Luna Marine(57)

He was still keeping secret the information Marc Billaud had given him about an ancient alien base at Tsiolkovsky. There was too much he was still unsure of, too many questions about the exact translations of some of what he’d found.

Before he could go much farther, he needed to be certain of his translations—and he needed something more reassuring than Howard’s cheerfully matter-of-fact pronouncements.

Shesh-Ki, which he translated as “Guardian of the Earth,” and which seemed, by context, to refer somehow, to the Moon.

Gab-Kur-Ra, “In the Chest of the Mountains” or “In the Hiding Place of the Mountains.” The phrase seemed to refer to some sort of secret cavern or base, again, from the context, located on the Moon. That was the secret place Billaud had talked about…on the Lunar farside, at Tsiolkovsky.

Shu-Ha-Da-Ku. “Supremely Strong, Goes Bright” was the exact translation, but it sounded ominously like a reference to a weapon.

And, perhaps most worrisome of all, was the repeated mention of a terrible threat, an enemy that threatened the An, and Earth itself, with Tar-Tar, with utter destruction. The name of this enemy was variously rendered Gaz-Bakar or Ur-Bakar, sometimes with the preface “Shar,” which meant great or the ultimate. Gaz-Bakar—David was guessing, here—must mean something like “Killers” or “Smiters of the Dawn.” Ur-Bakar, then, could be translated two ways, as “Foundations of the Dawn,” or as the far more ominous “Hunters of the Dawn.”

Marc had mentioned that phrase first, on the Moon, when he’d named the nemesis of the An.

The phrase sent an icy shiver down David’s spine. Such phrases, ever since the first decipherings of ancient Sumerian pictographs and the later cuneiform, had been assumed to be poetic references, figurative language only. Now he knew that some, at least, of the allusions were to something all too real.

What had so completely destroyed that An ship above Picard? What had happened to the An colony on Earth, a complex of several dozen high-tech settlements scattered from Egypt to the Indus Valley? He had to know, had to know his translations were right. Confirmation. He needed confirmation.

“Teri, who would you say is the best Sumerian linguist?”

“Hmm. I’d have to say François Villeret at the Sorbonne.”

David nodded thoughtfully. “That would have been my call, too.” He picked up the cast and tucked it under his arm. “Excuse me a moment, Teri,” he said, walking to the door.

“What are you doing, David?”

“Trust me. You don’t want to know. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

It would be better if he could keep her out of what he was about to do.

In the larger room outside of his office was a faxcaster, a table-sized piece of business-telecommunications equipment. He opened the bin, placed the artifact inside, engravings down, and closed the lid. At the keyboard, he typed in his Earthnet access and two addresses—that of the ultimate destination, and that of his blind remailer address in Finland. With a hum and a leaking of brilliant light from around the seal of the bin’s lid, lasers scanned the cast, as a computer converted each detail in three dimensions into a string of data, uploaded to the Net.

That data would wait in Villeret’s server thousands of kilometers away, until it was used to recast and carve an exact duplicate.

The fact that some people would consider him to be committing treason by sending this data to a French national was worrisome, of course…but David Alexander had no patience with the blinkered authorities and idiot politicians who were running this ridiculous war.

If François confirmed the translations he and Teri had made, he’d be a lot happier about publishing.

And the hell with what anyone else had to say about it.





ELEVEN




FRIDAY, 2 MAY 2042


Administration Complex

Vandenberg Space Command

Base

1635 hours PDT

“It is the finding of this court that Sergeant Frank Kaminski was not at fault for the friendly-fire incident that took place on Wednesday, 15 April 2042, at the former UN base at Picard Crater in the Mare Crisium, resulting in the deaths of three American soldiers attached to the US Army Special Forces Space Command.

“This court further finds that said friendly-fire incident occurred because the IFF codes that might have prevented the incident had not been programmed into the space suits worn by the victims. The threat to which they were responding developed before Army and Marine personnel at the site could coordinate the necessary codes and other protocols necessary for smooth joint action. Tasked with protecting the civilian in his care, Sergeant Kaminski responded properly to what he perceived as a direct and immediate threat when the Army personnel moved toward his position. In the chaos of battle, with no IFF codes registering on his helmet HUD and no easy way to clearly discriminate between the outward appearance of the space suits worn by newly arrived Army personnel and attacking Chinese troops, Sergeant Kaminski responded as he’d been trained and in full accord with his duties and orders as a United States Marine.