by Ian Douglas
“Range clear, Gunnery Sergeant Knox!”
Smiling, Knox entered a code into the controller, flipped off a safety, then mashed his thumb down on the firing button without even turning to watch the display.
There was a sharp, ringing crack, and the dummy on the left was kicked backward in a flurry of plastic limbs. Several of the recruits jumped. One said, “Oh, God!”
“God’s not going to help the poor son of a bitch now, recruit,” Knox said, replacing the controller. “Let’s go see.”
Together, the recruits followed Knox across the open field to see the effects of the blast up close. The explosion had punched a hole big enough to admit three fingers straight through the breastplate, through the dummy, and out the rear of the breastplate as well, though the exit hole was smaller than the width of a pencil. Bright red gelatin, the semiliquid stuffing inside the dummy’s chest, was splattered across the ground in a realistic display of human gore.
Jack heard a retching sound from one of his fellow re cruits but couldn’t see who it was. God, if he gets sick seeing a damned dummy get holed!…
“Two hundred grams of high explosives, ladies,” Knox said in his best lecturing tone, “releases one million joules of energy upon detonation. That is enough, as you can see, to penetrate standard Marine-issue armor and blast a very nasty hole clear through your giblets! One megajoule. Remember that! Okay, back to the firing line!”
When the recruits were seated once again, Knox walked over to the table and picked up a long and complex-looking weapon. With its bipod and pistol grip, it had the look of an old-fashioned squad light machine gun, but it was connected to a foil-encased backpack resting on the ground by a segmented cable as thick as a man’s forefinger. Knox hefted the bulky weapon easily with one hand, while he reached down and flipped a switch on the backpack with the other. A tiny, high-pitched whine spooled up from the power pack, and a red light began winking on the weapon’s receiver assembly.
When the red light stopped blinking and glowed steadily, Knox brought the weapon’s stock to his shoulder with a crisp, efficient motion straight out of the Marine Corps manual and squeezed the trigger. There was no flash, no beam, or other outward sign, but downrange, the second target dummy leaped backward with a sharp crack, leaving a faint, hazy blur of vaporized metal hanging in the air. As Knox lowered the weapon, the recruits could hear the power pack spooling up again, until he reached down and switched it off. He replaced the laser weapon on the table, muzzle pointed carefully away from both the students and the range.
“Time to compare,” he told them.
The two dummies lay on their backs, side by side. The second now sported a hole in its breastplate in exactly the same place as the first. The entry hole was a bit smaller…but the exit hole was larger, much larger, with a lot more red goo spattered on the grass.
“One megajoule,” Knox repeated, speaking slowly and patiently, as if for the slowest of students. “One million joules. Watkins! What is one joule?”
“Sir! One joule is one watt of power applied for one second, sir!” It was one of the thousands of isolated facts and bits of information that had been hammered into them all during the past three weeks, like the serial numbers of their ATARs or the names of the ten people in the chain of command above them, from Gunnery Sergeant Harold Knox all the way up to President Roger Markham.
“Correct. Since it’s damned hard to get an uncooperative target to stand still for one whole second, we use a ten-million-watt laser to release a pulse that lasts one-tenth of a second. One million watts for one second equals ten million watts for one-tenth second. The result is the same. One million joules, delivered on-target. That is enough to punch through the best personal armor we know. It’s enough to chew though your guts, charbroil them, and spit them out your backsides. Flash!”
Jack gritted his teeth. “Flash” had become his nickname, his handle in the platoon, a jeering reference to Flash Gordon and his desire to be a space Marine.
“What is the effective range of the Sunbeam M228 Squad Laser Weapon?”
“Sir!” Jack shouted as hard and as loud as he could, reciting the relevant textbook paragraph. “The effective range of the Sunbeam M228 Squad Laser Weapon is approximately eighteen hundred to twenty-two hundred meters, but that range may be sharply restricted by attenuation or by adverse atmospheric conditions, sir!”
“Correct! And what is the maximum range in hard vacuum?”
