I sighed, then nodded. “Fair enough. Which means I need to get back to work. Take me home.”
Jude sat still. “You drive.”
“What?”
He pointed at a set of paddles folded beneath the electronic countermeasures console. “The Wizzo’s got a redundant control set.”
“It’s idiotic. This thing costs more than Costa Rica.”
He snorted. “It’ll be the most fun you’ve had with your clothes on. You would have done it if my dad had asked you when you were teenagers. And I’m right here to override if you overcook it.”
I would have. He was. And my godson was also right about the fun.
When we got back, a total of one hour and fifteen minutes after I left my office, Jude parked the Scorpion out on the field, belly tiles high enough off the ground to avoid a prairie fire. A tech with a chipboard met us.
Jude reverted from godson to test pilot, speaking to the tech as we walked to the hangar through the early-morning cool. “It handles fundamentally identical to the original. No observable hull expansion problems with temperature variation. Well, I noticed a creak starboard rear, at the fairing.”
I left my godson to his Zoomie duties and walked back to my headquarters with a bounce in my step.
We were planning a high-risk operation, but the reward demanded it. I might end up defeated like Lee at Gettysburg as easily as victorious like MacArthur at Inchon. And the people who surrounded me would make it work, just like they had made so many other things work over the course of this decades-long trip through this now-brightening tunnel.
I stepped through the door to my offices at zero eight hundred, smiling. We had been open for business since zero seven hundred, and the aroma of strong Tassini coffee mixed with the smell of ink on the ribbons of Marini clerks clacking away on steel typing machines. An Earthling staff sergeant looked up from Ord’s desk. “Morning, General.”
As I passed him, I looked left and right, into adjacent, unoccupied cubicles and file aisles. “Where’s the sergeant major, Tierney?” Ord late for work was as improbable as the moons of Bren failing to rise at night.
I pushed open my office door as the staff sergeant shrugged. “Not here, sir. Put himself on sick call.”
I froze with my palm against the rough wood. In thirty years Ord had never put himself on sick call. “Tierney, reset my morning schedule. I’ll be out of the office for an indeterminate period.”
He cocked his head. “What’s up, General?”
“I’ve got a case of scotch to deliver.”
THIRTY-THREE
I CHASED DOWN Hippocrates Wallace in an infirmary corridor between maternity and pathology. He glanced over his shoulder when I called, then turned and faced me with his rounds chipboard in one cocoa-colored hand.
I said, “There’s a case of Glenmorangie in the foot-well under your desk. Don’t drink it all in one place, Colonel.”
He grunted. “Took you long enough.”
“I brought it all the way from Earth. And I’ve been busy.”
“So I’ve heard.” He stared at me for two heartbeats. Then he said, “You didn’t come over here to deliver scotch.”
I shook my head.
He pointed at an empty double room across the hall, ushered me in, then closed the door behind us.
My heart pounded. “I hear Ord put himself on sick call this morning.”
“DeArthur stopped by downstairs, two weeks before you got back here from Earth. Complained of persistent sniffles. Got loaded up with the usual complement of patent meds and a download advising rest and clear fluids.”
“You’ve known Ord long enough to know he’d never visit the infirmary over sniffles.”
“I have. But he didn’t come to me, just saw a duty nurse.”
“And?”
“The next visit, which was just after you got back from Earth, he did come to me. I observed visible weight loss. He complained of flulike symptoms that persisted too long. I ordered some tests.”
I closed my eyes.
I heard Wally draw a deep breath.
I said, “Pneumonia?”
“Jason, we can’t beat all the bugs on Earth, much less the pathogens on fourteen alien planets.”
I opened my eyes. “I don’t understand.”
Wally pulled up two chairs, sat me in one, then sat down across from me and laid a hand on my knee. “We’ve seen this bug infect Earthborns on Bren before. Mostly picked up in the Highlands, maybe waterborne. Ord was out in the boonies a couple days while you were gone. The locals are resistant. In Earthborns, it mimics cold and flu, while it digs in.”
“Digs in. Where?”
