Luna Marine

by Ian Douglas

  That bubble was so fragile. What if his Uncle David’s theory about the Hunters of the Dawn was right? Man’s birthworld seemed so vulnerable from out here; the attack on Chicago had demonstrated just how vulnerable it could be.

  And if the Hunters of the Dawn didn’t destroy that frail beauty, how long before Man himself did?

  He pushed the churning, unpleasant thoughts aside. For now, Earth’s beauty was enough, something to cling to, to lose himself in. For Jack, it felt as though all of the years he’d yearned to be out in space had been distilled to this one peaceful, crystalline moment.

  Despite the discomfort, he wanted to savor the experience as long as he could.

  Lieutenant Kaitlin Garroway

  Tsiolkovsky Crater

  0035 hours GMT

  A point of incandescence appeared against the ungainly, strut-crisscrossed flank of the nearest hopper, and in seconds the vehicle was falling from the sky, its reaction mass tanks holed. A second flare of light appeared on the side of the UN ship.

  “Objective is under fire!” Hartwell called.

  “Outstanding!” That meant that LAV-2 and LAV-4 were also close enough to engage, somewhere on the other side of the UN base. Approaching from two directions, coming around both sides of the central peak, must have the enemy commander beside himself. “Pop a comm relay!”

  “Roger that!”

  Hartwell pressed several screen touchpoints as the LAV gave another lurch and thump. On the upper deck, just behind the laser turret, a hatch popped open and a burst of compressed nitrogen blasted a baseball-sized sphere into the black sky.

  Almost immediately, a crackle of radio voices sounded in Kaitlin’s helmet headset.

  “LAV-2, this is LAV-4! I’ve got movement on the ship!” That sounded like Staff Sergeant Mohr. “I think I see the turret!”

  “Hit it!” the captain’s voice cried back. “Take out the turret!”

  “Firing!”

  “Damn! You hit something! Can’t see what!…”

  “Two, this is One!” Kaitlin called. “Target in sight! Watch out for hoppers!”

  The other two LAVs were masked by Tsiolkovsky’s central peak, and there was no ionosphere here to bounce signals off of, but the comm relay, following its mortar-lobbed trajectory, could relay communications between the widely scattered elements of the company for over a minute before the Moon’s sixth of a G could drag it back down to the surface.

  “Roger that, One,” Fuentes replied. “Nice you could join us!”

  “Hoo, yeah!” Mohr added. “Kick ass and take names!”

  “We’ll be moving too fast to take names,” Fuentes replied. “I’ll settle for initials!”

  “Two, Four! I’ve got hoppers incoming, bearing one-nine-five!”

  “LAV-1, this is Two! Hit the primary target, and keep hitting him! LAV-4, open fire on those hoppers.”

  “Roger, LAV-2.”

  “Roger that, Skipper,” Kaitlin said. She looked at Hartwell. “You heard?”

  “Aye-firmative. Lemme get clear of the damned dust!” Hartwell’s erratic driving had provided at least one side benefit—sending a cloud of fine, lunar dust into the sky…dust that at least partly obscured the fast-moving LAV. As the image on the screen cleared, Hartwell began moving the targeting cursor up the side of the UN ship.

  An instant later, a flash of intense and silent light blanked out Hartwell’s monitor, a flare as dazzling as the surface of the sun.

  Général de Brigade Paul-Armand

  Larouche

  Tsiolkovsky Base

  0037 hours GMT

  “A hit!” d’André shouted. He pointed at the monitor, which showed now the view from a camera mounted on the main weapon turret. From that vantage point, thirty meters above the ground, an immense cloud of dust was rising from the barren Lunar plain, just beyond the low hill sheltering the base to the west. For a moment, the camera’s optics had been blinded by the flash, but as the image cleared, there was little to be seen but a slow-falling cascade of dark gray dust. “We got him, General!”

  “Swiftly, now,” Larouche ordered. “Bring the weapon to bear on the two vehicles to the northeast!”

  “Slewing about to zero-eight-one…”

  With the lone attacking vehicle killed, perhaps they now had a chance. Even if the primary weapon turret was knocked out now…

  “It’s going to be difficult, General. Our people are too close!”

