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Luna Marine:
Book Two of
the Heritage Trilogy
Ian Douglas

Contents

Prologue

Sound did not carry well in near vacuum, but Dr.David…

One

“Okay, gorgeous. Let’s get you out of those clothes, first.”

Two

Marine Lieutenant Kaitlin Garroway leaned forward and bounced, easing herself…

Three

Sergeant Frank Kaminski stood in line with the other members…

Four

A lobber hop on the Moon was nowhere near as…

Five

The missile struck the LSCP from the right and from…

Six

“So, David,” the other archeologist said, cuddling close in his…

Seven

The Moon filled the black sky, half-full from this vantage…

Eight

“So, anyway,” Kaminksi said, “I was wonderin’ if we could,…

Nine

Jack Ramsey—Private Jack Ramsey, US Marine Corps—stood at a rigid…

Ten

There were no marching crowds today, for a change, no…

Eleven

“It is the finding of this court that Sergeant Frank…

Twelve

“Okay, ladies,” Gunnery Sergeant Knox said, grinning. He was holding…

Thirteen

David was whistling as he entered the broad, skylight-illuminated lobby…

Fourteen

“We have a problem,” the tall man said. “And an…

Fifteen

“Well, Dr. Alexander,” Carruthers said with a smile. “Are you enjoying…

Sixteen

The FBI special agent was different, this time, not Carruthers,…

Seventeen

General Montgomery Warhurst took his seat next to his boss,…

Eighteen

“I just can’t tell you how good it is to…

Nineteen

The met-boys were calling for another day with a high…

Twenty

Jack stood at rigid attention in front of Captain Thomas…

Twenty-One

The main body of 2034L was considerably smaller than it…

Twenty-Two

When the knock sounded on the door, David very nearly…

Twenty-Three

They called them LAVs, but the M340A1 Armored Personnel Carrier…

Twenty-Four

Communicating with Earth was a real problem for the Rim…

Twenty-Five

On the floor of the crater, the LAV could make…

Twenty-Six

Jack pulled his helmet down until the ring lock engaged,…

Twenty-Seven

Jack ducked through the aft airlock hatch and jumped, landing…

Twenty-Eight

“Damn, Sam. I don’t know how we’re going to pull…

Epilogue

“Lance Corporal Jack Ramsey, front and center!”

Other Books by Ian Douglas

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

8 AUGUST 2040

Cave of Wonders, Cydonia, Mars

1445 hours MMT

Sound did not carry well in near vacuum, but Dr. David Alexander felt the slight, ringing vibration of each step through the insulation of his Marsuit boots. There’d been no sound within this chamber in…how long? The team’s best guess was half a million years.

“Halfway across the catwalk,” he said, speaking into the needle mike positioned close by his lips. “Twenty meters.” Over the headset clamped down over his ears, he could hear the unsteady rasp of his own breathing, the hiss-thump of his backpack PLSS. His breath, hot and moist, fogged his helmet visor with each exhalation, a white smear immediately dissolved by the stream of cool air blowing past his face.

“Ah, we copy that, Aladdin,” a voice crackled in his ears. “You’re looking good.”

Aladdin. The radio handle was a last-minute joke concocted by Ed Pohl that morning, back at C-Prime. Naming this place the Cave of Wonders had been his idea, after he’d seen the first transmissions from the penetrator robot three days ago.

It could as easily have been Ali Baba. The cavern, apparently, required a human presence to operate it, a living open, sesame to switch on power and lights and to open doors. Robots massing one hundred kilos and programmed to radiate at thirty-seven degrees—human body temperature—had failed to learn anything about the long-sealed chamber. Alexander, claiming the right as the one who’d found the cavern entrance in the first place, had volunteered to go in. He was, he estimated, a hundred meters into the vast and labyrinthine complex hollowed out beneath the Cydonian Face, and perhaps ten meters beneath the surface of the ground outside.

“Aladdin, we’re seeing an increase in heart rate and respiration. Please check your O₂ mix.”

“Copy.” His eyes flicked to the med and PLSS readouts mirrored above and to the right of his visor, checking that all were well in the green. Of course his heart and breathing were faster, the idiots! “O-two at six-point-three. Systems nominal. Fifteen meters.”

“Ah, roger that, Aladdin. Watch the hyperventilation.”

That sounded like Doc Penkov. He could imagine all of the Team members back at Cydonia Prime, crowded into the radio shack as they followed his progress. Only Devora Druzhinova and Louis Vandemeer were on the surface today, now waiting just outside the tunnel entrance in case he needed help.

The catwalk of black metal trembled harder with his next few steps, and he stopped, gripping the pencil-thin guardrails to either side until the motion dampened itself out. His heart was pounding hard now, beneath the breastplate of his suit. At last, he was inside the Face….

The Face…first observed on photographs transmitted to Earth late in the previous century by the Viking orbiters and subsequently confirmed by other robot spacecraft. The Face…enigma and lure, drawing scientists like David Alexander to probe its secrets, held in silence now for half a million years. Even now, with all the evidence of the ancient ruins uncovered on the Cydonian plain, with the uncanny discovery of flash-frozen and desiccated corpses of long-dead archaic Homo sapiens on Mars, there were some who yet thought the two-kilometer-long mesa’s vague and sandblasted resemblance to a human face to be the product of chance and human psychology.

The discovery of the Cave of Wonders had all but put to rest that notion. Sometime between four and five hundred thousand years ago, someone had reshaped a natural landform, giving it the vaguely apelike, vaguely human features that had attracted so much comment when they were first noticed sixty years before. At the same time, they’d hollowed out the Cave in the bedrock beneath the towering mesa, connecting it by a long, descending, and carefully sealed tunnel to the well-hidden entrance on the Face’s eastern corner, just below the left end of the harsh-carved canyon slash that formed the Face’s mouth.

Once, the Cave had been airtight, accessed through a series of airlocks that still worked at the touch of a gloved, human hand. But even solid rock is porous over geological time. The air within this enormous chamber—radar probings had established that it was a spherical cavern half a kilometer across—had leaked out long ago. The air pressure inside now stood at a little below ten millibars, the temperature constant at minus fifteen degrees Celsius.

Alexander tried not to look down. The catwalk seemed impossibly frail, a spider’s web of black, interlacing threads woven into a deck that felt solid and metallic enough but was hard to see against the deeper black of the two-hundred-meter depths below. Ahead, a pale light—a white-yellow glow a meter across without visible source—illuminated the end of the catwalk; the only other light in the place came from the worklights mounted on the shoulders of his suit and from the telltales inside his helmet.

