I bit my tongue. The medic I had nearly killed an hour ago had said it. Ord had fried to teach me an eternity ago. This lieutenant had been through hell. We all had. Together. We were family.
Ari nodded, again. “He’s right, Jason. About doctrine.”
Why conserve Jeeb? So he would be here to see the last of us die on this rock? “Thanks for the perspective, Lieutenant. But doctrine got us in this mess. Ari, what can Jeeb look for?”
Ari walked us over to the suitcase-size holotank that showed us what he saw through Jeeb’s eyes.
He pointed. “These depressions at the crater rim are the staging area where the Slugs formed up. This”—Ari drew his finger along parallel lines in the dust—“is a trail back to somewhere.”
We watched the view change as Jeeb zoomed down and shot along scant feet above Ganymede’s surface. Miles flew by, then the dust trails disappeared. Jeeb stopped and hairpin-turned, then the view was right at ground level. I imagined Jeeb picking his way across Ganymede on six legs.
“They crossed solid rock, here, no tracks.”
“So?”
Ari closed his eyes and made a scooping motion with one hand. “Sampling. Jeeb’s taking the rock’s temperature.” Ari opened his eyes. “Okay. We switched to passive infrared. The Slugs left a trail a quarter degree warmer when they crossed this rock pile.”
The infrared holo shimmered, not like the visual-spectrum image. But the Slug trails crossed the rock, as obvious as pale smoke. Jeeb crawled slowly as he followed them.
“Sir?” Lieutenant Negative broke in.
I nodded and he continued. “If the TOT doesn’t find something before nightfall, the storm and the temperature drop will wipe out any traces. We’ll be nowhere.”
I shot Ari a glance.
He said, “Lieutenant’s right, Ja—sir.”
If I’d bitten Lieutenant Negative’s head off the minute before, he would never have offered the second bit of advice. The remaining eight hundred of us wouldn’t last to try again after the following day’s attack. It was now or never.
“So, what do we do, Ari?”
“If Jeeb switches from passive infrared to active, he can track while he’s flying.” Ari’s face darkened. “But it’s like shining a searchlight. He gives himself away to any observer who sees in the infrared spectrum.”
I shot Howard a glance. Sluggo’s autopsy and two nights on Ganymede had taught us that Slugs saw in the infrared spectrum. Ari would be risking not just a metal robot, but the flesh of his flesh, the blood of his blood. As I had risked Munchkin.
I turned back to Ari. “Do it.”
He hesitated one heartbeat, then closed his eyes. “Yes, sir.” The image rolled across the holo faster.
An hour later, the trails disappeared again, against a cliff.
Ari said, “I don’t see anything. If there was a door, you’d expect straight lines. The rarest thing in nature.”
“No. Slug doors are circular, with curved panels. Like a camera’s iris.”
Ari moved his hands and the holo image got herky-jerky again, as Jeeb climbed the vertical cliff. Ari made his hands flat and stabbed the air. In the holotank, I could see from Jeeb’s viewpoint. He hung fifty feet above the ground, his forelimbs probing for joints in the rock.
Above our heads, pebbles rattled across the roof as afternoon wind heralded the nightstorm that would end Jeeb’s search, and all our lives.
Ari opened his eyes and exhaled explosively. “Nothing. I’m not saying nothing’s there. We just can’t find it.”
Before Jeeb moved again, the horizon in the holo rotated.
I stabbed my finger. “There! It’s there!” A hole grew as the door-panel petals expanded. Jeeb was hanging from a moving door panel as it rotated open. It looked ten feet thick.
The holo went black. I shot Ari a glance.
“Jeeb only cuts contact when he thinks he’s detected. They picked up his infrared.”
“He knocked on their door?”
“Now he’ll switch to passive sensing and try to sneak in that door.”
Ari’s face was chalk and I knew why. Jeeb was nearly indestructible. But he couldn’t drill through a ten-foot- thick blast door or tunnel out from under thousands of feet of solid rock. The Slugs wouldn’t open that door again. If Jeeb got inside, half of Ari was imprisoned for life. And if the Slugs caught Jeeb and dismantled him, Ari would feel it like he was being broken on the wheel. No. Jeeb would blow himself into rutabagas if they tried that and take a bunch of Slugs with him. For Ari, it would be like spectating at his own suicide.
Lieutenant Negative pulled up his jacket sleeve to read his wrist ‘puter. Seconds trickled away.
Suddenly it hit me. I whispered to Ari, stupid since the Slugs couldn’t hear me, “Jeeb can’t transmit from under a mountain!”
Ari closed his eyes and held up his palm at me.
The holo flickered, then fired up.
Ari whispered, too. “He’s okay. He’s transmitting ultralow frequency, now. ULF just means he has to be in contact with the rock to send signals through it. His passive night vision’s working. They may suspect he’s in there with them, but they’ll never find him.”
The cave corkscrewed like the passage I had navigated in the Slug Projectile, but bigger. Then it swelled into a cavern big enough to swallow Lake Erie.
Ari lifted his arms and Jeeb drifted along the curved ceiling. Below, around the chamber’s walls, bulging, churning organic machines spurted out Slugs like green bread loaves. Near the chamber’s center, finished products in their body armor circled a spherical sack a hundred feet tall, like Muslim pilgrims around the K’aaba stone.
Howard Hibble whispered, “Jackpot.”
I looked at my wrist ‘puter. Hope should be in range, now. A corporal stuck his head in the room. “Sir, we got Slugs outside! Must’ve missed some cave cracks. They pulled down the uplink antenna to Hope .”
Whatever else the Slug common intelligence was, a slow learner it wasn’t. It realized what we were up to. It realized Jeeb had blown its cover, even if it couldn’t catch him. It had communicated to the Slugs inside our perimeter, and they attacked the one thing that we couldn’t live without, that uplink antenna. If we didn’t contact Hope on this pass, night would fall, and the game was over.
Ari stared at me. Jeeb’s only way out was if Hope’s ordnance cracked open Slugtown and busted him loose. Jeeb could survive anything short of a nuke, but he couldn’t dig for crap.
Before I could speak, Ari picked up a rifle and tore for the trench exit.
I ran after him.
Outside, Ari had already dropped three Slugs. Two more hunkered in rocks; the drooping antenna mast laid down behind them. There was no question we would get the bastards. But late was never, and Ari knew it. He charged out firing and made it all the way to them before the last surviving Slug sent a round point-blank into Ari’s chest. I ran up and shot the twitching Slug. In fact, I emptied my magazine into it. But it was over.
I stood panting.
“Sir?” A soldier who had followed me touched my elbow. I turned, and he nodded toward Ari. A medic knelt alongside him, attaching monitor leads.
“Jason?”
I knelt there, too, and drew back Ari’s blood-sodden field jacket with two fingers. The Slug round had penetrated a seam between plates of Ari’s body armor, then it had twisted through him like a ferret.
Munchkin’s wound, horrible as it was, had been a lucky nick. Inside Ari’s jacket, lungs, liver, arteries, all those miraculous human complexities, pulsed like lacerated table scraps. I gulped a breath and bit back nausea.
His breath sighed between his lips in pink froth. “Would you—?”
“Relax.” I laid my palm on his brow.
He shook his head. “No time.”
I looked at the medic. He gave me a one-inch head-shake as he unwrapped a morphine syrette.
Ari pushed it away. The effort of moving his hand made his eyes tear. Or maybe it was something else. “I
