“But, sir. We don’t know—”
“You will tell them, General. We need that information. And we need Billaud. The possibility that the UN is running an AM project of their own merely makes the acquisition of that information even more imperative. I’m sorry, but I see no way around it.”
As the debate continued, Walker dithered for a moment over whether to stay at the podium or return to his seat. He decided on the latter, quietly walking around the table and resuming his seat. There was nothing more in the way of hard information to convey, and it was clear that the discussion had swept well beyond the parameters of his report.
He wondered, though, what the Marines would think about being sent into their objective blind…sent in without even knowing that they were blind.
LSCP-44, The Moon
0643 hours GMT
Kaitlin climbed up the ladder from the LSCP’s cockpit. It had been over an hour now since they’d filed aboard, and the mounting tension within the craft’s steel bulkheads was as thick as week-old bottled air. The cockpit was a cramped and claustrophobic space, wedged in among instrument consoles and all but filled by the side-by-side couches for the module’s pilot and the mission commander.
The right-hand seat was empty, and Kaitlin pulled herself into it. Lieutenant Chris Dow sat in the other seat, completing the prelaunch checklist.
“We’ve got clearance, Garry,” Dow told her. “We’re go for immediate liftoff.”
“About damned time! What did they say about the target?”
“Not a thing. Just, ‘Proceed with op.’”
“That’s it? Proceed with op? Nothing else?”
“Not a word. I guess we can assume the recon didn’t spot anything noteworthy.”
“Some updated images of the target would’ve been nice. Okay. How long to boost?”
“Ten minutes.” He flipped a row of switches on his main console. “Reactor is on-line, and I’m warming up the main thrusters now. He gestured out the narrow forward window, where a second LSCP was visible on the dusty regolith outside. “Gotta coordinate with Becky, of course. She’s on track for liftoff two minutes after us.”
“I’ll pass the word, then.”
He tapped the commo console. “You can plug in from here.”
“Thanks. I’d rather do it in person.”
Not that “in person” meant very much, when every Marine in her platoon was suited up anyway, with all orders and announcements coming in through the platoon ops channel. Still, she wanted her people to know her as a person, someone with them, and not as a disembodied voice on the IC.
Stepping off the ladder, she turned and faced the double row of waiting, space-suited Marines. “Ten minutes, people. The mission is go.”
“Ooh-rah!” sounded over her helmet headset. “We’re gonna kick some UNdie ass!”
“Let’s get it on!”
“So how about it, Lieutenant?” That was Kaminski’s voice. “They sending us after alien shit?”
“You have the same set of orders DLed on your PAD as I do, Kaminski,” she replied. “We’re looking for Dr. Billaud. And the suits are gonna want to see what we find at Picard. Any other questions?”
“Yeah, Lieutenant. Is it true this place is named after a spaceship captain in that old flat-TV epic?”
“As far as I know, Picard was a seventeenth-century astronomer,” she replied, laughing. “Accurately calculated the length of one degree of meridian on Earth, among other things. Anything else? Okay. Next stop, Picard!”
Eight minutes later, in a silent spray of billowing, Lunar dust, the LSCP bug lifted into the black Lunar sky.
FOUR
WEDNESDAY, 9 APRIL 2042
LSCP-44, Call sign Raven
Mare Crisium, The Moon
0905 hours GMT
A lobber hop on the Moon was nowhere near as violent as the liftoff from Vandenberg had been—or even the mildly bone-rattling three-G boost from LEO into trans-Lunar injection. The LSCP’s main engine was a Westinghouse-Lockheed NTR that superheated water into a high-speed plasma. Thin and sun-hot, the plasma was invisible—no rocket blasts or licking flames—and constant, providing a slow but steady shove that lofted the bug into a low, Lunar suborbital path. Precisely controlled in short bursts, the jets allowed the bugs to skim the cratered, gray landscape at an altitude of less than three kilometers, terrain-hugging to avoid enemy radar. The acceleration was gentle, punctuated from time to time by another nudge from the main thrusters, or the slighter, more unpredictable bumps from the attitude-control jets.
Kaitlin stood in the meter-wide space just behind and to the right of the pilot’s acceleration couch, stooping to watch the smoothly sculpted landscape unfold ahead through the bug’s angular, greenhouse canopy, comparing the view from time to time with the various computer graphics and schematics displayed on the main console’s monitors. At Fra Mauro, the sun had been almost overhead, and the terrain had been silver-gray. Here, with the sun just above the western horizon at their backs, the regolith had taken on a redder, warmer appearance, one where long shadows made every hollow and depression, every rock and boulder and cliff face stand out in diamond-hard relief.
“We’re coming up on the Crisium Ringwall,” Dow said. “Over the top, and then we’ll see if they’re watching for us.” He reached out and tapped a readout on a console on the right side of the cockpit with a forefinger. “You might keep your eye on this one. Threat warning.”
“Roger that,” Kaitlin replied. Half an hour before, they’d drifted silently through the skies of the Mare Tranquillitatus, just north of Tranquillity Base, the old Apollo 11 landing site. Someday, she imagined, the place would be a museum, but there was nothing there now but the LEM’s descent module, some scientific instruments and mission castoffs, and a launch-toppled American flag.
Now, they’d reached the eastern shores of the Sea of Tranquillity, and the rugged highlands separating the Mare Tranquillitatus from the Mare Crisium rose ahead, brilliant in the long-setting sun. If the UN had established a radar watch from Picard, it would pick them up as they cleared the mountaintops.
“So, your dad ever talk much about what he saw out on Mars?” Dow asked. He turned his head inside his helmet, to peer up at her through the side of the visor. The question seemed purely conversational, but there was an edge behind the words that Kaitlin had come to recognize.
“Quite a bit, actually,” she said. “But I don’t think he saw anything you haven’t heard about already on the newsnet.”
“Well, I was just wondering if there was anything else. You know, stuff the government was covering up.”
“If there was, I could hardly tell you about it now, could I?” She let the reply dangle a bit of mystery for Dow. “Or, if I did—”
He finished the old joke’s punch line for her. “You would have to kill me, yeah, yeah.”
She laughed. The LSCP pilot was fun, smart, and pleasant, and she enjoyed flirting with him. They’d talked about alien artifacts on the trip out from Earth a couple of times, and he’d been so curious about what her father had seen at Cydonia that she’d started having entirely too much fun teasing him.
“I guess the two things everyone’s talking about back on Earth are the war and the Builders,” he said, using the popular term coined to describe the unknown beings who’d carved the immense and still enigmatic monuments on the Cydonian plain on Mars and, apparently, tampered to some extent with the genetic makeup of an unprepossessing