Luna Marine:
Book Two of
the Heritage Trilogy
Ian Douglas

Contents

Prologue

Sound did not carry well in near vacuum, but Dr.David…

One

“Okay, gorgeous. Let’s get you out of those clothes, first.”

Two

Marine Lieutenant Kaitlin Garroway leaned forward and bounced, easing herself…

Three

Sergeant Frank Kaminski stood in line with the other members…

Four

A lobber hop on the Moon was nowhere near as…

Five

The missile struck the LSCP from the right and from…

Six

“So, David,” the other archeologist said, cuddling close in his…

Seven

The Moon filled the black sky, half-full from this vantage…

Eight

“So, anyway,” Kaminksi said, “I was wonderin’ if we could,…

Nine

Jack Ramsey—Private Jack Ramsey, US Marine Corps—stood at a rigid…

Ten

There were no marching crowds today, for a change, no…

Eleven

“It is the finding of this court that Sergeant Frank…

Twelve

“Okay, ladies,” Gunnery Sergeant Knox said, grinning. He was holding…

Thirteen

David was whistling as he entered the broad, skylight-illuminated lobby…

Fourteen

“We have a problem,” the tall man said. “And an…

Fifteen

“Well, Dr. Alexander,” Carruthers said with a smile. “Are you enjoying…

Sixteen

The FBI special agent was different, this time, not Carruthers,…

Seventeen

General Montgomery Warhurst took his seat next to his boss,…

Eighteen

“I just can’t tell you how good it is to…

Nineteen

The met-boys were calling for another day with a high…

Twenty

Jack stood at rigid attention in front of Captain Thomas…

Twenty-One

The main body of 2034L was considerably smaller than it…

Twenty-Two

When the knock sounded on the door, David very nearly…

Twenty-Three

They called them LAVs, but the M340A1 Armored Personnel Carrier…

Twenty-Four

Communicating with Earth was a real problem for the Rim…

Twenty-Five

On the floor of the crater, the LAV could make…

Twenty-Six

Jack pulled his helmet down until the ring lock engaged,…

Twenty-Seven

Jack ducked through the aft airlock hatch and jumped, landing…

Twenty-Eight

“Damn, Sam. I don’t know how we’re going to pull…

Epilogue

“Lance Corporal Jack Ramsey, front and center!”

Other Books by Ian Douglas

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PROLOGUE

8 AUGUST 2040

Cave of Wonders, Cydonia, Mars

1445 hours MMT

Sound did not carry well in near vacuum, but Dr. David Alexander felt the slight, ringing vibration of each step through the insulation of his Marsuit boots. There’d been no sound within this chamber in…how long? The team’s best guess was half a million years.

“Halfway across the catwalk,” he said, speaking into the needle mike positioned close by his lips. “Twenty meters.” Over the headset clamped down over his ears, he could hear the unsteady rasp of his own breathing, the hiss-thump of his backpack PLSS. His breath, hot and moist, fogged his helmet visor with each exhalation, a white smear immediately dissolved by the stream of cool air blowing past his face.

“Ah, we copy that, Aladdin,” a voice crackled in his ears. “You’re looking good.”

Aladdin. The radio handle was a last-minute joke concocted by Ed Pohl that morning, back at C-Prime. Naming this place the Cave of Wonders had been his idea, after he’d seen the first transmissions from the penetrator robot three days ago.

It could as easily have been Ali Baba. The cavern, apparently, required a human presence to operate it, a living open, sesame to switch on power and lights and to open doors. Robots massing one hundred kilos and programmed to radiate at thirty-seven degrees—human body temperature—had failed to learn anything about the long-sealed chamber. Alexander, claiming the right as the one who’d found the cavern entrance in the first place, had volunteered to go in. He was, he estimated, a hundred meters into the vast and labyrinthine complex hollowed out beneath the Cydonian Face, and perhaps ten meters beneath the surface of the ground outside.

“Aladdin, we’re seeing an increase in heart rate and respiration. Please check your O₂ mix.”

“Copy.” His eyes flicked to the med and PLSS readouts mirrored above and to the right of his visor, checking that all were well in the green. Of course his heart and breathing were faster, the idiots! “O-two at six-point-three. Systems nominal. Fifteen meters.”

“Ah, roger that, Aladdin. Watch the hyperventilation.”

That sounded like Doc Penkov. He could imagine all of the Team members back at Cydonia Prime, crowded into the radio shack as they followed his progress. Only Devora Druzhinova and Louis Vandemeer were on the surface today, now waiting just outside the tunnel entrance in case he needed help.

The catwalk of black metal trembled harder with his next few steps, and he stopped, gripping the pencil-thin guardrails to either side until the motion dampened itself out. His heart was pounding hard now, beneath the breastplate of his suit. At last, he was inside the Face….

The Face…first observed on photographs transmitted to Earth late in the previous century by the Viking orbiters and subsequently confirmed by other robot spacecraft. The Face…enigma and lure, drawing scientists like David Alexander to probe its secrets, held in silence now for half a million years. Even now, with all the evidence of the ancient ruins uncovered on the Cydonian plain, with the uncanny discovery of flash-frozen and desiccated corpses of long-dead archaic Homo sapiens on Mars, there were some who yet thought the two-kilometer-long mesa’s vague and sandblasted resemblance to a human face to be the product of chance and human psychology.

The discovery of the Cave of Wonders had all but put to rest that notion. Sometime between four and five hundred thousand years ago, someone had reshaped a natural landform, giving it the vaguely apelike, vaguely human features that had attracted so much comment when they were first noticed sixty years before. At the same time, they’d hollowed out the Cave in the bedrock beneath the towering mesa, connecting it by a long, descending, and carefully sealed tunnel to the well-hidden entrance on the Face’s eastern corner, just below the left end of the harsh-carved canyon slash that formed the Face’s mouth.

Once, the Cave had been airtight, accessed through a series of airlocks that still worked at the touch of a gloved, human hand. But even solid rock is porous over geological time. The air within this enormous chamber—radar probings had established that it was a spherical cavern half a kilometer across—had leaked out long ago. The air pressure inside now stood at a little below ten millibars, the temperature constant at minus fifteen degrees Celsius.

Alexander tried not to look down. The catwalk seemed impossibly frail, a spider’s web of black, interlacing threads woven into a deck that felt solid and metallic enough but was hard to see against the deeper black of the two-hundred-meter depths below. Ahead, a pale light—a white-yellow glow a meter across without visible source—illuminated the end of the catwalk; the only other light in the place came from the worklights mounted on the shoulders of his suit and from the telltales inside his helmet.

“Ten meters,” he said.

“Hold it, Aladdin. Can you pan for us?”

“Roger. Panning to the right.” Carefully, he turned himself in place, allowing the camera mounted on the outside of his helmet to relay the view across a full three-sixty. He could see nothing but black; the cavern swallowed his worklights in impenetrable darkness, but the camera would be picking up frequencies invisible to his eye. Perhaps they were enjoying a better view of things than he, back at the Team HQ.

Alexander thought of Howard Carter. On November 26, 1922, after a long dig and repeated disappointments, the British archeologist had chiseled a narrow hole through a stone door separating him from another world, in a long-sealed tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. Air thirty centuries old, hot and stale, had gusted from the opening; a candle thrust through the hole flickered but remained lit, proving the air breathable.

Carter’s heart must have been pounding as hard as Alexander’s was now, his breathing as fast and as uneven, as he carefully enlarged the hole and peered through. The candle’s flame had been captured and flung back at him by myriad polished surfaces of pure gold.

“Can you see anything?” Lord Carnarvon, his partner and the expedition’s backer, has asked, close at his shoulder.

“Yes,” Carter had replied, his voice cracking with emotion. “Yes, wonderful things!”

Alexander knew now exactly what Carter must have felt as he first addressed that sealed, stone door leading to the tomb of Tutankhamen.

“Still not a lot to see,” the voice said over his headset, “even at IR freaks. Maybe this thing is a bust after all.”

Alexander refused to even consider the possibility. “I’m moving again. Eight meters.”

It could not be a bust. It couldn’t. So far, except for the automated controls on the airlock doors on the way in, there’d been no positive indication that there was anything inside this sealed, empty sphere worth exploring. Even so, Alexander had suggested the name Cave of Wonders in what was for him an atypically romantic whim; no one knew what they would find in the chamber, though speculation had ranged from living quarters for the transplanted humans who’d worked here, to some kind of operational center for the yet-unknown intelligences who’d brought early hominids to this place, to a starship, intact and filled with secrets buried these past five hundred millennia.

The last few steps toward the end of the catwalk, suspended high above an invisible floor and surrounded by darkness absolute, were the hardest steps David Alexander had ever taken. He was drawn on, however, by wonder and by Howard Carter’s ghost. Like Carter, he was standing at a doorway opening to another world.

But he still needed to find the key….

“Five meters,” he said. “I’m…I’m entering the lighted area now.” The sourceless glow seemed to hover above a widening in the walkway, a structure that reminded him, disconcertingly, of the harpoon gunner’s bowsprit platform on an old-time whaling vessel.

Light surrounded him. He raised his gloved hands, staring at the white material. St. Elmo’s fire danced from the fingertips, cold and otherworldly. His fingertips traced blue arcs in the air…

…and the cavern was no longer shrouded in blackness. From his vantage point, suspended near the center of that kilometer-wide chamber, it seemed as though he was in the middle of a perfectly spherical swarm of stars, each star rigidly locked with the geometric perfection of the other stationary stars around it. There were thousands of them, in orderly, regimented splendor. Fainter glows floated among the ranked stars, forming oddly regular sweeps and streaks and dots that might have been words, an alien script felt more than seen.

“Ah, Control,” he called, his breathing coming faster still. “Are you picking this up?”

“Roger that, Aladdin. We see…something, but we’re not sure what we’re seeing. What do you make of it?”

“I’m…not…sure….”

As he focused on one section of that far-off wall of stars, one marked by one of the alien-script words, it seemed as though one section of the spherical surface—twenty degrees, perhaps—broke off and rushed toward him, each star becoming a tiny, polished facet, like a jewel.

Or…like a display screen or monitor.

How was the illusion accomplished? Was he seeing something real? Or was it in his mind?

Alexander blinked, hard. Sweat was trickling down his face, tickling his nose and stinging his eyes, and he yearned to be able to reach up and wipe it away. His mouth felt as dry as the thin, dry vacuum of the Martian atmosphere. He was looking now at an array of tiny, rectangular TV screens, an array at least fifty rectangles wide and fifty high…or were they, in fact, tiny? He had no way of judging scale. They might have been the size of a thumbnail, suspended a few centimeters in front of his eyes, or the size of a theater’s holoscreen, each three stories tall. Without a frame of reference, there was no way to tell.

“Aladdin! We’re not seeing anything here. Can you describe what you’re seeing?”

The clear majority of those screens, he saw—perhaps two thousand of them or more—were blank. But on the others…

He picked out one that was alive with a reddish hue, straining to make out the scene he could just distinguish glowing in its depths. Abruptly, and silently, the screen expanded until it filled his field of vision.

“Aladdin!” the voice called, tinny in his ears. “Aladdin! Can you see anything?”

It took Alexander a long time to answer. “Yes,” he replied at last. “Wonderful things!…”

ONE

SATURDAY, 5 APRIL 2042

Ramsey Residence

Greensburg, Pennsylvania

1635 hours EST

“Okay, gorgeous. Let’s get you out of those clothes, first.”

“But, Jack…all of them? How far do you want me to go? I mean, I’m outside, and the neighbors might—”

“I want you naked, babe.” Not that the bikini top and tight, red slacks she was wearing now left all that much to the imagination. “Make yourself starkers. For me.”

John Charles Ramsey—he preferred the name Jack—leaned a bit closer as he watched the young woman on the flatscreen that dominated one wall of his room. She gave him a sultry pout, one filled with lust-churning promise, then started slowly unzipping her pants. She was lounging on a folding chaise next to an outdoor pool, where the sunlight turned her long hair to spun gold, and she had to wiggle a bit to get the slacks down off her hips. Jack licked his lips once, then reached down to unzip his own pants.

Before long, the woman was naked, seated in that tailor’s seat, show-all pose that Jack loved best. She leaned back with catlike grace, closing her eyes and smiling dreamily as she started gently fingering her blond-tufted cleft. “Oooh, Jack,” she breathed.

“Yeah, Sam. Oh, yeah. Do it. Do it….” His hand was inside his shorts, now, squeezing with slow, deep movements. God, she was beautiful….

“I want you, Sam,” he told her, leaning even closer to the screen. The way those big, hard-nippled breasts bobbed and circled with her quickening motions was pure heaven, especially when she reached up with her free hand and rubbed them. “Oh, God, I want you, Sam.”

“Oooh, and I want you, Jack. I want you right here, inside me….”

“Jack?”

“Mom!” He started violently, bumping hard against his desk top and nearly falling out of the chair. At the code word “Mom,” the image of Sam and her breast-heaving passion dissolved in a cloud of rippling pixels, replaced in a startled heartbeat by an elderly man with a bushy mustache, bright eyes, and a white linen suit, standing in a library or book-filled study.

The door to Jack’s room, just to the left of the screen, opened, and his mother walked in. She glanced at the screen, then at Jack, who was pulling himself and his chair awkwardly up close against his desk. “Are you okay, dear? I thought I heard you…talking to someone.”

“Um, sure, Mom. I was just talking to Sam, here. You know, Sam Clemens? My agent?”

“Howdy, Ms. Ramsey,” Sam said in a pleasant, homespun Missouri drawl.

“Oh, of course, dear,” she said, ignoring the AI agent. “I just wanted to tell you that your Aunt Liana just arrived. I think it would be nice if you came down and said hello.”

“Aw, now?”

“That’s the general idea.”

“Uh, I’ll be down in just a few, Mom. Sam here is helping me download some stuff.”

“That’s fine.”

She paused to glance at the recruiting posters decorating much of the wall space not taken up by the monitor. Above Jack’s bed, a grinning, life-size Marine in crisp Class As snapped a salute, held it, dropped it, then saluted again in an endlessly animated cycle. “The Marines Want YOU” was emblazoned across the bottom of the sheet, the letters cycling through the entire spectrum, as Valkyries streaked through the sky in the background. Nearby by was a large, full-color poster of the flag-raising at Cydonia, five US Marines in vacuum armor, hoisting a small American flag on a length of pipe against the pink sky and rusty stone backdrop of Mars. The photo was signed by David Alexander, the civilian archeologist who’d taken the photograph.

The man who also happened to be Jack’s uncle.

“Come on down when you’re ready. Just don’t take too long.”

She pulled the door shut behind her, and Jack loosed a long, heartfelt sigh of relief. That had been entirely too close; usually, he could hear her coming up the stairs, but that time he’d nearly been caught. He thought again about a pressure-sensitive switch with a PC-radio link he’d seen in World Electronics for fifty bucks. It might be worth it, to be able to flash an alarm whenever Mom started up the steps. If she ever caught on to “Sam’s” alter ego…

“It’s okay, Samantha,” he whispered. “She’s gone. But, uh, keep your voice down, okay?”

At the name Samantha, Samuel Longhorn Clemens pixel-flickered back into the guise of a blond, naked, twenty-year-old woman, standing this time in the Clemens library. Jack himself was seventeen, an age particularly susceptible to the charms of commercial AI net agents who looked and spoke and undressed like her. Software packages like Samantha—the thought of the word “software” made him vent a quiet, frustratedly longing groan—were supposedly restricted to people twenty-one and older, but it was easy enough to get around those rules, especially if you had a buddy with a valid Net ID. The net vendors, mostly, just wanted your recorded assurance that you were twenty-one so that they didn’t get into trouble if you got caught. Damn it, the United States still had such uptight and puritanical laws about sex. It wasn’t like you couldn’t go to any public beach or download any movie these days without seeing plenty of nudity, all ages, all sexes, all orientations.

