Jeeb hopped up alongside me, cocked his optics, and peered in through my faceplate.
The roar became thunder, and dust and bits of construction debris stirred, then swirled, then blew away toward the open centerline tunnel.
On my visor display, I watched the outside pressure drop. The band at my shoulder clamped my arm, not too tight, yet. Like a blood-pressure cuff.
The rush of air down the passage was like a hurricane now, and rolled me toward the centerline.
I hooked my armored arm around a stanchion as I rolled past, and clung to it.
The shoulder band tightened around my arm like, I suppose, a python.
Jeeb clung to my armored shoulder. He wasn’t helping, but it was good to know he was there. The outside pressure displayed on my visor reached zero, then the numbers blurred, and so did everything else.
SEVENTY
THE SPECIAL NEEDS Ward of New Bethesda Naval Hospital was on the ground floor. The Yellow Ribbon Girl with the pushcart chirped to me one day that this gave us the best courtyard views. But it was really so the convalescents— or, as I preferred to think of us, inmates—couldn’t hurl themselves from windows.
I sat in my room chair, waiting for the screaming pain of morning therapy to subside. The sadists strapped my new arm against my ribs after every session, like the uneducated meat it was, which was supposed to reduce post-therapeutic irritation. What would have reduced my irritation was joy juice, but the bastards had weaned me off that months before. They assured me that traumatic amputation—was there any other kind?—resulted in a perfectly normal diminished sense of self, to which I would adapt, with time and therapy. They could give back my arm, but they could never give back family. Jude and I hadn’t communicated since I failed to save his mother.
I turned my head toward my unmade bed. Later a therapist would unstrap my arm, and force me to make the bed myself, with as little assistance from him as possible. He would extol the benefits of routine, of self reliance, and of motor skill redevelopment, while he smiled at my agony. I never spoke to the therapists. In all the months, I had never spoken to anyone.
Locked in the nightstand beside the torture rack was the medal that was awarded to band-aid my failure. They really didn’t need to lock it up. They had already sawed the pin off the back. Even the meds in Special Needs were administered without IVs, so us convalescents couldn’t manufacture nooses out of the tubing.
On the nightstand by the bed Jeeb perched. Some of my fellow nut jobs preferred companion dogs. Jeeb, however, didn’t slobber or poop.
I read News-on-Text off the flat wall screen, waiting for the morning sun to light the courtyard outside my window. Special Needs Ward wasn’t fed images, just text. Disturbing images retarded healing.
So, apparently, did news reports, because all Special Needs Ward ever got was a gruel of months-old headlines.
Human Union threatens additional sanctions against Tressel, citing intolerable human rights abuses. C¦€…lan hostility again threatens Cavorite. Fleet continues hot pursuit of Slug vessels escaping Second Battle of Mousetrap. By then, nobody on Earth knew how hot the pursuit was. Nobody even knew how many jumps out the Fleet was. Someday, word might wend its way back across the jumps. Unless the Fleet had been destroyed, and she was dead.
“Good morning, General! How are you feeling, today, sir?” Ord stepped through my door smiling like a drill sergeant meeting a busload of recruits, as pressed as ever in antediluvian utility uniform. He stiffened his utilities in some sort of ancient vegetable starch introduced during the laundry process. He smiled every morning, and asked how I felt, even though he knew I never answered.
As he did every morning, Ord pulled a visitor’s chair alongside the window, where the light was better, donned his ancient wire-rimmed spectacles, and sat tapping away on his chipboard, plowing through paperless paperwork.
“Good morning, Jason! How are you feeling, today?”
It must have been Friday, because Sunshine Boy number two was also darkening my doorway. Nat Cobb visited every Friday morning. I never answered him, or anyone else, but still he came.
He had new Virtulenses, sleeker, presumably lighter, and he smiled as he drew up a visitor’s chair in front of me, and leaned forward, elbows on knees. “No word yet on your retirement paperwork.” He patted my knee. “Should come through any time.”
He was lying. With my physical disability, retirement papers should have processed in days. Stump Peavey got early retired in hours after his stroke. General Cobb wouldn’t admit it, but as long as he kept me on active duty, he could keep me there in Special Needs. Retirees were transferred to VA care, and the VA didn’t have much of a suicide watch, whereas Special Needs was a funny farm. Also, as long as I remained on active duty, Nat could, apparently, trump up some job description so Ord could babysit me daily.
Actually, I had thought about self-waxing, in a detached, professional way. I concluded that, despite a soldier’s familiarity with firearms and edged weapons, drug overdose would be most efficient. I could task Jeeb to steal barbiturates. This is a hospital. How hard could it be? But the trouble with a robot with personality is that he would probably come back, look up at me, hydraulics whining, and hold out a yellow box of chocolates from the gift shop, labeled “Please get well!”
Nat Cobb said, “We need you back. Jason, you need you back.”
I looked away.
“I don’t know why you stayed behind on Mousetrap. I suspect you don’t know, really. It was irrational. But I know that if you hadn’t stayed, we might have lost that battle. Instead, we won.”
