Luna Marine (36 page)

A flash, a burst of white-hot incandescence, flared from the side of the UN ship, now less than four kilometers away.

“
Score one for LAV-4
!” Sergeant Mohr's voice called over her headset. “
I think we nailed the bastard that time
!”

“I just lost the relay from LAV-1!” Staff Sergeant Michaels, LAV-2's driver, announced.

“Put up another comm relay,” Carmen told him.

“We still have two in the sky,” Michaels replied. “And the LOS hit when the UN ship fired. Captain, I think LAV-1 just got scragged!”

“Shit.” She'd liked Garroway. A lot.
Grieve later
, she thought.
When there's time
! “Okay…keep targeting the ship.”

“Firing!” Then, “Captain, I think we nailed that turret. Nothing there but a hole!”

“You're sure that's where the positron beam was coming from?”

“Affirmative! Got it recorded, if you want a replay.”

“Let's see it.”

Michaels set the replay going in a small window opened in the lower left corner of the main display. It was hard to see, even magnified and in slow motion, but it did look as though a dazzling pinpoint of light had appeared on something like a ball turret set in the UN ship's hull; an instant later, the horizon had flared in a sun-brilliant detonation, searing the lunar regolith some ten or fifteen kilometers away. As the screen cleared, laser hits from LAV-4's cannon could clearly be seen shredding the turret like cardboard.

“Okay,” she said. “We'll call that a kill on the AM weapon, and call for Plan Bravo.” She glanced at the time readout: if
Ranger
was on time, she should be gentling into Lunar orbit within another few minutes…and would be coming over the western horizon twenty-five minutes after that, but for any number of reasons she could be late, or early. “Start popping com relays every minute,” Carmen added. “Coded for Select Bravo. I want
Ranger
to pick that up as soon as she clears the ringwall.”

“You got it, Captain.”

“Take us in closer.”

The LAV accelerated, spewing dust like a smoke screen.

PFC Jack Ramsey
USS
Ranger
0044 hours GMT

“How about it, people?” Captain Lee said. “Any broken bones? Anyone hurt?” He moved down the aisle, adrift once again in blessed zero G. Jack raised one hand and looked at it; it was trembling, beyond his ability to
control it. God…was the entire platoon in this bad a shape?

“My dignity's pretty badly hurt, Skipper,” one Marine replied, wiping his face with a rag. “Can I be excused?”

“You'll survive, Logan,” Gunnery Sergeant Bueller told him. “Okay, Marines! Listen up! I want you all to move forward, single file. Take a helmet and gloves from Lance Corporal Schultz, seal up tight, then check your weapon. Remember, do not load until your section leader gives you the word!”

Bueller was a short, stocky fireplug of a Marine, with a bulldog's face and a Doberman's growl. “Now!” he continued, anchoring himself between two seatbacks. “Are there any Marines who need help making it to the LSCPs? Speak up now, and don't give me no macho shit! If you're having trouble navigating, we'll assign someone to help you!”

Jack considered raising a hand, then decided that he would be okay. He knew what Bueller was looking for; all of the Marines aboard
Ranger
except Bos, Dillon, and Jack had had plenty of zero-gravity practice. The three of them had had three days at the construction shack to practice, though, and Bueller had made sure they'd worked at moving around without losing a handhold or getting disoriented in the weird, no-up-and-no-down falling sensation of weightlessness.

Ranger
's engines had cut off only moments before, and they were now in orbit around the Moon at a mountain-skimming altitude of only fifty kilometers. The Marines had twenty-two minutes now to get aboard the LSCPs strapped to
Ranger
's sides.

He craned his neck, looking for his uncle. There he was. David didn't seem to be having any trouble moving about; then Jack remembered that the archeologist had spent sixteen months or so on cycler spacecraft going to and from Mars. Though the cyclers had spin gravity habs, he would've had plenty of opportunity to practice handling himself in free fall.

He also saw Captain Lee…and was shocked by the expression on the man's face. After those soothing words
during the second half of the flight, it was a little unsettling to see what looked like worry there.

Then Jack remembered the scuttlebutt he'd been hearing for the past several weeks. Captain Lee was rumored to be pretty tight with the L-T commanding 1-SAG's Bravo Company Second Platoon…and she would be on the ground right now, trying to clear the way for
Ranger's
approach and landing. The captain must be sick with worry. Like his DI in boot camp had told him, the First Space Assault Group was an awfully small unit. That meant people formed close bonds within it; it also increased the risk that close friends would die.

He looked again at his Uncle David and wondered if both of them would survive what was about to happen. Jack hadn't thought much about his own mortality, but there was something about the expression on Rob Lee's features that demanded it.

