WEDNESDAY, 15 APRIL 2042

The Dig, Picard Base
Mare Crisium, the Moon
1438 hours GMT

“So, anyway,” Kaminksi said, “I was wonderin’ if we could, well, trade e-mails or something. I really enjoyed learning that stuff you were telling me about on Mars, and I keep wanting to ask you questions about it. And it looks like you’ve got a lot more to learn here.” They were standing on the Lunar surface, among the crisscrossing trenches of the French excavation. It seemed like a huge area for two men to search.

“That,” David said, grinning inside his helmet, “is an understatement! I’d be delighted to correspond with you, Ski. You’re not afraid to ask questions, and you have a knack for asking the right ones.”

“Thanks! I’ll try not to be a pest with it, but, well, the news, Triple-N, and all, they always seem to get the facts tangled up, at least from what you were saying.”

“Sometimes they do.”

“So, anyway, you was sayin’ that the aliens who built the Face, and all that stuff on Mars, they’re different from the aliens who were here on the Moon?”

“That’s right, Ski,” David replied. “The Cave of Wonders, the Face, all of that is about half a million years old. Whatever crashed here was a lot more recent. Eight thousand years, six thousand years, something like that.”

Kaminski turned slowly, surveying the harshly illuminated patch of the crater floor, trying to imagine what must have happened here. This part of the Moon was now completely dark. Only the worklights cast any light at all, and they made this one tiny corner of the Lunar surface seem very small and isolated. Even the stars were banished by their glare, though the Earth, a blue-and-white first quarter, still hung in its unvarying spot in the western sky.

“Quite a mess, isn’t it, Ski?” David asked, misinterpreting Kaminski’s silent gaze.

“What do you mean?”

David, swaddled and clumsy in his government-issue space suit, turned to face Kaminski. “In proper archeology,” David told him, “we’re interested in the layers, the strata, of debris, of how things are laid down one on top of another. We’re also very interested in the precise locations in which artifacts are found, relative to one another, and to the terrain. We’re very careful about such things, laying out precisely numbered grids, taking photographs of everything in situ, making sure we understand everything there is to know about an object’s position before we remove it.”

“You were tellin’ me about all that on Mars, sir,” Kaminski said.

“So I did. The problem there, of course, was far too much in the way of buildings, artifacts, and debris to explore and catalog, with far, far too few people to do the work. It’s different here.” Turning again, David waved one arm, taking in the entire black panorama of the crater floor, the trenches and excavated pits beneath the worklights, the mounds of debris piled nearby. “We archeologists have a technical term for this sort of site,” David told him. “We call it fubaritic strata.”

“Yeah?”

“As in fubar.”

“Ah! As in ‘Situation Normal, All Fucked Up.’”

“Exactly. See? We’ll make an archeologist out of you yet.” David started to walk. Kaminski followed, shouldering the massive canvas satchel he’d been packing for Alexander since they’d left the hab. It didn’t weigh very much in the Lunar gravity, but its inertia made it a chore to move or to stop.

With the satchel, his PLSS, and his slung ATAR, Kaminski was beginning to feel like a caddie following a VIP around a golf course. A golf course with grays instead of greens that was one big sand trap from tee to hole.

“So, how’s it screwed up?” Kaminski asked.

“We just had two small armies tramping back and forth through these trenches the other day, Ski. What else would it be?” They arrived at the edge of a large, shallow pit. David jumped in, followed a moment later by Kaminski. The floor was covered by treaded-boot prints, with tangles of white string scattered about seemingly at random. “Looks like they had that area laid out in a proper grid for photography and cataloging, with string and posts, but so many people stampeded through that the grid lines are all torn down. I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to recreate Dr. Billaud’s survey work here.”

“Maybe you could get him to help? I mean, back in the hab this morning, you were tellin’ those Army guys that he was cooperatin’ with you. He told you all that stuff about Sumeria.”

“Hmm. An attractive idea, Ski. Unfortunately, the government frowns on close collaborations with the enemy. I imagine they’ll be shipping Dr. Billaud and his colleagues back to Earth on the first available transport.”

“What’ll happen to them then? They’re not gonna get sent back to France.”

“No. I’m afraid that’s most unlikely. Especially considering what they know.”

“Is what they found here really that important? I mean, it’s just more alien shit, like we found on Mars, right?”

