“Twenty seconds.”
We were supposed to touch landing skids to the flat crater floor at two hundred miles per hour. Smooth as glass. Then run out four miles while the nose settled.
If the LZ turned out to be hot, we would be taking hostile tire on the way down, and it would intensify after touchdown.
Whump!
It could have been the first landing jolt. It could have been a Slug round gutting us.
Whump-whump’Whump . Landing jolts.
Smooth.
The next jolt slammed Munchkin against me so hard I thought she broke my ribs. All around us gear tore free and missiled toward the forward bulkhead.
A loose rifle arrowed at Wire seated across from me, still relaxed and ready for the show to start. It stabbed through his temple like a toothpick through an olive.
His experience hadn’t saved him.
The man next to Wire screamed, “Christ. Oh Christ!” He cradled the dead man’s head in bloody hands.
We stopped. The lights went out. At first I thought I was unconscious, then somebody swore.
Something dripped in the dark. Somebody puked.
Bam! Bam! Bam!
The explosive bolts along the cabin’s top spine fired, the fuselage split like a pea pod and fell away. Ganymede’s orange sky surrounded us.
I flipped down my night-vison goggles. We lay right side up, more or less, in gray dust.
“Move it! Out of this coffin, people!”
Even as I looked at the landscape my gloved hands pounded the harness-release plate on my chest. I turned to help Munchkin, but she was already loose and bent forward, unlashing our gun from its floor hooks.
All around us, troops clattered out onto Ganymede’s surface.
Clattered. Unlike the moon, the atmosphere here carried sound. Otherwise, it was just as frigid and forbidding.
Munch and I loped in the light gravity, kicking up dust that rose to our ankles. We threw ourselves prone, spaced between riflemen in a defensive perimeter fifty meters out, surrounding our dropship.
Rifles popped as troops cleared weapons. Squad leaders yelled, adjusting positions on the perimeter.
Thunder rumbled behind us and drowned it all out, then Dropship Number Three roared over our heads, its landing skids shaving fifty feet above our helmets.
A football field away it slammed into a mountain and crushed against itself like a stomped beer can. No flame. Of course not. Only 2 percent oxygen in this air.
Ship Three’s wrecked fuselage teetered, then tumbled down the mountain and rolled to within fifty yards of our perimeter.
Mountain?
I levered myself up on my knees and scanned 360 degrees. Instead of the predicted flat plain of the landing zone all around, we lay at the base of the mountain in the crater center, our dropship’s nose buried under rubble. Behind us stretched miles of flat crater floor. Half-shadowed Jupiter hung huge and smoky red on the horizon.
We had overshot the LZ by miles and crashed into the only obstacle in an area bigger than Los Angeles. Ship Three did even worse.
And Ship One, with all our vehicles and heavy weapons, was nowhere to be seen.
What the hell had Pooh done?
Pooh!
The dropship cockpit wasn’t visible under the jumbled Ganymede rock.
To our left and right, dropships screamed in, skidding and slewing, then crumpling their noses against the shallow cliffs of the mountain that was to have been our sanctuary. Exactly like we had.
Distant pops echoed off the mountain as explosive bolts blew open the surviving transports. Soldiers boiled out like we had, then linked with us into a common perimeter.
I stared across dust and scrambling medics at the split, twisted husk that had been our dropship. Nothing moved.
I fingered the ammo belt in our gun, made sure the next box was open and ready to load, then said to Munchkin, “I’m going back to the dropship.”
“Nobody said you could.”
“Pooh’s there.”
“It’s desertion.”
“It’s fifty yards away!” I scrambled up, shrugging off my pack, and ran hunched against enemy fire. And realized there was none. Ganymede was as still and empty as the big rock in space that it was.
Closer to the mountain, medics already crawled over Ship Three’s wreckage. An electric saw whined as they hacked open the cockpit. “Bring that over here!” I screamed, and waved.
The fuselage pinched shut just aft of our dropship’s cockpit. No way in, there. “Pooh?”
Nothing.
