Luna Marine (18 page)

But storms also returned the sand, sometimes, and current beach conditions were posted as fair to good. If the shelf, even at low tide, wasn't as broad as it had been fifty, or even twenty years ago, it still offered a glimpse of what the wild and spray-drenched interface between land and sea had once been like.

The Moon was well up in the southeast, just past full and gleaming silver in a cloudless sky, when Kaitlin and Rob left his car at the lot and started down the long flight of steps leading to the beach below. Waves crashed and hissed, each incoming roller shattering the dancing pillar of reflected moonlight in the water up the beach.

By day, the park, like all of the state beaches, tended to be jammed with refugees from the city enjoying a spray-laden taste of clothing-optional nature. After sunset, though, the crowds had thinned to a scattering of couples and small family groups, gathered around fires or discreetly making out on blankets scattered among dunes and rocks. The stars were as brilliant as they ever got this close to Los Angeles, which even this far up the coast flooded most of the eastern horizon with warm light.

“So, what've you heard about Operation Swift Victory?” Kaitlin asked Rob. They'd talked a little about it during the drive. Lately, Kaitlin had been thinking a lot about the rumored upcoming assault but hadn't talked to anyone who knew any more about it than she did. Security was extraordinarily tight.

Stopping suddenly, she slipped her shoes off and let her bare feet sink into wet sand. Rob crouched and untied his
shoes, pulled off his socks, and rolled up the cuffs of his jeans. He'd brought a towel along, which he kept slung over his shoulder. The air was still hot after a day that had hit thirty degrees, but the sea breeze was refreshingly cool, almost chilly. As always, weather this warm in April made Kaitlin wonder how bad the summer was going to be. Each year, somehow, seemed a bit hotter, a bit stormier, than the last.

“Don't know,” he said at last. “But I got a bad feeling. You know who's in command?”

“General Richardson, I heard.”

“Overall, yeah. But he won't be leaving the Pentagon. No, the CO on-site. The guy up front, leading the charge.”

“Not…”

“'Fraid so. Your old friend, Colonel Whitworth.” He chuckled. “Someone figured he was
the
man, because he's had experience with vac-combat.”

“God help us.”

“I heard there was quite a row during the planning. Seems like all of the services wanted a crack at the UN-dies.”

“What happened?”

“The Army won. The Marines lost out, because someone pointed out that they'd already had a shot at Moonglory.”

She laughed. “Is that what they call it?”

“Well, it makes great copy on the vidcasts. Anyway, I imagine Aerospace Force transports will take 'em in. Don't know what they're planning, but my guess would be a quick, one-step thrust, straight from Earth to orbit to Moon. Come in low, mountain-skimming, to avoid the Demon.” The Demon was the currently circulating slang for whatever it was that had nailed Black Crystal, variously rumored to be a powerful laser, an antimatter beam, or an entirely new type of weapon unlike anything known before.

“Think it'll work?”

“Damfino. I hope so, but…”

“But?”

“Shoot. It just feels all wrong, you know? I don't think
anybody has any decent intel. No one knows what's going on back there, on the back side of the Moon. The Army could be walking into six different kinds of hell.”

They'd walked a fair distance east from the steps, and were on an almost deserted stretch of beach. A few fires flickered in the distance behind them, but they were alone here, save for crashing surf and glittering stars and Moon.

“How about a swim?” he asked.

She had to consider that cheerful suggestion for a moment. She hadn't brought a swimsuit, and she suddenly wished she'd worn something more appropriate under her slacks than filmy panties, even a thong-G. Oh, she'd been nude in public plenty of times, on the beach and elsewhere, but she'd never stripped down in front of
Rob
. Kaitlin was suddenly aware of feelings, unsettled feelings that made her state of dress or undress more important than if he'd been an anonymous stranger in a crowd at the beach.

