SUNDAY, 9 NOVEMBER 2042

Lieutenant Kaitlin Garroway
Tsiolkovsky Crater, West Rim
2233 hours GMT

Communicating with Earth was a real problem for the Rim Assault Group, once the Earth had dropped behind the stark, Lunar horizon. Any US spacecraft entering orbit around the Moon was killed as soon as it passed into line of sight of Tsiolkovsky. The same went in spades for any comsat parked in a halo orbit in L-1, above the Lunar farside; it was possible to establish a short-term polar orbit that wouldn’t rise above Tsiolkovsky’s horizon, but there were almost certainly UN forces at one or both of the moon’s water-rich poles, and even if they couldn’t shoot it down, they would certainly warn the UN farside base that something was up.

And the RAG depended utterly on its presence being kept secret until the last possible moment. A teleoperated Earth-Lunar freighter had been sacrificed to preserve that secret.

They’d been traveling steadily for nearly fourteen hours, a line-ahead column of vehicles nearly invisible against the unyielding silver-gray of the Lunar surface. A careful search from the sky might have picked them up, or at least have picked up their tracks, but the Moon was an extremely large place, with as much surface area as the continent of Africa, and the LAVs were very small. Even so, the four-wheeled vehicles had been deliberately designed to toss rooster tails of dust high and to the rear as they traveled, and as the dust settled out of the sky it tended to partially fill in and blur those telltale parallel trails, not filling them in completely, but making them far harder to spot at a casual glance.

One LAV had broken down. Gunnery Sergeant Miller’s LAV-3, with Second Platoon, Second Squad, had quietly died as they’d traversed the floor of the huge crater Fermi, fifty kilometers back. There wasn’t room in the other LAVs for any more personnel, so Miller and his people were sitting tight; if the RAG was successful, they would be picked up later.

If not…

Kaitlin tried not to think about the alternatives.

They made the approach up the western slope of Tsiolkovsky cautiously. There were UN defensive installations along the ringwall, but the crater’s circumference, over 580 kilometers, was so large that the UN couldn’t have woven a very tight net, and LAVs with stealth surfacing should be able to slip between them. The trick was identifying the UN perimeter installations in the first place so the Marines could sneak through.

Kaitlin sat in a jump seat next to Staff Sergeant Hartwell, watching over his shoulder as the staff sergeant threaded the LAV up the gradually steepening slope. It was particularly rugged here, good country for evading surface radar. Besides, since all of the LAVs possessed radar-absorbing stealth laminates, it should be possible for them to pick up UN radar before that radar could register them in return.

Still, it was a nail-biting feeling, sitting there, locked up in a brick-shaped can with twelve other Marines, inching up the slope while waiting for a sudden, sharp IFF challenge. No one spoke…almost as though they feared being heard by the enemy, which, of course, was nonsense in the Lunar vacuum.

People under stress, she thought, rarely act in strictly logical ways.

The expected challenge was never issued. Hartwell picked up one intermittent radar emitter fifteen kilometers to the south, and a very faint signal perhaps at twice that range to the north. Carefully, he adjusted LAV-1’s course to thread between the two at roughly the halfway point, with LAVs 2 and 4 following slowly in his tire tracks.

Thirteen hours and forty-eight minutes after the Santa Fe had dropped the LAVs to the surface on the southeast side of Pasteur Crater, the three LAVs were atop Tsiolkovsky’s broken and rubble-strewn west rim.

Tsiolkovsky was considerably larger than little Picard, a vast bowl 185 kilometers across from rim to rim, centered by a smooth but irregularly shaped central peak. From the crest of the west rim, the crater floor appeared to be an utterly flat, dark gray plain stretching clear to the horizon. The central peak itself was just visible as a silvery white hummock breaking the perfectly flat line where prairie met black sky; most of the peak, plus the floor of the crater around it where the UN installations had been built, were still hidden beyond the curve of the Moon.

