by Ian Douglas
Kaitlin exchanged a long look with Gunny Yates. “I don’t like this, Lieutenant,” he said, keeping his voice low. “It’s going to get damned sticky out there!”
“Granted, Gunny. But he is senior officer aboard. Pass the word to your people to be careful about IDing their targets.”
“Roger that. But it’s not going to be easy!”
“What’d you expect, Gunny? A goddamn walk in the park?” She stared at the map table, where small green squares were spilling across the contour-marked terrain. Red squares—the enemy—appeared and vanished as trackers identified them and fed the data into the Marine battle-management system. Most of the red symbols were ghosted, indicating probable positions based on last confirmed reports.
There’d been six Marines outside when the alert had first been sounded, in three widely separated two-man OPs. No…make that seven, counting Kaminski, who was supposed to be hustling his civilian charge back inside. A ready force of Second Platoon Marines had been waiting, however, already suited up and ready to go except for gloves and helmets, on the lower decks of Habs Three and Five, and they were spilling out through the airlocks and onto the lunar surface right now. Every Marine had an IFF transponder mounted in his or her suit; the coded signal from each IFF was picked up by the antenna arrays atop Hab One and fed into the battle-management system. The BMS, in turn, displayed the positions and identities of all of the Marines in the action. Ranging data picked up from the Marines’ laser sighting systems on their ATARs located the unidentifeds—the probable UN troops.
The problem was that Whitworth was now giving orders to some forty Army Special Forces troops to join the battle. There’d been no time yet to set their IFF transponders to frequencies recognized by the BMS; hell, she didn’t even know yet if the Army suits had transponders. When those troops stormed out onto the crater floor, there would be no way at all to separate them from the enemy.
Yates was right. This could be real sticky.
The Dig, Picard Base
Mare Crisium, the Moon
1456 hours GMT
David started to pull himself to his feet once more, but Kaminski was lying across his legs. “Stay down, dammit!” the Marine shouted, before adding a perfunctory “Sir!”
“But I can’t see!” Try as he might to lever the front part of his suit higher, David could not find a position that would let him see what was happening. Kaminski seemed to be shooting at something; David could feel the jarring against the legs of his suit as the Marine’s ATAR recoiled.
A battle. He was smack in the middle of a battle once again, though the eerie silence, the lack of crackling gunfire and explosions, gave a surreal, almost dreamlike feeling to the engagement. He could hear distinct voices over his radio, though for the most part they were all but unintelligible. They might have been kids playing some backyard game utterly beyond the ken of listening adults.
“Delta-one, this is Five! Heads up, on your six!”
“Copy, Five, I see ’em!”
“Clear! I gotta lock! That’s fox!”
“Ooh-rah! Hey, UNdie! Special delivery from the Corps!”
Those voices sounded so young.
War might arise from the failings of old politicians, but always it was the young who paid war’s price. The average age of the SAG Marines, he’d heard during his trip out from Earth, was twenty-two—a little over half David’s age—and it was as old as that only because SAG included a higher-than-usual proportion of seasoned NCOs than the typical Marine rifle company back on Earth.
He wondered if war had been the same the last time this crater had been illuminated by fire from the black Lunar sky, a drawn-out game between elders, with brave youngsters as the playing pieces, the expendable pawns. That was the most disturbing bit of intelligence that Marc Billaud had passed on that morning—the knowledge that thousands of years ago, at the very dawn of human civilization, the aliens worshiped as gods by those humans had been destroying themselves in a cataclysmic war; the wreckage of the cargo ship that had fallen here within this crater allowed no other interpretation. The vessel had been destroyed by powerful weapons…almost certainly a positron beam, a bolt of antielectrons that had annihilated the target in a deadly flash of hard radiation.
Similar weapons had been employed half a million years earlier, on the Cydonian plains of Mars.
Was war the inevitable fruit of all civilization, of all so-called intelligence?
“We got another UNdie bug, comin’ in from East One!”
“Lauden! Can you tag him with your Wyvern?”
“That’s negative! I’m foxed out!”
