I crawled forward. And my web-gear harness caught on the plug’s torn surface. I tugged and dragged the plug behind me.
Ten feet to the bridge hatch.
Beyond the hull breach, I heard thrusters fire, their sound conducted through the contact between the hulls of the V-Star and the Troll.
The gap between me and the bridge hatch widened to twelve feet as Mimi backed the V-Star away.
My ’puter beeped. Two minutes to detonation.
I popped the buckle on my harness. It fell away from my body and flopped to the deck, along with the deflated plug.
I dove for the bridge-hatch handle, caught it, and got dragged toward outer space as the V-Star backed away from the Troll. I twisted my body and the hatch fell open. I scrambled in, the hatch snapped shut behind me, and the rush of atmosphere exploding out of the open breach thundered against the docking bridge’s skin.
Armored Slugs got sucked out through the breach into vacuum like spilled black marbles. The passage became impassable. The Slugs couldn’t cross vacuum and get to Brumby in time to prevent detonation, now.
I lay there in the docking bridge’s white metal tube and just breathed, listening to thruster nozzles fire as Mimi rotated the V-Star so she could fire the main engine.
I weaseled around inside the docking bridge and pressed my helmet faceplate to the quartz porthole in the hatch.
We were five hundred feet from the Troll’s vast surface, and backing off fast.
“Jason? You in?”
“In.”
My ’puter beeped. One minute.
“Hang on.”
Mimi lit the main engine and acceleration crushed me against the docking bridge’s rear hatch like a musket ball rammed down a flintlock’s muzzle.
I don’t know how many Gees we pulled, but my helmet faceplate got measled red from my nosebleed.
I was jammed against the rear inspection plate, a quartz port like the front hatch porthole. Behind us, the city-sized Troll already looked as small as a basketball. I chinned my faceplate dark.
My heart beat and I thought of Brumby.
The Troll seemed to wiggle, growing smaller by the second, then it turned into a miniature sunrise.
The yellow explosion raced at us.
In my helmet, Mimi muttered, “Go. Go, you mother!”
Flame engulfed us in seconds. The ship rocked and spun. Debris banged against us like the start of a rain.
I tumbled inside the bridge as the ship yawed.
Then space was black again. The roar of the main engine cut off and weight lifted off my chest as the V-Star coasted through space.
“Jason? You okay?”
“Bruised. But glad to be here. I owe you.”
Mimi asked, “Howard?”
“Holy moly!”
I dragged myself through the inner bridge hatch and floated in the troop bay, where Howard was strapped in, helmet off, his head poking up out of his armor like an undernourished turtle’s. I popped my helmet and let it float in the bay.
Mimi Ozawa wormed her way back from the flight deck. This time I watched.
She drifted into the bay, tugged off her own helmet, and smoothed back sweat-plastered hair with both hands. It struck me that she had never looked more beautiful.
She said, “This thing flies itself.”
Howard narrowed his eyes until she smiled at him. “But can we get home in this thing?”
“We’re pointed in the right direction and close enough that the Earth’s gravity will help reel us in after about three days. If you mean all that un-aerodynamic thruster piping and tankage? Easy on, easy off.” She pointed at a mushroom-shaped red button, shielded and mounted alongside the backup gauge panel set in the forward bulkhead. “Before we insert into the atmosphere, we hit that. Explosive bolts blow it all off and we’re clean as a whistle for reentry.”
She said to me, “General Wander, this is the second time you’ve been late for a bus I was driving.” Then she grinned again, as warm as pre-war sunshine.
“Nice driving, too, Major. One invasion transport the size of Toledo blown to pieces. Not to mention one hundred twenty-one really ugly fighters.”
While I spoke, she swam herself up into the Mercury system’s crystal blister and let herself spin slowly, enjoying a non-viewscreen look out at space.
Her next words rang cold. “Make that one hundred twenty.”
Fifty
“Huh?”
Mimi scrambled down from the observation blister and dog-paddled along handholds toward the flight deck. “Firewitch Alpha. Dead astern and closing.”
