Orphan Brigade (3 page)

Mortas turned away from the unyielding exit to see that the open goals in the far wall were belching now, a cascading gray cloud that spewed forth and billowed toward the high ceiling. Tumbling, churning, thick with chemicals that were already poisoning the air.

Without thinking, he was prone on the hard floor and trying to remember what to do. Recalling a voice telling him to hold a damp rag over his mouth and nostrils, he dragged his T-­shirt up over his nose. Not damp, but better than nothing. The alarm was still honking, so loud now that he couldn't make out the words that accompanied it. His vision darted across the flat expanse, knowing that there was no other exit.

His eyes began to smart, but Mortas hardly noticed because the floor beneath him was growing noticeably warmer. A grinding, machinelike rattling joined the booming siren, forcing him to bring his hands up over his ears. Crawling on his elbows, he dragged himself up against the wall near the door for no reason other than the desire to be close by if it miraculously opened.

Looking up through watering eyes, a stench far fouler than ordinary smoke penetrating the shirt, he saw that a dark, roiling cloud had obscured the ceiling. A glance at the goals showed that all three were open, vomiting the noisome gas that was rapidly polluting an already-­dwindling amount of oxygen. He saw the forgotten ball moving on its own, its material swelling with the heat and rolling, lopsided and silly, out of his sight.

The floor was actually hot now, and he sensed more than heard a long string of rippling burps that could only be the boiling of whatever was beneath him. His fingers pressed into his running, smarting eyes, and then a loud thud in the compartments below the court got him moving.

Up now, one hand clapping the fabric over his nose while the other tried to shield his eyes, bent over because the smoke had come down so low. Kicking madly at the door, feeling no give at all, several steps back, then running forward to jump with both soles only to rebound and land painfully on his kidneys. Back on his feet, coughing, eyes turned to slits, crouching, then running toward the exit again, knowing it wouldn't open, that the stinging in his feet wasn't the pain from striking the door but the heat of the fire on which he stood, the gas swirling around him, running shoulder first into the hatch and dropping like a stone.

The smoke was almost to the floor, the heat was everywhere, and Mortas realized with true terror that he had to abandon the room's only exit. Fearing he'd never be able to find it again in the cloud, eyes forcing themselves shut, the shirt back up over his nose, Mortas crawled blindly across the surface in the vain hope of finding a patch where the fire wasn't going to roast him.

Mortas was lying on a lukewarm patch of floor, curled in a ball with his entire head inside the sweat-­soaked shirt, when a pair of hands roughly took hold of him. They pulled him to his feet, the shirt coming down to reveal that the room was being blown clear of the evil cloud and that the door stood wide open behind a tall figure holding him at arm's length. His eyes were refusing to open fully, and his lungs were fighting to expel whatever was roughening them, but Mortas recognized the coal-­gray tunic of his father's security detail.

“Jan! Jan!” The hands, incredibly strong, had him by the upper arms and were shaking him even though he and the other man were the same height. Eyelids fluttering open just a crack as he recognized the voice but not believing it. “Jan, it's me! Hugh Leeger! Do you know me?”

Mortas shook his head to clear it, simultaneously relieved and angered by the dawning realization that the life-­threatening event had been a setup. He contorted his body, trying to break loose, recognizing the man who was the chief of his father's security detail. The man who had practically raised him, from the day his mother died until the day he'd gone to boarding school. Big brother, surrogate father, coach, mentor, and friend.

Mortas's fists were flying without any instructions to do so, aiming for the face with the intent of doing real harm, but bouncing off Leeger's expert parries instead. Then the hands were on him again, his body twisting, his center of gravity gone, and he was facedown on the floor with one arm behind his back bearing Leeger's full weight.

The familiar voice in his ear, gentle but not kind. “Amazing. No matter how old we both get, I can still pin you in one fall.”

“L
ean your head back, please.” The technician was short and pretty, with jet-­black hair piled under a barrette. She was also very nervous, and managed to run most of the eye drops down Mortas's cheek. His eyes had been flushed out by a doctor who couldn't wait to pass him on to someone else, and now he saw an amused look on Leeger's face as the security man stepped closer.

