Luna Marine (11 page)

Pulling the folding panel shut behind him—the only concession to the human need for privacy aboard—he peeled his computer from the desk and wiggled into the sleeping bag so that he didn't have to think about
not
floating about. Outside his cabin, the bumps and thumps, the conversations, the smells of ready-heat meals and men in close confinement continued to permeate his world. As much as he'd been enjoying this mission, he was going to be glad to get back to Paris. He'd actually felt, he realized now, a pang of disappointment a few minutes ago when he'd learned
Laplace
would not be immediately returning home.

He logged onto Spacenet.

Everyone in
Laplace
's little crew had his own Net account; the best defense against the feelings of isolation and depression common on long missions in space was the ability to log onto the Net and have immediate access to news, to books or music, to v-mail and e-mail that let the astronauts keep in close touch with people and events back home. As his browser came up, the new-mail icon flashed cheerfully on the menu bar.

Twenty-seven messages, including five requests for real-time v-chats. One from Annette that he'd been look
ing forward to…the rest from sources as varied as the Académie des Sciences and the Cousteau Foundation, and a British UFO e-mag looking for an interview on ancient aliens. Maybe instant communications through the Net weren't such an all-encompassing and unalloyed blessing after all.

One e-mail was flagged as confidential and encrypted, from a masked address. He knew immediately who
that
was from, and it worried him.

He accessed the message. It was in text only, to make the multilevel encryptions it employed simpler…as well as making them less obvious to anyone who might be monitoring e-mail packet transmissions.

The immediate address was a remailing service in Finland; he knew, though, that its author was in the United States. It was hard to decide who would get into more trouble if this correspondence was ever discovered—David Alexander for writing it, or Cheseaux for reading it and not reporting it at once to UN officials.

Not that he would even consider reporting it. David was a good friend, had been a friend and close correspondent ever since the two of them had met at a symposium on the Cydonian ruins held in Athens in 2037. It had been one of those relationships that sparks from the first meeting, as though they'd known one another for years, a reflection of what the Latinos called
simpatico
.

His screen went dark as the encryption software began chewing through columns of numbers and letters. There were several such software packages available, none guaranteed a hundred percent secure…but the sheer volume of encoded messages routing their way through the Spacenet nowadays meant their correspondence was probably safe, even though such traffic was actively discouraged by both sides in the war.

The words decryption complete appeared, followed a moment later by the complete text of the message.

Cheseaux smiled. A charming letter, and so utterly naive…but then, the Americans were a naive people. As much as he liked, admired, and respected young Alexander, he was not about to give the American military secrets. There was a war on, after all! And as for ending hostilities—he assumed that that was the meaning of the enigmatic phrase “bury the hatchet”—he surely didn't think that the UN Authority was about to surrender its claim to the wreckage discovered recently at Picard, did he?

Except…

Cheseaux sighed. How much of what David wanted was classified for honest reasons of legitimate state security, and how much was due to the shortsighted scrabblings of small-minded and paranoid UN bureaucrats?

Just what was it that had divided the world for these past two years, anyway? The United States refusal to hold a UN-mandated plebiscite on the question of independence for some of its Southwestern states. Cheseaux snorted. He scarcely blamed Washington for refusing that one, especially since the vote was to be limited to the American states involved and would have included the populations
of Mexico's northwestern states—a stacked deck if ever there'd been one. That wasn't even worth a decent riot or two, to say nothing of the war!

What else? Russia's refusal to back down to China's demands for parts of Siberia; those land claims went way back and could have been settled in other ways. The fear that the United States and Russia were using their superiority in spaceflight technology to grab the newly discovered archeological discoveries and exotechnologies for themselves. The willingness of the United States to actually publish some of those discoveries prematurely, without weighing the impact they would have on religious, political, and social systems worldwide.

Those last two, Cheseaux thought, were rarely trumpeted as reasons for the continued crusade against the US and Russia, but he suspected that they were the
real
reason for the hostilities.

If so, however, it was possible that his friend was headed into considerable danger. He hadn't heard anything about an American attack on the Picard site, but that was implied by David's letter. He doubted that the UN forces at Tsiolkovsky would let the Americans stay without a damned stiff challenge.

He hoped David knew enough to keep his head down when the shooting started.

