He shrugged, weary. “Suit yourselves. I’m just a grunt. They were supposed to send us a new platoon leader. No loss. He was just some enlisted weenie detached from HQ Battalion.”
Under my fatigues goose flesh rippled my forearms. Besides Munchkin and me, all that remained of HQ Battalion was Howard, Ari, and General Cobb.
I pulled out my Chipboard and read the part of my orders I’d skipped. I swear my pack gained a hundred pounds. “Acting second lieutenant… assume command effective immediately.”
I pulled Munchkin aside and held my Chipboard so she could read my orders. I whispered, “This is a typo. They don’t jump specialist fours to platoon leader. I’m a twenty-one-year-old grunt.”
“Who General Cobb probably recommended for the job personally, because he knew you could do it.”
“Why not you? I’m not even the boss of this gun, you are.”
“I wasn’t born to this. Judge March saw it in you, Jason. So did Sergeant Ord. I believe this is your destiny.”
My head spun. Destiny, shmestiny. I’d think about that tomorrow. “What do I do?”
“Your job.”
I took a breath and turned back to the corporal. “I’m Wander. The weenie from HQ.”
I expected him to roll his eyes, and say, “Oh, sure.” Instead he stood up straight and saluted. GEF was on the ropes, but we were soldiers, after all.
“Yes, sir. I didn’t know, sir.” He stared at me waiting for orders. I prayed to God for a clue. God, as usual, ignored me.
I tugged the corporal’s unfastened equipment harness. “First thing you do, straighten up your gear. If we look like whipped dogs, we’ll fight like whipped dogs.”
“Yes, sir.”
An hour later, I’d walked our sector with him, met my soldiers, repositioned a few, and contacted the platoon leaders to our left and right. Our coverage wasn’t just thin, it was onionskin.
I headed back to the center of our sector, where I’d left Munchkin and found her position.
She had dug in on the escarpment at the military crest, the line below the high point where a soldier could see her field of fire but wasn’t silhouetted against the sky. I crab-walked sideways down loose scree, and she turned at the sound of cascading pebbles.
“Hey.”
“Hey.” She eyed the bar on my collar, which the corporal had recovered from his platoon leader’s body.
“I mean,‘Hey, sir.’”
I smiled. “You ready?”
She pointed over her gunsights at her ravine. “Ravine” was descriptive but a misnomer. No water had flowed on Ganymede to sculpt it. However it got there, the fea-ture was a rock-strewn funnel that narrowed toward Munchkin as it rose from the plain a thousand feet below us.
She pointed downslope, where her new loader threw together rock cairns that would serve to mark range to target. I picked out other cairns that defined where her sector of fire ended and those of the riflemen on her flanks began. Her loader turned and circled his gloved thumb and forefinger. She waved in acknowledgment, and he began the climb back to her position.
“Ready,” she said.
My earpiece chirped. The corporal had also recovered the platoon leader’s radio for me. The microphone smelled of my predecessor’s blood.
“Jason? This is General Cobb.”
So much for proper radio-telephone procedures and chain of command.
“Yes, sir.”
“Your troop dispositions look fine.” I hadn’t mastered my platoon leader’s HUD enough to eyeball them myself, so I’d take the general’s word for it. But the division commander was monitoring where I dug in twenty-five riflemen? My heart rate rose.
“How’s morale there?” Static crackled the general’s voice.
“They took it on the chin last night. Better now.”
“I hope you’re right, ‘cause they’re gonna take it again.”
“Sir?”
A barely visible shape flitted against the sky at the edge of my vision. Jeeb.
Hair stood on my neck.
GEF’s one-and-only TOT sat tight above our position. The commanding general had placed a handpicked soldier, whose judgment and communication skills he knew personally, in charge of this unit. Said handpicked soldier was at this moment patched through direct to said commanding general, leapfrogging the intervening company, battalion and brigade commanders.
“Sir, are we in for trouble?”
