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“What the hell?” Delgado said. “Different aliens?”
“More recent aliens,” White said. “The Mars, um, artifacts are supposed to be half a million years old. I just finished going through some of Billaud’s notes—”
“Who’s Billaud?” Lee wanted to know.
“Marc Billaud,” Avery said. “The head UNdie archeologist here. A very important man. Earthside wants us to find him, bad.”
White ignored the interruption, forging ahead. “Dr. Billaud’s report suggests that the ruins they’ve uncovered here are considerably younger. Perhaps even dating to historical times.”
“Shit,” Machuga said. “Startin’ t’look like Grand Central Station around here.”
“What difference does it make how old they are?” Palmer wanted to know.
“The astronuts,” Kaitlin said. She’d talked about the subject a lot with her father.
“Would you care to explain, Lieutenant?” Avery said.
“Well, it’s just that people all over Earth are going ballistic over what we’ve been finding on Mars. New religions. Predictions of the end of the world. New takes on the old ancient-astronaut theories. Claims that aliens were God, and that when He comes back in his flying saucer, we won’t need governments anymore, that kind of thing.”
Palmer chuckled. “Sounds reasonable.”
“It’s nonsense,” Kaitlin replied. “Half a million years is a long time. What could any alien visitors that far back have done that humans might still remember, as religious myth or legend or whatever? But if the aliens were here in just the last few thousand years, it…well, it could be a different story.”
“Gotcha,” Lieutenant Dow, one of the LSCP pilots, said with a smirk. “God help us! Jesus was an astronaut, and the Ark of the Covenant was a two-way radio tuned in to God.” Those old chestnuts had received a lot of reawakened interest on Earth during the past couple of years.
“Maintaining civic order is becoming a serious concern,” Avery said, “not only in Washington, but all over the world. What the UNdies have found here could be of strategic importance in the war. And that, gentlemen, and ladies, is why we are here.”
Which made Kaitlin wonder if this expedition was becoming a reprise of her dad’s experience on Mars. Though the UN war had a number of formal causes, ranging from US foreign trade practices to Latino demands for an independent nation of Aztlan carved from the American Southwest, the trigger had been the perception in Europe and Japan that the US and Russia were going to keep the secrets of newly discovered extraterrestrial technology for themselves. Close on the heels of that problem was the UN desire to keep the remarkable finds on Mars—especially those that suggested that aliens had somehow tampered with human evolution—a closely guarded secret. During the famous March, Major Garroway had arranged for Dr. David Alexander to publish news of some of the initial archeological finds on the Internet, a move that had started riots and caused unrest worldwide and shaken several of the governments arrayed against the United States.
That move had been instrumental in forcing Japan to switch her allegiance from the UN to the US, a shift of power that might well have marked a turning point in the war.
Of course, those reports about aliens and ancient humans on Mars had stirred up problems in the United States as well. Every man and woman in 1-SAG had signed Disclosure Oaths at Vandenberg just before the launch, swearing not to talk to anyone other than their debriefing officers about anything they might see or find on the Moon.
Kaitlin wondered what her father would have thought about that. It had been his idea to post the news of the Martian finds on the Net, to undermine the UN’s efforts to clamp down on the activities on Mars.
“The evidence we’ve uncovered here,” Avery went on, “suggests that an UNdie survey team found something important at Picard. We don’t know what. Earth wants us to go in, secure the site, and hold it until they can send in their own arky team. And that, Marines, is exactly what we’re going to do.”
He began typing on his keyboard, accessing the table’s display software to bring up two green arrows on the map. “Captain Fuentes, you’ll deploy in your two LSCPs, coming in low and from the west, along here. Crisium’s western mountain wall should shield you from radar…and in the final part of your approach, you can skim the surface and stay below the crater rim.”
“They might have an OP on the crest of the rim,” Fuentes pointed out. “Or a portable radar. That’s what I’d do, if I was in their place.”
“There is no evidence of an OP anywhere on the rim, Captain,” White pointed out.
“Not as of five days ago,” Fuentes replied, an edge to her voice. “But you can’t imagine these bozos don’t know that we’re here. Or that we might be getting ready to come gunning for ’em.”
“Your Second Platoon will come in first to secure the crater rim,” Avery went on, as one of the arrows touched the southwestern edge of the circle of smooth-rounded hills defining the rim. “From here, you should be able to apply covering fire for First Platoon’s approach, if necessary. First Platoon will cross the rim in their bug and descend to the crater floor…about here.” The map expanded again, centering on a flashing landing point between the pressurized habs and the grounded hoppers. “The tactics we employed here at Fra Mauro should work well. Twenty-four men will be sufficient to overwhelm any personnel who happen to be outside the habs, hotwire the airlocks, and gain entry. You are to use care not to breach the habs’ pressure integrity. HQ wants prisoners, not vacuum-dried corpses. We particularly need to take Dr. Billaud alive. Questions?”
