MONDAY, 10 NOVEMBER 2042

PFC Jack Ramsey
Tsiolkovsky Base
0103 hours GMT

Jack ducked through the aft airlock hatch and jumped, landing on the Moon with a slight jar to his knees and a puff of scuffed-up dust around his boots. I made it! I’m on the Moon! I’m actually on the freaking Moon!…

But, damn it, there was no time to enjoy the fact. In eerie silence, space-suited figures ran, bounded in long kangaroo leaps, or spun and fell as gunfire or lasers cut them down. Wyvern rockets streaked across the sky, explosions flashed…and all in an utter, death-still silence that lent a touch of the surreal to the scene as it unfolded beyond Jack’s helmet visor. Radio chatter alone filled the Lunar night. “Chicago!” some Marine shouted over the combat frequency. “Remember Chicago!” And then everyone was shouting it.

As he’d been ordered, Jack dropped to a crouch in a depression just beyond the grounded LSCP, and Diane crouched with him. The scene was so chaotic, he couldn’t make sense of it at first. He saw the UN spacecraft that was their goal perhaps a hundred meters ahead, rising from within the embrace of a red-and-white-painted gantry and the caress of harsh worklights. He saw the Quonset-hut shapes of the base proper, tucked away in the shadow at the base of the central peak, which towered above the entire area, vast and brooding.

Jack switched on his tagger and studied the symbols that appeared on his HUD. The nearest troops all carried the green symbols indicating friend…fellow Marines. The few he could see without flags, on the mountainside or high up in the gantry, were far enough away to pose no immediate threat. He would wait and let the experienced hands take care of them.

One of the unflagged figures was leaning over a catwalk railing up near the top of the gantry, though, and appeared to be firing at Marines working their way up from below. He decided that he wouldn’t be breaking orders if he took the guy out…and he might save some Marine’s life.

Plugging a connector from his rifle into his suit, then switching on his ATAR’s sighting system, he waited until a green crosshair appeared on his visor, then carefully moved the rifle back and forth until the crosshair centered on the enemy. Range figures flickered on the side of his visor: 156.3 meters. At that range, Jack could just make out the guy’s UN-blue helmet. With the ATAR set for a three-round burst, he depressed the firing button. The weapon cycled with a swift, short vibration; the M-29 ATAR’s rate of fire was so fast that the third round left the barrel before the first round’s recoil had knocked the weapon off target.

He couldn’t see the target now. He’d looked down at his HUD, distracted, and missed it. Had he hit him? Was the UN soldier down? Damn! He hadn’t even seen what had happened!

In Siberia, Jack had never even seen the enemy…an invisible foe who dropped high-velocity shells on the Marine camp from over the horizon or rushed the perimeter at night, a half-glimpsed green-and-yellow shadow in an IR headset. Here, he still couldn’t tell what was happening…but the fighting was far more immediate, more real.

And more deadly. A hit to arm or leg that would simply sting on Earth could be fatal here, in hard vacuum. Jack found he was shaking and couldn’t stop.

He hoped no one else could tell how scared he was.

The other LSCP had touched down fifty meters away. As Marines spilled from the aft end of the vehicle, four suited figures lumbered across the plain toward Jack and Diane. IFF tagged them as Gunnery Sergeant Bueller, Bosnivic, and two Second Squad Marines.

“You two okay?” Bueller called. “Okay! Let’s rock!” Turning, he trotted toward the gantry, leading the way. Rising from the depression, Jack and Diane followed.

Moving on the moon, Jack found, took a knack…one easily acquired, though it was hard work to get up to speed. He found a gentle lope, half skipping, half kangaroo hop, carried him across the lunar surface at the ground-eating pace of a running man.

He found himself wondering if he’d just killed someone up there on that steel tower.

“Okay!” Bueller called. “Tomlinson! Jakosky Take point! You three follow. We’ll bring up the rear! Amphibious green blurs, now! Go! Go!”

Jack grabbed a rung and started climbing right behind Corporal Jakosky. He’d expected the climb to be harder than it was, but even with his suit, weapon, and backpack PLSS, he still weighed only about twenty kilos. He could pull himself up, hard, and before he stopped moving upward, he could reach up, grab, and pull again, with his feet providing only occasional guidance and support.

