Munchkin’s bouquet trembled, and I felt her arm shake as it threaded through mine. She wore dress whites, with a veil and a train added. A uniform may not sound like much of a wedding gown, but Munchkin was the loveliest bride I’d ever seen.
I had a little speech ready, to tell her how perfect it was that the two most important people in my life were going to be together forever.
I bent to her ear to whisper.
“Don’t speak, Jason.” She gulped. “Or I’ll lose it.”
Fair enough. Tears blurred my own vision, already.
The bride and I literally flew down the aisle in the tiny center-axis gravity, Munchkin’s train drifting behind like a cloud. At the ceremony’s end, Ari pulled out a lightbulb wrapped in a napkin and had Metzger stomp it. Jeeb reared back in horror at the murder of his fellow electrical appliance. Munchkin taught Pooh a tongue-wagging Arab yodel, which, I learned, only women do, and the newly weds exited to her ululations while bagpipes keened.
The event was supposed to be private, but when the wedding party emerged from the Navigation Blister, Metzger’s cheering crew waited with a raucous reception that broke more regs.
Another thing the agriculture lab manufactured illegally was potato vodka. It curled my toes and made Pooh hornier than usual.
I was almost tired of getting laid by the next morning when, on flight day 602, Hope intersected the orbit of Jupiter.
Silly me.
Chapter Thirty
“Many of us will die in this place.” GEF’s Operations officer stared down at the boxing ring-size holo image of Ganymede Landing Zone Alpha at his feet. Ten thousand of us peeked over his shoulder from temporary bleachers that ringed the big training bay for predrop briefing. We’d heard it all a hundred times, but we hung on every word.
The day-old holo had been broadcast back from a deep-space drone, Jeeb’s dumb, muscular cousin. Hope had launched the speedier DSD weeks before.
Ganymede, like Earth’s moon, was barren, crater-pocked rock and ice. Astronomers debated whether its core was molten or cold or liquid water, but its surface was as dead as headstones.
LZ Alpha was a crater floor. The army didn’t care whether some astronomer had named it, it was a landing zone. Hibble’s geologists had lectured us how the three-thousand-foot mountain in the astroblem’s center resulted from rebound of the planetary fabric after a meteorite impact. The flat crater floor was cooled lava that had oozed from the impact perforation eons earlier.
The resulting topography formed a perfect defensive position: high ground centered in a circular plain, sixty miles across, with billiard-table-flat fields of fire and observation. That plain also provided miles of smooth runway for the dropships that Pooh led, which would glide in at two hundred miles per hour with no brakes.
The Ops officer waggled a red laser pointer’s tip at a spot on the plain a couple miles from the mountain. “The dropships will overfly the crater rim here, touch down, then roll to a stop here.” He slid the red beam to the mountain. “The Force will assemble, then advance to and occupy this prominent terrain feature. There we will set our operational base.”
Cakewalk. Assuming the Slugs were deaf, dumb, and blind. Boots scuffed bleachers in restless disbelief.
He looked up. “The DSD detected no Slug sign at the LZ. The drone wasn’t acquired by radar or any other active-imaging medium during its flyby. We’re ready for a hot LZ, but we don’t expect one.”
Munchkin leaned against me, and whispered, “If we know that’s the flattest spot on Ganymede, next to the best natural fort, so do the Slugs.”
I looked across the big chamber at Pooh. The pilots sat in a row at ringside, in the order their dropships would land. Pooh flew Dropship Number One, carrying General Cobb and all of us in Headquarters Battalion, but physically she sat second-in-line. First down would be the mech ship, loaded with all the GOATs and heavy weapons, to give the engineers extra minutes to drive them off the dropship and reassemble them. I smiled as she pouted, arms crossed. It burned her ass that she had to fly second position and watch a lesser pilot become the first human ever to land beyond the moon.
After briefing we lined Hope’s corridors, hunched under basic loads of ammunition, grenades, rations, water, and clothing that no Sherpa on Earth could have budged.
My gear had evolved as far from my old Basic equipment as the 300 million miles that separated me from In-diantown Gap, Pennsylvania.
My M-20 handled just like an ancient M-16. All the weight the rifle itself lost, through zoomy neoplast construction, came back in the extra ammo held by the M-20’s bigger magazine. Ganymede cartridges packed less powder so recoil and muzzle velocity would replicate Earth-normal, but a hundred of them still weighed the brick.
We had gotten the Eternad fatigues that weren’t perfected when I cheated Munchkin through temperature-endurance testing back at Camp Hale. Most people think the hard shell is strictly body armor. In fact, the rigidity aligns the joints so the bands and levers that move with the wearer crank kinetic energy into the batteries. We looked as clumsy as medieval knights, but Eternads weighed a third what a turn-of-the-century football uniform did. And those old suits didn’t heat, cool, and stop bullets.