“Sir! In vacuum, the maximum range of the Sunbeam M228 Squad Laser Weapon is theoretically infinite, sir!”
“Theoretically? You gonna trust your life, or the life of your buddy in the hole with you, to theory?”
That sounded like one of Knox’s frequent rhetorical questions, so Jack remained silent. It turned out to be the right response.
“The important thing to remember about the slaw,” Knox went on, “is that if you can see your target, you can hit it.
“And the important thing to remember about energy, is that energy is energy, whether it comes from a lump of plastic explosives, or the muzzle of M228 Squad Laser Weapon, or your fist. All any weapon is is a means of delivering energy on target. And delivering a hell of a lot of energy on-target, accurately and lethally, is what being a Marine is all about. With an M228 ten-megawatt Squad Laser Weapon. With an ATAR standard personal weapon. With an entrenching tool. With a rock. With your fist. With your teeth. You are the weapon! You, the men of the United States Marine Corps! Do you read me?”
“Sir! Yes, sir!” the recruits chorused.
“A US Marine is far more deadly than a ten-megawatt M-228 Squad Laser Weapon! And that is because a ten-megawatt M-228 Squad Laser Weapon cannot think. It cannot plan. And most of all, it does not possess the courage, fortitude, adaptability, willpower, or sheer, mean grit of a US Marine! Do you read me?”
“Sir, yes, sir!”
“I can’t hear you!”
“SIR, YES, SIR!”
“What does a US Marine do?”
“Kill! Kill! Marine Corps!”
Jack shouted with the others, yelling past the harsh rasp in his throat, overriding the chill, the discomfort, the bone-tired ache, the chattering of his teeth.
Still, it was impossible not to look down at those two, drilled-through dummies and not imagine himself lying there. My God, he thought, and not for the first time since he’d come aboard at Parris Island. What have I gotten myself into?
Assault Shuttle 06, Army Space
Force Assault Group
Approaching Lunar South Pole
2035 hours GMT
The K-440 Space Transport Cargo pod was the size and roughly the shape of a boxcar, a no-frills pressurized module capable of transporting up to fifteen tons with a Zeus II HLV to provide the initial kick. With Aerospace Force modifications allowing for air and temperature control, it could carry fifty men to orbit, or thirty as far as the Moon.
Colonel Thomas R. Whitworth floated in the two-man cockpit between the commander’s and pilot’s seats, peering through the narrow slit windows at the rugged terrain ahead. Sunlight, reflected from silver-white mountains, flooded the cockpit and warmed his face; he preferred spending the travel time aft with his men—a good leader never separated himself from his men or their discomfort—but he’d asked Major Jones, the Aerospace Force mission commander, to call him forward for the final approach. It always helped to be able to actually see the terrain you were supposed to assault, using your God-given Mark I eyeballs instead of watching a computer simulation. He’d not had a good feel for the terrain the last time he’d led his men into this desolate waste, and he thought that that was why they’d made a relatively poor showing when the enemy counterattacked.
They would do better this time. The damned Marines weren’t here to get in the way, for one thing…or to inflict casualties with so-called friendly fire. Whitworth had a soldier’s native distrust for joint operations, and a dislike in particular for the Marines. Like Truman a century earlier, he thought t
hey served well enough as the Navy’s police force, but the needs of the military as a whole would be best served if there was one aerospace arm, and one ground assault force. So-called elites like the Marines simply pulled good men and women away from the service that could best use them—the Army, and, in particular, Army Special Forces.
Today we’ll see what the Army Space Force can really do, he thought. This one could end the goddamned war!
Everything hinged on the Moon’s reserves of frozen water.
Water ice had been discovered on the Moon over forty years ago, first by a Defense Department Lunar probe, with confirmation a few years later by Lunar Prospector, a NASA satellite. When humans had again walked on the face of the Moon after the half century hiatus following Apollo, long-term explorations had been launched and permanent bases had been built with the knowledge that large reserves of water—locked up in ice mixed with the Lunar regolith—existed within the deep, eternal night of crater floors at both the north and south poles of the Moon. Theory held that cometary impacts over the past few billions of years had scattered droplets of water all over the Lunar surface—but only deep inside the craters at the poles where the sun literally never shone could it accumulate as ice, droplet piling upon frozen droplet for four billion lightless years.
