by Allen Steele
A month before they left for Mars on the Enterprise—by coincidence, the pilot was to be Billy DeWolfe, who had gotten us into this mess in the first place—I got a final card from Tiny: “We still need a bass player. Please reconsider. C’mon down and we’ll make room for you.”
I didn’t write back, figuring that he was just being cute. The shuttle up to Columbus Station and the Enterprise launched from the Cape a few days later, and Joe and Tiny were on their way back…
(Long pause.) Funny. I almost said, “On their way back home.” I guess it was. I guess it always will be now.
Billy DeWolfe:
When Tiny and Joe climbed through the hatch into the manned lander, I never thought for an instant that I would be the last person to see them alive. I would have been piloting the lander down myself, if it wasn’t that I had to close down the Enterprise and bring the cargo lander down. I suppose I should consider myself lucky.
There weren’t any great last words from either of them that I can recall, only Joe grinning and saying, “See you later,” just before I shut and dogged the airlock hatch. I remember both of them being happy as hell to be back, though. During the two days since they had come out of the zombie tanks, while we were on our final approach and Mars was getting bigger and bigger, they had been talking about music, working on a song together—and they had been talking about making music, not just playing the oldies. (Laughs.) They said that when they were ready, they would give me a new tape to take back to Earth with me, as long as I didn’t take it to Nashville.
And y’know…suddenly, they were gone. I was on the command deck safeing everything for the return flight when Arsia Control came over the comlink saying that they had lost telemetry with the lander.
Alan Glass:
We buried them where we found them at the crash site, northeast of the Tharsis Montes range just above the equator. We wrapped Joe and Tiny, along with the three other people who had been in the lander, in the parachutes that had tangled after aerobraking, and buried their bodies under piles of rocks. I went back a few weeks later to place markers we had made from pieces of the wreckage. The floor of the desert shifts around a lot, so I don’t know if the graves are even visible anymore.
Billy found their instruments in the cargo lander, and they’re now in the Mars Hotel, hanging on the walls. Some country music museum wanted us to ship them back, so they could put Tiny’s guitar and Joe’s mini-synth on display, but we refused. It’s more appropriate that they stay on Mars…
It’s funny that you ask. A few days ago I got a letter from a friend who’s still stationed there, telling me that somebody’s been playing Tiny’s guitar. Guy from Florida, who wanted to try it out and thought it was okay to take it down from the hooks. I don’t think anyone minded very much. Besides, my friend says he’s pretty good.
The War Memorial
The first-wave assault is jinxed from the very beginning. Even before the dropship touches down, its pilot shouts over the comlink that a Pax missile battery seven klicks away has locked in on their position, despite the ECM buffer set up by the lunarsats. So it’s going to be a dust-off; the pilot has done his job by getting the men down to the surface, and he doesn’t want to be splattered across Mare Tranquillitatis.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Baker Company has been deployed for less than two minutes before the Pax heatseekers pummel the ground around them and take out the dropship even as it begins its ascent.
Giordano hears the pilot scream one last obscenity before his ugly spacecraft is reduced to metal rain, then something slams against his back and everything within the suit goes black. For an instant he believes he’s dead, that he’s been nailed by one of the heatseekers, but it’s just debris from the dropship. The half-ton ceramic-polymer shell of the Mark III Valkyrie Combat Armor Suit has absorbed the brunt of the impact.
When the lights flicker back on within his soft cocoon and the flatscreen directly in front of his face stops fuzzing, he sees that not everyone has been so lucky. A few dozen meters away at three o’clock, there’s a new crater that used to be Robinson. The only thing left of Baker Company’s resident card cheat is the severed rifle arm of his CAS.
