Orphan's Destiny

by Robert Buettner

  They were just the salvage-title paperwork that declared Jeeb scrap and transferred ownership of him to me. “Sure. I bought a battle-damaged Tactical Observation Transport. Its Wrangler was—”

  Beside my ear, Jeeb’s circuits whined. I swear the noise was “Uh-oh.”

  “How much does a TOT cost taxpayers?”

  “Lots. That’s why even a division-size unit’s Table of Organization and Equipment allows for only one.” A Manhattan skyscraper cost less than Jeeb. Even allowing for government-procurement overengineering, that was serious money for a mechanical cockroach no bigger than a watermelon.

  She nodded. “And what did you pay for this unit?”

  I shuffled papers. Howard had said a couple months’ pay. Of course, that amount was a few seconds interest on Jeeb’s original sticker price.

  Ruth switched her Chipad to hand calculate, punched it, then showed me the display. There were seven more zeroes tacked on the original price compared to what I had bought Jeeb for. “That discount’s correct, isn’t it?”

  I shrugged. “I guess.”

  “Quite a bargain, wouldn’t you say?”

  “It wasn’t a question of a bargain.” It was a question of loyalty and friendship and duty and of adopting an orphan.

  “Of course not. Any citizen could have made the same deal. If he or she had the inside information you did.”

  I stood up. “I don’t have to take this. Maybe I’ll take Aaron Grodt up on his book deal. I’ll tell the world what a hypocritical, screwed-up mess—”

  She dropped another packet facedown in front of me.

  I peeled it off the bed linens and turned it over. A Grodt International book contract. The advance number was filled in and it was obscenely large.

  “If you sign Grodt’s book contract you’ll look like—”

  A cheap opportunist. Besides, the producer who Variety called “The Sultan of Slapstick Sex” wasn’t likely to let me publish a sociologically responsible exposé.

  Ruth’s eyes softened. “You see? You can’t play Zorro even if you want to.”

  I sat back down on the bed, elbows on knees. Jeeb perched on my shoulder. “You just showed me how you can get rid of me. You think I’m a hopeless fuckup. But you’re still helping me. Why?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe I believe that greatness is your destiny.”

  I snorted. “One other person said that. But he’s . . .” Ari Klein had looked at me with dark, deep-set eyes when he had said it. Ruth had Ari’s eyes. My heart skipped. “Tway. That’s not your maiden name.”

  “Ari was my brother.” She stroked Jeeb.

  “He lost his parents but he couldn’t have gotten into GEF if he had a live sister.”

  “Would you have lied to get a ticket to Ganymede?”

  In a heartbeat.

  “You spend enough time in Washington, you learn how to tweak government records.”

  I pointed at the ’bot on my shoulder. “You put up with me to be close to what’s left of your brother.”

  She shook her head and blinked, but a tear escaped onto her cheek. “I put up with you because my brother said you and I were the only family he had left. Jason, if you and I aren’t together, we’re orphans.”

  My throat swelled and I blinked back my own tear.

  “Okay. What next?”

  “First, nobody knows there’s a demotion pending. The President insisted on it, to keep a sword over your head.”

  “He doesn’t need it.”

  “That’s what I told him, but there it is. And this recording. We keep it as a road map to court-martial if you do try to play Zorro. Stay the course and I can undo all of it.” She clapped her hands. “Okay. We’ll spin the story from our side. You were misquoted. For now, you go on like nothing happened, attend the big Ganymede Egg Cutting tomorrow down at Canaveral and smile a lot. And stop talking nonsense about Slugs coming back.”

  I stepped to the window and pulled back the drape. The Potomac almost sparkled in half sunshine. I took a deep breath. “Fair enough. It’s just print on a page. Not the end of the world as we know it.”

  That was still twenty-four hours away.

  Twenty-Two

  The Pseudocephalopod Technology Recovery Center at Canaveral employed six thousand scientists, engineers, cafeteria cooks, and janitors.

  The morning after my impolitic headline ran, every one of those employees who wasn’t pushing a spectroscope, a spatula, or a broom had squeezed into the auditorium that occupied the Center’s sub-basement. The auditorium seating was upholstered blood red, what could be seen of it beneath the crowd. Ceiling fixtures gleamed in sleek glass and chrome.

