Mimi slid us away from Excalibur with bow thrusters, then she flew one lunar orbit, lit the main engine, and slingshot us toward home.
Three days later we dropped through the stratosphere, crossed the Pacific Coast thirty miles above Oregon, and burned east.
A V-Star isn’t the unmaneuverable bullet that the old space shuttles had been, but it’s no personal stunter. Mimi bent a turn south so wide that we overflew Niagara Falls, then arrowed toward Washington, D.C.
The Excalibur Venture Stars that had landed in the preceding days had all landed at Canaveral, the only extended runway specifically designed to receive them. Only Mimi Ozawa was pilot enough to be trusted to land a V-Star on a conventional runway like the one at Reagan.
Mimi greased us down like Pooh Hart would have. I stared at the hull and wished for a window. I was home, but the only way I knew it was because my liver and all the rest of my guts pressed down on top of one another with full Earth weight for the first time in five years.
The bulkhead viewscreen flicked to life and I pointed with a leaden finger. “Howard, it’s still gray!” I knew the planet hadn’t bounced back from the Projectile attacks but somehow I still expected green grass and blue skies.
Mimi rolled us to a stop on the Reagan runway and the ramp dropped with a hydraulic whine. Home at last, I unbuckled and jumped to my feet. Or tried to. My knees buckled. I sat back down and pressed my palms to my trembling thighs. “Crap!” I had worked out like a fiend, twice every day of the Jovian crossing, but still I could barely stand.
Howard just sat in his seat and grinned at me. “Wait for the medics.”
Minutes later two zoomie corpsmen gathered me up, one under each armpit like I was someone’s grandpa, and we trundled down the ramp.
I nearly drowned in thick air salted with smells I didn’t know I’d missed. Dust. Kerosene. Asphalt. For me, that was like orchids. I wobbled along, grinning.
I half expected a brass band, or at least someone to shake my hand, but the medics just loaded Howard and me and our duffels onto an Electruk no fancier than what you’d see in any mall and we whirred off across the tarmac to a hangar.
In the hangar sat a blue bus fleet. Formed up in front of the buses, at ease with hands clasped at the small of their backs, stood my seven hundred GEF survivors. We had left Ganymede a dirty band of Lost Boys, with me playing Peter Pan.
The seven hundred soldiers who gleamed before me stood as fully formed and disciplined as Roman legionnaires.
We hadn’t worn battle-rattle aboard Excalibur, so the quartermasters and armorers had spent two years repairing and reconditioning our Eternad armor.
A GI in polished, crimson Eternads with visor retracted and decoration ribbons arrayed across the breastplate is truly a knight in shining armor. Seven hundred knights make a crusade.
Munchkin, being Muslim, always hated that comparison, but there she was, on the left flank, the second-smallest troop in ranks. The smallest troop, in crimson pajamas and a cut-down breastplate, sat in an Eternad-crimson Earth-bought stroller alongside her. I caught Munchkin’s eye, winked, and grinned, then my grin faded.
Jude wasn’t the only one seated. Slug weapons made mostly corpses, not wounded, but a dozen wheelchaired amputees sprinkled the ranks.
Earthside medtech would rebuild each man and woman among them with organic prosthetics, but for now they were reminders that these shiny recruiting posters had been to hell.
So this was our welcome home. One final formation, then dismissed. Heat rose in me from anger, sorrow, relief, and all the emotions that come with a parting. And a pang because I was here and thousands as good and as brave as I was were not.
The Electruk slid up behind Brumby, who, as division sergeant major, faced the troops, front and center.
I swung my legs over the ’truk’s side to touch the hangar floor. One medic grabbed my arm and whispered, “Sir, you shouldn’t—”
I shrugged off his hand and pointed at my division. “They’re standing!”
“They’re acclimated,” the medic hissed.
It was my last moment as a general, a farewell to comrades-in-arms. Acclimated, schmaclimated. I choked back tears and thrust myself off the seat. My legs trembled. Not as bad as back aboard the V-Star, though. I caught myself and hobbled forward.
