“Sometime back in the 1920s or 1930s,” David said, “the first radio signals strong enough to propagate through space left our planet. The oldest of them are over a hundred light-years away by now, and there’s no way to call them back. If anyone is out there, listening, we’ve given ourselves away already.”
“And is that why the UN is so worried about it?”
“It’s why we’re all worried about it, Jack, and why I want to be damned sure of things before I release this. If my idea is true, galactic civilizations go through a kind of cycle, rising, developing interstellar travel, then getting smashed by the current crop of Hunters. That suggests we’re in an upswing now, on our way to the stars. And somewhere out there, maybe not too far away, the next batch of Hunters are setting up shop, too.”
“Well, we do have an advantage.”
“What?”
“We know about them. I imagine most emerging races don’t have a clue that the Hunters are out there. They struggle up to civilized status, develop spaceflight, go to the stars, and wham! They never know what hit ’em. You know,” he continued thoughtfully, “there’s another possibility too.”
“Oh? And what’s that?”
“That we’re the next Hunters of the Dawn.”
David’s mouth twisted, as though at a bad taste. “That’s…not a very pleasant idea.”
“It could happen,” Jack said. “Remember Chicago? People did that. People not so different from us.”
A shrill whistle sounded from an overhead speaker, and every Marine in the squad bay fell silent, listening.
“Now hear this, now hear this,” Captain Lee’s voice said over the speaker. “We have just received a report that the RAG has reached its first objective and is deploying for the assault. We are now cleared for loading and debarkation. All hands, grab your gear and report to your squad leaders, preparatory for embarkation aboard the Ranger.”
“That’s it, Uncle David,” Jack said. His heart was hammering now, and he was praying that he wasn’t going to screw up. He folded up his PAD and tucked it back into his holster. “We’re going to war!”
“And God help us all,” David replied quietly. “God help us all….”
TWENTY-FOUR
SUNDAY, 9 NOVEMBER 2042
Lieutenant Kaitlin Garroway
Tsiolkovsky Crater, West Rim
2233 hours GMT
Communicating with Earth was a real problem for the Rim Assault Group, once the Earth had dropped behind the stark, Lunar horizon. Any US spacecraft entering orbit around the Moon was killed as soon as it passed into line of sight of Tsiolkovsky. The same went in spades for any comsat parked in a halo orbit in L-1, above the Lunar farside; it was possible to establish a short-term polar orbit that wouldn’t rise above Tsiolkovsky’s horizon, but there were almost certainly UN forces at one or both of the moon’s water-rich poles, and even if they couldn’t shoot it down, they would certainly warn the UN farside base that something was up.
And the RAG depended utterly on its presence being kept secret until the last possible moment. A teleoperated Earth-Lunar freighter had been sacrificed to preserve that secret.
They’d been traveling steadily for nearly fourteen hours, a line-ahead column of vehicles nearly invisible against the unyielding silver-gray of the Lunar surface. A careful search from the sky might have picked them up, or at least have picked up their tracks, but the Moon was an extremely large place, with as much surface area as the continent of Africa, and the LAVs were very small. Even so, the four-wheeled vehicles had been deliberately designed to toss rooster tails of dust high and to the rear as they traveled, and as the dust settled out of the sky it tended to partially fill in and blur those telltale parallel trails, not filling them in completely, but making them far harder to spot at a casual glance.
One LAV had broken down. Gunnery Sergeant Miller’s LAV-3, with Second Platoon, Second Squad, had quietly died as they’d traversed the floor of the huge crater Fermi, fifty kilometers back. There wasn’t room in the other LAVs for any more personnel, so Miller and his people were sitting tight; if the RAG was successful, they would be picked up later.
If not…
Kaitlin tried not to think about the alternatives.
They made the approach up the western slope of Tsiolkovsky cautiously. There were UN defensive installations along the ringwall, but the crater’s circumference, over 580 kilometers, was so large that the UN couldn’t have woven a very tight net, and LAVs with stealth surfacing should be able to slip between them. The trick was identifying the UN perimeter installations in the first place so the Marines could sneak through.