“Ten meters,” he said.

“Hold it, Aladdin. Can you pan for us?”

“Roger. Panning to the right.” Carefully, he turned himself in place, allowing the camera mounted on the outside of his helmet to relay the view across a full three-sixty. He could see nothing but black; the cavern swallowed his worklights in impenetrable darkness, but the camera would be picking up frequencies invisible to his eye. Perhaps they were enjoying a better view of things than he, back at the Team HQ.

Alexander thought of Howard Carter. On November 26, 1922, after a long dig and repeated disappointments, the British archeologist had chiseled a narrow hole through a stone door separating him from another world, in a long-sealed tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. Air thirty centuries old, hot and stale, had gusted from the opening; a candle thrust through the hole flickered but remained lit, proving the air breathable.

Carter’s heart must have been pounding as hard as Alexander’s was now, his breathing as fast and as uneven, as he carefully enlarged the hole and peered through. The candle’s flame had been captured and flung back at him by myriad polished surfaces of pure gold.

“Can you see anything?” Lord Carnarvon, his partner and the expedition’s backer, has asked, close at his shoulder.

“Yes,” Carter had replied, his voice cracking with emotion. “Yes, wonderful things!”

Alexander knew now exactly what Carter must have felt as he first addressed that sealed, stone door leading to the tomb of Tutankhamen.

“Still not a lot to see,” the voice said over his headset, “even at IR freaks. Maybe this thing is a bust after all.”

Alexander refused to even consider the possibility. “I’m moving again. Eight meters.”

It could not be a bust. It couldn’t. So far, except for the automated controls on the airlock doors on the way in, there’d been no positive indication that there was anything inside this sealed, empty sphere worth exploring. Even so, Alexander had suggested the name Cave of Wonders in what was for him an atypically romantic whim; no one knew what they would find in the chamber, though speculation had ranged from living quarters for the transplanted humans who’d worked here, to some kind of operational center for the yet-unknown intelligences who’d brought early hominids to this place, to a starship, intact and filled with secrets buried these past five hundred millennia.

The last few steps toward the end of the catwalk, suspended high above an invisible floor and surrounded by darkness absolute, were the hardest steps David Alexander had ever taken. He was drawn on, however, by wonder and by Howard Carter’s ghost. Like Carter, he was standing at a doorway opening to another world.

But he still needed to find the key….

“Five meters,” he said. “I’m…I’m entering the lighted area now.” The sourceless glow seemed to hover above a widening in the walkway, a structure that reminded him, disconcertingly, of the harpoon gunner’s bowsprit platform on an old-time whaling vessel.

Light surrounded him. He raised his gloved hands, staring at the white material. St. Elmo’s fire danced from the fingertips, cold and otherworldly. His fingertips traced blue arcs in the air…

…and the cavern was no longer shrouded in blackness. From his vantage point, suspended near the center of that kilometer-wide chamber, it seemed as though he was in the middle of a perfectly spherical swarm of stars, each star rigidly locked with the geometric perfection of the other stationary stars around it. There were thousands of them, in orderly, regimented splendor. Fainter glows floated among the ranked stars, forming oddly regular sweeps and streaks and dots that might have been words, an alien script felt more than seen.

“Ah, Control,” he called, his breathing coming faster still. “Are you picking this up?”

“Roger that, Aladdin. We see…something, but we’re not sure what we’re seeing. What do you make of it?”

“I’m…not…sure….”

As he focused on one section of that far-off wall of stars, one marked by one of the alien-script words, it seemed as though one section of the spherical surface—twenty degrees, perhaps—broke off and rushed toward him, each star becoming a tiny, polished facet, like a jewel.

Or…like a display screen or monitor.

How was the illusion accomplished? Was he seeing something real? Or was it in his mind?

Alexander blinked, hard. Sweat was trickling down his face, tickling his nose and stinging his eyes, and he yearned to be able to reach up and wipe it away. His mouth felt as dry as the thin, dry vacuum of the Martian atmosphere. He was looking now at an array of tiny, rectangular TV screens, an array at least fifty rectangles wide and fifty high…or were they, in fact, tiny? He had no way of judging scale. They might have been the size of a thumbnail, suspended a few centimeters in front of his eyes, or the size of a theater’s holoscreen, each three stories tall. Without a frame of reference, there was no way to tell.

“Aladdin! We’re not seeing anything here. Can you describe what you’re seeing?”

The clear majority of those screens, he saw—perhaps two thousand of them or more—were blank. But on the others…

He picked out one that was alive with a reddish hue, straining to make out the scene he could just distinguish glowing in its depths. Abruptly, and silently, the screen expanded until it filled his field of vision.

“Aladdin!” the voice called, tinny in his ears. “Aladdin! Can you see anything?”

It took Alexander a long time to answer. “Yes,” he replied at last. “Wonderful things!…”

ONE

SATURDAY, 5 APRIL 2042

Ramsey Residence

Greensburg, Pennsylvania

1635 hours EST

“Okay, gorgeous. Let’s get you out of those clothes, first.”

“But, Jack…all of them? How far do you want me to go? I mean, I’m outside, and the neighbors might—”

“I want you naked, babe.” Not that the bikini top and tight, red slacks she was wearing now left all that much to the imagination. “Make yourself starkers. For me.”

John Charles Ramsey—he preferred the name Jack—leaned a bit closer as he watched the young woman on the flatscreen that dominated one wall of his room. She gave him a sultry pout, one filled with lust-churning promise, then started slowly unzipping her pants. She was lounging on a folding chaise next to an outdoor pool, where the sunlight turned her long hair to spun gold, and she had to wiggle a bit to get the slacks down off her hips. Jack licked his lips once, then reached down to unzip his own pants.

Before long, the woman was naked, seated in that tailor’s seat, show-all pose that Jack loved best. She leaned back with catlike grace, closing her eyes and smiling dreamily as she started gently fingering her blond-tufted cleft. “Oooh, Jack,” she breathed.

“Yeah, Sam. Oh, yeah. Do it. Do it….” His hand was inside his shorts, now, squeezing with slow, deep movements. God, she was beautiful….

“I want you, Sam,” he told her, leaning even closer to the screen. The way those big, hard-nippled breasts bobbed and circled with her quickening motions was pure heaven, especially when she reached up with her free hand and rubbed them. “Oh, God, I want you, Sam.”

“Oooh, and I want you, Jack. I want you right here, inside me….”

“Jack?”