On the targeting screen aboard LAV-1, Kaitlin peered at the image of a silver mountaintop centered in green crosshairs. The camera view was greatly magnified, but it was still hard to make out any detail.

“Take the range,” she told Hartwell.

He pressed a button, firing a laser ranging beam. “Range to target, ninety-three-point-one-one kilometers,” Hartwell reported. “I’ve got a lock.” A red light came on, accompanied by a thin, warning beep. “That’s enemy radar. They’ve got us tagged.”

“Well, they know we’re here now,” she said.

“Looks like the captain’s deploying LAV-4.”

Kaitlin clamped down on her emotions, glad that she didn’t have to give the next set of orders. This, the very first shot to be fired—not counting the one that had downed the Santa Fe—was the critical moment in the operation. If the UNdies had their magic beam weapon mounted atop Tsiolkovsky’s central peak, the Marines could expect an almost immediate counterbattery fire, one that might well turn the firing LAV into a puddle of bubbling, radioactive sludge.

Against that possibility, LAV-4 had been deliberately positioned hull down, her complement of Marines debarked and scattered across the crater rim. The other two LAVs had taken up positions to either side of LAV-4, their lasers locked onto the distant mountaintop.

The only man still aboard LAV-4 was First Platoon’s Gunnery Sergeant George Massey, and he was a volunteer; if the enemy did have their secret weapon on top of the mountain, Massey would almost certainly be dead within the next few seconds.

As hard as manning the LAV in the face of that threat, Kaitlin thought, was giving the order to Massey to fire…and to invite immediate and deadly retaliation. Kaitlin wondered how Carmen Fuentes could do it.

She could hear the captain’s voice over the combat channel. “Okay, George. Weapons free. You may fire when ready.”

There was no flash, no beam, no indication at all that LAV-4 had just loosed a fifty-megajoule burst of coherent light at the target, a dish antenna on a mast reaching above the mountaintop. The warning indicator switched off.

“Hit!” Hartwell exclaimed. “He zapped the mother!”

“Any response?” Kaitlin asked.

“Nothing. Not a thing!”

Kaitlin felt a surge of relief. Having to single someone out like that, ordering him, in effect, to be a target, was so damned cold; could she do it if she had to? She didn’t want to know. A damned stupid attitude, she knew. All of them were expendable on this op.

And it wasn’t over yet. The enemy weapon was still there, hidden. She wished they’d been able to rig some sort of teleoperated sensor aboard the Santa Fe to pinpoint where the UN shot had come from, but there simply hadn’t been time—or the equipment to allow that precise a remote scan of enemy positions.

Most likely, the enemy antimatter weapon was mounted at the base of Tsiolkovsky, still below the horizon from the crater rim. The Marines were going to have to get closer.

On Hartwell’s monitor, a trio of bright stars winked on. “Uh-oh,” he said. “We are taking fire. But it’s not the big gun.”

“What do you have?”

“Lasers. Megajoule range. Probably slaws.”

“The big gun must not be up there,” she said. “Open fire!”

Megajoule laser fire wouldn’t penetrate the LAV’s armor, at least, not right away, though there would be some armor loss with repeated hits, and a lucky shot might puncture a tire or fry delicate electronic optics.

“All units, keep firing!” Fuentes ordered. “I want that installation fried!”

All three LAVs joined in the long-range bombardment, along with those Marines outside armed with squad lasers. There was little indication that a battle was being fought, though once a boulder to the left of LAV-2 suddenly blossomed with an intolerably bright patch and a puff of vaporized rock. Several Marines crouched in the dust nearby rose and started moving back down the reverse slope, seeking better cover.

It was a one-sided battle, however, and in another few moments, the laser positions atop the distant mountain were no longer firing. Hartwell reported that the tower structure was no longer showing above the mountaintop, and that all radar and laser emissions from the central peak had ceased.

“Okay, Marines,” the captain’s voice sounded over the combat channel. “Good work! Donaldson! Are your people ready?”

