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Luna Marine
Ian Douglas
Now that the secrets of Mars have been unearthed, nation stands against nation in the brink of a catastrophic war. A war that threatens our entire existence.The revelations on Mars – a half-million year-old legacy of the vanished star-traveling Builders – have fed the flames of catastrophic war. A beleaguered United States and its Russian and Japanese allies struggle to hold their own against the indomitable forces of the enemy United Nations. The bloody conflict that has swept over the home planet now rages across the blackness of space – with the U.S. Marine Corps in the vanguard, leading the charge as always.But Mars is not the sole repository of alien wonders. The Earth's moon hides unsettling mysteries of its own-and dangerous secrets pointing toward an unstoppable threat advancing from somewhere beyond the solar system. And as scientists on both sides ract to utilize technology they have only barely begun to comprehend, the UN makes the opening move in a gambit that could end the hostilities quickly and decisively by bringing about the death of millions…without the aid of alien-inspired weaponry.A bad situation worsens by the nanosecond. And that means it's time to call in the Marines – to make a life or death stand on the gray shores of Luna.
Luna Marine:
Book Two of
the Heritage Trilogy
Ian Douglas
Contents
Prologue
Sound did not carry well in near vacuum, but Dr.David…
One
“Okay, gorgeous. Let’s get you out of those clothes, first.”
Two
Marine Lieutenant Kaitlin Garroway leaned forward and bounced, easing herself…
Three
Sergeant Frank Kaminski stood in line with the other members…
Four
A lobber hop on the Moon was nowhere near as…
Five
The missile struck the LSCP from the right and from…
Six
“So, David,” the other archeologist said, cuddling close in his…
Seven
The Moon filled the black sky, half-full from this vantage…
Eight
“So, anyway,” Kaminksi said, “I was wonderin’ if we could,…
Nine
Jack Ramsey—Private Jack Ramsey, US Marine Corps—stood at a rigid…
Ten
There were no marching crowds today, for a change, no…
Eleven
“It is the finding of this court that Sergeant Frank…
Twelve
“Okay, ladies,” Gunnery Sergeant Knox said, grinning. He was holding…
Thirteen
David was whistling as he entered the broad, skylight-illuminated lobby…
Fourteen
“We have a problem,” the tall man said. “And an…
Fifteen
“Well, Dr. Alexander,” Carruthers said with a smile. “Are you enjoying…
Sixteen
The FBI special agent was different, this time, not Carruthers,…
Seventeen
General Montgomery Warhurst took his seat next to his boss,…
Eighteen
“I just can’t tell you how good it is to…
Nineteen
The met-boys were calling for another day with a high…
Twenty
Jack stood at rigid attention in front of Captain Thomas…
Twenty-One
The main body of 2034L was considerably smaller than it…
Twenty-Two
When the knock sounded on the door, David very nearly…
Twenty-Three
They called them LAVs, but the M340A1 Armored Personnel Carrier…
Twenty-Four
Communicating with Earth was a real problem for the Rim…
Twenty-Five
On the floor of the crater, the LAV could make…
Twenty-Six
Jack pulled his helmet down until the ring lock engaged,…
Twenty-Seven
Jack ducked through the aft airlock hatch and jumped, landing…
Twenty-Eight
“Damn, Sam. I don’t know how we’re going to pull…
Epilogue
“Lance Corporal Jack Ramsey, front and center!”
Other Books by Ian Douglas
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PROLOGUE
8 AUGUST 2040
Cave of Wonders, Cydonia, Mars
1445 hours MMT
Sound did not carry well in near vacuum, but Dr. David Alexander felt the slight, ringing vibration of each step through the insulation of his Marsuit boots. There’d been no sound within this chamber in…how long? The team’s best guess was half a million years.
“Halfway across the catwalk,” he said, speaking into the needle mike positioned close by his lips. “Twenty meters.” Over the headset clamped down over his ears, he could hear the unsteady rasp of his own breathing, the hiss-thump of his backpack PLSS. His breath, hot and moist, fogged his helmet visor with each exhalation, a white smear immediately dissolved by the stream of cool air blowing past his face.
“Ah, we copy that, Aladdin,” a voice crackled in his ears. “You’re looking good.”
Aladdin. The radio handle was a last-minute joke concocted by Ed Pohl that morning, back at C-Prime. Naming this place the Cave of Wonders had been his idea, after he’d seen the first transmissions from the penetrator robot three days ago.
It could as easily have been Ali Baba. The cavern, apparently, required a human presence to operate it, a living open, sesame to switch on power and lights and to open doors. Robots massing one hundred kilos and programmed to radiate at thirty-seven degrees—human body temperature—had failed to learn anything about the long-sealed chamber. Alexander, claiming the right as the one who’d found the cavern entrance in the first place, had volunteered to go in. He was, he estimated, a hundred meters into the vast and labyrinthine complex hollowed out beneath the Cydonian Face, and perhaps ten meters beneath the surface of the ground outside.
