Ian Douglas - Luna Marine

Together, they hurried up the ramp and squeezed through into the airlock, where First Squad was waiting.

Seventy seconds later, Dow radioed a crisp warning, then Kaitlin’s knees almost gave way as the LSCP boosted skyward from the crater rim.

Forza di Intervento Rapido

Picard Base, The Moon

0921 hours GMT

Capitano Arnaldo Tessitore, of the FIR’s Forza Spazia rose from behind the shelter of the excavation he’d been crouching in, holding his imager to his visor. The second enemy landing craft was rising from its hiding place, a clear and easy target less than eight and a half kilometers away. “Zhang!” he shouted. “Target…above the crater rim!”

“I have, Captain,” the PRC lieutenant replied in his thickly accented Italian. Tessitore listened as Zhang sing-songed a barrage of orders in Mandarin to the Chinese soldiers who’d just arrived at Picard aboard the Millénium, and wished again the mission planners back in Geneva had made up their Lunar Expeditionary Force out of troops from a single country. Too many nationalities, too many languages might have been great for the public image of a truly United Nations, but it guaranteed confusion and misunderstanding.

Two PRC troops shouldering massive Type 80 launchers rose to their feet, loosing their missiles in almost the same silent instant of flame. One of the men pitched backward a second later, freezing vapor spilling from a black-ringed hole low and in the center of his suit’s cuirass, a victim of the all-too-deadly and accurate laser fire from the nearby trenches; the shot was too late to stop the launch, however. Twin stars, bright as worklights, zig-zagged away toward the rising spacecraft.

Long before the missiles could hit their target, however, the American craft had vanished below the crater rim, moving under full thrust back toward the west.

Tessitore blinked, lowering the imager. They were retreating, flying back the way they’d come! The missiles, their radar lock broken, detonated in a pair of flashes against the crater rim.

Had that last laser shot really come from the trenches near the crashed ship? Or had it come from higher up and to the left, from the crater rim? No…it must have been from the crashed vehicle. The enemy wouldn’t have abandoned a laser team up on that ridge, with only their backpack PLSS units to keep them breathing.

“Captain. We should use chance! Hit enemy now!”

“Affermativo, Tenente.” He’d been holding off, hoping to break the enemy with the sheer overwhelming force of massed firepower from prepared positions, or wait for their air supplies to give out while his own troops recharged, a few at a time, in the habs, or, at worst, to work forward through the labyrinth of trenches…but Zhang was right. Enemy reinforcements might be on the way, and they had to strike now, before the battle spread out of his control. The bombardment of the past several minutes must have the enemy troops dazed and completely disorganized. One quick, sudden rush, and it would all be over. “Go! Go!”

“Zou! Zou!” Zhang yelled. “Kuai! Qianjin!”

To either side of Tessitore’s position, dozens of suited figures rose from the trenches and the shelter of heavy equipment scattered across the crater-floor site; all wore black space helmets, instead of the usual UN light blue, and each wore the bright red arm patch marking them as members of the Hangkong Tuji Budui, the PRC’s elite Air/ Space Assault Force. “San Marcos!” Tessitore called, summoning his own FIR troops by the name of their parent regiment, the San Marco Marines. “Forward!”

He scrambled up out of the excavation, then hesitated as his own troops rose from hiding all about him. He drew in a deep breath, then waved his Beretta M-31 assault rifle above his head. “Il più forte!” he shouted. That battle cry of the San Marco Marines had first been spoken by Gabriele D’Annunzio, speaking of the regiment’s defense of the Cortelazzo Bridgehead in 1917. “The strongest!”

Still waving the rifle, he started lumbering toward the enemy position, marked by the crumpled, ice-and-vapor-wreathed shape of their crashed lander a hundred meters away. His suit was clumsy and made running difficult, but once he got moving, it was mostly a matter of guiding himself under its inertia. He reached a trench and sailed across, skimming above a surface of fine, gray powder; a Chinese soldier to his right suddenly folded over but kept drifting forward for several meters before he finally hit the ground in an explosion of dust and cartwheeling legs and arms. Things—people—fell slowly in the Moon’s one-sixth gravity, and the wild charge held the slow-motion quality of a dream.

His heart pounding with exertion and fear, Tessitore kept bounding ahead, unable to swerve left or right or to stop, moving on sheer inertia, though the terror that at any moment his suit or—far worse!—his helmet visor would be breached, emptying his air into space, hammered at his brain. Enemy troops were rising ahead, aiming their assault rifles, and more UN troops were falling. Perhaps it would have been better, after all, to have tried working ahead through the trenches…but, no, that would have taken too long and raised the risk of having his troops pinned down as badly as the enemy was now. No, this was better. One quick rush…One quick rush…

And then still more Chinese and Italian troops were falling; one of his men, the red-and-gold emblem of the San Marco Marines displayed on his arm, suddenly stumbled as his backpack PLSS exploded in whirling fragments and fast-freezing vapor. That shot had come from behind….

He bounced to a stop, taking several long, dust-plowing steps to slow, turning in place as he came to a halt. Behind them, almost directly over the point where he’d started the charge, an American spacecraft, an ugly, angular, spindle-legged contraption, was drifting out of a black sky, descending gently toward a landing. A space-suited figure was visible in the open airlock; dust blasted from beneath the settling lander as plasma thrusters chewed into regolith.

“San Marcos!” he shouted over the regiment’s channel. “Take cover! Take cover!”

Other UN troops were noticing the incoming spacecraft now, stopping in their tracks, jumping into nearby trenches. A few dropped their weapons and raised their hands, surrendering.

The Chinese troops, Tessitore noted, continuing their blind charge, were almost to the American lines now, but there were far fewer of them than before. Zhang had started the battle with thirty-two men; fewer than ten were still on their feet as they sprinted the last few meters to grapple with the enemy.

The landing craft settled to the Lunar surface with a gentle bobbing motion of its suspension. Americans were leaping from the already open airlock, some rushing toward the shattered knot of UN troops, others moving toward the habs.

That last decided Tessitore. If the Americans seized the habitats—and there was nothing at all now standing in their way—the UN troops outside would either have to surrender or face death by suffocation as their air supplies gave out. He tossed his Beretta aside and raised his hands.

An American was approaching him, ATAR leveled, suit reflecting the grays and blacks of his surroundings in oddly shifting patterns of light and dark. As the soldier came closer, Tessitore was rocked by two startling revelations. The first was that the suited figure approaching him was a girl…her blond hair closely framing her face behind her visor. The second was the emblem painted next to the name tag affixed to the front of her suit. The name tag spelled GARROWAY in stenciled letters, but it was the emblem that startled Tessitore more: a globe and anchor, the badge of the United States Marine Corps.

His hands went up higher. “Lebanon!” he shouted, even though he knew she could not hear. “Sudan! Brazil!”