Luna Marine

by Ian Douglas

  “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.

  FOUR

  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 t
he 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 resemblance 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.

  Kaitlin dropped a gloved hand on Lieutenant Dow’s shoulder. “Congratulations, Lieutenant. I think you just scored the first shoot-down of an enemy craft on the Moon.”

  “Four more and I’m an ace,” Dow replied. He shook his head. “Don’t think I’d care to try that again, though.” Holding the stick in his left hand, he punched in a series of commands with his right, firing port and starboard attitude jets that thumped and bumped through the hull and against Kaitlin’s boots. The bug descended swiftly, narrowly missing a tumble of huge, gray boulders before the view was obscured by a cloud of rising dust, and the landing pads settled with a bump and a jar into the hard-packed regolith.

  “Contact light!” Dow called, reaching out to flip down a row of switches. “Thrusters off and safed. Reactor to standby. You’re clear to debark.”

  “Right.” She keyed the platoon channel. “Gunny Yates? We’re down. Move ’em out!”

  “Copy that, Lieutenant. All right, Marines, you heard the lieutenant! We’re moving!”

  LSCP-44, Call sign Raven

  Picard Ringwall, The Moon

  0914 hours GMT

  Frank Kaminski brought his ATAR to his chest, waiting in the dark and close-packed confines of the airlock as the chamber’s atmosphere bled away. A winking red light flicked green, then the outer door swung slowly open, flooding the airlock with silvery light.

  “Hit the beach, Marines!” Yates shouted over the platoon channel. “Go! Go! Go!”

  He crowded ahead close behind Lance Corporal Nardelli, feeling the vibrations through his boots as the file pounded down the metal grating that served as a debarkation ramp. The regolith gave beneath his feet with a crunch felt rather than h
eard, like thin, crusty snow; directly ahead, the sun blazed above the shadowed western cliffs of Crisium, beneath the slender, just-visible blue-and-silver bow of a crescent Earth.

  As at Fra Mauro, he felt again the mingled feelings of awe and desolation. There were no stars visible in the side of the sky near the sun, but if he turned away and looked up, an icy scattering of stars was just visible above the eastern horizon. The crater rim stretched away to either side, to north and south; with nothing but black sky and red-gray hills as smooth as earthly sand dunes as measures of scale, he felt bug-small, tiny and exposed, as he followed the other Marines across the surface.

  “Jeez, what happened there?” someone called. “Got a crashed bug, here. South, fifty meters.”

  “That’s a UN hopper, and we just shot it down,” the lieutenant’s voice replied. “Watch it. They may have left troops on the ground.”

  “We’ll check it, Lieutenant,” Yates replied. “Okay! First Squad, check the hopper. Second Squad, deploy in defense perimeter. Let’s move it, Marines!”

  Trotting easily in long, bounding strides that quickly slid into a kind of kangaroo hop-and-skip, Kaminski and the others in his squad scuffed and bounced their way up a shallow slope to the spot where the UN hopper, its thin hull crumpled and torn, lay upside down. A space-suited body, a man in a blue UN helmet, lay sprawled in his back nearby. His face, just visible through a blackened, chipped visor, was horribly blistered, as though his skin had been hit by a blowtorch. The name stenciled on a strip of cloth attached to his suit read LECLERC. Kaminski wondered who the man was…and if he had a family waiting for him back on Earth.

  “What happened to him?” Ahearn asked.

  “Didn’t you feel us bouncing around before we landed?” Kaminski replied. “I think the lieutenant fried ’em by hitting ’em with the bug’s main jets.”

  “Yeah? Man, that’s doin’ it the hard way!”