He shrugged and sighed. “The impact dust Earthside is bad for jets, but the reason commercial air is grounded is most of the aircraft mechanics and aviation machine tools on Earth got diverted to build modified space shuttles to ferry stuff to the moon. Six weeks after the first Projectile hit, the first ship landed here. There are thirteen thousand people here now.” That was one thousand times as many people as had set foot on the moon during the course of human history before the war started.
“Imminent genocide lit a fire under the human race.”
He nodded.
I snapped my fingers. “Static in the holos? It’s not Projectile dust.” We had diverted every communications- satellite repair and launch vehicle to hauling material and workers up here. Nobody found disappearing loved ones unusual. Not with millions of people missing.
He nodded.
I nodded back. “But still, you can’t cover up a project this massive completely. So we announce we’re building a ship, alright, but it’s going to be built on Earth and take five years. That way we can train troops openly.”
He shrugged. “The spooks say that a good he has a basis in truth.”
Sun Tzu wrote, “All warfare is based on deception.” He could have continued that it has to be if your side’s too weak to kick ass. I sat on my bunk, pressing into my mattress with one-sixth my normal weight and wondered what would come next.
I knew history’s biggest secret. So did thirteen thousand others, at least. But the thirteen thousand were sequestered on the moon, where they couldn’t blab.
It seemed like overkill. Especially now that we knew that a Slug couldn’t exactly slap on a false mustache and spy around Earth undetected.
But there were other ways to spy. Eavesdrop on radio or holo or video. Look down with high-powered imagery systems. Remote-sensing intel was the one area of the military that had advanced in this century while weapons rusted. Even Infantry units, real ones, not training menag-eries like I had endured through Basic, had little observation drones that hovered above the battlefield like giant bugs.
We had to assume the Slugs knew whatever the human media knew. So since I knew about the massive deception of this base and this ship, they would lock me away here for the duration. If they didn’t just court-martial me and shoot me. My success in bringing back a dead Slug evidently was overshadowed by my failure to bring back a live one, not to mention that they thought I blew up his ship.
I slept poorly.
The next morning, the MP led me back to the floodlit operating room. Sluggo still lay on his table, but the amphitheater seats were filled with twelve silhouettes.
I shaded my eyes to confront my jury.
They wore officer’s uniforms of a half dozen armed forces. All theater-grade brass by their shoulder boards. Mr. I-know-an-asshole was absent. This crowd was way above his pay grade. Except one scrawny silhouette. That one stood.
My heart pounded.
Was he the jury foreman, about to sentence me to life imprisonment on the moon?
The foreman stepped down to the operating-room floor and walked toward me, squinting. Unlike his spit- and-polish cronies, his boots looked like he shined them with a Hershey bar.
“Jason? Did they feed you?”
Howard Hibble pumped my hand. He now wore major’s oak leaves on his collar.
“Howard? You need to tell them! I didn’t kick that Slug to death!”
“That investigation? Bureaucratic humbug! It’s over and done.”
He raised his hands in front of his chest.
And applauded. The rest stood and clapped, too. Within ten minutes, I had been congratulated by generals from four nations.
They and a panel of experts donned surgical masks and gowns, filed back into the seats, and oohed and ahhed while other experts sliced Sluggo up and asked me questions.
During a break in the autopsy, Howard sidled up to me. He hacked a smoker’s cough, his fist to his surgical mask.
“We never had a chance to talk. What was it like in there? How did they move? Did they display individualized characteristics?”
“They oozed at me like green spaghetti. I ran for my life. I was so scared I wet my pants.”
“I bet that was terrific!”
Six hours later, the brain trust had decided that the Slugs see with the white patches near their heads, even though they don’t have what we’d call eyes. They don’t see visible light but infrared. They are cloned, not born. The hollow thing I tripped over was probably artificial body armor. They communicate with sound, but maybe they can project vague feelings, too. They have outsized neural ganglia but little cerebral capacity for independent thought. They stink to high heaven if you don’t keep dead ones frozen. And the experts agreed with me about the toilet.
After my brain was picked as clean as Sluggo’s body, they filed out. Howard stayed. “You did say your family was killed at Indianapolis?”
“My mom. She was all there was.”
“The Ganymede Expeditionary Force will be organized like a light-infantry division. Ten thousand of the best, most experienced soldiers in the world. The volunteer lists were overwhelming. The UN decided to take only those who had lost their entire family to the Slugs.”
What was Howard saying? “I’m a war orphan. But I’m not experienced.”
“The hell! You’re the only human who’s ever seen Slugs alive!”
“Huh?”
“The Headquarters Battalion will have my Intelligence company attached. Our job is to tell the commander what to expect from the enemy. I told them I need your expertise.”
“I’m no scientist. I barely passed precalc.”
Howard waved his hand. “I handled that. Your records say you can shoot. I got you assigned to the commanding general’s personal security detachment.”
I swallowed. “PSD have the shortest combat life expectancy of any military operational specialty!”
He shrugged. “Take a bullet for the team. Mostly you’ll be a resource for me. That ship you saw, above us? You’re going to be on it!”
My head spun. I’d gone from court-martial to the one thing I wanted more than anything in the world.
Later, a Military Police corporal escorted me not to my cell but to the bachelor officers’ quarters.
I entered the dark room and stumbled. Metzger waved the lights on and levered himself off his bunk on one elbow. “What happened?”
I cocked my head. “Everything.”
Metzger, Howard, and I left the moon the next morning. The Luna Base Shuttles landed at Canaveral at night, one after another, so no one would know there was all this traffic going into space and coming back. The crew let Metzger bring our shuttle in. A one-hundred-ton glider screaming down to a pitch-dark runway with landing lights off. What a rush.
A day later, I left to report. Even though my Slug battle was secret, and I had signed another secrecy agreement to prove it, my GEF billet meant no more military hitchhiking for me. I rode for two days in a Space Force blue bus with reclining seats. An orderly brought me sandwiches, I caught up on months of sleep, and I watched rural America pass.
Closed businesses squatted alongside deserted highways as we headed northwest across gray, cold Oklahoma. There was no agriculture left to speak of, so roadside businesses had no customers.
I slumped in my seat and watched flat Oklahoma dirt turn to flat Colorado dirt by Act of Congress. On my previous car trips from back East, the Rockies usually rose on the horizon while we were well out on the plains.
This time, the mountains never came into sight through the twilight. Humanity didn’t have much time. The ship couldn’t be ready too soon. Neither could the division I was about to join.
In Denver, I boarded a helicopter headed deep into the Front Range.
