LITMIR.BIZ

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the circular hatch that lead down to the forward end of the bug’s main compartment. There, deck had risen to meet a descending overhead, and she had to crouch low to make her way aft through cramped, near-total darkness, groping for the entrance to the airlock. She switched on the light mounted on the right shoulder of her suit and let the pale circle of illumination it cast flicker along both sides of the compartment. Several still, space-suited bodies lay there, two on the deck, three more still strapped to their bulkhead supports up forward. Lieutenant Machuga was one of those still strapped to his bulkhead support, the front of his suit peeled open in jagged leaves to expose pale bone, glistening black blood already freezing, and a fist-sized hole going clear through the platform at his back and the deck underneath. Next to him was HMC Strigel, the company’s corpsman, his visor shattered. Shrapnel from the missile strike must have sleeted through the forward end of the compartment.

      Stopping only to retrieve an ATAR from a bulkhead storage rack, she kept moving aft, squeezing through the misshapen airlock hatch, then through the lock and out onto the still, vast quiet of the Lunar surface, crawling on hands and knees to squeeze through the outer door.

      The bug had come down at the edge of the crisscross of trenches and excavated pits, the spider’s legs twisted and snapped by the impact, the frame crumpled badly on one side. Clouds of vapor jetted from a dozen holes in the reaction-mass tanks; as the water escaped into space, it froze, creating clouds of glittering ice particles that gradually settled toward the ground. In the shadows of the crater floor, quite a bit of ice had built up, where water reaction mass had escaped the tanks and frozen almost immediately.

      She rose unsteadily to her feet, breathing hard, then leaped for the nearest trench as silently blossoming puffs of dust stitched across the regolith a few meters to her left and black holes appeared as if by magic in the LSCP’s hull metal.

      She landed almost on top of three Marines, their reactive camo armor black in the blackness of the ditch. “Shit! Watch what the fuck you’re doing!” one of the Marines barked as she hit his leg. Then he did a clumsy double take, reading name or rank tabs. “Uh, sorry, Captain.”

      She ignored the outburst. “Where’s Gunny Jack?”

      A black figure crouched farther along the trench raised an arm, signaling. “Over here, Captain.”

      “I’m coming to you.”

      “Watch your head, ma’am! They’ve got an MG over there somewhere!”

      “Roger that!”

      She squeezed past the three Marines and moved toward Jaclovic’s position. The trench was a meter deep and only about a meter wide; to stay concealed, she had to crawl on her hands and knees, and even so she wondered if the back of her PLSS was showing enough to make an inviting target.

      As she neared Jaclovic, the NCO raised himself above the lip of the trench, aiming his ATAR from the shoulder. The Advanced Technology Assault Rifle employed electronic optics in the sighting mechanism to place a crosshair on the firer’s visor, targeting whatever it was aimed at, but long habit had Jaclovic firing from a perfect kneeling stance, even if his suit and helmet didn’t allow him to sight his weapon directly. He loosed a quick burst of triplet shots, then dropped back behind the cover of the trench as the enemy’s machine gun returned the fire in silent puffs of dust.

      “H’lo, Captain,” he said as she dropped to the floor of the trench beside him. “Ain’t we got fun?”

      She twisted about, raising her helmet above the rim of the trench. “Where’s the fire coming from? I can’t see.”

      “Stay down! Uh, ma’am.” He made a slicing motion with one hand, pointing. “That tall radio mast, call it twelve o’clock. We got a machine gun at about one o’clock, near the big bulldozer, and a slaw in the dirt pile at about eleven. The hab at ten o’clock, I think there’s a guy on top of it spotting. There’s also troops, maybe ten, maybe twelve, covering in the trenches over closer to the habs.”

      “Trench warfare!” she said. The thought was almost funny.

      “Yeah. Lasers. Spaceships.” He raised himself up again and loosed another silent burst toward the habs. “And we’re back to shootin’ each other from the trenches.”

      Carmen unslung the ATAR she’d picked up in the bug, flicked on the optic sight, plugged in her suit connector to get an HUD link, pulled the bolt to chamber a round, and flicked the selector to three-round burst. As Jaclovic took cover again, she rose to her knees, swinging the assault rifle toward the bulldozer where he’d said the machine gun was hidden. A bright green crosshair tracked across her helmet’s visor, showing where she was aimed at the moment. She adjusted the weapon until the crosshairs were centered on the bulldozer. Carmen waited, watching for movement…and then a puff of gray dust exploded across her visor as a round plowed into regolith a few centimeters away. She jerked back down under cover, without having taken the shot.

      “Touchy, aren’t they?” she said.

      “Gotta watch yourself, Captain. They got us covered six ways from—”

      “Incoming!” someone shouted over the channel, and a second later a bright light blossomed from the direction of the grounded LSCP. Bits and pieces of rock and metallic debris showered over the trenches.

      “Forgot to tell you, ma’am,” Jaclovic added. “They got slams out there, too.”

      “This is fun. Can we work some people over that way, try to get behind them?”

      “I sent Second Squad that way soon as we got clear, ma’am. They got pinned…about there. We salvaged one Wyvern from the crash, and both squad lasers, but we haven’t been able to see a target long enough to hit it. Somethin’ else, too.”

      “What?”

      “From the volume of fire we’ve been taking, I’d say we’re facing more than a handful of troops out there. They’ve got, I don’t know…dozens, hidden in the trenches all along from there…to there, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they had more people positioned to move in from the flanks or behind. These guys have it organized, and right now, I’d say they have us just about where they want us.”

      She rose again, this time simply pointing her assault rifle in the general direction of the bulldozer and clamping her gloved forefinger down on the trigger. The gunfire was silent, of course, but the butt gave a reassuring triple-thump to her shoulder before she dropped behind cover once more. She couldn’t possibly have actually hit anything, but at least the gesture felt good.

      “Communications?”

      “No problem there. We’ve got an open channel with Second Platoon, on the crater rim about eight klicks that way. And an L-2 satlink to Fra Mauro. But I don’t think either of those are gonna help us.”

      “Why not?”

      He jerked a gauntleted thumb over his shoulder, toward the habs and the concealed UN soldiers. “Because they’re getting in position to rush us, and there’s not one damned thing we can do about it.”

      LSCP-44, Call sign Raven

       Picard Ringwall, The Moon

       0919 hours GMT

      Kaitlin Garroway held the viewer of her electronic imager against her visor, pressing the button that zoomed the view in to maximum magnification. With light enhancement, she could peer right down inside the trenches below, where a large number of black-helmeted figures were massing in huddled-down groups, weapons very much in evidence. Scanning slowly, she noted the main enemy groupings, the gun positions, and even a pair of suited figures atop one of the habs—probably an OP.

      “What do you think, Gunny?” she asked. “Forty…fifty of them?”

      “At least, ma’am” was Yates’s radioed response. “Looks like they came in on that black transport that just bugged out.”

      “Yeah, but from where? Earth? The bastards could’ve warned us!” She shifted back to the trenches, then pivoted slowly,

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