“Maybe I should go ahead and get those downloads,” he told her.

Reaching up, she cupped her full breasts, rubbing her nipples between her fingers. “Whatever you say…Jack. But, oooh, I would just love it if you could download me.” Watching her, it was impossible to think of her as anything other than a flesh-and-blood woman. Net agents, however, artificially intelligent programs designed to search the Net for information and to serve as secretaries, librarians, search specialists, data valets, and even personal stand-ins, were the most visible aspects of the ongoing computer revolution, and they could look like anyone, or anything, their owners desired.

“Whatcha got for me?”

She leaned forward in the screen, drawing a deep, slow breath. “Lots….”

A window opened to the left of the screen, the image adjusting itself so that none of Sam’s lush anatomy was obscured. A succession of images—military aircraft, tanks, troops, and ships flashed across the screen window. “I have two hundred twenty-seven news downloads,” Sam told him, “dealing with the war. Eighty-five of those are cross-linked with stories about the US Marine Corps.”

“Just gimme a summary.”

“Of course, Jack. In summation of the most important stories, extensive fighting is continuing near Chapayevsk and Saratov, where Moslem troops continue their advance into southern Russia, and at Vladivostok, where PRC troops are threatening to break through the Russian-American lines. US forces entered the towns of Navajoa and Ciudad Camargo yesterday, completing operations in Sonora and Chihuahua. According to Secretary of Defense Archibald Severin, ‘The threat of Mexico forcing the creation of their so-called Aztlan Republic, carved out of the American Southwest, has been effectively and permanently neutralized.’”

As she spoke, she let one hand slide down between her legs, gently caressing. Jack’s attention was torn between her and the rapid-fire succession of download imagery. On the screen, greasy black smoke boiled into the sky behind a war-damaged Capitol dome. Other scenes showed fire-fighters and disaster crews picking their way through tumbledown rubble and smoking craters.

“Four American cities,” Sam continued, “Washington, Atlanta, Boston, and Miami, were hit by EU ship-or sub-launched cruise missiles last night. Damage and casualties are reportedly light. The president said today that—”

“Never mind that. Let’s hear the stories about the Corps.”

“Of course, Jack. In Cuba, the launch sites at Matanzas and Sagua la Grande are now firmly under US control. Elements of the 1st Marines are advancing on Habana, and reports of mass surrenders of starving Cuban soldiers have been reported by most major news networks.

“In the Russian Far East today, the 1st and 3rd Battalions of the 5th Marines, fighting alongside battle-hardened elements of the 43rd and 115th Russian Armies, repulsed what was described as a major human-wave assault south of Laka Khanka near the city of Ussuriysk—”

“Skip it, Sam. Space news.”

“Whatever you say, Jack. There are fifteen new stories dealing with space, including one cross-indexed to the US Marines and to the war.”

“Shibui! Now you’re talking! Let me hear that one, Sam.”

The window showed a stock photo of the moon, shot from space. “Reports of a military expedition to the moon by a special assault force of US Marines trained in space-combat techniques have been circulating in Washington today, but all attempts to confirm or deny these reports have so far failed. It has been confirmed that a Zeus II heavy-lift booster took off from Vandenberg early this morning with an estimated ninety to one hundred Marines aboard. Official agencies have responded only with ‘no comment’ to speculations that the Marines are bound for the UN-held base in the lunar crater Fra Mauro. There are no images associated with this story.”

“Okay. Save it, and I’ll look at that one a bit later. Anything on aliens?”

“There are twelve stories dealing with extraterrestrials or aliens, including three new additions to the Cave of Wonders database.”

“Sugoi shibui! Lemme see those now.”

“Of course, Jack. One of those stories mentions your Uncle David.”

“Hey, yatta! Play that one first.”

“Whatever you say, Jack.”

Jack didn’t mind admitting that he was space-crazy. A lot of his friends were, especially since the intriguing discovery of ancient humans on Mars had been publicized two years ago. The fact that his archeologist uncle, Dr. David Alexander, had been the sonic-imager technician on that expedition—and the man who’d smuggled out news of the discovery at the very beginning of the war—just made it that much better. And some of what they’d been coming up with, lately, from the incredible mass of data gathered within the Cave of Wonders…

His uncle’s face came up in the window, as secondary windows opened to show the red Martian landscape, the now-famous Cydonian Face, and a montage of images taken from the immense chamber beneath the Face. Jack leaned a bit closer, his heart pounding, as he looked at those images.

Images from other worlds.

His uncle was talking. “Full screen, Sam.”

“Of course, Jack.”

The view of David Alexander filled the screen, replacing Samantha’s tanned and naked body. There were a few things that Jack found more fascinating than pretty women.

“…and so we’ve been able to identify another alien race from the data we’ve brought back,” the man was saying. He was wearing a safari jacket with the Mars-Face emblem of the Cydonian Research Foundation over the left breast pocket. “Of course we don’t know what they called themselves, but we call them Race Eighty-four, because they’re the eighty-fourth distinct species we’ve been able to isolate for study.”

Another window expanded in the picture, showing a…face. It was recognizable as such, at least, which was more than could be said with many of the eighty-three other beings glimpsed on the display screens found within the Cave of Wonders. The eyes were startling, large and golden and horizontally slit by a jagged black line that must have been a pupil; the head was more like that of a fish or reptile, a mottled apple green and green-yellow, with a low skull crest and glistening scales like fine chain mail. There were no external ears that Jack could see, but there was a recognizable nose and a lipless, black-rimmed mouth in a more or less human arrangement on the head.

Lizard-man, Jack thought, heart pounding. Fish-man. It looked so human it almost looked hokey, like one of those man-in-latex monsters that still occasionally waddled through the cheaper varieties of sci-fi late movies, the ones made decades ago, before the advent of digital characters and programmable AI agents. He wondered what its hands looked like, and whether or not it had a tail.

“The other end of this particular communications link,” Alexander said, “is still working, apparently has been working for thousands of years. We think, from what we’ve learned so far, that the Eighty-fours must have been an advanced, technic species perhaps ten to twelve thousand years ago. Now, they seem to be barely above the stone age, if that. We have no idea what happened.

“We also don’t know how the communications complex at Cydonia managed to connect with the Eighty-fours’ home world, especially since Cydonia is something like half a million years old. Each of the active screens within the Cave of Wonders, however, has large amounts of encoded information, information which, we believe, includes data on that species’s language, culture, history, and biology. In time, we might be able to learn more about the Eighty-fours, as well as the other races we’ve glimpsed so far, and discover what connection they may have with the Builders of so long ago.

“What makes this one especially interesting,” Alexander continued, “is that we’ve been able to identify the home star of these people…and they’re close. Real close!”

The alien face was replaced by a landscape and a darkening, alien sky. It looked as though the scene had been shot from the open-air top of some kind of high, flat-topped building; in the distance, fading into the shadows, something like an ancient Mayan step pyramid rose from a black jungle, with stairways sloping up each face and ornate carvings worked into the stone. Two moons, crescents bowed away from the red-orange twilight glow at the horizon, hung in a purple sky. The stars were just coming out….

“It appears that their end of the communication link with Cydonia is now an object of veneration, of sorts. They have it set up atop one of their distinctive pyramids—we think it’s a temple of some kind—and so we’ve been able to watch a number of the local sunsets…and we’ve been able to match the constellations we can glimpse in their sky with constellations in our sky, changed a little, of course…but recognizably the same as constellations in our own sky.”

Lines drew themselves from star to star in the landscape, picking out a familiar hourglass shape with three bright stars across the middle. The hourglass lay on its side instead of standing upright and was slightly distorted by parallax, but it was obviously Orion; it could be none other.

“What is truly spectacular about this find,” Alexander went on, “is the fact that these, these people, the Eighty-fours, are living right now on a world circling the star we call Lalande 21185. A star that is only about eight and a quarter light-years away….”

“Wow!” Jack said, the word long, drawn-out, and breathless. Why, eight light-years was right next door as far as interstellar distances went, just less than twice the distance to Alpha Centauri. It meant that intelligent life must be dirt-common throughout the Galaxy…though the number of races represented on those display screens in the Cave of Wonders had pretty well established that.

The face of the Eighty-four reappeared as Alexander kept discussing the find. Jack found himself wondering what they called themselves…and whether they’d had anything to do with the structures on Mars.

Or with the ancient humans found there. It didn’t sound like their civilization was that old. But…what were they doing at the other end of that magical, faster-than-light communications device buried beneath the Face on Mars?

“Jack!” Another window opened on the screen, and his mother looked out at him. “Jack, are you coming?”

Jack started. Damn! He’d let the time get away from him. “Sorry, Mom! I’ll be right down! Uh, halt program,” he said. Windows closed, leaving only the bright-eyed electronic ghost of Mark Twain on the screen. The word “Mom” had reactivated his incarnation. “Uh, save all this stuff, Sam,” he said. “I’ll have to go over it later!”

“Whatever you say, Jack,” Sam drawled. “’Minds me that I still have t’run down that data on spacecraft converted to military operations you asked fer this morning. I got some, but I’m still followin’ up some leads, like the good newsman that I am.” He winked. “Catch you later.”

He sighed. He was really proud of the Samantha—Sam Clemens crossover, which he’d hacked out himself from two separate sets of vendored software. Sometimes, he felt guilty about deceiving his mom…but, then, Mom wouldn’t understand about Samantha. She didn’t understand a lot of things….

The display flicked to the screen saver his mother had bought him last year as an “educational” gift—a tedious succession of abstract animated light paintings by various modern artists. He had others that he preferred, but he let them run only when he was sure his mother wasn’t going to come barging into his room. He checked his fly, steeled himself, then strolled out of his room and onto the open landing above the house’s main den.

His mother was still seated at the downstairs computer where she’d called with her reminder. Aunt Liana, who looked a lot like her older sister, except for the short blond, green, and pink hair, sat in the conversation pit. Her eyes were puffy and red.

Uh-oh, Jack thought. Looks like houseguest time again….

“Oh, good, Jack,” his mother called as he trotted down the stairs. “Would you go bring your aunt’s things in and put them in the spare bedroom? She’s going to be staying with us a few days.”

“Sure, Mom.” Liana’s car, a bright red, yellow, and black ’39 hydrogen-fueled Apollo, was parked in the drive just outside. Wondering just what “a few days” meant in real-world time, he hauled the two suitcases out of the backseat and carried them inside and down the hall.

When he returned to the E-room, his mom was seated next to Liana, her arm around the other woman’s shoulders. Used tissues littered the rug around the sofa.

“This is it, Stacy,” Liana sobbed. “He just…he just won’t understand!…”

“I know, Li. It was like that with Doug, before the divorce.”

“But I can’t divorce David, I just can’t. P-pastor Blaine would…”

Liana saw Jack standing uncertainly at the edge of the room. “Oh, hi, Jack,” she said with a sniff and a dab from the wadded-up tissue in her fist. “Don’t…don’t mind me. How are you? How’s school?”

“I’m all done with school, Aunt Li,” he told her. “I was doing Net homeschooling, remember? Got my diploma a couple of months ago. Soon as I turn eighteen, I figure on joining the Marines!”

“Good heavens! Why?”

He was used to the question. “Well, because—”

“Jack doesn’t really know what he wants, Sis,” his mother said. “He’s been on this Marine kick for a couple of years, now.”

“Mom….”

“Why, with his test scores, he won’t have any trouble getting into just about any college he wants.”

“Mom….”

“He’s always been fascinated by space travel, of course. I’ve been telling him he should try to go to CMU, in Pittsburgh, and get into their AI and Cognitive Sciences program.”

“Mom!…”

“Why, as good as he is with computers and Net agents and all of that? I’ll bet he could get a position with the Space Agency, or maybe the Moravec Institute. They need good computer people in orbit, they say….”

Jack rolled his eyes but gave up trying to bull his way through the barrier. Once his mother got going, there was no stopping her, and she would not listen. It was his fascination with space that had led to his determination to join the Marines, and she just didn’t seem to understand that. Marines had gone to Mars, for Pete’s sake! They’d recaptured the International Space Station from UN troops, and now they were on their way to the Moon. As a computer scientist, his chances of getting to go to space were about on a par with winning the lottery, he figured. But as a Marine, he knew he had a chance….

Someday….

“Your mother says you’re really interested in all the news about the aliens, lately,” his aunt said. “I think it’s so exciting, don’t you?”

Uh-oh, he thought. Here it comes. He hated talking to her about this and had a pretty good idea why she wasn’t getting along with his uncle.

“Uh, yeah!” he said, brightly. “Real yatta! Just now, upstairs, I DLed the goods on three new species from the Face. Really shibby stuff. I—”

“Jack! I wish you wouldn’t use those ugly, made-up words!”

“What ugly? Everybody uses ’em!”

“Nonsense. What’s that, that ‘shibby,’ you said?…”

“Oh, you know. Shibby. Like sugoi shibui! It means, I don’t know. Max-slick. Iced. Um, really good.”

“And yatta?”

“That’s a real word, Mom. It’s just Japanese. Means great.”

“Seems like everything Japanese is popular, now,” Liana said with another sniff. “Ever since they left the UN and joined our side in the war. My hairdresser told me that pink-and-green geisha bobs were going to be all the thing this year.” She turned to Jack. “I heard that they’ve discovered the Divine Masters in that Martian cave, but that some people high up are trying to hide it from the rest of us!”

“I, uh, really don’t think that’s what’s—”

“I mean, it’s obvious that they’ve found something up there they don’t want to talk about! It’s obvious! David was the one who found the cave, found out how to open it. He came home with all that data, and all they can do is release a little bit of harmless stuff once in a while, nothing about who built the Face, or why.”

“I think that’s because they don’t know yet, Aunt Li.”

“Nonsense! They know more than they’re telling! David’s been a changed man ever since he came back from Mars! And the Space Agency! All they do is trot him around to one public-relations or fund-raising gig after another. Won’t let him work. And of course they don’t let him talk with his colleagues in Europe and China, with the war and everything. And so he takes it out on me!…”

Jack thought it might be a good idea to deflect the conversation from that particular topic. “They’re not hiding anything, Aunt Li,” he insisted. “I mean, the UN were the ones trying to cover things up. That’s why they grabbed Mars, back at the beginning of the war, ’cause they were afraid the news would cause riots and stuff. That’s why Uncle David arranged to broadcast everything he’d learned on the Net, so that the world would know the truth!”

Liana leaned forward, tapping Jack’s kneecap with her forefinger to emphasize her point. “I think they learned a lot that they’re not telling us, Jack! Maybe they released a little of what they learned, to mess up those other countries and stuff, but I think the real knowledge about the Cosmic Brothers and the Creator Space Gods is being kept secret! I mean, look at how the scientists…and David is among them! Look at how they attack Dr. Caulder’s work! And Sitchen! And von Daniken! All the really great men in the field are just positively vilified, just because they tried to speak the truth! I told David, I said…”

Jack sighed and leaned back in his chair. Once his Aunt Liana got wound up about the ancient astronauts and the cosmic space brothers, there was no way to stop her. As she babbled happily about flying saucers using antigravity to build the pyramids and the stone heads on Easter Island, he thought about that glimpse of a genuine alien world he’d just had upstairs…dark-stone step pyramids against a violet sky, enigmatic beings with green scales and golden eyes, a world, a civilization only eight light-years away.

