Luna Marine (19 page)

It was estimated that some hundreds of millions of tons of water ice now lay buried in the regolith at each pole. Transports like the K-440 had originally been designed in the late 2020s to haul ice from the poles to places like Fra Mauro and Tsiolkovsky, where it could provide drinking water, oxygen, and the fuel for fuel cells or for chemicalfuel launch systems, so that more pounds of payload boosted from Earth could be devoted to food, nonconsumables, and people.

Lunar ice was, arguably,
the
most important natural resource discovered so far in near-Earth space. With all mass expensive in terms of having to drag it out of Earth's gravity well, having a local source of drinking water, oxygen, and fuel—both the hydrogen and oxygen employed by chemical thrusters, and the water used as reaction mass in nuclear-plasma main engines—meant the difference between viable long-term settlements and what was euphemistically referred to as a fingernail op, fingernail as in hanging on by a.

Operation Swift Victory had been conceived as just that—a means of stabbing straight through to the heart of the UN's Lunar operations, rendering them untenable. With the UN blocked from both the Moon and Mars, the war could indeed be brought to a swift and victorious end; after all, it was control of the ancient-alien artifacts out here that was the principal cause of the war…even if the folks back home were being told that issues like independence for the Southwest US or sovereignty under United Nations rule were the
real
cause of the fighting. Whoever
controlled the technology still locked up in those old ruins and archeological digs would ultimately make
all
of the rules, no questions asked.

Mars had been brought under US control by grabbing both ends of the cycler transport system to and from the Red Planet—the former International Space Station in Earth orbit, and the Mars Shuttle Lander bases on Mars.

The best way to control the Moon, however, was to control the water.

He watched the landscape unfolding below and ahead with an intent eagerness. The terrain appeared impossibly rugged, but that was an illusion brought on by the extreme contrast between light and shadow, day and night. The sun was very low on the horizon behind them, now, and every bump, every ridge and boulder, each crevasse and hill and crater rim cast shadows far longer than might have been expected. A screen on the pilot's console showed the same view, rendered through the far less ominous-looking medium of a graphic radar display.

“Acceleration, sir,” the transport's pilot warned. “Maybe you should grab a seat.”

“I'm fine.” Whitworth swung his feet around until they were in contact with the deck plating. A moment later, a tug of returning weight dragged at him, hard enough to make him sag a bit at the knees.

A green light began winking rapidly on the console. “Contact light!” the pilot said.

“Okay,” Major Jones added. “That's our come-ahead.”

“Excellent!” Whitworth said. He grinned, adding in deliberate imitation of an old Marine Corps expression, “The Green Berets have landed and have the situation well in hand!”

The first troops down at Objective Sierra Peter had been a detachment of Special Forces tasked with securing the landing zone; had there been an overwhelmingly powerful occupation force or a trap of some kind, they would have uncovered it and flashed the incoming transports a warn-off. The come-ahead meant the LZ was clear and nonhostile.

“How far?” Whitworth asked.

“Another two kilometers,” Jones said. He pointed. “Just beyond that crater rim up ahead. Um, maybe you should seal up, sir? Helmet and gloves in the locker back there.”

“I'm okay.” He wanted to
see
. The transport was dropping lower now, skimming the Lunar mountains at an altitude of barely a hundred meters. The ground canted up as they swept across the crater ringwall; the floor beyond was lost in black shadow. On the screen, several glowing green triangles came into view—the IFF codes of the Rangers already on the ground. A flashing X marked the LZ beacon.

“Here we go,” Jones said. “Take us in.”

“Roger that,” the pilot said. “I'll set us down over—”

The green flashing come-ahead went out. Two seconds later, a different light winked on, a baleful red.

“Shit!” Jones snapped.

“What's happening?” Whitworth demanded.

“Wave off!” The landing zone beacon snapped off. “They're waving us off!”

“Give me a direct channel!”

“You're on the air.”

“Advance Delta!” Whitworth shouted into his needle mike, using the Army team's call sign. “Advance Delta, this is Capstone! What the hell is going on?”

“Capstone, Advance Delta,” a voice called back, tinny and strained in Whitworth's earphone. “Wave off! Hot LZ! Repeat, hot—”

The transmission ended in a burst of static.

The transport's pilot hauled back on both of his armrest joysticks, and a sudden surge of acceleration dragged at Whitworth, slamming both feet against the deck. Struggling to stay up, he managed to lever himself down into the cockpit's jump seat and strap himself in.

