FRIDAY, 2 MAY 2042

Administration Complex
Vandenberg Space Command
Base
1635 hours PDT

“It is the finding of this court that Sergeant Frank Kaminski was not at fault for the friendly-fire incident that took place on Wednesday, 15 April 2042, at the former UN base at Picard Crater in the Mare Crisium, resulting in the deaths of three American soldiers attached to the US Army Special Forces Space Command.

“This court further finds that said friendly-fire incident occurred because the IFF codes that might have prevented the incident had not been programmed into the space suits worn by the victims. The threat to which they were responding developed before Army and Marine personnel at the site could coordinate the necessary codes and other protocols necessary for smooth joint action. Tasked with protecting the civilian in his care, Sergeant Kaminski responded properly to what he perceived as a direct and immediate threat when the Army personnel moved toward his position. In the chaos of battle, with no IFF codes registering on his helmet HUD and no easy way to clearly discriminate between the outward appearance of the space suits worn by newly arrived Army personnel and attacking Chinese troops, Sergeant Kaminski responded as he’d been trained and in full accord with his duties and orders as a United States Marine.

“This court of inquiry finds the cause of the incident leading to the soldiers’ deaths to be human error but can assign no specific blame or responsibility in the matter.

“We hereby declare this case to be closed, with no further recommendations.” A gavel cracked on the wooden strike pad. “Case dismissed!”

“Attention on deck!” the bailiff cried, and everyone in the chamber rose as the panel of three Marine and two Army officers stood behind the bench, gathered their papers, then filed out of the room. Kaitlin watched Kaminski’s back as the young man, who’d been standing at attention to hear the court’s verdict, swayed a little on his feet. This is going to hit him hard, she thought.

She walked forward and touched his shoulder. He jumped.

“You going to be okay, Frank?” she asked.

“Uh, yes, ma’am! I’m fine.”

“You understand, don’t you, that you didn’t have to go through all of this because anyone thought you’d killed those men on purpose, or even because they thought you screwed up. The Corps has to go through the motions, to find out what really happened, and to try to make sure that accidents like this one don’t happen again.”

“Yes, ma’am. I understand all that. Mostly, well, I’m just sorry for those three guys I…that I killed.”

She nodded, patting his shoulder. “It was an accident. There is a difference between an accident and a screwup, Frank. It just happens that accidents tend to be especially deadly in an environment like space.”

“Doesn’t make it easier for their wives and families, does it, ma’am?”

“Sure doesn’t. But people get killed in war, and sometimes people get killed by accident. It wasn’t your fault, Marine. Remember that.”

“Aye, aye, ma’am.” But he didn’t sound convinced.

As Kaminski’s commanding officer, of course, Kaitlin had had to testify at the inquiry. She’d emphasized the lack of coordination between the Marine and Army components of the US force at Picard and tried to assume responsibility for the IFF gaffe herself. If she’d just tried to force the issue with Colonel Whitworth. There simply hadn’t been time….

Her testimony had been accepted; her attempt at taking the blame had been rejected: likely, she thought, because both the Army and Corps wanted to keep the incident as low-profile as possible.

Even so, she’d been very much afraid that someone intended to throw Frank Kaminski to the wolves, a sacrifice to appease the media gods who’d been writing about the friendly-fire incident at Picard ever since the unit’s return to Earth.

The Second Battle of Picard Crater had been a complete victory for the American forces. Kaitlin’s ploy, holding a platoon in reserve south of the crater until the Chinese attack, had been a triumphant vindication of the longstanding Marine tactical dogma of fighting with two lead elements, and keeping a third in reserve. Casualties had been light: eight killed, including the three killed by friendly fire. Twenty-eight UN troops, all members of the seventy-fourth People’s Army of the Republic of North China, had been killed, and fifteen captured. Those prisoners, when added to the Italian POWs taken in the first battle, had posed a real problem, stretching American logistics and the ability to feed them and keep them breathing to the limit. The mining shuttle captured at Picard had been kept busy making runs to and from the Moon’s north pole, bringing in loads of polar ice for the base’s O₂ converters. Even at that, by the time a relief expedition, including twelve more tugs, had arrived from Earth five days later, everyone had been on short rations, and off-duty personnel were kept in their racks, sleeping, to conserve oxygen.

One-SAG had returned to Earth and to a heroes’ welcome; maybe that was why the powers-that-were hadn’t pushed the court of inquiry thing further.

“You look mad,” a voice said in her ear.

She turned, looking up at Captain Rob Lee, trim and sharp in his razor-creased khakis. “Damn it, if anyone had to face an official court of inquiry,” she said, “it should have been me.”

“If anyone had to face a court,” he corrected her, “it should have been that idiot Whitworth. You done good, Kate.”

“Wish I could believe you.”

“You got the duty tonight, Marine?”