“But—”
Howard said, “Most of the Firewitches had docked with the Troll. It had pickets out. One must’ve survived.”
The survivor would be very grumpy.
I called to Mimi. “We’ve been coasting. Can we outrun it?”
She called back as her boot soles wriggled at us from the flight-deck access tube, “Not likely. Even if we had fuel to spare. Which we don’t.”
Howard drifted alongside the redundant gauge bank set in the forward bulkhead. He looked at one, then tapped it with his finger. “This says eighty-five percent.”
“You’re looking at the auxiliary maneuvering-thruster fuel. That’s no help. If we burn the main engine too much, when we reverse we won’t be able to decelerate. If we can’t decelerate, we enter the atmosphere too fast. Either we skip off and slide out to an orbit beyond the moon, where we suffocate, freeze, or starve, or we plunge right on in and burn to cinders.”
I tugged my helmet back on. “So, what do we do?”
“You game to shoot ’em up with the Mercury again?”
I heard no other option. I swam up into the blister again and twisted into the fighting chair. It seemed like home, now. I flipped the power-up switch and the cage whined and vibrated around me. I hit the foot treadles, swinging left, then right and elevated, then dropped the chair relative to the horizon. I spun the turret rearward and punched up magnification. I didn’t need to.
Blue against space’s blackness, its navigation lights flaring in patterns only a Slug could decipher, the Firewitch had already closed to firing range and its ordnance arms spidered open.
Up front, Mimi had to be looking in her rearview. “Jason?”
Range was really not an issue with ballistic weapons in space. For practical purposes, the Mercury’s cannon rounds wouldn’t slow down. Aim wasn’t a factor either, with a target as big as the closing Firewitch in my sights.
I depressed the trigger. The gun shrieked. Flame spit from a half-dozen rotating barrels.
And stopped.
Yellow tracer flew downrange and a hundred 37-millimeter rounds exploded in a hundred harmless orange-poppy blooms on the Firewitch’s nose.
“Jason? Why’d you stop?”
“I didn’t!” I looked down. My gloved thumb pressed the trigger so hard it shook. I ran my eyes across the gauge bank, then groaned at a flashing red light. I had ripped away, trigger-happy, on the first Firewitch we disabled. Now I wished I had a few of those rounds back. “The ammo light was green. But we only had a hundred rounds.”
The Firewitch snapped off a first round. It burned toward us like a crimson comet, then passed over my left shoulder, a hundred yards away.
“They won’t take long to target us.”
We shot through space at ten thousand miles per hour. The Firewitch pursued even faster. It was occupying the space we were in mere seconds later. It would all be over in moments.
I pounded the cage frame with my three-fingered hand and yelped. We had come so far! Beaten such impossible odds! I had given up a literal piece of myself. Brumby had given up his life.
Brumby, who could make a bomb out of nearly anything.
I paused and stared at my reflection in the dome, then asked Mimi, “What’s the auxiliary thruster fuel?”
“Why?”
“Goddammit, what’s it made of?”
“Liquid hydrogen and liquid ox
ygen.”
“Is it explosive?”
“Yeah.”
“How much we got?” I was already unbuckling from the fighting chair.
“Four, five thousand pounds.”
Another Firewitch round bore in on us and shot past. It screamed above me, noiseless, but so close that I saw Slug hieroglyphs etched on its blue, spinning side.
I looked up. The Firewitch’s arms twitched small adjustments. The next salvo would be “fire for effect.”
I slid down into the troop bay and launched myself at the redundant gauge bank, floating, it seemed, as lazy as a Thanksgiving-parade balloon.
I tore open the safety cover and punched the red JETTISON button with my bad hand. Weightless, my fist didn’t strike the Earth-standard spring-loading hard enough to depress the plunger.
What idiot engineer didn’t think about that?
I pulled myself against the panel, braced my feet, and swung again.
Click.
The explosive bolts thumped, not all at once, as piping and tankage peeled away from our skin, piece by piece, and drifted back into our wake.
