I sighed, then nodded. “Fair enough. Which means I need to get back to work. Take me home.”

Jude sat still. “You drive.”

“What?”

He pointed at a set of paddles folded beneath the electronic countermeasures console. “The Wizzo’s got a redundant control set.”

“It’s idiotic. This thing costs more than Costa Rica.”

He snorted. “It’ll be the most fun you’ve had with your clothes on. You would have done it if my dad had asked you when you were teenagers. And I’m right here to override if you overcook it.”

I would have. He was. And my godson was also right about the fun.

When we got back, a total of one hour and fifteen minutes after I left my office, Jude parked the Scorpion out on the field, belly tiles high enough off the ground to avoid a prairie fire. A tech with a chipboard met us.

Jude reverted from godson to test pilot, speaking to the tech as we walked to the hangar through the early-morning cool. “It handles fundamentally identical to the original. No observable hull expansion problems with temperature variation. Well, I noticed a creak starboard rear, at the fairing.”

I left my godson to his Zoomie duties and walked back to my headquarters with a bounce in my step.

We were planning a high-risk operation, but the reward demanded it. I might end up defeated like Lee at Gettysburg as easily as victorious like MacArthur at Inchon. And the people who surrounded me would make it work, just like they had made so many other things work over the course of this decades-long trip through this now-brightening tunnel.

I stepped through the door to my offices at zero eight hundred, smiling. We had been open for business since zero seven hundred, and the aroma of strong Tassini coffee mixed with the smell of ink on the ribbons of Marini clerks clacking away on steel typing machines. An Earthling staff sergeant looked up from Ord’s desk. “Morning, General.”

As I passed him, I looked left and right, into adjacent, unoccupied cubicles and file aisles. “Where’s the sergeant major, Tierney?” Ord late for work was as improbable as the moons of Bren failing to rise at night.

I pushed open my office door as the staff sergeant shrugged. “Not here, sir. Put himself on sick call.”

I froze with my palm against the rough wood. In thirty years Ord had never put himself on sick call. “Tierney, reset my morning schedule. I’ll be out of the office for an indeterminate period.”

He cocked his head. “What’s up, General?”

“I’ve got a case of scotch to deliver.”

I CHASED DOWN Hippocrates Wallace in an infirmary corridor between maternity and pathology. He glanced over his shoulder when I called, then turned and faced me with his rounds chipboard in one cocoa-colored hand.

I said, “There’s a case of Glenmorangie in the foot-well under your desk. Don’t drink it all in one place, Colonel.”

He grunted. “Took you long enough.”

“I brought it all the way from Earth. And I’ve been busy.”

“So I’ve heard.” He stared at me for two heartbeats. Then he said, “You didn’t come over here to deliver scotch.”

I shook my head.

He pointed at an empty double room across the hall, ushered me in, then closed the door behind us.

My heart pounded. “I hear Ord put himself on sick call this morning.”

“DeArthur stopped by downstairs, two weeks before you got back here from Earth. Complained of persistent sniffles. Got loaded up with the usual complement of patent meds and a download advising rest and clear fluids.”

“You’ve known Ord long enough to know he’d never visit the infirmary over sniffles.”

“I have. But he didn’t come to me, just saw a duty nurse.”

“And?”

“The next visit, which was just after you got back from Earth, he did come to me. I observed visible weight loss. He complained of flulike symptoms that persisted too long. I ordered some tests.”

I closed my eyes.

I heard Wally draw a deep breath.

I said, “Pneumonia?”

“Jason, we can’t beat all the bugs on Earth, much less the pathogens on fourteen alien planets.”

I opened my eyes. “I don’t understand.”

Wally pulled up two chairs, sat me in one, then sat down across from me and laid a hand on my knee. “We’ve seen this bug infect Earthborns on Bren before. Mostly picked up in the Highlands, maybe waterborne. Ord was out in the boonies a couple days while you were gone. The locals are resistant. In Earthborns, it mimics cold and flu, while it digs in.”

“Digs in. Where?”

“Jason, it’s a total bastard. Once it gets going, it fragments erythrocytes faster than we can transfuse the patient.”

“It’s eating his blood?”

“The red cells.”

“You have antibiotics.”

Wally shook his head. “In a few years, maybe.”

“The medic shot me up with a blood booster before the Weichsel raid. That would replace the red cells.”

Wally shook his head again.

“You can transplant bone marrow.”

Wally sighed. “That’s cancer. Cancer would be easier.”

I shook my head back at him. “No. Not Ord. No bug would dare-”

“DeArthur’s a tough customer. But he doesn’t have a younger man’s immune system, Jason.”

“Wally, listen up! I’m a fucking lieutenant general. I said no! Doesn’t that count for something?”

I walked to the window, shaking my head. Troops drilled in the sunlight, and in the distance, aircraft floated into the cloudless sky. I said into the windowpane, “No, no, no!”

Blood roared in my ears, and finally I knew that my rank and my rage counted for nothing. Ord was dying. Not cut down in combat like a soldier. Murdered by some fucking Mesozoic bacteria. I grasped the windowsill, then pounded my fists on it. I spun and pointed at Wally. “Goddamit! You call yourself a fucking doctor? I want the nurse who sent him home with two aspirin in my office in an hour! With her lawyer!”

“She could have shot him home to the Mayo Clinic on a cruiser and the result would be the same, Jason.”

I pounded the wall again, until my fists were sore, while Wally stood by, silent.

Finally I turned to him. “How long?”

“Art’s in remarkable shape for his age. And we can transfuse the hell out of him.”

I blinked back tears. “How long?”

“Three weeks. Two quality.”

I stepped back until I steadied myself against the windowsill, then whispered, “Does he know?”

Wally nodded.

I wiped my eyes with the heel of my hand, then straightened my gig line. “Where is he?”

“I’ll take you to him.”

WALLY LEFT ME IN THE HALL outside Ord’s room to suck it up. I got my game face on and stepped toward the door.

Dialogue I recognized, from a remastered holo of the last reel of a century-old flatscreen, trickled through the open door, out into the hallway. It was an Ord favorite. John Wayne, who played a U.S. Marine sergeant, was saying something about never feeling better in his life. As I recall, he said this during a lull in battle, while lighting up a cigarette, which shows you how times change. Bang. There was a shot, and the sergeant was dead. The end. Maybe times didn’t change.

I froze, then sagged against the doorjamb and recomposed myself, while I listened to music play over the end credits.

Silence.

I rapped on the doorjamb. “Sergeant Major?”

“Come! And close the door behind you, trainee!” It was an exchange Ord and I had shared decades ago, when I was the worst trainee he ever had, and he was to me, well, what he had been for as long as I had known him.

I stepped into the room, around the gauzy screen that shielded the rest of the hospital from his wrath.

Ord lay on top of his sheets, cranked up to the angle of a poolside chaise. His arms and legs toothpicked out of a hospital smock, without his uniform the pale and fragile limbs of an old man.