aluminum hull was so thin in places that a clumsily dropped tool could puncture it…and the more massively constructed LSCP wasn’t that much better. If one of the two craft could maneuver above the other, the jet of hot, charged particles from its ventral thrusters would become a formidable short-range weapon.
The UN hopper was climbing fast now, rising above the bug as the bug descended. As the range closed to within thirty meters, Kaitlin could see the airlock door on the hopper just beneath its cockpit windows; the door was open and a space-suited figure was leaning out, a figure wearing a bright blue UN helmet and aiming a rifle. She didn’t see a muzzle flash, but she thought she felt a vibration, a dull thud from somewhere beneath her feet.
“We’re under fire,” she warned.
“I see him.” Dow hit the main ventral thruster for a two-second burst, and Kaitlin felt her knees sag with the acceleration. The bug gained the altitude advantage on the hopper. A moment later, Dow angled the LSCP over, nose down, and fired again, banking slightly with the port thrusters to send the ungainly bug drifting across and above the UN hopper’s flight path.
There was no time for calculations or pulling up numbers or scenarios on the computer. The entire maneuver was strictly seat-of-the-pants, executed within the space of five seconds. As the bug passed ten meters above the hopper, Dow brought the ungainly craft’s nose up and fired the main thrusters again.
They couldn’t see whether the invisible burst of hot plasma was on target or not, but as the bug rotated slowly at Dow’s practiced touch, the other vehicle came into view a second later. Together, wordlessly, they watched as the hopper continued drifting down toward the surface, rushing to meet its own shadow…and then the two merged in a sudden, silent burst of Lunar dust. The hopper crumpled and rolled, cartwheeling in slow-motion bounds low across the surface, hurling up great, arcing jets of dust with each impact. As it came to rest, a blurring cloud of dust enveloped the wreckage, settling with agonizing slowness.
Kaitlin dropped a gloved hand on Lieutenant Dow’s shoulder. “Congratulations, Lieutenant. I think you just scored the first shoot-down of an enemy craft on the Moon.”
“Four more and I’m an ace,” Dow replied. He shook his head. “Don’t think I’d care to try that again, though.” Holding the stick in his left hand, he punched in a series of commands with his right, firing port and starboard attitude jets that thumped and bumped through the hull and against Kaitlin’s boots. The bug descended swiftly, narrowly missing a tumble of huge, gray boulders before the view was obscured by a cloud of rising dust, and the landing pads settled with a bump and a jar into the hard-packed regolith.
“Contact light!” Dow called, reaching out to flip down a row of switches. “Thrusters off and safed. Reactor to standby. You’re clear to debark.”
“Right.” She keyed the platoon channel. “Gunny Yates? We’re down. Move ’em out!”
“Copy that, Lieutenant. All right, Marines, you heard the lieutenant! We’re moving!”
LSCP-44, Call sign Raven
Picard Ringwall, The Moon
0914 hours GMT
Frank Kaminski brought his ATAR to his chest, waiting in the dark and close-packed confines of the airlock as the chamber’s atmosphere bled away. A winking red light flicked green, then the outer door swung slowly open, flooding the airlock with silvery light.
“Hit the beach, Marines!” Yates shouted over the platoon channel. “Go! Go! Go!”
He crowded ahead close behind Lance Corporal Nardelli, feeling the vibrations through his boots as the file pounded down the metal grating that served as a debarkation ramp. The regolith gave beneath his feet with a crunch felt rather than heard, like thin, crusty snow; directly ahead, the sun blazed above the shadowed western cliffs of Crisium, beneath the slender, just-visible blue-and-silver bow of a crescent Earth.
As at Fra Mauro, he felt again the mingled feelings of awe and desolation. There were no stars visible in the side of the sky near the sun, but if he turned away and looked up, an icy scattering of stars was just visible above the eastern horizon. The crater rim stretched away to either side, to north and south; with nothing but black sky and red-gray hills as smooth as earthly sand dunes as measures of scale, he felt bug-small, tiny and exposed, as he followed the other Marines across the surface.
“Jeez, what happened there?” someone called. “Got a crashed bug, here. South, fifty meters.”
“That’s a UN hopper, and we just shot it down,” the lieutenant’s voice replied. “Watch it. They may have left troops on the ground.”
“We’ll check it, Lieutenant,” Yates replied. “Okay! First Squad, check the hopper. Second Squad, deploy in defense perimeter. Let’s move it, Marines!”
Trotting easily in long, bounding strides that quickly slid into a kind of kangaroo hop-and-skip, Kaminski and the others in his squad scuffed and bounced their way up a shallow slope to the spot where the UN hopper, its thin hull crumpled and torn, lay upside down. A space-suited body, a man in a blue UN helmet, lay sprawled in his back nearby. His face, just visible through a blackened, chipped visor, was horribly blistered, as though his skin had been hit by a blowtorch. The name stenciled on a strip of cloth attached to his suit read LECLERC. Kaminski wondered who the man was…and if he had a family waiting for him back on Earth.
“What happened to him?” Ahearn asked.
“Didn’t you feel us bouncing around before we landed?” Kaminski replied. “I think the lieutenant fried ’em by hitting ’em with the bug’s main jets.”
“Yeah? Man, that’s doin’ it the hard way!”
He didn’t answer. He was thinking about something he’d read once, as a kid, about how air-to-air combat had begun when pilots on both sides, flying cloth-and-wood-frame biplanes over France in the First World War, had begun carrying pistols with them on reconnaissance flights and exchanging shots with enemy fliers. Pistols had led to machine guns…and ultimately radar-homing missiles and airborne lasers. He wondered if they were witness to a dawn of a new and similar type of warfare.
There wasn’t time to think much about history, though. A squad sweep through the area turned up bits of scrap and wreckage knocked from the UN hopper, and a portable radar unit mounted on a tripod at the top of a low hill. The footprints scuffed and stamped into the dust showed where UN troops had set the radar up only moments earlier. After a careful check for booby traps, two of the Marines began dismantling the unit; Kaminski took the moment’s respite to turn his back on Earth and the sun and stare down into the crater bowl below them.
The bottom of the crater was night black, but enough light was scattering off the crater rim to provide a little illumination. In fact, though, the lights of the UN base shone like a tightly packed constellation of brilliant stars on the crater’s floor, only a few kilometers away. Yates was standing on the hill crest a few meters away, pressing the rubber-ringed facepiece of a photomultiplier magnifier to his visor. He was studying the layout of the UN base, the bulky length of his Wyvern resting in the dust by his feet.
Kaminski dropped the reload case he was humping in the dust nearby. “Hey, Gunny. Can I have a look?”
Yates handed him the electronic imager. Kaminski raised the facepiece, positioning the small, rectangular screen against his visor. A tiny IR laser built into the optics gave the range to target as 8.34 kilometers; in the pale green glow of the photomultiplier optics, he could penetrate the night shadows easily.
The Picard base consisted of several squat, upright, cylindrical habs and not much more besides the worklights and a scattering of vacuum-rigged bulldozers and trench-diggers. Not far away were several more lobbers, plus a larger, sleeker shape, an arrowhead of stealth-jet black, sitting erect on quad-frame landing jacks.
Closer, between the habs and the crater’s western slope, the ground had been carved and plowed in a rectilinear patchwork of trenches connecting several deep, square-sided pits. It was, Kaminski thought, obviously an archeological dig of