He doesn’t have time to contemplate Robinson’s fate. He’s in the midst of battle. Sgt. Boyle’s voice comes through the comlink, shouting orders. Traveling overwatch, due west, head for Marker One-Eight-Five. Kemp, take Robinson’s position. Cortez, you’re point. Stop staring, Giordano (yes sir). Move, move, move…
So they move, seven soldiers in semi-robotic heavy armor, bounding across the flat silver-gray landscape. Tin men trying to outrun the missiles plummeting down around them, the soundless explosions they make when they hit. For several kilometers around them, everywhere they look, there are scores of other tin men doing the same, each trying to survive a silent hell called the Sea of Tranquility.
Giordano is sweating hard, his breath coming in ragged gasps. He tells himself that if he can just make Marker One-Eight-Five—crater Arago, over so the map overlay tells him—then everything will be okay. The crater walls will protect them. Once Baker Company sets up its guns and erects a new ECM buffer, they can dig in nice and tight and wait it out; the beachhead will have been established by then and the hard part of Operation Monkey Wrench will be over.
But the crater is five-and-a-half klicks away, across plains as flat and wide-open as Missouri pasture, and between here and there a lot of shitfire is coming down. The Pax Astra guns in the foothills of the lunar highlands due west of their position can see them coming; the enemy has the high ground, and they’re throwing everything they can at the invading force.
Sgt. Boyle knows his platoon is in trouble. He orders everyone to use their jumpjets. Screw formation; it’s time to run like hell.
Giordano couldn’t agree more whole-heartedly. He tells the Valkyrie to engage the twin miniature rockets mounted on the back of his carapace.
Nothing happens.
Once again, he tells the voice-activated computer mounted against the back of his neck to fire the jumpjets. When there’s still no response, he goes to manual, using the tiny controls nestled within the palm of his right hand inside the suit’s artificial arm.
At that instant, everything goes dark again, just like it did when the shrapnel from the dropship hit the back of his suit.
This time, though, it stays dark.
A red LCD lights above his forehead, telling him that there’s been a total system crash.
Cursing, he finds the manual override button and stabs it with his little finger. As anticipated, it causes the computer to completely reboot itself; he hears servomotors grind within the carapace as its limbs move into neutral position, until his boots are planted firmly on the ground and his arms are next to his sides, his rifle pointed uselessly at the ground.
There is a dull click from somewhere deep within the armor, then silence.
Except for the red LCD, everything remains dark.
He stabs frantically at the palm buttons, but there’s no power to any of the suit’s major subsystems. He tries to move his arms and legs, but finds them frozen in place.
Limbs, jumpjets, weapons, ECM, comlink…nothing works.
Now he’s sweating more than ever. The impact of that little bit of debris from the dropship must have been worse than he thought. Something must have shorted out, badly, within the Valkyrie’s onboard computer.
He twists his head to the left so he can gaze through the eyepiece of the optical periscope, the only instrument within the suit that isn’t dependent upon computer control. What he sees, terrifies him: the rest of his platoon jumpjetting for the security of the distant crater, while missiles continue to explode all around him.
Abandoning him. Leaving him behind.
He screams at the top of his lungs, yelling for Boyle and Kemp and Cortez and the rest, calling them foul names, demanding that they wait or come back for them, knowing that it’s futile. They can’t hear him. For whatever reason, they’ve alr
eady determined that he’s out of action; they cannot afford to risk their lives by coming back to lug an inert CAS across a battlefield.
He tries again to move his legs, but it’s pointless. Without direct interface from the main computer, the limbs of his suit are immobile. He might as well be wearing a concrete block.
The suit contains three hours of oxygen, fed through pumps controlled by another computer tucked against his belly, along with rest of its life-support systems. So at least he won’t suffocate or fry…
For the next three hours, at any rate.
Probably less. The digital chronometer and life-support gauge are dead, so there’s no way of knowing for sure.
As he watches, even the red coal of the LCD warning lamp grows dim until it finally goes cold, leaving him in the dark.
He has become a living statue. Fully erect, boots firmly placed upon the dusty regolith, arms held rigid at his sides, he is in absolute stasis.
