UN troops were noticing the incoming spacecraft now, stopping in their tracks, jumping into nearby trenches. A few dropped their weapons and raised their hands, surrendering.
The Chinese troops, Tessitore noted, continuing their blind charge, were almost to the American lines now, but there were far fewer of them than before. Zhang had started the battle with thirty-two men; fewer than ten were still on their feet as they sprinted the last few meters to grapple with the enemy.
The landing craft settled to the Lunar surface with a gentle bobbing motion of its suspension. Americans were leaping from the already open airlock, some rushing toward the shattered knot of UN troops, others moving toward the habs.
That last decided Tessitore. If the Americans seized the habitats—and there was nothing at all now standing in their way—the UN troops outside would either have to surrender or face death by suffocation as their air supplies gave out. He tossed his Beretta aside and raised his hands.
An American was approaching him, ATAR leveled, suit reflecting the grays and blacks of his surroundings in oddly shifting patterns of light and dark. As the soldier came closer, Tessitore was rocked by two startling revelations. The first was that the suited figure approaching him was a girl…her blond hair closely framing her face behind her visor. The second was the emblem painted next to the name tag affixed to the front of her suit. The name tag spelled GARROWAY in stenciled letters, but it was the emblem that startled Tessitore more: a globe and anchor, the badge of the United States Marine Corps.
His hands went up higher. “Lebanon!” he shouted, even though he knew she could not hear. “Sudan! Brazil!”
LSCP-44, Call sign Raven
Picard Base, The Moon
0924 hours GMT
Kaitlin held her ATAR pointed at the man’s chest, her eyes widening as she saw the crest affixed to his left breast and his sleeve—a gold lion on a distinctive red backing. Until this moment, she’d not known that the enemy included elements of the San Marco Marines. His mouth was moving; he was trying to tell her something.
With one hand, she stabbed the key on her common controls that set up a channel search. A moment later, she heard a burst of Italian, and the words “Lebanon! Sudan! Brazil!”
“San Marco,” she said. “The Strongest.” What was the Italian phrase? She’d learned it in OCS. “Il più forte!”
Part of every Marine officer’s training was a survey of the other Marine forces of the world, of the actions they’d taken part in, of the traditions and battle honors they carried. The San Marcos were no exception. The Italian Marines had served together with the US Marines on three separate occasions: in the Lebanon peacekeeping operation of 1983, in the Sudan in 1992 to 1993, and in the Brazilian Incursion of 2029.
“Sì,” she said, straining her grasp of Italian to the limit. “Bene.”
Her prisoner straightened up, then rendered a crisp salute. Kaitlin returned the honor. Elsewhere across the desolate and dusty field, other troops, Chinese and Italian—but so very few!—were dropping their weapons and raising their hands as the US Marines came out of the trenches and began herding them together. She watched, thoughtful, as a Marine lance corporal arrived to take her prisoner away, leading him back toward the habs. They’d fought hard, these Italian Marines. The battle here had been a close-run thing.
Something caught her eye in the dusty floor of a trench close by. Lightly, she hopped into the excavation, reached down, and brushed away at something protruding from the hard-packed powder.
It looked like…gold.
It was gold, gold worked into a smooth and highly polished figurine perhaps ten centimeters tall…a standing human woman with arms outstretched, nude save for bracelets, anklets, and a necklace of some kind. And…was that writing on the base?
Standing, the figurine in her gloved hands, Kaitlin raised her eyes to the plain around her, seeing it, really seeing it for the first time. Until this moment, the Picard base had been a tactical exercise; even when she’d given the orders to Dow to fly away from the crater, descend, then skim the surface back and around to approach the base from another direction, she’d been thinking of this as a problem in tactics, of ground and cover and fields of fire. But now that the battle was over, what, exactly, had they won?
Archeologists had laid out these trenches; the larger excavations had been marked off into large grids with pegs and white string—most of which had been trampled in the fighting. An archeological dig…with golden statues of human women…on the Moon.
“This is too weird for the Marines,” she said aloud.
“Non capisco, Signora,” a voice replied in her helmet set, and she realized that she was still tuned to the Italian Marine frequency.
“That’s okay, San Marco,” she said, musing. “I don’t understand either.”
SIX
THURSDAY, 10 APRIL 2042
Institute for Exoarcheological
Studies
Chicago, Illinois
1440 hours CDT
“So, David,” the other archeologist said, cuddling close in his arms, “is it true what Ed Pohl told me the other day? That you’re now a member of the Three Dolphin Club?”
“And what do you know about the Three Dolphin Club, Teri?” David asked.
“That it’s the same as the Mile-High Club, but for zero G. What I don’t understand is where the name comes from.”
David grinned at her. Dr. Theresa Sullivan might be a colleague, and a highly respected one at that, but sometimes it was hard to get any serious work done with her around. Especially during the past couple of weeks. What had started as a fling at an archeology conference in Los Angeles had swiftly turned into something more.
A lot more.
“Ah. Well, back in the late twentieth century, I guess it must have been, the old space agency, NASA, was awfully nervous about any hint of impropriety. Their astronauts were professionals and would never consider experimenting with things like sex in zero gravity. Bad public image, you know.”
“I thought zero-G sex would attract interest.”
Slowly, he began unbuttoning her blouse. “Maybe they thought it would be the wrong sort of interest. Anyway, the story goes that some highly dedicated researchers and technicians at the Marshall Spaceflight Center, at Huntsville, decided to experiment on their own, using the big swimming pool at Marshall where they simulated weightless conditions. They sneaked in and used the tank after hours, of course, because if NASA had found out what they were doing, they would’ve all been fired. But they found out that a couple could have sex in weightlessness, even though there was a tendency for them to, ah, come undocked at a critical moment. Your motions, yours and your partner’s, tend to pull you apart unless you hold real tight and close.”
“Where did you learn all of this?”
“One of the officers on the cycler told me, on the trip back from Mars. He was a Three-Dolphins member. Even had a little pin to show me.”