“Aladdin, we’re seeing an increase in heart rate and respiration. Please check your O
mix.”
“Copy.” His eyes flicked to the med and PLSS readouts mirrored above and to the right of his visor, checking that all were well in the green. Of course his heart and breathing were faster, the idiots! “O-two at six-point-three. Systems nominal. Fifteen meters.”
“Ah, roger that, Aladdin. Watch the hyperventilation.”
That sounded like Doc Penkov. He could imagine all of the Team members back at Cydonia Prime, crowded into the radio shack as they followed his progress. Only Devora Druzhinova and Louis Vandemeer were on the surface today, now waiting just outside the tunnel entrance in case he needed help.
The catwalk of black metal trembled harder with his next few steps, and he stopped, gripping the pencil-thin guardrails to either side until the motion dampened itself out. His heart was pounding hard now, beneath the breastplate of his suit. At last, he was inside the Face….
The Face…first observed on photographs transmitted to Earth late in the previous century by the Viking orbiters and subsequently confirmed by other robot spacecraft. The Face…enigma and lure, drawing scientists like David Alexander to probe its secrets, held in silence now for half a million years. Even now, with all the evidence of the ancient ruins uncovered on the Cydonian plain, with the uncanny discovery of flash-frozen and desiccated corpses of long-dead archaic Homo sapiens on Mars, there were some who yet thought the two-kilometer-long mesa’s vague and sandblasted resemblance to a human face to be the product of chance and human psychology.
The discovery of the Cave of Wonders had all but put to rest that notion. Sometime between four and five hundred thousand years ago, someone had reshaped a natural landform, giving it the vaguely apelike, vaguely human features that had attracted so much comment when they were first noticed sixty years before. At the same time, they’d hollowed out the Cave in the bedrock beneath the towering mesa, connecting it by a long, descending, and carefully sealed tunnel to the well-hidden entrance on the Face’s eastern corner, just below the left end of the harsh-carved canyon slash that formed the Face’s mouth.
Once, the Cave had been airtight, accessed through a series of airlocks that still worked at the touch of a gloved, human hand. But even solid rock is porous over geological time. The air within this enormous chamber—radar probings had established that it was a spherical cavern half a kilometer across—had leaked out long ago. The air pressure inside now stood at a little below ten millibars, the temperature constant at minus fifteen degrees Celsius.
Alexander tried not to look down. The catwalk seemed impossibly frail, a spider’s web of black, interlacing threads woven into a deck that felt solid and metallic enough but was hard to see against the deeper black of the two-hundred-meter depths below. Ahead, a pale light—a white-yellow glow a meter across without visible source—illuminated the end of the catwalk; the only other light in the place came from the worklights mounted on the shoulders of his suit and from the telltales inside his helmet.
“Ten meters,” he said.
“Hold it, Aladdin. Can you pan for us?”
“Roger. Panning to the right.” Carefully, he turned himself in place, allowing the camera mounted on the outside of his helmet to relay the view across a full three-sixty. He could see nothing but black; the cavern swallowed his worklights in impenetrable darkness, but the camera would be picking up frequencies invisible to his eye. Perhaps they were enjoying a better view of things than he, back at the Team HQ.
Alexander thought of Howard Carter. On November 26, 1922, after a long dig and repeated disappointments, the British archeologist had chiseled a narrow hole through a stone door separating him from another world, in a long-sealed tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. Air thirty centuries old, hot and stale, had gusted from the opening; a candle thrust through the hole flickered but remained lit, proving the air breathable.
Carter’s heart must have been pounding as hard as Alexander’s was now, his breathing as fast and as uneven, as he carefully enlarged the hole and peered through. The candle’s flame had been captured and flung back at him by myriad polished surfaces of pure gold.
“Can you see anything?” Lord Carnarvon, his partner and the expedition’s backer, has asked, close at his shoulder.
“Yes,” Carter had replied, his voice cracking with emotion. “Yes, wonderful things!”
Alexander knew now exactly what Carter must have felt as he first addressed that sealed, stone door leading to the tomb of Tutankhamen.
“Still not a lot to see,” the voice said over his headset, “even at IR freaks. Maybe this thing is a bust after all.”
Alexander refused to even consider the possibility. “I’m moving again. Eight meters.”
It could not be a bust. It couldn’t. So far, except for the automated controls on the airlock doors on the way in, there’d been no positive indication that there was anything inside this sealed, empty sphere worth exploring. Even so, Alexander had suggested the name Cave of Wonders in what was for him an atypically romantic whim; no one knew what they would find in the chamber, though speculation had ranged from living quarters for the transplanted humans who’d worked here, to some kind of operational center for the yet-unknown intelligences who’d brought early hominids to this place, to a starship, intact and filled with secrets buried these past five hundred millennia.
