Luna Marine

by Ian Douglas

  “Haven’t you learned yet, David?” she said. “Don’t you talk to any of these sons of bitches, don’t you even give them the time unless I’m here with you!”

  David found his heart was pounding hard and fast after the encounter. He was sweating, and it had nothing to do with the temperature of the room. “I didn’t agree to anything.”

  “What did he want?”

  “I think they want to use me to plant disinformation in the enemy camp. Maybe spy on some friends of mine.” He shook his head. “I won’t do it, counselor.”

  She didn’t look at him for a long moment. “You may not have much choice. Not if you want out of here before the war ends.”

  He looked up at her sharply. “He told me he could make me…disappear. He said they could keep me from going to trial and just keep me locked away for the rest for my life! Julia, they can’t just keep me locked up in here, can they?”

  She took too long to answer. “David, I’m afraid you’ve made some people mad. Powerful people. This ancient-alien gods garbage is getting out of hand, with its end-times melodrama and its message that our real allegiance is to angelic beings or whatever on some other planet. Some people, high up, think it could undermine the war effort. And they see you at the center of this thing.”

  “I don’t have anything to do with those lunatic cults!”

  “Guess again. You found those human skeletons on Mars and uploaded the news to the whole world. You found the Cave of Wonders in the Cydonian Face, with all those weird aliens on TV, including some that look like they might be the folks who were visiting this part of the galactic neighborhood just a few thousand years ago. And you found those tablets on the Moon, with information that got passed on to the churches almost before it was deciphered.”

  “I didn’t—”

  She raised a slim hand. “I know. You didn’t. But you did broadcast that stuff from Mars all over the Net for everyone to see and download.”

  “They—the UN—were trying to suppress it!”

  “And you kept them from doing that, yes. Kept them from suppressing your discovery. Your little news flash from Mars probably caused the UN a lot of domestic problems, just when they didn’t need them. But it also caused Washington some similar problems. And that wasn’t appreciated.”

  “So…what? I betray these people, and that makes it better?”

  “It makes you some friends in high places. And, believe me, David. You need some right now.”

  “Just whose side are you on, anyway?”

  “Yours,” she snapped. “And don’t you forget that! Now…I’ve got some things to go over with you, here….”

  She opened her briefcase and began laying out papers for his inspection. He couldn’t really focus on them, though. Though he hated to admit it, even to himself, Carruthers had found a deadly, weak chink in his armor. David was an archeologist, but that didn’t mean he was suited to the academic, indoor life. He was, above all, a digger, a man who lived for getting out in the field and conducting his own excavations, who still felt that spine-tingling thrill each time he picked up a coin or a pottery shard or a graven bone tool and knew that he was the first, in some thousands of years, to see and touch that bit of human ingenuity, industry, and artistic skill. He needed the sun on his face…the dirt under his fingernails.

  His love of fieldwork had taken him as far as Mars and the Moon. How could he possibly cut himself off from that?

  But how could he buy his freedom by betraying his friends? An impossible dilemma. Worse was the growing fear that he was on the wrong side, that somehow, when he’d not been looking, the so-called land of the free, home of the brave had acquired some of the blood-encrusted patina of a police state.

  War could bring out the worst in people and in governments. Just as, occasionally, it brought out the best.

  He found himself thinking of the Marine, Kaminski. The man had little education, but a good mind, a kind heart…and absolutely unimpeachable loyalty to his buddies and to the Corps.

  What David admired most about the Marines, he thought, was the way they looked out for one another. He’d been with Garroway on the March from Heinlein Station to Mars Prime; the esprit, the camaraderie, the sense of belonging during that cramped, uncomfortable, and desperate three-week trek through a portion of the Valles Marineris had been downright magical. Powerful. Throughout that time, there’d been a sense of us-against-the-world, a do-or-die flame that could not be quenched.

  Marines never left their own behind. Never. They didn’t turn on their own. They belonged to one another in a way civilians could never quite comprehend.

  The scientific community was hardly the same as the United States Marine Corps. Still, David wondered if he’d somehow assimilated Marine values after being locked up with them for three weeks on that grueling march.

