood that managing the peace was my job.

Brumby was twenty-four but combat had left him with a grandmother’s twitches. His fingers quivered while I swept my hands with a Sterilette, then pressed the handset to my ear. “This is Juliet, over.”

A blink’s hesitance separated question from answer as the signal relayed through the Tactical Observation Transport hovering line-of-sight-high between us.

“Jason, we found an artifact.”

I raised my eyebrows. Intact Slug machinery might hold the key to their technology. To date, we had recovered nothing but metal bits, plus Slug carcasses, personal weapons, and body armor. “What is it?”

“A metallic, oblate spheroid. Fourteen inches long.”

“A tin football?” For a grunt, I had high verbal SATs.

“Sixty pounds, Earth weight.”

“What’s it do?”

“Lies in a hole in the ground, so far.”

I squeezed the handset. “Howard, it’s undetonated ordnance! Get your people away from it!”

“We’ve never seen any indication that the Pseudocephalopod employed explosive weapons. It favored kinetic-energy projectiles. The engineers haven’t sniffed any explosives.”

“A human wouldn’t know a Slug bomb if it got stuffed up his nose!”

“We’ve already crated it. My hunch is it was a Pseudocephalopod remote-sensing device.”

The Army put up with Howard because his professorial hunches were usually right.

I sighed, then shook my head. “Howard, get your ass back here!” Our mission had never been to Lewis-and-Clark Ganymede. It was to destroy the Pseudocephalopod ability to make war on Earth from Ganymede. We had done that. Now, my job as commanding officer was to get my troops home, safe. If the Slugs had left behind a remote sensor, they might have left behind time bombs, Anthrax, or bad poetry. If there was a chance in a million that the Slugs remained a threat I didn’t want my force split like Chelmsford’s at Isandlwhana. Howard’s archaeological expedition was a dumb idea. “And leave that goddamn bomb right where it is!”

Static hissed back.

Brumby said, “We’ve lost ’em ’til the TOT repositions above the horizon, sir.”

Brumby retrieved the handset and trotted back to HQ, as gangling as the stringless puppet he resembled. Brumby had left Earth a high school senior with a genius for creating stink bombs and a belligerent propensity for setting them off in high school cafeterias. That had made him a combat engineer.

He would return to Earth, if we ever returned, an acting division sergeant major with post-combat yips.

“Now?” Munchkin growled through clenched teeth.

The instruction holo said that if I coached her to push too early, before she was fully dilated, she would exhaust herself. I hadn’t gotten to the part of the holo explaining what I had to do then, but I was afraid Dr. Jason would have to reach in there and pry the little rascal out. Or cut Munchkin open. I shuddered.

Sharia Munshara-Metzger was the closest thing to family I had. But as one soldier looking after another, I had seen her bleed before. And I had the remains of an infantry division waiting on my orders while I midwifed. What the hell. “Push, Munchkin.”

Ten minutes of screaming — by both of us — passed. Then I held my godson, as healthy as any squalling, purple prune with a cord growing from his navel. I swabbed mucus from his mouth and nostrils, then laid him across Munchkin’s belly.

While I tied off, then cut, the umbilical cord, I asked, “Did you pick a name?” I knew she had, because every time I had asked her over the last seven months she looked away. Munchkin had a Muslim superstitious streak as wide as the Nile. I figured she was afraid she’d jinx the kid if she said a name.

“Jason.” Munchkin’s smile glowed through the subterranean twilight.

“What?” I swallowed a lump in my throat, even though I’d half guessed the name. Munchkin, Metzger, and I were all war orphans. Ganymede was our orphanage and we were our own family.

“Jason Udey Metzger. My father was Udey.”

I adjusted my surgical mask, so I could wipe my eyes without seeming to. “People will call him Jude.”

People would call him more than that. The Son of the Savior of the Human Race. The Spawn of the Exterminator of the Universe’s other intelligent species. The only Earthling conceived and born in outer space. The Freak.

“Jason, this is the best day of my life.” Tears streamed down Munchkin’s cheeks and she sobbed so hard that Jude Metzger bounced on his mother’s belly like he was rafting class-three whitewater.

I understood. But I thought that for me the best day would be the day we all left Ganymede.

I was wrong.