Luna Marine (4 page)

“There's still the little matter of those sixty missing troops,” Lee put in. “I can't believe intelligence could be off
that
much.”

“Military intelligence,” Fuentes said with a grim chuckle. “A contradiction in terms.”

“All right, all right,” Avery said. “Let's stick to the point of the thing.” He tapped the surface of the table. “Earthside thinks the UNdies have uncovered something at Picard. Something important. They want us to go in and secure it, whatever it is. They'll have an arky team here in a couple of days to check it out.”

Palmer gave a low whistle. “Alien shit, huh?” He glanced at Kaitlin. “We pullin' another Sands of Mars here?”

Kaitlin refused to meet Palmer's eyes but continued a pointed study of the map display of the floor of Picard Crater and the excavations there. Two years before, her father, then Major Mark Garroway, had made Corps history by leading a band of Marines 650 kilometers through the twists and turns of one arm of the Valles Marineris to capture the main colony back from United Nations forces at the very start of the war. “Sands of Mars” Garroway was a genuine hero within the Corps, and ever since she'd joined the Marines, Kaitlin had found it difficult to live up to that rather daunting image. Some seemed to assume that if her father was a hero, she must be cut of the same tough, Marine-green stuff. Others…

“This operation,” Avery said with a dangerous edge to his voice, “will be strictly by the manual. No improvisations. And no
heroics
.” He stared at Kaitlin with cold, blue eyes as he said it.

“Yeah, but what kind of alien shit?” Machuga wanted to know. The CO of Bravo Company's First Platoon was
a short, stocky, shaven-headed fireplug of a Marine who'd come up as a ranker before going OCS, and his language tended to reinforce the image. “Anything they can freakin' use against us?”

Avery looked at his aide. “Captain White?”

“Sir. We know very little about any supposed ET presence on the Moon,” White said. He was a lean, private man with an aristocrat's pencil-line mustache, a ring-knocker, like Avery. “The records we've captured here…well, we haven't had time to go through all of them, of course, but the UN people conducting the investigation apparently think that these are different ruins, artifacts, whatever, from what we found on Mars.”

“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 Dis
closure 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.”