“Sure,” she said, deciding suddenly. She began shucking her clothing and dropping it on the sand. “Why not?” She felt daring…and a bit giddy. They left their clothing piled on the beach next to the towel. Holding hands, then, they started jogging down the narrow shelf toward the breakers.

Before they reached the waves, however, thunder tolled, a distant, muffled drumroll. Both of them stopped and turned, looking up into the northwestern sky, but the stars were still sharp and clear, with no hint of an approaching storm.

Then a dazzling flare of light appeared, rising slowly above the Santa Ynez Mountains, brighter than the street-lamps over the parking lot and trailing a long, wavering tail of white flame. It rose high toward the zenith, its path curving slightly, until it passed almost directly overhead, moving out over the ocean now, traveling rapidly south. The sound, which lagged far behind the moving flare's visual position, faded a bit to a ragged, thuttering chain of cracks and claps chasing the flare toward orbit.

“Zeus II,” Kaitlin said, as the noise faded. The flare vanished into the distance, but the contrail, illuminated by
the moonlight, remained hanging in the sky like a scratch across heaven.

“Heavy lifter,” Rob added, in needless elaboration. “Jeez. Doesn't seem possible that we rode one of those things to space, does it?”

Thunder tolled again, and another flare heaved into view above the mountains to the northwest. “There goes another,” Kaitlin said.

The second was followed by a third, then a fourth and a fifth, each one almost seeming to crawl up along the path of the last, their gleaming contrails appearing to tangle and merge in their vast arc across the star-dotted zenith.

Kaitlin didn't know how it had happened, didn't remember it happening, but she and Rob were standing together now, their arms tight around one another as they stared up into the sky. The incoming tide brought a sudden rush of cold seawater surging past their ankles, and she let out a little gasp. Letting go of Rob, she jumped back, splashing back onto dry sand, the spell broken.

“Go Army,” Rob said, still looking up. “And Godspeed.”

“Think that's Swift Victory?”

“Gotta be,” Rob replied. “Five HLVs in as many minutes? I doubt that they'll even change orbits. They'll probably rendezvous with some tugs already parked in a polar orbit, then boost straight for Luna.”

Launches from Vandenberg were always aimed toward the south, over open ocean and into a polar or near-polar orbit. It would never do to have the fragments of a failed launch coming down in a fiery footprint stretching across Greater Los Angeles. The tight clustering of the launches suggested that they were aiming for an unusually small launch window, which in turn suggested a rendezvous with a fleet of LEO-to-Luna transports already in orbit.

Dropping his gaze from the heavens, he gave her a long and appraising look in the moonlight. Then he shrugged. “I…guess maybe we'd best be getting back to the base, huh?”

She had to give that one some thought as well. There
were regulations aplenty regarding sexual liaisons within military service, especially when there was a difference in rank involved that might be seen either as an abuse of power or as sex-for-privileges. Still, the practical implementation of those regs tended toward the assumption that men and women were going to do what was natural for them, and to turn a blind eye…unless the couple was flagrant in their play or the relationship involved “conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline,” as Article 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice so succinctly phrased it.

The question wasn't what the Marine Corps had to say about a lieutenant sleeping with a captain. It was what she was ready for. She hadn't had a sexual relationship with anyone since Yukio's death, and that was two years ago now.

She knew she couldn't put her life on hold forever.

“We don't
have
to go back yet,” she told him. “Do you have the duty this weekend?”

He shook his head no.

“Me neither. We don't
have
to report in until oh seven hundred Monday morning, right?” She stepped back into the surf, moving close, letting her hands lightly caress his body. “So…whatcha want to do about it, huh?”

“This,” he replied, reaching for her.

The kiss lasted for a long, long time.

WEDNESDAY
, 7
MAY
2042

Recruit Platoon 4239
Parris Island Recruit Training
Center
1345 hours EDT

“Okay, ladies,” Gunnery Sergeant Knox said, grinning. He was holding a lump of something that looked like heavy, gray clay. He tossed it a few centimeters into the air and caught it again in the same hand several times, the soft slap of each catch emphasizing his words. “I wanna show you all somethin' here. Somethin' important.”

