by Dale Brown
“Negative,” the younger officer reported from his own position near the southern edge of the base perimeter, more than a kilometer away. “Do you think his com systems have gone down?”
Lavrentyev bit down on a curse. “I think his whole damned robot is down, Captain. And that he’s dead. Because the Americans are here. Somewhere.” He shook his head in dismay. “Bezrukov was right. They must have circled around to hit us from behind.”
“Then what should we do now, Colonel?” Yanin asked.
Lavrentyev forced himself to think. Before joining the Russian Space Force as a military cosmonaut, he’d flown Su-27 fighters. He was not a foot soldier by training or inclination. Well, modern combat aircraft flew in fighting pairs, with each wingman protecting the other. Perhaps the same principle applied here. “Close up on my position, Yanin,” he directed. “I’ll cover you.”
“On my way,” the other man acknowledged.
Through his sensors, Lavrentyev saw the other KLVM sprinting toward him at high speed across the gray, powdery plateau. Yanin’s robot dodged from side to side and then dropped into cover behind the south side of a large Chinese Mă Luó spacecraft about a hundred meters behind him. Their three-meter-tall fusion power reactor sat near one of its landing legs.
From where they each crouched now—roughly halfway between the base’s habitat module and their chain of two radar emplacements and the plasma rail gun mount out near the edge of the rim wall—Lavrentyev and Yanin could cover most of the plateau. There were a few blind spots, mostly behind other landers, but their fields of fire covered most of Korolev’s key installations. Best of all, anyone who wanted to take a shot at them would have to come out into the open.
“Now what?” Yanin asked quietly.
“Now we wait,” Lavrentyev replied. “We’ll let the Americans come to us.”
“Sentinel Lead, this is Korolev Base,” Liu’s excited voice suddenly blared over the com circuit. “Small radar contact! Along the eastern crater rim, north-northeast of your current position!”
Startled, Lavrentyev looked in that direction . . . and swore. One of the other cargo landers blocked his view of that section of the rim wall. He shook his head in consternation. Another age-old military maxim had proved true. His “brilliant” plan to hold their ground and fight from cover hadn’t survived first contact with the enemy. He jumped up, readying his autocannon. “Yanin! Come with me!”
Brad McLanahan clambered awkwardly up the last few yards of the slope and scrambled out onto the plateau. He dropped to one knee and scanned his surroundings. Damaged sensors created patches of darkness across his field of vision. But he could still see well enough to make out a bleak landscape dotted with grounded spacecraft, a weird-looking, off-white cylindrical habitat module, and, most important of all, the three raised mounds of dirt and rock topped by the enemy’s radars and plasma rail gun.
Microwaves suddenly lashed his CLAD. Through the neural link, the sensation translated into something like needles stabbing his chest. Warning, X-band radar has locked on, his computer reported.
“Ah, crap,” Brad muttered to himself. He’d hoped to come in under that radar emplacement’s horizon . . . but his navigation system had fritzed out a couple of minutes ago and he’d obviously misjudged his exact position. This robot was dying under him, as system after system shut down—either because of damage or because its power demands were too high for the juice left in his surviving batteries and fuel cells. On the other hand, he finally had a clear line of sight to their mission’s primary target.
He raised his 25mm autocannon. His computer silhouetted the stubby cylinder and starfish-shaped supercapacitor array of the Russian plasma rail gun. Without waiting, he squeezed off a shot. And another. And then, shifting his aim slightly, he fired a third time . . . all in fractions of a second. Three brief, blue-tinted flashes strobed across his vision.
Hit twice, the plasma gun’s cylindrical firing tube shattered. Brad’s third armor-piercing round tore through the weapon’s supercapacitors. They blew up. A huge orange flash lit the plateau—temporarily overloading his damaged visual sensors. When they cleared, Brad saw that the plasma gun had been turned into a heap of half-melted slag.