Kaminski heard David’s sigh, a blast of air across his helmet microphone. “What we’re finding on Mars—and here—is completely changing everything we thought we understood about human origins, about who and what we are. The artifacts, the bodies and so on we found on Mars suggests that someone was tinkering with our DNA half a million years back. That’s momentous enough. But what Billaud and his people have found here on the Moon is a lot closer to our historical origins. It tells us, not about our biology, but about our culture, our civilization. I’m afraid this is going to upset people even more than the news from Mars did.”

“You mean the ancient-astronaut stuff? The stuff we found on Mars is already really stirring people up. All those cults and things.”

“Yes.” That one word sounded almost sad.

“’Course, doesn’t this all just go to show the ancient-alien people are right?”

“Not the part about the ETs being God, or us being created in their image, or any of that. No.”

“You were telling the Army guys about what Billaud told you. Something about the Sumerians?”

“Sumer was one of Earth’s earliest true civilizations. Dates back to about 4,000 B.C., though they probably had their start well before that. They established quite a remarkable culture at the head of the Persian Gulf, one that literally seemed to spring up overnight, out of nowhere.”

“The Fertile Crescent? Tigris and Euphrates Rivers?”

“That’s right, Ski! Very good!”

He shrugged inside his suit. “Okay, so I did remember something from high-school history class. And you guys think these aliens got the Sumerians off to a civilized start, is that it?”

“The amusing thing is that the Sumerians themselves claimed—in their myths and legends—that the gods were people much like themselves who came down from the heavens and taught them everything they needed to know, agriculture, writing, building cities, working gold, numbers, medicine…” He stopped, then bent over, hands on knees, as he intently studied a patch of boot-trammeled Lunar soil.

“Yeah, but don’t all those ancient civilizations claim they got their start from the gods? Kind of like a good public-relations campaign, y’know? My civilization is better than your civilization, ’cause it was started by the gods. I’m king, ’cause God said that’s the way it is.”

“You’re absolutely right. Still, that doesn’t mean that the first people to claim that distinction weren’t telling the exact and literal truth.” He stooped and began scraping at the ground with his gloved hands. The regolith was soft and powdery, but firmly packed, with the consistency of damp beach sand.

“So…what were they doin’ here?” Kaminski asked after a long moment. “The aliens, I mean. Why would they come all the way here to give us writing and stuff. What was in it for them?”

“Excellent question. Let me have that bag, will you?”

Kaminski let the massive satchel slide from his shoulder, and David unsnapped the cover and opened it up. Inside was a variety of tools, including hammers, a whisk broom, mirrors with handles, small shovels, and numerous pry bars, from a half-meter-long crowbar down to probes the size of a nutpick. The archeologist selected one of the latter, picking it up clumsily in his heavy gloves.

“According to Dr. Billaud,” David went on, scraping at the ground with the tool, “there was an alien ship flying over Picard a few thousand years ago. It…well, it didn’t explode. But it apparently tore open, just like a seagoing ship getting ripped open by an iceberg. The loot inside spilled out.”

“Loot?”

“Statues. Gold plates or tablets with writing on them. Objets d’art. A lot of the stuff landed here, inside this crater, in an enormous footprint. The heavier pieces were moving fast enough to plow down into the regolith a ways, like bullets. The lighter, flimsier stuff ended up on the surface.”

“I don’t see nothing like that up here.”

“Our UN counterparts have already cleaned the area out pretty well, Ski.” He began prying something shiny up out of the clinging dust. “They were in the process of sinking these trenches to try to find and recover the heavier things. Like…this.”

David straightened up again, holding something in both hands. Kaminski stepped closer, his eyes widening. It was a statue, perhaps ten inches long…and it gleamed in the worklights like pure gold. At first, Kaminski thought the figure was human…but then, as David turned it in his hands, he got a better look at the face…roughly human, with mouth and nose and eyes in about the right place, but with eyes that looked like enormous goggles or bubbles, with deeply incised, horizontal lines instead of pupils. In one clenched fist it held a kind of staff or scepter; in the other, it clutched five ropes or leashes that ran down the front of the statue to the necks of five delicately sculpted figures, grouped waist high in front of the main figure. These smaller images were clearly human, with almond-shaped but human-looking eyes—three men and two women, nude, with their hands tied and their heads bowed.

“I wonder,” David said slowly, “if this might be our answer to your question.”

“If it is,” Kaminski replied, “a lot of these ancient-astronaut worshipers back home are in for one hell of a shock. That big guy there doesn’t exactly look like their idea of a happy, loving, creator god, like they’ve been saying.”

“You’re right there, Ski. This is going to upset a lot of folks back home….”

