He smiled and waved me to a chair across from him. “Glad to be home?”

I could still smell the bacon. “Some things are hard to get used to, General.”

He smiled again. “Me being one of those things, I suppose. You probably wonder why someone with a non-combat, personnel background got Nat Cobb’s slot.”

Pinchon was going to tell me why, even if I said I didn’t wonder, so I sat mute.

He stared into his palms, then looked up. “The war’s been coasting downhill for a couple of years now.”

“I’ve been pedaling the bike too hard to notice, sir.”

He nodded, smiled again. “I understand. If propulsion-grade Cavorite wasn’t flowing from Bren, if Mousetrap wasn’t secure, if Bren wasn’t providing a stable staging area for Silver Bullet, and, most recently, if the Weichsel raid hadn’t yielded the last puzzle piece we need to exterminate the Slugs, the existence of mankind would still hang in the balance.”

“Aren’t you starting the victory party a little early, sir?”

“Like you said, you’ve been busy pedaling the bike. Mankind’s best minds think we entered the war’s end game months ago. We just have to play it out.”

I squirmed in my chair. “That’s great. I intend to play it out. So it doesn’t get screwed up. Sir.”

He pressed his lips together. “Jason, your contributions have been extraordinary, and so have your sacrifices. Do you feel that you’ve done enough?”

Hair rose on the back of my neck. “When we know the Slugs are gone, I’ll feel like I’ve done enough. Sir, what are you trying to say?”

“The end game-Silver Bullet-is a Space Force show. Basically it’s a reconnaissance to locate a target, followed by a bombing mission to deliver a single, outcome-determinative device.”

I straightened in my chair. “Every time we’ve thought we had the Slugs on the ropes since I’ve been in this war-and I’ve been in it from the beginning-we’ve been wrong, General Pinchon. Maybe Silver Bullet’s Hiroshima, maybe it isn’t.”

He nodded. “We have been wrong. And if it hadn’t been for people like you and Nat Cobb bailing us out, we wouldn’t stand today on the threshold of final victory, ready to move to new challenges.”

Stale doughnut congealed in my stomach. “Is this my golden handshake?”

Pinchon frowned. “Jason, by statute, the U.S. military is authorized three hundred twenty active-duty generals at a time. The math works out that there are currently slots for only a dozen army three-stars, like you.”

The numbers fluctuated, but even I knew that the brass ceiling had been the law since before the Cold War. It meant that just as perfectly competent senior general officers figured out how to do their jobs, they got squeezed out of the top of the officer corps, like used toothpaste out of a tube, so junior generals could move up.

I said, “Nat never got pushed out.”

“The war was different then. And Nat was different. He knew how to watch his own back in Washington.”

I smiled, even as my heart sank in my chest. “He watched mine, too.”

Pinchon sighed. “Frankly, Jason, given your record, Nat’s the only reason you got far enough that we’re having this conversation.”

I couldn’t argue. The army had been trying to fire me since basic training, and for good reasons. I was no MacArthur, no Eisenhower. I had stumbled through a career doing the wrong things for the right reasons, then scratching and clawing back from the brink of disaster only by the grace and intervention of people like Ord and Nat Cobb. That didn’t make the shock of this moment less electric.

“What about my command? My kids.”

“Our outworld presence will be reconfigured. We won’t need and can’t afford a ground army forward-deployed to meet a threat that’s about to disappear. Most of your command will be safely redeployed home with the gratitude of their respective nations. Any commander should be delighted with that outcome.”

Maybe so, but shock gave way to heat that flushed up from my gut. My fists balled at my sides. “That’s it? You think I’m going to go quietly?”

“Jason, there’s nobody here to protect you this time. Nat’s gone. And you’ll be retired on a four-star’s pension. The defense industry will snap you up as a consultant, if the holo nets don’t hire you as an expert first. This isn’t a punishment, it’s a reward.”

“How long have I got?”

Pinchon smiled, as gently as I suppose he knew how. “You make retirement sound like a tumor.” He waved the holo screen so it faced me. “Before you leave, I’ll print out your retirement forms for you. They become effective when you sign them. Meantime, let’s run through your ongoing benefits and privileges…”

He talked for, as my ’Puter read later, forty-four more minutes. I didn’t hear one word.

Finally, I found myself standing beside the elevator, with a breast pocket full of army paper, in silence broken only by hollow ringing in my ears, as though an eight-inch howitzer shell had detonated alongside me. I stared back at the MacArthur plaque on the hallway wall. There was a quote, from MacArthur’s address to a joint session of Congress, after Truman rightly canned him for trying to start World War III in Korea. MacArthur had quoted a barracks ballad: “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.”

I stared at the quote for a long time before I pressed the down button.

At a kiosk down in the Waldorf’s lobby, I rented another manual drive, including mobile recharge coverage.

Five minutes later the car whispered up to the curb, and as I pressed a bill into the live doorman’s white-gloved hand, I said to him, “Fade away, my ass!”

Then I slipped the renter out, between the yellow nose of one cab and the tail of another, and told my car to give me directions to Maryland.

FORT MEADE, MARYLAND, wasn’t the only place Howard’s Spooks infested, but it was the place where they had for years maintained facilities to hold a Slug smart enough to tell them anything-if, like a dog that chased cars, they ever caught one.

Howard buzzed me in through the doors of a three-story black glass cube with a sign out front that read “ International Communicable Disease Research Center. Protective clothing required beyond this point.”

He was wearing slacks, sandals, and a T-shirt that announced “On my planet, I’m normal.” The most military thing about him was an old-style ID badge he wore on a lanyard around his chicken-wattle neck. The army had long ago come to terms with the need to let Howard run his Spooks the way he wanted to. The honeymoon had lasted because his methods allowed him to recruit persons who thought outside the box. Way outside.

We stepped into the elevator, and Howard poked his badge into a slot for a subbasement level five stories down. Alongside the slot, someone had taped a hand-printed sign that read “Dungeon. Quiet please! Torture in progress.”

The elevator opened to a desk labeled “Security,” behind which sat a girl wearing farmer’s bib jeans over bare shoulders, with corporal’s chevrons pinned to the strap of an empty leather shoulder holster. She made one of those waves where the hand remains still while the fingers wiggle. “Hi, Howard. Who’s your friend?”

I sighed. Ord’s head would have exploded.

We passed by her, then through a set of double doors. Howard said, “Her IQ is one ninety-five.”

“One would hope.”

The room we entered was big enough to garage three buses, and at its center floated my green traveling companion from Weichsel, under a cone of soft blue overhead light. A cable thicket ran from plates taped to the Ganglion’s hide to consoles along all four walls, behind which sat a hundred Spooks.

I pointed at the cables and frowned. “Is that how you make it talk? Electric shock?”

Howard’s eyes widened. “The sign in the elevator was a joke!”