The memory of Walter Lorenzen’s dead eyes filled my mind.
“Jason!” Munchkin slapped my cheek, then pulled the pin and threw her first grenade over the barricade formed by our dead.
Thunder reverberated. Shrapnel whizzed like oversized mosquitoes. The five of us hurled grenades into the cavern until we ran out.
Explosive echoes died and left the sound of our gasping and the howl of outside wind.
I pulled myself up and peeked over the now-shredded bodies that had saved our lives. My gloves slid across blood.
Mounded, motionless Slug carcasses lay tattered over hundreds of torn human dead. Nothing moved but pooling blood and Slug slime. Each fluid trickled, then froze in seconds.
The five of us were all that remained of Headquarters Battalion. If the other caves were hit as hard, we could be the five survivors out of ten thousand.
I turned away, slumped, then fell to my knees and threw up my guts.
General Cobb knelt beside me, hand steadying my shoulder.
Drool strings froze as they dripped from my lips, and tears blurred my vision. “I can’t do this.”
“You just did. I wish I could tell you it gets easier.” It didn’t.
Chapter Thirty-Four
In next morning’s calm twilight, GEF licked its wounds and struggled to survive one more day.
General Cobb knelt in the dust outside the cave that entombed most of HQ Battalion. He rested a hand on a suitcase-size holomap balanced on a flat rock. Previous staff meetings I had guarded took place around a polished synwood conference table with an orderly refilling officers’ coffee cups. Actually, this meeting was Munchkin’s tc cover, but she huddled behind a rock puking.
Today, GEF’s staff slouched in a ragged ring around the commanding officer. Most wore new, elevated-rani collar brass. With the nearest promotion board 300 million miles away, GEF had streamlined rules for such things. One staffer was original, a colonel, his hand shrouded in field dressing stiff with frozen blood. He was alive only because he had been checking equipment in a line brigade’s cave, instead of with us in HQ Battalion-The staffers he commanded died in our cave. He was alive, but he hung his head like he wished he could join them.
Junior officers promoted from other units stood with helmets askew and uniform jackets untucked. For most, last night had been their first combat. We were beaten, and it showed.
The general looked around. “First thing you do, straighten up your gear.”
Vacant eyes stared back at him.
“Now, gentlemen! If we look like whipped dogs, we’ll fight like whipped dogs.”
New majors and captains snapped to, adjusting uniforms and straightening spines. I buttoned a pocket on my own uniform and tightened a sagging web-gear suspender. Somehow, I felt better. I looked at the others and found light in eyes that had been dull.
General Cobb nodded, then asked an acting colonel, “Casualties?”
He was really a major, new to his job as division Operations officer. He hesitated. “HQ Battalion got hit worst. But some of the other caves were nearly as bad. My battalion—”
“Numbers, Ken.”
“We have four thousand available for duty.”
Sixty percent casualties after one day! I took a step backward.
For the briefest moment I thought General Cobb’s shoulders sagged. Then he pointed to the major. “Reassign troops to restore unit integrity. You’ll have to fold some battalions. We’ll be spread thin, but that can’t be helped. Once we stabilize a defensive position we’ll think about offense.” The general nodded, then turned to Howard Hibble.
Howard’s uniform still looked like the inside of a laundry bag, but that was normal.
“Howard, if the tittle bastards can’t surprise us any more, will they leave us be?”
Howard screwed up his face, then exhaled. “Don’t think so. It perceives a threat.”
“It?”
“My working hypothesis is these physically separate organisms are a single cognitive entity. Last night bolstered my view. No more individual thought or fear than hair growing.”
“So what do I plan for?”
“Frontal assault. Massive and remorseless.”
“They may find us tougher in conventional battle. One armed human soldier can take these worms out by the hundreds.”
“We’ve underestimated these worms so far. When Jason fought them in that Projectile, he observed individual weapons and what may have been body armor. Last night it traded weapons and body armor, that wouldn’t fit in those cracks, for surprise. Don’t expect it to repeat tactics. Expect warriors.”
“Still think they can’t fly?”
“No evidence of it so far.”
General Cobb pointed at the holo and nodded. “Alright We will prepare to defend against an attack across the plain. We have to assume they can cross the dust. They got into those caves somehow.”
Fifty feet away, four engineers tried to epoxy-glue a shelter together. It would blow away like a McSushi wrapper when the twilight gales came.
General Cobb turned to Howard. “Can we be safe in those caves? Those cracks could still be full of the slimy little bastards.”
Bad enough we had no safe place to sleep. Enemy troops could be hiding inside our defensive perimeter.
No Slug could defeat a GI one-on-one. But they didn’t need to. We couldn’t chance sheltering in the caves, while they could come at us in numbers we couldn’t even guess. Exposed out here on the surface, we wouldn’t last another night.
General Cobb looked back at the cave that entombed most of Headquarters Battalion and uncountable Slugs, then at Howard. “We have to be able to shelter in those caves.”
Howard unwrapped a nicotine-gum stick. “It’s not as simple as plugging a leaky bucket with chewing gum, Nat.”
Futile silence ticked by, broken only by engineer curses as they sprayed epoxy on shelter panels.
I cleared my throat. “Sir? Maybe it is.”
General Cobb turned to me. “Jason? You got an idea?”
I held up one of the now-useless sprayers for the epoxy that was to have glued together the panels of our above-ground shelters. The epoxy that we had too much of because some idiot computer clerk sent it instead of fruit. “We’ve got a thousand palettes of epoxy. It bonds to rock and sets up in sixty seconds stronger than steel. We send an escorted engineer team into enough caves to shelter us for the night and fill all the cracks. Any Slugs still hiding in those walls will stay there.”
Burying Slugs alive didn’t bother me a bit.
The general turned to Howard. “Will that work?”
Howard shrugged. “I haven’t heard a better idea.”
The general motioned to a lieutenant who now commanded a platoon-sized battalion, then pointed at the epoxy-spraying engineers. “Do it!” General Cobb pointed at Munchkin and me. “Here’s your MG team. I don’t need bodyguards.”
And I didn’t need to go back into a cave full of Slugs. When would I learn to shut up?
An hour later, forty of us lay on our bellies twenty yards outside a cave we had skipped last night. We could, I suppose, have cleaned out the caves where our dead lay. They should have held fewer live Slugs, maybe even none. Instead, a chaplain at each one said a few words, then the engineers sealed them with explosives.
This cave’s entrance was a slot as narrow as a double doorway, but, as Jeeb had discovered, it widened inside into a low-roofed cavern that could sleep hundreds.
Beside me Munchkin lay with her cheek against our gunstock, her eyes and mine wide and searching for