It was a sweltering, humid May afternoon beneath a brassy, overcast sky. Week Three of recruit training for Platoon 4239 had brought them face-to-face with a number of firsts as they settled into the boot-camp routine. Early in the week they'd run the obstacle course for the first time, a run through obstacles, over walls, and hand over hand along a rope above a mud pit in a routine euphemistically known as the “confidence course.” The recruits had also faced their first written exam, their first physical evaluation since the admission physicals, their first inspection, and their first parade to demonstrate their growing command of close-order drill.

Training had been grueling, an exhausting regime deliberately orchestrated to spring one surprise after another on the recruits as they struggled to overcome each new
challenge. Head knowledge was emphasized as much as physical training, on the theory, as Knox expressed it, that “a smart Marine is a live Marine.” Because of the incessant heat, physical training, calisthenics, long runs, and close-order drill tended to be held in the morning or late in the afternoon; midday, before and after noon chow, was reserved for lectures and demonstrations, such as this one.

Of course, that often meant that the recruits ended up sitting in mud-drenched utilities after a late-morning romp in the mud pit or getting drenched in sweat running the confidence course, trying to stay alert while they listened to the lecture.

As he sat cross-legged on the ground, watching Knox work the clay a bit more, Jack realized that he'd really accomplished something just making it this far. In three weeks, attrition had whittled an eighty-man platoon down to sixty-one—reducing it by almost a quarter. There'd been that kid from Tennessee who'd pleaded with the DI one evening to be allowed to go home, tears streaming down his face; there'd been that sharp, smart-mouthed kid from New York named Doud who'd snapped in the mess hall and actually taken a swing at Knox…a swing that hadn't connected but
had
resulted Doud's being hustled away and never seen again. There'd been Martelli—one of the platoon's “fat trays,” or overweight recruits—who'd washed out when he couldn't pass the physical quals earlier in the week.

There'd also been those six or eight guys who'd hurt themselves—a couple of them badly enough to end up in the hospital with broken bones—and the word was they'd all have to pick up their training in a later platoon.
That
sucked, in Jack's expert opinion. Having to come into a platoon full of strangers partway through, knowing no one, no one knowing you…

Jack lived in dread of that happening to
him
. He knew these guys, was bonded with them, molded with them, become a part of them in a way that he'd never been a part of anything else in his life. After three weeks, Gunnery Sergeant Knox and his assistant DIs had broken everyone about as low as it was possible to break them.
Now they were in the process of building them back up.

As something
new
….

Turning away from the watching recruits, Knox walked ten meters across the open ground of the training field to the two lifelike mannequins standing next to one another, plastic faces showing no emotion. Both dummies wore Marine-issue Class-Three armor breastplates, over OD utilities.

Reaching the dummy on the left, Knox slapped the clay against its breastplate, high up, just below the throat, kneading it with his thumb to make it stick, then inserting a small, black object the size and shape of a domino.

Returning to the recruits, waiting in a semicircle in their soggy, mud-covered utilities, Knox jerked a thumb over his shoulder, indicating the waiting dummy. “That, ladies, which I just placed on our volunteer out there, is two hundred grams of C-320 plastic explosives. That's less than half a pound.” Taking a position next to the table set behind the firing line, he picked up a small controller. “Sergeant Bayerly?”

“Range clear, Gunnery Sergeant Knox!”

Smiling, Knox entered a code into the controller, flipped off a safety, then mashed his thumb down on the firing button without even turning to watch the display.

There was a sharp, ringing crack, and the dummy on the left was kicked backward in a flurry of plastic limbs. Several of the recruits jumped. One said, “Oh, God!”

“God's not going to help the poor son of a bitch now, recruit,” Knox said, replacing the controller. “Let's go see.”

