Orphanage

by Robert Buettner

  Ari clucked, and his robot alter ego hopped onto his shoulder, still watching me. “He’s a J-series. He’s the second one, ‘B,’ of six. So, Jeeb.”

  Jeeb twisted his head to take in the room. He imaged visible light, infrared, ultraviolet, and radar. He heard sound from five to fifty thousand hertz and soft as a rat fart, plus all bands of radio.

  “Is he looking for his bunk?” I asked. Ari shook his head. “He’s programmed to scan for eavesdropping sensors. He makes you nervous, doesn’t he?”

  “Nah.” Of course he did. I was sleeping with a mechanical cockroach as big as a Thanksgiving turkey.

  Jeeb hopped from Ari’s shoulder to the windowsill, worked the latch with one arm while perched on the other five, and threw up the sash. The covering on his back split, telescoped into wings, and Jeeb flew away.

  Ari grinned as he began unpacking the inanimate parts of his gear. “The Swedish troops are landing. Half women. Babefest!”

  Ari was seeing them as he spoke, through Jeeb’s eyes. A TOT displayed holo images on a suitcase-size viewer for analysis, but its input also beamed directly into the Wrangler’s brain, through surgical implants.

  TOTs are just metal-and-plastic machines. They respond to the thoughts of their Wranglers and to no other input, immune to jamming. They have enough artificial intelligence to function when out of range of their Wranglers, but no personality, theoretically. But I read that Wranglers and TOTs are closer than the old K-9 dogs and trainers.

  Ari laughed. “The Swedes are catching hell from the drills, blonde or not.”

  GEF was technically a UN operation. But after a century as the world’s policeman, the US military, sad as it was, functioned light-years ahead of the rest of the world’s. Most of GEF’s troops were American. Most of GEF’s equipment was American. Most of GEF’s trainers were American.

  So experienced soldiers arriving from other countries were being subjected to American boot-camp indoctrination just to get them up to speed with the likes of me.

  Ari consulted his wrist ‘puter. “Hour ’til chow. Let’s go down to the airstrip so you can see it, too.”

  By the time we arrived the decorative Swedes had moved out for a jolly double-time around the post.

  A Here disgorged a sorry-looking bunch of male and female soldiers.

  “Egyptians.” Ari was getting input from Jeeb. I shaded my eyes with my hand and squinted at the low clouds. I knew Jeeb hovered up there, but still I couldn’t find him, his belly chameleoned gray to match the clouds.

  “They’re bitching about the cold.” Jeeb also translated languages, dialects, codes, and ciphers in real time as he sent his eavesdroppings back into Ari’s head.

  The Egyptians formed up and stood more or less at attention. Frigid wind off the peaks ruffed the fleece halos on our parka hoods. The poor Egyptians wore just desert fatigues and shivered on the runway, especially the small or skinny ones.

  A voice echoed across the runway.

  “Sir? Commissioned officers are addressed as ‘Sir’! I am Division Sergeant Major Ord and am so addressed!”

  Even though the words weren’t addressed to me, I shivered.

  Ord! It hadn’t occurred to me that Pittsburgh had made Ord a war orphan, eligible for GEF, just like me. But with his qualifications he didn’t need to capture a Slug to get in, like I had.

  As divison sergeant major, he ruled my HQ Battalion with an iron fist. Oh joy.

  We sidled up to the formation.

  The object of Ord’s affection was a young, female soldier, who wore the uniform of an Egyptian army lieutenant. In GEF, we all gave up our rank pending final assignment. She was just another grunt.

  She stood maybe four-ten, so Ord had to bend at the waist to get nose to nose with her.

  When he finally drew back, I saw her face and nearly stopped breathing.

  Her skin was olive and flawless, her eyes wide and dark, and her features perfect. Fatigues don’t reveal much about a woman’s shape, but hers looked promising.

  As Ari and I watched, arms folded and smirking, Ord ended his welcome spiel. He commanded, “Dis-missed!”

  The Egyptians spun stunned about-faces, picked up their gear, and jogged toward trucks that would haul them to the quartermaster building.

  I jogged alongside the little officer, whose head hung a millimeter. “Don’t let Ord bother you.”

