Luna Marine (6 page)

“We've known for some time that they were working at something major back there, sir,” Walker replied. “The transport launches from Kourou and Xichang have been regular as clockwork. And…nothing much has been coming back to Earth. Whatever they've been sending up there has been
staying
there.”

“Tsiolkovsky,” General Sidney said. She closed her eyes. “What would they be building out of our SETI base? What benefit could they—”

“Power, General,” Admiral Gray snapped. “Power from the fusion plant at the site, and Tsiolkovsky's manufactory.”

“But SETI was shut down,” Turner said, protesting. “Everybody said, with the discoveries on Mars—”

“SETI was shut down,” General Sidney said. “And the UN grabbed the radio-telescope facility in…I think it was '35, maybe '36? I'd bet they're using the factory to turn out something other than telescope components now.”

“Makes sense,” Admiral Gray said, thoughtful. “If they wanted to keep something hidden from us, something big they were building, the Lunar farside would be the place to do it, wouldn't it?”

“And the SETI facility's fusion reactor would certainly be big enough to power a weapon like that,” Sidney added.

“The president is going to want to know just what it is they're building back there,” Harrel said. “He's also going to want to know how the hell they saw our Sparrow-
hawk! That thing's supposed to be the best we have in stealth technology!”

“Even the best stealth technology,” General Sidney said, “has trouble masking IR. Especially in space, where a ship
has
to radiate the heat that builds up inside, from power plants and life support.”

“Was that how the enemy tracked them?” General Turner asked. He looked at Walker. “Colonel? What is Cheyenne's analysis?”

Walker gestured at the IR image on the flatscreen, now frozen in time. “If we could track them by IR, so could the enemy. Now, we knew exactly where to look, of course. Broad-sky IR sweeps can be tricky. CCDs—the charged coupling devices used in such scans—tend to have a very narrow field of view, so you have to know just where to point them. And the Sparrowhawk's flight profile was designed to keep any radiating surfaces blocked from UN observation by the body of the spacecraft itself. But heat does leak through. Also, to be frank, even a stealth space-craft with a radar cross section the size of my thumbnail can be picked up by a strong enough radar emitter, and the Tsiolkovsky facility can transmit an
extremely
powerful signal. Our best guess is that the UN forces at the SETI facility were carrying out periodic short-term scans of their horizons, concentrating on probable orbital paths of incoming spacecraft. Once they had a target, they would know exactly where to aim their IR CCDs.”

“But why would they have constructed something as powerful as an antimatter beam weapon on the Lunar farside?” Harrel wanted to know.

Walker clasped his hands behind his back. This was the
real
bad news, the news he'd feared delivering. There was no way to do it but to be blunt. “There is one other possibility that we need to consider, ladies and gentlemen. An alternative to a major Lunar base with a weapons system with a dedicated fusion plant. There is the possibility that the UN is working on their own version of
Ranger
. And that they're using the SETI facilities as a construction site.”

This time, there was no conversation. The room grew
so silent that Walker could easily hear the faint, shrill ringing in his ears that told him his blood pressure was rising. Absently, almost automatically, he reached into his blue and black jacket's inside pocket, extracting the small plastic box with its dose of a single small, blue pill.

“How likely is that?” Archibald Severin, the secretary of defense, wanted to know. “We've been getting reports for months, I know, but there's been no hard data.”

Ignoring the cold stares from his audience, Walker slipped the pill under his tongue, feeling it dwindle and dissolve. Like nitroglycerin, the vasorelaxant absorbed directly into his bloodstream. “So far, we've had very little information to work with, sir. And no means at all of gaining confirmation, short of a reconnaissance overflight—which, of course, is what we were trying to do with Black Crystal.”

“If the UN forces are working on a
Ranger
project of their own…” Gray said. His fist clenched, relaxed, clenched once more. He turned to Marine General Warhurst, seated across the table from him. “Warhurst? Your people are up there now. Any chance they could manage a look-see for us at Tsiolkovsky?”

“My people,” Warhurst replied, “are at Fra Mauro, with orders to conduct a snap raid at Picard. That's twenty-five hundred kilometers away from Tsiolkovsky, across some of the roughest, most mountainous terrain on the Moon.”

“They have lobbers. Landing modules,” the SECDEF pointed out. “If the enemy is developing their own AM craft, then we are in a race. We
must
know.”