Fuentes gave a low whistle. “It’ll work, sir, if the bad guys do exactly what you think they’re gonna do. In my experience, the enemy isn’t usually that accommodating.”
“Sir,” Kaitlin added, pointing. “This facility is a good five or six kilometers from the crater rim. We’re not going to be able to provide much overwatch fire support from way the hell out there.”
“You’ll have your Wyverns and two SLWs. That should be more than enough to provide adequate support.” He gave Fuentes a hard look. “Remember, people, we’re dealing with a tiny outpost here. From the number and size of those habs, we’re looking at life support for fifteen people, tops! If anyone was shuttling in large number of troops and the hab modules to support them, we’d have picked up the deployment from Earth, both optically and by radar.”
“AFSCOM has a recon spacecraft up,” White said. He glanced at the LED time readout displayed on the back of his left glove. “They’ll relay to Colorado Springs, and Colorado Springs will relay to us. We should have an up-to-the-minute report on what’s going on in Picard within the next thirty minutes.”
Captain Lee scratched the side of his face, making a bristly sound on the unshaven skin. “Sir, if I may suggest…Alfa, Second Platoon, ought to provide additional overwatch, at least as reinforcements. The UNdies know we’re here, now, and we don’t know where those sixty troops are supposed to be.”
“Well, they’re not at Picard, Captain,” White said with a thin smile. “We’d have seen them if they were.”
“Intelligence believes that the UNdies’ main Lunar force is on the farside,” Avery said. “At our old radio-astronomy facility at Tsiolkovsky. If the Air Force guys don’t report anything unexpected at Picard, we’re go.”
“I still think it might be a good idea to have some of my people in reserve, sir,” Lee insisted. “Just in case. Captain Fuentes is right. You can’t count on the bad guys to do what you expect.”
Avery exchanged a glance with White, then shrugged. “I want at least one platoon here to hold Fra Mauro,” he said. “You can have the other platoon as reserve. Not that you’re going to need it.”
“This,” Captain White said, “is going to be a stroll in the park.”
Kaitlin said nothing, but she had to suppress an icy shudder. The assault on Fra Mauro, sudden, sharp, and decisive, had been as close to a “stroll in the park” as anyone had a right to expect…and three of Alfa Company’s people had died when a couple of Chinese special forces troops had opened up on them from the grounded Kongyunjian transport with a rapid-fire squad laser.
Even a minor hit, if it burned through armor, was deadly on the Moon; here, the usual battlefield ratio of three or four wounded for every man dead was reversed. And in this unfamiliar environment, things could so very easily go death-cold wrong, especially in a cobbled-together, ad hoc deployment like this one.
She found herself hoping that the Air Force mission did see something at Picard. Better to call this assault off and wait for a stronger and better-equipped follow-up force from Earth. Scuttlebutt had it that Army troops would be arriving in a few days, with transports for prisoners and a ticket home for the Marines. Let them deal with Picard and its “alien shit.”
She checked her own glove-back timepiece. Zero-four-fifty-five GMT. Twenty-eight minutes until the fly-boys could report….
USASF Reconnaissance Flight
Black Crystal, trans-Lunar orbit
0521 hours GMT
“What the hell is that?” Aerospace Force Major Sam Barnes pulled back from the padded double eyepiece and looked at the mission commander, Lieutenant Colonel Jacob DeMitre.
“Whatcha got, Sam?” DeMitre said. Silver-white light flooded the cockpit, dazzling and inexpressibly beautiful. The Sparrowhawk’s CO eased himself from his couch and made his way carefully, hand over hand, toward Barnes’s console.
There was scarcely room for them to breathe, much less move. For three days, they’d been crammed into a space roughly the size of a small closet, with most of the compartment taken up by acceleration couches and consoles. The SRE-10 Sparrowhawk was a tiny ship, a sleek, black-sheathed lifting body with stubby fins and a rounded nose, designed to be piggybacked for launch to a Zeus II HLV booster. They’d boosted from Vandenberg three days earlier, whipping into a high-speed parabola around the Moon on a recon flight dubbed Black Crystal.
At the moment, they were high above Luna’s eastern limb, as viewed from Earth, almost ten thousand kilometers above the Mare Crisium and falling in a long, zero-G curve around toward the Lunar farside. Their primary mission had been to overfly the farside radio-telescope complex at Tsiolkovsky, but a last-minute add-on to their orders directed them to scope out Picard Crater in particular, and to check for UN activity in the Crisium region as well.
