Luna Marine (33 page)

“So you think she's self-aware?”

“Well, I don't
really
think she is, but sometimes I get the strangest feeling that she's doing things on her own. Thinking.
Reasoning
things out.” He shook his head. “She's probably too complex now for any programmer to understand how she works. That can be unsettling, y'know?”

“How about it, Sam?” David asked the woman on the PAD display screen. “Are you self-aware?”

“Would you respond to me differently if I were, David?” she asked. “Maybe it's best that you not be too sure of me.”

David blinked. “I see what you mean, Jack. You didn't program that answer into her…into
it
, I mean?”

“Nope. Sometimes she comes up with the damnedest stuff, seems to think of things I never would've thought of in a million years. Anyway, we're going in with three different nutcrackers. I'm betting Sam will be the one that breaks through.”

“I wouldn't be a bit surprised.” David chuckled. “So, what is a nutcracker, anyway?”

“Oh, well, the UN ship will have its own computer system, right? To control power, life support, all that stuff, just like our ships.”

“Okay.”

“If we're going to capture that ship, we need to talk to the computer. Program it to respond to our commands. But it probably won't be that simple. There's almost certain to be some sort of password protection, just so some unauthorized guy like the janitor or a bunch of invading Marines don't screw things up.”

“Gotcha.”

“Sam's got a database of…I don't know. How many passwords do you have, Sam?”

“Sixteen thousand, three hundred, eighty-four,” she replied immediately.

“Okay. Sixteen thousand possible passwords, compiled by the NSA. They put together files on all the people they figured might've been involved in programming the enemy ship's systems. They got names of wives and girl-friends and kids. Birthdates of family members. Titles of favorite books. Places they've lived or gone to school. Known passwords they've used before. All kinds of trivia that a programmer might've used as an easy-to-remember password.”

David's brow furrowed. “That still seems like kind of a long shot. I mean, that sort of code isn't going to be easy, or what's the point?”

“I think the idea is that the UN isn't expecting us to come and try to take their ship away from them, so the password's going to be relatively simple.”

“Still, so many possibilities….”

“Well, they've also put together some code-breaking algorithms that Sam can draw on. And she's pretty slick herself, now. I've used her to get into places I wasn't supposed to be.”

David's eyebrows went higher. “Oh? And what places would those be?”

“Oh, password-protected stuff.” He didn't elaborate. Two weeks earlier, however, Sam had broken into the main personnel files at Quantico to see if Jack had been selected for this mission. He hadn't intended to
change
anything in those files, just to look around.

As it happened, he'd had the second best scores of all the trainees, after Diane Dillon, and had been given a slot aboard the
Ranger
.

And then there'd also been the time when he'd taken a peek at some of his uncle's working files on aliens from the Cydonian underground site. He simply hadn't been able to resist
that
siren's call.

“So…how come you're here?” Jack asked David, shifting the subject to safer ground. “Is Tsiolkovsky another alien site?”

“It's distinctly possible.”

“The An again? Or the…what are they called? The Hunters of the Dawn?”

David looked at him sharply. “How much do you know about the Hunters?”

Damn. He probably shouldn't have brought
them
up. “Not…not a whole lot. There's been some stuff out on the Net.”

“Liana got some things out of my files she shouldn't have,” David said, “and uploaded it to her cult church. From there it went…everywhere. But there's a lot of speculation and misunderstanding and just plain idiot stuff mixed in. Don't believe everything you hear.”

“That's it, though, isn't it?” Jack said, pushing. “There's something about the Hunters of the Dawn at Tsiolkovsky?”

“I don't really think so,” David replied. “If anything, there's just an An base back there. From what Intelligence picked up, though, from some French scientists they questioned, our UN friends are
very
interested in the Hunters. Almost frantic. And our people would like to know what
they
know. What they're afraid of.”

“The answer to the Fermi Paradox?”

Again, David gave Jack a long, hard look.

“I, uh, had Sam out looking for everything she could find on the Hunters of the Dawn,” Jack admitted. “The little bit I found on the open Net, well, like you said, it didn't seem very reliable. Ancient-astronut stuff. So I guess maybe she did a check on everything you'd written on the subject.”

“Including some classified reports?” David shook his head and grinned. “Okay. I should have guessed as much. Don't put too much store in any of that stuff, though, Jack. It's all still
very
preliminary.”

“Yeah, but it's important,” Jack said. “Alien civilizations that think they have to wipe out every other civilization they find, just to survive? I can see why the government would be interested in that. We might run into them ourselves, soon.”

“Sometime back in the 1920s or 1930s,” David said,
“the first radio signals strong enough to propagate through space left our planet. The oldest of them are over a hundred light-years away by now, and there's no way to call them back. If anyone is out there, listening, we've given ourselves away already.”

