John didn't have time for this. He cut Max off, angrily. "Max, damn it, just stay hidden. Unity of command. I think I'll succeed, but if I don't, then you'll get your chance to fight PKs."
Max took a deep breath, then nodded.
Duncan looked back and forth between them. "If you don't succeed? Do you mean -"
"Let's hope it doesn't come to that."
"John, if you don't - " Duncan licked his lips nervously. "If you don't succeed, do you think we can surrender?"
Max and John spoke at the same time. "No."
Duncan hung his head.
Rex said, "I've got an idea for a fallback plan."
John checked the clock in his display. The troops would be over the crater wall soon.
"Tell it to Max."
If he failed at this, it would mean not only his own death, but theirs as well. Should he tell them to stay safe? Tell them how much they - and the rest of the Dogs at Aristillus - meant to him?
Fuck it. There was no time.
John turned and began moving quickly in large ground-covering arcs back toward the crater rim.
He didn't head for the landslide of scree they'd climbed, but circled wide to the west, putting a three-story-tall outcropping between him and the trail they'd laid down. Between him and where the PKs would climb the rim.
On the far side of the outcropping he found a crack in the granite and slipped into the pitch black shadow. He brought up his overlay and called up the video feed from the first camera, the one looking down into the crater. The footage was jerky from data dropouts; the microwatt transmitter in the camera wasn't designed to punch through stone like this.
The first camera showed ten men still down in the crater. The two heading toward the landslide were invisible - perhaps they'd followed the tracks all the way to the scree and were already climbing.
He was about to switch to the second camera when a spacesuited arm reached over the crater wall. And then the two PKs were pulling themselves over the edge.
A moment later they stood. His helmet speakers crackled as one of the PKs pointed at the camera. "What's that?"
The idiots were talking over an open, unencrypted channel.
The other PK reached for the camera, and then the image slewed. A moment later John was staring, through his overlay, at the PK's helmet from arm's length. Out of habit John looked away before remembering that they couldn't see him. He turned his eyes back to the PK.
The golden visor, the divot at the brow of the helmet. They were wearing Airtights. The two suits had PK rank stripes crudely stenciled onto the biceps and last names painted on the chests. "Ting" and "Al Farran.” John scowled. The suits must have been taken from the RTFM or one of the other seized ships. The symbolism of the crude PK paint jobs on top of the elegant Aristillus suits annoyed him.
Still, the fact that the suits were stolen didn't matter. The important thing is that he knew the Gen Vs. He knew how the KO2 scrubber was mounted and he knew where the air tube ran. John closed his eyes and slowed his breathing, and then rolled his neck from side to side. He opened his eyes and looked at the video.
The PK holding the camera played with it a moment longer and then tossed it aside. The view spun wildly and the error-correcting software left blocks and smears across the overlay; then the camera landed in the dust.
John cleared the screen and looked out from the dark crack he was hidden in. A moment later the PKs walked into his line of sight as they followed the trail he and the Dogs had laid down. They were looking down as they walked and over the radio channel he could hear them chatting about the Brazilian national soccer team. Perfect. John clenched and released his hands once, twice.
Then the PKs were past. John stretched his neck one last time, and reached down to his belt where the repair kit hung. He pulled the pouch open, pushed aside the bottle of sealant and the patches, and found the rescue knife. It wasn't a fighting knife, but it was designed to cut through a space suit or tangled cord. It would do.
John stepped out of the crevasse and into the sunlight. The two PKs, "Ting" and "Al Farran,” were ahead of him. Still stumbling forward and staring at the footprints in the dust. Still talking about a soccer match.
John took a moment to look around and make sure that he wasn't missing anything: a third man, another ship overhead. No. He was good. He turned back to Ting and Al Farran. The two idiots were walking almost side by side, which helped his chances. He followed them, moving deliberately but quickly. A stray thought occurred to him: having hiked a few thousand kilometers across the moon's surface, he was probably the world's foremost expert on lunar surface travel. He revised the thought: he was the foremost human expert.
He drew closer to the two PKs: they were just three meters ahead now. They walked on, clueless. In the vacuum they heard nothing. John checked the clock in his screen and tightened his grip on the hilt of the knife.
One last exhalation and a rapid step forward and he was on them. John reached out with his left hand and grabbed the air hose that connected the back of Ting's helmet to his life support pack. The PK stumbled.
"Hey, what -".
John slid his knife into the gap between the hose and the helmet ring, and then pulled the blade across the hose. The layers of reflective foil, warming wires, Kevlar strands, polymer tube, and repair vacuoles parted.
Ting stumbled forward, finishing his sentence " - the fuck?"
John let go with his left hand and covered the two meters to Al Farran. The second PK was just starting to turn in response to Ting's yell when John was on him. From this angle the air hose was harder to reach. Plan B. With his left hand John grabbed the PK's shoulder. Farran brought one hand up instinctively to ward him off, and in doing so left his stomach unguarded.
The knife punched in exactly where John had aimed it: a bit higher than the interior waist reinforcing seam, right at kidney level.
John yanked the knife savagely to the side. Al Farran didn't realize that he'd been stabbed - or that his suit had been sliced open.