I kept staring at the wall. Why did people like Cobb and Ord keep imprinting merit onto my bungling? My so-called career had consisted of stumbling out of bad situations after the roof fell in—often literally. My stumbling had already burdened the taxpayers with reequipping me with two lungs, two femurs, and undifferentiated soft tissue. Currently it burdened them with the cost of my new arm. Not to mention a minimally camouflaged suicide watch. Worst, my stumbling had killed almost all of the people I loved most.
“Jason, I can teach any officer tactics and management. I can’t teach intuition, and I can’t manufacture life experience.” General Cobb sat with me for ten more minutes. Finally, he sighed, like he did every Friday, then stood, and said to Ord, “A word, Sergeant Major?”
Ord would be gone with him until after lunch, presumably attending to some actual, productive business, instead of nursemaiding me.
Five minutes after they left, I heard in the hallway, “And how is the General on this beautiful day?” Yellow Ribbon Girls wore sunshine-yellow smocks that identified them as volunteers. They spoke in italics, like they were on work-release from a home for the terminally perky. They delivered hard-copy mail, parcels, and USO flowers, from squeaking pushcarts.
I recognized the voice. That particular Yellow Ribbon Girl came each Friday. Nat always had chocolates sent up from the gift shop, which always arrived via her cart after he left. She always said, “Well, well! We have something very special for you, today!”
I always faced the wall, and waved her away. Finally, she always sighed, and I heard a metallic clank, as she chucked the chocolates box in the cart’s wire bin, to be dropped off in the staff break room.
I heard her cart’s wheels squeak as she entered my room. Then I heard paper rustle as she dug through the mass of parcels and mail on her cart.
She cleared her throat. “There’s something for you, today.”
Well, well! Today she didn’t bubble. In fact, she had whispered. I waited for her to leave.
Plop.
The cart wheels squeaked, then vanished down the corridor.
I turned, and saw on my bed a Plastek mail bin. I never got mail, but the bin was labeled “Wander,” followed by the right room number. Two envelopes angled above the bin’s lip.
The first was the pale green of the Army Officers Personnel Directorate. AOPD still issued career-dispositive documentation in har
d copy, and required blue ink, cursive signature. I suppose they required that because they were afraid you could steal somebody’s thumbprint while they slept. I reached forward, plucked the envelope from the basket with my good hand, and tore it open with my teeth.
The Retirement Request Confirmation’s first page thanked me for my service, and directed me to a site where I could research my VA options. The last page required my signature, requested date of separation, and choice of VA facility within the Continental United States, to which Retiree would be transferred forthwith upon separation.
I dropped the papers on the bed, for now. The only pens in Special Needs were welded to chains inside the nurse’s station. Sharp objects.
I peered at the second envelope peeking out of the basket, and shuddered. No wonder the Yellow Ribbon Girl wasn’t perky. In a nearly paperless age, the one communication in every service that was always hard copied, in fact always written in longhand, was a commander’s letter of condolence to next of kin of a decedent. The letters w«€€…ere always written on commander’s standard personal letterhead, always mailed in a thick, cream envelope, always hand-addressed.
Everyone associated with the military recognized weep-and-keep stationery, and approached the envelope like it was a cottonmouth. There was no letter any next of kin dreaded more. There was no letter a commander dreaded writing more.
I stared at the personal letterhead envelope’s corner for ten minutes. Then I took a breath, and tugged it out.
The envelope was wrinkled, and covered with overlapping, multicolored cancellation place-and-date stamps. Hard copy mail inbound from the outworlds got cancelled each time it transferred ship-to-ship after a TFIP jump. I counted eight stamps. Some of the stamps named jumps I had never even heard of. When there is no transport, letters pile up, but when the chance comes to move mail back home, it flows in lumps. The envelope’s earliest, original postmark was months old, barely after I was dragged out of Mousetrap.
I tore the envelope open, unfolded the single page inside, and read the handwriting.
Dearest Jason,
If you are reading this, you are alive, a fact uncertain to me as I write this. Just as you cannot know, or may not care, whether I am still alive as you read this. It is selfish of me to wish that you remain safe, and to hope that we may one day be together, but command leaves so few opportunities to be selfish . . .
There was more, but tears blurred my vision, and I had to set the letter down, to wipe my eyes with my available hand. I did blink my eyes, and cleared them enough to read the signature, “Love, Mimi.”
I bent forward to look into the basket. It was filled with commander’s stationery letterhead envelopes, identical to the one I had just dropped, and as I thumbed through them I found serial postmarks, one envelope for every day following her first letter.
I picked up my unsigned retirement letter, clamped one corner between my teeth, and tore it in half, then in quarters.
One of the usual therapists, his name was Roy, came in to administer bed-making torture. When he saw the torn paper dangling from my mouth, his eyes widened.
I spit out the scraps, then spoke to him for the first time. “I’ll make it alone, Roy. But first I’ve got mail to read.”
SEVENTY-ONE
I FLOAT WEIGHTLESS in the observation blister on Abraham Lincoln’s prow. The spangled blackness glides around me, as the ship rotates. Dead ahead beckons the lightless disk of our next insertion point, its gravity already accelerating us forward. Invisible over my shoulder, the Fleet trails us, a single file of projected power that stretches behind this flagship, over a span longer than the distance between Earth and the moon.
