SUNDAY, 9 NOVEMBER 2042

Above the Lunar Farside
0845 hours GMT

They called them LAVs, but the M340A1 Armored Personnel Carrier had very little in common with the Light Armored Vehicles employed by the US Marines during the closing years of the twentieth century. These LAVs had been designated as Lunar Assault Vehicles by some unsung Pentagon bureaucrat, either in deliberate imitation of the earlier LAVs, or in complete technomilitary historical ignorance. Either way, the informal designation allowed the team members of Bravo Company, 1-SAG, to resurrect an old Marine battle cry: LAV it to the Marines!

The heavy Conestoga-class trans-Lunar cargo shuttle Santa Fe was one of only two vessels of her class, heavy-lift ships designed to carry prefabricated hab units and construction materials to the bases at Fra Mauro and Tsiolkovsky when they were first built back in the 2020s. Obsolete now, the Santa Fe had been adapted by the military for one final Lunar flight.

She came in above the flat, dark floor of the Mare Crisium, heading southeast. She dropped to less than twenty kilometers’ altitude above the Mare Smythii and went “over the hill,” dropping below the horizon visible from Earth and vanishing around the farside. Still descending, the craft swept in low across the crater rim of Pasteur before pitching over and firing a savage burst of plasma, braking her forward velocity before gentling down toward the dusty Lunar surface.

Clouds of dust lashed and billowed from the touch of those hot jets; the freighter’s open-girder undercarriage touched down, and the vessel, momentarily, at least, was at rest.

Almost at once, however, there was fresh activity, as foil-covered bays on each side opened, and the wedge-shaped objects stowed inside folded out and down, dropping the last several meters to the Lunar surface in a silent, slow-motion drop and bounce.

During the Apollo program, over seventy years before, a similar system had been used to stow and deliver light-weight Lunar Rovers to the Moon’s surface; the four wedge shapes deployed this time were each far larger and more massive than those primitive NASA rovers. Each LAV massed just under fifteen tons and measured 9.1 meters long by 3.5 meters wide by 2.4 meters tall, a lean, flat brick with a wedge-shaped nose, mounted on four independently powered tires and coated with reactive camo and ablative plastic and ceramic laminates. The flat upper deck was interrupted only by the swell of a ball-mounted weapons turret.

“C’mon, people!” Gunnery Sergeant Yates’s voice called over the company frequency. “Move it! Move it! A day here lasts twenty-seven Earth days! At that rate you’ve already been lollygagging on your fat tails for two hours! Step it up!”

Fifty Marines and one Navy pilot were descending from the Santa Fe’s hab module, leaving the vessel, its reaction-mass tanks not quite empty, vacant on its spidery legs. Kaitlin dropped the last couple of meters off the Santa Fe’s ladder, falling slowly to the surface and taking the gentle impact on flexing knees before moving out of the way of the next Marine coming down.

LAV-2, with Captain Fuentes and First Platoon, First Squad, was already loaded and ambling off in a tight curve away from the ship, moving toward the southeastern horizon. Its tires hurled rooster-tail clouds of soft, gray dust aloft, making it look as though it were laying down a smoke screen. LAV-4, with First Platoon, Second Squad, started up, following the first at an interval that would allow decent visibility.

Kaitlin’s platoon would be traveling in LAV-1 and LAV-3; her vehicle, with a white “1” painted just behind the small American flag on its mottled gray-and-black flank, waited just ahead, the rear doors open and the ramp down. The Marines of Second Platoon, First Squad were filing inside, stepping up the ramp and ducking beneath the low overhang of the hatchway, and she followed, her ATAR tucked in tight behind her arm and next to her PLSS. Inside, the Marines took their places in shock-mounted, center-facing seats, strapping down and plugging in commo and life-support feeds from the bulkhead into their PLSS packs.

“Secure and plug in!” Yates ordered. “Klinginsmith! Help Ahearn with her O₂ hose!”

