“Crossing the Mare Crisium, east to west,” Barnes said. “Looks like it might be headed for Picard.”
“Stealth surfacing,” DeMitre observed. “On that heading, he could be coming from Tsiolkovsky. Okay. I’ll phone it in.”
A warning chime sounded, electronic and urgent. “Uh-oh,” Barnes said, turning. “We’re being painted! Looks like target-lock radar.”
“S’okay. We’re stealthy, too. But I wonder who’s curious…and why. Recorders going?”
“Affirmative. The paint’s at two-nine-zero and rising.” The best stealth materials and geometries in the world couldn’t absorb or misdirect that strong a pulse. “Damn! It’s strong. Real strong! I think they may have made us, stealth or no stealth.”
“Yeah. I got that feeling. Who’s ‘they’?”
“Shit! I think it’s from Tsiolkovsky.” He brought up a graphics display showing the Moon’s principal features. Tsiolkovsky was still deep within the Lunar night, but it was above the Sparrowhawk’s horizon, in direct line of sight. A red light showed on the graphics, at the top of Tsiolkovsky’s central peak, marking the radar source.
“But radar that strong?” DeMitre hesitated, then groaned. “Ah! The old Big-T radio telescope. That could put out one hell of a tight beam.”
“Roger that. And they’ve got us right in their—”
The positron beam struck the Sparrowhawk in that instant, searing through the hull of the reconnaissance space-craft like a blowtorch through paper, antimatter and matter combining in a brief, unholy alliance of mutual annihilation, generating an intense burst of high-energy radiation…heat, light, X rays, and gamma rays.
The burst was instantly lethal to both Barnes and DeMitre. Although they never had a chance to radio a warning to Space Command Headquarters, the high-energy shriek of their disintegrating spacecraft was picked up by Aerospace Force sensors in Low Earth Orbit just over a second later.
THREE
WEDNESDAY, 9 APRIL 2042
LSCP-44, The Moon
0553 hours GMT
Sergeant Frank Kaminski stood in line with the other members of his squad, waiting to file aboard the spindle-legged, insect-shaped bulk of LSCP-44. The ugly little transport, a Landing Space Craft, Personnel in official nomenclature, but a ferry bug in normal usage or, more often yet, simply a bug, had been designed twenty years earlier to haul personnel and cargo from Earth orbit to the Moon and back in reliable, if less than lavish, efficiency. The Marines had bought eight of the rugged little transports during the last fiscal year and adapted them to the impromptu role of Lunar assault craft.
In Kaminski’s opinion, that was roughly on a par with sticking a popgun on a garbage scow and calling the thing a battleship. The old hull number 44 had been left painted below its faceted cockpit sponson, at least partly as a bit of false intelligence, but he wondered if the UN could possibly be concerned about the appearance of forty-some bugs that looked more like child’s snap-together toys than Marine assault craft.
“Hey, Ski,” Lance Corporal Roger Liddel called over the squad channel. “So what’s the word on the skipper? Is she really ‘Sands of Mars’ Garroway’s kid?”
“That’s ay-firmative.”
“Yeah,” Sergeant Timothy Papaloupolis added. “And Ski, here, has a straight shot at her, ’cause he was with her dad on Mars!”
“No shit, Sarge?” PFC Jordy Rawlins asked. He was new to the unit, one of five newbies who’d transferred in two days before launch. “The guys said you was on the Valles March, but I didn’t believe it.”
“I was there.” Funny. He felt a little reluctant to talk about it now, even with his squadmates. “Wasn’t as big a deal as the news downloads make out.”
“Huh.” Rawlins sounded impressed. “You see any alien shit while you were there?”
“A little. Most of it was too damned big to think of it as alien stuff, though. More like…I dunno. Big, funny-shaped mountains.”
“Yeah, but you got to see the Cave of Wonders, didn’t you?” Lance Corporal Michael Klinginsmith asked. “All the Net DLs’ve been full of that stuff.”
“Television, live from the stars,” Pap said, laughing.
“I…saw it.” Yeah, but he didn’t like thinking about it. Some of those…things he’d seen in the big, spherical chamber had turned his stomach and set the skin on the back of his neck crawling. Even now, some he could remember with crystalline clarity. Others had been so strange he remembered little at all, save a vague impression of color or texture. There’d been nothing about them that the human mind could recognize and seize as its own.