I ran through our mostly empty trenches toward HQ, listening as Hope’s bombs began pattering like raindrops out on the plain. Then they stopped.
I looked up, steadying my helmet with one hand. Hope’s silver dot floated overhead, clearly still in firing position. Odd.
Minutes later, the Slug boom-boom-boom echoed off the crags. The Slugs had advanced within small-arms range but Hope had barely fired a shot.
As I ran, I wondered whether I would really have shot the medic. I wondered whether I should tell Metzger that Munchkin carried their child. I wondered how badly we were hurt that a specialist fourth class commanded a battalion after two days’ battle. Three leg-infantry companies and a weapons company made a battalion. If the battalion was at full strength, which, of course, it wasn’t, eight hundred soldiers would live and die on my orders.
By the time I rounded a bend, and HQ came in sight, battle sounds had died. We had beaten back the Slugs again. Since I’d left, the engineers had rigged a roof, of sorts, over HQ and topped it with loose rock. Antennae sprouted from it, and below I saw soldiers move.
I got closer and realized that the movement was the hauling of wounded. Slug carcasses draped HQ’s parapet by the hundreds. If the Slugs had got this close to our HQ, the next assault would be the last.
I ducked under HQ’s low ceiling and waited for my goggles to adjust. The first person I recognized was Howard Hibble. He sat with his back against the trench wall, a rifle across his bony knees. Its stock had shattered. Howard never touched rifles if he could help it.
A medic knelt beside him, dressing Howard’s bloody forearm.
“What happened?” I asked.
The medic tied the dressing. “Slugs breached HQ. Major here mowed down fifty. Clubbed the last two with his rifle butt.”
I almost smiled. “Holy Moly, Howard!”
He rolled his head back against the rock. “I’d kill for a cigarette.”
“You still think they’re a hive entity?”
He nodded, slowly.
An orderly entered the room, saw me, and snapped to attention, head cocked below the ceiling. “Sir!”
“I’m Wander.”
“General Cobb said to bring you to him as soon as you arrived.”
The orderly led me deeper into the warren of roofed trenches that had become HQ since I’d left. Unit radios squawked. Litters of wounded were ranked along trench walls. Too many were no longer wounded.
He handed me off to another orderly, who led me to the wide trench that formed GEF’s nerve center. The roof had been breached. Dead Slug warriors slumped in the opening. Don’t mess with Howard Hibble.
“I’m Wander. New CO of the Third of the Second.”
“No, sir. You’re not.”
“What?” Rage surged in me. I’d abandoned Munchkin for nothing?
“Jason!”
I turned. General Cobb lay on a litter, a pressure dressing banded across his eyes with blood-soaked gauze strips. I knelt beside him. He groped for my arm, frowned as his fingers slipped in blood. “You hit bad, son?”
I looked down. A metal splinter jutted from my bicep. I hadn’t even noticed. “No, sir. You—”
He shook his head. “I can’t command what I can’t see.”
Somebody cried for her mother. I looked around, then back.
“You’ve done okay with your platoon. You’ll do okay with the division.”
My ears rang. Not just from the cacophony around us. I was supposed to play one poker hand for the future of the human race? I didn’t even know the rules. And I had no cards. “Division, sir? I never. I can’t.”
“You will. Hell, it’s not much more than a battalion left, now.” He reached to his collar, fumbled with his stars, then pressed them into my palm.
“Coffee, General?” A private held out a canteen cup in a shaking hand. To me.
I shook my head, pointed to General Cobb. The kid took his hand, pressed the cup into it. Then the private asked me, “What do you need, sir?”
A fucking clue, for starters. I sat still and breathed.
General Cobb reached up, groped for the back of my head. He tugged my ear down to his lips and whispered. “Jason, you’re in command! The one thing you can’t do is nothing. Do something , even if it’s wrong!”
I turned to the private as I pinned the stars to my collar. “Get me staff. Now.” I needed information.
“Sir, there hasn’t been a live staff officer for twelve hours.”
Somewhere a wounded man screamed.
Of course there was no staff. Why did I think an acting lieutenant had been jumped over colonels, majors, and captains? They were dead.
“You have any idea what our strength is?”
“Eight hundred available for duty, sir.”
“What about the other brigades?”
“All brigades. Eight hundred left in the whole GEF, sir.”
“It can’t be.”
“It is.”
We needed fire support more than ever.
“How do I talk to Hope ?”
He pointed across the room, at a radio console on a folding table.
“Why isn’t somebody manning that?” I asked.
He stepped to it and turned it, displaying a line of holes across the back. “It got shot up today.”
No wonder we’d lost fire support. I would have blamed the ship’s computers.
“Nobody’s talked to Hope in hours. Except the cooks, of course.”