“Look to your front.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
I snapped my head up. The only thing moving in Munchkin’s ravine was her loader, now twenty yards from us and puffing audibly as he climbed. I raised my gaze to the wide, distant end of the funnel, then to the gray, volcanic-dust plain beyond. Nothing.
Except a thin shadow on the dust, miles away.
General Cobb’s voice buzzed in my earpiece. “See ‘em?”
I popped the BAM over my right eye and chinned the laser-designator function. It fired a beam that painted targets so smart bombs could see them, but it also made good binoculars.
I found the smudge of the shadow, then blinked for focus.
At first, it looked like a million snaking poppy seeds, shiny, black, and rounded.
I blinked up the magnification. Even though I expected it, my heart skipped.
Slugs. Slugs gliding over die dust like the footless snails they were. Slugs encased in shiny, black armor like “the hollow cornhusk I had tripped over when I invaded | their projectile. The armor curved around each Slug’s body like a scimitar, exposing flesh in two places. Where a face should be, a green oval showed. Above it hooked a helmetlike visor. From the left side of the body, halfway down, protruded a tentacle, what Hib-ble’s freaks called a pseudopod. Each warrior’s tentacle wrapped around a twin to that curved, sword-edged individual weapon I had fired once. Replicants of the soldiers we had battled in the caves, but these stretched across the horizon.
I glanced at Munchkin. She had followed my lead and peered through her LD, too. She muttered in Arabic.
My earpiece buzzed. “Jason?”
“I see them, sir.” The line moved toward us fast enough that dust kicked up behind it. From my vantage point, I could only tell that they were moving closer to our mountain. “Have you defined an axis of attack, sir?”
“Your salient is it, son. The TOT above you has counted fifty thousand of them.”
Fifty thousand against twenty-five. Not twenty-five thousand. Twenty-five. If every round we fired killed a Slug, thousands would remain to overrun us when we ran out of ammo.
The fact that I wasn’t surprised didn’t keep my stomach from knotting. I shivered, blurring the image of charging Slugs in the LD.
“What’s left will reach small-arms range in twenty minutes, Jason.”
“Left?”
“Hope’s orbit brings her into tiring position in fifteen minutes.”
I stared through the LD while my jaw dropped. Of course. Fire support.
Even though Hope still sped above us miles beyond the horizon, I stared at the sky. As usual, Metzger was above the battle, literally, and poised to make things better by a button push.
“Jason, I’m switching your audio feed direct to fire control. Give ‘em hell, son.”
My earpiece went dead while I watched the Slugs advance. I switched my radio to my platoon net to give my people a heads-up.
“—must be a million of them.”
“Anybody got extra rounds?”
Both voices quavered, but they were firm.
I switched my radio back to fire control net and prayed I remembered procedure.
“This is fire control, over.”
“Fire mission, over.”
“Fire mission, aye.”
“Target, troops in the open. Coordinates…” I looked into the LD at red numbers that shifted constantly as I shifted the LD over the miles of onrushing Slugs. “Fuck! Just wax the whole place!” I paused. “Over.”
“Just play your designator up and
down the line. We’ll bring the goods.” Field artillery rarely sees the enemy, but they’re a combat arm like us and proud of it.
The Slugs were close enough now to make out individuals without magnification.
Thunder rumbled somewhere.
I looked again through the LD. No, not thunder. As they came, the Slugs pounded their weapons against their armor, in unison, boom-boom-boom.
They might be doing it to keep cadence. They might be doing it to scare the crap out of their enemy.
The last part was working.
A few of them fired their weapons. Howard’s people had examined the ones we captured in the cave. They decided the weapons were magnetic sling guns. Whatever.
Their rounds fell way short and kicked up dust fountains on the plain.
I craned my neck and wondered where the hell Hope was.
Pop—pop—pop.
I jumped. Alongside me, Munchkin lay with her cheek along the gunstock. Smoke curled from the barrel. Just a three-round clearing burst.
Below us, dust fountains from the exploratory Slug firing kicked up at the funnel’s base, walking closer to us by the moment.
