Luna Marine(35)

Except…

Cheseaux sighed. How much of what David wanted was classified for honest reasons of legitimate state security, and how much was due to the shortsighted scrabblings of small-minded and paranoid UN bureaucrats?

Just what was it that had divided the world for these past two years, anyway? The United States refusal to hold a UN-mandated plebiscite on the question of independence for some of its Southwestern states. Cheseaux snorted. He scarcely blamed Washington for refusing that one, especially since the vote was to be limited to the American states involved and would have included the populations of Mexico’s northwestern states—a stacked deck if ever there’d been one. That wasn’t even worth a decent riot or two, to say nothing of the war!

What else? Russia’s refusal to back down to China’s demands for parts of Siberia; those land claims went way back and could have been settled in other ways. The fear that the United States and Russia were using their superiority in spaceflight technology to grab the newly discovered archeological discoveries and exotechnologies for themselves. The willingness of the United States to actually publish some of those discoveries prematurely, without weighing the impact they would have on religious, political, and social systems worldwide.

Those last two, Cheseaux thought, were rarely trumpeted as reasons for the continued crusade against the US and Russia, but he suspected that they were the real reason for the hostilities.

If so, however, it was possible that his friend was headed into considerable danger. He hadn’t heard anything about an American attack on the Picard site, but that was implied by David’s letter. He doubted that the UN forces at Tsiolkovsky would let the Americans stay without a damned stiff challenge.

He hoped David knew enough to keep his head down when the shooting started.





SEVEN




WEDNESDAY, 15 APRIL 2042


USASF Tug Clarke

Nearing the Moon

0740 hours GMT

The Moon filled the black sky, half-full from this vantage point, the terminator line a crinkled, ragged lace-work of silver-gray, brown, and black, the rest of the visible face as dazzling in the sunlight as new snow. David Alexander struggled to orient himself but found an excess of map detail too confusing. “So…where is it we’re going?”

The tug’s pilot was a US Aerospace Force captain named Heyerson. He pointed beyond the sunset terminator, into darkness.

“About there,” he said. Sunlight flashed off the dark glasses he wore inside his comset helmet. “The Mare Crisium is well past sunset, now. You guys are gettin’ dropped off at Picard Crater, just inside Crisium’s wall.”

The third man in the tug’s cramped cockpit clung to the back of the pilot’s couch, trying to see. He was a Navy man, HM1 Robert Thornton. “What I wanna know,” he said, “is where Tranquillity Base is.”

“Ah.” Heyerson pointed again, this time toward a dark, smooth plain bisected by the terminator. “Up that way. Almost to the horizon. You won’t be able to see it naked-eye, though, if that’s what you were expecting.”

“I just want to see the place, man,” Thornton replied. “Where it started.”

The Aerospace man chuckled. “Whatever.” He glanced at Thornton. “Y’know, I still don’t know what the Navy’s doing up here. The Marines, I can understand, kinda. The Army, no problem. Civilian scientists, all in a day’s work. But the Navy?…”

“Read your briefing, Captain,” David said. “The Marines don’t have medics, like the Army. They rely on Navy corpsmen instead.”

“Bravo Company’s corpsman was killed in the assault,” Thornton said. He was black, his skin so dark in the instrumentation-lit cockpit that it was difficult to make out any expression at all. “I’m the replacement.”

“Yeah, well, the jarheads are all goin’ home as soon as I get this lot settled in,” Heyerson said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder to indicate the forty US Army Special Forces troops crammed into the tug’s cargo bay aft. “Don’t know why you bothered to make the trip when you’re just gonna have to turn around and go back again!”

“Yeah, well, it’s the government’s dime,” Thornton said. “They say ‘Go,’ I go.”

“The Navy likes to take good care of the Marines,” David added. “It’s tradition.”

“Nah,” Thornton said. “The leathernecks just need someone to ride herd on ’em. Us corpsmen, we control their health records, see? Any of ’em get out of line, we lose their shot card, and they have to get every shot all over again. They know better than to make trouble with us around.”