Brumby sang, “Division!”
The preparatory command echoed back through shrunken brigades, battalions, companies, and platoons and bounced off the hangar walls.
“Atten-shun!” At the command of execution, the division snapped to attention like statuary.
We were young and we were beat-to-crap but we were professionals.
Brumby faced about and saluted. “Sir! The division is formed!”
I returned his salute, then leaned forward. “A few words, then dismissed, hey, Brumby?”
Brumby’s right eyelid fluttered as he shook his head. “Sir, the parade—”
“Huh?” For an omniscient leader, I said that a lot.
“You got the Chipmemo, sir. It’s why you flew into D.C., instead of Canaveral. The division marches from the Capitol, up Constitution Avenue to the Washington Monument. You present them to the President and the UN Secretary-General.”
A division commander, even of a shrunken division, plows through four hundred Chipmemos each day. I skimmed over too many of them. One more reason I wasn’t General Staff material.
“So what do I have to do, Brumby?”
He slid his eyes left, to a windowless bus. “You go in there, sir, while the division mounts the buses and heads into D.C.” He looked at the windowless bus like a mallard looking down a twelve-gauge barrel.
How long had my soldiers been standing in armor? I sighed. “Okay, Brumby. Dismiss ’em, mount ’em up. Get ’em off their feet.”
Amid the clatter of fourteen hundred armored legs, I shuffled to the bus, dragged myself inside, and flopped on a purple crushed-velvet sofa.
Sofa? I looked around. The bus was tricked out like a pop star’s tour vehicle, with a bar, multiple holo tanks, and bolted-down furniture that must have been bought at a turn-of-the-century pimp’s estate sale. I would have thought that for a Washington parade the vehicles would be brand new.
The bus lurched forward and pulled up to the tail end of our bus convoy.
Space Force ratings wearing Signals collar brass swarmed me. By the time we crossed the Potomac into the District of Columbia I had been reshaved, stripped to my underwear, and refitted into my Eternad armor, which had been patched, polished, and smelled like pine inside. It was mine, alright, down to the pale blue Medal of Honor ribbon on the breastplate.
A female in a well-cut black business suit bustled up, Chipboard in hand. Pencil-slim, Howard’s age, she wore her black hair spiky. The effect was witch and broomstick wrapped up in one package. “General Wander? Ruth Tway.” She shook my hand while she reached across and straightened my ribbons.
Tway read her Chipboard screen. “I’m with the White House. Today, you ride and wave. No speeches. No interviews.”
Each of the three holotanks across the bus aisle from me played a different news net. Each anchorperson stood with emptied Constitution Avenue in their background, crowds lining the sidewalks.
“Fine by me, ma’am. But we’re infantry. Why are we riding buses in this parade?”
Tway shook her head. “Just to the parade staging area. Your troops march. You sit in an open limousine and wave to adoring crowds.”
Our bus stopped on the Mall, near the Capitol. My troops were already forming up. We would be led by a band, Marine Corps by the look of it, and followed by Third Division and then Excalibur’s Space Force swabbies. Behind the band parked an open Daimler limousine, with a red two-starred front plate. I turned to Tway. “You think I’m riding in that while my troops walk?”
She pressed her lips into a thin line. “Of course. It gets you up high. The holo crews are coordinated to close up on you every two hundred yards.”
“No. I’
ll walk. Put a couple of the amputees in the limo.”
“It’s a global hookup holocast. It’s more tightly choreographed than Worldbowl Halftime. The holos—”
“Holos are for heroes. The amputees are bigger heroes than I’ll ever be.”
Tway drummed a finger against her Chipboard. “General, even if we could do it that way, you’re just off the ship. It took most of your soldiers days before they could walk two hundred yards, much less this parade route. What’s the big deal?”
I folded my arms. “My troops walk. I walk. I command this unit.”
She snapped an audiophone wafer off her belt and held it to her ear. “I’m calling the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He commands you.”