I looked to the sky again. The silver dot that was Hope came into view, crawling across the sky, and silhouetted against Jupiter’s striped bulk.
Below, Slug rounds now impacted a hundred yards from us.
I flicked on my laser designator and a thread-thin red beam painted the charging Slug battle line. I ran it back and forth while I peeked up with my uncovered eye.
Sparks detached themselves from Hope’s dot and drifted toward us.
My heart pounded.
Crack.
A Slug round shattered rock ten yards to our right.
Thump.
Out on the plain, a yellow flash flicked in the Slug line’s center. Then another.
Those little thumps were two-thousand-pound bombs. We were probably a mile from the impacts, but the mountain shook under my boots. A dozen dead Slugs littered each impact point. Great. But at that rate, forty-eight thousand of them would overrun us instead of fifty thousand. I stared through my LD as the Slug wave rolled toward us.
“Adjust fire? Over.” The voice in my earpiece made me blink. These first bombs were ranging rounds. I was supposed to be telling them whether to adjust aim long, short, left, or right.
“Uh. No. You’re on target.”
A bomb flicked through my field of vision as it burrowed into the dust amid charging Slugs. Dust erupted, the ground thumped and a handful of Slugs bought the farm.
“But you’re not killing dick. The dust swallows the bombs.”
Silence.
“Fuck!”
At least I knew I was talking to a GI.
The voice continued, “We racked thuds fused for ground bursts.” Assuming our LZ was rocky, our artillerymen had set fuses so the bombs would explode just after their noses touched the surface. That way the bombs would shatter rock into deadly, secondary splinters. Instead, our bombs were plunging into the plain before exploding, so the dust muffled their effect. The bombs should have been fused to burst in air fifty feet above the Slugs.
The artilleryman’s voice sagged. Artillery’s creed was “On target, on time, every time.” On the most important fire mission in history, it wasn’t.
“How long to reset fuses, fire control? Over.”
“Too long. We got airburst racks coming from the magazine.”
In my mind I saw Hope’s space squids racing racks of properly fused bombs to elevators for the trip from the ship’s core to the weapons bays. If Hope’s computer net picked this moment for one of its too-frequent blackouts, the elevators would freeze, and we would be toast.
In front of me, fifty thousand Slugs closed to where I could pick out individuals with my naked eyes.
One of my guys cut in, on platoon net. “Lieutenant? Where’s our fire support? There’s a million Slugs to our front.”
“Hang on. Aimed shots when they come in range. Out.”
Minutes crawled. Aimed shots would be worthless if the sky didn’t rain bombs, pronto.
Munchkin turned her eyes to the sky, and her lips moved. She always prayed for serenity.
I followed her gaze and prayed for shrapnel.
The Slugs had closed to where their ranging rounds struck around us every few seconds.
Fire control said, “On the way.”
God bless squids. God bless Hope’s computers.
Our incoming painted heaven, now. The bombs’ heat shields burned away as they dropped through the atmosphere. They left fire trails like shooting stars crossing Ganymede’s dark sky.
Bombs began exploding in an accelerating crescendo, like popcorn in a microwave. Each detonation took out Slugs by the hundreds.
I switched my radio to platoon net. My guys whooped with each explosion.
I held the LD on the Slugs, even though smoke—no, not smoke, nothing burned, here, dust—obscured them.
When the dust broke, I saw, at each explosion’s epicenter, Slugs vanish. Just body fragments Uttered the next ring out from the bull’s-eye, then still, whole carcasses beyond mat.
Slugs were inhuman. They had murdered my mother and were out to kill me. Yet for a moment, as high explosives flung them like sacks, a pang touched me for living things now dead.
The dead Slugs’ comrades in arms shared no such grief. The rear ranks skimmed over the fallen without pause.
It seemed our ordnance pounded them for hours, but Hope was only in firing position for minutes each orbit. Nothing but dust showed in my LD’s eyepieces.
