Luna Marine (8 page)

“Man down!” someone yelled over the platoon channel. “Man down! Corpsman!”

“We can't slug it out with them for long,” Kaitlin said. “They've got too much firepower.” She pressed the button on the left forearm of her suit, opening the com channel to Alfa's Second Platoon. “Falcon! Falcon! This is Raven. Do you copy, over?”

“Raven, this is Falcon,” Captain Lee's voice came back immediately. “Go ahead.”

“We've got a situation here, Captain. Bravo First is pinned down at the base under heavy fire, their bug shot to hell. We're on the crater rim eight klicks to the west, also taking heavy fire. Enemy is present in force, repeat, in force.”

She realized that her voice had been steadily climbing in pitch as she spoke. She stopped, drew a deep breath, and tried to bring her voice back under control. Another shoulder-launched missile streaked up out of the crater,
angling almost straight toward her before it whipped low overhead. She crouched low as the blast went off somewhere at her back.

“It looks as though the enemy is preparing to rush First Platoon,” she continued. “We need help, fast. Can you comply, over?”

“Raven, Falcon. We're about five minutes out, still over the Mare Tranquillitatus. Can you hold that long, over?”

“Falcon, Raven. Looks like we'll have to, doesn't it? Come as fast as you can. Raven out.”

“On our way, Raven. Falcon out.”

Five minutes…an eternity in combat.

The UN troops were concentrating their fire on First Platoon, and, despite the fire they were taking from the crater rim, it was clear they were going to try a charge, probably within the next minute or two. Kaitlin knew that she had just two choices…to sit up here on her ass and watch half of her rifle company be overrun, or…

She changed channels on her com. “Listen up, everybody! This is Garroway! Second Squad! Hold your positions. Maintain fire on the enemy. First Squad! Back to the bug, on the double! Get into the airlock, and stay there! Lieutenant Dow! Are you on the line?”

“Affirmative, Lieutenant. I'm here.”

“Warm up the fire and stand by to boost. We're going on a little hop.”

“Reactor coming up. Pressure okay. We can bounce in two minutes.”

“Make it a minute thirty.”

“Whatcha got in mind, Lieutenant?” Yates asked.

“Making it all or nothing, Gunny. The captain is going to get wiped off the map if we don't break the UNdies' attack.”

“Roger that, Lieutenant. Okay, Marines! Hustle! Hustle! I wanna see nothing but amphibious green blurs!” They started trotting back toward the LSCP, as other Marines closed in from different directions, crowding up the debarkation ramp and into the craft's airlock.

“If I may suggest, ma'am,” Yates said, pausing at the
foot of the ramp, “you should stay here and direct the covering fire.”

“Negative, Gunny. If I'm about to pull something stupid, I want to be there to take the blame.”

She heard the grin. “Understood, Lieutenant. Understood.”

Together, they hurried up the ramp and squeezed through into the airlock, where First Squad was waiting.

Seventy seconds later, Dow radioed a crisp warning, then Kaitlin's knees almost gave way as the LSCP boosted skyward from the crater rim.

Forza di Intervento Rapido
Picard Base, The Moon
0921 hours GMT

Capitano
Arnaldo Tessitore, of the FIR's
Forza Spazia
rose from behind the shelter of the excavation he'd been crouching in, holding his imager to his visor. The second enemy landing craft was rising from its hiding place, a clear and easy target less than eight and a half kilometers away. “Zhang!” he shouted. “Target…above the crater rim!”

“I have, Captain,” the PRC lieutenant replied in his thickly accented Italian. Tessitore listened as Zhang sing-songed a barrage of orders in Mandarin to the Chinese soldiers who'd just arrived at Picard aboard the
Millénium
, and wished again the mission planners back in Geneva had made up their Lunar Expeditionary Force out of troops from a single country. Too many nationalities, too many languages might have been great for the public image of a truly
United
Nations, but it guaranteed confusion and misunderstanding.

