Temperature endurance testing involved freezing your ass off. Every moment at Camp Hale involved freezing your ass off, but TET had it as a specific objective.
The brains had figured out early that humans would freeze to death on Ganymede without battery-heated fatigues. So they invented Smart Clothes. Very forties. A chip calculates your body’s need for heat against available battery power. You stay alive, if not comfortable.
If you’re wondering why battery depletion was an issue, remember that the Eternad system wasn’t perfected at first. In case you’ve been living in a cave the last few years, Eternad’s a system of flexible bands and levers built into clothing that stores body-motion energy in rechargeable batteries. Just like the alternators on internal-combustion cars recharged the battery by harnessing engine motion. Simply breathing keeps you juiced.
But at that time, the batteries were conventional. A GI with hardy metabolism could last a day under field conditions without a new battery. Another might popsicle inside twelve hours because his chip calculated he needed more warmth. The twelve-hour troops simply couldn’t be sent to Ganymede.
TET consisted of two GIs just sitting in one foxhole in a line of foxholes dug along a wind-scoured ridge at twelve thousand feet. Chill factor was equivalent to eighty below zero, Fahrenheit. You stayed in your hole for a solid day while your fatigues kept you right on the edge of misery. It was the one test you couldn’t retake, except in case of verifiable mechanical breakdown. If you made the day, you stayed in. If you were cold-sensitive and sucked off your battery juice in twelve hours, you went hypothermic and washed out of GEF permanently. Simple, pragmatic, and a bitch.
Each GI wore a finger clip so the instructor could test body-core temperature periodically. If a soldier went hypothermic, the soldier washed out but lived.
As they trucked us up to the ridge, my soon-to-be foxhole mate swayed against me. She shrank away, as she had a week ago.
If I had harbored romantic notions about Munchkin, as Ari had called her, they died a week before. We were at the range, testing to rank machine gunners for division assignments. Munchkin and I tied for top score. We would both be assigned to HQ Battalion, which I was, already. But we had to have a shoot-off to determine who would be gunner and who would be loader. Gunner was not only boss, gunner humped the gun, not the heavier ammo load.
The rest of the failed competitors stood behind us. She, in turn, stood behind the gun, tight-lipped and shak-ing tension from her fingers as she gazed downrange at the targets six hundred meters out.
“Good luck,” I had said, as she wriggled down prone behind the gun and adjusted the sights. “I won’t need it.”
And I didn’t need a snotty Egyptian Princess. Maybe she was just covering her nervousness. I wanted to say something diplomatic to former Lieutenant Munshara. I really did. Not something personal that might upset her concentration. But what actually spewed out was, “What you need is a spanking, Munchkin.”
Somebody laughed, then somebody else. It was the kind of nickname that stuck. Especially if the nicknamed hated it.
She turned as red as a cafe-au-lait complexion can turn, and fixed me with a stare as cold as Camp Hale. Then she laid her cheek alongside the gunstock, and the range went silent.
Never, ever piss off a shrimp. The competition was over before it started.
Munchkin nailed every target, then begged another ammo belt and drilled a batch of leftover tank-gun targets a thousand meters out.
I didn’t even bother shooting. So a week ago she had stood and brushed off her fatigues. “How’s that for a spanking, Wander?” She had waved her hand at the gun on the ground. “Clean that up, Wander!”
“Wander!” The voice snapped me back to the present as the TET truck squealed to a stop. My still-pissed gunner jolted against me again.
“I said first pair out now. Wander and Munchkin.” Mr.
Wire, the chief of this exercise, was a US Navy SEAL. As old as Ord and of equivalent noncommissioned rank, a master chief petty officer. He screamed to be heard over the wind.
Thirty seconds later the woman I had forever dubbed “Munchkin” and I stood together on a gale-swept ridge. The truck disappeared as wind needled snow into the bits of skin that our face masks didn’t cover.
I tapped my mitten on her padded shoulder, pointed at our snow-swirled hole, and screamed, “Out of this wind!”
She nodded. By the time we wedged ourselves in she shook so hard her voice trembled. “God tests me.”
“Yeah. It’s cold.”
“I mean putting me together with you.”
“The feeling’s mutual.” Not really. If you have to freeze your butt off better to do it with a babe. “Look, I was just kidding the other day.”
“You were just arrogant!” She hugged her torso and turned her face to the rock wall.
“Attitude won’t keep you warmer. Take it from a Col-oradan. Neither will the fact that they dropped us off first. We’ll be out here longer than anybody else. Bad luck.”
“No. Not luck. For this single thing I apologize to you, Wander. It’s my fault. We are placed near the command post so the instructors can watch me closer.”
“Huh?”
“I’m the smallest person in the entire Ganymede Expeditionary Force. Their charts say it is physically impossible for me to retain adequate body heat. They already asked me to withdraw, voluntarily.”
“The weather isn’t that bad.” Actually, it was horrible. I was freezing my ass off already, batteries or no.
“It isn’t the cold. It’s the unknown. I’ve never been cold. In Egypt it never even approaches zero degrees.”
“Zero’s damn cold.”
