He stared into his palms, then looked up. “The war’s been coasting downhill for a couple of years now.”
“I’ve been pedaling the bike too hard to notice, sir.”
He nodded, smiled again. “I understand. If propulsion-grade Cavorite wasn’t flowing from Bren, if Mousetrap wasn’t secure, if Bren wasn’t providing a stable staging area for Silver Bullet, and, most recently, if the Weichsel raid hadn’t yielded the last puzzle piece we need to exterminate the Slugs, the existence of mankind would still hang in the balance.”
“Aren’t you starting the victory party a little early, sir?”
“Like you said, you’ve been busy pedaling the bike. Mankind’s best minds think we entered the war’s end game months ago. We just have to play it out.”
I squirmed in my chair. “That’s great. I intend to play it out. So it doesn’t get screwed up. Sir.”
He pressed his lips together. “Jason, your contributions have been extraordinary, and so have your sacrifices. Do you feel that you’ve done enough?”
Hair rose on the back of my neck. “When we know the Slugs are gone, I’ll feel like I’ve done enough. Sir, what are you trying to say?”
“The end game-Silver Bullet-is a Space Force show. Basically it’s a reconnaissance to locate a target, followed by a bombing mission to deliver a single, outcome-determinative device.”
I straightened in my chair. “Every time we’ve thought we had the Slugs on the ropes since I’ve been in this war-and I’ve been in it from the beginning-we’ve been wrong, General Pinchon. Maybe Silver Bullet’s Hiroshima, maybe it isn’t.”
He nodded. “We have been wrong. And if it hadn’t been for people like you and Nat Cobb bailing us out, we wouldn’t stand today on the threshold of final victory, ready to move to new challenges.”
Stale doughnut congealed in my stomach. “Is this my golden handshake?”
Pinchon frowned. “Jason, by statute, the U.S. military is authorized three hundred twenty active-duty generals at a time. The math works out that there are currently slots for only a dozen army three-stars, like you.”
The numbers fluctuated, but even I knew that the brass ceiling had been the law since before the Cold War. It meant that just as perfectly competent senior general officers figured out how to do their jobs, they got squeezed out of the top of the officer corps, like used toothpaste out of a tube, so junior generals could move up.
I said, “Nat never got pushed out.”
“The war was different then. And Nat was different. He knew how to watch his own back in Washington.”
I smiled, even as my heart sank in my chest. “He watched mine, too.”
Pinchon sighed. “Frankly, Jason, given your record, Nat’s the only reason you got far enough that we’re having this conversation.”
I couldn’t argue. The army had been trying to fire me since basic training, and for good reasons. I was no MacArthur, no Eisenhower. I had stumbled through a career doing the wrong things for the right reasons, then scratching and clawing back from the brink of disaster only by the grace and intervention of people like Ord and Nat Cobb. That didn’t make the shock of this moment less electric.
“What about my command? My kids.”
“Our outworld presence will be reconfigured. We won’t need and can’t afford a ground army forward-deployed to meet a threat that’s about to disappear. Most of your command will be safely redeployed home with the gratitude of their respective nations. Any commander should be delighted with that outcome.”
Maybe so, but shock gave way to heat that flushed up from my gut. My fists balled at my sides. “That’s it? You think I’m going to go quietly?”
“Jason, there’s nobody here to protect you this time. Nat’s gone. And you’ll be retired on a four-star’s pension. The defense industry will snap you up as a consultant, if the holo nets don’t hire you as an expert first. This isn’t a punishment, it’s a reward.”
“How long have I got?”
Pinchon smiled, as gently as I suppose he knew how. “You make retirement sound like a tumor.” He waved the holo screen so it faced me. “Before you leave, I’ll print out your retirement forms for you. They become effective when you sign them. Meantime, let’s run through your ongoing benefits and privileges…”
He talked for, as my ’Puter read later, forty-four more minutes. I didn’t hear one word.