“Shit, Gunny!” Nardelli called. “Why can’t we ride to Big-T in comfort, like with a pressurized cabin?”

“You want to chew vacuum if the UNdies hole us, be my guest. Me, I’m keeping my helmet on. Rawlins! Stow your ATAR and give Falk a hand! Kaminski! You too!”

Carefully, Kaitlin made her way up the central aisle, squeezing past the Marines still standing there as they pulled off their ATARs and other carry-on equipment and stored them in bulkhead racks and lockers. The layout was similar to the interior of an LSCP, but much more cramped; inside the cabin there was only 1.8 meters’ head clearance, and even a short Marine like Kaitlin had to duck to avoid scraping her helmet along the overhead.

At the front of the cabin, Staff Sergeant Peter Hartwell, crammed into the tiny driver’s cubicle, was readjusting the reactive camo feeds in the hull outside; the upper deck was capturing and reemitting the black of space, which made it as visible from overhead as a deep, black hole; by adjusting the feeds to have the turret and upper deck emit the powdery silver-gray of the surrounding landscape, the vehicle became effectively invisible from above.

Next to him was the Navy pilot, Lieutenant Thomas Wood, hunched over his PAD, which displayed a touch-screen image of lighted keys. A monitor on the cube control panel showed the Santa Fe outside, the image relayed from a camera in the LAV’s turret.

Kaitlin took her seat, just behind the entrance to the driver’s cubicle, and started plugging in her life-support hoses. “Okay,” she said. “How’s our time doing, Lieutenant?”

“We’re still in the window,” Wood replied. “But it’s gonna be tight.”

“Second Platoon, First Squad!” Yates sounded off over the platoon frequency. “We’re squared away and ready to roll!”

“Okay, Staff Sergeant,” she said. “Let’s do it!”

“Hang on to your butts! We’re rolling!” With a lurch, the LAV started forward, the ride surprisingly smooth in the Moon’s low gravity.

“Two hundred meters. We’re clear of the blast zone,” Hartwell announced.

“Are the other LAVs clear?” Wood asked.

“That’s affirmative. We’re last man out.”

“All right.” Wood turned his head inside his helmet, looking at Kaitlin. “We’re ready, Lieutenant.”

“Tracking armed and ready?”

“That’s affirmative.”

She nodded. “Let her rip!”

Wood touched a key on his PAD; on the monitor, dust billowed again from beneath the now-deserted transport Santa Fe. Slowly, then, balancing on an invisible stream of hot plasma, the transport edged into the black sky. The turret camera panned up, following the craft as it dwindled into the night.

Wood had one gloved finger on an image on his screen configured as a touch pad, rocking his finger slightly to control the accelerating ship as though he were using a joystick. “Pushing her over,” he said, eyes on the readouts on his PAD. “Altitude forty-three hundred, speed eighteen-thirty-five. Five kilometers downrange.”

“I hope to hell they buy this,” Kaitlin said.

“We’re still in the window,” Wood told her. “If the UNdies had observers at the poles, they wouldn’t have had a better track on the Santa Fe’s likely orbit closer than fifteen minutes. And the lasers fired from Earth orbit probably bought us even more time.”

“Roger that. But it’s my job to worry.”

The tactical challenge they faced, of course, was how to sneak up on Tsiolkovsky, an enormous crater located on the farside of the Moon some twenty-six hundred kilometers from the Mare Crisium and farther still from the base in the Fra Mauro Highlands. With an antimatter weapon of some kind mounted at Tsiolkovsky, one capable of blasting any spacecraft that entered its line of sight, even getting close to the enemy farside base was going to be damned near impossible with a conventional approach.

So the op planning staff at the Pentagon had come up with a sneaky alternative.

