“It?”

“My working hypothesis is these physically separate organisms are a single cognitive entity. Last night bolstered my view. No more individual thought or fear than hair growing.”

“So what do I plan for?”

“Frontal assault. Massive and remorseless.”

“They may find us tougher in conventional battle. One armed human soldier can take these worms out by the hundreds.”

“We’ve underestimated these worms so far. When Jason fought them in that Projectile, he observed individual weapons and what may have been body armor. Last night it traded weapons and body armor, that wouldn’t fit in those cracks, for surprise. Don’t expect it to repeat tactics. Expect warriors.”

“Still think they can’t fly?”

“No evidence of it so far.”

General Cobb pointed at the holo and nodded. “Alright We will prepare to defend against an attack across the plain. We have to assume they can cross the dust. They got into those caves somehow.”

Fifty feet away, four engineers tried to epoxy-glue a shelter together. It would blow away like a McSushi wrapper when the twilight gales came.

General Cobb turned to Howard. “Can we be safe in those caves? Those cracks could still be full of the slimy little bastards.”

Bad enough we had no safe place to sleep. Enemy troops could be hiding inside our defensive perimeter.

No Slug could defeat a GI one-on-one. But they didn’t need to. We couldn’t chance sheltering in the caves, while they could come at us in numbers we couldn’t even guess. Exposed out here on the surface, we wouldn’t last another night.

General Cobb looked back at the cave that entombed most of Headquarters Battalion and uncountable Slugs, then at Howard. “We have to be able to shelter in those caves.”

Howard unwrapped a nicotine-gum stick. “It’s not as simple as plugging a leaky bucket with chewing gum, Nat.”

Futile silence ticked by, broken only by engineer curses as they sprayed epoxy on shelter panels.

I cleared my throat. “Sir? Maybe it is.”

General Cobb turned to me. “Jason? You got an idea?”

I held up one of the now-useless sprayers for the epoxy that was to have glued together the panels of our above-ground shelters. The epoxy that we had too much of because some idiot computer clerk sent it instead of fruit. “We’ve got a thousand palettes of epoxy. It bonds to rock and sets up in sixty seconds stronger than steel. We send an escorted engineer team into enough caves to shelter us for the night and fill all the cracks. Any Slugs still hiding in those walls will stay there.”

Burying Slugs alive didn’t bother me a bit.

The general turned to Howard. “Will that work?”

Howard shrugged. “I haven’t heard a better idea.”

The general motioned to a lieutenant who now commanded a platoon-sized battalion, then pointed at the epoxy-spraying engineers. “Do it!” General Cobb pointed at Munchkin and me. “Here’s your MG team. I don’t need bodyguards.”

And I didn’t need to go back into a cave full of Slugs. When would I learn to shut up?

An hour later, forty of us lay on our bellies twenty yards outside a cave we had skipped last night. We could, I suppose, have cleaned out the caves where our dead lay. They should have held fewer live Slugs, maybe even none. Instead, a chaplain at each one said a few words, then the engineers sealed them with explosives.

This cave’s entrance was a slot as narrow as a double doorway, but, as Jeeb had discovered, it widened inside into a low-roofed cavern that could sleep hundreds.

Beside me Munchkin lay with her cheek against our gunstock, her eyes and mine wide and searching for movement inside the cave mouth. Ari Klein lay alongside us, eyes shut but seeing more than we ever could.

At the cave mouth Jeeb, chameleoned as gray as the stones he scuffled across, disappeared into the dark. Ari’s alter ego was literally bulletproof but closed eyes didn’t mean that Ari was relaxed. His jaw was tight, fists clenched. Sending Jeeb into a closed space risked Jeeb’s “life,” and Ari’s sanity.

Jeeb was wired with enough ounces of explosives and incendiaries to fry himself to avoid being captured and dismantled. Brain-linked TOTs were new. In their brief history, none had ever been destroyed or had self-destructed. But every time a new model replaced an old TOT, its Wrangler got sedated for a month, just to adjust to the loss. GIs who didn’t understand sneered that Wrangler was a cake MOS. I knew better.

I fidgeted and realigned already-aligned ammo belts.

“Klein? What we got in there?” The earpiece voice of the lieutenant commanding this battalion-shrunk-to-platoon cracked with impatience. Combat soldiers may be family, but every family has its jerks.

“So far, we identify a company-sized unit.”

We were outnumbered more than three to one. Armies like that ratio reversed when they attack adversaries of equal combat power.

Ari continued, “They’re massed behind cover, rocks, and boulders, just beyond the entrance. They’re wearing body armor, with just individual weapons. No mines or booby traps we can detect.”

Last night, the Slugs had been their own booby traps. This fight would be head to, well, pseudocephalon. They probably intended to give us both barrels at the entrance bottleneck, then fall back.

“Okay. G-men prep in two minutes.”

Our lieutenant may have been a jerk, but he was a sound tactician. We couldn’t just destroy this cave with artillery, even if we still had artillery, instead of it being buried under two hundred feet of volcanic dust. We just wanted to do a little pest control in our new sleeping quarters. Flamethrowers excel at cleansing enemy holes, but nothing burns on Ganymede.

That left us to apply Infantry’s unique, dirty genius: controlled, selective violence.

Each squad had two grenadiers armed with repeating grenade launchers. With round magazines, the launchers looked like the early-1900s tommy guns the old federal police “G-men” carried.

Seconds ticked away.

Thok.

Even cartridged for Earth gravity, much less the reduced Ganymede load, grenade launchers whispered and the round crawled so slow you could see it. A single grenade looped into the cave mouth. A grenade launcher is an indirect-fire weapon. The round arcs above the line of sight between the weapon and the target, the difference between a fly ball and a line drive. No explosion. It must have been a dummy ranging round, lobbed in by our most accurate grenadier.

More seconds ticked.

“Fire for effect!”

Thok. Thok. Thok.

From up and down our line, fist-size antipersonnel grenades arced like Texas League singles at a combined eight hundred rounds per minute.

Nothing. Could the Slugs keep our conventional explosives from detonating, too?

Before my heart beat again, flashes flickered in the cave’s darkness, and detonation bangs merged into a constant rumble. As small as each individual grenade may have been, the ground shook beneath my belly.

Munchkin whispered, “Wow!”

“Cease fire!”

I looked over at Ari. He nodded, eyes still closed as he spoke to the lieutenant. “There are probably forty of them still moving.”

Forty on forty was more like it. Now we had to do what Infantry had done since before Thermopylae. Dig the enemy out of his hole and bleed doing it.

“Even squads advance.”

My heart skipped.

Our gun was attached to First Squad, so Munchkin joined the rest of our squad and rattled rounds into the cave while Second and Fourth Squads ran forward, online, and crouched. I had red tracer loaded every third round and watched Munchkin stitch every shot straight into the cave. The others deluged the cave rim and exploded rock chips in a shrapnel storm so violent that Squads Two and Four dropped and covered.

“Cease fire! Odd squads advance!”

I had already loaded a fresh ammo belt. We stood, along with First Squad. Ari stayed behind, too valuable to risk in a firelight. His jaw hung slack. The grenades hadn’t trapped Jeeb inside and bullets and shrapnel would barely scratch a TOT’s paint. Ari’s Moment of Truth had passed. Ours lay ahead.