Jeeb never slept, so he perched on my chair back, reading over my shoulder. What Jeeb saw, Ari saw, too, in his head.
“I dunno.”
“You bucking for Officer Candidate School?”
Until he said it, I’d never thought of it. “You need a college degree.”
Ari wrapped his pillow around his ears. “You need a lobotomy. Go to sleep.”
Besides sleep, our routine included PT, of course, to keep us at Earth-normal strength and fitness levels, even as our coordination adjusted to Ganymede-level gravity. We would be strong enough to perform as human soldiers never had.
We also got periodic lectures from Hibble’s spooks on what to expect.
On the sixty-third day out, we sat in the forward mess, which doubled as a lecture hall, and listened to an astro-climatologist, a Nepali.
The scientist aimed a laser pointer at an on-screen outline. “The atmosphere will be as thin as Earth’s at Mount Everest’s summit Colder—2 percent oxygen compared to Earth air’s 16 percent.”
That meant no air support. Jets, prop planes, and helicopters needed oxygen to combust their fuel. Jeeb, who ran on Eternad batteries, would be our only flying vehicle. Ditto tanks and trucks. A handful of battery-powered GOATs, adapted from lunar service, would be flown down in the first dropship, but Ganymede was going to put the foot back in foot soldier.
A soldier raised her hand. “Will the Slugs have air capability?”
Howard Hibble stood at the side of the room. “We’re betting no. This is one of the most important things we learned from inspecting that crashed Projectile. Slugs are anatomically similar to cephalopods and jellyfish. No skeletons. The only Earth phyla that have evolved flight capacity are vertebrates and arthropods. An animal needs rigidity to fly. Our flying machines mimic animals with hard parts.” He shrugged. “The Slugs shouldn’t have figured out flight.”
“They figured out interstellar travel.”
Howard said, “Moving through vacuum doesn’t involve aerodynamics. It’s a human conceit that since we built spaceflight technology up from atmospheric-flight technology that another intelligence had to do the same.”
The climatologist broke in, “If they were so smart, they would have stabilized Ganymede’s climate better. Like Earth’s moon, Ganymede keeps one face to Jupiter. Its sidereal period—one revolution around Jupiter—takes just over seven days. Sunshine, such as it is, for eighty-four hours, then an eighty-four-hour night. In the night cycle, contraction of the atmosphere due to cooling creates windstorms.”
So we had heard. Rather than tents, we would shelter the stormy nights in fiberglass huts, which the combat engineers would glue together with an epoxy that sprayed out as liquid but set up instantaneously even at zero Fahrenheit.
The army being the army, somebody in supply had loaded a thousand extra palettes of epoxy in place of a thousand of dried and fresh fruit. Anyone aboard would kill for strawberries, but we had enough epoxy to glue together the city of Tallahassee. Logistics were a bitch, as Lee found out during the American Civil War when he tried to invade the North.
Mistakes in feeding his troops drove General Cobb nuts. He even had communications cobble together a cook-to-cook radio net to improve meal quality.
That evening after chow Pooh had duty, so Munchkin visited our cabin. She flopped on my lower bunk and tap-danced her boots on Ari’s mattress above, where he propped on one elbow, reading. She had to stretch her legs all the way out to reach. If I joked about it, she’d be hurt.
“I can obtain freeze-dried peaches. My friend in Delta Company came in to a boxful. She says she sweet-talked a mess sergeant in a battalion back aft. Personally, I think she sucked his dick for them.”
Munchkin relished things sexual. Just not between us.
Ari poked his head over his bunk edge. “You can earn a can of real ones in syrup I was saving for my birthday.”
“You? For a single can of peaches?” She wrinkled her nose.
“I call this progress. Now we’re just haggling over price.”
The contemplated activity was entirely hypothetical.
Romance aboard Hope violated regs, even between fellow noncommissioned personnel like Munchkin and Ari.
“But I know your heart belongs to the unobtainable commissioned officer, Commodore Metzger.” Ari sighed and hung his head in mock dejection. Jeeb, dangling batlike from a bunk rail, couldn’t sigh; but he mimicked his Wrangler’s action.