“Heads up, Marines, this is Bravo-six” cut in on their suit-to-suit channel. The voice was that of Lieutenant Garroway. Bravo-6 was the company’s radio code for Marine C-cubed. “We have bogies inbound, presumed hostile! All Marines outside, take cover and look sharp.” There was a pause. “Kaminski! You copy?”

“Six, Kaminski. I copy.”

“You have the package?”

Alexander. “That’s affirmative. Right here beside me.”

“Get him back inside, stat! We don’t want him wandering outside when…shit!”

A babble of radio voices sounded over Kaminski’s headset.

“Bravo-six, OP-two! Bogies in sight, repeat, bogies in sight, bearing two degrees north of Marker East Three. They’re coming in low and tight!”

“Six! OP-one! I have them! Incoming, by East Three!”

“Bravo-six! Bravo-six! Perimeter Green One! We are taking fire! We are taking—”

Static hissed over the radio channel. Kaminski crouched in the pit, staring toward the blackness of the eastern horizon, but his night vision, burned by the worklights, was gone. He thought he saw—

Gray dust exploded in a silent, deadly blossom the size of a small tree in the airless void twenty meters to Kaminski’s right. David was standing, staring in the wrong direction, his back to the explosion, and didn’t even see the danger. Swiftly, Kaminski reached up, grabbed Alexander’s PLSS harness, and yanked, hard, toppling the big man in a slow-motion tumble to the ground, the gold statue spinning in a gentle descent from the archeologist’s hands.

“What the?…”

“Get down, sir!” Kaminski snapped, peeling the ATAR off his shoulder and slapping the charging lever to chamber the first round. “We got problems!”

He could see the first of the UN hoppers now, an ungainly flying bug shape dropping out of the glare of the lights fifty meters away, almost directly between the two of them and the HQ hab. “Ooh-rah!” he shouted over the radio. “Target acquired!”

He brought the assault rifle to his shoulder, switched on HUD targeting, and dragged the muzzle until the crosshairs on his visor aligned with a hatch in the hopper’s side, already gaping open.

“All units!” Kaitlin’s voice called. “We’re under attack! Fire at will!”

Kaminski had already squeezed the firing button.

Hab One, Picard Base
Mare Crisium, the Moon 1455 hours GMT

Kaitlin looked up as a voice crackled from an overhead speaker. “Bravo-six! Bravo-six! Enemy troops in sight. They’re not blue-tops. Repeat, negative blue-tops!”

“Chinese,” she said.

Gunnery Sergeant Yates, at her side, nodded. “Almost certainly.”

“Blue-tops” was slang for the light, UN-blue helmets worn by European troops. The Chinese forces encountered so far tended to wear olive-drab and black space suits, with either olive or black helmets.

The door to the Battle Management Center clanged open, and Colonel Whitworth stormed in, with Major Dahlgren and Captain Slizak in close tow. “What the devil is going on?” he bellowed. Kaitlin looked up from the map table and looked him in the eye.

“We are under attack, Colonel,” she said, her voice cool.

“I know that! By who, goddammit?”

Yates pointed at the map table, which had been set to display input from a small computer operated by one of the Marines at the communications console. It now showed the various buildings and trenches at Picard, together with a scattering of green and red symbols. “UN forces, Colonel. Probably dispatched from the UN base on the farside, unless they had the foresight to set up a ready reserve someplace a little closer than Tsiolkovsky. They’re not wearing European Union space suits, so we suspect that they may be members of the Hangkong Tuji Budui.”

“Chinks, eh?” Whitworth said, nodding. “Right. As senior officer present, I am officially taking charge of this action.” He stared down at the map table for a moment. “Where…where are my troops on this thing?”

“There, Colonel,” Kaitlin said, pointing to two of the blue symbols denoting Habs Two and Four. “Those are the quarters they’ve been assigned to. But, with all due respect, I think you should—”

“Young lady!” Whitworth barked. “Are you presuming to tell me how to run a battle? Or are you simply telling me what to do with my troops?”

Kaitlin fought down a burst of anger. “No, sir. But you should know—”

But Whitworth was not listening. He turned to the communications personnel. “You, there! Get me an open channel to Captain Bladen, in Hab Two!”

“Aye, aye, sir,” one of the technicians said, his face carefully expressionless.

“These UNdies can’t know that the Green Berets are here, in force! We’ll goddamn teach the bastards a lesson!”

“Sir!” the Marine at the radio called. “Captain Bladen.”

