Luna Marine (28 page)

“National security,” Rob added.

“Yeah. The UN would know we had a working antimatter-drive vessel. Maybe they're close enough with their AM ship that they could rush it through to completion, confront us with an armed supership. We lose the edge…maybe lose the war.”

“Somehow, that's a worrisome thought,” Kaitlin said. “Sacrifice five million civilians in the name of national security.”

“We'll only have one shot with the
Ranger
,” Fuentes pointed out. “She has to work, and she has to work perfectly, first time. If we lose her, if something goes wrong on her first mission, we don't have anything on hand when the UN unveils their AM supership. And scuttlebutt says they
are
armed, with something that makes lasers look like flashlights.”

“What's
Ranger
supposed to be packing,” Rob asked. “You know?”

“Lasers. Probably in the hundred-gig range. Probably missiles. I don't know. Everyone's being pretty tight-lipped about it.”

“All things considered, that's good,” Kaitlin said. “If we don't know, maybe the UN doesn't either!”

The door at the far end of the room opened and Major Avery stride in, accompanied by Captain White and a base photographer. “Attention on deck!” someone yelled, and
the Marines already seated in the briefing room came to their feet.

“As you were, as you were,” Avery said, waving them down. He made his way to the podium at the head of the room, taking his place there with his hands braced on the sides as though he were conning the thing through a storm. His photographer crouched nearby, taking shots as the rest of the Marines in the room filed through the aisles to take their seats.

“Good morning, Marines,” he said as the room went quiet. “First item on the agenda. The Deep Space Tracking Net at Colorado Springs has just issued an all-clear for Earth, which they now say is safe from Asteroid 2034L. Apparently, the vector change introduced by the Aerospace Force strike a month ago
was
sufficient to deflect the body. They report that, while we may be in for some shooting-star fireworks on Monday evening, the main body has definitely changed vector sufficiently to easily clear the Earth as it passes us.” Several of the Marines in the room broke out into cheers and applause at the news. Avery waited, frowning, until the noise had died down before continuing. “Of course, this means that the One-SAG alert is canceled. It now appears that our services will
not
be necessary in dealing with this threat.”

He almost seems disappointed
, Kaitlin thought, be-mused. She wondered how much career capital Avery had had riding on the possibility of a Marine-SAG mission to disintegrate 2034L. It was possible. Of course, after the UN strike against Vandenberg, it would have been impossible to launch any kind of space intercept mission at all, which was probably why the UN had launched it in the first place. The sub-carrier air strike must have been planned months ago, before 2034L's course had been changed in the first place.

“We can, therefore, turn to the second item on the agenda, which we are now calling Operation Dark Star. Gentlemen, ladies, we are now assured that the USS
Ranger
will be fully operational within two weeks. We have authorization from President Markham himself to use her in a combined-arms sky-and-ground assault against the
enemy forces dug in at Tsiolkovsky, what the Army tried to do last May, and failed. We now anticipate being able to mount a major op against the enemy within the next two months.”

That caused a stir in the audience. Avery tapped out something on his podium's touch pad, darkening the room lights and opening the wall at his back to reveal a large display screen. Another few taps, and the screen lit with an image, a high-orbit view of a portion of the Moon's surface.

It was a particularly rugged and forbidding stretch of terrain, heavily cratered and broken. The only flat area at all was a flattened oval that stood out as much darker than the surrounding highlands, a large, deep bowl of a crater with an off-center central peak and steep walls.

“This is the crater Tsiolkovsky,” Avery told them. “As you can see, it's one of the very few flat places on the entire Lunar farside. The near side is characterized by the flat-plain maria, with some highlands. On the farside, there are no true maria at all, except for the Mare Moscoviense, farther north, and the Mare Ingenii to the southeast, and those, properly speaking, are just large craters with lava-plain floors, a little larger, a little less steep than Tsiolkovsky, here. On the whole farside, there are no seas at all even as large as the Mare Crisium. Very rugged territory. Very hard to traverse on the ground.

