Orphan's Destiny

Home > Other > Orphan's Destiny > Page 10
Orphan's Destiny Page 10

by Robert Buettner


  He wrinkled his brow.

  “I didn’t mean stop. Just, you know, drive by the new ones on the lot.”

  He grinned and nodded. “Good one, sir.”

  He held the door for me and I ducked in. “If it won’t make us late.”

  He peered in as I settled into worn suede upholstery. “You really have been away a long time, sir.”

  “Huh?”

  “There hasn’t been Plasteel for new cars in five years. War Procurement Act. Even Mr. Grodt couldn’t buy a new Daimler, today.”

  The Daimler hushed away from the curb as I watched my openmouthed reflection in the partition rearview. Hope had been a mile long. Excalibur the same. The transport fleets and support infrastructure to build them in lunar orbit and launch them, with their cargo of high-priced mudfoots like me, to Jupiter’s orbit on a panic schedule must have drained the world economy. Especially since the Slugs had permanently reduced the workforce by tens of millions.

  A chilled Dom Perignon bottle sweated in the console ice bucket at my elbow. Not everybody seemed to have been drained. My first real look at post-Slug War America came through a pre-war limousine window, needlessly tinted today. What I noticed was what was missing more than what had changed. Few cars roamed the streets and fewer pedestrians. Straw-drab trees and lawns bored the eye. War had sucked the life from America and, I supposed, everywhere else on Earth. Yet here I was in a limo bound for a bomber, or whatever the current slang was these days for a rippin’ big party.

  A half hour later, my remorse at disproportionate sacrifice had dissolved in a half bottle of champagne sloshing in an empty stomach. At the gate in the wall that isolated Grodt’s mansion, a tuxedoed guard waved the Daimler through. His green laserflash spun bored corkscrews in perpetual twilight. I waved back, invisible to him behind dark glass. My ticker-tape parade for saving the human race.

  At first, Grodt’s driveway curved through brown lawns and dormant palm groves. But when we crossed a ringing perimeter of guest bungalows and headed up to the main house, the lawns rolled by the acre, green and jeweled with sprinkler spray, beneath sun lamps hidden in overarching palm fronds. Grodt’s monthly energy EFT had to cost enough to heat Toledo for a week.

  At the mansion entrance, a valet opened my passenger door and I stepped out into seventy-degrees Fahrenheit, squinting against phony sunshine. The valet flicked me a civilian excuse for a salute, and I returned it, grinning.

  The main entry hall seemed smaller than my last visit, maybe because the walls were darker. I touched one. It had been repapered in emerald silk. The foyer remained big enough to host basketball playoffs.

  Tanned, tuxedoed, gowned, and beautiful, Grodt’s guests clattered across marble tile and swirled up the curve of the grand staircase. Scents of perfume and passed hors d’oeuvres filled the air along with live music.

  Evidently, Plasteel wasn’t the only material rationed by the War Procurement Act. Unlike the dresses I had left behind five years ago, the average female hem hovered two inches below paradise. Historically, hemlines rose during wartime. Material conservation, the chips said. But the Slug War had shrunk skirts to an endangered species. One more year of war and dresses would have gone the way of the trilobite. Perhaps war wasn’t completely hell.

  I hadn’t seen an available woman out of uniform in five years. Across the room, a stunning brunette tugged her tiny skirt down as she prepared to settle onto a low sofa, a futile wave at modesty. I held my breath. In moments, I would learn whether fashion had also changed in women’s underwear.

  A hand clapped my shoulder. “Jason!”

  I exhaled and tore my eyes away from the tableau about to unfold on the sofa. “Mr. Grodt.”

  He spun me toward him and clapped his other hand on my other shoulder, holding me at arm’s length. “Jason!”

  “Mr. Grodt.”

  This had all the earmarks of a boring conversation.

  His grin melted and he brushed a curl off one ear. “My boy, I prayed to God each day for your safe return.”

  A female server slithered up to us in the uniform of the day, four-inch heels and chrome-studded leather straps that covered only erectile tissue. She offered Prozac wafers and pills I didn’t recognize, mounded on a silver tray. I smiled and shook my head. Grodt dismissed her with a pat on her bare bottom.