“No….”

He drew a deep breath. “Then I’ll tell you what. Ol’ Doc Lee prescribes dinner out tonight. Followed by a drive down to Gaviota and a moonlight walk on the beach. Say…I pick you up at nineteen hundred?”

“A moonlight walk?” She smiled. “Not as good as a walk on the Moon itself.”

“But a damn sight more romantic. You ever try necking while sealed up inside one of those tin suits? Not my idea of a good time.”

“Well, I guess you’ll have to show me what your idea of a good time is. Nineteen hundred it is. Where do you want to eat?”

“I was kind of thinking of the Menkoi.”

Her eyebrows went up. “‘Love noodles’?”

“Is that what it means?” The scalp beneath his short-cropped Marine haircut flushed darker, and he looked uncomfortable.

“More or less.”

“It’s the name of a new Japanese restaurant in Las Cruces.”

“I know. It sounds great. I’m looking forward to it.”

It wouldn’t be their first date since their return from the Moon. In fact, they’d been seeing rather a lot of one another lately. She hadn’t known Rob all that well before the mission, but since then, she’d discovered that they had a lot in common besides a passionate love of the Corps. Both loved long discussions and longer walks; both were outspoken and not afraid to express an opinion. Both were well-read, enjoyed programming, and loved science fiction. Both were taking cram courses in French, in the spirit of know-your-enemy. And they both loved Japanese food.

Dinner was, for Kaitlin, a blissful escape from the stress she’d been under for the past week, during the official inquiry. The chefs all knew her—she’d been to the Menkoi more than once and startled the Japanese manager by bowing and greeting him in fluent Nihongo—and they made a fuss over the two Marines, so much so that Rob was embarrassed. “I keep forgetting you’re half-Japanese yourself,” he said with a wry grin.

“Only in the heart,” she replied. “Living there as long as I did will do that to you.”

“And that’s why you’re so good at French, right? Because you speak Japanese?”

“Any second language makes the third easier,” she told him.

While the Menkoi had a Western section in the front, there were rooms in the back reserved for traditional dining, where shoes were left outside the door, and the rice was served after the various side dishes that made up the meal, to fill the belly and cleanse the palate. They ate seated on the floor, using o-hashi; Kaitlin had to help Rob get his fingers properly positioned for the exercise and to reassure him that it was okay to lift the soup bowl to his chin in order to get at the solid bits of meat and vegetable afloat inside. Their conversation ranged from the alien images and information discovered on Mars to the future of humankind in space.

By tacit consent, they both steered well clear of anything about the inquiry, or the friendly-fire incident at Picard.

“Mark my words, Kate,” Rob told her as they ate. “The military is taking us back into space. And it’s the Marines who are leading the way.”

“’Sfunny,” she said around a mouthful of bamboo and mushroom. “I thought it was all the alien stuff we’ve been finding out there. That was what revitalized the space program, back when we’d all but given up on space.”

“Sure. I guess that got things rolling.” He chewed for a moment, thoughtful. “But if you think about it, it was the need to get lots of people out to Mars, and provide ’em with air and power, that got us on track with the cycler spacecraft and the big bases at Mars Prime and Cydonia. And most of the people we ended up sending were Marines. To protect our national interests…meaning the ET technology and stuff we were finding out there. And now, the same is happening on the Moon.”

The conversation had veered perilously close to a dangerous area. She decided to try steering the subject clear of the Marine missions to Fra Mauro and Picard. “It’s the technology we need,” she told him. “The things we can learn from the ancient ETs. Everyone knows that!”

“Think about history,” he told her. “Think about what happened in the American West. Sure, settlers started heading west looking for gold or farmland or whatever, and they built covered wagons and, later, transcontinental railroad lines to get ’em there. But it was the soldiers who went along who spread civilization to that whole empty stretch of the continent, from Missouri to California. It was the soldiers who built the forts at Laramie and Fort Collins and Leavenworth and Dodge and Lincoln and how many other lonely outposts across the West that later became towns and cities.”

“Well, the Native Americans might quibble with your use of the word civilization,” she replied, “but I guess I see your point.”

“The Army opened the West in a way the mountain men and the gold rushers never could,” he insisted. “Without those forts stretched clear across the continent, we would have ended up with two countries, the US and California, with nothing but wilderness and mountains between the two.”

“And the Mormons,” Kaitlin said. She knew enough history to hold her own against Rob, usually, and she enjoyed a good debate. “Don’t forget the Mormons.”

“Finicky details,” he said, with a dismissive flutter of his hand. “In the grand scheme of things, it was the soldiers who built those outposts, then brought their wives along and started the towns. The settlers moved in to feed the Army. The railroads came through and connected the new towns. The soldiers retired and took up farming cheap land in the area. And that’s what’s going to happen in space.”

