WEDNESDAY, 7 MAY 2042

Recruit Platoon 4239
Parris Island Recruit Training
Center
1345 hours EDT

“Okay, ladies,” Gunnery Sergeant Knox said, grinning. He was holding a lump of something that looked like heavy, gray clay. He tossed it a few centimeters into the air and caught it again in the same hand several times, the soft slap of each catch emphasizing his words. “I wanna show you all somethin’ here. Somethin’ important.”

It was a sweltering, humid May afternoon beneath a brassy, overcast sky. Week Three of recruit training for Platoon 4239 had brought them face-to-face with a number of firsts as they settled into the boot-camp routine. Early in the week they’d run the obstacle course for the first time, a run through obstacles, over walls, and hand over hand along a rope above a mud pit in a routine euphemistically known as the “confidence course.” The recruits had also faced their first written exam, their first physical evaluation since the admission physicals, their first inspection, and their first parade to demonstrate their growing command of close-order drill.

Training had been grueling, an exhausting regime deliberately orchestrated to spring one surprise after another on the recruits as they struggled to overcome each new challenge. Head knowledge was emphasized as much as physical training, on the theory, as Knox expressed it, that “a smart Marine is a live Marine.” Because of the incessant heat, physical training, calisthenics, long runs, and close-order drill tended to be held in the morning or late in the afternoon; midday, before and after noon chow, was reserved for lectures and demonstrations, such as this one.

Of course, that often meant that the recruits ended up sitting in mud-drenched utilities after a late-morning romp in the mud pit or getting drenched in sweat running the confidence course, trying to stay alert while they listened to the lecture.

As he sat cross-legged on the ground, watching Knox work the clay a bit more, Jack realized that he’d really accomplished something just making it this far. In three weeks, attrition had whittled an eighty-man platoon down to sixty-one—reducing it by almost a quarter. There’d been that kid from Tennessee who’d pleaded with the DI one evening to be allowed to go home, tears streaming down his face; there’d been that sharp, smart-mouthed kid from New York named Doud who’d snapped in the mess hall and actually taken a swing at Knox…a swing that hadn’t connected but had resulted Doud’s being hustled away and never seen again. There’d been Martelli—one of the platoon’s “fat trays,” or overweight recruits—who’d washed out when he couldn’t pass the physical quals earlier in the week.

There’d also been those six or eight guys who’d hurt themselves—a couple of them badly enough to end up in the hospital with broken bones—and the word was they’d all have to pick up their training in a later platoon. That sucked, in Jack’s expert opinion. Having to come into a platoon full of strangers partway through, knowing no one, no one knowing you…

Jack lived in dread of that happening to him. He knew these guys, was bonded with them, molded with them, become a part of them in a way that he’d never been a part of anything else in his life. After three weeks, Gunnery Sergeant Knox and his assistant DIs had broken everyone about as low as it was possible to break them. Now they were in the process of building them back up.

As something new….

Turning away from the watching recruits, Knox walked ten meters across the open ground of the training field to the two lifelike mannequins standing next to one another, plastic faces showing no emotion. Both dummies wore Marine-issue Class-Three armor breastplates, over OD utilities.

Reaching the dummy on the left, Knox slapped the clay against its breastplate, high up, just below the throat, kneading it with his thumb to make it stick, then inserting a small, black object the size and shape of a domino.

Returning to the recruits, waiting in a semicircle in their soggy, mud-covered utilities, Knox jerked a thumb over his shoulder, indicating the waiting dummy. “That, ladies, which I just placed on our volunteer out there, is two hundred grams of C-320 plastic explosives. That’s less than half a pound.” Taking a position next to the table set behind the firing line, he picked up a small controller. “Sergeant Bayerly?”

“Range clear, Gunnery Sergeant Knox!”

Smiling, Knox entered a code into the controller, flipped off a safety, then mashed his thumb down on the firing button without even turning to watch the display.

There was a sharp, ringing crack, and the dummy on the left was kicked backward in a flurry of plastic limbs. Several of the recruits jumped. One said, “Oh, God!”

“God’s not going to help the poor son of a bitch now, recruit,” Knox said, replacing the controller. “Let’s go see.”

Together, the recruits followed Knox across the open field to see the effects of the blast up close. The explosion had punched a hole big enough to admit three fingers straight through the breastplate, through the dummy, and out the rear of the breastplate as well, though the exit hole was smaller than the width of a pencil. Bright red gelatin, the semiliquid stuffing inside the dummy’s chest, was splattered across the ground in a realistic display of human gore.