The fifty Marines of the Rim Assault Group had made the three-day flight from Earth orbit to the Moon packed like sardines inside a small hab mounted on the Santa Fe’s transport bus, the four LAVs carefully stowed in the landing assembly. As the Santa Fe had begun her deceleration burn to drop into a direct Lunar-landing approach, a pair of Aerospace Force gigawatt lasers in Earth orbit had fired simultaneously, bathing the visible portions of both the Lunar north and south poles in torrents of coherent light.

At a distance of a quarter of a million miles, the lasers were attenuated enough that they couldn’t do much in the way of actual damage, but any UN observers watching the Santa Fe’s approach would be fools to keep staring into that light…and the more sensitive optics of cameras would either automatically shutter or be burned out. With no direct information on the length of the Santa Fe’s burn, there would be considerable doubt about her actual orbit…and when she might appear above the horizon at Tsiolkovsky.

There was just enough time for the Santa Fe, once she was safely over the horizon as seen from Earth, and before she’d risen above the horizon at Tsiolkovsky, to actually land on the rim of Pasteur Crater, offload the Marines and the four LAVs, and take off again, this time under tele-operation from Lieutenant Wood’s PAD. She had just enough fuel remaining to make a final suborbital hop on a course that would take her directly over Tsiolkovsky, three hundred kilometers to the southeast of Pasteur.

The Santa Fe vanished behind the low, smoothly sloping mountains in front of the column of lightly bouncing LAVs.

“LOS,” Wood announced. “She’s over the horizon.”

“How long until she’s over Tsiolkovsky’s horizon?” Kaitlin wanted to know.

“She’s still rising,” Wood replied. “I’d say five…maybe six minutes. Depends on how on the ball they are at the UNdie base.”

“Oh, they’ll be awake, all right,” Kaitlin said with a grin. “They’ll have been watching the Santa Fe on an approach vector for three days now. They know she’s on the way. They’ve probably been at general quarters for the last couple of days!”

“Let’s hope they didn’t get any sleep all that time,” Hartwell said, laughing.

“Roger that!”

She turned slightly in her seat, listening to the radio chatter as Yates lashed the squad with a traditional pre-battle warm-up. “We are lean! We are mean! We are lean, mean, fighting machines! We are Marines!”

“Ooh-rah!” the squad bellowed back.

“We are gonna kill!”

“Marines! Kill! Kill!”

It was, Kaitlin thought, a barbaric ritual, chilling, almost bloodthirsty…and terrifyingly effective. God help any UNdies who get in our way, she thought.

For minutes more, they traveled on across the silent vastness of the lunar surface. Each LAV was powered by a three-hundred-megawatt gas-turbine engine; each tire was independently hooked to its own power train and transmission and could be individually depressurized to increase traction on slippery slopes and in deep powder. Under one-sixth G, each LAV could manage eighty kilometers per hour on the flats…and up to half that on rugged, broken, boulder-strewn or steep terrain.

Unfortunately, this was the Lunar farside, a jumble of craters upon craters upon craters, and the only flats were at the bottom of a couple of the largest, like Tsiolkovsky itself. They were going to be lucky to average twenty-five or thirty klicks an hour.

Which put them ten hours from their target. The mission plan allowed for eighteen.

“Ah!” Hartwell called. “I’ve got a reading! Looks like hard gamma!”

An instant later, white light shone above the rounded mountains ahead, a briefly expanding dome of light that swiftly faded from view in utter silence.

“I guess they were awake,” Wood said.

“Roger that,” Kaitlin replied. “Now if they’ll just celebrate shooting down the Santa Fe and go back to sleep!…”

But the cabin was quiet now, with no more banter. The four LAVs were now utterly alone on the farside of the Moon, with no transport, no chance of retrieval.

It was a damned lonely feeling.

L-3 Construction Shack
2212 hours GMT

“Uncle David! What are you doing here!”

Jack gaped as the tall, lean archeologist pulled his way into the squad bay area, his small duffel bag trailing him on its canvas leash. David was upside down from Jack’s point of view, so he twisted off the bulkhead in a quick rotation that brought them face-to-face.