At the top, several blue-helmeted suits lay sprawled about like limp rag dolls, while the two Marine escorts and another Marine, with a Second Platoon shoulder patch, waited, ATARs at the ready.

Someone had already blown the ship’s airlock hatch, which gaped open. The inner hatch was closed, but a bulkhead panel had been torn open, and a hot-wire box clipped on. Jack had seen the device demonstrated and explained at Quantico; rather than cycling a few people through at a time, the outer hatch would be kept open, with the inner hatch safeties overridden. Each time someone wanted to pass through, the inner hatch would be opened; the ship would lose some more air each time, and eventually be left in vacuum, but the method was a hell of a lot faster than the depressurization-repressurization cycle they would have to use otherwise.

“How many inside already, Marine?” Bueller asked the Second Platoon guard as he mounted the catwalk.

“Four, Gunnery Sergeant,” the man replied. The name on his chest read NARDELLI. “Lieutenant Garroway and three others. It’s…it’s all that’s left of us!” His eyes were wide and frightened behind his visor.

“Hold your post, Marine. Rest of you, with me!”

A puff of vapor exploded from the torso of Diane’s suit and she toppled backward, dropping her ATAR. She almost went over the edge, but Jack reached out and grabbed her arm, hauling her back from the edge and lowering her to the catwalk. “Sniper!” Jack yelled, pointing in the direction from which the laser shot had come…high up on the flank of the mountain, above the base. Nardelli, Bueller, and the others opened up with their ATARs, firing full-auto, but Jack couldn’t tell if they could even see the target.

Dillon stared at him from inside her helmet, looking very frightened. “I…what happened?…Jack?”

“You took a laser bolt, Diane,” he told her. The hole, just below her left breast, was only as wide as a pencil, but blood was bubbling through, steaming and freezing at the same time as it hit vacuum. He decided to lie. “Doesn’t look bad.”

He fumbled in an external pouch for a slap-stick patch and brought it down on the hole, sealing it over.

“It…hurts.”

“Ramsey!” Bueller shouted. “Let’s move!”

Nardelli held up a morphine gun. “I’ll take care of her,” he said.

“Do that!” He patted Dillon’s shoulder. “You’ll be okay!”

“Crack the fucking code, Jack,” she told him, clinging to his arm with a gloved hand. “You and Sam…crack the fucking code!”

“You got it! I’ll tell you all about it when I come back!”

Rising, he hurried after Bueller, who was waving him on from inside the airlock.

When all four Marines were ready, Bueller pressed the hot-wire box, and the inner hatch slid open. Air burst from within, a hurricane that threatened to sweep all five of them out of the lock and back onto the gantry at their backs, but Bueller leaned against the gale and waded in, as loose papers and a copy of Playboy in French whirled past and into the night.

Inside lay the body of a Marine, PFC Juarez, his helmet shattered.

Jack wondered how many Marines had been killed or wounded already in this impossible, insane attack…and how many were left….

Général de Brigade Paul-Armand
Larouche
UNS Guerrière, Tsiolkovsky Base
0110 hours GMT

In another few moments, it won’t matter. General Larouche dragged back the charging handle on his MAB-31 autopistol and set the selector to full automatic. He heard a loud thump and the clatter of metal on metal below the small bridge. They would be here, soon. But the ship knew what to do….

He hadn’t heard from d’ André in a long time. He’d sent him aft to organize a defense of the main locks, but that line of defense had obviously failed. Three times, the bridge alarms had gone off, warning of dropping pressure as the enemy breached the main lock, then resealed it. Air pressure aboard the Guerrière was down to about half normal, and the sounds picked up by his suit’s external mikes had a curiously flat and tinny quality to them.

He exchanged a glance with the other two space-suited men in the compartment, a pair of North Chinese special forces troops who’d taken refuge on the bridge a few moments ago. Unfortunately, Larouche did not speak Mandarin, and they seemed to speak no French, German, or English. Their dark eyes, deep within their black helmets, gave nothing away when they looked at him. He wondered if they knew what he’d done, that there was no hope now for any of them.

