Luna Marine (34 page)

Bosnivic dropped into the empty seat beside him and started strapping in. “Hey, Flash! Got your girlfriend to play with, I see!” he said on the platoon channel.

“Screw you, Bos,” Jack said amiably. Still, he had to suppress a small start of anger. Bosnivic, like most of the Marines he knew, loved the idea of a sex-goddess PAD agent; what they didn't know, or didn't understand, was that Jack himself no longer thought about Sam
that
way. The last time he'd seen her nude was that afternoon in Colonel Bradley's office. After that, he'd had Sam herself go through her own code, line by line, finding and deleting every possible trigger command that would have her remove her clothing. For one thing, that saved some space in the PAD's main storage. For another, it was a lot easier now for him to relate to Sam as a coworker—hell, even as another Marine—instead of as some horny adolescent's wet dream.

It was not an attitude he knew how to talk about with his fellow Marines, however.

“Twenty bucks says my nutcracker beats yours,” Bosnivic said. “Yours is prettier than mine, but mine is NSA-issue, and it kicks ass.”

Bosnivic and Corporal Diane Dillon each had slightly different versions of the standard National Security Agency nutcracker. The idea was to try all three, the NSA programs and Jack's modified agent, tripling, in theory,
the chances of breaking the UN security code.

“You're on,” Jack said. “Now go away and let me work.”

“Ha! I can tell my victim's worried already!”

“All hands,” Captain Lee's voice sounded over the command channel. “Cut the chatter. Fifteen seconds to boost!”

Quietly, Jack continued to work with Sam using the intercom link; as long as he wasn't broadcasting over an open channel, he could talk. He was concerned about Sam's ability to pick up on what might be happening in the target program on the farside of a security barrier. Though everyone was assuming that the UN security wall would be a simple one, there were some nasty twists they could put up if they wanted to—like a counter that ticked off failed attempts and did something nasty after a set number, like wipe the hard drive.

Or detonate an explosive charge. In a spacecraft powered by antimatter,
that
trick ought to be very easy to arrange.

Weight returned.

The acceleration was gentle at first, a hard nudge that pressed Jack back into his couch with what felt like his normal weight of about seventy-five kilos. He wished the hab module had windows so he could see out; he would have liked to watch the L-3 station falling away astern, or Earth growing larger ahead.

His weight increased.

All of the Marines assigned to this part of the mission had pulled plenty of practice time in the big centrifuge at Quantico. He knew he could take six Gs for a couple of hours, though the experience had left him bruised and sore afterward. But he could
do
it.

The aisle that the captain had been moving along earlier now looked like a wall; down was toward the back of his seat, and he was lying on that seat with his knees in the air and Sam's face hanging above him. He guessed they were pulling about three gravities now, the same acceleration developed by a Zeus II during its launch from Earth. It wasn't too bad; certainly, it didn't feel like he now
weighed 225 kilos. He just felt a bit, well,
heavy
, was all, like someone was sitting in his lap.

“We are now at one G,” Captain Lee's voice said over the platoon channel. “I imagine this is a bit of a shock after three days of zero G! Better brace yourselves. From here on out, this is going to get rough. Hang on to your eyeballs!”

And then the pressure grew swiftly very bad indeed….

SUNDAY
, 9
NOVEMBER
2040

Général de Brigade Paul-Armand
Larouche
UNS
Guerrière,
Tsiolkovsky Base
2357 hours GMT

Général
Larouche clasped his hands at his back as he stared at the big bridge monitor. He'd been expecting an attack for a long time…and even forewarned, there'd been pathetically little that he could do to prepare. At least three enemy wheeled vehicles were approaching across the crater plain from the west, just visible, now, to the ship's radar. That couldn't be the entirety of the enemy force; they would not be moving against Tsiolkovsky now unless they felt themselves ready.

The transport downed fourteen hours ago must have been part of a larger invasion fleet, setting down these vehicles somewhere to the west and making the final approach on the surface, where the antimatter weapon couldn't reach them. Larouche had warned his superiors of the possibility of an overland assault, but his reports had been ignored.

Fools. Idiots and fools
!

“Colonel d'André?” he said, turning slightly. “Is
Shuhadaku
still on-line?” The name was still clumsy in his mouth. He'd been told that it was a Sumerian phrase that meant something like “Supreme Strong Bright Weapon,” as good a description as any he'd heard for the terrifying power of the antimatter beam.

“Yes, my General,” d'André replied. “Antimatter re
actor on-line, conventional nuclear plant on-line at eighty percent.” When Larouche did not reply immediately, d'André added, “Shall we open fire on the targets approaching from the west, sir?”

Larouche gestured at the screen. “The image is being relayed from a remote camera on the mountain,” he said. “Unfortunately, the central peak is blocking our fire.”

“We have ground troops outside, sir,” d'André said. “They can engage at any time.”

“No. Save them.” At a range of over ninety kilometers, the enemy had swept twelve men armed with H&K Laserkarabiner LK-36 lasers from the peak in something less than forty seconds. It would serve no purpose to waste more men firing at a target they could not stop.

But there would be a part for them to play soon, if he kept them in reserve now.

In fact, the UN position at Tsiolkovsky was now in serious trouble. With the loss of their main radar, UN forces had lost both their primary deep-space eyes, and the fire control for the Shuhadaku system. That meant that the enemy ground vehicles could get very close indeed before the antimatter cannon could be turned against them; worse, as soon as the beam weapon was fired at one of the enemy vehicles, the others would know
exactly
where to fire to knock Shuhadaku out of operation.

If Larouche wanted to save the antimatter weapon for the main American assault, which he was sure was yet to come, he would have to kill the ground vehicles by more conventional means.

