Luna Marine

by Ian Douglas

  “Okay, Ramsey,” Bueller said, checking his suit PLSS readouts, then rotating him to stare through his visor and into his face. “Let’s have a look-see. You ready to rock?”

  “Yes, Gunnery Sergeant. Ready to go!”

  “Your PAD hooked up and ready?” It was like Bueller to double-check the important stuff. The man had an incredible mind for fine detail and seemed to know every Marine in the platoon and what they should have with them down to his or her socks.

  “Right here.”

  He looked past Jack at the Marine floating behind him. “How about you, Dillon? You okay? Got your PAD?”

  “All set, Gunny,” Diane Dillon replied. She punched Jack’s side, causing him to drift around slightly and bump against the bulkhead. “This shaggy character’d just better watch my smoke!”

  “Bosnivic? How about you?”

  “I’m okay.” He was starting to sound nervous.

  “Got your PAD? It’s working okay?”

  “On-line and ready.”

  “Okay. Remember the drill. Ramsey and Dillon, you two are going down in LSCP-52. Bosnivic, you’re going down in 54.”

  Jack nodded. If one of the two landers was shot down, at least one of the 4069 MOS Marines would survive to board the UN ship. “Got it.”

  “When you’re on the ground, the three of you keep together and stay down! I’ll round you all up and lead you in with my combat team, just behind the primary assault group. We’ll get you in, don’t worry about that. Use your weapons if you have to, but do not let yourselves be suckered into a firefight. You three people are the whole freaking reason we’re here, and I don’t want any of you getting capped because he or she got distracted. You read me?”

  “We read you,” Dillon said.

  “Loud and clear, Gunny,” Jack added.

  “Yeah,” Bosnivic said.

  “Okay. Ramsey and Dillon…port tube. Bos, starboard. See you on the beach, Marines.”

  With his ATAR clanging once or twice as he squeezed through the airlock hatch, Jack pulled himself through and into LSCP-52. Finding an empty seat, he swung himself around, pulled himself down, and buckled in. Diane found a seat opposite.

  The landing craft was packed with twenty-four Marines on board, with no room at all to move even if they hadn’t been strapped in. He faced Diane across the narrow aisle, their knees touching, and wondered what to say.

  Through her helmet visor, she winked at him.

  He managed a smile in reply. He hadn’t known her for long—just since he’d arrived at Quantico—and she’d struck him as an all-business sort, but she seemed like a nice person. He wondered if he could get to know her better, after the op. Talking to her, he’d found, was a lot more interesting than talking to Sam, even though he’d never seen her out of uniform.

  They waited for what seemed like eternity.

  “Now hear this, now hear this,” a voice called over Jack’s headset. “We’ve just cleared the horizon with a com relay from the RAG. We are go for Plan Bravo. Repeat, go for Plan Bravo. Good luck, Marines!”

  Go for Bravo! That meant the RAG had managed to knock out the A-M cannon! Instantly, the platoon channel was filled with cheers and wild shouts.

  “Outstanding!”

  “Gung ho!”

  “Ooh-rah!”

  “Let’s kick it!”

  The enthusiasm was heady, dizzying, and contagious. Jack found himself shouting with the rest and exchanging a clumsy, gloved high five with Diane.

  The remarkable thing was that Plan Bravo actually meant a more dangerous approach for the Marine assault teams. Alfa meant the AM gun was intact, but positioned at or near the UN base on the south side of Tsiolkovsky’s central peak. If the call had been for Plan Alfa, they would have set down on the north side of the peak and approached the enemy base overland and spread out, so the enemy AM weapon couldn’t burn them from the sky. Bravo meant they could come storming right in to the base’s front door. Even with the AM cannon knocked out, that meant a hot LZ, with lots of base defenders about determined to make sure the Marines were cut down before they could fully deploy.

  It seemed a little crazy to be cheering because they were about to hit a more dangerous LZ.

  But then, Jack thought, they were Marines.

  “Ooh-rah!” he shouted.

  He’d never felt this kind of excitement in his entire life.

  Or this kind of fear.

  Captain Carmen Fuentes

  UN Base, Tsiolkovsky Crater

  0054 hours GMT

  “Let’s go, Marines!”

