Ian Douglas - Luna Marine

LSCP-44, Call sign Raven

Picard Base, The Moon

0924 hours GMT

Kaitlin held her ATAR pointed at the man’s chest, her eyes widening as she saw the crest affixed to his left breast and his sleeve—a gold lion on a distinctive red backing. Until this moment, she’d not known that the enemy included elements of the San Marco Marines. His mouth was moving; he was trying to tell her something.

With one hand, she stabbed the key on her common controls that set up a channel search. A moment later, she heard a burst of Italian, and the words “Lebanon! Sudan! Brazil!”

“San Marco,” she said. “The Strongest.” What was the Italian phrase? She’d learned it in OCS. “Il più forte!”

Part of every Marine officer’s training was a survey of the other Marine forces of the world, of the actions they’d taken part in, of the traditions and battle honors they carried. The San Marcos were no exception. The Italian Marines had served together with the US Marines on three separate occasions: in the Lebanon peacekeeping operation of 1983, in the Sudan in 1992 to 1993, and in the Brazilian Incursion of 2029.

“Sì,” she said, straining her grasp of Italian to the limit. “Bene.”

Her prisoner straightened up, then rendered a crisp salute. Kaitlin returned the honor. Elsewhere across the desolate and dusty field, other troops, Chinese and Italian—but so very few!—were dropping their weapons and raising their hands as the US Marines came out of the trenches and began herding them together. She watched, thoughtful, as a Marine lance corporal arrived to take her prisoner away, leading him back toward the habs. They’d fought hard, these Italian Marines. The battle here had been a close-run thing.

Something caught her eye in the dusty floor of a trench close by. Lightly, she hopped into the excavation, reached down, and brushed away at something protruding from the hard-packed powder.

It looked like…gold.

It was gold, gold worked into a smooth and highly polished figurine perhaps ten centimeters tall…a standing human woman with arms outstretched, nude save for bracelets, anklets, and a necklace of some kind. And…was that writing on the base?

Standing, the figurine in her gloved hands, Kaitlin raised her eyes to the plain around her, seeing it, really seeing it for the first time. Until this moment, the Picard base had been a tactical exercise; even when she’d given the orders to Dow to fly away from the crater, descend, then skim the surface back and around to approach the base from another direction, she’d been thinking of this as a problem in tactics, of ground and cover and fields of fire. But now that the battle was over, what, exactly, had they won?

Archeologists had laid out these trenches; the larger excavations had been marked off into large grids with pegs and white string—most of which had been trampled in the fighting. An archeological dig…with golden statues of human women…on the Moon.

“This is too weird for the Marines,” she said aloud.

“Non capisco, Signora,” a voice replied in her helmet set, and she realized that she was still tuned to the Italian Marine frequency.

“That’s okay, San Marco,” she said, musing. “I don’t understand either.”

THURSDAY, 10 APRIL 2042

Institute for Exoarcheological

Studies

Chicago, Illinois

1440 hours CDT

“So, David,” the other archeologist said, cuddling close in his arms, “is it true what Ed Pohl told me the other day? That you’re now a member of the Three Dolphin Club?”

“And what do you know about the Three Dolphin Club, Teri?” David asked.

“That it’s the same as the Mile-High Club, but for zero G. What I don’t understand is where the name comes from.”

David grinned at her. Dr. Theresa Sullivan might be a colleague, and a highly respected one at that, but sometimes it was hard to get any serious work done with her around. Especially during the past couple of weeks. What had started as a fling at an archeology conference in Los Angeles had swiftly turned into something more.

A lot more.

“Ah. Well, back in the late twentieth century, I guess it must have been, the old space agency, NASA, was awfully nervous about any hint of impropriety. Their astronauts were professionals and would never consider experimenting with things like sex in zero gravity. Bad public image, you know.”

“I thought zero-G sex would attract interest.”

Slowly, he began unbuttoning her blouse. “Maybe they thought it would be the wrong sort of interest. Anyway, the story goes that some highly dedicated researchers and technicians at the Marshall Spaceflight Center, at Huntsville, decided to experiment on their own, using the big swimming pool at Marshall where they simulated weightless conditions. They sneaked in and used the tank after hours, of course, because if NASA had found out what they were doing, they would’ve all been fired. But they found out that a couple could have sex in weightlessness, even though there was a tendency for them to, ah, come undocked at a critical moment. Your motions, yours and your partner’s, tend to pull you apart unless you hold real tight and close.”

“Where did you learn all of this?”

“One of the officers on the cycler told me, on the trip back from Mars. He was a Three-Dolphins member. Even had a little pin to show me.”

“Okay, okay. I’ve got to know! Why three dolphins?”

“Well, those researchers at Huntsville found that a couple could stay together, but that it worked lots better if a third party was present, someone who could kind of give a push to key portions of the anatomy at the right times, y’know? And, as they studied the problem, they learned that when dolphins have sex, there’s always a third dolphin standing by, nudging the happy couple with his nose, and for the same reason.”

“You’re kidding!”

“Nope. It’s true! Three dolphins.”

“So…are you a member?”

He grinned. “Well…I don’t have the Three Dolphin pin…”

“I knew it! And how many were in the room?”

“Just two of us, I’m afraid. But we managed okay.”

“How conventional! So, was it true what they say about zero-G sex?”

“Gee, Teri, I don’t know. What do they say?”

“Oh, that it’s a really shib experience. Better than anything on Earth.” She giggled. “That you can both be on top at once.”

Dr. David Alexander pulled her a bit closer with his left hand, while roving about slowly beneath her opened blouse with his right. “It’s really just like here,” he told her, giving her breast a playful squeeze. “It depends on who you do it with.”

“Mmm. I would like to try it, sometime.”

“It’s kind of messy. All the sweat and, ah, other fluids tend to form little droplets that just float around in the air. It can be interesting trying to chase them all down with a rag, afterward. And even on a Mars cycler, it can be damned hard finding any privacy!” He kissed her, then shifted a bit, trying to get more comfortable on his half-seated perch against the corner of his desk. “All things considered, it’s usually a lot more convenient to do it in a plain, ordinary, Earth-bound bed, with a nice steady pull of one G to keep things in place.”

“Like, maybe, a gel-bed? They say that’s the closest thing there is to zero G on Earth. If you don’t count giant swimming pools.”

“That would work. Like a waterbed without the sloshing.”

“At my place? Tonight?”

He kissed her again. “That sounds just about perfect. Dinner first?”

“Sure. You have to tell your wife you’re working late?”

He winced inwardly at the mention of Liana. Things had not been good between them for a long, long time, not since the very early days of their marriage, in fact. Liana’s stubborn refusal to consider a divorce hadn’t really bothered him before. He’d always managed to keep his affairs discreet. But now, with Teri, he found himself wishing there was something he could do to overthrow Liana’s religious convictions and make her see that their relationship wasn’t salvageable. The thought of being able to come home at night to a woman who shared his passions, who wasn’t enmired in senseless garbage like Liana’s cosmic astronuts, a woman who was intelligent and competent and endlessly fascinating…