“And is that why the UN is so worried about it?”

“It's why we're
all
worried about it, Jack, and why I want to be damned sure of things before I release this. If my idea is true, galactic civilizations go through a kind of cycle, rising, developing interstellar travel, then getting smashed by the current crop of Hunters. That suggests we're in an upswing now, on our way to the stars. And somewhere out there, maybe not too far away, the next batch of Hunters are setting up shop, too.”

“Well, we do have an advantage.”

“What?”

“We know about them. I imagine most emerging races don't have a clue that the Hunters are out there. They struggle up to civilized status, develop spaceflight, go to the stars, and wham! They never know what hit 'em. You know,” he continued thoughtfully, “there's another possibility too.”

“Oh? And what's that?”

“That
we're
the next Hunters of the Dawn.”

David's mouth twisted, as though at a bad taste. “That's…not a very pleasant idea.”

“It could happen,” Jack said. “Remember Chicago? People did that. People not so different from us.”

A shrill whistle sounded from an overhead speaker, and every Marine in the squad bay fell silent, listening.

“Now hear this, now hear this,” Captain Lee's voice said over the speaker. “We have just received a report that the RAG has reached its first objective and is deploying for the assault. We are now cleared for loading and debarkation. All hands, grab your gear and report to your squad leaders, preparatory for embarkation aboard the
Ranger
.”

“That's it, Uncle David,” Jack said. His heart was hammering now, and he was praying that he wasn't going to
screw up. He folded up his PAD and tucked it back into his holster. “We're going to war!”

“And God help us all,” David replied quietly. “God help us all….”

SUNDAY
, 9
NOVEMBER
2042

Lieutenant Kaitlin Garroway
Tsiolkovsky Crater, West Rim
2233 hours GMT

Communicating with Earth was a real problem for the Rim Assault Group, once the Earth had dropped behind the stark, Lunar horizon. Any US spacecraft entering orbit around the Moon was killed as soon as it passed into line of sight of Tsiolkovsky. The same went in spades for any comsat parked in a halo orbit in L-1, above the Lunar farside; it
was
possible to establish a short-term polar orbit that wouldn't rise above Tsiolkovsky's horizon, but there were almost certainly UN forces at one or both of the moon's water-rich poles, and even if they couldn't shoot it down, they would certainly warn the UN farside base that something was up.

And the RAG depended utterly on its presence being kept secret until the last possible moment. A teleoperated Earth-Lunar freighter had been sacrificed to preserve that secret.

They'd been traveling steadily for nearly fourteen hours, a line-ahead column of vehicles nearly invisible against the unyielding silver-gray of the Lunar surface. A careful search from the sky might have picked them up, or at least have picked up their tracks, but the Moon was an extremely large place, with as much surface area as the continent of Africa, and the LAVs were very small. Even so,
the four-wheeled vehicles had been deliberately designed to toss rooster tails of dust high and to the rear as they traveled, and as the dust settled out of the sky it tended to partially fill in and blur those telltale parallel trails, not filling them in completely, but making them far harder to spot at a casual glance.

One LAV had broken down. Gunnery Sergeant Miller's LAV-3, with Second Platoon, Second Squad, had quietly died as they'd traversed the floor of the huge crater Fermi, fifty kilometers back. There wasn't room in the other LAVs for any more personnel, so Miller and his people were sitting tight; if the RAG was successful, they would be picked up later.

If not…

Kaitlin tried not to think about the alternatives.

They made the approach up the western slope of Tsiolkovsky cautiously. There were UN defensive installations along the ringwall, but the crater's circumference, over 580 kilometers, was so large that the UN couldn't have woven a very tight net, and LAVs with stealth surfacing should be able to slip between them. The trick was identifying the UN perimeter installations in the first place so the Marines could sneak through.

Kaitlin sat in a jump seat next to Staff Sergeant Hartwell, watching over his shoulder as the staff sergeant threaded the LAV up the gradually steepening slope. It was particularly rugged here, good country for evading surface radar. Besides, since all of the LAVs possessed radar-absorbing stealth laminates, it should be possible for them to pick up UN radar before that radar could register them in return.

Still, it was a nail-biting feeling, sitting there, locked up in a brick-shaped can with twelve other Marines, inching up the slope while waiting for a sudden, sharp IFF challenge. No one spoke…almost as though they feared being heard by the enemy, which, of course, was nonsense in the Lunar vacuum.

People under stress
, she thought,
rarely act in strictly logical ways
.

