“I was checking my people at the spaceport and the vehicle bays, sir.”
“That is why you have section leaders,” Avery said. “That is why we have staff and gunnery sergeants, to look after those little details for us…so that we can show up on goddamn time for briefings!”
“Sir! I—” She clamped her mouth shut, angry, but unwilling to show it. “Yes, sir.”
“See that you remember that in future, Lieutenant. I expect my officers to be punctual and BTFM. Do you understand?”
“By the manual, sir. Yes, sir.”
The others shuffled aside enough to make room for her at the table. A dozen Marines in full armor left precious little room for movement. The photomemory plastic sheathing most of the armor captured ambient light and modified its own pigments to reflect the colors and tones of the surroundings. In these close quarters, the Marines’ active camouflage armor reflected back the glare of the table and the overhead lighting and the close, dark gray mesh of the metal floors and walls, giving them a strange and alien patterning that the eye found difficult to cling to. With helmets off, their heads seemed to float above confusing masses of black, gray, and cool white reflections.
Kaitlin drew a deep breath, steadying herself as she slumped against the edge of the table. The Ops Center, broad and metallic, with low ceilings and harsh fluorescent lighting, stank of unwashed bodies and sweat. None of the people in that room had been out of their suits for the better part of a week, and the hab’s air must have been pretty gamy to begin with. She could hear the low-voiced rumble of the hab’s air circulators and wondered if they always labored that hard.
“So what’s the deal, Major?” Carmen Fuentes asked. “Scuttlebutt says we have a new objective. What’s the matter. This one wasn’t good enough?”
Avery favored her with a scowl from across the table. “You got a problem with that, Marine?”
“Negative, sir!” Fuentes rasped out. She glanced at Kaitlin, and her eyes gave the slightest of upward flickers. Avery, Kaitlin had heard, was not universally loved by the Marines under his command, especially those with combat experience. He’d come to 1-SAG straight from four years in the Pentagon, where he had the reputation of being a number one i-dotter, t-crosser, and form-shuffler. How he’d rated a combat command like the First Space Assault Group was anyone’s guess.
“Garroway,” Avery snapped. “Your people in good shape?”
“Ready to rock and roll, sir,” Kaitlin said, straightening up again from the table, pushing against the weary pain in her back and legs. Marine Class One/Special armor wasn’t all that heavy in Luna’s one-sixth-G gravity, but it had a full eighty kilos’ worth of inertia, just like it did Earthside, and dragging the stuff around, hour after hour, was a real workout.
“Casualties?”
“Negative, Major. We didn’t even get into the fight.”
“What’s th’ matter, Garry?” Lieutenant Delgado said, teeth white in his dark face. “Movin’ a bit slow today?”
“Screw you, Del.”
“Hey, anytime.”
“That’s enough of that,” Avery said. “Okay, Garroway, you and Machuga have point on this new op, then,” He brought up a USCGS map on the surface of the light table’s projection display, topo lines overlaid on a black-and-white photo. Several of the officers moved styro coffee cups out of the way. “Alfa took the brunt of the assault, turns out. Three dead. Damned Chinese fanatics. I’m holding Alfa in reserve here. Captain Fuentes, you will deploy your people to Objective Picard. First Platoon in assault, Second Platoon in overwatch and flank security.”
Fuentes looked startled. “Flank security, sir? That hardly seems necessary when—”
“We are playing this one by the book, Captain. By the Corps manual. Now, listen up.” He’d removed his suit’s gloves, and one precisely manicured finger poked at the topo map projected onto the illuminated tabletop.
“This is the Mare Crisium, the Sea of Crisis,” he said, indicating an almost featurelessly smooth expanse of darkness pocked here and there by isolated craters and ringed by bright, bumpy-looking hills, crater rims, and mountains. “It’s located about two thousand kilometers east-northeast of our position here. Roughly circular, four hundred fifty by five hundred sixty kilometers, near enough.” He touched a keyboard on his side of the table, and a white square picked out one of the two largest, isolated craters in the mare, then expanded sharply, expanding the crater until it covered the table’s top. “The crater Picard,” Avery said, pointing again. “Twenty-two hundred klicks from Fra Mauro, at fourteen point six north, fifty-four point seven east. Diameter of twenty-three kilometers, with a rim rising two thousand meters above the crater floor. As you can see, there’s some interesting activity of some sort in here.”