by Ian Douglas
Hab One, Picard Base
Mare Crisium, the Moon
1038 hours GMT
“Why just you?” Kaitlin wanted to know. “The Army’s here. We should all pull back to Fra Mauro.”
Captain Fuentes shrugged. “God knows, Garroway,” she replied. “His message just said he needed to consult with the company commanders. He’s a major, Lee and I are captains, so we’ll go consult. We’ll take Bug Thirty-eight.”
“It’s damned idiocy, if you ask me. Why do you think God invented radios and scrambled channels?”
“Here, now, Lieutenant Garroway!” Captain Rob Lee replied with a wry grin. “Are you actually implying that Battalion has something in its ditty bag masquerading as common sense?”
She smiled. Captain Rob Lee, Alfa Company’s CO, was young, smart, and good-looking, with that sense of rough give-a-damn that she normally associated with fighter jocks. His penchant for scathing one-liners was legendary in 1-SAG.
“That’s asking too much, huh?” she asked. “I have noted a tendency in Major Avery to slip back into his childhood, counting beans and shuffling files.”
Rob closed his eyes. “The major,” he said quietly, but with great seriousness, “is a good man, means well, and works hard. Unfortunately, he would not be able to get a clue if he went out into a field full of horny clues during clue mating season, smeared his naked body with clue musk, and danced the ritual clue mating dance.”
Kaitlin groaned. “Now there’s an image I’d really have preferred you’d kept to yourself.”
“There shouldn’t be a problem, Lieutenant,” Fuentes told her. “You’re senior to Palmer, so you’re in charge of both companies while we’re gone. Colonel Whitworth, of course, will be in overall command of this station, but that shouldn’t affect the regular routine.”
“The routine’s not what’s bothering me, Captain,” Kaitlin said. “It’s the non-routine. If the UNdies are going to counterattack, it’ll be in the next day or two, before we have a chance to get dug in.”
“We should be back by 2200 hours tonight,” Rob told her. He folded his arms. “I imagine the major just wants to go over routine joint-op protocol with us. IFF freaks, pass codes, and so on.”
“Which ought to already be set up,” Fuentes said. “Garroway’s right. If the bad guys hit us anytime soon, we’re screwed, and it won’t help things a bit if we’re attending a fragging staff meeting at Fra Mauro. Damn!”
“I do have an idea,” Kaitlin told them. “If we could set things up this way…”
EIGHT
WEDNESDAY, 15 APRIL 2042
The Dig, Picard Base
Mare Crisium, the Moon
1438 hours GMT
“So, anyway,” Kaminksi said, “I was wonderin’ if we could, well, trade e-mails or something. I really enjoyed learning that stuff you were telling me about on Mars, and I keep wanting to ask you questions about it. And it looks like you’ve got a lot more to learn here.” They were standing on the Lunar surface, among the crisscrossing trenches of the French excavation. It seemed like a huge area for two men to search.
“That,” David said, grinning inside his helmet, “is an understatement! I’d be delighted to correspond with you, Ski. You’re not afraid to ask questions, and you have a knack for asking the right ones.”
“Thanks! I’ll try not to be a pest with it, but, well, the news, Triple-N, and all, they always seem to get the facts tangled up, at least from what you were saying.”
“Sometimes they do.”
“So, anyway, you was sayin’ that the aliens who built the Face, and all that stuff on Mars, they’re different from the aliens who were here on the Moon?”
“That’s right, Ski,” David replied. “The Cave of Wonders, the Face, all of that is about half a million years old. Whatever crashed here was a lot more recent. Eight thousand years, six thousand years, something like that.”
Kaminski turned slowly, surveying the harshly illuminated patch of the crater floor, trying to imagine what must have happened here. This part of the Moon was now completely dark. Only the worklights cast any light at all, and they made this one tiny corner of the Lunar surface seem very small and isolated. Even the stars were banished by their glare, though the Earth, a blue-and-white first quarter, still hung in its unvarying spot in the western sky.