“Mom!” He started violently, bumping hard against his desk top and nearly falling out of the chair. At the code word “Mom,” the image of Sam and her breast-heaving passion dissolved in a cloud of rippling pixels, replaced in a startled heartbeat by an elderly man with a bushy mustache, bright eyes, and a white linen suit, standing in a library or book-filled study.

The door to Jack’s room, just to the left of the screen, opened, and his mother walked in. She glanced at the screen, then at Jack, who was pulling himself and his chair awkwardly up close against his desk. “Are you okay, dear? I thought I heard you…talking to someone.”

“Um, sure, Mom. I was just talking to Sam, here. You know, Sam Clemens? My agent?”

“Howdy, Ms. Ramsey,” Sam said in a pleasant, homespun Missouri drawl.

“Oh, of course, dear,” she said, ignoring the AI agent. “I just wanted to tell you that your Aunt Liana just arrived. I think it would be nice if you came down and said hello.”

“Aw, now?”

“That’s the general idea.”

“Uh, I’ll be down in just a few, Mom. Sam here is helping me download some stuff.”

“That’s fine.”

She paused to glance at the recruiting posters decorating much of the wall space not taken up by the monitor. Above Jack’s bed, a grinning, life-size Marine in crisp Class As snapped a salute, held it, dropped it, then saluted again in an endlessly animated cycle. “The Marines Want YOU” was emblazoned across the bottom of the sheet, the letters cycling through the entire spectrum, as Valkyries streaked through the sky in the background. Nearby by was a large, full-color poster of the flag-raising at Cydonia, five US Marines in vacuum armor, hoisting a small American flag on a length of pipe against the pink sky and rusty stone backdrop of Mars. The photo was signed by David Alexander, the civilian archeologist who’d taken the photograph.

The man who also happened to be Jack’s uncle.

“Come on down when you’re ready. Just don’t take too long.”

She pulled the door shut behind her, and Jack loosed a long, heartfelt sigh of relief. That had been entirely too close; usually, he could hear her coming up the stairs, but that time he’d nearly been caught. He thought again about a pressure-sensitive switch with a PC-radio link he’d seen in World Electronics for fifty bucks. It might be worth it, to be able to flash an alarm whenever Mom started up the steps. If she ever caught on to “Sam’s” alter ego…

“It’s okay, Samantha,” he whispered. “She’s gone. But, uh, keep your voice down, okay?”

At the name Samantha, Samuel Longhorn Clemens pixel-flickered back into the guise of a blond, naked, twenty-year-old woman, standing this time in the Clemens library. Jack himself was seventeen, an age particularly susceptible to the charms of commercial AI net agents who looked and spoke and undressed like her. Software packages like Samantha—the thought of the word “software” made him vent a quiet, frustratedly longing groan—were supposedly restricted to people twenty-one and older, but it was easy enough to get around those rules, especially if you had a buddy with a valid Net ID. The net vendors, mostly, just wanted your recorded assurance that you were twenty-one so that they didn’t get into trouble if you got caught. Damn it, the United States still had such uptight and puritanical laws about sex. It wasn’t like you couldn’t go to any public beach or download any movie these days without seeing plenty of nudity, all ages, all sexes, all orientations.

“Maybe I should go ahead and get those downloads,” he told her.

Reaching up, she cupped her full breasts, rubbing her nipples between her fingers. “Whatever you say…Jack. But, oooh, I would just love it if you could download me.” Watching her, it was impossible to think of her as anything other than a flesh-and-blood woman. Net agents, however, artificially intelligent programs designed to search the Net for information and to serve as secretaries, librarians, search specialists, data valets, and even personal stand-ins, were the most visible aspects of the ongoing computer revolution, and they could look like anyone, or anything, their owners desired.

“Whatcha got for me?”

She leaned forward in the screen, drawing a deep, slow breath. “Lots….”

A window opened to the left of the screen, the image adjusting itself so that none of Sam’s lush anatomy was obscured. A succession of images—military aircraft, tanks, troops, and ships flashed across the screen window. “I have two hundred twenty-seven news downloads,” Sam told him, “dealing with the war. Eighty-five of those are cross-linked with stories about the US Marine Corps.”

“Just gimme a summary.”

“Of course, Jack. In summation of the most important stories, extensive fighting is continuing near Chapayevsk and Saratov, where Moslem troops continue their advance into southern Russia, and at Vladivostok, where PRC troops are threatening to break through the Russian-American lines. US forces entered the towns of Navajoa and Ciudad Camargo yesterday, completing operations in Sonora and Chihuahua. According to Secretary of Defense Archibald Severin, ‘The threat of Mexico forcing the creation of their so-called Aztlan Republic, carved out of the American Southwest, has been effectively and permanently neutralized.’”

As she spoke, she let one hand slide down between her legs, gently caressing. Jack’s attention was torn between her and the rapid-fire succession of download imagery. On the screen, greasy black smoke boiled into the sky behind a war-damaged Capitol dome. Other scenes showed fire-fighters and disaster crews picking their way through tumbledown rubble and smoking craters.

“Four American cities,” Sam continued, “Washington, Atlanta, Boston, and Miami, were hit by EU ship-or sub-launched cruise missiles last night. Damage and casualties are reportedly light. The president said today that—”

“Never mind that. Let’s hear the stories about the Corps.”

“Of course, Jack. In Cuba, the launch sites at Matanzas and Sagua la Grande are now firmly under US control. Elements of the 1st Marines are advancing on Habana, and reports of mass surrenders of starving Cuban soldiers have been reported by most major news networks.

“In the Russian Far East today, the 1st and 3rd Battalions of the 5th Marines, fighting alongside battle-hardened elements of the 43rd and 115th Russian Armies, repulsed what was described as a major human-wave assault south of Laka Khanka near the city of Ussuriysk—”

“Skip it, Sam. Space news.”

“Whatever you say, Jack. There are fifteen new stories dealing with space, including one cross-indexed to the US Marines and to the war.”

“Shibui! Now you’re talking! Let me hear that one, Sam.”

The window showed a stock photo of the moon, shot from space. “Reports of a military expedition to the moon by a special assault force of US Marines trained in space-combat techniques have been circulating in Washington today, but all attempts to confirm or deny these reports have so far failed. It has been confirmed that a Zeus II heavy-lift booster took off from Vandenberg early this morning with an estimated ninety to one hundred Marines aboard. Official agencies have responded only with ‘no comment’ to speculations that the Marines are bound for the UN-held base in the lunar crater Fra Mauro. There are no images associated with this story.”

“Okay. Save it, and I’ll look at that one a bit later. Anything on aliens?”

