Роберт Бюттнер - Orphan's Destiny

Then my jaw dropped. We rolled up alongside wheeled stairs that climbed to the door of an unmarked passenger Supersonic Combustion Ramjet liner. Shaped like a surfboard with tail fins, it had mammoth air intakes that gaped at me.

Scram travel cost The Brick. It made sense only for over-water flights where the passengers thought they needed to get to another continent faster than they got to the airport. But my traveling companions, waiting on the tarmac, were a bigger surprise.

Jude clapped when he saw me climb out of the limo. “Dason!”

Munchkin smiled and hugged me. “Are you ready?”

My intestines gurgled. Everything I had overeaten last night picked this moment to make a break for it. “Huh?”

“Jude’s going home! My home, anyway!”

I struggled up the stairs to the Scram. “Egypt?”

“Jude’s half Egyptian!”

“Sure.” I clenched my teeth and climbed aboard. To reach the Scramjet’s bathroom, I would have agreed Jude was half Martian.

Ten minutes later, I sank, relieved, into a window seat alongside squirming Jude, with Munchkin and Tway across the aisle.

Few people besides diplomats, tycoons, and hopstars have been inside a Scram. The cabin ceiling’s so low a guy like me has to bend a little. The seats are butter-soft leather, deep-padded, but narrower than coach-class airliner seats. They don’t need to be big, because a Scram can reach any place on Earth in under two hours. They do need to be well padded because those short flight times mean heavy takeoff Gees to reach seven thousand miles per hour. And the seat-belt system includes padded shoulder straps, because deceleration is multi-Gee, too.

I looked around. We had the Scram cabin to ourselves. A steward offered pre-takeoff coffee. And, better, Tylenol powder pax.

The plane shook as the takeoff engines lit. I winced at the roar that pounded my pounding head.

Munchkin frowned. “You won’t barf on us?”

I shook my head. “Nothing to barf. Why Egypt?”

Tway said, “Cairo was the cultural capital of the Pan-Islamic world. What’s left of it still is. We persuade Egypt about our plans, we persuade the Third World.”

Munchkin’s Class-A tunic buttoned at the throat, anyway. But she wore uniform trousers, not a skirt, and her beret covered her hair.

I said to Munchkin while I pointed at Tway, “She’s been helping with your image?”

“Lieutenant Munshara-Metzger doesn’t need my help.” Tway leaned across and brushed spilled Tylenol powder off my lapel.

Lieutenant? I squinted at Munchkin’s collar. The change would have been obvious but for my hangover. “You got your lieutenant’s bar back!”

Munchkin had been a commissioned officer in the Egyptian Army. All of us volunteers had given up rank and accepted redesignation as a condition of Ganymede Expeditionary Force assignment.

Munchkin pushed her collar brass out with her thumb and smiled.

Tway said, “Democratized or not, Egypt is still Muslim.”

At least Tway wasn’t making Munchkin wear a sack with eyeholes.

Tway said, “She needs to be nearly equal. But if she outranks her male counterpart, we kiss off the fundamentalist demographic.”

I looked at Tway while she arranged a black scarf over her own hair. “Why don’t you do the talking? You excel at that.”

Tway wrinkled her nose. “The Muslim world’s still not ready to hear from a nice Jewish girl.”

I raised my eyebrows. It never occurred to me that dark-eyed Ruth Tway was Jewish. I’d bunked with Ari Klein for two years and never cared about his Jewishness, either. One more reason I didn’t belong in politics.

I was getting to keep my stars for PR, not because I was making a military difference. I was supporting another Tway political ploy so Machiavellian that I didn’t even know what it was. However, the fact that I still outranked my shrimpy, de facto little sister soothed me. Maybe there’s a little Muslim fundamentalist in most guys.

The intercom sang. “Steward, please prepare the cabin for takeoff.”

Engine vibration and roar shook the cabin. Jude looked up at me, wide-eyed, lip quivering.

I smiled down at him. “It’s alright.”

Jude frowned.

I stroked his hair. “We’re all safe.”

He smiled back, then we lurched into takeoff roll.

I turned to the window and watched central Florida blur. Beside me, Jude imitated engine roar, his cheeks puffed, as I hugged him against me. If I told someone we were safe, that someone believed me. That was a good thing. Wasn’t it?

Acceleration pushed me back into the seat cushions and Jude gripped my arm as the rocket disposables beneath the Scram’s fuselage pushed us higher, and farther out over the Atlantic.

The rocket bottles accelerated the Scram toward supersonic flight, where speed would ram enough air into the now-lifeless main engines to light them up.

The Scram jumped, like a bus hitting a speed bump. Jude squeezed my arm harder.

The pilot’s voice crackled from the ceiling. “That jolt was us dropping our rocket bottles. You’ll feel another in a minute, when we climb up on the air wave we’re piling in front of us. Once we’re surfing the wave you’ll be free to move about the cabin. Speaking of surf, we are now two hundred nautical miles east of the Florida coastal surfline.”

I glanced at my ’puter and whistled. We had only been up a couple minutes. And we weren’t near cruising speed yet.

I rolled my head, now heavy from acceleration as well as from prior debauchery, toward the window. Below us, through the lingering haze of atmospheric Slug impact dust, the horizon curved in the distance and the sky was indigo. I wasn’t back in space, but I was close.

The steward made a quick pass with a snack tray. Tway wagged her finger and held out a protein bar. She needn’t have bothered. Between the bumpy ride, the Gees, and last night’s excess, I planned not to eat. Ever again.

Just after the steward retrieved Jude’s fruit wrapper, deceleration pressed me forward against my shoulder harness. By the time my Tylenol kicked in, the Sahara spread beneath us like a dune-wrinkled Persian carpet, but monochromatically ochre.

Munchkin leaned across and pointed to a distant silver ribbon that snaked across the lifeless sand carpet. “The Nile. For five thousand years, everybody lived along the Nile.”

And that had been the death of them.

I had done my reading. The Nile floodplain was desert that bloomed each spring when the river faithfully overflowed. For millennia, the Nile nurtured agrarian millions who lived along its low banks and welcomed fertility brought by the encroaching waters.

No one knew how many the Cairo Projectile vaporized in the impact instant. Cairo’s census had been acknowledged to understate the population by millions for, an Egyptian proverb said, as long as the Nile had flowed. People with a five-thousand-year history seemed to like time-related proverbs.

But the Nile, giver of life, ran through Cairo’s heart. The impact crater’s south wall dammed the river, already in annual flood upstream, instantly at two A.M. For the first time since before the Pharaohs, the Nile did not flow. The government and media in Cairo, which might have spread warnings, vanished in an eyeblink.

So, upstream, flooding claimed millions more lives. Children died disproportionately, their smaller, sleeping bodies swept away.

I hugged Jude closer.

We landed at the strip outside the suburban sprawl that now was Cairo. I had to carry Jude down the departure stairs. Munchkin’s tears flowed. Jude’s maternal grandparents and his six aunts had disappeared in the heartbeat of impact.

The strip had been bulldozed across desert, and I squinted against sand on the wind.