Jack heard a retching sound from one of his fellow re cruits but couldn’t see who it was. God, if he gets sick seeing a damned dummy get holed!…

“Two hundred grams of high explosives, ladies,” Knox said in his best lecturing tone, “releases one million joules of energy upon detonation. That is enough, as you can see, to penetrate standard Marine-issue armor and blast a very nasty hole clear through your giblets! One megajoule. Remember that! Okay, back to the firing line!”

When the recruits were seated once again, Knox walked over to the table and picked up a long and complex-looking weapon. With its bipod and pistol grip, it had the look of an old-fashioned squad light machine gun, but it was connected to a foil-encased backpack resting on the ground by a segmented cable as thick as a man’s forefinger. Knox hefted the bulky weapon easily with one hand, while he reached down and flipped a switch on the backpack with the other. A tiny, high-pitched whine spooled up from the power pack, and a red light began winking on the weapon’s receiver assembly.

When the red light stopped blinking and glowed steadily, Knox brought the weapon’s stock to his shoulder with a crisp, efficient motion straight out of the Marine Corps manual and squeezed the trigger. There was no flash, no beam, or other outward sign, but downrange, the second target dummy leaped backward with a sharp crack, leaving a faint, hazy blur of vaporized metal hanging in the air. As Knox lowered the weapon, the recruits could hear the power pack spooling up again, until he reached down and switched it off. He replaced the laser weapon on the table, muzzle pointed carefully away from both the students and the range.

“Time to compare,” he told them.

The two dummies lay on their backs, side by side. The second now sported a hole in its breastplate in exactly the same place as the first. The entry hole was a bit smaller…but the exit hole was larger, much larger, with a lot more red goo spattered on the grass.

“One megajoule,” Knox repeated, speaking slowly and patiently, as if for the slowest of students. “One million joules. Watkins! What is one joule?”

“Sir! One joule is one watt of power applied for one second, sir!” It was one of the thousands of isolated facts and bits of information that had been hammered into them all during the past three weeks, like the serial numbers of their ATARs or the names of the ten people in the chain of command above them, from Gunnery Sergeant Harold Knox all the way up to President Roger Markham.

“Correct. Since it’s damned hard to get an uncooperative target to stand still for one whole second, we use a ten-million-watt laser to release a pulse that lasts one-tenth of a second. One million watts for one second equals ten million watts for one-tenth second. The result is the same. One million joules, delivered on-target. That is enough to punch through the best personal armor we know. It’s enough to chew though your guts, charbroil them, and spit them out your backsides. Flash!”

Jack gritted his teeth. “Flash” had become his nickname, his handle in the platoon, a jeering reference to Flash Gordon and his desire to be a space Marine.

“What is the effective range of the Sunbeam M228 Squad Laser Weapon?”

“Sir!” Jack shouted as hard and as loud as he could, reciting the relevant textbook paragraph. “The effective range of the Sunbeam M228 Squad Laser Weapon is approximately eighteen hundred to twenty-two hundred meters, but that range may be sharply restricted by attenuation or by adverse atmospheric conditions, sir!”

“Correct! And what is the maximum range in hard vacuum?”

“Sir! In vacuum, the maximum range of the Sunbeam M228 Squad Laser Weapon is theoretically infinite, sir!”

“Theoretically? You gonna trust your life, or the life of your buddy in the hole with you, to theory?”

That sounded like one of Knox’s frequent rhetorical questions, so Jack remained silent. It turned out to be the right response.

“The important thing to remember about the slaw,” Knox went on, “is that if you can see your target, you can hit it.

“And the important thing to remember about energy, is that energy is energy, whether it comes from a lump of plastic explosives, or the muzzle of M228 Squad Laser Weapon, or your fist. All any weapon is is a means of delivering energy on target. And delivering a hell of a lot of energy on-target, accurately and lethally, is what being a Marine is all about. With an M228 ten-megawatt Squad Laser Weapon. With an ATAR standard personal weapon. With an entrenching tool. With a rock. With your fist. With your teeth. You are the weapon! You, the men of the United States Marine Corps! Do you read me?”

“Sir! Yes, sir!” the recruits chorused.

“A US Marine is far more deadly than a ten-megawatt M-228 Squad Laser Weapon! And that is because a ten-megawatt M-228 Squad Laser Weapon cannot think. It cannot plan. And most of all, it does not possess the courage, fortitude, adaptability, willpower, or sheer, mean grit of a US Marine! Do you read me?”

“Sir, yes, sir!”

“I can’t hear you!”

“SIR, YES, SIR!”

