I zipped into my mummy bag, lay on my back, and counted ceiling cracks until I dozed. I didn’t take my downer. Fitful sleep seemed preferable to drugs. Once bitten, twice shy, they say.

Despite all of the day’s disasters, the feeling gnawed me that I had missed something, that the worst was yet to come.

I dreamed I was back in the twisting corridors of the Slug Projectile, scrambling for my life, catching toes and ringers in those air vents two finger widths wide. And every corner I turned I found putty-bodied Slugs writhing toward me from out of nowhere.

I half woke in blackness to echoing, muted human snoring.

And something else.

Plop. Plop.

Like big raindrops. I flicked my goggles down and waited until they let me see.

Outside our low-ceilinged alcove, in the main chamber, rain leaked slowly from the ceiling. Well, the astro-geologists said Ganymede had water.

The drops were enormous. They oozed from ceiling cracks and fell on the upturned faces of sleeping, drugged GIs. But the soldiers lay sleeping, still.

It seemed so odd.

I shrank deeper into my mummy bag. Heated fatigues or no, it had to be ten below in here.

Electricity flashed through me. It didn’t rain at ten below.

I came awake as adrenaline surged. I tossed my head to drop my goggles.

Slugs!

Amorphous Slugs by the hundreds oozed from ceiling cracks and wall cracks. Cracks just as wide as the doors in the Projectile walls that I had mistaken for ventilators.

I had seen holos of octopi squeezing through rock cracks an inch wide. It seemed so obvious now.

As obvious as where the stupid humans would land. As obvious as where we would shelter when the night storms came, if any of our ships survived the crater dust. As obvious as the fact that all guards would face out into the night, not inward to sound the alarm.

We had blundered into a massive and perfect ambush.

I turned my head to see a Slug stretch rope-thin from the ceiling to drape itself over Munchkin’s face.

“Fuck!” I tore the zipper out of my mummy bag and lunged toward her.

Her arms and legs thrashed as the Slug smothered her, so muffling her screams that Ari slept on, beside her.

I wrestled the blob off her, snatched a rock from the cave floor, and pounded the thing into slime.

Munchkin sat up, gasping and scrubbing her face with her hands.

I grabbed my rifle and began picking off green ceiling bulges as they appeared. As I fired, I ran among our soldiers, kicking Slugs off them and screaming to wake them.

In moments, constant gunfire echoed. Acrid gun smoke filled and fogged the chamber. Whether the battle raged for minutes or hours I’ll never know.

More Slugs dropped and oozed into the cavern than I had bullets.

Few GIs stirred. The Slugs had been at work for hours before I woke.

I backed to our alcove at the side of the main cavern.

The general blazed away with his sidearm, Munchkin, Ari, and Howard with rifles.

The cavern fell silent except for the sobs of too few wounded.

Ari and the others knelt behind the bodies of dead soldiers. He snapped back his smoking rifle’s charging handle. “No ammo, Jason.”

I looked over my shoulder. A hundred remaining Slugs writhed toward us. We would simply be smothered.

I felt the harness on my chest. Hand grenades. In this closed space, they would be as deadly to friend as enemy. Unless.

My boots straddled a human corpse. I dragged it toward the alcove and piled it on top of the body in front of Ari.

He looked at me. “Wounded are alive out there, Jason.”

“They won’t be, one way or another.”

He nodded, lips tight, then jumped to snatch another dead man. In seconds we had built a flesh wall.

I jumped and rolled across, crouching down alongside the four of them. General Cobb nodded, and we all snatched grenades from our chest harnesses. I froze, staring at mine.

The memory of Walter Lorenzen’s dead eyes filled my mind.

“Jason!” Munchkin slapped my cheek, then pulled the pin and threw her first grenade over the barricade formed by our dead.

Thunder reverberated. Shrapnel whizzed like oversized mosquitoes. The five of us hurled grenades into the cavern until we ran out.

Explosive echoes died and left the sound of our gasping and the howl of outside wind.

I pulled myself up and peeked over the now-shredded bodies that had saved our lives. My gloves slid across blood.

Mounded, motionless Slug carcasses lay tattered over hundreds of torn human dead. Nothing moved but pooling blood and Slug slime. Each fluid trickled, then froze in seconds.

The five of us were all that remained of Headquarters Battalion. If the other caves were hit as hard, we could be the five survivors out of ten thousand.

I turned away, slumped, then fell to my knees and threw up my guts.

General Cobb knelt beside me, hand steadying my shoulder.

Drool strings froze as they dripped from my lips, and tears blurred my vision. “I can’t do this.”

“You just did. I wish I could tell you it gets easier.” It didn’t.

In next morning’s calm twilight, GEF licked its wounds and struggled to survive one more day.

General Cobb knelt in the dust outside the cave that entombed most of HQ Battalion. He rested a hand on a suitcase-size holomap balanced on a flat rock. Previous staff meetings I had guarded took place around a polished synwood conference table with an orderly refilling officers’ coffee cups. Actually, this meeting was Munchkin’s tc cover, but she huddled behind a rock puking.

Today, GEF’s staff slouched in a ragged ring around the commanding officer. Most wore new, elevated-rani collar brass. With the nearest promotion board 300 million miles away, GEF had streamlined rules for such things. One staffer was original, a colonel, his hand shrouded in field dressing stiff with frozen blood. He was alive only because he had been checking equipment in a line brigade’s cave, instead of with us in HQ Battalion-The staffers he commanded died in our cave. He was alive, but he hung his head like he wished he could join them.

Junior officers promoted from other units stood with helmets askew and uniform jackets untucked. For most, last night had been their first combat. We were beaten, and it showed.

The general looked around. “First thing you do, straighten up your gear.”

Vacant eyes stared back at him.

“Now, gentlemen! If we look like whipped dogs, we’ll fight like whipped dogs.”

New majors and captains snapped to, adjusting uniforms and straightening spines. I buttoned a pocket on my own uniform and tightened a sagging web-gear suspender. Somehow, I felt better. I looked at the others and found light in eyes that had been dull.

General Cobb nodded, then asked an acting colonel, “Casualties?”

He was really a major, new to his job as division Operations officer. He hesitated. “HQ Battalion got hit worst. But some of the other caves were nearly as bad. My battalion—”

“Numbers, Ken.”

“We have four thousand available for duty.”

Sixty percent casualties after one day! I took a step backward.

For the briefest moment I thought General Cobb’s shoulders sagged. Then he pointed to the major. “Reassign troops to restore unit integrity. You’ll have to fold some battalions. We’ll be spread thin, but that can’t be helped. Once we stabilize a defensive position we’ll think about offense.” The general nodded, then turned to Howard Hibble.

Howard’s uniform still looked like the inside of a laundry bag, but that was normal.

“Howard, if the tittle bastards can’t surprise us any more, will they leave us be?”

Howard screwed up his face, then exhaled. “Don’t think so. It perceives a threat.”