“I've got laser fire,” Jones announced, his voice maddeningly calm. “Someone down there is painting us.”

“Where?” Whitworth demanded, leaning against his harness, trying to see. “I don't see anything!” There was
no answer, and Whitworth cursed himself for speaking without thinking, a sure way to look stupid in front of subordinates. Of course! In a vacuum, with no dust to illuminate or air molecules to ionize, laser beams would be invisible. The flashing beams and eye-popping bolts of colorful radiance so popular in the entertainment vids had no basis in reality.

A hard thump, like some giant kicking the transport from beneath, sounded through the thin metal hull. “What was that?” Whitworth demanded.

“Number three O-two tank just went,” the pilot shouted. “Hang on! We're losing it!”

A flash as brilliant as sunlight shone briefly through the cockpit windows, so bright that Whitworth thought they'd turned to face the sun. Then the light faded, and he realized he'd just seen an explosion—one of the other transports disintegrating in a violent, soundless detonation.

“Brace for impact!” Jones shouted over the transport's IC system. “Everyone brace for impact!” Then black-shadowed mountains swept past the cockpit window at an impossible angle, and Whitworth felt the deck slamming up against his feet and the mounting of his chair. A shrill scream—unmistakably the howl of atmosphere venting into hard vacuum—rang in his ears…which began to hurt intolerably as the cabin pressure dropped. Fumbling with the latches of his harness, he managed to get shakily to his feet, then accepted a helmet and gloves from Jones, who'd broken them out of an emergency locker at the rear of the cockpit. He clamped the helmet down over his head, seating it in the locking ring of his suit and giving it a hard quarter-twist to lock it. Jones, who seemed a lot more adept at garbing fast in an emergency, helped him with the gloves.

The pilot wouldn't need to suit up; he was slumped forward in his seat, his head twisted at an impossible angle. Whitworth wondered how many of his men in the main cargo bay had survived. At least they should have all been suited up for the approach.

As he should have been.

Still unsteady on trembling legs, he made his way back
through the cockpit hatch and into the cargo bay, where vac-suited troops struggled to get clear of cases of supplies that had shifted and broken free in the crash. The company radio channel was clogged with moans and a few screams; Lieutenant Hastings was shouting orders, trying to get a team to clear the airlock hatch of a spilled tangle of debris and electrical wiring. A number of men were trapped in their seats yet, some struggling feebly, but all too many lying as limp and as still as the transport's pilot. Ice—frozen out of the evacuating air as it thinned—coated many of the surfaces, gleaming eerily as handheld emergency lights flashed and swung and touched it.

Whitworth tried to think of something to say, some order to give…and couldn't. The situation was now completely out of his control, and all he could do was stand by helplessly and watch as Hastings and three others finally cleared the hatch and pried it open. A few moments later, he stood in the midnight shadow of the crater pole, looking up at hard, bright stars and an encircling rim of mountains, with only the highest peaks silvered by bright sunlight. The regolith crunched under his boots as he moved, and he could feel the crumbly texture of ice mixed with Lunar dust. The scene was utterly peaceful; other transports lay scattered across the crater floor where they'd landed, marked by the bobbing and moving emergency lights of other survivors. All three transports had been downed, probably in as many minutes.

“Colonel Whitworth?”

He turned. A soldier in black-and-gray vac-suit armor with Special Forces patches on left chest and shoulder, came toward him.

“Here. I'm Whitworth.”

The figure saluted. “Sergeant Canady, sir. Ranger LZ assault team. We, sir, are in a world of shit.”

“What the hell happened?” He wanted to lash out at someone,
anyone
, for this disaster. “Why didn't you pick the bastards up with your IR scans?”

He heard the blast of air across a mike as the Ranger sighed. “Sir, I don't think there were any bastards! The fire was coming from up there.” He pointed, indicating
the crater rim. “I think they have some kind of robot or teleoperated defense system. When we came in, we overflew and scanned for infrared leakage. If there were people, habitats, a ship, anything with operating life support, we would have seen the heat signature. But there was
nothing
!”

The words hit Whitworth like hammerblows. He'd been expecting some sort of token guard force or garrison…but not lasers aimed and triggered by men thousands of kilometers away. When had they set up the defense grid? After Picard, certainly, since the Navy had been making regular runs down here to collect ice for Picard's life support. Maybe the UNdies had even planted the things before the US invasion, sitting here quietly, letting individual transports come and go, while waiting for the transports that obviously meant an all-out assault on their farside fortress.

With a cold, hard, sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach, Whitworth realized he'd been guilty of the worst sin possible for a military commander.