Metzger took meals with us when his enormous duties allowed, he and Munchkin mooning at one another across a table two feet across, but separated by nonfraternization regulations as wide as the Asteroid Belt.
It would have been laughable, but I felt the same ache whenever I saw Pooh Hart.
Other than eating chow, sleeping, sponge bathing, reading, and speculating on the deviant behavior of others, for the next five hundred days we cleaned weapons, broke them apart, and cleaned them again until we were afraid we’d rub them down into useless metal slivers.
We did calisthenics in the training bays. We double-timed laps around the outer-perimeter corridors like hamsters in an interplanetary wheel. We moved crates and keyed letters into Chipboards that we hoped someone would read someday. We maneuvered in units small and large. We took target practice on virtual and live-fire ranges.
And all the while we tried to forget what we were preparing for.
One of those attempts to forget became my third court-martial offense.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
It began innocently. Everyone, except General Cobb who spent his so-called off hours prowling the ship in search of ways to make his troops’ lives better, got one day off duty out of every ten. You might wonder why bother, sealed up with the same ten thousand others in a taupe-walled tin can.
But that free day became the cherry on everybody’s sundae. First, you could wear civvies. Everyone had been permitted to bring one change of civilian clothing. Second, you could sleep until noon if you chose. Third, you could play. Some soldiers formed bands, mixing everything from bagpipes to balalaikas. Others went to the holos. One of the teaching classrooms had a killer setup and it was given over to recreation half of every day. The cooks even took turns making free popcorn, theater-style.
I always went to the holos. Not for the shows, though the ship had every title imaginable. I begged Munchkin to clue me when the world’s best dropship pilot scheduled her free days, men I bartered desserts and extra duty like a rug merchant until my schedule matched Pooh’s. Pooh loved holos. At least, she was always there when I turned up.
It took me weeks to figure out that Pooh and Munchkin planned Pooh’s schedule to match mine, anyway. Women think men are idiots. They’re right.
Pooh hailed from western Wyoming. Her civvies were a plaid shirt and jeans that fit either too tight or just tight enough, depending on one’s perspective.
No nonfraternization reg restricted one’s perspective, nor how good an officer could smell. On that day Pooh’s jeans fit indecently, and she smelled of lilac.
“I’ve seen this one already. I’m skipping.” She pointed at the bulkhead holo poster.
I had been aching to see it for weeks. “Me too.”
She ducked her head toward her popcorn bag and plucked a kernel out with her moist tongue tip. “Gravity’s less in the storage bays at the ship’s axis. I thought I might go try it.”
“Want company?”
“C’mon.” She waved her hand as I followed her jeans to the elevator tube.
The munitions bays were always populated as the Space Force armorers checked and rechecked the millions of pounds of precision-guided munitions that Hope would rain down from her orbit around Ganymede to support us. Similarly active were the vehicle bays where mechanics maintained the GOATs.
Deepest inside were stored the upships. They were packed away because they would only fetch us back up to Hope from Ganymede if and when we had won. Rumor had it they only held five thousand, total. That meant the pla
nners calculated that one of every two of us would buy the farm on Ganymede. I preferred to calculate the perfection of Pooh’s jeans.
The provisions-storage areas were dimly lit and deserted.
Hope’s core rotated more slowly than the inhabited, perimeter decks. The resultant reduced gravity caused my first step to bounce me off the deck as I stepped from the elevator into a freight-palette maze. I read a label. One of our zillion palettes of epoxy that had displaced fresh fruit.
Ahead of me, Pooh hopped and touched fingers to the twelve-foot ceiling. Her giggle echoed in the emptiness. She lost her balance on the way down, spun to face me, and I caught her at the waist
The right thing was to set her down and let her go. Fraternization was a court-martial offense in combat, and we had begun drawing combat pay when the first booster lit at Canaveral.
Her lips and mine were eight inches apart, and the warmth of her breath feathered my cheek. She closed her eyes, and I forgot about the right thing.
