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.”
“You’ll have your Wyverns and two SLWs. That should be more than enough to provide adequate support.” He gave Fuentes a hard look. “Remember, people, we’re dealing with a tiny outpost here. From the number and size of those habs, we’re looking at life support for fifteen people, tops! If anyone was shuttling in large number of troops and the hab modules to support them, we’d have picked up the deployment from Earth, both optically and by radar.”
“AFSCOM has a recon spacecraft up,” White said. He glanced at the LED time readout displayed on the back of his left glove. “They’ll relay to Colorado Springs, and Colorado Springs will relay to us. We should have an up-to-the-minute report on what’s going on in Picard within the next thirty minutes.”
Captain Lee scratched the side of his face, making a bristly sound on the unshaven skin. “Sir, if I may suggest…Alfa, Second Platoon, ought to provide additional overwatch, at least as reinforcements. The UNdies know we’re here, now, and we don’t know where those sixty troops are supposed to be.”
“Well, they’re not at Picard, Captain,” White said with a thin smile. “We’d have seen them if they were.”
“Intelligence believes that the UNdies’ main Lunar force is on the farside,” Avery said. “At our old radio-astronomy facility at Tsiolkovsky. If the Air Force guys don’t report anything unexpected at Picard, we’re go.”
“I still think it might be a good idea to have some of my people in reserve, sir,” Lee insisted. “Just in case. Captain Fuentes is right. You can’t count on the bad guys to do what you expect.”
Avery exchanged a glance with White, then shrugged. “I want at least one platoon here to hold Fra Mauro,” he said. “You can have the other platoon as reserve. Not that you’re going to need it.”
“This,” Captain White said, “is going to be a stroll in the park.”
Kaitlin said nothing, but she had to suppress an icy shudder. The assault on Fra Mauro, sudden, sharp, and decisive, had been as close to a “stroll in the park” as anyone had a right to expect…and three of Alfa Company’s people had died when a couple of Chinese special forces troops had opened up on them from the grounded Kongyunjian transport with a rapid-fire squad laser.
Even a minor hit, if it burned through armor, was deadly on the Moon; here, the usual battlefield ratio of three or four wounded for every man dead was reversed. And in this unfamiliar environment, things could so very easily go death-cold wrong, especially in a cobbled-together, ad hoc deployment like this one.
She found herself hoping that the Air Force mission did see something at Picard. Better to call this assault off and wait for a stronger and better-equipped follow-up force from Earth. Scuttlebutt had it that Army troops would be arriving in a few days, with transports for prisoners and a ticket home for the Marines. Let them deal with Picard and its “alien shit.”
She checked her own glove-back timepiece. Zero-four-fifty-five GMT. Twenty-eight minutes until the fly-boys could report….
USASF Reconnaissance Flight
Black Crystal, trans-Lunar orbit
0521 hours GMT
“What the hell is that?” Aerospace Force Major Sam Barnes pulled back from the padded double eyepiece and looked at the mission commander, Lieutenant Colonel Jacob DeMitre.
“Whatcha got, Sam?” DeMitre said. Silver-white light flooded the cockpit, dazzling and inexpressibly beautiful. The Sparrowhawk’s CO eased himself from his couch and made his way carefully, hand over hand, toward Barnes’s console.
There was scarcely room for them to breathe, much less move. For three days, they’d been crammed into a space roughly the size of a small closet, with most of the compartment taken up by acceleration couches and consoles. The SRE-10 Sparrowhawk was a tiny ship, a sleek, black-sheathed lifting body with stubby fins and a rounded nose, designed to be piggybacked for launch to a Zeus II HLV booster. They’d boosted from Vandenberg three days earlier, whipping into a high-speed parabola around the Moon on a recon flight dubbed Black Crystal.
At the moment, they were high above Luna’s eastern limb, as viewed from Earth, almost ten thousand kilometers above the Mare Crisium and falling in a long, zero-G curve around toward the Lunar farside. Their primary mission had been to overfly the farside radio-telescope complex at Tsiolkovsky, but a last-minute add-on to their orders directed them to scope out Picard Crater in particular, and to check for UN activity in the Crisium region