Echoes of our last bombs died, and I squinted at the dust cloud below.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
At the base of the funnel, Slugs emerged from the dust, climbing toward us and pounding their armor.
“Shit!”
Their front line came even with the most-distant of Munchkin’s range markers, and she squeezed off a three-round burst. Three Slugs dropped. So their armor wasn’t bulletproof.
It didn’t need to be.
They advanced on-line, as fast as a sprinting man. Odd numbers leapfrogged ahead while even numbers fired, then advanced. I sighted on one who would soon stop advancing and present me with a still target.
Just as their pattern emerged, they switched. Random groups advanced, and others covered. I swore and swung my sights.
No Slug slowed. No Slug hesitated beside a fallen comrade. No Slug broke ranks. Perfect Infantry.
If our bombs had slaughtered tens of thousands, they also missed thousands. Too many. Too close. I dialed up platoon net. “Fix bayonets.”
I reached to my belt, slid my stubby bayonet from its scabbard, and clicked it below my rifle muzzle.
Munchkin kept firing. Slugs kept dropping.
More kept coming.
I squeezed off aimed shots while her loader changed barrels. M-60 barrels overheat. The loader uses an insulated glove like an oven mitt to unscrew the barrel and replace it.
While she waited she looked at me. “Jason, I need to tell you—”
Her loader finished and tapped her helmet. She turned her head back and resumed firing.
Ricocheting Slug rounds cracked all around us, now, but it seemed Slugs were crappy shots. Maybe they really couldn’t see us in our red armor.
But we saw them from fifty yards, which is how close their lead soldiers were.
“Switch to full auto.” At this range, aimed shots wouldn’t save us.
My words were intended for Munchkin, but I saw her thumb the selector switch on our gun even as the words left my lips. I switched my rifle to full auto and blazed away.
I don’t know how many magazines I changed until I reached to the ammo pouch at my waist and felt nothing but empty fabric.
A Slug warrior lunged at me with his weapon’s edge. I parried, then stabbed my bayonet into the green place where his face should be. His insides sprayed my sleeve as he fell, twitching. I braced for the next ones and prepared to die.
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I stood my ground, arms shaking, for minutes before I realized there were no next ones.
The first breeze of Ganymede’s coming night blew dust away. Black Slug corpses carpeted the ravine floor in front of me, stacked one on another in places. The one I had bested in hand-to-pseudopod combat was their high-water mark. Two armies had journeyed light-years to fight a battle decided by knives stabbing flesh.
I looked around and saw Munchkin’s loader sprawled alongside the gun, a neat hole in his forehead.
She lay still, facedown alongside him. My blood froze.
“No! No, no, no!” I knelt beside her, and her fingers twitched. Thank God!
Then I saw the stiff, red stain on her jacket shoulder.
I turned her on her back, slow and careful, then cut away her clothing. The wound was eggcup deep and showed shattered bone. Coagulant powder would stop her bleeding, but she must have lost a quart already. I bit my tongue as I sprinkled antisepticIcoag powder, then packed the hole with a field dressing.
“Jason?”
“You’re fine, Munchkin.”
“I’m cold.”
Shock. Blood loss. I propped her feet higher than her head with a rock. One thing Ganymede had was rocks.
Her loader lay dead, in battery-heated clothing he no longer needed.
It took minutes to strip his stiff corpse and wrap Munchkin in his clothing. I overrode his thermostat so his batteries warmed her and started an IV with plasma from my backpack.
She needed more.
I fired up my radio.
“Jason? What the hell happened?”
General Cobb’s voice snapped me back to my job. “We stopped them, sir.”
“The TOT shows me that. Why didn’t you report?”
Because I thought Munchkin was dead. “Tending wounded, sir. We need medics here. Bad.”
“Everyone does. We’ll send what we can. Jason? Howard thinks they’ll come again. You need to regroup.”
“They can’t come again. They didn’t retreat to re-group. We killed them all.”
“He thinks they’ve got a hatchery someplace. They’ll keep making more until we run out of troops and ammunition.”
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