by Ian Douglas
By tacit consent, they both steered well clear of anything about the inquiry, or the friendly-fire incident at Picard.
“Mark my words, Kate,” Rob told her as they ate. “The military is taking us back into space. And it’s the Marines who are leading the way.”
“’Sfunny,” she said around a mouthful of bamboo and mushroom. “I thought it was all the alien stuff we’ve been finding out there. That was what revitalized the space program, back when we’d all but given up on space.”
“Sure. I guess that got things rolling.” He chewed for a moment, thoughtful. “But if you think about it, it was the need to get lots of people out to Mars, and provide ’em with air and power, that got us on track with the cycler spacecraft and the big bases at Mars Prime and Cydonia. And most of the people we ended up sending were Marines. To protect our national interests…meaning the ET technology and stuff we were finding out there. And now, the same is happening on the Moon.”
The conversation had veered perilously close to a dangerous area. She decided to try steering the subject clear of the Marine missions to Fra Mauro and Picard. “It’s the technology we need,” she told him. “The things we can learn from the ancient ETs. Everyone knows that!”
“Think about history,” he told her. “Think about what happened in the American West. Sure, settlers started heading west looking for gold or farmland or whatever, and they built covered wagons and, later, transcontinental railroad lines to get ’em there. But it was the soldiers who went along who spread civilization to that whole empty stretch of the continent, from Missouri to California. It was the soldiers who built the forts at Laramie and Fort Collins and Leavenworth and Dodge and Lincoln and how many other lonely outposts across the West that later became towns and cities.”
“Well, the Native Americans might quibble with your use of the word civilization,” she replied, “but I guess I see your point.”
“The Army opened the West in a way the mountain men and the gold rushers never could,” he insisted. “Without those forts stretched clear across the continent, we would have ended up with two countries, the US and California, with nothing but wilderness and mountains between the two.”
“And the Mormons,” Kaitlin said. She knew enough history to hold her own against Rob, usually, and she enjoyed a good debate. “Don’t forget the Mormons.”
“Finicky details,” he said, with a dismissive flutter of his hand. “In the grand scheme of things, it was the soldiers who built those outposts, then brought their wives along and started the towns. The settlers moved in to feed the Army. The railroads came through and connected the new towns. The soldiers retired and took up farming cheap land in the area. And that’s what’s going to happen in space.”
“I’m not sure there’ll ever be ‘cheap land’ in space.”
“C’mon, Kate. You see what I mean.”
“Sure. And you might have a point….”
“Might have?”
“What was our biggest problem on the Moon?”
He gave her a weary smile. “You mean, besides the Army?” She nodded, and he shrugged. “Logistics, I guess. Especially water and air.”
“Right. We had working parties at the Lunar north pole the whole time, digging up ice and hauling it back to Picard. Most places in the solar system, it won’t even be that easy.”
“Actually, it might. Y’know, probably the only place in the whole solar system that doesn’t have readily available water somewhere close by is Venus.”
“Mercury?”
“There’s polar ice there, too.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” she said, remembering an article she’d read on the subject.
“And wherever we can find ice, we can make oxygen, drinking water, and rocket fuel. And what I picture, see, is the Army having to set up outposts, like those frontier forts, to guard the water holes.”
“By ‘Army,’ I’m assuming you really mean ‘Marines.’”
He laughed and lifted his cup of o-sake, as if in a toast. “Semper fi, do or die!” he cried. “The Marines will go in first to stake out the beachhead, just like always. As soon as it’s safe, the doggies move in and claim the credit!”
“Okay, okay, I’ll go along with all that. Still, you’ve gotta admit that if it hadn’t been for all the alien stuff we’ve found out there, the space program would be dead on arrival, right now.”
He shrugged. “It still might be, too, if the ET tech doesn’t deliver something pretty spectacular.”
“Like what?”
“Hell, I don’t know. A cure for global warming?”
“That’s a good one.”
