Luna Marine(134)
TWENTY-FIVE
MONDAY, 10 NOVEMBER 2042
Lieutenant Kaitlin Garroway
Tsiolkovsky Crater
0034 hours GMT
On the floor of the crater, the LAV could make top speed, bounding across the surface at eighty kilometers per hour. The faster it went, of course, the higher and broader the plumes of dust thrown up by its tires. This was both blessing and problem. It made their approach a lot easier to see; on the other hand, the enemy couldn’t be sure of exactly what it was that was approaching from the west, or even how many of them there were.
Kaitlin clutched the sides of her seat as LAV-1 bounced and lurched across the Lunar regolith. Though her armor was securely harnessed to the seat, she was taking a beating inside, and she had to grab hard and hold on to keep from rattling around inside the suit’s hard torso like a marble inside a tin can.
Beside her, Hartwell drove with sharp, precise pulls left and right with the joystick, trying to be as unpredictable as possible as the LAV raced across the plain. Ahead, on his monitor, Tsiolkovsky’s central peak rose against the night, smooth-sided, its flanks scoured by eons of infalling micrometeorites. Tucked away at the mountain’s base, just visible now rising behind a low-lying spur of the mountain, was their objective, the slender spire of the UN supership they’d come to capture or kill.
There’d still been no fire from the mountaintop, which suggested that the enemy weapon was now mounted aboard the ship. That made the most sense; the UN couldn’t have many of the alien-derived antimatter weapons and likely had only the one.
But the three LAVs were almost certainly in the enemy’s sights now. The only reason they weren’t firing was the fear—a fear quite justified—that at the first shot, the LAVs would target the antimatter weapon’s vulnerable turret. Lasers allowed a degree of pinpoint accuracy and precision in running gun battles unheard of in any previous war in history.
The Marines, Kaitlin decided, needed something better than an armored, four-wheeled box to deploy troops across modern combat distances. She hurt, the wild motion was making her sick to her stomach, and something like panic claustrophobia—a gnawing dread that within the next instant or two white fire was going to sear through the LAV and reduce them all to a cloud of hot plasma—was growing with each moment that she was trapped inside. Hartwell’s tiny display screen was no substitute for the wide-open spaces and a place to dig deep and hide; it would be even worse, she knew, for the rest of her Marines, who could do absolutely nothing but sit there strapped to their seats, wondering what was happening.
“We have aircraft taking off at the base, Lieutenant,” Hartwell announced.
Kaitlin twisted her head inside her helmet, trying to get a better view. The term aircraft was almost comically in-appropriate here, in the Lunar vacuum, but old habits die hard. On the monitor, she could just make out four tiny constructs gleaming in the sunlight as they lifted off from beyond the low-lying spur. They were hoppers, short-range Lunar transports, like the one Chris Dow had taken out during the approach to Picard. They would have enemy riflemen aboard, probably with squad laser weapons at least as good as the Sunbeam M228, and the LAV’s upper-deck armor wasn’t all that thick…a design compromise for greater speed and fuel efficiency.
An even greater danger, though, was the possibility of a low pass by a hopper with its ventral thrusters on full. She well remembered the Marine use of that strategy at Picard, and the UN forces would remember as well.
“Are we close enough yet to pinpoint the ship’s main weapon turret?” she asked.
“I’ve got five different blisters or bumps registered on that thing that could be the turret, Lieutenant,” Hartwell replied. “Don’t know which is the target.”
“If we start shooting randomly, they’re liable to open up,” she said. “Of course, we might get lucky.” She thought for a moment, working up her courage. She felt like she was about to stick a pin into a sleeping lion. “Any sign of First Platoon?”
“Negative,” Hartwell replied. “Other side of the mountain.”
They were pursuing their original plan, with Second Platoon swinging south of the central peak, while Captain Fuentes and First Platoon swung around to the north. With the enemy base probably located on the site of the old radio-astronomy facility, nestled up against the southeast flank of the central peak, the idea was to split the enemy’s fire and keep him guessing…but with Second Platoon, Second Squad stranded back there on the floor of Fermi Crater, it was getting a bit cold and lonely here to the southwest of that high and brooding mountain.