The red cloud washed over one side of the slowly tumbling asteroid, scouring across grid coordinates two-five-three by zero-one-nine like a blood-hued storm. Gallois could hear a new sound, now, a tick-tick-ticking of small particles colliding with the EU vessel’s hull. The ticking became a steady hiss, then a roar as bits of aluminized polymer chaff and reflective metallic particles like coarse grit stormed against the hull.
“I have a target!” Marichy called. “Bearing zero-three-zero by minus zero-one-one! It looks like!…”
“Fire!” Never mind what it looked like. That could be sorted out later.
On the main display, the target, a fast-moving yellow diamond traveling in the red cloud’s wake, flared brightly, pulsed visibly for a moment as metal vaporized in a light-and-radar-reflecting cloud, then winked out. A second diamond was moving in along a slightly different vector. Gallois could feel the humming in the deck as Marichy brought Sagittaire’s ball turret to bear….
The second missile’s warhead detonated on target, eleven meters from Asteroid 2034L’s surface, and less than three hundred meters from the Sagittaire. The flash, silent and deadly, briefly touched both the asteroid’s dusty surface and the ship’s hull with liquid fire and the rippling quicksilver of metal and ceramic flowing like water. Dust vaporized, erupting from 2034L’s surface in mute, explosive fury; superheated rock cracked, split, and exploded, hurling multiton chunks into space. One of those chunks struck Sagittaire squarely in her propulsion unit, rupturing water tanks and setting her thirty-meter length tumbling in the center of a spiraling cloud of fragments and glittering spray.
That wild tumble scarcely mattered. Sagittaire’s entire crew was already dead, strapped in at their duty stations as superheated clouds of smoke and steam from burning wiring and ruptured feed lines filled the radiation-blasted interior of her hab module.
A dead ship now, with dead hands at her lifeless controls, Sagittaire continued to fall with the slowly dispersing cloud of debris along much the same path that she’d been traveling before the warhead’s detonation….
NINETEEN
WEDNESDAY, 3 SEPTEMBER 2042
Marine Fire Base 125
Near Kirovsky
Russian Far Eastern Maritime
Territory
0800 hours local time
The met-boys were calling for another day with a high of 30° Celsius, humid, with the wind from the southeast…a typical summer’s day, in other words, in this muddy, godforsaken, global-warmed corner of Asia. It was hard to imagine, Jack thought as he came to attention, that in another three months this place would be a howling, ice-and snowbound wilderness. Across the grinder, canned music began playing the “Star Spangled Banner,” and he snapped to a crisp salute as the American flag fluttered up the pole set in front of the sandbagged Quonset hut serving as 3rd Battalion HQ. Right on cue, he heard the sharp but distant thump-thump-thump of the NC mortars, but he held his salute as the anthem continued to play.
He knew the game now, and the rules. After two weeks at Marine Fire Base 125—“Ol’ Buck and a Quarter” to the old hands—he could play it with the best of them. He still remembered that first Monday, his first at Kirovsky, when he’d come to attention with his entire company at morning colors and heard the thump of the mortars. He’d flinched—hell, he’d been ready to dive headfirst for the nearest slit trench—but Gunnery Sergeant Blandings had been standing nearby. “As you were, Marine,” Blandings had growled from the side of his mouth, just loud enough for Jack to hear. The man must’ve had eyes in the back of his head.
The anthem had finished, Captain Rollins, his company commander, had dropped the salute he’d been holding for the unit, and then, finally, Blandings had shouted, “Incoming!”
The company had melted away, diving into slit trenches, bunkers, and foxholes. Seconds later, the first savage crump of a mortar round had thundered on the grinder where the company had been drawn up for colors, followed by another detonation…and a third…and a fourth. It had been Jack’s first time under hostile fire, and he’d huddled in the bottom of a muddy trench with five other Marines, as gravel, mud, and hot bits of shrapnel rained on them from the startlingly clear, blue sky.
Blandings had explained it to him later. “The NCs always fire a few rounds when they see us raising the colors…especially if they see us in formation, like today. But the first rounds don’t arrive until ten, maybe fifteen seconds after the anthem ends, so there’s plenty of time, see?”
If that had seemed strange, the aftermath was even stranger. The bombardment had lasted only a couple of moments and consisted of perhaps a dozen rounds. After the silence following the last tooth-rattling whump of an explosion, Marines all over the camp began jeering, whistling, and catcalling, as though taunting the unseen enemy. Seconds later, another flag had gone up…a T-shirt dyed bright red and affixed to a pole so it could be waved back and forth in slow, lazy arcs.