Роберт Бюттнер - Orphan's Destiny

To that pilot, every minute’s delay meant stronger launch crosswinds. After his mission, his first responsibility was his ship, just as my troops were mine. If I stood in that pilot’s boots I would leave me behind in a heartbeat.

Crap!

I bounded back along the causeway, got blown over by the crosswind, and nearly turned an ankle. That slowed me to a shuffle.

In the distant sky crawled the firefly that was the last upship, inbound at eleven thousand miles per hour. Crap, crap, crap. I sped up.

By the time I crested the crater rim, the V-Star touched down in the distance. I stopped watching it and concentrated on dodging boulders as I descended.

When I rounded the last house-sized boulder between me and the takeoff apron, nothing remained on the apron but footprints and the V-Star. Its elevation-pylon doors whined open as it prepared to jack itself vertical for launch.

I sucked air like a vacuum ’bot set for deep-pile synwool as I ran. Sweat soaked the long johns beneath my armor. Seventy-mile-per-hour wind sizzled dust against my helmet visor.

I looked up at the V-Star and saw Howard’s helmeted head poking out of the hatch like a bespectacled hunting trophy nailed on a wall. He waved me toward him.

I sprinted and leapt through the hatch. Pneumatics hissed and it slammed and locked twenty seconds later.

My earpiece beeped as the V-Star pilot spoke to Howard. Her voice rasped over the Command Net, heard only by Howard, her copilot, and me. “If waiting for your general costs us this ship, I’ll make hell a lot hotter for that asshole, Hibble!”

I smiled. Pilots.

Panting, heart pounding, I strapped in alongside Howard and realized that my panicked dash had saved me a broken heart. I’m not sure I could have left them all if I had had to think about it as I marched away. I wondered whether I had lingered on purpose. The ache of loneliness sank into my chest even as GI breathing fogged the air around me.

Hydraulics whined as the V-Star pointed its nose to the sky and I sank into my seat back. The Space Force troop bay technician across the aisle had touched his boots to Ganymede for all of ten minutes. All his buddies, all his family, were where he was going, not where he had been.

The fuselage shuddered as pumps fueled the engines. The technician glanced at my harness, to be sure I was strapped in, then nodded at me, one soldier to another.

The space between our eyes was thirty inches. But the gulf between our lives was light-years.

Then I settled back into my seat and felt like I had just shrugged out of a field pack. The irate pilot had called me “General,” but now, in the nurturing womb of a ship somebody else was driving, I would be free to be just a GI. I would shed the temporary rank that forced me to be the daddy of soldiers older than I was. I would be slid back to a lieutenancy, where I belonged.

The intercom squawked. “Ignition!”

I closed my eyes and let the grumpy pilot fly me toward home. My worries were over.

I thought.

FIVE

V-STAR TROOP BAYS LACK WINDOWS but the troop bay technician had duct-taped a cheap plasma flatscreen to the forward bulkhead, then hard-wired it. Therefore, we saw the same feed as the pilot’s camera while she slid our upship alongside Excalibur’s majestically rotating, mile-long bulk, like a snowflake landing on a polar bear.

Excalibur looked like Hope, except for the addition of defensive weapons systems that were, like Excalibur herself, mere surplus, now that Slugs were extinct.

I lay back in my seat until the last of my men were safely through the lock, then unbuckled. I stood in that odd centrifugal-force gravity I had never expected to feel again and faced the exit hatch.

“General? May I have a word, please?” The pilot’s Texanese twanged through the intercom.

I turned and stared toward the flight deck. The V-Star flight deck connects to the troop bays through a shoulder-width tube that corkscrews through the avionics. Negotiating the tube requires some delightfully unladylike contortions, so female pilots usually entered and exited while the troop bay was empty of GIs.

Pooh had told me the pilots were acutely aware they were putting on a show for their passengers. She had also told me she would demonstrate the flight-deck worm for me privately, anytime I wanted.

I swallowed back tears even as I smiled.

From emotion, not good manners, I turned my head away as the rasp of this pilot’s synlon flight suit against aluminum echoed in the bay. Finally, her boots tapped the deck plates.

“Politeness doesn’t make infantry less stupid.”

Smart-ass was even more a pilot trait than a Texan one. I turned back to face her, then looked around for the Texan pilot.

The woman who stood, feet planted shoulder-width apart, in front of the flight-deck hatch, was tiny and as Japanese as cherry blossoms. Her eyes were enormous, brown almonds set in porcelain. Her hair was ebony silk and she combed it with her fingers, taming helmet-head spikes. Almonds or not, her eyes burned at me.

I flicked my eyes across the shoulder loops of her flight suit. I didn’t really feel like I outranked a doorman, but part of being an officer is demanding military courtesy. I tried to burn my eyes back at her. “Major, did the Space Force teach you the difference between Stars and an Oak Leaf?” Every zoomie should be required to spend a month with a real drill sergeant.

“General, we’re still aboard my ship. Hero of the Battle of Ganymede or not, you endangered my ship and my crew. I don’t care cowshit what’s on your shoulders.”

I paused. I’d kind-of skipped over the military justice part of my correspondence courses. There was something somewhere about a vessel master’s absolute authority.

The name tape stitched to her flight suit, over her heart, read Ozawa.

The name tape was the second thing I noticed.

Pilot attire had changed while I was gone. Pooh’s flight suit had been UN powder-blue, floppy coveralls. Major Ozawa’s was diagonal-striped rescue-me orange and yellow. More significantly, it was stretch synlon, tight enough that there wasn’t much question about how Major Ozawa would look without it. And the answer to that question was “terrific.”

It’s not like I hadn’t seen a woman for seven months. Munchkin wasn’t the only surviving female soldier in GEF, and a few of them were cream. But an officer doesn’t think about his soldiers that way. They say it’s professional detachment, like being a gynecologist. But Major Ozawa wasn’t even in the Army, so I felt undetached stirrings.

“Whenever you’ve seen enough, General.”

I jerked my eyes back up to hers. “Uh.”

I blinked and felt myself flush. It is just barely possible that I might have been staring.

She folded her arms across her chest. “I held this ship twenty minutes for you. Relive your glory. Strand yourself and your Medal of Honor if you want. But you jeopardized my ship.”

She was right. “You don’t understand—”

She chopped the air with a hand as delicate as a sparrow’s wing. “I understand hundred-knot crosswinds! Do you? You almost killed fifteen of your own people!”

I blinked back tears and swallowed. Then I whispered, “I already killed nine thousand of them.”

Her mouth froze open like a pink Cheerio.

We stood like fence posts until a boot scraped metal and Sergeant Major Ord poked his head through the exit hatch. “General Wander? Admiral Brace requests to welcome you aboard, sir!”

Ozawa avoided my eyes, craning her neck at gauges and recording end-of-mission data on a Chipboard.

Ord led me through the lock into brightness, warmth, and the womblike thrum of ship machinery for the first time in seven months.