Luna Marine (38 page)

As he scrambled up the ladders connecting two more decks, close on Bosnivic's heels, Jack passed several examples of Marine accuracy in close-quarters combat. How many UNdies were left alive on the ship? He didn't know, and that wasn't his concern. The bridge was clear now, and he had a job to do.

Squeezing through the final hatch, he stepped onto the bridge, a dark and claustrophobic place only six meters across and already crowded by Bueller, two Second Platoon Marines, and three UN bodies. Bosnivic was already moving to the computer station, and it didn't look like there would be room there for two at that console.

Well, if Bos didn't succeed, Jack thought, maybe he and Sam would still get a shot. He wanted to know how Sam would stack up against the vaunted NSA nutcracker. He stepped back, standing between the Second Platoon Marines, Lieutenant Garroway and Sergeant Kaminski. “About time you fellows showed up,” the lieutenant told him.

One of the bodies on the deck was moving.

“Watch out!” Jack yelled. “On the deck!”

It happened too fast to follow. Two of the dead UN troops wore the black helmets of Chinese special forces;
the third wore a lightweight, bloodied white suit with the characteristic blue UN helmet, and he was the one who'd just risen to hands and knees and flung himself across the deck, almost under Bosnivic's feet, snatching up an ugly little pistol with a large magazine in front of the trigger and rolling over, aiming up at Bos.

Jack brought his ATAR off his back, but Bos was in the way, his feet tangled with the UN man's legs. The UNdie gripped the machine pistol in both hands, jamming it straight up, almost against Bosnivic's groin, and pulled the trigger. A stream of explosive rounds blasted through his torso, as chunks of armor and bloody flesh sprayed the compartment.

Kaminski and Lieutenant Garroway both reacted faster than Jack could, pivoting and raising their ATARs in the same instant and blasting the UN soldier with a snapping burst of high-speed fire.

But it was too late for Bos.

“You're up, buddy,” Kaminski said. Half in shock, Jack stepped across the body of his friend, slinging his ATAR as he pulled his PAD from its holster.

Captain Robert Lee
USS
Ranger
0113 hours GMT

It almost
had
been too late.
Ranger
had swept past Tsiolkovsky's central peak, still decelerating at three Gs, but then, slowly, she'd brought her speed to zero relative to the Lunar surface, then started moving back toward the west, toward the firefight raging around the southwestern flank of the mountain. On her bridge, Rob Lee and David Alexander got to their feet once more, feeling now only the Moon's sixth of a gravity, and the rattling vibration of the ship's drives, holding them at a drifting near hover less than half a kilometer above the crater floor.

“There's a lot going on down there, sir,” Kieffer said. “I see several small groups IDed as Marines. The rest are scattered all over the place.” He pointed. “Looks like
some sniper positions up on the side of the mountain. Squad lasers, shoulder-fired missiles, and a lot of small-arms stuff.”

Rob glanced at Avery, who shrugged, then nodded. “Unless you see some other targets in the clear,” Rob said, “let's take out those snipers. But watch out for heavy battery fire from the ship.”

The AM cannon might have been dealt with, but the UN ship almost certainly possessed high-energy lasers as well, and there was no word yet on whether the assault team had secured her or not. A well-placed HEL barrage could still ruin the
Ranger
's whole day.

Ranger
mounted three HELs, each in the two-hundred-megajoule range, which gave them the explosive equivalent of forty-kilo charges of high explosive. The bolts falling from the sky were invisible in hard vacuum, but the explosions were not, dazzling, pulsing flashes against the mountainside like scattered strobe beacons. In seconds, a faint haze of dust was settling across the mountainside, and each bolt became visible as it flashed through the cloud, searing streaks of white light that continued to hit the mountain slope in a devastating, rapid-fire barrage. As quickly as a UN soldier could be spotted by the
Ranger
's weapons officer, using IR optics, a lightning bolt would fall.

“Okay, okay,”
Ranger
's communications/electronics officer said, touching his headset. “I'm getting a call from someone down there.”

“Put it on the speaker,” Avery said.