My only companion in here, Jeeb, perches on the blister’s handrail alongside me, and one of his legs squeaks loud enough in the stillness that I wince. He stares up at me with polished optics, and I task him. “Accelerate left third locomo®€…tor replacement.”
In response, his internals click, so faintly that only I would notice, as he reprograms.
I rest one hand on the rail beside Jeeb, and my replaced arm throbs. By now, Jeeb and I each resemble George Washington’s hatchet. One hundred percent original equipment, except for six new handles and four new heads.
But Jeeb, for all the humanity I see in him, is so immortal that he can survive a near-miss nuke, and is selfless in the way that only machinery can be. We humans are all too mortal and all too selfish. And that, my life has taught me, is the essence of being us. We understand our mortality, yet we sacrifice everything for others. Sometimes the calculus of sacrifice is simple, one life for six thousand, or for all mankind. Sometimes the calculus is one arm for nothing explicable. I believe that sacrifice won the Second Battle of Mousetrap for mankind. I fear that only more sacrifice will win this longest and broadest of wars for us. I believe that we will overcome the Pseudocephalopod because, in our best moments, we overcome our selfishness.
The Spooks and my life have taught me that our distant adversary is one, single, self-perpetuating unitary intelligence. As the Fleet gets closer and closer to It across the jumps, the Spooks gather their clues, and read their entrails. They say we will find at our enemy’s core sentient tissue so eternal, so massive, that it has filled an entire planet, the way that a hermit crab grows to fill a discarded shell.
Despite the experience of most of a lifetime, that’s all I know of the future. I think I’ve earned answers, but all that my soldier’s life has rewarded me with are loved ones lost or barely known, and questions.
What else does Howard know that he hasn’t told me? Can my old friend Bassin remake a world that exists half slave and half free? Are my godson and Audace Planck complicit in Tressel’s evil empire? Does Jude blame me for his mother’s death? Can Mimi and I ever be more than interstellar pen pals? And is this universe big enough for us and the Slugs?
From the speaker in the handrail, the bosun’s whistle disturbs Wander’s Philosophy 101. The whistle’s music lilts, but I grumble because it never stops calling me. I sigh, then I somersault, and float aft, in the direction from which I came. “Let’s go, Jeeb. We’re not done yet.”
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my editor, Devi Pillai, and to Orbit’s publishing director, Tim Holman, for support and wisdom in making the Jason Wander books possible. Thanks also to Kim Gonzalez for thoughtful copyediting, to Calvin Chu for yet another sparkling cover, to Alex Lencicki, guide to the Internet and fixer of tickets, to Jennifer Flax for perceptive editing and so much more, and to everyone at Orbit for their energy and great work.
Thanks particularly to the many readers who have served their countries around the world and who have written to tell me that my labors have in some small way lightened or validated theirs.
Thanks also to Winifred Golden, agent to the stars and even to me, and, always, thanks to Mary Beth and the kids for sticking around.
¶€…Extras
Meet the Author
ROBERT BUETTNER is a former Military Intelligence Officer, National Science Foundation Fellow in Pale ontology and has been published in the field of Natural Resources Law. He lives in Georgia. His Web site is www.RobertBuettner.com.
Introducing
If you enjoyed ORPHAN’S ALLIANCE, look out for
ORPHAN’S TRIUMPH
Book 5 of the Jason Wander series
by Robert Buettner
BLAM-BLAM-BLAM.
The assault rifle’s burst snaps me awake inside my armor, and the armor’s heater motor prickles me between the shoulder blades when I stir. The shots’ reverberation shivers the cave’s ceiling, and snow plops through my open faceplate, onto my upturned lips.
“Paugh!” The crystals on my lips taste of cold and old bones, and I scrub my face with my glove. “Goddamit, Howard!”
Fifty dark feet from me, silhouetted against the pale dawn now lighting the cave’s mouth, condensed breath balloons out of Howard’s open helmet. “There are dire wolves out here, Jason!”
“
Don’t make noise. They’re just big hyenas.”
“They’re slobbering!”
“Throw rocks. That’s what I did. It works.” I roll over, aching, on the stone floor and glance at the time winking from my faceplate display. I have just been denied my first hour’s sleep after eight hours on watch. Before that, we towed the third occupant of this cave across the steel-hard tundra of this Ice Age planet through a sixteen-hour blizzard until we found this shelter, more a rocky wrinkle in a shallow hillside than a cave.
I squint over my shoulder, behind Howard and me, at our companion. It is the first Pseudocephalopod Planetary Ganglion any Earthling has seen, much less taken alive, in the three decades of the Slug War. Like a hippo-sized, mucous-green octopus on a platter, the Ganglion quivers atop its Slug-metal blue motility disc, which hums a yard above the cave floor. Six disconnected sensory conduits droop bare over the disc’s edges, isolating the Ganglion from this world and, we hope, from the rest of Slug-kind.
Orphan's Alliance Page 23