It made Liana’s twaddle about ancient astronauts and godlike ETs seem like comic-book stuff. No wonder Uncle David didn’t get along with her! He had the scientist’s approach to life and the universe, a rational approach that demanded evidence, data, and proof. Liana was happy to snag any passing bit of fiction wrapped in the guise of wisdom from the ancients or the star gods or whatever and incorporate it whole into her eclectic and uncritical world-view. According to her, the star gods and cosmic brothers would be here any day to stop the war and lead humankind to a new and higher level of evolution.

God, was she actually thinking about staying here long? Jack wasn’t sure he could stand it, not for more than a day or two.

As she kept talking, a growing resolve hardened within him. In two weeks, he would be eighteen and able to enlist in the Marines without a signature from his mother.

If he could just hold out until then….

TWO

WEDNESDAY, 9 APRIL 2042

UN Base, Fra Mauro, The Moon

0435 hours GMT

Marine Lieutenant Kaitlin Garroway leaned forward and bounced, easing herself into the gently loping “kangaroo hop” that Aldrin and Armstrong had discovered, seventy-three years before, to be the most efficient way of maneuvering a space suit about the Lunar surface. Dust exploded in slow motion about her feet and legs as she bounded forward, exhilarated by speed, by strangeness, by the utter silence of her surroundings.

Shadowless hills burned in the arc-brilliant sunshine, mounds and swellings like silver-gray sand dunes, smooth-sculpted against the featureless black of the sky at a horizon too crisp, too clear, too near to be Earth’s. The sun, close-guarded by a crescent Earth, stood almost directly overhead—high noon at Fra Mauro, with another seven days to go until sunset. Small and alone in the near-featureless emptiness of the Lunar landscape, the former UN base was little more than a half circle of hab cylinders partly buried in the mounds of regolith bulldozed over them as protection against flares and solar radiation. To her right, a bulky, Chinese-built Kongyunjian transport rested on splayed landing legs in the flame-scorched plain designated as the Fra Mauro Spaceport, flanked by the squat, black insect shapes of four Marine LSCP-K landers.

An American flag, stretched taut by a wire from hoist to fly, hung breezelessly motionless from a jury-rigged mast raised above the landing-field control shack. Two Marines from Kaitlin’s platoon, Anders and Juarez, stood guard outside, like bulky black-and-white statues in their combat rigs and active camo armor. The Marines had landed, as the old saying went, and the situation was well in hand.

The stark silence was broken by the click and hiss of a radio channel opening in her headset. “Hey, Lieutenant? Kaminski, on your six. Is the scuttlebutt true?”

She stopped, taking another couple of bounces to keep from falling headlong, then turned in place until she saw another space-suited figure coming toward her from behind. She couldn’t see his face through the highly reflective visor, but the name KAMINSKI was picked out in block letters across the upper chest of his suit, while a sergeant’s stripes had been painted on his left arm. The rest of his armor, with its active camo coating, reflected the grays, silvers, and night blacks of his surroundings, an illusion not good enough to render him invisible, certainly, but effective enough to make it difficult to precisely trace his outline. “And what scuttlebutt would that be, Sergeant?”

Kaminski stopped and gave the buttstock of the ATAR rifle he carried a slap, the gesture silent in hard vacuum. “That they already have another objective for us. Something about alien shit here on the Moon.”

Kaitlin snorted. “I swear, Sergeant. The only thing faster than light is rumor in the Corps!”

“Is it true then, ma’am?”

“I don’t know yet, Ski. I’m on my way to a briefing now. You’ll know when I do.” More likely, you’ll know before I do, she thought. The resourcefulness of Marine noncoms in general in acquiring field intel on upcoming deployments and the resourcefulness of this Marine in particular in working the system were legendary.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Everybody done topping off their plissers?”

“That’s affirmative, Lieutenant. Gunny Yates’s cycled ’em through the pliss rechargers in the UNdies’ barracks. Soon as they was checked for traps.”

“Good. Pass the word for me, and tell them to swap out their PSMs now, while they have the chance. Otherwise the UNdies’ll claim we’re engaged in chemical-biological warfare.”

Kaminski chuckled. “Y’know, Lieutenant, some of the guys are sayin’ this had t’be the first time in the history of the Corps that two companies of Marines went into battle wearing full diapers.”

“Execute, Ski.”

“Aye, aye, ma’am!” Kaminski slapped the rifle butt again in lieu of a salute—such niceties as rifle salutes were impossibly cumbersome inside armor—then bounded off in a puff of gray, slow-falling dust, making for the space field. Kaitlin continued her trek toward the two-story hab that had originally housed the UN Lunar HQ, now commandeered as the Marines’ Ops Center. Left, several Marines guarded the main personnel module, where the base’s UN crew was being held until transport could be arranged for their removal back to Earth.

The battle for Fra Mauro had been Kaitlin’s first time in combat, and she hadn’t even come under fire. The battle proper had been over in all of five minutes.

Four days before, the First Marine Space Assault Group had shuttled to Earth orbit and rendezvoused with the former International Space Station. There, they’d transferred to the four ugly little LSCP-Ks, which had been ferried to LEO from Vandenberg in a pair of heavy-lift cargo transports the week before. The boost to Luna had been three days of claustrophobic hell, twenty-four Marines packed like ceramic-swaddled sardines into no-frills accommodations that barely left them room to move…and civilized notions like swapping out their Personal Sanitation Modules had been impossible.

One-SAG was organized as a special assault battalion, under the command of Major Theodore Avery—two companies, each composed of two twenty-four-man platoons. Kaitlin was CO of Second Platoon, Bravo Company, under the command of Captain Carmen Fuentes. For the actual assault, however, honors had been awarded to Alfa Company, under the command of Captain Robert Lee. Alfa had stormed the main habs, hacked through the airlock electronics, and secured the entire base before Bravo’s two LSCPs had even touched down.

There’d not been more than a handful of UN troopers at Fra Mauro in any case; intelligence had reported at least sixty elite French Foreign Legion troops on Luna, but there’d been nothing more there than a small token guard, four Legionnaires and a couple of PLA security troops off the Kongyunjian heavy transport.

Fra Mauro was not the only Lunar base, however, though it was the oldest and best-established, dating back to the 2020s. There were numerous small outposts and research stations, too…and there was also the former US-Russian radio telescope facility at Tsiolkovsky on the Lunar farside, a base as large as Fra Mauro that had been taken over by the UN before the war. There was plenty of evidence to suggest that the UN had been busy indeed on the moon during the past thirty months; dozens of Lunar transport flights had been tracked during the past two years from Kourou in French Guiana, from Shar in India, from Jiuquan and Xichang in China, and—at least until Japan had defected from the UN camp—from Tanegashima Spaceport as well. One reason the Marines had been deployed here was to find out just what it was the enemy was up to.

Two Marines from Alfa Company stood guard in front of Ops. Stepping through the low, round outer hatch of the airlock, Kaitlin cycled through, wondering as the closet-sized chamber pressurized if anyone in 1-SAG knew what was really going on.

Given a choice, she knew she would trust Kaminski’s scuttlebutt over almost any other authority available.

The inner hatch sighed open, and she stepped into the hab’s lower deck. Ops, and Fra Mauro’s control center, were up one level. Four more Marines greeted her, took her ATAR, helped her unlatch and remove her helmet, then detach the heavy PLSS—the Portable Life Support System, popularly called a plisser—and slide it from her aching shoulders.

“They’re waitin’ for you topside, ma’am,” said one of the men, a gunnery sergeant with JACLOVIC stenciled across his breastplate.

“Thanks, Gunny.” She clanged up the ladder and emerged in a pie-wedge of a room, cramped by consoles, commo gear, and computers. The first thing that hit her as she emerged from the hatch was the smell of brewing coffee. Tradition. The Marines had been in control of the UN Lunar base for less than three hours now, and they already had the coffee going.

They were waiting for her there: Major Avery, Captain Fuentes, and Captain Lee; and the other platoon commanders, Lieutenants Delgado, Palmer, and Machuga; along with the four LSCP pilots and Captain White, Avery’s number two. Twelve men and women, all still wearing their Class-One/Specials, more than filled the small compartment as they clustered about the light table in the center.

“So good of you to join us, Lieutenant,” Avery said, an edge to his voice. Somehow, he’d managed to make himself clean-shaven, a bit of personal grooming that set him well apart from the stubble-faced men around him.

“I was checking my people at the spaceport and the vehicle bays, sir.”

“That is why you have section leaders,” Avery said. “That is why we have staff and gunnery sergeants, to look after those little details for us…so that we can show up on goddamn time for briefings!”

“Sir! I—” She clamped her mouth shut, angry, but unwilling to show it. “Yes, sir.”

“See that you remember that in future, Lieutenant. I expect my officers to be punctual and BTFM. Do you understand?”

“By the manual, sir. Yes, sir.”

The others shuffled aside enough to make room for her at the table. A dozen Marines in full armor left precious little room for movement. The photomemory plastic sheathing most of the armor captured ambient light and modified its own pigments to reflect the colors and tones of the surroundings. In these close quarters, the Marines’ active camouflage armor reflected back the glare of the table and the overhead lighting and the close, dark gray mesh of the metal floors and walls, giving them a strange and alien patterning that the eye found difficult to cling to. With helmets off, their heads seemed to float above confusing masses of black, gray, and cool white reflections.

Kaitlin drew a deep breath, steadying herself as she slumped against the edge of the table. The Ops Center, broad and metallic, with low ceilings and harsh fluorescent lighting, stank of unwashed bodies and sweat. None of the people in that room had been out of their suits for the better part of a week, and the hab’s air must have been pretty gamy to begin with. She could hear the low-voiced rumble of the hab’s air circulators and wondered if they always labored that hard.

“So what’s the deal, Major?” Carmen Fuentes asked. “Scuttlebutt says we have a new objective. What’s the matter. This one wasn’t good enough?”

Avery favored her with a scowl from across the table. “You got a problem with that, Marine?”

“Negative, sir!” Fuentes rasped out. She glanced at Kaitlin, and her eyes gave the slightest of upward flickers. Avery, Kaitlin had heard, was not universally loved by the Marines under his command, especially those with combat experience. He’d come to 1-SAG straight from four years in the Pentagon, where he had the reputation of being a number one i-dotter, t-crosser, and form-shuffler. How he’d rated a combat command like the First Space Assault Group was anyone’s guess.

“Garroway,” Avery snapped. “Your people in good shape?”

“Ready to rock and roll, sir,” Kaitlin said, straightening up again from the table, pushing against the weary pain in her back and legs. Marine Class One/Special armor wasn’t all that heavy in Luna’s one-sixth-G gravity, but it had a full eighty kilos’ worth of inertia, just like it did Earthside, and dragging the stuff around, hour after hour, was a real workout.

“Casualties?”

“Negative, Major. We didn’t even get into the fight.”

“What’s th’ matter, Garry?” Lieutenant Delgado said, teeth white in his dark face. “Movin’ a bit slow today?”

“Screw you, Del.”

“Hey, anytime.”

“That’s enough of that,” Avery said. “Okay, Garroway, you and Machuga have point on this new op, then,” He brought up a USCGS map on the surface of the light table’s projection display, topo lines overlaid on a black-and-white photo. Several of the officers moved styro coffee cups out of the way. “Alfa took the brunt of the assault, turns out. Three dead. Damned Chinese fanatics. I’m holding Alfa in reserve here. Captain Fuentes, you will deploy your people to Objective Picard. First Platoon in assault, Second Platoon in overwatch and flank security.”

Fuentes looked startled. “Flank security, sir? That hardly seems necessary when—”

“We are playing this one by the book, Captain. By the Corps manual. Now, listen up.” He’d removed his suit’s gloves, and one precisely manicured finger poked at the topo map projected onto the illuminated tabletop.

“This is the Mare Crisium, the Sea of Crisis,” he said, indicating an almost featurelessly smooth expanse of darkness pocked here and there by isolated craters and ringed by bright, bumpy-looking hills, crater rims, and mountains. “It’s located about two thousand kilometers east-northeast of our position here. Roughly circular, four hundred fifty by five hundred sixty kilometers, near enough.” He touched a keyboard on his side of the table, and a white square picked out one of the two largest, isolated craters in the mare, then expanded sharply, expanding the crater until it covered the table’s top. “The crater Picard,” Avery said, pointing again. “Twenty-two hundred klicks from Fra Mauro, at fourteen point six north, fifty-four point seven east. Diameter of twenty-three kilometers, with a rim rising two thousand meters above the crater floor. As you can see, there’s some interesting activity of some sort in here.”

As Avery expanded the scale still further, a patchwork of shallow excavations, piles of tailings, and the broadly looping tracks of wheeled vehicles, startlingly white against the dark regolith, became clearly visible. Several habs and a pair of Lunar hoppers stood near one side of the heaviest activity.

“How recent are these?” Captain Lee wanted to know.

“The photos? Five days.”

“So we don’t know what they have out there right now,” Lieutenant Machuga said.

“There’s still the little matter of those sixty missing troops,” Lee put in. “I can’t believe intelligence could be off that much.”

“Military intelligence,” Fuentes said with a grim chuckle. “A contradiction in terms.”

“All right, all right,” Avery said. “Let’s stick to the point of the thing.” He tapped the surface of the table. “Earthside thinks the UNdies have uncovered something at Picard. Something important. They want us to go in and secure it, whatever it is. They’ll have an arky team here in a couple of days to check it out.”

Palmer gave a low whistle. “Alien shit, huh?” He glanced at Kaitlin. “We pullin’ another Sands of Mars here?”

Kaitlin refused to meet Palmer’s eyes but continued a pointed study of the map display of the floor of Picard Crater and the excavations there. Two years before, her father, then Major Mark Garroway, had made Corps history by leading a band of Marines 650 kilometers through the twists and turns of one arm of the Valles Marineris to capture the main colony back from United Nations forces at the very start of the war. “Sands of Mars” Garroway was a genuine hero within the Corps, and ever since she’d joined the Marines, Kaitlin had found it difficult to live up to that rather daunting image. Some seemed to assume that if her father was a hero, she must be cut of the same tough, Marine-green stuff. Others…

“This operation,” Avery said with a dangerous edge to his voice, “will be strictly by the manual. No improvisations. And no heroics.” He stared at Kaitlin with cold, blue eyes as he said it.

“Yeah, but what kind of alien shit?” Machuga wanted to know. The CO of Bravo Company’s First Platoon was a short, stocky, shaven-headed fireplug of a Marine who’d come up as a ranker before going OCS, and his language tended to reinforce the image. “Anything they can freakin’ use against us?”

Avery looked at his aide. “Captain White?”

“Sir. We know very little about any supposed ET presence on the Moon,” White said. He was a lean, private man with an aristocrat’s pencil-line mustache, a ring-knocker, like Avery. “The records we’ve captured here…well, we haven’t had time to go through all of them, of course, but the UN people conducting the investigation apparently think that these are different ruins, artifacts, whatever, from what we found on Mars.”

“What the hell?” Delgado said. “Different aliens?”

“More recent aliens,” White said. “The Mars, um, artifacts are supposed to be half a million years old. I just finished going through some of Billaud’s notes—”

“Who’s Billaud?” Lee wanted to know.

“Marc Billaud,” Avery said. “The head UNdie archeologist here. A very important man. Earthside wants us to find him, bad.”

