Luna Marine (31 page)

“Three million years is a long time.”

“It's an eyeblink, compared to eight
billion
years.”

“I see what you mean. So Fermi wondered why somebody hadn't already colonized the entire galaxy. Why they weren't
here
already.”

“Exactly. And the more we learn about extraterrestrial civilizations, the more urgent his question becomes. In the Cave of Wonders, beneath Cydonia…that huge array of image screens shows hundreds of other civilizations. We suspect that the blank screens in the Cave represent civilizations that no longer exist, that have died out over the past half million years. Extraterrestrial cultures are
common
. The galaxy should have been filled up many times over. It should be teeming with starfaring civilizations. Radio astronomers ought to be bombarded by the alien equivalent of TV programs, shortwave broadcasts, and military call signs. But when we listen, we hear…nothing.”

“But we do know there are other races out there. And we know that at least two of them
were
here, once.”

“Right. But what happened to them?

“According to your research both of them were attacked. Destroyed by invaders?”

“You've seen photos of the Cydonian site, General?” When Warhurst nodded, David went on. “You know, there are still people who haven't been there who argue that the Face on Mars is a natural phenomenon, that the fact that the Cave of Wonders is located underneath is just a coincidence. It was assumed to be a chance product of
weathering for a long time after it was first spotted by early orbital probes. And the funny part was, the first detailed imaging orbital of the site, in the late nineties, showed it really didn't look much like a face at all. You can just barely make out the overall shape of the features, but they're battered, smashed, broken…and what's left has been worn down to dust and rubble by half a million years of sandstorms. The earlier, lower-quality images had actually blurred things enough to show what the Face must have looked like once, half a million years ago, before someone, or some
thing
, shot the hell out of it.”

“Okay, so what's the point of your new explanation of Fermi's Paradox?” Warhurst asked. “I mean, what we've found on Mars and the Moon, especially the display screens in the Cave of Wonders, proves that aliens were here. What's the paradox?”

“Mostly, I guess, the paradox is why aren't they here now? Some of the astronut cults make the claim that
we
are the descendants of alien colonists, maybe an expedition of Builders who got marooned here a long time ago, but that just doesn't hold up. Our DNA is very clearly the product of evolution here on Earth. Over 98 percent of the DNA in chimps is identical to ours.

“What's also puzzling, though, is that the An, whoever they were, didn't have a technology that was all that much ahead of ours. From what we've found on the Moon, they used antimatter-powered spacecraft maybe a century or two ahead of what we're flying today. Okay, so that meant they were several thousand years ahead of the Sumerians, but that's not much time at all when you're talking about periods of millions or even billions of years. The Builders were more advanced, maybe a thousand years beyond where we are now. Again, not that big a difference, when there ought to be civilizations out there millions or even billions of years old.”

“Maybe there's some built-in self-destruct mechanism, so that no civilization lasts more than a few thousand years. Or maybe they evolve into…I don't know. Something else. Something we can't recognize.”

“Maybe. But think about this. It only takes
one
long-
lived and energetic civilization to overrun the entire galaxy in a few million years. That's part of the paradox. It only has to happen
once
, and we know, in fact, that it must have happened many times.

“Now, imagine an intelligence that evolves, develops civilization, starflight, and moves out into the galaxy. Imagine that it evolved with a kind of Darwinian imperative, a survival-of-the-fittest mentality that leads it to seek out other, less developed civilizations, and destroy them
before
they become a threat. And…remember that this only has to happen once to establish a pattern. If it happens once, if it works for them, it could happen again, and again, and again.”

“This predatory species becomes top dog in the galaxy, you're saying. It just hangs around and stomps on the new-bies as they emerge, is that what you're saying?”

“What I developed in my paper was the idea that the galaxy may endure cycles of civilization alternating with destruction. Hundreds, maybe thousands of civilizations emerge throughout the galaxy, all at about the same time. They develop space travel, spread out…but if even one of them out of how many hundreds or thousands is a predatory race, it's going to have an advantage over all the others, and it will destroy them.

