“Secure and plug in!” Yates ordered. “Klinginsmith! Help Ahearn with her O2 hose!”
“Shit, Gunny!” Nardelli called. “Why can’t we ride to Big-T in comfort, like with a pressurized cabin?”
“You want to chew vacuum if the UNdies hole us, be my guest. Me, I’m keeping my helmet on. Rawlins! Stow your ATAR and give Falk a hand! Kaminski! You too!”
Carefully, Kaitlin made her way up the central aisle, squeezing past the Marines still standing there as they pulled off their ATARs and other carry-on equipment and stored them in bulkhead racks and lockers. The layout was similar to the interior of an LSCP, but much more cramped; inside the cabin there was only 1.8 meters’ head clearance, and even a short Marine like Kaitlin had to duck to avoid scraping her helmet along the overhead.
At the front of the cabin, Staff Sergeant Peter Hartwell, crammed into the tiny driver’s cubicle, was readjusting the reactive camo feeds in the hull outside; the upper deck was capturing and reemitting the black of space, which made it as visible from overhead as a deep, black hole; by adjusting the feeds to have the turret and upper deck emit the powdery silver-gray of the surrounding landscape, the vehicle became effectively invisible from above.
Next to him was the Navy pilot, Lieutenant Thomas Wood, hunched over his PAD, which displayed a touch-screen image of lighted keys. A monitor on the cube control panel showed the Santa Fe outside, the image relayed from a camera in the LAV’s turret.
Kaitlin took her seat, just behind the entrance to the driver’s cubicle, and started plugging in her life-support hoses. “Okay,” she said. “How’s our time doing, Lieutenant?”
“We’re still in the window,” Wood replied. “But it’s gonna be tight.”
“Second Platoon, First Squad!” Yates sounded off over the platoon frequency. “We’re squared away and ready to roll!”
“Okay, Staff Sergeant,” she said. “Let’s do it!”
“Hang on to your butts! We’re rolling!” With a lurch, the LAV started forward, the ride surprisingly smooth in the Moon’s low gravity.
“Two hundred meters. We’re clear of the blast zone,” Hartwell announced.
“Are the other LAVs clear?” Wood asked.
“That’s affirmative. We’re last man out.”
“All right.” Wood turned his head inside his helmet, looking at Kaitlin. “We’re ready, Lieutenant.”
“Tracking armed and ready?”
“That’s affirmative.”
She nodded. “Let her rip!”
Wood touched a key on his PAD; on the monitor, dust billowed again from beneath the now-deserted transport Santa Fe. Slowly, then, balancing on an invisible stream of hot plasma, the transport edged into the black sky. The turret camera panned up, following the craft as it dwindled into the night.
Wood had one gloved finger on an image on his screen configured as a touch pad, rocking his finger slightly to control the accelerating ship as though he were using a joystick. “Pushing her over,” he said, eyes on the readouts on his PAD. “Altitude forty-three hundred, speed eighteen-thirty-five. Five kilometers downrange.”
“I hope to hell they buy this,” Kaitlin said.
“We’re still in the window,” Wood told her. “If the UNdies had observers at the poles, they wouldn’t have had a better track on the Santa Fe’s likely orbit closer than fifteen minutes. And the lasers fired from Earth orbit probably bought us even more time.”
“Roger that. But it’s my job to worry.”
The tactical challenge they faced, of course, was how to sneak up on Tsiolkovsky, an enormous crater located on the farside of the Moon some twenty-six hundred kilometers from the Mare Crisium and farther still from the base in the Fra Mauro Highlands. With an antimatter weapon of some kind mounted at Tsiolkovsky, one capable of blasting any spacecraft that entered its line of sight, even getting close to the enemy farside base was going to be damned near impossible with a conventional approach.
So the op planning staff at the Pentagon had come up with a sneaky alternative.
The fifty Marines of the Rim Assault Group had made the three-day flight from Earth orbit to the Moon packed like sardines inside a small hab mounted on the Santa Fe’s transport bus, the four LAVs carefully stowed in the landing assembly. As the Santa Fe had begun her deceleration burn to drop into a direct Lunar-landing approach, a pair of Aerospace Force gigawatt lasers in Earth orbit had fired simultaneously, bathing the visible portions of both the Lunar north and south poles in torrents of coherent light.
At a distance of a quarter of a million miles, the lasers were attenuated enough that they couldn’t do much in the way of actual damage, but any UN observers watching the Santa Fe’s approach would be fools to keep staring into that light…and the more sensitive optics of cameras would either automatically shutter or be burned out. With no direct information on the length of the Santa Fe’s burn, there would be considerable doubt about her actual orbit…and when she might appear above the horizon at Tsiolkovsky.