White ignored the interruption, forging ahead. “Dr. Billaud’s report suggests that the ruins they’ve uncovered here are considerably younger. Perhaps even dating to historical times.”

“Shit,” Machuga said. “Startin’ t’look like Grand Central Station around here.”

“What difference does it make how old they are?” Palmer wanted to know.

“The astronuts,” Kaitlin said. She’d talked about the subject a lot with her father.

“Would you care to explain, Lieutenant?” Avery said.

“Well, it’s just that people all over Earth are going ballistic over what we’ve been finding on Mars. New religions. Predictions of the end of the world. New takes on the old ancient-astronaut theories. Claims that aliens were God, and that when He comes back in his flying saucer, we won’t need governments anymore, that kind of thing.”

Palmer chuckled. “Sounds reasonable.”

“It’s nonsense,” Kaitlin replied. “Half a million years is a long time. What could any alien visitors that far back have done that humans might still remember, as religious myth or legend or whatever? But if the aliens were here in just the last few thousand years, it…well, it could be a different story.”

“Gotcha,” Lieutenant Dow, one of the LSCP pilots, said with a smirk. “God help us! Jesus was an astronaut, and the Ark of the Covenant was a two-way radio tuned in to God.” Those old chestnuts had received a lot of reawakened interest on Earth during the past couple of years.

“Maintaining civic order is becoming a serious concern,” Avery said, “not only in Washington, but all over the world. What the UNdies have found here could be of strategic importance in the war. And that, gentlemen, and ladies, is why we are here.”

Which made Kaitlin wonder if this expedition was becoming a reprise of her dad’s experience on Mars. Though the UN war had a number of formal causes, ranging from US foreign trade practices to Latino demands for an independent nation of Aztlan carved from the American Southwest, the trigger had been the perception in Europe and Japan that the US and Russia were going to keep the secrets of newly discovered extraterrestrial technology for themselves. Close on the heels of that problem was the UN desire to keep the remarkable finds on Mars—especially those that suggested that aliens had somehow tampered with human evolution—a closely guarded secret. During the famous March, Major Garroway had arranged for Dr. David Alexander to publish news of some of the initial archeological finds on the Internet, a move that had started riots and caused unrest worldwide and shaken several of the governments arrayed against the United States.

That move had been instrumental in forcing Japan to switch her allegiance from the UN to the US, a shift of power that might well have marked a turning point in the war.

Of course, those reports about aliens and ancient humans on Mars had stirred up problems in the United States as well. Every man and woman in 1-SAG had signed Disclosure Oaths at Vandenberg just before the launch, swearing not to talk to anyone other than their debriefing officers about anything they might see or find on the Moon.

Kaitlin wondered what her father would have thought about that. It had been his idea to post the news of the Martian finds on the Net, to undermine the UN’s efforts to clamp down on the activities on Mars.

“The evidence we’ve uncovered here,” Avery went on, “suggests that an UNdie survey team found something important at Picard. We don’t know what. Earth wants us to go in, secure the site, and hold it until they can send in their own arky team. And that, Marines, is exactly what we’re going to do.”

He began typing on his keyboard, accessing the table’s display software to bring up two green arrows on the map. “Captain Fuentes, you’ll deploy in your two LSCPs, coming in low and from the west, along here. Crisium’s western mountain wall should shield you from radar…and in the final part of your approach, you can skim the surface and stay below the crater rim.”

“They might have an OP on the crest of the rim,” Fuentes pointed out. “Or a portable radar. That’s what I’d do, if I was in their place.”

“There is no evidence of an OP anywhere on the rim, Captain,” White pointed out.

“Not as of five days ago,” Fuentes replied, an edge to her voice. “But you can’t imagine these bozos don’t know that we’re here. Or that we might be getting ready to come gunning for ’em.”

“Your Second Platoon will come in first to secure the crater rim,” Avery went on, as one of the arrows touched the southwestern edge of the circle of smooth-rounded hills defining the rim. “From here, you should be able to apply covering fire for First Platoon’s approach, if necessary. First Platoon will cross the rim in their bug and descend to the crater floor…about here.” The map expanded again, centering on a flashing landing point between the pressurized habs and the grounded hoppers. “The tactics we employed here at Fra Mauro should work well. Twenty-four men will be sufficient to overwhelm any personnel who happen to be outside the habs, hotwire the airlocks, and gain entry. You are to use care not to breach the habs’ pressure integrity. HQ wants prisoners, not vacuum-dried corpses. We particularly need to take Dr. Billaud alive. Questions?”

Fuentes gave a low whistle. “It’ll work, sir, if the bad guys do exactly what you think they’re gonna do. In my experience, the enemy isn’t usually that accommodating.”

“Sir,” Kaitlin added, pointing. “This facility is a good five or six kilometers from the crater rim. We’re not going to be able to provide much overwatch fire support from way the hell out there.”

“You’ll have your Wyverns and two SLWs. That should be more than enough to provide adequate support.” He gave Fuentes a hard look. “Remember, people, we’re dealing with a tiny outpost here. From the number and size of those habs, we’re looking at life support for fifteen people, tops! If anyone was shuttling in large number of troops and the hab modules to support them, we’d have picked up the deployment from Earth, both optically and by radar.”

“AFSCOM has a recon spacecraft up,” White said. He glanced at the LED time readout displayed on the back of his left glove. “They’ll relay to Colorado Springs, and Colorado Springs will relay to us. We should have an up-to-the-minute report on what’s going on in Picard within the next thirty minutes.”

Captain Lee scratched the side of his face, making a bristly sound on the unshaven skin. “Sir, if I may suggest…Alfa, Second Platoon, ought to provide additional overwatch, at least as reinforcements. The UNdies know we’re here, now, and we don’t know where those sixty troops are supposed to be.”

“Well, they’re not at Picard, Captain,” White said with a thin smile. “We’d have seen them if they were.”

“Intelligence believes that the UNdies’ main Lunar force is on the farside,” Avery said. “At our old radio-astronomy facility at Tsiolkovsky. If the Air Force guys don’t report anything unexpected at Picard, we’re go.”

“I still think it might be a good idea to have some of my people in reserve, sir,” Lee insisted. “Just in case. Captain Fuentes is right. You can’t count on the bad guys to do what you expect.”

Avery exchanged a glance with White, then shrugged. “I want at least one platoon here to hold Fra Mauro,” he said. “You can have the other platoon as reserve. Not that you’re going to need it.”

“This,” Captain White said, “is going to be a stroll in the park.”

Kaitlin said nothing, but she had to suppress an icy shudder. The assault on Fra Mauro, sudden, sharp, and decisive, had been as close to a “stroll in the park” as anyone had a right to expect…and three of Alfa Company’s people had died when a couple of Chinese special forces troops had opened up on them from the grounded Kongyunjian transport with a rapid-fire squad laser.

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.

THREE

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.

“Can the chatter, people,” Lieutenant Garroway’s voice said, cutting in on the channel. Ski flushed inside his helmet, wondering if she’d been listening in long enough to have overheard Pap’s “straight shot” crack. “First Squad’s turn next. Mount up!”

The LSCP’s cargo lock was just barely big enough for twelve men and their gear to pass through at one time, so boarding was by squads. The line of armor-suited Marines started forward, each man carrying his assault rifle slung muzzle down, and at least one other weapon or load. Kaminski was lugging a two-round reload case of twelve-centimeter rockets for Sergeant Payne’s Wyvern. The bulky container only weighed five kilograms on the Moon, but it acted like it weighed thirty. You had to be careful manhandling gear and heavy loads here; a missed step and the load would keep going while you fell flat on your ass. Or your faceplate, which could be worse.

The squad filed into the airlock, then stood packed in shoulder-to-shoulder as the outer door closed and the whine of air vents slowly rose from the vacuum-clad silence. That, Kaminski reflected, was a real problem in using these personnel landing craft for assaults: It just took too damned long to cycle through the airlock…especially if unpleasant locals were shooting at you.

The clear light flashed green, and the inner hatch sighed open. The squad shuffled through into cool green light, joining Second Platoon’s Second Squad, already aboard, and began stowing their rifles and carry-on gear in the secure lockers. “First Squad, sound off!” Gunnery Sergeant Tom Yates barked. “Ahearn!”

“Yo!”

“Anders!”

“Here!”

As Yates ran down the roster, Kaminski backed his way up against one of the slanting, thinly padded shelves lining the sides of the cylindrical compartment, lowering himself carefully onto his backpack PLSS. Yates reached his name with a sharp “Kaminski!”

“Short!” he replied, but Yates ignored the play and kept reciting. In point of fact, he wasn’t short anymore, not after re-upping; that was a joke that was quickly losing its savor. Sometimes he wondered what had possessed him to reenlist during that long, cycler-coast home from Mars. Re-upping had not only restored his former rank of corporal—a rank lost on Mars during that incident with the beer—but guaranteed his promotion to sergeant as soon as the shuttle deposited him and the other Mars veterans once again on the runway at Vandenberg.

But he sure as hell hadn’t signed on for six more years in the Corps for the joy of wearing three stripes above the crossed rifles on his sleeve instead of two. Nor had he joined for the dubious pleasure of being sealed inside an aluminum can for a sardine’s-eye view of a trip to the Moon.

To tell the truth, he wasn’t sure why he’d re-upped, and the not-knowing bothered him. Hell, the first thing he’d learned when he joined the Corps was never volunteer….

The roll call came to an end. “All aboard and squared away, Gunny?” Lieutenant Garroway asked Yates.

“Affirmative, Lieutenant. All present and accounted for, sir.”

“So what’s the word, Lieutenant?” Kaminski called out. “The brass hear from the Aerospace Force, yet?”

“Negative,” Kaitlin replied. “But they must be figuring no news is good news, because the mission is go.”

“Ooh-rah!” a chorus of radioed voices sounded over the channel, in the half-shouted, half-growled Corps battle cry.

“All right, people, listen up!” the lieutenant went on. “Flight time will be approximately three hours. You will stay buttoned up, helmets and gloves.”

The chorus this time consisted of groans and a few choice expletives. “Jesus shit, L-T!” one voice called above the rest. “That’s inhuman!”

“Who is that?” Kaitlin asked. “Nardelli? Just what makes you think you can lay claim to being human?” When the guffaws and laughter had died down, she continued. “You should all have your plissers topped off, but we don’t know how long we’re going to be on the beach, so all of you lash down and plug into your umbilicals.”

Another moment of shuffling and bumping ensued in the narrow cargo space, as the twenty-two Marines, all save Gunny Yates and the lieutenant, took their places, made all too familiar by the long and deadly boring journey out from Earth. Kaminski backed up against one of the craft’s outward-sloping bulkheads and used the harnesses welded there to strap himself in tight. Hoses dragged down from overhead racks snap-locked onto connectors on the sides of his PLSS unit, letting him breathe off the bug’s life support instead of his own. Yates went down the narrow passageway between the Marines, checking the equipment and PLSS connections on each man and woman in turn.

“So, what now, Gunny?” Papaloupoulis called.

“We wait, Marines,” Yates growled in reply. “We wait for the word.”

As far as Kaminski was concerned, the waiting was always the hardest part.

US Joint Chiefs’ Command/

Control Bunker, Arlington,

Virginia

0610 hours GMT (0110 hours

EDT)

The place was a fortress, hollowed out of bedrock two hundred meters beneath the maze of offices and corridors still called the Pentagon, despite changes to its architecture and geometry over the years. Though called the Bunker by the thousands of personnel, military and civilian, who worked there, it was more of a city than a refuge, a very comfortable and high-tech fortress with cool air, pleasant background music, and the latest in AI neural-link processing to link the place with the World Above.

In two years of war, there’d been frequent calls to abandon this site, so close to the vulnerable and tempting target just across the river that was the nation’s capital, but even in the early months of the war, when the continental United States had come under sustained and brutal cruise-missile bombardment, those calls had never been seriously considered. Even if the war—God forbid!—went NBC, the Pentagon’s underground warrens were well shielded, well supplied, and capable of maintaining communications with the nation’s far-flung military assets, and no matter if the city above was reduced to radioactive slag. The Bunker was, above all else, secure.

Colonel David Walker, USAF, was not feeling particularly secure, however, as he stood up in the cool-lit, thick-carpeted briefing room on Sublevel 20, with its waiting circle of generals, aides, and politicians, and walked to the head of the room with its slab of a podium and the array of wall screens behind him and to his right. The US had managed to hold its own during the past two years, since the beginning of what was now being called the UN war, but the news was rarely good. It was the United States, the Russian Federation, and Japan against almost all of the rest of the world, now, and for months they’d been able to do little but hold their own…and in many cases, not even that. The early successes on Mars and in Earth orbit had buoyed hopes, of course, and a lot was riding now on the current Marine op on the Moon, but in most cases, in most places, US forces were just barely hanging on.

The worse the war news got, the edgier the Joint Chiefs and the JCS staff became. This place had a nasty tendency to shoot the messengers bringing bad news, and the news he carried to this middle-of-the-night special meeting was decidedly less than career-enhancing.

“Gentlemen,” Walker said, “and ladies. This report has just come through from Cheyenne. Black Crystal has been destroyed.”

A low murmur of voices sounded around the circular table. He was no more than confirming the rumor that had been spreading throughout the underground complex for the past twenty minutes, he knew, but the shock in that room as he made the announcement was sudden, almost palpable, nonetheless.

Admiral Charles Jordan Gray, head of the Joint Chiefs, fixed Walker with a hard glare. “Who destroyed it? How?”

“We’re…Cheyenne, I mean, is still looking at that, sir. The spacecraft was on the outward leg of its circumlunar parabola, approximately ten thousand kilometers above the Mare Crisium, and about to loop around the farside. We were tracking it, of course, from the ISS. This is what we picked up.”

A flatscreen on the wall behind him switched on, bringing up several windows, each with its own display. The image showing the target in visible light gave little information, a speck of light all but lost in the glare from the nearby silver curve of the Moon. Other windows showed the same picture, but at different wavelengths. The infrared view was clearest. Alphanumerics scrolled up the screen and wrote themselves across various windows, displaying times, camera data and wavelength, magnification factors and uncounted other informational elaborations.

Walker pointed to the IR image, where Black Crystal was visible as a red sliver against background blues and blacks. “We were tracking their IR signature with the big Humasen telescope at the ISS. Watch this, now. Time factor slowed, twenty to one….”

The window expanded, magnifying the red sliver. As a dwindling readout of tenths of seconds reached zero, a white spot flared brilliant against the sliver’s side; the spot grew brighter, expanded…and then engulfed the sliver in a roiling fireball of orange and yellow, a bright disk that expanded, thinned, and faded. Red and orange fragments drifted apart in ragged, frame-by-frame silence.

“My God,” the Aerospace Force JCS member, General Grace Sidney, said. Like Walker, she was wearing the new-style USAF dress uniform, a two-tone pattern in black and light blue, for space and sky. “What have they got up there?”

“Spectral analysis of the radiation showed a sharp spike at 115 keV,” Walker continued, “which is the characteristic signature of positronium annihilation.”

“Would you care to try that again in English, son?” The tall and soft-spoken black man was Louis Carlton Harrel, the president’s national security advisor.

“Antimatter,” Admiral Gray said. “The sons of bitches have an antimatter weapon!”

“Yes, sir,” Walker said. “Specifically, we think they’ve developed a weapon that directs a stream of positrons—antielectrons—at the target. When positrons interact with ordinary matter, the two annihilate each other, releasing a very great deal of energy. That 115 keV spike in the gamma range is the giveaway. We’ve known how to build electron-beam weapons for years, but we can’t begin to generate that much antimatter that quickly.”