“There appear to be only three enemy vehicles, sir,” d'André reported. “There must be more of them, some-where.”

“There must be, indeed,” Larouche replied. He sighed. “We are about to reap the yield of our leaders' hubris, my friend.”

“Sir?”

“Never mind.” Quietly, he added, “Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord…have mercy.”

Born and raised in the tiny village of Echallon, high in the mountains not far from Geneva and the Swiss border,
Paul-Armand Larouche had wanted to be a priest. He'd already been attending the seminary at Bourg-en-Bresse for a year when his father, then a colonel in the French Army, had ordered him to transfer to St. Michael's Military Academy or be cut off from the family.

The battle with his father had been raging for five years already by that time, and Paul-Armand thought he'd had what it took to outstubborn the man, who seemed obsessed with France's past militant glories and her future as leader of the European Union, and through the EU, the United Nations. In the end, the old man had won.

His father had died in 2023, but by that time Paul-Armand's military career had been firmly set. He'd married, settled down as much as any military man could do so, and continued up the rungs of advancement and honor.

But he still knew, deep in his heart, that he would have been happier as a parish priest in some small town in his beloved mountains of Jura and Ain. Especially now, when he could muster no sympathy, no understanding at all for his superiors' decision.

Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison. Kyrie eleison
.

It was said that the great twentieth-century Japanese admiral, Isoroku Yamoto, had warned that the Americans were above all a just people who honored justice and fair play. If the attack at Pearl Harbor was not completely successful, he'd warned, then the Japanese Empire would have succeeded only in waking a sleeping giant and filling him with terrible resolve.

So far as Larouche was concerned, France and the UN had done just that in this century, first by trying to force the issue of independence for the Southwestern United States, then by attempting to take over the American archeological finds on Mars, and finally, and most unforgivably, by trying to end a war that never should have begun by dropping an asteroid into the American heartland. There would be, there
could
be no forgiveness now from the Americans, not unless they were completely exterminated…or the UN threat arrayed against them crushed for all time.

And Larouche did not believe the Americans
could
be
exterminated, not by any force or combination of forces that could now be brought to bear on them.

The UN's last chance had been the AM warship
Guerrière
.

If the
Guerrière
could have been made fully operational, she would have been a weapon of overwhelming, of devastating power;
Guerrière
alone, armed with her positron main weapon, could have ended all American space operations and obliterated her cities one by one. Sooner or later, the Americans would have been forced to surrender, for they would have been unable to touch a warship of
Guerrière
's capabilities.

But, inevitably, it hadn't been that simple. The problem was the damned alien technology.

The basic physics for an antimatter-powered space drive had been understood for years. Inject a very small amount of antimatter into a large volume of water; the annihilation of a small part of that mass turned the remaining water into plasma at extraordinarily high temperatures, which could be channeled aft as a highly efficient drive.

Ordinary plasma drives worked the same way, except that the water was either heated first in a liquid-core nuclear reactor or channeled through layers of corrugated plutonium. Either way, the water was heated to plasma to provide thrust. The difference was one of degree…or, rather, of
degrees
. The antimatter drive produced a much hotter and more energetic plasma jet than a liquid-core reactor; more, it could
sustain
high thrust for days or weeks at a time, allowing steady acceleration at one G or more.
Guerrière
, when she was fully operational, would be able to fly to Mars in a few days; the skies would be opened, and at long last the bounty of the solar system would be free for the taking.

Unfortunately, the Directorate of Science had decided to use the wreckage found at Picard as a kind of shortcut. The ancient, spacefaring An, evidently, had known how to produce antimatter in a steady, constant, and powerful stream; the antimatter generator of one of their freighters had been recovered intact by Billaud's team of archeologists and transported to the growing French base at Tsiol
kovsky. A French, German, and Chinese team had attempted to reverse-engineer the technology.

Larouche smiled at the thought, though there was very little good humor there. Half a century ago, there'd been wild rumors that the Americans had recovered alien space-craft from various crashes—or even as gifts from extraterrestrial visitors—and were trying to reverse-engineer them at a secret base in the Nevada desert. It was possible that the rumored cover-up by the US government in the second half of the twentieth century had been responsible, in part, for the paranoid fear within the UN that the Americans were going to keep recovered technology found at Cydonia, on Mars, for themselves…a fear that had led, at least in part, to the current war.

Larouche's own experiences with back-engineering alien technology had convinced him that those old stories could not possibly have been true. Figuring out how something worked and going back to figure out how it was made was an effective tool only when the technologies more or less matched.
Merde
! Could Leonardo da Vinci, brilliant as he was, have reverse-engineered a television wall screen if a time traveler had presented him one as a gift? Could he have discovered the science and engineering behind generating and propagating radio waves, behind constructing cameras, behind encoding and decoding transmissions, behind all of the myriad sciences and technologies discovered and developed from the eighteenth century onward that made modern, flatscreen digital displays possible?

Da Vinci wouldn't even have been able to understand the plastic of the wall screen's display.

The alien technology recovered on the Moon so far was at least five centuries ahead of current terrestrial understanding of physics, engineering, materials processing, and control technologies. Reverse-engineering meant figuring out how to build not only the device in question, but how to build the tools that made the tools that made the tools that made the device…as well as principles of physics and engineering that were balanced one atop another in a terribly unsteady tower of innovation. Less than a century
and a half had elapsed between the difference engine and silicon chips; there were elements of recovered An technology at least as strange to the UN engineering team as a PAD would have been to Charles Babbage. It was going to be decades more, perhaps centuries, before the fragments of An technology were understood within the context of human science. Merely knowing that something was possible was rarely enough to transform possibility into reality.