MONDAY, 10 NOVEMBER 2042

Lieutenant Kaitlin Garroway
Tsiolkovsky Crater
0034 hours GMT

On the floor of the crater, the LAV could make top speed, bounding across the surface at eighty kilometers per hour. The faster it went, of course, the higher and broader the plumes of dust thrown up by its tires. This was both blessing and problem. It made their approach a lot easier to see; on the other hand, the enemy couldn’t be sure of exactly what it was that was approaching from the west, or even how many of them there were.

Kaitlin clutched the sides of her seat as LAV-1 bounced and lurched across the Lunar regolith. Though her armor was securely harnessed to the seat, she was taking a beating inside, and she had to grab hard and hold on to keep from rattling around inside the suit’s hard torso like a marble inside a tin can.

Beside her, Hartwell drove with sharp, precise pulls left and right with the joystick, trying to be as unpredictable as possible as the LAV raced across the plain. Ahead, on his monitor, Tsiolkovsky’s central peak rose against the night, smooth-sided, its flanks scoured by eons of infalling micrometeorites. Tucked away at the mountain’s base, just visible now rising behind a low-lying spur of the mountain, was their objective, the slender spire of the UN supership they’d come to capture or kill.

There’d still been no fire from the mountaintop, which suggested that the enemy weapon was now mounted aboard the ship. That made the most sense; the UN couldn’t have many of the alien-derived antimatter weapons and likely had only the one.

But the three LAVs were almost certainly in the enemy’s sights now. The only reason they weren’t firing was the fear—a fear quite justified—that at the first shot, the LAVs would target the antimatter weapon’s vulnerable turret. Lasers allowed a degree of pinpoint accuracy and precision in running gun battles unheard of in any previous war in history.

The Marines, Kaitlin decided, needed something better than an armored, four-wheeled box to deploy troops across modern combat distances. She hurt, the wild motion was making her sick to her stomach, and something like panic claustrophobia—a gnawing dread that within the next instant or two white fire was going to sear through the LAV and reduce them all to a cloud of hot plasma—was growing with each moment that she was trapped inside. Hartwell’s tiny display screen was no substitute for the wide-open spaces and a place to dig deep and hide; it would be even worse, she knew, for the rest of her Marines, who could do absolutely nothing but sit there strapped to their seats, wondering what was happening.

“We have aircraft taking off at the base, Lieutenant,” Hartwell announced.

Kaitlin twisted her head inside her helmet, trying to get a better view. The term aircraft was almost comically in-appropriate here, in the Lunar vacuum, but old habits die hard. On the monitor, she could just make out four tiny constructs gleaming in the sunlight as they lifted off from beyond the low-lying spur. They were hoppers, short-range Lunar transports, like the one Chris Dow had taken out during the approach to Picard. They would have enemy riflemen aboard, probably with squad laser weapons at least as good as the Sunbeam M228, and the LAV’s upper-deck armor wasn’t all that thick…a design compromise for greater speed and fuel efficiency.

An even greater danger, though, was the possibility of a low pass by a hopper with its ventral thrusters on full. She well remembered the Marine use of that strategy at Picard, and the UN forces would remember as well.

“Are we close enough yet to pinpoint the ship’s main weapon turret?” she asked.

“I’ve got five different blisters or bumps registered on that thing that could be the turret, Lieutenant,” Hartwell replied. “Don’t know which is the target.”

“If we start shooting randomly, they’re liable to open up,” she said. “Of course, we might get lucky.” She thought for a moment, working up her courage. She felt like she was about to stick a pin into a sleeping lion. “Any sign of First Platoon?”

“Negative,” Hartwell replied. “Other side of the mountain.”

They were pursuing their original plan, with Second Platoon swinging south of the central peak, while Captain Fuentes and First Platoon swung around to the north. With the enemy base probably located on the site of the old radio-astronomy facility, nestled up against the southeast flank of the central peak, the idea was to split the enemy’s fire and keep him guessing…but with Second Platoon, Second Squad stranded back there on the floor of Fermi Crater, it was getting a bit cold and lonely here to the southwest of that high and brooding mountain.

Another twenty kilometers to go.

“Okay,” she told Hartwell. “Keep an eye on the ship, but let’s engage those hoppers before they get close enough to fry us.”

“Roger that.” He manipulated a joystick, centering a targeting cursor to move the LAV’s laser turret topside. “Firing!”

PFC Jack Ramsey
USS Ranger
0035 hours GMT

The Ranger was now less than ten minutes from its objective, and only now was Jack beginning to hope that he was going to make it.