“There are twelve stories dealing with extraterrestrials or aliens, including three new additions to the Cave of Wonders database.”

“Sugoi shibui! Lemme see those now.”

“Of course, Jack. One of those stories mentions your Uncle David.”

“Hey, yatta! Play that one first.”

“Whatever you say, Jack.”

Jack didn’t mind admitting that he was space-crazy. A lot of his friends were, especially since the intriguing discovery of ancient humans on Mars had been publicized two years ago. The fact that his archeologist uncle, Dr. David Alexander, had been the sonic-imager technician on that expedition—and the man who’d smuggled out news of the discovery at the very beginning of the war—just made it that much better. And some of what they’d been coming up with, lately, from the incredible mass of data gathered within the Cave of Wonders…

His uncle’s face came up in the window, as secondary windows opened to show the red Martian landscape, the now-famous Cydonian Face, and a montage of images taken from the immense chamber beneath the Face. Jack leaned a bit closer, his heart pounding, as he looked at those images.

Images from other worlds.

His uncle was talking. “Full screen, Sam.”

“Of course, Jack.”

The view of David Alexander filled the screen, replacing Samantha’s tanned and naked body. There were a few things that Jack found more fascinating than pretty women.

“…and so we’ve been able to identify another alien race from the data we’ve brought back,” the man was saying. He was wearing a safari jacket with the Mars-Face emblem of the Cydonian Research Foundation over the left breast pocket. “Of course we don’t know what they called themselves, but we call them Race Eighty-four, because they’re the eighty-fourth distinct species we’ve been able to isolate for study.”

Another window expanded in the picture, showing a…face. It was recognizable as such, at least, which was more than could be said with many of the eighty-three other beings glimpsed on the display screens found within the Cave of Wonders. The eyes were startling, large and golden and horizontally slit by a jagged black line that must have been a pupil; the head was more like that of a fish or reptile, a mottled apple green and green-yellow, with a low skull crest and glistening scales like fine chain mail. There were no external ears that Jack could see, but there was a recognizable nose and a lipless, black-rimmed mouth in a more or less human arrangement on the head.

Lizard-man, Jack thought, heart pounding. Fish-man. It looked so human it almost looked hokey, like one of those man-in-latex monsters that still occasionally waddled through the cheaper varieties of sci-fi late movies, the ones made decades ago, before the advent of digital characters and programmable AI agents. He wondered what its hands looked like, and whether or not it had a tail.

“The other end of this particular communications link,” Alexander said, “is still working, apparently has been working for thousands of years. We think, from what we’ve learned so far, that the Eighty-fours must have been an advanced, technic species perhaps ten to twelve thousand years ago. Now, they seem to be barely above the stone age, if that. We have no idea what happened.

“We also don’t know how the communications complex at Cydonia managed to connect with the Eighty-fours’ home world, especially since Cydonia is something like half a million years old. Each of the active screens within the Cave of Wonders, however, has large amounts of encoded information, information which, we believe, includes data on that species’s language, culture, history, and biology. In time, we might be able to learn more about the Eighty-fours, as well as the other races we’ve glimpsed so far, and discover what connection they may have with the Builders of so long ago.

“What makes this one especially interesting,” Alexander continued, “is that we’ve been able to identify the home star of these people…and they’re close. Real close!”

The alien face was replaced by a landscape and a darkening, alien sky. It looked as though the scene had been shot from the open-air top of some kind of high, flat-topped building; in the distance, fading into the shadows, something like an ancient Mayan step pyramid rose from a black jungle, with stairways sloping up each face and ornate carvings worked into the stone. Two moons, crescents bowed away from the red-orange twilight glow at the horizon, hung in a purple sky. The stars were just coming out….

“It appears that their end of the communication link with Cydonia is now an object of veneration, of sorts. They have it set up atop one of their distinctive pyramids—we think it’s a temple of some kind—and so we’ve been able to watch a number of the local sunsets…and we’ve been able to match the constellations we can glimpse in their sky with constellations in our sky, changed a little, of course…but recognizably the same as constellations in our own sky.”

Lines drew themselves from star to star in the landscape, picking out a familiar hourglass shape with three bright stars across the middle. The hourglass lay on its side instead of standing upright and was slightly distorted by parallax, but it was obviously Orion; it could be none other.

“What is truly spectacular about this find,” Alexander went on, “is the fact that these, these people, the Eighty-fours, are living right now on a world circling the star we call Lalande 21185. A star that is only about eight and a quarter light-years away….”

“Wow!” Jack said, the word long, drawn-out, and breathless. Why, eight light-years was right next door as far as interstellar distances went, just less than twice the distance to Alpha Centauri. It meant that intelligent life must be dirt-common throughout the Galaxy…though the number of races represented on those display screens in the Cave of Wonders had pretty well established that.

The face of the Eighty-four reappeared as Alexander kept discussing the find. Jack found himself wondering what they called themselves…and whether they’d had anything to do with the structures on Mars.

Or with the ancient humans found there. It didn’t sound like their civilization was that old. But…what were they doing at the other end of that magical, faster-than-light communications device buried beneath the Face on Mars?

“Jack!” Another window opened on the screen, and his mother looked out at him. “Jack, are you coming?”

Jack started. Damn! He’d let the time get away from him. “Sorry, Mom! I’ll be right down! Uh, halt program,” he said. Windows closed, leaving only the bright-eyed electronic ghost of Mark Twain on the screen. The word “Mom” had reactivated his incarnation. “Uh, save all this stuff, Sam,” he said. “I’ll have to go over it later!”

“Whatever you say, Jack,” Sam drawled. “’Minds me that I still have t’run down that data on spacecraft converted to military operations you asked fer this morning. I got some, but I’m still followin’ up some leads, like the good newsman that I am.” He winked. “Catch you later.”

He sighed. He was really proud of the Samantha—Sam Clemens crossover, which he’d hacked out himself from two separate sets of vendored software. Sometimes, he felt guilty about deceiving his mom…but, then, Mom wouldn’t understand about Samantha. She didn’t understand a lot of things….

The display flicked to the screen saver his mother had bought him last year as an “educational” gift—a tedious succession of abstract animated light paintings by various modern artists. He had others that he preferred, but he let them run only when he was sure his mother wasn’t going to come barging into his room. He checked his fly, steeled himself, then strolled out of his room and onto the open landing above the house’s main den.

His mother was still seated at the downstairs computer where she’d called with her reminder. Aunt Liana, who looked a lot like her older sister, except for the short blond, green, and pink hair, sat in the conversation pit. Her eyes were puffy and red.