DeMitre pulled himself up alongside Barnes, rotating his body enough to peer into the eyepiece. “Damfino,” he said. “Never seen anything like it. Where is it?”
“Computer,” Barnes said. “Optics display, monitor three.”
The monitor flicked on, allowing them both to watch. They were looking down into a highly magnified view of the Moon’s surface, all bright silver-white light and black shadow. “Magnify and enhance.”
The view zeroed in on a tiny black shape…a sleek triangle just edging out of the shadows and into the brilliant light of the Lunar sunrise.
“Crossing the Mare Crisium, east to west,” Barnes said. “Looks like it might be headed for Picard.”
“Stealth surfacing,” DeMitre observed. “On that heading, he could be coming from Tsiolkovsky. Okay. I’ll phone it in.”
A warning chime sounded, electronic and urgent. “Uh-oh,” Barnes said, turning. “We’re being painted! Looks like target-lock radar.”
“S’okay. We’re stealthy, too. But I wonder who’s curious…and why. Recorders going?”
“Affirmative. The paint’s at two-nine-zero and rising.” The best stealth materials and geometries in the world couldn’t absorb or misdirect that strong a pulse. “Damn! It’s strong. Real strong! I think they may have made us, stealth or no stealth.”
“Yeah. I got that feeling. Who’s ‘they’?”
“Shit! I think it’s from Tsiolkovsky.” He brought up a graphics display showing the Moon’s principal features. Tsiolkovsky was still deep within the Lunar night, but it was above the Sparrowhawk’s horizon, in direct line of sight. A red light showed on the graphics, at the top of Tsiolkovsky’s central peak, marking the radar source.
“But radar that strong?” DeMitre hesitated, then groaned. “Ah! The old Big-T radio telescope. That could put out one hell of a tight beam.”
“Roger that. And they’ve got us right in their—”
The positron beam struck the Sparrowhawk in that instant, searing through the hull of the reconnaissance space-craft like a blowtorch through paper, antimatter and matter combining in a brief, unholy alliance of mutual annihilation, generating an intense burst of high-energy radiation…heat, light, X rays, and gamma rays.
The burst was instantly lethal to both Barnes and DeMitre. Although they never had a chance to radio a warning to Space Command Headquarters, the high-energy shriek of their disintegrating spacecraft was picked up by Aerospace Force sensors in Low Earth Orbit just over a second later.
THREE
WEDNESDAY, 9 APRIL 2042
LSCP-44, The Moon
0553 hours GMT
Sergeant Frank Kaminski stood in line with the other members of his squad, waiting to file aboard the spindle-legged, insect-shaped bulk of LSCP-44. The ugly little transport, a Landing Space Craft, Personnel in official nomenclature, but a ferry bug in normal usage or, more often yet, simply a bug, had been designed twenty years earlier to haul personnel and cargo from Earth orbit to the Moon and back in reliable, if less than lavish, efficiency. The Marines had bought eight of the rugged little transports during the last fiscal year and adapted them to the impromptu role of Lunar assault craft.
In Kaminski’s opinion, that was roughly on a par with sticking a popgun on a garbage scow and calling the thing a battleship. The old hull number 44 had been left painted below its faceted cockpit sponson, at least partly as a bit of false intelligence, but he wondered if the UN could possibly be concerned about the appearance of forty-some bugs that looked more like child’s snap-together toys than Marine assault craft.
“Hey, Ski,” Lance Corporal Roger Liddel called over the squad channel. “So what’s the word on the skipper? Is she really ‘Sands of Mars’ Garroway’s kid?”
“That’s ay-firmative.”
“Yeah,” Sergeant Timothy Papaloupolis added. “And Ski, here, has a straight shot at her, ’cause he was with her dad on Mars!”
“No shit, Sarge?” PFC Jordy Rawlins asked. He was new to the unit, one of five newbies who’d transferred in two days before launch. “The guys said you was on the Valles March, but I didn’t believe it.”
“I was there.” Funny. He felt a little reluctant to talk about it now, even with his squadmates. “Wasn’t as big a deal as the news downloads make out.”
“Huh.” Rawlins sounded impressed. “You see any alien shit while you were there?”
“A little. Most of it was too damned big to think of it as alien stuff, though. More like…I dunno. Big, funny-shaped mountains.”
“Yeah, but you got to see the Cave of Wonders, didn’t you?” Lance Corporal Michael Klinginsmith asked. “All the Net DLs’ve been full of that stuff.”
“Television, live from the stars,” Pap said, laughing.
“I…saw it.” Yeah, but he didn’t like thinking about it. Some of those…things he’d seen in the big, spherical chamber had turned his stomach and set the skin on the back of his neck crawling. Even now, some he could remember with crystalline clarity. Others had been so strange he remembered little at all, save a vague impression of color or texture. There’d been nothing about them that the human mind could recognize and seize as its own.