“Hey, Jack!” David cried as they clasped forearms, rotating slowly in mid-bay. “I heard you were on this ride. Didn’t you know I was coming?”

“Shit, no one tells us anything. They must be getting desperate, though, if they’re throwing in honorary Marines now!”

Several other Marines gathered around the two. Captain Robert Lee braced himself on a deck support. “You’re David Alexander?”

“Yes, sir,” David replied. He extended a hand and Lee took it. Then he fished into his inside jacket pocket, pulling out a manila envelope. “Got my orders here.”

“S’okay,” Rob replied. “Give ’em to the CO over there.” He pointed across the crowded bay. “Colonel Avery. You’ll want to check in with him soon as you get squared away. Welcome aboard, Doctor.”

“Thank you, Captain.”

“So, orders?” Jack asked. “What, are you in the Corps for real, now?”

“Not quite,” David replied. “I’m a ‘civilian specialist observer,’ I think they call me now. ‘CSO’ for short.”

“Actually, that stands for ‘caught and shot out-of-hand,’” Corporal Negley said, floating nearby. “Hey! Look at his jacket! He was with ‘Sands of Mars’!”

David was wearing a Marine-issue leather jacket with the beer-can insignia sewn to the left breast. “Guilty,” he said with a grin.

“It’s an honor to have you with us, sir,” Negley said.

Lee looked at Jack. “Okay, Flash. You want to see that your buddy here gets settled in?”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Jack replied.

“‘Flash?’” David said, eyebrows rising as the captain kicked off from a nearby bulkhead and floated toward the aft end of the squad bay.

“Long story,” Jack replied. “You don’t want to know.” Somehow, the name had caught up with him again after Siberia. He still wasn’t sure how. “Hey, it’s really great to see you. I, I thought you were dead, until you got that e-mail to me, right after Chicago.”

“Not quite. I would have been, though, if General Warhurst hadn’t sent for me. Your Aunt Liana…”

“Yeah. I heard. I’m awfully sorry.” An awkward silence hung between them.

“So, Flash, you two know each other?” Sergeant Bosnivic said, drifting closer and breaking the deepening seriousness with a bright grin. He looked from one to the other, appraisingly.

“My uncle,” Jack said proudly.

“Any guy who was with ‘Sands of Mars’ Garroway,” Bosnivic said, sticking out a hand. “Great to meet you, sir.”

“Thanks.” David looked about the squad bay, a cavernous space now crowded with a couple of dozen Marines performing various tasks in zero G. “So, where do I bunk down?”

“Any free space you can find, deck, bulkhead, or overhead!” Bosnivic said, laughing. “But I don’t think there’ll be much time for sleeping now.”

“Why’s that?”

“Scuttlebutt says the first prong has already gone in,” Jack said, pleased to be in the know for a change. “If it goes well for them, we’ll be getting the word to board and light off in another few hours.”

“Yeah? And where’s this new supership I’ve been hearing about?”

“Over here,” Jack said, lightly pushing off from a deck support and drifting toward a small, square viewing port in a nearby bulkhead. “You can see her from here.”

Tucking his duffel under his arm, David followed, with Bosnivic bringing up the rear. Jack caught hold of a hand grip by the port and gestured with his head. “Ain’t she a beaut?”

The view through the small port was breathtaking. Jack had been in the squad bay for three days now, ever since the assault group’s arrival at L-3 from Earth, and he never tired of looking through it…when he could find it free, that is, or when he had a few free moments. They’d been keeping him busy for the past several weeks, working on his “nutcracker,” as he called it, and he was still running through a long list of final checks and tests, making sure that his modified version of Sam was ready for the task ahead of her.

But when he could, he stared out the window.