Together, the recruits followed Knox across the open field to see the effects of the blast up close. The explosion had punched a hole big enough to admit three fingers straight through the breastplate, through the dummy, and out the rear of the breastplate as well, though the exit hole was smaller than the width of a pencil. Bright red gelatin, the semiliquid stuffing inside the dummy's chest, was splattered across the ground in a realistic display of human gore.

Jack heard a retching sound from one of his fellow re
cruits but couldn't see who it was.
God, if he gets sick seeing a damned dummy get holed
!…

“Two hundred grams of high explosives, ladies,” Knox said in his best lecturing tone, “releases one million joules of energy upon detonation. That is enough, as you can see, to penetrate standard Marine-issue armor and blast a very nasty hole clear through your giblets! One megajoule. Remember that! Okay, back to the firing line!”

When the recruits were seated once again, Knox walked over to the table and picked up a long and complex-looking weapon. With its bipod and pistol grip, it had the look of an old-fashioned squad light machine gun, but it was connected to a foil-encased backpack resting on the ground by a segmented cable as thick as a man's forefinger. Knox hefted the bulky weapon easily with one hand, while he reached down and flipped a switch on the backpack with the other. A tiny, high-pitched whine spooled up from the power pack, and a red light began winking on the weapon's receiver assembly.

When the red light stopped blinking and glowed steadily, Knox brought the weapon's stock to his shoulder with a crisp, efficient motion straight out of the Marine Corps manual and squeezed the trigger. There was no flash, no beam, or other outward sign, but downrange, the second target dummy leaped backward with a sharp crack, leaving a faint, hazy blur of vaporized metal hanging in the air. As Knox lowered the weapon, the recruits could hear the power pack spooling up again, until he reached down and switched it off. He replaced the laser weapon on the table, muzzle pointed carefully away from both the students and the range.

“Time to compare,” he told them.

The two dummies lay on their backs, side by side. The second now sported a hole in its breastplate in exactly the same place as the first. The entry hole was a bit smaller…but the exit hole was larger,
much
larger, with a
lot
more red goo spattered on the grass.

“One megajoule,” Knox repeated, speaking slowly and patiently, as if for the slowest of students. “One million joules. Watkins! What is one joule?”

“
Sir
! One joule is one watt of power applied for one second,
sir
!” It was one of the thousands of isolated facts and bits of information that had been hammered into them all during the past three weeks, like the serial numbers of their ATARs or the names of the ten people in the chain of command above them, from Gunnery Sergeant Harold Knox all the way up to President Roger Markham.

“Correct. Since it's damned hard to get an uncooperative target to stand still for one whole second, we use a ten-million-watt laser to release a pulse that lasts one-tenth of a second. One million watts for one second equals
ten
million watts for one-tenth second. The result is the same. One million joules, delivered on-target. That is enough to punch through the best personal armor we know. It's enough to chew though your guts, charbroil them, and spit them out your backsides. Flash!”

Jack gritted his teeth. “Flash” had become his nickname, his handle in the platoon, a jeering reference to Flash Gordon and his desire to be a space Marine.

“What is the effective range of the Sunbeam M228 Squad Laser Weapon?”

“
Sir
!” Jack shouted as hard and as loud as he could, reciting the relevant textbook paragraph. “The effective range of the Sunbeam M228 Squad Laser Weapon is approximately eighteen hundred to twenty-two hundred meters, but that range may be sharply restricted by attenuation or by adverse atmospheric conditions,
sir
!”

“Correct! And what is the maximum range in hard vacuum?”

“Sir! In vacuum, the maximum range of the Sunbeam M228 Squad Laser Weapon is theoretically infinite,
sir
!”

“
Theoretically
? You gonna trust your life, or the life of your buddy in the hole with you, to
theory
?”

That sounded like one of Knox's frequent rhetorical questions, so Jack remained silent. It turned out to be the right response.

“The important thing to remember about the slaw,” Knox went on, “is that if you can see your target, you can hit it.