I swallowed while she whispered a dial code. Crap, crap, crap. I wore stars but I was a spec four at heart. I had only had my boots on dirt for twenty minutes and I was in trouble with authority just like I was back in Basic.
At the parade’s head, a holo-director type wearing neon-orange gloves glanced at his ’puter, spoke into an audio wafer, then pointed an orange finger at the band. They struck up “Stars and Stripes Forever” and stepped off.
Tway turned and watched them. A gap grew between the band rear drummers’ rank and the still-empty limo.
“You’re losing your tight choreography, Ms. Tway.”
Ruth Tway apparently had the stroke to phone the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. But she was evidently also political enough to cut her losses.
She shook her head and let her breath hiss out between her teeth. Then she dropped her audiophone hand to her side and pointed from the corpsmen behind the wheelchairs to the limo. “Wander, were you such a butt-pain when you were a spec four?”
I grinned. “Worse.”
One hundred yards later I didn’t feel clever. My butt wasn’t the only pain. My thighs burned and quivered, and my grin was pasted on. Tway may have been a bitch, but on this point she was a bitch who was right.
My pain went beyond my leg throbs. D.C. looked and sounded and smelt as healthy as cancer. The Slug Blitz had missed Washington and so many other cities. The familiar buildings still rose all around me. Crowds lined the street. But the sky was so gray, the air so chill, the faces in the shivering crowd so pale that it scarcely mattered. Loss and effort had sucked mankind dry.
Still, as we marched, I heard cheers, both ahead of GEF and behind us.
The crowd would rev up as the band at the parade’s head marched by.
Then the limo bearing our wounded appeared and the cheers died as though a curtain had been dragged across the crowds.
I think the civilians’ shock was as much from seeing how few of us remained as seeing the wounded. There were high school marching bands nearly as big as what was left of GEF. We had marched past before people even knew we were coming.
I locked eyes with an old man at the curb, a scarecrow wearing a VFW cap in the dun-camouflage pattern that had been current during the Second Afghan Conflict. In the stillness, he cupped a hand to his lips and called, “Why you? Why me?”
I blinked. He had had a lifetime to think about the question and he still couldn’t answer it.
By the time my boots dragged across the Ellipse’s brown grass, my grin stretched like a death mask and my waving arm had turned as wooden as a galley slave’s oar. The reviewing stand, draped in UN-blue bunting as well as red, white, and blue, loomed ahead, backstopped by the Washington Monument’s white obelisk. Atop the flagpoles that ringed the monument the flags of a hundred nations snapped in the wind.
I teared up. Not with soldierly pride but because I knew I was going to have to climb a flight of stairs at the stand’s side to reach the Sec-Gen and the President.
When all the troops at last stood, leg-dead and shivering, on General Washington’s dead grass, the band struck up and played what seemed to be the extended, studio version of every march written since World War I.
This was a soldier’s glory moment. The fact that all I wanted was to sit down tells you how much soldiers love parades.
Finally, silence returned, except for a chorus of arrhythmic clangs as those multinational flags drummed their hoist ropes against their flagpoles.
President Lewis stood—he had sat and watched us slog—and advanced to the lectern in silver-haired glory.
“Welcome home! The world salutes you for a job well done!”
The crowds behind us cheered, their voices snatched away on the wind. Lewis spoke for, by my ’puter, ten minutes. Then he said, “General Wander!”
By the time I stumbled up the stairs to the lectern, the Sec-Gen, an African who looked like mahogany wire in a Savile Row suit, had joined him.
How long we stood there and what was said I don’t recall. I recall I was tired and in pain. I’ve never chipped out the holocast to listen to the speeches.
It must be dull footage. The war had ended almost three years ago. Made-for-holo moments of soldiers reuniting with loved ones didn’t apply for us survivors of the Ganymede Expeditionary Force, since a prerequisite to assignment had been that we had lost our entire immediate families to the Slugs. A ticker-tape parade would have left behind an expensive clean-up, so nothing to see there.
Besides, whatever novelty GEF’s return might have held for the holo audience had worn off as seven hundred other troops had arrived before me over the last weeks, one transport at a time.
