Luna Marine (32 page)

“Thank you, Captain.”

“So, orders?” Jack asked. “What, are you in the Corps for real, now?”

“Not quite,” David replied. “I'm a ‘civilian specialist observer,' I think they call me now. ‘CSO' for short.”

“Actually, that stands for ‘caught and shot out-of-hand,'” Corporal Negley said, floating nearby. “Hey! Look at his jacket! He was with ‘Sands of Mars'!”

David was wearing a Marine-issue leather jacket with the beer-can insignia sewn to the left breast. “Guilty,” he said with a grin.

“It's an honor to have you with us, sir,” Negley said.

Lee looked at Jack. “Okay, Flash. You want to see that your buddy here gets settled in?”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Jack replied.

“‘Flash?'” David said, eyebrows rising as the captain kicked off from a nearby bulkhead and floated toward the aft end of the squad bay.

“Long story,” Jack replied. “You don't want to know.” Somehow, the name had caught up with him again after Siberia. He still wasn't sure how. “Hey, it's
really
great to see you. I, I thought you were
dead
, until you got that e-mail to me, right after Chicago.”

“Not quite. I would have been, though, if General Warhurst hadn't sent for me. Your Aunt Liana…”

“Yeah. I heard. I'm awfully sorry.” An awkward silence hung between them.

“So, Flash, you two know each other?” Sergeant Bosnivic said, drifting closer and breaking the deepening seriousness with a bright grin. He looked from one to the other, appraisingly.

“My uncle,” Jack said proudly.

“Any guy who was with ‘Sands of Mars' Garroway,”
Bosnivic said, sticking out a hand. “Great to meet you, sir.”

“Thanks.” David looked about the squad bay, a cavernous space now crowded with a couple of dozen Marines performing various tasks in zero G. “So, where do I bunk down?”

“Any free space you can find, deck, bulkhead, or overhead!” Bosnivic said, laughing. “But I don't think there'll be much time for sleeping now.”

“Why's that?”

“Scuttlebutt says the first prong has already gone in,” Jack said, pleased to be in the know for a change. “If it goes well for them, we'll be getting the word to board and light off in another few hours.”

“Yeah? And where's this new supership I've been hearing about?”

“Over here,” Jack said, lightly pushing off from a deck support and drifting toward a small, square viewing port in a nearby bulkhead. “You can see her from here.”

Tucking his duffel under his arm, David followed, with Bosnivic bringing up the rear. Jack caught hold of a hand grip by the port and gestured with his head. “Ain't she a beaut?”

The view through the small port was breathtaking. Jack had been in the squad bay for three days now, ever since the assault group's arrival at L-3 from Earth, and he never tired of looking through it…when he could find it free, that is, or when he had a few free moments. They'd been keeping him busy for the past several weeks, working on his “nutcracker,” as he called it, and he was still running through a long list of final checks and tests, making sure that his modified version of Sam was ready for the task ahead of her.

But when he could, he stared out the window.

L-3 was one of five points in gravitational balance with the Earth and the Moon, convenient spots to park a space station, or a small construction facility like this one. L-4 and L-5 were the best-known of these Lagrange points, sharing the Moon's orbit around the Earth—one, sixty degrees ahead of the Moon, the other, sixty degrees behind
it. L-1 was a halo point directly behind the Moon, as seen from Earth, while L-2 was a spot directly between the Earth and the Moon where the gravitational pull of the two was balanced.

L-3, like L-4 and L-5, also followed the Moon's orbit, a quarter of a million miles from Earth, but directly opposite the Moon from the Earth. From there, the Moon was always hidden behind the blue-and-white glory of the Earth, which slowly changed phases as the construction shack moved through its twenty-seven-day orbit. At the moment, Earth showed a slender crescent, mostly white with a thin streak of blue along the lower limb. But the
real
spectacle lay much closer at hand.

The construction shack itself was little more than a girder-connected collection of tin cans, with tunnels leading from one hab or workshop to the next, with a huge, blue-black spread of solar panels like gleaming, rectilinear wings. Most of the structure which, together with the solar panels, covered a larger area than a football field, was invisible from the squad bay window, but they did have a good view of the docking port, where two cis-Lunar transports were parked just within the shadow of the USS
Ranger
.