We looked more like halfbacks than infantrymen, too, because the armor’s iron-oxide, mercury-sulphide coating was as red as an old fire engine. Howard’s Spooks thought it would diffuse our infrared-visible signature so the Slugs could hardly see us. Maybe.
My helmet was no trainee’s Kevlar pot. Like Eternads, it weighed less than old football equipment. But packed into its bulges and ridges were flip-down passive-night vision goggles, a multinet radio, and electronics supporting the heads-up display and laser designator. The soldier sees the HUD and LD display in the battlefield awareness monocle. The BAM is that retractable gizmo that makes recruiting-holo Infantrymen look like one-eyed pirates.
Underneath it all I was still just scared blood and bones.
Metzger and General Cobb walked the lines, inspecting and wishing luck. Metzger stopped in front of us and stepped over our machine gun to stand close to his wife. “Nice makeup.”
Munchkin stared at him through a mask of gray-black camouflage insulated-paint stripes. The theory was that the thermal-insulated gray paint and uninsulated black would create cool and warm stripes, breaking up our facial outline to an infrared-seeing Slug. A tube curled like transparent spaghetti from each nostril along her cheek toward her oxygen generator. “Nice honeymoon.” She stretched her lips over her teeth, imitating a smile.
As he bent and hugged her, he tucked something in her hand. A white rose from her bridal bouquet. “Love you.”
“Me too.”
Then he was gone down the line, her hand reaching after him until he vanished in a sea of soldiers. One rose petal drifted to the deck.
Pooh was already at our dropship’s controls, so we had no good-byes to say.
General Cobb hobbled past us and into the air lock, struggling under the same basic load he demanded of his far-younger troops. Munchkin and I fell in behind him, then sat at his left.
I squatted to dip my pack under the top air lock lip, then I stepped outside my home of six hundred days. The Ganymede-normal zero-Fahrenheit air of the dropship cabin slapped my face. I watched my breath and shivered until my fatigue batteries kicked on.
It wasn’t until Munchkin and I lumbered to our places on the sidelining benches, sat, and strapped in, that I realized something was missing. I patted my web harness. Grenades. First aid-dressing packet. Entrenching tool. Insulated canteens. I felt for the night-vision goggles pushed up on my helmet and found them right where I’d left them.
Finally, I got it. No vibration. For nearly two years, I had lived within Hope’s always-rumbling womb. The stillness in this cabin was, I supposed, like being born again at twenty-one.
Munchkin, beside me, sat closer to General Cobb and eavesdropped on his half of command-net conversation.
After three hours by my wrist ‘
puter, she leaned to me and whispered, “Two females in Dropship Number Three tripped in the air lock. Dislocated elbow and hip. One damaged an air lock seal.”
I expelled a breath too loudly. I’ll fight next to any female soldier proudly, present company of the Munchkin being Exhibit A. But when society in its collective wisdom decides to send someone to break things and hurt people, men are the gender of choice.
The next delay resulted when a male soldier in Drop-ship Number Sixteen suffered an epileptic seizure and kicked an air lock seal loose. It took Metzger’s crew three hours to repair. So much for the gender of choice.
I hoped Hibble guessed right about the Slugs’ lack of air-warfare capability, because if he was wrong, these delays gave time to scramble flocks of interceptors down below. He couldn’t have been that sure, or these dropships wouldn’t have been equipped with electronic counter-measures.
All the while the dropships undulated at the end of their air lock tubes as Hope spun slowly in orbit, provoking mass motion sickness.
From up front, Pooh serenaded us over the intercom with century-old show tunes.
Ari faced us across the aisle, Jeeb hibernating in his pack. Ari rolled his eyes. “I can take the puke smell, but make her stop.”
At last the air lock rasped shut, and the cabin lights dimmed and reddened, to allow us to build night vision.
Pooh stopped singing long enough to tell us she knew we had a choice of airlines today, and she appreciated our business. Then she told us to remember that when we landed we had completed the safest part of our journey.
We were about to drop a hundred miles in ancient aluminum eggshells, then crash them under control at two hundred knots. But she was telling the truth.
Intercoms crackled. “Begin drop sequence on my mark… Now.”
Chapter Thirty-One
We fell toward Ganymede a hundred miles below. The dropship’s acceleration pressed me sideways against Munchkin’s shoulder. At first, we seemed to ride a fast-descending elevator. Then atmospheric friction against the hull behind me soaked heat through my backpack.
The first bump nearly sent me through the ceiling plates, harness or not. The hull creaked as the explosive stress of internal atmospheric pressure against vacuum reversed. Now Ganymede’s artificial atmospheric pressure squeezed the dropship.