Uh-oh, Jack thought. Looks like houseguest time again….

“Oh, good, Jack,” his mother called as he trotted down the stairs. “Would you go bring your aunt’s things in and put them in the spare bedroom? She’s going to be staying with us a few days.”

“Sure, Mom.” Liana’s car, a bright red, yellow, and black ’39 hydrogen-fueled Apollo, was parked in the drive just outside. Wondering just what “a few days” meant in real-world time, he hauled the two suitcases out of the backseat and carried them inside and down the hall.

When he returned to the E-room, his mom was seated next to Liana, her arm around the other woman’s shoulders. Used tissues littered the rug around the sofa.

“This is it, Stacy,” Liana sobbed. “He just…he just won’t understand!…”

“I know, Li. It was like that with Doug, before the divorce.”

“But I can’t divorce David, I just can’t. P-pastor Blaine would…”

Liana saw Jack standing uncertainly at the edge of the room. “Oh, hi, Jack,” she said with a sniff and a dab from the wadded-up tissue in her fist. “Don’t…don’t mind me. How are you? How’s school?”

“I’m all done with school, Aunt Li,” he told her. “I was doing Net homeschooling, remember? Got my diploma a couple of months ago. Soon as I turn eighteen, I figure on joining the Marines!”

“Good heavens! Why?”

He was used to the question. “Well, because—”

“Jack doesn’t really know what he wants, Sis,” his mother said. “He’s been on this Marine kick for a couple of years, now.”

“Mom….”

“Why, with his test scores, he won’t have any trouble getting into just about any college he wants.”

“Mom….”

“He’s always been fascinated by space travel, of course. I’ve been telling him he should try to go to CMU, in Pittsburgh, and get into their AI and Cognitive Sciences program.”

“Mom!…”

“Why, as good as he is with computers and Net agents and all of that? I’ll bet he could get a position with the Space Agency, or maybe the Moravec Institute. They need good computer people in orbit, they say….”

Jack rolled his eyes but gave up trying to bull his way through the barrier. Once his mother got going, there was no stopping her, and she would not listen. It was his fascination with space that had led to his determination to join the Marines, and she just didn’t seem to understand that. Marines had gone to Mars, for Pete’s sake! They’d recaptured the International Space Station from UN troops, and now they were on their way to the Moon. As a computer scientist, his chances of getting to go to space were about on a par with winning the lottery, he figured. But as a Marine, he knew he had a chance….

Someday….

“Your mother says you’re really interested in all the news about the aliens, lately,” his aunt said. “I think it’s so exciting, don’t you?”

Uh-oh, he thought. Here it comes. He hated talking to her about this and had a pretty good idea why she wasn’t getting along with his uncle.

“Uh, yeah!” he said, brightly. “Real yatta! Just now, upstairs, I DLed the goods on three new species from the Face. Really shibby stuff. I—”

“Jack! I wish you wouldn’t use those ugly, made-up words!”

“What ugly? Everybody uses ’em!”

“Nonsense. What’s that, that ‘shibby,’ you said?…”

“Oh, you know. Shibby. Like sugoi shibui! It means, I don’t know. Max-slick. Iced. Um, really good.”

“And yatta?”

“That’s a real word, Mom. It’s just Japanese. Means great.”

“Seems like everything Japanese is popular, now,” Liana said with another sniff. “Ever since they left the UN and joined our side in the war. My hairdresser told me that pink-and-green geisha bobs were going to be all the thing this year.” She turned to Jack. “I heard that they’ve discovered the Divine Masters in that Martian cave, but that some people high up are trying to hide it from the rest of us!”

“I, uh, really don’t think that’s what’s—”

“I mean, it’s obvious that they’ve found something up there they don’t want to talk about! It’s obvious! David was the one who found the cave, found out how to open it. He came home with all that data, and all they can do is release a little bit of harmless stuff once in a while, nothing about who built the Face, or why.”

“I think that’s because they don’t know yet, Aunt Li.”

“Nonsense! They know more than they’re telling! David’s been a changed man ever since he came back from Mars! And the Space Agency! All they do is trot him around to one public-relations or fund-raising gig after another. Won’t let him work. And of course they don’t let him talk with his colleagues in Europe and China, with the war and everything. And so he takes it out on me!…”

Jack thought it might be a good idea to deflect the conversation from that particular topic. “They’re not hiding anything, Aunt Li,” he insisted. “I mean, the UN were the ones trying to cover things up. That’s why they grabbed Mars, back at the beginning of the war, ’cause they were afraid the news would cause riots and stuff. That’s why Uncle David arranged to broadcast everything he’d learned on the Net, so that the world would know the truth!”

Liana leaned forward, tapping Jack’s kneecap with her forefinger to emphasize her point. “I think they learned a lot that they’re not telling us, Jack! Maybe they released a little of what they learned, to mess up those other countries and stuff, but I think the real knowledge about the Cosmic Brothers and the Creator Space Gods is being kept secret! I mean, look at how the scientists…and David is among them! Look at how they attack Dr. Caulder’s work! And Sitchen! And von Daniken! All the really great men in the field are just positively vilified, just because they tried to speak the truth! I told David, I said…”

Jack sighed and leaned back in his chair. Once his Aunt Liana got wound up about the ancient astronauts and the cosmic space brothers, there was no way to stop her. As she babbled happily about flying saucers using antigravity to build the pyramids and the stone heads on Easter Island, he thought about that glimpse of a genuine alien world he’d just had upstairs…dark-stone step pyramids against a violet sky, enigmatic beings with green scales and golden eyes, a world, a civilization only eight light-years away.

It made Liana’s twaddle about ancient astronauts and godlike ETs seem like comic-book stuff. No wonder Uncle David didn’t get along with her! He had the scientist’s approach to life and the universe, a rational approach that demanded evidence, data, and proof. Liana was happy to snag any passing bit of fiction wrapped in the guise of wisdom from the ancients or the star gods or whatever and incorporate it whole into her eclectic and uncritical world-view. According to her, the star gods and cosmic brothers would be here any day to stop the war and lead humankind to a new and higher level of evolution.

God, was she actually thinking about staying here long? Jack wasn’t sure he could stand it, not for more than a day or two.

As she kept talking, a growing resolve hardened within him. In two weeks, he would be eighteen and able to enlist in the Marines without a signature from his mother.

If he could just hold out until then….