“What does a US Marine do?”

“Kill! Kill! Marine Corps!”

Jack shouted with the others, yelling past the harsh rasp in his throat, overriding the chill, the discomfort, the bone-tired ache, the chattering of his teeth.

Still, it was impossible not to look down at those two, drilled-through dummies and not imagine himself lying there. My God, he thought, and not for the first time since he’d come aboard at Parris Island. What have I gotten myself into?

Assault Shuttle 06, Army Space
Force Assault Group
Approaching Lunar South Pole
2035 hours GMT

The K-440 Space Transport Cargo pod was the size and roughly the shape of a boxcar, a no-frills pressurized module capable of transporting up to fifteen tons with a Zeus II HLV to provide the initial kick. With Aerospace Force modifications allowing for air and temperature control, it could carry fifty men to orbit, or thirty as far as the Moon.

Colonel Thomas R. Whitworth floated in the two-man cockpit between the commander’s and pilot’s seats, peering through the narrow slit windows at the rugged terrain ahead. Sunlight, reflected from silver-white mountains, flooded the cockpit and warmed his face; he preferred spending the travel time aft with his men—a good leader never separated himself from his men or their discomfort—but he’d asked Major Jones, the Aerospace Force mission commander, to call him forward for the final approach. It always helped to be able to actually see the terrain you were supposed to assault, using your God-given Mark I eyeballs instead of watching a computer simulation. He’d not had a good feel for the terrain the last time he’d led his men into this desolate waste, and he thought that that was why they’d made a relatively poor showing when the enemy counterattacked.

They would do better this time. The damned Marines weren’t here to get in the way, for one thing…or to inflict casualties with so-called friendly fire. Whitworth had a soldier’s native distrust for joint operations, and a dislike in particular for the Marines. Like Truman a century earlier, he thought they served well enough as the Navy’s police force, but the needs of the military as a whole would be best served if there was one aerospace arm, and one ground assault force. So-called elites like the Marines simply pulled good men and women away from the service that could best use them—the Army, and, in particular, Army Special Forces.

Today we’ll see what the Army Space Force can really do, he thought. This one could end the goddamned war!

Everything hinged on the Moon’s reserves of frozen water.

Water ice had been discovered on the Moon over forty years ago, first by a Defense Department Lunar probe, with confirmation a few years later by Lunar Prospector, a NASA satellite. When humans had again walked on the face of the Moon after the half century hiatus following Apollo, long-term explorations had been launched and permanent bases had been built with the knowledge that large reserves of water—locked up in ice mixed with the Lunar regolith—existed within the deep, eternal night of crater floors at both the north and south poles of the Moon. Theory held that cometary impacts over the past few billions of years had scattered droplets of water all over the Lunar surface—but only deep inside the craters at the poles where the sun literally never shone could it accumulate as ice, droplet piling upon frozen droplet for four billion lightless years.

It was estimated that some hundreds of millions of tons of water ice now lay buried in the regolith at each pole. Transports like the K-440 had originally been designed in the late 2020s to haul ice from the poles to places like Fra Mauro and Tsiolkovsky, where it could provide drinking water, oxygen, and the fuel for fuel cells or for chemicalfuel launch systems, so that more pounds of payload boosted from Earth could be devoted to food, nonconsumables, and people.

Lunar ice was, arguably, the most important natural resource discovered so far in near-Earth space. With all mass expensive in terms of having to drag it out of Earth’s gravity well, having a local source of drinking water, oxygen, and fuel—both the hydrogen and oxygen employed by chemical thrusters, and the water used as reaction mass in nuclear-plasma main engines—meant the difference between viable long-term settlements and what was euphemistically referred to as a fingernail op, fingernail as in hanging on by a.

Operation Swift Victory had been conceived as just that—a means of stabbing straight through to the heart of the UN’s Lunar operations, rendering them untenable. With the UN blocked from both the Moon and Mars, the war could indeed be brought to a swift and victorious end; after all, it was control of the ancient-alien artifacts out here that was the principal cause of the war…even if the folks back home were being told that issues like independence for the Southwest US or sovereignty under United Nations rule were the real cause of the fighting. Whoever controlled the technology still locked up in those old ruins and archeological digs would ultimately make all of the rules, no questions asked.

Mars had been brought under US control by grabbing both ends of the cycler transport system to and from the Red Planet—the former International Space Station in Earth orbit, and the Mars Shuttle Lander bases on Mars.

The best way to control the Moon, however, was to control the water.