  Merde! That was the biggest disadvantage of being forced to fight at such close quarters. The blast of the positron beam—heat, light, and radiation—was as undiscriminating as the detonation of a small nuclear weapon. The UN troops outside would suffer, too, if they were too close to the blast.

  “The main turret is taking hits!” d’André shouted.

  But that couldn’t be helped. “Fire! Fire now!…”

  God forgive me!…

  Captain Carmen Fuentes

  Tsiolkovsky Crater

  0037 hours GMT

  “Fire!” Carmen yelled. Her eyes were watering from the flash that had momentarily blanked the screen. “Fire!”

  A flash, a burst of white-hot incandescence, flared from the side of the UN ship, now less than four kilometers away.

  “Score one for LAV-4!” Sergeant Mohr’s voice called over her headset. “I think we nailed the bastard that time!”

  “I just lost the relay from LAV-1!” Staff Sergeant Michaels, LAV-2’s driver, announced.

  “Put up another comm relay,” Carmen told him.

  “We still have two in the sky,” Michaels replied. “And the LOS hit when the UN ship fired. Captain, I think LAV-1 just got scragged!”

  “Shit.” She’d liked Garroway. A lot. Grieve later, she thought. When there’s time! “Okay…keep targeting the ship.”

  “Firing!” Then, “Captain, I think we nailed that turret. Nothing there but a hole!”

  “You’re sure that’s where the positron beam was coming from?”

  “Affirmative! Got it recorded, if you want a replay.”

  “Let’s see it.”

  Michaels set the replay going in a small window opened in the lower left corner of the main display. It was hard to see, even magnified and in slow motion, but it did look as though a dazzling pinpoint of light had appeared on something like a ball turret set in the UN ship’s hull; an instant later, the horizon had flared in a sun-brilliant detonation, searing the lunar regolith some ten or fifteen kilometers away. As the screen cleared, laser hits from LAV-4’s cannon could clearly be seen shredding the turret like cardboard.

  “Okay,” she said. “We’ll call that a kill on the AM weapon, and call for Plan Bravo.” She glanced at the time readout: if Ranger was on time, she should be gentling into Lunar orbit within another few minutes…and would be coming over the western horizon twenty-five minutes after that, but for any number of reasons she could be late, or early. “Start popping com relays every minute,” Carmen added. “Coded for Select Bravo. I want Ranger to pick that up as soon as she clears the ringwall.”

  “You got it, Captain.”

  “Take us in closer.”

  The LAV accelerated, spewing dust like a smoke screen.

  PFC Jack Ramsey

  USS Ranger

  0044 hours GMT

  “How about it, people?” Captain Lee said. “Any broken bones? Anyone hurt?” He moved down the aisle, adrift once again in blessed zero G. Jack raised one hand and looked at it; it was trembling, beyond his ability to control it. God…was the entire platoon in this bad a shape?

  “My dignity’s pretty badly hurt, Skipper,” one Marine replied, wiping his face with a rag. “Can I be excused?”

  “You’ll survive, Logan,” Gunnery Sergeant Bueller told him. “Okay, Marines! Listen up! I want you all to move forward, single file. Take a helmet and gloves from Lance Corporal Schultz, seal up tight, then check your weapon. Remember, do not load until your section leader gives you the word!”

  Bueller was a short, sto
cky fireplug of a Marine, with a bulldog’s face and a Doberman’s growl. “Now!” he continued, anchoring himself between two seatbacks. “Are there any Marines who need help making it to the LSCPs? Speak up now, and don’t give me no macho shit! If you’re having trouble navigating, we’ll assign someone to help you!”

  Jack considered raising a hand, then decided that he would be okay. He knew what Bueller was looking for; all of the Marines aboard Ranger except Bos, Dillon, and Jack had had plenty of zero-gravity practice. The three of them had had three days at the construction shack to practice, though, and Bueller had made sure they’d worked at moving around without losing a handhold or getting disoriented in the weird, no-up-and-no-down falling sensation of weightlessness.