WEDNESDAY
, 15
APRIL
2042

USASF Tug Clarke
Nearing the Moon
0740 hours GMT

The Moon filled the black sky, half-full from this vantage point, the terminator line a crinkled, ragged lace-work of silver-gray, brown, and black, the rest of the visible face as dazzling in the sunlight as new snow. David Alexander struggled to orient himself but found an excess of map detail too confusing. “So…where is it we're going?”

The tug's pilot was a US Aerospace Force captain named Heyerson. He pointed beyond the sunset terminator, into darkness.

“About there,” he said. Sunlight flashed off the dark glasses he wore inside his comset helmet. “The Mare Crisium is well past sunset, now. You guys are gettin' dropped off at Picard Crater, just inside Crisium's wall.”

The third man in the tug's cramped cockpit clung to the back of the pilot's couch, trying to see. He was a Navy man, HM1 Robert Thornton. “What I wanna know,” he said, “is where Tranquillity Base is.”

“Ah.” Heyerson pointed again, this time toward a dark, smooth plain bisected by the terminator. “Up that way. Almost to the horizon. You won't be able to see it naked-eye, though, if that's what you were expecting.”

“I just want to see the place, man,” Thornton replied. “Where it started.”

The Aerospace man chuckled. “Whatever.” He glanced at Thornton. “Y'know, I still don't know what the
Navy's
doing up here. The Marines, I can understand, kinda. The Army, no problem. Civilian scientists, all in a day's work. But the Navy?…”

“Read your briefing, Captain,” David said. “The Marines don't have medics, like the Army. They rely on Navy corpsmen instead.”

“Bravo Company's corpsman was killed in the assault,” Thornton said. He was black, his skin so dark in the instrumentation-lit cockpit that it was difficult to make out any expression at all. “I'm the replacement.”

“Yeah, well, the jarheads are all goin' home as soon as I get this lot settled in,” Heyerson said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder to indicate the forty US Army Special Forces troops crammed into the tug's cargo bay aft. “Don't know why you bothered to make the trip when you're just gonna have to turn around and go back again!”

“Yeah, well, it's the government's dime,” Thornton said. “They say ‘Go,' I go.”

“The Navy likes to take good care of the Marines,” David added. “It's tradition.”

“Nah,” Thornton said. “The leathernecks just need someone to ride herd on 'em. Us corpsmen, we control their health records, see? Any of 'em get out of line, we lose their shot card, and they have to get every shot all over again. They know better than to make trouble with
us
around.”

“How about you, Doc?” Heyerson said, turning to look at David. “Why'd they send you out?”

“First of all,” David said, nodding at Thornton, “
he's
‘Doc,' not me. Second, you really should've looked at your briefing.”

“I did…sir. Didn't say much, except that I was to deliver forty soldiers, one Navy corpsman, and one civilian scientist to Picard Crater.”

“Maybe they didn't want you to know, then.”

“Screw 'em.” His gaze dropped to the garish cloth patch sewn to David's leather flight jacket. “How about that? Is that classified?”

He touched the patch. “What, this?”

“Yeah. I been wonderin' about that since we boosted from LEO. T'tell you the truth, I didn't know at first whether you were civilian or military, wearin' that rig.”

Temperatures aboard a spacecraft, no matter how good the life-support systems, could vary swiftly from too warm to chilly, depending on the craft's attitude of the moment with respect to the sun. David was wearing Marine-issue slacks, deck shoes, and orange T-shirt—garb he'd become comfortable with during his long cycler passage back from Mars. Since it was a bit on the chilly side aboard the
Clarke
now, he'd pulled a flight jacket on over the T-shirt—again, Marine-issue, but with a highly unofficial patch sewn to the left breast.

The stitching was a bit crude, but the elements were all clearly recognizable. The badge was shield-shaped, dark blue with a black border. Two black Advanced Tech Assault Rifles were crossed over a red disk representing Mars; a gold, white, and gray cylinder—a fair representation of a beer can—was superimposed over the ATARs. The legend, gold against dark blue at the top of the device, was
HOPS VINCET
. Curving all the way across the bottom of the badge, in tiny, carefully stitched gold letters, was the unwieldy line of characters:
ATWTMATMUTATB
.

