I shot Howard a glance. Sluggo’s autopsy and two nights on Ganymede had taught us that Slugs saw in the infrared spectrum. Ari would be risking not just a metal robot, but the flesh of his flesh, the blood of his blood. As I had risked Munchkin.
I turned back to Ari. “Do it.”
He hesitated one heartbeat, then closed his eyes. “Yes, sir.” The image rolled across the holo faster.
An hour later, the trails disappeared again, against a cliff.
Ari said, “I don’t see anything. If there was a door, you’d expect straight lines. The rarest thing in nature.”
“No. Slug doors are circular, with curved panels. Like a camera’s iris.”
Ari moved his hands and the holo image got herky-jerky again, as Jeeb climbed the vertical cliff. Ari made his hands flat and stabbed the air. In the holotank, I could see from Jeeb’s viewpoint. He hung fifty feet above the ground, his forelimbs probing for joints in the rock.
Above our heads, pebbles rattled across the roof as afternoon wind heralded the nightstorm that would end Jeeb’s search, and all our lives.
Ari opened his eyes and exhaled explosively. “Nothing. I’m not saying nothing’s there. We just can’t find it.”
Before Jeeb moved again, the horizon in the holo rotated.
I stabbed my finger. “There! It’s there!” A hole grew as the door-panel petals expanded. Jeeb was hanging from a moving door panel as it rotated open. It looked ten feet thick.
The holo went black. I shot Ari a glance.
“Jeeb only cuts contact when he thinks he’s detected. They picked up his infrared.”
“He knocked on their door?”
“Now he’ll switch to passive sensing and try to sneak in that door.”
Ari’s face was chalk and I knew why. Jeeb was nearly indestructible. But he couldn’t drill through a ten-foot-thick blast door or tunnel out from under thousands of feet of solid rock. The Slugs wouldn’t open that door again. If Jeeb got inside, half of Ari was imprisoned for life. And if the Slugs caught Jeeb and dismantled him, Ari would feel it like he was being broken on the wheel. No. Jeeb would blow himself into rutabagas if they tried that and take a bunch of Slugs with him. For Ari, it would be like spectating at his own suicide.
Lieutenant Negative pulled up his jacket sleeve to read his wrist ‘puter. Seconds trickled away.
Suddenly it hit me. I whispered to Ari, stupid since the Slugs couldn’t hear me, “Jeeb can’t transmit from under a mountain!”
Ari closed his eyes and held up his palm at me.
The holo flickered, then fired up.
Ari whispered, too. “He’s okay. He’s transmitting ultralow frequency, now. ULF just means he has to be in contact with the rock to send signals through it. His passive night vision’s working. They may suspect he’s in there with them, but they’ll never find him.”
The cave corkscrewed like the passage I had navigated in the Slug Projectile, but bigger. Then it swelled into a cavern big enough to swallow Lake Erie.
Ari lifted his arms and Jeeb drifted along the curved ceiling. Below, around the chamber’s walls, bulging, churning organic machines spurted out Slugs like green bread loaves. Near the chamber’s center, finished products in their body armor circled a spherical sack a hundred feet tall, like Muslim pilgrims around the K’aaba stone.
Howard Hibble whispered, “Jackpot.”
I looked at my wrist ‘puter. Hope should be in range, now. A corporal stuck his head in the room. “Sir, we got Slugs outside! Must’ve missed some cave cracks. They pulled down the uplink antenna to Hope.”
Whatever else the Slug common intelligence was, a slow learner it wasn’t. It realized what we were up to. It realized Jeeb had blown its cover, even if it couldn’t catch him. It had communicated to the Slugs inside our perimeter, and they attacked the one thing that we couldn’t live without, that uplink antenna. If we didn’t contact Hope on this pass, night would fall, and the game was over.
Ari stared at me. Jeeb’s only way out was if Hope’s ordnance cracked open Slugtown and busted him loose. Jeeb could survive anything short of a nuke, but he couldn’t dig for crap.
Before I could speak, Ari picked up a rifle and tore for the trench exit.
I ran after him.
