Orphan's Triumph

TWENTY-SIX

THE NEXT MORNING I stood at parade rest on the academy’s lecture-hall stage and stared out across three thousand young faces, all eyes staring up at me. The cadets’ uniforms were gray, impeccable, and indistinguishable one from another. The faces, however, were brown, white, yellow, male, and female. Tattoos curled around some faces; jewels dangled from others. They were badges of their human homeworlds, each spawned by, and once ruled by, the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony. Some of those worlds I had fought to free from the hegemony. Some I had fought to keep in the union. The names of some I could barely pronounce.

Mimi stood to my right, then gave me a wink.

She gripped the podium, and her words to her cadets echoed off the arched ’lume ceiling. “I’ll keep the intro brief. I know you don’t want the assembly to run long. That could shorten morning PT.”

Three thousand throats boomed a chuckle off the ceiling. Then silence returned.

The ceiling ’lume dimmed, and a quote faded in on the flatscreen wall behind the commandant. Mimi turned, then read aloud:

“‘Terracentric it may be to refer to “The Pseudocephalopod War,” much less to date its onset from “ 2037.” However, all history pivoted on those events in the Spiral Arm, as undeniably as conventional space folds around every ultradwarf at every Temporal Fabric Insertion Point. Students of that time and place will find no truer account than in the warrior’s-eye view of Jason Wander.’

– Chronicles of the Galaxy,

Volume XXIII”

That was I. That was me. A historical footnote.

The commandant turned back to her Corps of Cadets. “Today’s topic is a retrospective on the campaign for the liberation of Bren.” Mimi took a seat in the audience, leaving me alone center stage.

I stepped alongside the chair placed there for me. My legs ached, as they always did in the mornings. So did every other part that the Slugs and the calendar had forced the army to rebuild.

But I frowned down at the chair and said to the audience, “Everybody provides one of these for me, these days. Deference to rank, or age, I suppose. But infantry doesn’t sit.”

Whoops and pumped fists erupted from the back rows, where the lousy students stood. When the first graduating class came to draw postgrad assignments in a few months, the top students would snatch the glam slots, like flight school and astrogation. The back row would become infantry lieutenants. It was natural selection. Infantry gets the sharp, dirty end of the stick from the beginning, so it learns to laugh about it.

I smiled and pumped my fist back at them. Where they were going, whatever the war, they would need their sense of humor.

I cleared my throat.

PalmTalkers swiveled up alongside whispering lips. Personal ’Puter keyboards unfolded in hands. A few kids snatched pterosaur-quill pens and sheets of flat paper from hiding places beneath stiff shirtfronts. Different cultures, different study habits.

I waved the devices away. “No notes. You get enough logistics and tactics at the puzzle factory next door.”

Laughter.

I said, “Bren wasn’t liberated by so-called military genius.”

A kid in back raised his hand. “Then why do our chips teach the Bren campaign, sir?” He knew the answer. Every kid in the union knew it. He was just stretching the lecture.

But I answered like they didn’t know. “Because it turned the tide of this war. We flew the transport we captured back to Earth, used that ship’s power plant for a template, used Bren’s Cavorite for fuel, and built the fleets that liberated, then unified, the planets of the union. My meaning was that wars are won by soldiers sacrificing for other soldiers. And by trial and blunder. And by which side got stuck in the mud least. And by commanders who learned to lead effectively while engulfed by chaos, and lunacy, and their own heartbreak.”

Twenty minutes later, I took questions. The kids knew that Mimi wanted cadets who spoke their minds. I pointed at the raised hand of a shaved-headed kid with indigo-dyed eyebrows.

She stood as straight and as hard as a Casuni broadsword and asked, “Sir, our poli-sci chips say the real liberation of Bren depends on Bassin the First.”

I nodded. “They’re right. The uncivil ‘peace’ among the clans that’s followed the expulsion of the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony has killed more Marini, Casuni, and Tassini than the Slugs did.”

With those indigo eyebrows, she was clearly Tassini. Probably second-generation emancipated. I guessed she was asking a rhetorical question, designed to educate classmates to whom slavery was just a word. If it hadn’t been for the changes that started on Bren with the Expulsion of the Slugs, she’d be bending over some landowner’s plow or washtub, like her grandparents did. Thanks to emancipation, she had traveled to the stars, here to the motherworld, where she had learned things like astrogation and comparative lit.

She asked, “You agree with the chips that say the war was wrong, then?”

“Creating freedom for people can’t be wrong. Even if some people create wrong out of freedom.”

She half-smiled at the kid next to her.

I pointed at his raised hand, and he said, “Maybe the war was right for Bren. And for the union. But on a galactic scale, since the Expulsion we haven’t seen the end of war. Soldiers are still dying.”

He didn’t know that the end of this long and inglorious-is there any other kind?-war was imminent, and I couldn’t tell him.

So I said, “‘Only the dead have seen the end of war.’ The chips attribute that quote to Plato. It’s still true twenty-five hundred years after Plato died. The lesson you’re here to learn is, never waste the life of any soldier you command.”

He nodded.

I said, “Even if you learn that lesson, you’ll hate it. Command is an orphan’s journey.”

The kids milked question time for twenty minutes more, then the applause from the infantry gonna-bes in the back rows shook the Omnifoam floor tiles.

As I stepped offstage, someone in Space Force blue grasped my elbow and steered me toward an exit.

It was Jude.

I stopped like I had walked into a Glasstic door. “What are you doing here?”

“I hear you gave the same speech last year. They still applaud.”

“They applaud because I talk so long that the commandant cancels PT. What’s going on?”

Jude slid back his uniform sleeve, which was now Zoomie blue, not Tressen Nazi black, to show me the red-flashing screen on his wrist ’Puter. “Orders. We lift on next hour’s fleet orbital.”

I frowned. The only thing that could transfer a Tressen officer into the service of the Human Union was clear and present danger from the common enemy.

Jude said, “You won’t believe what the Slugs just did. Want to hear where we go next?”

I shook my head. “Just so we go together.”

After Mimi dismissed the corps, she stepped backstage, widened her eyes when she saw Jude, then hugged him.

Then she frowned at both of us, hands on hips. “What the hell’s going on?”

Jude said, “Nobody exactly knows. Something big on Bren.”

I held Mimi at arm’s length, shrugged. “To be continued.”

She touched my cheek, and her eyes glistened. “Someday.”