“We read you,” Dillon said.
“Loud and clear, Gunny,” Jack added.
“Yeah,” Bosnivic said.
“Okay. Ramsey and Dillon…port tube. Bos, starboard. See you on the beach, Marines.”
With his ATAR clanging once or twice as he squeezed through the airlock hatch, Jack pulled himself through and into LSCP-52. Finding an empty seat, he swung himself around, pulled himself down, and buckled in. Diane found a seat opposite.
The landing craft was packed with twenty-four Marines on board, with no room at all to move even if they hadn’t been strapped in. He faced Diane across the narrow aisle, their knees touching, and wondered what to say.
Through her helmet visor, she winked at him.
He managed a smile in reply. He hadn’t known her for long—just since he’d arrived at Quantico—and she’d struck him as an all-business sort, but she seemed like a nice person. He wondered if he could get to know her better, after the op. Talking to her, he’d found, was a lot more interesting than talking to Sam, even though he’d never seen her out of uniform.
They waited for what seemed like eternity.
“Now hear this, now hear this,” a voice called over Jack’s headset. “We’ve just cleared the horizon with a com relay from the RAG. We are go for Plan Bravo. Repeat, go for Plan Bravo. Good luck, Marines!”
Go for Bravo! That meant the RAG had managed to knock out the A-M cannon! Instantly, the platoon channel was filled with cheers and wild shouts.
“Outstanding!”
“Gung ho!”
“Ooh-rah!”
“Let’s kick it!”
The enthusiasm was heady, dizzying, and contagious. Jack found himself shouting with the rest and exchanging a clumsy, gloved high five with Diane.
The remarkable thing was that Plan Bravo actually meant a more dangerous approach for the Marine assault teams. Alfa meant the AM gun was intact, but positioned at or near the UN base on the south side of Tsiolkovsky’s central peak. If the call had been for Plan Alfa, they would have set down on the north side of the peak and approached the enemy base overland and spread out, so the enemy AM weapon couldn’t burn them from the sky. Bravo meant they could come storming right in to the base’s front door. Even with the AM cannon knocked out, that meant a hot LZ, with lots of base defenders about determined to make sure the Marines were cut down before they could fully deploy.
It seemed a little crazy to be cheering because they were about to hit a more dangerous LZ.
But then, Jack thought, they were Marines.
“Ooh-rah!” he shouted.
He’d never felt this kind of excitement in his entire life.
Or this kind of fear.
Captain Carmen Fuentes
UN Base, Tsiolkovsky Crater
0054 hours GMT
“Let’s go, Marines!”
Carmen stooped low to clear the aft hatch of LAV-2, stepping out onto the ramp, then bounding down onto the lunar regolith. The other Marines crammed into the confines of the LAV exploded around and past her, scattering in long, low kangaroo bounds that kicked up clouds of fine dust with each landing.
The LAV had slewed to a halt less than twenty meters from the foundation of a towering gantry, a latticework of steel and aluminum hugging the half-obscured shape of a sleek, black craft with UN markings. Space-suited figures moved high among the gantry catwalks; only when a puff of dust geysered a meter to her left was she aware that some of those figures, at least, were shooting at her.
She kept moving, bouncing forward toward the relative shelter at the base of the gantry ladder. It was a strange kind of battle, with everyone moving with the eerie semblance of slow motion characteristic of moving in the Moon’s one-sixth gravity. She could hear the calls of the other Marines over her combat channel, but there was no crash and rattle of gunfire, no explosions, none of the shrill, deafening, and mind-numbing thunder that marked battles in environments that happened to include an atmosphere. Wyvern shoulder-launched rockets flared brightly against the night, streaking toward their targets. An explosion detonated nearby; there was no sound, but she felt the concussion through the soles of her boots.
Sergeant Joles, just in front of her, staggered in mid-leap, crumpled, and fell, dropping slowly to the surface and rolling over several times as his momentum kept dragging him forward. Without thinking, Carmen stooped, grabbed a carry handle on his PLSS, and dragged him along, hauling him through the dust until she was under the gantry’s shadow.
She rolled Joles over, looking for an entry wound, reaching for one of the slap-stick pressure seals issued to the assault force to stop puncture leaks…but Joles needed more than a patch. A round had penetrated his helmet visor smack in the center, crazing the plastic, and splashing the interior curve with frothing red.