The
Ranger
, clearly, was the featured sight for the squad bay window, at least with so little of the Earth visible right now. She was big—seventy-four meters long and massing sixteen hundred tons empty. She was also sleek, showing her origins as the upper half of a Zeus IIc piloted heavy-lift SSTO booster; only spacecraft that had to traverse atmosphere needed streamlining. Her smooth lines were broken, however, by the lower drive and landing assembly, which looked more like the Tinkertoy construction of a Lunar hopper than the sky-slicing curves of a hypersonic transport, and by the ungainly struts and angles of a pair of LSCPs strapped to her hull like outrigger pontoons. Her outer hull was deep black with a light-and radar-absorbing laminate, but the construction shack's worklights revealed her in pools of white light. A heat-radiator panel unfolded from the landing assembly like a squared-off shark's fin.

“That's it?” David asked, clearly impressed despite his nonchalant-sounding question. “That's our secret anti-matter ship?”

“Isn't she gorgeous?” Bosnivic said, peering over David's shoulder. “You feed just a little antimatter into a reaction tank full of water, a microgram at a time, and it creates enough thrust to drive her at one G for hours. That ship, my friends, could make it to Mars in one week, accelerating half the way, then flipping end for end and decelerating the rest of the way, all at a comfy one gravity! None of this seven or eight months in a cycler.”

“How long to the Moon?” David wanted to know.

“From here? A little under five hours.”

Jack pulled his PAD from its holster and typed in some numbers. “Two hundred ninety-two-point-three minutes,” Jack added a moment later. “Assuming we go in at one G, of course, and not taking into account any gravitational boost we get whipping past the Earth.”

“Good God. Last time I went to the Moon it took three days.”

“Yeah, but the
Ranger
can pull six Gs,” Bosnivic said. “And scuttlebutt says we're gonna haul ass to get where we're goin'. What does that do to the travel time, Flash?”

Jack typed in the new figures. “Just under two hours. One hundred nineteen minutes, in fact.” He looked up. “Stepping up the acceleration doesn't cut down your travel time as much as you'd think.”

“I imagine how fast we scoot'll depend on how bad the RAG needs us,” Bosnivic said.

“Well, that and how hard they think they can push the
Ranger
on her maiden voyage,” Jack said. “This antimatter stuff is pretty new technology, and maybe they don't want to pull out all the stops, first time around.”

“Where's the antimatter come from?” David asked.

“Oh, they manufacture the stuff right here at the construction shack,” Bosnivic said, “using solar energy and something like a miniature version of one of those big particle accelerators back on Earth. Takes a long time, even to collect just a few grams of the stuff.”

“Isn't that dangerous?” David asked. “I mean, even a microgram of antimatter will make a hell of a bang if it touches normal matter, right?”

“Hell, yeah!” Bosnivic said, grinning. “A big bang, and a lot of very hard radiation. Why do you think they make the stuff way out here?”

“I'd think it would be pretty vulnerable to UN attack.”

“Not as vulnerable as you think. From here, we can see anything on an approach vector clear back to Earth orbit. And we have a squadron of Sparrowhawks stationed here, just in case the bad guys decide to come check us out. So far, we don't even think they know what we're doing here.”

“Which is just as well,” Jack put in. “If we could get a nuke through to that asteroid they were trying to send our way, they could hit us with one if they were really determined. And they would be, too, if they knew the
Ranger
there was ready to fly!”

Bosnivic nudged Jack and pointed at his PAD. “So, you got your girlfriend in there to crank out those numbers?”

“Hmm? No. That was just the calc function. You could do it, too, Bos, if you could just keep straight which is division and which is multiplication.”

“Girlfriend?” David asked.

“Hey, you never met Jack's girlfriend? I thought you two were related!”

“Last girlfriend of his I heard about was that v-mail correspondent you were always talking to in California—”

“Let's not bring
that
up,” Jack said, his face reddening.

