Luna Marine(45)

He wondered if war had been the same the last time this crater had been illuminated by fire from the black Lunar sky, a drawn-out game between elders, with brave youngsters as the playing pieces, the expendable pawns. That was the most disturbing bit of intelligence that Marc Billaud had passed on that morning—the knowledge that thousands of years ago, at the very dawn of human civilization, the aliens worshiped as gods by those humans had been destroying themselves in a cataclysmic war; the wreckage of the cargo ship that had fallen here within this crater allowed no other interpretation. The vessel had been destroyed by powerful weapons…almost certainly a positron beam, a bolt of antielectrons that had annihilated the target in a deadly flash of hard radiation.

Similar weapons had been employed half a million years earlier, on the Cydonian plains of Mars.

Was war the inevitable fruit of all civilization, of all so-called intelligence?

“We got another UNdie bug, comin’ in from East One!”

“Lauden! Can you tag him with your Wyvern?”

“That’s negative! I’m foxed out!”

Damn! he thought. I wish I could see. Unable to rise to watch the unfolding battle, David looked instead at the marvelously delicate and expressive figurine he held cradled in his arms. The back, he saw, was flat, as though a three-dimensional statue had been sliced cleanly in two from top to bottom…then heavily inscribed all over the back with tiny, crisply incised marks. The entire lower half, he saw, was covered with tiny pictographs, the top half with something like writing, with repetitive symbols that…

With an ice-shocked jar that literally drove the breath from his body, David understood just what it was he was holding. Rolling suddenly out from beneath Kaminski’s legs, he sat up, holding the statuette in both hands, staring at it as though it had just come alive.

Which in a very real sense, it had.

“Goddammit, sir,” Kaminski screamed, lurching toward him. “Get the fuck down!”

Dazedly, he looked around, becoming aware of running shapes, bright and silent flashes against the darkness, and Kaminski’s wide-eyed face behind his visor. “The Rosetta stone!” he said, more to himself than to the frantic Marine.

“Whatever!” Kaminski hit him, hard, with one outstretched hand, knocking him back to the ground. “Hit the dirt!”

David lay on his side, continuing to stare at the inscriptions on the back of the gold statue. They had a machine-precise look about them, as though they’d been stamped into the metal, rather than carved out by artisans. Those on the bottom half were almost shockingly familiar; David couldn’t read it, but he was quite familiar with the pictographs known as Proto-Sumerian, the antecedent of Mesopotamian cuneiform writing.

And as for the stranger, more fluid writing at the top…

He clutched the artifact more closely against the front of his suit. Suddenly, it was vitally important that he survive this firefight, vital that he return with the golden statue and its paired texts to the institute in Chicago.

The statue he was holding was more important than his life.


The Dig, Picard Base

Mare Crisium, the Moon

1457 hours GMT

Kaminski was aware of Alexander curling himself up around the odd gold statue, but didn’t think any more about it. The important thing was to keep the civilian alive, and if the idiot would just keep his head down, there was at least a chance of that happening.

The battle, from Kaminski’s point of view, at least, was a confusing, night-cloaked collision. Alexander’s complaint a moment ago about not being able to see struck him as hilarious. All Kaminski could see was the pitch-blackness surrounding the base, the glare of worklights illuminating the central area, and various large and vaguely defined shapes—the habs and the insect-legged hoppers the UNdies were arriving in. Occasionally, a space-suited form would dash across the light, moving from shadow to shadow. When he kicked in the IR overlay of his helmet’s heads-up display system, he could see the wavering, red-yellow man-shapes of other figures concealed by the dark. To sort friend from foe, he had to rely on the radioed commentary from C-cubed.

“Heads up, Marines! We have four Marines coming out of Hab Three, crossing toward Marker South Five.”

He turned to look at the indicated hab, spotted three…no, four heat-shapes moving on the double. Superimposed on each was a small, bright green symbol, marking them as IFF-IDed friendlies. Good enough. He raised his ATAR and painted another target, a glowing mass crouched in the blackness beneath the first grounded hopper, perhaps ninety meters away. He couldn’t see an IFF tag. “Six! This is Ski! I got a paint! What’s my target?”