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 grinned. “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?”

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.