Finally, I found myself standing beside the elevator, with a breast pocket full of army paper, in silence broken only by hollow ringing in my ears, as though an eight-inch howitzer shell had detonated alongside me. I stared back at the MacArthur plaque on the hallway wall. There was a quote, from MacArthur’s address to a joint session of Congress, after Truman rightly canned him for trying to start World War III in Korea. MacArthur had quoted a barracks ballad: “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.”
I stared at the quote for a long time before I pressed the down button.
At a kiosk down in the Waldorf’s lobby, I rented another manual drive, including mobile recharge coverage.
Five minutes later the car whispered up to the curb, and as I pressed a bill into the live doorman’s white-gloved hand, I said to him, “Fade away, my ass!”
Then I slipped the renter out, between the yellow nose of one cab and the tail of another, and told my car to give me directions to Maryland.
TWENTY-FOUR
FORT MEADE, MARYLAND, wasn’t the only place Howard’s Spooks infested, but it was the place where they had for years maintained facilities to hold a Slug smart enough to tell them anything-if, like a dog that chased cars, they ever caught one.
Howard buzzed me in through the doors of a three-story black glass cube with a sign out front that read “ International Communicable Disease Research Center. Protective clothing required beyond this point.”
He was wearing slacks, sandals, and a T-shirt that announced “On my planet, I’m normal.” The most military thing about him was an old-style ID badge he wore on a lanyard around his chicken-wattle neck. The army had long ago come to terms with the need to let Howard run his Spooks the way he wanted to. The honeymoon had lasted because his methods allowed him to recruit persons who thought outside the box. Way outside.
We stepped into the elevator, and Howard poked his badge into a slot for a subbasement level five stories down. Alongside the slot, someone had taped a hand-printed sign that read “Dungeon. Quiet please! Torture in progress.”
The elevator opened to a desk labeled “Security,” behind which sat a girl wearing farmer’s bib jeans over bare shoulders, with corporal’s chevrons pinned to the strap of an empty leather shoulder holster. She made one of those waves where the hand remains still while the fingers wiggle. “Hi, Howard. Who’s your friend?”
I sighed. Ord’s head would have exploded.
We passed by her, then through a set of double doors. Howard said, “Her IQ is one ninety-five.”
“One would hope.”
The room we entered was big enough to garage three buses, and at its center floated my green traveling companion from Weichsel, under a cone of soft blue overhead light. A cable thicket ran from plates taped to the Ganglion’s hide to consoles along all four walls, behind which sat a hundred Spooks.
I pointed at the cables and frowned. “Is that how you make it talk? Electric shock?”
Howard’s eyes widened. “The sign in the elevator was a joke!”
“I got that, Howard.”
“Jason, the Pseudocephalopod has no concept of withholding information from another because it’s never known another. It’s the only one of its kind. There’s no need to coerce anything, any more than you coerce a book to let you read it. We simply had to synthesize an algorithm that translated the information stored in this Ganglion.”
“Had. You’ve already done it?”
“We’ve been preparing for this moment for years.”
“Did it know where it came from?” I had come to see Howard from curiosity, but after Pinc
hon made me walk the plank, a half-hope had formed in a selfish corner of my mind. If Howard’s prisoner didn’t possess the navigational information we needed, we couldn’t end the war soon. If the war wasn’t ending, Pinchon might not send me to the glue factory. Perversely, during the entire drive down from New York, I had hoped the Ganglion would prove to be a bust.
Howard grinned. “Absolutely! Last night we deciphered a sequence of twenty-six jumps that lead from Weichsel to the homeworld system. Simple, really. We’re just tidying up now.”
“Great.” It was. In fact, it was the greatest news of the war. Somehow, I couldn’t get as excited as I should have been.
Behind Howard, Spooks had lined up to get their pictures taken standing in front of the Ganglion. Some hammed it up, holding a magazineless pistol, presumably borrowed from the corporal in coveralls, and snarling. Most smiled, whooped, and pumped fists overhead.
Howard said, “Want to get your picture taken with the Ganglion? Before the war ends?”