After only minutes at six Gs, he’d decided that he wasn’t going to be able even to think about doing more work on the nutcracker code. The pressure, the apparent weight of five full-grown men lying in a stack on top of him, was suffocating, crushing, and made gasping down each breath a struggle. Finally, he’d shut Sam down and switched the seatback display instead to a view relayed from a camera in Ranger’s nose.

The view of Earth, visibly growing larger minute by minute as the Ranger accelerated toward her, was absolutely spectacular, but Jack hadn’t been able to muster more than a passing and somewhat lethargic interest.

An hour after they’d cut free from the L-3 construction shack, at just before midnight GMT, they’d whipped past the Earth, traveling now at over two hundred kilometers per second. For a blessed span of minutes, zero gravity had returned as the Ranger pivoted, nose skewing toward the fast-passing Earth with an unpleasant wrench to the gut and head, until she was traveling tail first, past the Earth and on her way now toward the Moon.

Jack had heard hear the harsh retching sounds of several Marines being sick elsewhere in the cabin. He’d kept his eyes carefully on the screen, unwilling to let his own stomach rebel as well. Amazing how contagious nausea could be.

Then acceleration returned…deceleration now, rather, as the Ranger began killing her tremendous velocity after the turn-over. Jack’s maltreated stomach twisted, and he’d nearly lost it then; only the fact that he’d been on a special low-bulk diet for three days already saved him. The diet, evidently, hadn’t helped everyone in the company; when weight returned, Jack was glad he wasn’t farther aft, where, judging from the yells and curses, tiny, free-floating globules of vomit were suddenly falling like rain.

“Okay, people,” Captain Lee’s voice said over the cabin comm system, moments after the six-G torture resumed. “Not much longer. Remember, we’re going…for either Plan Alfa…or Plan Bravo. Which way we go…depends on…our fellow Marines. On whether they…were able to nail that damned cannon…or not. Either way…we have a good chance…of pulling this thing…off. Stay focused…stay alert…and you’ll come through fine….”

He spoke quietly, calmly, and reassuringly, despite the pauses between each phrase as he caught his breath and rallied his strength for the next handful of words. What Captain Lee was saying, Jack found, wasn’t nearly as important as the fact that he was saying it…demonstrating to each miserable Marine in that cabin that he or she was not alone, that this punishment was routine, that it was all part of the game. After a few moments more, he wasn’t even aware of the captain’s voice…only of the reassurance.

With a grunting effort, Jack found he was able to toggle the seatback screen’s display either to the receding blue-white beauty of Earth or to the fast-swelling, crater-battered visage of the Moon, visible now beyond the Tinkertoy struts of Ranger’s landing assembly. After several changes of mind, he settled on the Earth; he thought he knew now what the Apollo astronauts had felt, seventy-some years ago, when they’d looked back at the world of their birth and realized that all of humankind, all art, all history, everything that made him what he was, was contained in that one small and delicate bubble of cloud-swirled blue.

That bubble was so fragile. What if his Uncle David’s theory about the Hunters of the Dawn was right? Man’s birthworld seemed so vulnerable from out here; the attack on Chicago had demonstrated just how vulnerable it could be.

And if the Hunters of the Dawn didn’t destroy that frail beauty, how long before Man himself did?

He pushed the churning, unpleasant thoughts aside. For now, Earth’s beauty was enough, something to cling to, to lose himself in. For Jack, it felt as though all of the years he’d yearned to be out in space had been distilled to this one peaceful, crystalline moment.

Despite the discomfort, he wanted to savor the experience as long as he could.

Lieutenant Kaitlin Garroway
Tsiolkovsky Crater
0035 hours GMT

A point of incandescence appeared against the ungainly, strut-crisscrossed flank of the nearest hopper, and in seconds the vehicle was falling from the sky, its reaction mass tanks holed. A second flare of light appeared on the side of the UN ship.

“Objective is under fire!” Hartwell called.

“Outstanding!” That meant that LAV-2 and LAV-4 were also close enough to engage, somewhere on the other side of the UN base. Approaching from two directions, coming around both sides of the central peak, must have the enemy commander beside himself. “Pop a comm relay!”

“Roger that!”

Hartwell pressed several screen touchpoints as the LAV gave another lurch and thump. On the upper deck, just behind the laser turret, a hatch popped open and a burst of compressed nitrogen blasted a baseball-sized sphere into the black sky.

Almost immediately, a crackle of radio voices sounded in Kaitlin’s helmet headset.

“LAV-2, this is LAV-4! I’ve got movement on the ship!” That sounded like Staff Sergeant Mohr. “I think I see the turret!”