Two PRC troops shouldering massive Type 80 launchers rose to their feet, loosing their missiles in almost the same silent instant of flame. One of the men pitched backward a second later, freezing vapor spilling from a black-ringed hole low and in the center of his suit's cuirass, a victim of the all-too-deadly and accurate laser fire from
the nearby trenches; the shot was too late to stop the launch, however. Twin stars, bright as worklights, zig-zagged away toward the rising spacecraft.

Long before the missiles could hit their target, however, the American craft had vanished below the crater rim, moving under full thrust back toward the west.

Tessitore blinked, lowering the imager. They were
retreating
, flying back the way they'd come! The missiles, their radar lock broken, detonated in a pair of flashes against the crater rim.

Had that last laser shot really come from the trenches near the crashed ship? Or had it come from higher up and to the left, from the crater rim? No…it must have been from the crashed vehicle. The enemy wouldn't have abandoned a laser team up on that ridge, with only their backpack PLSS units to keep them breathing.

“Captain. We should use chance! Hit enemy now!”

“
Affermativo, Tenente
.” He'd been holding off, hoping to break the enemy with the sheer overwhelming force of massed firepower from prepared positions, or wait for their air supplies to give out while his own troops recharged, a few at a time, in the habs, or, at worst, to work forward through the labyrinth of trenches…but Zhang was right. Enemy reinforcements might be on the way, and they had to strike
now
, before the battle spread out of his control. The bombardment of the past several minutes must have the enemy troops dazed and completely disorganized. One quick, sudden rush, and it would all be over. “Go! Go!”

“
Zou! Zou
!” Zhang yelled. “
Kuai! Qianjin
!”

To either side of Tessitore's position, dozens of suited figures rose from the trenches and the shelter of heavy equipment scattered across the crater-floor site; all wore black space helmets, instead of the usual UN light blue, and each wore the bright red arm patch marking them as members of the
Hangkong Tuji Budui
, the PRC's elite Air/ Space Assault Force. “San Marcos!” Tessitore called, summoning his own FIR troops by the name of their parent regiment, the San Marco Marines. “Forward!”

He scrambled up out of the excavation, then hesitated as his own troops rose from hiding all about him. He drew
in a deep breath, then waved his Beretta M-31 assault rifle above his head. “
Il più forte
!” he shouted. That battle cry of the San Marco Marines had first been spoken by Gabriele D'Annunzio, speaking of the regiment's defense of the Cortelazzo Bridgehead in 1917. “The strongest!”

Still waving the rifle, he started lumbering toward the enemy position, marked by the crumpled, ice-and-vapor-wreathed shape of their crashed lander a hundred meters away. His suit was clumsy and made running difficult, but once he got moving, it was mostly a matter of guiding himself under its inertia. He reached a trench and sailed across, skimming above a surface of fine, gray powder; a Chinese soldier to his right suddenly folded over but kept drifting forward for several meters before he finally hit the ground in an explosion of dust and cartwheeling legs and arms. Things—
people
—fell
slowly
in the Moon's one-sixth gravity, and the wild charge held the slow-motion quality of a dream.

His heart pounding with exertion and fear, Tessitore kept bounding ahead, unable to swerve left or right or to stop, moving on sheer inertia, though the terror that at any moment his suit or—far worse!—his helmet visor would be breached, emptying his air into space, hammered at his brain. Enemy troops were rising ahead, aiming their assault rifles, and more UN troops were falling. Perhaps it would have been better, after all, to have tried working ahead through the trenches…but, no, that would have taken too long and raised the risk of having his troops pinned down as badly as the enemy was now. No, this was better.
One quick rush…One quick rush
…

And then still more Chinese and Italian troops were falling; one of his men, the red-and-gold emblem of the San Marco Marines displayed on his arm, suddenly stumbled as his backpack PLSS exploded in whirling fragments and fast-freezing vapor. That shot had come from
behind
….

He bounced to a stop, taking several long, dust-plowing steps to slow, turning in place as he came to a halt. Behind them, almost directly over the point where he'd started the charge, an American spacecraft, an ugly, angular, spindle-legged contraption, was drifting out of a black sky, de
scending gently toward a landing. A space-suited figure was visible in the open airlock; dust blasted from beneath the settling lander as plasma thrusters chewed into regolith.

