Orphan's Triumph

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.

Then she frowned at both of us, hands on hips. “What the hell’s going on?”

Jude said, “Nobody exactly knows. Something big on Bren.”

I held Mimi at arm’s length, shrugged. “To be continued.”

She touched my cheek, and her eyes glistened. “Someday.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

FORT MEADE IS A SHORT DRIVE FROM REAGAN, but a tilt-wing picked up Jude, Howard, and me, sped us above the guideway traffic, then delivered us to the tarmac fifty feet from where the hourly fleet orbital lingered, just for us.

Also fifty feet from us a staff-driven pool car had parked. Pinchon stood, feet planted, arms crossed, in front of the shuttle’s extended belly ladder. His cheeks were more sunken, his lips more tightly drawn, than when I had met him at the Waldorf. I paused in front of him, and he cleared his throat.

Before he could speak, I said, “I’ve got the retirement papers with me. Effective on my signature, you said? Because it may take me a while to get around to signing them. If that’s okay, General?”

For a moment, he stiffened. Then he stood aside. “God-speed, General.”

I laid my hand on the belly ladder’s rail and climbed aboard the shuttle.

As we strapped in, Jude asked, “Who was pucker-face?”

“My new boss.”

“So he doesn’t know much about your job yet?”

“He knows when to get out of the way.”

Ninety minutes later, Jude, Howard, and I stepped out of the shuttle onto the arrival platform in a launch bay aboard the Tehran .

The Tehran had been held in orbit for us, delaying its long-scheduled departure to Mousetrap for refit. Tehran ’s refit had also been pushed back, so she could barrel straight through the Mousetrap, jump again, then deliver us to Bren a couple of days faster. Normally priority-transport procedures would have cost a couple of days while we changed to a fresh outbound cruiser at Mousetrap.

Tiny in the vast bay, between us and the exit hatch from the bay into the ship proper, stood Tehran ’s skipper.

His chin thrust out, his feet were planted, and his arms were crossed, in a pose like the one Pinchon had assumed when we met in front of the up-shuttle’s ladder. But it was clear that the skipper wasn’t about to get out of the way.

TWENTY-EIGHT

THE TEHRAN ’S CAPTAIN was actually a rear admiral, so I ranked him, but barely. Red-faced Boston Irish, he had, therefore, proven a competent drinking companion. Eddie Duffy stabbed a finger at my chest. “This bettah be good, Jason!”

As the Ganymede’s christening had recently proved, cruisers were built stronger these days, but the swabbie book still called for them to refit after enduring the stress of a T-FIP jump like the one the Tehran would make to deliver us into the Mousetrap. But Eddie Duffy had just been ordered to jump his baby, his only child, the ship he had nursed since it was a set of blueprints, back-to-back into Mousetrap and then out the other side, to get us to Bren sooner. He didn’t like it.

I jerked my thumb over my shoulder at Howard. “This guy’ll explain it all, Eddie.”

Howard forced his eyes wide. “Why do you think I know, Jason?”

“Because you always do.” The branch insignia pinned crooked on Howard’s lapel was military intelligence, the people who renamed paranoia “need-to-know.” So, professorial geek though he was, Howard tossed information