I sighed, stepped to the gate, and swung a leg over.
A shadow flickered across my shoulders and forearms, then a tin voice above me said, “Halt and be recognized.”
NINETEEN
I FROZE ASTRIDE THE GATE.
A surveillance ’bot whirred around to face me, a dragonfly with a six-foot Plasteel wingspan.
Unlike a county-mountie surveillance ’bot, the turret on this one, which followed my every twitch, in unison with the ’bot’s optic sensors, mounted a six-barrel micro-gun in place of a nonlethal dazer.
A voice boomed from the ’bot’s speaker. “Get off the fence, raise your hands, then back away twenty feet.”
I did.
“Why are you here?”
“I’m invited for dinner.”
Pause.
“Why didn’t you come to the front gate?”
“I had to rent a manual-drive car, so I couldn’t use the guideway. The car ran out of juice back over the hill.” I jerked my thumb back down the road. “You can check.”
“Who are you?”
“Lieutenant General Jason Wander. My ID’s in the car.”
Pause.
It seemed neighborly to fill the silence. “I declined the mobile recharge coverage.”
The ’bot’s turret whined, and I heard the microgun’s safety click off. “Nobody declines the mobile recharge coverage.”
The ’bot hovered, I sweated, and my upraised arms grew heavy.
During the pause, I could hear my interrogator breathe through his open mike, and his voice came through faintly. “Yes, ma’am. That’s who he claims to be. The car checks out, a rental… completely discharged.”
Pause.
“He says he declined it, ma’am.”
Another pause.
“Yes, ma’am. Only an idiot.”
My interrogator sighed, more loudly, then spoke to me. “She says it can only be you, General.” The ’bot’s safety clicked back on. “Sit tight, sir. A tilt-wing will be out to pick you up in three minutes. We’ll tow your vehicle in and charge it. Welcome to Eisenhower Farm.”
TWENTY
ON THE APPROACH TO EISENHOWER FARM, the tilt-wing overflew the pastoral hills that had once run with the blood of the Battle of Gettysburg. Eisenhower bought the farm during his presidency, as a retirement place, because he had been a soldier and the land overlooked the ghosts of Lee’s lines along Seminary Ridge. The Eisenhowers passed the farm to the National Park Service in 1967, a century ago, and ten acres had been retransferred a few years back, by act of Congress, to the two least likely cohabiting VIPs on Earth.
Margaret Irons and Nat Cobb stood arm in arm, heads down against the tilt-wing’s downwash, as I ran to them, stooped beneath the thumping props. The tilt-wing lifted, returning to whatever secret place the Secret Service kept it in, and the gale and roar faded.
Maggie was the first of them I got to, slender as wire, no taller than my shoulder, with hair that clung in ermine ringlets against her mahogany skin. She hugged me, and only gingerly did I hug back, keeping one eye on her Secret Service detail. A former president is a former president, after all.
Nat Cobb, my boss since before the Battle of Ganymede, was as thin as Maggie and as pale as the snows of his Maine birthplace. His sparse hair was clipped in a retired four-star’s brush, as white as his female companion’s. He patted my back. “Good to see you, Jason.”
Like many people who saw through Virtulenses, Nat said that to remind new acquaintances that blind was a relative term. He made the remark to me from reflex. Nat Cobb had breveted me to succeed him in command in battle when a Slug heavy splinter took his natural sight, and I had long since thereafter learned that he saw what was going on in Washington better through Virtulenses than others saw it twenty-twenty.
I stood back from the second U.S. president to resign her office and the longest-serving U.S. Army four-star.
It warmed me that the only two Washington survivors I knew well enough to admire chose to spend their retirement in each other’s company. Though the physical aspect was creepier than visualizing my parents having sex.
Nat said to me, “How you feeling, son?”
President Irons and General Cobb were old enough for me to be their son. But “old” has been a moving target, lockstepped to medical progress, throughout human history. Alexander the Great died of disease or boredom with life at thirty-two. Even in Eisenhower’s day, a century ago, people still aged so rapidly that the government paid them to retire at age sixty-five, so they could rest a few months before they croaked.
I shrugged. “Pretty good. You two?”
It was Nat’s turn to shrug. “We’ll be better if Howard’s POW spills some beans.”
Neither Nat nor Maggie had ever been much for small talk. I smiled as I shook my head. Howard’s secrecy about the Ganglion’s capture was impenetrable, except by Maggie and Nat’s back-channel network.
The two of them toured me around their place before dinner. I walked, as, at a discreet distance, did Maggie’s Secret Service minders. Maggie and Nat rode little scooters that floated six inches off the ground. They were Cavorite-powered prototypes, in effect parallel machines to the saucer we dragged the Ganglion around on. Spin-off technology no more justified war than full employment for cops justified burglary. But plenty of swords had been beaten into better plowshares for centuries.
Nat’s voice graveled as he pointed out landmarks of the great battle that had forever marked this place. Maggie remarked about her predecessor, Lincoln, his few words at Gettysburg, and the great battle for civil rights that he began, which historians said didn’t fully end until she was elected president. I told them about the outworlds, in particular about the recent dustup on Weichsel.
After a dinner punctuated with old war stories and new Beltway gossip, the three of us creaked in wooden rockers, on a porch lit by the flicker of oil lanterns, as distant frogs sang.
I pulled out the package I had brought and presented it to Nat. “Sorry I missed your Relief and Retirement ceremony.”
Nat waved his hand. “Penguin-suit hoo-hah.”
Margaret Irons raised her chin. “It was lovely and dignified, Nathan. You looked very distinguished.”
Nat lifted my retirement gift to him from its case, and the Cavorite stones on its scabbard glowed with their own crimson light.
I said, “From Ord and me. He says a Marinus-forged broadsword’s finer than the best Japanese koto.”
Nat smiled as he drew the blade and turned it so it flashed in the lantern light. “You might want to borrow this when you meet your new boss.”
Nat’s commission, as well as his retirement date, had been extended six times by act of Congress. I had been commanded by-and protected against my own inexperience and blundering by-the same mentor for decades.
I grimaced. “So I hear. We powwow tomorrow, after the christening.”
War stories and gossip had been exhausted, and only the tyrannosaur in the corner, which I knew was the real reason I had been invited, was left to discuss. Ice rang against crystal as Margaret Irons sipped her bourbon. “You can go see him tonight, you know, Jason. The tilt-wing can land you in New York in an hour. The staff will take care of your rental car.”
I furrowed my brow in the dark. Maggie wasn’t talking about my new commanding officer, but my estranged godson.
Nat leaned on the arm of his rocker closest to me. “Jude arrived from Tressel with the rest of the Tressen delegation at Luna Base. They’re coming down from Luna aboard the Ganymede. She lands at midnight. Bringing her down in daylight would’ve stolen the visual thunder for tomorrow.”
Since the Blitz, human ships of the line had been fabricated in lunar orbit, then lived and died in vacuum. With Mousetrap’s shipyards now humming, Ganymede would be the end of her line. She was the last starship scheduled to be built within the Solar System, as production shifted to a nickel-iron asteroid captured as a moonlet by a planet light-years away. In that, Ganymede was like a tyrannosaur just before the Chixulub Impact, the mightiest of her kind, a race about to be extincted by a lump of interstellar trash.