He'd completely underestimated the enemy.

An hour later, he knew the worst. Out of 160 men in the South Polar assault force, 98 were dead, killed by the initial laser fire, or the crash of their transport seconds later. When contact was at last established with the North Polar group, his worst fears were confirmed. An identical ambush there had killed 82 out of 105; the survivors were in communication with UN forces and had decided to surrender.

There was, really, no alternative. It would be days before a relief force from Earth could arrive, and the tiny Army garrisons at Picard and Fra Mauro could offer no help. Their suit PLSS units would keep them breathing another twelve hours, or so, and they might scavenge more oxygen from supplies still aboard the wrecked transports, but they had no food, no water, and no way out save walking…

The alternative to an impossibly long and difficult overland trek appeared in the sky overhead two and a half hours after the brief battle that had marooned them. The
ship was death black and diamond-shaped, streamlined except for the wire-cage basket housing landing legs, reaction-mass tanks, and a plasma engine mounted on the stern. The only markings visible on the vessel as it drifted toward a vertical landing on invisible jets of high-temperature plasma were a small, blue, UN flag painted on each of the three fins, and the name, picked out in gray lettering near the prow:
Millénium
.

The mystery ship reported at Picard. The “unknown” that had launched from Earth months before and vanished behind the Moon.

There was no question of fighting the thing. Ball turrets mounted in that sleek, black hull rotated, tracking men on the ground. Oh, they could have opened up with the handful of missile launchers or squad lasers recovered so far from the wrecks, but to do so would have sealed their fate.

He opened Channel 9, the universal emergency frequency. “This is Colonel Thomas R. Whitworth, commanding the US Special Forces Lunar Assault Unit, calling UN ship. We are prepared to lay down our arms and surrender.”

There was no other option open.

None at all.

MONDAY
, 26
MAY
2042

Institute for Exoarcheological
Studies
Chicago, Illinois
0855 hours CDT

David was whistling as he entered the broad, skylight-illuminated lobby of the Institute for Exoarcheological Studies. They were waiting for him there, next to the fauxstone cast replica of the Sphinx, among fountains, palm trees, and rented vegetation.

“Dr. Alexander?” Both men flashed badges, though David was too startled to read them. “I'm Special Agent Carruthers. This is Special Agent Rodriguez. We have a warrant for your arrest, sir. Please come along quietly.”

“My…arrest! What charge?”

“Criminal espionage, violation of national security, and electronically consorting with agents of foreign countries with whom we are currently at war.” The two closed in on him from opposite sides. Handcuffs flashed. “You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to an attorney. Should you require an attorney…”

As Carruthers recited his rights, Rodriguez snapped the handcuffs closed on his wrists, pinning his hands at his back. Passersby in the lobby stopped, watching curiously. Helplessly, stunned by the suddenness of the arrest, he stared up at the enigmatic and secretive face of the Sphinx. The replica was only a fraction of the size of the original,
of course, crouched in one corner of the lobby among palms and tinkling fountain pools, but it was still large enough that David had to look up to stare into sightlessly farseeing eyes.

There was a rustle of fabric at his back as the recitation ended. Teri walked over, her PAD case slung over her shoulder. “David! What's going on?”

“Nothing to see here, Miss,” Rodriguez said. “Go on about your business, please.”

“David?…”

“Call my lawyer,” David told her. “Julia Dutton. Her number's on my v-mail address list in the office.”

“C'mon, Dr. Alexander,” Rodriguez said, tugging at his elbow. “You'll have lots of time to discuss things with your girlfriend later.”

“Go on, Teri,” David told her, as they led him toward the front door. “Call her! I need help!”

“That's for sure,” Rodriguez told him as they stepped outside. “Treason's not so hot as a career choice, you know what I mean?”

“Treason! What the hell are you talking about?”
Damn
! They must have found out about the fax.

“There's a war on, fella,” Carruthers said. “Maybe you hadn't heard. Sharing classified information with foreign nationals is—”

“
Look
, damn it!” David interrupted him. “I
know
we're at war. But there's a, a fellowship within the scientific community that transcends national borders. The people I was communicating with are friends of mine. There was no spying involved!”

“That's not for us to decide, sir,” Rodriguez replied. “You'll get your chance to explain it all in court.”

“But, you know, Dr. Alexander,” Carruthers added, “we've been keeping a close eye on you for some time now. What was happening here was sufficient grounds for us to get a court order to access your home network. Seems you've been electronically passing confidential files to the, ah, what is it? The First Church of the Divine Masters of the Cosmos.”