  Ranger’s engines had cut off only moments before, and they were now in orbit around the Moon at a mountain-skimming altitude of only fifty kilometers. The Marines had twenty-two minutes now to get aboard the LSCPs strapped to Ranger’s sides.

  He craned his neck, looking for his uncle. There he was. David didn’t seem to be having any trouble moving about; then Jack remembered that the archeologist had spent sixteen months or so on cycler spacecraft going to and from Mars. Though the cyclers had spin gravity habs, he would’ve had plenty of opportunity to practice handling himself in free fall.

  He also saw Captain Lee…and was shocked by the expression on the man’s face. After those soothing words during the second half of the flight, it was a little unsettling to see what looked like worry there.

  Then Jack remembered the scuttlebutt he’d been hearing for the past several weeks. Captain Lee was rumored to be pretty tight with the L-T commanding 1-SAG’s Bravo Company Second Platoon…and she would be on the ground right now, trying to clear the way for Ranger’s approach and landing. The captain must be sick with worry. Like his DI in boot camp had told him, the First Space Assault Group was an awfully small unit. That meant people formed close bonds within it; it also increased the risk that close friends would die.

  He looked again at his Uncle David and wondered if both of them would survive what was about to happen. Jack hadn’t thought much about his own mortality, but there was something about the expression on Rob Lee’s features that demanded it.

  Carefully, he pulled himself into the aisle, making sure he had the next handhold grasped securely before letting go of the last.

  Another Marine’s legs swung through the air and thumped heavily against his torso, nearly knocking him free. “You okay, Ramsey?” Bueller asked him, gripping his upper arm to steady him. “You got your PAD and shit okay?”

  “Squared away, Gunny.”

  “Semper fi, Marine. We’re countin’ on ya.”

  It was a sobering thought. Capture of the UN ship might well depend on one of the three 4069 MOSs cracking the enemy’s computer security.

  His stomach gave another twist, and he bit back a sharp and sour taste. Grimly, he followed the queue forward.

  Lieutenant Kaitlin Garroway

  Tsiolkovsky Crater

  0045 hours GMT

  The rasp of her own breathing was impossibly loud inside her helmet. “Hello! Hello!” she called. “Does anyone hear me?”

  Kaitlin could hear groans, cries, and mumbled curses coming over the platoon com channel. The lights were out and the LAV’s cabin submerged in blackness absolute, but at least communications were still working.

  “Ah…yeah, L-T. I hear ya.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Sorry. Kaminski, ma’am.” He sounded dazed, maybe hurt.

  “I’m here too,” Hartwell said. “Christ! What hit us?”

  “The enemy AM beam would be my guess,” Kaitlin replied. “Don’t know why it didn’t fry us, though.”

  “Let’s have some light in here! Who’s got their suit lights working?” She began fumbling for her own light, reaching for the switch mounted high on her left shoulder. As the lights mounted on her shoulders flicked on, other lights came on as well, filling the LAV’s interior with bizarrely misshapen and grotesquely huge shadows.

  The LAV, she thought, was canted to the left at about a forty-five-degree angle. Part of the right side had crumpled inward, as though from the blow of a giant fist, and her helmet readout was showing zero pressure in the cabin.

  Another readout showed something far more worrisome: she’d just picked up 100 rads in a single dose. Not good. Not good at all. She felt queasy and wondered if it was the radiation.

  She still couldn’t figure out what had happened. A near miss by the positron beam, yes…but why weren’t they all dead? “Someone aft, see if you can get the airlock doors open,” she called. “The rest of you, sound off when I call your names. Let me know if you’re in one piece! Ahearn!”

  “Here! Okay!”

  “Anders!”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Castellano!” She waited. “Castellano!”

  “He’s bought it, L-T.”

  “Hartwell!”

  “Okay.”

  She ran down First Squad’s roster and was relieved to find that there were only two dead—Castellano and PFC Jordy Rawlins. Two more were hurt badly enough that they’d better not be moved—Navy Lieutenant Wood with a probable broken leg, and Lance Corporal Klinginsmith with what was probably a couple of broken ribs.

  All of the squad had taken a hefty dose of radiation. Antimatter reacted with matter by vanishing in a burst of very hard radiation—X rays and gamma rays, especially—and both the armored hull of the LAV and their space suits would have generated additional, secondary radiation in a cascade effect.

