blasting our trench system.
An hour after that Munchkin and I were breaking 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.”
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?”