“But if there's one such race, maybe there are two. Or a dozen. Or a thousand. Sooner or later, they come into conflict with one another. After a few thousand years of all-out warfare, the galaxy is empty again, except for a scattering of stone-chipping primitives on a few thousand bombed-out worlds who begin starting the whole cycle all over again.”

“‘The Hunters of the Dawn.'”

“What we've been able to translate of the An records and tablets suggests that they were terribly afraid of someone. They called them
Ur-Bakar
, the Hunters of the Dawn.”

“And these Hunters also destroyed the Builders?”

“I think it was a different group of Hunters. I think that galactic civilization was at a high point half a million years ago…then it all collapsed in a war that makes our dustup
with the UN look like a shoving match with the neighbor's kid. A predator race destroyed the Builders, bombed the structures on Mars, destroyed their colonies. Fortunately for us, they missed, or didn't bother with, the early
Homo sapiens
who were living on Earth at the time. Within another few thousand years or so, the Hunters were gone as well, probably fighting among themselves, or with other predators.

“Then, a long time later, maybe ten or fifteen thousand years ago, the An develop star flight. Since we've identified the An in the Cave of Wonders display, we have to assume that they were around half a million years ago, were smacked down, and then rebuilt their civilization.

“They come to Earth, maybe by accident, maybe because they remembered the Builders and were looking for them. They find our ancestors in Mesopotamia, settle down, and start their own colony, using primitives for slave labor.”

“And then the Hunters of the Dawn come again.”

“Right. Probably a whole new crop that evolved along those same kill-them-before-they-kill-you lines. They destroyed the An bases on the Moon. Destroyed their colonies on Earth…and by doing so must've left a pretty deep impression in the surviving humans about fire raining from the skies and wars among the gods.

“And once again we were lucky. The Hunters either ignored what they considered to be savages, or they just couldn't find and exterminate them all.” He shook his head. “I hate like the devil to sound like one of the ancient-astronut preachers, but there
is
evidence of a cataclysmic flood throughout the Tigris-Euphrates Valley five or six thousand years ago, and it was probably the basis for the Sumerian flood myths that eventually found their way into the Book of Genesis. My thinking now is that the Destroyers dropped a small asteroid into the Arabian Sea, and let the tidal wave wipe out the An cities.”

“Just like Chicago.”

“Just like Chicago. We know that the Persian Gulf was swampy lowland until just a few thousand years ago. Maybe it's just still flooded, after six thousand years. You
know, it might be interesting to do a careful sonar survey of the floor of the Arabian Sea, looking for a recent impact crater under the silt.”

He found he was breathing hard, that he was on his feet and pacing, instead of slumped on the hotel-room bed. He'd not wanted to discuss any of this, to discuss anything, but once the words had started, they'd tumbled out in an unruly torrent. He wondered if that had been Warhurst's purpose.

There was a knock at the door. “You'd better get that,” Warhurst told him.

A bit unsteadily, he walked to the door, considered activating the small security display, then decided that the Marines posted outside were all the security anyone needed. He opened the door….

“Teri!”

“David!” She stepped forward, taking him in her arms. “General Warhurst told me…that they haven't found Liana.”

“Teri…” He couldn't raise his arms to return her embrace. He
couldn't
…. He was so damned happy to see her alive…but the thought that he'd wished Liana dead would not let go.

She seemed to sense his confusion. Slowly she released him. “I'm sorry, David. I'm so sorry.”

“I…I'm going to need some time, Teri. To get my head straight.”

“I understand.”

“Dr. Sullivan, here, is the one who got you sprung,” Warhurst said, “not me. She talked with your wife, and got access to your correspondence files. Sent e-mail to every person in your address file. That happened to include a young Marine—”

“Frank Kaminski?”

“Affirmative. Kaminski took it up with his CO, who happens to be a friend of mine.”

“That would be Kaitlin Garroway.”

“And she told me.”