  Three holo crews occupied the front seat row. Onstage, Brace sat with the governor of Florida while the lab-coated research director stood at a podium, thanked everybody for coming, and explained that from the ashes of war might come better things for better living through chemistry.

  Also onstage, Howard represented the Spook House; me, the veterans of Ganymede; and Munchkin, in civvies with Jude in tow, the rest of the United Nations and their forces. We were relegated to a corner where an earphoned technician sat at a console. Ruth sat behind us, just offstage. She didn’t have me on a short leash, but I suspected she carried one in her purse, just in case.

  I leaned toward the console-minder and lifted one earflap. “Are you the sound man?”

  He shook his head. “I monitor signals.”

  “What signals?”

  “Exactly.” He shrugged. “But it’s a living.”

  That was what this ceremony was truly about. Nobody really thought The Football was the gift that would lead us to cure cancer or create calorie-free cheeseburgers. But the project sure spread paychecks across eastern Florida.

  All eyes focused on the spotlighted table to the podium’s right. In a titanium cradle nested The Football, a featureless egg, shimmering dull Slug-metal blue.

  Brace spoke about duty, technology, and the wonderfulness of the Navy, then stepped out into the audience, so as not to upstage the governor of Florida.

  The governor wore an orange-and-blue tie adorned with some crocodile. When he stepped to the podium, the holo recorders fired up with a popping chorus like New Year’s Eve in a champagne factory. The governor extolled the virtues of Floridian labor and—I am not making this up—orange juice.

  The research director stepped alongside The Football.

  Between gleaming rails above the blue egg hung an automated diamond saw assembly, its start lever tied with a blue ribbon.

  Jude squirmed on Munchkin’s lap.

  I whispered, “He’s a handful today.”

  She said, “I don’t know why. He isn’t running a fever.”

  Howard leaned toward me. “I’ve been thinking about The Football.”

  “Me, too. I’ve been thinking you should have left it behind on Ganymede. This is a circus.”

  “What you said yesterday about how we were supposed to find it. There’s a mythological parallel.”

  I smiled. Howard had found a mythological parallel to a political pork barrel. He whispered, “I just had a thought. We need to stop this.”

  I glanced over my shoulder at Ruth. She frowned at us the way my first-grade teacher used to do before she asked whether us boys had something we wanted to share with the rest of the class. “Howard, there are three thousand people and the governor of thirty-four percent of the world’s citrus fruit production in this auditorium. We’re on live international holo. You can’t stop this show because you had a thought!”

  “Brace can!” Howard slid from his seat, stepped backstage around Ruth, and emerged headed into the audience, hurrying toward Brace.

  The research director reached for the start lever to scattered applause.

  He rotated the lever and the saw’s whine echoed across the suddenly still auditorium.

  Jude shrieked and thrashed in Munchkin’s arms.

  The vibrating saw blade inched down toward The Football’s blue
skin.

  Munchkin stood and carried Jude offstage.

  The saw’s edge bit into The Football.

  “Aaah!” The console-minder next to me tore off his headset.

  I leaned toward him. “What?”

  The console-minder rubbed his ears and whispered, “I dunno. Microburst transmission.”

  In the audience, Howard waved his arms, his face dark.

  The racked spotlights above the stage flickered.

  Then they fell on us, along with the ceiling.

  Twenty-Three

  I lay on something sharp, stabbing the small of my back. Red-light bursts, crackling in air fogged with dust that stank of sulfur and ozone, tore the darkness around me. Men wailed. I moved one hand, tried to move the other, and screamed as shock shot up my arm.

  I had died and gone to hell.

  The pops, cracks, and smells sparked from severed electrical wiring. The red light pulsing from a sputtering EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY sign hung crooked at my vision’s limit.

  I turned my head. The console-minder lay beside me, his chest crushed under a jagged concrete block as large as an urban runabout. From the block’s opposite end protruded trousered legs, a lab-coat hem, and the overturned saw, its blade gleaming like a crimson saber in the sparks’ light. The research director.

