Luna Marine (13 page)

“Chinks, eh?” Whitworth said, nodding. “Right. As senior officer present, I am officially taking charge of this action.” He stared down at the map table for a moment. “Where…where are my troops on this thing?”

“There, Colonel,” Kaitlin said, pointing to two of the blue symbols denoting Habs Two and Four. “Those are the quarters they've been assigned to. But, with all due respect, I think you should—”

“Young lady!” Whitworth barked. “Are you presuming to tell
me
how to run a battle? Or are you simply telling me what to do with my troops?”

Kaitlin fought down a burst of anger. “No, sir. But you should know—”

But Whitworth was not listening. He turned to the communications personnel. “You, there! Get me an open channel to Captain Bladen, in Hab Two!”

“Aye, aye, sir,” one of the technicians said, his face carefully expressionless.

“These UNdies can't know that the Green Berets are here, in force! We'll goddamn teach the bastards a lesson!”

“Sir!” the Marine at the radio called. “Captain Bladen.”

“About goddamn time!” He strode to the com console, snatched the mike from the Marine's hand, and began talking.

Kaitlin exchanged a long look with Gunny Yates. “I don't like this, Lieutenant,” he said, keeping his voice low. “It's going to get damned sticky out there!”

“Granted, Gunny. But he
is
senior officer aboard. Pass the word to your people to be careful about IDing their targets.”

“Roger that. But it's not going to be easy!”

“What'd you expect, Gunny? A goddamn walk in the park?” She stared at the map table, where small green squares were spilling across the contour-marked terrain. Red squares—the enemy—appeared and vanished as trackers identified them and fed the data into the Marine battle-management system. Most of the red symbols were ghosted, indicating probable positions based on last confirmed reports.

There'd been six Marines outside when the alert had first been sounded, in three widely separated two-man OPs. No…make that seven, counting Kaminski, who was supposed to be hustling his civilian charge back inside. A ready force of Second Platoon Marines had been waiting, however, already suited up and ready to go except for gloves and helmets, on the lower decks of Habs Three and Five, and they were spilling out through the airlocks and onto the lunar surface right now. Every Marine had an IFF transponder mounted in his or her suit; the coded signal from each IFF was picked up by the antenna arrays atop Hab One and fed into the battle-management system. The BMS, in turn, displayed the positions and identities of all of the Marines in the action. Ranging data picked up from the Marines' laser sighting systems on their ATARs
located the unidentifeds—the probable UN troops.

The problem was that Whitworth was now giving orders to some forty Army Special Forces troops to join the battle. There'd been no time yet to set their IFF transponders to frequencies recognized by the BMS; hell, she didn't even know yet if the Army suits
had
transponders. When those troops stormed out onto the crater floor, there would be no way at all to separate them from the enemy.

Yates was right. This could be
real
sticky.

The Dig, Picard Base
Mare Crisium, the Moon
1456 hours GMT

David started to pull himself to his feet once more, but Kaminski was lying across his legs. “Stay down, dammit!” the Marine shouted, before adding a perfunctory “
Sir
!”

“But I can't see!” Try as he might to lever the front part of his suit higher, David could not find a position that would let him see what was happening. Kaminski seemed to be shooting at something; David could feel the jarring against the legs of his suit as the Marine's ATAR recoiled.

A battle. He was smack in the middle of a battle once again, though the eerie silence, the lack of crackling gunfire and explosions, gave a surreal, almost dreamlike feeling to the engagement. He could hear distinct voices over his radio, though for the most part they were all but unintelligible. They might have been kids playing some backyard game utterly beyond the ken of listening adults.

“
Delta-one, this is Five! Heads up, on your six
!”

“
Copy, Five, I see 'em
!”

“
Clear! I gotta lock! That's fox
!”

“
Ooh-rah! Hey, UNdie! Special delivery from the Corps
!”

Those voices sounded so young.

War might arise from the failings of old politicians, but always it was the young who paid war's price. The average age of the SAG Marines, he'd heard during his trip out
from Earth, was twenty-two—a little over half David's age—and it was as old as that only because SAG included a higher-than-usual proportion of seasoned NCOs than the typical Marine rifle company back on Earth.

