“Sergeant Major, I was the first modern human being to see a Slug alive. Colonel Hibble and I are the only people left alive who’ve been inside a working Troll incubator ship. This is a hasty operation, with the war at stake.
This plan, more than most, won’t survive contact with the enemy. Improvisation, based on intuitive knowledge of the Slugs, may decide the result. No human in this galaxy has fought more Slugs in more venues than I have. If I didn’t apply my specialized expertise on the ground, where it could do some good, I’d fire myself.” My chest puffed a bit. I doubt that Churchill made as good a speech when he argued his case.
Ord chewed his lip. Real-time battlefield communication had made leading from the front obsolete since Rommel, and we both knew it.
I pointed at the Spooks as they gawked and dawdled. “If Rusty’s two best infantry companies can protect that bunch until the cav lands, they can sure protect me.”
Ord crossed his arms, frowned, but nodded. “I want the general to know that I question the true rationale behind his decision.”
“But it is my decision?” Generals don’t need to persuade sergeants. Maybe I was really persuading myself.
“Indubitably, sir.”
I nodded and harrumphed.
“Then may I accompany the general?”
“No. There isn’t room, and you’re too valuable here.” Both reasons were more or less true.
I locked down my visor, then stepped toward the loading ramp.
“General?” Ord’s voice crackled in my earpiece.
I turned back toward him as he saluted. “Keep the maggots off your ass, sir.”
I returned his salute and smiled through my visor. “Always, Sergeant Major. This one should be easy.”
ELEVEN
FOUR MINUTES LATER, I stood tail-end-Charlie on the ramp behind the Spooks as a medic plugged in to the meds catheter on each man’s armored thigh, then handed the troop off to the loadmaster to be fitted into the Scorpion’s weapons bay like a breathing log with Plasteel bark.
As only one of seven hundred fifty survivors from the Ganymede Expeditionary Force, I remembered how, during the Blitz at the start of the war, infantry got hauled through space for days, sedated and stacked inside de-mothballed space shuttles, to save space and conserve life-support systems. I also remembered being hauled off the battlefield of the First Battle of Mousetrap like a flour sack, in the emptied weapons bay of a Scorpion, which up until then nobody had ever ridden in.
Today, we had drugs that could knock a GI colder and revive him sharper.
I put two and two together and figured that we could convert the fastest, stealthiest single-seat fighters in the universe into squad-carrying landing craft. Nobody had tried it yet, but it seemed to me like a terrific way to surprise the maggots.
I gave myself a mental back pat for that particular application of my specialized expertise. Just one more example of why I should send myself in with the first wave. I stepped up to the medic.
He pointed at the cap of my catheter, his eyes on a sedative syrette while he unpeeled it. “Open up, newbie. This doesn’t hurt.”
It was actually easier for the medic to open the catheter cap from outside the suit, but forcing a newbie to reach around and unscrew it with his gauntleted fingers was a simple test to be sure the newbie had at least some fine-motor skills in armor.
I said, “You go ahead, doc. I’ve done this before.”
He jerked his gaze up from the syrette, and his eyes widened when he saw the stars stenciled above my helmet visor. “General Wander?”
“Just along for the ride. What are you pouring, today, son?”
He unscrewed my catheter cap, then plugged in the syrette. “Uh-thousand milligrams of timed-release Neobarbitol with a delayed amphetamine and caffeine chaser. And a hematopoietin to enhance red blood cell growth. Thirty minutes from now, you’ll drop out like you fell off a table, and when you wake up you’ll be ready to scrimmage the Chicago Bears for forty-eight hours straight.” He paused. “At least-”
“At least that’s how it affects younger troops?”
“Yes, sir.”
I hate drugs, but I hate missing a party worse. I patted his shoulder as he depressed the syrette’s plunger. “I’ll be fine, son.”
The loadmaster also did a double take when he saw me shuffle into the bay. He and I would be rearmost in the pod, and thus first from this ship to exit onto Weichsel. He harnessed me, then helped me pack in alongside three young Spooks and boots-on-helmet to the trio behind us. Most were already purring along in the low-metabolism sleep that would allow all of us to live together in this oversized sewer pipe for three days.
The loadmaster wriggled in alongside me. The medic dosed him, then toggled the ramp’s controls and backed out on it. That left us all hanging in the bay, heads down, like bananas on a stalk, with the deck plates thirty feet below us.
I held my breath. Then the clamshell doors below whined closed and left us in absolute darkness. I exhaled. I don’t mind tight spaces as much as I mind heights.
The way the first phase of this operation, the part I was about to sleep through, was supposed to work was that as soon as the two infantry companies and the Spooks were buttoned up inside their Scorpions, the Abraham Lincoln would make the jump from the Mousetrap and pop out three days’ travel from Weichsel.
We didn’t know what kind of sensing the Slugs used to detect a ship, but it seemed to work as well-and as poorly-as ours. That meant the Slugs occupying Weichsel would know immediately that a human cruiser had appeared three days away from them. The Slugs also knew that in three decades of war we had staged every landing we had attempted by bringing capital ships like the Abraham Lincoln within low-orbital distance. So, Abraham Lincoln would carve obvious, loitering figure eights just beyond the Temporal Fabric Insertion Point it had popped out of, posing no threat.
However, as soon as Abraham Lincoln popped out, she would launch all thirty-six Scorpions poised, like the one I hung within, on her launch rails. The Scorpions would make for Weichsel like scalded gnats, as invisible to the Slugs as Scorpions were to us, according to the Spooks.
Two days and twenty hours later, the infantry inside the Scorpions would waken. Two days and twenty-three hours later, all thirty-six Scorpions would form up in space a hundred miles up, directly above Howard’s precious Slug brain. Then the Scorpions would dive straight down through Weichsel’s atmosphere at ten thousand miles per hour, stop on the proverbial dime at an altitude of forty feet, turn their stinger ends down toward the ground, and open their bay doors. Scorpions were less gravity-shielded than cruisers, so the troops would endure six G and arrive bruised and nauseated, but that was a price any GI would gladly pay to avoid being shot at.
The Slugs, knowing that the Abraham Lincoln remained a safe three days’ journey away, would be tactically astonished. At least, that was the assumption.
But if this first-wave landing went wrong, the Scorpions’ bays were clogged with useless troops, not weapons to defend themselves ship-to-ship. The four Firewitches patrolling above Weichsel weren’t nimble, but as soon as they realized they had company, they would swoop in. At best, the Scorpions would scatter like quail and sneak back to the Abraham Lincoln, and the operation would crater. At worst, pieces of these kids and of me would be scattered across the snow a hundred light-years from home.
In my earpiece, over the beeps and chirps of telemetry, the Scorpion pilot’s intercom voice buzzed. “In a moment, our flight attendants will begin our beverage service for all of you back there in the main cabin. Correct change is always-”