  Semper fi!

  Recruit Platoon 4239

  Parris Island Recruit Training

  Center

  1510 hours EDT

  “Move it, move it, move it, recruits!” Gunnery Sergeant Knox yelled. “Hit that wall! Up and over! We don’t have all freakin’ day!”

  Jack ran down the path, taking the muddy stretch in two steps, then leaping, high and hard, slamming against the wooden barrier, his outstretched arms snagging the log at the top three meters above the ground. He chinned himself, dragging his body up and over. Couldn’t have done that ten weeks ago, he thought, a little wildly. As he straddled the barrier, the next recruit behind him leaped and slammed; Lonnie Costantino’s hands were muddy from an earlier fall, and he nearly lost his precarious handhold. Without thinking, Jack reached down with a hard, forearm grip, helping the other recruit over the top.

  “Thanks, man!” Lonnie gasped.

  “Semper fi, man,” Jack repeated, dropping down the farside of the wall. Technically, each recruit was being timed on this run, with the results entered in his final record. In fact, the average time of the entire platoon was what counted toward the awards and honors ceremonies at graduation next week. It was one small part of the not-so-subtle process of indoctrination here. You could run the obstacle course as fast as you could and get the best personal time possible. Or you could help your platoon win.

  By this time, the recruits scarcely needed to think about that. They were a unit, a team. The good of the platoon came before the good of any individual.

  Knox was still shouting as more recruits came over the wall. “What’re you ladies waiting for? I don’t wanna see nothing here but amphibious green blurs!…”

  Amphibious green Marines. It was an old concept, dating back at least to Vietnam. There were no black Marines, the saying went. No white or yellow or red Marines. Only amphibious green Marines. Recruit Platoon 4239 was down to fifty-one men now, and they made up a fair cross section of American society. Twelve were African-American, seven were Asian, fifteen were Latino. One, John Horse, was Lakota, while Gary Lim was Polynesian. Such distinctions, though, had been lost on the recruits a long time ago, lost in their step-by-step metamorphosis from civilians to Marines.

  Another hard, quick run, a leap, a grab. Jack snatched hold of the Cable, a massive rope, stretched at an angle across the mud pit, which bounced and swung dizzyingly as he gripped it with hands and legs and began working his way along it, head down. If he slipped and fell, tradition demanded that he emerge from the mud singing the “Marine Corps Hymn” at the top of his voice; he’d done that a time or two in weeks past and knew it would knock precious seconds from his score.

  He didn’t slip, not this time. He hit the ground running, as Knox made a notation on a PAD and kept on shouting. “Go-go-go-go!”

  Jack attacked the final line of obstacles with a second wind that was more of the spirit than in his lungs. Flat on his back in the mud, he slithered forward beneath tangles of barbed wire, as an old-fashioned machine gun yammered somewhere close by, live bullets snapping and hissing a meter or two above his body.

  One more week, and he would be a Marine
. A Marine, not a recruit. Even now it was hard to credit; boot camp had been his whole life for so long he scarcely gave a thought anymore to what was going on outside the narrow, isolated, sandbagged and leveed world of Parris Island.

  It was hard to imagine being free of the mud and the aching muscles, of the night firewatches and the sand fleas, of the drills and Gunny Knox.

  Damned if I’m not going to miss this. The thought made him laugh. Somewhere along the line, he’d gone over that infamous hump that every recruit faced.

  Gung ho! All together…

  EU Science Research Vessel

  Pierre-Simon Laplace

  In Trans-Lunar Space

  2150 hours GMT

  Laplace was eight thousand kilometers from 2034L, falling toward the distant twin-star pair of Earth and Moon, when Jean-Etienne Cheseaux saw the flash. It was small, an unremarkable pulse of light partially blocked by the body of the asteroid itself, but his instruments registered hard radiation—gamma and a flux of high-speed neutrons—together with the electromagnetic pulse that was the characteristic fingerprint of a nuclear detonation.

  “Damn them!” Cheseaux exclaimed, pulling back from the eyepiece on his broad-spectrum analyzer. He checked the readouts again, to be sure there was no mistake. “Damn them! What do they think they’re doing?”

