Like me. Nothing in all the world.
“What about this one?”
“Dunno. He’s just fucked up.”
A hand slapped my shoulder. “Yo! Soldier!”
I turned and saw a sergeant from another platoon.
“On your feet!”
“Give him time. They were together.” Munchkin’s voice.
“We don’t have time. He’ll be together with her again if he doesn’t move his ass.”
Munchkin tugged me to my feet.
Ari stood next to her. “The sarge’s right, Jason.”
Around us wounded lay in ragged rows. Medics scrambled from one to the next. Many they just tagged on the forehead “M.” Morphine. No other help for those.
Two medics rested a Utter beside us. Air splints cased both of the man’s legs. His flight suit matched Pooh’s, but his sleeve patch read dropship number three, the one that had overshot us and slammed into the mountain.
He rolled his head and gazed at her through doped eyes. “Dunno how she did it.” He held his hands above his chest like airplanes. “Ship One was first on the LZ. Disappeared.”
Ari whispered. “Jeeb’s overflying the LZ now. The lava plain we were supposed to land on’s not lava. It’s volcanic dust. Ship One sank like a brick.”
“Are they okay?”
“Jeeb’s magnetometer says Ship One sank two hundred feet deep.”
Ganymede had already buried four hundred GIs alive.
The Ship Three pilot mumbled as he stared at Pooh. “She saw One go under. She overflew and brought Two down against the mountain. She knew the nose would crush on her. But it gave her soldiers a chance.”
He shook his head.
“Tried to follow. Nobody flies like Pooh.”
Flew.
I looked around and counted. Stretched a mile along the escarpment at the mountain’s base lay sixteen drop- ships, each nose crumpled like ours, surrounded by troops digging in and by clustered wounded.
Most of the other pilots, with seconds more to react than Ship Three, had followed Pooh’s lead. And died to save the soldiers in their dropships. In a heartbeat she had traded her own life to save thousands.
She had said I would do something noble and stupid and die. I stared down at her through tears welling inside my goggles.
Munchkin held my hand and made me look in her eyes. “We should bury her before sunset. It is the Muslim way.”
GEF had landed at what passed for dawn in Ganymede’s dim rotational period. Hibble’s astrometeorolo-gists predicted that the part of Ganymede in “daylight” was calm, then as it rotated into each “night,” cooling atmosphere shrank and made wind.
Blown dust shrouded Ari, Munchkin, and me as we laid stones over Pooh Hart. Munchkin said Arabic words and left on Pooh’s grave the white rose that Metzger had given her before we entered our dropship. Ari prayed in Hebrew. I wept.
Pooh Hart’s was the last funeral I attended on Ganymede.
There was no time for the rest.
Chapter Thirty-Three
A thousand feet above Pooh Hart’s grave I realized the enormity of GEF’s disaster. As part of what was left of HQ Battalion I was among the first to top the escarpment against which GEF had wrecked itself.
I dragged myself over craggy rocks, grabbed a breath, and turned. Even in Ganymede’s reduced gravity, and though we sucked manufactured oxygen, we labored. We carried packs as big as clothes dryers and breathed air as thin as at Everest’s summit.
Ahead of us, Jeeb flew point, linked to Ari’s mind, securing us against lurking dangers. Behind us stretched GEF’s remains.
Wrecked dropships and corpses littered the escarpment’s foot. From mere, the twenty-mile-wide plain we now knew was virtual quicksand stretched to the surrounding crater rim. LZ Alpha lay in Ganymede’s rocky quadrant. No ice here. Jupiter’s bloodred crescent hung beyond the rim, murky through dust billows raised by ever-swelling wind.
I handed Munchkin up, then General Cobb. Gasping, he turned, too, and followed my gaze. Thousands of black dots spackled the cliff face below as GEF’s soldiers swarmed up from the plain.
The general stood still, staring one-eyed into his BAM, then retracted it. Command helmets’ HUDs displayed positions of whole units or even individuals. All courtesy of Jeeb, hovering above. The general’s earpiece also fed him everything from casualty reports to dinner menus.
He hung his hands on his hips and shook his head as he spoke. “Ship One didn’t just cost four hundred good soldiers. We lost our vehicles and heavy weapons. We’re gonna complete our mission with what we carry on our backs.”
Complete our mission? Impossible.
Already, between the three other dropships sunk in the dust like Ship One and the casualties from the crash landings of the rest, we had lost a quarter of our troops.
I looked over my shoulder. Above the rock shelf where we rested, gray, jagged peaks climbed another two thousand feet. Black smudges among the crags marked cave mouths. Marching GEF up here from the exposed plain was the only logical move. This mountain formed a defensive position as perfect as a medieval castle.
But our mission was offense, not defense. We had journeyed 300 million miles to seek out and destroy the Slugs’ capability to strangle humanity. Now we had trapped ourselves on a barren rock isolated from the rest of Ganymede by an uncrossable moat. If the Slugs knew we were here, they could ignore us as if we still sat in the Colorado mountains.
I cleared my throat. “Sir, aren’t we screwed?”
General Cobb shrugged. “Battle rarely goes as planned, Jason.”
“Yes, sir. We all trust you. You just need to tell us what to do.”
He cocked his head. “Me? George Patton said never tell people what to do. Tell them what needs to be accomplished and let them astonish you with their ingenuity.”
A wind gust staggered us all. Kibble’s astrometeorolo-gists had been right about winds increasing as the eighty-four-hour day ended. Fifty feet away, combat engineers laid fiberglass panels on rock and assembled epoxy sprayers to glue them into shelters. Tents would have been impossible. Already the cold had worsened, even discounting wind-chill. At least the planners had got one thing right.
The next gust knocked the General against me and Munchkin, and the three of us landed in a heap. A wind- borne fiberglass panel skipped across the landscape toward us. I threw myself across General Cobb and Munchkin as it slammed my back like a charging bull.
I peeked at the engineers. Like us, they huddled on the ground. Any fiberglass panels had disappeared. I twisted my head to see the escarpment lip. A trooper fought his way over the top and staggered up. Wind caught his pack, and he toppled backward and disappeared.
The planners had estimated Ganymede’s night-storm winds at eighty miles per hour. Hundred-mile-plus gales rocked us already, and it was only dusk.
An engineer crawled to us through the driven dust and screamed in the general’s ear. “Sir, it’s no good. The shelters wouldn’t hold even if we could get ‘em stuck together. And we can’t.”
Howard Hibble and Ari had made the cliff top and crawled alongside General Cobb. Howard pointed up slope. “These formations are shot through with caves.”
Ari shouted, “Jeeb’s found some big enough to hold battalions, sir.”