“Well, having the Marines trek across twenty-five hundred kilometers of Lunar wilderness seems to me to be out of the question,” Turner said. “But they may find some intel that'll help us at Picard. Billaud might know what's happening on the farside.”

“Long shot, General,” Admiral Gray said.

“Hell, long shots are all we have, right now.”

“The big question is whether the enemy's waiting for my people at Picard with something they can't handle.” Warhurst cocked his head, nailing Walker with a look.
“Colonel? Anything at all about UN forces in Crisium? Ship landings? Transports from other Lunar bases?”

“None, General,” Walker replied. “We assume the Sparrowhawk crew was making their observations of the area when the laser took them out.”

“Then they're going in blind.”

“We're
all
blind on this one, General Warhurst,” Turner replied. “I'd say all we can do is send them in and see what they find at Picard.”

“What if the Sparrowhawk was shot down to cover UN deployments at Picard?” Admiral Gray said. “They could be walking into a trap.”

“We at least should warn them,” Warhurst said, “that Black Crystal was shot down.”

“I would strongly recommend against that,” Arthur Kinsley, the director of Central Intelligence said. “The Marines
must
reach Picard if we're to have a chance of capturing Billaud. What can we tell them? To be careful? I'm sure they know enough to keep their heads down! And we do not want to tip our hand to the UN, to let them know how much we know…or guess.”

Harrel rapped the tabletop, commanding attention. “You will tell them, General Warhurst, that they are clear to proceed.”

“But, sir. We don't know—”

“You
will
tell them, General. We need that information. And we need Billaud. The possibility that the UN is running an AM project of their own merely makes the acquisition of that information even more imperative. I'm sorry, but I see no way around it.”

As the debate continued, Walker dithered for a moment over whether to stay at the podium or return to his seat. He decided on the latter, quietly walking around the table and resuming his seat. There was nothing more in the way of hard information to convey, and it was clear that the discussion had swept well beyond the parameters of his report.

He wondered, though, what the Marines would think about being sent into their objective blind…sent in without even knowing that they
were
blind.

LSCP-44, The Moon
0643 hours GMT

Kaitlin climbed up the ladder from the LSCP's cockpit. It had been over an hour now since they'd filed aboard, and the mounting tension within the craft's steel bulkheads was as thick as week-old bottled air. The cockpit was a cramped and claustrophobic space, wedged in among instrument consoles and all but filled by the side-by-side couches for the module's pilot and the mission commander.

The right-hand seat was empty, and Kaitlin pulled herself into it. Lieutenant Chris Dow sat in the other seat, completing the prelaunch checklist.

“We've got clearance, Garry,” Dow told her. “We're go for immediate liftoff.”

“About damned time! What did they say about the target?”

“Not a thing. Just, ‘Proceed with op.'”

“That's it? Proceed with op? Nothing else?”

“Not a word. I guess we can assume the recon didn't spot anything noteworthy.”

“Some updated images of the target would've been nice. Okay. How long to boost?”

“Ten minutes.” He flipped a row of switches on his main console. “Reactor is on-line, and I'm warming up the main thrusters now. He gestured out the narrow forward window, where a second LSCP was visible on the dusty regolith outside. “Gotta coordinate with Becky, of course. She's on track for liftoff two minutes after us.”

“I'll pass the word, then.”

He tapped the commo console. “You can plug in from here.”

“Thanks. I'd rather do it in person.”

Not that “in person” meant very much, when every Marine in her platoon was suited up anyway, with all orders and announcements coming in through the platoon ops channel. Still, she wanted her people to know her as a person, someone with them, and not as a disembodied voice on the IC.

Stepping off the ladder, she turned and faced the double row of waiting, space-suited Marines. “Ten minutes, people. The mission is
go
.”

“
Ooh-rah
!” sounded over her helmet headset. “We're gonna kick some UNdie ass!”

“Let's get it
on
!”

“So how about it, Lieutenant?” That was Kaminski's voice. “They sending us after alien shit?”

“You have the same set of orders DLed on your PAD as I do, Kaminski,” she replied. “We're looking for Dr. Billaud. And the suits are gonna want to see what we find at Picard. Any other questions?”

“Yeah, Lieutenant. Is it true this place is named after a spaceship captain in that old flat-TV epic?”

