by Ian Douglas
He didn’t answer. He was thinking about something he’d read once, as a kid, about how air-to-air combat had begun when pilots on both sides, flying cloth-and-wood-frame biplanes over France in the First World War, had begun carrying pistols with them on reconnaissance flights and exchanging shots with enemy fliers. Pistols had led to machine guns…and ultimately radar-homing missiles and airborne lasers. He wondered if they were witness to a dawn of a new and similar type of warfare.
There wasn’t time to think much about history, though. A squad sweep through the area turned up bits of scrap and wreckage knocked from the UN hopper, and a portable radar unit mounted on a tripod at the top of a low hill. The footprints scuffed and stamped into the dust showed where UN troops had set the radar up only moments earlier. After a careful check for booby traps, two of the Marines began dismantling the unit; Kaminski took the moment’s respite to turn his back on Earth and the sun and stare down into the crater bowl below them.
The bottom of the crater was night black, but enough light was scattering off the crater rim to provide a little illumination. In fact, though, the lights of the UN base shone like a tightly packed constellation of brilliant stars on the crater’s floor, only a few kilometers away. Yates was standing on the hill crest a few meters away, pressing the rubber-ringed facepiece of a photomultiplier magnifier to his visor. He was studying the layout of the UN base, the bulky length of his Wyvern resting in the dust by his feet.
Kaminski dropped the reload case he was humping in the dust nearby. “Hey, Gunny. Can I have a look?”
Yates handed him the electronic imager. Kaminski raised the facepiece, positioning the small, rectangular screen against his visor. A tiny IR laser built into the optics gave the range to target as 8.34 kilometers; in the pale green glow of the photomultiplier optics, he could penetrate the night shadows easily.
The Picard base consisted of several squat, upright, cylindrical habs and not much more besides the worklights and a scattering of vacuum-rigged bulldozers and trench-diggers. Not far away were several more lobbers, plus a larger, sleeker shape, an arrowhead of stealth-jet black, sitting erect on quad-frame landing jacks.
Closer, between the habs and the crater’s western slope, the ground had been carved and plowed in a rectilinear patchwork of trenches connecting several deep, square-sided pits. It was, Kaminski thought, obviously an archeological dig of some kind. The arky teams on Mars had used similar techniques to carve trenches into the Martian regolith, sampling the layers they cut through for artifacts and cast-off bits of debris.
All the scene below was missing was people. Funny. The UN personnel obviously had had plenty of warning that the Marines were on their way. They’d had time to dispatch the lobber and set up a portable radar unit. They’d probably been warned by the garrison at Fra Mauro the moment the Marines had first appeared
Were they all inside, huddled up in their suits, waiting to see if the Marines would come in with can openers at the ready?
“Seems a bit too quiet, Gunny,” he said to Yates. “Don’t see a damned thing moving down there. Ah! Wait a sec!”
“Whatcha got?”
“That black ship grounded down there. It’s lifting!” There was no flame, but the arrowhead shape was silently rising now above a swirl of lunar dust.
“Gimme the imager.”
Kaminsky surrendered the device. Without it, he could just see the UN ship vanishing into the night beyond the base.
“Shit,” Yates said. “They’re bugging out. Wonder if they’re evacuating the place? Or…”
“Or what, Gunny?”
“Or if they just stopped long enough to haul in some reinforcements. I don’t like the looks of this.” He lowered the imager again and handed it to Kaminsky. “They gotta know we’re here, all right. But…uh-oh. Here comes Eagle.”
Kaminski turned, following Yates’s pointing arm. Another bug was coming in out of the sun, floating high, passing above Picard’s rim by at least two hundred meters. Silently, it drifted overhead and a bit to the north, descending rapidly as it cleared the rim, floating on unseen jets of plasma toward the brilliantly lit base below. Halfway down, the ungainly looking craft switched on its landing lights, casting bright circles of illumination across the habs and trenches.
Kaminski watched a moment…then lifted the magnifier to his visor again, staring down into the base. There was something…
He saw movement…a trio of blue helmets raised above the rim of one of the trenches…and the stubby, metallic cylinder of a shoulder-launched missile. “Missile on the ground!” he shouted. “This is Kaminski, I have a slam, in the trenches fifty meters from the base habs!”
