Well, if Bos didn’t succeed, Jack thought, maybe he and Sam would still get a shot. He wanted to know how Sam would stack up against the vaunted NSA nutcracker. He stepped back, standing between the Second Platoon Marines, Lieutenant Garroway and Sergeant Kaminski. “About time you fellows showed up,” the lieutenant told him.
One of the bodies on the deck was moving.
“Watch out!” Jack yelled. “On the deck!”
It happened too fast to follow. Two of the dead UN troops wore the black helmets of Chinese special forces; the third wore a lightweight, bloodied white suit with the characteristic blue UN helmet, and he was the one who’d just risen to hands and knees and flung himself across the deck, almost under Bosnivic’s feet, snatching up an ugly little pistol with a large magazine in front of the trigger and rolling over, aiming up at Bos.
Jack brought his ATAR off his back, but Bos was in the way, his feet tangled with the UN man’s legs. The UNdie gripped the machine pistol in both hands, jamming it straight up, almost against Bosnivic’s groin, and pulled the trigger. A stream of explosive rounds blasted through his torso, as chunks of armor and bloody flesh sprayed the compartment.
Kaminski and Lieutenant Garroway both reacted faster than Jack could, pivoting and raising their ATARs in the same instant and blasting the UN soldier with a snapping burst of high-speed fire.
But it was too late for Bos.
“You’re up, buddy,” Kaminski said. Half in shock, Jack stepped across the body of his friend, slinging his ATAR as he pulled his PAD from its holster.
Captain Robert Lee
USS Ranger
0113 hours GMT
It almost had been too late. Ranger had swept past Tsiolkovsky’s central peak, still decelerating at three Gs, but then, slowly, she’d brought her speed to zero relative to the Lunar surface, then started moving back toward the west, toward the firefight raging around the southwestern flank of the mountain. On her bridge, Rob Lee and David Alexander got to their feet once more, feeling now only the Moon’s sixth of a gravity, and the rattling vibration of the ship’s drives, holding them at a drifting near hover less than half a kilometer above the crater floor.
“There’s a lot going on down there, sir,” Kieffer said. “I see several small groups IDed as Marines. The rest are scattered all over the place.” He pointed. “Looks like some sniper positions up on the side of the mountain. Squad lasers, shoulder-fired missiles, and a lot of small-arms stuff.”
Rob glanced at Avery, who shrugged, then nodded. “Unless you see some other targets in the clear,” Rob said, “let’s take out those snipers. But watch out for heavy battery fire from the ship.”
The AM cannon might have been dealt with, but the UN ship almost certainly possessed high-energy lasers as well, and there was no word yet on whether the assault team had secured her or not. A well-placed HEL barrage could still ruin the Ranger’s whole day.
Ranger mounted three HELs, each in the two-hundred-megajoule range, which gave them the explosive equivalent of forty-kilo charges of high explosive. The bolts falling from the sky were invisible in hard vacuum, but the explosions were not, dazzling, pulsing flashes against the mountainside like scattered strobe beacons. In seconds, a faint haze of dust was settling across the mountainside, and each bolt became visible as it flashed through the cloud, searing streaks of white light that continued to hit the mountain slope in a devastating, rapid-fire barrage. As quickly as a UN soldier could be spotted by the Ranger’s weapons officer, using IR optics, a lightning bolt would fall.
“Okay, okay,” Ranger’s communications/electronics officer said, touching his headset. “I’m getting a call from someone down there.”
“Put it on the speaker,” Avery said.
“…on the run,” a scratchy voice called. “Glad you boys could make the party!”
Avery reached out and jacked his headset mike into the CE officer’s console. “This is Colonel Avery of the Ranger. What’s your situation down there?”
“Ah, okay, Colonel. This is Gunnery Sergeant Yates. We’re in good shape, here. The skipper’s inside the UN ship. Haven’t heard from her in a while, now. So’s the computer team. Outside, we were taking damned heavy fire from that mountain, but you boys just pretty well swept it clean! Looks like the UNdies are on the run, now!” There was a static-filled pause. “If you can set down near the UN ship, we’ve got a lot of wounded here.”
“Roger that.” Avery nodded to the pilot. “Take her down.”
“We don’t have much choice, sir,” the pilot said. “We’re down to eighty seconds’ RM at low thrust. We’re setting down whether we want to or not!”