He wondered if war had been the same the last time this crater had been illuminated by fire from the black Lunar sky, a drawn-out game between elders, with brave youngsters as the playing pieces, the expendable pawns. That was the most disturbing bit of intelligence that Marc Billaud had passed on that morning—the knowledge that thousands of years ago, at the very dawn of human civilization, the aliens worshiped as gods by those humans had been destroying themselves in a cataclysmic war; the wreckage of the cargo ship that had fallen here within this crater allowed no other interpretation. The vessel had been destroyed by powerful weapons…almost certainly a positron beam, a bolt of antielectrons that had annihilated the target in a deadly flash of hard radiation.

Similar weapons had been employed half a million years earlier, on the Cydonian plains of Mars.

Was war the inevitable fruit of all civilization, of all so-called intelligence?

“
We got another UNdie bug, comin' in from East One
!”

“
Lauden! Can you tag him with your Wyvern
?”

“
That's negative! I'm foxed out
!”

Damn
! he thought.
I wish I could see
. Unable to rise to watch the unfolding battle, David looked instead at the marvelously delicate and expressive figurine he held cradled in his arms. The back, he saw, was flat, as though a three-dimensional statue had been sliced cleanly in two from top to bottom…then heavily inscribed all over the back with tiny, crisply incised marks. The entire lower half, he saw, was covered with tiny pictographs, the top half with something like writing, with repetitive symbols that…

With an ice-shocked jar that literally drove the breath from his body, David understood just what it was he was holding. Rolling suddenly out from beneath Kaminski's
legs, he sat up, holding the statuette in both hands, staring at it as though it had just come alive.

Which in a very real sense, it had.

“
Goddammit, sir
,” Kaminski screamed, lurching toward him. “
Get the fuck down
!”

Dazedly, he looked around, becoming aware of running shapes, bright and silent flashes against the darkness, and Kaminski's wide-eyed face behind his visor. “The Rosetta stone!” he said, more to himself than to the frantic Marine.

“Whatever!” Kaminski hit him, hard, with one outstretched hand, knocking him back to the ground. “Hit the dirt!”

David lay on his side, continuing to stare at the inscriptions on the back of the gold statue. They had a machine-precise look about them, as though they'd been stamped into the metal, rather than carved out by artisans. Those on the bottom half were almost shockingly familiar; David couldn't read it, but he was quite familiar with the pictographs known as Proto-Sumerian, the antecedent of Mesopotamian cuneiform writing.

And as for the stranger, more fluid writing at the top…

He clutched the artifact more closely against the front of his suit. Suddenly, it was vitally important that he survive this firefight, vital that he return with the golden statue and its paired texts to the institute in Chicago.

The statue he was holding was more important than his life.

The Dig, Picard Base
Mare Crisium, the Moon
1457 hours GMT

Kaminski was aware of Alexander curling himself up around the odd gold statue, but didn't think any more about it. The important thing was to keep the civilian alive, and if the idiot would just keep his head down, there was at least a chance of that happening.

The battle, from Kaminski's point of view, at least, was a confusing, night-cloaked collision. Alexander's com
plaint a moment ago about not being able to see struck him as hilarious. All Kaminski could see was the pitch-blackness surrounding the base, the glare of worklights illuminating the central area, and various large and vaguely defined shapes—the habs and the insect-legged hoppers the UNdies were arriving in. Occasionally, a space-suited form would dash across the light, moving from shadow to shadow. When he kicked in the IR overlay of his helmet's heads-up display system, he could see the wavering, red-yellow man-shapes of other figures concealed by the dark. To sort friend from foe, he had to rely on the radioed commentary from C-cubed.

“
Heads up, Marines! We have four Marines coming out of Hab Three, crossing toward Marker South Five
.”

