Orphanage

by Robert Buettner

  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.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  A thousand feet above Pooh Hart’s grave I realized the enormity of GEF’s disaster. As part of what was left of HQ Battalion I was among the first to top the escarpment against which GEF had wrecked itself.

  I dragged myself over craggy rocks, grabbed a breath, and turned. Even in Ganymede’s reduced gravity, and though we sucked manufactured oxygen, we labored. We carried packs as big as clothes dryers and breathed air as thin as at Everest’s summit.

  Ahead of us, Jeeb flew point, linked to Ari’s mind, securing us against lurking dangers. Behind us stretched GEF’s remains.

  Wrecked dropships and corpses littered the escarpment’s foot. From mere, the twenty-mile-wide plain we now knew was virtual quicksand stretched to the surrounding crater rim. LZ Alpha lay in Ganymede’s rocky quadrant. No ice here. Jupiter’s bloodred crescent hung beyond the rim, murky through dust billows raised by ever-swelling wind.

  I handed Munchkin up, then General Cobb. Gasping, he turned, too, and followed my gaze. Thousands of black dots spackled the cliff face below as GEF’s soldiers
swarmed up from the plain.

  The general stood still, staring one-eyed into his BAM, then retracted it. Command helmets’ HUDs displayed positions of whole units or even individuals. All courtesy of Jeeb, hovering above. The general’s earpiece also fed him everything from casualty reports to dinner menus.

  He hung his hands on his hips and shook his head as he spoke. “Ship One didn’t just cost four hundred good soldiers. We lost our vehicles and heavy weapons. We’re gonna complete our mission with what we carry on our backs.”

  Complete our mission? Impossible.

  Already, between the three other dropships sunk in the dust like Ship One and the casualties from the crash landings of the rest, we had lost a quarter of our troops.

  I looked over my shoulder. Above the rock shelf where we rested, gray, jagged peaks climbed another two thousand feet. Black smudges among the crags marked cave mouths. Marching GEF up here from the exposed plain was the only logical move. This mountain formed a defensive position as perfect as a medieval castle.

  But our mission was offense, not defense. We had journeyed 300 million miles to seek out and destroy the Slugs’ capability to strangle humanity. Now we had trapped ourselves on a barren rock isolated from the rest of Ganymede by an uncrossable moat. If the Slugs knew we were here, they could ignore us as if we still sat in the Colorado mountains.

  I cleared my throat. “Sir, aren’t we screwed?”

  General Cobb shrugged. “Battle rarely goes as planned, Jason.”

  “Yes, sir. We all trust you. You just need to tell us what to do.”

  He cocked his head. “Me? George Patton said never tell people what to do. Tell them what needs to be accomplished and let them astonish you with their ingenuity.”

  A wind gust staggered us all. Kibble’s astrometeorolo-gists had been right about winds increasing as the eighty-four-hour day ended. Fifty feet away, combat engineers laid fiberglass panels on rock and assembled epoxy sprayers to glue them into shelters. Tents would have been impossible. Already the cold had worsened, even discounting wind-chill. At least the planners had got one thing right.

  The next gust knocked the General against me and Munchkin, and the three of us landed in a heap. A wind-borne fiberglass panel skipped across the landscape toward us. I threw myself across General Cobb and Munchkin as it slammed my back like a charging bull.

  I peeked at the engineers. Like us, they huddled on the ground. Any fiberglass panels had disappeared. I twisted my head to see the escarpment lip. A trooper fought his way over the top and staggered up. Wind caught his pack, and he toppled backward and disappeared.

  The planners had estimated Ganymede’s night-storm winds at eighty miles per hour. Hundred-mile-plus gales rocked us already, and it was only dusk.

  An engineer crawled to us through the driven dust and screamed in the general’s ear. “Sir, it’s no good. The shelters wouldn’t hold even if we could get ‘em stuck together. And we can’t.”

  Howard Hibble and Ari had made the cliff top and crawled alongside General Cobb. Howard pointed up slope. “These formations are shot through with caves.”

  Ari shouted, “Jeeb’s found some big enough to hold battalions, sir.”

  The general nodded. “Okay. Pass the word.”

  An hour later, Ganymede’s howling night storm had taken two hundred more troops. The rest of us split up and huddled in a belt line of caves. Hibble’s meteorologists measured winds of two hundred miles per hour outside. GEF hunkered down for its first night on another world.

  HQ Battalion’s cave had a ceiling that arched twenty feet high and twisted back into the mountain fifty yards. I picked out a low-ceilinged side alcove big enough to shelter General Cobb, Munchkin, Howard, Ari, and me, then spread out sleeping bags. No oxygen in the atmosphere meant no campfires, even if Ganymede had wood to burn. But body heat from five of us packed in there might take the edge off the cold.

  Hibble and an engineer prowled the cave’s main chamber, high-stepping over sprawled GIs who huddled together and wolfed cold rations and sedatives. The army had almost booted me for using Prozac, but it had issued us amphetamines to keep us sharp for the eighty-four-hour days and downers so we could sleep during the long nights. Hibble and the engineer peered up at the ceiling and eyeballed the walls. Cracks spiderwebbed the rock.

  They arrived at our alcove, and I listened.

  “Igneous. Brecciated. But stable,” said the engineer.