For three hours. Certainly less.
For all intents and purposes, he is dead.
In the smothering darkness of his suit, Giordano prays to a god in which he has never really believed. Then, for lack of anything else to do, he raises his eyes to the periscope eyepiece and watches as the battle rages on around him.
He fully expects—and, after a time, even hopes—for a Pax missile to relieve him of his ordeal, but this small mercy never occurs. Without an active infrared or electromagnetic target to lock in upon, the heatseekers miss the small spot of ground he occupies, instead decimating everything around him.
Giordano becomes a mute witness to the horror of the worst conflict of the Moon War, what historians will later call the Battle of Mare Tranquillitatis. Loyalty, duty, honor, patriotism…all the things in which he once believed are soon rendered null and void as he watches countless lives being lost.
Dropships touch down near and distant, depositing soldiers in suits similar to his own. Some don’t even make it to the ground before they become miniature supernovas.
Men and women like himself are apart even as they charge across the wasteland for the deceptive security of distant craters and rills.
An assault rover bearing three lightsuited soldiers rushes past him, only to be hit by fire from the hills. It is thrown upside down, crushing two of the soldiers beneath it. The third man, his legs broken and his suit punctured, manages to crawl from the wreckage. He dies at Giordano’s feet, his arms reaching out to him.
He has no idea whether Baker Company has survived, but he suspects it hasn’t, since he soon sees a bright flash from the general direction of the crater it was supposed to occupy and hold.
In the confines of his suit, he weeps and screams and howls against the madness erupting around him. In the end, he goes mad himself, cursing the same god to whom he prayed earlier for the role he has been damned.
If God cares, it doesn’t matter. By then, the last of Giordano’s oxygen reserves have been exhausted; he asphyxiates long before his three hours are up, his body still held upright by the Mark III Valkyrie Combat Armor Suit.
When he is finally found, sixty-eight hours later, by a patrol from the victorious Pax Astra Free Militia, they are astonished that anything was left standing on the killing ground. This sole combat suit, damaged only by a small steel pipe wedged into its CPU housing, with a dead man inexplicably sealed inside, is the only thing left intact. All else has been reduced to scorched dust and shredded metal.
So they leave him standing.
They do not remove the CAS from its place, nor do they attempt to pry the man from his armor. Instead, they erect a circle of stones around the Valkyrie. Later, when peace has been negotiated and lunar independence has been achieved, a small plaque is placed at his feet.
The marker bears no name. Because so many lives were lost during the battle, nobody can be precisely certain of who was wearing that particular CAS on that particular day.
An eternal flame might have been placed at his feet, but it wasn’t, because nothing burns on the Moon.
Moreau2
Carson and Mariano were the sole survivors of the crash; everyone else was killed. Upon later reflection, Phil would realize that the only reason why he and George made it through was that they had been in the back of the spacecraft; the military lander had come down nose-first, so the pilot and co-pilot died instantly, and the two Marines from the 4th Space riding in the forward section of the passenger compartment were crushed when the cockpit bulkhead collapsed upon them.
So it was all a matter of luck, really. If the seating arrangements been reversed before they departed Olympus Station, if the Pax Astra heatseeker the pilots were trying to avoid before they lost control had made a direct hit, if the craft had rolled over upon impact, if its fuel tanks had exploded…no sense in trying to second-guess fate. They were alive, and that’s all there was to it.
But Mariano was unconscious, and when Carson pulled him from the wreckage he noticed that his right leg was twisted at a bad angle. Phil didn’t know enough first-aid to help him even if he wasn’t wearing a hardsuit; at least his suit was still intact, and when Phil pushed back George’s helmet visor, he saw a white smudge of vapor against the faceplate. That’s when he knew for certain the photographer was still among the living.
