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.
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.
I stared into the darkness as the tilt-wing bore me north. The reunion that awaited me in an hour, and the baggage, would be more complex.