Fire control said, “On the way.”
God bless squids. God bless Hope’s computers.
Our incoming painted heaven, now. The bombs’ heat shields burned away as they dropped through the atmosphere. They left fire trails like shooting stars crossing Ganymede’s dark sky.
Bombs began exploding in an accelerating crescendo, like popcorn in a microwave. Each detonation took out Slugs by the hundreds.
I switched my radio to platoon net. My guys whooped with each explosion.
I held the LD on the Slugs, even though smoke—no, not smoke, nothing burned, here, dust—obscured them.
When the dust broke, I saw, at each explosion’s epicenter, Slugs vanish. Just body fragments Uttered the next ring out from the bull’s-eye, then still, whole carcasses beyond mat.
Slugs were inhuman. They had murdered my mother and were out to kill me. Yet for a moment, as high explosives flung them like sacks, a pang touched me for living things now dead.
The dead Slugs’ comrades in arms shared no such grief. The rear ranks skimmed over the fallen without pause.
It seemed our ordnance pounded them for hours, but Hope was only in firing position for minutes each orbit. Nothing but dust showed in my LD’s eyepieces.
Echoes of our last bombs died, and I squinted at the dust cloud below.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
At the base of the funnel, Slugs emerged from the dust, climbing toward us and pounding their armor.
“Shit!”
Their front line came even with the most-distant of Munchkin’s range markers, and she squeezed off a three- round burst. Three Slugs dropped. So their armor wasn’t bulletproof.
It didn’t need to be.
They advanced on-line, as fast as a sprinting man. Odd numbers leapfrogged ahead while even numbers fired, then advanced. I sighted on one who would soon stop advancing and present me with a still target.
Just as their pattern emerged, they switched. Random groups advanced, and others covered. I swore and swung my sights.
No Slug slowed. No Slug hesitated beside a fallen comrade. No Slug broke ranks. Perfect Infantry.
If our bombs had slaughtered tens of thousands, they also missed thousands. Too many. Too close. I dialed up platoon net. “Fix bayonets.”
I reached to my belt, slid my stubby bayonet from its scabbard, and clicked it below my rifle muzzle.
Munchkin kept firing. Slugs kept dropping.
More kept coming.
I squeezed off aimed shots while her loader changed barrels. M-60 barrels overheat. The loader uses an insulated glove like an oven mitt to unscrew the barrel and replace it.
While she waited she looked at me. “Jason, I need to tell you—”
Her loader finished and tapped her helmet. She turned her head back and resumed firing.
Ricocheting Slug rounds cracked all around us, now, but it seemed Slugs were crappy shots. Maybe they really couldn’t see us in our red armor.
But we saw them from fifty yards, which is how close their lead soldiers were.
“Switch to full auto.” At this range, aimed shots wouldn’t save us.
My words were intended for Munchkin, but I saw her thumb the selector switch on our gun even as the words left my lips. I switched my rifle to full auto and blazed away.
I don’t know how many magazines I changed until I reached to the ammo pouch at my waist and felt nothing but empty fabric.
A Slug warrior lunged at me with his weapon’s edge. I parried, then stabbed my bayonet into the green place where his face should be. His insides sprayed my sleeve as he fell, twitching. I braced for the next ones and prepared to die.
I stood my ground, arms shaking, for minutes before I realized there were no next ones.
The first breeze of Ganymede’s coming night blew dust away. Black Slug corpses carpeted the ravine floor in front of me, stacked one on another in places. The one I had bested in hand-to-pseudopod combat was their high-water mark. Two armies had journeyed light-years to fight a battle decided by knives stabbing flesh.
I looked around and saw Munchkin’s loader sprawled alongside the gun, a neat hole in his forehead.
She lay still, facedown alongside him. My blood froze.
“No! No, no, no!” I knelt beside her, and her fingers twitched. Thank God!
Then I saw the stiff, red stain on her jacket shoulder.
I turned her on her back, slow and careful, then cut away her clothing. The wound was eggcup deep and showed shattered bone. Coagulant powder would stop her bleeding, but she must have lost a quart already. I bit my tongue as I sprinkled antisepticIcoag powder, then packed the hole with a field dressing.
“Jason?”
“You’re fine, Munchkin.”
“I’m cold.”
Shock. Blood loss. I propped her feet higher than her head with a rock. One thing Ganymede had was rocks.
Her loader lay dead, in battery-heated clothing he no longer needed.
It took minutes to strip his stiff corpse and wrap Munchkin in his clothing. I overrode his thermostat so his batteries warmed her and started an IV with plasma from my backpack.
She needed more.
I fired up my radio.
“Jason? What the hell happened?”
General Cobb’s voice snapped me back to my job. “We stopped them, sir.”
“The TOT shows me that. Why didn’t you report?”
Because I thought Munchkin was dead. “Tending wounded, sir. We need medics here. Bad.”
“Everyone does. We’ll send what we can. Jason? Howard thinks they’ll come again. You need to regroup.”
“They can’t come again. They didn’t retreat to re-group. We killed them all.”
“He thinks they’ve got a hatchery someplace. They’ll keep making more until we run out of troops and ammunition.”
Cheery news.
Munchkin sobbed.
“Sir—”
“I know. See to your troops. Out.”
I switched the BAM to display the vitals of my platoon before my eye. Sixteen solid, green bars showed survivors. Munchkin’s bar was green, but blinking for wounded. There were nine blinking red crosses. The corporal from Chicago was a red blinker.
As the night wind kicked up, we withdrew to a Hibble-sanitized cave behind our sector. Moving Munchkin made no sense, but she couldn’t stay outside. I shot her up with morphine and carried her fireman-style across my shoulder. She never let out a peep until she lost consciousness. Then she screamed with every step I took.
I may have slept that night, huddled against Munchkin in frigid blackness while unbreathable wind howled. But mostly I half dreamed of dead people. Mom. Walter Loren-zen, who gave his life for me but never won a medal for his mother. Wire, the sergeant major. Pooh. The loader with the hole in his head, whose name I didn’t even know. Eight other GIs I only knew as blinking red crosses who had just died because I hadn’t known how to save them.
At first light, such as it was on Ganymede, the gale abated and the Slugs came again. This time artillery cracked them hard, miles out on the dust plain.
I pulled triple duty, commanding, firing our machine gun, and loading it myself. The closest remaining Slug took a fatal round a hundred yards downrange from me.
But we still lost three more men. Little by little the Slugs would wear us down. I ached from toenails to scalp
