Carefully, he pulled himself into the aisle, making sure he had the next handhold grasped securely before letting go of the last.
Another Marine’s legs swung through the air and thumped heavily against his torso, nearly knocking him free. “You okay, Ramsey?” Bueller asked him, gripping his upper arm to steady him. “You got your PAD and shit okay?”
“Squared away, Gunny.”
“Semper fi, Marine. We’re countin’ on ya.”
It was a sobering thought. Capture of the UN ship might well depend on one of the three 4069 MOSs cracking the enemy’s computer security.
His stomach gave another twist, and he bit back a sharp and sour taste. Grimly, he followed the queue forward.
Lieutenant Kaitlin Garroway
Tsiolkovsky Crater
0045 hours GMT
The rasp of her own breathing was impossibly loud inside her helmet. “Hello! Hello!” she called. “Does anyone hear me?”
Kaitlin could hear groans, cries, and mumbled curses coming over the platoon com channel. The lights were out and the LAV’s cabin submerged in blackness absolute, but at least communications were still working.
“Ah…yeah, L-T. I hear ya.”
“Who’s that?”
“Sorry. Kaminski, ma’am.” He sounded dazed, maybe hurt.
“I’m here too,” Hartwell said. “Christ! What hit us?”
“The enemy AM beam would be my guess,” Kaitlin replied. “Don’t know why it didn’t fry us, though.”
“Let’s have some light in here! Who’s got their suit lights working?” She began fumbling for her own light, reaching for the switch mounted high on her left shoulder. As the lights mounted on her shoulders flicked on, other lights came on as well, filling the LAV’s interior with bizarrely misshapen and grotesquely huge shadows.
The LAV, she thought, was canted to the left at about a forty-five-degree angle. Part of the right side had crumpled inward, as though from the blow of a giant fist, and her helmet readout was showing zero pressure in the cabin.
Another readout showed something far more worrisome: she’d just picked up 100 rads in a single dose. Not good. Not good at all. She felt queasy and wondered if it was the radiation.
She still couldn’t figure out what had happened. A near miss by the positron beam, yes…but why weren’t they all dead? “Someone aft, see if you can get the airlock doors open,” she called. “The rest of you, sound off when I call your names. Let me know if you’re in one piece! Ahearn!”
“Here! Okay!”
“Anders!”
“I’m okay.”
“Castellano!” She waited. “Castellano!”
“He’s bought it, L-T.”
“Hartwell!”
“Okay.”
She ran down First Squad’s roster and was relieved to find that there were only two dead—Castellano and PFC Jordy Rawlins. Two more were hurt badly enough that they’d better not be moved—Navy Lieutenant Wood with a probable broken leg, and Lance Corporal Klinginsmith with what was probably a couple of broken ribs.
All of the squad had taken a hefty dose of radiation. Antimatter reacted with matter by vanishing in a burst of very hard radiation—X rays and gamma rays, especially—and both the armored hull of the LAV and their space suits would have generated additional, secondary radiation in a cascade effect.
How badly they were burned remained to be seen. The tables said that fifty percent fatalities resulted from 300 rads, but as little as 4 rads delivered all at once would cause some physical effects. They’d been “hardened” against radiation—put on a diet heavy in green vegetables and Vitamin A and E, and they’d all been taking daily doses of fat-soluble antioxidants—all of which was supposed to cut the effects of radiation by better than thirty percent. And once they were out of this, shots of atropine and antirad drugs would cut the effects still further.
But a hell of a lot depended on how quickly they could get that additional treatment, and even more on the exact nature of their exposure.
Outside, on the dusty plain as they scrambled clear of the wrecked LAV, Hartwell approached her. “I think I know what happened,” he said. He pointed back behind the LAV, where an expanse of Lunar regolith had been fused, as if by intense heat. “I’d just put the stick hard over when the beam hit. I think the matter-antimatter reaction took place in the dust cloud.”
“The dust cloud? How…oh!” Kaitlin understood. “It didn’t all go off at once!”
“Right. Some positrons must have leaked through…and hit the ground just behind us. Others hit dust particles. The dust probably diffused the blast, spread it out over a large area. There wouldn’t be any shock wave, of course, except through the ground, which is what tipped us over and crumpled the side.”