Outside, Ari had already dropped three Slugs. Two more hunkered in rocks; the drooping antenna mast laid down behind them. There was no question we would get the bastards. But late was never, and Ari knew it. He charged out firing and made it all the way to them before the last surviving Slug sent a round point-blank into Ari’s chest. I ran up and shot the twitching Slug. In fact, I emptied my magazine into it. But it was over.
I stood panting.
“Sir?” A soldier who had followed me touched my elbow. I turned, and he nodded toward Ari. A medic knelt alongside him, attaching monitor leads.
“Jason?”
I knelt there, too, and drew back Ari’s blood-sodden field jacket with two fingers. The Slug round had penetrated a seam between plates of Ari’s body armor, then it had twisted through him like a ferret.
Munchkin’s wound, horrible as it was, had been a lucky nick. Inside Ari’s jacket, lungs, liver, arteries, all those miraculous human complexities, pulsed like lacerated table scraps. I gulped a breath and bit back nausea.
His breath sighed between his lips in pink froth. “Would you—?”
“Relax.” I laid my palm on his brow.
He shook his head. “No time.”
I looked at the medic. He gave me a one-inch head-shake as he unwrapped a morphine syrette.
Ari pushed it away. The effort of moving his hand made his eyes tear. Or maybe it was something else. “I need to go fast. Jeeb feels what I feel.” Ari gathered himself to speak again. “Jason, he’s alone now. He doesn’t understand. He’s an orphan, like you.”
The medic looked blank, presuming Ari’s delirium.
“Take care of him?” Ari asked me.
“Sure. Always.” With those words I adopted a steel-and-plastic orphan.
Ari relaxed and lay back against hard stone. I saw his eyes close through my own tears.
Behind me, troops raised the mast.
By the time I got back to the radio, Metzger’s voice crackled. “Jason?”
“Wander here. Over.”
“What’s happening down there?”
“Too much. We need everything you’ve got. I mean everything, delivered on the coordinates the TOT’s transmitting to you now.”
“Jason—”
Even radioed from orbit I could hear it in Metzger’s voice. “What?”
“We got nothing. Computers are down.”
“Fix ‘em.”
“We’re trying! By next orbit—”
“There is no next orbit!” I told him what was going on.
“Those coordinates are halfway around Ganymede,” he said.
Silence.
“Jason? How is she?”
“Alive. Hurt, but alive.”
“You believe this Slugtown is the real deal?”
“Ari believed it enough to die for it.” There was no time for tact. “Munchkin’s pregnant.”
More silence.
“Okay. I’ll take care of everything. Good-bye, Jason.”
In that moment, after a lifetime together, I knew exactly what he meant.
I dropped the mike, walked out into Ganymede’s twilight, and looked to the sky. Hope drifted into view over the horizon, one hundred miles high, silver against Jupiter’s red disk. Sparks flickered from her and drifted down toward us. Escape pods. Hope’s crew was abandoning her, on Metzger’s orders.
One pilot in the world could fly Hope alone, without computers, lying on his belly in the Navigation Blister while Ganymede’s horizon stretched before him. One pilot in the world could calculate and execute course corrections to bring her mile-long bulk screaming down on Slugtown in half of an orbit.
Metzger chose to end his marriage where it began, in that star-spangled crystal do
me.
Hope streaked flame red across the sky, now, as she dropped into the atmosphere. By the time she reached
Slugtown in Ganymede’s opposite hemisphere she would be a molten mass, trailing fire miles wide.
She disappeared over the horizon. I held my breath.
The flash came first, blinding even half a world away. I threw myself on the ground as the blast wave and then seismic quakes rocked Ganymede.
History would say that Metzger died to save the human race. History would lie. Metzger sacrificed himself to give his wife and unborn child and the rest of us on this rock a chance at life.
The next morning, Jeeb sent images back to the holotank as he flew home, his course erratic. The electronics people said the explosion had freed him from the Slugtown cave, but scrambled his circuits. I believed it was grief.