Burying the dead was pointless. The pilots were entombed within the craft, and he would have wasted precious air attempting to dig graves for the two Marines in the lunar regolith. When Phil climbed back into the lander to see if he could salvage anything useful, he found a helmet resting a couple meters away from the hardsuit to which it had once been attached. It took a few moments for him to realize that the helmet wasn’t a spare, and the significance of the red ice frozen around the suit’s collar ring. He turned away and took several deep breaths, and somehow managed not to get sick.
Some reporter he was: he couldn’t remember the names of the soldiers who’d died.
Pulling a seat cushion out of the ship, Phil lashed George to it with a safety belt, then found some severed electrical cables and used them to fashion a crude harness. He also found an undamaged carbine, but decided against taking it; if he was picked up by a Pax squad, carrying a weapon might invalidate his status as a non-com. He located Mariano’s camera bag, and as an afterthought he looped its strap around the photographer’s neck. If he knew George, he’d throw a fit if he woke up to find that his rig had been left behind.
The electronic compass on his helmet’s heads-up told him which direction was west. He pulled up a map overlay, and discovered that the dead volcano upon the horizon was Sosigenes. He had no idea how far away it was; he’d already been warned that ground distance was difficult to determine on the Moon. With any more luck, they might be able to reach it before their air ran out. And, after all, Sosigenes had been their destination in the first place…
So off he went across the Sea of Tranquility, trying to avoid the larger rocks in his way as he dragged Mariano behind him. One-sixth gravity helped a little bit, but not much; the stretcher prohibited him from making bunny-hops, and after awhile it didn’t seem as if there was any real difference. At first he maintained radio silence, for fear that any transmissions might bring another missile down upon him, until he realized that the radio was his only real hope of being rescued before his air supply was used up. So he switched it back on and toggled to the emergency band. No one responded to his calls for help, though, and soon he was singing “Little Red Rooster” over and over, just to keep him himself company. It was the only song he could remember offhand, but his father had sung it with his platoon during Gulf War II, and just now it seemed appropriate.
About an hour after he left the crash site, Phil caught a faint flicker from the corner of his eye. He turned to look, and saw a bright starburst above the southern horizon. A moment later, he spotted another one, like distant fireworks on the Fourth of July. Then he glimpsed tiny pinpricks of light racing across the sky, low to the ground in the approximate direction of Arago Crater, and realized
what he was witnessing: a battle between the Pax Astra Free Militia and the 4th Space Infantry.
Too bad he didn’t know how to operate George’s camera. It would have made an excellent shot to accompany his dispatch from the front. If he lived to write it, that is.
Phil was within sight of the long, deep rill separating him from Sosigenes, and was beginning to wonder how he was going to get around it (and trying to forget the fact that he had less than fifteen minutes of oxygen left; he hadn’t checked Mariano’s suit lately, so he had no idea whether his companion was alive or not) when he saw something moving several kilometers away. At first he thought it was a sunlight reflecting off the silver-gray dust that marred his visor, but as he watched it became a white object, kicking up fantails of regolith as it skirted boulders and small impact craters.
A rover.
Dropping the stretcher, Phil began jumping up and down as high as he could, waving both hands above his head. That wasn’t a good idea; besides the fact that he used up more air that way, he was also exhausted. As the rover swerved toward him, the sole of his left boot came down on a rock; Phil lost his balance tumbled to the ground.
The back of his head smacked the inside of his helmet, and that was the last thing he felt for a good long while.
Like so many conflicts before it, the Moon War began with a press conference.
The OTV from the Cape carrying the twenty members of press pool arrived at Olympus Station at 1100 hours. Phil was already there, of course; as a UMI stringer, he had been living aboard Skycan for the past four months, filing stories about the breakdown of diplomatic relations between the Pax Astra and the spacefaring Earth nations. Fat lot of good it had done him; as soon as the U.N. Security Council voted in favor of the U.S.-backed resolution authorizing military action against the Pax, orders came down from the Civil Space Administration to quarantine the operations center in the station’s hub.