Luna Marine

by Ian Douglas

  “Hot and ready, Captain.”

  “Target. Two UN spotters on top of the hab at one-one-three-zero o’clock.” The lack of a Lunar magnetic field was proving to be a nuisance. Giving firing coordinates by arbitrary clock-face references, instead of by compass degrees, was considerably less than precise. “Take ’em down!”

  Fortunately, the targets stood out like blue-headed bugs on an empty white dinner plate. “I’m on ’em, Skipper.”

  Both UN troops were studying the Marine positions in the trenches, using electronic imagers like Kaitlin’s own. One suddenly spun around, the imager flying from his grasp, a silvery cloud of vapor enveloping his chest. The second UN soldier turned, reaching out…then he, too, toppled, his blue helmet spraying a white jet of fast-freezing vapor.

  “Nice shooting, Paps. Two up, two down.”

  “Thanks, Lieutenant. Like they say, reach out and touch someone.” The expression was a very old one, still common among Marine snipers and slaw gunners. Like so many other favorite expressions in the Corps, no one knew where it had come from or who’d said it first.

  A bright point of light streaked through the darkness from the crater rim, slamming with a flash into the bulldozer that seemed to be providing shelter for a number of enemy troops. Seconds later, another missile was sky-borne, this one zigzagging up from the crater floor and slamming into the hilltop, a hundred meters to Kaitlin’s right. A second enemy missile followed the first, this from a different position. The explosion flashed just short of LSCP-44. The landing craft was shielded from direct line of sight from the base, but a smart missile—or a lucky shot—would find that particularly vulnerable target before long.

  “Man down!” someone yelled over the platoon channel. “Man down! Corpsman!”

  “We can’t slug it out with them for long,” Kaitlin said. “They’ve got too much firepower.” She pressed the button on the left forearm of her suit, opening the com channel to Alfa’s Second Platoon. “Falcon! Falcon! This is Raven. Do you copy, over?”

  “Raven, this is Falcon,” Captain Lee’s voice came back immediately. “Go ahead.”

  “We’ve got a situation here, Captain. Bravo First is pinned down at the base under heavy fire, their bug shot to hell. We’re on the crater rim eight klicks to the west, also taking heavy fire. Enemy is present in force, repeat, in force.”

  She realized that her voice had been steadily climbing in pitch as she spoke. She stopped, drew a deep breath, and tried to bring her voice back under control. Another shoulder-launched missile streaked up out of the crater, angling almost straight toward her before it whipped low overhead. She crouched low as the blast went off somewhere at her back.

  “It looks as though the enemy is preparing to rush First Platoon,” she continued. “We need help, fast. Can you comply, over?”

  “Raven, Falcon. We’re about five minutes out, still over the Mare Tranquillitatus. Can you hold that long, over?”

  “Falcon, Raven. Looks like we’ll have to, doesn’t it? Come as fast as you can. Raven out.”

  “On our way, Raven. Falcon out.”

  Five minutes…an eternity in combat.

  The UN troops were concentrating their fire on First Platoon, and, despite the fire they were taking from the crater rim, it was clear they were going to try a charge, probably within the next minute or two. Kaitlin knew that she had just two choices…to sit up here on her ass and watch half of her rifle company be overrun, or…

  She changed channels on her com. “Listen up, everybody! This is Garroway! Second Squad! Hold your positions. Maintain fire on the enemy. First Squad! Back to the bug, on the double! Get into the airlock, and stay there! Lieutenant Dow! Are you on the line?”

  “Affirmative, Lieutenant. I’m here.”

  “Warm up the fire and stand by to boost. We’re going on a little hop.”

  “Reactor coming up. Pressure okay. We can bounce in two minutes.”

  “Make it a minute thirty.”

  “Whatcha got in mind, Lieutenant?” Yates asked.

  “Making it all or nothing, Gunny. The captain is going to get wiped off the map if we don’t break the UNdies’ attack.”

  “Roger that, Lieutenant. Okay, Marines! Hustle! Hustle! I wanna see nothing but amphibious green blurs!” They started trotting back toward the LSCP, as other Marines closed in from different directions, crowding up the debarkation ramp and into the craft’s airlock.