Hope’s impact had rent the very fabric of Ganymede. Lava and liquid water flowed in a flaming, steaming, unending mass across the other side of this world. This world that the Slugs no longer held. The volcanism lit the sky dull red as the seven hundred of us who had survived settled in for a long, cold occupation.
We reestablished radio contact with Earth and got thanked. Politicians radioed that a grateful world had awarded me the Medal of Honor. I had it presented to Walter Lorenzen’s mother.
That afternoon, before the nightstorm came, Howard Hibble and I scaled the crag above HQ and looked out across the battlefield.
Howard tucked his bandaged arm against his side. “In the end, gadgets didn’t matter. Soldiers who could choose to live or to die for one another fought perfect soldiers that died without thinking. We should have lost. But we won.”
Below us, dead Slugs blackened the plain and the mountain.
There, too, lay nine thousand children who traveled 300 million miles and made Ganymede their orphanage forever. The dropships Pooh Hart had led Uttered the foot of the escarpment, and I imagined I could see her grave from here.
“Won?” I shook my head. “Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. He said there is nothing so melancholy as a battle lost, except a battle won.”
I sat on the cold stone of Ganymede, laid my elbows on my knees, and cried.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
I run my hands along the vibrating viewport frame as the new ship hangs in parking orbit above United Nations Base Ganymede. So much a part of me is the ship’s vibration that I notice it only when I have time to think, like now.
The Metzger class is so much Hope never was. Beyond the viewport at ten-mile intervals orbit the other four cruisers of the Metzger class. Synchronous with us, they glisten silver against space’s black velvet. Utility barges one hundred feet long scurry around the cruisers like ants around logs. The new ships’ antimatter bottles alone are as large as Hope’s entire payload section was.
The new cruisers have better gravity. That means real showers instead of years of sponge baths. Their agriculture labs grow hydroponic fruits and vegetables for us grunts, not just bootleg vodka. Maybe best of all, the Metz’s antimatter interplanetary drive gets here from Earth in half the time. After decades of drift, war made us leapfrog direct from chemical propulsion past fission, fu-sion and plasma to AMat. Metzger would be proud of the class of ships they named for him.
Below the viewport green streaks are visible on Ganymede, even from here in orbit. The lava flows and liquid-water floods touched off by Hope’s impact continue even now. Eons ago, meteors did the same thing to Ganymede’s sister satellite, Callisto. But with these flows heat was released from Ganymede’s depths. Evaporation released oxygen into the atmosphere. Oxygen content reached half-Earth-normal last year and climbs annually. And the heat has increased the surface temperature so high that the ag-lab wizards are growing things down there. Just primitive lichen, so far.
Nonetheless, along with death and destruction, war brought life to Ganymede. War forced men beyond the moon, and now to the stars, where we might not have ventured for centuries. Horrible trades that those were, they are no less fact.
I step away and turn back into my stateroom. Rank hath its privileges. As embarked-division commanding general, I have a tree. Just a foot-tall bonsai juniper, but green, alive, and all mine.
A six-legged football preens beside my juniper. The stateroom’s not all mine. I share with Jeeb. His combat circuits fried when he escaped Slugtown. As an obsolete J-series, they decommissioned him, extracted his self-destruct explosives, and let me buy him for scrap. Machines have no personality, of course. But I see Ari in him every day.
I sit at my desk and read the screen. I read a lot during the years it took for relief to reach Ganymede. Enough to earn my master’s in military science and validate my field promotion. The longest-distance correspondence course in human history, completed while on the most boring diet. Rations for a force of ten thousand fed us seven hundred survivors, but we were glad to see peaches when relief arrived.
They busted me back from division commander to second lieutenant, correspondence degree or not. Why and what happened then are stories for another time.
The Battle of Ganymede was a miraculous victory. It will never be miraculous to us who left brothers and sisters beneath Ganymede’s cold stones, but it was miraculous, nonetheless.
Pooh Hart sleeps beneath those stones. I always visit on her birthday. I always leave white roses. I always cry.
Pooh won the Medal of Honor and the Distinguished Flying Cross, posthumously. In all, 307 soldiers there won their nations’ highest awards for valor, including Ari Klein and Nathan Cobb. I told Walter Lorenzen once that medals recognized an army’s mistakes. That may be, but it doesn’t diminish the courage and sacrifice of those who win them.
