Orphan's Triumph (Jason Wander) (13 page)

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 our 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”

That was I. That was me. A historical footnote.

The commandant turned back to her Corps of Cadets. “Today’s topic is a retrospective on the campaign for the liberation of Bren.” Mimi took a seat in the audience, leaving me alone center stage. I stepped alongside the chair placed there for me. My legs ached, as they always did in the mornings. So did every other part that the Slugs and the calendar had forced the army to rebuild. But I frowned down at the chair and said to the audience, “Everybody provides one of these for me, these days. Deference to rank, or age, I suppose. But infantry doesn’t sit.”

Whoops and pumped fists erupted from the back rows, where the lousy students stood. When the first graduating class came to draw postgrad assignments in a few months, the top students would snatch the glam slots, like flight school and astrogation. The back row would become infantry lieutenants. It was natural selection. Infantry gets the sharp, dirty end of the stick from the beginning, so it learns to laugh about it.

I smiled and pumped my fist back at them. Where they were going, whatever the war, they would need their sense of humor.

I cleared my throat.

PalmTalkers swiveled up alongside whispering lips. Personal ’Puter keyboards unfolded in hands. A few kids snatched pterosaur-quill pens and sheets of flat paper from hiding places beneath stiff shirtfronts. Different cultures, different study habits.

I waved the devices away. “No notes. You get enough logistics and tactics at the puzzle factory next door.”

Laughter.

I said, “Bren wasn’t liberated by so-called military genius.”

A kid in back raised his hand. “Then why do our chips teach the Bren campaign, sir?” He knew the answer. Every kid in the union knew it. He was just stretching the lecture. But I answered like they didn’t know. “Because it turned the tide of this war. We flew the transport we captured back to Earth, used that ship’s power plant for a template, used Bren’s Cavorite for fuel, and built the fleets that liberated, then unified, the planets of the union. My meaning was that wars are won by soldiers sacrificing for other soldiers. And by trial and blunder. And by which side got stuck in the mud least. And by commanders who learned to lead effectively while engulfed by chaos, and lunacy, and their own heartbreak.”

Twenty minutes later, I took questions. The kids knew that Mimi wanted cadets who spoke their minds. I pointed at the raised hand of a shaved-headed kid with indigo-dyed eyebrows. She stood as straight and as hard as a Casuni broadsword and asked, “Sir, our poli-sci chips say the real liberation of Bren depends on Bassin the First.”

I nodded. “They’re right. The uncivil ‘peace’ among the clans that’s followed the expulsion of the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony has killed more Marini, Casuni, and Tassini than the Slugs did.”

With those indigo eyebrows, she was clearly Tassini. Probably second-generation emancipated. I guessed she was asking a rhetorical question, designed to educate classmates to whom slavery was just a word. If it hadn’t been for the changes that started on Bren with the Expulsion of the Slugs, she’d be bending over some landowner’s plow or washtub, like her grandparents did. Thanks to emancipation, she had traveled to the stars, here to the motherworld, where she had learned things like astrogation and comparative lit.

She asked, “You agree with the chips that say the war was wrong, then?”

“Creating freedom for people can’t be wrong. Even if some people create wrong out of freedom.”

She half-smiled at the kid next to her.

I pointed at his raised hand, and he said, “Maybe the war was right for Bren. And for the union. But on a galactic scale, since the Expulsion we haven’t seen the end of war. Soldiers are still dying.”

He didn’t know that the end of this long and inglorious—is there any other kind?—war was imminent, and I couldn’t tell him.

So I said, “‘Only the dead have seen the end of war.’ The chips attribute that quote to Plato. It’s still true twenty-five hundred years after Plato died. The lesson you’re here to learn is, never waste the life of any soldier you command.”

He nodded.

I said, “Even if you learn that lesson, you’ll hate it. Command is an orphan’s journey.”

The kids milked question time for twenty minutes more, then the applause from the infantry gonna-bes in the back rows shook the Omnifoam floor tiles.

As I stepped offstage, someone in Space Force blue grasped my elbow and steered me toward an exit.

It was Jude.

I stopped like I had walked into a Glasstic door. “What are you doing here?”

“I hear you gave the same speech last year. They still applaud.”

“They applaud because I talk so long that the commandant cancels PT. What’s going on?”

Jude slid back his uniform sleeve, which was now Zoomie blue, not Tressen Nazi black, to show me the red-flashing screen on his wrist ’Puter. “Orders. We lift on next hour’s fleet orbital.”

I frowned. The only thing that could transfer a Tressen officer into the service of the Human Union was clear and present danger from the common enemy.

Jude said, “You won’t believe what the Slugs just did. Want to hear where we go next?”

I shook my head. “Just so we go together.”

After Mimi dismissed the corps, she stepped backstage, widened her eyes when she saw Jude, then hugged him.