  “If I may suggest, ma’am,” Yates said, pausing at the foot of the ramp, “you should stay here and direct the covering fire.”

  “Negative, Gunny. If I’m about to pull something stupid, I want to be there to take the blame.”

  She heard the grin. “Understood, Lieutenant. Understood.”

  Together, they hurried up the ramp and squeezed through into the airlock, where First Squad was waiting.

  Seventy seconds later, Dow radioed a crisp warning, then Kaitlin’s knees almost gave way as the LSCP boosted skyward from the crater rim.

  Forza di Intervento Rapido

  Picard Base, The Moon

  0921 hours GMT

  Capitano Arnaldo Tessitore, of the FIR’s Forza Spazia rose from behind the shelter of the excavation he’d been crouching in, holding his imager to his visor. The second enemy landing craft was rising from its hiding place, a clear and easy target less than eight and a half kilometers away. “Zhang!” he shouted. “Target…above the crater rim!”

  “I have, Captain,” the PRC lieutenant replied in his thickly accented Italian. Tessitore listened as Zhang sing-songed a barrage of orders in Mandarin to the Chinese soldiers who’d just arrived at Picard aboard the Millénium, and wished again the mission planners back in Geneva had made up their Lunar Expeditionary Force out of troops from a single country. Too many nationalities, too many languages might have been great for the public image of a truly United Nations, but it guaranteed confusion and misunderstanding.

  Two PRC troops shouldering massive Type 80 launchers rose to their feet, loosing their missiles in almost the same silent instant of flame. One of the men pitched backward a second later, freezing vapor spilling from a black-ringed hole low and in the center of his suit’s cuirass, a victim of the all-too-deadly and accurate laser fire from the nearby trenches; the shot was too late to stop the launch, however. Twin stars, bright as worklights, zig-zagged away toward the rising spacecraft.

  Long before the missiles could hit their target, however, the American craft had vanished below the crater rim, moving under full thrust back toward the west.

  Tessitore blinked, lowering the imager. They were retreating, flying back the way they’d come! The missiles, their radar lock broken, detonated in a pair of flashes against the crater rim.

  Had that last laser shot really come from the trenches near the crashed ship? Or had it come from higher up and to the left, from the crater rim? No…it must have been from the crashed vehicle. The enemy wouldn’t have abandoned a laser team up on that ridge, with only their backpack PLSS units to keep them breathing.

  “Captain. We should use chance! Hit enemy now!”

  “Affermativo, Tenente.” He’d been holding off, hoping to break the enemy with the sheer overwhelming force of massed firepower from prepared positions, or wait for their air supplies to give out while his own troops recharged, a few at a time, in the habs, or, at worst, to work forward through the labyrinth of trenches…but Zhang was right. Enemy reinforcements might be on the way, and they had to strike now, before the battle spread out of his control. The bombardment of the past several minutes must have the enemy troops dazed and completely disorganized. One quick, sudden rush, and it would all be over. “Go! Go!”

  “Zou! Zou!” Zhang yelled. “Kuai! Qianjin!”

  To either side of Tessitore’s position, dozens of suited figures rose from the trenches and the shelter of heavy equipment scattered across the crater-floor site; all wore black space helmets, instead of the usual UN light blue, and each wore the bright red arm patch markin
g them as members of the Hangkong Tuji Budui, the PRC’s elite Air/ Space Assault Force. “San Marcos!” Tessitore called, summoning his own FIR troops by the name of their parent regiment, the San Marco Marines. “Forward!”

  He scrambled up out of the excavation, then hesitated as his own troops rose from hiding all about him. He drew in a deep breath, then waved his Beretta M-31 assault rifle above his head. “Il più forte!” he shouted. That battle cry of the San Marco Marines had first been spoken by Gabriele D’Annunzio, speaking of the regiment’s defense of the Cortelazzo Bridgehead in 1917. “The strongest!”