L-3 was one of five points in gravitational balance with the Earth and the Moon, convenient spots to park a space station, or a small construction facility like this one. L-4 and L-5 were the best-known of these Lagrange points, sharing the Moon’s orbit around the Earth—one, sixty degrees ahead of the Moon, the other, sixty degrees behind it. L-1 was a halo point directly behind the Moon, as seen from Earth, while L-2 was a spot directly between the Earth and the Moon where the gravitational pull of the two was balanced.

L-3, like L-4 and L-5, also followed the Moon’s orbit, a quarter of a million miles from Earth, but directly opposite the Moon from the Earth. From there, the Moon was always hidden behind the blue-and-white glory of the Earth, which slowly changed phases as the construction shack moved through its twenty-seven-day orbit. At the moment, Earth showed a slender crescent, mostly white with a thin streak of blue along the lower limb. But the real spectacle lay much closer at hand.

The construction shack itself was little more than a girder-connected collection of tin cans, with tunnels leading from one hab or workshop to the next, with a huge, blue-black spread of solar panels like gleaming, rectilinear wings. Most of the structure which, together with the solar panels, covered a larger area than a football field, was invisible from the squad bay window, but they did have a good view of the docking port, where two cis-Lunar transports were parked just within the shadow of the USS Ranger.

The Ranger, clearly, was the featured sight for the squad bay window, at least with so little of the Earth visible right now. She was big—seventy-four meters long and massing sixteen hundred tons empty. She was also sleek, showing her origins as the upper half of a Zeus IIc piloted heavy-lift SSTO booster; only spacecraft that had to traverse atmosphere needed streamlining. Her smooth lines were broken, however, by the lower drive and landing assembly, which looked more like the Tinkertoy construction of a Lunar hopper than the sky-slicing curves of a hypersonic transport, and by the ungainly struts and angles of a pair of LSCPs strapped to her hull like outrigger pontoons. Her outer hull was deep black with a light-and radar-absorbing laminate, but the construction shack’s worklights revealed her in pools of white light. A heat-radiator panel unfolded from the landing assembly like a squared-off shark’s fin.

“That’s it?” David asked, clearly impressed despite his nonchalant-sounding question. “That’s our secret anti-matter ship?”

“Isn’t she gorgeous?” Bosnivic said, peering over David’s shoulder. “You feed just a little antimatter into a reaction tank full of water, a microgram at a time, and it creates enough thrust to drive her at one G for hours. That ship, my friends, could make it to Mars in one week, accelerating half the way, then flipping end for end and decelerating the rest of the way, all at a comfy one gravity! None of this seven or eight months in a cycler.”

“How long to the Moon?” David wanted to know.

“From here? A little under five hours.”

Jack pulled his PAD from its holster and typed in some numbers. “Two hundred ninety-two-point-three minutes,” Jack added a moment later. “Assuming we go in at one G, of course, and not taking into account any gravitational boost we get whipping past the Earth.”

“Good God. Last time I went to the Moon it took three days.”

“Yeah, but the Ranger can pull six Gs,” Bosnivic said. “And scuttlebutt says we’re gonna haul ass to get where we’re goin’. What does that do to the travel time, Flash?”

Jack typed in the new figures. “Just under two hours. One hundred nineteen minutes, in fact.” He looked up. “Stepping up the acceleration doesn’t cut down your travel time as much as you’d think.”

“I imagine how fast we scoot’ll depend on how bad the RAG needs us,” Bosnivic said.

“Well, that and how hard they think they can push the Ranger on her maiden voyage,” Jack said. “This antimatter stuff is pretty new technology, and maybe they don’t want to pull out all the stops, first time around.”

“Where’s the antimatter come from?” David asked.

“Oh, they manufacture the stuff right here at the construction shack,” Bosnivic said, “using solar energy and something like a miniature version of one of those big particle accelerators back on Earth. Takes a long time, even to collect just a few grams of the stuff.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?” David asked. “I mean, even a microgram of antimatter will make a hell of a bang if it touches normal matter, right?”