“‘Hops vincet?'” Heyerson said, mispronouncing the last word.

“Hops
winkit
,” David replied, stressing the proper pronunciation. “Latin, sort of. It means ‘beer conquers.'”

“Yeah? Well, I'll buy that.” Heyerson shook his head. “Some kind of fraternity?”

“You could say that.”

Thornton grinned. “‘Hops' ain't the Latin word for ‘beer.'”

“Don't tell the Marines,” David replied with a chuckle. “It would disillusion them. The poor dears.”

“You two better strap down,” Heyerson warned. “We're coming up on our final thrust phase, here. I'd hate to deliver the jarheads' new corpsman with two busted legs.”

Space, of course, was at a claustrophobic premium aboard the
Clarke
. The ugly little tug had been designed to haul construction materials, fuel, and personnel from LEO to higher orbits—especially to geosynch, and to the construction shacks at L-3, L-4, and L-5. With the addition of a spidery set of landing legs, it could carry heavy cargoes to the Lunar surface; the USAF Transport Command had requisitioned
Clarke
and three sisters,
Asimov, Ecklar
, and
Viglione
for hauling high-priority cargoes to the Moon and back. In fact, the
Viglione
, with forty more soldiers, was trailing behind the
Clarke
by a few thousand kilometers, preparing for her own landing maneuvers at Fra Mauro.

Because of the crowding, and his VIP status of
Clarke
's sole civilian aboard, David had been allowed to make the trip in one of the cockpit couches; his service with the Marines on Mars had almost automatically meant that he and Thornton had found each other on the first day out from LEO, and the permission had been extended to the Navy man, too.

Cramped as the tug's cockpit was, it was a lot roomier than the cargo bay, with space-suited soldiers packed into narrow bucket seats like armored eggs in a carton. David hadn't been at all shy about taking advantage of Heyerson's offer.

And he found he was enjoying his status as an honorary Marine.

As he strapped himself in, listening to Heyerson warning the troops aft of a delta-
v
maneuver in another minute, David thought about that. He'd received his patch at a party on Earth, just a month after his return from Mars. Gunnery Sergeant Harold Knox, one of the Marines on the March, had had a source in San Diego make up enough of the unauthorized patches for every Marine who'd been to Mars, with one left over for the civilian who'd endured the grueling, three-week march from Heinlein Station to Mars Prime…and then been on hand to snap the famous flag-raising at Cydonia.

The beer can represented an in joke among the men and women who'd been with the MMEF. “Sands of Mars”
Garroway, in the true improvise-adapt-overcome spirit of the Marines, had converted cans of contraband beer into weapons, showering them on UN troops at Cydonia from a hovering Mars lander. The aluminum cans had burst on impact in the thin Martian air, spraying suits and helmet visors with a fast-congealing foam that had immediately frozen, leaving the enemy confused, frightened, and largely blind.

The ponderous acronym across the bottom of the patch stood for “All The Way To Mars And They Made Us Throw Away The Beer.”

“Our honorary Marine,” Knox had called him when he'd presented the badge. After the shared hardships and dangers of Garroway's March, after the wild firefight—and the
literal
beer bust—with UN Foreign Legion troops at the Cydonian base, David Alexander had been…changed.

It was hard to put into words, even now. David had been a Navy brat, and as a kid had dreamed of being an aviator, like his father. After losing his aviator father to an equipment failure aboard the USS
Reagan
, though, he'd developed a deep-seated loathing for the military, coupled with a pacifist's hatred for war in all its forms.

But now? He still hated war and thought that
this
war, in particular, was suicidally stupid. But for the men he'd been forced to serve with, struggle with, fight beside on Mars, he felt nothing but admiration and respect.

Acceleration slammed at him through the couch, its hand unpleasantly heavy across his chest after three days of free fall. The pressure went on and on for a long time, too. Normally, a Moon-bound craft would decelerate first into Lunar orbit, followed by a second deceleration to drop into a landing approach, and the final burst as it gentled in for a landing.
Clarke
was combining all three delta-
v
maneuvers in one, however; no one had said anything definite, but David had heard rumors that the Aerospace Force had already lost a spacecraft passing over the Lunar farside. Coming in straight this way, without an initial orbit, was risky…but it avoided the possibility of being shot down
by the rumored UN forces on the side of the Moon always hidden from the Earth.

