“Tony, did you get that peach cobbler recipe?”
I flexed my knees as I stood in the conference room corner at ease and listened to General Cobb run the GEF daily staff meeting.
It had been two weeks since the Slugs had killed Metzger’s family and the rest of Denver. Judge March had been out of town; so had my brief foster family, the Ryans.
GEF’s business continued. Permanent assignments were being made. Munchkin and I were the crew-served-weapons team of the Headquarters Battalion personal security detachment. That meant one of us attended each staff meeting in case a Slug wandered in to knife the general.
Even though I was just wallpaper, it was interesting.
General Cobb stared across his conference table at his logistics officer.
“Distributed the recipe to every mess in camp, sir.”
“Finest damn cobbler I ever tasted.”
When I was a civilian, about a million years ago, I would have thought that a general spending staff meeting time on dessert recipes was insane. But Napoleon—who knew a thing or two about soldiering—said an army travels on its stomach.
General Cobb spun his chair toward me. “What do you think, Jason?”
“Sir?” My spine stiffened and adrenaline spiked through me. General Cobb knew the first name of every one of the ten thousand soldiers in GEF and called each of us by it. Or so the legend went.
“Well?”
“It’s beats ham and limas, sir.”
“How’d you know about ham and limas, son?”
“We ate C-rations in Basic, General.”
“I’ll be damned! Well, they didn’t kill either of us, did they?”
“Not yet, sir.”
The commander of the Ganymede Expeditionary Force nodded, grunted, and turned his attention back to saving the human race.
Howard Hibble sat at the table’s far end, and General Cobb nodded for him to report.
In the smoke-free room, while he licked a Tootsie Pop, Howard reported a 2 percent probability that the Slugs would incinerate us on landing.
What strategy and tactics we had sprouted from the loopy crania of Howard’s spooks. From wreckage and Sluggo’s anatomy and my experience they tacked together our battle plan. What to take, what to leave on Earth; how we would travel on Ganymede, how we would shelter; most of all, how to win. Ganymede was million miles distant, but the answer to that last question seemed even farther away.
As division sergeant major, Ord sat in, too. He didn’t say much, either. But it comforted me to know his infallible self was part of the team.
“Space Force choose us a ship captain yet?” General Cobb looked at the Space Force liaison officer, a light colonel.
She screwed up her face. “They’ve trained several. There are political considerations. It’s down to a field of three.”
“It better be down to a field of one by next week.”
We weren’t scheduled to embark for months. For years , as far as the public, and hopefully the Slugs, knew. We needed every minute of the time to train.
But Munchkin had noticed that the training schedule cut off next week. General Cobb wanted a pilot for the big ship being built out in lunar orbit, the ship that nobody knew existed, also by next week. My adrenaline spiked again.