  Still waving the rifle, he started lumbering toward the enemy position, marked by the crumpled, ice-and-vapor-wreathed shape of their crashed lander a hundred meters away. His suit was clumsy and made running difficult, but once he got moving, it was mostly a matter of guiding himself under its inertia. He reached a trench and sailed across, skimming above a surface of fine, gray powder; a Chinese soldier to his right suddenly folded over but kept drifting forward for several meters before he finally hit the ground in an explosion of dust and cartwheeling legs and arms. Things—people—fell slowly in the Moon’s one-sixth gravity, and the wild charge held the slow-motion quality of a dream.

  His heart pounding with exertion and fear, Tessitore kept bounding ahead, unable to swerve left or right or to stop, moving on sheer inertia, though the terror that at any moment his suit or—far worse!—his helmet visor would be breached, emptying his air into space, hammered at his brain. Enemy troops were rising ahead, aiming their assault rifles, and more UN troops were falling. Perhaps it would have been better, after all, to have tried working ahead through the trenches…but, no, that would have taken too long and raised the risk of having his troops pinned down as badly as the enemy was now. No, this was better. One quick rush…One quick rush…

  And then still more Chinese and Italian troops were falling; one of his men, the red-and-gold emblem of the San Marco Marines displayed on his arm, suddenly stumbled as his backpack PLSS exploded in whirling fragments and fast-freezing vapor. That shot had come from behind….

  He bounced to a stop, taking several long, dust-plowing steps to slow, turning in place as he came to a halt. Behind them, almost directly over the point where he’d started the charge, an American spacecraft, an ugly, angular, spindle-legged contraption, was drifting out of a black sky, descending gently toward a landing. A space-suited figure was visible in the open airlock; dust blasted from beneath the settling lander as plasma thrusters chewed into regolith.

  “San Marcos!” he shouted over the regiment’s channel. “Take cover! Take cover!”

  Other UN troops were noticing the incoming spacecraft now, stopping in their tracks, jumping into nearby trenches. A few dropped their weapons and raised their hands, surrendering.

  The Chinese troops, Tessitore noted, continuing their blind charge, were almost to the American lines now, but there were far fewer of them than before. Zhang had started the battle with thirty-two men; fewer than ten were still on their feet as they sprinted the last few meters to grapple with the enemy.

  The landing craft settled to the Lunar surface with a gentle bobbing motion of its suspension. Americans were leaping from the already open airlock, some rushing toward the shattered knot of UN troops, others moving toward the habs.

  That last decided Tessitore. If the Americans seized the habitats—and there was nothing at all now standing in their way—the UN troops outside would either have to surrender or face death by suffocation as their air supplies gave out. He tossed his Beretta aside and raised his hands.

  An American was approaching him, ATAR leveled, suit reflecting the grays and blacks of his surroundings in oddly shifting patterns of light and dark. As the soldier came closer, Tessitore was rocked by two startling revelations. The first was that the suited figure approaching him was a girl…her blond hair closely framing her face behind her visor. The second was the emblem painted next to the name tag affixed to the front of her suit. The name tag spelled GARROWAY in stenciled letters, but it was the emblem that startled Tessitore more: a globe and anchor, the badge of the United States Marine Corps.

  His hands went up higher. “Lebanon!” he shouted, even though he knew she could not hear. “Sudan! Brazil!”

  LSCP-44, Call sign Raven

  Picard Base, The Moon

  0924 hours GMT

  Kaitlin held her ATAR pointed at the man’s chest, her eyes widening as she saw the crest affixed to his left breast and his sleeve—a gold lion on a distinctive red backing. Until this moment, she’d not known that the enemy included elements of the San Marco Marines. His mouth was moving; he was trying to tell her something.

  With one hand, she stabbed the key on her common controls that set up a channel search. A moment later, she heard a burst of Italian, and the words “Lebanon! Sudan! Brazil!”

  “San Marco,” she said. “The Strongest.” What was the Italian phrase? She’d learned it in OCS. “Il più forte!”

  Part of every Marine officer’s training was a survey of the other Marine forces of the world, of the actions they’d taken part in, of the traditions and battle honors they carried. The San Marcos were no exception. The Italian Marines had served together with the US Marines on three separate occasions: in the Lebanon peacekeeping operation of 1983, in the Sudan in 1992 to 1993, and in the Brazilian Incursion of 2029.