“Was it another spacecraft?” General Lamar Turner, the Army chief of staff, wanted to know. “One hidden behind the Moon?”

“Almost certainly not, sir. The power requirements for this kind of weapon are…considerable. Cheyenne thinks it more likely we’re dealing with a ground base, one with a large fusion reactor.”

“A ground base?” Harrel said.

“How the hell did the UNdies get a ground base on the backside of the frigging Moon?” Turner asked.

“We’ve known for some time that they were working at something major back there, sir,” Walker replied. “The transport launches from Kourou and Xichang have been regular as clockwork. And…nothing much has been coming back to Earth. Whatever they’ve been sending up there has been staying there.”

“Tsiolkovsky,” General Sidney said. She closed her eyes. “What would they be building out of our SETI base? What benefit could they—”

“Power, General,” Admiral Gray snapped. “Power from the fusion plant at the site, and Tsiolkovsky’s manufactory.”

“But SETI was shut down,” Turner said, protesting. “Everybody said, with the discoveries on Mars—”

“SETI was shut down,” General Sidney said. “And the UN grabbed the radio-telescope facility in…I think it was ’35, maybe ’36? I’d bet they’re using the factory to turn out something other than telescope components now.”

“Makes sense,” Admiral Gray said, thoughtful. “If they wanted to keep something hidden from us, something big they were building, the Lunar farside would be the place to do it, wouldn’t it?”

“And the SETI facility’s fusion reactor would certainly be big enough to power a weapon like that,” Sidney added.

“The president is going to want to know just what it is they’re building back there,” Harrel said. “He’s also going to want to know how the hell they saw our Sparrow-hawk! That thing’s supposed to be the best we have in stealth technology!”

“Even the best stealth technology,” General Sidney said, “has trouble masking IR. Especially in space, where a ship has to radiate the heat that builds up inside, from power plants and life support.”

“Was that how the enemy tracked them?” General Turner asked. He looked at Walker. “Colonel? What is Cheyenne’s analysis?”

Walker gestured at the IR image on the flatscreen, now frozen in time. “If we could track them by IR, so could the enemy. Now, we knew exactly where to look, of course. Broad-sky IR sweeps can be tricky. CCDs—the charged coupling devices used in such scans—tend to have a very narrow field of view, so you have to know just where to point them. And the Sparrowhawk’s flight profile was designed to keep any radiating surfaces blocked from UN observation by the body of the spacecraft itself. But heat does leak through. Also, to be frank, even a stealth space-craft with a radar cross section the size of my thumbnail can be picked up by a strong enough radar emitter, and the Tsiolkovsky facility can transmit an extremely powerful signal. Our best guess is that the UN forces at the SETI facility were carrying out periodic short-term scans of their horizons, concentrating on probable orbital paths of incoming spacecraft. Once they had a target, they would know exactly where to aim their IR CCDs.”

“But why would they have constructed something as powerful as an antimatter beam weapon on the Lunar farside?” Harrel wanted to know.

Walker clasped his hands behind his back. This was the real bad news, the news he’d feared delivering. There was no way to do it but to be blunt. “There is one other possibility that we need to consider, ladies and gentlemen. An alternative to a major Lunar base with a weapons system with a dedicated fusion plant. There is the possibility that the UN is working on their own version of Ranger. And that they’re using the SETI facilities as a construction site.”

This time, there was no conversation. The room grew so silent that Walker could easily hear the faint, shrill ringing in his ears that told him his blood pressure was rising. Absently, almost automatically, he reached into his blue and black jacket’s inside pocket, extracting the small plastic box with its dose of a single small, blue pill.

“How likely is that?” Archibald Severin, the secretary of defense, wanted to know. “We’ve been getting reports for months, I know, but there’s been no hard data.”

Ignoring the cold stares from his audience, Walker slipped the pill under his tongue, feeling it dwindle and dissolve. Like nitroglycerin, the vasorelaxant absorbed directly into his bloodstream. “So far, we’ve had very little information to work with, sir. And no means at all of gaining confirmation, short of a reconnaissance overflight—which, of course, is what we were trying to do with Black Crystal.”

“If the UN forces are working on a Ranger project of their own…” Gray said. His fist clenched, relaxed, clenched once more. He turned to Marine General Warhurst, seated across the table from him. “Warhurst? Your people are up there now. Any chance they could manage a look-see for us at Tsiolkovsky?”

“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.

FOUR

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.

Now, they’d reached the eastern shores of the Sea of Tranquillity, and the rugged highlands separating the Mare Tranquillitatus from the Mare Crisium rose ahead, brilliant in the long-setting sun. If the UN had established a radar watch from Picard, it would pick them up as they cleared the mountaintops.

“So, your dad ever talk much about what he saw out on Mars?” Dow asked. He turned his head inside his helmet, to peer up at her through the side of the visor. The question seemed purely conversational, but there was an edge behind the words that Kaitlin had come to recognize.

“Quite a bit, actually,” she said. “But I don’t think he saw anything you haven’t heard about already on the newsnet.”

“Well, I was just wondering if there was anything else. You know, stuff the government was covering up.”

“If there was, I could hardly tell you about it now, could I?” She let the reply dangle a bit of mystery for Dow. “Or, if I did—”

He finished the old joke’s punch line for her. “You would have to kill me, yeah, yeah.”

She laughed. The LSCP pilot was fun, smart, and pleasant, and she enjoyed flirting with him. They’d talked about alien artifacts on the trip out from Earth a couple of times, and he’d been so curious about what her father had seen at Cydonia that she’d started having entirely too much fun teasing him.

“I guess the two things everyone’s talking about back on Earth are the war and the Builders,” he said, using the popular term coined to describe the unknown beings who’d carved the immense and still enigmatic monuments on the Cydonian plain on Mars and, apparently, tampered to some extent with the genetic makeup of an unprepossessing hominid known to modern scientists as Homo erectus. An archaic Homo sapiens—whose freeze-dried corpses had been found at Cydonia now by the thousands—had been the result.

“Uh-huh. Digging up the Builders on Mars helped start the war in the first place. And there were all those ancient human bodies. And the Display Chamber, under the Face. I guess people are bound to be curious.”

He snorted, the noise a startling hiss over the helmet com system. “Curious? Yeah, I guess that’s one word for it. My family back home, my mom and both dads and my sister, they’ve all been after me about nothing but the Builders for weeks now. And when word leaked that there might be Builder stuff on the Moon, and that that was where I was going, well.”

“They members of any of these new religions popping up?”

“Nah. At least, I don’t think so. Did…did your dad get to see the Display Chamber?”

“Yes,” she said. “He went inside once with David Alexander—that’s one of the archeologists who was with him at the site. He hasn’t talked about it much, though. Wish I could see it in person. They say the tapes they’ve been playing over the Net don’t do the real thing justice.”

“Yeah. Well, maybe we’ll find another Chamber at Picard. This Billaud character must be working on something pretty big.”

The mountains were rising rapidly to meet the bug, their shadow now a misshapen black spider rippling up the slope ahead as though to escape them. The hillsides facing the sun were so bright; Kaitlin had heard somewhere that the actual color of moonrock and regolith was dark, darker, in fact, than coal…but that it appeared bright in contrast to the empty sky around it. She found such facts counterintuitive, however. It looked as bright as any white beach sand she’d ever seen. Dow gave another gentle tap to the thrusters, and the bug drifted higher, easily clearing the age-eroded crest of the slope.

The threat warning LED lit up in a flashing constellation of red.

“We’re being painted,” she said. The words were calm, unemotional, but suddenly her heart was pounding inside her chest. “Looks like traffic-control radar.”

“I see it. Maybe they’ll lose us against the mountains.”

The bug was dropping again, falling abruptly into shadow as it descended the inner face of the Crisium Ringwall. Ahead, the Mare Crisium stretched away clear to the black shadow of the terminator, flat and nearly featureless, the surface far darker than the sun-dazzled highlands had been. A large crater, flattened into a deeply shadowed oval by perspective, lay almost directly ahead.

“Picard,” Dow said, checking his displays. “Bang on target.”

The warning LEDs continued to show a strong radar signal coming from the crater ahead, though the mountains behind them might well be masking them from detection. Dow gentled the controls, smoothing and slowing the bug’s descent with several rapid-fire bursts from the attitude-control thrusters.

“Better let your Marines know we’re almost there,” he said. The oval of Picard was growing larger second by second, and also flatter, until all that was visible was a sunlit smear of smooth-shaped mountains, the crater’s ringwall extending above the surface of the darker basaltic sea. The LSCP had descended to within two hundred meters of the mare’s surface, below the top of the crater rim. Kaitlin approved. If the radar was coming from a grounded ship or lobber inside the crater basin, they should have just dropped below its horizon.

The threat indicator stayed on, however. That suggested that someone was watching them from the crater rim. It also suggested that that someone was waiting for them, waiting and ready for their arrival.

“Heads up, Marines,” she called over the platoon channel. “Target in sight. It looks like they see us coming, so be ready to unstrap and bounce as soon as I give the word.”

Dow hit the main thrusters again, dropping the craft’s nose to accelerate toward the target. Kaitlin found herself twisting her body so that she could peer up through her helmet visor at the rimwall mountains as they filled the cockpit’s forward window. She knew she ought to be watching the graphic displays instead—those carried more information than the naked-eye view out the bow of the LSCP—but she found herself wrestling with the terribly human urge to see the threat directly, instead of as it was implied by the craft’s electronics. Additional red LED readouts were winking on now, indicating other radar transmitters joining the first.

“I think—” she said, then stopped. A dazzling star appeared on the mountaintop, winking on, then off with the suddenness of a camera’s strobe.

“Did you see that?” Dow asked. Apparently, he preferred looking with his eyes instead of electronics as well.

“Sure did. There…to the right a bit.”

“Your call. Pass it by, or have a look?”

“We look,” she decided. “Definitely. We’re supposed to land up there to cover First Platoon. I think we’d better check that flash out.”

“Roger that.” The bug banked right and Dow cut in the main thrusters, clawing for altitude. Kaitlin watched for a second flash, but saw nothing. It had been about there…between those two rounded peaks at the crest of the crater rim. It might have been sun reflecting from a cast-off bit of space junk from the UN arky team at the crater, but she was betting that a flash that bright had come from something pretty large—as large, say, as the cockpit windows of a Lunar hopper or a ground crawler.

“Gimme a channel to 30.”

He keyed in some numbers on the commo console. “Plug in there.”

Kaitlin pulled a commo jack from the connector box on her suit’s belt, plugging it into the console receptacle. “Eagle,” she called. “Eagle, this is Raven.”

“Raven, Eagle,” Carmen Fuentes’s voice came back almost at once. “Go.”

Kaitlin checked the time readout inside her helmet. If LSCP-30 was on its mission profile, it would still be over the Mare Tranquillitatus, shielded from UN radar by the Crisium Ringwall. A military communications satellite at L-2 allowed the two bugs to stay in tight-beamed, scrambled contact despite the mountains between them. “We’ve got a possible hostile OP on the Picard Crater rim,” she said. “TC radar and transient visual. We’ll try to take it down before you clear the Crisium wall and get painted.”

“Copy that, Raven. We’ll relay to Falcon. If you run into trouble, give him a yell.” Falcon was the call sign for LSCP-38, bringing up the rear with Captain Lee and Alfa Company’s Second Platoon. Good luck!”

“Thank you, Eagle. Luck to you. Raven out.”

In another moment, LSCP-44 crested the Picard Crater rim, angling between the two peaks Kaitlin had identified seconds before. The crater was a vast bowl stretching clear to the horizon and beyond; she couldn’t even see the far crater wall. The bowl’s floor, five kilometers below the rim, was shrouded in impenetrable black shadow, but a cluster of lights in the near distance marked the UN’s Picard Base.

And then, on the sunlit crest ahead, she saw it, an enclosed Lunar hopper with pale blue UN markings, just rising above a swirling cloud of gray dust. Sunlight flashed again from the facets of its greenhouse windows. The spindly-legged craft was quite similar to the LSCP, though designed around a square base, instead of a rectangular one. It looked a lot like a larger version of the old LEMs, the Lunar Excursion Modules that NASA had used for the first landings over seventy years before, but the resemblance was one of design specifications rather than descent. Spacecraft didn’t need streamlining on the Moon, so efficiency and low mass were the key words. Hoppers, like the LSCPs, flew on fission-fired plasma thrusters; they weren’t rated for flights between the Moon and LEO, but they could reach Lunar orbit, easily enough, and could use short bursts to hop on suborbital vectors to any spot on the Moon.

“He’s making for the base,” Kaitlin said. “He’s probably already warned them.”

“I’m more worried about him getting above us,” Dow replied. The UN hopper slewed left, rotating, slowing sharply as it hovered on its invisible jet of hot plasma and rising toward the LSCP’s height.

“Why?” Kaitlin asked. Then the answer hit her. “Oh…”

Neither hopper nor LSCP carried anything like armor. The hopper’s aluminum hull was so thin in places that a clumsily dropped tool could puncture it…and the more massively constructed LSCP wasn’t that much better. If one of the two craft could maneuver above the other, the jet of hot, charged particles from its ventral thrusters would become a formidable short-range weapon.

The UN hopper was climbing fast now, rising above the bug as the bug descended. As the range closed to within thirty meters, Kaitlin could see the airlock door on the hopper just beneath its cockpit windows; the door was open and a space-suited figure was leaning out, a figure wearing a bright blue UN helmet and aiming a rifle. She didn’t see a muzzle flash, but she thought she felt a vibration, a dull thud from somewhere beneath her feet.

“We’re under fire,” she warned.

“I see him.” Dow hit the main ventral thruster for a two-second burst, and Kaitlin felt her knees sag with the acceleration. The bug gained the altitude advantage on the hopper. A moment later, Dow angled the LSCP over, nose down, and fired again, banking slightly with the port thrusters to send the ungainly bug drifting across and above the UN hopper’s flight path.

There was no time for calculations or pulling up numbers or scenarios on the computer. The entire maneuver was strictly seat-of-the-pants, executed within the space of five seconds. As the bug passed ten meters above the hopper, Dow brought the ungainly craft’s nose up and fired the main thrusters again.

They couldn’t see whether the invisible burst of hot plasma was on target or not, but as the bug rotated slowly at Dow’s practiced touch, the other vehicle came into view a second later. Together, wordlessly, they watched as the hopper continued drifting down toward the surface, rushing to meet its own shadow…and then the two merged in a sudden, silent burst of Lunar dust. The hopper crumpled and rolled, cartwheeling in slow-motion bounds low across the surface, hurling up great, arcing jets of dust with each impact. As it came to rest, a blurring cloud of dust enveloped the wreckage, settling with agonizing slowness.

Kaitlin dropped a gloved hand on Lieutenant Dow’s shoulder. “Congratulations, Lieutenant. I think you just scored the first shoot-down of an enemy craft on the Moon.”

“Four more and I’m an ace,” Dow replied. He shook his head. “Don’t think I’d care to try that again, though.” Holding the stick in his left hand, he punched in a series of commands with his right, firing port and starboard attitude jets that thumped and bumped through the hull and against Kaitlin’s boots. The bug descended swiftly, narrowly missing a tumble of huge, gray boulders before the view was obscured by a cloud of rising dust, and the landing pads settled with a bump and a jar into the hard-packed regolith.

“Contact light!” Dow called, reaching out to flip down a row of switches. “Thrusters off and safed. Reactor to standby. You’re clear to debark.”