A stream of positrons, released from the alien generator but not focused and directed by the main weapon’s magnetic channels, would destroy the entire ship…and probably a fair portion of the base as well. The countdown had already begun. He checked his helmet time readout. Four minutes, forty-eight seconds. No, not much longer at all….

The hatch leading aft was circular and set in the middle of the bridge deck. The three men had positioned themselves around the hatch, weapons aimed at it. There was no place to hide, and nowhere else to go.

He thought he heard…

With a high-pitched bang, the hatch flew into the air, struck the overhead, and fluttered down slowly in the Moon’s weak gravity. A small, dark olive cylinder flew up after it. “Don’t look!” Larouche shouted, turning his head inside his helmet, slamming down his outer sun shield, and squeezing his eyes shut.

The crackling chain of explosions was deafening…though not as bad as they would have been in a one-bar atmosphere. The strobing light was literally blinding, but he’d reacted quickly enough to avoid the effects. When the last explosion faded to a shrill ring, he opened his eyes again and raised his MAB pistol.

Someone below the open hatch thrust the muzzle of an ATAR rifle through, swinging it around to use its optics to scan the bridge. One of the NCA troops brought his weapon up, then pitched back against the pilot’s seat as the ATAR barked. The other Chinese soldier had been slow when the flash-bang had sailed through; he was stumbling about wildly, arms groping, obviously blind.

Larouche stepped forward, planning on firing directly down through the hatch, but a man in a suit reflecting the grays and blues of the ship’s interior compartments exploded up into the compartment. Larouche fired…but too late. The grenade launcher attached beneath the ATAR’s muzzle gave a heavy chuff, and a beehive swarm of fléchettes tore through his lightweight pressure suit, mangling his right arm and part of his chest.

Pain and shock drove him back a step, then the compartment tilted crazily as he dropped to the deck. A second Marine in reactive camo armor came up through the hatch and shot the blinded NCA spec forces trooper with a single 4.5mm ATAR round.

The first Marine took three steps toward Larouche and gently kicked the MAB machine pistol away from his gloved hand. It was, he could see now, a woman. The name stenciled on her suit read GARROWAY.

Garroway. Wasn’t that the name of the Marine who’d overturned the French-UN military op on Mars a couple of years back? He thought that had been a man.

It was getting hard to breathe. His suit no longer held pressure, and he was gasping in the thin air left aboard the Guerrière.

His helmet HUD was still working, though, and showed there were only three minutes and fifty seconds to go. He wondered if he would be unconscious by then. He didn’t want to burn, didn’t want to feel the radiation sleeting through his body at the end. When he’d set the timer going, he’d planned on cracking open his helmet and putting a bullet painlessly through his brain just before the explosion. Now he couldn’t.

Well, a matter-antimatter explosion should be as quick as a bullet. What he wasn’t sure about was how much antimatter would be reacting, and how quickly. He was picturing the blast less as a single, devastating explosion, and more as a rapidly accelerating meltdown.

Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison. Kyrie eleison. Lord, don’t let me suffer.

He waited to die….

PFC Jack Ramsey
UNS Guerrière, Tsiolkovsky Base
0112 hours GMT

“Okay!” Bueller said. “Bridge is clear, you two. Hit it!”

Jack and Bosnivic had been waiting in one of the Guerrière’s passageways for what had seemed like hours. Jack felt completely disoriented. He’d expected the interior of the UN ship to be more or less the same as the Ranger, but the design was totally different, without the US space-craft’s modular design. The passageways were cramped and oddly twisted, the bulkheads and overheads covered by snaking bundles of naked conduits, wires, and piping; the Marines had been ordered to use only their M-440s and fire fléchettes while on board, to avoid puncturing a bulkhead, but it looked like more damage could be done with a beehive round to all of those exposed wires.

The Marines, he noticed, had been switching freely between their ATARs and the shotgunned fléchette bundles, depending on the situation. Heavily armored troops couldn’t be hurt much by fléchettes in any case, so they’d been saving the beehive rounds for targets wearing light pressure suits only. With the rest, they used 4.5mm ATAR rounds and simply made sure they didn’t miss.

