Orphanage

by Robert Buettner

  My boots straddled a human corpse. I dragged it toward the alcove and piled it on top of the body in front of Ari.

  He looked at me. “Wounded are alive out there, Jason.”

  “They won’t be, one way or another.”

  He nodded, lips tight, then jumped to snatch another dead man. In seconds we had built a flesh wall.

  I jumped and rolled across, crouching down alongside the four of them. General Cobb nodded, and we all snatched grenades from our chest harnesses. I froze, staring at mine.

  The memory of Walter Lorenzen’s dead eyes filled my mind.

  “Jason!” Munchkin slapped my cheek, then pulled the pin and threw her first grenade over the barricade formed by our dead.

  Thunder reverberated. Shrapnel whizzed like oversized mosquitoes. The five of us hurled grenades into the cavern until we ran out.

  Explosive echoes died and left the sound of our gasping and the howl of outside wind.

  I pulled myself up and peeked over the now-shredded bodies that had saved our lives. My gloves slid across blood.

  Mounded, motionless Slug carcasses lay tattered over hundreds of torn human dead. Nothing moved but pooling blood and Slug slime. Each fluid trickled, then froze in seconds.

  The five of us were all that remained of Headquarters Battalion. If the other caves were hit as hard, we could be the five survivors out of ten thousand.

  I turned away, slumped, then fell to my knees and threw up my guts.

  General Cobb knelt beside me, hand steadying my shoulder.

  Drool strings froze as they dripped from my lips, and tears blurred my vision. “I can’t do this.”

  “You just did. I wish I could tell you it gets easier.” It didn’t.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  In next morning’s calm twilight, GEF licked its wounds and struggled to survive one more day.

  General Cobb knelt in the dust outside the cave that entombed most of HQ Battalion. He rested a hand on a suitcase-size holomap balanced on a flat rock. Previous staff meetings I had guarded took place around a polished synwood conference table with an orderly refilling officers’ coffee cups. Actually, this meeting was Munchkin’s tc cover, but she huddled behind a rock puking.

  Today, GEF’s staff slouched in a ragged ring around the commanding officer. Most wore new, elevated-rani collar brass. With the nearest promotion board 300 million miles away, GEF had streamlined rules for such things. One staffer was original, a colonel, his hand shrouded in field dressing stiff with frozen blood. He was alive only because he had been checking equipment in a line brigade’s cave, instead of with us in HQ Battalion-The staffers he commanded died in our cave. He was alive, but he hung his head like he wished he could join them.

  Junior officers promoted from other units stood with helmets askew and uniform jackets untucked. For most, last night had been their first combat. We were beaten, and it showed.

  The general looked around. “First thing you do, straighten up your gear.”

  Vacant eyes stared back at him.

  “Now, gentlemen! If we look like whipped dogs, we’ll fight like whipped dogs.”

  New majors and captains snapped to, adjusting uniforms and straightening spines. I buttoned a pocket on my own uniform and tightened a sagging web-gear suspender. Somehow, I felt better. I looked at the others and found light in eyes that had been dull.

  General Cobb nodded, then asked an acting colonel, “Casualties?”

  He was really a major, new to his job as division Operations officer. He hesitated. “HQ Battalion got hit worst. But some of the other caves were nearly as bad. My battalion—”

  “Numbers, Ken.”

  “We have four thousand available for duty.”

  Sixty percent casualties after one day! I took a step backward.

  For the briefest moment I thought General Cobb’s shoulders sagged. Then he pointed to the major. “Reassign troops to restore unit integrity. You’ll have to fold some battalions. We’ll be spread thin, but that can’t be helped. Once we stabilize a defensive position we’ll think about offense.” The general nodded, then turned to Howard Hibble.

  Howard’s uniform still looked like the inside of a laundry bag, but that was normal.

  “Howard, if the tittle bastards can’t surprise us any more, will they leave us be?”

  Howard screwed up his face, then exhaled. “Don’t think so. It perceives a threat.”

  “It?”

  “My working hypothesis is these physically separate organisms are a single cognitive entity. Last night bolstered my view. No more individual thought or fear than hair growing.”