Carefully, he pulled himself into the aisle, making sure he had the next handhold grasped securely before letting go of the last.

Another Marine's legs swung through the air and thumped heavily against his torso, nearly knocking him free. “You okay, Ramsey?” Bueller asked him, gripping his upper arm to steady him. “You got your PAD and shit okay?”

“Squared away, Gunny.”

“Semper fi, Marine. We're countin' on ya.”

It was a sobering thought. Capture of the UN ship might well depend on one of the three 4069 MOSs cracking the enemy's computer security.

His stomach gave another twist, and he bit back a sharp and sour taste. Grimly, he followed the queue forward.

Lieutenant Kaitlin Garroway
Tsiolkovsky Crater
0045 hours GMT

The rasp of her own breathing was impossibly loud inside her helmet. “Hello! Hello!” she called. “Does anyone hear me?”

Kaitlin could hear groans, cries, and mumbled curses coming over the platoon com channel. The lights were out and the LAV's cabin submerged in blackness absolute, but at least communications were still working.

“Ah…yeah, L-T. I hear ya.”

“Who's that?”

“Sorry. Kaminski, ma'am.” He sounded dazed, maybe hurt.

“I'm here too,” Hartwell said. “Christ! What hit us?”

“The enemy AM beam would be my guess,” Kaitlin replied. “Don't know why it didn't fry us, though.”

“Let's have some light in here! Who's got their suit lights working?” She began fumbling for her own light, reaching for the switch mounted high on her left shoulder. As the lights mounted on her shoulders flicked on, other lights came on as well, filling the LAV's interior with bizarrely misshapen and grotesquely huge shadows.

The LAV, she thought, was canted to the left at about a forty-five-degree angle. Part of the right side had crumpled inward, as though from the blow of a giant fist, and her helmet readout was showing zero pressure in the cabin.

Another readout showed something far more worrisome: she'd just picked up 100 rads in a single dose. Not good. Not good at all. She felt queasy and wondered if it was the radiation.

She still couldn't figure out what had happened. A near miss by the positron beam, yes…but why weren't they all dead? “Someone aft, see if you can get the airlock doors open,” she called. “The rest of you, sound off when I call your names. Let me know if you're in one piece! Ahearn!”

“Here! Okay!”

“Anders!”

“I'm okay.”

“Castellano!” She waited. “Castellano!”

“He's bought it, L-T.”

“Hartwell!”

“Okay.”

She ran down First Squad's roster and was relieved to find that there were only two dead—Castellano and PFC
Jordy Rawlins. Two more were hurt badly enough that they'd better not be moved—Navy Lieutenant Wood with a probable broken leg, and Lance Corporal Klinginsmith with what was probably a couple of broken ribs.

All of the squad had taken a hefty dose of radiation. Antimatter reacted with matter by vanishing in a burst of very hard radiation—X rays and gamma rays, especially—and both the armored hull of the LAV and their space suits would have generated additional, secondary radiation in a cascade effect.

How badly they were burned remained to be seen. The tables said that fifty percent fatalities resulted from 300 rads, but as little as 4 rads delivered all at once would cause
some
physical effects. They'd been “hardened” against radiation—put on a diet heavy in green vegetables and Vitamin A and E, and they'd all been taking daily doses of fat-soluble antioxidants—all of which was supposed to cut the effects of radiation by better than thirty percent. And once they were out of this, shots of atropine and antirad drugs would cut the effects still further.

But a hell of a lot depended on how quickly they could get that additional treatment, and even more on the exact nature of their exposure.

Outside, on the dusty plain as they scrambled clear of the wrecked LAV, Hartwell approached her. “I think I know what happened,” he said. He pointed back behind the LAV, where an expanse of Lunar regolith had been fused, as if by intense heat. “I'd just put the stick hard over when the beam hit. I think the matter-antimatter reaction took place in the dust cloud.”

“The dust cloud? How…oh!” Kaitlin understood. “It didn't all go off at once!”

“Right. Some positrons must have leaked through…and hit the ground just behind us. Others hit dust particles. The dust probably diffused the blast, spread it out over a large area. There wouldn't be any shock wave, of course, except through the ground, which is what tipped us over and crumpled the side.”

“And the dust might have scattered the rads a bit, too.”

“It's the only thing I can think of that saved us. We
had our own personal smoke screen up…and it blocked part of the beam.”

“The boys in R&D are going to be interested in that effect,” Kaitlin told him. “But that'll have to wait.” Turning her back on the wrecked LAV, she stared east, toward the UN base and the mountain. It looked close…but distances were deceiving on the Moon.

