you feel us bouncing around before we landed?” Kaminski replied. “I think the lieutenant fried ’em by hitting ’em with the bug’s main jets.”
“Yeah? Man, that’s doin’ it the hard way!”
He didn’t answer. He was thinking about something he’d read once, as a kid, about how air-to-air combat had begun when pilots on both sides, flying cloth-and-wood-frame biplanes over France in the First World War, had begun carrying pistols with them on reconnaissance flights and exchanging shots with enemy fliers. Pistols had led to machine guns…and ultimately radar-homing missiles and airborne lasers. He wondered if they were witness to a dawn of a new and similar type of warfare.
There wasn’t time to think much about history, though. A squad sweep through the area turned up bits of scrap and wreckage knocked from the UN hopper, and a portable radar unit mounted on a tripod at the top of a low hill. The footprints scuffed and stamped into the dust showed where UN troops had set the radar up only moments earlier. After a careful check for booby traps, two of the Marines began dismantling the unit; Kaminski took the moment’s respite to turn his back on Earth and the sun and stare down into the crater bowl below them.
The bottom of the crater was night black, but enough light was scattering off the crater rim to provide a little illumination. In fact, though, the lights of the UN base shone like a tightly packed constellation of brilliant stars on the crater’s floor, only a few kilometers away. Yates was standing on the hill crest a few meters away, pressing the rubber-ringed facepiece of a photomultiplier magnifier to his visor. He was studying the layout of the UN base, the bulky length of his Wyvern resting in the dust by his feet.
Kaminski dropped the reload case he was humping in the dust nearby. “Hey, Gunny. Can I have a look?”
Yates handed him the electronic imager. Kaminski raised the facepiece, positioning the small, rectangular screen against his visor. A tiny IR laser built into the optics gave the range to target as 8.34 kilometers; in the pale green glow of the photomultiplier optics, he could penetrate the night shadows easily.
The Picard base consisted of several squat, upright, cylindrical habs and not much more besides the worklights and a scattering of vacuum-rigged bulldozers and trench-diggers. Not far away were several more lobbers, plus a larger, sleeker shape, an arrowhead of stealth-jet black, sitting erect on quad-frame landing jacks.
Closer, between the habs and the crater’s western slope, the ground had been carved and plowed in a rectilinear patchwork of trenches connecting several deep, square-sided pits. It was, Kaminski thought, obviously an archeological dig of some kind. The arky teams on Mars had used similar techniques to carve trenches into the Martian regolith, sampling the layers they cut through for artifacts and cast-off bits of debris.
All the scene below was missing was people. Funny. The UN personnel obviously had had plenty of warning that the Marines were on their way. They’d had time to dispatch the lobber and set up a portable radar unit. They’d probably been warned by the garrison at Fra Mauro the moment the Marines had first appeared
Were they all inside, huddled up in their suits, waiting to see if the Marines would come in with can openers at the ready?
“Seems a bit too quiet, Gunny,” he said to Yates. “Don’t see a damned thing moving down there. Ah! Wait a sec!”
“Whatcha got?”
“That black ship grounded down there. It’s lifting!” There was no flame, but the arrowhead shape was silently rising now above a swirl of lunar dust.
“Gimme the imager.”
Kaminsky surrendered the device. Without it, he could just see the UN ship vanishing into the night beyond the base.
“Shit,” Yates said. “They’re bugging out. Wonder if they’re evacuating the place? Or…”
“Or what, Gunny?”
“Or if they just stopped long enough to haul in some reinforcements. I don’t like the looks of this.” He lowered the imager again and handed it to Kaminsky. “They gotta know we’re here, all right. But…uh-oh. Here comes Eagle.”
Kaminski turned, following Yates’s pointing arm. Another bug was coming in out of the sun, floating high, passing above Picard’s rim by at least two hundred meters. Silently, it drifted overhead and a bit to the north, descending rapidly as it cleared the rim, floating on unseen jets of plasma toward the brilliantly lit base below. Halfway down, the ungainly looking craft switched on its landing lights, casting bright circles of illumination across the habs and trenches.
Kaminski watched a moment…then lifted the magnifier to his visor again, staring down into the base. There was something…
He saw movement…a trio of blue helmets raised above the rim of one of the trenches…and the stubby, metallic cylinder of a shoulder-launched missile. “Missile on the ground!” he shouted. “This is Kaminski, I have a slam, in the trenches fifty meters from the base habs!”
Yates jerked the imager from Kaminski’s glove, lifting it one-handed to his own visor. “This is Yates! Confirmed! Shoulder-launched missile, in the trenches! They’re targeting Eagle!”
“Get the slaw on them!” Garroway’s voice called. “Yates! Get the Wyvern in action!”
Yates had already stooped, snatched up the Wyvern, and hoisted it to his shoulder, dropping the sighting display into place in front of his visor. “Clear aft!” he called.
“You’re clear!” Kaminski shot back, then slapped Yates’s shoulder for emphasis. “Go!”
Yates fired, loosing a silent gout of burning gas and strips of plastic packaging from the rear of the man-portable launcher. The Wyvern missile, kicked clear of the weapon’s muzzle by an explosive charge, shot twenty meters toward the edge of the crater rim before its engine switched on, a tiny, white-hot point of light dwindling rapidly toward the UN base.
Long before the Wyvern could cross the distance to its target, however, the UN troops hiding in the trenches fired their own missile. The slam’s back-flash was bright enough to be seen with the naked eye from eight kilometers away; the missile streaked skyward, scratching out a needle of white fire against the night as it arrowed into First Platoon’s LSCP.
The detonation was a strobe of light banishing the stars, dazzling against the night.
FIVE
WEDNESDAY, 9 APRIL 2042
LSCP-30, Call sign Eagle
Picard Crater, The Moon
0916 hours GMT
The missile struck the LSCP from the right and from below, the explosion a hammerblow that sent the frail craft lurching hard to the left, nose high, then dropped it into a spin. Captain Carmen Fuentes was standing behind the pilot, Lieutenant Kenneth Booth, when the blast slammed her against the back of the pilot’s couch.
Booth screamed, the sound shrill over Carmen’s head-set.
“Ken!”
“I’m hit! I’m hit, damn it!” He clawed at the side of his suit, where a thumb-sized hole in the tough, layered plastic matched a larger hole punched through his acceleration couch, and another
