The general nodded. “Okay. Pass the word.”
An hour later, Ganymede’s howling night storm had taken two hundred more troops. The rest of us split up and huddled in a belt line of caves. Hibble’s meteorologists measured winds of two hundred miles per hour outside. GEF hunkered down for its first night on another world.
HQ Battalion’s cave had a ceiling that arched twenty feet high and twisted back into the mountain fifty yards. I picked out a low-ceilinged side alcove big enough to shelter General Cobb, Munchkin, Howard, Ari, and me, then spread out sleeping bags. No oxygen in the atmosphere meant no campfires, even if Ganymede had wood to burn. But body heat from five of us packed in there might take the edge off the cold.
Hibble and an engineer prowled the cave’s main chamber, high-stepping over sprawled GIs who huddled together and wolfed cold rations and sedatives. The army had almost booted me for using Prozac, but it had issued us amphetamines to keep us sharp for the eighty-four-hour days and downers so we could sleep during the long nights. Hibble and the engineer peered up at the ceiling and eyeballed the walls. Cracks spiderwebbed the rock.
They arrived at our alcove, and I listened.
“Igneous. Brecciated. But stable,” said the engineer.
I raised my eyebrows at Howard.
He tapped the wall. The cracks spanned two finger widths. “He says the roof won’t fall in.”
Something bothered me, but my back throbbed where the fiberglass panel had bruised it, and I was too exhausted to think straight.
Each cave’s troops mounted guard at each cave mouth, though a Slug assault seemed the least of our worries, especially with impassable weather outside.
While the four of us huddled exhausted in our alcove, General Cobb circulated through our cavern visiting with individual soldiers, checking equipment, confirming procedures with unit commanders. I was less than half his age, I’d carried the same load over the same terrain, and I just sat here an immobile blob of sprains and sores.
Howard, cross-legged beside me, offered chocolate from his rations while he unwrapped nicotine gum. No oxygen, no smokes.
“I’m sorry, Jason.”
I nodded. Fatigue dulled every emotion, even grief. Or I was blocking.
“Howard, are the Slugs just going to let us rot here?”
He chewed his gum. “I’d guess not. They like to keep their enemy 300 million miles away. We threaten them.”
“You said they won’t be able to fly. They can’t get to us any more than we can get to them.”
He shrugged. “We know zip about their capabilities and tactics. We do know they sacrifice themselves readily.”
We had watched whole shiploads of them crash into Earth as kamikazes for years. “Why do they?”
“Slugs may not be ‘they,’ but ‘it.’ A single entity made up of physically separate organisms. The death of physically separate parts may be as meaningless to the one big Slug as loss of fingernail clippings is to us.” It was Howard’s job to be professorial amid chaos. Serendipi-tously, it was also his nature.
General Cobb sat down beside us. I swear his joints creaked. “If you’re right, Howard, we have to unthink everything. Human armies conserve force. Maybe not to save troops, but at least because resources are finite.”
Enemy philosophy suddenly bored me. My eyelids drooped. The last day had wrung me dry. Even Pooh’s death left only a dull ache. It had to be the same for all the troops. I pitied those who had pulled guard, condemned to stay close to the outside wind and cold, fu-tilely peering out into impassable darkness.
I zipped into my mummy bag, lay on my back, and counted ceiling cracks until I dozed. I didn’t take my downer. Fitful sleep seemed preferable to drugs. Once bitten, twice shy, they say.
Despite all of the day’s disasters, the feeling gnawed me that I had missed something, that the worst was yet to come.
I dreamed I was back in the twisting corridors of the Slug Projectile, scrambling for my life, catching toes and ringers in those air vents two finger widths wide. And every corner I turned I found putty-bodied Slugs writhing toward me from out of nowhere.
I half woke in blackness to echoing, muted human snoring.
And something else.
Plop. Plop.
Like big raindrops. I flicked my goggles down and waited until they let me see.
Outside our low-ceilinged alcove, in the main chamber, rain leaked slowly from the ceiling. Well, the astro- geologists said Ganymede had water.
The drops were enormous. They oozed from ceiling cracks and fell on the upturned faces of sleeping, drugged GIs. But the soldiers lay sleeping, still.
It seemed so odd.
I shrank deeper into my mummy bag. Heated fatigues or no, it had to be ten below in here.
Electricity flashed through me. It didn’t rain at ten below.
I came awake as adrenaline surged. I tossed my head to drop my goggles.
Slugs!
Amorphous Slugs by the hundreds oozed from ceiling cracks and wall cracks. Cracks just as wide as the doors in the Projectile walls that I had mistaken for ventilators.
I had seen holos of octopi squeezing through rock cracks an inch wide. It seemed so obvious now.
As obvious as where the stupid humans would land. As obvious as where we would shelter when the night storms came, if any of our ships survived the crater dust. As obvious as the fact that all guards would face out into the night, not inward to sound the alarm.
We had blundered into a massive and perfect ambush.
I turned my head to see a Slug stretch rope-thin from the ceiling to drape itself over Munchkin’s face.
“Fuck!” I tore the zipper out of my mummy bag and lunged toward her.
Her arms and legs thrashed as the Slug smothered her, so muffling her screams that Ari slept on, beside her.
I wrestled the blob off her, snatched a rock from the cave floor, and pounded the thing into slime.
Munchkin sat up, gasping and scrubbing her face with her hands.
I grabbed my rifle and began picking off green ceiling bulges as they appeared. As I fired, I ran among our soldiers, kicking Slugs off them and screaming to wake them.
In moments, constant gunfire echoed. Acrid gun smoke filled and fogged the chamber. Whether the battle raged for minutes or hours I’ll never know.
More Slugs dropped and oozed into the cavern than I had bullets.
Few GIs stirred. The Slugs had been at work for hours before I woke.
I backed to our alcove at the side of the main cavern.
The general blazed away with his sidearm, Munchkin, Ari, and Howard with rifles.
The cavern fell silent except for the sobs of too few wounded.
Ari and the others knelt behind the bodies of dead soldiers. He snapped back his smoking rifle’s charging handle. “No ammo, Jason.”
I looked over my shoulder. A hundred remaining Slugs writhed toward us. We would simply be smothered.
I felt the harness on my chest. Hand grenades. In this closed space, they would be as deadly to friend as enemy. Unless.
My boots straddled a human corpse. I dragged it toward the alcove and piled it on top of the body in front of Ari.
He looked at me. “Wounded are alive out there, Jason.”
“They won’t be, one way or another.”
He nodded, lips tight, then jumped to snatch another dead man. In seconds we had built a flesh wall.
I jumped and rolled across, crouching down alongside the four of them. General Cobb nodded, and we all snatched grenades from our chest harnesses. I froze, staring at mine.