Damn! he thought. I wish I could see. Unable to rise to watch the unfolding battle, David looked instead at the marvelously delicate and expressive figurine he held cradled in his arms. The back, he saw, was flat, as though a three-dimensional statue had been sliced cleanly in two from top to bottom…then heavily inscribed all over the back with tiny, crisply incised marks. The entire lower half, he saw, was covered with tiny pictographs, the top half with something like writing, with repetitive symbols that…
With an ice-shocked jar that literally drove the breath from his body, David understood just what it was he was holding. Rolling suddenly out from beneath Kaminski’s legs, he sat up, holding the statuette in both hands, staring at it as though it had just come alive.
Which in a very real sense, it had.
“Goddammit, sir,” Kaminski screamed, lurching toward him. “Get the fuck down!”
Dazedly, he looked around, becoming aware of running shapes, bright and silent flashes against the darkness, and Kaminski’s wide-eyed face behind his visor. “The Rosetta stone!” he said, more to himself than to the frantic Marine.
“Whatever!” Kaminski hit him, hard, with one outstretched hand, knocking him back to the ground. “Hit the dirt!”
David lay on his side, continuing to stare at the inscriptions on the back of the gold statue. They had a machine-precise look about them, as though they’d been stamped into the metal, rather than carved out by artisans. Those on the bottom half were almost shockingly familiar; David couldn’t read it, but he was quite familiar with the pictographs known as Proto-Sumerian, the antecedent of Mesopotamian cuneiform writing.
And as for the stranger, more fluid writing at the top…
He clutched the artifact more closely against the front of his suit. Suddenly, it was vitally important that he survive this firefight, vital that he return with the golden statue and its paired texts to the institute in Chicago.
The statue he was holding was more important than his life.
The Dig, Picard Base
Mare Crisium, the Moon
1457 hours GMT
Kaminski was aware of Alexander curling himself up around the odd gold statue, but didn’t think any more about it. The important thing was to keep the civilian alive, and if the idiot would just keep his head down, there was at least a chance of that happening.
The battle, from Kaminski’s point of view, at least, was a confusing, night-cloaked collision. Alexander’s complaint a moment ago about not being able to see struck him as hilarious. All Kaminski could see was the pitch-blackness surrounding the base, the glare of worklights illuminating the central area, and various large and vaguely defined shapes—the habs and the insect-legged hoppers the UNdies were arriving in. Occasionally, a space-suited form would dash across the light, moving from shadow to shadow. When he kicked in the IR overlay of his helmet’s heads-up display system, he could see the wavering, red-yellow man-shapes of other figures concealed by the dark. To sort friend from foe, he had to rely on the radioed commentary from C-cubed.
“Heads up, Marines! We have four Marines coming out of Hab Three, crossing toward Marker South Five.”
He turned to look at the indicated hab, spotted three…no, four heat-shapes moving on the double. Superimposed on each was a small, bright green symbol, marking them as IFF-IDed friendlies. Good enough. He raised his ATAR and painted another t
arget, a glowing mass crouched in the blackness beneath the first grounded hopper, perhaps ninety meters away. He couldn’t see an IFF tag. “Six! This is Ski! I got a paint! What’s my target?”
“Kaminski, Six. That’s a hostile!”
“Roger that! Takin’ ’im down!”
His selector switch was already set to a three-round burst. Holding the crosshairs on his helmet HUD steady on the red-glowing shape, he squeezed the trigger, felt the soft triplet of recoils as the 4.5mm caseless rounds snapped toward the target. The red mass suddenly split apart—there’d been two space-suited figures there—and started to move in opposite directions. He picked the one on the right and fired again. He thought he’d hit it; the figure wasn’t moving anymore, at any rate. The one to the left…was gone by the time he tracked back to reacquire it. Damn!…
“All Marines! Heads up! We have ten Army troops coming out of Hab Four! They don’t have IFFs, so watch what you’re shooting at!”