“Not exactly an earth-shattering ka-boom,” he said with satisfaction. “But it’ll do.” He opened a secure channel to Nadia’s robot. “Wolf Two to Three, the enemy’s plasma gun is kaput.”
Warning, movement alert, his computer blurted. Two hostiles to the right front. Range close, two hundred yards. The enemy combat machines had suddenly appeared out of one of his sensor blind spots.
“Damn it,” Brad growled. He swung his autocannon toward the charging Russians. Too late. They were already firing their own weapons.
A series of hammer blows across his chest and arms smashed him backward. He toppled over the edge of the crater rim in a spray of torn armor. As the robot tumbled and rolled down the steep slope in a boiling avalanche of loose rock and dust, he was slammed against the sides of the cockpit—thrown around like a rag doll tossed into a blender. Red failure warnings shrieked through his dazed, pain-filled mind. Total hydraulic system failure. Fire control system inoperative. Life-support systems failure. Neural link deteriorating. Multiple hull breaches.
“Oh, Christ,” Brad mumbled, barely conscious. Now he could hear the high-pitched whistle of his oxygen venting out into space. He fumbled desperately for the helmet he’d stowed somewhere in the cockpit . . . just as his neural link went dead . . . and everything went black.
Lavrentyev slewed to a halt next to the edge of the rim wall and peered over. The American combat robot lay motionless in a twisted heap several hundred meters down the slope, half-buried by the debris torn loose by its uncontrolled fall. Quickly, he queried his KLVM’s sensors. Power readings?
None, the computer assured him.
“Did we kill it?” Yanin asked. The younger cosmonaut had his robot facing back the way they’d come, ready to open fire at the first sign of movement anywhere among the spacecraft and other installations dotting the plateau.
“We did,” Lavrentyev answered. He breathed out in relief. “That one’s just wreckage. It’s no longer a threat.”
“So that’s one down,” Yanin said. “Out of how many?”
Lavrentyev shrugged, feeling more confident now. The American war machines were not invincible after all. “They couldn’t have crammed very many of those robots inside their lander,” he pointed out. “Maybe only two total.”
As if to prove his point, Liu broke into their circuit again. “Korolev Base to Sentinel Lead. We just picked up a new contact.”
“Where?”
“Somewhere inside the base,” the taikonaut told him. “Possibly over by Chang’e-Ten’s descent stage in the southwest corner of the plateau. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get a lock before it faded out.”
Lavrentyev and Yanin both dropped prone. If there was another enemy combat machine on the loose, they wanted to present as small a target as possible. “We’ll move in your direction, Major,” he radioed. “Keep your eyes open.”
“Yes, sir,” Liu agreed. But then he snarled, “Tā mā de! Damn it! My radars just went down!”
Lavrentyev swiveled toward the radar emplacements along the crater wall. Both arrays were collapsing in slow motion. They’d obviously been hit several times each by armor-piercing and high-explosive rounds. He jumped to his feet and waved Yanin upright. “Let’s go, Captain,” he snapped. “We need to hunt this marauder down and destroy it, before it wrecks the whole fucking base around us!”
Together, the two Russian war robots darted south—still being careful to use every available piece of cover.
Nadia glided back behind the Chinese lander descent stage. She slid her autocannon back into her weapons pack and then reactivated her camouflage systems. Life-support capability down to twenty hours, her computer warned. At current settings, stealth systems will consume all available power in less than one hundred seconds.
Inside the darkened cockpit, tears slid down Nadia’s face. Impatiently, she brushed them away with her hand, a motion eerily imitated by the robot she piloted. Grieve later, she told herself angrily, if there is a later. Her task now was to kill the men and machines who had just destroyed the man she loved.
Filled with renewed determination, she sprinted north across the plateau, heading for the rear of the enemy’s habitat module. On her display, blips appeared and disappeared as her thermal sensors picked up heat sources weaving in and out among the landed spacecraft. Very good, she thought coldly. Lured by her destruction of their radars, the Russian war machines were coming this way.