“The crater Tsiolkovsky was originally chosen as the primary site for the joint US—Russian SETI radio telescope project back in the '20s. The Mars landings and the discovery of alien artifacts at Cydonia resulted in the funding for the project being cut. After all, if we had an actual alien civilization to study, even a dead one, we wouldn't need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on an antenna to listen in on their equivalent of
Monday Night Football
.”

Polite chuckles rose from the audience. Avery smiled and continued. “In any case, the facility was mothballed and came under UN control in 2036. Since the beginning of the war, we've known they were up to something back there, but intelligence has been damned hard to come by.
This series of intel photos, unfortunately, is almost two years old. We have nothing more recent, and attempts to send recon spacecraft around the Lunar farside have all met with disaster.”

He touched a key, and the photo on the screen expanded sharply, zooming in until the oblong, dark gray plain of Tsiolkovsky filled the screen. The shot was oblique, taken from the north at an altitude of under one hundred kilometers; the three-dimensional nature of the terrain was plainly visible, with the crater clearly a deep, steep-sided bowl, with the central peak a prominent cluster of smoothly rounded mountains closer to the north rim than to the south. A cluster of lights was just visible in the shadows at the base of the central peak.

“Those lights,” Avery went on, “are at the site of the old SETI base. We believe the UN has simply added to the facilities there. The amount of space transport traffic we've tracked going around the back side of the Moon suggests they've expanded the port facilities there. They've probably built containment tanks of some sort for water hauled in from the Lunar south pole. They probably also have a large nuclear reactor. The creation of antimatter, I needn't remind you all, requires a
very
large expenditure of energy, so we expect a small fusion plant on-site, at the very least.”

The scene expanded again, this time zooming in on the central peak. The lights at the base were more numerous now and seemed to sketch out short lines and geometric figures. The base, obviously, was a big one. At the rounded top of the highest mountain, a slender silver tower extended high into space. It would have been almost impossible to see if not for the telltale shadow it cast, a long, black scratch across the sunlit mountaintop.

“That tower was part of the original SETI project. The idea was to raise the tower as the focus for incoming signals. A thin mesh of very fine wires would have extended from the mast clear to the crater rim, kind of like the old RT built in a round valley at Arecibo, in Puerto Rico. That would have resulted in a radio telescope dish 185 kilometers across, big enough to eavesdrop on a private, short-
range radio conversation clear across the galaxy.

“What we believe the UN has done is fit that central mast, which was already in place, as a transmitter instead of as a receiver. Easy enough to do, technically. In 1974, scientists used the radio telescope at Arecibo to send a symbolic radio message into space. The UN techies have probably done the same sort of thing, setting it up as a powerful radar station.

“Somewhere in this crater, the UN has also erected a powerful weapon designed to fire bursts of antimatter…specifically, positrons. Antielectrons. Such a burst destroyed a recon Sparrowhawk last April, at a range of some tens of thousands of kilometers. We think, but don't know, that they would have constructed their weapon somewhere at the top of the central peak, to give it a good field of fire, without raising the horizon by firing out of the bottom of this bowl. It's also possible, of course, that the weapon is sited somewhere along the crater rim.

“Somewhere inside the crater, we don't know where, the UN has assembled some sort of shipfitting or ship-building complex and is busily working on their version of our
Ranger
, an antimatter-powered spacecraft of tremendous range, power, and maneuverability. We believe, but don't know, that this spacecraft is a heavily modified Dauphin-class transport.” A diagram and accompanying photograph appeared in windows inset over the view of Tsiolkovsky, showing a black, diamond-shaped craft, streamlined for atmospheric flight. “We believe her to be the
Millénium
, launched early this year from Kourou, the ship some of you reported seeing at Picard. Also, fragmentary reports from the Army expedition at the Lunar south pole suggests that she was there as well, though this has not been confirmed. Intelligence believes that the
Millénium
is being refitted with both an antimatter drive and an antielectron cannon. It is possible—though we cannot count on this—that they have only one antimatter cannon, which was set up on the ground at Tsiolkovsky in April but is now being mounted, or else has been mounted already, aboard the ship.”

