Luna Marine(27)

Still waving the rifle, he started lumbering toward the enemy position, marked by the crumpled, ice-and-vapor-wreathed shape of their crashed lander a hundred meters away. His suit was clumsy and made running difficult, but once he got moving, it was mostly a matter of guiding himself under its inertia. He reached a trench and sailed across, skimming above a surface of fine, gray powder; a Chinese soldier to his right suddenly folded over but kept drifting forward for several meters before he finally hit the ground in an explosion of dust and cartwheeling legs and arms. Things—people—fell slowly in the Moon’s one-sixth gravity, and the wild charge held the slow-motion quality of a dream.

His heart pounding with exertion and fear, Tessitore kept bounding ahead, unable to swerve left or right or to stop, moving on sheer inertia, though the terror that at any moment his suit or—far worse!—his helmet visor would be breached, emptying his air into space, hammered at his brain. Enemy troops were rising ahead, aiming their assault rifles, and more UN troops were falling. Perhaps it would have been better, after all, to have tried working ahead through the trenches…but, no, that would have taken too long and raised the risk of having his troops pinned down as badly as the enemy was now. No, this was better. One quick rush…One quick rush…

And then still more Chinese and Italian troops were falling; one of his men, the red-and-gold emblem of the San Marco Marines displayed on his arm, suddenly stumbled as his backpack PLSS exploded in whirling fragments and fast-freezing vapor. That shot had come from behind….

He bounced to a stop, taking several long, dust-plowing steps to slow, turning in place as he came to a halt. Behind them, almost directly over the point where he’d started the charge, an American spacecraft, an ugly, angular, spindle-legged contraption, was drifting out of a black sky, descending gently toward a landing. A space-suited figure was visible in the open airlock; dust blasted from beneath the settling lander as plasma thrusters chewed into regolith.

“San Marcos!” he shouted over the regiment’s channel. “Take cover! Take cover!”

Other UN troops were noticing the incoming spacecraft now, stopping in their tracks, jumping into nearby trenches. A few dropped their weapons and raised their hands, surrendering.

The Chinese troops, Tessitore noted, continuing their blind charge, were almost to the American lines now, but there were far fewer of them than before. Zhang had started the battle with thirty-two men; fewer than ten were still on their feet as they sprinted the last few meters to grapple with the enemy.

The landing craft settled to the Lunar surface with a gentle bobbing motion of its suspension. Americans were leaping from the already open airlock, some rushing toward the shattered knot of UN troops, others moving toward the habs.

That last decided Tessitore. If the Americans seized the habitats—and there was nothing at all now standing in their way—the UN troops outside would either have to surrender or face death by suffocation as their air supplies gave out. He tossed his Beretta aside and raised his hands.

An American was approaching him, ATAR leveled, suit reflecting the grays and blacks of his surroundings in oddly shifting patterns of light and dark. As the soldier came closer, Tessitore was rocked by two startling revelations. The first was that the suited figure approaching him was a girl…her blond hair closely framing her face behind her visor. The second was the emblem painted next to the name tag affixed to the front of her suit. The name tag spelled GARROWAY in stenciled letters, but it was the emblem that startled Tessitore more: a globe and anchor, the badge of the United States Marine Corps.

His hands went up higher. “Lebanon!” he shouted, even though he knew she could not hear. “Sudan! Brazil!”


LSCP-44, Call sign Raven

Picard Base, The Moon

0924 hours GMT

Kaitlin held her ATAR pointed at the man’s chest, her eyes widening as she saw the crest affixed to his left breast and his sleeve—a gold lion on a distinctive red backing. Until this moment, she’d not known that the enemy included elements of the San Marco Marines. His mouth was moving; he was trying to tell her something.

With one hand, she stabbed the key on her common controls that set up a channel search. A moment later, she heard a burst of Italian, and the words “Lebanon! Sudan! Brazil!”

“San Marco,” she said. “The Strongest.” What was the Italian phrase? She’d learned it in OCS. “Il più forte!”

Part of every Marine officer’s training was a survey of the other Marine forces of the world, of the actions they’d taken part in, of the traditions and battle honors they carried. The San Marcos were no exception. The Italian Marines had served together with the US Marines on three separate occasions: in the Lebanon peacekeeping operation of 1983, in the Sudan in 1992 to 1993, and in the Brazilian Incursion of 2029.