Nadia reached the corner of the habitat module and crouched down in the deep, dark shadow it cast. Through her link with the computer, she deactivated the thermal tiles and chameleon camouflage across her robot’s legs and lower torso. That would conserve at least some power while she lay in wait for those she’d marked as prey.
And then she saw the two Russian robots. Tall, with spindly arms and legs, and topped by eyeless spheres crowded with sensor antennas, they stalked into view—prowling across the dull gray lunar surface with menacing grace. They slowed and then stopped, their torsos and heads swiveling in different directions as they sought her out. They were approximately a hundred yards from her position, near one of the big Chinese cargo landers. They were very close to an upright three-meter-tall metal cylinder erected at the lander’s base. Conduits snaked away from the cylinder to different installations across the base perimeter. It glowed brightly in her thermal sensors. Data indicates that is probably the enemy fusion power plant, her computer told her helpfully.
“Tak, wiem,” she said softly. “Yes, I know.”
Slowly, Nadia eased her electromagnetic rail gun out of her pack. Powering it up would instantly reveal her position, so she needed to wait for precisely the right moment . . . aware all the while that her batteries and fuel cells were draining at a rapid pace.
The solution to the tactical problem she faced was simple on the surface, but remarkably complex in its execution. If the Russian robots hunting her had separated, she could have destroyed them one by one, from ambush. But these two were operating as a fighting pair, staying close to each other for mutual support. With any of the weapons available to her, she could destroy one of the two enemy machines . . . but that would give its partner ample time to kill her in turn. The question, then, was how to eliminate both of them with a single shot.
Nadia’s eyes narrowed down to slits as she watched the Russians trying to decide their next move. Quick staccato beeps pulsed through her headset, indicating that they were talking to each other. Like their American equivalents, the robots’ radio transmissions were first encrypted and then compressed into millisecond-long bursts. Plainly they were reluctant to move away and expose the base’s vital fusion reactor to her attack. Slowly, the enemy war machines converged, moving to within a couple of yards of each other.
Close enough, she decided tightly. She flicked on the power to her rail gun and sighted down its short barrel.
Alerted by the strong electromagnetic signature suddenly picked up by their sensors, both Russians spun in her direction. Their weapons lifted.
“Too late,” Nadia snarled. “Far too late.” She squeezed the trigger. A burst of sun-bright white light flared as the rail gun sent its projectile slashing across the intervening space at Mach 5. It streaked right between the two enemy robots and tore through the thick-walled fusion reactor.
She whirled away and threw herself prone.
When the reactor’s magnetic containment field ruptured, plumes of helium-3/deuterium fusion plasma erupted—spewing outward for a brief microsecond before they cooled and dissipated. But in that almost infinitely short moment, the two Russian war machines were caught amid temperatures above one hundred million degrees Fahrenheit, hotter than those found at the core of the sun itself. When the enormous glare faded, there was nothing left for yards around where the reactor had been—only a cooling circle of glass and fused metal.
Fifty
Korolev Base
A Short Time Later
Weeping openly now, Nadia stalked through the remains of the Sino-Russian base. Periodically, she stopped to destroy pieces of enemy equipment—automated rovers and inflatable tanks containing oxygen, water, and hydrogen—with her autocannon. She’d already summoned Peter Vasey to fly here to this place of death and desolation. What she hadn’t yet decided was whether she would board the Xeus when it arrived, or remain here, waiting to join Brad in death.
Despite the robot’s sensors, sorrow had narrowed her world. She moved on, conscious only of targets yet to be destroyed and the wreckage she had already left behind. And so she was taken completely by surprise when an ever-more-urgent warning flashed across her neural link with the machine.
Hostile movement alert, the computer signaled, somehow sounding desperate despite its cool, emotionless tone. Six o’clock low. Threat level extremely high.