“Right.” She keyed the platoon channel. “Gunny Yates? We’re down. Move ’em out!”

“Copy that, Lieutenant. All right, Marines, you heard the lieutenant! We’re moving!”

LSCP-44, Call sign Raven

Picard Ringwall, The Moon

0914 hours GMT

Frank Kaminski brought his ATAR to his chest, waiting in the dark and close-packed confines of the airlock as the chamber’s atmosphere bled away. A winking red light flicked green, then the outer door swung slowly open, flooding the airlock with silvery light.

“Hit the beach, Marines!” Yates shouted over the platoon channel. “Go! Go! Go!”

He crowded ahead close behind Lance Corporal Nardelli, feeling the vibrations through his boots as the file pounded down the metal grating that served as a debarkation ramp. The regolith gave beneath his feet with a crunch felt rather than heard, like thin, crusty snow; directly ahead, the sun blazed above the shadowed western cliffs of Crisium, beneath the slender, just-visible blue-and-silver bow of a crescent Earth.

As at Fra Mauro, he felt again the mingled feelings of awe and desolation. There were no stars visible in the side of the sky near the sun, but if he turned away and looked up, an icy scattering of stars was just visible above the eastern horizon. The crater rim stretched away to either side, to north and south; with nothing but black sky and red-gray hills as smooth as earthly sand dunes as measures of scale, he felt bug-small, tiny and exposed, as he followed the other Marines across the surface.

“Jeez, what happened there?” someone called. “Got a crashed bug, here. South, fifty meters.”

“That’s a UN hopper, and we just shot it down,” the lieutenant’s voice replied. “Watch it. They may have left troops on the ground.”

“We’ll check it, Lieutenant,” Yates replied. “Okay! First Squad, check the hopper. Second Squad, deploy in defense perimeter. Let’s move it, Marines!”

Trotting easily in long, bounding strides that quickly slid into a kind of kangaroo hop-and-skip, Kaminski and the others in his squad scuffed and bounced their way up a shallow slope to the spot where the UN hopper, its thin hull crumpled and torn, lay upside down. A space-suited body, a man in a blue UN helmet, lay sprawled in his back nearby. His face, just visible through a blackened, chipped visor, was horribly blistered, as though his skin had been hit by a blowtorch. The name stenciled on a strip of cloth attached to his suit read LECLERC. Kaminski wondered who the man was…and if he had a family waiting for him back on Earth.

“What happened to him?” Ahearn asked.

“Didn’t you feel us bouncing around before we landed?” Kaminski replied. “I think the lieutenant fried ’em by hitting ’em with the bug’s main jets.”

“Yeah? Man, that’s doin’ it the hard way!”

He didn’t answer. He was thinking about something he’d read once, as a kid, about how air-to-air combat had begun when pilots on both sides, flying cloth-and-wood-frame biplanes over France in the First World War, had begun carrying pistols with them on reconnaissance flights and exchanging shots with enemy fliers. Pistols had led to machine guns…and ultimately radar-homing missiles and airborne lasers. He wondered if they were witness to a dawn of a new and similar type of warfare.

There wasn’t time to think much about history, though. A squad sweep through the area turned up bits of scrap and wreckage knocked from the UN hopper, and a portable radar unit mounted on a tripod at the top of a low hill. The footprints scuffed and stamped into the dust showed where UN troops had set the radar up only moments earlier. After a careful check for booby traps, two of the Marines began dismantling the unit; Kaminski took the moment’s respite to turn his back on Earth and the sun and stare down into the crater bowl below them.

The bottom of the crater was night black, but enough light was scattering off the crater rim to provide a little illumination. In fact, though, the lights of the UN base shone like a tightly packed constellation of brilliant stars on the crater’s floor, only a few kilometers away. Yates was standing on the hill crest a few meters away, pressing the rubber-ringed facepiece of a photomultiplier magnifier to his visor. He was studying the layout of the UN base, the bulky length of his Wyvern resting in the dust by his feet.

Kaminski dropped the reload case he was humping in the dust nearby. “Hey, Gunny. Can I have a look?”

Yates handed him the electronic imager. Kaminski raised the facepiece, positioning the small, rectangular screen against his visor. A tiny IR laser built into the optics gave the range to target as 8.34 kilometers; in the pale green glow of the photomultiplier optics, he could penetrate the night shadows easily.

The Picard base consisted of several squat, upright, cylindrical habs and not much more besides the worklights and a scattering of vacuum-rigged bulldozers and trench-diggers. Not far away were several more lobbers, plus a larger, sleeker shape, an arrowhead of stealth-jet black, sitting erect on quad-frame landing jacks.

Closer, between the habs and the crater’s western slope, the ground had been carved and plowed in a rectilinear patchwork of trenches connecting several deep, square-sided pits. It was, Kaminski thought, obviously an archeological dig of some kind. The arky teams on Mars had used similar techniques to carve trenches into the Martian regolith, sampling the layers they cut through for artifacts and cast-off bits of debris.

All the scene below was missing was people. Funny. The UN personnel obviously had had plenty of warning that the Marines were on their way. They’d had time to dispatch the lobber and set up a portable radar unit. They’d probably been warned by the garrison at Fra Mauro the moment the Marines had first appeared

Were they all inside, huddled up in their suits, waiting to see if the Marines would come in with can openers at the ready?

“Seems a bit too quiet, Gunny,” he said to Yates. “Don’t see a damned thing moving down there. Ah! Wait a sec!”

“Whatcha got?”

“That black ship grounded down there. It’s lifting!” There was no flame, but the arrowhead shape was silently rising now above a swirl of lunar dust.

“Gimme the imager.”

Kaminsky surrendered the device. Without it, he could just see the UN ship vanishing into the night beyond the base.

“Shit,” Yates said. “They’re bugging out. Wonder if they’re evacuating the place? Or…”

“Or what, Gunny?”

“Or if they just stopped long enough to haul in some reinforcements. I don’t like the looks of this.” He lowered the imager again and handed it to Kaminsky. “They gotta know we’re here, all right. But…uh-oh. Here comes Eagle.”

Kaminski turned, following Yates’s pointing arm. Another bug was coming in out of the sun, floating high, passing above Picard’s rim by at least two hundred meters. Silently, it drifted overhead and a bit to the north, descending rapidly as it cleared the rim, floating on unseen jets of plasma toward the brilliantly lit base below. Halfway down, the ungainly looking craft switched on its landing lights, casting bright circles of illumination across the habs and trenches.

Kaminski watched a moment…then lifted the magnifier to his visor again, staring down into the base. There was something…

He saw movement…a trio of blue helmets raised above the rim of one of the trenches…and the stubby, metallic cylinder of a shoulder-launched missile. “Missile on the ground!” he shouted. “This is Kaminski, I have a slam, in the trenches fifty meters from the base habs!”

Yates jerked the imager from Kaminski’s glove, lifting it one-handed to his own visor. “This is Yates! Confirmed! Shoulder-launched missile, in the trenches! They’re targeting Eagle!”

“Get the slaw on them!” Garroway’s voice called. “Yates! Get the Wyvern in action!”

Yates had already stooped, snatched up the Wyvern, and hoisted it to his shoulder, dropping the sighting display into place in front of his visor. “Clear aft!” he called.

“You’re clear!” Kaminski shot back, then slapped Yates’s shoulder for emphasis. “Go!”

Yates fired, loosing a silent gout of burning gas and strips of plastic packaging from the rear of the man-portable launcher. The Wyvern missile, kicked clear of the weapon’s muzzle by an explosive charge, shot twenty meters toward the edge of the crater rim before its engine switched on, a tiny, white-hot point of light dwindling rapidly toward the UN base.

Long before the Wyvern could cross the distance to its target, however, the UN troops hiding in the trenches fired their own missile. The slam’s back-flash was bright enough to be seen with the naked eye from eight kilometers away; the missile streaked skyward, scratching out a needle of white fire against the night as it arrowed into First Platoon’s LSCP.

The detonation was a strobe of light banishing the stars, dazzling against the night.

FIVE

WEDNESDAY, 9 APRIL 2042

LSCP-30, Call sign Eagle

Picard Crater, The Moon

0916 hours GMT

The missile struck the LSCP from the right and from below, the explosion a hammerblow that sent the frail craft lurching hard to the left, nose high, then dropped it into a spin. Captain Carmen Fuentes was standing behind the pilot, Lieutenant Kenneth Booth, when the blast slammed her against the back of the pilot’s couch.

Booth screamed, the sound shrill over Carmen’s head-set.

“Ken!”

“I’m hit! I’m hit, damn it!” He clawed at the side of his suit, where a thumb-sized hole in the tough, layered plastic matched a larger hole punched through his acceleration couch, and another in the deck centimeters from Carmen’s left foot. Air whistled from the puncture, as a cold fog condensed above it in a tiny, spinning whirlwind. The craft continued its roll sluggishly to the left, almost tipping all the way over, but at the last instant, it wallowed back, spilling Carmen against the side of the cockpit as the deck dropped away beneath her and took her stomach with it.

“Take the controls, damn it!” she shouted at the pilot. “Get us back under control!”

Booth nodded inside his helmet visor, which was already starting to fog up, and fumbled with the paired joysticks that controlled main thrust and attitude. She felt several hard bumps as he triggered the ACTs; both spin and descent slowed, but didn’t stop.

“Machuga!” she called over the platoon channel.

“This is Jaclovic, ma’am. The lieutenant’s dead.”

“Okay! Hang on! We’re hit and going down. You’re in charge! Get both squads out as soon as we hit!”

“Copy that! Okay, gyrines! You heard! Brace for impact!”

Booth fired the main thruster; Carmen nearly dropped to her knees with the sudden acceleration, and she heard a grinding shriek somewhere aft, like metal tearing.

Then the bug crumpled into the Lunar surface, almost upright, with the shock taken up by the folding of its six, splayed legs. This time, Carmen did hit her knees as the deck slammed up against her legs. The cockpit tilted heavily back to the right, and she had to cling to the acceleration couch to hold her place.

“The Eagle has damned well landed,” she muttered. They were down, at least more or less in one piece. She felt shaken, but unhurt. The tiny whirlwind of escaping air at her feet had become a hurricane, but a short-lived one as the last of the bug’s air shrilled out into space. Carmen was already fumbling at one of the pouches attached to her suit harness, pulling out a self-sealing vacuum patch which she slapped over the hole in the side of Booth’s suit. There was not a lot else she could offer in the way of first aid. The inside of his visor was smeared with blood and a bright, pink foam, and she could barely see his face. Damn! Why didn’t these Marine-issue armored suits come with external life-support readouts? She couldn’t tell if the man was alive or dead.

Light flared silently outside…another shoulder-launched missile strike somewhere close by, she thought. The people who’d shot down LSCP-30 would be closing in pretty quickly now.

“Captain!” Jaclovic’s voice called. “Captain! Are you okay?”

“I’m in one piece. Get the platoon out of here, Gunny! Perimeter defense. On the double!”

One of the square-paned windows of the cockpit’s greenhouse canopy suddenly bore a small, round hole surrounded by a frosting of tiny white cracks. She wondered why she hadn’t heard the shot or the impact—then remembered that she was in vacuum now. No sound. Over her helmet radio, though, she could hear shouted orders, calls, and the hiss and puff of heavy breathing as the platoon scrambled clear of the grounded craft.

The bug must be under attack by UN troops outside. They had to get out and get clear of the wreckage, or risk being trapped inside. The best thing she could do for Booth, she decided, was leave him where he was. If he was dead, there was nothing more she could do; if he was wounded, there still wasn’t much she could do, except arrange to get him inside one of those habs out there as quickly as possible, where his suit could be removed and his wounds treated.

“I’ll be back for you, Ken,” she said, not knowing if he heard her or not. “Just sit tight!”

The deck had folded enough in the crash that she almost didn’t make it, suit, PLSS, and all, through the circular hatch that lead down to the forward end of the bug’s main compartment. There, deck had risen to meet a descending overhead, and she had to crouch low to make her way aft through cramped, near-total darkness, groping for the entrance to the airlock. She switched on the light mounted on the right shoulder of her suit and let the pale circle of illumination it cast flicker along both sides of the compartment. Several still, space-suited bodies lay there, two on the deck, three more still strapped to their bulkhead supports up forward. Lieutenant Machuga was one of those still strapped to his bulkhead support, the front of his suit peeled open in jagged leaves to expose pale bone, glistening black blood already freezing, and a fist-sized hole going clear through the platform at his back and the deck underneath. Next to him was HMC Strigel, the company’s corpsman, his visor shattered. Shrapnel from the missile strike must have sleeted through the forward end of the compartment.

Stopping only to retrieve an ATAR from a bulkhead storage rack, she kept moving aft, squeezing through the misshapen airlock hatch, then through the lock and out onto the still, vast quiet of the Lunar surface, crawling on hands and knees to squeeze through the outer door.

The bug had come down at the edge of the crisscross of trenches and excavated pits, the spider’s legs twisted and snapped by the impact, the frame crumpled badly on one side. Clouds of vapor jetted from a dozen holes in the reaction-mass tanks; as the water escaped into space, it froze, creating clouds of glittering ice particles that gradually settled toward the ground. In the shadows of the crater floor, quite a bit of ice had built up, where water reaction mass had escaped the tanks and frozen almost immediately.

She rose unsteadily to her feet, breathing hard, then leaped for the nearest trench as silently blossoming puffs of dust stitched across the regolith a few meters to her left and black holes appeared as if by magic in the LSCP’s hull metal.

She landed almost on top of three Marines, their reactive camo armor black in the blackness of the ditch. “Shit! Watch what the fuck you’re doing!” one of the Marines barked as she hit his leg. Then he did a clumsy double take, reading name or rank tabs. “Uh, sorry, Captain.”

She ignored the outburst. “Where’s Gunny Jack?”

A black figure crouched farther along the trench raised an arm, signaling. “Over here, Captain.”

“I’m coming to you.”

“Watch your head, ma’am! They’ve got an MG over there somewhere!”

“Roger that!”

She squeezed past the three Marines and moved toward Jaclovic’s position. The trench was a meter deep and only about a meter wide; to stay concealed, she had to crawl on her hands and knees, and even so she wondered if the back of her PLSS was showing enough to make an inviting target.

As she neared Jaclovic, the NCO raised himself above the lip of the trench, aiming his ATAR from the shoulder. The Advanced Technology Assault Rifle employed electronic optics in the sighting mechanism to place a crosshair on the firer’s visor, targeting whatever it was aimed at, but long habit had Jaclovic firing from a perfect kneeling stance, even if his suit and helmet didn’t allow him to sight his weapon directly. He loosed a quick burst of triplet shots, then dropped back behind the cover of the trench as the enemy’s machine gun returned the fire in silent puffs of dust.

“H’lo, Captain,” he said as she dropped to the floor of the trench beside him. “Ain’t we got fun?”

She twisted about, raising her helmet above the rim of the trench. “Where’s the fire coming from? I can’t see.”

“Stay down! Uh, ma’am.” He made a slicing motion with one hand, pointing. “That tall radio mast, call it twelve o’clock. We got a machine gun at about one o’clock, near the big bulldozer, and a slaw in the dirt pile at about eleven. The hab at ten o’clock, I think there’s a guy on top of it spotting. There’s also troops, maybe ten, maybe twelve, covering in the trenches over closer to the habs.”

“Trench warfare!” she said. The thought was almost funny.