“As far as I know, Picard was a seventeenth-century astronomer,” she replied, laughing. “Accurately calculated the length of one degree of meridian on Earth, among other things. Anything else? Okay. Next stop, Picard!”

Eight minutes later, in a silent spray of billowing, Lunar dust, the LSCP bug lifted into the black Lunar sky.

WEDNESDAY
, 9
APRIL
2042

LSCP-44, Call sign Raven
Mare Crisium, The Moon
0905 hours GMT

A lobber hop on the Moon was nowhere near as violent as the liftoff from Vandenberg had been—or even the mildly bone-rattling three-G boost from LEO into trans-Lunar injection. The LSCP's main engine was a Westinghouse-Lockheed NTR that superheated water into a high-speed plasma. Thin and sun-hot, the plasma was invisible—no rocket blasts or licking flames—and constant, providing a slow but steady shove that lofted the bug into a low, Lunar suborbital path. Precisely controlled in short bursts, the jets allowed the bugs to skim the cratered, gray landscape at an altitude of less than three kilometers, terrain-hugging to avoid enemy radar. The acceleration was gentle, punctuated from time to time by another nudge from the main thrusters, or the slighter, more unpredictable bumps from the attitude-control jets.

Kaitlin stood in the meter-wide space just behind and to the right of the pilot's acceleration couch, stooping to watch the smoothly sculpted landscape unfold ahead through the bug's angular, greenhouse canopy, comparing the view from time to time with the various computer graphics and schematics displayed on the main console's monitors. At Fra Mauro, the sun had been almost overhead, and the terrain had been silver-gray. Here, with the
sun just above the western horizon at their backs, the regolith had taken on a redder, warmer appearance, one where long shadows made every hollow and depression, every rock and boulder and cliff face stand out in diamond-hard relief.

“We're coming up on the Crisium Ringwall,” Dow said. “Over the top, and then we'll see if they're watching for us.” He reached out and tapped a readout on a console on the right side of the cockpit with a forefinger. “You might keep your eye on this one. Threat warning.”

“Roger that,” Kaitlin replied. Half an hour before, they'd drifted silently through the skies of the Mare Tranquillitatus, just north of Tranquillity Base, the old Apollo 11 landing site. Someday, she imagined, the place would be a museum, but there was nothing there now but the LEM's descent module, some scientific instruments and mission castoffs, and a launch-toppled American flag.

Now, they'd reached the eastern shores of the Sea of Tranquillity, and the rugged highlands separating the Mare Tranquillitatus from the Mare Crisium rose ahead, brilliant in the long-setting sun. If the UN had established a radar watch from Picard, it would pick them up as they cleared the mountaintops.

“So, your dad ever talk much about what he saw out on Mars?” Dow asked. He turned his head inside his helmet, to peer up at her through the side of the visor. The question seemed purely conversational, but there was an edge behind the words that Kaitlin had come to recognize.

“Quite a bit, actually,” she said. “But I don't think he saw anything you haven't heard about already on the newsnet.”

“Well, I was just wondering if there was anything else. You know, stuff the government was covering up.”

“If there was, I could hardly tell you about it now, could I?” She let the reply dangle a bit of mystery for Dow. “Or, if I did—”

He finished the old joke's punch line for her. “You would have to kill me, yeah, yeah.”

She laughed. The LSCP pilot was fun, smart, and pleasant, and she enjoyed flirting with him. They'd talked about
alien artifacts on the trip out from Earth a couple of times, and he'd been so curious about what her father had seen at Cydonia that she'd started having entirely too much fun teasing him.

“I guess the two things everyone's talking about back on Earth are the war and the Builders,” he said, using the popular term coined to describe the unknown beings who'd carved the immense and still enigmatic monuments on the Cydonian plain on Mars and, apparently, tampered to some extent with the genetic makeup of an unprepossessing hominid known to modern scientists as
Homo erectus
. An archaic
Homo sapiens
—whose freeze-dried corpses had been found at Cydonia now by the thousands—had been the result.

“Uh-huh. Digging up the Builders on Mars helped start the war in the first place. And there were all those ancient human bodies. And the Display Chamber, under the Face. I guess people are bound to be curious.”

He snorted, the noise a startling hiss over the helmet com system. “Curious? Yeah, I guess that's one word for it. My family back home, my mom and both dads and my sister, they've all been after me about nothing but the Builders for weeks now. And when word leaked that there might be Builder stuff on the Moon, and that that was where I was going, well.”