He looked at Teri. “Thank you.” He tried to imagine her forcing a meeting with Liana, and failed. Maybe he
hadn't known either woman as well as he'd thought.

“Come on in and grab yourself a stool, Dr. Sullivan,” Warhurst said. “What we're talking about here will interest both of you.”

“So,” she said brightly, “what have you men been gabbing about?”

“We're getting ready to kick the UN off our Moon, Dr. Sullivan,” Warhurst said, extracting his PAD from his inside jacket pocket and unfolding it. “But we're going to want a couple of archeologists along, just in case we have another Cave of Wonders to deal with.”

“Billaud's site? At Tsiolkovsky?” David asked.

Warhurst nodded, and David groaned. He was remembering the battle at Picard, the carefully excavated trenches trampled over by soldiers. He thought, too, of that French soldier in 1799, who'd uncovered the Rosetta stone and provided Western science with the key to the writing of an ancient and very alien civilization. At the same time, some of the soldier's friends were practicing with artillery…and using the Great Sphinx, at that time showing only its head above the enveloping sands, as a target.

He'd seen two pitched battles fought on a valuable archeological site, now, at Cydonia and at Picard. He didn't want to see a third.

“What,” Warhurst replied, reading from his PAD, “does the term ‘E-U-Nir-Kingu Gab-Kur-Ra' mean to you?”

“Sumerian,” Teri said. “‘E-U-Nir' is, ah, a house with raised foundations? ‘House Rising High,' I think I'd translate it. ‘King-gu' means a righteous emissary, but it was also the Sumerian name for the Moon.”

“And ‘Gab-Kur-Ra' means something like ‘Chest Hidden in the Mountain,'” David added.

“A chest,” Warhurst repeated. “Or a storeroom, maybe? A place for storing records?”

Realization struck David. “Which is what Marc Billaud called the central peak at Tsiolkovsky.”

Warhurst shot him a sharp glance. “When was that?”

“When I talked to him on the Moon. At Picard. He said
he wasn't going to betray his country, but that we'd get the answers we wanted at Gab-Kur-Ra.”

“You didn't mention that in your report.”

“I…I didn't think of it at the time. I hadn't made the connection with ancient Sumerian and the An tablets yet. And, well, it didn't make much sense.”

“Maybe he was trying to tell you something he didn't want other people to hear, or understand,” Teri suggested.

“Could well be.” David looked at Warhurst. “Where did you hear that name?”

“From Billaud. He's been talking freely to our intel people ever since we learned the UN military was playing with the notion of bombing us with asteroids. He's given us some information about the UN layout at Tsiolkovsky—not everything we need; he's a scientist, not a military man, but some. He told us there were some ET ruins at the crater's central peak and that they were called Gab-Kur-Ra. He gave us a translation of that but wasn't able to tell us what was inside. He says no one's being allowed in.”

“The UN has been pretty touchy about ancient-astronaut stuff ever since we let the cat out of the bag about Cydonia,” David said. “Maybe they're still trying to sit on it.”

“Maybe. Or maybe what they've found there is so secret they can't let civilians see it. We already know the French were getting clues to building an antimatter-powered spacecraft from wreckage they picked up at Picard. Maybe there were more clues at this Gab-Kur-Ra place.”

“Which means,” David said, “it's going to be heavily guarded when your Marines get there. My God….”

Step by step, the scenario he'd most been dreading was unfolding….

SUNDAY
, 9
NOVEMBER
2042

Above the Lunar Farside
0845 hours GMT

They called them LAVs, but the M340A1 Armored Personnel Carrier had very little in common with the Light Armored Vehicles employed by the US Marines during the closing years of the twentieth century.
These
LAVs had been designated as Lunar Assault Vehicles by some unsung Pentagon bureaucrat, either in deliberate imitation of the earlier LAVs, or in complete technomilitary historical ignorance. Either way, the informal designation allowed the team members of Bravo Company, 1-SAG, to resurrect an old Marine battle cry:
LAV it to the Marines
!