“Zero Centigrade. Where water freezes. Egypt never even gets close to that . This is beyond imagination.”
“And I suppose having to go through it all with me makes it worse?” I’d read all the propaganda about superior female judgment and endurance and the sheer justice of including female soldiers in this Force. But here I was having a prom-night spat in a foxhole.
She twisted to look at me as I pulled my face mask up and blew my nose into my mitten.
She rolled her eyes and turned away again.
I peeled my mitten down and looked at my ‘puter. “Only twenty-three hours and fifty minutes to go. As the cold-weather expert in this team I have a suggestion. Huddle together for warmth. I think they expect us to do that.” I spread my arms. “Come to Papa.”
“God willing, I shall freeze to death first.”
I shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
It felt like she sat with her face to the foxhole wall for hours. My ‘puter insisted it was thirty minutes. I alligator-clipped my finger. Body temperature 98.6, battery drawdown 4 percent I was chilled, but I’d make it through with juice to spare.
“Okay, Munchkin. Time for your physical.”
“Fuck off.”
I uncoiled the wire for the fingertip sensor from the monitor box. “It’s not gynecology. Hold out your finger.”
She grumbled but extended her hand back to me, poking her trigger finger out through the firing slit in her right mitten.
I slipped the alligator clip on. Her hand was as delicate as a child’s. And shaking.
“Well?”
“It’s 98.5. So far so good. But your battery dropped 9 percent in the first hour. You’ll be cold meat in ten hours.”
She didn’t say a word. She just turned and hugged herself to me, burying her face against my chest.
After a couple minutes, she said, “Don’t think I’m enjoying this.”
“Me either. This sucks.” I thought it was a credible lie. She smelled wonderful.
Four hours after we were dropped off, Mr. Wire emerged from swirling snow and squatted alongside our hole, wind whipping fur parka trim around his bare face. He was just an instructor, not part of GEF, which meant he had the bad fortune to have a living family. SEALS drew this duty because being cold was their business. Well, okay, much as it pains me to admit it about squids, they’re also probably the world’s best troops.
He motioned us to hold up fingers and took his own readings on each of us. “Mr. Wander, you seem just dandy.”
“Hooya, Mr. Wire.” The SEALs may be good, but they are as full of crap as any unit. They insisted we say “Hooya” in place of “yes.” It built esprit de corps. They thought
Wire turned to the Munchkin. “Ma’am, I’m not gonna bullshit you. Your body temp’s sketchy, and it looks like you’re gonna run out of battery juice sometime middle of tonight. I can’t make you drop out, but I really don’t see the point in your continuing this exercise. No reflection on you personally. It’s just physics. You sure you want to hang in?”
“Hooya!” Her voice quavered already, and we had twenty hours to go.
He slapped palms on his thighs and stood. “Hooya, ma’am. Carry on.” He turned to me. “Wander, you keep an eye on her. Hypothermia’s nothing to screw with.” He disappeared into a gauze of snow.
Munchkin pounded fists against the rocks.
“Look, I know you want this. We all do. Bad. But Wire knows what he’s talking about.”
“He plays games of the mind with me. He wishes me to quit. I will not quit.”
She knew better. We all did. Neither the SEALs nor anyone else played mind games with the future of humanity at stake. The only reason to wash out a soldier from GEF was to protect the mission. The human race had too much invested in each of us to wash out a single one for laughs or prejudice. But there were going to be training accidents, changes of heart, performance failures. There was a shadow force training in parallel. If a soldier stumbled, five thousand stood ready to replace her.
“Why do you want this so bad?”
“Eight reasons. My mother, my father, my six sisters.” Her voice caught.
I pulled her against me again while I watched the sky. The sun was weak these days, but I could tell it was going down.
Wire visited us two more times that miserable night during his rounds of the foxhole line.
Each time Munchkin’s battery was drawn down farther than schedule. Each time she shivered and seemed to shrink even smaller before my eyes. Each time Wire asked her if she insisted on continuing. Each time she snapped out a faded “Hooya.”
I finger-clipped her again. The needle on the battery meter didn’t move. I thumbed the readout button to show her body temperature. It was down a half degree since last check.
I felt like crap. But Munchkin was dying. “Munchkin, what’s four times three?”
She stared through me and her lips quivered, but she said nothing. A first symptom of hypothermia was the inability to answer simple questions.
“That’s it. Let’s go to the command post. You’re done, Munchkin.”
She might have been on the edge of hypothermia, but through her fog she understood.
“N-no!”
“We still have six hours to go. Wire will pull the plug on you next time he comes by if I don’t.”
I grabbed her under the arms and heaved her up.
“No, you bastar‘!” Slurred speech, too. Another symptom. She pushed out her arms and legs against the foxhole walls, wedging herself in like a cork.
“I’m not a bastard! I’m trying to save your life!”
Weak as she was, she thrashed and kicked. My frozen shin burned where her boot toe thwacked it.
“What life, Wander? This is all I have left. Think what it would be like if you didn’t have something, somebody.”
I thought about it every day. Until now I believed I was the only one.
I stopped tugging at her and thought. What if roles were reversed? If I was going to lose my spot in the Force? There had to be a solution.
