Chapter Twenty-Seven
“Tony, did you get that peach cobbler recipe?”
I flexed my knees as I stood in the conference room corner at ease and listened to General Cobb run the GEF daily staff meeting.
It had been two weeks since the Slugs had killed Metzger’s family and the rest of Denver. Judge March had been out of town; so had my brief foster family, the Ryans.
GEF’s business continued. Permanent assignments were being made. Munchkin and I were the crew-served-weapons team of the Headquarters Battalion personal security detachment. That meant one of us attended each staff meeting in case a Slug wandered in to knife the general.
Even though I was just wallpaper, it was interesting.
General Cobb stared across his conference table at his logistics officer.
“Distributed the recipe to every mess in camp, sir.”
“Finest damn cobbler I ever tasted.”
When I was a civilian, about a million years ago, I would have thought that a general spending staff meeting time on dessert recipes was insane. But Napoleon—who knew a thing or two about soldiering—said an army travels on its stomach.
General Cobb spun his chair toward me. “What do you think, Jason?”
“Sir?” My spine stiffened and adrenaline spiked through me. General Cobb knew the first name of every one of the ten thousand soldiers in GEF and called each of us by it. Or so the legend went.
“Well?”
“It’s beats ham and limas, sir.”
“How’d you know about ham and limas, son?”
“We ate C-rations in Basic, General.”
“I’ll be damned! Well, they didn’t kill either of us, did they?”
“Not yet, sir.”
The commander of the Ganymede Expeditionary Force nodded, grunted, and turned his attention back to saving the human race.
Howard Hibble sat at the table’s far end, and General Cobb nodded for him to report.
In the smoke-free room, while he licked a Tootsie Pop, Howard reported a 2 percent probability that the Slugs would incinerate us on landing.
What strategy and tactics we had sprouted from the loopy crania of Howard’s spooks. From wreckage and Sluggo’s anatomy and my experience they tacked together our battle plan. What to take, what to leave on Earth; how we would travel on Ganymede, how we would shelter; most of all, how to win. Ganymede was million miles distant, but the answer to that last question seemed even farther away.
As division sergeant major, Ord sat in, too. He didn’t say much, either. But it comforted me to know his infallible self was part of the team.
“Space Force choose us a ship captain yet?” General Cobb looked at the Space Force liaison officer, a light colonel.
She screwed up her face. “They’ve trained several. There are political considerations. It’s down to a field of three.”
“It better be down to a field of one by next week.”
We weren’t scheduled to embark for months. For years, as far as the public, and hopefully the Slugs, knew. We needed every minute of the time to train.
But Munchkin had noticed that the training schedule cut off next week. General Cobb wanted a pilot for the big ship being built out in lunar orbit, the ship that nobody knew existed, also by next week. My adrenaline spiked again.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Two days later they packed us all into the auditorium building. MPs stood guard at every door, weapons locked and loaded. That was new.
General Cobb strode to the stage, fatigues crisp and eyes clear. “You know we have six weeks of training to complete here. And more before we embark.”
Years more, theoretically. And we needed it all.
He nodded toward the MPs. “What I say next remains here. No outgoing holos, no letters, nothing.”
Feet shuffled.
“The ship is ready.”
Silence became more silent Officially, the GEF soldiers knew no more than the published cover story. Embarkation was five years away. Unofficially, most suspected it would be sooner, maybe after only a couple years.
“The ship’s waiting in orbit around the moon. We leave for the moon next week and transfer to the ship there. We’ll complete training during the six hundred days en route to Ganymede.”
A hiss of fifteen thousand drawn breaths echoed through the room. General Cobb couldn’t have surprised his troops more if he had shown up in clown shoes and a red rubber nose.
He looked to the back of the auditorium and nodded. An MP turned and opened the double doors.
“Her name is United Nations Spaceship Hope. UNSS Hope is one mile long, and she will carry us 300 million miles. And back, God willing. I’ll let her skipper tell you more. Most of you know him, by reputation, at least.”