  She raised her head. Her eyes were prettier up close.

  “He picks on soldiers he likes. He did it to me when I was in Basic.”

  “And you are?” Her English was perfect but accented. I could watch her lips move all day.

  “Wander. Jason. US Army. Specialist fourth class. Or I was. Now I’m just another GEF grunt.”

  She nodded and extended her hand. “Munshara. Sharia. Egyptian Army. Formerly lieutenant, Specialist.” She raised her chin a notch.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Erased rank or not, military courtesy was a hard habit to break.

  Her duffel slipped from her shoulder. The canvas bag was as big as she was, and I reached to steady it. She jerked away and struggled not to puff in the thin, two-mile-high air.

  How do you pick up another soldier, especially one who outranks you?

  “I’m a machine gunner.”

  “I also. Perhaps we will compete.”

  Not exactly a date, but the door hung ajar for further contact.

  She reached the truck and hefted her duffel in. I thought about offering her a hand up. Maybe a push on the fanny. She shot me a look, and I dropped the thought.

  She had to hop twice to get herself up and into the truck. I looked away.

  “Thank you for the American welcome, Jason.” She smiled down at me. I watched the truck lurch away as my heart fluttered.

  “Nice.” Ari stood beside me. “But not my type.”

  “Huh?”

  “Israel and the Arabs made peace twenty years ago but Mom wouldn’t have been ready for me to bring home a nice Egyptian girl.” He blinked at the mention of his mother.

  “Oh.”

  Dallas had been an early hit and one of the worst. Every soldier in GEF had lived some variation of the same tragic story. Etiquette developed quickly. You never asked about anyone’s family, directly. Unless the other soldier brought it up, first “Lose anyone else?”

  Ari nodded. “My father was a haberdasher. We had three stores. North Dallas has good rag trade. Had.”

  He couldn’t ask, so I said, “My mother was in Indianapolis.”

  The other part of the ritual was to change subjects once basic information was exchanged.

  Jeeb fluttered down and perched, one wing brushing Ari’s curls. Four talons gripped Ari’s shoulder, two talons wiped antennae as they refracted into Jeeb’s anterior. Jeeb was a J-series, so he not only observed things, he hacked into any known database and cross-referenced anything he found.

  Ari pointed at the shrinking truck. “Lieutenant Munchkin, there? Her father was a colonel in the Egyptian Air Force. She lost her parents and six sisters to the Cairo Projectile. She can shoot the eyes out of the jacks in a card deck at six hundred meters with an M-60. She’s single and straight. She wears thong underwear.”

  “That’s some nosy bug you got mere, Ari.”

  Ari adjusted his yarmulke. “His grandma was Jewish.”

  Her truck turned and disappeared behind a row of parked Hercs. Jeeb had to be exaggerating. I was the best shot I knew with an M-60, and I couldn’t see a deck of cards at six hundred meters. But I hoped he was right about the thong.

  The next morning everyone at Camp Hale but support staff assembled in a rock bowl at the foot of the peaks. In its center, the Combat Engineer Battalion had erected a stage and loudspeakers. Earmarked for personal security, I sat up front with HQ Battalion, below the stage, with frigid rock searing my butt through insulated trousers and frigid wind searing my bare nose.

  Major General Nathan Cobb mounted the stage in the same fatigue parka the rest of us wore, but with two stars
on each shoulder. Our commanding officer flipped back his hood. Better him than me.

  Completely gray and rail-thin, he wore old-fashioned glasses. He pushed them back on a red nose and drew a paper from his pocket. Wind whipped it in his fingers.

  He looked out over fifteen thousand faces. Ten thou-sand would form the division, the rest were alternates. What that said about expected training casualties knotted my stomach.

  Nat Cobb adjusted his microphone. “Cold enough for you?” I’d read up on the man for whom I might take a bullet. He came from a small, plain town in Maine and talked like it.

  “No, sir!” Fifteen thousand voices roared back.

  “Maybe we can warm things up for the Slugs.”

  Bigger roar. Nat Cobb wiped snot off his nose with his mitten and smiled at his soldiers. Most generals come with papers like a pedigreed poodle. West Point. Family history. Embassy and Washington liaison assignments.