I finger-clipped myself. I had 40 percent juice left in my battery, and my body was humming at a toasty 98.6. “Turn around.”
“Wha?”
I slung her like a flour sack, unzipped the battery compartment on her fatigues, and snapped her dead battery out of the socket.
I pretzeled my arm to pop my own battery out, plugged it into her socket and popped her dead one into mine.
“Whaju do, Wander?”
“Nothing. Snuggle up, Munchkin.” I wondered whether I could feel more miserable.
Three hours later I knew I could.
I shook inside my field gear so hard that I thought I would rattle Munchkin’s teeth loose. The wind had picked up and howled as it drove snow in the darkness. But her body temperature had risen a hair.
Wire’s flashlight bobbed toward us through the night.
“Hooya, troops! Anyone for a cold beer?”
“F-fuck you, Mr.Wire!”
“Yes, ma’am!” He squinted at her. “Don’t we sounc perky all of a sudden.”
He finger-clipped Munchkin, read his meter, ther shook it and read it again. He looked at her, then at me.
“Munchkin, what’s three times two?”
She didn’t shake as she looked him in the eye. “Six.”
He finger-clipped me. “My, my. Wander, you have beer busy. Your battery is stone-dead. And your body tempera tore is falling. It’s gonna be close, but I mink you wil barely make it to End-of-Test. And with 40 percent juice left, Munchkin will, too. How fortunate for both of you.”
Wire paused and rubbed his fleece face mask. “Wander, please step out of your hole and join me over here.”
He cupped a mittened wave as he walked out of Munchkin’s earshot.
Crap. Crap, crap, crap. Why did I always get caught? Metzger never got caught.
Wire turned and faced me. The snow blew so hard I couldn’t even see our foxhole. He shouted over the gale. “Wander, did you swap batteries with Munchkin?”
Judge March said that if the truth wouldn’t set you free, lie your ass off. “Negative, Mr. Wire!”
“I’m not asking for the bullshit teamwork answer. Did you?”
“Negative, Mr. Wire.”
He looked down and scuffed snow with his boot toe. “If she sucks batteries like that in combat, she can’t function. She’ll die. People in her unit will die when she doesn’t do her job. Worse, she will jeopardize the mission. This exercise isn’t hazing.”
“This exercise is bullshit. When we get Eternad batteries—”
“ If you get ‘em! If you get ’em, maybe they’ll change this exercise and she can get reassigned to GEE”
“You know anybody that falls behind will never catch up.”
He looked away. “It isn’t up to you or me to decide who stays and who goes. Look, I know you people stick together, and I’m not saying I want to trade places.”
He surely did want to trade places. SEALs trained a lifetime hoping to be part of a mission like GEF’s. They were the best soldiers on the planet. SEALs like Wire had the bad luck to have live families. So the politicians had pulled the rug from under them in favor of neophyte orphans like me and Munchkin. Life’s a bitch.
“We’re in the places we’re in, Mr. Wire. For better or worse, Munchkin’s my family. She wants to stay in.”
He nodded. “So. You’re already soldier enough to know mat in combat we don’t fight for duty and honor and country. We fight for the soldier next to us. That’s admirable. But mere’s no room for chivalry or for covering up a buddy’s weakness. If Munchkin’s not mission-capable, she should be dropped.”
“When we get better batteries she’ll be mission-capable.”
He sighed. “You can cover for her now. I can’t prove you swapped batteries. But you can’t cover for the whole training cycle. Protecting her now just prolongs the agony for her and endangers your unit. I respect your reasons for your decision. But I’ll watch you and Munchkin with special interest for the duration of this cycle. Are we clear?”
“Hooya, Mr. Wire.”
“This is the stupidest abortion of a training stunt I’ve ever seen! Just to give a stubborn half-pint a chance to get her ass shot off!” He paused, then shook his head. “A SEAL would do that.”
That was about as big a compliment as Wire was capable of to a non-SEAL.
“So. Because I do respect you people—and that’s no bilge—the additional physical training you’ll do to make up for what you missed during our little philosophical discussion here will be reduced. Push out one hundred for me.”
If somebody had pulled on me the stunt I’d just pulled on Wire, I’d have made ‘em do a thousand push-ups.
After the TET exercise ended, Munchkin and I limped stiff into the mess hall. We sat across from one another, shivering, and wrapped our fingers around coffee cups that couldn’t be too hot. We didn’t even think about taking off our parkas.
“Thank you,” she said.
I shrugged and spread my fingers. “No frostbite.”
“Not just for taking the cold. I know Wire must have interrogated you. You must have lied for me. They might have thrown you out.”
Shit. I hadn’t thought of that.
“I will never forget what you did. No brother could have done more.”
Brother? I was hoping for sexually irresistible bedmate.
She reached across the table, peeled my fingers off my cup and rubbed them, to bring back circulation. Like a sister.
It was then I knew that Munchkin and I would love each other, but we would never be lovers. We had grown too close for that, as combat soldiers do.
We trained for two more weeks. Munchkin and I grew closer, as soldiers and as friends. Then Metzger showed up.