“Yeah. Lasers. Spaceships.” He raised himself up again and loosed another silent burst toward the habs. “And we’re back to shootin’ each other from the trenches.”

Carmen unslung the ATAR she’d picked up in the bug, flicked on the optic sight, plugged in her suit connector to get an HUD link, pulled the bolt to chamber a round, and flicked the selector to three-round burst. As Jaclovic took cover again, she rose to her knees, swinging the assault rifle toward the bulldozer where he’d said the machine gun was hidden. A bright green crosshair tracked across her helmet’s visor, showing where she was aimed at the moment. She adjusted the weapon until the crosshairs were centered on the bulldozer. Carmen waited, watching for movement…and then a puff of gray dust exploded across her visor as a round plowed into regolith a few centimeters away. She jerked back down under cover, without having taken the shot.

“Touchy, aren’t they?” she said.

“Gotta watch yourself, Captain. They got us covered six ways from—”

“Incoming!” someone shouted over the channel, and a second later a bright light blossomed from the direction of the grounded LSCP. Bits and pieces of rock and metallic debris showered over the trenches.

“Forgot to tell you, ma’am,” Jaclovic added. “They got slams out there, too.”

“This is fun. Can we work some people over that way, try to get behind them?”

“I sent Second Squad that way soon as we got clear, ma’am. They got pinned…about there. We salvaged one Wyvern from the crash, and both squad lasers, but we haven’t been able to see a target long enough to hit it. Somethin’ else, too.”

“What?”

“From the volume of fire we’ve been taking, I’d say we’re facing more than a handful of troops out there. They’ve got, I don’t know…dozens, hidden in the trenches all along from there…to there, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they had more people positioned to move in from the flanks or behind. These guys have it organized, and right now, I’d say they have us just about where they want us.”

She rose again, this time simply pointing her assault rifle in the general direction of the bulldozer and clamping her gloved forefinger down on the trigger. The gunfire was silent, of course, but the butt gave a reassuring triple-thump to her shoulder before she dropped behind cover once more. She couldn’t possibly have actually hit anything, but at least the gesture felt good.

“Communications?”

“No problem there. We’ve got an open channel with Second Platoon, on the crater rim about eight klicks that way. And an L-2 satlink to Fra Mauro. But I don’t think either of those are gonna help us.”

“Why not?”

He jerked a gauntleted thumb over his shoulder, toward the habs and the concealed UN soldiers. “Because they’re getting in position to rush us, and there’s not one damned thing we can do about it.”

LSCP-44, Call sign Raven

Picard Ringwall, The Moon

0919 hours GMT

Kaitlin Garroway held the viewer of her electronic imager against her visor, pressing the button that zoomed the view in to maximum magnification. With light enhancement, she could peer right down inside the trenches below, where a large number of black-helmeted figures were massing in huddled-down groups, weapons very much in evidence. Scanning slowly, she noted the main enemy groupings, the gun positions, and even a pair of suited figures atop one of the habs—probably an OP.

“What do you think, Gunny?” she asked. “Forty…fifty of them?”

“At least, ma’am” was Yates’s radioed response. “Looks like they came in on that black transport that just bugged out.”

“Yeah, but from where? Earth? The bastards could’ve warned us!” She shifted back to the trenches, then pivoted slowly, zeroing in on the enemy OP atop one of the habs. “Pap! You on the slaw?”

“Hot and ready, Captain.”

“Target. Two UN spotters on top of the hab at one-one-three-zero o’clock.” The lack of a Lunar magnetic field was proving to be a nuisance. Giving firing coordinates by arbitrary clock-face references, instead of by compass degrees, was considerably less than precise. “Take ’em down!”

Fortunately, the targets stood out like blue-headed bugs on an empty white dinner plate. “I’m on ’em, Skipper.”

Both UN troops were studying the Marine positions in the trenches, using electronic imagers like Kaitlin’s own. One suddenly spun around, the imager flying from his grasp, a silvery cloud of vapor enveloping his chest. The second UN soldier turned, reaching out…then he, too, toppled, his blue helmet spraying a white jet of fast-freezing vapor.

“Nice shooting, Paps. Two up, two down.”

“Thanks, Lieutenant. Like they say, reach out and touch someone.” The expression was a very old one, still common among Marine snipers and slaw gunners. Like so many other favorite expressions in the Corps, no one knew where it had come from or who’d said it first.

A bright point of light streaked through the darkness from the crater rim, slamming with a flash into the bulldozer that seemed to be providing shelter for a number of enemy troops. Seconds later, another missile was sky-borne, this one zigzagging up from the crater floor and slamming into the hilltop, a hundred meters to Kaitlin’s right. A second enemy missile followed the first, this from a different position. The explosion flashed just short of LSCP-44. The landing craft was shielded from direct line of sight from the base, but a smart missile—or a lucky shot—would find that particularly vulnerable target before long.

“Man down!” someone yelled over the platoon channel. “Man down! Corpsman!”

“We can’t slug it out with them for long,” Kaitlin said. “They’ve got too much firepower.” She pressed the button on the left forearm of her suit, opening the com channel to Alfa’s Second Platoon. “Falcon! Falcon! This is Raven. Do you copy, over?”

“Raven, this is Falcon,” Captain Lee’s voice came back immediately. “Go ahead.”

“We’ve got a situation here, Captain. Bravo First is pinned down at the base under heavy fire, their bug shot to hell. We’re on the crater rim eight klicks to the west, also taking heavy fire. Enemy is present in force, repeat, in force.”

She realized that her voice had been steadily climbing in pitch as she spoke. She stopped, drew a deep breath, and tried to bring her voice back under control. Another shoulder-launched missile streaked up out of the crater, angling almost straight toward her before it whipped low overhead. She crouched low as the blast went off somewhere at her back.

“It looks as though the enemy is preparing to rush First Platoon,” she continued. “We need help, fast. Can you comply, over?”

“Raven, Falcon. We’re about five minutes out, still over the Mare Tranquillitatus. Can you hold that long, over?”

“Falcon, Raven. Looks like we’ll have to, doesn’t it? Come as fast as you can. Raven out.”

“On our way, Raven. Falcon out.”

Five minutes…an eternity in combat.

The UN troops were concentrating their fire on First Platoon, and, despite the fire they were taking from the crater rim, it was clear they were going to try a charge, probably within the next minute or two. Kaitlin knew that she had just two choices…to sit up here on her ass and watch half of her rifle company be overrun, or…

She changed channels on her com. “Listen up, everybody! This is Garroway! Second Squad! Hold your positions. Maintain fire on the enemy. First Squad! Back to the bug, on the double! Get into the airlock, and stay there! Lieutenant Dow! Are you on the line?”

“Affirmative, Lieutenant. I’m here.”

“Warm up the fire and stand by to boost. We’re going on a little hop.”

“Reactor coming up. Pressure okay. We can bounce in two minutes.”

“Make it a minute thirty.”

“Whatcha got in mind, Lieutenant?” Yates asked.

“Making it all or nothing, Gunny. The captain is going to get wiped off the map if we don’t break the UNdies’ attack.”

“Roger that, Lieutenant. Okay, Marines! Hustle! Hustle! I wanna see nothing but amphibious green blurs!” They started trotting back toward the LSCP, as other Marines closed in from different directions, crowding up the debarkation ramp and into the craft’s airlock.

“If I may suggest, ma’am,” Yates said, pausing at the foot of the ramp, “you should stay here and direct the covering fire.”

“Negative, Gunny. If I’m about to pull something stupid, I want to be there to take the blame.”

She heard the grin. “Understood, Lieutenant. Understood.”

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!”

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.”

SIX

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…

He shook his head, dispelling the fantasy. “Actually, she’s out of town. In Pennsylvania, visiting her sister.”

“Great. Then you could spend the night.”

David’s workscreen chirped. Without letting Teri go, he reached behind his back and touched a key on his desk, opening the channel without turning on the visual. “Yes, Larry.”

“Sir, there are two people here to see you from the Department of Science? They say they need to talk to you.”

He pulled back from Teri’s moist lips long enough to say, “Do they have an appointment? I’m busy right now.”

“Uh, nossir. No appointment. But they said their business with you is, uh, Clearance Blue.”

Damn. “Wait a minute.” He looked down at Teri. “Sorry….”

For answer, she slid her hand down to his crotch and gave him a final, breath-catching squeeze. “Business first,” she said, licking her lips, then giving him a last, quick kiss. “I’ve got work to do, too. I can wait till to-night.”

She stepped away from him and busied herself with rebuttoning her blouse and tucking it in. David stood, straightened his clothing, then walked over to the large, corner-office window overlooking Lake Shore Drive and the Burnham Harbor Marina.

The crowd at Soldier’s Field, he saw, was still there, larger and more agitated than ever. Many of the protesters held signs. DON’T COVER UP OUR GOD, read one. THE BUILDERS MADE US IN THEIR IMAGE, said another, along-side a photograph of the Cydonian Face. A few had glued flatscreens to their signboards, to display animated clips or video—most of the Face or of some of the released images from the Cave of Wonders. Someone was haranguing the crowd with a microphone and amplifiers from a makeshift tower on Waldon Drive, but the soundproofing in the new IES building was too efficient for him to hear what was being said. Not that it mattered. Scuzzy-headed nonsense, all of it.

Well, not entirely scuzzy-headed. He could understand where the public—long prepared by wild stories of ETs and UFOs, of alien abductions and ancient astronauts—might have picked up misinformation enough to go off on these tangents. But the freestyle mingling of science fact, speculation, and outright fantasy had disturbed him since his earliest days as an archeology undergraduate.

It didn’t help at all that some, at least, of the long-running stories about extraterrestrials visiting primitive human cultures in the remote past were turning out to be true, at least in some aspects. Someone had transported early humans to Mars half a million years ago…and might even have been responsible for some genetic tampering at the time as well. There were still some nasty unanswered questions about the evolutionary transition from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens, and after a long, rearguard battle even longtime conservatives in anthropological and paleontological circles were now seriously considering ET intervention as a distinct, even a likely, possibility. The timing of the artifacts on Mars and of the poorly understood transition of Homo erectus to archaic Homo sapiens were too close to believably be coincidence.

David Alexander was now the closest thing there was to an expert on the whole question. The fifteen months he’d spent on Mars had made him a celebrity of sorts, as well as the authority on extraterrestrial intelligence within the solar system.

One of the protesters on the street below, a young woman wearing briefs and nothing else in the steamy Chicago-summer heat, was jumping up and down with a large sign held above her head. YOU CAN TELL US, DR. A! it read.

He snorted, turning away from the window. Being a celebrity wasn’t so bad—it certainly had enlivened his sex life since his return to Earth two months ago. If only celebrity status didn’t attract so many kooks.

And unpleasant responsibilities. Teri, her clothing ordered once again, flashed a smile and a wink filled with promise, and strolled out the door.

“Okay, Larry. Have them come in.”

His visitors were Sarah Mackler and Roger Flores, both in conservative orange-and-green business smartsuits, with scancards identifying them as agents of the US Department of Science. “Dr. Alexander!” the woman said. Her costume was accented by a brightly colored Ashanti head-band. “How are we doing today?”

“I have no idea how the corporate we is doing, Ms. Mackler,” he said. “I am doing well, although I have a feeling you’re about to change all of that. Again.”

Sarah smiled pleasantly, a flash of bright teeth against dark chocolate skin, as though she was determined to ignore his moodiness. “Good to hear it, Doctor. We have an assignment for you.”

“An urgent assignment,” her companion added.

David slumped into his chair. “Look. I appreciate the attention. And I certainly appreciate the position you people seem to have carved out for me here. But when are you going to get it through your bureaucratic heads that I am a scientist? A field man, not a damned desk pilot!”

“The desk work getting you down?” Sarah asked, taking a chair for herself.

“No. I’ll tell you what’s getting me down.” He gestured at his desk’s flatscreen. “In the past three weeks, I’ve been requested by either your department or the administration to speak at no fewer than seven dinners, luncheons, or other functions, from Great LA to Washington, DC! I’ve been in the air or in one hotel or other more than I’ve been here! Damn it, the work I’m doing is important. And I can’t do it when you people are sub-Oing me back and forth across the continent all the time!”

“Now, Dr. Alexander—” Roger Flores began.

“No! You listen to me, for a change! Ever since I got back from Mars, you people have had me on the go. Public-relations appearances. Consciousness-raising talks. Press conferences. Net recordings. Even fund-raisers! I’m sick of shaking hands and making nice to people who don’t understand what this is all about anyway! I’m sick of overpriced chicken dinners! I’m sick of not being able to go home to my wife!” That wasn’t particularly true, but it never hurt to throw a little extra guilt in a discussion like this one. “And I’m especially sick of being pulled away from my work to serve as some kind of glad-handing front man for the Department of Science, when I ought to be here studying the data we brought back from Cydonia!”

“I might point out,” Flores said stiffly, “that you were the one to upload such, um, controversial findings to the Earthnet, while you were on Mars.”

“I did what I thought was right!”

“Of course! No one’s blaming you. You rightly judged that releasing that information would pull the UN’s fangs, when they wanted to cover up your finds…but you also caused quite a few troubles for your own government.” He gestured toward the corner window. “Have you seen your fan club out there? They have the traffic tied up all the way from McCormack Place to the Field Museum!”

“Worse than a big game at Soldier Field,” Sarah added.

He sighed. “I’ve seen it. And I don’t care how many dinners I attend, how many college speeches I make, how many reporters I talk to, it’s not going to change the minds of people who have their minds made up already! What these pop-culture, garbage-science hooligans believe or don’t believe is not my responsibility.”

“Isn’t it, Doctor?” Sarah asked him. “You know, when you accepted this post, it was with the understanding that you would work closely with the department. With us. Between the war and your, um, sudden release of, shall we say, sensitive information, our society is rather delicately balanced right now. The peace movement is growing, getting more powerful, and it’s feeding off this ancient-astronaut craze. A craze you triggered by telling the world about those human bodies you found on Mars!”

“Well, I’m sorry people are such idiots! But I happen to be a firm believer in the essential freedom of science. You can’t smother newfound facts just because they’re inconvenient!”

“Nonsense,” Roger snapped. “All of history is one big session of spin control and public-relations management after another!”

“That’s an unpleasantly cynical outlook.”

“And yours is unpleasantly naive!”

“Gentlemen, please!” Sarah said. “Doctor, we appreciate your sentiment in the matter. By and large, I agree with you, and, more to the point, so does the president. We do still live in a democracy, for what that’s worth, and total censorship is incompatible with democratic principles. I’m sure you can accept, though, that where there is a danger to the country or to national security, the government has the right, has the responsibility to exercise judgment.” When David didn’t immediately reply, she shrugged and went on. “In any case, Doctor, I’m afraid you jumped the gun on us. As it happens, we don’t want to send you out to another college speech.”

“Eh? Why didn’t you say so!”

“You didn’t give us the chance!” Roger replied.

Sarah gave her comrade a sharp look, then smiled at David. “Actually, we do want you to go on a trip for us. A rather long trip. But I think you’ll agree that it qualifies as fieldwork. And…I can promise you, no bad chicken dinners!”

“Where do you want me to go?”

“To the Moon, Dr. Alexander. We need you to go to the Moon as quickly as we can get you there.”

“The…the Moon!”

“We have transport waiting for you to take you to O’Hare. We can have you in orbit in two hours, and by tonight you’ll be on your way!”

“That…is quite impossible!”

“You have another appointment?” Roger asked.

He thought about his date with Teri—obviously that wouldn’t be a valid excuse. Besides, he was intrigued now.

