wasted hiding it might.”
He turned away. “Carry on.”
The next day regs changed. Cabin hatches could be closed during social hour with no questions asked. Rumors spread that even marriage might not be questioned.
One hatch that closed immediately was to the commodore’s cabin. I never saw Metzger or Munchkin anymore except when I guarded a staff meeting he attended and when Munchkin and I trained together.
At sixty DTD, or days-to-drop, we had an early-morning University-of-Hibble class in Slug biology. Munchkin and I sat together as gunner and her loader.
The lecturer, Dr. Zhou, held captain rank, but she was just a cryp. Short for cryptozoologist. “Pseudocephalo- pod physical construction is barely more complex than the amoebae under your high-school-biology microscope. The lone specimen lacked neural structures consistent with independent thought. Socially, Slug society may resemble a single organism.”
On a high-school-science trip into the Rockies, I saw the world’s largest single living thing, an aspen grove that looked like a thousand separate trees. It was centuries old when the Slugs killed it.
Howard Hibble chimed in. “Expect perfect coordination among individual enemy soldiers, directed by a hive intelligence.”
Someone asked, “What will that intelligence tell them to do?”
Howard shrugged. “To behave like perfect soldiers. We’ll learn as we go.”
I swallowed. Sixty days remained before school would be in. Lots of us would learn only how to die. The day before, somebody leaked onto the ship’s net a Pentagon study made before we left. It ranked GEF military- occupational-specialty categories for combat survivability in the coming action. The release infuriated the chain of command, and the study quickly became known as “The Numbers.”
Hope’s stay-in-orbit crew had the longest life expectancy, followed by the dropship pilots like Pooh. The flyers would stay at arm’s length from the fight.
Projected lifetimes for other MOS shrank after that. Shortest were the commanding general’s personal security detachment. Not only did the theater commander in chief have an invisible bull’s-eye painted on his butt, the soldiers assigned to protect him were expected to throw themselves in front of it to save him. According to the Earthside computers, once a firelight started, Munchkin and I each had eleven seconds to live.
She seemed untroubled, though. I had watched Munchkin’s hands on our gun for nearly two years. They shook when she was happy, steadied as she got serious and deadly. This morning they positively trembled.
She leaned close, and whispered, “Jason, last night Metzger asked me to marry him.”
She could have just slapped me with a dead trout. I knew Metzger was busy, but this highlighted the gulf that had opened between us. Munchkin had displaced me. Metzger’s world now revolved around her like Ganymede around Jupiter. “That’s great.”
“We want you to be our best man.”
I felt less left out and smiled a little. “When we get home?”
“Next week.”
For the next hour I watched the instructor pace the stage, but I heard little. I thought, then I thought some more.
Since the fraternization policy change, Ari had hooked up with a demolitions expert A nice girl from Tel Aviv who drooled at his accent but couldn’t tell a west-of-the-Pecos cowpuncher from a north-of-the-LBJ-Freeway haberdasher. After all, his MOS was Wrangler. Jeeb, his Wrangl-ee, got exiled to the corridor during Ari’s social- hour trysts with her in our cabin. Still, doing it with a guy whose brain was coupled to an electric roach smacked of menage a trois to me.
Ari and I now alternated closed-door rights to our cabin for social hour. That evening was my turn. When I got there, Pooh’s coverall already hung folded over my chair back while she lay on my bunk with the blanket pulled up to her nose.
“In a hurry?” I asked.
Her eyes twinkled. “Just homy.”
I pulled my chair next to the bed, straddled it, and laid my chin on its back, where I could smell the sweetness of her in the fabric of her coverall. “I’ve been thinking.”
“Me too. Climb in, and I’ll prove it.”
“No. I mean thinking. About us.”
A shadow crossed her face.
I unbuttoned my bulging uniform-blouse pocket. There was a ship’s store aft. The jewelry section was small potatoes, but the clerk said it was the thought that counted. I fished in the pocket and my fingers touched the velvet box.
Her hand pressed mine. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what? You don’t even know—”
She shook her head and her eyes glistened. “We can’t. I can’t”
The human heart is physically anchored in the chest by tissue and cartilage and blood vessels. Mine sank into my gut like a cannonball. “What?”
She sat up, the blanket still clutched to her chin, and brushed her fingers on my cheek. “It’s nothing wrong with you. There could never be anything wrong with you.”
“Then what?”
She turned away and whispered into the bulkhead. “You saw The Numbers.”
Til beat The Numbers.“
“You’ll do something noble and stupid and die!”
We sat still, and I listened to her breathe.
She turned to me, her eyes swollen. “I’m already an orphan. I won’t become a widow in eleven seconds.” She squeezed the blanket with both fists while her breath came in gasps. Then her hands trembled, and she sobbed, huge and soft.
I grasped her bare shoulders, turned her to me, and held her while she shook and wept.
An hour later, the Klaxon sounded, she dressed and left without a word.
We didn’t speak about it again, but in the remaining days we made love like each moment counted for a lifetime, while the DTD clock rushed toward zero.
The Metzger-Munchkin nuptials were strange, not just because they were the first in human history held beyond the moon.
Hope’s only window was the Navigation Blister, a forty-foot crystal dome that jutted from the bow. A platform extended into it like a wide diving board. There an astrogator peering through an ancient, manual alidade could navigate by the stars, and even steer the ship from the blister if the computers went down. They went down frequently, for hours at a time, but since Hope was tracking toward Jupiter like a bowling ball between rails, the blister never got used.
Metzger was ship’s captain but couldn’t officiate the civil ceremony for his own wedding. However, Metz-ger’s crew numbered five hundred, and GEF was ten thousand. So the embarked-division commander was really in charge, and everybody knew it. General Cobb stood at the far end of the diving board in full-dress uniform, the civil-ceremony book resting in his white gloves. Above his head and beneath his feet space’s still, black velvet stretched. Sprinkled stars seemed to swirl as Hope rotated on her axis. Metzger stood beside the gen-eral, every inch the military groom, down to his sash and saber.
We had adjusted roles. Pooh served as maid of honor, Ari stood in as best man, and I gave the bride away, like a brother.
First down the aisle trundled Jeeb, history’s first six-legged ring bearer.
Pooh stood beside Munchkin and me, waiting her cue. Jeeb waddled ahead, his radar-absorbent coat gleaming in starlight, a velvet pillow balanced in his forelimbs.
Pooh touched her bouquet to her nose, then turned and pecked my cheek. “Someday, I want white roses, too. You’re the best.”
My chest swelled. My weeks of bartering for duty time to match Pooh’s schedule had taught me Hope’s black-market structure. Hope had an agriculture lab, the idea being mat after we took Ganymede we would try to grow stuff to feed ourselves. For a month’s pay plus a Crackerjack ring I no longer needed, I had scrounged the