“Set to go, Captain!” Gunnery Sergeant Donaldson’s baritone replied.

“Okay! Light the candle!”

In a display monitor on Hartwell’s console, Kaitlin could see three space-suited Marines crouched in the dust on the crater rim, fifty meters to the south. They’d set up something that looked like a complicated vidcorder on a slender tripod, lens hanging down between the legs. There was a puff of dust as the device’s solid-fuel motor fired, and the device rocketed swiftly and silently into the black Lunar sky, leaving the tripod behind.

“Let me know when you have signal acquisition,” she said.

Hartwell nodded inside his helmet. “Will do, Lieutenant. It’s climbing…still in the clear. Eight kilometers. Ten…Fourteen…”

The small probe was serving a double purpose. As it gained altitude, curving back toward the west, it would soon clear the horizon with the Doolittle, a US Aerospace Force ship near L-5, a spot still well below the horizon from Tsiolkovsky; it was the Doolittle that had picked up word fourteen hours earlier that the RAG was safely down and had relayed the information to L-3.

As soon as the communications-relay probe rose above the horizon, it would be able to relay a second message to the Doolittle and on to the Ranger.

The second purpose, of course, was a bit more direct. If there were any remaining radar or laser sites on or near Tsiolkovsky’s central peak—or if that killer antimatter cannon of theirs was unlimbered and ready just below the LAVs’ horizon, the probe might well reveal the fact by becoming a sudden target. Its destruction might help the Marines pinpoint the AM cannon.

“I have contact with the Doolittle,” Hartwell said.

“Punch it.”

Hartwell pressed a key, transmitting a complete record of the RAG mission to date. The other LAVs also transmitted their logs.

It would help in the planning of the next assault, if this one came to grief.

There was no blaze of antimatter fire from the crater’s center, and Kaitlin let herself relax…but only a bit. The critical portion of the RAG assault had just been deferred to later.

“Okay, everybody!” Fuentes said. “Saddle up! Get ready to roll! All drivers, check your fuel. This is the last chance you’ll have to refuel!”

“Now for the hard part,” Kaitlin said to Hartwell. “Never thought I’d get to take part in a cavalry charge…across a hundred kilometers of open plain!”

PFC Jack Ramsey
USS Ranger
2245 hours GMT

“Double-check those straps!” Captain Lee shouted, pulling himself along the aisle, from seat back to seat back. “We’re boosting at six Gs…I repeat, six Gs, and if you get bounced out of your seats, it’s going to ruin your whole day!”

“Hey, Captain!” someone called out. “What’s the skinny?”

“We’ve got the word,” Lee replied, but addressing the entire compartment. “The Doolittle just relayed the go-ahead from the RAG. We’re going in hot.”

Jack felt a cold shiver at that. “Going in hot” meant a hot LZ. Specifically, it meant the surface attack group hadn’t yet neutralized the AM cannon. While that eventuality was supposed to have been anticipated by the mission planners, it was damned scary to think about flying into the mouth of a weapon that shot antimatter at you. For weeks, now, scuttlebutt throughout 1-SAG had been revolving tightly around the supposed UN superweapon, giving it planet-buster status. If the Marines already on the ground at Tsiolkovsky couldn’t nail it in the next two hours, the USS Ranger was going to be flying into some serious shit.

He decided that it would be best if he didn’t think about what was waiting for him on the Moon. Carefully, Jack checked the harness that held him snug against a thickly padded contour couch. This, he thought, was luxury indeed for a Marine. The hab module of the Ranger had been adapted from the passenger compartment of a Lockheed Ballistic 2020 commercial suborbital transport; all it lacked was a flight attendant or two to pass out snacks and offer pillows.

Six Gs? It sounded like the brass had opted for the fast route to Luna. This was going to be fun.

As Captain Lee continued to check the others, Jack pulled a connector feed from his PAD and plugged it into a receptacle in one of his armrests, then plugged in an intercom jack from his suit. In another moment, the display screen on the seatback in front of him lit up, and Sam’s attractive features looked out at him with a smile. “Hello, Jack” sounded in his helmet headset. “What would you like to do?”

