I run my hands along the vibrating viewport frame as the new ship hangs in parking orbit above United Nations Base Ganymede. So much a part of me is the ship’s vibration that I notice it only when I have time to think, like now.
The Metzger class is so much Hope never was. Beyond the viewport at ten-mile intervals orbit the other four cruisers of the Metzger class. Synchronous with us, they glisten silver against space’s black velvet. Utility barges one hundred feet long scurry around the cruisers like ants around logs. The new ships’ antimatter bottles alone are as large as Hope’s entire payload section was.
The new cruisers have better gravity. That means real showers instead of years of sponge baths. Their agriculture labs grow hydroponic fruits and vegetables for us grunts, not just bootleg vodka. Maybe best of all, the Metz ’s antimatter interplanetary drive gets here from Earth in half the time. After decades of drift, war made us leapfrog direct from chemical propulsion past fission, fu-sion and plasma to AMat. Metzger would be proud of the class of ships they named for him.
Below the viewport green streaks are visible on Ganymede, even from here in orbit. The lava flows and liquid-water floods touched off by Hope’s impact continue even now. Eons ago, meteors did the same thing to Ganymede’s sister satellite, Callisto. But with these flows heat was released from Ganymede’s depths. Evaporation released oxygen into the atmosphere. Oxygen content reached half-Earth-normal last year and climbs annually. And the heat has increased the surface temperature so high that the ag-lab wizards are growing things down there. Just primitive lichen, so far.
Nonetheless, along with death and destruction, war brought life to Ganymede. War forced men beyond the moon, and now to the stars, where we might not have ventured for centuries. Horrible trades that those were, they are no less fact.
I step away and turn back into my stateroom. Rank hath its privileges. As embarked-division commanding general, I have a tree. Just a foot-tall bonsai juniper, but green, alive, and all mine.
A six-legged football preens beside my juniper. The stateroom’s not all mine. I share with Jeeb. His combat circuits fried when he escaped Slugtown. As an obsolete J-series, they decommissioned him, extracted his self-destruct explosives, and let me buy him for scrap. Machines have no personality, of course. But I see Ari in him every day.
I sit at my desk and read the screen. I read a lot during the years it took for relief to reach Ganymede. Enough to earn my master’s in military science and validate my field promotion. The longest-distance correspondence course in human history, completed while on the most boring diet. Rations for a force of ten thousand fed us seven hundred survivors, but we were glad to see peaches when relief arrived.
They busted me back from division commander to second lieutenant, correspondence degree or not. Why and what happened then are stories for another time.
The Battle of Ganymede was a miraculous victory. It will never be miraculous to us who left brothers and sisters beneath Ganymede’s cold stones, but it was miraculous, nonetheless.
Pooh Hart sleeps beneath those stones. I always visit on her birthday. I always leave white roses. I always cry.
Pooh won the Medal of Honor and the Distinguished Flying Cross, posthumously. In all, 307 soldiers there won their nations’ highest awards for valor, including Ari Klein and Nathan Cobb. I told Walter Lorenzen once that medals recognized an army’s mistakes. That may be, but it doesn’t diminish the courage and sacrifice of those who win them.
The First Batde of Ganymede didn’t make the killing stop. It wasn’t the end of the Slug War. It wasn’t even the beginning of the end. But, as the British Prime Minister, Churchill, put it a century ago, it was the end of the beginning.
Even AMat would take centuries to get us just to the Slug Outpost Worlds. So, how we stole Temporal-Fabric Insertion Technology from the Slugs is another story. So is our use of T-FIT to find the Slugs’ homeworld and to equip the Metzger Class with T-FIT so we can pay them a visit.
The after-action analysts eventually found out that Slugs hibernate. A few Slugs we had epoxied into their cave cracks got dug out alive.
The cryptozoologists and psyops spooks had little luck interrogating their first prisoners of war, even with Howard Hibble asking the questions. We’ve been working for years to figure out what makes the Slugs tick, so we can make peace, make it stop. Peace is what every man and woman in this army wants.