The heavy Conestoga-class trans-Lunar cargo shuttle
Santa Fe
was one of only two vessels of her class, heavy-lift ships designed to carry prefabricated hab units and construction materials to the bases at Fra Mauro and Tsiolkovsky when they were first built back in the 2020s. Obsolete now, the
Santa Fe
had been adapted by the military for one final Lunar flight.

She came in above the flat, dark floor of the Mare Crisium, heading southeast. She dropped to less than twenty kilometers' altitude above the Mare Smythii and went “over the hill,” dropping below the horizon visible from Earth and vanishing around the farside. Still descending, the craft swept in low across the crater rim of Pasteur before pitching over and firing a savage burst of plasma,
braking her forward velocity before gentling down toward the dusty Lunar surface.

Clouds of dust lashed and billowed from the touch of those hot jets; the freighter's open-girder undercarriage touched down, and the vessel, momentarily, at least, was at rest.

Almost at once, however, there was fresh activity, as foil-covered bays on each side opened, and the wedge-shaped objects stowed inside folded out and down, dropping the last several meters to the Lunar surface in a silent, slow-motion drop and bounce.

During the Apollo program, over seventy years before, a similar system had been used to stow and deliver light-weight Lunar Rovers to the Moon's surface; the four wedge shapes deployed this time were each far larger and more massive than those primitive NASA rovers. Each LAV massed just under fifteen tons and measured 9.1 meters long by 3.5 meters wide by 2.4 meters tall, a lean, flat brick with a wedge-shaped nose, mounted on four independently powered tires and coated with reactive camo and ablative plastic and ceramic laminates. The flat upper deck was interrupted only by the swell of a ball-mounted weapons turret.

“C'
mon
, people!” Gunnery Sergeant Yates's voice called over the company frequency. “Move it! Move it! A day here lasts twenty-seven Earth days! At that rate you've already been lollygagging on your fat tails for two hours! Step it
up
!”

Fifty Marines and one Navy pilot were descending from the
Santa Fe
's hab module, leaving the vessel, its reaction-mass tanks not quite empty, vacant on its spidery legs. Kaitlin dropped the last couple of meters off the
Santa Fe
's ladder, falling slowly to the surface and taking the gentle impact on flexing knees before moving out of the way of the next Marine coming down.

LAV-2, with Captain Fuentes and First Platoon, First Squad, was already loaded and ambling off in a tight curve away from the ship, moving toward the southeastern horizon. Its tires hurled rooster-tail clouds of soft, gray dust aloft, making it look as though it were laying down a
smoke screen. LAV-4, with First Platoon, Second Squad, started up, following the first at an interval that would allow decent visibility.

Kaitlin's platoon would be traveling in LAV-1 and LAV-3; her vehicle, with a white “1” painted just behind the small American flag on its mottled gray-and-black flank, waited just ahead, the rear doors open and the ramp down. The Marines of Second Platoon, First Squad were filing inside, stepping up the ramp and ducking beneath the low overhang of the hatchway, and she followed, her ATAR tucked in tight behind her arm and next to her PLSS. Inside, the Marines took their places in shock-mounted, center-facing seats, strapping down and plugging in commo and life-support feeds from the bulkhead into their PLSS packs.

“Secure and plug in!” Yates ordered. “Klinginsmith! Help Ahearn with her O
₂
hose!”

“Shit, Gunny!” Nardelli called. “Why can't we ride to Big-T in comfort, like with a pressurized cabin?”

“You want to chew vacuum if the UNdies hole us, be my guest. Me, I'm keeping my helmet on. Rawlins! Stow your ATAR and give Falk a hand! Kaminski! You too!”

Carefully, Kaitlin made her way up the central aisle, squeezing past the Marines still standing there as they pulled off their ATARs and other carry-on equipment and stored them in bulkhead racks and lockers. The layout was similar to the interior of an LSCP, but much more cramped; inside the cabin there was only 1.8 meters' head clearance, and even a short Marine like Kaitlin had to duck to avoid scraping her helmet along the overhead.