“Why would you want me on the Moon?”

“Dr. Alexander,” Sarah told him, “what we have to say to you now is classified. Classified, do you understand? You are not to discuss it with anyone, including the people working for you in this building.”

“I understand.”

“Several hours ago, US Marines captured a small UN base on the Moon. They were looking for a Professor Marc Billaud. You know him?”

David nodded. “I’ve met him several times. Last time was at a conference on ET archeology in Athens, before the war. A good man.”

“The UN Space Command had him at the Lunar site. Apparently, he and a team were in the process of doing some extensive archeological excavations.”

David’s eyes widened. He felt his heart pound. Excavations? On the Moon? “The Builders?…”

“That’s part of what we want you to tell us. Billaud’s notes suggest that there was an ET presence on the Moon, a fairly extensive one…but that it occurred during historical times.”

“How recent?”

“He thinks a few thousand years,” Sarah told him. “There are…artifacts.”

“What was he excavating? A building? A city?”

“Actually,” Sarah told him, “the evidence suggests that it was a spaceship of some kind. A ship that crashed on the Lunar surface something like eight or ten thousand years ago. And that is what makes this investigation so vitally important….”

As she talked, David thought about Mars…and the Ship.

The Face on Mars had been carved by someone half a million years ago, someone who’d built a number of cyclopean structures in the area and apparently used humans imported from Earth to help with the construction. There was even evidence that some sort of massive terraforming project had been under way at the time; most surface features had been damaged or destroyed by a savage flood of liquid water. Many of the human bodies found so far showed evidence of having suffocated as their atmosphere—possibly contained in some sort of field or bubble—bled suddenly away. There was also evidence—lots of it—of a battle, an attack that had ripped open milewide pyramids and left the site in ruins. The Face itself was almost unrecognizable as an artifact carved by intelligence, though the general form and the neatly carved geometries were still visible beneath the rubble.

One of the more enigmatic sites at Cydonia was the hill known as the Fortress. Once, probably, it had been a pyramidal structure like some of the others in the area, but something more powerful than a thermonuclear bomb had sheared off the top, wrecked the inside, and reduced much of it to rubble. Later, a ship of some kind, a vessel over a kilometer long, had toppled onto the ruins, wracked by internal explosions. The wreckage, exposed to the sand-blasting of half a million years of Martian weather, was so poorly preserved it was impossible to learn much.

But the ruins—and especially the promise of the wrecked ship—had been responsible for the revitalization of the on-again, off-again vagaries of the US space program, and of the Russian Space Agency as well. Whoever had built the Cydonian complex had possessed the secret of traveling among the stars; a careful study of the ruins might bring that secret home to Earth.

And more than that. The Builders had been engaged in terraforming on a planetary scale; the ongoing deterioration of Earth’s environment, the coastal flooding and rising global temperatures, had been growing slowly but steadily worse for the past fifty years. The secret of planetary climate control might well prove to be more important, at least insofar as Earth’s continued habitability was concerned, than the secret of traveling to the stars.

And so the infant science of exoarcheology, and its bastard half brother, exotecharcheology, had been born.

On Mars, the problem had been the sheer scale of things, coupled with how damnably difficult it was to get there in the first place. By using a system of space stations, called cyclers, that alternately touched the orbits of Earth and Mars, it had been possible to get a few hundred people out to the Red Planet over the past decade or so to study the site; the trouble was, it would take thousands of people, working for years, simply to carry out a decent survey of the Martian ruins. It might well be centuries, yet, before Cydonia yielded the last of its long-held secrets.

But if some of those secrets also lay hidden on the Moon, just three or four days away, instead of the six to nine months required for a cycler passage to Mars…

“We can’t tell you everything that’s going on right now,” Sarah was saying. “Suffice to say that it has become an issue of national security. We need a trained archeologist’s assessment of the wreckage, and we need to have an idea of just what the UN scientists might have learned from it.”

“But why me?”

Roger shrugged. “That should be evident. You’ve been to Cydonia. You know as much about the Builders, about exotech, as anyone, and more than most. You are probably the field authority on ET artifacts and technologies.”

And, he thought with a touch of bitterness, I’m here, in your institute, bought and paid for. The other scientists who’d been to Mars—Kettering, Pohl, Vandemeer, and the others—had returned to their old positions, to promotions, to careers made more secure by their fifteen months on Mars. But David had had no place to go but…here. The Cydonian Research Foundation, a government-sponsored organization, had funded the Exoarcheological Institute to study the finds being uncovered on Mars.

And, perhaps, on the Moon as well.

The problem was that David’s reputation as something of a maverick in established archeological circles had made him the ideal candidate for exoarcheologist-in-residence here at the institute.

And it was damned hard to say no to a government-backed request.

“You’re also already rated for a pressure suit and pliss,” Sarah told him.

True enough. In fact, he’d already been to the Moon, briefly, as part of his astronautics training in preparation for his flight to Mars. He’d spent three days at Fra Mauro and been bored most of the time, even with a crowded training schedule.

“Can I take anyone along? Dr. Sullivan has been working with me on…”

“I’m sorry, Doctor. Space is limited, and there’s no time for training.”

Teri was going to be disappointed. Hell, he was disappointed…but the thought of getting into the field again—and on the Moon!—was too much to resist.

Besides, he knew what LEO-Lunar transports were like. There’d have been no privacy, no opportunity to give Teri a chance to join the Three Dolphin Club.

Later, after his visitors had left, David stood at the window looking down at the demonstrators outside, thoughtful. There was someone he needed to talk to just now.

Someone he wasn’t supposed to talk to at all….

EU Science Research Vessel

Pierre-Simon Laplace

Co-orbit with Asteroid 2034L

2235 hours GMT

Dr. Jean-Etienne Cheseaux floated alongside the Laplace’s tiny observation port, slipping his dark glasses into place as sunlight flooded into the compartment. Outside, the sun was just clearing the edge of the Rock as the ship’s slow drift brought her clear of the small planetoid’s shadow. He still wondered why the Académie des Sciences had insisted that he come here.

Cheseaux was an astronomer; his primary specialization was selenology, the geology of the Moon, but the Academy had asked him to serve as payload specialist aboard the Laplace. Not that he was complaining, necessarily—he liked it in space, enjoyed the sensations of free fall and the spectacular purity of the sunlight—but the measurements he was taking of 2034L’s mass and spin and precise orbit could have been made by any competent technician. It was, he supposed, an indication of the importance the Academy attached to this mission. The knowledge stirred his professional pride, and his ego; there was talk, he’d heard, of naming this particular rock Cheseaux. Of course, the astronomical society frowned on using the names of living people, but there were precedents.

Asteroid 2034L had been discovered eight years ago, one of the fast-growing number of near-Earth asteroids whose orbits carried them periodically inside the orbit of Earth. This one was particularly disturbing; as carbonaceous chondrite, like the majority of asteroids, it had an extremely low albedo, rendering its surface as black as the blackest coal. It was also small, less than a hundred meters across.

That combination of orbit, albedo, and small size made 2034L particularly dangerous, a prime target for the Phaeton Project. In Greek mythology, Phaeton was the boy who’d lost control of Apollo’s sun-chariot, bringing it too near the Earth and nearly destroying humanity in fire. Since the 1980s, the particular danger Earth-crossing asteroids and comets represented to the Earth had been well understood; the lesson of the dinosaurs, exterminated by the ten-mile body that had smashed into the Yucatán sixty-five million years ago, could not be ignored. By the early 2000s, several skywatch operations were in place, identifying and charting the flying mountains that might someday pose a direct threat to Earth and her inhabitants.

Phaeton, one of the most comprehensive of the sky-watch programs, had been begun in 2029, a collaboration between the European Union, Japan, and the United States. The UN had assumed financial responsibility five years later, the same year in which 2034L had been discovered. The war, of course, had interfered to the extent that neither the United States nor Japan was participating any longer, but the work was vital enough that the EU Space Agency had continued the program, war or no war.

Cheseaux was now confident that this rock, at least, posed no immediate threat to humanity. With precise measurements now complete, he could confidently report that 2034L would pass within a million kilometers of the Earth in another five months. That was twice the distance from Earth to the Moon, a cat’s whisker when you looked at the sheer size of the whole solar system, but comfortable enough as a margin of safety. He would need to run his figures through the supercomputer center at the Sorbonne to be sure, but back-of-the-envelope calculations suggested that 2034L would again pass close by the Earth in another forty-five years. That passage would be a near miss of perhaps one hundred thousand kilometers that would slingshot the body in toward the sun…which in turn would either destroy the asteroid in celestial flame or send it careening out into the thin, cold dark of the outer system.

Either way, this particular Earth-crosser posed no threat.

“Upload complete, Doctor,” Laplace’s commander, Colonel Denis Armand, announced, drifting alongside of Cheseaux in a head-down position relative to him. “They have asked us to hold our position, however, until another vessel can rendezvous with us.”

“Another craft? What other craft?”

Armand gave a Gallic, inverted shrug, then reached out to brace himself against the bulkhead before he started turning. “They didn’t say. The war, after all…”

Cheseaux gave a soft grunt of understanding. It was always the war. Abject foolishness! The European Union needed to be working with the Americans and the Japanese and even the Russians, now…not fighting them. The Americans had already slammed the door to Mars shut in the UN’s face rather decisively; the UN risked losing access to the Moon as well, if they persisted in this insanity. It was time to end this, declare a truce, and find out how best to get all of humankind working on the problems of recovering and learning from the newly discovered alien technology.

Squinting against the sunlight, Cheseaux looked for and found a pair of tiny crescents, one silver, one gray, well beyond the horizon of 2034L and bowed away from the sun. Earth was now less than ten million kilometers away, its attendant moon somewhat farther. Both seemed transcendently delicate, ethereal, and small. The war that had wracked the world for the past two years, the burning political questions of Aztlan independence and control of ancient alien technologies all seemed so completely insignificant from this vantage point. It was true, what they said: Looking back at the Earth from space gave one an entirely new perspective, a new outlook.

Perhaps it was Earth’s politicians who should be shipped up here, the lot of them, and not her scientists and soldiers. Let them work out their differences bathed in heavenly radiance, with the Earth nothing more than a frail, silver sliver in the night.

“Well, I think I’ll turn in,” he told the commander. “Let me know if there’s a call from Earth.”

“Of course.”

Laplace was neither large nor luxurious, even as space-craft went. Her hab module and laboratory together were ten meters long and five wide, small enough to have fit easily inside the living and working area of the old Skylab, and she carried twice as many people, three crew and three payload specialists. Cheseaux’s cabin was a closet-sized space in the aft of the hab module with thin plastic walls and a sleeping bag attached to the bulkhead. His “desk” pulled out from one of the walls, a plastic board with Velcro surfaces, to which his laptop was attached.

Pulling the folding panel shut behind him—the only concession to the human need for privacy aboard—he peeled his computer from the desk and wiggled into the sleeping bag so that he didn’t have to think about not floating about. Outside his cabin, the bumps and thumps, the conversations, the smells of ready-heat meals and men in close confinement continued to permeate his world. As much as he’d been enjoying this mission, he was going to be glad to get back to Paris. He’d actually felt, he realized now, a pang of disappointment a few minutes ago when he’d learned Laplace would not be immediately returning home.

He logged onto Spacenet.

Everyone in Laplace’s little crew had his own Net account; the best defense against the feelings of isolation and depression common on long missions in space was the ability to log onto the Net and have immediate access to news, to books or music, to v-mail and e-mail that let the astronauts keep in close touch with people and events back home. As his browser came up, the new-mail icon flashed cheerfully on the menu bar.

Twenty-seven messages, including five requests for real-time v-chats. One from Annette that he’d been looking forward to…the rest from sources as varied as the Académie des Sciences and the Cousteau Foundation, and a British UFO e-mag looking for an interview on ancient aliens. Maybe instant communications through the Net weren’t such an all-encompassing and unalloyed blessing after all.

One e-mail was flagged as confidential and encrypted, from a masked address. He knew immediately who that was from, and it worried him.

He accessed the message. It was in text only, to make the multilevel encryptions it employed simpler…as well as making them less obvious to anyone who might be monitoring e-mail packet transmissions.

The immediate address was a remailing service in Finland; he knew, though, that its author was in the United States. It was hard to decide who would get into more trouble if this correspondence was ever discovered—David Alexander for writing it, or Cheseaux for reading it and not reporting it at once to UN officials.

Not that he would even consider reporting it. David was a good friend, had been a friend and close correspondent ever since the two of them had met at a symposium on the Cydonian ruins held in Athens in 2037. It had been one of those relationships that sparks from the first meeting, as though they’d known one another for years, a reflection of what the Latinos called simpatico.

His screen went dark as the encryption software began chewing through columns of numbers and letters. There were several such software packages available, none guaranteed a hundred percent secure…but the sheer volume of encoded messages routing their way through the Spacenet nowadays meant their correspondence was probably safe, even though such traffic was actively discouraged by both sides in the war.

The words decryption complete appeared, followed a moment later by the complete text of the message.

JEAN-ETIENNE:

THEY’RE SENDING ME TO THE MOON TO INVESTIGATE ARTIFACTS YOUR PEOPLE FOUND THERE. I GATHER OUR MUTUAL FRIEND MARC BILLAUD IS THERE ALREADY. WHAT GIVES WITH THE INCREDIBLE SECRECY SURROUNDING THIS THING? THEY TELL ME THAT MARC FOUND AN ET SHIP, WHICH IS FANTASTIC NEWS, IF TRUE. IT MIGHT EVEN BE THE SORT OF THING THAT WOULD GET OUR GOVERNMENTS TO BURY THE HATCHET AND DECLARE PEACE.

IT SOUNDS LIKE YOUR PEOPLE ARE OUT AND MINE CONTROL THE SITE NOW. IS THERE SOMETHING I SHOULD KNOW GOING IN? DO YOU HAVE ACCESS TO ANY OF MARC’S REPORTS ON THE SITE, THERE IN PARIS, OR DO YOU KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT HIS FINDS THAT WOULD BE USEFUL ON THIS END? I’LL PASS ON WHAT I CAN LEARN AS I GET THE CHANCE.

CORDIALLY,

DAVID A.

Cheseaux smiled. A charming letter, and so utterly naive…but then, the Americans were a naive people. As much as he liked, admired, and respected young Alexander, he was not about to give the American military secrets. There was a war on, after all! And as for ending hostilities—he assumed that that was the meaning of the enigmatic phrase “bury the hatchet”—he surely didn’t think that the UN Authority was about to surrender its claim to the wreckage discovered recently at Picard, did he?

Except…

Cheseaux sighed. How much of what David wanted was classified for honest reasons of legitimate state security, and how much was due to the shortsighted scrabblings of small-minded and paranoid UN bureaucrats?

Just what was it that had divided the world for these past two years, anyway? The United States refusal to hold a UN-mandated plebiscite on the question of independence for some of its Southwestern states. Cheseaux snorted. He scarcely blamed Washington for refusing that one, especially since the vote was to be limited to the American states involved and would have included the populations of Mexico’s northwestern states—a stacked deck if ever there’d been one. That wasn’t even worth a decent riot or two, to say nothing of the war!

What else? Russia’s refusal to back down to China’s demands for parts of Siberia; those land claims went way back and could have been settled in other ways. The fear that the United States and Russia were using their superiority in spaceflight technology to grab the newly discovered archeological discoveries and exotechnologies for themselves. The willingness of the United States to actually publish some of those discoveries prematurely, without weighing the impact they would have on religious, political, and social systems worldwide.

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