  “Sì,” she said, straining her grasp of Italian to the limit. “Bene.”

  Her prisoner straightened up, then rendered a crisp salute. Kaitlin returned the honor. Elsewhere across the desolate and dusty field, other troops, Chinese and Italian—but so very few!—were dropping their weapons and raising their hands as the US Marines came out of the trenches and began herding them together. She watched, thoughtful, as a Marine lance corporal arrived to take her prisoner away, leading him back toward the habs. They’d fought hard, these Italian Marines. The battle here had been a close-run thing.

  Something caught her eye in the dusty floor of a trench close by. Lightly, she hopped into the excavation, reached down, and brushed away at something protruding from the hard-packed powder.

  It looked like…gold.

  It was gold, gold worked into a smooth and highly polished figurine perhaps ten centimeters tall…a standing human woman with arms outstretched, nude save for bracelets, anklets, and a necklace of some kind. And…was that writing on the base?

  Standing, the figurine in her gloved hands, Kaitlin raised her eyes to the plain around her, seeing it, really seeing it for the first time. Until this moment, the Picard base had been a tactical exercise; even when she’d given the orders to Dow to fly away from the crater, descend, then skim the surface back and around to approach the base from another direction, she’d been thinking of this as a problem in tactics, of ground and cover and fields of fire. But now that the battle was over, what, exactly, had they won?

  Archeologists had laid out these trenches; the larger excavations had been marked off into large grids with pegs and white string—most of which had been trampled in the fighting. An archeological dig…with golden statues of human women…on the Moon.

  “This is too weird for the Marines,” she said aloud.

  “Non capisco, Signora,” a voice replied in her helmet set, and she realized that she was still tuned to the Italian Marine frequency.

  “That’s okay, San Marco,” she said, musing. “I don’t understand either.”

  SIX

  THURSDAY, 10 APRIL 2042

  Institute for Exoarcheological

  Studies

  Chicago, Illinois

  1440 hours CDT

  “So, David,” the other archeologist said, cuddling close in his arms, “is it true what Ed Pohl told me the other day? That you’re now a member of the Three Dolphin Club?”

  “And what do you know about the Three Dolphin Club, Teri?” David asked.

  “That it’s the same as the Mile-High Club, but for zero G. What I don’t understand is wher
e the name comes from.”

  David grinned at her. Dr. Theresa Sullivan might be a colleague, and a highly respected one at that, but sometimes it was hard to get any serious work done with her around. Especially during the past couple of weeks. What had started as a fling at an archeology conference in Los Angeles had swiftly turned into something more.

  A lot more.

  “Ah. Well, back in the late twentieth century, I guess it must have been, the old space agency, NASA, was awfully nervous about any hint of impropriety. Their astronauts were professionals and would never consider experimenting with things like sex in zero gravity. Bad public image, you know.”

  “I thought zero-G sex would attract interest.”

  Slowly, he began unbuttoning her blouse. “Maybe they thought it would be the wrong sort of interest. Anyway, the story goes that some highly dedicated researchers and technicians at the Marshall Spaceflight Center, at Huntsville, decided to experiment on their own, using the big swimming pool at Marshall where they simulated weightless conditions. They sneaked in and used the tank after hours, of course, because if NASA had found out what they were doing, they would’ve all been fired. But they found out that a couple could have sex in weightlessness, even though there was a tendency for them to, ah, come undocked at a critical moment. Your motions, yours and your partner’s, tend to pull you apart unless you hold real tight and close.”

  “Where did you learn all of this?”

  “One of the officers on the cycler told me, on the trip back from Mars. He was a Three-Dolphins member. Even had a little pin to show me.”

  “Okay, okay. I’ve got to know! Why three dolphins?”

  “Well, those researchers at Huntsville found that a couple could stay together, but that it worked lots better if a third party was present, someone who could kind of give a push to key portions of the anatomy at the right times, y’know? And, as they studied the problem, they learned that when dolphins have sex, there’s always a third dolphin standing by, nudging the happy couple with his nose, and for the same reason.”