“Hit it!” the captain’s voice cried back. “Take out the turret!”

“Firing!”

“Damn! You hit something! Can’t see what!…”

“Two, this is One!” Kaitlin called. “Target in sight! Watch out for hoppers!”

The other two LAVs were masked by Tsiolkovsky’s central peak, and there was no ionosphere here to bounce signals off of, but the comm relay, following its mortar-lobbed trajectory, could relay communications between the widely scattered elements of the company for over a minute before the Moon’s sixth of a G could drag it back down to the surface.

“Roger that, One,” Fuentes replied. “Nice you could join us!”

“Hoo, yeah!” Mohr added. “Kick ass and take names!”

“We’ll be moving too fast to take names,” Fuentes replied. “I’ll settle for initials!”

“Two, Four! I’ve got hoppers incoming, bearing one-nine-five!”

“LAV-1, this is Two! Hit the primary target, and keep hitting him! LAV-4, open fire on those hoppers.”

“Roger, LAV-2.”

“Roger that, Skipper,” Kaitlin said. She looked at Hartwell. “You heard?”

“Aye-firmative. Lemme get clear of the damned dust!” Hartwell’s erratic driving had provided at least one side benefit—sending a cloud of fine, lunar dust into the sky…dust that at least partly obscured the fast-moving LAV. As the image on the screen cleared, Hartwell began moving the targeting cursor up the side of the UN ship.

An instant later, a flash of intense and silent light blanked out Hartwell’s monitor, a flare as dazzling as the surface of the sun.

Général de Brigade Paul-Armand
Larouche
Tsiolkovsky Base
0037 hours GMT

“A hit!” d’André shouted. He pointed at the monitor, which showed now the view from a camera mounted on the main weapon turret. From that vantage point, thirty meters above the ground, an immense cloud of dust was rising from the barren Lunar plain, just beyond the low hill sheltering the base to the west. For a moment, the camera’s optics had been blinded by the flash, but as the image cleared, there was little to be seen but a slow-falling cascade of dark gray dust. “We got him, General!”

“Swiftly, now,” Larouche ordered. “Bring the weapon to bear on the two vehicles to the northeast!”

“Slewing about to zero-eight-one…”

With the lone attacking vehicle killed, perhaps they now had a chance. Even if the primary weapon turret was knocked out now…

“It’s going to be difficult, General. Our people are too close!”

Merde! That was the biggest disadvantage of being forced to fight at such close quarters. The blast of the positron beam—heat, light, and radiation—was as undiscriminating as the detonation of a small nuclear weapon. The UN troops outside would suffer, too, if they were too close to the blast.

“The main turret is taking hits!” d’André shouted.

But that couldn’t be helped. “Fire! Fire now!…”

God forgive me!…

Captain Carmen Fuentes
Tsiolkovsky Crater
0037 hours GMT

“Fire!” Carmen yelled. Her eyes were watering from the flash that had momentarily blanked the screen. “Fire!”

A flash, a burst of white-hot incandescence, flared from the side of the UN ship, now less than four kilometers away.

“Score one for LAV-4!” Sergeant Mohr’s voice called over her headset. “I think we nailed the bastard that time!”

“I just lost the relay from LAV-1!” Staff Sergeant Michaels, LAV-2’s driver, announced.

“Put up another comm relay,” Carmen told him.

“We still have two in the sky,” Michaels replied. “And the LOS hit when the UN ship fired. Captain, I think LAV-1 just got scragged!”

“Shit.” She’d liked Garroway. A lot. Grieve later, she thought. When there’s time! “Okay…keep targeting the ship.”

“Firing!” Then, “Captain, I think we nailed that turret. Nothing there but a hole!”

“You’re sure that’s where the positron beam was coming from?”

“Affirmative! Got it recorded, if you want a replay.”

“Let’s see it.”

Michaels set the replay going in a small window opened in the lower left corner of the main display. It was hard to see, even magnified and in slow motion, but it did look as though a dazzling pinpoint of light had appeared on something like a ball turret set in the UN ship’s hull; an instant later, the horizon had flared in a sun-brilliant detonation, searing the lunar regolith some ten or fifteen kilometers away. As the screen cleared, laser hits from LAV-4’s cannon could clearly be seen shredding the turret like cardboard.

“Okay,” she said. “We’ll call that a kill on the AM weapon, and call for Plan Bravo.” She glanced at the time readout: if Ranger was on time, she should be gentling into Lunar orbit within another few minutes…and would be coming over the western horizon twenty-five minutes after that, but for any number of reasons she could be late, or early. “Start popping com relays every minute,” Carmen added. “Coded for Select Bravo. I want Ranger to pick that up as soon as she clears the ringwall.”