TWO

WEDNESDAY, 9 APRIL 2042

UN Base, Fra Mauro, The Moon

0435 hours GMT

Marine Lieutenant Kaitlin Garroway leaned forward and bounced, easing herself into the gently loping “kangaroo hop” that Aldrin and Armstrong had discovered, seventy-three years before, to be the most efficient way of maneuvering a space suit about the Lunar surface. Dust exploded in slow motion about her feet and legs as she bounded forward, exhilarated by speed, by strangeness, by the utter silence of her surroundings.

Shadowless hills burned in the arc-brilliant sunshine, mounds and swellings like silver-gray sand dunes, smooth-sculpted against the featureless black of the sky at a horizon too crisp, too clear, too near to be Earth’s. The sun, close-guarded by a crescent Earth, stood almost directly overhead—high noon at Fra Mauro, with another seven days to go until sunset. Small and alone in the near-featureless emptiness of the Lunar landscape, the former UN base was little more than a half circle of hab cylinders partly buried in the mounds of regolith bulldozed over them as protection against flares and solar radiation. To her right, a bulky, Chinese-built Kongyunjian transport rested on splayed landing legs in the flame-scorched plain designated as the Fra Mauro Spaceport, flanked by the squat, black insect shapes of four Marine LSCP-K landers.

An American flag, stretched taut by a wire from hoist to fly, hung breezelessly motionless from a jury-rigged mast raised above the landing-field control shack. Two Marines from Kaitlin’s platoon, Anders and Juarez, stood guard outside, like bulky black-and-white statues in their combat rigs and active camo armor. The Marines had landed, as the old saying went, and the situation was well in hand.

The stark silence was broken by the click and hiss of a radio channel opening in her headset. “Hey, Lieutenant? Kaminski, on your six. Is the scuttlebutt true?”

She stopped, taking another couple of bounces to keep from falling headlong, then turned in place until she saw another space-suited figure coming toward her from behind. She couldn’t see his face through the highly reflective visor, but the name KAMINSKI was picked out in block letters across the upper chest of his suit, while a sergeant’s stripes had been painted on his left arm. The rest of his armor, with its active camo coating, reflected the grays, silvers, and night blacks of his surroundings, an illusion not good enough to render him invisible, certainly, but effective enough to make it difficult to precisely trace his outline. “And what scuttlebutt would that be, Sergeant?”

Kaminski stopped and gave the buttstock of the ATAR rifle he carried a slap, the gesture silent in hard vacuum. “That they already have another objective for us. Something about alien shit here on the Moon.”

Kaitlin snorted. “I swear, Sergeant. The only thing faster than light is rumor in the Corps!”

“Is it true then, ma’am?”

“I don’t know yet, Ski. I’m on my way to a briefing now. You’ll know when I do.” More likely, you’ll know before I do, she thought. The resourcefulness of Marine noncoms in general in acquiring field intel on upcoming deployments and the resourcefulness of this Marine in particular in working the system were legendary.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Everybody done topping off their plissers?”

“That’s affirmative, Lieutenant. Gunny Yates’s cycled ’em through the pliss rechargers in the UNdies’ barracks. Soon as they was checked for traps.”

“Good. Pass the word for me, and tell them to swap out their PSMs now, while they have the chance. Otherwise the UNdies’ll claim we’re engaged in chemical-biological warfare.”

Kaminski chuckled. “Y’know, Lieutenant, some of the guys are sayin’ this had t’be the first time in the history of the Corps that two companies of Marines went into battle wearing full diapers.”

“Execute, Ski.”

“Aye, aye, ma’am!” Kaminski slapped the rifle butt again in lieu of a salute—such niceties as rifle salutes were impossibly cumbersome inside armor—then bounded off in a puff of gray, slow-falling dust, making for the space field. Kaitlin continued her trek toward the two-story hab that had originally housed the UN Lunar HQ, now commandeered as the Marines’ Ops Center. Left, several Marines guarded the main personnel module, where the base’s UN crew was being held until transport could be arranged for their removal back to Earth.

The battle for Fra Mauro had been Kaitlin’s first time in combat, and she hadn’t even come under fire. The battle proper had been over in all of five minutes.

Four days before, the First Marine Space Assault Group had shuttled to Earth orbit and rendezvoused with the former International Space Station. There, they’d transferred to the four ugly little LSCP-Ks, which had been ferried to LEO from Vandenberg in a pair of heavy-lift cargo transports the week before. The boost to Luna had been three days of claustrophobic hell, twenty-four Marines packed like ceramic-swaddled sardines into no-frills accommodations that barely left them room to move…and civilized notions like swapping out their Personal Sanitation Modules had been impossible.

One-SAG was organized as a special assault battalion, under the command of Major Theodore Avery—two companies, each composed of two twenty-four-man platoons. Kaitlin was CO of Second Platoon, Bravo Company, under the command of Captain Carmen Fuentes. For the actual assault, however, honors had been awarded to Alfa Company, under the command of Captain Robert Lee. Alfa had stormed the main habs, hacked through the airlock electronics, and secured the entire base before Bravo’s two LSCPs had even touched down.

There’d not been more than a handful of UN troopers at Fra Mauro in any case; intelligence had reported at least sixty elite French Foreign Legion troops on Luna, but there’d been nothing more there than a small token guard, four Legionnaires and a couple of PLA security troops off the Kongyunjian heavy transport.

Fra Mauro was not the only Lunar base, however, though it was the oldest and best-established, dating back to the 2020s. There were numerous small outposts and research stations, too…and there was also the former US-Russian radio telescope facility at Tsiolkovsky on the Lunar farside, a base as large as Fra Mauro that had been taken over by the UN before the war. There was plenty of evidence to suggest that the UN had been busy indeed on the moon during the past thirty months; dozens of Lunar transport flights had been tracked during the past two years from Kourou in French Guiana, from Shar in India, from Jiuquan and Xichang in China, and—at least until Japan had defected from the UN camp—from Tanegashima Spaceport as well. One reason the Marines had been deployed here was to find out just what it was the enemy was up to.

Two Marines from Alfa Company stood guard in front of Ops. Stepping through the low, round outer hatch of the airlock, Kaitlin cycled through, wondering as the closet-sized chamber pressurized if anyone in 1-SAG knew what was really going on.

Given a choice, she knew she would trust Kaminski’s scuttlebutt over almost any other authority available.

The inner hatch sighed open, and she stepped into the hab’s lower deck. Ops, and Fra Mauro’s control center, were up one level. Four more Marines greeted her, took her ATAR, helped her unlatch and remove her helmet, then detach the heavy PLSS—the Portable Life Support System, popularly called a plisser—and slide it from her aching shoulders.