Startled, she reset her visual sensors to look directly behind her robot. And there she saw the two men in bulky EVA suits. One Chinese taikonaut was down on one knee, with a launch tube on his shoulder, ready to fire. The other stood at his side, with another of the tubes slung over his shoulder. Weapon is a Hóng Jiàn-12, infrared-homing antitank guided missile, the computer reported.
They must have been hiding inside the base’s habitat module, Nadia realized, suddenly angry at her own stupidity. She had left the inflated habitat untouched in her rampage across the plateau, knowing that she would need to set explosives to breach its half-meter-thick walls. It was a mistake that was going to kill her. And it was also going to kill Peter Vasey, since the base’s surviving crewmen had another antitank missile to use against the Xeus lander when it came within range.
Knowing she would be too slow, no matter how fast she moved, she started to spin toward the Chinese missile crew . . . and then stopped.
The kneeling taikonaut’s space helmet exploded. Already dead, he jerked forward, falling slowly in the moon’s low gravity. The other Chinese crewman turned in surprise and then folded over. A huge fountain of blood, black in the weird half-light, erupted from the hole drilled through him.
Nadia’s eyes widened in amazement as an astronaut wearing a silver carbon-fiber space suit limped slowly into view. With a gesture of disgust, he tossed away the pistol he’d just fired twice and headed in her direction. Weapon is a Russian-made Vektor SR-1M 9mm pistol captured by Major McLanahan during the capture of Mars Station almost two years ago, her computer announced.
“My God,” she whispered. “Brad?”
“Yeah, it’s me,” she heard a familiar, pain-filled voice say over the radio.
Unable to speak for the moment, she stumbled toward him, with her CLAD’s large, armored arms held open.
“Whoa there,” Brad said, backing away a bit with a hand held up in caution. “Please, please, please . . . do not hug me . . . at least not just yet.” Through his helmet visor, she saw his familiar, crooked grin. “Especially not while you’re still wearing that big-ass robot. Because I think I cracked a few ribs falling halfway down that damn rim wall.”
Now it was Nadia’s turn to smile. “You have a bad habit of making me think you might be dead, Brad McLanahan.”
“True,” he admitted. “But I promise it’s a habit I’m going to try real hard to break from here on out.”
Over the radio, they both heard Peter Vasey’s voice calling. “Wolf Two and Wolf Three, this is Lunar Wolf One. I’m approximately two minutes out from your location. Since it looks as though you’ve made a bit of a mess of things, could one of you find me a safe place to set this beast down?”
Aboard Lunar Wolf One, Departing Engel’gardt Crater
Two Hours Later
Strapped awkwardly into the lander’s rightmost seat, Brad listened to Vasey run through his pre-liftoff checklist. Not even counting his own injuries, both he and Nadia were physically exhausted and emotionally numbed by the battle they’d just fought and won—and only by the narrowest of margins. Neither of them was in any fit state to argue with the Englishman when he’d told them he’d be handling the outbound flight on his own.
“Main engine on standby,” Vasey announced. “Thrusters are go. Flight control and lunar navigation systems are go.” He turned his head, checking over his passengers with a faint smile. “We are go for liftoff. Any unfinished business you two need to take care of before we spread our wings and fly?”
Brad shook his head tiredly. “Not me, brother.”
“I, too, am ready to leave,” Nadia confirmed. She reached out and took Brad’s hand, holding on tight as if she never intended to let go.
With a satisfied nod, Vasey tapped his control panel. Seconds later, the Xeus lifted off from the plateau—riding thruster plumes that carried it higher in a swirling cloud of dust. Behind them, bright flashes flickered across the high crater rim as the demolition charges they’d rigged to destroy their CLADs and the Sino-Russian habitat detonated in sequence.
Several thousand feet above the surface, the Englishman lit their main rocket engine, throttling up slowly to spare Brad’s cracked ribs for as long as possible. Steadily, the lander accelerated, climbing higher on its way into orbit around the moon.