  Nat Cobb was a mutt He’d enlisted at eighteen, got a field promotion and fought his way into Officer Candidate School. Over the years, he’d earned a master’s in international relations and kicked ass at the Command and General Staff College. He spurned Pentagon career-builder assignments to stay close to troops in the field. They said he didn’t know which fork to use at White House dinners and didn’t care. Fortunately for Cobb’s career, the current occupant of that address didn’t care either, and she was the commander in chief.

  He cleared his throat, and the vast audience fell silent. “I’m not going to bullshit you or motivate you. We’ve all had plenty of both lately. Each of us has the most important, hardest job ahead of us any human being has ever had. Most of us will die trying to do that job. All I can offer you is my promise that I will bring you home alive even if it costs my own life. But if I must choose saving you or saving home, my choice is clear. I know each of you will make the same choice.”

  He paused. The wind died, and I heard breath in fifteen thousand throats.

  “You’ve already listened to me beat gums too long. Let’s get to work.” He turned and stepped down, to dead silence.

  I suppose we expected fist-pumping oratory or a detailed outline or something. General Patton telling us to make the other son of a bitch die for his country. General Marshall laying out the master plan.

  Ari leaned toward me. “Gets to the point, doesn’t he?”

  “Wait ‘til you meet his division sergeant major.”

  The next weeks flew. The good news was we slept an honest six hours daily, had staff to pull KP and the like, and got almost-edible meals. Nat Cobb was a GIs general. It was usual to find him in a mess hall, at a table with privates, eating off a tray like a regular grunt. And woe betide the mess sergeant who burned the bacon at that meal.

  The bad news was every minute that we didn’t spend on bullshit we spent humping up mountains or cleaning weapons. Basic was a vacation by comparison. And the cold hung around each of us morning and night like an icy rag.

  Which brings me to temperature endurance testing and back to Munchkin.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Temperature endurance testing involved freezing your ass off. Every moment at Camp Hale involved freezing your ass off, but TET had it as a specific objective.

  The brains had figured out early that humans would freeze to death on Ganymede without battery-heated fatigues. So they invented Smart Clothes. Very forties. A chip calculates your body’s need for heat against available battery power. You stay alive, if not comfortable.

  If you’re wondering why battery depletion was an issue, remember that the Eternad system wasn’t perfected at first. In case you’ve been living in a cave the last few years, Eternad’s a system of flexible bands and levers built into clothing that stores body-motion energy in rechargeable batteries. Just like the alternators on internal-combustion cars recharged the battery by harnessing engine motion. Simply breathing keeps you juiced.

  But at that time, the batteries were conventional. A GI with hardy metabolism could last a day under field conditions without a new battery. Another might popsicle inside twelve hours because his chip calculated he needed more warmth. The twelve-hour troops simply couldn’t be sent to Ganymede.

  TET consisted of two GIs just sitting in one foxhole in a line of foxholes dug along a wind-scoured ridge at twelve thousand feet. Chill factor was equivalent to eighty below zero, Fahrenheit. You stayed in your hole for a solid day while your fatigues kept you right on the edge of misery. It was the one test you couldn’t retake, except in case of verifiable mechanical breakdown. If you made the day, you stayed in. If you were cold-sensitive and sucked off your battery juice in twelve hours, you went hypothermic and washed out of GEF permanently. Simple, pragmatic, and a bitch.

  Each GI wore a finger clip so the instructor could test body-core temperature periodically. If a soldier went hypothermic, the soldier washed out but lived.

  As they trucked us up to the ridge, my soon-to-be foxhole mate swayed against me. She shrank away, as she had a week ago.

  If I had harbored romantic notions about Munchkin, as Ari had called her, they died a week before. We were at the range, testing to rank machine gunners for division assignments. Munchkin and I tied for top score. We would both be assigned to HQ Battalion, which I was, already. But we had to have a shoot-off to determine who would be gunner and who would be loader. Gunner was not only boss, gunner humped the gun, not the heavier ammo load.

