Orphan's Triumph

TWENTY-NINE

THE NEXT DAY’S DAWN shrouded the River Marin’s delta in icy drizzle, so Howard stood gripping a temporary lectern set up in the Spook hangar at Human Union Camp Bren, outside the old city of Marinus. Behind him the prototype Scorpions that had been modified to deliver Silver Bullet perched like pearlescent roaches on their landing gear. On rowed Marini benches in front of Howard sat the three hundred members of the Scorpion ground crews and pilots, who were his command’s only survivors, by the chance of being dirtside when the Slugs arrived.

Representing Earth’s host and ally, Bassin the First, absolute monarch of Marin and nominal ruler of the fractious commonwealth plains nations of Bren, sat behind Howard, to one side. Bassin wore the simple brown uniform of a colonel of combat engineers. Alongside him, set back a pace per Marini protocol, sat Ord, Jude, and me.

As an infantry commander, I’ve presided over too many memorial services. As head Spook, this was Howard Hibble’s first.

A tombstone-sized flatscreen set up on an easel next to Howard scrolled a numbered list of names of the missing in action, as he read them aloud.

With telescopic optics, from drones sent to recon the Red Moon, we could make out frozen human bodies, limbs splayed like DaVinci’s Vitruvian Man. The kids cartwheeled amid the hull plates and mattresses of the destroyed Spook laboratory ship, eccentrically orbiting the Red Moon, barely held by its peculiar gravity. Officially, Howard’s kids weren’t even dead, just absent, a cruelty of war accentuated in space engagements. We lost eight Scorpions trying to get in and recover bodies before the effort was halted, though not for lack of pilots begging to try.

The name alongside missing soldier number one was “Applebite, R.,” the kid that Ord and I had ridden up with back before Weichsel, back when the best minds said the war was nearly won. When the last name, “Wyvern, A.,” scrolled by, the number alongside had swollen to 1,372.

Howard’s shoulders sagged, and he clung to the podium sides as he stared at the hangar floor.

Ord wore his Class-A topcoat over his uniform, more, I suspected, to insulate himself from sentiment than the chill. The first time I saw him, he had been strutting through a Pennsylvania winter in starched cotton drill sergeant’s fatigues while us trainees had shivered inside our civilian winter coats.

Howard stood mute and numb. His kids’ war had always been a holo arcade game, with the bleeding and dying done by other kids on the sharp point of the stick. He cleared his throat, then said, “They never expected this. I never expected this.”

Howard’s remarks were less than Churchillian, but they were honest, which mattered.

Alongside me, Ord wiped his nose and whispered to me, “Expect the worst from the gods of war and they will seldom disappoint you.”

I whispered back, “Did Churchill say that?”

“Why, no, sir. You did.”

“Really?”

Whatever else Howard had planned to say, it was apparent he wasn’t going to make it through. Bassin watched, then inclined his head toward the back of the hangar.

A lone Marini bandsman marched from the rear of the hangar, with exaggerated arm swings, spun an about-face, then stood alongside Howard. The bandsman’s black hat, bigger than a watermelon, could have passed for a British foot guard’s bearskin, though the skin was proto feathered dinosaur. Marini infantry were still piped to battle by skrillers. A skrill resembles a bagpipe, except its pipes are carved from the hollow bones of pterosaurs.

The bandsman unfolded a yellowed paper music sheet, fastened it to a wooden clip on the blowpipe, then played “Amazing Grace” like he had known it all his life.

It was the first time I saw Ord cry. Everybody cried.

It was the kind of day to go home, draw the blinds, and drink alone. But we couldn’t do that.