“…
on the run
,” a scratchy voice called. “
Glad you boys could make the party
!”

Avery reached out and jacked his headset mike into the CE officer's console. “This is Colonel Avery of the
Ranger
. What's your situation down there?”

“
Ah, okay, Colonel. This is Gunnery Sergeant Yates. We're in good shape, here. The skipper's inside the UN ship. Haven't heard from her in a while, now. So's the computer team. Outside, we were taking damned heavy fire from that mountain, but you boys just pretty well swept it clean! Looks like the UNdies are on the run, now
!”
There was a static-filled pause. “
If you can set down near the UN ship, we've got a lot of wounded here
.”

“Roger that.” Avery nodded to the pilot. “Take her down.”

“We don't have much choice, sir,” the pilot said. “We're down to eighty seconds' RM at low thrust. We're setting down whether we want to or not!”

“Not too close to that damned French ship!” Avery snapped. “They may have explosives set!”

“Got news for you, sir,” Commander Kieffer said. “With antimatter, they don't need to worry about explosive charges. If that baby goes, everything on this side of the mountain goes. Shrapnel alone is going to get everything within miles!” He seemed to be enjoying himself.

Rob's heart was hammering. What about Kaitlin? Where was she? He glanced at David and saw the archeologist's clenched fists and pale, drawn face.
His nephew's in there, with the computer team
, he thought. And Kaitlin…

He'd seen one LAV destroyed out on the crater floor, and he could see another here, holed by a missile. Was Kaitlin dead? Hurt?

He desperately needed to know.

Moments later, the
Ranger
touched down gently on the Lunar regolith, a hundred meters from the UN ship and gantry. Rob hurried back down to the squad bay to get his helmet and gloves, and David followed.

Neither said a word.

PFC Jack Ramsey
UNS
Guerrière,
Tsiolkovsky Base
0114 hours GMT

Jack leaned against the computer console, his PAD open, the leads jacked into both the ship computer and to his own suit. Sam could talk to him now over his headset, and she would hear his instructions. “Go to it, Sam!” he told her, after setting up the first sweep sequence with a few keystrokes. “What are we up against?”

Sam was visible on the PAD screen. It seemed a little strange, seeing her there without a suit, while he was still encumbered with his. For the last month or so, he'd been thinking of her much more like a living person than a simulacrum. In fact, his whole relationship with her had changed.

He kind of liked it.

And—he knew he was anthropomorphizing here—he thought she liked it as well. “
I enjoy this new professional relationship with you
,” she'd told him once, a couple of weeks before.

“I am detecting computer security encryption, Jack,” Sam said. “It's asking me for a password.”

Her speech was crisp and precise, with none of the languid sexiness she'd had originally. Her responses were also immediate, or nearly so. Her personality software had possessed a built-in response-delay, so that her conversation sounded more human. Jack had disabled that last week, however, to bring his interaction with her to peak efficiency.

“Initiate nutcracker routine. Run program.”

“Jack, you should know that I have just tried the first word on the first list. The password failed, and at the same time, I detected the reset of an incremental counter, from three to two.”

“Oh, shit….” The
Guerrière
's system was set to detect and count each attempt to break security, probably with a three-times-and-you're-out routine attached. The instructors at Quantico had admitted the possibility of something like that but thought it unlikely, given that the UN wouldn't be expecting an enemy assault on Tsiolkovsky.

Evidently
Guerrière
's programmers had been expecting the attack after all, or else they were simply being cautious. Three-times-and-you're-out was the perfect way to foil pass-code-cracking attempts that relied on brute force. Three wrong guesses, and…well, there was no telling what would happen next. Maybe a special key was required to reset. Maybe a new set of instructions from an authorized programmer was required. Maybe there would even be a very loud boom.

“Jack, there is something else.”

“What is it, Sam?” He was breathing harder now, and his visor was starting to fog.

“Behind the counter, I am also detecting…something else. I believe it is a timer.”

“The computer clock?” Sweat burned his eyes.

“Negative, Jack. This is a special timer within the security program, and it is counting down. Now at T minus twenty-one seconds.

