Роберт Бюттнер - Orphan's Destiny

For Warrant Officer Robert Kreilick Buettner and USO Hostess Annette Catherine Buettner, whose contribution to this book cannot be overstated

“A Confederate sharpshooter’s ball slew our drummer today, as he took breakfast on a fair July morning. The lad joined up when his parents died, and had not passed fourteen. They say it is a soldier’s lot to die young and unexpectedly. Or to live and forever question God why he was spared. For me, should I live, I shall ask what cruel God makes death an orphan’s destiny.”

— True Occurrences During the Great Battle at Gettysburg: Recountings of a Soldier of the Sixty-first Ohio Infantry

ONE

“ANYBODY OUT THERE? OVER.”

Static, not a human voice, cackles back through my earpiece.

Sssss. Pop.

Ten feet across this egg-shaped chamber, the hull-plate barricade I’ve thrown across the entry glows red. The Slugs are burning through their own ship to finish me. Roasted metal’s tang singes my nostrils. Two minutes, tops, then Slugs will surge through their opening like man-sized, armored maggots.

I reverse the pistol in my hand to use it as a club. The gesture measures my resolve. The pistol’s empty magazine well measures its futility.

I sigh and my breath worms out and glows purple in Slug interior lighting. Before my heart can beat, my helmet ventilator wicks away the condensation like a stolen soul.

My legs sprawl across the quaking Slug metal-blue decking and I thump my numb, armored left thigh with a gloved fist. Leg infantry needs two good legs. I could limp if I had to. But to where?

I let my back sink into the rescue-me yellow mattress of the Polytane hull-breach plug. That’s how we boarded this monstrosity, like pirates in Eternad armor, but the hull breach is no way out for me. Behind it stretches vacuum, the emptiness that fills space between Earth and the moon.

My visor display freezes the year in emerald digits at 2043. The timer, though, rushes down to four minutes and keeps falling.

When those timer digits spin down to zero, the human race will live or die. I die either way. I’m Jason Wander. For now, history’s youngest and screwed-est major general. For a while, a twenty-four-year-old lieutenant. For eternity, Infantry.

I’m also the human speed bump between the Slugs and Brumby. A mile beneath me in this beast’s belly, he may blow this invasion transport into rutabagas and both of us with it. If I can buy seconds here at the price of my life.

If we fail, Slugs by the millions will overrun Earth in slimy waves. Mankind will struggle, of course, with a brick-by-brick tenacity that will make Stalingrad look like a pie fight. The Slugs don’t know mankind yet, not when it’s defending its own turf.

The oval that outlines the Slugs’ emerging doorway glows white. We didn’t know they could do that. We know even less about them than they know about us. Soon, we may both know too much.

One minute left before they break through, just over three minutes until detonation, if ever.

My shoulders sag under my armor.

It has, all things considered, been a fine twenty-four years. I knew my parents, though not for so long as I would have liked. I grew up. I met good people. The best, in fact. I experienced the one great love of my life, albeit for just 616 days. I had a godson I came to love like my own child. Oh, and, depending on which version of history one read, I saved the world.

My ’puter beeps. Three minutes.

They say contemplation of death comes in phases: denial, anger, some other stuff, then, finally, acceptance.

Maybe that was the thing I had been luckiest about, compared to the other orphans I had known. A soldier’s destiny is to die young and unexpectedly. Soldiers often die nobly. Soldiers often die for others’ hubris or stupidity. But it is rarely a soldier’s destiny to have the time to accept his death.

The first molten metal plops, then sizzles, on deck plates as the Slugs burn through. I grip my spent pistol tighter.

In some alternate reality, there may be truth in the soldierly deception that war is bloodshed that brings life. I cock my head. That is, word for word, what the woman who bore my godson said when I delivered him in a cave on Jupiter’s largest moon.

That’s where this started for me, three years ago.

TWO

“YOU COULD BLEED TO DEATH!” I swiveled my head from the obstetrics instruction holo flickering to my left to the unladylike thigh-sprawl I knelt between. The field lantern’s Eternad-battery light cut crumpled shadows on the cave’s rock walls and ceiling. Zero Centigrade artificial atmosphere, manufactured by the Slugs we kicked off this rock seven months ago, numbed my fingers, slick with amniotic fluid and blood. A cave on Ganymede makes an awful birthing suite.

“No, Jason, this bloodshed brings life. Can you see the head, yet?” Corporal Sharia Munshara-Metzger puffed like a four-foot-eleven locomotive.

“Yeah. I think it’s crowning, Munchkin.” Whatever crowning meant. Four years ago I joined the infantry as a specialist fourth class, to stay out of jail. Fate and shrapnel had left me the acting commanding general of the seven hundred human survivors of the Battle of Ganymede. Obstetrics I knew like Esperanto.

I slid my eyes back to the holo. Bad enough to report the gynecological play-by-play without staring into the genitals of my best friend’s widow.

Through clenched teeth, Munchkin spat Arabic that I was pretty sure compared me, her acting commanding general, to something excreted by a camel. Eight hours’ labor erodes military courtesy.

She pressed her palms to her temples and thrashed her head side to side. Sweat droplets arced away from bangs plastered to her forehead, zero degrees or not. Her cheeks, olive and flawless, swelled as she puffed and blew. She focused her big brown eyes on me. “Why did we do this, Jason?”

Who we? What this? Women omit pronouns’ antecedents like aspen drop leaves in fall. But woe betide the man who fails to mind-read. I guessed. “Because the Slugs sat out here bombing the human race to extinction?”

She snarled. “I mean, why did Metzger and I have this child?”

I rolled my eyes at a question I had asked myself a hundred times during Munchkin’s pregnancy. United Nations Space Ship Hope had carried ten thousand male and female light infantry troops and five hundred Space Force crew for six hundred days from Earth to the orbit of Jupiter. The politicians weeded six million volunteers down to us lucky orphans who had lost entire families to the Slugs: “The Orphan’s Crusade.”

Even for orphans, unwanted pregnancy was a last-century relic, unheard-of since After-Pills. Yet only my best friend, the commander of the mile-long spaceship on which humankind had bet its future, and my gunner, after I introduced them, managed to break every imaginable regulation and conjure up a little nipper amid interplanetary combat.

Troubles find me like buzzards find roadkill. The Battle of Ganymede had been no exception.

A contraction stabbed Munchkin. “I must push.”

I shifted my eyes between the holo cube and her crotch. Munchkin’s Egyptian-pixie pelvis needed another centimeter’s dilation to pass a watermelon-sized human. I shook my head. “Not yet.”

The look Munchkin shot me made me glad it didn’t come from behind the sights of our M-60, but she didn’t push. For reasons I’ll never understand, the worse things get, the more people think I have answers.

I suppose that’s why I got field-promoted. As a specialist fourth class, I wasn’t even in charge of the machine gun I loaded for Munchkin. Now I was commander of this disaster. The politicians didn’t call it a disaster. They pronounced the battle a miraculous victory. The Battle of Ganymede will never be miraculous to us seven hundred survivors who buried ten thousand comrades beneath this moon’s cold stones. But the alternative was the extinction of the human race, so it was miraculous.