He glanced toward Hab Four and saw moving shadows against the light. About time the damned doggies made it to the party. He wondered just what the odds were. There were three UN hopper transports, but they were big sons of bitches, bigger than the Marine bugs, big enough to carry a lot of troops. At the moment, the Marines were theoretically mustering fifty-three men in three companies—the fight three days ago at Picard had killed seventeen men and women, fifteen of them in Bravo’s First Platoon. Three hours ago, though, just after the departure of Captain Fuentes and Captain Lee, all twenty-three Marines in Alfa Company’s Second Platoon had boarded LSCP-44 and boosted skyward in a silent swirl of moon dust. Scuttlebutt had it that they were reconning off south of Picard somewhere, or even that they were scouting the approaches to a UN base hidden on the farside of the Moon, but no one was saying for sure. That left just Bravo’s Second Platoon and the remnants of First—thirty people against possibly three times that number…unless the Army’s Green Beanies entered the fight.
Two of the UN hoppers were on the ground; the third was still aloft, landing lights glaring against black space and the crisscross of steel struts. A streak of flame angled down from the hovering craft, striking a ditch digger in a soundless blossoming of white light that toppled Marines sheltered in the vehicle’s shadow. Shit! The bastards had jury-rigged a missile launcher to the outer hull of the hopper and were using it for close air support.
Behind the glare of its landing lights, Kaminski could see a UN trooper leaning out of an open hatch, struggling to reload the now-empty launch tube. Taking careful aim, he squeezed off four fast triplets, and the loader jerked back inside, lost from view. Kaminski didn’t know if he’d hit the guy or simply managed to scare him. Flicking the selector switch to full auto, he shifted his aim to the hopper’s angular cockpit as the hovering craft slowly rotated in the sky. He wasn’t sure how much 4.5-mm rounds would do to the ungainly thing, but he could sure let the UNdie bastards know that their presence above the battlefield was not appreciated.
God…was it falling?
It was spinning faster now, and settling, nose high. Other Marines, and Whitworth’s troops as well, were firing now at the hovering craft; Kaminski could see the sparks as rounds struck the craft’s lightly armored hull. It struck the crater floor two hundred meters from Hab One, one of its landing legs crumpling beneath it as it set down hard in a high-flying billow of Lunar dust, pitching it sideways at a steep angle. By the harsh illumination of its landing lights, still on, Kaminski could see shadowy, space-suited figures tumbling from the wreckage. He took aim and opened up on full rock-and-roll, holding down the ATAR’s firing button until the hundred-round stock magazine ran dry.
“Ooh-rah!” Kaminski shouted, holding his ATAR above his helmet in triumph. He was standing—and didn’t even remember getting to his feet. He fumbled at his vest harness for a fresh box of caseless rounds, dropping the empty mag and snapping home the fresh one. A soundless explosion detonated forty meters away, and he heard the clatter of flying gravel rattling lightly from his helmet.
“Maybe you should be the one to get the fuck down, Kaminski,” David called from his part of the excavation. “It’s getting damned hot out here!”
He dropped back to his knees. “I think you’re right. C’mon. Let’s see if we can find better cover over that way.” As they started to crawl, Kaminski looked back and noticed that Alexander was still carrying the statue he’d found. “Drop it, Professor,” he said. “Won’t do you no good if you get killed.”
“No way, Ski. You just keep crawling. I’ll keep up.”
Kaminski hesitated. Damn it, Alexander was a civilian, and short of knocking him out and dragging him, Kaminski couldn’t think of a way to enforce the order. He gave a mental shrug and kept crawling.
“Heads up, Marines and Berets!” the lieutenant’s voice called. “We have incoming friendlies, coming in near South Two! Hold your fire to ground targets!”
Friendlies! Kaminski stopped crawling and searched the sky toward the southern direction markers. He couldn’t see a thing…and then the bug switched on its landing lights, a quad of dazzling stars casting moving circles of illumination across the crater floor. Dust swirled as the vehicle gentled in for a landing not far from the wreckage of the downed UN hopper. The troops that came spilling out of the open cargo bay all bore green pips on Kaminski’s HUD display, and he felt a surge of sheer joy. Someone—the company commanders, or maybe Lieutenant Garroway—had come up with one hell of an idea, sending Alfa Company’s Second Platoon off to some nearby hidey hole beyond the crater rim as a strategic reserve. Once the UN forces had committed themselves to the counterattack, the reserves had come in, and now, suddenly the UN deployment was dissolving, their attack teams breaking into small groups of men, most of them now breaking for their remaining two hopper transports.