“Hell, yeah!” Bosnivic said, grinning. “A big bang, and a lot of very hard radiation. Why do you think they make the stuff way out here?”

“I’d think it would be pretty vulnerable to UN attack.”

“Not as vulnerable as you think. From here, we can see anything on an approach vector clear back to Earth orbit. And we have a squadron of Sparrowhawks stationed here, just in case the bad guys decide to come check us out. So far, we don’t even think they know what we’re doing here.”

“Which is just as well,” Jack put in. “If we could get a nuke through to that asteroid they were trying to send our way, they could hit us with one if they were really determined. And they would be, too, if they knew the Ranger there was ready to fly!”

Bosnivic nudged Jack and pointed at his PAD. “So, you got your girlfriend in there to crank out those numbers?”

“Hmm? No. That was just the calc function. You could do it, too, Bos, if you could just keep straight which is division and which is multiplication.”

“Girlfriend?” David asked.

“Hey, you never met Jack’s girlfriend? I thought you two were related!”

“Last girlfriend of his I heard about was that v-mail correspondent you were always talking to in California—”

“Let’s not bring that up,” Jack said, his face reddening.

“I definitely sense a story there,” Bosnivic said. “But, anyway, turns out that Flash here is a genius at hacking into AI programs, getting ’em to sit up and beg. They’ve had him modifying our Marine-issue PAD OS/AI to make us a nutcracker.” Floating in mid-bay, he reached down and rubbed his groin suggestively. “And a very nice nutcracker she is! Show him, Jack!”

“Uh, I’d really rather not! Listen, Bos, don’t you have some Marine stuff to do, somewhere?”

Grinning, Bosnivic rubbed his nose with his middle finger. “Thought of somethin’ right here, Flash.”

“Careful you don’t wear that out,” Jack replied, as Bosnivic kicked off the bulkhead and sailed across to some other Marines.

“So,” David said with a wry grin. “You getting on okay with your new friends?”

“Oh, they all figure they have to harass the new guy,” Jack said. “Hey, it’s great to see you! I heard they were assigning a civilian specialist to this op, but I didn’t know it was going to be you!”

“Well, I’m not sure why I got the job, but I’m glad I did. So tell me. What is all this stuff with modified programs, anyway?”

“Well, what he was talking about isn’t exactly something I want Mom to know about. But it got me a billet on this flight, and that’s the important thing.”

“Doing what?”

“There are three of us, see? Bos is one. So’s…that corporal over there. Yeah, the blond woman. Corporal Dillon. We graduated from a special 4069 MOS class they just held at the SCTF at Quantico.”

“Okay. Why?”

“Well, the UN has built a ship at a base they have on the farside of the Moon. An antimatter ship, like the Ranger. According to intelligence, she’s just about ready to go. She already has made some short hops, but they think they’re still working on getting her main weapon mounted and working. Our team is going in to either destroy or capture that ship, whichever we have the best chance of pulling off.

“Anyway, the three of us are on the boarding team. We go in with our nutcrackers, try to subvert the UN computer system running that ship, and take it over. If one of us can pull it off, we might be able to fly that ship out of there.”

“Ah. And if you can’t?”

“Then there’ll be other Marines planting explosives to make damned sure the UN can’t fly it out either!”

“And this nutcracker is?…”

Jack pulled out his PAD, opened the screen, and tapped in a command. “Sam?” he said. “I want you to meet my Uncle David.”

“Delighted to meet you, Uncle David,” Sam replied. She was modestly dressed, thank God, in slacks and an unrevealing blouse. Once, when he’d been working with her at Quantico, some of his instructors had dropped in to see how he was doing, including Staff Sergeant Ostrowsky and Colonel Joanna Bradley, the base XO. When he summoned Sam’s image, she’d appeared in the nude…a bug left over from the days when he’d wanted her to appear that way. He’d received a pretty stiff lecture on sexual harassment and proper respect shown to female members of the Corps.