“They members of any of these new religions popping up?”

“Nah. At least, I don't think so. Did…did your dad get to see the Display Chamber?”

“Yes,” she said. “He went inside once with David Alexander—that's one of the archeologists who was with him at the site. He hasn't talked about it much, though. Wish I could see it in person. They say the tapes they've been playing over the Net don't do the real thing justice.”

“Yeah. Well, maybe we'll find another Chamber at Picard. This Billaud character must be working on something pretty big.”

The mountains were rising rapidly to meet the bug, their shadow now a misshapen black spider rippling up the slope ahead as though to escape them. The hillsides facing
the sun were so bright; Kaitlin had heard somewhere that the actual color of moonrock and regolith was dark, darker, in fact, than coal…but that it appeared bright in contrast to the empty sky around it. She found such facts counterintuitive, however. It
looked
as bright as any white beach sand she'd ever seen. Dow gave another gentle tap to the thrusters, and the bug drifted higher, easily clearing the age-eroded crest of the slope.

The threat warning LED lit up in a flashing constellation of red.

“We're being painted,” she said. The words were calm, unemotional, but suddenly her heart was pounding inside her chest. “Looks like traffic-control radar.”

“I see it. Maybe they'll lose us against the mountains.”

The bug was dropping again, falling abruptly into shadow as it descended the inner face of the Crisium Ringwall. Ahead, the Mare Crisium stretched away clear to the black shadow of the terminator, flat and nearly featureless, the surface far darker than the sun-dazzled highlands had been. A large crater, flattened into a deeply shadowed oval by perspective, lay almost directly ahead.

“Picard,” Dow said, checking his displays. “Bang on target.”

The warning LEDs continued to show a strong radar signal coming from the crater ahead, though the mountains behind them might well be masking them from detection. Dow gentled the controls, smoothing and slowing the bug's descent with several rapid-fire bursts from the attitude-control thrusters.

“Better let your Marines know we're almost there,” he said. The oval of Picard was growing larger second by second, and also flatter, until all that was visible was a sunlit smear of smooth-shaped mountains, the crater's ringwall extending above the surface of the darker basaltic sea. The LSCP had descended to within two hundred meters of the mare's surface, below the top of the crater rim. Kaitlin approved. If the radar was coming from a grounded ship or lobber inside the crater basin, they should have just dropped below its horizon.

The threat indicator stayed on, however. That suggested
that someone was watching them from the crater rim. It also suggested that that someone was waiting for them, waiting and ready for their arrival.

“Heads up, Marines,” she called over the platoon channel. “Target in sight. It looks like they see us coming, so be ready to unstrap and bounce as soon as I give the word.”

Dow hit the main thrusters again, dropping the craft's nose to accelerate toward the target. Kaitlin found herself twisting her body so that she could peer up through her helmet visor at the rimwall mountains as they filled the cockpit's forward window. She knew she ought to be watching the graphic displays instead—those carried more information than the naked-eye view out the bow of the LSCP—but she found herself wrestling with the terribly human urge to see the threat directly, instead of as it was implied by the craft's electronics. Additional red LED readouts were winking on now, indicating other radar transmitters joining the first.

“I think—” she said, then stopped. A dazzling star appeared on the mountaintop, winking on, then off with the suddenness of a camera's strobe.

“Did you see that?” Dow asked. Apparently, he preferred looking with his eyes instead of electronics as well.

“Sure did. There…to the right a bit.”

“Your call. Pass it by, or have a look?”

“We look,” she decided. “Definitely. We're supposed to land up there to cover First Platoon. I think we'd better check that flash out.”

“Roger that.” The bug banked right and Dow cut in the main thrusters, clawing for altitude. Kaitlin watched for a second flash, but saw nothing. It had been about
there
…between those two rounded peaks at the crest of the crater rim. It might have been sun reflecting from a cast-off bit of space junk from the UN arky team at the crater, but she was betting that a flash that bright had come from something pretty large—as large, say, as the cockpit windows of a Lunar hopper or a ground crawler.

“Gimme a channel to 30.”

He keyed in some numbers on the commo console. “Plug in there.”