“Jason, it’s a total bastard. Once it gets going, it fragments erythrocytes faster than we can transfuse the patient.”
“It’s eating his blood?”
“The red cells.”
“You have antibiotics.”
Wally shook his head. “In a few years, maybe.”
“The medic shot me up with a blood booster before the Weichsel raid. That would replace the red cells.”
Wally shook his head again.
“You can transplant bone marrow.”
Wally sighed. “That’s cancer. Cancer would be easier.”
I shook my head back at him. “No. Not Ord. No bug would dare-”
“DeArthur’s a tough customer. But he doesn’t have a younger man’s immune system, Jason.”
“Wally, listen up! I’m a fucking lieutenant general. I said no! Doesn’t that count for something?”
I walked to the window, shaking my head. Troops drilled in the sunlight, and in the distance, aircraft floated into the cloudless sky. I said into the windowpane, “No, no, no!”
Blood roared in my ears, and finally I knew that my rank and my rage counted for nothing. Ord was dying. Not cut down in combat like a soldier. Murdered by some fucking Mesozoic bacteria. I grasped the windowsill, then pounded my fists on it. I spun and pointed at Wally. “Goddamit! You call yourself a fucking doctor? I want the nurse who sent him home with two aspirin in my office in an hour! With her lawyer!”
“She could have shot him home to the Mayo Clinic on a cruiser and the result would be the same, Jason.”
I pounded the wall again, until my fists were sore, while Wally stood by, silent.
Finally I turned to him. “How long?”
“Art’s in remarkable shape for his age. And we can transfuse the hell out of him.”
I blinked back tears. “How long?”
“Three weeks. Two quality.”
I stepped back until I steadied myself against the windowsill, then whispered, “Does he know?”
Wally nodded.
I wiped my eyes with the heel of my hand, then straightened my gig line. “Where is he?”
“I’ll take you to him.”
THIRTY-FOUR
WALLY LEFT ME IN THE HALL outside Ord’s room to suck it up. I got my game face on and stepped toward the door.
Dialogue I recognized, from a remastered holo of the last reel of a century-old flatscreen, trickled through the open door, out into the hallway. It was an Ord favorite. John Wayne, who played a U.S. Marine sergeant, was saying something about never feeling better in his life. As I recall, he said this during a lull in battle, while lighting up a cigarette, which shows you how times change. Bang. There was a shot, and the sergeant was dead. The end. Maybe times didn’t change.
I froze, then sagged against the doorjamb and recomposed myself, while I listened to music play over the end credits.
Silence.
I rapped on the doorjamb. “Sergeant Major?”
“Come! And close the door behind you, trainee!” It was an exchange Ord and I had shared decades ago, when I was the worst trainee he ever had, and he was to me, well, what he had been for as long as I had known him.
I stepped into the room, around the gauzy screen that shielded the rest of the hospital from his wrath.
Ord lay on top of his sheets, cranked
up to the angle of a poolside chaise. His arms and legs toothpicked out of a hospital smock, without his uniform the pale and fragile limbs of an old man.
He smiled at me as midmorning sun angled across his torso. Now that I knew, the hollows in his cheeks seemed so obvious. He said, “Thought I might enjoy a vacation at taxpayer expense, sir!”
I nodded. “About time, Sergeant Major. Mind if I join you?”
He wrinkled his forehead. “Sir, our paperwork-”
“Is being handled by Staff Sergeant Tierney and Brigadier Hawkins. You have a problem with either of those gentlemen’s capacity?”
He stiffened. “Certainly not, sir.”
Lunch was better than Meals, Utility, Dessicated. Barely. We watched Sands of Iwo Jima again, together. By the time the sergeant died again, late-afternoon shadows shrouded the room.
I said, “I talked to Colonel Wallace.”
“I presumed as much, sir. If the general needs anything over the next week or two, I should still be able-”
I raised my palm. “What I need, Sergeant Major, is to come back again for the day, tomorrow. Maybe every day for a while. You okay with that?”
He tucked his chin against his chest. “If the general can spare the time.”