If that first brief and tentative glimpse had been anything to go by, extraterrestrials were…alien, nothing at all like the prosthesis-clad actors and humanoid digital constructs so popular on the science-fiction channels.
“Can the chatter, people,” Lieutenant Garroway’s voice said, cutting in on the channel. Ski flushed inside his helmet, wondering if she’d been listening in long enough to have overheard Pap’s “straight shot” crack. “First Squad’s turn next. Mount up!”
The LSCP’s cargo lock was just barely big enough for twelve men and their gear to pass through at one time, so boarding was by squads. The line of armor-suited Marines started forward, each man carrying his assault rifle slung muzzle down, and at least one other weapon or load. Kaminski was lugging a two-round reload case of twelve-centimeter rockets for Sergeant Payne’s Wyvern. The bulky container only weighed five kilograms on the Moon, but it acted like it weighed thirty. You had to be careful manhandling gear and heavy loads here; a missed step and the load would keep going while you fell flat on your ass. Or your faceplate, which could be worse.
The squad filed into the airlock, then stood packed in shoulder-to-shoulder as the outer door closed and the whine of air vents slowly rose from the vacuum-clad silence. That, Kaminski reflected, was a real problem in using these personnel landing craft for assaults: It just took too damned long to cycle through the airlock…especially if unpleasant locals were shooting at you.
The clear light flashed green, and the inner hatch sighed open. The squad shuffled through into cool green light, joining Second Platoon’s Second Squad, already aboard, and began stowing their rifles and carry-on gear in the secure lockers. “First Squad, sound off!” Gunnery Sergeant Tom Yates barked. “Ahearn!”
“Yo!”
“Anders!”
“Here!”
As Yates ran down the roster, Kaminski backed his way up against one of the slanting, thinly padded shelves lining the sides of the cylindrical compartment, lowering himself carefully onto his backpack PLSS. Yates reached his name with a sharp “Kaminski!”
“Short!” he replied, but Yates ignored the play and kept reciting. In point of fact, he wasn’t short anymore, not after re-upping; that was a joke that was quickly losing its savor. Sometimes he wondered what had possessed him to reenlist during that long, cycler-coast home from Mars. Re-upping had not only restored his former rank of corporal—a rank lost on Mars during that incident with the beer—but guaranteed his promotion to sergeant as soon as the shuttle deposited him and the other Mars veterans once again on the runway at Vandenberg.
But he sure as hell hadn’t signed on for six more years in the Corps for the joy of wearing three stripes above the crossed rifles on his sleeve instead of two. Nor had he joined for the dubious pleasure of being sealed inside an aluminum can for a sardine’s-eye view of a trip to the Moon.
To tell the truth, he wasn’t sure why he’d re-upped, and the not-knowing bothered him. Hell, the first thing he’d learned when he joined the Corps was never volunteer….
The roll call came to an end. “All aboard and squared away, Gunny?” Lieutenant Garroway asked Yates.
“Affirmative, Lieutenant. All present and accounted for, sir.”
“So what’s the word, Lieutenant?” Kaminski called out. “The brass hear from the Aerospace Force, yet?”
“Negative,” Kaitlin replied. “But they must be figuring no news is good news, because the mission is go.”
“Ooh-rah!” a chorus of radioed voices sounded over the channel, in the half-shouted, half-growled Corps battle cry.
“All right, people, listen up!” the lieutenant went on. “Flight time will be approximately three hours. You will stay buttoned up, helmets and gloves.”
The chorus this time consisted of groans and a few choice expletives. “Jesus shit, L-T!” one voice called above the rest. “That’s inhuman!”
“Who is that?” Kaitlin asked. “Nardelli? Just what makes you think you can lay claim to being human?” When the guffaws and laughter had died down, she continued. “You should all have your plissers topped off, but we don’t know how long we’re going to be on the beach, so all of you lash down and plug into your umbilicals.”
Another moment of shuffling and bumping ensued in the narrow cargo space, as the twenty-two Marines, all save Gunny Yates and the lieutenant, took their places, made all too familiar by the long and deadly boring journey out from Earth. Kaminski backed up against one of the craft’s outward-sloping bulkheads and used the harnesses welded there to strap himself in tight. Hoses dragged down from overhead racks snap-locked onto connectors on the sides of his PLSS unit, letting him breathe off the bug’s life support instead of his own. Yates went down the narrow passageway between the Marines, checking the equipment and PLSS connections on each man and woman in turn.
“So, what now, Gunny?” Papaloupoulis called.
“We wait, Marines,” Yates growled in reply. “We wait for the word.”
As far as Kaminski was concerned, the waiting was always the hardest part.