  I rolled my head in the opposite direction. The governor of Florida lay on his side, weeping. Two steel reinforcing bars thrust through him, splitting his crocodile tie, now crimson instead of orange. Blood pulsed from the wound, enlarging a pool on the floor as large as a throw rug. He wouldn’t weep much longer.

  A small figure crept across jumbled concrete and furniture. “Jason?” It was Munchkin. Blood streaked her cheek, her right sleeve was missing, and her hose were torn, but she was ambulatory. She waved a flashlight, probably from the kit by the EMERGENCY EXIT sign.

  “What happened, Munchkin?”

  “My baby. I can’t find my baby!”

  She reached me, saw the governor, and sucked in her breath.

  She trembled, flung herself across a concrete boulder as big as an old-fashioned television box, and threw up her guts.

  The governor stopped weeping. Electricity sparked and sputtered. Something dripped. From a distance echoed muffled screams.

  Munchkin pulled herself to her knees, then turned to examine me. Drool and puke strings dangled from her chin and her eyes watered. She muttered to Allah.

  “Munchkin, I can’t see what’s pinning my left arm. I can’t help you find Jude if I can’t move.”

  She shone the light down my left uniform sleeve and I gasped. The same concrete slab that had crushed the console-minder and the research director pinned my little and third fingers as flat as Kleenex. My shock must have been severe or I would have felt it more.

  Someone moaned. Munchkin swung the light. Ruth lay pinned by a tabletop that had collapsed across her thighs. Her face was pale, powdered with concrete dust. “Help me.”

  Munchkin looked down at my crushed hand.

  I nodded toward Ruth. “See about her.”

  “But Jude—”

  “He’ll turn up.”

  We had been through enough together that Munchkin nodded, then crawled toward Ruth. The tabletop weighed easily eight hundred pounds. Munchkin weighed a soft 102 dripping wet. I said, “Find a lever.”

  She jerked her light around the room, the beam lancing through roiling concrete dust. It flashed across metal.

  “There!”

  She swung the light back. A pipe as big around as a garden hose ran from floor to ceiling. Munchkin took it in two fingers and tugged. “It won’t budge!”

  “Goddammit! Pull the son of a bitch!”

  She stood, grasped the pipe in both hands, and threw herself backward.

  Metal popped and a six-foot pipe segment popped free from its upper and lower joints. Munchkin staggered backward, holding the segment like a tightrope walker.

  Something hissed. Mercaptan-sulfur smell pricked my nose.

  “Crap.”

  She turned to me. “What?”

  “We snapped a gas line.”

  Electric sparks crackled.

  Munchkin played the flashlight around the space we were in. The ceiling’s collapse had split the auditorium in two. It seemed half the building had fallen on the holo crews, isolating us from the rest of the auditorium. My bright idea was now filling our little pocket of hell with methane gas. The screams of the audience’s survivors leaked through to us across a concrete-and-steel wall formed by the building’s collapse. It might be bad over there, but to stay here meant quick and certain death by asphyxiation or immolation. The screams seemed strongest at a dark spot forty feet from us.

  I pointed with my free hand. “That place over there. It’s a gap you should be able to crawl through, to the other side. Get out of here!”

  “But the baby. And you—”

  “Tway first. Then me. Then we find Jude. Everything’s gonna be fine.” There wouldn’t even be time for me. But if I could damp her panic over the baby, I might persuade her to save herself and Ruth.

  She scurried across rubble, wedged the gas pipe under a tabletop corner, and leaned her weight on the pipe. It bent like a Tootsie Roll and the tabletop didn’t budge.

  She knelt alongside the table and heaved her shoulder against it like a blocking lineman. Nothing.

  She drew back and plunged against the tabletop again, screaming like a karate champ. Maybe the tabletop twitched.

  The gas smelled stronger. The room was becoming a bomb. I looked up at the sparking wiring. It was everywhere, and out of reach, besides.

  If I could push, too, we might spring Tway. I tugged at my pinioned hand. Pain flashed purple spots before my eyes but I remained stuck fast.

