Howard Hibble. He sat with his back against the trench wall, a rifle across his bony knees. Its stock had shattered. Howard never touched rifles if he could help it.
A medic knelt beside him, dressing Howard’s bloody forearm.
“What happened?” I asked.
The medic tied the dressing. “Slugs breached HQ. Major here mowed down fifty. Clubbed the last two with his rifle butt.”
I almost smiled. “Holy Moly, Howard!”
He rolled his head back against the rock. “I’d kill for a cigarette.”
“You still think they’re a hive entity?”
He nodded, slowly.
An orderly entered the room, saw me, and snapped to attention, head cocked below the ceiling. “Sir!”
“I’m Wander.”
“General Cobb said to bring you to him as soon as you arrived.”
The orderly led me deeper into the warren of roofed trenches that had become HQ since I’d left. Unit radios squawked. Litters of wounded were ranked along trench walls. Too many were no longer wounded.
He handed me off to another orderly, who led me to the wide trench that formed GEF’s nerve center. The roof had been breached. Dead Slug warriors slumped in the opening. Don’t mess with Howard Hibble.
“I’m Wander. New CO of the Third of the Second.”
“No, sir. You’re not.”
“What?” Rage surged in me. I’d abandoned Munchkin for nothing?
“Jason!”
I turned. General Cobb lay on a litter, a pressure dressing banded across his eyes with blood-soaked gauze strips. I knelt beside him. He groped for my arm, frowned as his fingers slipped in blood. “You hit bad, son?”
I looked down. A metal splinter jutted from my bicep. I hadn’t even noticed. “No, sir. You—”
He shook his head. “I can’t command what I can’t see.”
Somebody cried for her mother. I looked around, then back.
“You’ve done okay with your platoon. You’ll do okay with the division.”
My ears rang. Not just from the cacophony around us. I was supposed to play one poker hand for the future of the human race? I didn’t even know the rules. And I had no cards. “Division, sir? I never. I can’t.”
“You will. Hell, it’s not much more than a battalion left, now.” He reached to his collar, fumbled with his stars, then pressed them into my palm.
“Coffee, General?” A private held out a canteen cup in a shaking hand. To me.
I shook my head, pointed to General Cobb. The kid took his hand, pressed the cup into it. Then the private asked me, “What do you need, sir?”
A fucking clue, for starters. I sat still and breathed.
General Cobb reached up, groped for the back of my head. He tugged my ear down to his lips and whispered. “Jason, you’re in command! The one thing you can’t do is nothing. Do something , even if it’s wrong!”
I turned to the private as I pinned the stars to my collar. “Get me staff. Now.” I needed information.
“Sir, there hasn’t been a live staff officer for twelve hours.”
Somewhere a wounded man screamed.
Of course there was no staff. Why did I think an acting lieutenant had been jumped over colonels, majors, and captains? They were dead.
“You have any idea what our strength is?”
“Eight hundred available for duty, sir.”
“What about the other brigades?”
“All brigades. Eight hundred left in the whole GEF, sir.”
“It can’t be.”
“It is.”
We needed fire support more than ever.
“How do I talk to Hope ?”
He pointed across the room, at a radio console on a folding table.
“Why isn’t somebody manning that?” I asked.
He stepped to it and turned it, displaying a line of holes across the back. “It got shot up today.”
No wonder we’d lost fire support. I would have blamed the ship’s computers.
“Nobody’s talked to Hope in hours. Except the cooks, of course.”
“What?”
He pointed across the room. A corporal wearing mess fatigues sat at a radio, talking.
“They been sending up menu orders, just in case Hope can get some hots down to us. You know how General Cobb feels about feeding the troops.”
The firepower to destroy a planet hung in orbit above us, and the only working uplink was being used to order stew.
I jumped up, snatched the corporal’s mike, and spoke. “Who is this?”
“Who is this ! ‘Cause this is Senior Mess Steward Anthony Garcia and I got work to do! So get off my net, dick brain.”
“This is Division Commander Wander, Garcia. It’s my net. If you want to stay senior anything, you patch me through to Commodore Metzger on the bridge. Now.”
Silence. While I waited for the patch, Howard Hibble and Ari came in, along with a handful of surviving junior officers. Except for Howard, their combined age matched a Scout troop.
Ari said, “Heard you got a small promotion. Sir.”
I nodded, then held up a finger as Metzger’s voice came through. “Jason? You’re commanding?” He didn’t have to say what he meant. If I was in charge, things had gone to unimaginable shit down here.
“I’m commanding. How’s fire support? ‘Cause we’re hurting down here.”
Static roared. The mess uplink had been the general’s indulgence. It was an obsolete radio with a line-of-sight antenna. We’d have to wait for Hope’s next orbit to talk again.
I turned to Howard. “How do we stop them, Howard? Because even if Hope can bomb the Slugs back for another attack, eventually she runs out of bombs.”
Howard sucked his teeth. “It. Stop it. There’s probably a single central point, a brain if you will. It breeds troops there, thinks there, fabricates Projectiles there.”
“You know this?”
“Wild-ass educated guess.”
A lieutenant, real, not day-old like I had been, seesawed his hand. The jerk who had been impatient with Ari when we assaulted that cave. “More likely they decentralized their command and control structure. They’re not dumb.”
Howard shrugged. “Never said it was dumb. Just different.”
I looked around at all of them as we hunched under the low ceiling. “Howard guessed right about the frontal assault. Anybody got a better guess?”
Feet shifted, but no one spoke.
I slapped my palms on my thighs. “Okay. We need to find this brain. Fast.”
The lieutenant spoke again. “If we had choppers… or if we had time to get patrols out across the dust bowl…”
I looked at Ari. “Jeeb.”
Ari nodded.
The lieutenant shook his head. “Sir, doctrine is we keep the TOT tight to the division. It’s too valuable for patrolling.”
Adrenaline surged in me. This lieutenant was probably incredulous that I got jumped over him. My spec-four patch remained sewn on my sleeve, even if my collar brass said different. The last thing I needed now was attitude from somebody who was supposed to be working for me. And I was the by-God division commander! “Lieutenant—!”
He winced.
