Luna Marine

by Ian Douglas

  “Who was it who said, ‘Give me a lever long enough and I’ll move the Earth’?” Rob wanted to know. “Euripides?”

  “You rippa-dese, you pay for ’em,” Kaitlin shot back. “Actually, he wrote plays. Archimedes played around with moving the Earth.” She frowned at the thought. What was it about humans, what was it about her that cracked jokes three days before the greatest catastrophe on Earth since the ice ages? Life went inexorably on; maybe people simply weren’t able to face disaster on such a scale squarely.

  “I still like the first idea that was floating around the base for a while,” Rob said. He chose a doughnut from a plate, broke off a piece, and ate it—leaning forward carefully to avoid getting powdered sugar on his uniform. “Send in the Marines and blast the thing out of the sky.”

  “Not an option now,” Fuentes said. “I heard we won’t have any more Zeus IIs on the ready-pad for a couple of weeks, now. That leaves 1-SAG sitting in the mud, all dressed up with no way to get there.”

  “A permanent Marine presence in space,” Rob said. “That’s what we need, and we needed it a year ago.”

  “You want to be stationed in space?” Kaitlin asked, smiling. “I hear the liberty is awful. No bars, no cat-houses, no tattoo parlors, no girlie reviews or skin flicks. I mean, what’s a Marine supposed to do with his free time?”

  “Well, this special-launch-for-every-mission business stinks,” Rob replied. “If we had SAG teams stationed up there all the time, they’d be in a position to do something right away if some nut-case decides to drop rocks on Earth. The farther away we intercept an incoming rock, the smaller that lever needs to be.”

  “No argument there,” Fuentes said.

  “I’d like to know why we can’t use the Ranger against those fragments,” Kaitlin wanted to know. “From what I’ve been reading, the hardest part about rendezvousing with an oncoming asteroid is matching vectors with the thing. You’ve got to fly past it, stop, and accelerate back to match course and speed. That takes time, and a hell of a lot of reaction mass. But if Ranger’s specs are anything close to what I’ve seen published, she could match vectors with the rock easy enough.”

  Rob grunted. “She could…and then the UN would know all about her. Maybe even rush through the completion of their own antimatter drive. Besides, she’s not ready yet, is she? I know they don’t have her weapons installed yet.”

  Fuentes shrugged. “I heard her drives were operational. They could’ve used her to plant Marines on the asteroid, if they’d gone that route instead of trying to nudge it with nukes. But that would’ve given the game away, y’know?”

  “National security,” Rob added.

  “Yeah. The UN would know we had a working antimatter-drive vessel. Maybe they’re close enough with their AM ship that they could rush it through to completion, confront us with an armed supership. We lose the edge…maybe lose the war.”

  “Somehow, that’s a worrisome thought,” Kaitlin said. “Sacrifice five million civilians in the name of national security.”

  “We’ll only have one shot with the Ranger,” Fuentes pointed out. “She has to work, and she has to work perfectly, first time. If we lose her, if something goes wrong on her first mission, we don’t have anything on hand when the UN unveils their AM supership. And scuttlebutt says they are armed, with something that makes lasers look like flashlights.”

  “What’s Ranger supposed to be packing,” Rob asked. “You know?”

  “Lasers. Probably in the hundred-gig range. Probably missiles. I don’t know. Everyone’s being pretty tight-lipped about it.”

  “All things considered, that’s good,” Kaitlin said. “If we don’t know, maybe the UN doesn’t either!”

  The door at the far end of the room opened and Major Avery stride in, accompanied by Captain White and a base photographer. “Attention on deck!” someone yelled, and the Marines already seated in the briefing room came to their feet.

  “As you were, as you were,” Avery said, waving them down. He made his way to the podium at the head of the room, taking his place there with his hands braced on the sides as though he were conning the thing through a storm. His photographer crouched nearby, taking shots as the rest of the Marines in the room filed through the aisles to take their seats.