“Quite a mess, isn’t it, Ski?” David asked, misinterpreting Kaminski’s silent gaze.
“What do you mean?”
David, swaddled and clumsy in his government-issue space suit, turned to face Kaminski. “In proper archeology,” David told him, “we’re interested in the layers, the strata, of debris, of how things are laid down one on top of another. We’re also very interested in the precise locations in which artifacts are found, relative to one another, and to the terrain. We’re very careful about such things, laying out precisely numbered grids, taking photographs of everything in situ, making sure we understand everything there is to know about an object’s position before we remove it.”
“You were tellin’ me about all that on Mars, sir,” Kaminski said.
“So I did. The problem there, of course, was far too much in the way of buildings, artifacts, and debris to explore and catalog, with far, far too few people to do the work. It’s different here.” Turning again, David waved one arm, taking in the entire black panorama of the crater floor, the trenches and excavated pits beneath the worklights, the mounds of debris piled nearby. “We archeologists have a technical term for this sort of site,” David told him. “We call it fubaritic strata.”
“Yeah?”
“As in fubar.”
“Ah! As in ‘Situation Normal, All Fucked Up.’”
“Exactly. See? We’ll make an archeologist out of you yet.” David started to walk. Kaminski followed, shouldering the massive canvas satchel he’d been packing for Alexander since they’d left the hab. It didn’t weigh very much in the Lunar gravity, but its inertia made it a chore to move or to stop.
With the satchel, his PLSS, and his slung ATAR, Kaminski was beginning to feel like a caddie following a VIP around a golf course. A golf course with grays instead of greens that was one big sand trap from tee to hole.
“So, how’s it screwed up?” Kaminski asked.
“We just had two small armies tramping back and forth through these trenches the other day, Ski. What else would it be?” They arrived at the edge of a large, shallow pit. David jumped in, followed a moment later by Kaminski. The floor was covered by treaded-boot prints, with tangles of white string scattered about seemingly at random. “Looks like they had that area laid out in a proper grid for photography and cataloging, with string and posts, but so many people stampeded through that the grid lines are all torn down. I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to recreate Dr. Billaud’s survey work here.”
“Maybe you could get him to help? I mean, back in the hab this morning, you were tellin’ those Army guys that he was cooperatin’ with you. He told you all that stuff about Sumeria.”
“Hmm. An attractive idea, Ski. Unfortunately, the government frowns on close collaborations with the enemy. I imagine they’ll be shipping Dr. Billaud and his colleagues back to Earth on the first available transport.”
“What’ll happen to them then? They’re not gonna get sent back to France.”
“No. I’m afraid that’s most unlikely. Especially considering what they know.”
“Is what they found here really that important? I mean, it’s just more alien shit, like we found on Mars, right?”
Kaminski heard David’s sigh, a blast of air across his helmet microphone. “What we’re finding on Mars—and here—is completely changing everything we thought we understood about human origins, about who and what we are. The artifacts, the bodies and so on we found on Mars suggests that someone was tinkering with our DNA half a million years back. That’s momentous enough. But what Billaud and his people have found here on the Moon is a lot closer to our historical origins. It tells us, not about o
ur biology, but about our culture, our civilization. I’m afraid this is going to upset people even more than the news from Mars did.”
“You mean the ancient-astronaut stuff? The stuff we found on Mars is already really stirring people up. All those cults and things.”
“Yes.” That one word sounded almost sad.
“’Course, doesn’t this all just go to show the ancient-alien people are right?”
“Not the part about the ETs being God, or us being created in their image, or any of that. No.”
“You were telling the Army guys about what Billaud told you. Something about the Sumerians?”
“Sumer was one of Earth’s earliest true civilizations. Dates back to about 4,000 B.C., though they probably had their start well before that. They established quite a remarkable culture at the head of the Persian Gulf, one that literally seemed to spring up overnight, out of nowhere.”
“The Fertile Crescent? Tigris and Euphrates Rivers?”
“That’s right, Ski! Very good!”