I made it back up into the dome as the silver tangle of discarded equipment tumbled toward the Firewitch’s vulnerable, cyclopean, purple eye.
“Mimi, better spend a little juice, or we’ll blow ourselves up, too.”
But the Firewitch didn’t explode like the Troll had. The eye exploded satisfyingly, then the ship’s lights went out in a finger snap and it slowed and drifted.
Howard poked his head up into the bubble and looked back as the derelict began to tumble, its momentum carrying it slowly behind us, toward Earth. “Holy moly. Jason Wander, the three-fingered buccaneer.”
“Huh?”
“You just captured our first capital prize of this war.”
Howard wedged himself into the fighting cage alongside me and I rotated it so we faced forward.
Earth hung peaceful and blue in space, the moon silver, and off her shoulder, the Milky Way’s swath powdering the blackness behind them.
I pointed toward the stars. “We’re not alone in this galaxy. Is our destiny out there?”
“You mean ‘destination.’”
“No, I don’t.”
Fifty-One
“General?” My command sergeant major knocks on the hatch frame of my stateroom as he opens the hatch.
“Time, Sergeant Major Ord?”
“Yes, sir.”
I stand up at my desk and rub my hand. “I already knew.” Organic prosthetic fingers are indistinguishable from original, they say. But the change in atmospheric pressure when a Metzger-class cruiser accelerates to make Temporal-Fabric Insertion always makes mine throb.
The swabbies don’t really need the embarked-division commander on the bridge at insert. It’s routine now. But it’s also tradition. And tradition counts with Space Force as much as it did with the old wet-Navy.
Ord strides beside me, holding a Chipboard for me to sign, clicking from document to document as we walk. Genius may be ninety-nine percent perspiration but commanding a division is ninety-nine percent paperwork.
Ord snaps off the board. “That’s all the business for now, sir.”
I smile. The real business that this ship—this fleet—will do remains months and light-years away.
I pause at the bridge hatch. The swabbie rating with his little manual whistle spots me.
He snaps to, skirls out a call, and misses a note.
I squint at his chest. His ribbon row is as short as his skin is baby-pale. But he wears the blue-and-gold Rodger Young ribbon.
First of the gravity-shielded Corvette-transport fast-movers, crewed with bright kids, the Young exploded on her maiden voyage before she ever got out of Earth orbit.
In the best military tradition, those kids who never saw it coming got posthumous medals because somebody made a mistake.
The Young’s orphaned survivors had been distributed among other ships. He’s probably never played a manual bosun’s whistle before.
He calls, “Attention on deck! The embarked-division commander is on the bridge!”
I step around the master holo and salute the captain. Admiral, actually. “How we doing?”
The admiral points at the frontscreen. “Nothing unusual. The fast-movers made insertion two days ago. Those new ones fly.”
In the frontscreen’s green glow, I see wistfulness in her eyes. “You miss flying fast-movers, don’t you, Mimi?”
She smiles. It would be unprofessional to mention it on the bridge, but as lovely as the day we met. She says, “I’d trade the Metz for a Brumby-class command in a heartbeat.”
“And miss the fun of keeping peace between your squids and ten thousand mudfeet?” The Metzger class may be slower than the Corvette transports, but each ship can haul a full division.
The three “P”s that dog theater-grade commanders are paperwork, personnel, and politics. That was the best part of Insertion. Once you popped out in new space, you were light-years away from the politicians. No armchair quarterbacking until you came home.
If you came home. Not that politics offers safe harbor in the Slug War. Jeeb and I visit Ruth’s grave when we’re dirtside. We both cry.
I bitch a lot—only to myself and my Significant Other—about the three “P”s, but the fact remains that ten thousand kids bet their lives on my ability to juggle all those things and still be a better soldier than any of them.
In the viewscreens, the space ahead of us darkens first, as all light gets sucked into the ultradwarf core of the Insertion Point.
The kid with the whistle stares, bug-eyed.
I lean toward him, hands clasped behind my back. “First Insert?”
He nods. “Yes, sir.”
“And you worry why you get to see it while your buddies on the Young never will?”