“If we knew any less about the objective,” Carmen
whispered at Kaitlin's side, “we'd be going in completely blind.”

The sentiment echoed Kaitlin's own thoughts. How did you plan an attack on an objective that you hadn't reconned, that you hadn't even
seen
for two years?

“We have been working on a plan of battle,” Avery went on, “one that will allow us to approach Tsiolkovsky with a fair chance of success. The operation, as we see it so far, will require a two-pronged attack, beginning with an assault on these perimeter defenses…incapacitating the enemy's long-range radar.

“Three gets you five he had nothing to do with the planning,” Rob whispered at her side. “This had to come from the very top.”

Kaitlin shushed him, then leaned forward, trying to capture every word. He was now describing a new vehicle, which he called the new and improved LAV, and how it would be used for the initial phase of the Tsiolkovsky attack.

The plan, she thought, was nothing short of brilliant. Risky…even dangerous, but brilliant nonetheless….

Discharge Office
Joliet Federal Prison
1543 hours CDT

“Sign here, sir…and here.”

David Alexander signed the release forms on the indicated lines. He'd already had his personal effects returned to him…the suit he'd been wearing the day he'd been arrested, his digital Rolex, his Sony PAD, his wallet with eighty-five dollars, pocket change of three dollar coins and a quarter, and a small globe-and-anchor pin one of the Marines had given him as a keepsake after the return from Mars; he liked to carry it as a good-luck piece.

“Thank you, sir,” the prison clerk said, checking the form over inside his cage. “That'll do it.”

“It certainly will,” David replied.

“Is it, ah, true what they've been saying? That you're
gonna sue the government for false arrest?”

He considered a sharp answer and discarded it. The clerk was a part of the system, but he wasn't the system and certainly had had no part in David's arrest and illegal imprisonment. He smiled. “My lawyer recommended that I reply to that question with a firm and definite ‘no comment,'” he replied. “But damn it, you people stole almost four months of my life, maybe even derailed my whole career. You can bet that pretty blue uniform of yours I'm at least
thinking
about the idea!”

“Well, that's your business, of course.” The clerk looked uncomfortable as he countersigned the papers, then typed something into the computer on his counter. “I'll bet you're looking forward to getting to sleep in your own bed tonight! Here ya go.”

The clerk slid the prison-release form through the slot in the cage front, and David pocketed it. Julia Dutton had told him that morning to be damned sure he kept all of the paperwork they gave him; it would all be evidence at the trial when they sued for wrongful arrest and imprisonment.

He still wasn't sure what had happened, exactly. His lawyer had seen him in the prison's visitor center that morning, ecstatic with the news that he was to be released. Apparently, he'd had some pretty big guns on his side and not even realized it. If Dutton had her facts straight—and she always seemed to—then General Warhurst himself, with a small army of JAG lawyers in tow, had dismantled at least part of the Justice Department in Washington, DC, threatening all-out war if David Alexander's case was not investigated, reviewed, and brought out into the open. The investigation had taken weeks; according to Dutton, there'd been some deeply entrenched political powers behind the scenes trying to delay or derail the process, but Warhurst and his legal legions had triumphed in the end.

David had met Montgomery Warhurst several times, both before and after the MMEF expedition to Mars, and been impressed with the man's sharp intelligence, determination, and sheer guts. What David didn't know yet was why the commandant of the US Marine Corps had gone
on the warpath for
him
. Sure, sure, he was an honorary Marine, and all of that, but the way Dutton told the story, Warhurst had been
that
close to declaring war on Justice and the FBI both.

And hell, he
had
shared information with foreign nationals. Had Justice decided to try his case, instead of trying to pressure him into spying on his friends, he had little doubt that he would have ended up as a guest at Joliet for ten to fifteen big ones.