“I’m not sure there’ll ever be ‘cheap land’ in space.”

“C’mon, Kate. You see what I mean.”

“Sure. And you might have a point….”

“Might have?”

“What was our biggest problem on the Moon?”

He gave her a weary smile. “You mean, besides the Army?” She nodded, and he shrugged. “Logistics, I guess. Especially water and air.”

“Right. We had working parties at the Lunar north pole the whole time, digging up ice and hauling it back to Picard. Most places in the solar system, it won’t even be that easy.”

“Actually, it might. Y’know, probably the only place in the whole solar system that doesn’t have readily available water somewhere close by is Venus.”

“Mercury?”

“There’s polar ice there, too.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” she said, remembering an article she’d read on the subject.

“And wherever we can find ice, we can make oxygen, drinking water, and rocket fuel. And what I picture, see, is the Army having to set up outposts, like those frontier forts, to guard the water holes.”

“By ‘Army,’ I’m assuming you really mean ‘Marines.’”

He laughed and lifted his cup of o-sake, as if in a toast. “Semper fi, do or die!” he cried. “The Marines will go in first to stake out the beachhead, just like always. As soon as it’s safe, the doggies move in and claim the credit!”

“Okay, okay, I’ll go along with all that. Still, you’ve gotta admit that if it hadn’t been for all the alien stuff we’ve found out there, the space program would be dead on arrival, right now.”

He shrugged. “It still might be, too, if the ET tech doesn’t deliver something pretty spectacular.”

“Like what?”

“Hell, I don’t know. A cure for global warming?”

“That’s a good one.”

“Has to be something more than these crazy new religions. Maybe a new kind of space drive, or a new power source. Anyway, I think we’re going to keep looking now, now that we have a presence out there.”

“So do I,” she told him.

And then she told him her lifelong dream, about how she was going to be among the first to go to the stars….

After dinner, Rob drove them down out of the mountains to Gaviota State Park. As with every other beach in the world, the steady rise of sea levels was slowly devouring the sandy shelf, and the increase in violent storms and El Niño years frequently scoured the surviving sand away to bare rock.

But storms also returned the sand, sometimes, and current beach conditions were posted as fair to good. If the shelf, even at low tide, wasn’t as broad as it had been fifty, or even twenty years ago, it still offered a glimpse of what the wild and spray-drenched interface between land and sea had once been like.

The Moon was well up in the southeast, just past full and gleaming silver in a cloudless sky, when Kaitlin and Rob left his car at the lot and started down the long flight of steps leading to the beach below. Waves crashed and hissed, each incoming roller shattering the dancing pillar of reflected moonlight in the water up the beach.

By day, the park, like all of the state beaches, tended to be jammed with refugees from the city enjoying a spray-laden taste of clothing-optional nature. After sunset, though, the crowds had thinned to a scattering of couples and small family groups, gathered around fires or discreetly making out on blankets scattered among dunes and rocks. The stars were as brilliant as they ever got this close to Los Angeles, which even this far up the coast flooded most of the eastern horizon with warm light.

“So, what’ve you heard about Operation Swift Victory?” Kaitlin asked Rob. They’d talked a little about it during the drive. Lately, Kaitlin had been thinking a lot about the rumored upcoming assault but hadn’t talked to anyone who knew any more about it than she did. Security was extraordinarily tight.

Stopping suddenly, she slipped her shoes off and let her bare feet sink into wet sand. Rob crouched and untied his shoes, pulled off his socks, and rolled up the cuffs of his jeans. He’d brought a towel along, which he kept slung over his shoulder. The air was still hot after a day that had hit thirty degrees, but the sea breeze was refreshingly cool, almost chilly. As always, weather this warm in April made Kaitlin wonder how bad the summer was going to be. Each year, somehow, seemed a bit hotter, a bit stormier, than the last.

“Don’t know,” he said at last. “But I got a bad feeling. You know who’s in command?”

“General Richardson, I heard.”

“Overall, yeah. But he won’t be leaving the Pentagon. No, the CO on-site. The guy up front, leading the charge.”

“Not…”

“’Fraid so. Your old friend, Colonel Whitworth.” He chuckled. “Someone figured he was the man, because he’s had experience with vac-combat.”

“God help us.”

“I heard there was quite a row during the planning. Seems like all of the services wanted a crack at the UN-dies.”

“What happened?”

“The Army won. The Marines lost out, because someone pointed out that they’d already had a shot at Moonglory.”

She laughed. “Is that what they call it?”

“Well, it makes great copy on the vidcasts. Anyway, I imagine Aerospace Force transports will take ’em in. Don’t know what they’re planning, but my guess would be a quick, one-step thrust, straight from Earth to orbit to Moon. Come in low, mountain-skimming, to avoid the Demon.” The Demon was the currently circulating slang for whatever it was that had nailed Black Crystal, variously rumored to be a powerful laser, an antimatter beam, or an entirely new type of weapon unlike anything known before.

