He snorted, the noise a startling hiss over the helmet com system. “Curious? Yeah, I guess that’s one word for it. My family back home, my mom and both dads and my sister, they’ve all been after me about nothing but the Builders for weeks now. And when word leaked that there might be Builder stuff on the Moon, and that that was where I was going, well.”
“They members of any of these new religions popping up?”
“Nah. At least, I don’t think so. Did…did your dad get to see the Display Chamber?”
“Yes,” she said. “He went inside once with David Alexander—that’s one of the archeologists who was with him at the site. He hasn’t talked about it much, though. Wish I could see it in person. They say the tapes they’ve been playing over the Net don’t do the real thing justice.”
“Yeah. Well, maybe we’ll find another Chamber at Picard. This Billaud character must be working on something pretty big.”
The mountains were rising rapidly to meet the bug, their shadow now a misshapen black spider rippling up the slope ahead as though to escape them. The hillsides facing the sun were so bright; Kaitlin had heard somewhere that the actual color of moonrock and regolith was dark, darker, in fact, than coal…but that it appeared bright in contrast to the empty sky around it. She found such facts counterintuitive, however. It looked as bright as any white beach sand she’d ever seen. Dow gave another gentle tap to the thrusters, and the bug drifted higher, easily clearing the age-eroded crest of the slope.
The threat warning LED lit up in a flashing constellation of red.
“We’re being painted,” she said. The words were calm, unemotional, but suddenly her heart was pounding inside her chest. “Looks like traffic-control radar.”
“I see it. Maybe they’ll lose us against the mountains.”
The bug was dropping again, falling abruptly into shadow as it descended the inner face of the Crisium Ringwall. Ahead, the Mare Crisium stretched away clear to the black shadow of the terminator, flat and nearly featureless, the surface far darker than the sun-dazzled highlands had been. A large crater, flattened into a deeply shadowed oval by perspective, lay almost directly ahead.
“Picard,” Dow said, checking his displays. “Bang on target.”
The warning LEDs continued to show a strong radar signal coming from the crater ahead, though the mountains behind them might well be masking them from detection. Dow gentled the controls, smoothing and slowing the bug’s descent with several rapid-fire bursts from the attitude-control thrusters.
“Better let your Marines know we’re almost there,” he said. The oval of Picard was growing larger second by second, and also flatter, until all that was visible was a sunlit smear of smooth-shaped mountains, the crater’s ringwall extending above the surface of the darker basaltic sea. The LSCP had descended to within two hundred meters of the mare’s surface, below the top of the crater rim. Kaitlin approved. If the radar was coming from a grounded ship or lobber inside the crater basin, they should have just dropped below its horizon.
The threat indicator stayed on, however. That suggested that someone was watching them from the crater rim. It also suggested that that someone was waiting for them, waiting and ready for their arrival.
“Heads up, Marines,” she called over the platoon channel. “Target in sight. It looks like they see us coming, so be ready to unstrap and bounce as soon as I give the word.”
Dow hit the main thrusters again, dropping the craft’s nose to accelerate toward the target. Kaitlin found herself twisting her body so that she could peer up through her helmet visor at the rimwall mountains as they filled the cockpit’s forward window. She knew she ought to be watching the graphic displays instead—those carried more information than the naked-eye view out the bow of the LSCP—but she found herself wrestling with the terribly human urge to see the threat directly, instead of as it was implied by the craft’s electronics. Additional red LED readouts were winking on now, indicating other radar transmitters joining the first.
“I think—” she said, then stopped. A dazzling star appeared on the mountaintop, winking on, then off with the suddenness of a camera’s strobe.
“Did you see that?” Dow asked. Apparently, he preferred looking with his eyes instead of electronics as well.
“Sure did. There…to the right a bit.”
“Your call. Pass it by, or have a look?”
“We look,” she decided. “Definitely. We’re supposed to land up there to cover First Platoon. I think we’d better check that flash out.”
“Roger that.” The bug banked right and Dow cut in the main thrusters, clawing for altitude. Kaitlin watched for a second flash, but saw nothing. It had been about there…between those two rounded peaks at the crest of the crater rim. It might have been sun reflecting from a cast-off bit of space junk from the UN arky team at the crater, but she was betting that a flash that bright had come from something pretty large—as large, say, as the cockpit windows of a Lunar hopper or a ground crawler.
“Gimme a channel to 30.”
He keyed in some numbers on the commo console. “Plug in there.”
Kaitlin pulled a commo jack from the connector box on her suit’s belt, plugging it into the console receptacle. “Eagle,” she called. “Eagle, this is Raven.”
“Raven, Eagle,” Carmen Fuentes’s voice came back almost at once. “Go.”
Kaitlin checked the time readout inside her helmet. If LSCP-30 was on its mission profile, it would still be over the Mare Tranquillitatus, shielded from UN radar by the Crisium Ringwall. A military communications satellite at L-2 allowed the two bugs to stay in tight-beamed, scrambled contact despite the mountains between them. “We’ve got a possible hostile OP on the Picard Crater rim,” she said. “TC radar and transient visual. We’ll try to take it down before you clear the Crisium wall and get painted.”
“Copy that, Raven. We’ll relay to Falcon. If you run into trouble, give him a yell.” Falcon was the call sign for LSCP-38, bringing up the rear with Captain Lee and Alfa Company’s Second Platoon. Good luck!”
“Thank you, Eagle. Luck to you. Raven out.”
In another moment, LSCP-44 crested the Picard Crater rim, angling between the two peaks Kaitlin had identified seconds before. The crater was a vast bowl stretching clear to the horizon and beyond; she couldn’t even see the far crater wall. The bowl’s floor, five kilometers below the rim, was shrouded in impenetrable black shadow, but a cluster of lights in the near distance marked the UN’s Picard Base.
And then, on the sunlit crest ahead, she saw it, an enclosed Lunar hopper with pale blue UN markings, just rising above a swirling cloud of gray dust. Sunlight flashed again from the facets of its greenhouse windows. The spindly-legged craft was quite similar to the LSCP, though designed around a square base, instead of a rectangular one. It looked a lot like a larger version of the old LEMs, the Lunar Excursion Modules that NASA had used for the first landings over seventy years before, but the resemblance was one of design specifications rather than descent. Spacecraft didn’t need streamlining on the Moon, so efficiency and low mass were the key words. Hoppers, like the LSCPs, flew on fission-fired plasma thrusters; they weren’t rated for flights between the Moon and LEO, but they could reach Lunar orbit, easily enough, and could use short bursts to hop on suborbital vectors to any spot on the Moon.
“He’s making for the base,” Kaitlin said. “He’s probably already warned them.”
“I’m more worried about him getting above us,” Dow replied. The UN hopper slewed left, rotating, slowing sharply as it hovered on its invisible jet of hot plasma and rising toward the LSCP’s height.
“Why?”