  Carmen stooped low to clear the aft hatch of LAV-2, stepping out onto the ramp, then bounding down onto the lunar regolith. The other Marines crammed into the confines of the LAV exploded around and past her, scattering in long, low kangaroo bounds that kicked up clouds of fine dust with each landing.

  The LAV had slewed to a halt less than twenty meters from the foundation of a towering gantry, a latticework of steel and aluminum hugging the half-obscured shape of a sleek, black craft with UN markings. Space-suited figures moved high among the gantry catwalks; only when a puff of dust geysered a meter to her left was she aware that some of those figures, at least, were shooting at her.

  She kept moving, bouncing forward toward the relative shelter at the base of the gantry ladder. It was a strange kind of battle, with everyone moving with the eerie semblance of slow motion characteristic of moving in the Moon’s one-sixth gravity. She could hear the calls of the other Marines over her combat channel, but there was no crash and rattle of gunfire, no explosions, none of the shrill, deafening, and mind-numbing thunder that marked battles in environments that happened to include an atmosphere. Wyvern shoulder-launched rockets flared brightly against the night, streaking toward their targets. An explosion detonated nearby; there was no sound, but she felt the concussion through the soles of her boots.

  Sergeant Joles, just in front of her, staggered in mid-leap, crumpled, and fell, dropping slowly to the surface and rolling over several times as his momentum kept dragging him forward. Without thinking, Carmen stooped, grabbed a carry handle on his PLSS, and dragged him along, hauling him through the dust until she was under the gantry’s shadow.

  She rolled Joles over, looking for an entry wound, reaching for one of the slap-stick pressure seals issued to the assault force to stop puncture leaks…but Joles needed more than a patch. A round had penetrated his helmet visor smack in the center, crazing the plastic, and splashing the interior curve with frothing red.

  Both remaining LAVs were moving now, circling out away from the base, partly to make themselves harder to hit, partly to draw fire from the Marines now storming the base. LAV-2 pivoted sharply, its turret rolling high. Ten meters above her head, a UN trooper pitched over a catwalk railing as the LAV’s laser exploded his legs and part of the steel platform he was standing on with the equivalent of ten kilograms of high explosives. Half of a body and a cloud of steel fragments fell in a broad-arcing spray, slowly at first, then faster as they got closer to the ground. Bits of metal rattled off Carmen’s helmet like a rain of steel bearings.

  She saw movement on another part of the structure and tried taking aim. It was almost impossible, though, to position herself so she could aim her ATAR almost straight up, and the built-in camera-aiming system didn’t work unless the rifle’s butt was connected with the pivot socket in her suit’s torso, right at her center of gravity. The idea was to have the rifle’s targeting system throw a crosshair cursor on her visor’s HUD, showing where she was aiming, but she ended up aiming blindly and squeezing the trigger, hoping that the high-velocity spray of full-auto rounds hit something.

  LAV-2’s Marines, First Squad, First Platoon, were at the gantry; LAV-4’s were assaulting the base control center a hundred meters away. The enemy base suddenly seemed far larger than the simulations and maps had made it look back on Earth, far too large for twenty-four…no, twenty-three Marines to handle.

  “Come on, Avery,” she mutte
red to herself. She looked west, over the sheltering flank of the central peak, but the sky was empty except for stars. “Move your fat ass!”

  “Hey, Captain Fuentes!” A voice called. “This is Mohr, in LAV-4! I found somethin’ here!”

  Turning, she saw the LAV approaching, a shadow behind its headlamps and the glare they cast in the dust. Smaller shadows moved on the vehicle’s flat upper deck, shadows already dropping off the top and onto the surface.

  “Found ’em a couple of klicks to the west, Captain,” Mohr continued. “They were hoofing it and asked for a lift!”

  Carmen triggered her suit’s IFF ID call, and familiar names flashed onto her HUD. The Marine coming toward her was…

  “Garry! I thought you were dead!”

  “They singed us a bit, Captain,” Kaitlin replied, close enough now that Carmen could see the other Marine’s easy grin through her visor. “Nothing a shot of atropine and a decon routine won’t handle!”