  “Good morning, Marines,” he said as the room went quiet. “First item on the agenda. The Deep Space Tracking Net at Colorado Springs has just issued an all-clear for Earth, which they now say is safe from Asteroid 2034L. Apparently, the vector change introduced by the Aerospace Force strike a month ago was sufficient to deflect the body. They report that, while we may be in for some shooting-star fireworks on Monday evening, the main body has definitely changed vector sufficiently to easily clear the Earth as it passes us.” Several of the Marines in the room broke out into cheers and applause at the news. Avery waited, frowning, until the noise had died down before continuing. “Of course, this means that the One-SAG alert is canceled. It now appears that our services will not be necessary in dealing with this threat.”

  He almost seems disappointed, Kaitlin thought, be-mused. She wondered how much career capital Avery had had riding on the possibility of a Marine-SAG mission to disintegrate 2034L. It was possible. Of course, after the UN strike against Vandenberg, it would have been impossible to launch any kind of space intercept mission at all, which was probably why the UN had launched it in the first place. The sub-carrier air strike must have been planned months ago, before 2034L’s course had been changed in the first place.

  “We can, therefore, turn to the second item on the agenda, which we are now calling Operation Dark Star. Gentlemen, ladies, we are now assured that the USS Ranger will be fully operational within two weeks. We have authorization from President Markham himself to use her in a combined-arms sky-and-ground assault against the enemy forces dug in at Tsiolkovsky, what the Army tried to do last May, and failed. We now anticipate being able to mount a major op against the enemy within the next two months.”

  That caused a stir in the audience. Avery tapped out something on his podium’s touch pad, darkening the room lights and opening the wall at his back to reveal a large display screen. Another few taps, and the screen lit with an image, a high-orbit view of a portion of the Moon’s surface.

  It was a particularly rugged and forbidding stretch of terrain, heavily cratered and broken. The only flat area at all was a flattened oval that stood out as much darker than the surrounding highlands, a large, deep bowl of a crater with an off-center central peak and steep walls.

  “This is the crater Tsiolkovsky,” Avery told them. “As you can see, it’s one of the very few flat places on the entire Lunar farside. The near side is characterized by the flat-plain maria, with some highlands. On the farside, there are no true maria at all, except for the Mare Moscoviense, farther north, and the Mare Ingenii to the southeast, and those, properly speaking, are just large craters with lava-plain floors, a little larger, a little less steep than Tsiolkovsky, here. On the whole farside, there are no seas at all even as large as the Mare Crisium. Very rugged territory. Very hard to traverse on the ground.

  “The crater Tsiolkovsky was originally chosen as the primary site for the joint US—Russian SETI radio telescope project back in the ’20s. The Mars landings and the discovery of alien artifacts at Cydonia resulted in the funding for the project being cut. After all, if we had an actual alien civilization to study, even a dead one, we wouldn’t need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on an antenna to listen in on their equivalent of Monday Night Football.”

  Polite chuckles rose from the audience. Avery smiled and continued. “In any case, the facility was mothballed and came under UN control in 2036. Since the beginning of the war, we’ve known they were up to something back there, but intelligence has been damned hard to come by. This series of intel photos, unfortunately, is almost two years old. We have nothing more recent, and attempts to send recon spacecraft around the Lunar farside have all met with disaster.”

&n
bsp; He touched a key, and the photo on the screen expanded sharply, zooming in until the oblong, dark gray plain of Tsiolkovsky filled the screen. The shot was oblique, taken from the north at an altitude of under one hundred kilometers; the three-dimensional nature of the terrain was plainly visible, with the crater clearly a deep, steep-sided bowl, with the central peak a prominent cluster of smoothly rounded mountains closer to the north rim than to the south. A cluster of lights was just visible in the shadows at the base of the central peak.

  “Those lights,” Avery went on, “are at the site of the old SETI base. We believe the UN has simply added to the facilities there. The amount of space transport traffic we’ve tracked going around the back side of the Moon suggests they’ve expanded the port facilities there. They’ve probably built containment tanks of some sort for water hauled in from the Lunar south pole. They probably also have a large nuclear reactor. The creation of antimatter, I needn’t remind you all, requires a very large expenditure of energy, so we expect a small fusion plant on-site, at the very least.”