He was pretty sure he had that problem worked out now, at least. The question was how she was going to fare against the UN computer.

“I’m, ah, pleased to meet you, Sam,” David replied. He glanced at Jack. “This is your nutcracker?”

“She was originally a Net agent,” Jack explained. “Or part of her was. That means she was designed to go out into Earthnet and find information for me, which she did by looking at lots of programs very quickly and comparing their content with lists of things I told her I was interested in. It wasn’t hard to modify her so that she could go into one program, figure out how it worked and what it did, and change how it worked.

“In fact, a lot of the work I did on her, she really did to herself. I just told her what I needed done, and she did it.” He snorted. “Everybody around here’s convinced I’m some sort of programming hotshot. She did all the work, though.”

“You talk about her as thought she’s…alive.”

“Uncle David, sometimes I wonder if she is. She sure acts like she’s self-aware.”

“Well, if she was programmed to act that way—”

“Oh, sure. I know all about simulated personalities. That’s what Sam started off as.” He didn’t add that the personality in question was a rather shallow adolescent’s sex fantasy. Now that Sam had become…legitimate, it embarrassed him to talk about that aspect of her past. “The thing is, AIs, even simple ones like Sam started off as, are meant to grow. To change with time, as they learn things, as they work with humans. It’s fun. Sam’s reached the point where I can’t really tell what she’s about to do or say. Just like a real person.”

“So you think she’s self-aware?”

“Well, I don’t really think she is, but sometimes I get the strangest feeling that she’s doing things on her own. Thinking. Reasoning things out.” He shook his head. “She’s probably too complex now for any programmer to understand how she works. That can be unsettling, y’know?”

“How about it, Sam?” David asked the woman on the PAD display screen. “Are you self-aware?”

“Would you respond to me differently if I were, David?” she asked. “Maybe it’s best that you not be too sure of me.”

David blinked. “I see what you mean, Jack. You didn’t program that answer into her…into it, I mean?”

“Nope. Sometimes she comes up with the damnedest stuff, seems to think of things I never would’ve thought of in a million years. Anyway, we’re going in with three different nutcrackers. I’m betting Sam will be the one that breaks through.”

“I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.” David chuckled. “So, what is a nutcracker, anyway?”

“Oh, well, the UN ship will have its own computer system, right? To control power, life support, all that stuff, just like our ships.”

“Okay.”

“If we’re going to capture that ship, we need to talk to the computer. Program it to respond to our commands. But it probably won’t be that simple. There’s almost certain to be some sort of password protection, just so some unauthorized guy like the janitor or a bunch of invading Marines don’t screw things up.”

“Gotcha.”

“Sam’s got a database of…I don’t know. How many passwords do you have, Sam?”

“Sixteen thousand, three hundred, eighty-four,” she replied immediately.

“Okay. Sixteen thousand possible passwords, compiled by the NSA. They put together files on all the people they figured might’ve been involved in programming the enemy ship’s systems. They got names of wives and girl-friends and kids. Birthdates of family members. Titles of favorite books. Places they’ve lived or gone to school. Known passwords they’ve used before. All kinds of trivia that a programmer might’ve used as an easy-to-remember password.”

David’s brow furrowed. “That still seems like kind of a long shot. I mean, that sort of code isn’t going to be easy, or what’s the point?”

“I think the idea is that the UN isn’t expecting us to come and try to take their ship away from them, so the password’s going to be relatively simple.”

“Still, so many possibilities….”

“Well, they’ve also put together some code-breaking algorithms that Sam can draw on. And she’s pretty slick herself, now. I’ve used her to get into places I wasn’t supposed to be.”

David’s eyebrows went higher. “Oh? And what places would those be?”

“Oh, password-protected stuff.” He didn’t elaborate. Two weeks earlier, however, Sam had broken into the main personnel files at Quantico to see if Jack had been selected for this mission. He hadn’t intended to change anything in those files, just to look around.