“About goddamn time!” He strode to the com console, snatched the mike from the Marine’s hand, and began talking.

Kaitlin exchanged a long look with Gunny Yates. “I don’t like this, Lieutenant,” he said, keeping his voice low. “It’s going to get damned sticky out there!”

“Granted, Gunny. But he is senior officer aboard. Pass the word to your people to be careful about IDing their targets.”

“Roger that. But it’s not going to be easy!”

“What’d you expect, Gunny? A goddamn walk in the park?” She stared at the map table, where small green squares were spilling across the contour-marked terrain. Red squares—the enemy—appeared and vanished as trackers identified them and fed the data into the Marine battle-management system. Most of the red symbols were ghosted, indicating probable positions based on last confirmed reports.

There’d been six Marines outside when the alert had first been sounded, in three widely separated two-man OPs. No…make that seven, counting Kaminski, who was supposed to be hustling his civilian charge back inside. A ready force of Second Platoon Marines had been waiting, however, already suited up and ready to go except for gloves and helmets, on the lower decks of Habs Three and Five, and they were spilling out through the airlocks and onto the lunar surface right now. Every Marine had an IFF transponder mounted in his or her suit; the coded signal from each IFF was picked up by the antenna arrays atop Hab One and fed into the battle-management system. The BMS, in turn, displayed the positions and identities of all of the Marines in the action. Ranging data picked up from the Marines’ laser sighting systems on their ATARs located the unidentifeds—the probable UN troops.

The problem was that Whitworth was now giving orders to some forty Army Special Forces troops to join the battle. There’d been no time yet to set their IFF transponders to frequencies recognized by the BMS; hell, she didn’t even know yet if the Army suits had transponders. When those troops stormed out onto the crater floor, there would be no way at all to separate them from the enemy.

Yates was right. This could be real sticky.

The Dig, Picard Base
Mare Crisium, the Moon
1456 hours GMT

David started to pull himself to his feet once more, but Kaminski was lying across his legs. “Stay down, dammit!” the Marine shouted, before adding a perfunctory “Sir!”

“But I can’t see!” Try as he might to lever the front part of his suit higher, David could not find a position that would let him see what was happening. Kaminski seemed to be shooting at something; David could feel the jarring against the legs of his suit as the Marine’s ATAR recoiled.

A battle. He was smack in the middle of a battle once again, though the eerie silence, the lack of crackling gunfire and explosions, gave a surreal, almost dreamlike feeling to the engagement. He could hear distinct voices over his radio, though for the most part they were all but unintelligible. They might have been kids playing some backyard game utterly beyond the ken of listening adults.

“Delta-one, this is Five! Heads up, on your six!”

“Copy, Five, I see ’em!”

“Clear! I gotta lock! That’s fox!”

“Ooh-rah! Hey, UNdie! Special delivery from the Corps!”

Those voices sounded so young.

War might arise from the failings of old politicians, but always it was the young who paid war’s price. The average age of the SAG Marines, he’d heard during his trip out from Earth, was twenty-two—a little over half David’s age—and it was as old as that only because SAG included a higher-than-usual proportion of seasoned NCOs than the typical Marine rifle company back on Earth.

He wondered if war had been the same the last time this crater had been illuminated by fire from the black Lunar sky, a drawn-out game between elders, with brave youngsters as the playing pieces, the expendable pawns. That was the most disturbing bit of intelligence that Marc Billaud had passed on that morning—the knowledge that thousands of years ago, at the very dawn of human civilization, the aliens worshiped as gods by those humans had been destroying themselves in a cataclysmic war; the wreckage of the cargo ship that had fallen here within this crater allowed no other interpretation. The vessel had been destroyed by powerful weapons…almost certainly a positron beam, a bolt of antielectrons that had annihilated the target in a deadly flash of hard radiation.

Similar weapons had been employed half a million years earlier, on the Cydonian plains of Mars.

Was war the inevitable fruit of all civilization, of all so-called intelligence?

“We got another UNdie bug, comin’ in from East One!”

“Lauden! Can you tag him with your Wyvern?”

“That’s negative! I’m foxed out!”

Damn! he thought. I wish I could see. Unable to rise to watch the unfolding battle, David looked instead at the marvelously delicate and expressive figurine he held cradled in his arms. The back, he saw, was flat, as though a three-dimensional statue had been sliced cleanly in two from top to bottom…then heavily inscribed all over the back with tiny, crisply incised marks. The entire lower half, he saw, was covered with tiny pictographs, the top half with something like writing, with repetitive symbols that…

With an ice-shocked jar that literally drove the breath from his body, David understood just what it was he was holding. Rolling suddenly out from beneath Kaminski’s legs, he sat up, holding the statuette in both hands, staring at it as though it had just come alive.