“Okay, Marines,” Kaitlin said, turning back to face the group standing in a semicircle behind her. “Here's the deal. We can sit where we are and wait for someone to win this damned fight…or we can hotfoot it over to that base and take a hand in what happens. Strictly volunteer. You want to sit this one out, no one's gonna squawk. Every one of you's done more than what was expected by the strict call of duty already. Me, I'm going to go see if I can give Captain Fuentes a hand. Anyone want to come along?”

“I'm with you, Lieutenant.” One space-suited figure brandished an ATAR and started forward. He had to get close for Kaitlin to read the name
KAMINSKI
on the front of his suit. Yates shouldered a slaw and stepped forward. Then Julia Ahearn. In another moment, all eight were with her; she had to order Lance Corporal Lidell point-blank to stay behind with the two wounded men.

She tried to make it look like a random choice. She imagined most of the people in the squad would know, though, that Lidell's wife was expecting a child.

Even in war, life could be respected and preserved. It had to be that way.

“Keep a radio beacon going,” she told him. “Someone will be along to pick you up before long. And…if it happens to be the UN, no heroics.” She gestured to the two wounded men. “Your responsibility is to them, to see that they're taken care of.”

“Aye, aye, ma'am,” Lidell said. “I still wish you'd let me—”

“Carry out your orders, Marine.”

He slapped his ATAR brusquely. “Aye, aye, ma'am!”

“The rest of you? Follow me!”

Turning, she started moving toward the UN base, sev
eral kilometers distant, still partly obscured by a shoulder of the crater's central mountain peak.

It looked like the battle there was on in earnest, and she was determined to have a piece of it.

MONDAY
, 10
NOVEMBER
2042

PFC Jack Ramsey
USS
Ranger
0049 hours GMT

Jack pulled his helmet down until the ring lock engaged, then gave it a hard counterclockwise twist to seal it. As he pulled himself hand over hand along the passageway leading to the port airlock, Lance Corporal Wojtaszek handed him an ATAR and a pouch with five loaded 4.5mm magazines and two beehive mags for his M-440. Gunnery Sergeant Bueller gave each Marine a quick once-over as he went through the airlock, sending some to the left, others to the right as they squirmed through close-fitting boarding tubes and into the LSCPs mounted on the
Ranger
's flanks like Tinkertoy remoras.

“Okay, Ramsey,” Bueller said, checking his suit PLSS readouts, then rotating him to stare through his visor and into his face. “Let's have a look-see. You ready to rock?”

“Yes, Gunnery Sergeant. Ready to go!”

“Your PAD hooked up and ready?” It was like Bueller to double-check the important stuff. The man had an incredible mind for fine detail and seemed to know every Marine in the platoon and what they should have with them down to his or her socks.

“Right here.”

He looked past Jack at the Marine floating behind him. “How about you, Dillon? You okay? Got your PAD?”

“All set, Gunny,” Diane Dillon replied. She punched Jack's side, causing him to drift around slightly and bump against the bulkhead. “This shaggy character'd just better watch my smoke!”

“Bosnivic? How about you?”

“I'm okay.” He was starting to sound nervous.

“Got your PAD? It's working okay?”

“On-line and ready.”

“Okay. Remember the drill. Ramsey and Dillon, you two are going down in LSCP-52. Bosnivic, you're going down in 54.”

Jack nodded. If one of the two landers was shot down, at least one of the 4069 MOS Marines would survive to board the UN ship. “Got it.”

“When you're on the ground, the three of you keep together and stay down! I'll round you all up and lead you in with my combat team, just behind the primary assault group. We'll get you in, don't worry about that. Use your weapons if you have to, but do
not
let yourselves be suckered into a firefight. You three people are the whole freaking reason we're here, and I don't want any of you getting capped because he or she got distracted. You read me?”

“We read you,” Dillon said.

“Loud and clear, Gunny,” Jack added.

“Yeah,” Bosnivic said.

“Okay. Ramsey and Dillon…port tube. Bos, starboard. See you on the beach, Marines.”

With his ATAR clanging once or twice as he squeezed through the airlock hatch, Jack pulled himself through and into LSCP-52. Finding an empty seat, he swung himself around, pulled himself down, and buckled in. Diane found a seat opposite.

The landing craft was packed with twenty-four Marines on board, with no room at all to move even if they hadn't been strapped in. He faced Diane across the narrow aisle, their knees touching, and wondered what to say.

Through her helmet visor, she winked at him.

He managed a smile in reply. He hadn't known her for long—just since he'd arrived at Quantico—and she'd struck him as an all-business sort, but she seemed like a
nice person. He wondered if he could get to know her better, after the op. Talking to her, he'd found, was a lot more interesting than talking to Sam, even though he'd never seen her out of uniform.