  The rest of the failed competitors stood behind us. She, in turn, stood behind the gun, tight-lipped and shak-ing tension from her fingers as she gazed downrange at the targets six hundred meters out.

  “Good luck,” I had said, as she wriggled down prone behind the gun and adjusted the sights. “I won’t need it.”

  And I didn’t need a snotty Egyptian Princess. Maybe she was just covering her nervousness. I wanted to say something diplomatic to former Lieutenant Munshara. I really did. Not something personal that might upset her concentration. But what actually spewed out was, “What you need is a spanking, Munchkin.”

  Somebody laughed, then somebody else. It was the kind of nickname that stuck. Especially if the nicknamed hated it.

  She turned as red as a cafe-au-lait complexion can turn, and fixed me with a stare as cold as Camp Hale. Then she laid her cheek alongside the gunstock, and the range went silent.

  Never, ever piss off a shrimp. The competition was over before it started.

  Munchkin nailed every target, then begged another ammo belt and drilled a batch of leftover tank-gun targets a thousand meters out.

  I didn’t even bother shooting. So a week ago she had stood and brushed off her fatigues. “How’s that for a spanking, Wander?” She had waved her hand at the gun on the ground. “Clean that up, Wander!”

  “Wander!” The voice snapped me back to the present as the TET truck squealed to a stop. My still-pissed gunner jolted against me again.

  “I said first pair out now. Wander and Munchkin.” Mr.

  Wire, the chief of this exercise, was a US Navy SEAL. As old as Ord and of equivalent noncommissioned rank, a master chief petty officer. He screamed to be heard over the wind.

  Thirty seconds later the woman I had forever dubbed “Munchkin” and I stood together on a gale-swept ridge. The truck disappeared as wind needled snow into the bits of skin that our face masks didn’t cover.

  I tapped my mitten on her padded shoulder, pointed at our snow-swirled hole, and screamed, “Out of this wind!”

  She nodded. By the time we wedged ourselves in she shook so hard her voice trembled. “God tests me.”

  “Yeah. It’s cold.”

  “I mean putting me together with you.”

  “The feeling’s mutual.” Not really. If you have to freeze your butt off better to do it with a babe. “Look, I was just kidding the other day.”

  “You were just arrogant!” She hugged her torso and turned her face to the rock wall.

  “Attitude won’t keep you warmer. Take it from a Col-oradan. Neith
er will the fact that they dropped us off first. We’ll be out here longer than anybody else. Bad luck.”

  “No. Not luck. For this single thing I apologize to you, Wander. It’s my fault. We are placed near the command post so the instructors can watch me closer.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’m the smallest person in the entire Ganymede Expeditionary Force. Their charts say it is physically impossible for me to retain adequate body heat. They already asked me to withdraw, voluntarily.”

  “The weather isn’t that bad.” Actually, it was horrible. I was freezing my ass off already, batteries or no.

  “It isn’t the cold. It’s the unknown. I’ve never been cold. In Egypt it never even approaches zero degrees.”

  “Zero’s damn cold.”

  “Zero Centigrade. Where water freezes. Egypt never even gets close to that. This is beyond imagination.”

  “And I suppose having to go through it all with me makes it worse?” I’d read all the propaganda about superior female judgment and endurance and the sheer justice of including female soldiers in this Force. But here I was having a prom-night spat in a foxhole.

  She twisted to look at me as I pulled my face mask up and blew my nose into my mitten.

  She rolled her eyes and turned away again.

  I peeled my mitten down and looked at my ‘puter. “Only twenty-three hours and fifty minutes to go. As the cold-weather expert in this team I have a suggestion. Huddle together for warmth. I think they expect us to do that.” I spread my arms. “Come to Papa.”

  “God willing, I shall freeze to death first.”

  I shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

  It felt like she sat with her face to the foxhole wall for hours. My ‘puter insisted it was thirty minutes. I alligator-clipped my finger. Body temperature 98.6, battery drawdown 4 percent I was chilled, but I’d make it through with juice to spare.

  “Okay, Munchkin. Time for your physical.”

  “Fuck off.”

  I uncoiled the wire for the fingertip sensor from the monitor box. “It’s not gynecology. Hold out your finger.”