Maybe there was going to be a very loud boom whether Sam entered more passwords or not. Two more tries, out of sixteen thousand possibilities? There was no way in hell he could pull the pass code out of a hat, not with twenty seconds to go.

“Damn, Sam,” Jack said, feeling sick. “I don't know how we're going to pull this off….”

MONDAY
, 10
NOVEMBER
2042

Sam
UNS
Guerrière,
Tsiolkovsky Base
0114 hours GMT

“
Damn, Sam. I don't know how we're going to pull this off
….”

PFC Jack Ramsey
UNS
Guerrière,
Tsiolkovsky Base
0114 hours

“Jack, I think we're going to have to try a completely different approach,” Sam said, less than two seconds later. “I believe I may have a possible password.”

“Do it!”

An agony of seconds passed.

“The second password was not accepted,” Sam said. “Incremental counter now set at one. However, I am certain I am on the right track. Does anyone know how to say ‘Hunters of the Dawn' in French?”

Jack blinked. She'd been given French word lists….

…but that wasn't the same as
knowing
a language, and he didn't think that that phrase was on the list in any case. “Hey!” He shouted on the platoon channel. “Sam needs to know how to say ‘Hunters of the Dawn' in French! Who knows it?”

“I do,” Kaitlin said. “
Chasseurs de l'Aube
.”

“Shass—Damn it! Spell the fucking thing! On Channel Three!”

Ignoring his less than protocol-correct words, Kaitlin spelled the phrase.

A long second later, Sam said, “Computer security safeguards are now down. I have control of
GUERRIÈRE
's computer.” Another pause. “Countdown to uncontrolled release of antimatter aborted at T minus four-point-one-three-one seconds.”

“Sam…I think I love you!…”

Jack didn't feel it when his knees gave way and he dropped to the deck, falling slowly in one-sixth G.

Captain Rob Lee
UNS
Guerrière,
Tsiolkovsky Base
0118 hours GMT

Rob came up onto the bridge, expecting almost anything. The fighting everywhere appeared to be ending, but there was always the possibility of a holdout fanatic somewhere…or a UN trooper who hadn't gotten the word.

She was there, helping as Marine on the deck. “Kaitlin!” Bueller and Kaminski stood nearby, weapons ready; the bridge around them a charnel house. He scarcely saw them. “Kaitlin! You're okay!” Then he saw that one of the bodies was Bosnivic, the other Jack Ramsey. “Are they—”

“Bosnivic's dead,” Kaitlin told him. She sounded shaken. “I think Ramsey, here, just had too little CO
₂
in his mix. He got excited, hyperventilated, and passed out.” She looked up at Rob, eyes very large. “He just saved us, Rob.
All
of us.”

“The computer? The ship?”

“Is ours. But it was damned close. Four seconds to spare. They had a trigger set on the antimatter generator, and a timer going.”

“Holy God….”

She finished adjusting Jack's gas mix, then stood up, swaying a bit. Rob tried to take her in his arms, but Mark I armor was less than satisfactory for close contact. They bumped awkwardly, and she laughed, fending him off. “Easy, there, Tiger. You'll startle the men. Maybe later….”

Kaminski was at the communications console nearby. “Uh, Lieutenant? I think I can patch through to an L-1 halo comsat!”

“Great!” Kaitlin replied. “Can you raise Mission Control?”

“That's what I'm working on, ma'am. It's gonna take a while.”

L-1 was a gravitational balance point above the Moon's farside. It was possible to orbit that point, rather than the Moon itself, which made it an ideal spot for comsats. The
UN had taken advantage of this footnote in physics to keep their base at Tsiolkovsky in touch with Earth; now it could serve the victorious American forces as well.

Jack was trying to sit up. “Christ! What happened?”

“You got a little too excited, Ramsey,” Kaitlin told him. “You passed out. Feeling better now?”

“Uh, yeah. Yeah, I think so.”

“Good. We'll have the corpsmen take a look at you aboard the
Ranger
, just to be sure.”