“Has to be something more than these crazy new religions. Maybe a new kind of space drive, or a new power source. Anyway, I think we’re going to keep looking now, now that we have a presence out there.”
“So do I,” she told him.
And then she told him her lifelong dream, about how she was going to be among the first to go to the stars….
After dinner, Rob drove them down out of the mountains to Gaviota State Park. As with every other beach in the world, the steady rise of sea levels was slowly devouring the sandy shelf, and the increase in violent storms and El Niño years frequently scoured the surviving sand away to bare rock.
But storms also returned the sand, sometimes, and current beach conditions were posted as fair to good. If the shelf, even at low tide, wasn’t as broad as it had been fifty, or even twenty years ago, it still offered a glimpse of what the wild and spray-drenched interface between land and sea had once been like.
The Moon was well up in the southeast, just past full and gleaming silver in a cloudless sky, when Kaitlin and Rob left his car at the lot and started down the long flight of steps leading to the beach below. Waves crashed and hissed, each incoming roller shattering the dancing pillar of reflected moonlight in the water up the beach.
By day, the park, like all of the state beaches, tended to be jammed with refugees from the city enjoying a spray-laden taste of clothing-optional nature. After sunset, though, the crowds had thinned to a scattering of couples and small family groups, gathered around fires or discreetly making out on blankets scattered among dunes and rocks. The stars were as brilliant as they ever got this close to Los Angeles, which even this far up the coast flooded most of the eastern horizon with warm light.
“So, what’ve you heard about Operation Swift Victory?” Kaitlin asked Rob. They’d talked a little about it during the drive. Lately, Kaitlin had been thinking a lot about the rumored upcoming assault but hadn’t talked to anyone who knew any more about it than she did. Security was extraordinarily tight.
Stopping suddenly, she slipped her shoes off and let her bare feet sink into wet sand. Rob crouched and untied his shoes, pulled off his socks, and rolled up the cuffs of his jeans. He’d brought a towel along, which he kept slung over his shoulder. The air was still hot after a day that had hit thirty degrees, but the sea breeze was refreshingly cool, almost chilly. As always, weather this warm in April made Kaitlin wonder how bad the summer was going to be. Each year, somehow, seemed a bit hotter, a bit stormier, than the last.
“Don’t know,” he said at last. “But I got a bad feeling. You know who’s in command?”
“General Richardson, I heard.”
“Overall, yeah. But he won’t be leaving the Pentagon. No, the CO on-site. The guy up front, leading the charge.”
“Not…”
“’Fraid so. Your old friend, Colonel Whitworth.” He chuckled. “Someone figured he was the man, because he’s had experience with vac-combat.”
“God help us.”
“I heard there was quite a row during the planning. Seems like all of the services wanted a crack at the UN-dies.”
“What happened?”
“The Army won. The Marines lost out, because someone pointed out that they’d already had a shot at Moonglory.”
She laughed. “Is that what they call it?”
“Well, it mak
es great copy on the vidcasts. Anyway, I imagine Aerospace Force transports will take ’em in. Don’t know what they’re planning, but my guess would be a quick, one-step thrust, straight from Earth to orbit to Moon. Come in low, mountain-skimming, to avoid the Demon.” The Demon was the currently circulating slang for whatever it was that had nailed Black Crystal, variously rumored to be a powerful laser, an antimatter beam, or an entirely new type of weapon unlike anything known before.
“Think it’ll work?”
“Damfino. I hope so, but…”
“But?”
“Shoot. It just feels all wrong, you know? I don’t think anybody has any decent intel. No one knows what’s going on back there, on the back side of the Moon. The Army could be walking into six different kinds of hell.”
They’d walked a fair distance east from the steps, and were on an almost deserted stretch of beach. A few fires flickered in the distance behind them, but they were alone here, save for crashing surf and glittering stars and Moon.
“How about a swim?” he asked.