Kaitlin pulled a commo jack from the connector box on her suit's belt, plugging it into the console receptacle. “Eagle,” she called. “Eagle, this is Raven.”

“Raven, Eagle,” Carmen Fuentes's voice came back almost at once. “Go.”

Kaitlin checked the time readout inside her helmet. If LSCP-30 was on its mission profile, it would still be over the Mare Tranquillitatus, shielded from UN radar by the Crisium Ringwall. A military communications satellite at L-2 allowed the two bugs to stay in tight-beamed, scrambled contact despite the mountains between them. “We've got a possible hostile OP on the Picard Crater rim,” she said. “TC radar and transient visual. We'll try to take it down before you clear the Crisium wall and get painted.”

“Copy that, Raven. We'll relay to Falcon. If you run into trouble, give him a yell.” Falcon was the call sign for LSCP-38, bringing up the rear with Captain Lee and Alfa Company's Second Platoon. Good luck!”

“Thank you, Eagle. Luck to you. Raven out.”

In another moment, LSCP-44 crested the Picard Crater rim, angling between the two peaks Kaitlin had identified seconds before. The crater was a vast bowl stretching clear to the horizon and beyond; she couldn't even see the far crater wall. The bowl's floor, five kilometers below the rim, was shrouded in impenetrable black shadow, but a cluster of lights in the near distance marked the UN's Picard Base.

And then, on the sunlit crest ahead, she saw it, an enclosed Lunar hopper with pale blue UN markings, just rising above a swirling cloud of gray dust. Sunlight flashed again from the facets of its greenhouse windows. The spindly-legged craft was quite similar to the LSCP, though designed around a square base, instead of a rectangular one. It looked a lot like a larger version of the old LEMs, the Lunar Excursion Modules that NASA had used for the first landings over seventy years before, but the resem
blance was one of design specifications rather than descent. Spacecraft didn't need streamlining on the Moon, so efficiency and low mass were the key words. Hoppers, like the LSCPs, flew on fission-fired plasma thrusters; they weren't rated for flights between the Moon and LEO, but they could reach Lunar orbit, easily enough, and could use short bursts to hop on suborbital vectors to any spot on the Moon.

“He's making for the base,” Kaitlin said. “He's probably already warned them.”

“I'm more worried about him getting above us,” Dow replied. The UN hopper slewed left, rotating, slowing sharply as it hovered on its invisible jet of hot plasma and rising toward the LSCP's height.

“Why?” Kaitlin asked. Then the answer hit her. “Oh…”

Neither hopper nor LSCP carried anything like armor. The hopper's aluminum hull was so thin in places that a clumsily dropped tool could puncture it…and the more massively constructed LSCP wasn't that much better. If one of the two craft could maneuver above the other, the jet of hot, charged particles from its ventral thrusters would become a formidable short-range weapon.

The UN hopper was climbing fast now, rising above the bug as the bug descended. As the range closed to within thirty meters, Kaitlin could see the airlock door on the hopper just beneath its cockpit windows; the door was open and a space-suited figure was leaning out, a figure wearing a bright blue UN helmet and aiming a rifle. She didn't see a muzzle flash, but she thought she felt a vibration, a dull thud from somewhere beneath her feet.

“We're under fire,” she warned.

“I see him.” Dow hit the main ventral thruster for a two-second burst, and Kaitlin felt her knees sag with the acceleration. The bug gained the altitude advantage on the hopper. A moment later, Dow angled the LSCP over, nose down, and fired again, banking slightly with the port thrusters to send the ungainly bug drifting across and above the UN hopper's flight path.

There was no time for calculations or pulling up numbers or scenarios on the computer. The entire maneuver was strictly seat-of-the-pants, executed within the space of five seconds. As the bug passed ten meters above the hopper, Dow brought the ungainly craft's nose up and fired the main thrusters again.

They couldn't see whether the invisible burst of hot plasma was on target or not, but as the bug rotated slowly at Dow's practiced touch, the other vehicle came into view a second later. Together, wordlessly, they watched as the hopper continued drifting down toward the surface, rushing to meet its own shadow…and then the two merged in a sudden, silent burst of Lunar dust. The hopper crumpled and rolled, cartwheeling in slow-motion bounds low across the surface, hurling up great, arcing jets of dust with each impact. As it came to rest, a blurring cloud of dust enveloped the wreckage, settling with agonizing slowness.