At the front of the cabin, Staff Sergeant Peter Hartwell, crammed into the tiny driver's cubicle, was readjusting the reactive camo feeds in the hull outside; the upper deck was capturing and reemitting the black of space, which made it as visible from overhead as a deep, black hole; by adjusting the feeds to have the turret and upper deck emit the powdery silver-gray of the surrounding landscape, the vehicle became effectively invisible from above.

Next to him was the Navy pilot, Lieutenant Thomas Wood, hunched over his PAD, which displayed a touch-
screen image of lighted keys. A monitor on the cube control panel showed the
Santa Fe
outside, the image relayed from a camera in the LAV's turret.

Kaitlin took her seat, just behind the entrance to the driver's cubicle, and started plugging in her life-support hoses. “Okay,” she said. “How's our time doing, Lieutenant?”

“We're still in the window,” Wood replied. “But it's gonna be tight.”

“Second Platoon, First Squad!” Yates sounded off over the platoon frequency. “We're squared away and ready to roll!”

“Okay, Staff Sergeant,” she said. “Let's do it!”

“Hang on to your butts! We're rolling!” With a lurch, the LAV started forward, the ride surprisingly smooth in the Moon's low gravity.

“Two hundred meters. We're clear of the blast zone,” Hartwell announced.

“Are the other LAVs clear?” Wood asked.

“That's affirmative. We're last man out.”

“All right.” Wood turned his head inside his helmet, looking at Kaitlin. “We're ready, Lieutenant.”

“Tracking armed and ready?”

“That's affirmative.”

She nodded. “Let her rip!”

Wood touched a key on his PAD; on the monitor, dust billowed again from beneath the now-deserted transport
Santa Fe
. Slowly, then, balancing on an invisible stream of hot plasma, the transport edged into the black sky. The turret camera panned up, following the craft as it dwindled into the night.

Wood had one gloved finger on an image on his screen configured as a touch pad, rocking his finger slightly to control the accelerating ship as though he were using a joystick. “Pushing her over,” he said, eyes on the readouts on his PAD. “Altitude forty-three hundred, speed eighteen-thirty-five. Five kilometers downrange.”

“I hope to hell they buy this,” Kaitlin said.

“We're still in the window,” Wood told her. “If the UNdies had observers at the poles, they wouldn't have had
a better track on the
Santa Fe
's likely orbit closer than fifteen minutes. And the lasers fired from Earth orbit probably bought us even more time.”

“Roger that. But it's my job to worry.”

The tactical challenge they faced, of course, was how to sneak up on Tsiolkovsky, an enormous crater located on the farside of the Moon some twenty-six hundred kilometers from the Mare Crisium and farther still from the base in the Fra Mauro Highlands. With an antimatter weapon of some kind mounted at Tsiolkovsky, one capable of blasting any spacecraft that entered its line of sight, even getting close to the enemy farside base was going to be damned near impossible with a conventional approach.

So the op planning staff at the Pentagon had come up with a sneaky alternative.

The fifty Marines of the Rim Assault Group had made the three-day flight from Earth orbit to the Moon packed like sardines inside a small hab mounted on the
Santa Fe
's transport bus, the four LAVs carefully stowed in the landing assembly. As the
Santa Fe
had begun her deceleration burn to drop into a direct Lunar-landing approach, a pair of Aerospace Force gigawatt lasers in Earth orbit had fired simultaneously, bathing the visible portions of both the Lunar north and south poles in torrents of coherent light.

At a distance of a quarter of a million miles, the lasers were attenuated enough that they couldn't do much in the way of actual damage, but any UN observers watching the
Santa Fe
's approach would be fools to keep staring into that light…and the more sensitive optics of cameras would either automatically shutter or be burned out. With no direct information on the length of the
Santa Fe
's burn, there would be considerable doubt about her actual orbit…and when she might appear above the horizon at Tsiolkovsky.