Which in a very real sense, it had.

“Goddammit, sir,” Kaminski screamed, lurching toward him. “Get the fuck down!”

Dazedly, he looked around, becoming aware of running shapes, bright and silent flashes against the darkness, and Kaminski’s wide-eyed face behind his visor. “The Rosetta stone!” he said, more to himself than to the frantic Marine.

“Whatever!” Kaminski hit him, hard, with one outstretched hand, knocking him back to the ground. “Hit the dirt!”

David lay on his side, continuing to stare at the inscriptions on the back of the gold statue. They had a machine-precise look about them, as though they’d been stamped into the metal, rather than carved out by artisans. Those on the bottom half were almost shockingly familiar; David couldn’t read it, but he was quite familiar with the pictographs known as Proto-Sumerian, the antecedent of Mesopotamian cuneiform writing.

And as for the stranger, more fluid writing at the top…

He clutched the artifact more closely against the front of his suit. Suddenly, it was vitally important that he survive this firefight, vital that he return with the golden statue and its paired texts to the institute in Chicago.

The statue he was holding was more important than his life.

The Dig, Picard Base
Mare Crisium, the Moon
1457 hours GMT

Kaminski was aware of Alexander curling himself up around the odd gold statue, but didn’t think any more about it. The important thing was to keep the civilian alive, and if the idiot would just keep his head down, there was at least a chance of that happening.

The battle, from Kaminski’s point of view, at least, was a confusing, night-cloaked collision. Alexander’s complaint a moment ago about not being able to see struck him as hilarious. All Kaminski could see was the pitch-blackness surrounding the base, the glare of worklights illuminating the central area, and various large and vaguely defined shapes—the habs and the insect-legged hoppers the UNdies were arriving in. Occasionally, a space-suited form would dash across the light, moving from shadow to shadow. When he kicked in the IR overlay of his helmet’s heads-up display system, he could see the wavering, red-yellow man-shapes of other figures concealed by the dark. To sort friend from foe, he had to rely on the radioed commentary from C-cubed.

“Heads up, Marines! We have four Marines coming out of Hab Three, crossing toward Marker South Five.”

He turned to look at the indicated hab, spotted three…no, four heat-shapes moving on the double. Superimposed on each was a small, bright green symbol, marking them as IFF-IDed friendlies. Good enough. He raised his ATAR and painted another target, a glowing mass crouched in the blackness beneath the first grounded hopper, perhaps ninety meters away. He couldn’t see an IFF tag. “Six! This is Ski! I got a paint! What’s my target?”

“Kaminski, Six. That’s a hostile!”

“Roger that! Takin’ ’im down!”

His selector switch was already set to a three-round burst. Holding the crosshairs on his helmet HUD steady on the red-glowing shape, he squeezed the trigger, felt the soft triplet of recoils as the 4.5mm caseless rounds snapped toward the target. The red mass suddenly split apart—there’d been two space-suited figures there—and started to move in opposite directions. He picked the one on the right and fired again. He thought he’d hit it; the figure wasn’t moving anymore, at any rate. The one to the left…was gone by the time he tracked back to reacquire it. Damn!…

“All Marines! Heads up! We have ten Army troops coming out of Hab Four! They don’t have IFFs, so watch what you’re shooting at!”

He glanced toward Hab Four and saw moving shadows against the light. About time the damned doggies made it to the party. He wondered just what the odds were. There were three UN hopper transports, but they were big sons of bitches, bigger than the Marine bugs, big enough to carry a lot of troops. At the moment, the Marines were theoretically mustering fifty-three men in three companies—the fight three days ago at Picard had killed seventeen men and women, fifteen of them in Bravo’s First Platoon. Three hours ago, though, just after the departure of Captain Fuentes and Captain Lee, all twenty-three Marines in Alfa Company’s Second Platoon had boarded LSCP-44 and boosted skyward in a silent swirl of moon dust. Scuttlebutt had it that they were reconning off south of Picard somewhere, or even that they were scouting the approaches to a UN base hidden on the farside of the Moon, but no one was saying for sure. That left just Bravo’s Second Platoon and the remnants of First—thirty people against possibly three times that number…unless the Army’s Green Beanies entered the fight.

