We talked sports, and about our common acquaintances, and about New York, until the deli closed. Then I walked with him to his billet at the Tressen consulate, which was near my hotel, according to Navex.
The moon had set while sparse traffic trickled down the deserted streets.
Jude turned his collar up against the chill as our footsteps echoed off the brownstones that flanked us. “You think I blame you, don’t you, Jason?”
Like his mother, he said what he thought. “Do you?” I asked.
“Nobody told me! I was right there, and nobody even told me she was still alive.”
“Jude, you know the Slugs were jamming the radios. And there was nothing you could have done.”
He stuffed his hands in his uniform jacket pockets as we walked. “I was mad at the world. And you were part of the world.”
“I was doped up for weeks,” I said.
He eyed my regrown arm. “I’m sorry that you lost your arm. But they did a nice job on this one.”
I shrugged. “I didn’t even know about the blockade for months.”
“I should’ve gotten in touch with you. I could’ve snuck a chip offworld through the consulate.”
I stopped and faced him beside trash cans lined up beside a front stoop. We could talk past each other for another ten blocks, or we could communicate. “The last thing she said-” My throat constricted as the moment flooded back. I blinked, took a breath. “The last thing she asked was that I take care of you. Take care of her baby, she said.”
Jude blinked back tears, nodded. “You always have.”
I shook my head.
“Jason, just because we didn’t walk down to the fishing hole together every afternoon doesn’t mean you weren’t there for me.”
Bong.
A guy sat up between two trash cans, grimy and smelling like old wine. “You two wanna keep it down?” Then he cocked his head. “Spare any change?”
Jude shifted his feet, and the man’s eyes widened at Jude’s uniformed silhouette. The man extended his arms, palms waving. “Not for booze! A loan. To get me home.”
I fished in my trouser pockets until I assembled a wad of bills, and I tucked them into his breast pocket and patted it. “Don’t decline the mobile recharge coverage.”
He wrinkled his face, then smiled at Jude while pointing at me. “This here’s a good fella.”
Jude said, “I know.”
SleepExpress was the only alternative in midtown Manhattan that flashed up when I had narrowed my booking search to government per diem or less. It turned out to be a century-old parking structure redivided into cubicles the size of an embarked division commander’s cruiser stateroom, meaning a bed, Sanolet, and desk, with room left over to stand a frozen pizza on edge. At SleepExpress the stateroom desk was replaced by a pay-per-view porn hologen, a bonus I was too tired and too old to appreciate. But I’ve slept in places that made SleepExpress feel like the Waldorf Astoria. I suppose I could have withdrawn cash and supplemented my per diem card out of pocket, but Nat Cobb had taught me by example that a commander shouldn’t live better than he expects his kids to live.
Morning dawned clear and cool. After years in places where pork and maple trees lay in the evolutionary future, I went looking to sit down and breakfast on pancakes, real maple syrup, and bacon. After six blocks of menu reading, I realized that the balance remaining on my per diem chip would cover only coffee in a therm cup and a doughnut eaten standing up at a counter.
At Ganymede’s christening I greeted old comrades, all of whom, unlike me, of course, had turned older, fatter, and grayer. Jude’s speech would have made his mother and father proud. Then the starship circled above Manhattan like a thunderhead, or more accurately, like an advertising dirigible, for the rest of the morning, while pedestrians craned their necks.
After the ceremony, I caught a cab to 100 East Fiftieth Street, the address where I was to meet my new boss, who had traveled up from Washington to meet me. Despite Nat Cobb’s advice, I didn’t take along a sword.
TWENTY-THREE
WHEN THE CAB DROPPED ME OFF, it said, “We have arrived at 100 East Fiftieth Street. Welcome to your destination…”
The cab paused, then clicked.
“The Waldorf Towers.” General Galen Pinchon was toughing it out in the discreet and separately addressed part of the Waldorf-Astoria that served those for whom the Waldorf offered insufficient exclusivity.
According to a hallway plaque outside Pinchon’s suite, Douglas MacArthur had occupied the suite for years after he retired.
Pinchon’s aide met me at the door and steered me around a room-service trolley, its linens upturned to shroud the remains of what smelled like bacon and real maple syrup.
The aide swung a hand around at the silk-papered walls as he rolled his eyes. “Thank heavens general officers are exempt from per diem!”
“They are?”
He flapped his hand at me. “You know that, General! If you tried to live on per diem in Manhattan, you’d probably have to sleep in a garage and eat stale doughnuts.”
“Probably.”
Pinchon sat reading a holoscreen, behind a marble-topped desk that would have looked at home in the Summer Palace of Marin.
I had finished my own reading about Pinchon aboard Maggie’s tilt-wing on the way to New York. Pinchon had gone straight from ROTC to the Pentagon and, they said, never left. His commission was in the Adjutant General’s Corps. AG’s most vital role, to the average GI, was mail delivery. AG’s other roles included administration of military bands, awarding medals, and personnel matters. AG’s roles did not include shooting, nor getting shot at.
Nonetheless, Pinchon had been chosen to succeed Nat Cobb as commander of all of the army’s unconventional ground forces. Unconventional forces, which encompassed both Earthbound snake eaters and everything offworld, had done most of the army’s shooting and getting shot during the near-century that had passed since the Cold War ended.
Pinchon looked up at me. He looked ten years older than I was, with sunken cheeks and lips that puckered like he had sucked a lemon and never recovered.
He smiled and waved me to a chair across from him. “Glad to be home?”
I could still smell the bacon. “Some things are hard to get used to, General.”
He smiled again. “Me being one of those things, I suppose. You probably wonder why someone with a non-combat, personnel background got Nat Cobb’s slot.”
Pinchon was going to tell me why, even if I said I didn’t wonder, so I sat mute.
He stared into his palms, then looked up. “The war’s been coasting downhill for a couple of years now.”
“I’ve been pedaling the bike too hard to notice, sir.”
He nodded, smiled again. “I understand. If propulsion-grade Cavorite wasn’t flowing from Bren, if Mousetrap wasn’t secure, if Bren wasn’t providing a stable staging area for Silver Bullet, and, most recently, if the Weichsel raid hadn’t yielded the last puzzle piece we need to exterminate the Slugs, the existence of mankind would still hang in the balance.”
“Aren’t you starting the victory party a little early, sir?”
“Like you said, you’ve been busy pedaling the bike. Mankind’s best minds think we entered the war’s end game months ago. We just have to play it out.”
I squirmed in my chair. “That’s great. I intend to play it out. So it doesn’t get screwed up. Sir.”
He pressed his lips together. “Jason, your contributions have been extraordinary, and so have your sacrifices. Do you feel that you’ve done enough?”
Hair rose on the back of my neck. “When we know the Slugs are gone, I’ll feel like I’ve done enough. Sir, what are you trying to say?”
“The end game-Silver Bullet-is a Space Force show. Basically it’s a reconnaissance to locate a target, followed by a bombing mission to deliver a single, outcome-determinative device.”