Free Luna Marine by Ian Douglas Page A

supposed to land up there to cover First Platoon. I think we’d better check that flash out.”
    â€œRoger that.” The bug banked right and Dow cut in the main thrusters, clawing for altitude. Kaitlin watched for a second flash, but saw nothing. It had been about there …between those two rounded peaks at the crest of the crater rim. It might have been sun reflecting from a cast-off bit of space junk from the UN arky team at the crater, but she was betting that a flash that bright had come from something pretty large—as large, say, as the cockpit windows of a Lunar hopper or a ground crawler.
    â€œGimme a channel to 30.”
    He keyed in some numbers on the commo console. “Plug in there.”
    Kaitlin pulled a commo jack from the connector box on her suit’s belt, plugging it into the console receptacle. “Eagle,” she called. “Eagle, this is Raven.”
    â€œRaven, Eagle,” Carmen Fuentes’s voice came back almost at once. “Go.”
    Kaitlin checked the time readout inside her helmet. If LSCP-30 was on its mission profile, it would still be over the Mare Tranquillitatus, shielded from UN radar by the Crisium Ringwall. A military communications satellite at L-2 allowed the two bugs to stay in tight-beamed, scrambled contact despite the mountains between them. “We’ve got a possible hostile OP on the Picard Crater rim,” she said. “TC radar and transient visual. We’ll try to take it down before you clear the Crisium wall and get painted.”
    â€œCopy that, Raven. We’ll relay to Falcon. If you run into trouble, give him a yell.” Falcon was the call sign for LSCP-38, bringing up the rear with Captain Lee and Alfa Company’s Second Platoon. Good luck!”
    â€œThank you, Eagle. Luck to you. Raven out.”
    In another moment, LSCP-44 crested the Picard Crater rim, angling between the two peaks Kaitlin had identified seconds before. The crater was a vast bowl stretching clear to the horizon and beyond; she couldn’t even see the far crater wall. The bowl’s floor, five kilometers below the rim, was shrouded in impenetrable black shadow, but a cluster of lights in the near distance marked the UN’s Picard Base.
    And then, on the sunlit crest ahead, she saw it, an enclosed Lunar hopper with pale blue UN markings, just rising above a swirling cloud of gray dust. Sunlight flashed again from the facets of its greenhouse windows. The spindly-legged craft was quite similar to the LSCP, though designed around a square base, instead of a rectangular one. It looked a lot like a larger version of the old LEMs, the Lunar Excursion Modules that NASA had used for the first landings over seventy years before, but the resemblance was one of design specifications rather than descent. Spacecraft didn’t need streamlining on the Moon, so efficiency and low mass were the key words. Hoppers, like the LSCPs, flew on fission-fired plasma thrusters; they weren’t rated for flights between the Moon and LEO, but they could reach Lunar orbit, easily enough, and could use short bursts to hop on suborbital vectors to any spot on the Moon.
    â€œHe’s making for the base,” Kaitlin said. “He’s probably already warned them.”
    â€œI’m more worried about him getting above us,” Dow replied. The UN hopper slewed left, rotating, slowing sharply as it hovered on its invisible jet of hot plasma and rising toward the LSCP’s height.
    â€œWhy?” Kaitlin asked. Then the answer hit her. “Oh…”
    Neither hopper nor LSCP carried anything like armor. The hopper’s aluminum hull was so thin in places that a clumsily dropped tool could puncture it…and the more massively constructed LSCP wasn’t that much better. If one of the two craft could maneuver above the other, the jet of hot, charged particles from its ventral thrusters would become a formidable short-range weapon.
    The