Luna Marine(46)

“Kaminski, Six. That’s a hostile!”

“Roger that! Takin’ ’im down!”

His selector switch was already set to a three-round burst. Holding the crosshairs on his helmet HUD steady on the red-glowing shape, he squeezed the trigger, felt the soft triplet of recoils as the 4.5mm caseless rounds snapped toward the target. The red mass suddenly split apart—there’d been two space-suited figures there—and started to move in opposite directions. He picked the one on the right and fired again. He thought he’d hit it; the figure wasn’t moving anymore, at any rate. The one to the left…was gone by the time he tracked back to reacquire it. Damn!…

“All Marines! Heads up! We have ten Army troops coming out of Hab Four! They don’t have IFFs, so watch what you’re shooting at!”

He glanced toward Hab Four and saw moving shadows against the light. About time the damned doggies made it to the party. He wondered just what the odds were. There were three UN hopper transports, but they were big sons of bitches, bigger than the Marine bugs, big enough to carry a lot of troops. At the moment, the Marines were theoretically mustering fifty-three men in three companies—the fight three days ago at Picard had killed seventeen men and women, fifteen of them in Bravo’s First Platoon. Three hours ago, though, just after the departure of Captain Fuentes and Captain Lee, all twenty-three Marines in Alfa Company’s Second Platoon had boarded LSCP-44 and boosted skyward in a silent swirl of moon dust. Scuttlebutt had it that they were reconning off south of Picard somewhere, or even that they were scouting the approaches to a UN base hidden on the farside of the Moon, but no one was saying for sure. That left just Bravo’s Second Platoon and the remnants of First—thirty people against possibly three times that number…unless the Army’s Green Beanies entered the fight.

Two of the UN hoppers were on the ground; the third was still aloft, landing lights glaring against black space and the crisscross of steel struts. A streak of flame angled down from the hovering craft, striking a ditch digger in a soundless blossoming of white light that toppled Marines sheltered in the vehicle’s shadow. Shit! The bastards had jury-rigged a missile launcher to the outer hull of the hopper and were using it for close air support.

Behind the glare of its landing lights, Kaminski could see a UN trooper leaning out of an open hatch, struggling to reload the now-empty launch tube. Taking careful aim, he squeezed off four fast triplets, and the loader jerked back inside, lost from view. Kaminski didn’t know if he’d hit the guy or simply managed to scare him. Flicking the selector switch to full auto, he shifted his aim to the hopper’s angular cockpit as the hovering craft slowly rotated in the sky. He wasn’t sure how much 4.5-mm rounds would do to the ungainly thing, but he could sure let the UNdie bastards know that their presence above the battlefield was not appreciated.

God…was it falling?

It was spinning faster now, and settling, nose high. Other Marines, and Whitworth’s troops as well, were firing now at the hovering craft; Kaminski could see the sparks as rounds struck the craft’s lightly armored hull. It struck the crater floor two hundred meters from Hab One, one of its landing legs crumpling beneath it as it set down hard in a high-flying billow of Lunar dust, pitching it sideways at a steep angle. By the harsh illumination of its landing lights, still on, Kaminski could see shadowy, space-suited figures tumbling from the wreckage. He took aim and opened up on full rock-and-roll, holding down the ATAR’s firing button until the hundred-round stock magazine ran dry.

“Ooh-rah!” Kaminski shouted, holding his ATAR above his helmet in triumph. He was standing—and didn’t even remember getting to his feet. He fumbled at his vest harness for a fresh box of caseless rounds, dropping the empty mag and snapping home the fresh one. A soundless explosion detonated forty meters away, and he heard the clatter of flying gravel rattling lightly from his helmet.

“Maybe you should be the one to get the fuck down, Kaminski,” David called from his part of the excavation. “It’s getting damned hot out here!”

He dropped back to his knees. “I think you’re right. C’mon. Let’s see if we can find better cover over that way.” As they started to crawl, Kaminski looked back and noticed that Alexander was still carrying the statue he’d found. “Drop it, Professor,” he said. “Won’t do you no good if you get killed.”

“No way, Ski. You just keep crawling. I’ll keep up.”

Kaminski hesitated. Damn it, Alexander was a civilian, and short of knocking him out and dragging him, Kaminski couldn’t think of a way to enforce the order. He gave a mental shrug and kept crawling.