rarest commodity in outer space, flowers, from an ag-lab technician.
Munchkin’s bouquet trembled, and I felt her arm shake as it threaded through mine. She wore dress whites, with a veil and a train added. A uniform may not sound like much of a wedding gown, but Munchkin was the loveliest bride I’d ever seen.
I had a little speech ready, to tell her how perfect it was that the two most important people in my life were going to be together forever.
I bent to her ear to whisper.
“Don’t speak, Jason.” She gulped. “Or I’ll lose it.”
Fair enough. Tears blurred my own vision, already.
The bride and I literally flew down the aisle in the tiny center-axis gravity, Munchkin’s train drifting behind like a cloud. At the ceremony’s end, Ari pulled out a lightbulb wrapped in a napkin and had Metzger stomp it. Jeeb reared back in horror at the murder of his fellow electrical appliance. Munchkin taught Pooh a tongue-wagging Arab yodel, which, I learned, only women do, and the newly weds exited to her ululations while bagpipes keened.
The event was supposed to be private, but when the wedding party emerged from the Navigation Blister, Metzger’s cheering crew waited with a raucous reception that broke more regs.
Another thing the agriculture lab manufactured illegally was potato vodka. It curled my toes and made Pooh hornier than usual.
I was almost tired of getting laid by the next morning when, on flight day 602, Hope intersected the orbit of Jupiter.
Silly me.
Chapter Thirty
“Many of us will die in this place.” GEF’s Operations officer stared down at the boxing ring-size holo image of Ganymede Landing Zone Alpha at his feet. Ten thousand of us peeked over his shoulder from temporary bleachers that ringed the big training bay for predrop briefing. We’d heard it all a hundred times, but we hung on every word.
The day-old holo had been broadcast back from a deep-space drone, Jeeb’s dumb, muscular cousin. Hope had launched the speedier DSD weeks before.
Ganymede, like Earth’s moon, was barren, crater-pocked rock and ice. Astronomers debated whether its core was molten or cold or liquid water, but its surface was as dead as headstones.
LZ Alpha was a crater floor. The army didn’t care whether some astronomer had named it, it was a landing zone. Hibble’s geologists had lectured us how the three-thousand-foot mountain in the astroblem’s center resulted from rebound of the planetary fabric after a meteorite impact. The flat crater floor was cooled lava that had oozed from the impact perforation eons earlier.
The resulting topography formed a perfect defensive position: high ground centered in a circular plain, sixty miles across, with billiard-table-flat fields of fire and observation. That plain also provided miles of smooth runway for the dropships that Pooh led, which would glide in at two hundred miles per hour with no brakes.
The Ops officer waggled a red laser pointer’s tip at a spot on the plain a couple miles from the mountain. “The dropships will overfly the crater rim here, touch down, then roll to a stop here.” He slid the red beam to the mountain. “The Force will assemble, then advance to and occupy this prominent terrain feature. There we will set our operational base.”
Cakewalk. Assuming the Slugs were deaf, dumb, and blind. Boots scuffed bleachers in restless disbelief.
He looked up. “The DSD detected no Slug sign at the LZ. The drone wasn’t acquired by radar or any other active-imaging medium during its flyby. We’re ready for a hot LZ, but we don’t expect one.”
Munchkin leaned against me, and whispered, “If we know that’s the flattest spot on Ganymede, next to the best natural fort, so do the Slugs.”
I looked across the big chamber at Pooh. The pilots sat in a row at ringside, in the order their dropships would land. Pooh flew Dropship Number One, carrying General Cobb and all of us in Headquarters Battalion, but physically she sat second-in-line. First down would be the mech ship, loaded with all the GOATs and heavy weapons, to give the engineers extra minutes to drive them off the dropship and reassemble them. I smiled as she pouted, arms crossed. It burned her ass that she had to fly second position and watch a lesser pilot become the first human ever to land beyond the moon.
After briefing we lined Hope’s corridors, hunched under basic loads of ammunition, grenades, rations, water, and clothing that no Sherpa on Earth could have budged.
My gear had evolved as far from my old Basic equipment as the 300 million miles that separated me from In- diantown Gap, Pennsylvania.
My M-20 handled just like an ancient M-16. All the weight the rifle itself lost, through zoomy neoplast construction, came back in the extra ammo held by the M-20’s bigger magazine. Ganymede cartridges packed less powder so recoil and muzzle velocity would replicate Earth-normal, but a hundred of them still weighed the brick.
We had gotten the Eternad fatigues that weren’t perfected when I cheated Munchkin through temperature- endurance testing back at Camp Hale. Most people think the hard shell is strictly body armor. In fact, the rigidity aligns the joints so the bands and levers that move with the wearer crank kinetic energy into the batteries. We looked as clumsy as medieval knights, but Eternads weighed a third what a turn-of-the-century football uniform did. And those old suits didn’t heat, cool, and stop bullets.
We looked more like halfbacks than infantrymen, too, because the armor’s iron-oxide, mercury-sulphide coating was as red as an old fire engine. Howard’s Spooks thought it would diffuse our infrared-visible signature so the Slugs could hardly see us. Maybe.
My helmet was no trainee’s Kevlar pot. Like Eternads, it weighed less than old football equipment. But packed into its bulges and ridges were flip-down passive-night vision goggles, a multinet radio, and electronics supporting the heads-up display and laser designator. The soldier sees the HUD and LD display in the battlefield awareness monocle. The BAM is that retractable gizmo that makes recruiting-holo Infantrymen look like one-eyed pirates.
Underneath it all I was still just scared blood and bones.
Metzger and General Cobb walked the lines, inspecting and wishing luck. Metzger stopped in front of us and stepped over our machine gun to stand close to his wife. “Nice makeup.”
Munchkin stared at him through a mask of gray-black camouflage insulated-paint stripes. The theory was that the thermal-insulated gray paint and uninsulated black would create cool and warm stripes, breaking up our facial outline to an infrared-seeing Slug. A tube curled like transparent spaghetti from each nostril along her cheek toward her oxygen generator. “Nice honeymoon.” She stretched her lips over her teeth, imitating a smile.
As he bent and hugged her, he tucked something in her hand. A white rose from her bridal bouquet. “Love you.”
“Me too.”
Then he was gone down the line, her hand reaching after him until he vanished in a sea of soldiers. One rose petal drifted to the deck.
Pooh was already at our dropship’s controls, so we had no good-byes to say.
General Cobb hobbled past us and into the air lock, struggling under the same basic load he demanded of his far-younger troops. Munchkin and I fell in behind him, then sat at his left.
I squatted to dip my pack under the top air lock lip, then I stepped outside my home of six hundred days. The Ganymede-normal zero-Fahrenheit air of the dropship cabin slapped my face. I watched my breath and shivered until my fatigue batteries kicked on.
It wasn’t until Munchkin and I lumbered to our places on the sidelining benches, sat, and strapped in, that I realized something was missing. I patted my web harness. Grenades. First aid-dressing packet. Entrenching tool. Insulated canteens. I felt for the night-vision goggles pushed up on my helmet and found them right where I’d left them.