There was just enough time for the
Santa Fe
, once she was safely over the horizon as seen from Earth, and before she'd risen above the horizon at Tsiolkovsky, to actually land on the rim of Pasteur Crater, offload the Marines and the four LAVs, and take off again, this time under tele-operation from Lieutenant Wood's PAD. She had just
enough fuel remaining to make a final suborbital hop on a course that would take her directly over Tsiolkovsky, three hundred kilometers to the southeast of Pasteur.

The
Santa Fe
vanished behind the low, smoothly sloping mountains in front of the column of lightly bouncing LAVs.

“LOS,” Wood announced. “She's over the horizon.”

“How long until she's over Tsiolkovsky's horizon?” Kaitlin wanted to know.

“She's still rising,” Wood replied. “I'd say five…maybe six minutes. Depends on how on the ball they are at the UNdie base.”

“Oh, they'll be awake, all right,” Kaitlin said with a grin. “They'll have been watching the
Santa Fe
on an approach vector for three days now. They know she's on the way. They've probably been at general quarters for the last couple of days!”

“Let's hope they didn't get any sleep all that time,” Hartwell said, laughing.

“Roger that!”

She turned slightly in her seat, listening to the radio chatter as Yates lashed the squad with a traditional pre-battle warm-up. “We are
lean
! We are
mean
! We are lean, mean, fighting ma
chines
! We are
Marines
!”

“
Ooh-rah
!” the squad bellowed back.

“We are gonna kill!”

“
Marines! Kill! Kill
!”

It was, Kaitlin thought, a barbaric ritual, chilling, almost bloodthirsty…and terrifyingly effective.
God help any UNdies who get in our way
, she thought.

For minutes more, they traveled on across the silent vastness of the lunar surface. Each LAV was powered by a three-hundred-megawatt gas-turbine engine; each tire was independently hooked to its own power train and transmission and could be individually depressurized to increase traction on slippery slopes and in deep powder. Under one-sixth G, each LAV could manage eighty kilometers per hour on the flats…and up to half that on rugged, broken, boulder-strewn or steep terrain.

Unfortunately, this was the Lunar farside, a jumble of
craters upon craters upon craters, and the only flats were at the bottom of a couple of the largest, like Tsiolkovsky itself. They were going to be lucky to average twenty-five or thirty klicks an hour.

Which put them ten hours from their target. The mission plan allowed for eighteen.

“Ah!” Hartwell called. “I've got a reading! Looks like hard gamma!”

An instant later, white light shone above the rounded mountains ahead, a briefly expanding dome of light that swiftly faded from view in utter silence.

“I guess they were awake,” Wood said.

“Roger that,” Kaitlin replied. “Now if they'll just celebrate shooting down the
Santa Fe
and go back to sleep!…”

But the cabin was quiet now, with no more banter. The four LAVs were now utterly alone on the farside of the Moon, with no transport, no chance of retrieval.

It was a damned lonely feeling.

L-3 Construction Shack
2212 hours GMT

“Uncle David! What are
you
doing here!”

Jack gaped as the tall, lean archeologist pulled his way into the squad bay area, his small duffel bag trailing him on its canvas leash. David was upside down from Jack's point of view, so he twisted off the bulkhead in a quick rotation that brought them face-to-face.

“Hey, Jack!” David cried as they clasped forearms, rotating slowly in mid-bay. “I heard you were on this ride. Didn't you know I was coming?”

“Shit, no one tells us
anything
. They must be getting desperate, though, if they're throwing in
honorary
Marines now!”

Several other Marines gathered around the two. Captain Robert Lee braced himself on a deck support. “You're David Alexander?”

“Yes, sir,” David replied. He extended a hand and Lee
took it. Then he fished into his inside jacket pocket, pulling out a manila envelope. “Got my orders here.”

“S'okay,” Rob replied. “Give 'em to the CO over there.” He pointed across the crowded bay. “Colonel Avery. You'll want to check in with him soon as you get squared away. Welcome aboard, Doctor.”