  “So what do I plan for?”

  “Frontal assault. Massive and remorseless.”

  “They may find us tougher in conventional battle. One armed human soldier can take these worms out by the hundreds.”

  “We’ve underestimated these worms so far. When Jason fought them in that Projectile, he observed individual weapons and what may have been body armor. Last night it traded weapons and body armor, that wouldn’t fit in those cracks, for surprise. Don’t expect it to repeat tactics. Expect warriors.”

  “Still think they can’t fly?”

  “No evidence of it so far.”

  General Cobb pointed at the holo and nodded. “Alright We will prepare to defend against an attack across the plain. We have to assume they can cross the dust. They got into those caves somehow.”

  Fifty feet away, four engineers tried to epoxy-glue a shelter together. It would blow away like a McSushi wrapper when the twilight gales came.

  General Cobb turned to Howard. “Can we be safe in those caves? Those cracks could still be full of the slimy little bastards.”

  Bad enough we had no safe place to sleep. Enemy troops could be hiding inside our defensive perimeter.

  No Slug could defeat a GI one-on-one. But they didn’t need to. We couldn’t chance sheltering in the caves, while they could come at us in numbers we couldn’t even guess. Exposed out here on the surface, we wouldn’t last another night.

  General Cobb looked back at the cave that entombed most of Headquarters Battalion and uncountable Slugs, then at Howard. “We have to be able to shelter in those caves.”

  Howard unwrapped a nicotine-gum stick. “It’s not as simple as plugging a leaky bucket with chewing gum, Nat.”

  Futile silence ticked by, broken only by engineer curses as they sprayed epoxy on shelter panels.

  I cleared my throat. “Sir? Maybe it is.”

  General Cobb turned to me. “Jason? You got an idea?”

  I held up one of the now-useless sprayers for the epoxy that was to have glued together the panels of our above-ground shelters. The epoxy that we had too much of because some idiot computer clerk sent it instead of fruit. “We’ve got a thousand palettes of epoxy. It bonds to rock and sets up in sixty seconds stronger than steel. We send an escorted engineer team into enough caves to shelter us for the night and fill all the cracks. Any Slugs still hiding in those walls will stay there.”

  Burying Slugs alive didn’t bother me a bit.

  The general turned to Howard. “Will that work?”

  Howard shrugged. “I haven’t heard a better idea.”

  The general motioned to a lieutenant who now commanded a platoon-sized battalion, then pointed at the epoxy-spraying engineers. “Do it!” General Cobb pointed at Munchkin and me. “Here’s your MG team. I don’t need bodyguards.”

  And I didn’t need to go back into a cave full of Slugs. When would I learn to shut up?

  An hour later, forty of us lay on our bellies twenty yards outside a cave we had skipped last night. We could, I suppose, have cleaned out the caves where our dead lay. They should have held fewer live Slugs, maybe even none. Instead, a chaplain at each one said a few words, then the engineers sealed them with explosives.

  This cave’s entrance was a slot as narrow as a double doorway, but, as Jeeb had discovered, it widened inside into a low-roofed cavern that could sleep h
undreds.

  Beside me Munchkin lay with her cheek against our gunstock, her eyes and mine wide and searching for movement inside the cave mouth. Ari Klein lay alongside us, eyes shut but seeing more than we ever could.

  At the cave mouth Jeeb, chameleoned as gray as the stones he scuffled across, disappeared into the dark. Ari’s alter ego was literally bulletproof but closed eyes didn’t mean that Ari was relaxed. His jaw was tight, fists clenched. Sending Jeeb into a closed space risked Jeeb’s “life,” and Ari’s sanity.

  Jeeb was wired with enough ounces of explosives and incendiaries to fry himself to avoid being captured and dismantled. Brain-linked TOTs were new. In their brief history, none had ever been destroyed or had self-destructed. But every time a new model replaced an old TOT, its Wrangler got sedated for a month, just to adjust to the loss. GIs who didn’t understand sneered that Wrangler was a cake MOS. I knew better.

  I fidgeted and realigned already-aligned ammo belts.