He watched the landscape unfolding below and ahead with an intent eagerness. The terrain appeared impossibly rugged, but that was an illusion brought on by the extreme contrast between light and shadow, day and night. The sun was very low on the horizon behind them, now, and every bump, every ridge and boulder, each crevasse and hill and crater rim cast shadows far longer than might have been expected. A screen on the pilot’s console showed the same view, rendered through the far less ominous-looking medium of a graphic radar display.

“Acceleration, sir,” the transport’s pilot warned. “Maybe you should grab a seat.”

“I’m fine.” Whitworth swung his feet around until they were in contact with the deck plating. A moment later, a tug of returning weight dragged at him, hard enough to make him sag a bit at the knees.

A green light began winking rapidly on the console. “Contact light!” the pilot said.

“Okay,” Major Jones added. “That’s our come-ahead.”

“Excellent!” Whitworth said. He grinned, adding in deliberate imitation of an old Marine Corps expression, “The Green Berets have landed and have the situation well in hand!”

The first troops down at Objective Sierra Peter had been a detachment of Special Forces tasked with securing the landing zone; had there been an overwhelmingly powerful occupation force or a trap of some kind, they would have uncovered it and flashed the incoming transports a warn-off. The come-ahead meant the LZ was clear and nonhostile.

“How far?” Whitworth asked.

“Another two kilometers,” Jones said. He pointed. “Just beyond that crater rim up ahead. Um, maybe you should seal up, sir? Helmet and gloves in the locker back there.”

“I’m okay.” He wanted to see. The transport was dropping lower now, skimming the Lunar mountains at an altitude of barely a hundred meters. The ground canted up as they swept across the crater ringwall; the floor beyond was lost in black shadow. On the screen, several glowing green triangles came into view—the IFF codes of the Rangers already on the ground. A flashing X marked the LZ beacon.

“Here we go,” Jones said. “Take us in.”

“Roger that,” the pilot said. “I’ll set us down over—”

The green flashing come-ahead went out. Two seconds later, a different light winked on, a baleful red.

“Shit!” Jones snapped.

“What’s happening?” Whitworth demanded.

“Wave off!” The landing zone beacon snapped off. “They’re waving us off!”

“Give me a direct channel!”

“You’re on the air.”

“Advance Delta!” Whitworth shouted into his needle mike, using the Army team’s call sign. “Advance Delta, this is Capstone! What the hell is going on?”

“Capstone, Advance Delta,” a voice called back, tinny and strained in Whitworth’s earphone. “Wave off! Hot LZ! Repeat, hot—”

The transmission ended in a burst of static.

The transport’s pilot hauled back on both of his armrest joysticks, and a sudden surge of acceleration dragged at Whitworth, slamming both feet against the deck. Struggling to stay up, he managed to lever himself down into the cockpit’s jump seat and strap himself in.

“I’ve got laser fire,” Jones announced, his voice maddeningly calm. “Someone down there is painting us.”

“Where?” Whitworth demanded, leaning against his harness, trying to see. “I don’t see anything!” There was no answer, and Whitworth cursed himself for speaking without thinking, a sure way to look stupid in front of subordinates. Of course! In a vacuum, with no dust to illuminate or air molecules to ionize, laser beams would be invisible. The flashing beams and eye-popping bolts of colorful radiance so popular in the entertainment vids had no basis in reality.

A hard thump, like some giant kicking the transport from beneath, sounded through the thin metal hull. “What was that?” Whitworth demanded.

“Number three O-two tank just went,” the pilot shouted. “Hang on! We’re losing it!”

A flash as brilliant as sunlight shone briefly through the cockpit windows, so bright that Whitworth thought they’d turned to face the sun. Then the light faded, and he realized he’d just seen an explosion—one of the other transports disintegrating in a violent, soundless detonation.

“Brace for impact!” Jones shouted over the transport’s IC system. “Everyone brace for impact!” Then black-shadowed mountains swept past the cockpit window at an impossible angle, and Whitworth felt the deck slamming up against his feet and the mounting of his chair. A shrill scream—unmistakably the howl of atmosphere venting into hard vacuum—rang in his ears…which began to hurt intolerably as the cabin pressure dropped. Fumbling with the latches of his harness, he managed to get shakily to his feet, then accepted a helmet and gloves from Jones, who’d broken them out of an emergency locker at the rear of the cockpit. He clamped the helmet down over his head, seating it in the locking ring of his suit and giving it a hard quarter-twist to lock it. Jones, who seemed a lot more adept at garbing fast in an emergency, helped him with the gloves.