He shrugged inside his suit. “Okay, so I did remember something from high-school history class. And you guys think these aliens got the Sumerians off to a civilized start, is that it?”
“The amusing thing is that the Sumerians themselves claimed—in their myths and legends—that the gods were people much like themselves who came down from the heavens and taught them everything they needed to know, agriculture, writing, building cities, working gold, numbers, medicine…” He stopped, then bent over, hands on knees, as he intently studied a patch of boot-trammeled Lunar soil.
“Yeah, but don’t all those ancient civilizations claim they got their start from the gods? Kind of like a good public-relations campaign, y’know? My civilization is better than your civilization, ’cause it was started by the gods. I’m king, ’cause God said that’s the way it is.”
“You’re absolutely right. Still, that doesn’t mean that the first people to claim that distinction weren’t telling the exact and literal truth.” He stooped and began scraping at the ground with his gloved hands. The regolith was soft and powdery, but firmly packed, with the consistency of damp beach sand.
“So…what were they doin’ here?” Kaminski asked after a long moment. “The aliens, I mean. Why would they come all the way here to give us writing and stuff. What was in it for them?”
“Excellent question. Let me have that bag, will you?”
Kaminski let the massive satchel slide from his shoulder, and David unsnapped the cover and opened it up. Inside was a variety of tools, including hammers, a whisk broom, mirrors with handles, small shovels, and numerous pry bars, from a half-meter-long crowbar down to probes the size of a nutpick. The archeologist selected one of the latter, picking it up clumsily in his heavy gloves.
“According to Dr. Billaud,” David went on, scraping at the ground with the tool, “there was an alien ship flying over Picard a few thousand years ago. It…well, it didn’t explode. But it apparently tore open, just like a seagoing ship getting ripped open by an iceberg. The loot inside spilled out.”
“Loot?”
“Statues. Gold plates or tablets with writing on them. Objets d’art. A lot of the stuff landed here, inside this crater, in an enormous footprint. The heavier pieces were moving fast enough to plow down into the regolith a ways, like bullets. The lighter, flimsier stuff ended up on the surface.”
“I don’t see nothing like that up here.”
“Our UN counterparts have already cleaned the area out pretty well, Ski.” He began prying something shiny up out of the clinging dust. “They were in the process of sinking these trenches to try to find and recover the heavier things. Like…this.”
David straightened up again, holding something in both hands. Kaminski stepped closer, his eyes widening. It was a statue, perhaps ten inches long…and it gleamed in the worklights like pure gold. At first, Kaminski thought the figure was human…but then, as David turned it in his hands, he got a better look at the face…roughly human, with mouth and nose and eyes in about the right place, but with eyes that looked like enormous goggles or bubbles, with deeply incised, horizontal lines instead of pupils. In one clenched fist it held a kind of staff or scepter; in the other, it clutched five ropes or leashes that ran down the front of the statue to the necks of five delicately sculpted figures, grouped waist high in front of the main figure. These smaller images were clearly human, with almond-shaped but human-looking eyes—three men and two women, nude, with their hands tied and their heads bowed.
“I wonder,” David said slowly, “if this might be our answer to your question.”
“If it is,” Kaminski replied, “a lot of these ancient-astronaut worshipers back home are in for one hell of a shock. That big guy there doesn’t exactly look like their idea of a happy, loving, creator god, like they’ve been saying.”
“You’re right there, Ski. This is going to upset a lot of folks back home….”
“Heads up, Marines, this is Bravo-six” cut in on their suit-to-suit channel. The voice was that of Lieutenant Garroway. Bravo-6 was the company’s radio code for Marine C-cubed. “We have bogies inbound, presumed hostile! All Marines outside, take cover and look sharp.” There was a pause. “Kaminski! You copy?”
“Six, Kaminski. I copy.”
“You have the package?”
Alexander. “That’s affirmative. Right here beside me.”
“Get him back inside, stat! We don’t want him wandering outside when…shit!”
A babble of radio voices sounded over Kaminski’s headset.