They waited for what seemed like eternity.

“Now hear this, now hear this,” a voice called over Jack's headset. “We've just cleared the horizon with a com relay from the RAG. We are go for Plan Bravo. Repeat, go for Plan Bravo. Good luck, Marines!”

Go for Bravo! That meant the RAG had managed to knock out the A-M cannon! Instantly, the platoon channel was filled with cheers and wild shouts.

“
Outstanding
!”

“
Gung ho
!”

“
Ooh-rah
!”

“
Let's kick it
!”

The enthusiasm was heady, dizzying, and contagious. Jack found himself shouting with the rest and exchanging a clumsy, gloved high five with Diane.

The remarkable thing was that Plan Bravo actually meant a more dangerous approach for the Marine assault teams. Alfa meant the AM gun was intact, but positioned at or near the UN base on the south side of Tsiolkovsky's central peak. If the call had been for Plan Alfa, they would have set down on the north side of the peak and approached the enemy base overland and spread out, so the enemy AM weapon couldn't burn them from the sky. Bravo meant they could come storming right in to the base's front door. Even with the AM cannon knocked out, that meant a hot LZ, with lots of base defenders about determined to make sure the Marines were cut down before they could fully deploy.

It seemed a little crazy to be cheering because they were about to hit a more dangerous LZ.

But then, Jack thought, they
were
Marines.

“Ooh-
rah
!” he shouted.

He'd never felt this kind of excitement in his entire life.

Or this kind of fear.

Captain Carmen Fuentes
UN Base, Tsiolkovsky Crater
0054 hours GMT

“Let's go, Marines!”

Carmen stooped low to clear the aft hatch of LAV-2, stepping out onto the ramp, then bounding down onto the lunar regolith. The other Marines crammed into the confines of the LAV exploded around and past her, scattering in long, low kangaroo bounds that kicked up clouds of fine dust with each landing.

The LAV had slewed to a halt less than twenty meters from the foundation of a towering gantry, a latticework of steel and aluminum hugging the half-obscured shape of a sleek, black craft with UN markings. Space-suited figures moved high among the gantry catwalks; only when a puff of dust geysered a meter to her left was she aware that some of those figures, at least, were shooting at her.

She kept moving, bouncing forward toward the relative shelter at the base of the gantry ladder. It was a strange kind of battle, with everyone moving with the eerie semblance of slow motion characteristic of moving in the Moon's one-sixth gravity. She could hear the calls of the other Marines over her combat channel, but there was no crash and rattle of gunfire, no explosions, none of the shrill, deafening, and mind-numbing thunder that marked battles in environments that happened to include an atmosphere. Wyvern shoulder-launched rockets flared brightly against the night, streaking toward their targets. An explosion detonated nearby; there was no sound, but she felt the concussion through the soles of her boots.

Sergeant Joles, just in front of her, staggered in mid-leap, crumpled, and fell, dropping slowly to the surface and rolling over several times as his momentum kept dragging him forward. Without thinking, Carmen stooped, grabbed a carry handle on his PLSS, and dragged him along, hauling him through the dust until she was under the gantry's shadow.

She rolled Joles over, looking for an entry wound,
reaching for one of the slap-stick pressure seals issued to the assault force to stop puncture leaks…but Joles needed more than a patch. A round had penetrated his helmet visor smack in the center, crazing the plastic, and splashing the interior curve with frothing red.

Both remaining LAVs were moving now, circling out away from the base, partly to make themselves harder to hit, partly to draw fire from the Marines now storming the base. LAV-2 pivoted sharply, its turret rolling high. Ten meters above her head, a UN trooper pitched over a catwalk railing as the LAV's laser exploded his legs and part of the steel platform he was standing on with the equivalent of ten kilograms of high explosives. Half of a body and a cloud of steel fragments fell in a broad-arcing spray, slowly at first, then faster as they got closer to the ground. Bits of metal rattled off Carmen's helmet like a rain of steel bearings.

She saw movement on another part of the structure and tried taking aim. It was almost impossible, though, to position herself so she could aim her ATAR almost straight up, and the built-in camera-aiming system didn't work unless the rifle's butt was connected with the pivot socket in her suit's torso, right at her center of gravity. The idea was to have the rifle's targeting system throw a crosshair cursor on her visor's HUD, showing where she was aiming, but she ended up aiming blindly and squeezing the trigger, hoping that the high-velocity spray of full-auto rounds hit
something
.