“San Marcos!” he shouted over the regiment's channel. “Take cover! Take cover!”

Other UN troops were noticing the incoming spacecraft now, stopping in their tracks, jumping into nearby trenches. A few dropped their weapons and raised their hands, surrendering.

The Chinese troops, Tessitore noted, continuing their blind charge, were almost to the American lines now, but there were far fewer of them than before. Zhang had started the battle with thirty-two men; fewer than ten were still on their feet as they sprinted the last few meters to grapple with the enemy.

The landing craft settled to the Lunar surface with a gentle bobbing motion of its suspension. Americans were leaping from the already open airlock, some rushing toward the shattered knot of UN troops, others moving toward the habs.

That last decided Tessitore. If the Americans seized the habitats—and there was nothing at all now standing in their way—the UN troops outside would either have to surrender or face death by suffocation as their air supplies gave out. He tossed his Beretta aside and raised his hands.

An American was approaching him, ATAR leveled, suit reflecting the grays and blacks of his surroundings in oddly shifting patterns of light and dark. As the soldier came closer, Tessitore was rocked by two startling revelations. The first was that the suited figure approaching him was a
girl
…her blond hair closely framing her face behind her visor. The second was the emblem painted next to the name tag affixed to the front of her suit. The name tag spelled
GARROWAY
in stenciled letters, but it was the emblem that startled Tessitore more: a globe and anchor, the badge of the United States Marine Corps.

His hands went up higher. “Lebanon!” he shouted, even though he knew she could not hear. “Sudan! Brazil!”

LSCP-44, Call sign Raven
Picard Base, The Moon
0924 hours GMT

Kaitlin held her ATAR pointed at the man's chest, her eyes widening as she saw the crest affixed to his left breast and his sleeve—a gold lion on a distinctive red backing. Until this moment, she'd not known that the enemy included elements of the San Marco Marines. His mouth was moving; he was trying to tell her something.

With one hand, she stabbed the key on her common controls that set up a channel search. A moment later, she heard a burst of Italian, and the words “Lebanon! Sudan! Brazil!”

“San Marco,” she said. “The Strongest.” What was the Italian phrase? She'd learned it in OCS. “
Il più forte
!”

Part of every Marine officer's training was a survey of the other Marine forces of the world, of the actions they'd taken part in, of the traditions and battle honors they carried. The San Marcos were no exception. The Italian Marines had served together with the US Marines on three separate occasions: in the Lebanon peacekeeping operation of 1983, in the Sudan in 1992 to 1993, and in the Brazilian Incursion of 2029.

“
Sì
,” she said, straining her grasp of Italian to the limit. “
Bene
.”

Her prisoner straightened up, then rendered a crisp salute. Kaitlin returned the honor. Elsewhere across the desolate and dusty field, other troops, Chinese and Italian—but so very few!—were dropping their weapons and raising their hands as the US Marines came out of the trenches and began herding them together. She watched, thoughtful, as a Marine lance corporal arrived to take her prisoner away, leading him back toward the habs. They'd fought hard, these Italian Marines. The battle here had been a close-run thing.

Something caught her eye in the dusty floor of a trench close by. Lightly, she hopped into the excavation, reached down, and brushed away at something protruding from the hard-packed powder.

It looked like…gold.

It
was
gold, gold worked into a smooth and highly polished figurine perhaps ten centimeters tall…a standing human woman with arms outstretched, nude save for bracelets, anklets, and a necklace of some kind. And…was that
writing
on the base?

Standing, the figurine in her gloved hands, Kaitlin raised her eyes to the plain around her, seeing it, really seeing it for the first time. Until this moment, the Picard base had been a tactical exercise; even when she'd given the orders to Dow to fly away from the crater, descend, then skim the surface back and around to approach the base from another direction, she'd been thinking of this as a problem in tactics, of ground and cover and fields of fire. But now that the battle was over, what, exactly, had they won?

Archeologists had laid out these trenches; the larger excavations had been marked off into large grids with pegs and white string—most of which had been trampled in the fighting. An archeological dig…with golden statues of human women…on the Moon.