“Hello, Sam,” he replied, using his suit’s intercom channel. “Let’s keep going through the code-break checklist.” That was a long list of different ways Sam might use to get through the target program’s security barriers. The NSA had provided that list, he was told, a compilation of the Agency’s long experience at code-breaking and gaining computer access. Like the list of possible passwords, the checklist was stored in a special one-hundred-terabyte external drive plugged into his PAD.

Bosnivic dropped into the empty seat beside him and started strapping in. “Hey, Flash! Got your girlfriend to play with, I see!” he said on the platoon channel.

“Screw you, Bos,” Jack said amiably. Still, he had to suppress a small start of anger. Bosnivic, like most of the Marines he knew, loved the idea of a sex-goddess PAD agent; what they didn’t know, or didn’t understand, was that Jack himself no longer thought about Sam that way. The last time he’d seen her nude was that afternoon in Colonel Bradley’s office. After that, he’d had Sam herself go through her own code, line by line, finding and deleting every possible trigger command that would have her remove her clothing. For one thing, that saved some space in the PAD’s main storage. For another, it was a lot easier now for him to relate to Sam as a coworker—hell, even as another Marine—instead of as some horny adolescent’s wet dream.

It was not an attitude he knew how to talk about with his fellow Marines, however.

“Twenty bucks says my nutcracker beats yours,” Bosnivic said. “Yours is prettier than mine, but mine is NSA-issue, and it kicks ass.”

Bosnivic and Corporal Diane Dillon each had slightly different versions of the standard National Security Agency nutcracker. The idea was to try all three, the NSA programs and Jack’s modified agent, tripling, in theory, the chances of breaking the UN security code.

“You’re on,” Jack said. “Now go away and let me work.”

“Ha! I can tell my victim’s worried already!”

“All hands,” Captain Lee’s voice sounded over the command channel. “Cut the chatter. Fifteen seconds to boost!”

Quietly, Jack continued to work with Sam using the intercom link; as long as he wasn’t broadcasting over an open channel, he could talk. He was concerned about Sam’s ability to pick up on what might be happening in the target program on the farside of a security barrier. Though everyone was assuming that the UN security wall would be a simple one, there were some nasty twists they could put up if they wanted to—like a counter that ticked off failed attempts and did something nasty after a set number, like wipe the hard drive.

Or detonate an explosive charge. In a spacecraft powered by antimatter, that trick ought to be very easy to arrange.

Weight returned.

The acceleration was gentle at first, a hard nudge that pressed Jack back into his couch with what felt like his normal weight of about seventy-five kilos. He wished the hab module had windows so he could see out; he would have liked to watch the L-3 station falling away astern, or Earth growing larger ahead.

His weight increased.

All of the Marines assigned to this part of the mission had pulled plenty of practice time in the big centrifuge at Quantico. He knew he could take six Gs for a couple of hours, though the experience had left him bruised and sore afterward. But he could do it.

The aisle that the captain had been moving along earlier now looked like a wall; down was toward the back of his seat, and he was lying on that seat with his knees in the air and Sam’s face hanging above him. He guessed they were pulling about three gravities now, the same acceleration developed by a Zeus II during its launch from Earth. It wasn’t too bad; certainly, it didn’t feel like he now weighed 225 kilos. He just felt a bit, well, heavy, was all, like someone was sitting in his lap.

“We are now at one G,” Captain Lee’s voice said over the platoon channel. “I imagine this is a bit of a shock after three days of zero G! Better brace yourselves. From here on out, this is going to get rough. Hang on to your eyeballs!”

And then the pressure grew swiftly very bad indeed….