LAV-2's Marines, First Squad, First Platoon, were at the gantry; LAV-4's were assaulting the base control center a hundred meters away. The enemy base suddenly seemed far larger than the simulations and maps had made it look back on Earth, far too large for twenty-four…no, twenty-
three
Marines to handle.

“Come on, Avery,” she muttered to herself. She looked west, over the sheltering flank of the central peak, but the sky was empty except for stars. “Move your fat ass!”

“Hey, Captain Fuentes!” A voice called. “This is Mohr, in LAV-4! I found somethin' here!”

Turning, she saw the LAV approaching, a shadow be
hind its headlamps and the glare they cast in the dust. Smaller shadows moved on the vehicle's flat upper deck, shadows already dropping off the top and onto the surface.

“Found 'em a couple of klicks to the west, Captain,” Mohr continued. “They were hoofing it and asked for a lift!”

Carmen triggered her suit's IFF ID call, and familiar names flashed onto her HUD. The Marine coming toward her was…

“Garry! I thought you were dead!”

“They singed us a bit, Captain,” Kaitlin replied, close enough now that Carmen could see the other Marine's easy grin through her visor. “Nothing a shot of atropine and a decon routine won't handle!”

“
Jesús y Maria
!” Carmen cried, a phrase from her childhood she'd never expected to use again. “It's good to see you, girl!”

Something hit her in the side, a sledgehammer swung with a force that slammed her off her feet. The next thing Carmen Fuentes knew, she was on her back, feeling very, very cold as air whistled past her ears and a tinny voice announced, “
Warning! Suit breach! Pressure dropping! warning! Suit breach
!…”

Dimly, she was aware of a space-helmeted head hovering above her. “Captain!” It was Garroway's voice. “Captain! Hang on!”

“Take…command.” Her voice broke, and she tasted blood, hot and salty. She tried again, reaching for the figure crouched above her. “Take command!”

“Captain!…”

“Take them…take them up the ladder, Marine!”

“Aye, aye, ma'am!”

The computer voice was no longer shrilling at her. Had Garroway patched the leak? Or was the air in her suit gone? No, that made no sense. She was breathing
something
. But it was starting to hurt now, starting to hurt a
lot
.

She felt a sting in her shoulder—Garroway using one of the special high-pressure air-fired needles to slam a shot
of morphine right through the heavy material of her suit. In a few moments, it still hurt, but the pain was very, very far away….

Lieutenant Kaitlin Garroway
UN Base, Tsiolkovsky Crater
0058 hours GMT

Kaitlin pulled the morphine injector free from the captain's arm and slapped a small patch over the hole…a bright red patch that indicated that the suit's wearer had been given morphine. Tossing the injector away, she used a grease pencil to mark the time on the patch. Then she picked up her ATAR and looked up the side of the gantry.
Take them up the ladder
.

She felt lonely. She was in command now, and ordering her people to do the impossible was up to
her
now, not Carmen Fuentes.

“Marines!” she shouted over the combat channel. “This is Lieutenant Garroway! The skipper's down, and I'm taking command! Everyone who can make it to the base of the gantry, get there on the double!” An explosion flared among the girders high above her, as one of the LAVs killed a sniper. A moment later, the LAV exploded in a silent gout of light, dust, and hurtling fragments.
God
! “Move it! Move it!”

The seven who'd come with her from LAV-1 were already there. “We're with you, Lieutenant!” Kaminski called. Other Marines were approaching

“Okay, then! You! You! You! Cover us and come up last! The rest of you, follow me!” Grabbing the handrails of the gantry ladder, she started up the steel rungs.

She wondered where the
Ranger
Marines were, and how much longer they'd be.

Captain Robert Lee
USS
Ranger
0058 hours GMT

Rob was furious.

He was floating on
Ranger
's tiny bridge, where the ship's four flight officers were strapped into seats all but surrounded by instrumentation and consoles, and Colonel Avery was sitting in a jump seat just behind the captain's station. The hell of it was that the bastard Avery was right.
He
had the call, and the safety of the ship came first.

He shifted handholds, moving closer to Avery's seat. “Sir, I understand that,” he said. On the big display screen above the captain's and pilot's positions, the ruggedly cratered surface of the Moon scrolled past. A steadily dwindling number on the lower right corner of the display gave the range to the UN base. Just over one hundred kilometers. They must be just outside the Tsiolkovsky ringwall. They had to act within the next minute or two, or miss their chance entirely. “But our people need the firepower we can bring to bear. That's why we're here!”

“You are being insubordinate, Captain,” Avery replied. “Our primary mission objective has been met.” Minutes before, the two LSCPs had been jettisoned; drifting clear of the
Ranger
, flying tail first, they'd fired their engines together and now were dropping toward the surface, and a landing at the UN base.