As it happened, he’d had the second best scores of all the trainees, after Diane Dillon, and had been given a slot aboard the Ranger.

And then there’d also been the time when he’d taken a peek at some of his uncle’s working files on aliens from the Cydonian underground site. He simply hadn’t been able to resist that siren’s call.

“So…how come you’re here?” Jack asked David, shifting the subject to safer ground. “Is Tsiolkovsky another alien site?”

“It’s distinctly possible.”

“The An again? Or the…what are they called? The Hunters of the Dawn?”

David looked at him sharply. “How much do you know about the Hunters?”

Damn. He probably shouldn’t have brought them up. “Not…not a whole lot. There’s been some stuff out on the Net.”

“Liana got some things out of my files she shouldn’t have,” David said, “and uploaded it to her cult church. From there it went…everywhere. But there’s a lot of speculation and misunderstanding and just plain idiot stuff mixed in. Don’t believe everything you hear.”

“That’s it, though, isn’t it?” Jack said, pushing. “There’s something about the Hunters of the Dawn at Tsiolkovsky?”

“I don’t really think so,” David replied. “If anything, there’s just an An base back there. From what Intelligence picked up, though, from some French scientists they questioned, our UN friends are very interested in the Hunters. Almost frantic. And our people would like to know what they know. What they’re afraid of.”

“The answer to the Fermi Paradox?”

Again, David gave Jack a long, hard look.

“I, uh, had Sam out looking for everything she could find on the Hunters of the Dawn,” Jack admitted. “The little bit I found on the open Net, well, like you said, it didn’t seem very reliable. Ancient-astronut stuff. So I guess maybe she did a check on everything you’d written on the subject.”

“Including some classified reports?” David shook his head and grinned. “Okay. I should have guessed as much. Don’t put too much store in any of that stuff, though, Jack. It’s all still very preliminary.”

“Yeah, but it’s important,” Jack said. “Alien civilizations that think they have to wipe out every other civilization they find, just to survive? I can see why the government would be interested in that. We might run into them ourselves, soon.”

“Sometime back in the 1920s or 1930s,” David said, “the first radio signals strong enough to propagate through space left our planet. The oldest of them are over a hundred light-years away by now, and there’s no way to call them back. If anyone is out there, listening, we’ve given ourselves away already.”

“And is that why the UN is so worried about it?”

“It’s why we’re all worried about it, Jack, and why I want to be damned sure of things before I release this. If my idea is true, galactic civilizations go through a kind of cycle, rising, developing interstellar travel, then getting smashed by the current crop of Hunters. That suggests we’re in an upswing now, on our way to the stars. And somewhere out there, maybe not too far away, the next batch of Hunters are setting up shop, too.”

“Well, we do have an advantage.”

“What?”

“We know about them. I imagine most emerging races don’t have a clue that the Hunters are out there. They struggle up to civilized status, develop spaceflight, go to the stars, and wham! They never know what hit ’em. You know,” he continued thoughtfully, “there’s another possibility too.”

“Oh? And what’s that?”

“That we’re the next Hunters of the Dawn.”

David’s mouth twisted, as though at a bad taste. “That’s…not a very pleasant idea.”

“It could happen,” Jack said. “Remember Chicago? People did that. People not so different from us.”

A shrill whistle sounded from an overhead speaker, and every Marine in the squad bay fell silent, listening.

“Now hear this, now hear this,” Captain Lee’s voice said over the speaker. “We have just received a report that the RAG has reached its first objective and is deploying for the assault. We are now cleared for loading and debarkation. All hands, grab your gear and report to your squad leaders, preparatory for embarkation aboard the Ranger.”

“That’s it, Uncle David,” Jack said. His heart was hammering now, and he was praying that he wasn’t going to screw up. He folded up his PAD and tucked it back into his holster. “We’re going to war!”

“And God help us all,” David replied quietly. “God help us all….”