The most wonderful thirty minutes of my life later, the roar of my own breath in my ears was interrupted.
“Jason? What are you doingT The words exploded an electric shock up my spine. I knew General Cobb’s voice without opening my eyes, even here where no one should be. The best commanders inspect what the troops ignore.
What to answer? Practicing mouth-to-mouth? Pooh’s mouth was in no position to improve my respiration.
I opened one eye and saw General Cobb standing hands on hips, jaw hung open. I tried to straighten to attention and screen Pooh from view but tripped on my pants. I tried to salute but tangled my hand in her bra.
General Cobb averted his eyes. “Don’t answer. I’m old, but I remember what you’re doing.”
Pooh and I tucked ourselves back into our clothing, then he turned and faced us. I knew he would recognize Pooh as an officer. As Number One Dropship pilot, his life and that of all of us in Headquarters Battalion would be in her hands. Which, at the moment, she was wiping on her jeans to obscure certain evidence.
I squeezed one eye shut. “Sir—”
General Cobb held up his palm and sighed. “You two aren’t the first.” He shook his head. “Stuff ten thousand kids with maybe two years to live in a steel tube. Then pretend they aren’t human. Sex won’t kill us, but time wasted hiding it might.”
He turned away. “Carry on.”
The next day regs changed. Cabin hatches could be closed during social hour with no questions asked. Rumors spread that even marriage might not be questioned.
One hatch that closed immediately was to the commodore’s cabin. I never saw Metzger or Munchkin anymore except when I guarded a staff meeting he attended and when Munchkin and I trained together.
At sixty DTD, or days-to-drop, we had an early-morning University-of-Hibble class in Slug biology. Munchkin and I sat together as gunner and her loader.
The lecturer, Dr. Zhou, held captain rank, but she was just a cryp. Short for cryptozoologist. “Pseudocephalo-pod physical construction is barely more complex than the amoebae under your high-school-biology microscope. The lone specimen lacked neural structures consistent with independent thought. Socially, Slug society may resemble a single organism.”
On a high-school-science trip into the Rockies, I saw the world’s largest single living thing, an aspen grove that looked like a thousand separate trees. It was centuries old when the Slugs killed it.
Howard Hibble chimed in. “Expect perfect coordination among individual enemy soldiers, directed by a hive intelligence.”
Someone asked, “What will that intelligence tell them to do?”
Howard shrugged. “To behave like perfect soldiers. We’ll learn as we go.”
I swallowed. Sixty days remained before school would be in. Lots of us would learn only how to die. The day before, somebody leaked onto the ship’s net a Pentagon study made before we left. It ranked GEF military-occupational-specialty categories for combat survivability in the coming action. The release infuriated the chain of command, and the study quickly became known as “The Numbers.”
Hope’s stay-in-orbit crew had the longest life expectancy, followed by the dropship pilots like Pooh. The flyers would stay at arm’s length from the fight.
Projected lifetimes for other MOS shrank after that. Shortest were the commanding general’s personal security detachment. Not only did the theater commander in chief have an invisible bull’s-eye painted on his butt, the soldiers assigned to protect him were expected to throw themselves in front of it to save him. According to the Earthside computers, once a firelight started, Munchkin and I each had eleven seconds to live.
She seemed untroubled, though. I had watched Munchkin’s hands on our gun for nearly two years. They shook when she was happy, steadied as she got serious and deadly. This morning they positively trembled.
She leaned close, and whispered, “Jason, last night Metzger asked me to marry him.”
She could have just slapped me with a dead trout. I knew Metzger was busy, but this highlighted the gulf that had opened between us. Munchkin had displaced me. Metzger’s world now revolved around her like Ganymede around Jupiter. “That’s great.”
“We want you to be our best man.”
I felt less left out and smiled a little. “When we get home?”
“Next week.”
For the next hour I watched the instructor pace the stage, but I heard little. I thought, then I thought some more.