If the Slugs won’t make peace, well, payback’s a bitch.
My command sergeant major raps on the hatch frame, then sticks his head in. “Sir, the spec four you wanted to see is out here.”
Another of rank’s privileges is you can cherry-pick your cadre. I pulled strings and got my division sergeant major shipped up from Earth aboard the Metz . He is the finest NCO in the armed services, bar none. Without him this division wouldn’t be worth a rat fart. “I’m ready, Sergeant Major Ord.”
“Sir, Specialist Trent reports.” She snaps off a salute so crisp her fingers quiver. I could cut my fingers on her fatigue creases.
I smile. We are the finest unit in military history. I’m just being objective, even if it’s my own division. “Take a seat, Specialist.”
She sits. The prettiest M-60 loader I ever saw.
“The general sent for me?”
But not the shyest.
“Your platoon sergeant tells me you are the biggest troublemaker in your company. You beat the snot out of a squad mate.”
“A guy, sir.” She looks smug.
“Another soldier!”
Her shoulders sag. “Is the general advising me that Articles have been drawn? Because I want to stay in sir. I need to. I lost my family—”
“I’ve read your file. Your platoon sergeant also tells me you are potentially the finest soldier he has ever trained. You finished college. You enjoy being a loader?”
She squeezes her lips together, opens her mouth, closes it, then speaks. “Rather be a gunner. They say I’m too small to handle the gun. But they’re fine with me humping the ammo, sir.”
I smile. “My gunner was smaller than you are, but I never saw the gun handled better.”
Her eyes get big. “I knew the general received battlefield promotions. But from spec four to general?”
I nod. “However, I don’t recommend the career plan. Would the specialist care to make a deal?”
“Sir?”
“No Articles will be filed.”
She straightens but her eyes narrow. “What do I have to do, sir?”
“You return to Earth tomorrow on the Powell and attend OCS on my personal recommendation.”
“Officer Candidate School?” Her jaw drops, and she forgets to say “sir.”
“And”—I lift two boxes from my desk drawer—“you will personally deliver these to the addresses noted, with my regards.”
“Sir? I should know what they are.”
“With a general’s return address on them, the MPs won’t give you trouble. But they’re not secrets. They’re gifts. Ganymede rock made into paperweights. You’ll de-liver one to the senior juvenile judge in Denver. Plan to spend an hour visiting him. He’s Infantry, too.”
She nods and places the first box in her lap. “The other?”
“To my godson. His mother was my gunner.“ Munch-kin lives in the Rockies foothills, now, not so far from Camp Hale. She prefers cold to Egyptian heat, after Ganymede. On her pension and Metzger’s, she raises Jason Udey Metzger, the first extraterrestrial-conceived and -born human. They say Jude is… different.
My visitor’s eyes glisten as she gathers up the second box.
“Godspeed, Specialist.”
She stands, and I return her salute.
“Sir!” Her about-face is crisper than hydroponic-grown lettuce. Before she reaches the hatch, she whispers, “Thank you, General.”
She’s out the hatch without hearing me whisper, “No, thank you.”
I don’t tell her that if things really work out the way I hope, she’ll never come back here. At least not as a combat Infantryman. With luck we’ll end this war before she or any other kid has to fight another lick.
Ord slips in the hatch before it closes behind her, a holobox in his hand. “Thought you might like to see this, sir.”
It is a picture of the old company street at Indiantown Gap. Alongside the mess hall a solitary tree stands, covered in green leaves. The sky behind glows faint blue, like before the war.
“Trees are leafing out all over Earth this spring, General. First time since the war started.“
I step to the viewport and look out into space. I stand silent with my feet spread shoulder width apart, hands clasped behind me at the small of my back. In Drill and Ceremony, the position is called “At Ease.” For the first time in years, it is also how I feel.
Someday maybe I’ll see trees again. For now it is enough to know they are there.