"Who the fuck- ?"
John grabbed one of the troop's outstretched hands, twisted, and pulled the PK off balance. The man tripped and went down - and then the pain hit.
Al Farran screamed as he fell. He hit, and the air venting from the savage tear in his suit blew a cloud of dust off the ground. Both hands clutched at the rip in his suit. John stepped into billowing gray, grabbed the hose on the back of Al Farran's helmet, and parted it with a slice.
There.
Both men were down.
John checked the timer in his display.
Six seconds.
This suit was slowing him down, but he'd done well enough.
John returned the knife to the sheath, snapped the safety strap over it, and then waited for the men to finish dying. A minute. Then two. He stepped up to Al Farran's body and pulled the rifle from the corpse, tugging until the sling slipped off the dead man's shoulder.
He held the weapon out and looked it over. An YM-20 with triggers and fire selector switches modified for gloved hands in arctic combat. Or, in this case, lunar combat. A forty-year-old design, but decent.
And there - the mesh bag on the PK's belt looked like it held magazines.
John slung the rifle, unclipped the bag from the PK, and snapped it onto a D-ring on his own suit. He turned to the second corpse and stripped it of rifle and ammunition.
He held the rifle in low ready and started walking back to the Dogs.
After a few steps he had a thought. No. Even they wouldn't be that dumb.
He stopped and pulled the charging handle back half way.
The chamber had been empty.
Jesus.
Fucking amateurs.
John cycled the firearm and chambered a round.
Chapter 98
2064: just west of Zhukovskiy Crater, Lunar Nearside
John looked around. This was where he'd left Blue and the others... And there, Dog and mule tracks led around a large boulder.
He followed them - and then ducked as a barrage of fist-sized rocks flew straight at his helmet. One of the rocks hit his forearm. "Jesus, guys, it's me!"
There was a brief pause. "Oh," said Max. "Sorry John. We thought -"
John shook his head. "Rocks?"
"You came around the corner with a rifle..."
"OK. But next time pay attention to the suits. The peakers have rank stripes painted on their biceps and names on the chest."
The Dogs barked assent.
"Tell us what happened."
"I took out the two that came up here to the rim. The other ten are still down on the crater floor."
Duncan furrowed his brow. "Took out? How?"
"Later."
Max said, "What now?"
"I've got to take out the rest."
"You want us to stay back here again?"
"Yeah."
"Give me one of the rifles."
John looked at Max, thought about it for a moment, then unslung the second YM-20 and handed it to him.
Max tried to shoulder the rifle, but it was a losing battle. The pull was too long for his short foreleg. John thought briefly of breaking out the repair kit from one of the mules and lopping off several centimeters of stock, but realized that the pull was the least of Max's problems. Between his stubby fingers and a wrist that couldn't pronate as fully as a human's, it just wasn't going to work.
No, if Max and the others needed firearms it would have to wait until they were back at Aristillus and had access to modeling programs and 3D printers.
John reached out and laid a hand on the rifle. Max looked at him and didn't let it go. "Max, it's not going to work." Max held on for another second. He knew what must be going through the Dog's head - nothing felt as bad as impotence in the face of a dangerous situation.
Reluctantly, slowly, Max let go.
John reslung the rifle. "The PKs are going to notice those two missing any time now. I've got to go."
Max snarled. "We need real weapons."
"Nothing we can do now. Wish me good hunting."
The Dogs echoed the phrase, and then Duncan asked, "Aren't you scared?"
"I'll be back."
John hitched his right shoulder up to keep the spare rifle in position, and then turned.
Max called after him, "Kill some for me."
John headed for the crater rim.
Mike had been arguing for years that the war was coming. John had always pushed back, insisting that it wasn't, or that if it was, it was years off. Now he shook his head. Mike had been right and he'd been wrong.
He'd been engaging in wishful thinking: wishing that the threat to the Dogs was over...and wishing that he wasn't really going to end up in a shooting war with old friends and colleagues on the other side.
Shit.
But if the war was really here, then he knew what he had to do. First, he had to kill the rest of the PKs. If he survived that, he had to get back to Aristillus and warn Mike not just about PKs on the farside, but about Gamma. And after that, he had a war to win.
His mind raced with ideas. Strategies. Tactics. And smaller stuff. The trivial stuff that shouldn't matter but always did.
He pulled up a note-taking application and wrote
talk to Katherine Dycus; better thermal control in suits
He looked down at his waist where the two mesh bags of magazines bounced and added
ammo pockets
And then he was near the edge of the crater. He'd get the rifle sighted in back here, away from the lip, and then he'd move forward to the rim.
He leaned the spare rifle against a rock and then adjusted the sling on the other one.
Time to verify his equipment.
The PK ship had been, what? Three hundred meters from the crater wall? He picked a boulder about that far away, bent his head down - and then realized he couldn't get a cheek weld with the helmet in the way. Shit. If his cheek was tight against the stock he'd have a good on-parallax view through the heads-up scope on top of the rifle. Without a tight weld he had to look through the scope at an angle.
He pulled back and looked at the rifle. Was there some trick? Did the scope extend up from the receiver?