“What?”
He pointed across the room. A corporal wearing mess fatigues sat at a radio, talking.
“They been sending up menu orders, just in case Hope can get some hots down to us. You know how General Cobb feels about feeding the troops.”
The firepower to destroy a planet hung in orbit above us, and the only working uplink was being used to order stew.
I jumped up, snatched the corporal’s mike, and spoke. “Who is this?”
“Who is this ! ‘Cause this is Senior Mess Steward Anthony Garcia and I got work to do! So get off my net, dick brain.”
“This is Division Commander Wander, Garcia. It’s my net. If you want to stay senior anything, you patch me through to Commodore Metzger on the bridge. Now.”
Silence. While I waited for the patch, Howard Hibble and Ari came in, along with a handful of surviving junior officers. Except for Howard, their combined age matched a Scout troop.
Ari said, “Heard you got a small promotion. Sir.”
I nodded, then held up a finger as Metzger’s voice came through. “Jason? You’re commanding?” He didn’t have to say what he meant. If I was in charge, things had gone to unimaginable shit down here.
“I’m commanding. How’s fire support? ‘Cause we’re hurting down here.”
Static roared. The mess uplink had been the general’s indulgence. It was an obsolete radio with a line-of-sight antenna. We’d have to wait for Hope’s next orbit to talk again.
I turned to Howard. “How do we stop them, Howard? Because even if Hope can bomb the Slugs back for another attack, eventually she runs out of bombs.”
Howard sucked his teeth. “It. Stop it. There’s probably a single central point, a brain if you will. It breeds troops there, thinks there, fabricates Projectiles there.”
“You know this?”
“Wild-ass educated guess.”
A lieutenant, real, not day-old like I had been, seesawed his hand. The jerk who had been impatient with Ari when we assaulted that cave. “More likely they decentralized their command and control structure. They’re not dumb.”
Howard shrugged. “Never said it was dumb. Just different.”
I looked around at all of them as we hunched under the low ceiling. “Howard guessed right about the frontal assault. Anybody got a better guess?”
Feet shifted, but no one spoke.
I slapped my palms on my thighs. “Okay. We need to find this brain. Fast.”
The lieutenant spoke again. “If we had choppers… or if we had time to get patrols out across the dust bowl…”
I looked at Ari. “Jeeb.”
Ari nodded.
The lieutenant shook his head. “Sir, doctrine is we keep the TOT tight to the division. It’s too valuable for patrolling.”
Adrenaline surged in me. This lieutenant was probably incredulous that I got jumped over him. My spec-four patch remained sewn on my sleeve, even if my collar brass said different. The last thing I needed now was attitude from somebody who was supposed to be working for me. And I was the by-God division commander! “Lieutenant—!”
He winced.
I bit my tongue. The medic I had nearly killed an hour ago had said it. Ord had fried to teach me an eternity ago. This lieutenant had been through hell. We all had. Together. We were family.
Ari nodded, again. “He’s right, Jason. About doctrine.”
Why conserve Jeeb? So he would be here to see the last of us die on this rock? “Thanks for the perspective, Lieutenant. But doctrine got us in this mess. Ari, what can Jeeb look for?”
Ari walked us over to the suitcase-size holotank that showed us what he saw through Jeeb’s eyes.
He pointed. “These depressions at the crater rim are the staging area where the Slugs formed up. This”—Ari drew his finger along parallel lines in the dust—“is a trail back to somewhere.”
We watched the view change as Jeeb zoomed down and shot along scant feet above Ganymede’s surface. Miles flew by, then the dust trails disappeared. Jeeb stopped and hairpin-turned, then the view was right at ground level. I imagined Jeeb picking his way across Ganymede on six legs.
“They crossed solid rock, here, no tracks.”
“So?”
Ari closed his eyes and made a scooping motion with one hand. “Sampling. Jeeb’s taking the rock’s temperature.” Ari opened his eyes. “Okay. We switched to passive infrared. The Slugs left a trail a quarter degree warmer when they crossed this rock pile.”
The infrared holo shimmered, not like the visual-spectrum image. But the Slug trails crossed the rock, as obvious as pale smoke. Jeeb crawled slowly as he followed them.
“Sir?” Lieutenant Negative broke in.
I nodded and he continued. “If the TOT doesn’t find something before nightfall, the storm and the temperature drop will wipe out any traces. We’ll be nowhere.”
I shot Ari a glance.
He said, “Lieutenant’s right, Ja—sir.”
If I’d bitten Lieutenant Negative’s head off the minute before, he would never have offered the second bit of advice. The remaining eight hundred of us wouldn’t last to try again after the following day’s attack. It was now or never.
“So, what do we do, Ari?”