As he scrambled up the ladders connecting two more decks, close on Bosnivic’s heels, Jack passed several examples of Marine accuracy in close-quarters combat. How many UNdies were left alive on the ship? He didn’t know, and that wasn’t his concern. The bridge was clear now, and he had a job to do.

Squeezing through the final hatch, he stepped onto the bridge, a dark and claustrophobic place only six meters across and already crowded by Bueller, two Second Platoon Marines, and three UN bodies. Bosnivic was already moving to the computer station, and it didn’t look like there would be room there for two at that console.

Well, if Bos didn’t succeed, Jack thought, maybe he and Sam would still get a shot. He wanted to know how Sam would stack up against the vaunted NSA nutcracker. He stepped back, standing between the Second Platoon Marines, Lieutenant Garroway and Sergeant Kaminski. “About time you fellows showed up,” the lieutenant told him.

One of the bodies on the deck was moving.

“Watch out!” Jack yelled. “On the deck!”

It happened too fast to follow. Two of the dead UN troops wore the black helmets of Chinese special forces; the third wore a lightweight, bloodied white suit with the characteristic blue UN helmet, and he was the one who’d just risen to hands and knees and flung himself across the deck, almost under Bosnivic’s feet, snatching up an ugly little pistol with a large magazine in front of the trigger and rolling over, aiming up at Bos.

Jack brought his ATAR off his back, but Bos was in the way, his feet tangled with the UN man’s legs. The UNdie gripped the machine pistol in both hands, jamming it straight up, almost against Bosnivic’s groin, and pulled the trigger. A stream of explosive rounds blasted through his torso, as chunks of armor and bloody flesh sprayed the compartment.

Kaminski and Lieutenant Garroway both reacted faster than Jack could, pivoting and raising their ATARs in the same instant and blasting the UN soldier with a snapping burst of high-speed fire.

But it was too late for Bos.

“You’re up, buddy,” Kaminski said. Half in shock, Jack stepped across the body of his friend, slinging his ATAR as he pulled his PAD from its holster.

Captain Robert Lee
USS Ranger
0113 hours GMT

It almost had been too late. Ranger had swept past Tsiolkovsky’s central peak, still decelerating at three Gs, but then, slowly, she’d brought her speed to zero relative to the Lunar surface, then started moving back toward the west, toward the firefight raging around the southwestern flank of the mountain. On her bridge, Rob Lee and David Alexander got to their feet once more, feeling now only the Moon’s sixth of a gravity, and the rattling vibration of the ship’s drives, holding them at a drifting near hover less than half a kilometer above the crater floor.

“There’s a lot going on down there, sir,” Kieffer said. “I see several small groups IDed as Marines. The rest are scattered all over the place.” He pointed. “Looks like some sniper positions up on the side of the mountain. Squad lasers, shoulder-fired missiles, and a lot of small-arms stuff.”

Rob glanced at Avery, who shrugged, then nodded. “Unless you see some other targets in the clear,” Rob said, “let’s take out those snipers. But watch out for heavy battery fire from the ship.”

The AM cannon might have been dealt with, but the UN ship almost certainly possessed high-energy lasers as well, and there was no word yet on whether the assault team had secured her or not. A well-placed HEL barrage could still ruin the Ranger’s whole day.

Ranger mounted three HELs, each in the two-hundred-megajoule range, which gave them the explosive equivalent of forty-kilo charges of high explosive. The bolts falling from the sky were invisible in hard vacuum, but the explosions were not, dazzling, pulsing flashes against the mountainside like scattered strobe beacons. In seconds, a faint haze of dust was settling across the mountainside, and each bolt became visible as it flashed through the cloud, searing streaks of white light that continued to hit the mountain slope in a devastating, rapid-fire barrage. As quickly as a UN soldier could be spotted by the Ranger’s weapons officer, using IR optics, a lightning bolt would fall.

“Okay, okay,” Ranger’s communications/electronics officer said, touching his headset. “I’m getting a call from someone down there.”

“Put it on the speaker,” Avery said.

“…on the run,” a scratchy voice called. “Glad you boys could make the party!”

Avery reached out and jacked his headset mike into the CE officer’s console. “This is Colonel Avery of the Ranger. What’s your situation down there?”