His jaw drops. “Uh, yes, sir.”
I shake my head. “Don’t worry. Live the best life you know how. The rest is destiny.”
I point at the sidescreens. “Watch. First the stars stretch out like taffy, when their light gets bent. Then their light turns parallel to us and they go out altogether. It’s really wick!”
He looks at me oddly. They tell me nobody has said “wick” since before the war, but the only way I throw my rank around is to choose my own slang.
A ’puter voice, throaty and feminine, chimes. “Insertion in five.”
There was a time when I giggled every time I heard that.
The stars go out.
Acknowledgments
Authors like reissues because others do the heavy lifting. Rarely, those others lift extraordinarily well, and Orbit’s reissue of Orphan’s Destiny, like its predecessor, Orphanage, is such a rarity. Therefore, my special thanks to Orbit publishing director Tim Holman and editor Devi Pillai for vision and drive; to Calvin Chu for a sparkling new cover design; to Alex Lencicki for imagination; and, to Jennifer Flax for keeping them all on track.
Thanks, too, to my agent, Winifred Golden for unflagging enthusiasm and savvy, and to Mary Beth, for everything.
Meet The Author
Robert Buettner is a former Military Intelligence Officer, National Science Foundation Fellow in Paleontology, and has published in the field of Natural Resources Law. He lives in Georgia. His Web site is: www.robertbuettner.com.
Author’s Note
Orphanage: A 2004 take on an evergreen story by Robert Buettner
On January 29, 1898, the Saturday Review gasped at a new “romance” that had “hit upon a subject so far from experience and completely outside common expectation” that “our readers must buy it and alarm themselves with it at their leisure.” Readers did.
A century after H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, we still snap up Alien-war tales. Those tales have evolved to match the zeitgeist of the world in which each was written.
Wells’ story reflected Victorian fears of massive, mechanized war that would torture all of Europe.
Wells was right
, but he won no sympathy for Aliens. In 1993, Sir Arthur C. Clarke stopped short of “blam[ing] Wells for all the later excesses of interplanetary warfare,” but Sir Arthur complained that Wells laid it down that “anything Alien was likely to be horrible.” Nowadays, we prefer our Aliens warm, fuzzy and politically correct.
Fortunately for those who like good yarns, writers didn’t write all Mork-from-Ork since 1898, probably because the world they wrote in was no sitcom.
In Cold War 1959, Robert Heinlein won a Hugo with Starship Troopers. As Uncle Sam drafted even Elvis Presley to repel the Commies, Heinlein penned a tale of noble battle against city-nuking spiders commanded by fat, Nikita Khrushchev brain bugs.
Post-Vietnam, Joe Haldeman exposed a never-ending war, started by our side for no good reason, waged by cynical conscripts, in his own 1974 Hugo-winner, The Forever War.
So, why the Orphanage books, a fast, darkly funny, retold tales of a young man-become-soldier amid interplanetary war? Because Starship Troopers and The Forever War marvelously embraced the zeitgeist in which each was written, but each suffers for it in a post-9/11 world.
Starship Troopers glorified a neo-facist future where only soldiers earn voting rights and we flog criminals publicly. Dialogue often echoes ’50s TV. Women pilot Heinlein’s starships, but they are perfumed and mystical, like aproned ’50s moms flying Frigidaires.
Vietnam-vet Haldeman expressly rewrote Heinlein and scorned Starship’s Cold War jingoism. Haldeman embraced the ’60s’ “emerging truths.” The war is our fault. All officers and politicians are sadistic fools. Soldiers get pot rations and bunk co-ed, rotating sex partners nightly.
Orphanage and Orphan’s Destiny avoid politics. It was written to say one true thing to a population that has been blessed by scant military experience but that, post-9/11, finds soldiers again relevant. That thing is: soldiers fight not for flags or against tyrants but for each other. Combat soldiers become one another’s only family. Strip away politics and, wherever or whenever, war is an orphanage.
Orphan’s Destiny was written to explore the challenges soldiers face when they survive.
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