“I definitely sense a story there,” Bosnivic said. “But, anyway, turns out that Flash here is a genius at hacking into AI programs, getting 'em to sit up and beg. They've had him modifying our Marine-issue PAD OS/AI to make us a nutcracker.” Floating in mid-bay, he reached down and rubbed his groin suggestively. “And a very
nice
nutcracker she is! Show him, Jack!”

“Uh, I'd really rather not! Listen, Bos, don't you have some Marine stuff to do, somewhere?”

Grinning, Bosnivic rubbed his nose with his middle finger. “Thought of somethin' right here, Flash.”

“Careful you don't wear that out,” Jack replied, as Bosnivic kicked off the bulkhead and sailed across to some other Marines.

“So,” David said with a wry grin. “You getting on okay with your new friends?”

“Oh, they all figure they have to harass the new guy,” Jack said. “Hey, it's great to see you! I heard they were assigning a civilian specialist to this op, but I didn't know it was going to be you!”

“Well, I'm not sure why I got the job, but I'm glad I did. So tell me. What
is
all this stuff with modified programs, anyway?”

“Well, what he was talking about isn't exactly something I want Mom to know about. But it got me a billet on this flight, and that's the important thing.”

“Doing what?”

“There are three of us, see? Bos is one. So's…that corporal over there. Yeah, the blond woman. Corporal Dillon. We graduated from a special 4069 MOS class they just held at the SCTF at Quantico.”

“Okay. Why?”

“Well, the UN has built a ship at a base they have on the farside of the Moon. An antimatter ship, like the
Ranger
. According to intelligence, she's just about ready to go. She already has made some short hops, but they think they're still working on getting her main weapon mounted and working. Our team is going in to either destroy or capture that ship, whichever we have the best chance of pulling off.

“Anyway, the three of us are on the boarding team. We go in with our nutcrackers, try to subvert the UN computer system running that ship, and take it over. If one of us can pull it off, we might be able to fly that ship out of there.”

“Ah. And if you can't?”

“Then there'll be other Marines planting explosives to make damned sure the UN can't fly it out either!”

“And this nutcracker is?…”

Jack pulled out his PAD, opened the screen, and tapped in a command. “Sam?” he said. “I want you to meet my Uncle David.”

“Delighted to meet you, Uncle David,” Sam replied. She was modestly dressed, thank God, in slacks and an unrevealing blouse. Once, when he'd been working with her at Quantico, some of his instructors had dropped in to see how he was doing, including Staff Sergeant Ostrowsky and Colonel Joanna Bradley, the base XO. When he summoned Sam's image, she'd appeared in the nude…a bug left over from the days when he'd
wanted
her to appear that way. He'd received a pretty stiff lecture on sexual harassment and proper respect shown to female members of the Corps.

He was pretty sure he had that problem worked out now, at least. The question was how she was going to fare against the UN computer.

“I'm, ah, pleased to meet you, Sam,” David replied. He glanced at Jack. “This is your nutcracker?”

“She was originally a Net agent,” Jack explained. “Or part of her was. That means she was designed to go out into Earthnet and find information for me, which she did by looking at lots of programs very quickly and comparing their content with lists of things I told her I was interested in. It wasn't hard to modify her so that she could go into
one
program, figure out how it worked and what it did, and
change
how it worked.

“In fact, a lot of the work I did on her, she really did to herself. I just told her what I needed done, and she did it.” He snorted. “Everybody around here's convinced I'm some sort of programming hotshot.
She
did all the work, though.”

“You talk about her as thought she's…alive.”

“Uncle David, sometimes I wonder if she is. She sure
acts
like she's self-aware.”

“Well, if she was programmed to act that way—”

“Oh, sure. I know all about simulated personalities. That's what Sam started off as.” He didn't add that the personality in question was a rather shallow adolescent's sex fantasy. Now that Sam had become…legitimate, it
embarrassed him to talk about that aspect of her past. “The thing is, AIs, even simple ones like Sam started off as, are meant to grow. To change with time, as they learn things, as they work with humans. It's fun. Sam's reached the point where I can't really tell what she's about to do or say. Just like a real person.”