“I'll do that.” He took the drops from the tech, and the woman was gone a grateful moment later. Mortas scowled up at him as Leeger pried his eyelids open and carefully squeezed a few drops from the bottle, not wasting any. “Everybody gets so scared whenever your father is in the area. I've never understood that.”

Mortas blinked rapidly, lowering his chin. He was sitting on a shiny metal stool in a small examination room, and although his breathing had returned to normal, his eyes still stung. The nervous doctor had said he'd been dosed with a harmless irritant similar to riot gas, but the insides of his nose retained the odor from the smoke.

“Where am I?”

“Home.” Leeger returned to the small chair near the door and sat down smoothly. “Earth orbit. You might have had the shortest combat tour on record, Jan. This here is a Force research facility, for testing stress levels and physical readiness. That was a special Sim Ball court, in case you haven't guessed. It's rigged up to do all sorts of things to unsuspecting Force personnel.”

“So why do it to me?”

“Oh, you already know the answer to that. You were exposed to an alien life-­form we've never seen before, one that did things that none of our scientists can explain. Up until now everybody's been focusing on why the Sims can't reproduce and why they can't form our syllables, but the appearance of that alien put all that stuff on the back burner.”

“You didn't answer me.”

“Sure I did. Nobody knows what that thing was, how it could do the things it did, and what else it might have been able to do. We had to make sure you weren't carrying a passenger, in other words. So creating a situation where you believed you were about to die was the only way we could be certain there wasn't anything left of that thing hidden inside you.”

“You didn't seriously believe that, right?”

Leeger leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “Jan, the entire Human Defense Force went on alert because of that alien. Almost every Forcemember in the war zone has been put through the same type of scan that caught that thing, the one that showed it wasn't human. That's how seriously they're treating this.”

“What did they find?”

The older man straightened up. “Nothing. Not a single sighting of anything like what you encountered. And it's been weeks. To be honest, no one knows what to make of that.”

“Weeks? I was locked up for weeks, and you knew about it?”

Leeger's lips parted in a disbelieving smile. “Son, you've been scanned in every way we know, several times, and they had one last look at your insides while you were enjoying the ambience of that Sim Ball court. It was the only way they were ever going to let your father come into contact with you, so I consider it a small price to pay.”

“He's here?”

“His shuttle's docking even as we speak. Command wouldn't dare let the Chairman of the Emergency Senate on the same station with you until they were certain you were clean.” Leeger stood. “So if you're done crying, let's get you into a uniform, Lieutenant. And then go see your dad.”

T
he dress uniform's high collar seemed to bite into his throat as Mortas followed Leeger down the telescoping passage that joined the station to his father's shuttle. He remembered sealing the crisp new suit in a protective case and hanging it in a closet at the Mortas home not long before, in preparation for shipping out. As an infantry lieutenant headed for a platoon in the war zone he would have had little need for such finery, and his thoughts briefly went to the filthy, torn fatigues he'd been wearing when he'd finally reached Glory Main.

His left hand swung unnaturally, as if he were holding a small weight, and Mortas kept looking down at his university ring. That too had been placed in safekeeping before he shipped out, and he hadn't expected to see it again for several years. If ever.

The ship's hatch was open when they reached the end of the umbilical, and even though he'd traveled on his father's shuttle many times, he was still struck by its opulence. Perhaps it was the recent experience of being transported by standard military carriers, or maybe that he'd been locked up for several weeks, but the entire setup seemed grossly luxuriant.

Imitation wood decorated the edges of the craft's furnishings, and everything else appeared to be colored in rich cream. The crew contained no Human Defense Force personnel, instead consisting of carefully screened and highly trained members of Olech Mortas's considerable retinue. Even so, they all sported uniforms that were quasi-­military, and Mortas found that it bothered him. Remembering now that he'd never felt fully at ease on this ship or with any of the more recent additions to his father's coterie, suspicious that the too-­ready smiles were masks that these ­people probably practiced in mirrors.