He turned to look at the indicated hab, spotted three…no, four heat-shapes moving on the double. Superimposed on each was a small, bright green symbol, marking them as IFF-IDed friendlies. Good enough. He raised his ATAR and painted another target, a glowing mass crouched in the blackness beneath the first grounded hopper, perhaps ninety meters away. He couldn't see an IFF tag. “Six! This is Ski! I got a paint! What's my target?”

“
Kaminski, Six. That's a hostile
!”

“Roger that! Takin' 'im down!”

His selector switch was already set to a three-round burst. Holding the crosshairs on his helmet HUD steady on the red-glowing shape, he squeezed the trigger, felt the soft triplet of recoils as the 4.5mm caseless rounds snapped toward the target. The red mass suddenly split apart—there'd been
two
space-suited figures there—and started to move in opposite directions. He picked the one on the right and fired again. He
thought
he'd hit it; the figure wasn't moving anymore, at any rate. The one to the left…was gone by the time he tracked back to reacquire it.
Damn
!…

“
All Marines! Heads up! We have ten Army troops coming out of Hab Four! They don't have IFFs, so watch what you're shooting at
!”

He glanced toward Hab Four and saw moving shadows against the light. About time the damned doggies made it
to the party. He wondered just what the odds were. There were three UN hopper transports, but they were
big
sons of bitches, bigger than the Marine bugs, big enough to carry a
lot
of troops. At the moment, the Marines were theoretically mustering fifty-three men in three companies—the fight three days ago at Picard had killed seventeen men and women, fifteen of them in Bravo's First Platoon. Three hours ago, though, just after the departure of Captain Fuentes and Captain Lee, all twenty-three Marines in Alfa Company's Second Platoon had boarded LSCP-44 and boosted skyward in a silent swirl of moon dust. Scuttlebutt had it that they were reconning off south of Picard somewhere, or even that they were scouting the approaches to a UN base hidden on the farside of the Moon, but no one was saying for sure. That left just Bravo's Second Platoon and the remnants of First—thirty people against possibly three times that number…unless the Army's Green Beanies entered the fight.

Two of the UN hoppers were on the ground; the third was still aloft, landing lights glaring against black space and the crisscross of steel struts. A streak of flame angled down from the hovering craft, striking a ditch digger in a soundless blossoming of white light that toppled Marines sheltered in the vehicle's shadow. Shit! The bastards had jury-rigged a missile launcher to the outer hull of the hopper and were using it for close air support.

Behind the glare of its landing lights, Kaminski could see a UN trooper leaning out of an open hatch, struggling to reload the now-empty launch tube. Taking careful aim, he squeezed off four fast triplets, and the loader jerked back inside, lost from view. Kaminski didn't know if he'd hit the guy or simply managed to scare him. Flicking the selector switch to full auto, he shifted his aim to the hopper's angular cockpit as the hovering craft slowly rotated in the sky. He wasn't sure how much 4.5-mm rounds would do to the ungainly thing, but he could sure let the UNdie bastards know that their presence above the battlefield was
not
appreciated.

God…was it falling?

It was spinning faster now, and settling, nose high.
Other Marines, and Whitworth's troops as well, were firing now at the hovering craft; Kaminski could see the sparks as rounds struck the craft's lightly armored hull. It struck the crater floor two hundred meters from Hab One, one of its landing legs crumpling beneath it as it set down hard in a high-flying billow of Lunar dust, pitching it sideways at a steep angle. By the harsh illumination of its landing lights, still on, Kaminski could see shadowy, space-suited figures tumbling from the wreckage. He took aim and opened up on full rock-and-roll, holding down the ATAR's firing button until the hundred-round stock magazine ran dry.

“
Ooh
-rah!” Kaminski shouted, holding his ATAR above his helmet in triumph. He was standing—and didn't even remember getting to his feet. He fumbled at his vest harness for a fresh box of caseless rounds, dropping the empty mag and snapping home the fresh one. A soundless explosion detonated forty meters away, and he heard the clatter of flying gravel rattling lightly from his helmet.

“Maybe
you
should be the one to get the fuck down, Kaminski,” David called from his part of the excavation. “It's getting damned hot out here!”