No.
So what the hell had the US and PK leadership been thinking? They'd sent men to the moon, armed them with rifles, and never even verified that they could shoot the damned things? And not one of the PK grunts had raised an objection?
Jesus.
Fucking idiots, every one of them.
And it meant that he had a problem. If he had to deal with this parallax bullshit, his bullets wouldn't impact where he wanted them to. There must be a solution.
John experimented and finally found that pushing the rifle forward and craning his head back a few centimeters helped. The line of sight from his eyes through the optics was a bit closer to parallel with the barrel.
Not perfect, but it would have to do.
Now to test his aim.
He found the boulder he'd picked before and tried to flip the selector switch. His clumsy suit gloves made it tricky even with the Arctic-combat modifications, but the switch flipped from 'safe' to 'fire.’
And then he squeezed the trigger. The rifle's silent kick was minimal.
The dust a meter to the left of the boulder splashed. A miss. The parallax. Shit.
He had to hurry - but he also had to get this right.
He could deal with the parallax - he just had to tweak the scope. He realized the problem with that a moment later and cursed as he tried to adjust the small calibration dials on the sight with his bulky gloves.
He fished a screwdriver from his repair kit. After almost a minute of fiddling he finally managed to get the calibration dials adjusted. Another round fired - and the bullet hit just a hands-breadth from the boulder. Another few adjustments, another few shots, and he was hitting the center of the boulder reliably.
The rifle still had sloppy trigger pull, but Kazakhstan, Nairobi, and the Saud Protectorate were all proof that equipment counted for less than a coherent plan.
And he had one. If he could carry it out crisply - and if he could deal with the inevitable shit storm when it went bad - he might be OK.
Or maybe not.
Either way, he was as ready as he was going to be. Time to do it.
John turned away from his impromptu range and approached the edge of the crater. As he got closer he dropped to all fours and crawled forward. As he covered the last few meters to the edge he picked up the radio chatter from the peakers down in the crater.
" - don't know about that - I think Barcelona has a chance against Manchester, but -"
"Keep this channel clear you two!"
A pause, and then a resentful "Yes, sir."
John inched further to the edge and looked over. The PK ship was still in the center of the crater.
John pulled the sling tight around his forearms and pushed the rifle out against the tension. More radio traffic:
"Major Tudel, squad one reporting. We're through the crack in the east wall. Everything's fucked here. The Paul Henri is gone - there's just a massive fucking hole. Most of the moon base equipment is destroyed."
"Our intel says the expats live underground. Find some airlocks, see if the power is still on."
"Shit, Major, do we have to? This shit's gotta be radioactive as fuck -"
"You went to the briefings just like I did. The nuclear scuttling charges are nothing like nuclear power plants."
"But Major -"
"All of this is on audio and video, and it's going to be reviewed. Now, get in there and scout for tunnel entrances.”
A pause, then "OK, Major."
Safe nuclear weapons? John shook his head - what sort of bullshit were they feeding the grunts these days? And speaking of nuclear weapons, the scout had said that the explosion had left a crater. If the nuke dug a hole when it popped, that meant lots of vaporized crap, and lots of fallout. John turned his attention away from the crater floor a
nd looked up. There was no visible mushroom cloud, but there must be a huge amount of irradiated crap overhead. If he and the Dogs weren't already in a shower of radioactive dust, they would be soon. His skin itched just thinking about it.
First things first, though.
John turned back to the crater floor. The five PKs he'd just overheard on the radio were through the crack to the east and weren't visible. The five who had headed west, though, had reached wherever they were going and were now heading back to the downed PK ship. At that moment one of them reported in. "Outside the crater wall the tracks just spread out. No hardware, no people, no other facilities that we can see. We're coming back."
The leader - Major Tudel? - answered. "Roger, I can see you from here."
That must mean that Tudel was in the ship. How many others were there with him? It would be nice to know, but in the end it didn't matter. John's plan was the same no matter what: he'd take out the western five, then the eastern five when they came back through the crack in the Zhukovskiy wall, and then he'd deal with anyone in the ship. Or try to.
So - the western five. They were clumped together, just like Ting and Al Farran had been. The clumping had worked to his advantage in the knife fight, but he wished that these five were spread out a bit more.
No help for it.
The scope said that the range was just over 400 meters, which was further than he'd sighted in. There was also an elevation drop of - he took a guess - about 140 meters. The heads-up sight did the ballistics calculation for him. For a moment he was about to trust it, but then remembering that the sights hadn't even been adjusted for spacesuit helmets, John realized that the chance that its firmware had been reprogrammed to deal with lower lunar gravity was almost zero.
And - shit. Chances were that the sight not only was expecting one g, but also was doing math based on bullets slowing down in air. He was going to have to compensate for all of this himself.
Damn it.
This plan just got a hell of a lot more complicated.
OK, he needed to focus to solve the ballistics problem. So what did that mean?
Lower gravity would flatten the trajectory, and zero air resistance would change the shape even more. Fuck. Max or Blue could probably figure this out in their heads, doing the raw calculus. For him, though, it was hopeless.
The Powers of the Earth (Aristillus Book 1) Page 42