need to go fast. Jeeb feels what I feel.” Ari gathered himself to speak again. “Jason, he’s alone now. He doesn’t understand. He’s an orphan, like you.”
The medic looked blank, presuming Ari’s delirium.
“Take care of him?” Ari asked me.
“Sure. Always.” With those words I adopted a steel-and-plastic orphan.
Ari relaxed and lay back against hard stone. I saw his eyes close through my own tears.
Behind me, troops raised the mast.
By the time I got back to the radio, Metzger’s voice crackled. “Jason?”
“Wander here. Over.”
“What’s happening down there?”
“Too much. We need everything you’ve got. I mean everything, delivered on the coordinates the TOT’s transmitting to you now.”
“Jason—”
Even radioed from orbit I could hear it in Metzger’s voice. “What?”
“We got nothing. Computers are down.”
“Fix ‘em.”
“We’re trying! By next orbit—”
“There is no next orbit!” I told him what was going on.
“Those coordinates are halfway around Ganymede,” he said.
Silence.
“Jason? How is she?”
“Alive. Hurt, but alive.”
“You believe this Slugtown is the real deal?”
“Ari believed it enough to die for it.” There was no time for tact. “Munchkin’s pregnant.”
More silence.
“Okay. I’ll take care of everything. Good-bye, Jason.”
In that moment, after a lifetime together, I knew exactly what he meant.
I dropped the mike, walked out into Ganymede’s twilight, and looked to the sky. Hope drifted into view over the horizon, one hundred miles high, silver against Jupiter’s red disk. Sparks flickered from her and drifted down toward us. Escape pods. Hope’s crew was abandoning her, on Metzger’s orders.
One pilot in the world could fly Hope alone, without computers, lying on his belly in the Navigation Blister while Ganymede’s horizon stretched before him. One pilot in the world could calculate and execute course corrections to bring her mile-long bulk screaming down on Slugtown in half of an orbit.
Metzger chose to end his marriage where it began, in that star-spangled crystal dome.
Hope streaked flame red across the sky, now, as she dropped into the atmosphere. By the time she reached
Slugtown in Ganymede’s opposite hemisphere she would be a molten mass, trailing fire miles wide.
She disappeared over the horizon. I held my breath.
The flash came first, blinding even half a world away. I threw myself on the ground as the blast wave and then seismic quakes rocked Ganymede.
History would say that Metzger died to save the human race. History would lie. Metzger sacrificed himself to give his wife and unborn child and the rest of us on this rock a chance at life.
The next morning, Jeeb sent images back to the holotank as he flew home, his course erratic. The electronics people said the explosion had freed him from the Slugtown cave, but scrambled his circuits. I believed it was grief.
Hope’s impact had rent the very fabric of Ganymede. Lava and liquid water flowed in a flaming, steaming, unending mass across the other side of this world. This world that the Slugs no longer held. The volcanism lit the sky dull red as the seven hundred of us who had survived settled in for a long, cold occupation.
We reestablished radio contact with Earth and got thanked. Politicians radioed that a grateful world had awarded me the Medal of Honor. I had it presented to Walter Lorenzen’s mother.
That afternoon, before the nightstorm came, Howard Hibble and I scaled the crag above HQ and looked out across the battlefield.
Howard tucked his bandaged arm against his side. “In the end, gadgets didn’t matter. Soldiers who could choose to live or to die for one another fought perfect soldiers that died without thinking. We should have lost. But we won.”
Below us, dead Slugs blackened the plain and the mountain.
There, too, lay nine thousand children who traveled 300 million miles and made Ganymede their orphanage forever. The dropships Pooh Hart had led Uttered the foot of the escarpment, and I imagined I could see her grave from here.
“Won?” I shook my head. “Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. He said there is nothing so melancholy as a battle lost, except a battle won.”
I sat on the cold stone of Ganymede, laid my elbows on my knees, and cried.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
I run my hands along the vibrating viewport frame as the new ship hangs in parking orbit above United Nations Base Ganymede. So much a part of me is the ship’s vibration that I notice it only when I have time to think, like now.
The Metzger class is so much Hope never was. Beyond the viewport at ten-mile intervals orbit the other four cruisers of the Metzger class. Synchronous with us, they glisten silver against space’s black velvet. Utility barges one hundred feet long scurry around the cruisers like ants around logs. The new ships’ antimatter bottles alone are as large as Hope’s entire payload section was.
The new cruisers have better gravity. That means real showers instead of years of sponge baths. Their agriculture labs grow hydroponic fruits and vegetables for us grunts, not just bootleg vodka. Maybe best of all, the Metz ’s antimatter interplanetary drive gets here from Earth in half the time. After decades of drift, war made us leapfrog direct from chemical propulsion past fission, fu-sion and plasma to AMat. Metzger would be proud of the class of ships they named for him.
Below the viewport green streaks are visible on Ganymede, even from here in orbit. The lava flows and liquid-water floods touched off by Hope’s impact continue even now. Eons ago, meteors did the same thing to Ganymede’s sister satellite, Callisto. But with these flows heat was released from Ganymede’s depths. Evaporation released oxygen into the atmosphere. Oxygen content reached half-Earth-normal last year and climbs annually. And the heat has increased the surface temperature so high that the ag-lab wizards are growing things down there. Just primitive lichen, so far.
Nonetheless, along with death and destruction, war brought life to Ganymede. War forced men beyond the moon, and now to the stars, where we might not have ventured for centuries. Horrible trades that those were, they are no less fact.
I step away and turn back into my stateroom. Rank hath its privileges. As embarked-division commanding general, I have a tree. Just a foot-tall bonsai juniper, but green, alive, and all mine.
A six-legged football preens beside my juniper. The stateroom’s not all mine. I share with Jeeb. His combat circuits fried when he escaped Slugtown. As an obsolete J-series, they decommissioned him, extracted his self- destruct explosives, and let me buy him for scrap. Machines have no personality, of course. But I see Ari in him every day.
I sit at my desk and read the screen. I read a lot during the years it took for relief to reach Ganymede. Enough to earn my master’s in military science and validate my field promotion. The longest-distance correspondence course in human history, completed while on the most boring diet. Rations for a force of ten thousand fed us seven hundred survivors, but we were glad to see peaches when relief arrived.
They busted me back from division commander to second lieutenant, correspondence degree or not. Why and