I shook my head. “I’ve got another stop to make.”
Fort Meade, like many military reservations, is big enough, and has enough excess, mothballed, built-out space, that it hosts activities in addition to those connected with its primary mission. Often, those activities are temporary, pending completion of permanent facilities.
The temporary location of the three-year-old Human Union Military Academy was in a sixty-year-old complex four miles from Spook Castle.
HUMA’s commandant lived in a government-provided house on the temporary academy grounds, like a university president. I parked at the curb, lifted a package the size of a Kleenex cube off the seat beside me, then carried it to the front door and rang the bell. As I waited, I looked around. The place was more bungalow than house, walled in peeling stucco, with a roof of cracked red tile and a dropcloth-sized lawn baked to steel wool by summer.
I thought it was the most beautiful home I had ever seen.
Clack.
The door’s deadbolt rattled, then the door swung inward, squealing on unoiled hinges.
TWENTY-FIVE
MIMI’S MOUTH DROPPED OPEN, and her brown eyes widened in her perfect face. A towel turbaned her head, and she stood barefooted in a gray sweatsuit. “I thought you were flying down. Tonight.”
“Pinchon finished with me early. Evidently my ’Puter’s not connected to the net, or I would have let you know.”
Her breath hissed out. “You can rent a temporary for five bucks, Jason.” She shook her head while she fiddled with the towel that wrapped it. “You’re an inconsiderate child.”
After three years, this wasn’t how I had imagined this moment.
It was hot on her front step. “Can I come in?”
She stared at me, then stood aside. “Yeah. I’m sorry. I love being commandant. But a cadet got caught cheating on an exam today. Another one broke her back on the obstacle course. And we’re over budget for the quarter.”
She closed the door behind us and walked me into her living room. Framed citations and flat photographs of uniformed crews and long-mothballed vessels cluttered the walls, along with the kinds of parquet-framed mirrors and gilt-threaded tapestries that look memorable in port bazaar stalls but tawdry forever after. Amid a career’s flotsam, a worn green sofa angled in front of the dark hologen. She flopped on the sofa, then tugged the sweatpants on her thighs like they were mainsails. “And look at this. I wanted to look beautiful for you. But no, you-” Her officerial lip quivered.
I sat beside her and lifted her chin with my finger. “I’ve never seen anything more beautiful in my life.”
Her eyes widened as she blinked back tears. “You’re serious. You’re such an idiot.”
I set the wooden box in her lap.
“What is it?”
I shrugged.
She raised the lid, plucked out a translucent snowball of a rock, and turned it in her fingers, so the facets inside caught the light. She squinted and frowned. “Is this a Weichselan diamond?”
“Blue white, with a one-hundred-six-carat perfect core, if it’s cut right, they tell me. You could say I picked it up cheap, but the freight was murder.”
She smiled. Then her face creased into panic and she stiffened.
I threw my palm up. “The jewelers said it’s suitable to be set as a pendant. A major piece suitable for evening wear.” The jewelers had also said it was too big for a ring, but clarifying it that way would have made the moment even more awkward.
Mimi relaxed and held the diamond near her throat as she turned her head left, then right, and watched her reflection in the mirror on the far wall.
She returned the jewel to its box, smiling at me. “You might not be an idiot.”
Mimi unwrapped the towel from around her head, then curled around until she faced me, on her knees on the sofa, and leaned toward me and breathed in my ear. “I missed you, Jason.”
A diamond may be a girl’s best friend, but it is also a boon companion to a man who might not be an idiot.
Four hours later, I lay on my back, staring up at the ceiling of Mimi’s bedroom. Her head lay on my bare chest, and her finger traced the scar-tissue line where my regrown arm joined my shoulder. “Your arm works fine. Everything works fine.”
Military homecomings are blisteringly awkward in so many ways. But once physical contact occurs, mutual hormonal autodrive kicks in for a while. I kissed her hair and knew that the right thing to do was to savor the moment, to say nothing.