The expected challenge was never issued. Hartwell
picked up one intermittent radar emitter fifteen kilometers to the south, and a very faint signal perhaps at twice that range to the north. Carefully, he adjusted LAV-1's course to thread between the two at roughly the halfway point, with LAVs 2 and 4 following slowly in his tire tracks.

Thirteen hours and forty-eight minutes after the
Santa Fe
had dropped the LAVs to the surface on the southeast side of Pasteur Crater, the three LAVs were atop Tsiolkovsky's broken and rubble-strewn west rim.

Tsiolkovsky was considerably larger than little Picard, a vast bowl 185 kilometers across from rim to rim, centered by a smooth but irregularly shaped central peak. From the crest of the west rim, the crater floor appeared to be an utterly flat, dark gray plain stretching clear to the horizon. The central peak itself was just visible as a silvery white hummock breaking the perfectly flat line where prairie met black sky; most of the peak, plus the floor of the crater around it where the UN installations had been built, were still hidden beyond the curve of the Moon.

On the targeting screen aboard LAV-1, Kaitlin peered at the image of a silver mountaintop centered in green crosshairs. The camera view was greatly magnified, but it was still hard to make out any detail.

“Take the range,” she told Hartwell.

He pressed a button, firing a laser ranging beam. “Range to target, ninety-three-point-one-one kilometers,” Hartwell reported. “I've got a lock.” A red light came on, accompanied by a thin, warning beep. “That's enemy radar. They've got us tagged.”

“Well, they know we're here now,” she said.

“Looks like the captain's deploying LAV-4.”

Kaitlin clamped down on her emotions, glad that she didn't have to give the next set of orders. This, the very first shot to be fired—not counting the one that had downed the
Santa Fe
—was the critical moment in the operation. If the UNdies had their magic beam weapon mounted atop Tsiolkovsky's central peak, the Marines could expect an almost immediate counterbattery fire, one that might well turn the firing LAV into a puddle of bubbling, radioactive sludge.

Against that possibility, LAV-4 had been deliberately positioned hull down, her complement of Marines debarked and scattered across the crater rim. The other two LAVs had taken up positions to either side of LAV-4, their lasers locked onto the distant mountaintop.

The only man still aboard LAV-4 was First Platoon's Gunnery Sergeant George Massey, and he was a volunteer; if the enemy did have their secret weapon on top of the mountain, Massey would almost certainly be dead within the next few seconds.

As hard as manning the LAV in the face of that threat, Kaitlin thought, was giving the order to Massey to fire…and to invite immediate and deadly retaliation. Kaitlin wondered how Carmen Fuentes could do it.

She could hear the captain's voice over the combat channel. “Okay, George. Weapons free. You may fire when ready.”

There was no flash, no beam, no indication at all that LAV-4 had just loosed a fifty-megajoule burst of coherent light at the target, a dish antenna on a mast reaching above the mountaintop. The warning indicator switched off.

“Hit!” Hartwell exclaimed. “He zapped the mother!”

“Any response?” Kaitlin asked.

“Nothing. Not a thing!”

Kaitlin felt a surge of relief. Having to single someone out like that, ordering him, in effect, to be a target, was so damned cold; could she do it if she had to? She didn't want to know. A damned stupid attitude, she knew.
All
of them were expendable on this op.

And it wasn't over yet. The enemy weapon was still there, hidden. She wished they'd been able to rig some sort of teleoperated sensor aboard the
Santa Fe
to pinpoint where the UN shot had come from, but there simply hadn't been time—or the equipment to allow that precise a remote scan of enemy positions.

Most likely, the enemy antimatter weapon was mounted at the base of Tsiolkovsky, still below the horizon from the crater rim. The Marines were going to have to get closer.

On Hartwell's monitor, a trio of bright stars winked on.
“Uh-oh,” he said. “We are taking fire. But it's not the big gun.”

“What do you have?”

“Lasers. Megajoule range. Probably slaws.”

“The big gun must not be up there,” she said. “Open fire!”

Megajoule laser fire wouldn't penetrate the LAV's armor, at least, not right away, though there would be some armor loss with repeated hits, and a lucky shot might puncture a tire or fry delicate electronic optics.

“All units, keep firing!” Fuentes ordered. “I want that installation fried!”

All three LAVs joined in the long-range bombardment, along with those Marines outside armed with squad lasers. There was little indication that a battle was being fought, though once a boulder to the left of LAV-2 suddenly blossomed with an intolerably bright patch and a puff of vaporized rock. Several Marines crouched in the dust nearby rose and started moving back down the reverse slope, seeking better cover.

It was a one-sided battle, however, and in another few moments, the laser positions atop the distant mountain were no longer firing. Hartwell reported that the tower structure was no longer showing above the mountaintop, and that all radar and laser emissions from the central peak had ceased.