  “Munchkin! The saw!” I pointed my free hand at the saw assembly that lay alongside the research director’s legs.

  She turned her palms up. “What?”

  “Bring me the saw blade.”

  “Why?” She coughed into her fist as the gas hissed louder.

  “Now!”

  She crept to the machine and tugged at the blade. “Aaagh!”

  “Loosen the chuck first.”

  She freed the blade, then knelt alongside me, turning it in her hands like a jagged knife and eyeing the tabletop. “This is stronger than the pipe, but it’s too short, Jason.”

  I breathed through clenched teeth. “Not a lever.”

  She looked down at my hand, the concrete’s edge just below my knuckles. Her eyes widened and she shook her head. “I can’t!”

  “I’m gonna lose the fingers either way.”

  “The blade’s not sterile.”

  The gas choked me.

  Ruth pounded her fists against the tabletop that imprisoned her.

  “Munchkin! Come on.”

  She held the blade in two hands, poised above my knuckles, her eyes closed. The blade quivered. Munchkin sobbed, her face red in the EMERGENCY sign’s glow.

  Ruth yelled, “It’s too late!”

  Munchkin didn’t move, didn’t open her eyes.

  I balled the fist of my free hand and raised it over the saw blade.

  Sparks crackled.

  I squeezed my own eyes shut and pounded my fist down. Daylight brightness sparked beyond the lids.

  Twenty-Four

  I screamed and clutched my freed hand in the other, eyes still squeezed shut. I couldn’t look at the place where the rest of me was, couldn’t look at the stumps. I tugged out a handkerchief and pressed it to my self-inflicted wound, then opened my eyes. My handkerchief was already red and as sodden as a dishrag.

  I pushed Munchkin with my clasped hands until we both knelt beside the tabletop. “On three.”

  She nodded, vacantly.

  I counted. We heaved. Nothing.

  “Again, Munchkin.”

  Something creaked.

  “Third time’s the charm, Munch.”

  This time, my shoulder hit the tabletop so h
ard that I saw stars and forgot about the screaming throb in my ruined hand.

  The tabletop raised six inches and I wedged myself underneath it.

  Munchkin seemed to wake up and dragged Ruth free. I started to shrink back, then saw a tiny shoe. I grabbed with my good hand and yanked. Jude popped free, I dragged him out, and the top fell, exploding a cement dust cloud.

  “Go, Munchkin!” Gas so thickened the air that I could scarcely catch my breath. No time to decide whether Jude or Ruth should be moved.

  Munchkin grabbed Ruth by one of her arms. I grasped the other with one hand, tucked Jude under my other arm like a flour sack, and we scuttled toward the opening.

  Ruth screamed.

  Munchkin paused.

  “No. Go!”

  Munchkin dove under the gap and disappeared. I followed. Ruth’s shoe caught on rebar as I low-crawled under a hundred tons of concrete. Something creaked, six inches above my head. I pushed Jude’s body through the opening. Arms reached from the other side and pulled Jude through to safety. Gold admiral’s stripes shone on one torn sleeve, field-grade officer’s stripes on the other. Brace and Howard.

  As I tugged Ruth loose and pushed her under the gap, I saw yellow flame bloom along an electrical cord behind me, across the stage space.

  I rolled under the gap, free on the other side. Brace was already hammering debris with a stanchion.

  The stage chamber exploded in an orange burst.

  The debris Brace pounded gave way, crashed down, and sealed the auditorium off from the blast that shook the floor.

  I lay motionless on the auditorium floor. On this side of the barrier wounded sobbed. On the other side, flames rumbled and cremated the bodies we had left behind the debris wall.

  Brace knelt beside me and opened a white metal first-aid kit. He bandaged my stumps, handed me a morphtab, and fed two to Ruth.

  Her abdomen had been perforated by a table leg as big around as a Louisville Slugger. I was no medic but her pelvis appeared to have been crushed. Our efforts had likely just altered Ruth’s final resting place by thirty feet.

  Munchkin looked up at the sagging ceiling. Jude conscious and squirming in her arms. A hundred feet of pork-barrel concrete separated us from daylight. “What do you think happened?” she asked.