SUNDAY, 9 NOVEMBER 2040

Général de Brigade Paul-Armand
Larouche
UNS Guerrière, Tsiolkovsky Base
2357 hours GMT

Général Larouche clasped his hands at his back as he stared at the big bridge monitor. He’d been expecting an attack for a long time…and even forewarned, there’d been pathetically little that he could do to prepare. At least three enemy wheeled vehicles were approaching across the crater plain from the west, just visible, now, to the ship’s radar. That couldn’t be the entirety of the enemy force; they would not be moving against Tsiolkovsky now unless they felt themselves ready.

The transport downed fourteen hours ago must have been part of a larger invasion fleet, setting down these vehicles somewhere to the west and making the final approach on the surface, where the antimatter weapon couldn’t reach them. Larouche had warned his superiors of the possibility of an overland assault, but his reports had been ignored.

Fools. Idiots and fools!

“Colonel d’André?” he said, turning slightly. “Is Shuhadaku still on-line?” The name was still clumsy in his mouth. He’d been told that it was a Sumerian phrase that meant something like “Supreme Strong Bright Weapon,” as good a description as any he’d heard for the terrifying power of the antimatter beam.

“Yes, my General,” d’André replied. “Antimatter reactor on-line, conventional nuclear plant on-line at eighty percent.” When Larouche did not reply immediately, d’André added, “Shall we open fire on the targets approaching from the west, sir?”

Larouche gestured at the screen. “The image is being relayed from a remote camera on the mountain,” he said. “Unfortunately, the central peak is blocking our fire.”

“We have ground troops outside, sir,” d’André said. “They can engage at any time.”

“No. Save them.” At a range of over ninety kilometers, the enemy had swept twelve men armed with H&K Laserkarabiner LK-36 lasers from the peak in something less than forty seconds. It would serve no purpose to waste more men firing at a target they could not stop.

But there would be a part for them to play soon, if he kept them in reserve now.

In fact, the UN position at Tsiolkovsky was now in serious trouble. With the loss of their main radar, UN forces had lost both their primary deep-space eyes, and the fire control for the Shuhadaku system. That meant that the enemy ground vehicles could get very close indeed before the antimatter cannon could be turned against them; worse, as soon as the beam weapon was fired at one of the enemy vehicles, the others would know exactly where to fire to knock Shuhadaku out of operation.

If Larouche wanted to save the antimatter weapon for the main American assault, which he was sure was yet to come, he would have to kill the ground vehicles by more conventional means.

“There appear to be only three enemy vehicles, sir,” d’André reported. “There must be more of them, some-where.”

“There must be, indeed,” Larouche replied. He sighed. “We are about to reap the yield of our leaders’ hubris, my friend.”

“Sir?”

“Never mind.” Quietly, he added, “Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord…have mercy.”

Born and raised in the tiny village of Echallon, high in the mountains not far from Geneva and the Swiss border, Paul-Armand Larouche had wanted to be a priest. He’d already been attending the seminary at Bourg-en-Bresse for a year when his father, then a colonel in the French Army, had ordered him to transfer to St. Michael’s Military Academy or be cut off from the family.

The battle with his father had been raging for five years already by that time, and Paul-Armand thought he’d had what it took to outstubborn the man, who seemed obsessed with France’s past militant glories and her future as leader of the European Union, and through the EU, the United Nations. In the end, the old man had won.

His father had died in 2023, but by that time Paul-Armand’s military career had been firmly set. He’d married, settled down as much as any military man could do so, and continued up the rungs of advancement and honor.

But he still knew, deep in his heart, that he would have been happier as a parish priest in some small town in his beloved mountains of Jura and Ain. Especially now, when he could muster no sympathy, no understanding at all for his superiors’ decision.

Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison. Kyrie eleison.

It was said that the great twentieth-century Japanese admiral, Isoroku Yamoto, had warned that the Americans were above all a just people who honored justice and fair play. If the attack at Pearl Harbor was not completely successful, he’d warned, then the Japanese Empire would have succeeded only in waking a sleeping giant and filling him with terrible resolve.