  “Jesús y Maria!” Carmen cried, a phrase from her childhood she’d never expected to use again. “It’s good to see you, girl!”

  Something hit her in the side, a sledgehammer swung with a force that slammed her off her feet. The next thing Carmen Fuentes knew, she was on her back, feeling very, very cold as air whistled past her ears and a tinny voice announced, “Warning! Suit breach! Pressure dropping! warning! Suit breach!…”

  Dimly, she was aware of a space-helmeted head hovering above her. “Captain!” It was Garroway’s voice. “Captain! Hang on!”

  “Take…command.” Her voice broke, and she tasted blood, hot and salty. She tried again, reaching for the figure crouched above her. “Take command!”

  “Captain!…”

  “Take them…take them up the ladder, Marine!”

  “Aye, aye, ma’am!”

  The computer voice was no longer shrilling at her. Had Garroway patched the leak? Or was the air in her suit gone? No, that made no sense. She was breathing something. But it was starting to hurt now, starting to hurt a lot.

  She felt a sting in her shoulder—Garroway using one of the special high-pressure air-fired needles to slam a shot of morphine right through the heavy material of her suit. In a few moments, it still hurt, but the pain was very, very far away….

  Lieutenant Kaitlin Garroway

  UN Base, Tsiolkovsky Crater

  0058 hours GMT

  Kaitlin pulled the morphine injector free from the captain’s arm and slapped a small patch over the hole…a bright red patch that indicated that the suit’s wearer had been given morphine. Tossing the injector away, she used a grease pencil to mark the time on the patch. Then she picked up her ATAR and looked up the side of the gantry. Take them up the ladder.

  She felt lonely. She was in command now, and ordering her people to do the impossible was up to her now, not Carmen Fuentes.

  “Marines!” she shouted over the combat channel. “This is Lieutenant Garroway! The skipper’s down, and I’m taking command! Everyone who can make it to the base of the gantry, get there on the double!” An explosion flared among the girders high above her, as one of the LAVs killed a sniper. A moment later, the LAV exploded in a silent gout of light, dust, and hurtling fragments. God! “Move it! Move it!”

  The seven who’d come with her from LAV-1 were already there. “We’re with you, Lieutenant!” Kaminski called. Other Marines were approaching

  “Okay, then! You! You! You! Cover us and come up last! The rest of you, follow me!” Grabbing the handrails of the gantry ladder, she started up the steel rungs.

  She wondered where the Ranger Marines were, and how much longer they’d be.

  Captain Robert Lee

  USS Ranger

  0058 hours GMT

  Rob was furious.

  He was floating on Ranger’s tiny bridge, where the ship’s four flight officers were strapped into seats all but surrounded by instrumentation and consoles, and Colonel Avery was sitting in a jump seat just behind the captain’s station. The hell of it was that the bastard Avery was right. He had the call, and the safety of the ship came first.

  He shifted handholds, moving closer to Avery’s seat. “Sir, I understand that,” he said. On the big display screen above the captain’s and pilot’s positions, the ruggedly cratered surface of the Moon scrolled past. A steadily dwindling number on the lower right corner of the display gave the range to the UN base. Just over one hundred kilometers. They must be just outside the Tsiolkovsky ringwall. They had to act within the next minute or two, or miss their chance entirely. “But our people need the firepower we can bring to bear. That’s why we’re here!”

  “You are being insubordinate, Captain,” Avery replied. “Our primary mission objective has been met.” Minutes before, the two LSCPs had been jettisoned; drifting clear of the Ranger, flying tail first, they’d fired their engines together and now were dropping toward the surface, and a landing at the UN base.

  Technically, Ranger was supposed to do the same, but according to the mission orders, that was an option, one that Avery could exercise at his discretion.

  And he was choosing not to exercise it.

  “Sir, may I remind you that this mission was originally designed to take advantage of Ranger as a mobile fire-support platform. If you stay in orbit, we get one pass. A couple of shots. It won’t be enough to help.”

  “And I will remind you, Captain, that we have burned over ninety percent of our reaction mass in that six-G run from L-3. We have just enough remaining to boost free of Lunar orbit and make Earth orbit in three days. If we decelerate to land, if we expend reaction mass hovering, we will have to set down, and we will be stranded here. Vulnerable.”