The commodore commanding the biggest vessel in human history walked down the auditorium’s center aisle to the stage as troops stood on tiptoe for a look. Resplendent in Space Force dress blues, he looked old beyond his years, weary. Like a man who had been orphaned two weeks before.
Metzger reached the stage, and General Cobb walked over and handed him up.
I didn’t hear much of what Metzger said. I just watched him while my ears rang. I think it was mostly details of how they would pack ten thousand of us into Interceptor cargo bays like cordwood to fly us to the moon.
Afterward, Metzger, Munchkin, and I sat in the Officers’ Club and talked over beers.
“You could have told me.”
“It wasn’t final until two days ago.”
Metzger twirled his beer bottle. “The psych people needed to check me out. See if I was stable after the loss.”
“And are you?” I tried to see behind his eyes. I knew what ate him. Metzger had wangled a weekend pass to chase a girl when he could have been on duty, intercepting the Projectile that killed his parents and one million others. No guilt could attach to him, personally, any more than to the patrolling pilots who were up there, in crates too old and slow to stop every Projectile. But guilt is as personal as a thumbprint, and as indelible.
Such guilt and sorrow would have crippled most people. Metzger wasn’t most people. He could firewall those emotions from the calculating part of his brain that was going to exact revenge.
His voice echoed from behind the firewall. “I’m coping.”
“But why you, anyway? Hope’s an ocean liner. You drive speedboats.”
He shrugged. “It’s not like anybody else has experience at this. And there’s politics.”
Of course. There were lots of pilots. Few of them were heroes. None of them were war orphans. Until two weeks ago.
War never made sense. But the idea that losing your family passed for luck was hard to swallow.
I shook my head. “Even if you’re ready, we’re half-trained.”
He shrugged. “And the ship’s barely flyable. But the Slugs will expect us to embark so that we intercept Jupiter when it’s closest to Earth. That means departure in two years. Going now may surprise them, even though we fly farther.” His face darkened. “And Earth is running out of time faster than we knew. Ambient-temperature drops will freeze most harbors permanently within a year. The climate of Kansas is already Alaskan. Three years from now wheat won’t grow at the equator. We go half-ready or we may as well stay home and die.”
Two days later, after dark, a stream of Hercs landed without lights to fly ten thousand of us to Canaveral.
The five thousand alternate troops would remain at Camp Hale and impersonate fifteen thousand people, to keep the Slugs from knowing we were on the way. They had inflatable, fake vehicles to park where ours had been, and banks of radio and holo transmitters to send out tons of voice and coded traffic like we were all still here. They would go into Leadville for haircuts twice as often, so civilian businesses would see no drop-off. Since none of us had family to wonder where we were, the deception would be easier.
The Allies pulled off a similar trick before they invaded Europe in World War n. General Pa
tton commanded a phony army in England. The Axis believed it was the main force for weeks after D-day.
Those who remained behind turned out on the runway to watch us go.
Headquarters Battalion formed up on the frozen tarmac, all of us navigating using our night-vision goggles. I saw Wire, the old SEAL, striding up the line, inspecting gear. He gigged a soldier who had a pocket unbuttoned, and the guy said, “Yes, Sergeant Major.”
Odd. Ord was the division sergeant major.
I glanced at the stay-behinds lining the runway. Ord stood among them, arms folded. He had been designated a mere decoy. My stomach knotted. I was about to fly 300 Bullion miles to fight a desperate battle. Now I had to do it without Ord.
Wire, our new division sergeant major, faced us right, and we marched to our Here’s rear ramp in the green darkness of a night-vision world. I snuck a glance at Wire. He had aged years in the last days. Losing family does that Would the next year shock me as gray as Uncle Sam?
Engines whined, and the smell of burned kerosene filled the wind. My boots hit the aluminum ramp, and I scanned the crowd until I picked out Ord again.
He snapped off a salute in our direction.
It was intended for me. That was impossible, of course, since I was an enlisted man, and one among thousands, at that. But I returned it, as a lump swelled in my throat.