And as the
Clarke
plunged from dazzling, white sunlight into the Moon's shadow, David decided that he was all in favor of that….

Hab One, Picard Base
Mare Crisium, the Moon
0758 hours GMT

“Kaminski!”

“Yeah, Gunny?”

Yates jerked a thumb at the ladder leading to the upper deck of the hab. “Get your sorry butt topside, Sergeant. The captain wants to see ya.”

“Christ, Ski!” Corporal Ahearn shook her head. “What the fuck did you do now?”

“Dunno, Hern,” he said, throwing down his cards. Jesus, always something. It had been a good hand, too. “I ain't been in trouble for, hell, two or three hours, it seems like.”

Padding across the steel deck in his socks, he hesitated at the ladder. None of the Marines had their boondockers because they'd all arrived in pressure suits, and their shoes were still with the rest of their personal gear, back at Fra Mauro. It seemed…
wrong
, somehow, to be going up to see the skipper in BDUs and padded green socks.

“Get movin', Ski,” Yates warned. “She didn't say tomorrow.”

“Aye, aye, Gunnery Sergeant Yates,
sir
!” he snapped, and started up the ladder.

Captain Fuentes was seated at the desk that until a few days ago had belonged to the commander of UN forces at Picard, Arnaldo Tessitore of the San Marco Marines. Lieutenant Garroway was perched on the corner of the desk, also in greens and socks. “Sergeant Kaminski, reporting as ordered, ma'am,” he announced, centering himself in front of the desk and coming to attention.

“At ease, Sergeant,” Fuentes said. “According to your
records, you were with Major Garroway on Mars.”

Kaminski flicked a quick glance at the lieutenant. “Yes, ma'am.”

“Then you knew one of the scientists on the expedition, Dr. Alexander.”

“Huh? Sure!”

“My father told me that you and Alexander were pretty friendly,” Lieutenant Garroway said. “You were with him inside the Cave of Wonders, helped him out, that sort of thing.”

“Uh, yes, ma'am. I guess I was pretty interested in what he was doin'. He let me help out some. And, yeah. He let me come inside the cave with him.” Kaminski suppressed a shudder. “Didn't like it, though.”

“Why not?”

“Some of those, uh,
things
on the things like TV screens were pretty, well, they gave me the creeps, ma'am.”

“But you got on well with Alexander?”

“Huh? Yeah! The Professor, he was okay.” Kaminski drew himself up a little straighter. “Th' way I see it, anyone on the March with us was okay! And the Prof, he did just great, for a civilian.”

“Excellent, Sergeant,” Fuentes said, making a notation with a stylus on the screen of her PAD. “Thank you for volunteering.”

“Volunteering!” He stopped himself, swallowed, and licked his lips. “Uh, if the captain doesn't mind telling me, what did the sergeant just volunteer for?”

“We have a guest, Sergeant,” Fuentes replied. “Dr. Alexander. He's just arrived to investigate the UN archeological dig outside. And you just volunteered to be his assistant.”

Kaminski sagged just the slightest bit with relief.
That
ought to be easy enough. A real skylark detail. He'd seen the new arrivals filing from their bug transport, of course, but had had no idea that Alexander was aboard. “Uh, yes, ma'am. Thank you, ma'am.”

“He's in Hab Three, with Dr. Billaud and the other UN
scientists we captured. Suit up, hotfoot on over there, and make yourself useful. That is all.”

“Aye, aye, Captain!”

He came to attention again, whirled in place, and dived for the ladder. Hot damn! If they had to roust him from a friendly game with his squadmates, at least it was for an assignment that ought to be interesting.

The last few days, since the Marine assault on Picard, had been downright boring.

He had a happy feeling that that was about to change.

Hab Three, Picard Base
Mare Crisium, the Moon
0815 hours GMT

They'd been shouting at the prisoners when David had walked into the hab compartment, moments before. “You had damned well better cooperate, mister,” the Army colonel bellowed, his voice ringing off the metal walls as he leaned over the prisoner. “I'm losing my patience! It is one hell of a long walk back to Earth, and right now, we are your
only
hope of a ride!”