“From Billaud. He’s been talking freely to our intel people ever since we learned the UN military was playing with the notion of bombing us with asteroids. He’s given us some information about the UN layout at Tsiolkovsky—not everything we need; he’s a scientist, not a military man, but some. He told us there were some ET ruins at the crater’s central peak and that they were called Gab-Kur-Ra. He gave us a translation of that but wasn’t able to tell us what was inside. He says no one’s being allowed in.”
“The UN has been pretty touchy about ancient-astronaut stuff ever since we let the cat out of the bag about Cydonia,” David said. “Maybe they’re still trying to sit on it.”
“Maybe. Or maybe what they’ve found there is so secret they can’t let civilians see it. We already know the French were getting clues to building an antimatter-powered spacecraft from wreckage they picked up at Picard. Maybe there were more clues at this Gab-Kur-Ra place.”
“Which means,” David said, “it’s going to be heavily guarded when your Marines get there. My God….”
Step by step, the scenario he’d most been dreading was unfolding….
TWENTY-THREE
SUNDAY, 9 NOVEMBER 2042
Above the Lunar Farside
0845 hours GMT
They called them LAVs, but the M340A1 Armored Personnel Carrier had very little in common with the Light Armored Vehicles employed by the US Marines during the closing years of the twentieth century. These LAVs had been designated as Lunar Assault Vehicles by some unsung Pentagon bureaucrat, either in deliberate imitation of the earlier LAVs, or in complete technomilitary historical ignorance. Either way, the informal designation allowed the team members of Bravo Company, 1-SAG, to resurrect an old Marine battle cry: LAV it to the Marines!
The heavy Conestoga-class trans-Lunar cargo shuttle Santa Fe was one of only two vessels of her class, heavy-lift ships designed to carry prefabricated hab units and construction materials to the bases at Fra Mauro and Tsiolkovsky when they were first built back in the 2020s. Obsolete now, the Santa Fe had been adapted by the military for one final Lunar flight.
She came in above the flat, dark floor of the Mare Crisium, heading southeast. She dropped to less than twenty kilometers’ altitude above the Mare Smythii and went “over the hill,” dropping below the horizon visible from Earth and vanishing around the farside. Still descending, the craft swept in low across the crater rim of Pasteur before pitching over and firing a savage burst of plasma, braking her forward velocity before gentling down toward the dusty Lunar surface.
Clouds of dust lashed and billowed from the touch of those hot jets; the freighter’s open-girder undercarriage touched down, and the vessel, momentarily, at least, was at rest.
Almost at once, however, there was fresh activity, as foil-covered bays on each side opened, and the wedge-shaped objects stowed inside folded out and down, dropping the last several meters to the Lunar surface in a silent, slow-motion drop and bounce.
During the Apollo program, over seventy years before, a similar system had been used to stow and deliver light-weight Lunar Rovers to the Moon’s surface; the four wedge shapes deployed this time were each far larger and more massive than those primitive NASA rovers. Each LAV massed just under fifteen tons and measured 9.1 meters long by 3.5 meters wide by 2.4 meters tall, a lean, flat brick with a wedge-shaped nose, mounted on four independently powered tires and coated with reactive camo and ablative plastic and ceramic laminates. The flat upper deck was interrupted only by the swell of a ball-mounted weapons turret.
“C’mon, people!” Gunnery Sergeant Yates’s voice called over the company frequency. “Move it! Move it! A day here lasts twenty-seven Earth days! At that rate you’ve already been lollygagging on your fat tails for two hours! Step it up!”
Fifty Marines and one Navy pilot were descending from the Santa Fe’s hab module, leaving the vessel, its reaction-mass tanks not quite empty, vacant on its spidery legs. Kaitlin dropped the last couple of meters off the Santa Fe’s ladder, falling slowly to the surface and taking the gentle impact on flexing knees before moving out of the way of the next Marine coming down.
LAV-2, with Captain Fuentes and First Platoon, First Squad, was already loaded and ambling off in a tight curve away from the ship, moving toward the southeastern horizon. Its tires hurled rooster-tail clouds of soft, gray dust aloft, making it look as though it were laying down a smoke screen. LAV-4, with First Platoon, Second Squad, started up, following the first at an interval that would allow decent visibility.
Kaitlin’s platoon would be traveling in LAV-1 and LAV-3; her vehicle, with a white “1” painted just behind the small American flag on its mottled gray-and-black flank, waited just ahead, the rear doors open and the ramp down. The Marines of Second Platoon, First Squad were filing inside, stepping up the ramp and ducking beneath the low overhang of the hatchway, and she followed, her ATAR tucked in tight behind her arm and next to her PLSS. Inside, the Marines took their places in shock-mounted, center-facing seats, strapping down and plugging in commo and life-support feeds from the bulkhead into their PLSS packs.