Yet none of the billions of humans who never left Earth, whose taxes and sweat had built the great ships for all the decades of the war against the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony, had ever seen a cruiser in its mile-long, Plasteel flesh.
So the politicians had decided to christen the Ganymede in New York.
“He’s the right person to do it, you know.” I swallowed. “But what about the blockade?”
Tressel, home to my godson since his altruistic enlistment there, had also become the most repressive society in the Human Union. The Human Union had accordingly severed ties with Tressel to punish its leadership.
Maggie snorted. “The blockade blocks emigration and trade, not diplomatic contact. Democracies talk to dictatorships because talk sells better to voters than war.”
“That’s a bad thing, Madame President?”
She frowned. Not at my “youthful” impertinence, but because she had been instructing me to call her just plain Maggie for years. She said, “Sometimes. Our diplomats were talking to the Japanese when they bombed Pearl Harbor.”
Nat Cobb rocked forward, then touched my thigh with a bony hand. “Jason, we didn’t ask you out here to debate politics. You’ve never been spit for politics, anyway. You’ve been an unhappy boy.”
I stiffened. “I haven’t been a boy since the Blitz, sir.”
General Cobb had also tried to get me to stop calling him sir.
“You know what I mean. You never thought like conventional military, even as a trainee. In an unconventional war, your temperament had its place. You matured on Bren, during the Expulsion. By First Mousetrap, people thought your judgment was catching up to your experience and ingenuity. But since Second Mousetrap, people think you’ve changed. I hear.”
“People” meant Ord. Ord and Nat Cobb had nursed me up since infantry basic. Ord had ratted me out, as usual.
I sighed. “If I hadn’t landed with the Spooks, the Weichsel raid might have failed.”
Nat raised his palm. “We didn’t ask you here to debate strategy and tactics, either. Jason, it’s time for you to become a whole human being.”
I flexed my prosthetic arm, drew breath into my re-grown lungs, and rubbed my Plasteel-femured thighs. “Too late for that.”
It was Maggie’s turn to lean forward and touch me, on my shoulder. “No. You need to resolve the issues between yourself and Jude. And you can. If not for your own sake, for the sake of your troops. A depressed commander can be a bad commander.”
“Why do you think I’m here for the ceremony? As soon as I saw Jude was going to christen the Ganymede, I came.” Jude was the closest thing I had to a son, and I was the closest thing he had to a father. But it was the unavoidable curse of the military parent to be an occasional visitor to one’s children.
Nat nodded. “It will be a start. But awkward.”
Maggie said, “Mimi Ozawa joined us for dinner, too, just after she took over at the academy. Were you planning to look her up while you were here?”
I rolled my eyes. “She’s invited me to address the Cadet Corps during Commandant’s Time, two days after the christening. I’m taking a day’s leave in between, to see her. Okay?” I braced myself for one of them to ask me whether I needed to borrow the family car, so I could take that nice Ozawa girl out to the drive-in for a milk shake, like some flatscreen situation comedy the two of them had grown up with.
Nat looked at Maggie, then back at me. “One more thing.”
I sighed. I was too old for lectures, but also too old to argue with people even older.
Nat leaned forward on his elbows. “I’m not your shrink. I’m not your commanding officer anymore. But I am your friend. Jason, you’re disconnected from the people you love. Worse, you’re uncertain whether they love you back.”
I spread my palms. “Jude’s been behind the new Iron Curtain. Mimi’s duty stations and mine have been light-years apart, and the human race is at war for its survival. What did you expect me to do, desert?”
Nat said, “No. But maybe you could add a functional relationship to soothe the pain of the dysfunctional ones.”
A female orderly, blonde and smiling, stepped onto the porch with a decanter and refilled our glasses.
I watched her walk away. “You mean proposition cocktail waitresses half my age?”
“I’m serious. There’s plenty you can do. Socialize more.”
“Away from Earth I outrank my potential buddies by a couple of stars, sir.” I turned to President Irons. “You know the problem. You can’t even get people you’ve known for years to stop calling you Madame President. Poker’s no fun when the other guys let you win. And Ord’s idea of guys’ night out is ironing his battle dress uniforms.”
A dachshund, Fritz the Fourth, if I remembered the press releases, waddled onto the porch and got scooped onto the former presidential lap. Maggie scratched her dog’s ear. “Animal companion holistic therapy’s been accepted practice for decades. Centuries, really.”
I rolled my eyes. “A pet? There are no pugs in space. The poop issues alone-”
Nat said softly, “You mothballed Jeeb after Second Mousetrap, didn’t you?”
My chest softened inside. “He’s so old that maintenance cost would have been prohibitive, outworld.”
Jeeb was a four-decade-old, J-series Tactical Observation Transport, a turkey-sized, six-legged mechanical flying cockroach. Nobody remembers brain-linked spy TOTs like Jeeb for two reasons. First, faster, smaller, stealthier, cheaper Autonomous Mechanicals obsoleted them by 2050. Second, the Department of Defense quietly swept everything about brain-link technology under the rug a decade after that.
The combat intel value of brain-linking had been that instructions passed from wrangler to ’bot, and intercepted communications and images passed back from ’bot to wrangler, immune to interception and jamming, and at least as fast as the speed of light.
The mutual link was so strong and transparent that TOTs, though the cyberneticists deny it to this day, permanently imprinted the personalities of their wranglers. But if combat or, for that matter, a bus wreck killed the wrangler or destroyed the TOT, the surviving partner effectively experienced its own death. The few wranglers who didn’t suicide lived out their days as vegetative guests of the Veterans Administration. Surviving TOTs just got scrapped.
So, by dint of a Department of Defense salvage title, I “adopted” Jeeb when he was orphaned by the death of his wrangler, and my friend, at the Battle of Ganymede.
Nat snorted into his bourbon until it bubbled. “Expense, my ass. All you do is bank your paycheck, anyway. Dust the little rascal off and take him with you.”
I frowned. “If I agree to do this, can I finish my bourbon?” It wasn’t really a question. A former president and a former four-star were accustomed to having their “suggestions” followed. Besides, I missed the little roach.
Maggie actually had the tilt-wing make an intermediate stop on its way to deliver me to New York, at the storage unit complex where I kept my Earthside worldly goods. The night ’bot didn’t know what to make of a visitor who didn’t enter through the main gate, but my ID checked out. Twenty minutes later, the ’bot tracked the tilt-wing as it took off, now laden with the crate within which nestled the night ’bot’s elderly, distant relative, plus spares and diagnostic ’Puter.
I sat in the tilt-wing’s presidential-purple upholstered passenger compartment, staring at the crate. My reunion with Jeeb would require no more than unpacking baggage.