“He holoed me today,” I said.

She turned toward me, then tried to look away.

“He’s got more passes for this weekend. And that condo. Don’t suppose you’d want to come along?”

She studied her boot toe and shrugged. “Maybe. I wouldn’t mind spending time with Major Metzger if the chance should arouse.” She squeezed her eyes shut and glowed red. “Arise.”

I grinned. “Munchkin Metzger. Such a nice name. You writing it inside your Chip-pad covers, already? Your new in-laws’ names will be Ted and Bunny.”

She threw a chair cushion at me.

None of us three ever saw the Aspen condo again. The next morning at 6:08 Mountain Time the Denver Projectile hit. We used the passes to attend the memorial service for Metzger’s parents.

“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.

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.”