She had to consider that cheerful suggestion for a moment. She hadn’t brought a swimsuit, and she suddenly wished she’d worn something more appropriate under her slacks than filmy panties, even a thong-G. Oh, she’d been nude in public plenty of times, on the beach and elsewhere, but she’d never stripped down in front of Rob. Kaitlin was suddenly aware of feelings, unsettled feelings that made her state of dress or undress more important than if he’d been an anonymous stranger in a crowd at the beach.
“Sure,” she said, deciding suddenly. She began shucking her clothing and dropping it on the sand. “Why not?” She felt daring…and a bit giddy. They left their clothing piled on the beach next to the towel. Holding hands, then, they started jogging down the narrow shelf toward the breakers.
Before they reached the waves, however, thunder tolled, a distant, muffled drumroll. Both of them stopped and turned, looking up into the northwestern sky, but the stars were still sharp and clear, with no hint of an approaching storm.
Then a dazzling flare of light appeared, rising slowly above the Santa Ynez Mountains, brighter than the street-lamps over the parking lot and trailing a long, wavering tail of white flame. It rose high toward the zenith, its path curving slightly, until it passed almost directly overhead, moving out over the ocean now, traveling rapidly south. The sound, which lagged far behind the moving flare’s visual position, faded a bit to a ragged, thuttering chain of cracks and claps chasing the flare toward orbit.
“Zeus II,” Kaitlin said, as the noise faded. The flare vanished into the distance, but the contrail, illuminated by the moonlight, remained hanging in the sky like a scratch across heaven.
“Heavy lifter,” Rob added, in needless elaboration. “Jeez. Doesn’t seem possible that we rode one of those things to space, does it?”
Thunder tolled again, and another flare heaved into view above the mountains to the northwest. “There goes another,” Kaitlin said.
The second was followed by a third, then a fourth and a fifth, each one almost seeming to crawl up along the path of the last, their gleaming contrails appearing to tangle and merge in their vast arc across the star-dotted zenith.
Kaitlin didn’t know how it had happened, didn’t remember it happening, but she and Rob were standing together now, their arms tight around one another as they stared up into the sky. The incoming tide brought a sudden rush of cold seawater surging past their ankles, and she let out a little gasp. Letting go of Rob, she jumped back, splashing back onto dry sand, the spell broken.
“Go Army,” Rob said, still looking up. “And Godspeed.”
“Think that’s Swift Victory?”
“Gotta be,” Rob replied. “Five HLVs in as many minutes? I doubt that they’ll even change orbits. They’ll probably rendezvous with some tugs already parked in a polar orbit, then boost straight for Luna.”
Launches from Vandenberg were always aimed toward the south, over open ocean and into a polar or near-polar orbit. It would never do to have the fragments of a failed launch coming down in a fiery footprint stretching across Greater Los Angeles. The tight clustering of the launches suggested that they were aiming for an unusually small launch window, which in turn suggested a rendezvous with a fleet of LEO-to-Luna transports already in orbit.
Dropping his gaze from the heavens, he gave her a long and appraising look in the moonlight. Then he shrugged. “I…guess maybe we’d best be getting back to the base, huh?”
She had to give that one some thought as well. There were regulations aplenty regarding sexual liaisons within military service, especially when there was a difference in rank involved that might be seen either as an abuse of power or as sex-for-privileges. Still, the practical implementation of those regs tended toward the assumption that men and women were going to do what was natural for them, and to turn a blind eye…unless the couple was flagrant in their play or the relationship involved “conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline,” as Article 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice so succinctly phrased it.
The question wasn’t what the Marine Corps had to say about a lieutenant sleeping with a captain. It was what she was ready for. She hadn’t had a sexual relationship with anyone since Yukio’s death, and that was two years ago now.
She knew she couldn’t put her life on hold forever.
“We don’t have to go back yet,” she told him. “Do you have the duty this weekend?”
He shook his head no.