I scrambled up the rock pile until I stood in rubble just above the cockpit roof. There was an emergency hatch on the fuselage top, somewhere beneath the boulders I balanced on.
It seemed I tore and dug for hours, then I brushed pebbles off the red-stenciled hull plate, open here.
Impact had already peeled back the hatch like orange rind. “Pooh?”
Silence. My gut turned to water.
I needed to go into that black pit more than life itself, and I needed to stay away just as badly. I bent, peered in, and saw only darkness.
I tossed my head to drop my night goggles and waited the three beats until they brightened my view.
The hatch opened on the right, above Pooh’s copilot. Only floor bolts showed where his seat had attached.
I swiveled my head. He and the seat smeared the windscreen. No need asking if he was okay.
I couldn’t look left toward Pooh’s seat with my eyes open. I closed them, stopped breathing, turned then looked.
Her seat remained bolted to the floor. She lay in her harness, eyes closed, as though she slept.
“Pooh?”
No movement.
I tugged off my glove, unzipped her flight suit, and pressed my fingers to her throat to find a pulse.
There was no need to search.
The cold flesh I felt held no beating heart.
I had known with absolute certainty that it would be me. It would never be her that was gone. It could not be her.
“Anybody alive in there?”
No. None of the three of us.
Hands from above dragged me away from her. “Give us room to work, man.”
Some time later I sat in the dust with my elbows on my knees when they laid her beside me.
Someone spoke. “Neck broke clean. She felt nothing.”
Like me. Nothing in all the world.
“What about this one?”
“Dunno. He’s just fucked up.”
A hand slapped my shoulder. “Yo! Soldier!”
I turned and saw a sergeant from another platoon.
“On your feet!”
“Give him time. They were together.” Munchkin’s voice.
“We don’t have time. He’ll be together with her again if he doesn’t move his ass.”
Munchkin tugged me to my feet.
Ari stood next to her. “The sarge’s right, Jason.”
Around us wounded lay in ragged rows. Medics scrambled from one to the next. Many they just tagged on the forehead “M.” Morphine. No other help for those.
Two medics rested a Utter beside us. Air splints cased both of the man’s legs. His flight suit matched Pooh’s, but his sleeve patch read dropship number three, the one that had overshot us and slammed into the mountain.
He rolled his head and gazed at her through doped eyes. “Dunno how she did it.” He held his hands above his chest like airplanes. “Ship One was first on the LZ. Disappeared.”
Ari whispered. “Jeeb’s overflying the LZ now. The lava plain we were supposed to land on’s not lava. It’s volcanic dust. Ship One sank like a brick.”
“Are they okay?”
“Jeeb’s magnetometer says Ship One sank two hundred feet deep.”
Ganymede had already buried four hundred GIs alive.
The Ship Three pilot mumbled as he stared at Pooh. “She saw One go under. She overflew and brought Two down against the mountain. She knew the nose would crush on her. But it gave her soldiers a chance.”
He shook his head.
“Tried to follow. Nobody flies like Pooh.”
Flew.
I looked around and counted. Stretched a mile along the escarpment at the mountain’s base lay sixteen drop-ships, each nose crumpled like ours, surrounded by troops digging in and by clustered wounded.
Most of the other pilots, with seconds more to react than Ship Three, had followed Pooh’s lead. And died to save the soldiers in their dropships. In a heartbeat she had traded her own life to save thousands.
She had said I would do something noble and stupid and die. I stared down at her through tears welling inside my goggles.
Munchkin held my hand and made me look in her eyes. “We should bury her before sunset. It is the Muslim way.”
GEF had landed at what passed for dawn in Ganymede’s dim rotational period. Hibble’s astrometeorolo-gists predicted that the part of Ganymede in “daylight” was calm, then as it rotated into each “night,” cooling atmosphere shrank and made wind.
Blown dust shrouded Ari, Munchkin, and me as we laid stones over Pooh Hart. Munchkin said Arabic words and left on Pooh’s grave the white rose that Metzger had given her before we entered our dropship. Ari prayed in Hebrew. I wept.
Pooh Hart’s was the last funeral I attended on Ganymede.
There was no time for the rest.