B LAM-BLAM-BLAM .
The assault rifle’s burst snaps me awake inside my armor, and the armor’s heater motor, ineffectual but operating, prickles me between the shoulder blades when I stir. The shots’ reverberation shivers the cave’s ceiling, and snow plops through my open faceplate, onto my upturned lips.
“Paugh!” The crystals on my lips taste of cold and old bones, and I scrub my face with my glove. “Goddamit, Howard!”
I’m Lieutenant General Jason Wander, Colonel Howard Hibble is an intelligence Spook, and both of us are too old to be hiding in caves light-years from Earth.
Fifty dark feet from me, silhouetted against the pale dawn now lighting the cave’s mouth, condensed breath balloons out of Howard’s open helmet. “There are dire wolves out here, Jason!”
“Don’t make noise. They’re just big hyenas.”
“They’re coming closer!”
“Throw rocks. That’s what I did. It works.” I roll over, aching, on the stone floor and glance at the time winking from my faceplate display. I have just been denied my first hour’s sleep after eight hours on watch. Before that, we towed the third occupant of this cave across the steel-hard tundra of this Ice Age planet through a sixteen-hour blizzard. This shelter is more a rocky wrinkle in a shallow hillside than a cave.
I squint over my shoulder, behind Howard and me, at our companion. It is the first Pseudocephalopod Planetary Ganglion any Earthling has seen, much less taken alive, in the three decades of the Slug War, since the Blitz hit Earth in 2036. Like a hippo-sized, mucous-green octopus on a platter, the Ganglion quivers atop its Slug-metal blue motility disc, which hums a yard above the cave floor. Six disconnected sensory conduits droop bare over the disc’s edges, isolating the Ganglion from this world and, we hope, from the rest of Slug-kind.
Two synlon ropes dangle, knotted to the motility disc. We used the ropes to drag our POW, not to hog-tie it. A Slug Warrior moves fast for a man-sized, armored maggot, but the Ganglion possesses neither organic motile structures nor even an interface so it can steer its own motility disc. Howard was very excited to discover that. He was a professor of extraterrestrial intelligence studies before the war.
I sigh. Everybody was somebody else before the war.
Howard would like to take our prisoner to Earth alive, so Howard’s exobiology Spooks can, uh, chat with it.
That means I have to get us three off this Ice Age rock unfrozen, unstarved, and undigested.
I groan. My original parts awaken more slowly than the replaced ones, and they throb when they do. Did I mention that I’m growing too old for this?
“Jason!” Howard’s voice quavers. He was born too old for this.
I stand, yawn, wish I could scratch myself through my armor, then shuffle to the cave mouth, juggling a baseball-sized rock from palm to palm. Last night, I perfected a fastball that terrorized many a dire wolf.
As I step alongside Howard at the cave mouth, he lobs an egg-sized stone with a motion like a girl in gym class. It lands twenty feet short of the biggest, nearest wolf. The monster saunters up, sniffs the stone, then bares its teeth at us in a red-eyed growl. The wolf pack numbers eleven total, milling around behind the big one, all gaunt enough that we must look like walking pot roast to them.
But I’m unconcerned that the wolves will eat us. A dire wolf could gnaw an Eternad forearm gauntlet for a week with no result but dull teeth.
I look up at the clear dawn sky. My concern is that the wolves are bad advertising. The storm we slogged through wiped out all traces of our passing and, I hope, kept any surviving Slugs from searching for us. But the storm has broken, for now. I plan for us to hide out in this hole until the good guys home in on our transponders.
If any good guys survived. We may starve in this hole waiting for dead people.
We don’t really know how Slugs track humans, or even if they do. We do know that the maggots incinerated Weichsel’s primitive human nomads one little band and extended family group at a time-not just by waxing the whole planet, which the Slugs are capable of. And the maggots had rude surprises for us less primitive humans when we showed up here, too.