“Okay, Marines,” the captain's voice sounded over the combat channel. “Good work! Donaldson! Are your people ready?”

“Set to go, Captain!” Gunnery Sergeant Donaldson's baritone replied.

“Okay! Light the candle!”

In a display monitor on Hartwell's console, Kaitlin could see three space-suited Marines crouched in the dust on the crater rim, fifty meters to the south. They'd set up something that looked like a complicated vidcorder on a slender tripod, lens hanging down between the legs. There was a puff of dust as the device's solid-fuel motor fired, and the device rocketed swiftly and silently into the black Lunar sky, leaving the tripod behind.

“Let me know when you have signal acquisition,” she said.

Hartwell nodded inside his helmet. “Will do, Lieutenant. It's climbing…still in the clear. Eight kilometers. Ten…Fourteen…”

The small probe was serving a double purpose. As it gained altitude, curving back toward the west, it would soon clear the horizon with the
Doolittle
, a US Aerospace Force ship near L-5, a spot still well below the horizon from Tsiolkovsky; it was the
Doolittle
that had picked up word fourteen hours earlier that the RAG was safely down and had relayed the information to L-3.

As soon as the communications-relay probe rose above the horizon, it would be able to relay a second message to the
Doolittle
and on to the
Ranger
.

The second purpose, of course, was a bit more direct. If there were any remaining radar or laser sites on or near Tsiolkovsky's central peak—or if that killer antimatter cannon of theirs was unlimbered and ready just below the LAVs' horizon, the probe might well reveal the fact by becoming a sudden target. Its destruction might help the Marines pinpoint the AM cannon.

“I have contact with the
Doolittle
,” Hartwell said.

“Punch it.”

Hartwell pressed a key, transmitting a complete record of the RAG mission to date. The other LAVs also transmitted their logs.

It would help in the planning of the next assault, if this one came to grief.

There was no blaze of antimatter fire from the crater's center, and Kaitlin let herself relax…but only a bit. The critical portion of the RAG assault had just been deferred to later.

“Okay, everybody!” Fuentes said. “Saddle up! Get ready to roll! All drivers, check your fuel. This is the last chance you'll have to refuel!”

“Now for the hard part,” Kaitlin said to Hartwell. “Never thought I'd get to take part in a cavalry charge…across a hundred kilometers of open plain!”

PFC Jack Ramsey
USS
Ranger
2245 hours GMT

“Double-check those straps!” Captain Lee shouted, pulling himself along the aisle, from seat back to seat back. “We're boosting at six Gs…I repeat, six Gs, and if you get bounced out of your seats, it's going to ruin your whole day!”

“Hey, Captain!” someone called out. “What's the skinny?”

“We've got the word,” Lee replied, but addressing the entire compartment. “The
Doolittle
just relayed the go-ahead from the RAG. We're going in hot.”

Jack felt a cold shiver at that. “Going in hot” meant a hot LZ. Specifically, it meant the surface attack group hadn't yet neutralized the AM cannon. While that eventuality was supposed to have been anticipated by the mission planners, it was damned scary to think about flying into the mouth of a weapon that shot antimatter at you. For weeks, now, scuttlebutt throughout 1-SAG had been revolving tightly around the supposed UN superweapon, giving it planet-buster status. If the Marines already on the ground at Tsiolkovsky couldn't nail it in the next two hours, the USS
Ranger
was going to be flying into some serious shit.

He decided that it would be best if he didn't think about what was waiting for him on the Moon. Carefully, Jack checked the harness that held him snug against a thickly padded contour couch.
This
, he thought, was luxury indeed for a Marine. The hab module of the Ranger had been adapted from the passenger compartment of a Lockheed Ballistic 2020 commercial suborbital transport; all it lacked was a flight attendant or two to pass out snacks and offer pillows.

Six Gs? It sounded like the brass had opted for the fast route to Luna. This was going to be
fun
.

As Captain Lee continued to check the others, Jack pulled a connector feed from his PAD and plugged it into a receptacle in one of his armrests, then plugged in an
intercom jack from his suit. In another moment, the display screen on the seatback in front of him lit up, and Sam's attractive features looked out at him with a smile. “Hello, Jack” sounded in his helmet headset. “What would you like to do?”

“Hello, Sam,” he replied, using his suit's intercom channel. “Let's keep going through the code-break checklist.” That was a long list of different ways Sam might use to get through the target program's security barriers. The NSA had provided that list, he was told, a compilation of the Agency's long experience at code-breaking and gaining computer access. Like the list of possible passwords, the checklist was stored in a special one-hundred-terabyte external drive plugged into his PAD.