So far as Larouche was concerned, France and the UN had done just that in this century, first by trying to force the issue of independence for the Southwestern United States, then by attempting to take over the American archeological finds on Mars, and finally, and most unforgivably, by trying to end a war that never should have begun by dropping an asteroid into the American heartland. There would be, there could be no forgiveness now from the Americans, not unless they were completely exterminated…or the UN threat arrayed against them crushed for all time.

And Larouche did not believe the Americans could be exterminated, not by any force or combination of forces that could now be brought to bear on them.

The UN’s last chance had been the AM warship Guerrière.

If the Guerrière could have been made fully operational, she would have been a weapon of overwhelming, of devastating power; Guerrière alone, armed with her positron main weapon, could have ended all American space operations and obliterated her cities one by one. Sooner or later, the Americans would have been forced to surrender, for they would have been unable to touch a warship of Guerrière’s capabilities.

But, inevitably, it hadn’t been that simple. The problem was the damned alien technology.

The basic physics for an antimatter-powered space drive had been understood for years. Inject a very small amount of antimatter into a large volume of water; the annihilation of a small part of that mass turned the remaining water into plasma at extraordinarily high temperatures, which could be channeled aft as a highly efficient drive.

Ordinary plasma drives worked the same way, except that the water was either heated first in a liquid-core nuclear reactor or channeled through layers of corrugated plutonium. Either way, the water was heated to plasma to provide thrust. The difference was one of degree…or, rather, of degrees. The antimatter drive produced a much hotter and more energetic plasma jet than a liquid-core reactor; more, it could sustain high thrust for days or weeks at a time, allowing steady acceleration at one G or more. Guerrière, when she was fully operational, would be able to fly to Mars in a few days; the skies would be opened, and at long last the bounty of the solar system would be free for the taking.

Unfortunately, the Directorate of Science had decided to use the wreckage found at Picard as a kind of shortcut. The ancient, spacefaring An, evidently, had known how to produce antimatter in a steady, constant, and powerful stream; the antimatter generator of one of their freighters had been recovered intact by Billaud’s team of archeologists and transported to the growing French base at Tsiolkovsky. A French, German, and Chinese team had attempted to reverse-engineer the technology.

Larouche smiled at the thought, though there was very little good humor there. Half a century ago, there’d been wild rumors that the Americans had recovered alien space-craft from various crashes—or even as gifts from extraterrestrial visitors—and were trying to reverse-engineer them at a secret base in the Nevada desert. It was possible that the rumored cover-up by the US government in the second half of the twentieth century had been responsible, in part, for the paranoid fear within the UN that the Americans were going to keep recovered technology found at Cydonia, on Mars, for themselves…a fear that had led, at least in part, to the current war.

Larouche’s own experiences with back-engineering alien technology had convinced him that those old stories could not possibly have been true. Figuring out how something worked and going back to figure out how it was made was an effective tool only when the technologies more or less matched. Merde! Could Leonardo da Vinci, brilliant as he was, have reverse-engineered a television wall screen if a time traveler had presented him one as a gift? Could he have discovered the science and engineering behind generating and propagating radio waves, behind constructing cameras, behind encoding and decoding transmissions, behind all of the myriad sciences and technologies discovered and developed from the eighteenth century onward that made modern, flatscreen digital displays possible?

Da Vinci wouldn’t even have been able to understand the plastic of the wall screen’s display.

The alien technology recovered on the Moon so far was at least five centuries ahead of current terrestrial understanding of physics, engineering, materials processing, and control technologies. Reverse-engineering meant figuring out how to build not only the device in question, but how to build the tools that made the tools that made the tools that made the device…as well as principles of physics and engineering that were balanced one atop another in a terribly unsteady tower of innovation. Less than a century and a half had elapsed between the difference engine and silicon chips; there were elements of recovered An technology at least as strange to the UN engineering team as a PAD would have been to Charles Babbage. It was going to be decades more, perhaps centuries, before the fragments of An technology were understood within the context of human science. Merely knowing that something was possible was rarely enough to transform possibility into reality.