Pooh’s voice dripped casual through the speakers. “Skin temp eight-five-zero. Ablation pattern nominal.”
Cookies bake at three-five-zero.
The buffeting pounded all four hundred of us against the hull and against one another.
Munchkin panted like a horny Chihuahua. “They test-dropped these hulls from Earth orbit, didn’t they?”
“Yeah.” But nobody had tested them after they had been hauled across 300 million miles of vacuum at close to absolute zero for two years.
“Skin temp one-zero-zero-zero.”
Pooh’s reports ceased, and there was only the roar of Ganymede’s atmosphere against our hull and the crash of loose equipment as she and her copilot fought the bucking dropship.
Munchkin stared at me, her eyes so wide that the whites looked like hard-boiled eggs against her camo paint
My heart pounded. “We’re okay. We’re okay, Munch.”
Like hell. If she got out her Muslim beads again, I’d pray with them myself.
The troop cabin’s only window was a half-foot-thick porthole in the emergency hatch across from me. Gobbets of flame flashed by it as the ceramic coating on the drop-ship’s leading edges burned away. Ablation was supposed to happen. They said.
I looked across the cabin at Wire, the old SEAL who had usurped Ord’s division sergeant major job. Wire should have been crapping bricks. But he just sat limp, eyes closed, body rolling with the bumps, conserving energy for when it would matter. Experience would carry him through this. Would inexperience kill the rest of us?
Buffeting slammed heads against hull plates.
How much vibration and temperature these dropships would really take nobody knew. We had been up to a thousand degrees on the nose when Pooh stopped her play-by-play reports. Thirteen hundred degrees was predicted. As for vibration, the ship groaned and bucked so violently that I thought I could see it flex. It seemed like the lines where hull plates joined grew wider as I watched. We could only have seconds left.
Ahead of us streaked the mech ship. Strung out behind and above us at six-mile intervals flew thousands more troops in eighteen other dropships.
I squeezed my eyes shut and counted my heartbeats as the pounding compressed my vertebrae together, then stretched them apart.
My count reached eighty, and I realized I was still alive.
Whump!
The jolt was different. Bigger yet smoother.
Pooh’s voice crackled over static. “For you in back, the ECM pods just redeployed. Our skin temp is nine-zero-zero and dropping. Airspeed’s below a thousand knots. Just a slow float from here down.”
I looked at Munchkin and nodded. “Told ya we were okay.”
“Bite me.” She had her prayer beads out.
The flight smoothed out to something equivalent to parachuting through a thunderstorm.
After five minutes Pooh came back on. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have begun our final approach to Ganymede. Local time is oh-dark-thirty, and the ground temperature is a brisk ten below zero.”
Nobody laughed.
Her voice was a tone higher when she spoke again. “We’re twenty-five miles high and two hundred miles off the LZ. ETA seven minutes. Ganymede looks just like the holo sims so far. We’re busy up here, so ‘bye for now. We’re comin’ in a tad hotter than plan, so strap in tight.”
Pooh, queen of understatement, said “a tad” only once before. We’d made love, and she lay gasping, as limp as a beached jellyfish, her bangs sweat-plastered to her forehead. “That was a tad tiring, Jason.” Hair rose on my neck.
The plan was to touch down at two hundred miles per hour. Whispers drifted back along the rows. “Two-fifty!”
I adjusted my web gear and felt for magazines in my ammo pouches. I checked the safety on my rifle and ran my eyes along our machine gun, lashed snug to the floor plates beyond my boots and Munchkin’s. I turned to her, and we repeated the routine on each other. Gear clattered throughout the cabin as other pairs did the same.
“One minute.”
Thump.
A soft one. Landing skids lowered. The engineers said tires were too risky on the crater floor’s lava rock, so our dropships’ skids would be the first man-made objects to touch Ganymede.
Our battle fatigues’ torsos were armored against shrapnel and small-arms rounds and proof against liquid flame, radiation, and chemical-biological agents. We could breathe indefinitely in an oxygen-free atmosphere, live at thirty below, and see in the dark, passively and actively. We each held a rifle with a cyclic-fire rate of eight hundred rounds per minute, and we each carried two thousand rounds in the light gravity. We carried grenades by the dozen and more plasma packets, atropine syringes, and coagulant dressings than a clinic. Each pair of troops was deadlier than a whole Korean War platoon. Our commanders were radio-linked and could pinpoint each soldier’s location on a global positioning system tied into a satellite network sown in orbit earlier today by Hope. We packed laser designators that would allow Hope to rain down from orbit everything from one-ton smart bombs to burrowing bunker-busters, and bull’s-eye targets a yard wide.
We were prepared for everything.
Except what we found.
Chapter Thirty-Two
“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.
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.
Orphanage Page 18