Since the fraternization policy change, Ari had hooked up with a demolitions expert A nice girl from Tel Aviv who drooled at his accent but couldn’t tell a west-of-the-Pecos cowpuncher from a north-of-the-LBJ-Freeway haberdasher. After all, his MOS was Wrangler. Jeeb, his Wrangl-ee, got exiled to the corridor during Ari’s social-hour trysts with her in our cabin. Still, doing it with a guy whose brain was coupled to an electric roach smacked of menage a trois to me.
Ari and I now alternated closed-door rights to our cabin for social hour. That evening was my turn. When I got there, Pooh’s coverall already hung folded over my chair back while she lay on my bunk with the blanket pulled up to her nose.
“In a hurry?” I asked.
Her eyes twinkled. “Just homy.”
I pulled my chair next to the bed, straddled it, and laid my chin on its back, where I could smell the sweetness of her in the fabric of her coverall. “I’ve been thinking.”
“Me too. Climb in, and I’ll prove it.”
“No. I mean thinking. About us.”
A shadow crossed her face.
I unbuttoned my bulging uniform-blouse pocket. There was a ship’s store aft. The jewelry section was small potatoes, but the clerk said it was the thought that counted. I fished in the pocket and my fingers touched the velvet box.
Her hand pressed mine. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what? You don’t even know—”
She shook her head and her eyes glistened. “We can’t. I can’t”
The human heart is physically anchored in the chest by tissue and cartilage and blood vessels. Mine sank into my gut like a cannonball. “What?”
She sat up, the blanket still clutched to her chin, and brushed her fingers on my cheek. “It’s nothing wrong with you. There could never be anything wrong with you.”
“Then what?”
She turned away and whispered into the bulkhead. “You saw The Numbers.”
Til beat The Numbers.“
“You’ll do something noble and stupid and die!”
We sat still, and I listened to her breathe.
She turned to me, her eyes swollen. “I’m already an orphan. I won’t become a widow in eleven seconds.” She squeezed the blanket with both fists while her breath came in gasps. Then her hands trembled, and she sobbed, huge and soft.
I grasped her bare shoulders, turned her to me, and held her while she shook and wept.
An hour later, the Klaxon sounded, she dressed and left without a word.
We didn’t speak about it again, but in the r
emaining days we made love like each moment counted for a lifetime, while the DTD clock rushed toward zero.
The Metzger-Munchkin nuptials were strange, not just because they were the first in human history held beyond the moon.
Hope’s only window was the Navigation Blister, a forty-foot crystal dome that jutted from the bow. A platform extended into it like a wide diving board. There an astrogator peering through an ancient, manual alidade could navigate by the stars, and even steer the ship from the blister if the computers went down. They went down frequently, for hours at a time, but since Hope was tracking toward Jupiter like a bowling ball between rails, the blister never got used.
Metzger was ship’s captain but couldn’t officiate the civil ceremony for his own wedding. However, Metz-ger’s crew numbered five hundred, and GEF was ten thousand. So the embarked-division commander was really in charge, and everybody knew it. General Cobb stood at the far end of the diving board in full-dress uniform, the civil-ceremony book resting in his white gloves. Above his head and beneath his feet space’s still, black velvet stretched. Sprinkled stars seemed to swirl as Hope rotated on her axis. Metzger stood beside the gen-eral, every inch the military groom, down to his sash and saber.
We had adjusted roles. Pooh served as maid of honor, Ari stood in as best man, and I gave the bride away, like a brother.
First down the aisle trundled Jeeb, history’s first six-legged ring bearer.
Pooh stood beside Munchkin and me, waiting her cue. Jeeb waddled ahead, his radar-absorbent coat gleaming in starlight, a velvet pillow balanced in his forelimbs.
Pooh touched her bouquet to her nose, then turned and pecked my cheek. “Someday, I want white roses, too. You’re the best.”
My chest swelled. My weeks of bartering for duty time to match Pooh’s schedule had taught me Hope’s black-market structure. Hope had an agriculture lab, the idea being mat after we took Ganymede we would try to grow stuff to feed ourselves. For a month’s pay plus a Crackerjack ring I no longer needed, I had scrounged the rarest commodity in outer space, flowers, from an ag-lab technician.
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