“If Jeeb switches from passive infrared to active, he can track while he’s flying.” Ari’s face darkened. “But it’s like shining a searchlight. He gives himself away to any observer who sees in the infrared spectrum.”
I shot Howard a glance. Sluggo’s autopsy and two nights on Ganymede had taught us that Slugs saw in the infrared spectrum. Ari would be risking not just a metal robot, but the flesh of his flesh, the blood of his blood. As I had risked Munchkin.
I turned back to Ari. “Do it.”
He hesitated one heartbeat, then closed his eyes. “Yes, sir.” The image rolled across the holo faster.
An hour later, the trails disappeared again, against a cliff.
Ari said, “I don’t see anything. If there was a door, you’d expect straight lines. The rarest thing in nature.”
“No. Slug doors are circular, with curved panels. Like a camera’s iris.”
Ari moved his hands and the holo image got herky-jerky again, as Jeeb climbed the vertical cliff. Ari made his hands flat and stabbed the air. In the holotank, I could see from Jeeb’s viewpoint. He hung fifty feet above the ground, his forelimbs probing for joints in the rock.
Above our heads, pebbles rattled across the roof as afternoon wind heralded the nightstorm that would end Jeeb’s search, and all our lives.
Ari opened his eyes and exhaled explosively. “Nothing. I’m not saying nothing’s there. We just can’t find it.”
Before Jeeb moved again, the horizon in the holo rotated.
I stabbed my finger. “There! It’s there!” A hole grew as the door-panel petals expanded. Jeeb was hanging from a moving door panel as it rotated open. It looked ten feet thick.
The holo went black. I shot Ari a glance.
“Jeeb only cuts contact when he thinks he’s detected. They picked up his infrared.”
“He knocked on their door?”
“Now he’ll switch to passive sensing and try to sneak in that door.”
Ari’s face was chalk and I knew why. Jeeb was nearly indestructible. But he couldn’t drill through a ten-foot-thick blast door or tunnel out from under thousands of feet of solid rock. The Slugs wouldn’t open that door again. If Jeeb got inside, half of Ari was imprisoned for life. And if the Slugs caught Jeeb and dismantled him, Ari would feel it like he was being broken on the wheel. No. Jeeb would blow himself into rutabagas if they tried that and take a bunch of Slugs with him. For Ari, it would be like spectating at his own suicide.
Lieutenant Negative pulled up his jacket sleeve to read his wrist ‘puter. Seconds trickled away.
Suddenly it hit me. I whispered to Ari, stupid since the Slugs couldn’t hear me, “Jeeb can’t transmit from under a mountain!”
Ari closed his eyes and held up his palm at me.
The holo flickered, then fired up.
Ari whispered, too. “He’s okay. He’s transmitting ultralow frequency, now. ULF just means he has to be in contact with the rock to send signals through it. His passive night vision’s working. They may suspect he’s in there with them, but they’ll never find him.”
The cave corkscrewed like the passage I had navigated in the Slug Projectile, but bigger. Then it swelled into a cavern big enough to swallow Lake Erie.
Ari lifted his arms and Jeeb drifted along the curved ceiling. Below, around the chamber’s walls, bulging, churning organic machines spurted out Slugs like green bread loaves. Near the chamber’s center, finished products in their body armor circled a spherical sack a hundred feet tall, like Muslim pilgrims around the K’aaba stone.
Howard Hibble whispered, “Jackpot.”
I looked at my wrist ‘puter. Hope should be in range, now. A corporal stuck his head in the room. “Sir, we got Slugs outside! Must’ve missed some cave cracks. They pulled down the uplink antenna to Hope .”
Whatever else the Slug common intelligence was, a slow learner it wasn’t. It realized what we were up to. It realized Jeeb had blown its cover, even if it couldn’t catch him. It had communicated to the Slugs inside our perimeter, and they attacked the one thing that we couldn’t live without, that uplink antenna. If we didn’t contact Hope on this pass, night would fall, and the game was over.
Ari stared at me. Jeeb’s only way out was if Hope’s ordnance cracked open Slugtown and busted him loose. Jeeb could survive anything short of a nuke, but he couldn’t dig for crap.
Before I could speak, Ari picked up a rifle and tore for the trench exit.
I ran after him.
Outside, Ari had already dropped three Slugs. Two more hunkered in rocks; the drooping antenna mast laid down behind them. There was no question we would get the bastards. But late was never, and Ari knew it. He charged out firing and made it all the way to them before the last surviving Slug sent a round point-blank into Ari’s chest. I ran up and shot the twitching Slug. In fact, I emptied my magazine into it. But it was over.
I stood panting.
