Ian Douglas - Luna Marine

“My people,” Warhurst replied, “are at Fra Mauro, with orders to conduct a snap raid at Picard. That’s twenty-five hundred kilometers away from Tsiolkovsky, across some of the roughest, most mountainous terrain on the Moon.”

“They have lobbers. Landing modules,” the SECDEF pointed out. “If the enemy is developing their own AM craft, then we are in a race. We must know.”

“Well, having the Marines trek across twenty-five hundred kilometers of Lunar wilderness seems to me to be out of the question,” Turner said. “But they may find some intel that’ll help us at Picard. Billaud might know what’s happening on the farside.”

“Long shot, General,” Admiral Gray said.

“Hell, long shots are all we have, right now.”

“The big question is whether the enemy’s waiting for my people at Picard with something they can’t handle.” Warhurst cocked his head, nailing Walker with a look. “Colonel? Anything at all about UN forces in Crisium? Ship landings? Transports from other Lunar bases?”

“None, General,” Walker replied. “We assume the Sparrowhawk crew was making their observations of the area when the laser took them out.”

“Then they’re going in blind.”

“We’re all blind on this one, General Warhurst,” Turner replied. “I’d say all we can do is send them in and see what they find at Picard.”

“What if the Sparrowhawk was shot down to cover UN deployments at Picard?” Admiral Gray said. “They could be walking into a trap.”

“We at least should warn them,” Warhurst said, “that Black Crystal was shot down.”

“I would strongly recommend against that,” Arthur Kinsley, the director of Central Intelligence said. “The Marines must reach Picard if we’re to have a chance of capturing Billaud. What can we tell them? To be careful? I’m sure they know enough to keep their heads down! And we do not want to tip our hand to the UN, to let them know how much we know…or guess.”

Harrel rapped the tabletop, commanding attention. “You will tell them, General Warhurst, that they are clear to proceed.”

“But, sir. We don’t know—”

“You will tell them, General. We need that information. And we need Billaud. The possibility that the UN is running an AM project of their own merely makes the acquisition of that information even more imperative. I’m sorry, but I see no way around it.”

As the debate continued, Walker dithered for a moment over whether to stay at the podium or return to his seat. He decided on the latter, quietly walking around the table and resuming his seat. There was nothing more in the way of hard information to convey, and it was clear that the discussion had swept well beyond the parameters of his report.

He wondered, though, what the Marines would think about being sent into their objective blind…sent in without even knowing that they were blind.

LSCP-44, The Moon

0643 hours GMT

Kaitlin climbed up the ladder from the LSCP’s cockpit. It had been over an hour now since they’d filed aboard, and the mounting tension within the craft’s steel bulkheads was as thick as week-old bottled air. The cockpit was a cramped and claustrophobic space, wedged in among instrument consoles and all but filled by the side-by-side couches for the module’s pilot and the mission commander.

The right-hand seat was empty, and Kaitlin pulled herself into it. Lieutenant Chris Dow sat in the other seat, completing the prelaunch checklist.

“We’ve got clearance, Garry,” Dow told her. “We’re go for immediate liftoff.”

“About damned time! What did they say about the target?”

“Not a thing. Just, ‘Proceed with op.’”

“That’s it? Proceed with op? Nothing else?”

“Not a word. I guess we can assume the recon didn’t spot anything noteworthy.”

“Some updated images of the target would’ve been nice. Okay. How long to boost?”

“Ten minutes.” He flipped a row of switches on his main console. “Reactor is on-line, and I’m warming up the main thrusters now. He gestured out the narrow forward window, where a second LSCP was visible on the dusty regolith outside. “Gotta coordinate with Becky, of course. She’s on track for liftoff two minutes after us.”

“I’ll pass the word, then.”

He tapped the commo console. “You can plug in from here.”

“Thanks. I’d rather do it in person.”

Not that “in person” meant very much, when every Marine in her platoon was suited up anyway, with all orders and announcements coming in through the platoon ops channel. Still, she wanted her people to know her as a person, someone with them, and not as a disembodied voice on the IC.

Stepping off the ladder, she turned and faced the double row of waiting, space-suited Marines. “Ten minutes, people. The mission is go.”

“Ooh-rah!” sounded over her helmet headset. “We’re gonna kick some UNdie ass!”

“Let’s get it on!”

“So how about it, Lieutenant?” That was Kaminski’s voice. “They sending us after alien shit?”

“You have the same set of orders DLed on your PAD as I do, Kaminski,” she replied. “We’re looking for Dr. Billaud. And the suits are gonna want to see what we find at Picard. Any other questions?”

“Yeah, Lieutenant. Is it true this place is named after a spaceship captain in that old flat-TV epic?”

“As far as I know, Picard was a seventeenth-century astronomer,” she replied, laughing. “Accurately calculated the length of one degree of meridian on Earth, among other things. Anything else? Okay. Next stop, Picard!”

Eight minutes later, in a silent spray of billowing, Lunar dust, the LSCP bug lifted into the black Lunar sky.

WEDNESDAY, 9 APRIL 2042

LSCP-44, Call sign Raven

Mare Crisium, The Moon

0905 hours GMT

A lobber hop on the Moon was nowhere near as violent as the liftoff from Vandenberg had been—or even the mildly bone-rattling three-G boost from LEO into trans-Lunar injection. The LSCP’s main engine was a Westinghouse-Lockheed NTR that superheated water into a high-speed plasma. Thin and sun-hot, the plasma was invisible—no rocket blasts or licking flames—and constant, providing a slow but steady shove that lofted the bug into a low, Lunar suborbital path. Precisely controlled in short bursts, the jets allowed the bugs to skim the cratered, gray landscape at an altitude of less than three kilometers, terrain-hugging to avoid enemy radar. The acceleration was gentle, punctuated from time to time by another nudge from the main thrusters, or the slighter, more unpredictable bumps from the attitude-control jets.

Kaitlin stood in the meter-wide space just behind and to the right of the pilot’s acceleration couch, stooping to watch the smoothly sculpted landscape unfold ahead through the bug’s angular, greenhouse canopy, comparing the view from time to time with the various computer graphics and schematics displayed on the main console’s monitors. At Fra Mauro, the sun had been almost overhead, and the terrain had been silver-gray. Here, with the sun just above the western horizon at their backs, the regolith had taken on a redder, warmer appearance, one where long shadows made every hollow and depression, every rock and boulder and cliff face stand out in diamond-hard relief.

“We’re coming up on the Crisium Ringwall,” Dow said. “Over the top, and then we’ll see if they’re watching for us.” He reached out and tapped a readout on a console on the right side of the cockpit with a forefinger. “You might keep your eye on this one. Threat warning.”

“Roger that,” Kaitlin replied. Half an hour before, they’d drifted silently through the skies of the Mare Tranquillitatus, just north of Tranquillity Base, the old Apollo 11 landing site. Someday, she imagined, the place would be a museum, but there was nothing there now but the LEM’s descent module, some scientific instruments and mission castoffs, and a launch-toppled American flag.