“They’re waitin’ for you topside, ma’am,” said one of the men, a gunnery sergeant with JACLOVIC stenciled across his breastplate.

“Thanks, Gunny.” She clanged up the ladder and emerged in a pie-wedge of a room, cramped by consoles, commo gear, and computers. The first thing that hit her as she emerged from the hatch was the smell of brewing coffee. Tradition. The Marines had been in control of the UN Lunar base for less than three hours now, and they already had the coffee going.

They were waiting for her there: Major Avery, Captain Fuentes, and Captain Lee; and the other platoon commanders, Lieutenants Delgado, Palmer, and Machuga; along with the four LSCP pilots and Captain White, Avery’s number two. Twelve men and women, all still wearing their Class-One/Specials, more than filled the small compartment as they clustered about the light table in the center.

“So good of you to join us, Lieutenant,” Avery said, an edge to his voice. Somehow, he’d managed to make himself clean-shaven, a bit of personal grooming that set him well apart from the stubble-faced men around him.

“I was checking my people at the spaceport and the vehicle bays, sir.”

“That is why you have section leaders,” Avery said. “That is why we have staff and gunnery sergeants, to look after those little details for us…so that we can show up on goddamn time for briefings!”

“Sir! I—” She clamped her mouth shut, angry, but unwilling to show it. “Yes, sir.”

“See that you remember that in future, Lieutenant. I expect my officers to be punctual and BTFM. Do you understand?”

“By the manual, sir. Yes, sir.”

The others shuffled aside enough to make room for her at the table. A dozen Marines in full armor left precious little room for movement. The photomemory plastic sheathing most of the armor captured ambient light and modified its own pigments to reflect the colors and tones of the surroundings. In these close quarters, the Marines’ active camouflage armor reflected back the glare of the table and the overhead lighting and the close, dark gray mesh of the metal floors and walls, giving them a strange and alien patterning that the eye found difficult to cling to. With helmets off, their heads seemed to float above confusing masses of black, gray, and cool white reflections.

Kaitlin drew a deep breath, steadying herself as she slumped against the edge of the table. The Ops Center, broad and metallic, with low ceilings and harsh fluorescent lighting, stank of unwashed bodies and sweat. None of the people in that room had been out of their suits for the better part of a week, and the hab’s air must have been pretty gamy to begin with. She could hear the low-voiced rumble of the hab’s air circulators and wondered if they always labored that hard.

“So what’s the deal, Major?” Carmen Fuentes asked. “Scuttlebutt says we have a new objective. What’s the matter. This one wasn’t good enough?”

Avery favored her with a scowl from across the table. “You got a problem with that, Marine?”

“Negative, sir!” Fuentes rasped out. She glanced at Kaitlin, and her eyes gave the slightest of upward flickers. Avery, Kaitlin had heard, was not universally loved by the Marines under his command, especially those with combat experience. He’d come to 1-SAG straight from four years in the Pentagon, where he had the reputation of being a number one i-dotter, t-crosser, and form-shuffler. How he’d rated a combat command like the First Space Assault Group was anyone’s guess.

“Garroway,” Avery snapped. “Your people in good shape?”

“Ready to rock and roll, sir,” Kaitlin said, straightening up again from the table, pushing against the weary pain in her back and legs. Marine Class One/Special armor wasn’t all that heavy in Luna’s one-sixth-G gravity, but it had a full eighty kilos’ worth of inertia, just like it did Earthside, and dragging the stuff around, hour after hour, was a real workout.

“Casualties?”

“Negative, Major. We didn’t even get into the fight.”

“What’s th’ matter, Garry?” Lieutenant Delgado said, teeth white in his dark face. “Movin’ a bit slow today?”

“Screw you, Del.”

“Hey, anytime.”

“That’s enough of that,” Avery said. “Okay, Garroway, you and Machuga have point on this new op, then,” He brought up a USCGS map on the surface of the light table’s projection display, topo lines overlaid on a black-and-white photo. Several of the officers moved styro coffee cups out of the way. “Alfa took the brunt of the assault, turns out. Three dead. Damned Chinese fanatics. I’m holding Alfa in reserve here. Captain Fuentes, you will deploy your people to Objective Picard. First Platoon in assault, Second Platoon in overwatch and flank security.”

Fuentes looked startled. “Flank security, sir? That hardly seems necessary when—”

“We are playing this one by the book, Captain. By the Corps manual. Now, listen up.” He’d removed his suit’s gloves, and one precisely manicured finger poked at the topo map projected onto the illuminated tabletop.

“This is the Mare Crisium, the Sea of Crisis,” he said, indicating an almost featurelessly smooth expanse of darkness pocked here and there by isolated craters and ringed by bright, bumpy-looking hills, crater rims, and mountains. “It’s located about two thousand kilometers east-northeast of our position here. Roughly circular, four hundred fifty by five hundred sixty kilometers, near enough.” He touched a keyboard on his side of the table, and a white square picked out one of the two largest, isolated craters in the mare, then expanded sharply, expanding the crater until it covered the table’s top. “The crater Picard,” Avery said, pointing again. “Twenty-two hundred klicks from Fra Mauro, at fourteen point six north, fifty-four point seven east. Diameter of twenty-three kilometers, with a rim rising two thousand meters above the crater floor. As you can see, there’s some interesting activity of some sort in here.”

As Avery expanded the scale still further, a patchwork of shallow excavations, piles of tailings, and the broadly looping tracks of wheeled vehicles, startlingly white against the dark regolith, became clearly visible. Several habs and a pair of Lunar hoppers stood near one side of the heaviest activity.

“How recent are these?” Captain Lee wanted to know.

“The photos? Five days.”

“So we don’t know what they have out there right now,” Lieutenant Machuga said.

“There’s still the little matter of those sixty missing troops,” Lee put in. “I can’t believe intelligence could be off that much.”

“Military intelligence,” Fuentes said with a grim chuckle. “A contradiction in terms.”

“All right, all right,” Avery said. “Let’s stick to the point of the thing.” He tapped the surface of the table. “Earthside thinks the UNdies have uncovered something at Picard. Something important. They want us to go in and secure it, whatever it is. They’ll have an arky team here in a couple of days to check it out.”

Palmer gave a low whistle. “Alien shit, huh?” He glanced at Kaitlin. “We pullin’ another Sands of Mars here?”