  How badly they were burned remained to be seen. The tables said that fifty percent fatalities resulted from 300 rads, but as little as 4 rads delivered all at once would cause some physical effects. They’d been “hardened” against radiation—put on a diet heavy in green vegetables and Vitamin A and E, and they’d all been taking daily doses of fat-soluble antioxidants—all of which was supposed to cut the effects of radiation by better than thirty percent. And once they were out of this, shots of atropine and antirad drugs would cut the effects still further.

  But a hell of a lot depended on how quickly they could get that additional treatment, and even more on the exact nature of their exposure.

  Outside, on the dusty plain as they scrambled clear of the wrecked LAV, Hartwell approached her. “I think I know what happened,” he said. He pointed back behind the LAV, where an expanse of Lunar regolith had been fused, as if by intense heat. “I’d just put the stick hard over when the beam hit. I think the matter-antimatter reaction took place in the dust cloud.”

  “The dust cloud? How…oh!” Kaitlin understood. “It didn’t all go off at once!”

  “Right. Some positrons must have leaked through…and hit the ground just behind us. Others hit dust particles. The dust probably diffused the blast, spread it out over a large area. There wouldn’t be any shock wave, of course, except through the ground, which is what tipped us over and crumpled the side.”

  “And the dust might have scattered the rads a bit, too.”

  “It’s the only thing I can think of that saved us. We had our own personal smoke screen up…and it blocked part of the beam.”

  “The boys in R&D are going to be interested in that effect,” Kaitlin told him. “But that’ll have to wait.” Turning her back on the wrecked LAV, she stared east, toward the UN base and the mountain. It looked close…but distances were deceiving on the Moon.

  “Okay, Marines,” Kaitlin said, turning back to face the group standing in a semicircle behind her. “Here’s the deal. We can sit where we are and wait for someone to win this damned fight…or we can hotfoot it over to that base and take a hand in what happens. Strictly volunteer. You want to sit this one out, no one’s gonna squawk. Every one of you’s done more than what was expected by the strict call of duty already. Me, I’m going to go see if I can give Captain Fuentes a hand. Anyone want to come along?”

  “I’m with you, Lieutenant.” One space-suit
ed figure brandished an ATAR and started forward. He had to get close for Kaitlin to read the name KAMINSKI on the front of his suit. Yates shouldered a slaw and stepped forward. Then Julia Ahearn. In another moment, all eight were with her; she had to order Lance Corporal Lidell point-blank to stay behind with the two wounded men.

  She tried to make it look like a random choice. She imagined most of the people in the squad would know, though, that Lidell’s wife was expecting a child.

  Even in war, life could be respected and preserved. It had to be that way.

  “Keep a radio beacon going,” she told him. “Someone will be along to pick you up before long. And…if it happens to be the UN, no heroics.” She gestured to the two wounded men. “Your responsibility is to them, to see that they’re taken care of.”

  “Aye, aye, ma’am,” Lidell said. “I still wish you’d let me—”

  “Carry out your orders, Marine.”

  He slapped his ATAR brusquely. “Aye, aye, ma’am!”

  “The rest of you? Follow me!”

  Turning, she started moving toward the UN base, several kilometers distant, still partly obscured by a shoulder of the crater’s central mountain peak.

  It looked like the battle there was on in earnest, and she was determined to have a piece of it.

  TWENTY-SIX

  MONDAY, 10 NOVEMBER 2042

  PFC Jack Ramsey

  USS Ranger

  0049 hours GMT

  Jack pulled his helmet down until the ring lock engaged, then gave it a hard counterclockwise twist to seal it. As he pulled himself hand over hand along the passageway leading to the port airlock, Lance Corporal Wojtaszek handed him an ATAR and a pouch with five loaded 4.5mm magazines and two beehive mags for his M-440. Gunnery Sergeant Bueller gave each Marine a quick once-over as he went through the airlock, sending some to the left, others to the right as they squirmed through close-fitting boarding tubes and into the LSCPs mounted on the Ranger’s flanks like Tinkertoy remoras.