“You got it, Captain.”

“Take us in closer.”

The LAV accelerated, spewing dust like a smoke screen.

PFC Jack Ramsey
USS Ranger
0044 hours GMT

“How about it, people?” Captain Lee said. “Any broken bones? Anyone hurt?” He moved down the aisle, adrift once again in blessed zero G. Jack raised one hand and looked at it; it was trembling, beyond his ability to control it. God…was the entire platoon in this bad a shape?

“My dignity’s pretty badly hurt, Skipper,” one Marine replied, wiping his face with a rag. “Can I be excused?”

“You’ll survive, Logan,” Gunnery Sergeant Bueller told him. “Okay, Marines! Listen up! I want you all to move forward, single file. Take a helmet and gloves from Lance Corporal Schultz, seal up tight, then check your weapon. Remember, do not load until your section leader gives you the word!”

Bueller was a short, stocky fireplug of a Marine, with a bulldog’s face and a Doberman’s growl. “Now!” he continued, anchoring himself between two seatbacks. “Are there any Marines who need help making it to the LSCPs? Speak up now, and don’t give me no macho shit! If you’re having trouble navigating, we’ll assign someone to help you!”

Jack considered raising a hand, then decided that he would be okay. He knew what Bueller was looking for; all of the Marines aboard Ranger except Bos, Dillon, and Jack had had plenty of zero-gravity practice. The three of them had had three days at the construction shack to practice, though, and Bueller had made sure they’d worked at moving around without losing a handhold or getting disoriented in the weird, no-up-and-no-down falling sensation of weightlessness.

Ranger’s engines had cut off only moments before, and they were now in orbit around the Moon at a mountain-skimming altitude of only fifty kilometers. The Marines had twenty-two minutes now to get aboard the LSCPs strapped to Ranger’s sides.

He craned his neck, looking for his uncle. There he was. David didn’t seem to be having any trouble moving about; then Jack remembered that the archeologist had spent sixteen months or so on cycler spacecraft going to and from Mars. Though the cyclers had spin gravity habs, he would’ve had plenty of opportunity to practice handling himself in free fall.

He also saw Captain Lee…and was shocked by the expression on the man’s face. After those soothing words during the second half of the flight, it was a little unsettling to see what looked like worry there.

Then Jack remembered the scuttlebutt he’d been hearing for the past several weeks. Captain Lee was rumored to be pretty tight with the L-T commanding 1-SAG’s Bravo Company Second Platoon…and she would be on the ground right now, trying to clear the way for Ranger’s approach and landing. The captain must be sick with worry. Like his DI in boot camp had told him, the First Space Assault Group was an awfully small unit. That meant people formed close bonds within it; it also increased the risk that close friends would die.

He looked again at his Uncle David and wondered if both of them would survive what was about to happen. Jack hadn’t thought much about his own mortality, but there was something about the expression on Rob Lee’s features that demanded it.

Carefully, he pulled himself into the aisle, making sure he had the next handhold grasped securely before letting go of the last.

Another Marine’s legs swung through the air and thumped heavily against his torso, nearly knocking him free. “You okay, Ramsey?” Bueller asked him, gripping his upper arm to steady him. “You got your PAD and shit okay?”

“Squared away, Gunny.”

“Semper fi, Marine. We’re countin’ on ya.”

It was a sobering thought. Capture of the UN ship might well depend on one of the three 4069 MOSs cracking the enemy’s computer security.

His stomach gave another twist, and he bit back a sharp and sour taste. Grimly, he followed the queue forward.

Lieutenant Kaitlin Garroway
Tsiolkovsky Crater
0045 hours GMT

The rasp of her own breathing was impossibly loud inside her helmet. “Hello! Hello!” she called. “Does anyone hear me?”

Kaitlin could hear groans, cries, and mumbled curses coming over the platoon com channel. The lights were out and the LAV’s cabin submerged in blackness absolute, but at least communications were still working.

“Ah…yeah, L-T. I hear ya.”

“Who’s that?”

“Sorry. Kaminski, ma’am.” He sounded dazed, maybe hurt.

“I’m here too,” Hartwell said. “Christ! What hit us?”

“The enemy AM beam would be my guess,” Kaitlin replied. “Don’t know why it didn’t fry us, though.”

“Let’s have some light in here! Who’s got their suit lights working?” She began fumbling for her own light, reaching for the switch mounted high on her left shoulder. As the lights mounted on her shoulders flicked on, other lights came on as well, filling the LAV’s interior with bizarrely misshapen and grotesquely huge shadows.