  I watched her slink into the crowd. Maybe she helped Grodt with his daily prayers.

  “Was it terrible, Jason?” Grodt asked.

  It was worse than that.

  I sighed. How could I explain to someone like Grodt? Someone had written about it. Isolation. Self-doubt. Boredom punctuated by terror. The random chaos of battle. The bond between people who have no more in common than absolute responsibility for one another’s lives. I opened my mouth, “Well—”

  He pressed the back of his hand to his forehead. “My God, say no more. I can imagine.” Staring over my shoulder, he raised his glass to someone.

  “Jason, we need to talk.” He wrapped his arm around my neck and steered me through the crowd.

  My heart sank. The brunette had folded herself demurely into sofa cushions and smiled up at some bald civilian in a raspberry-colored jumpsuit.

  Grodt led me down a carpeted hallway that stretched so far that the band and crowd dwindled to a murmur. He stopped and pushed open twelve-foot-high double doors, grinning. “My library.”

  His library actually contained one shelf of paper books, sealed under glass. All the remaining wall space, except for French doors that led to outdoor gardens, was hung with flat film posters, also behind glass, and theater-front holos of Grodt features.

  Grodt International had made its share of tripe, period-piece musicals featuring women in turn-of-the-century thong swimsuits and men with tattoos. But Grodt International had also remade some highbrow stuff, Graphnov classics like Crusades of the LaserLeague.

  Stepping to a sideboard, he poured an inch of amber liquid each into cut-crystal snifters as big as pineapples. He handed me one, then raised his in a toast. “To your return. Hell, to your future!”

  I raised my snifter to my nose. Even a few days in hotel bars with Tway picking up the tab had educated me. It was cognac strong enough to clear my sinuses. “Sir?”

  He motioned me to sit in one of a pair of wing chairs, then sat in the other. “Your story needs to be told.”

  Exactly what I had tried to do when he had cut me off a few minutes ago.

  He crossed his legs. “An autobiography, then a holo based on it. Ten-thousand-theater multinational release.”

  I frowned. “I’m no author.” I leaned forward. “But I kept a diary! If you want to read it.”

  He raised his palm. “Read it?” He fluttered his hand. “No, no. We hired a freelancer. He’s already writing your autobiography chip. Then my team adapts it to a holoplay.”

  “But how do you know—?”

  He waved me off, then held his hands at arm’s length and made a frame with thumbs and forefingers. He squinted through it and said, “Your face is going to be too familiar to the public. So we can’t get away with having you played by a hunk.”

  “Thanks a lot, Mr. Grodt.”

  The table phone glowed and he waved it on and whispered into it.

  I looked out the window at a gardener. The man frowned as he trimmed Grodt’s roses with a laser wand. I shook my head. Nine thousand soldiers forever on Ganymede would have smilingly traded places with that gardener. “It seems too soon for a holo.”

  “You’ll make a fortune.”

  I already had enough to buy a car, if they ever started making them again. Bachelor officers’ quarters cost less than fertilizer for Grodt’s roses. “I don’t need a fortune. And I don’t want to make one off my dead buddies.”

  Grodt sighed. “I expected something like this. You’ll get over it. I’ll keep the offer open. Until I find a more commercial project. Don’t agonize too long.”

  I returned to Grodt’s party and ate everything that didn’t taste li
ke a Tway protein bar. I washed it all down with beaucoup cognac. I didn’t find a woman to, uh, liaise with. Much later I learned that the only person I had screwed that night was me.

  The morning after my last Grodt party, I got rocketed into space and landed on the moon.

  This time, the morning after was calmer. I just got shot into the stratosphere at seven thousand miles per hour and landed in the Sahara Desert.

  Seventeen

  My Ritz suite was big enough for me, my hangover, and Jeeb. Most important, it had an old-fashioned security chain on the door, so Tway couldn’t barge in. But she could call, and then badger the hotel to activate the room phone’s emergency shriek when I ignored normal ringing.

  On shriek twelve, I unwrapped the pillow from around my ears, waved the phone on, audio only, and croaked, “General Wander.”

  “Are you packed?” Tway.

  “Huh?”

  “We leave this lobby for the Long Strip at Canaveral in twenty minutes.”