I wind up, peg my baseball-sized stone at the big wolf, and plink him on the nose. I whoop. I couldn’t duplicate that throw if I pitched nine innings’ worth. The wolf yelps and trots back fifty yards, whining but unhurt.
Howard shrugs. “The wolf pack doesn’t necessarily give us away. We could just be a bear carcass or something in here.”
I jerk my thumb back in the direction of the green blob in the cave. “Even if the Slugs don’t know how to track us, do you think they can track the Ganglion?”
Disconnected or not, our prisoner could be screaming for help in Slugese right now, for all we know.
Howard shrugs again. “I don’t think-”
The wolf pack, collectively, freezes, noses upturned.
Howard says, “Uh-oh.”
I tug Howard deeper into the cave’s shadows and whisper, “Whatever they smell, we can’t see. The wind’s coming from upslope, behind us.”
As I speak, Howard clicks his rifle’s magazine into his palm and replaces it with a completely full one. I’ve known him since the first weeks of the Blitz, nearly three decades now, and Colonel Hibble is a geek, all right. But when the chips are down, he’s as infantry as I am.
Outside, the wolves retreat another fifty yards from the mouth of our cave as a shadow crosses it.
My heart pounds, and I squeeze off my rifle’s grip safety.
Eeeeerr.
The shadow shuffles past the cave mouth. Another replaces it, then more. As they stride into the light, the shadows resolve into trumpeting, truck-sized furballs the color of rust.
Howard whispers, “Mammoth.”
The herd bull strides toward the wolf pack, bellowing, head back to display great curved tusks. The wolves retreat again.
Howard says, “If we shot a mammoth out there, the carcass would explain the wolf pack. It could make an excellent distraction.”
He’s right. I raise my M40 and sight on the nearest cow, but at this range I could drop her with a hip shot.
Then I pause. “The carcass might attract those big cats.” Weichsel’s fauna parallels Pleistocene Earth’s in many ways, but our Neolithic forefathers never saw saber-toothed snow leopards bigger than Bengal tigers.
Really, my concern with Howard’s idea isn’t baiting leopards. Saber teeth can’t scuff Eternads any more than wolf teeth can. I just don’t want to shoot a mammoth.
It sounds absurd. I can’t count the Slugs that have died at my hand or on my orders in this war. And over my career I’ve taken human lives, too, when the United States in its collective wisdom has lawfully ordered me to.
It’s not as though any species on Weichsel is endangered, except us humans, of course. The tundra teems with life, a glacial menagerie. Weichsel wouldn’t miss one mammoth.
So why do I rationalize against squeezing my trigger one more time?
I can’t deny that war callouses a soldier to brutality. But as I grow older, I cherish the moments when I can choose not to kill.
I lower my rifle. “Let’s see what happens.”
By midmorning, events moot my dilemma. The wolves isolate a lame cow from the mammoth herd, bring her down two hundred yards from us, and begin tearing meat from her woolly flanks like bleeding rugs. The mammoth herd stands off, alternately trumpeting in protest at the gore-smeared wolves, then bulldozing snow with their sinuous tusks to get at matted grass beneath. For both species, violence is another day at the office.
Howard and I withdraw inside the cave, to obscure our visual and infrared signatures, and sit opposite our prisoner.
The Ganglion just floats there, animated only by the vibrations of its motility plate. After thirty years of war, all I know about the blob is that it is my enemy. I have no reason to think it knows me any differently. For humans and Slugs, like the mammoths and wolves, violence has become another day at the office.
Howard, this blob, and I are on the cusp of changing that. If I can get us off Weichsel alive. At the moment, getting out alive requires me to freeze my butt off in a hole, contemplating upcoming misery and terror. After a lifetime in the infantry, I’m used to that.
I pluck an egg-sized stone off the cave floor and turn it in my hand like Yorick’s skull. The stone is a gem-quality diamond. Weichsel’s frozen landscape is as full of diamonds as the Pentagon is full of underemployed lieutenant generals. Which is what I was when this expedition-become-fiasco started, three months ago, light-years away in a very different place.