“And the important thing to remember about
energy
, is
that energy is energy, whether it comes from a lump of plastic explosives, or the muzzle of M228 Squad Laser Weapon, or your fist. All
any
weapon is is a means of delivering energy on target. And delivering a hell of a lot of energy on-target, accurately and lethally, is what being a Marine is all about. With an M228 ten-megawatt Squad Laser Weapon. With an ATAR standard personal weapon. With an entrenching tool. With a rock. With your fist. With your teeth.
You
are the weapon!
You
, the men of the United States Marine Corps!
Do
you read me?”

“Sir! Yes, sir!” the recruits chorused.

“A US Marine is far more deadly than a ten-megawatt M-228 Squad Laser Weapon! And that is because a ten-megawatt M-228 Squad Laser Weapon cannot
think
. It cannot
plan
. And most of all, it does not possess the courage, fortitude, adaptability, willpower, or sheer, mean grit of a US Marine!
Do
you read me?”

“Sir, yes, sir!”

“I can't hear you!”

“SIR, YES, SIR!”

“What does a US Marine
do
?”

“Kill! Kill!
Marine Corps
!”

Jack shouted with the others, yelling past the harsh rasp in his throat, overriding the chill, the discomfort, the bone-tired ache, the chattering of his teeth.

Still, it was impossible not to look down at those two, drilled-through dummies and not imagine himself lying there.
My God
, he thought, and not for the first time since he'd come aboard at Parris Island.
What have I gotten myself into
?

Assault Shuttle 06, Army Space
Force Assault Group
Approaching Lunar South Pole
2035 hours GMT

The K-440 Space Transport Cargo pod was the size and roughly the shape of a boxcar, a no-frills pressurized module capable of transporting up to fifteen tons with a Zeus
II HLV to provide the initial kick. With Aerospace Force modifications allowing for air and temperature control, it could carry fifty men to orbit, or thirty as far as the Moon.

Colonel Thomas R. Whitworth floated in the two-man cockpit between the commander's and pilot's seats, peering through the narrow slit windows at the rugged terrain ahead. Sunlight, reflected from silver-white mountains, flooded the cockpit and warmed his face; he preferred spending the travel time aft with his men—a good leader never separated himself from his men or their discomfort—but he'd asked Major Jones, the Aerospace Force mission commander, to call him forward for the final approach. It always helped to be able to actually
see
the terrain you were supposed to assault, using your God-given Mark I eyeballs instead of watching a computer simulation. He'd not had a good feel for the terrain the last time he'd led his men into this desolate waste, and he thought that that was why they'd made a relatively poor showing when the enemy counterattacked.

They would do better this time. The damned Marines weren't here to get in the way, for one thing…or to inflict casualties with so-called friendly fire. Whitworth had a soldier's native distrust for joint operations, and a dislike in particular for the Marines. Like Truman a century earlier, he thought they served well enough as the Navy's police force, but the needs of the military as a whole would be best served if there was
one
aerospace arm, and
one
ground assault force. So-called elites like the Marines simply pulled good men and women away from the service that could best use them—the Army, and, in particular, Army Special Forces.

Today we'll see what the Army Space Force can
really
do
, he thought.
This one could end the goddamned war
!

Everything hinged on the Moon's reserves of frozen water.

Water ice had been discovered on the Moon over forty years ago, first by a Defense Department Lunar probe, with confirmation a few years later by Lunar Prospector, a NASA satellite. When humans had again walked on the face of the Moon after the half century hiatus following
Apollo, long-term explorations had been launched and permanent bases had been built with the knowledge that large reserves of water—locked up in ice mixed with the Lunar regolith—existed within the deep, eternal night of crater floors at both the north and south poles of the Moon. Theory held that cometary impacts over the past few billions of years had scattered droplets of water all over the Lunar surface—but only deep inside the craters at the poles where the sun literally never shone could it accumulate as ice, droplet piling upon frozen droplet for four billion lightless years.