It was estimated that some hundreds of millions of tons of water ice now lay buried in the regolith at each pole. Transports like the K-440 had originally been designed in the late 2020s to haul ice from the poles to places like Fra Mauro and Tsiolkovsky, where it could provide drinking water, oxygen, and the fuel for fuel cells or for chemicalfuel launch systems, so that more pounds of payload boosted from Earth could be devoted to food, nonconsumables, and people.
Lunar ice was, arguably, the most important natural resource discovered so far in near-Earth space. With all mass expensive in terms of having to drag it out of Earth’s gravity well, having a local source of drinking water, oxygen, and fuel—both the hydrogen and oxygen employed by chemical thrusters, and the water used as reaction mass in nuclear-plasma main engines—meant the difference between viable long-term settlements and what was euphemistically referred to as a fingernail op, fingernail as in hanging on by a.
Operation Swift Victory had been conceived as just that—a means of stabbing straight through to the heart of the UN’s Lunar operations, rendering them untenable. With the UN blocked from both the Moon and Mars, the war could indeed be brought to a swift and victorious end; after all, it was control of the ancient-alien artifacts out here that was the principal cause of the war…even if the folks back home were being told that issues like independence for the Southwest US or sovereignty under United Nations rule were the real cause of the fighting. Whoever controlled the technology still locked up in those old ruins and archeological digs would ultimately make all of the rules, no questions asked.
Mars had been brought under US control by grabbing both ends of the cycler transport system to and from the Red Planet—the former International Space Station in Earth orbit, and the Mars Shuttle Lander bases on Mars.
The best way to control the Moon, however, was to control the water.
He watched the landscape unfolding below and ahead with an intent eagerness. The terrain appeared impossibly rugged, but that was an illusion brought on by the extreme contrast between light and shadow, day and night. The sun was very low on the horizon behind them, now, and every bump, every ridge and boulder, each crevasse and hill and crater rim cast shadows far longer than might have been expected. A screen on the pilot’s console showed the same view, rendered through the far less ominous-looking medium of a graphic radar display.
“Acceleration, sir,” the transport’s pilot warned. “Maybe you should grab a seat.”
“I’m fine.” Whitworth swung his feet around until they were in contact with the deck plating. A moment later, a tug of returning weight dragged at him, hard enough to make him sag a bit at the knees.
A green light began winking rapidly on the console. “Contact light!” the pilot said.
“Okay,” Major Jones added. “That’s our come-ahead.”
“Excellent!” Whitworth said. He grinned, adding in deliberate imitation of an old Marine Corps expression, “The Green Berets have landed and have the situation well in hand!”
The first troops down at Objective Sierra Peter had been a detachment of Special Forces tasked with securing the landing zone; had there been an overwhelmingly powerful occupation force or a trap of some kind, they would have uncovered it and flashed the incoming transports a warn-off. The come-ahead meant the LZ was clear and nonhostile.
“How far?” Whitworth asked.
“Another two kilometers,” Jones said. He pointed. “Just beyond that crater rim up ahead. Um, maybe you should seal up, sir? Helmet and gloves in the locker back there.”
“I’m okay.” He wanted to see. The transport was dropping lower now, skimming the Lunar mountains at an altitude of barely a hundred meters. The ground canted up as they swept across the crater ringwall; the floor beyond was lost in black shadow. On the screen, several glowing green triangles came into view—the IFF codes of the Rangers already on the ground. A flashing X marked the LZ beacon.
“Here we go,” Jones said. “Take us in.”
“Roger that,” the pilot said. “I’ll set us down over—”
The green flashing come-ahead went out. Two seconds later, a different light winked on, a baleful red.
“Shit!” Jones snapped.
“What’s happening?” Whitworth demanded.