“What, those nutcases! You've got to be kidding!”

“You've been feeding them classified documents for the past couple of months, and we've got the records to prove it.”

Still protesting, David was hustled into a black Lancer Electra waiting outside.

Recruit Platoon 4239
Parris Island Recruit Training
Center
1120 hours EDT

“Listen up, now, recruits. You're about to meet the best friend you have in this world besides your rifle!”

Jack sat cross-legged on the deck at the forward end of the squad bay, listening attentively as Gunnery Sergeant Knox addressed them. The platoon was leaner now, after four weeks. Attrition had continued, though at a slower pace now that the deadwood and ballast had been jettisoned. Platoon 4239 was down to fifty-six men. They were still tired nearly all of the time from the grueling schedule of up to seventeen hours a day of drill, exercise, and training, but at least now they acted less like a herd of sheep chivvied along by screaming DIs. Now, they moved with purpose.

And a common goal.

Knox held up a pouch that was obviously designed to clip to a Marine's combat web gear. Each of the recruits, minutes before, had been issued an identical pouch before being mustered to the squad bay for a training session.

“Each of you will now remove the device you've just been issued from its holster,” Knox said.

Jack did as he was told, sliding a small but massive black case from his pouch. It looked like a computer of some sort, a PAD folded closed to protect screen and keyboard, of course, but a computer nonetheless. Folded, the device was about the size and shape of a paperback book, though it was considerably heavier. He could see a line of data jacks and power ports along one end.

Jack felt a surge of excitement, closely followed by an
almost reverent nostalgia. He'd been so busy for this past month that he'd not realized how much he missed his computer at home.

“The device you are holding,” Knox continued, “is the Marine-issue HP-9800 Mark III Personal Access Device, or PAD. Do not open it until I give you the word to do so.” Knox held up the PAD in his hand. “Two hundred years ago, a combat rifleman was expected to be able to march and drill in close formation, stand shoulder to shoulder with his fellows in the battle line, and give fire and reload while taking fire from the enemy. Combat has changed in two centuries. Not only the weapons and the techniques have changed, but there has been a profound change in the way riflemen are expected to operate in combat. To stand shoulder to shoulder with your buddies while you loaded and fired your musket took bravery, but you didn't have to be smart. Today, we expect you to be smart, because being smart spells the difference between victory and defeat, between you scoring a kill and what's left of you coming home in a body bag.

“The PAD will help you be smart. To
fight
smart.” He pointed to a catch on one of the long ends. “Press here to open your PADs. Now! Open them, but do
not
touch the ON switch until I give you the word!”

It opened just like a book, too, revealing two screens of dark, high-impact plastic. A single small button, inscribed
ON/OFF
, was recessed into the case at the lower right; a tiny camera lens was set into the plastic just above the top screen.

“The HP-9800 Mark III Personal Access Device is a computer,” Knox said, “two and one-half gigahertz, one hundred twenty-eight gigabytes of one-hundred-fifty-picosecond RAM, and onboard laser-read quantum-state crystal storage with a capacity of three hundred terabytes. The built-in gallium-selenium-arsenide dense-charge battery provides power for eighteen to twenty-four hours of continuous operation and can be recharged in one hour from either AC or DC sources, including your pliss converters or the power pack for your standard Sunbeam M228 Squad Laser Weapon.”

Jack felt a patronizing amusement as Knox ran through the PAD's stats, though he'd learned by now to keep his face impassively neutral with the smile well hidden inside. The device was impressive, yes—especially in its rugged construction, theoretically allowing it to be carried, jarred, dragged, dropped, bumped, kicked, and stepped on in hard vacuum, desert sand, thick mud, ice, or seawater at temperatures ranging from minus one hundred to plus seventy degrees Celsius and keep on working. By civilian standards, though, it was almost laughably primitive. His own home system, running at 4 gigahertz with almost a terb of 80ps RAM and 650 terbs of storage, was far superior.

It was a lot bigger, too, and not nearly as robust. The manufacturers of these devices had outdone themselves in making Marine-issue PADs as indestructible and idiot-proof as possible.