“Ski!” David called out suddenly. “On your left!”
Kaminski turned and saw a group of five or six red-orange heat images loping toward him. They were running in the general direction of one of the unloaded UN hoppers, and he and Alexander were squarely in their path.
He raised his ATAR, checked for green pips…and when he saw none he squeezed the firing button, sending a stream of 4.5mm rounds slashing into the running troops at a range of less than fifty meters. Two of the space-suited figures went down…then a third, his visor exploding in a spray of plastic shards and pink mist that froze instantly into an icy cloud as it blossomed from the helmet. The two survivors dropped prone, and puffs of dust exploded from the rim of the excavation as they returned fire.
“Hold your fire!” Kaitlin’s voice cried over the general combat channel. “Damn it, hold your fire! Kaminski! Hold fire! Those are friendlies!”
Oh, God….
NINE
MONDAY, 21 APRIL 2042
Parris Island Recruit Training
Center
0725 hours EDT
Jack Ramsey—Private Jack Ramsey, US Marine Corps—stood at a rigid, fair approximation of attention on the recruit battalion grinder, gaze focused on the tops of the palmetto palms in the distance. Parris Island, they said, was slowly sinking as the world’s sea levels continued to rise. Scuttlebutt had it that the whole island was already beneath sea level, like Holland, and the only thing holding the Atlantic at bay were the rings of seawalls, dikes, and tide barriers erected by the Army Corps of Engineers and a few thousand Marines.
Jack was less interested at the moment in the possibility of a storm’s fury sweeping over the low-lying island than he was in the fury of another force of nature. Moments before, Recruit Platoon 4239 had met their drill instructors, and, in an old and venerable tradition of the Corps, they were enduring their first inspection and their welcoming speech, delivered by the platoon’s senior DI, Gunnery Sergeant Harold Knox.
“Never, never in my entire military career,” Knox was saying as he stalked along the solitary line of recruits, “have I seen such sorry specimens!” The expression on his leathery face gave every appearance o
f a man appalled by what he had just had the misfortune of witnessing. His voice, crackling with the authority known throughout the Marine Corps as the Command Voice, bore the punch and edge necessary to carry above a howling storm…or a pitched battle. The stress he laid on certain words gave his oration an almost singsong, mesmerizing quality, holding the recruits spellbound. “It makes me sick to think that my beloved Corps could someday be in your pale, flabby hands!”
The Voice went on, and Jack swayed slightly on his feet. He was exhausted…running about ten hours minus on sleep at the moment. It felt like he’d been here for days already, and yet he’d only arrived at Parris Island that morning. Somehow, confusion and sleep deprivation had conspired to keep him from clicking in with the routine.
Every waking moment for the past month had been geared toward this moment, from his last on-line discussion with the recruiter, Staff Sergeant Henson, to his physical in Pittsburgh, to his swearing in at the recruiter’s office. The maglev bringing him down from Pittsburgh had arrived in Charleston late on the previous afternoon, but the bus to take them the final short leg to the Parris Island Marine Recruit Depot—a clattering wreck with a gasoline engine, no less—had been mysteriously delayed. They’d not arrived at the base until 2:00 A.M.—0200 hours, in Marine parlance—a bit of disorganization that Jack was convinced had been done on purpose. Arriving in the middle of the night, told to “hit the beach” by screaming Marine NCOs and made to line up on yellow-painted footprints on the pavement, bullied, harassed, and screamed at some more, had resulted in the forty-three men and women aboard the bus feeling as cut off from their former lives as they might have been on the farside of the Moon.
After an initial orientation lecture, the female recruits had been called off and marched away into the night; the Marines alone of the four major services continued to maintain separate training battalions for its male and female recruits. There’d followed a nightmare, sleep-deprived blur of standing in line, of running, of standing in more lines, and of listening to bellowed lectures that extended throughout the rest of the night hours and well into the dawn of the morning. After breakfast, they’d been officially mustered into Recruit Platoon 4239 with a number of men already there in a holding company, bringing their numbers up to an even eighty. After that, they’d been checked into a recruit barracks, issued uniforms, and herded through a thirty-second haircut that left each recruit “high and tight.”