The pilot wouldn’t need to suit up; he was slumped forward in his seat, his head twisted at an impossible angle. Whitworth wondered how many of his men in the main cargo bay had survived. At least they should have all been suited up for the approach.

As he should have been.

Still unsteady on trembling legs, he made his way back through the cockpit hatch and into the cargo bay, where vac-suited troops struggled to get clear of cases of supplies that had shifted and broken free in the crash. The company radio channel was clogged with moans and a few screams; Lieutenant Hastings was shouting orders, trying to get a team to clear the airlock hatch of a spilled tangle of debris and electrical wiring. A number of men were trapped in their seats yet, some struggling feebly, but all too many lying as limp and as still as the transport’s pilot. Ice—frozen out of the evacuating air as it thinned—coated many of the surfaces, gleaming eerily as handheld emergency lights flashed and swung and touched it.

Whitworth tried to think of something to say, some order to give…and couldn’t. The situation was now completely out of his control, and all he could do was stand by helplessly and watch as Hastings and three others finally cleared the hatch and pried it open. A few moments later, he stood in the midnight shadow of the crater pole, looking up at hard, bright stars and an encircling rim of mountains, with only the highest peaks silvered by bright sunlight. The regolith crunched under his boots as he moved, and he could feel the crumbly texture of ice mixed with Lunar dust. The scene was utterly peaceful; other transports lay scattered across the crater floor where they’d landed, marked by the bobbing and moving emergency lights of other survivors. All three transports had been downed, probably in as many minutes.

“Colonel Whitworth?”

He turned. A soldier in black-and-gray vac-suit armor with Special Forces patches on left chest and shoulder, came toward him.

“Here. I’m Whitworth.”

The figure saluted. “Sergeant Canady, sir. Ranger LZ assault team. We, sir, are in a world of shit.”

“What the hell happened?” He wanted to lash out at someone, anyone, for this disaster. “Why didn’t you pick the bastards up with your IR scans?”

He heard the blast of air across a mike as the Ranger sighed. “Sir, I don’t think there were any bastards! The fire was coming from up there.” He pointed, indicating the crater rim. “I think they have some kind of robot or teleoperated defense system. When we came in, we overflew and scanned for infrared leakage. If there were people, habitats, a ship, anything with operating life support, we would have seen the heat signature. But there was nothing!”

The words hit Whitworth like hammerblows. He’d been expecting some sort of token guard force or garrison…but not lasers aimed and triggered by men thousands of kilometers away. When had they set up the defense grid? After Picard, certainly, since the Navy had been making regular runs down here to collect ice for Picard’s life support. Maybe the UNdies had even planted the things before the US invasion, sitting here quietly, letting individual transports come and go, while waiting for the transports that obviously meant an all-out assault on their farside fortress.

With a cold, hard, sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach, Whitworth realized he’d been guilty of the worst sin possible for a military commander.

He’d completely underestimated the enemy.

An hour later, he knew the worst. Out of 160 men in the South Polar assault force, 98 were dead, killed by the initial laser fire, or the crash of their transport seconds later. When contact was at last established with the North Polar group, his worst fears were confirmed. An identical ambush there had killed 82 out of 105; the survivors were in communication with UN forces and had decided to surrender.

There was, really, no alternative. It would be days before a relief force from Earth could arrive, and the tiny Army garrisons at Picard and Fra Mauro could offer no help. Their suit PLSS units would keep them breathing another twelve hours, or so, and they might scavenge more oxygen from supplies still aboard the wrecked transports, but they had no food, no water, and no way out save walking…

The alternative to an impossibly long and difficult overland trek appeared in the sky overhead two and a half hours after the brief battle that had marooned them. The ship was death black and diamond-shaped, streamlined except for the wire-cage basket housing landing legs, reaction-mass tanks, and a plasma engine mounted on the stern. The only markings visible on the vessel as it drifted toward a vertical landing on invisible jets of high-temperature plasma were a small, blue, UN flag painted on each of the three fins, and the name, picked out in gray lettering near the prow: Millénium.

The mystery ship reported at Picard. The “unknown” that had launched from Earth months before and vanished behind the Moon.

There was no question of fighting the thing. Ball turrets mounted in that sleek, black hull rotated, tracking men on the ground. Oh, they could have opened up with the handful of missile launchers or squad lasers recovered so far from the wrecks, but to do so would have sealed their fate.

He opened Channel 9, the universal emergency frequency. “This is Colonel Thomas R. Whitworth, commanding the US Special Forces Lunar Assault Unit, calling UN ship. We are prepared to lay down our arms and surrender.”

There was no other option open.

None at all.