“I can lay my hands on Sergeant York by tomorrow. Not colorized. Vintage.”
He smiled. “I’d enjoy that, sir.”
I got up at three to handle morning reports, met staff an hour earlier than usual, and arrived in Ord’s hospital room before lunch. By that time, Wally’s vampires had him tubed up, so he was sucking whole blood like Bela Lugosi.
After Sergeant York, he cleared his throat. “Sir, Adjutant General’s Corps stopped by today before you got here. For my DR-663 CONUS Option Interview.”
I shook my head. “English, Sergeant Major?”
“Disposal of remains, sir. Next of kin of personnel deceased outside the Continental United States have the option of repatriation of remains to CONUS at government expense by first available transport.”
I pressed my lips together. “Damn generous of the government, isn’t it, Sergeant Major?”
“Sir, I identified you as next of kin-”
I shook my head. “I-”
“-and if it’s all the same to you, sir, I’d as soon not make the trip.”
I blinked, swallowed, then stretched a smile. “Always trying to save the taxpayers a buck, Sergeant Major?”
“Sir, it’s more that I’d like you to be there. And I’m told the Marini do military funerals up quite nicely.”
I mumbled, “Anything. Anything you want.”
“My will’s in my footlocker, upper right corner of the pull-up shelf. It’s up-to-date. Everything goes to the Noncommissioned Officers’ Orphan’s Fund.” He slid folded papers across his nightstand toward me. “GI life-insurance policy. Enough to get me buried, buy a round for everybody at the NCO Club, and-”
I hid my forehead behind my palm, then ran my hand across my hair. “Stop!”
Silence.
“Please. Sergeant Major, you don’t need to worry about that stuff. It will be taken care of. I swear.” I breathed deep. “Do you want to talk about-I dunno-anything?”
He nodded. “There is something. One item of personalty I want to pass outside the will.” He rolled on his side, then reached into his nightstand’s drawer. He drew out a leather-holstered pistol.
I smiled. “Ah. The forty-five.” Weapons had always been a busman’s holiday for Ord, the only “personalty” he valued that hadn’t been issued to him by the government.
The pistol he cradled, in a hand that seemed to have withered even since the preceding day, was his own M1911 Colt automatic. The design was pushing two centuries old. Too heavy, too hard to fire accurately, but Ord wasn’t the only careerist who continued to carry a service.45 into combat as his sidearm. Ord’s was an aftermarket blue steel version that he had souped up with custom-carved grips and hand balancing. And one unique modification made the pistol worth what it cost-a scratch along the receiver where the steel of Ord’s.45 had stopped a bullet bound for his heart.
He drew the pistol from its holster and turned it in his hands. “Saw me through the Second Afghan, sir. Saw you through the Armada business.”
I bowed as I sat, diplomat style. “A loan I was honored to receive. And lucky to repay.”
He gazed at the ceiling, then closed his eyes, nodding as he recited postings and battles. “The Relief of Ganymede. Sudan. Kazakhstan. Peru. Tibet. Headwaters of the Marin. Emerald River. The Tressen Barrens Offensive. Second Mousetrap…”
I eyed the insurance policy flimsy on the nightstand, and a coal-black, ancient trough of a scar on his forearm, a badge of some forgotten heroics, then sighed. “You didn’t get much for that life, Sergeant Major.”
Ord opened his eyes and smiled. “On the contrary, sir. Churchill said all we make by what we get is a living. We make a life by what we give.”
By delegating things I shouldn’t have, cutting out catnaps, and pounding ’Phets like I hadn’t since I was a teenager during finals, I managed to spend most of Ord’s waking hours with him. Our blood matched, so I gave him a pint, then lied to a different nurse about it so that she took another pint a day later. I wheedled a medic for precombat blood boosters, to fool my body into making more red cells, so I could be transfused again, though the medic told me they wouldn’t grow until it was too late.
No matter. Over the next nine days, the bug silently ate Ord alive, from the inside out.
On the tenth day, I sat with him for the last time.
His eyes had sunk into pits in his face. He dragged fingers across gray stubble on hollow cheeks and croaked. “They won’t shave me, sir. It’s driving me crazy.”