The LAV, she thought, was canted to the left at about a forty-five-degree angle. Part of the right side had crumpled inward, as though from the blow of a giant fist, and her helmet readout was showing zero pressure in the cabin.

Another readout showed something far more worrisome: she’d just picked up 100 rads in a single dose. Not good. Not good at all. She felt queasy and wondered if it was the radiation.

She still couldn’t figure out what had happened. A near miss by the positron beam, yes…but why weren’t they all dead? “Someone aft, see if you can get the airlock doors open,” she called. “The rest of you, sound off when I call your names. Let me know if you’re in one piece! Ahearn!”

“Here! Okay!”

“Anders!”

“I’m okay.”

“Castellano!” She waited. “Castellano!”

“He’s bought it, L-T.”

“Hartwell!”

“Okay.”

She ran down First Squad’s roster and was relieved to find that there were only two dead—Castellano and PFC Jordy Rawlins. Two more were hurt badly enough that they’d better not be moved—Navy Lieutenant Wood with a probable broken leg, and Lance Corporal Klinginsmith with what was probably a couple of broken ribs.

All of the squad had taken a hefty dose of radiation. Antimatter reacted with matter by vanishing in a burst of very hard radiation—X rays and gamma rays, especially—and both the armored hull of the LAV and their space suits would have generated additional, secondary radiation in a cascade effect.

How badly they were burned remained to be seen. The tables said that fifty percent fatalities resulted from 300 rads, but as little as 4 rads delivered all at once would cause some physical effects. They’d been “hardened” against radiation—put on a diet heavy in green vegetables and Vitamin A and E, and they’d all been taking daily doses of fat-soluble antioxidants—all of which was supposed to cut the effects of radiation by better than thirty percent. And once they were out of this, shots of atropine and antirad drugs would cut the effects still further.

But a hell of a lot depended on how quickly they could get that additional treatment, and even more on the exact nature of their exposure.

Outside, on the dusty plain as they scrambled clear of the wrecked LAV, Hartwell approached her. “I think I know what happened,” he said. He pointed back behind the LAV, where an expanse of Lunar regolith had been fused, as if by intense heat. “I’d just put the stick hard over when the beam hit. I think the matter-antimatter reaction took place in the dust cloud.”

“The dust cloud? How…oh!” Kaitlin understood. “It didn’t all go off at once!”

“Right. Some positrons must have leaked through…and hit the ground just behind us. Others hit dust particles. The dust probably diffused the blast, spread it out over a large area. There wouldn’t be any shock wave, of course, except through the ground, which is what tipped us over and crumpled the side.”

“And the dust might have scattered the rads a bit, too.”

“It’s the only thing I can think of that saved us. We had our own personal smoke screen up…and it blocked part of the beam.”

“The boys in R&D are going to be interested in that effect,” Kaitlin told him. “But that’ll have to wait.” Turning her back on the wrecked LAV, she stared east, toward the UN base and the mountain. It looked close…but distances were deceiving on the Moon.

“Okay, Marines,” Kaitlin said, turning back to face the group standing in a semicircle behind her. “Here’s the deal. We can sit where we are and wait for someone to win this damned fight…or we can hotfoot it over to that base and take a hand in what happens. Strictly volunteer. You want to sit this one out, no one’s gonna squawk. Every one of you’s done more than what was expected by the strict call of duty already. Me, I’m going to go see if I can give Captain Fuentes a hand. Anyone want to come along?”

“I’m with you, Lieutenant.” One space-suited figure brandished an ATAR and started forward. He had to get close for Kaitlin to read the name KAMINSKI on the front of his suit. Yates shouldered a slaw and stepped forward. Then Julia Ahearn. In another moment, all eight were with her; she had to order Lance Corporal Lidell point-blank to stay behind with the two wounded men.

She tried to make it look like a random choice. She imagined most of the people in the squad would know, though, that Lidell’s wife was expecting a child.

Even in war, life could be respected and preserved. It had to be that way.

“Keep a radio beacon going,” she told him. “Someone will be along to pick you up before long. And…if it happens to be the UN, no heroics.” She gestured to the two wounded men. “Your responsibility is to them, to see that they’re taken care of.”

“Aye, aye, ma’am,” Lidell said. “I still wish you’d let me—”

“Carry out your orders, Marine.”

He slapped his ATAR brusquely. “Aye, aye, ma’am!”

“The rest of you? Follow me!”

Turning, she started moving toward the UN base, several kilometers distant, still partly obscured by a shoulder of the crater’s central mountain peak.

It looked like the battle there was on in earnest, and she was determined to have a piece of it.