Yates jerked the imager from Kaminski’s glove, lifting it one-handed to his own visor. “This is Yates! Confirmed! Shoulder-launched missile, in the trenches! They’re targeting Eagle!”
“Get the slaw on them!” Garroway’s voice called. “Yates! Get the Wyvern in action!”
Yates had already stooped, snatched up the Wyvern, and hoisted it to his shoulder, dropping the sighting display into place in front of his visor. “Clear aft!” he called.
“You’re clear!” Kaminski shot back, then slapped Yates’s shoulder for emphasis. “Go!”
Yates fired, loosing a silent gout of burning gas and strips of plastic packaging from the rear of the man-portable launcher. The Wyvern missile, kicked clear of the weapon’s muzzle by an explosive charge, shot twenty meters toward the edge of the crater rim before its engine switched on, a tiny, white-hot point of light dwindling rapidly toward the UN base.
Long before the Wyvern could cross the distance to its target, however, the UN troops hiding in the trenches fired their own missile. The slam’s back-flash was bright enough to be seen with the naked eye from eight kilometers away; the missile streaked skyward, scratching out a needle of white fire against the night as it arrowed into First Platoon’s LSCP.
The detonation was a strobe of light banishing the stars, dazzling against the night.
FIVE
WEDNESDAY, 9 APRIL 2042
LSCP-30, Call sign Eagle
Picard Crater, The Moon
0916 hours GMT
The missile struck the LSCP from the right and from below, the explosion a hammerblow that sent the frail craft lurching hard to the left, nose high, then dropped it into a spin. Captain Carmen Fuentes was standing behind the pilot, Lieutenant Kenneth Booth, when the blast slammed her against the back of the pilot’s couch.
Booth screamed, the sound shrill over Carmen’s head-set.
“Ken!”
“I’m hit! I’m hit, damn it!” He clawed at the side of his suit, where a thumb-sized hole in the tough, layered plastic matched a larger hole punched through his acceleration couch, and another in the deck centimeters from Carmen’s left foot. Air whistled from the puncture, as a cold fog condensed above it in a tiny, spinning whirlwind. The craft continued its roll sluggishly to the left, almost tipping all the way over, but at the last instant, it wallowed back, spilling Carmen against the side of the cockpit as the deck dropped away beneath her and took her stomach with it.
“Take the controls, damn it!” she shouted at the pilot. “Get us back under control!”
Booth nodded inside his helmet visor, which was already starting to fog up, and fumbled with the paired joysticks that controlled main thrust and attitude. She felt several hard bumps as he triggered the ACTs; both spin and descent slowed, but didn’t stop.
“Machuga!” she called over the platoon channel.
“This is Jaclovic, ma’am. The lieutenant’s dead.”
“Okay! Hang on! We’re hit and going down. You’re in charge! Get both squads out as soon as we hit!”
“Copy that! Okay, gyrines! You heard! Brace for impact!”
Booth fired the main thruster; Carmen nearly dropped to her knees with the sudden acceleration, and she heard a grinding shriek somewhere aft, like metal tearing.
Then the bug crumpled into the Lunar surface,
almost upright, with the shock taken up by the folding of its six, splayed legs. This time, Carmen did hit her knees as the deck slammed up against her legs. The cockpit tilted heavily back to the right, and she had to cling to the acceleration couch to hold her place.
“The Eagle has damned well landed,” she muttered. They were down, at least more or less in one piece. She felt shaken, but unhurt. The tiny whirlwind of escaping air at her feet had become a hurricane, but a short-lived one as the last of the bug’s air shrilled out into space. Carmen was already fumbling at one of the pouches attached to her suit harness, pulling out a self-sealing vacuum patch which she slapped over the hole in the side of Booth’s suit. There was not a lot else she could offer in the way of first aid. The inside of his visor was smeared with blood and a bright, pink foam, and she could barely see his face. Damn! Why didn’t these Marine-issue armored suits come with external life-support readouts? She couldn’t tell if the man was alive or dead.