“The lieutenant tells me you just saved us all, son,” Rob said.

“Wasn't me, sir.” He shook his head emphatically. “It was Sam.”

“Sam?”

Standing, he retrieved his PAD from a nearby console. His suit communications jack had pulled free when he'd fallen, and he plugged himself back in now. “
This
is Sam. And if I didn't know better, I'd swear she just had a very uncomputerlike burst of pure, creative thought!”

“But, of course, you
do
know better, don't you, Jack?” a young woman's voice said over the platoon channel.

“Sam, I don't know a damned thing anymore. You and me have to talk!…”

Lieutenant Kaitlin Garroway
UNS
Guerrière,
Tsiolkovsky Base
0535 hours GMT

It took over four hours—and some more of Sam's nut-cracking to override some UN security protocols—to make the comsat patch, but at last the thing was done. Kaitlin sat at the communications console and jacked in her headset. “Potomac, Potomac,” she called. “This is Night Rider. Over.”

Static hissed in her earphones.
Guerrière
's hatch had been repaired and her atmosphere restored during the past couple of hours, and she had her helmet and gloves off at last.

“Night Rider,” she heard in her headphones. “Night Rider, this is Potomac. We read you!”

She thought she recognized that voice. Encryption software at both ends of the link made it safe enough to say the name to be sure. “General Warhurst? Is that you?”

The two-and-a-half-second time lag for a radio signal to travel to Earth and for the reply to come back was noticeable, but not long enough to be a problem. “This is Warhurst. Kaitlin? Kaitlin, is that you?”

“That's affirmative, sir!” She grinned. Only a few moments ago, Kaminski had reminded her of what day it was. By this time, it was even the tenth of November in Washington, where the commandant was waiting out the mission with the Chiefs of Staff. “Listen up! It is my great pleasure to present you and the Marine Corps with a special birthday present…the UN warship
Guerrière
!”

Three seconds dragged by. When she heard Warhurst's voice again, she could hear wild cheering in the background, so loud that it almost drowned out the commandant. “Excellent, Lieutenant Garroway! That's splendid.” There was a pause. “Does your being on the line mean…are Colonel Avery or Captain Fuentes or Captain Lee there?”

“The colonel is still aboard
Ranger
, sir. Captain Lee…I think he's outside, helping collect the wounded and get the POWs organized. Captain Fuentes was hurt pretty bad, but I understand from one of the corpsmen aboard
Ranger
that she'll be okay.” She caught her lower lip between her teeth, hesitated, then added, “The butcher's bill was damned high, sir. Don't have the figures yet, but we had at least fifty percent casualties, dead and wounded. Probably more.”

“I understand, Lieutenant. You people accomplished the damned-near impossible!”

“You have
no
idea just how close it was, sir.”

“Be advised that three transports are already en route from Earth and will arrive there in two days. Sorry, but except for
Ranger
and that UN ship, everything we have is old tech! I'm afraid they'll take their time getting there!”

“Understood, Potomac. We have water, food, air, power, and med support. We'll be okay.”

“They'll be dropping off an Army team to take over from you. We want all of the Marines back on Earth as quickly as possible. Don't know the details, but I imagine they're going to be throwing a bit of a bash for you people as soon as you get home!”

The news did not cheer her. Postcombat fatigue was setting in, and she still felt sick after taking those rads.

She wondered how badly she and the other surviving Marines of Second Platoon, First Squad, had been burned.

She wondered if she would ever be able to have children. The thought scared her, left her shaking.

“Once again, Lieutenant, an outstanding job. I'll want to pass that on to Colonel Avery and the rest of the command staff personally as soon as you can round them up and get them on the line.”

“Aye, aye, sir. We just got the comm link working now. We'll call back at…make it zero-eight-hundred, Greenwich.”

“Roger that! We'll talk to you again at oh-eight-hundred.”

“Roger, Night Rider copies. Over and out.”

She looked again at the bodies of Bosnivic and three UN troopers—one of the last, apparently, the general in command of the installation—laid out now side by side on the deck near the open hatch. So many killed. So many others wounded.