And then he was at the hatch leading to his father's office, the traveling control room at the very top of humanity's governmental apparatus. Despite the disorganization and inefficiency he'd encountered in the war zone, Mortas knew from personal witness that the multidecade conflict was directed by the man who sat beyond this hatch. Leeger ushered him in and shut the entrance behind him, and Mortas felt a twinge of the same apprehension he'd experienced whenever his interrogations had recommenced.

A curtain hung before him now, intended to block prying eyes whenever the hatch was open, and Mortas took a deep breath before stepping through the drapes. It was exactly as he remembered it, a small room decorated with the same imitation wood, but festooned with electronic screens that currently displayed a variety of paintings depicting pastoral scenes of a bygone age. Many visitors to that office left without realizing that the screens had been arranged so that the Chairman of the Emergency Senate could view selected data or manage a crisis, all just by standing in the room's center.

The chairman sat facing the hatch with his back to the far bulkhead, behind a communications console that had always reminded Mortas of an old-­style organ he'd once seen in a church. He'd found it funny, imagining his father's fingers dancing over the buttons and keyboards, directing the far-­flung machinations of his latest schemes while a sonorous dirge blasted from pipes made of lead, copper, and tin.

A maestro more concerned with the activities of total strangers in distant solar systems than the two motherless children in his own home.

The man behind the desk looked up from one of its screens and gave Mortas the same smile he'd seen in the passageways leading there. Olech came to his feet, wearing a tunic and pressed trousers of a rich fabric colored something between dark green and dark gray. It was cut in a military style, but that was fitting in the Chairman's case because a single blood red bar was pinned to his chest, a decoration Mortas had known all his life.

Earned by an Olech Mortas he had never known, a volunteer in the early years of the long war, aged only fifteen because the fight had been going so badly. The award represented ser­vice in a special army formed by a temporary waiver that had dropped the volunteer age to twelve. They were still revered decades later, because most of them had perished in the desperate but ultimately successful bid to reverse the seemingly endless string of Sim victories. Olech Mortas had been severely wounded after several weeks of combat that he routinely referred to—­humbly, of course—­as total chaos that had consumed the lives of better men—­better children—­than he. They were collectively known as the Unwavering, and in a private moment Olech had once admitted to his son that their minimal training and panicked commanders had been the main reasons why so few of them had returned.

Olech was in his early fifties, but looked ten years younger. Matching Mortas's six-­foot height and almost as lean as his twenty-­two-­year-­old son, the Chairman still sported a full head of hair that was gracefully changing from blond to silver. His daughter Ayliss had inherited the golden hair and the blue eyes, while her younger brother Jander had come into the world with their mother's dark hair and eyes of the same color.

His father maintained the smile as he approached, and when Olech extended his hand Mortas took it. The Chairman's eyes bore straight into him, and when he spoke it was with mirth.

“Didn't expect to be seeing you so soon, Jan.”

“—­a
nd they kept me in a cell, interrogated me, told me nothing, and finally brought me here.” Mortas finished the long tale in the same even tone that his father always demanded. “Apparently someone thought I was possessed by a demon or something, so they put me through a fake shipboard fire where I thought I was going to die, just to see what would pop out of me.”

“Station-­board.”

“Excuse me?”

“Station-­board. You weren't on a ship, so it couldn't be a fake shipboard fire. And it was the only way I was ever going to get you back.”

“Back?”

The chairman misunderstood the barb, and began to nod. He'd resumed his place behind the desk, and Mortas was seated before him in a straight-­backed chair with no arms.

“Yes. Back. I have to admit something here, Jan. I knew you'd go out there and give it your best, but I had no idea you'd developed such talents at bringing ­people together. I've read all the reports, and the way you got the other three maroons to work with you was impressive.” He paused, and Mortas prepared himself for a comment about his failure to spot the alien. “Especially Gorman.”