Light flared silently outside…another shoulder-launched missile strike somewhere close by, she thought. The people who’d shot down LSCP-30 would be closing in pretty quickly now.
“Captain!” Jaclovic’s voice called. “Captain! Are you okay?”
“I’m in one piece. Get the platoon out of here, Gunny! Perimeter defense. On the double!”
One of the square-paned windows of the cockpit’s greenhouse canopy suddenly bore a small, round hole surrounded by a frosting of tiny white cracks. She wondered why she hadn’t heard the shot or the impact—then remembered that she was in vacuum now. No sound. Over her helmet radio, though, she could hear shouted orders, calls, and the hiss and puff of heavy breathing as the platoon scrambled clear of the grounded craft.
The bug must be under attack by UN troops outside. They had to get out and get clear of the wreckage, or risk being trapped inside. The best thing she could do for Booth, she decided, was leave him where he was. If he was dead, there was nothing more she could do; if he was wounded, there still wasn’t much she could do, except arrange to get him inside one of those habs out there as quickly as possible, where his suit could be removed and his wounds treated.
“I’ll be back for you, Ken,” she said, not knowing if he heard her or not. “Just sit tight!”
The deck had folded enough in the crash that she almost didn’t make it, suit, PLSS, and all, through the circular hatch that lead down to the forward end of the bug’s main compartment. There, deck had risen to meet a descending overhead, and she had to crouch low to make her way aft through cramped, near-total darkness, groping for the entrance to the airlock. She switched on the light mounted on the right shoulder of her suit and let the pale circle of illumination it cast flicker along both sides of the compartment. Several still, space-suited bodies lay there, two on the deck, three more still strapped to their bulkhead supports up forward. Lieutenant Machuga was one of those still strapped to his bulkhead support, the front of his suit peeled open in jagged leaves to expose pale bone, glistening black blood already freezing, and a fist-sized hole going clear through the platform at his back and the deck underneath. Next to him was HMC Strigel, the company’s corpsman, his visor shattered. Shrapnel from the missile strike must have sleeted through the forward end of the compartment.
Stopping only to retrieve an ATAR from a bulkhead storage rack, she kept moving aft, squeezing through the misshapen airlock hatch, then through the lock and out onto the still, vast quiet of the Lunar surface, crawling on hands and knees to squeeze through the outer door.
The bug had come down at the edge of the crisscross of trenches and excavated pits, the spider’s legs twisted and snapped by the impact, the frame crumpled badly on one side. Clouds of vapor jetted from a dozen holes in the reaction-mass tanks; as the water escaped into space, it froze, creating clouds of glittering ice particles that gradually settled toward the ground. In the shadows of the crater floor, quite a bit of ice had built up, where water reaction mass had escaped the tanks and frozen almost immediately.
She rose unsteadily to her feet, breathing hard, then leaped for the nearest trench as silently blossoming puffs of dust stitched across the regolith a few meters to her left and black holes appeared as if by magic in the LSCP’s hull metal.
She landed almost on top of three Marines, their reactive camo armor black in the blackness of the ditch. “Shit! Watch what the fuck you’re doing!” one of the Marines barked as she hit his leg. Then he did a clumsy double take, reading name or rank tabs. “Uh, sorry, Captain.”
She ignored the outburst. “Where’s Gunny Jack?”
A black figure crouched farther along the trench raised an arm, signaling. “Over here, Captain.”
“I’m coming to you.”
“Watch your head, ma’am! They’ve got an MG over there somewhere!”
“Roger that!”
She squeezed past the three Marines and moved toward Jaclovic’s position. The trench was a meter deep and only about a meter wide; to stay concealed, she had to crawl on her hands and knees, and even so she wondered if the back of her PLSS was showing enough to make an inviting target.
As she neared Jaclovic, the NCO raised himself above the lip of the trench, aiming his ATAR from the shoulder. The Advanced Technology Assault Rifle employed electronic optics in the sighting mechanism to place a crosshair on the firer’s visor, targeting whatever it was aimed at, but long habit had Jaclovic firing from a perfect kneeling stance, even if his suit and helmet didn’t allow him to sight his weapon directly. He loosed a quick burst of triplet shots, then dropped back behind the cover of the trench as the enemy’s machine gun returned the fire in silent puffs of dust.