Two of the UN hoppers were on the ground; the third was still aloft, landing lights glaring against black space and the crisscross of steel struts. A streak of flame angled down from the hovering craft, striking a ditch digger in a soundless blossoming of white light that toppled Marines sheltered in the vehicle’s shadow. Shit! The bastards had jury-rigged a missile launcher to the outer hull of the hopper and were using it for close air support.

Behind the glare of its landing lights, Kaminski could see a UN trooper leaning out of an open hatch, struggling to reload the now-empty launch tube. Taking careful aim, he squeezed off four fast triplets, and the loader jerked back inside, lost from view. Kaminski didn’t know if he’d hit the guy or simply managed to scare him. Flicking the selector switch to full auto, he shifted his aim to the hopper’s angular cockpit as the hovering craft slowly rotated in the sky. He wasn’t sure how much 4.5-mm rounds would do to the ungainly thing, but he could sure let the UNdie bastards know that their presence above the battlefield was not appreciated.

God…was it falling?

It was spinning faster now, and settling, nose high. Other Marines, and Whitworth’s troops as well, were firing now at the hovering craft; Kaminski could see the sparks as rounds struck the craft’s lightly armored hull. It struck the crater floor two hundred meters from Hab One, one of its landing legs crumpling beneath it as it set down hard in a high-flying billow of Lunar dust, pitching it sideways at a steep angle. By the harsh illumination of its landing lights, still on, Kaminski could see shadowy, space-suited figures tumbling from the wreckage. He took aim and opened up on full rock-and-roll, holding down the ATAR’s firing button until the hundred-round stock magazine ran dry.

“Ooh-rah!” Kaminski shouted, holding his ATAR above his helmet in triumph. He was standing—and didn’t even remember getting to his feet. He fumbled at his vest harness for a fresh box of caseless rounds, dropping the empty mag and snapping home the fresh one. A soundless explosion detonated forty meters away, and he heard the clatter of flying gravel rattling lightly from his helmet.

“Maybe you should be the one to get the fuck down, Kaminski,” David called from his part of the excavation. “It’s getting damned hot out here!”

He dropped back to his knees. “I think you’re right. C’mon. Let’s see if we can find better cover over that way.” As they started to crawl, Kaminski looked back and noticed that Alexander was still carrying the statue he’d found. “Drop it, Professor,” he said. “Won’t do you no good if you get killed.”

“No way, Ski. You just keep crawling. I’ll keep up.”

Kaminski hesitated. Damn it, Alexander was a civilian, and short of knocking him out and dragging him, Kaminski couldn’t think of a way to enforce the order. He gave a mental shrug and kept crawling.

“Heads up, Marines and Berets!” the lieutenant’s voice called. “We have incoming friendlies, coming in near South Two! Hold your fire to ground targets!”

Friendlies! Kaminski stopped crawling and searched the sky toward the southern direction markers. He couldn’t see a thing…and then the bug switched on its landing lights, a quad of dazzling stars casting moving circles of illumination across the crater floor. Dust swirled as the vehicle gentled in for a landing not far from the wreckage of the downed UN hopper. The troops that came spilling out of the open cargo bay all bore green pips on Kaminski’s HUD display, and he felt a surge of sheer joy. Someone—the company commanders, or maybe Lieutenant Garroway—had come up with one hell of an idea, sending Alfa Company’s Second Platoon off to some nearby hidey hole beyond the crater rim as a strategic reserve. Once the UN forces had committed themselves to the counterattack, the reserves had come in, and now, suddenly the UN deployment was dissolving, their attack teams breaking into small groups of men, most of them now breaking for their remaining two hopper transports.

“Ski!” David called out suddenly. “On your left!”

Kaminski turned and saw a group of five or six red-orange heat images loping toward him. They were running in the general direction of one of the unloaded UN hoppers, and he and Alexander were squarely in their path.

He raised his ATAR, checked for green pips…and when he saw none he squeezed the firing button, sending a stream of 4.5mm rounds slashing into the running troops at a range of less than fifty meters. Two of the space-suited figures went down…then a third, his visor exploding in a spray of plastic shards and pink mist that froze instantly into an icy cloud as it blossomed from the helmet. The two survivors dropped prone, and puffs of dust exploded from the rim of the excavation as they returned fire.

“Hold your fire!” Kaitlin’s voice cried over the general combat channel. “Damn it, hold your fire! Kaminski! Hold fire! Those are friendlies!”

Oh, God….