There were two basic approaches to powering an antimatter spacecraft. You could manufacture the antimatter, a few atoms at a time, in a particle accelerator, and store it in magnetic bottles, an approach using old and well-established technology that had been around for half a century at least, almost certainly the route the Americans had pursued in their AM-drive research.

But the An had known how to manufacture antimatter, specifically positrons—antielectrons—in large and continuous quantities. How the antimatter reactor recovered from the dusty floor of Picard did this was still not well understood—at least in terms that Larouche could comprehend, and he suspected that the UN engineers working on the problem only dimly glimpsed the principles involved. Zero-point energy? Energy drawn from the vacuum of space? Energy converted in its creation into, not matter, but antimatter? It sounded like magic to Larouche.

Using the An AM generator as a weapon was relatively easy, so long as you knew how to manipulate positrons in a magnetic field. Using it in a controlled fashion, however, feeding a precisely measured and balanced stream of antimatter to the reaction chamber, was orders of magnitude more difficult. It must have been much the same in developing early atomic energy; slapping two chunks of plutonium together to release energy in an uncontrolled chain reaction was relatively simple; producing controlled and controllable energy from the same equations had been much harder.

They’d had the weapon portion of the project working in April, when they’d first used a positron beam to destroy an American reconnaissance spacecraft. The actual weapon emplacement had been mounted high atop Tsiolkovsky’s central peak, with power provided by a large, deeply buried fission reactor. The Guerrière, then still the Millénium, had at that point only recently arrived at Tsiolkovsky, and the engineering team hadn’t yet begun the conversion of the big shuttle. In fact, they’d used the ship as an ordinary transport, first to ferry troops to Picard during the fighting there, and a month later, at the Lunar north and south poles, to stop the American takeovers of the Moon’s only sources of water.

In June, however, the engineering team had begun the actual ship conversion, removing Guerrière’s liquid-core fission reactor and primary thruster assembly and replacing it with a much more robust thruster unit shipped up from Earth. The positron weapon had been dismantled in August and lowered down the mountainside; by October, the positron weapon was working again, mounted now inside the sleek, black hull of the Guerrière rising above the Tsiolkovsky plain. A ball turret in Guerrière’s side channeled the positron stream through magnetic conduits and directed it at any radar-locked target within line of sight. It was that ball turret that was vulnerable to enemy counterbattery fire. And if they hit the turret while positrons were actually in the conduit, the result would be the same as an antimatter attack against the Guerrière.

As for the drive, however, the engineers still were having trouble finding a way to regulate the flow of antimatter from the generator. They were confident that they would have the problem under control soon…but how soon was unknown. Guerrière could fight, but she could not fly. It left Larouche’s forces at a terrible disadvantage.

They would have been better off, Larouche thought bitterly, if they’d simply used the alien machinery to produce positrons and store them for later use, as the Americans were. The thought of using equipment that no one really understood to power a spacecraft was, frankly, a bit frightening.

Worse was possessing such a terrible weapon, but finding oneself in the faintly ridiculous position of knowing that if he used it, he would lose it almost immediately. At the same time, if he didn’t use the primary weapon, the enemy might well take the ship.

An impossible dilemma.

“Colonel d’André?”

“Yes, General.”

“Have the special weapon crew stand by to engage with the primary weapon. We may not be able to fly, but by God we can give a good account of ourselves!”

“Yes, General.”

“Get the hopper fireteams aloft.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And place the computer safeguards on active,” he added after a moment’s consideration more.

It was a measure of last resort, but a vital one.

He might sympathize with the enemy cause, might hate the fact that his countrymen had attempted what amounted to genocide against the Americans, might have the gravest of doubts that the UN cause was right.

But there was also the matter of honor and duty, virtues instilled in him by his father long before their falling-out.

He would not be known as the man who’d lost the UN’s greatest weapon to the enemy.