  The second EU ship, the Sagittaire, had rendezvoused with Laplace and 2034L over a month before. Two weeks ago, Laplace had been ordered to return to Earth.

  Cheseaux had liked no part of the arrangement. Sagittaire was unmistakably a military ship, with a dorsally mounted ball turret that he suspected housed a high-energy laser. What possible interest could a military vessel and crew have in an asteroid orbiting the sun in deep space?

  He could think of only one possible reason, and the mere possibility chilled him to the core. They couldn’t be thinking of…that!

  Colonel Armand and the rest of Laplace’s small crew were eager to leave the desolate boulder in space and return to the Moon, but Cheseaux had found a pretext to stay—a broken spectrometer and the urgent need for some additional data on 2034L’s chemical composition.

  A message had arrived from Earth a few days later. Laplace had until the twenty-third and then she must burn for the return trajectory. Food and water would soon be a problem, and the crew of the Laplace were obviously angered at Cheseaux’s apparent scientific fussiness.

  Let them fuss! As Laplace had completed her burn, falling into a vector that would carry her to the Moon and then to home, he’d stayed at the science vessel’s instrument suite, watching the asteroid and the tiny Sagittaire hanging in its shadow.

  He wasn’t surprised when the nuclear explosion briefly flared against the night, but the horror nearly overwhelmed him. Maybe, maybe they were changing the asteroid’s orbit for some other purpose than the one he feared, but he couldn’t imagine what that purpose might be. A base of some sort? Raw materials for the highly secret construction rumored to be proceeding on the Lunar farside?

  As hour followed hour and he continued to watch the change in 2034L’s course, the surer he became. Running simulations on his computer suggested that the nuclear blast—which he estimated to be in the fifty-to one-hundred-kiloton range—had nudged the tiny, flying mountain just enough to swing it inward, ever so slightly toward the Earth.

  His software wasn’t good enough, and his measurements over the course of twenty-some hours weren’t precise enough and they didn’t cover a long enough span of time, but Cheseaux was now convinced that the European Union government was planning to smash 2034L into the Earth. He wasn’t sure of the target; it might be Russia, which would be on the outer, nightside of Earth at impact. But it might also be aimed at the United States, which would be on the trailing, sunset side of the planet when the asteroid came plunging in from space.

  The sheer irresponsibility of the act was staggering; not for the first time, Cheseaux wondered if he was on the right side of this war. He rarely followed politics; politicians were buffoons at best, criminals at worst, and any claims they laid to concern for ordinary people was purely for show. Still, he’d read the Geneva Report and thought that its conclusion—that civilization could collapse across the planet if Earth was not united under one rule within another eight years—was accurate, if unduly pessimistic in the timetable it presented.

  But, mon Dieu! How serious could they be about their concern for the plight of Earth’s billions when they were willing to drop an asteroid on the planet? It was insane!

  For the next hour, Cheseaux thought carefully about what he must do. He could talk to Colonel Armand, of course…but that didn’t seem to be a productive option. What could the man do, save, possibly, join his protest to Cheseaux’s? And he certainly wouldn’t condone the single other option Cheseaux could think of, the only option possible, under the circumstances.

  No, Cheseaux would have to shoulder this particular responsibility alone.

  After copying the visual and spectographic records of the explosion and the observations that showed the asteroid’s new and deadly orbit to PAD microdisk, he made his way hand over hand through the zero-G complexity of the ship to this quarters.

  He had an important call to make….

  SIXTEEN

  THURSDAY, 26 JUNE 2042

  Interrogation Room 12

  Joliet Federal Prison

  1445 hours CDT

  The FBI special agent was different, this time, not Carruthers, but a small, dark-haired man with a worried accountant’s expression. He had a large-screen executive PAD open on the table as they led David in. “Dr. Alexander?” He stood, and offered a hand which David refused. “I’m Bill Twiggs. We need to talk.”

  “Not without my lawyer present,” David replied.

  Twiggs sighed. “Dr. Alexander…David, this is not a formal interrogation. We need your help.”