Kaitlin refused to meet Palmer’s eyes but continued a pointed study of the map display of the floor of Picard Crater and the excavations there. Two years before, her father, then Major Mark Garroway, had made Corps history by leading a band of Marines 650 kilometers through the twists and turns of one arm of the Valles Marineris to capture the main colony back from United Nations forces at the very start of the war. “Sands of Mars” Garroway was a genuine hero within the Corps, and ever since she’d joined the Marines, Kaitlin had found it difficult to live up to that rather daunting image. Some seemed to assume that if her father was a hero, she must be cut of the same tough, Marine-green stuff. Others…

“This operation,” Avery said with a dangerous edge to his voice, “will be strictly by the manual. No improvisations. And no heroics.” He stared at Kaitlin with cold, blue eyes as he said it.

“Yeah, but what kind of alien shit?” Machuga wanted to know. The CO of Bravo Company’s First Platoon was a short, stocky, shaven-headed fireplug of a Marine who’d come up as a ranker before going OCS, and his language tended to reinforce the image. “Anything they can freakin’ use against us?”

Avery looked at his aide. “Captain White?”

“Sir. We know very little about any supposed ET presence on the Moon,” White said. He was a lean, private man with an aristocrat’s pencil-line mustache, a ring-knocker, like Avery. “The records we’ve captured here…well, we haven’t had time to go through all of them, of course, but the UN people conducting the investigation apparently think that these are different ruins, artifacts, whatever, from what we found on Mars.”

“What the hell?” Delgado said. “Different aliens?”

“More recent aliens,” White said. “The Mars, um, artifacts are supposed to be half a million years old. I just finished going through some of Billaud’s notes—”

“Who’s Billaud?” Lee wanted to know.

“Marc Billaud,” Avery said. “The head UNdie archeologist here. A very important man. Earthside wants us to find him, bad.”

White ignored the interruption, forging ahead. “Dr. Billaud’s report suggests that the ruins they’ve uncovered here are considerably younger. Perhaps even dating to historical times.”

“Shit,” Machuga said. “Startin’ t’look like Grand Central Station around here.”

“What difference does it make how old they are?” Palmer wanted to know.

“The astronuts,” Kaitlin said. She’d talked about the subject a lot with her father.

“Would you care to explain, Lieutenant?” Avery said.

“Well, it’s just that people all over Earth are going ballistic over what we’ve been finding on Mars. New religions. Predictions of the end of the world. New takes on the old ancient-astronaut theories. Claims that aliens were God, and that when He comes back in his flying saucer, we won’t need governments anymore, that kind of thing.”

Palmer chuckled. “Sounds reasonable.”

“It’s nonsense,” Kaitlin replied. “Half a million years is a long time. What could any alien visitors that far back have done that humans might still remember, as religious myth or legend or whatever? But if the aliens were here in just the last few thousand years, it…well, it could be a different story.”

“Gotcha,” Lieutenant Dow, one of the LSCP pilots, said with a smirk. “God help us! Jesus was an astronaut, and the Ark of the Covenant was a two-way radio tuned in to God.” Those old chestnuts had received a lot of reawakened interest on Earth during the past couple of years.

“Maintaining civic order is becoming a serious concern,” Avery said, “not only in Washington, but all over the world. What the UNdies have found here could be of strategic importance in the war. And that, gentlemen, and ladies, is why we are here.”

Which made Kaitlin wonder if this expedition was becoming a reprise of her dad’s experience on Mars. Though the UN war had a number of formal causes, ranging from US foreign trade practices to Latino demands for an independent nation of Aztlan carved from the American Southwest, the trigger had been the perception in Europe and Japan that the US and Russia were going to keep the secrets of newly discovered extraterrestrial technology for themselves. Close on the heels of that problem was the UN desire to keep the remarkable finds on Mars—especially those that suggested that aliens had somehow tampered with human evolution—a closely guarded secret. During the famous March, Major Garroway had arranged for Dr. David Alexander to publish news of some of the initial archeological finds on the Internet, a move that had started riots and caused unrest worldwide and shaken several of the governments arrayed against the United States.

That move had been instrumental in forcing Japan to switch her allegiance from the UN to the US, a shift of power that might well have marked a turning point in the war.

Of course, those reports about aliens and ancient humans on Mars had stirred up problems in the United States as well. Every man and woman in 1-SAG had signed Disclosure Oaths at Vandenberg just before the launch, swearing not to talk to anyone other than their debriefing officers about anything they might see or find on the Moon.

Kaitlin wondered what her father would have thought about that. It had been his idea to post the news of the Martian finds on the Net, to undermine the UN’s efforts to clamp down on the activities on Mars.

“The evidence we’ve uncovered here,” Avery went on, “suggests that an UNdie survey team found something important at Picard. We don’t know what. Earth wants us to go in, secure the site, and hold it until they can send in their own arky team. And that, Marines, is exactly what we’re going to do.”

He began typing on his keyboard, accessing the table’s display software to bring up two green arrows on the map. “Captain Fuentes, you’ll deploy in your two LSCPs, coming in low and from the west, along here. Crisium’s western mountain wall should shield you from radar…and in the final part of your approach, you can skim the surface and stay below the crater rim.”

“They might have an OP on the crest of the rim,” Fuentes pointed out. “Or a portable radar. That’s what I’d do, if I was in their place.”

“There is no evidence of an OP anywhere on the rim, Captain,” White pointed out.

“Not as of five days ago,” Fuentes replied, an edge to her voice. “But you can’t imagine these bozos don’t know that we’re here. Or that we might be getting ready to come gunning for ’em.”

“Your Second Platoon will come in first to secure the crater rim,” Avery went on, as one of the arrows touched the southwestern edge of the circle of smooth-rounded hills defining the rim. “From here, you should be able to apply covering fire for First Platoon’s approach, if necessary. First Platoon will cross the rim in their bug and descend to the crater floor…about here.” The map expanded again, centering on a flashing landing point between the pressurized habs and the grounded hoppers. “The tactics we employed here at Fra Mauro should work well. Twenty-four men will be sufficient to overwhelm any personnel who happen to be outside the habs, hotwire the airlocks, and gain entry. You are to use care not to breach the habs’ pressure integrity. HQ wants prisoners, not vacuum-dried corpses. We particularly need to take Dr. Billaud alive. Questions?”

Fuentes gave a low whistle. “It’ll work, sir, if the bad guys do exactly what you think they’re gonna do. In my experience, the enemy isn’t usually that accommodating.”

“Sir,” Kaitlin added, pointing. “This facility is a good five or six kilometers from the crater rim. We’re not going to be able to provide much overwatch fire support from way the hell out there.”