I don’t remember much of our trip from Canaveral to Hope. They sedated us all to slow our metabolisms, made us wear diapers, then tucked us into individual, coffinlike tubes. The tubes got stacked inside Interceptor cabins and cargo bays like cordwood, one hundred per Interceptor. That meant a hundred ships had to fly to the moon. If we had all ridden up like airline coach passengers, it would have taken a thousand ships.
I understood why we had to travel that way. Still, I awoke three days later hungover, weightless, a quarter million miles from home, and needing a diaper change. I was among the few who awoke so early.
My travel tube had been loaded in the forward cabin of my transport. I popped the end off and wriggled out. Drifting forward, I anchored myself with two fingers on the pilot’s seat back. I peered out the windscreen, over the pilot’s shoulder.
Hope hung regally above the moon’s white curve, gray against space’s blackness, even bigger than my memory of her as an orbiting skeleton. Though she was built to move faster than any manned object in history, she needed no streamlining. She most resembled a mile-long beer can, with an open parasol attached to her front.
We drifted toward Hope while our pilot stretched arms above her helmeted head.
“Automatic pilot?” I asked.
She nodded. “For a couple more minutes.”
I pointed ahead at Hope. “What’s the parasol?”
“Solar-wind sail. Photons headed out from the sun bombard it and boost her speed. But her conventional engines do most of the work.”
“What happens when she gets to running as fast as the photons?”
“Photons move at light speed. Hope wouldn’t get going that fast if she accelerated on out past Pluto!” She snorted.
Well, pardon my dumb-grunt command of physics.
It occurred to me that I didn’t want another round of extravehicular activity like the one that nearly killed me on my last trip to the moon.
“How do we get aboard?”
She pointed at a belt of indentations that circled the big ship’s midsection. “Docking bays. There’s twenty. They’re really for those dropships that fly you from Ganymede orbit to the surface.”
A tawny-gray wedge shape drifted behind each docking bay, at the end of a slender tether. Actually, the drop-ships themselves were so small compared to Hope, and almost the same color, that what I saw were the black shadows they threw on the mother ship’s massive hull.
“They disengaged the dropships and hung them out on their umbilicals so we could deliver you guys.”
I squinted at the dropships and remembered my trading-holo pictures. “They’re Lockheed-Martin Venture Stars. NASA cancelled that project in 2000.”
She half-glanced my way. “2001. You’re smarter than I thought. The dropships are unpowered airframes. The troop-transport bays are 767-airliner fuselages stuffed in where the fuel tanks would have been in the old space plane.”
My jaw dropped. “We fly through space in antique airplanes?”
“The fuselages are reinforced. But they’re really just souped-up gliders.”
I swallowed and wished I hadn’t read so much military history. “Every major glider-borne assault in the history of warfare ended in catastrophe.”
“That’s because they didn’t have the world’s best pilot flying lead.”
“And that would be… ?”
“Me.”
I pulled myself forward to see what the only human cockier than Metzger looked like, but her helmet visor covered her face. Her coverall name tag read hart.
I was close enough that I heard a faint voice squawk inside Hart’s helmet. She jerked her thumb aft. “Get back there and strap in. I’m flying, here.”
Hart was a captain so I did as I was told, but I left the end of my tube open and watched. One by one, our hundred-foot-long transports drifted close, then stabbed their disembarkation tubes against Hope’s docking-bay air locks, like a mosquito swarm attacking a rhino.
Up close, the dropships drifted in vacuum like titanic bats, a graceful, new generation dwarfing these old space shuttle-based crates.
Metzger’s maneuvering of the LEM when he landed us on the moon had been impressive. But Hart slid us up to Hope’s air lock as smoothly as a falling snowflake.
Hope was a mile long and three hundred yards in diameter, but that didn’t mean we had elbow room. Fuel and munitions packed much of her. We did, however share semiprivate cabins for the nearly two-year crossing to Jupiter. Her decks were concentric, so the floor of the lowermost deck was the outer hull. The inhabited decks formed rings around a tubular core that was fuel, mechanicals, and storage. Hope rotated just fast enough to create centrifugal gravity equivalent to Ganymede’s. The decks, in turn, were stacked like cake layers.