  The scene expanded again, this time zooming in on the central peak. The lights at the base were more numerous now and seemed to sketch out short lines and geometric figures. The base, obviously, was a big one. At the rounded top of the highest mountain, a slender silver tower extended high into space. It would have been almost impossible to see if not for the telltale shadow it cast, a long, black scratch across the sunlit mountaintop.

  “That tower was part of the original SETI project. The idea was to raise the tower as the focus for incoming signals. A thin mesh of very fine wires would have extended from the mast clear to the crater rim, kind of like the old RT built in a round valley at Arecibo, in Puerto Rico. That would have resulted in a radio telescope dish 185 kilometers across, big enough to eavesdrop on a private, short-range radio conversation clear across the galaxy.

  “What we believe the UN has done is fit that central mast, which was already in place, as a transmitter instead of as a receiver. Easy enough to do, technically. In 1974, scientists used the radio telescope at Arecibo to send a symbolic radio message into space. The UN techies have probably done the same sort of thing, setting it up as a powerful radar station.

  “Somewhere in this crater, the UN has also erected a powerful weapon designed to fire bursts of antimatter…specifically, positrons. Antielectrons. Such a burst destroyed a recon Sparrowhawk last April, at a range of some tens of thousands of kilometers. We think, but don’t know, that they would have constructed their weapon somewhere at the top of the central peak, to give it a good field of fire, without raising the horizon by firing out of the bottom of this bowl. It’s also possible, of course, that the weapon is sited somewhere along the crater rim.

  “Somewhere inside the crater, we don’t know where, the UN has assembled some sort of shipfitting or ship-building complex and is busily working on their version of our Ranger, an antimatter-powered spacecraft of tremendous range, power, and maneuverability. We believe, but don’t know, that this spacecraft is a heavily modified Dauphin-class transport.” A diagram and accompanying photograph appeared in windows inset over the view of Tsiolkovsky, showing a black, diamond-shaped craft, streamlined for atmospheric flight. “We believe her to be the Millénium, launched early this year from Kourou, the ship some of you reported seeing at Picard. Also, fragmentary reports from the Army expedition at the Lunar south pole suggests that she was there as well, though this has not been confirmed. Intelligence believes that the Millénium is being refitted with both an antimatter drive and an antielectron cannon. It is possible—though we cannot count on this—that they have only one antimatter cannon, which was set up on the ground at Tsiolkovsky in April but is now being mounted, or else has been mounted already, aboard the ship.”

  “If we knew any less about the objective,” Carmen whispered at Kaitlin’s side, “we’d be going in completely blind.”

  The sentiment echoed Kaitlin’s own thoughts. How did you plan an attack on an objective that you hadn’t reconned, that you hadn’t even seen for two years?

  “We have been working on a plan of battle,” Avery went on, “one that will allow us to approach Tsiolkovsky with a fair chance of success. The operation, as we see it so far, will require a two-pronged attack, beginning with an assault on these perimeter defenses…incapacitating the enemy’s long-range radar.

  “Three gets you five he had nothing to do with the planning,” Rob whispered at her side. “This had to come from the very top.”

  Kaitlin shushed him, then leaned forward, trying to capture every word. He was now describing a new vehicle, which he called the new and improved LAV, and how it would be used for the initial phase of the Tsiolkovsky attack.

  The plan, she thought, was nothing short of brilliant. Risky…even dangerous, but brilliant nonetheless….

  Discharge Office

  Joliet Federal Prison

  1543 hours CDT

  “Sign here, sir…and here.”

  David Alexander signed the release forms on the indicated lines. He’d already had his personal effects returned to him…the suit he’d been wearing the day he’d been arrested, his digital Rolex, his Sony PAD, his wallet with eighty-five dollars, pocket change of three dollar coins and a quarter, and a small globe-and-anchor pin one of the Marines had given him as a keepsake after the return from Mars; he liked to carry it as a good-luck piece.