“Bravo-six, OP-two! Bogies in sight, repeat, bogies in sight, bearing two degrees north of Marker East Three. They’re coming in low and tight!”
“Six! OP-one! I have them! Incoming, by East Three!”
“Bravo-six! Bravo-six! Perimeter Green One! We are taking fire! We are taking—”
Static hissed over the radio channel. Kaminski crouched in the pit, staring toward the blackness of the eastern horizon, but his night vision, burned by the worklights, was gone. He thought he saw—
Gray dust exploded in a silent, deadly blossom the size of a small tree in the airless void twenty meters to Kaminski’s right. David was standing, staring in the wrong direction, his back to the explosion, and didn’t even see the danger. Swiftly, Kaminski reached up, grabbed Alexander’s PLSS harness, and yanked, hard, toppling the big man in a slow-motion tumble to the ground, the gold statue spinning in a gentle descent from the archeologist’s hands.
“What the?…”
“Get down, sir!” Kaminski snapped, peeling the ATAR off his shoulder and slapping the charging lever to chamber the first round. “We got problems!”
He could see the first of the UN hoppers now, an ungainly flying bug shape dropping out of the glare of the lights fifty meters away, almost directly between the two of them and the HQ hab. “Ooh-rah!” he shouted over the radio. “Target acquired!”
He brought the assault rifle to his shoulder, switched on HUD targeting, and dragged the muzzle until the crosshairs on his visor aligned with a hatch in the hopper’s side, already gaping open.
“All units!” Kaitlin’s voice called. “We’re under attack! Fire at will!”
Kaminski had already squeezed the firing button.
Hab One, Picard Base
Mare Crisium, the Moon 1455 hours GMT
Kaitlin looked up as a voice crackled from an overhead speaker. “Bravo-six! Bravo-six! Enemy troops in sight. They’re not blue-tops. Repeat, negative blue-tops!”
“Chinese,” she said.
Gunnery Sergeant Yates, at her side, nodded. “Almost certainly.”
“Blue-tops” was slang for the light, UN-blue helmets worn by European troops. The Chinese forces encountered so far tended to wear olive-drab and black space suits, with either olive or black helmets.
The door to the Battle Management Center clanged open, and Colonel Whitworth stormed in, with Major Dahlgren and Captain Slizak in close tow. “What the devil is
going on?” he bellowed. Kaitlin looked up from the map table and looked him in the eye.
“We are under attack, Colonel,” she said, her voice cool.
“I know that! By who, goddammit?”
Yates pointed at the map table, which had been set to display input from a small computer operated by one of the Marines at the communications console. It now showed the various buildings and trenches at Picard, together with a scattering of green and red symbols. “UN forces, Colonel. Probably dispatched from the UN base on the farside, unless they had the foresight to set up a ready reserve someplace a little closer than Tsiolkovsky. They’re not wearing European Union space suits, so we suspect that they may be members of the Hangkong Tuji Budui.”
“Chinks, eh?” Whitworth said, nodding. “Right. As senior officer present, I am officially taking charge of this action.” He stared down at the map table for a moment. “Where…where are my troops on this thing?”
“There, Colonel,” Kaitlin said, pointing to two of the blue symbols denoting Habs Two and Four. “Those are the quarters they’ve been assigned to. But, with all due respect, I think you should—”
“Young lady!” Whitworth barked. “Are you presuming to tell me how to run a battle? Or are you simply telling me what to do with my troops?”
Kaitlin fought down a burst of anger. “No, sir. But you should know—”
But Whitworth was not listening. He turned to the communications personnel. “You, there! Get me an open channel to Captain Bladen, in Hab Two!”
“Aye, aye, sir,” one of the technicians said, his face carefully expressionless.
“These UNdies can’t know that the Green Berets are here, in force! We’ll goddamn teach the bastards a lesson!”
“Sir!” the Marine at the radio called. “Captain Bladen.”
“About goddamn time!” He strode to the com console, snatched the mike from the Marine’s hand, and began talking.
