movement inside the cave mouth. Ari Klein lay alongside us, eyes shut but seeing more than we ever could.
At the cave mouth Jeeb, chameleoned as gray as the stones he scuffled across, disappeared into the dark. Ari’s alter ego was literally bulletproof but closed eyes didn’t mean that Ari was relaxed. His jaw was tight, fists clenched. Sending Jeeb into a closed space risked Jeeb’s “life,” and Ari’s sanity.
Jeeb was wired with enough ounces of explosives and incendiaries to fry himself to avoid being captured and dismantled. Brain-linked TOTs were new. In their brief history, none had ever been destroyed or had self- destructed. But every time a new model replaced an old TOT, its Wrangler got sedated for a month, just to adjust to the loss. GIs who didn’t understand sneered that Wrangler was a cake MOS. I knew better.
I fidgeted and realigned already-aligned ammo belts.
“Klein? What we got in there?” The earpiece voice of the lieutenant commanding this battalion-shrunk-to- platoon cracked with impatience. Combat soldiers may be family, but every family has its jerks.
“So far, we identify a company-sized unit.”
We were outnumbered more than three to one. Armies like that ratio reversed when they attack adversaries of equal combat power.
Ari continued, “They’re massed behind cover, rocks, and boulders, just beyond the entrance. They’re wearing body armor, with just individual weapons. No mines or booby traps we can detect.”
Last night, the Slugs had been their own booby traps. This fight would be head to, well, pseudocephalon. They probably intended to give us both barrels at the entrance bottleneck, then fall back.
“Okay. G-men prep in two minutes.”
Our lieutenant may have been a jerk, but he was a sound tactician. We couldn’t just destroy this cave with artillery, even if we still had artillery, instead of it being buried under two hundred feet of volcanic dust. We just wanted to do a little pest control in our new sleeping quarters. Flamethrowers excel at cleansing enemy holes, but nothing burns on Ganymede.
That left us to apply Infantry’s unique, dirty genius: controlled, selective violence.
Each squad had two grenadiers armed with repeating grenade launchers. With round magazines, the launchers looked like the early-1900s tommy guns the old federal police “G-men” carried.
Seconds ticked away.
Thok.
Even cartridged for Earth gravity, much less the reduced Ganymede load, grenade launchers whispered and the round crawled so slow you could see it. A single grenade looped into the cave mouth. A grenade launcher is an indirect-fire weapon. The round arcs above the line of sight between the weapon and the target, the difference between a fly ball and a line drive. No explosion. It must have been a dummy ranging round, lobbed in by our most accurate grenadier.
More seconds ticked.
“Fire for effect!”
Thok. Thok. Thok.
From up and down our line, fist-size antipersonnel grenades arced like Texas League singles at a combined eight hundred rounds per minute.
Nothing. Could the Slugs keep our conventional explosives from detonating, too?
Before my heart beat again, flashes flickered in the cave’s darkness, and detonation bangs merged into a constant rumble. As small as each individual grenade may have been, the ground shook beneath my belly.
Munchkin whispered, “Wow!”
“Cease fire!”
I looked over at Ari. He nodded, eyes still closed as he spoke to the lieutenant. “There are probably forty of them still moving.”
Forty on forty was more like it. Now we had to do what Infantry had done since before Thermopylae. Dig the enemy out of his hole and bleed doing it.
“Even squads advance.”
My heart skipped.
Our gun was attached to First Squad, so Munchkin joined the rest of our squad and rattled rounds into the cave while Second and Fourth Squads ran forward, online, and crouched. I had red tracer loaded every third round and watched Munchkin stitch every shot straight into the cave. The others deluged the cave rim and exploded rock chips in a shrapnel storm so violent that Squads Two and Four dropped and covered.
“Cease fire! Odd squads advance!”
I had already loaded a fresh ammo belt. We stood, along with First Squad. Ari stayed behind, too valuable to risk in a firelight. His jaw hung slack. The grenades hadn’t trapped Jeeb inside and bullets and shrapnel would barely scratch a TOT’s paint. Ari’s Moment of Truth had passed. Ours lay ahead.
Munchkin folded our gun’s bipod legs back along the barrel, then raised it to her shoulder. We shuffled forward, on-line with our squad mates, our gun as long as she was tall. But I wouldn’t want to be a Slug in front of that muzzle.
After another leapfrog round and a half, our squad was first into the cave. We paused in the cave mouth for our night-vision goggles to adjust. Just long enough to be silhouetted as targets.
On my right, a Slug round struck a rifleman’s forehead. Our helmets will deflect a grazing round, maybe even a small-caliber bullet direct, but Slug rounds come big and fast. His head tore off.
I shoved Munchkin down as I dropped, and we both hit the cave floor before the headless rifleman’s body fell across us. There was no time to think about who he had been or where he was going, just to shove him aside as his arterial blood pulsed onto our gun’s barrel and sizzled.
Munchkin returned fire as the Slug who shot him slunk behind a rock. If we hadn’t been green and exhausted, we would have crawled in the cave entrance instead of making silhouette targets of ourselves. Careless soldiers are dead soldiers.
The little bastard was pinned down, but there was no rushing him in force. His position commanded our axis of advance, which had to be single file between rock walls. He could stay behind his boulder all day and pick off any single soldier who tried to get through. He was too far away to throw a grenade at him, the roof too low for a G-man to lob one in. The Slug just had to keep us outside for a few hours, until the nightstorm could kill us.
“Now what?” I muttered.
Munchkin shifted her aiming point to the rock wall six feet behind the boulder, thumbed her selector switch to full auto and cut loose twenty rounds.
“What—”
Her burst thundered against the wall and a hail of ricochets peppered the cavern. Half of them deflected behind the boulder.
Our gun’s echoes died.
The Slug flopped out from behind the rock, his armor shredded. Ricocheted M-20 rounds were too small and slow to penetrate Slug armor, but when an M-60 talks, everybody listens.
Before any of the dead Slug’s buddies could take over his little sniper’s nest, we were through the gap.
“That was amazing!” I told Munchkin.
“That was bumper pool.” She shrugged.
Once we got a couple squads into the main cave, it was a mop-up. We took no prisoners, not from rage but because the Slugs fought until they died. We lost two KIA. Slug firefights, we were learning, left few wounded. Their rounds tore GIs to pieces.
We secured that cave and a couple of others and copped a night’s rest while the nightstorm howled.
The next morning, Munchkin and I were back on PSD with General Cobb. He huddled up for a staff meeting with his back to a rock wall.
He looked up at the commander of the surviving combat engineers. A skinny lieutenant where there had been a colonel.
The general’s finger inscribed a circle along the holo-model escarpment, making a ring all the way around the mountain, a thousand feet above the plain. “Son, can you blast a trench ring along the military crest?”
“One thing we got’s explosives, sir.”
“Off you go.”
The lieutenant saluted and double-timed away. An hour later we heard the first boom as the engineers began