“Me neither. We don’t have to report in until oh seven hundred Monday morning, right?” She stepped back into the surf, moving close, letting her hands lightly caress his body. “So…whatcha want to do about it, huh?”
“This,” he replied, reaching for her.
The kiss lasted for a long, long time.
TWELVE
WEDNESDAY, 7 MAY 2042
Recruit Platoon 4239
Parris Island Recruit Training
Center
1345 hours EDT
“Okay, ladies,” Gunnery Sergeant Knox said, grinning. He was holding a lump of something that looked like heavy, gray clay. He tossed it a few centimeters into the air and caught it again in the same hand several times, the soft slap of each catch emphasizing his words. “I wanna show you all somethin’ here. Somethin’ important.”
It was a sweltering, humid May afternoon beneath a brassy, overcast sky. Week Three of recruit training for Platoon 4239 had brought them face-to-face with a number of firsts as they settled into the boot-camp routine. Early in the week they’d run the obstacle course for the first time, a run through obstacles, over walls, and hand over hand along a rope above a mud pit in a routine euphemistically known as the “confidence course.” The recruits had also faced their first written exam, their first physical evaluation since the admission physicals, their first inspection, and their first parade to demonstrate their growing command of close-order drill.
Training had been grueling, an exhausting regime deliberately orchestrated to spring one surprise after another on the recruits as they struggled to overcome each new challenge. Head knowledge was emphasized as much as physical training, on the theory, as Knox expressed it, that “a smart Marine is a live Marine.” Because of the incessant heat, physical training, calisthenics, long runs, and close-order drill tended to be held in the morning or late in the afternoon; midday, before and after noon chow, was reserved for lectures and demonstrations, such as this one.
Of course, that often meant that the recruits ended up sitting in mud-drenched utilities after a late-morning romp in the mud pit or getting drenched in sweat running the confidence course, trying to stay alert while they listened to the lecture.
As he sat cross-legged on the ground, watching Knox work the clay a bit more, Jack realized that he’d really accomplished something just making it this far. In three weeks, attrition had whittled an eighty-man platoon down to sixty-one—reducing it by almost a quarter. There’d been that kid from Tennessee who’
d pleaded with the DI one evening to be allowed to go home, tears streaming down his face; there’d been that sharp, smart-mouthed kid from New York named Doud who’d snapped in the mess hall and actually taken a swing at Knox…a swing that hadn’t connected but had resulted Doud’s being hustled away and never seen again. There’d been Martelli—one of the platoon’s “fat trays,” or overweight recruits—who’d washed out when he couldn’t pass the physical quals earlier in the week.
There’d also been those six or eight guys who’d hurt themselves—a couple of them badly enough to end up in the hospital with broken bones—and the word was they’d all have to pick up their training in a later platoon. That sucked, in Jack’s expert opinion. Having to come into a platoon full of strangers partway through, knowing no one, no one knowing you…
Jack lived in dread of that happening to him. He knew these guys, was bonded with them, molded with them, become a part of them in a way that he’d never been a part of anything else in his life. After three weeks, Gunnery Sergeant Knox and his assistant DIs had broken everyone about as low as it was possible to break them. Now they were in the process of building them back up.
As something new….
Turning away from the watching recruits, Knox walked ten meters across the open ground of the training field to the two lifelike mannequins standing next to one another, plastic faces showing no emotion. Both dummies wore Marine-issue Class-Three armor breastplates, over OD utilities.
Reaching the dummy on the left, Knox slapped the clay against its breastplate, high up, just below the throat, kneading it with his thumb to make it stick, then inserting a small, black object the size and shape of a domino.
Returning to the recruits, waiting in a semicircle in their soggy, mud-covered utilities, Knox jerked a thumb over his shoulder, indicating the waiting dummy. “That, ladies, which I just placed on our volunteer out there, is two hundred grams of C-320 plastic explosives. That’s less than half a pound.” Taking a position next to the table set behind the firing line, he picked up a small controller. “Sergeant Bayerly?”