I popped the BAM over my right eye and chinned the laser-designator function. It fired a beam that painted targets so smart bombs could see them, but it also made good binoculars.
I found the smudge of the shadow, then blinked for focus.
At first, it looked like a million snaking poppy seeds, shiny, black, and rounded.
I blinked up the magnification. Even though I expected it, my heart skipped.
Slugs. Slugs gliding over die dust like the footless snails they were. Slugs encased in shiny, black armor like “the hollow cornhusk I had tripped over when I invaded | their projectile. The armor curved around each Slug’s body like a scimitar, exposing flesh in two places. Where a face should be, a green oval showed. Above it hooked a helmetlike visor. From the left side of the body, halfway down, protruded a tentacle, what Hib-ble’s freaks called a pseudopod. Each warrior’s tentacle wrapped around a twin to that curved, sword-edged individual weapon I had fired once. Replicants of the soldiers we had battled in the caves, but these stretched across the horizon.
I glanced at Munchkin. She had followed my lead and peered through her LD, too. She muttered in Arabic.
My earpiece buzzed. “Jason?”
“I see them, sir.” The line moved toward us fast enough that dust kicked up behind it. From my vantage point, I could only tell that they were moving closer to our mountain. “Have you defined an axis of attack, sir?”
“Your salient is it, son. The TOT above you has counted fifty thousand of them.”
Fifty thousand against twenty-five. Not twenty-five thousand. Twenty-five. If every round we fired killed a Slug, thousands would remain to overrun us when we ran out of ammo.
The fact that I wasn’t surprised didn’t keep my stomach from knotting. I shivered, blurring the image of charging Slugs in the LD.
“What’s left will reach small-arms range in twenty minutes, Jason.”
“Left?”
“ Hope’s orbit brings her into tiring position in fifteen minutes.”
I stared through the LD while my jaw dropped. Of course. Fire support.
Even though Hope still sped above us miles beyond the horizon, I stared at the sky. As usual, Metzger was above the battle, literally, and poised to make things better by a button push.
“Jason, I’m switching your audio feed direct to fire control. Give ‘em hell, son.”
My earpiece went dead while I watched the Slugs advance. I switched my radio to my platoon net to give my people a heads-up.
“—must be a million of them.”
“Anybody got extra rounds?”
Both voices quavered, but they were firm.
I switched my radio back to fire control net and prayed I remembered procedure.
“This is fire control, over.”
“Fire mission, over.”
“Fire mission, aye.”
“Target, troops in the open. Coordinates…” I looked into the LD at red numbers that shifted constantly as I shifted the LD over the miles of onrushing Slugs. “Fuck! Just wax the whole place!” I paused. “Over.”
“Just play your designator up and down the line. We’ll bring the goods.” Field artillery rarely sees the enemy, but they’re a combat arm like us and proud of it.
The Slugs were close enough now to make out individuals without magnification.
Thunder rumbled somewhere.
I looked again through the LD. No, not thunder. As they came, the Slugs pounded their weapons against their armor, in unison, boom-boom-boom .
They might be doing it to keep cadence. They might be doing it to scare the crap out of their enemy.
The last part was working.
A few of them fired their weapons. Howard’s people had examined the ones we captured in the cave. They decided the weapons were magnetic sling guns. Whatever.
Their rounds fell way short and kicked up dust fountains on the plain.
I craned my neck and wondered where the hell Hope was.
Pop—pop—pop.
I jumped. Alongside me, Munchkin lay with her cheek along the gunstock. Smoke curled from the barrel. Just a three-round clearing burst.
Below us, dust fountains from the exploratory Slug firing kicked up at the funnel’s base, walking closer to us by the moment.
I looked to the sky again. The silver dot that was Hope came into view, crawling across the sky, and silhouetted against Jupiter’s striped bulk.
Below, Slug rounds now impacted a hundred yards from us.
I flicked on my laser designator and a thread-thin red beam painted the charging Slug battle line. I ran it back and forth while I peeked up with my uncovered eye.
Sparks detached themselves from Hope’s dot and drifted toward us.
My heart pounded.
Crack.
A Slug round shattered rock ten yards to our right.
Thump.
Out on the plain, a yellow flash flicked in the Slug line’s center. Then another.
Those little thumps were two-thousand-pound bombs. We were probably a mile from the impacts, but the mountain shook under my boots. A dozen dead Slugs littered each impact point. Great. But at that rate, forty-eight thousand of them would overrun us instead of fifty thousand. I stared through my LD as the Slug wave rolled toward us.
“Adjust fire? Over.” The voice in my earpiece made me blink. These first bombs were ranging rounds. I was supposed to be telling them whether to adjust aim long, short, left, or right.
“Uh. No. You’re on target.”
A bomb flicked through my field of vision as it burrowed into the dust amid charging Slugs. Dust erupted, the ground thumped and a handful of Slugs bought the farm.
“But you’re not killing dick. The dust swallows the bombs.”
Silence.
“Fuck!”
At least I knew I was talking to a GI.
The voice continued, “We racked thuds fused for ground bursts.” Assuming our LZ was rocky, our artillerymen had set fuses so the bombs would explode just after their noses touched the surface. That way the bombs would shatter rock into deadly, secondary splinters. Instead, our bombs were plunging into the plain before exploding, so the dust muffled their effect. The bombs should have been fused to burst in air fifty feet above the Slugs.
The artilleryman’s voice sagged. Artillery’s creed was “On target, on time, every time.” On the most important fire mission in history, it wasn’t.
“How long to reset fuses, fire control? Over.”
“Too long. We got airburst racks coming from the magazine.”
In my mind I saw Hope’s space squids racing racks of properly fused bombs to elevators for the trip from the ship’s core to the weapons bays. If Hope’s computer net picked this moment for one of its too-frequent blackouts, the elevators would freeze, and we would be toast.
In front of me, fifty thousand Slugs closed to where I could pick out individuals with my naked eyes.
One of my guys cut in, on platoon net. “Lieutenant? Where’s our fire support? There’s a million Slugs to our front.”
“Hang on. Aimed shots when they come in range. Out.”
Minutes crawled. Aimed shots would be worthless if the sky didn’t rain bombs, pronto.
Munchkin turned her eyes to the sky, and her lips moved. She always prayed for serenity.
I followed her gaze and prayed for shrapnel.
The Slugs had closed to where their ranging rounds struck around us every few seconds.