In thirty years, Ord had never admitted discomfort to a living soul, so far as I knew.
“I’ll speak to the nurse.” A lie. If he bled out one nick’s worth, there would be nothing left.
He said, “You’re going to outlive me.”
My throat swelled so I couldn’t speak. I waved my hand. “Ahhh.”
“I’m glad. No man should bury his son.”
He had slipped away from reality. I whispered, “Sergeant Major, I’m not-”
“Yes. The way Jude is yours. I’m as proud of you as you are of him.”
“Proud? I never got things right.”
“But you always tried.”
I laid my hand on his arm.
His lips moved. “You’re on your own now, Jason.”
Six minutes later, his skin was cold beneath my fingers.
THIRTY-FIVE
THE CLANS OF BREN cremate their dead on pyramidal pyres of gathered wood, and the time of Ord’s funeral was dictated by the hour at which a pyre of a size appropriate to the departed’s station was completed.
Bassin the First, himself, as a comrade in arms of the departed, would place the last log on Ord’s pyre.
Bassin ruled a kingdom divided against itself, plains hunters and desert nomads against the worldly Marini, and, within Marin itself, abolitionists against slave holders. And none of the clans were crazy about having us neocolonial motherworlders on their soil. But Ord had fought shoulder to shoulder with them all when we had all made common cause and expelled the Slugs from Bren after thirty thousand years.
Therefore, over the next three days, Tassini Scouts carried janga wood from the Tassin desert, Casuni warriors brought scrub oak from the Stone Hills, and Bassin dispatched his royal barge upriver to gather magnolia from the base of the Falls of the Marin. Only when all that had been completed did Ord’s funeral begin, on a clear, cold night in the center of our landing field.
The full White Moon lit the field so that the moon’s light reflected off Earth troops’ Eternad armor. It also reflected off the breastplates of mounted Casuni warriors on reined-in duckbills and off the delicate swords of Tassini Scouts mounted on twitching, ostrichlike wobbleheads. Crowds of civilian freemen and freewomen gathered, too, attracted by t
he spectacle.
Meanwhile, preparations to retake the Red Moon from the Slugs advanced. I had slept three hours each of the last three nights. I could have slept longer. My staff, the Marini, the Zoomies, and most of all the landing troops had forged and practiced a plan that I believed would succeed. We would retake the Red Moon, we would seek out the Slugs’ home, and we would win the war. Ord had seemed to think that we would, and Ord had never been wrong.
The Red Moon rose above the horizon and silhouetted the fifty-foot-high pyramid that Bassin now climbed. After Bassin placed the last log, actually a ceremonial stick, Ord’s catafalque was borne to the pyramid’s top by a joint honor guard, then set ablaze.
I stood alongside Jude, both of us left of, and a pace behind, Bassin. A Marini band piped a dirge.
Jude whispered, “How are you doing, Jason?”
I shrugged. “I spent these last few days with him. Soldiers don’t usually get to see death coming. I thought we’d talk about things that mattered. Things we hadn’t said. But mostly we watched war movies and told stories. Sometimes we laughed.” I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
The Red Moon, still befogged by the Slug fleet that kept us from it, had risen so high now that its disk intersected the roiling smoke plume that had been Ord.
In the civilian crowd, a murmur rose.
I shot Bassin a glance.
He leaned toward Jude and me and whispered, “It’s nothing. If a warrior’s smoke crosses his enemy’s path before battle, it’s bad luck.”
I whispered, “Sure. It means he’s already dead.”
The dirge ended.
Jude said, “Huh?”
I stared where my godson was staring, up at the Red Moon, which seemed smaller.
The Red Moon shrank in the sky, from basketball-size to melon-size.
The murmur spread to the Casuni and Tassini ranks, then to the more worldly Marini soldiers, and finally to my troops.
Overhead, the Red Moon, our key to victory, had become as tiny as a crimson pea.
Then it winked out altogether.
Now the Tassini and Casuni pointed and shouted. Their mounts pranced and snorted.
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