I can’t say I minded. I had leave accumulated and five years of back pay, most of it with combat and flight supplements and much of it in officer grade. I just wanted this day to be over.
The Secretary-General looked up from his prompter—I was standing behind him, so I saw that clear glass in front of him was covered in scrolling, blue text, the way data displays on the Battlefield Awareness Monocle of an Eternad helmet. He folded his notes, and the band played “Stars and Stripes Forever,” which I guess was right since we were in America, though soldiers from thirty-one nations besides the U.S. had gone to and come back from Ganymede.
And that was that, I thought.
Fingers closed on my elbow. “General? A word?” The President of the United States steered me beneath the reviewing stand.
Fresh sawdust smell and light filtered through cotton-bunting walls stretched around a two-by-four frame. It was hardly the Oval Office. A Secret Service man stood at the door while another hovered, in earshot but acting like he wasn’t listening.
“Jason—may I call you Jason?” He was the most powerful man on Earth. He could call me whatever he chose. Whatever else I may have thought of Lewis, the guy was disarming. He wore the whitest shirt I had ever seen, his teeth matched it, and he showed them in that famous former senatorial grin.
“Jason, you performed a wonderful service. You all did.” Then his eyelids sagged like a funeral director’s. “I’d like to have a word with you about your new assignment.”
O boy. Here it came. Lewis was about to break the news to me that I was being busted back from general to platoon leader.
If only he knew I didn’t mind. I lacked the life experience to thrust and parry with diplomats, staff officers, and members of a House Appropriations Committee. Getting busted back to lieutenant was going to be a relief.
“Of course, sir.”
Wind snapped the bunting wall up and wedged it into the two-by-fours, letting the view in. The Secret Service man interposed himself between us and the view and reached to tug the cloth barrier back down.
The President waved him away and pointed up the Mall, toward the Capitol dome. The National Gallery was somewhere off on our left, the Smithsonian museums on our right. The most powerful man on Earth leaned close enough that I smelled peppermint on his breath. “Jason, have you been to Washington before?”
“Yes, sir.” Class trip. On and off the bus. If it’s Tuesday, that must be the rocket-ship museum.
“The Mall. It’s the essence of America, isn’t it?”
“If you mean a place where the National Park Service sells overpriced hambu
rgers, I suppose so. I’d have thought Arlington Cemetery, sir.” I winced. Four hours back from outer space and I was as insubordinate as a high school dick again.
The President clapped me on the shoulder, threw his head back, and laughed, too sincerely to be real. “They said you’d have a chip on your shoulder.” He sighed.
I cocked my head. He might want to break it to me gently, but how hard could it be to tell me I was going to be an infantry platoon leader?
“Jason, do you know what it cost to send a member of the Ganymede Expeditionary Force into battle?”
“One life. That’s the only number that matters.”
“Of course. Of course.” He looked away and licked his lips. “I’m asking you to step back emotionally, see the cost of national defense, worldwide defense, objectively. Like the general you are.”
“I’m no general.”
“The world thinks you are. It thinks you saved it. You symbolize the shield the military provides. For all Americans. For all humanity.” He stretched a smile. “When you think of America, what do you think of?”
I shrugged. Traffic jams? Infomercials?
“Prosperity!” The President punched air. “Not just for Americans. America is the engine that pulls the train of the world economy. Jason, the Slug War killed sixty million people. After subtracting defense spending, the current, combined Gross National Products of the UN’s member nations today equals China’s, pre-war. It will take years before Americans can think about buying a new holoset, much less about taking the kids to Virtuworld. That’s why Margaret Irons got chased out of the White House.”
I inclined my head. “Sir, what does this have to do—?”
“Jason, we have to return the world economy to a peacetime footing. President Irons’s deficits left humanity with a bleak future.”
“If she hadn’t spent that money, humanity wouldn’t have a future.”
Lewis stopped and turned to me, hands on hips, eyes narrow as he let the mask slip. “Margaret Irons was your commander-in-chief. Now I am. Do you have a problem with that, General?”
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