The First Batde of Ganymede didn’t make the killing stop. It wasn’t the end of the Slug War. It wasn’t even the beginning of the end. But, as the British Prime Minister, Churchill, put it a century ago, it was the end of the beginning.
Even AMat would take centuries to get us just to the Slug Outpost Worlds. So, how we stole Temporal-Fabric Insertion Technology from the Slugs is another story. So is our use of T-FIT to find the Slugs’ homeworld and to equip the Metzger Class with T-FIT so we can pay them a visit.
The after-action analysts eventually found out that Slugs hibernate. A few Slugs we had epoxied into their cave cracks got dug out alive.
The cryptozoologists and psyops spooks had little luck interrogating their first prisoners of war, even with Howard Hibble asking the questions. We’ve been working for years to figure out what makes the Slugs tick, so we can make peace, make it stop. Peace is what every man and woman in this army wants.
If the Slugs won’t make peace, well, payback’s a bitch.
My command sergeant major raps on the hatch frame, then sticks his head in. “Sir, the spec four you wanted to see is out here.”
Another of rank’s privileges is you can cherry-pick your cadre. I pulled strings and got my division sergeant major shipped up from Earth aboard the Metz. He is the finest NCO in the armed services, bar none. Without him this division wouldn’t be worth a rat fart. “I’m ready, Sergeant Major Ord.”
“Sir, Specialist Trent reports.” She snaps off a salute so crisp her fingers quiver. I could cut my fingers on her fatigue creases.
I smile. We are the finest unit in military history. I’m just being objective, even if it’s my own division. “Take a seat, Specialist.”
She sits. The prettiest M-60 loader I ever saw.
“The general sent for me?”
But not the shyest.
“Your platoon sergeant tells me you are the biggest troublemaker in your company. You beat the snot out of a squad mate.”
“A guy, sir.” She looks smug.
“Another soldier!”
Her shoulders sag. “Is the general advising me that Articles have been drawn? Because I want to stay in sir. I need to. I lost my family—”
“I’ve read your file. Your platoon sergeant also tells me you are potentially th
e finest soldier he has ever trained. You finished college. You enjoy being a loader?”
She squeezes her lips together, opens her mouth, closes it, then speaks. “Rather be a gunner. They say I’m too small to handle the gun. But they’re fine with me humping the ammo, sir.”
I smile. “My gunner was smaller than you are, but I never saw the gun handled better.”
Her eyes get big. “I knew the general received battlefield promotions. But from spec four to general?”
I nod. “However, I don’t recommend the career plan. Would the specialist care to make a deal?”
“Sir?”
“No Articles will be filed.”
She straightens but her eyes narrow. “What do I have to do, sir?”
“You return to Earth tomorrow on the Powell and attend OCS on my personal recommendation.”
“Officer Candidate School?” Her jaw drops, and she forgets to say “sir.”
“And”—I lift two boxes from my desk drawer—“you will personally deliver these to the addresses noted, with my regards.”
“Sir? I should know what they are.”
“With a general’s return address on them, the MPs won’t give you trouble. But they’re not secrets. They’re gifts. Ganymede rock made into paperweights. You’ll de-liver one to the senior juvenile judge in Denver. Plan to spend an hour visiting him. He’s Infantry, too.”
She nods and places the first box in her lap. “The other?”
“To my godson. His mother was my gunner.“ Munch-kin lives in the Rockies foothills, now, not so far from Camp Hale. She prefers cold to Egyptian heat, after Ganymede. On her pension and Metzger’s, she raises Jason Udey Metzger, the first extraterrestrial-conceived and -born human. They say Jude is… different.
My visitor’s eyes glisten as she gathers up the second box.
“Godspeed, Specialist.”
She stands, and I return her salute.
“Sir!” Her about-face is crisper than hydroponic-grown lettuce. Before she reaches the hatch, she whispers, “Thank you, General.”
She’s out the hatch without hearing me whisper, “No, thank you.”
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