The embarked division lived in the aft layers, the Space Force crew forward. Headquarters Battalion bunked forward, right at the Space Force boundary. Each deck was further divided into male and female territories, which were closed to the opposite sex except for the hour after evening chow.
Ari and I drew a cabin two hundred feet from Munchkin’s.
The three of us ate our first meal aboard together, then Ari went to recalibrate Jeeb to reduced gravity while I walked back with Munchkin to see her cabin. We had to sidestep down the narrow corridors, a maneuver soon dubbed the “Hope Shuffle,” because food and munitions palettes packed every corridor to the low ceilings. In six hundred days, the excess would be consumed, and there would be room to play hockey in the corridors if we chose.
Munchkin’s cabin was identical to ours, spartan bunks, wall lockers, and two tiny, built-in desks with wall screens. She waved her arm at the unpainted bulkheads. “I think pale yellow.”
I shrugged. “I wonder what else didn’t get finished before we left.”
The uniforms hung in the other wall locker were sky-blue. “Who’s your roomie?”
“The numbers came out odd. I drew a Space Force pilot. An officer.”
“Hey.” The voice was female and familiar.
I turned and saw in the cabin’s hatchway a Space Force captain not much taller than Munchkin. Her hair was silky, brown, and short, framing a round face with cheeks like peaches. She wasn’t slim like Munchkin, but to me she filled her coverall perfectly.
It was her eyes that made my heart skip. Big and brown, with long lashes.
She extended her hand. “You Wander?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Pooh.”
“Ma’am?”
“Forget the ma’am. It’s gonna be a long trip. Call me Pooh. Short for Priscilla Olivia Hart.” She poked an index finger into each cheek and gri
nned. “These were even chubbier when I was little. My brother said I looked like Winnie the Pooh. He used to read me the book. I loved that book.” She blinked as her grin faded. Every grin on this ship faded when the subject turned to family.
She was cute and vulnerable, and I melted. Then I recognized the name. The cocky transport pilot. Cute, vulnerable, but also sassy. My meltdown turned permanent.
A Klaxon sounded, and I jumped.
Munchkin said, “Hours. See you in the morning, Jason.”
Pooh Hart smiled. “Tomorrow night you can read to me.”
The gravity seemed even lighter as I crossed the bulkhead back into male territory.
The next morning we awoke to metallic clatter in the corridor. I opened our hatch to find Space Force enlisted men dropping off paint cans and old-fashioned brushes at each cabin. They said spray painters would have overloaded the ventilators. I think the army just wanted to keep us busy.
The first weeks of the voyage we all painted, sanded, bolted, and welded everything the exhausted workers on the moon had been unable to finish before they passed Hope to us like God’s own relay baton.
As for Munchkin’s dream of a pale yellow cabin, the army supplied one color. UNSS Hope soon became known as UNSS Taupe.
While we kept busy with the brushes, Metzger and his crew steered a course that kept either Earth or the moon between Hope and Ganymede. The idea was to hide us until we were a few million miles from Earth. Space is a big place, so when Hope emerged, naked in space, any Slug watching wouldn’t notice one more mile-long asteroid. Theoretically.
It was no more audacious than Doollittle’s raiding Tokyo with one naked aircraft carrier during World War II. And the Pacific’s a smaller place to hide than the Solar System.
You have no idea how many brushstrokes it takes to paint a vessel the size of a couple dozen aircraft carriers. I occupied my mind during the painting day thinking up excuses to drop by Munchkin’s cabin during social hour, on the chance Pooh Hart would be there.
After social hour, I spent any spare time chipping out every military-science entry in the ship’s library. One midnight I was sitting at my desk reading. Ari, face to the wall in his bunk, moaned. “You actually care whether the Byzantines adopted Roman combat-engineer practices?”
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