“H’lo, Captain,” he said as she dropped to the floor of the trench beside him. “Ain’t we got fun?”
She twisted about, raising her helmet above the rim of the trench. “Where’s the fire coming from? I can’t see.”
“Stay down! Uh, ma’am.” He made a slicing motion with one hand, pointing. “That tall radio mast, call it twelve o’clock. We got a machine gun at about one o’clock, near the big bulldozer, and a slaw in the dirt pile at about eleven. The hab at ten o’clock, I think there’s a guy on top of it spotting. There’s also troops, maybe ten, maybe twelve, covering in the trenches over closer to the habs.”
“Trench warfare!” she said. The thought was almost funny.
“Yeah. Lasers. Spaceships.” He raised himself up again and loosed another silent burst toward the habs. “And we’re back to shootin’ each other from the trenches.”
Carmen unslung the ATAR she’d picked up in the bug, flicked on the optic sight, plugged in her suit connector to get an HUD link, pulled the bolt to chamber a round, and flicked the selector to three-round burst. As Jaclovic took cover again, she rose to her knees, swinging the assault rifle toward the bulldozer where he’d said the machine gun was hidden. A bright green crosshair tracked across her helmet’s visor, showing where she was aimed at the moment. She adjusted the weapon until the crosshairs were centered on the bulldozer. Carmen waited, watching for movement…and then a puff of gray dust exploded across her visor as a round plowed into regolith a few centimeters away. She jerked back down under cover, without having taken the shot.
“Touchy, aren’t they?” she said.
“Gotta watch yourself, Captain. They got us covered six ways from—”
“Incoming!” someone shouted over the channel, and a second later a bright light blossomed from the direction of the grounded LSCP. Bits and pieces of rock and metallic debris showered over the trenches.
“Forgot to tell you, ma’am,” Jaclovic added. “They got slams out there, too.”
“This is fun. Can we work some people over that way, try to get behind them?”
“I sent Second Squad that way soon as we got clear, ma’am. They got pinned…about there. We salvaged one Wyvern from the crash, and both squad lasers, but we haven’t been able to see a target long enough to hit it. Somethin’ else, too.”
“What?”
“From the volume of fire we’ve been taking, I’d say we’re facing more than a handful of troops out there. They’ve got, I don’t know…dozens, hidden in the trenches all along from there…to there, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they had more people positioned to move in from the flanks or behind. These guys have it organized, and right now, I’d say they have us just about where they want us.”
She rose again, this time simply pointing her assault rifle in the general direction of the bulldozer and clamping her gloved forefinger down on the trigger. The gunfire was silent, of course, but the butt gave a reassuring triple-thump to her shoulder before she dropped behind cover once more. She couldn’t possibly have actually hit anything, but at least the gesture felt good.
“Communications?”
“No problem there. We’ve got an open channel with Second Platoon, on the crater rim about eight klicks that way. And an L-2 satlink to Fra Mauro. But I don’t think either of those are gonna help us.”
“Why not?”
He jerked a gauntleted thumb over his shoulder, toward the habs and the concealed UN soldiers. “Because they’re getting in position to rush us, and there’s not one damned thing we can do about it.”
LSCP-44, Call sign Raven
Picard Ringwall, The Moon
0919 hours GMT
Kaitlin Garroway held the viewer of her electronic imager against her visor, pressing the button that zoomed the view in to maximum magnification. With light enhancement, she could peer right down inside the trenches below, where a large number of black-helmeted figures were massing in huddled-down groups, weapons very much in evidence. Scanning slowly, she noted the main enemy groupings, the gun positions, and even a pair of suited figures atop one of the habs—probably an OP.
“What do you think, Gunny?” she asked. “Forty…fifty of them?”
“At least, ma’am” was Yates’s radioed response. “Looks like they came in on that black transport that just bugged out.”
“Yeah, but from where? Earth? The bastards could’ve warned us!” She shifted back to the trenches, then pivoted slowly, zeroing in on the enemy OP atop one of the habs. “Pap! You on the slaw?”