Nothing moved.
“Bullfrog, this is Scorpion leader. Report fire mission effect, over.”
I coughed at the smoke, wished my filters worked.
The voice came again, higher-pitched. “Bullfrog, do you copy?” There are worse fears in combat than the fear of blue-on-blue, of firing on your own troops. But none make you feel colder and sicker.
“We’re fine, Scorpion leader. Wait one for damage assessment. Over.”
Outside the cave, wisps of purple marking smoke mixed with gray explosive smoke and with the white steam of snow vaporized by red-hot metal shards.
The bombing had melted or blown back a foot of snow, and the black-armored carcasses of Slug Warriors, sprawled in pools of their own leaked green guts, dotted the remaining snow like boulders in a pasture. There were other carcasses, brown, in red pools. Dire wolves, mammoth, some razored beyond identity.
In my earpiece I heard, “Waiting.” The voice croaked but was no longer shrill.
“Cease fire. Target destroyed. Over.”
“Bullfrog, this is Scorpion leader. You and the package ready for extraction?”
I turned. Howard had already towed our prisoner, none the worse for wear, into the sunlight.
I said, “Bullfrog ready for extraction. Send down the sling.”
Only then did I realize how successful this fiasco had been. We had captured Howard’s first useful POW, mission one hundred percent accomplished. Our little raiding party had expected to take casualties for three days, holding off legions of Slug Warriors, until the rest of Ready Brigade could deploy from the Abraham Lincoln, then land in the Slugs’ rear and decimate them. In fact, we had taken minimal casualties, and most of Ready Brigade hadn’t even had to get its feet cold on Weichsel.
I paused and swore at myself. Had my life numbed me to the point that I defined a minimal casualty as one I didn’t know personally?
The Zoomies radioed, “Bet you’re glad to see the last of Weichsel.”
I stared at a dead dire wolf and a cub-sized corpse, disemboweled beside it. Unexploded bomblets dotted the snow in the distance like spilled candy. “I’m sure the feeling’s mutual.”
The Abraham Lincoln’s return voyage from Weichsel to Mousetrap was uneventful. Ready Brigade would disembark, mourning its casualties yet feeling a bit surly over a fight most of the brigade spoiled for but never got. Then the Abe would haul Howard and its precious cargo back to Earth. I would part company with the Abe and return to my post at my headquarters on Bren.
I was in my cabin, packing my duffel to transship from the Abe to the next available transportation from Mousetrap to my headquarters when Howard rapped on my hatch frame, then stepped through, anyway.
He asked, “Jason, why are you doing that?”
“I packed my duffel when I was a spec 4. I haven’t gotten that old or that special since.” My rank entitled me to an orderly, my ego entitled me to refuse one.
“I mean why are you packing at all?”
“ Thermopylae ’s outbound to Bren ninety minutes after we dock.” As C-in-C, I could make them hold her for me, but delaying a cruiser for one VIP would cost taxpayers the price of Thanksgiving turkey for a battalion. Besides, it would make me feel and look like a prima ballerina.
“I thought you were going on to Earth, to deliver the prisoner, with us.”
I pointed with a handful of GI socks, in a general direction that I assumed was away from Earth. “Earth’s the last place I should go. You said yourself that the Slugs’ incursion on Weichsel was bait. My place is at my headquarters.”
“Your headquarters operates fine without you. It’s operating fine without you right now. And you’ve been away from Earth a long time.”
Howard was right, of course, about my staff. In a profession where unexpected death was part of the job description, only bad officers made themselves indispensable. He was wrong about the other. “I have fewer ties to Earth than a Weichselan. And I’ve spent thirty years trying to forget the Blitz, not remember it. That’s why I declined the Ganymede invitation.”
Mankind’s first interplanetary capital ships had been the chemical-fueled, cobbled-together sister ships Hope and Excalibur. I had watched the war destroy both, Hope in the victory at the Battle of Ganymede, Excalibur tilting at the windmill that had been the Slug Armada.
The first generation of starships followed, hybrids, propelled between planets by antimatter drive and between stars by Cavorite drive we pinched from the Slugs. This next class of cruisers was named for fallen human heroes, like the Abraham Lincoln. Not least among those heroes was my best friend, and father of my godson, the hero of Ganymede, for whom the Metzger class was named.
The third-generation, all-Cavorite-drive cruisers were the Bastogne class, named for historic battles, like the Yorktown and the Tehran . The first cruiser named for a battle of the Slug War was the Emerald River . The second would be the Ganymede. As the then-breveted commander of the Ganymede Expeditionary Force, I had been asked to christen the ship that would memorialize the first human victory of the Pseudocephalopod War.
“You know I think you should have accepted. Not for yourself. For all of us.” Howard’s eyes softened between his old-fashioned glasses. We were both among the seven hundred of ten thousand who survived the Battle of Ganymede.
A lump swelled my throat. “Exactly. Any of you would be qualified to christen the ship. I don’t need the pomp and circumstance. I don’t need the pain of remembering.”
Howard rested a hand on my shoulder. “Jason, your pain goes deeper than what you lost at Ganymede. Come back with me. Come back with us. Not to christen the ship. But you should be there.”
I blinked. “Why?”
Howard slipped out his microreader, punched up an entry on its screen, and turned it toward me. “They’ve decided on a replacement for you at the ceremony, someone else to christen the ship.”
I read what glowed on the screen, which was a program for the ceremony.
I stiffened. Then I stopped packing. “Why don’t you give me back those two packages I gave you? I’ll deliver them myself.”
Howard nodded. “Good.” Then he narrowed his eyes. “Exactly when did you last spend time on Earth?”
I stared at the ceiling, then ticked off on my fingers. “Not counting Pentagon meetings, hospitalization, and one academy speech…” None of which got one out on the economy. “Thirteen years.” I shrugged. “I doubt things have changed that much.”
Howard frowned. “Maybe. But neither have you.”
EIGHTEEN
WE DEPARTED THE ABE IN EARTH ORBIT, and our shuttle landed at Reagan, inside Greater Washington, but on the military side of the field. We arrived a day ahead of schedule, on purpose, so the receiving personnel weren’t expecting us. Howard wore civvies and insisted I do the same, also, so no one would notice our arrival with the most important POW in human history. Howard had a tarp stretched over the Ganglion, stenciled “rock samples,” so no one would notice. Maybe they wouldn’t, but they probably noticed the twenty plainclothes, assault-rifle-toting security Spooks that surrounded the “rock samples,” and the chain-gun equipped tilt-wing that hovered above them.
A Spook convoy met Howard and our prisoner and hustled them off to Fort Meade, so the interrogation could begin. I had my own agenda.