“Ah, okay, Colonel. This is Gunnery Sergeant Yates. We’re in good shape, here. The skipper’s inside the UN ship. Haven’t heard from her in a while, now. So’s the computer team. Outside, we were taking damned heavy fire from that mountain, but you boys just pretty well swept it clean! Looks like the UNdies are on the run, now!” There was a static-filled pause. “If you can set down near the UN ship, we’ve got a lot of wounded here.”

“Roger that.” Avery nodded to the pilot. “Take her down.”

“We don’t have much choice, sir,” the pilot said. “We’re down to eighty seconds’ RM at low thrust. We’re setting down whether we want to or not!”

“Not too close to that damned French ship!” Avery snapped. “They may have explosives set!”

“Got news for you, sir,” Commander Kieffer said. “With antimatter, they don’t need to worry about explosive charges. If that baby goes, everything on this side of the mountain goes. Shrapnel alone is going to get everything within miles!” He seemed to be enjoying himself.

Rob’s heart was hammering. What about Kaitlin? Where was she? He glanced at David and saw the archeologist’s clenched fists and pale, drawn face. His nephew’s in there, with the computer team, he thought. And Kaitlin…

He’d seen one LAV destroyed out on the crater floor, and he could see another here, holed by a missile. Was Kaitlin dead? Hurt?

He desperately needed to know.

Moments later, the Ranger touched down gently on the Lunar regolith, a hundred meters from the UN ship and gantry. Rob hurried back down to the squad bay to get his helmet and gloves, and David followed.

Neither said a word.

PFC Jack Ramsey
UNS Guerrière, Tsiolkovsky Base
0114 hours GMT

Jack leaned against the computer console, his PAD open, the leads jacked into both the ship computer and to his own suit. Sam could talk to him now over his headset, and she would hear his instructions. “Go to it, Sam!” he told her, after setting up the first sweep sequence with a few keystrokes. “What are we up against?”

Sam was visible on the PAD screen. It seemed a little strange, seeing her there without a suit, while he was still encumbered with his. For the last month or so, he’d been thinking of her much more like a living person than a simulacrum. In fact, his whole relationship with her had changed.

He kind of liked it.

And—he knew he was anthropomorphizing here—he thought she liked it as well. “I enjoy this new professional relationship with you,” she’d told him once, a couple of weeks before.

“I am detecting computer security encryption, Jack,” Sam said. “It’s asking me for a password.”

Her speech was crisp and precise, with none of the languid sexiness she’d had originally. Her responses were also immediate, or nearly so. Her personality software had possessed a built-in response-delay, so that her conversation sounded more human. Jack had disabled that last week, however, to bring his interaction with her to peak efficiency.

“Initiate nutcracker routine. Run program.”

“Jack, you should know that I have just tried the first word on the first list. The password failed, and at the same time, I detected the reset of an incremental counter, from three to two.”

“Oh, shit….” The Guerrière’s system was set to detect and count each attempt to break security, probably with a three-times-and-you’re-out routine attached. The instructors at Quantico had admitted the possibility of something like that but thought it unlikely, given that the UN wouldn’t be expecting an enemy assault on Tsiolkovsky.

Evidently Guerrière’s programmers had been expecting the attack after all, or else they were simply being cautious. Three-times-and-you’re-out was the perfect way to foil pass-code-cracking attempts that relied on brute force. Three wrong guesses, and…well, there was no telling what would happen next. Maybe a special key was required to reset. Maybe a new set of instructions from an authorized programmer was required. Maybe there would even be a very loud boom.

“Jack, there is something else.”

“What is it, Sam?” He was breathing harder now, and his visor was starting to fog.

“Behind the counter, I am also detecting…something else. I believe it is a timer.”

“The computer clock?” Sweat burned his eyes.

“Negative, Jack. This is a special timer within the security program, and it is counting down. Now at T minus twenty-one seconds.

Maybe there was going to be a very loud boom whether Sam entered more passwords or not. Two more tries, out of sixteen thousand possibilities? There was no way in hell he could pull the pass code out of a hat, not with twenty seconds to go.

“Damn, Sam,” Jack said, feeling sick. “I don’t know how we’re going to pull this off….”