  “Klein? What we got in there?” The earpiece voice of the lieutenant commanding this battalion-shrunk-to-platoon cracked with impatience. Combat soldiers may be family, but every family has its jerks.

  “So far, we identify a company-sized unit.”

  We were outnumbered more than three to one. Armies like that ratio reversed when they attack adversaries of equal combat power.

  Ari continued, “They’re massed behind cover, rocks, and boulders, just beyond the entrance. They’re wearing body armor, with just individual weapons. No mines or booby traps we can detect.”

  Last night, the Slugs had been their own booby traps. This fight would be head to, well, pseudocephalon. They probably intended to give us both barrels at the entrance bottleneck, then fall back.

  “Okay. G-men prep in two minutes.”

  Our lieutenant may have been a jerk, but he was a sound tactician. We couldn’t just destroy this cave with artillery, even if we still had artillery, instead of it being buried under two hundred feet of volcanic dust. We just wanted to do a little pest control in our new sleeping quarters. Flamethrowers excel at cleansing enemy holes, but nothing burns on Ganymede.

  That left us to apply Infantry’s unique, dirty genius: controlled, selective violence.

  Each squad had two grenadiers armed with repeating grenade launchers. With round magazines, the launchers looked like the early-1900s tommy guns the old federal police “G-men” carried.

  Seconds ticked away.

  Thok.

  Even cartridged for Earth gravity, much less the reduced Ganymede load, grenade launchers whispered and the round crawled so slow you could see it. A single grenade looped into the cave mouth. A grenade launcher is an indirect-fire weapon. The round arcs above the line of sight between the weapon and the target, the difference between a fly ball and a line drive. No explosion. It must have been a dummy ranging round, lobbed in by our most accurate grenadier.

  More seconds ticked.

  “Fire for effect!”

  Thok. Thok. Thok.

  From up and down our line, fist-size antipersonnel grenades arced like Texas League singles at a combined eight hundred rounds per minute.

  Nothing. Could the Slugs keep our conventional explosives from detonating, too?

  Before my heart beat again, flashes flickered in the cave’s darkness, and detonation bangs merged into a constant rumble. As small as each individual grenade may have been, the ground shook beneath my belly.

  Munchkin whispered, “Wow!”

  “Cease fire!”

  I looked over at Ari. He nodded, eyes still closed as he spoke to the lieutenant. “There are probably forty of them still moving.”

  Forty on forty was more like it. Now we had to do what Infantry had done since before Thermopylae. Dig the enemy out of his hole and bleed doing it.

  “Even squads advance.”

  My heart skipped.

  Our gun was attached to First Squad, so Munchkin joined the rest of our squad and rattled rounds into the cave while Second and Fourth Squads ran forward, online, and crouched. I had red tracer loaded every third round and watched Munchkin stitch every shot straight into the cave. The others deluged the cave rim and exploded rock chips in a shrapnel storm so violent that Squads Two and Four dropped and covered.

  “Cease fire! Odd squads advance!”

  I had already loaded a fresh ammo belt. We stood, along with First Squad. Ari stayed behind, too valuable to risk in a firelight. His jaw hung slack. The grenades hadn’t trapped Jeeb inside and bullets and shrapnel would barely scratch a TOT’s paint. Ari’s Moment of Truth had passed. Ours lay ahead.

  Munchkin folded our gun’s bipod legs back along the barrel, then raised it to her shoulder. We shuffled forward, on-line with our squad mates, our gun as long as she was tall. But I wouldn’t want to be a Slug in front of that muzzle.

  After another leapfrog round and a half, our squad was first into the cave. We paused in the cave mouth for our night-vision goggles to adjust. Just long enough to be silhouetted as targets.

  On my right, a Slug round struck a rifleman’s forehead. Our helmets will deflect a grazing round, maybe even a small-caliber bullet direct, but Slug rounds come big and fast. His head tore off.

  I shoved Munchkin down as I dropped, and we both hit the cave floor before the headless rifleman’s body fell across us. There was no time to think about who he had been or where he was going, just to shove him aside as his arterial blood pulsed onto our gun’s barrel and sizzled.