“Sir?” A soldier who had followed me touched my elbow. I turned, and he nodded toward Ari. A medic knelt alongside him, attaching monitor leads.
“Jason?”
I knelt there, too, and drew back Ari’s blood-sodden field jacket with two fingers. The Slug round had penetrated a seam between plates of Ari’s body armor, then it had twisted through him like a ferret.
Munchkin’s wound, horrible as it was, had been a lucky nick. Inside Ari’s jacket, lungs, liver, arteries, all those miraculous human complexities, pulsed like lacerated table scraps. I gulped a breath and bit back nausea.
His breath sighed between his lips in pink froth. “Would you—?”
“Relax.” I laid my palm on his brow.
He shook his head. “No time.”
I looked at the medic. He gave me a one-inch head-shake as he unwrapped a morphine syrette.
Ari pushed it away. The effort of moving his hand made his eyes tear. Or maybe it was something else. “I need to go fast. Jeeb feels what I feel.” Ari gathered himself to speak again. “Jason, he’s alone now. He doesn’t understand. He’s an orphan, like you.”
The medic looked blank, presuming Ari’s delirium.
“Take care of him?” Ari asked me.
“Sure. Always.” With those words I adopted a steel-and-plastic orphan.
Ari relaxed and lay back against hard stone. I saw his eyes close through my own tears.
Behind me, troops raised the mast.
By the time I got back to the radio, Metzger’s voice crackled. “Jason?”
“Wander here. Over.”
“What’s happening down there?”
“Too much. We need everything you’ve got. I mean everything, delivered on the coordinates the TOT’s transmitting to you now.”
“Jason—”
Even radioed from orbit I could hear it in Metzger’s voice. “What?”
“We got nothing. Computers are down.”
“Fix ‘em.”
“We’re trying! By next orbit—”
“There is no next orbit!” I told him what was going on.
“Those coordinates are halfway around Ganymede,” he said.
Silence.
“Jason? How is she?”
“Alive. Hurt, but alive.”
“You believe this Slugtown is the real deal?”
“Ari believed it enough to die for it.” There was no time for tact. “Munchkin’s pregnant.”
More silence.
“Okay. I’ll take care of everything. Good-bye, Jason.”
In that moment, after a lifetime together, I knew exactly what he meant.
I dropped the mike, walked out into Ganymede’s twilight, and looked to the sky. Hope drifted into view over the horizon, one hundred miles high, silver against Jupiter’s red disk. Sparks flickered from her and drifted down toward us. Escape pods. Hope’s crew was abandoning her, on Metzger’s orders.
One pilot in the world could fly Hope alone, without computers, lying on his belly in the Navigation Blister while Ganymede’s horizon stretched before him. One pilot in the world could calculate and execute course corrections to bring her mile-long bulk screaming down on Slugtown in half of an orbit.
Metzger chose to end his marriage where it began, in that star-spangled crystal dome.
Hope streaked flame red across the sky, now, as she dropped into the atmosphere. By the time she reached
Slugtown in Ganymede’s opposite hemisphere she would be a molten mass, trailing fire miles wide.
She disappeared over the horizon. I held my breath.
The flash came first, blinding even half a world away. I threw myself on the ground as the blast wave and then seismic quakes rocked Ganymede.
History would say that Metzger died to save the human race. History would lie. Metzger sacrificed himself to give his wife and unborn child and the rest of us on this rock a chance at life.
The next morning, Jeeb sent images back to the holotank as he flew home, his course erratic. The electronics people said the explosion had freed him from the Slugtown cave, but scrambled his circuits. I believed it was grief.
Hope’s impact had rent the very fabric of Ganymede. Lava and liquid water flowed in a flaming, steaming, unending mass across the other side of this world. This world that the Slugs no longer held. The volcanism lit the sky dull red as the seven hundred of us who had survived settled in for a long, cold occupation.
We reestablished radio contact with Earth and got thanked. Politicians radioed that a grateful world had awarded me the Medal of Honor. I had it presented to Walter Lorenzen’s mother.
That afternoon, before the nightstorm came, Howard Hibble and I scaled the crag above HQ and looked out across the battlefield.
Howard tucked his bandaged arm against his side. “In the end, gadgets didn’t matter. Soldiers who could choose to live or to die for one another fought perfect soldiers that died without thinking. We should have lost. But we won.”
Below us, dead Slugs blackened the plain and the mountain.
There, too, lay nine thousand children who traveled 300 million miles and made Ganymede their orphanage forever. The dropships Pooh Hart had led Uttered the foot of the escarpment, and I imagined I could see her grave from here.
“Won?” I shook my head. “Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. He said there is nothing so melancholy as a battle lost, except a battle won.”
I sat on the cold stone of Ganymede, laid my elbows on my knees, and cried.