“Wave off!” The landing zone beacon snapped off. “They’re waving us off!”
“Give me a direct channel!”
“You’re on the air.”
“Advance Delta!” Whitworth shouted into his needle mike, using the Army team’s call sign. “Advance Delta, this is Capstone! What the hell is going on?”
“Capstone, Advance Delta,” a voice called back, tinny and strained in Whitworth’s earphone. “Wave off! Hot LZ! Repeat, hot—”
The transmission ended in a burst of static.
The transport’s pilot hauled back on both of his armrest joysticks, and a sudden surge of acceleration dragged at Whitworth, slamming both feet against the deck. Struggling to stay up, he managed to lever himself down into the cockpit’s jump seat and strap himself in.
“I’ve got laser fire,” Jones announced, his voice maddeningly calm. “Someone down there is painting us.”
“Where?” Whitworth demanded, leaning against his harness, trying to see. “I don’t see anything!” There was no answer, and Whitworth cursed himself for speaking without thinking, a sure way to look stupid in front of subordinates. Of course! In a vacuum, with no dust to illuminate or air molecules to ionize, laser beams would be invisible. The flashing beams and eye-popping bolts of colorful radiance so popular in the entertainment vids had no basis in reality.
A hard thump, like some giant kicking the transport from beneath, sounded through the thin metal hull. “What was that?” Whitworth demanded.
“Number three O-two tank just went,” the pilot shouted. “Hang on! We’re losing it!”
A flash as brilliant as sunlight shone briefly through the cockpit windows, so bright that Whitworth thought they’d turned to face the sun. Then the light faded, and he realized he’d just seen an explosion—one of the other transports disintegrating in a violent, soundless detonation.
“Brace for impact!” Jones shouted over the transport’s IC system. “Everyone brace for impact!” Then black-shadowed mountains swept past the cockpit window at an impossible angle, and Whitworth felt the deck slamming up against his feet and the mounting of his chair. A shrill scream—unmistakably the howl of atmosphere venting into hard vacuum—rang in his ears…which began to hurt intolerably as the cabin pressure dropped. Fumbling with the latches of his harness, he managed to get shakily to his feet, then accepted a helmet and gloves from Jones, who’d broken them out of an emergency locker at the rear of the co
ckpit. He clamped the helmet down over his head, seating it in the locking ring of his suit and giving it a hard quarter-twist to lock it. Jones, who seemed a lot more adept at garbing fast in an emergency, helped him with the gloves.
The pilot wouldn’t need to suit up; he was slumped forward in his seat, his head twisted at an impossible angle. Whitworth wondered how many of his men in the main cargo bay had survived. At least they should have all been suited up for the approach.
As he should have been.
Still unsteady on trembling legs, he made his way back through the cockpit hatch and into the cargo bay, where vac-suited troops struggled to get clear of cases of supplies that had shifted and broken free in the crash. The company radio channel was clogged with moans and a few screams; Lieutenant Hastings was shouting orders, trying to get a team to clear the airlock hatch of a spilled tangle of debris and electrical wiring. A number of men were trapped in their seats yet, some struggling feebly, but all too many lying as limp and as still as the transport’s pilot. Ice—frozen out of the evacuating air as it thinned—coated many of the surfaces, gleaming eerily as handheld emergency lights flashed and swung and touched it.
Whitworth tried to think of something to say, some order to give…and couldn’t. The situation was now completely out of his control, and all he could do was stand by helplessly and watch as Hastings and three others finally cleared the hatch and pried it open. A few moments later, he stood in the midnight shadow of the crater pole, looking up at hard, bright stars and an encircling rim of mountains, with only the highest peaks silvered by bright sunlight. The regolith crunched under his boots as he moved, and he could feel the crumbly texture of ice mixed with Lunar dust. The scene was utterly peaceful; other transports lay scattered across the crater floor where they’d landed, marked by the bobbing and moving emergency lights of other survivors. All three transports had been downed, probably in as many minutes.
“Colonel Whitworth?”