  “That’s what Carruthers has been telling me for the past month. I am not going to use my friends as, as intelligence sources.”

  “All I want you to do is read this.” He turned the PAD so that David could read what was on the screen.

  The header was David’s own Net address. This was a message sent to him, which someone else had intercepted electronically.

  MY DEAR DAVID:

  DO YOU REMEMBER OUR CONVERSATION ON THE THIRD NIGHT OF THAT CONFERENCE IN ATHENS? WE WERE AT THE HOTEL POOL, AND YOU WERE WITH THAT ENTRANCING WOMAN NAMED DANI OR DANIELLE, OR DONNA, I FORGET EXACTLY. WE TALKED, YOU AND I, ABOUT SOMETHING OF TERRIBLE IMPORT.

  IT IS IMPERATIVE THAT WE TALK AGAIN, OLD FRIEND. A DIRECT VID CONNECT WOULD BE BEST, SCRAMBLED, ENCRYPTED, AND SECURE. SEND IT VIA THE USUAL ROUTE. I’LL ARRANGE TO HAVE IT RELINKED HERE.

  YOUR GOVERNMENT MUST KNOW WHAT I HAVE SEEN HERE. PLEASE LINK IN PERSONALLY AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE. MOST URGENT!

  JEAN-ETIENNE

  David read the message through twice, his mind racing. His first thought was that this was some sort of a trick, that the FBI was baiting him with this message in an effort to set up the backdoor intelligence line they wanted him to establish with Jean-Etienne.

  The more he thought about it, though, the less likely that seemed. The message header proved it had arrived encoded, so someone had broken that code before delivering the message to him; they didn’t need him for that. The reference to the Athens conference, well, how could the Feds know that much detail? His attendance at the conference was a matter of public record, but they wouldn’t know about Donni, unless Donni herself had been a spy.

  Despite himself, he smiled at that small stab of paranoia. Just because you’re paranoid, the old saying went, it didn’t mean they weren’t out to get you. Still, Donni, a graduate student spending a year in Greece, had been anything but a government agent. He would stake anything on that, including the nights they’d spent together in bed. Besides, she’d been in the pool, a nude and gaily playful water nymph, when he and Jean-Etienne had had that particular conversation.

  He remembered the conversation
well, too.

  “David, we intercepted this message through our court-ordered tap on your home-computer system,” Twiggs said. “We know that you have been in communication with Dr. Cheseaux in the past…as recently, in fact, as the tenth of April, just before your departure for Luna. We would very much like to know what has Dr. Cheseaux so worried.”

  “I’ll bet you would,” David replied.

  “Dr. Alexander, please! We’re not trying to get you to betray anything, or anyone! From the contents of this message, it sounds as though Cheseaux wants to tell us something. Specifically, he wants to talk to you, and to tell you something he thinks Washington needs to know.”

  How were they using this situation against him? The message had to be from Jean-Etienne. There was simply no way they could have gotten that level of detail on his meeting with Cheseaux in Athens.

  “I’ll be honest with you, Dr. Alexander,” Twiggs went on. “We are extremely concerned right now about some sort of weapon the UN is building on the farside of the Moon, a weapon which they used two months ago to destroy one of our reconnaissance craft. We believe this weapon is a device that creates, contains, and fires a beam of positrons. Antimatter. The weapon almost certainly uses technology acquired from the aliens you’ve called the An. In fact, they may have picked up an intact antimatter reactor or generator at Picard, shortly before you visited that site.

  “What we are wondering, quite frankly, is whether Dr. Cheseaux might have some information on the UN antimatter-beam project for us. Was that what the two of you were discussing in Athens? Such a weapon would be devastatingly powerful, certainly. A spacecraft armed with such a weapon would be able to obliterate any city on Earth and would be next to impossible to destroy. Might he oppose antimatter research on humanitarian grounds?”

  “No…” David said, softly.

  Twiggs looked surprised. “We have quite a dossier on Cheseaux. While he’s not a confirmed pacifist, he doesn’t seem the sort of man who would advocate wholesale destruction of cities.”