  I raised my eyebrows at Howard.

  He tapped the wall. The cracks spanned two finger widths. “He says the roof won’t fall in.”

  Something bothered me, but my back throbbed where the fiberglass panel had bruised it, and I was too exhausted to think straight.

  Each cave’s troops mounted guard at each cave mouth, though a Slug assault seemed the least of our worries, especially with impassable weather outside.

  While the four of us huddled exhausted in our alcove, General Cobb circulated through our cavern visiting with individual soldiers, checking equipment, confirming procedures with unit commanders. I was less than half his age, I’d carried the same load over the same terrain, and I just sat here an immobile blob of sprains and sores.

  Howard, cross-legged beside me, offered chocolate from his rations while he unwrapped nicotine gum. No oxygen, no smokes.

  “I’m sorry, Jason.”

  I nodded. Fatigue dulled every emotion, even grief. Or I was blocking.

  “Howard, are the Slugs just going to let us rot here?”

  He chewed his gum. “I’d guess not. They like to keep their enemy 300 million miles away. We threaten them.”

  “You said they won’t be able to fly. They can’t get to us any more than we can get to them.”

  He shrugged. “We know zip about their capabilities and tactics. We do know they sacrifice themselves readily.”

  We had watched whole shiploads of them crash into Earth as kamikazes for years. “Why do they?”

  “Slugs may not be ‘they,’ but ‘it.’ A single entity made up of physically separate organisms. The death of physically separate parts may be as meaningless to the one big Slug as loss of fingernail clippings is to us.” It was Howard’s job to be professorial amid chaos. Serendipi-tously, it was also his nature.

  General Cobb sat down beside us. I swear his joints creaked. “If you’re right, Howard, we have to unthink everything. Human armies conserve force. Maybe not to save troops, but at least because resources are finite.”

  Enemy philosophy suddenly bored me. My eyelids drooped. The last day had wrung me dry. Even Pooh’s death left only a dull ache. It had to be the same for all the troops. I pitied those who had pulled guard, condemned to stay close to the outside wind and cold, fu-tilely peering out into impassable darkness.

  I zipped into my mummy bag, lay on my back, and counted ceiling cracks until I dozed. I didn’t take my downer. Fitful sleep seemed preferable to drugs. Once bitten, twice shy, they say.

  Despite all of the day’s disasters, the feeling gnawed me that I had missed something, that the worst was yet to come.

  I dreamed I was back in the twisting corridors of the Slug Projectile, scrambling for my life, catching toes and ringers in those air vents two finger widths wide. And every corner I turned I found putty-bodied Slugs writhing toward me from out of nowhere.

  I half woke in blackness to echoing, muted human snoring.

  And something else.

  Plop. Plop.

  Like big raindrops. I flicked my goggles down and waited until they let me see.

  Outside our low-ceilinged alcove, in the main chamber, rain leaked slowly from the ceiling. Well, the astro-geologists said Ganymede had water.

  The drops were enormous. They oozed from ceiling cracks and fell on the upturned faces of sleeping, drugged GIs. But the soldiers lay sleeping, still.

  It seemed so odd.

  I shrank deeper into my mummy bag. Heated fatigues or no, it had to be ten below in here.

  Electricity flashed th
rough me. It didn’t rain at ten below.

  I came awake as adrenaline surged. I tossed my head to drop my goggles.

  Slugs!

  Amorphous Slugs by the hundreds oozed from ceiling cracks and wall cracks. Cracks just as wide as the doors in the Projectile walls that I had mistaken for ventilators.

  I had seen holos of octopi squeezing through rock cracks an inch wide. It seemed so obvious now.

  As obvious as where the stupid humans would land. As obvious as where we would shelter when the night storms came, if any of our ships survived the crater dust. As obvious as the fact that all guards would face out into the night, not inward to sound the alarm.

  We had blundered into a massive and perfect ambush.

  I turned my head to see a Slug stretch rope-thin from the ceiling to drape itself over Munchkin’s face.

  “Fuck!” I tore the zipper out of my mummy bag and lunged toward her.

  Her arms and legs thrashed as the Slug smothered her, so muffling her screams that Ari slept on, beside her.

  I wrestled the blob off her, snatched a rock from the cave floor, and pounded the thing into slime.

  Munchkin sat up, gasping and scrubbing her face with her hands.

  I grabbed my rifle and began picking off green ceiling bulges as they appeared. As I fired, I ran among our soldiers, kicking Slugs off them and screaming to wake them.

  In moments, constant gunfire echoed. Acrid gun smoke filled and fogged the chamber. Whether the battle raged for minutes or hours I’ll never know.

  More Slugs dropped and oozed into the cavern than I had bullets.

  Few GIs stirred. The Slugs had been at work for hours before I woke.

  I backed to our alcove at the side of the main cavern.

  The general blazed away with his sidearm, Munchkin, Ari, and Howard with rifles.

  The cavern fell silent except for the sobs of too few wounded.

  Ari and the others knelt behind the bodies of dead soldiers. He snapped back his smoking rifle’s charging handle. “No ammo, Jason.”

  I looked over my shoulder. A hundred remaining Slugs writhed toward us. We would simply be smothered.

  I felt the harness on my chest. Hand grenades. In this closed space, they would be as deadly to friend as enemy. Unless.