  “Transports are already on the way from Earth, sir. And there’ll be a water tank down there somewhere, reaction mass for the UN ship. Sir, we can’t abandon our people!”

  “My orders state that I must secure the safety of this vessel,” Avery said, his voice petulant. “I do not intend to allow it to fall into UN hands or to suffer combat damage. If the Marine assault down there fails, we have no other defense against the enemy AM ship. None!”

  Eighty-eight kilometers. They were over the ringwall now, drifting swiftly above the flat, dark maria of Tsiolkovsky’s crater floor. Each second they waited meant more reaction mass spent killing their velocity.

  In another few seconds, it would all be moot. He didn’t mind arguing with his commanding officer when he thought the argument was justified…but there was no way in hell that he could argue against the laws of physics.

  PFC Jack Ramsey

  LSCP-52

  0059 hours GMT

  Jack had felt a solid thump as the LSCP jettisoned from the side of the Ranger. For another few moments, they’d been in free fall, and then the craft’s engines had cut in. With the seats facing each other, the minute or so of acceleration made him feel as though he was lying on his side. He let his tongue loll from his mouth and crossed his eyes, eliciting a laugh from Dillon.

  For several minutes, now, most of the sensation of weight had been directed toward the deck, which meant the LSCP was flying on her ventral thrusters. With no windows and no camera or seatback monitor, there was no way to see out, and the Marines had only the words of the LSCP’s pilot to cling to.

  And most of those words weren’t even directed at them.

  “Okay. I see the central massif. Comin’ up on fifteen kay…”

  “Five-two, this is Five-four. Looks like some shootin’ goin’ on there, just to the right. Got multiple airborne targets on radar.”

  “UNdie hoppers, Five-four. Give ’em a wide berth.”

  “Jesus Kee-rist…looks like one of the LAVs got nailed down there. Look at that crater!”

  “Roger that. Okay. Coming down to fifteen hundred. Fourteen…twelve…”

  “Ground’s rising. Watch your altimeter.”

  A resounding thump sounded from somewhere below and forward. “Uh, Five-four. I’m taking some fire here. I got laser fire from the south f
lank of the mountain and projectiles from the base.”

  “Roger that, Five-two. Same here. I think we’re attracting a little too much attention up here.”

  “Shit! Another hit! Let’s get the hell down on the deck before they catch us with a fuckin’ golden BB.”

  They went weightless again for several long seconds, before a solid kick through the deck caught Jack hard in the seat of the pants. The nausea he’d felt after the two-hour run from L-3 was returning, and he desperately hoped he wasn’t going to be sick inside his suit. He’d heard too many stories of people drowning on their own vomit after getting sick while suited up.

  Then the deck canted sharply, and the thrust increased. “Picking up some dust, here! Fifteen…ten…five…contact light! Throttle down!”

  With a heavy thump, the LSCP hit the ground. Immediately, the Marines began unbuckling their harnesses and collecting their weapons. The lock at the aft end of the cargo module opened, and the first squad of twelve Marines began filing in. Jack became aware of a fairly regular thump-clang against the starboard side of the craft. It took him a moment to decide that someone out there was popping small-arms fire at the spacecraft.

  “This,” he said to himself as he began filing aft toward the airlock, “must be what they mean by a hot LZ.”

  “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet, kid,” a tall, black sergeant named Matthews said over Jack’s headset. “It gets better!”

  He took a deep breath. “I can’t fucking wait!”

  Captain Robert Lee

  USS Ranger

  0101 hours GMT

  “If the Marine assault down there fails,” Avery said, “we have no other defense against the enemy AM ship. None!”

  Despite the hard words, Avery seemed to be wavering. Rob had the gut feeling that man wasn’t a coward, but that he was close to paralysis over making a decision that could screw the mission…and end his career in the process.

  “You will considerably improve their chances if you take the Ranger in.” Rob waited an uncomfortable beat before adding, “Sir.”

  “Excuse me,” David Alexander said, floating headfirst into the crowded compartment. “I heard the shouting. Mind if I join you?”