  “I thought the Long Strip was just for Interceptor landings. And international Scramjets.”

  The phone hissed.

  One thing Ord and the Army had taught me was to never go to sleep unpacked, drunk or sober. I shaved, showered, and slid into a limo alongside Tway with two minutes to spare, bent under my overstuffed duffel, and a throbbing head just as swollen.

  We rolled out into the smattering of cars that constituted post-war traffic and Tway turned to me. “You were at Aaron Grodt’s.”

  My pale face and red eyes stared back at me as I gazed out the tinted window. “It shows, huh?”

  “We just tracked your dogtag. I see you got zogged. Did you get laid?”

  I shook my head. Slowly. “If it’s your business, no. Just propositioned by a fat man.”

  She nodded. “Book deal?”

  “How did you know? Chipbugging’s illegal, even on military personnel.”

  “Curb your paranoia. Grodt called us and cleared an autobiography proposal before he talked to you. It’s good exposure and you get to keep the money.”

  “I turned him down.”

  Tway rolled her eyes. “Okay, give the money away. Altruism sells.”

  “It’s still exploiting dead soldiers. No.” I faced the window, watching the ’burbs roll silently by until we cleared Canaveral’s gate.

  Then my jaw dropped. We rolled up alongside wheeled stairs that climbed to the door of an unmarked passenger Supersonic Combustion Ramjet liner. Shaped like a surfboard with tail fins, it had mammoth air intakes that gaped at me.

  Scram travel cost The Brick. It made sense only for over-water flights where the passengers thought they needed to get to another continent faster than they got to the airport. But my traveling companions, waiting on the tarmac, were a bigger surprise.

  Jude clapped when he saw me climb out of the limo. “Dason!”

  Munchkin smiled and hugged me. “Are you ready?”

  My intestines gurgled. Everything I had overeaten last night picked this moment to make a break for it. “Huh?”

  “Jude’s going home! My home, anyway!”

  I struggled up the stairs to the Scram. “Egypt?”

  “Jude’s half Egyptian!”

  “Sure.” I clenched my teeth and climbed aboard. To reach the Scramjet’s bathroom, I would have agreed Jude was half Martian.

  Ten minutes later, I sank, relieved, into a window seat alongside squirming Jude, with Munchkin and Tway across the aisle.

  Few people besides diplomats, tycoons, and hopstars have been inside a Scram. The cabin ceiling’s so low a guy like me has to bend a little. The seats are butter-soft leather, deep-padded, but narrower than coach-class airliner seats. They don’t need to be big, because a Scram can reach any place on Earth in under two hours. They do need to be well padded because those short flight times mean heavy takeoff Gees to reach seven thousand miles per hour. And the seat-belt system includes padded shoulder straps, because deceleration is multi-Gee, too.

  I looked around. We had the Scram cabin to ourselves. A steward offered pre-takeoff coffee. And, better, Tylenol powder pax.

  The plane shook as the takeoff engines lit. I winced at the roar that pounded my pounding head.

  Munchkin frowned. “You won’t barf on us?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing to barf. Why Egypt?”

  Tway said, “Cairo was the cultural capital of the Pan-Islamic world. What’s left of it still is. We persuade Egypt about our plans, we persuade the Third World.”

  Munchkin’s Class-A tunic buttoned at the throat, anyway. But she wore uniform trousers, not a skirt, and her beret covered her hair.

  I said to Munchkin while I pointed at Tway, “She’s been helping with your image?”

  “Lieutenant Munshara-Metzger doesn’t need my help.” Tway leaned across and brushed spilled Tylenol powder off my lapel.

  Lieutenant? I squinted at Munchkin’s collar. The change would have been obvious but for my hangover. “You got your lieutenant’s bar back!”

  Munchkin had been a commissioned officer in the Egyptian Army. All of us volunteers had given up rank and accepted redesignation as a condition of Ganymede Expeditionary Force assignment.

  Munchkin pushed her collar brass out with her thumb and smiled.

  Tway said, “Democratized or not, Egypt is still Muslim.”

  At least Tway wasn’t making Munchkin wear a sack with eyeholes.

  Tway said, “She needs to be nearly equal. But if she outranks her male counterpart, we kiss off the fundamentalist demographic.”

