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,