Therefore, I said, “Pinchon fired me.”
Her finger continued to trace across my chest as she whispered, “Huh? It sounded like you said-”
“I did. My Relief and Retirement ceremony’s in ninety days.”
She sat up straight and shook her head, which made everything else shake delightfully. “No. Doesn’t that idiot know there’s a war on?”
“Not for long, there isn’t. Howard’s already got a fix on the homeworld. The weaponized-Cavorite project is down to just troubleshooting.”
“You’re going to fight the retirement mandate.”
“I was, I guess.” I shook my head. “But I dunno. You’re here. I could be here.”
The panic crossed her face again, and she looked toward her kitchen. “I was gonna do a rack of lamb, but… I could scramble some eggs. I input for a guest, so the house ordered extra.”
“Sure. That would be fine.”
Twenty minutes later we sat at her kitchen table, me in underwear and Mimi in a silk robe. I pushed eggs around my plate with a fork.
She leaned forward. “Are they all right? I don’t cook much.”
“They’re great. It’s the chives. I’m allergic.”
“I didn’t know.”
She ate one bite, then said, “Jason, I put in for a command.”
“Another ship? That would take years.”
“Not a keel-up command. I told them I’d take any rust bucket that opened up.”
“You just said you loved this job. And in your letters you said that you loved-”
“I do. I think.” She turned away as she stabbed her finger back at my plate. “But, hell, I can’t even make eggs for you right!”
“That’s a small thing. The kind of thing people in love learn about each other when they spend time together.”
“Oh, really? What about the big things? When you take the retirement gut-punch, I’m there for you. But they put me out to pasture as a schoolmaster and you don’t give a shit! All you do is complain about my cooking!”
My jaw dropped, and I spread my palms. “I never-you said…” For once, I shut up before I made it worse. How can you know a person you see at three-year intervals?
We sat and stared into the tabletop.
Mimi said, “Jason, I’m not ready to sit in rocking chairs playing Nat and Maggie.”
“Neither am I. Earth hasn’t changed for the better while I’ve been gone. Or I’ve changed for the worse. So what do we do?”
She stood up, carried both ou
r plates to the sink, and scraped the eggs down the drain. “I don’t know. Can we talk about it tomorrow? After your speech?”
We reloaded the dishes in the Sanaid, then sat on her couch in the dark, her head on my shoulder, without speaking, until I heard her breath turn heavy as she slept.
I stared into the dark, at our reflections in her mirror. They touched, but they were dark silhouettes that I couldn’t make out.
I tried to sleep, too, but wound up thinking about the speech I had to give in four hours.
TWENTY-SIX
THE NEXT MORNING I stood at parade rest on the academy’s lecture-hall stage and stared out across three thousand young faces, all eyes staring up at me. The cadets’ uniforms were gray, impeccable, and indistinguishable one from another. The faces, however, were brown, white, yellow, male, and female. Tattoos curled around some faces; jewels dangled from others. They were badges of their human homeworlds, each spawned by, and once ruled by, the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony. Some of those worlds I had fought to free from the hegemony. Some I had fought to keep in the union. The names of some I could barely pronounce.
Mimi stood to my right, then gave me a wink.
She gripped the podium, and her words to her cadets echoed off the arched ’lume ceiling. “I’ll keep the intro brief. I know you don’t want the assembly to run long. That could shorten morning PT.”
Three thousand throats boomed a chuckle off the ceiling. Then silence returned.
The ceiling ’lume dimmed, and a quote faded in on the flatscreen wall behind the commandant. Mimi turned, then read aloud:
“‘Terracentric it may be to refer to “The Pseudocephalopod War,” much less to date its onset from “ 2037.” However, all history pivoted on those events in the Spiral Arm, as undeniably as conventional space folds around every ultradwarf at every Temporal Fabric Insertion Point. Students of that time and place will find no truer account than in the warrior’s-eye view of Jason Wander.’
– Chronicles of the Galaxy,
Volume XXIII”
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