  I looked at Tway while she arranged a black scarf over her own hair. “Why don’t you do the talking? You excel at that.”

  Tway wrinkled her nose. “The Muslim world’s still not ready to hear from a nice Jewish girl.”

  I raised my eyebrows. It never occurred to me that dark-eyed Ruth Tway was Jewish. I’d bunked with Ari Klein for two years and never cared about his Jewishness, either. One more reason I didn’t belong in politics.

  I was getting to keep my stars for PR, not because I was making a military difference. I was supporting another Tway political ploy so Machiavellian that I didn’t even know what it was. However, the fact that I still outranked my shrimpy, de facto little sister soothed me. Maybe there’s a little Muslim fundamentalist in most guys.

  The intercom sang. “Steward, please prepare the cabin for takeoff.”

  Engine vibration and roar shook the cabin. Jude looked up at me, wide-eyed, lip quivering.

  I smiled down at him. “It’s alright.”

  Jude frowned.

  I stroked his hair. “We’re all safe.”

  He smiled back, then we lurched into takeoff roll.

  I turned to the window and watched central Florida blur. Beside me, Jude imitated engine roar, his cheeks puffed, as I hugged him against me. If I told someone we were safe, that someone believed me. That was a good thing. Wasn’t it?

  Acceleration pushed me back into the seat cushions and Jude gripped my arm as the rocket disposables beneath the Scram’s fuselage pushed us higher, and farther out over the Atlantic.

  The rocket bottles accelerated the Scram toward supersonic flight, where speed would ram enough air into the now-lifeless main engines to light them up.

  The Scram jumped, like a bus hitting a speed bump. Jude squeezed my arm harder.

  The pilot’s voice crackled from the ceiling. “That jolt was us dropping our rocket bottles. You’ll feel another in a minute, when we climb up on the air wave we’re piling in front of us. Once we’re surfing the wave you’ll be free to move about the cabin. Speaking of surf, we are now two hundred nautical miles east of the Florida coastal surfline.”

  I glanced at my ’puter and whistled. We had only been up a couple minutes. And we weren’t near cruising speed yet.

  I rolled my head, now heavy from acceleration as well as from prior debauchery, toward the window. Below us, through the lingering haze of atmospheric Slug impact dust, the horizon curved in the dist
ance and the sky was indigo. I wasn’t back in space, but I was close.

  The steward made a quick pass with a snack tray. Tway wagged her finger and held out a protein bar. She needn’t have bothered. Between the bumpy ride, the Gees, and last night’s excess, I planned not to eat. Ever again.

  Just after the steward retrieved Jude’s fruit wrapper, deceleration pressed me forward against my shoulder harness. By the time my Tylenol kicked in, the Sahara spread beneath us like a dune-wrinkled Persian carpet, but monochromatically ochre.

  Munchkin leaned across and pointed to a distant silver ribbon that snaked across the lifeless sand carpet. “The Nile. For five thousand years, everybody lived along the Nile.”

  And that had been the death of them.

  I had done my reading. The Nile floodplain was desert that bloomed each spring when the river faithfully overflowed. For millennia, the Nile nurtured agrarian millions who lived along its low banks and welcomed fertility brought by the encroaching waters.

  No one knew how many the Cairo Projectile vaporized in the impact instant. Cairo’s census had been acknowledged to understate the population by millions for, an Egyptian proverb said, as long as the Nile had flowed. People with a five-thousand-year history seemed to like time-related proverbs.

  But the Nile, giver of life, ran through Cairo’s heart. The impact crater’s south wall dammed the river, already in annual flood upstream, instantly at two A.M. For the first time since before the Pharaohs, the Nile did not flow. The government and media in Cairo, which might have spread warnings, vanished in an eyeblink.

  So, upstream, flooding claimed millions more lives. Children died disproportionately, their smaller, sleeping bodies swept away.

  I hugged Jude closer.

  We landed at the strip outside the suburban sprawl that now was Cairo. I had to carry Jude down the departure stairs. Munchkin’s tears flowed. Jude’s maternal grandparents and his six aunts had disappeared in the heartbeat of impact.

  The strip had been bulldozed across desert, and I squinted against sand on the wind.

 

‹ Prev