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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.

US Joint Chiefs’ Command/

Control Bunker, Arlington,

Virginia

0610 hours GMT (0110 hours

EDT)

The place was a fortress, hollowed out of bedrock two hundred meters beneath the maze of offices and corridors still called the Pentagon, despite changes to its architecture and geometry over the years. Though called the Bunker by the thousands of personnel, military and civilian, who worked there, it was more of a city than a refuge, a very comfortable and high-tech fortress with cool air, pleasant background music, and the latest in AI neural-link processing to link the place with the World Above.

In two years of war, there’d been frequent calls to abandon this site, so close to the vulnerable and tempting target just across the river that was the nation’s capital, but even in the early months of the war, when the continental United States had come under sustained and brutal cruise-missile bombardment, those calls had never been seriously considered. Even if the war—God forbid!—went NBC, the Pentagon’s underground warrens were well shielded, well supplied, and capable of maintaining communications with the nation’s far-flung military assets, and no matter if the city above was reduced to radioactive slag. The Bunker was, above all else, secure.

Colonel David Walker, USAF, was not feeling particularly secure, however, as he stood up in the cool-lit, thick-carpeted briefing room on Sublevel 20, with its waiting circle of generals, aides, and politicians, and walked to the head of the room with its slab of a podium and the array of wall screens behind him and to his right. The US had managed to hold its own during the past two years, since the beginning of what was now being called the UN war, but the news was rarely good. It was the United States, the Russian Federation, and Japan against almost all of the rest of the world, now, and for months they’d been able to do little but hold their own…and in many cases, not even that. The early successes on Mars and in Earth orbit had buoyed hopes, of course, and a lot was riding now on the current Marine op on the Moon, but in most cases, in most places, US forces were just barely hanging on.

The worse the war news got, the edgier the Joint Chiefs and the JCS staff became. This place had a nasty tendency to shoot the messengers bringing bad news, and the news he carried to this middle-of-the-night special meeting was decidedly less than career-enhancing.

“Gentlemen,” Walker said, “and ladies. This report has just come through from Cheyenne. Black Crystal has been destroyed.”

A low murmur of voices sounded around the circular table. He was no more than confirming the rumor that had been spreading throughout the underground complex for the past twenty minutes, he knew, but the shock in that room as he made the announcement was sudden, almost palpable, nonetheless.

Admiral Charles Jordan Gray, head of the Joint Chiefs, fixed Walker with a hard glare. “Who destroyed it? How?”

“We’re…Cheyenne, I mean, is still looking at that, sir. The spacecraft was on the outward leg of its circumlunar parabola, approximately ten thousand kilometers above the Mare Crisium, and about to loop around the farside. We were tracking it, of course, from the ISS. This is what we picked up.”

A flatscreen on the wall behind him switched on, bringing up several windows, each with its own display. The image showing the target in visible light gave little information, a speck of light all but lost in the glare from the nearby silver curve of the Moon. Other windows showed the same picture, but at different wavelengths. The infrared view was clearest. Alphanumerics scrolled up the screen and wrote themselves across various windows, displaying times, camera data and wavelength, magnification factors and uncounted other informational elaborations.

Walker pointed to the IR image, where Black Crystal was visible as a red sliver against background blues and blacks. “We were tracking their IR signature with the big Humasen telescope at the ISS. Watch this, now. Time factor slowed, twenty to one….”

The window expanded, magnifying the red sliver. As a dwindling readout of tenths of seconds reached zero, a white spot flared brilliant against the sliver’s side; the spot grew brighter, expanded…and then engulfed the sliver in a roiling fireball of orange and yellow, a bright disk that expanded, thinned, and faded. Red and orange fragments drifted apart in ragged, frame-by-frame silence.

“My God,” the Aerospace Force JCS member, General Grace Sidney, said. Like Walker, she was wearing the new-style USAF dress uniform, a two-tone pattern in black and light blue, for space and sky. “What have they got up there?”

“Spectral analysis of the radiation showed a sharp spike at 115 keV,” Walker continued, “which is the characteristic signature of positronium annihilation.”

“Would you care to try that again in English, son?” The tall and soft-spoken black man was Louis Carlton Harrel, the president’s national security advisor.

“Antimatter,” Admiral Gray said. “The sons of bitches have an antimatter weapon!”

“Yes, sir,” Walker said. “Specifically, we think they’ve developed a weapon that directs a stream of positrons—antielectrons—at the target. When positrons interact with ordinary matter, the two annihilate each other, releasing a very great deal of energy. That 115 keV spike in the gamma range is the giveaway. We’ve known how to build electron-beam weapons for years, but we can’t begin to generate that much antimatter that quickly.”

“Was it another spacecraft?” General Lamar Turner, the Army chief of staff, wanted to know. “One hidden behind the Moon?”

“Almost certainly not, sir. The power requirements for this kind of weapon are…considerable. Cheyenne thinks it more likely we’re dealing with a ground base, one with a large fusion reactor.”

“A ground base?” Harrel said.

“How the hell did the UNdies get a ground base on the backside of the frigging Moon?” Turner asked.

“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.