Ian Douglas - Luna Marine

Even a minor hit, if it burned through armor, was deadly on the Moon; here, the usual battlefield ratio of three or four wounded for every man dead was reversed. And in this unfamiliar environment, things could so very easily go death-cold wrong, especially in a cobbled-together, ad hoc deployment like this one.

She found herself hoping that the Air Force mission did see something at Picard. Better to call this assault off and wait for a stronger and better-equipped follow-up force from Earth. Scuttlebutt had it that Army troops would be arriving in a few days, with transports for prisoners and a ticket home for the Marines. Let them deal with Picard and its “alien shit.”

She checked her own glove-back timepiece. Zero-four-fifty-five GMT. Twenty-eight minutes until the fly-boys could report….

USASF Reconnaissance Flight

Black Crystal, trans-Lunar orbit

0521 hours GMT

“What the hell is that?” Aerospace Force Major Sam Barnes pulled back from the padded double eyepiece and looked at the mission commander, Lieutenant Colonel Jacob DeMitre.

“Whatcha got, Sam?” DeMitre said. Silver-white light flooded the cockpit, dazzling and inexpressibly beautiful. The Sparrowhawk’s CO eased himself from his couch and made his way carefully, hand over hand, toward Barnes’s console.

There was scarcely room for them to breathe, much less move. For three days, they’d been crammed into a space roughly the size of a small closet, with most of the compartment taken up by acceleration couches and consoles. The SRE-10 Sparrowhawk was a tiny ship, a sleek, black-sheathed lifting body with stubby fins and a rounded nose, designed to be piggybacked for launch to a Zeus II HLV booster. They’d boosted from Vandenberg three days earlier, whipping into a high-speed parabola around the Moon on a recon flight dubbed Black Crystal.

At the moment, they were high above Luna’s eastern limb, as viewed from Earth, almost ten thousand kilometers above the Mare Crisium and falling in a long, zero-G curve around toward the Lunar farside. Their primary mission had been to overfly the farside radio-telescope complex at Tsiolkovsky, but a last-minute add-on to their orders directed them to scope out Picard Crater in particular, and to check for UN activity in the Crisium region as well.

DeMitre pulled himself up alongside Barnes, rotating his body enough to peer into the eyepiece. “Damfino,” he said. “Never seen anything like it. Where is it?”

“Computer,” Barnes said. “Optics display, monitor three.”

The monitor flicked on, allowing them both to watch. They were looking down into a highly magnified view of the Moon’s surface, all bright silver-white light and black shadow. “Magnify and enhance.”

The view zeroed in on a tiny black shape…a sleek triangle just edging out of the shadows and into the brilliant light of the Lunar sunrise.

“Crossing the Mare Crisium, east to west,” Barnes said. “Looks like it might be headed for Picard.”

“Stealth surfacing,” DeMitre observed. “On that heading, he could be coming from Tsiolkovsky. Okay. I’ll phone it in.”

A warning chime sounded, electronic and urgent. “Uh-oh,” Barnes said, turning. “We’re being painted! Looks like target-lock radar.”

“S’okay. We’re stealthy, too. But I wonder who’s curious…and why. Recorders going?”

“Affirmative. The paint’s at two-nine-zero and rising.” The best stealth materials and geometries in the world couldn’t absorb or misdirect that strong a pulse. “Damn! It’s strong. Real strong! I think they may have made us, stealth or no stealth.”

“Yeah. I got that feeling. Who’s ‘they’?”

“Shit! I think it’s from Tsiolkovsky.” He brought up a graphics display showing the Moon’s principal features. Tsiolkovsky was still deep within the Lunar night, but it was above the Sparrowhawk’s horizon, in direct line of sight. A red light showed on the graphics, at the top of Tsiolkovsky’s central peak, marking the radar source.

“But radar that strong?” DeMitre hesitated, then groaned. “Ah! The old Big-T radio telescope. That could put out one hell of a tight beam.”

“Roger that. And they’ve got us right in their—”

The positron beam struck the Sparrowhawk in that instant, searing through the hull of the reconnaissance space-craft like a blowtorch through paper, antimatter and matter combining in a brief, unholy alliance of mutual annihilation, generating an intense burst of high-energy radiation…heat, light, X rays, and gamma rays.

The burst was instantly lethal to both Barnes and DeMitre. Although they never had a chance to radio a warning to Space Command Headquarters, the high-energy shriek of their disintegrating spacecraft was picked up by Aerospace Force sensors in Low Earth Orbit just over a second later.

WEDNESDAY, 9 APRIL 2042

LSCP-44, The Moon

0553 hours GMT

Sergeant Frank Kaminski stood in line with the other members of his squad, waiting to file aboard the spindle-legged, insect-shaped bulk of LSCP-44. The ugly little transport, a Landing Space Craft, Personnel in official nomenclature, but a ferry bug in normal usage or, more often yet, simply a bug, had been designed twenty years earlier to haul personnel and cargo from Earth orbit to the Moon and back in reliable, if less than lavish, efficiency. The Marines had bought eight of the rugged little transports during the last fiscal year and adapted them to the impromptu role of Lunar assault craft.

In Kaminski’s opinion, that was roughly on a par with sticking a popgun on a garbage scow and calling the thing a battleship. The old hull number 44 had been left painted below its faceted cockpit sponson, at least partly as a bit of false intelligence, but he wondered if the UN could possibly be concerned about the appearance of forty-some bugs that looked more like child’s snap-together toys than Marine assault craft.

“Hey, Ski,” Lance Corporal Roger Liddel called over the squad channel. “So what’s the word on the skipper? Is she really ‘Sands of Mars’ Garroway’s kid?”

“That’s ay-firmative.”

“Yeah,” Sergeant Timothy Papaloupolis added. “And Ski, here, has a straight shot at her, ’cause he was with her dad on Mars!”

“No shit, Sarge?” PFC Jordy Rawlins asked. He was new to the unit, one of five newbies who’d transferred in two days before launch. “The guys said you was on the Valles March, but I didn’t believe it.”

“I was there.” Funny. He felt a little reluctant to talk about it now, even with his squadmates. “Wasn’t as big a deal as the news downloads make out.”

“Huh.” Rawlins sounded impressed. “You see any alien shit while you were there?”

“A little. Most of it was too damned big to think of it as alien stuff, though. More like…I dunno. Big, funny-shaped mountains.”

“Yeah, but you got to see the Cave of Wonders, didn’t you?” Lance Corporal Michael Klinginsmith asked. “All the Net DLs’ve been full of that stuff.”

“Television, live from the stars,” Pap said, laughing.

“I…saw it.” Yeah, but he didn’t like thinking about it. Some of those…things he’d seen in the big, spherical chamber had turned his stomach and set the skin on the back of his neck crawling. Even now, some he could remember with crystalline clarity. Others had been so strange he remembered little at all, save a vague impression of color or texture. There’d been nothing about them that the human mind could recognize and seize as its own.

If that first brief and tentative glimpse had been anything to go by, extraterrestrials were…alien, nothing at all like the prosthesis-clad actors and humanoid digital constructs so popular on the science-fiction channels.