“Think it’ll work?”

“Damfino. I hope so, but…”

“But?”

“Shoot. It just feels all wrong, you know? I don’t think anybody has any decent intel. No one knows what’s going on back there, on the back side of the Moon. The Army could be walking into six different kinds of hell.”

They’d walked a fair distance east from the steps, and were on an almost deserted stretch of beach. A few fires flickered in the distance behind them, but they were alone here, save for crashing surf and glittering stars and Moon.

“How about a swim?” he asked.

She had to consider that cheerful suggestion for a moment. She hadn’t brought a swimsuit, and she suddenly wished she’d worn something more appropriate under her slacks than filmy panties, even a thong-G. Oh, she’d been nude in public plenty of times, on the beach and elsewhere, but she’d never stripped down in front of Rob. Kaitlin was suddenly aware of feelings, unsettled feelings that made her state of dress or undress more important than if he’d been an anonymous stranger in a crowd at the beach.

“Sure,” she said, deciding suddenly. She began shucking her clothing and dropping it on the sand. “Why not?” She felt daring…and a bit giddy. They left their clothing piled on the beach next to the towel. Holding hands, then, they started jogging down the narrow shelf toward the breakers.

Before they reached the waves, however, thunder tolled, a distant, muffled drumroll. Both of them stopped and turned, looking up into the northwestern sky, but the stars were still sharp and clear, with no hint of an approaching storm.

Then a dazzling flare of light appeared, rising slowly above the Santa Ynez Mountains, brighter than the street-lamps over the parking lot and trailing a long, wavering tail of white flame. It rose high toward the zenith, its path curving slightly, until it passed almost directly overhead, moving out over the ocean now, traveling rapidly south. The sound, which lagged far behind the moving flare’s visual position, faded a bit to a ragged, thuttering chain of cracks and claps chasing the flare toward orbit.

“Zeus II,” Kaitlin said, as the noise faded. The flare vanished into the distance, but the contrail, illuminated by the moonlight, remained hanging in the sky like a scratch across heaven.

“Heavy lifter,” Rob added, in needless elaboration. “Jeez. Doesn’t seem possible that we rode one of those things to space, does it?”

Thunder tolled again, and another flare heaved into view above the mountains to the northwest. “There goes another,” Kaitlin said.

The second was followed by a third, then a fourth and a fifth, each one almost seeming to crawl up along the path of the last, their gleaming contrails appearing to tangle and merge in their vast arc across the star-dotted zenith.

Kaitlin didn’t know how it had happened, didn’t remember it happening, but she and Rob were standing together now, their arms tight around one another as they stared up into the sky. The incoming tide brought a sudden rush of cold seawater surging past their ankles, and she let out a little gasp. Letting go of Rob, she jumped back, splashing back onto dry sand, the spell broken.

“Go Army,” Rob said, still looking up. “And Godspeed.”

“Think that’s Swift Victory?”

“Gotta be,” Rob replied. “Five HLVs in as many minutes? I doubt that they’ll even change orbits. They’ll probably rendezvous with some tugs already parked in a polar orbit, then boost straight for Luna.”

Launches from Vandenberg were always aimed toward the south, over open ocean and into a polar or near-polar orbit. It would never do to have the fragments of a failed launch coming down in a fiery footprint stretching across Greater Los Angeles. The tight clustering of the launches suggested that they were aiming for an unusually small launch window, which in turn suggested a rendezvous with a fleet of LEO-to-Luna transports already in orbit.

Dropping his gaze from the heavens, he gave her a long and appraising look in the moonlight. Then he shrugged. “I…guess maybe we’d best be getting back to the base, huh?”

She had to give that one some thought as well. There were regulations aplenty regarding sexual liaisons within military service, especially when there was a difference in rank involved that might be seen either as an abuse of power or as sex-for-privileges. Still, the practical implementation of those regs tended toward the assumption that men and women were going to do what was natural for them, and to turn a blind eye…unless the couple was flagrant in their play or the relationship involved “conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline,” as Article 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice so succinctly phrased it.

The question wasn’t what the Marine Corps had to say about a lieutenant sleeping with a captain. It was what she was ready for. She hadn’t had a sexual relationship with anyone since Yukio’s death, and that was two years ago now.

She knew she couldn’t put her life on hold forever.

“We don’t have to go back yet,” she told him. “Do you have the duty this weekend?”

He shook his head no.

“Me neither. We don’t have to report in until oh seven hundred Monday morning, right?” She stepped back into the surf, moving close, letting her hands lightly caress his body. “So…whatcha want to do about it, huh?”

“This,” he replied, reaching for her.

The kiss lasted for a long, long time.