“Your PADs will function as computers in their own right, of course,” Knox continued, “but their true power lies in their ability to tap into either the Earthnet or a special Marine tactical network, or tacnet. To accomplish this, they use a radio-connect onboard modem at 98K baud, fast enough to allow the transfer of high-resolution, full-color video. By connecting with the local network, you will be able to use your PADs as full-capability vidcom units; to download orders, tactical information, and updates; to use your PAD as a full-featured mapping and autolocation device; or to access other computers in order to extend your PAD's computational power or to retrieve or to uplink data. Tactical range for the radio modem varies with the signal strength of local Net repeaters but is typically on the order of one to two kilometers. By connecting your PAD to any uplink station and antenna, however, you can access any Net system or data base required through available communications satellites, which gives you essentially unlimited range.

“You may now press the
ON
switch. Do nothing else,
touch
nothing else, until I give you the word.”

Obediently, Jack pressed the button, and the double screen came to life. The lower half showed a graphic representation of a keyboard and was obviously configured
as a touch-sensitive screen. The upper half showed the Marine globe-and-anchor, the single phrase “
ENTER PASSWORD
”: and a winking cursor.

“Your PAD is password protected. This is to prevent the enemy from accessing our communications codes and protocols in the event your device falls into their hands. Further, there are certain special passwords which you will memorize. If you are captured and forced to divulge your password, one of these special passwords will not only scrub your PAD's memory, it will release enough energy from the battery pack to render the device unusable.

“For now, you will all use the password ‘recruit' to access your machines. You may do so now.”

There followed an inevitable period of confusion, as several of the recruit PADs refused to function. Several might have been genuine faults, though in at least three cases, it turned out that the operators were trying to access their devices with either “recrute” or “recroot.” Recruit Kirkpatrick was still having trouble getting the case open and needed help, accompanied by a suitable chewing-out from Knox, to work the catch.

Eventually, though, all of them had operating PADs, and all were tuned into the Parris Island Recruit Training Command tacnet. Knox led them all through the basic operations of the device, using it as a calculator, as a data bank with range and ballistics information for various ATAR rounds, and as a vid-com. They learned that, so long as they were recruits, they would only have access to a single specific and very narrow channel on the local tacnet—this, Knox patiently explained, to keep some ham-fisted idiot-brained recruit from tapping into Earthnet or the Pentagon and causing a disaster of global proportions.

They also met AIDE—the Marine Corp's Artificially Intelligent Dedicated Executive, a decidedly masculine and somewhat narrow-minded version of Sam, without the pictures.

“AIDE is your friend,” Knox told them. “Your advisor and your mentor. He will act as your on-line agent. Tell him what information you need, and he will get it for you, either on a general search or by searching databases that
you specify. He can communicate with you audibly through the PAD's speakers, through your helmet radio headset, or—if you require silence to avoid giving away your position to the enemy—by printed words on your screen or relayed to your combat helmet's HUD. For those of you used to those high-powered civilian AIs, with artificial personalities and full-vid presentation and all the rest, AIDE will seem a bit spartan, definitely a stripped-down version of those slick-chassis jobs. But, believe me, it will do the job.”

Jack suppressed another smile at Knox's description of the AIDE as stripped-down. He much preferred Sam when she was stripped down…and he suspected that she could do just about any agent work better, faster, and with a more efficient use of onboard memory than the military-issue AIDE. And this thing didn't even have a visual component.

Funny. He hadn't thought about Sam during the past month, even in his dreams. He'd been too tired and too stressed lately, he supposed, to waste any energy on a fantasy simulation. That part of his life, he realized with a small, inner start, seemed very distant now, almost like the life and memories of someone else entirely.

He might not be a Marine yet, but, by God, he was no longer a civilian either.

Knox led them through several routines involving their AIDEs, retrieving specific pieces of information from the recruit tacnet, including their drill and training schedules for the next week, and the menu for evening chow. The AIDEs' voices, male, deep, and with the precision and decidedly artificial inflection of low-grade, no-personality AIs, turned into a male a cappella chorus as all fifty-six of them responded to recruit queries together.

It didn't take Jack long to get the hang of either the PAD or his AIDE. The PAD was slow and clumsy compared with his computer at home, and the AIDE had all of the simulated intelligence of a doorknob, but he knew he was going to be able to work with them just fine. He wondered how he could get at the AIDE's source code, however. He'd done enough tinkering with Sam to have a
good idea how basic artificial-intelligence programs worked—the non-self-aware ones, at least—and he thought he knew three or four tricks at least that might put a bit more zip in the thing's operation.

At least he could find a way to give it some personality, some inflection in its voice and speech patterns! Somehow he doubted that the Corps in general or Gunnery Sergeant Knox in particular would appreciate his tinkering with the standard, Marine-issue AIDE. Still, he knew he was going to
have
to try, sooner or later. It was a challenge.