Were they all inside, huddled up in their suits, waiting to see if the Marines would come in with can openers at the ready?
“Seems a bit too quiet, Gunny,” he said to Yates. “Don’t see a damned thing moving down there. Ah! Wait a sec!”
“Whatcha got?”
“That black ship grounded down there. It’s lifting!” There was no flame, but the arrowhead shape was silently rising now above a swirl of lunar dust.
“Gimme the imager.”
Kaminsky surrendered the device. Without it, he could just see the UN ship vanishing into the night beyond the base.
“Shit,” Yates said. “They’re bugging out. Wonder if they’re evacuating the place? Or…”
“Or what, Gunny?”
“Or if they just stopped long enough to haul in some reinforcements. I don’t like the looks of this.” He lowered the imager again and handed it to Kaminsky. “They gotta know we’re here, all right. But…uh-oh. Here comes Eagle.”
Kaminski turned, following Yates’s pointing arm. Another bug was coming in out of the sun, floating high, passing above Picard’s rim by at least two hundred meters. Silently, it drifted overhead and a bit to the north, descending rapidly as it cleared the rim, floating on unseen jets of plasma toward the brilliantly lit base below. Halfway down, the ungainly looking craft switched on its landing lights, casting bright circles of illumination across the habs and trenches.
Kaminski watched a moment…then lifted the magnifier to his visor again, staring down into the base. There was something…
He saw movement…a trio of blue helmets raised above the rim of one of the trenches…and the stubby, metallic cylinder of a shoulder-launched missile. “Missile on the ground!” he shouted. “This is Kaminski, I have a slam, in the trenches fifty meters from the base habs!”
Yates jerked the imager from Kaminski’s glove, lifting it one-handed to his own visor. “This is Yates! Confirmed! Shoulder-launched missile, in the trenches! They’re targeting Eagle!”
“Get the slaw on them!” Garroway’s voice called. “Yates! Get the Wyvern in action!”
Yates had already stooped, snatched up the Wyvern, and hoisted it to his shoulder, dropping the sighting display into place in front of his visor. “Clear aft!” he called.
“You’re clear!” Kaminski shot back, then slapped Yates’s shoulder for emphasis. “Go!”
Yates fired, loosing a silent gout of burning gas and strips of plastic packaging from the rear of the man-portable launcher. The Wyvern missile, kicked clear of the weapon’s muzzle by an explosive charge, shot twenty meters toward the edge of the crater rim before its engine switched on, a tiny, white-hot point of light dwindling rapidly toward the UN base.
Long before the Wyvern could cross the distance to its target, however, the UN troops hiding in the trenches fired their own missile. The slam’s back-flash was bright enough to be seen with the naked eye from eight kilometers away; the missile streaked skyward, scratching out a needle of white fire against the night as it arrowed into First Platoon’s LSCP.
The detonation was a strobe of light banishing the stars, dazzling against the night.
FIVE
WEDNESDAY, 9 APRIL 2042
LSCP-30, Call sign Eagle
Picard Crater, The Moon
0916 hours GMT
The missile struck the LSCP from the right and from below, the explosion a hammerblow that sent the frail craft lurching hard to the left, nose high, then dropped it into a spin. Captain Carmen Fuentes was standing behind the pilot, Lieutenant Kenneth Booth, when the blast slammed her against the back of the pilot’s couch.
Booth screamed, the sound shrill over Carmen’s head-set.
“Ken!”
“I’m hit! I’m hit, damn it!” He clawed at the side of his suit, where a thumb-sized hole in the tough, layered plastic matched a larger hole punched through his acceleration couch, and another in the deck centimeters from Carmen’s left foot. Air whistled from the puncture, as a cold fog condensed above it in a tiny, spinning whirlwind. The craft continued its roll sluggishly to the left, almost tipping all the way over, but at the last instant, it wallowed back, spilling Carmen against the side of the cockpit as the deck dropped away beneath her and took her stomach with it.
“Take the controls, damn it!” she shouted at the pilot. “Get us back under control!”
Booth nodded inside his helmet visor, which was already starting to fog up, and fumbled with the paired joysticks that controlled main thrust and attitude. She felt several hard bumps as he triggered the ACTs; both spin and descent slowed, but didn’t stop.
“Machuga!” she called over the platoon channel.
“This is Jaclovic, ma’am. The lieutenant’s dead.”
“Okay! Hang on! We’re hit and going down. You’re in charge! Get both squads out as soon as we hit!”
“Copy that! Okay, gyrines! You heard! Brace for impact!”
Booth fired the main thruster; Carmen nearly dropped to her knees with the sudden acceleration, and she heard a grinding shriek somewhere aft, like metal tearing.
Then the bug crumpled into the Lunar surface, almost upright, with the shock taken up by the folding of its six, splayed legs. This time, Carmen did hit her knees as the deck slammed up against her legs. The cockpit tilted heavily back to the right, and she had to cling to the acceleration couch to hold her place.
“The Eagle has damned well landed,” she muttered. They were down, at least more or less in one piece. She felt shaken, but unhurt. The tiny whirlwind of escaping air at her feet had become a hurricane, but a short-lived one as the last of the bug’s air shrilled out into space. Carmen was already fumbling at one of the pouches attached to her suit harness, pulling out a self-sealing vacuum patch which she slapped over the hole in the side of Booth’s suit. There was not a lot else she could offer in the way of first aid. The inside of his visor was smeared with blood and a bright, pink foam, and she could barely see his face. Damn! Why didn’t these Marine-issue armored suits come with external life-support readouts? She couldn’t tell if the man was alive or dead.
Light flared silently outside…another shoulder-launched missile strike somewhere close by, she thought. The people who’d shot down LSCP-30 would be closing in pretty quickly now.
“Captain!” Jaclovic’s voice called. “Captain! Are you okay?”
“I’m in one piece. Get the platoon out of here, Gunny! Perimeter defense. On the double!”
One of the square-paned windows of the cockpit’s greenhouse canopy suddenly bore a small, round hole surrounded by a frosting of tiny white cracks. She wondered why she hadn’t heard the shot or the impact—then remembered that she was in vacuum now. No sound. Over her helmet radio, though, she could hear shouted orders, calls, and the hiss and puff of heavy breathing as the platoon scrambled clear of the grounded craft.
The bug must be under attack by UN troops outside. They had to get out and get clear of the wreckage, or risk being trapped inside. The best thing she could do for Booth, she decided, was leave him where he was. If he was dead, there was nothing more she could do; if he was wounded, there still wasn’t much she could do, except arrange to get him inside one of those habs out there as quickly as possible, where his suit could be removed and his wounds treated.
“I’ll