  “Thank you, sir,” the prison clerk said, checking the form over inside his cage. “That’ll do it.”

  “It certainly will,” David replied.

  “Is it, ah, true what they’ve been saying? That you’re gonna sue the government for false arrest?”

  He considered a sharp answer and discarded it. The clerk was a part of the system, but he wasn’t the system and certainly had had no part in David’s arrest and illegal imprisonment. He smiled. “My lawyer recommended that I reply to that question with a firm and definite ‘no comment,’” he replied. “But damn it, you people stole almost four months of my life, maybe even derailed my whole career. You can bet that pretty blue uniform of yours I’m at least thinking about the idea!”

  “Well, that’s your business, of course.” The clerk looked uncomfortable as he countersigned the papers, then typed something into the computer on his counter. “I’ll bet you’re looking forward to getting to sleep in your own bed tonight! Here ya go.”

  The clerk slid the prison-release form through the slot in the cage front, and David pocketed it. Julia Dutton had told him that morning to be damned sure he kept all of the paperwork they gave him; it would all be evidence at the trial when they sued for wrongful arrest and imprisonment.

  He still wasn’t sure what had happened, exactly. His lawyer had seen him in the prison’s visitor center that morning, ecstatic with the news that he was to be released. Apparently, he’d had some pretty big guns on his side and not even realized it. If Dutton had her facts straight—and she always seemed to—then General Warhurst himself, with a small army of JAG lawyers in tow, had dismantled at least part of the Justice Department in Washington, DC, threatening all-out war if David Alexander’s case was not investigated, reviewed, and brought out into the open. The investigation had taken weeks; according to Dutton, there’d been some deeply entrenched political powers behind the scenes trying to delay or derail the process, but Warhurst and his legal legions had triumphed in the end.

  David had met Montgomery Warhurst several times, both before and after the MMEF expedition to Mars, and been impressed with the man’s sharp intelligence, determination, and sheer guts. What David didn’t know yet was why the commandant of the US Marine Corps had gone on the warpath for him. Sure, sure, he was an honorary Marine, and all of that, but the way Dutton told the story, Warhurst had been that close to declaring war on Justice and the FBI both.

  And hell, he had shared information with foreign nationals. Had Justice decided to try his case, instead of trying to pressure him into spying on his friends, he had little doub
t that he would have ended up as a guest at Joliet for ten to fifteen big ones.

  “This way, if you please, Dr. Alexander,” the guard who’d accompanied him through the bureaucratic circles toward release said. “There’s someone here to meet you.”

  Funny, David wasn’t going to be able to think of the man or his comrades as anything other than screws from now on. Prison life had a culture and a language all its own. “Lead on,” he said. “Who is it, my lawyer?”

  “I really don’t know, Dr. Alexander.” He tapped the radio on his belt. “They just told me from the visitors’ check-in desk.”

  David wondered who was meeting him, then decided it had to be either his lawyer or, just possibly, Teri. He’d asked Dutton not to tell his wife that he was being released. He still had some thinking to do about that. If he could just convince Liana that it would be better for them both to end this mismatched marriage once and for all….

  The clerk was right. It would be good to sleep in his own bed tonight. On the other hand, he wasn’t sure he wanted to see Liana just yet. He’d been doing a lot of thinking about things during the past couple of months. It was time, he thought, to have it out with Liana once and for all…to sit down with her, make her see that it just wasn’t working out, make her realize that there was no good reason for the two of them to keep on destroying each other’s lives. There had to be a way to make her listen to reason.

  He knew he had to do it, and soon, but the thought of going home tonight, before he’d had a chance to work out exactly what he wanted to say, was more daunting than Joliet’s walls. Funny. All those months alone, here, and he hadn’t figured out yet how to say what he needed to say….

  Maybe he would take a hotel room in Chicago for a day or two, while he thought things out. Somehow, he had to find a way to resolve things with Liana before he could let himself even think about a new life with Teri.