  Munchkin returned fire as the Slug who shot him slunk behind a rock. If we hadn’t been green and exhausted, we would have crawled in the cave entrance instead of making silhouette targets of ourselves. Careless soldiers are dead soldiers.

  The little bastard was pinned down, but there was no rushing him in force. His position commanded our axis of advance, which had to be single file between rock walls. He could stay behind his boulder all day and pick off any single soldier who tried to get through. He was too far away to throw a grenade at him, the roof too low for a G-man to lob one in. The Slug just had to keep us outside for a few hours, until the nightstorm could kill us.

  “Now what?” I muttered.

  Munchkin shifted her aiming point to the rock wall six feet behind the boulder, thumbed her selector switch to full auto and cut loose twenty rounds.

  “What—”

  Her burst thundered against the wall and a hail of ricochets peppered the cavern. Half of them deflected behind the boulder.

  Our gun’s echoes died.

  The Slug flopped out from behind the rock, his armor shredded. Ricocheted M-20 rounds were too small and slow to penetrate Slug armor, but when an M-60 talks, everybody listens.

  Before any of the dead Slug’s buddies could take over his little sniper’s nest, we were through the gap.

  “That was amazing!” I told Munchkin.

  “That was bumper pool.” She shrugged.

  Once we got a couple squads into the main cave, it was a mop-up. We took no prisoners, not from rage but because the Slugs fought until they died. We lost two KIA. Slug firefights, we were learning, left few wounded. Their rounds tore GIs to pieces.

  We secured that cave and a couple of others and copped a night’s rest while the nightstorm howled.

  The next morning, Munchkin and I were back on PSD with General Cobb. He huddled up for a staff meeting with his back to a rock wall.

  He looked up at the commander of the surviving combat engineers. A skinny lieutenant where there had been a colonel.

  The general’s finger inscribed a circle along the holo-model escarpment, making a ring all the way around the mountain, a thousand feet above the plain. “Son, can you blast a trench ring along the military crest?”

  “One thing we got’s explosives, sir.”

  “Off you go.”

  The lieutenant saluted and double-timed away. An hour later we heard the first boom as the engineers began blasting our trench system.

  An hour after that Munchkin and I were bre
aking our backs digging trenches to shelter headquarters when messages beeped up on my Chipboard and Munchkin’s simultaneously.

  We both read halfway through the orders, then she turned to me, eyes wide. “We’re reassigned to a line unit, again.”

  “You know the casualty numbers. General Cobb figures he can take care of himself. They need our gun on the perimeter.”

  We gathered gear and trudged around the mountain toward our new outfit, bent under our gun and ten thousand rounds. As we moved, all along our perimeter, soldiers dug blasted rock from the trenches like their lives depended on it. They did.

  We found the line segment held by the platoon to which we were loaned.

  Their platoon sergeant had never made it out of their dropship. Their platoon leader bought the farm in a cave the first night. They had shrunk below half strength, otherwise.

  Therefore, the platoon’s current stud duck was a corporal from Chicago. We found him squatting beside a boulder, drinking coffee from a therm cup that likely warmed it just enough to unfreeze it. He looked up, and coffee slopped onto his field-jacket front. He didn’t clean it off

  “Just you two? That’s all they sent?” He eyed our gun. “We can use the weapon.” He pointed us at a rock pile a hundred yards along his platoon’s sector of the perimeter. “Set up there.”

  I looked around. “You mind a suggestion?”

  He tugged down his face mask and scratched an unshaven jaw. “Free country.”

  The platoon’s sector included a ridge that stuck out from the mountain like Florida stuck out from the United States. “You got a salient here to cover.”

  “No shit.” He grimaced. A salient is a bulge in an army’s line. The trouble with bulges is bad guys can attack you from the sides as well as the front. If they succeed when they attack your flanks, they pinch off your salient and encircle the troops left inside. The German

  General Staff in World War II assaulted the poor bastards pocketed in a salient at Bastogne. The Battle of the Bulge nearly turned the war for Germany. Salients attracted enemy attention.

  Salient or not, there was a right way to defend it. “Your—our—sector’s mostly unscalable cliffs. Except for that ravine, there.” I pointed. “It’s the most likely avenue of approach. Lay our gun to cover it.”