Chapter 1

“Oi!I think they forgot about us, Sarge.”

“Na ruddy likely!” I wished I sounded more convincing—like convincing enough that I’d believe it too. Instead this girl figured Grant had it nailed spot on.

He looked at me and rolled his eyes. It wasn’t the sort of thing you could actually see through a full-kit Moon suit with the sun visor down. But trapped in these damn things as frequently as we were, you learned to read the signs: quarter turn toward me (not enough to stop covering his zone, good man), hesitate, then twist back.

The silence was…real damn quiet. Part of it was that we were in the hard vacuum. With the plas dome collapsed across the entire city—huge slabs of it landing every which way—air went real scarce right quick. No stars with the sun visor in place, but old Sol was bright as could be.

I tipped my helmet against the wall of the building guarding our backs. No sounds through the vacuum, but conduction should be…conducting.

A functioning lunar city was never silent—not one only half notched into the Lunar surface like Tycho nor one burrowed deep like our Glaswegian engineers had done onta Farside.

HVAC systems should be pushing around air because there was no weather system to do it for you. Auto-corers punching new caves because no matter how efficient the reclamation systems, you still need ice and minerals to grow. And the Russians had certainly been growing the crap out of Tycho.

They hadn’t been real hot on the live-within-your-resources kind of program like the rest of us. It was more, breed-like-fuckin’-rabbits—literally, fertility drugs and the whole bit. Their plan for survivin’ out here was to repeople the solar system exclusively with Russians by sheer population pressure.

Not so much anymore.

The wreckage of Tycho City was as quiet through the ears as it was through the eyes.

I resisted the urge to pound my helmet against the silent wall in purest frustration about our present situation.

First, the eejit Russians’ arrogance of building a crazy showpiece dome that spanned a full kilometer with no extra supports and no safety sectioning of the city beneath.

Second, that the two of us were now squatting in the wreckage of it all, cut off from everyone else. Tycho was dead—seen enough bodies to prove that—what we were nominally here to check out.

And the rest of the team…

Dinnae ken if not hearing from them was a good sign or a bad one.

Looking out at Carmyn’s body, or the few bits of it that remained on the street, said it wasn’t the exactly all braw and dandy.

“We’re at Fourth and Trotsky.” At least I was mostly sure we were. Tycho City had made a lot more sense before the dome fell, not that I’d been here more than a few times. It was, had been, the biggest dome this side of Mars and a hell of a lot older. A kilometer-wide bubble of plas as thick as my thigh didn’t fail pretty.

Would have been nice if the Frenchies hadn’t shot the shit out of all the nav sats while they were taking on the Brits one last time out at L2 Lagrange Point over Farside. Was gonna be a long time before the LPS, Luna Positioning System, was functioning again. Being more intended for flying around a megaton spaceship, the Deep Space Nav Network wasn’t exactly useful when wandering through the remains of a Russian ghetto.

“Command said this was our corner. We keep security here and they pick us up here.” And if this wasn’t Fourth and Trotsky, this was where we were, so I was going with it.

“It was supposed to be just a dumb recon and data grab, Sarge.” Grant just wouldn’t let it go; he liked to worry at things. My theory was if he didn’t, he’d have to start thinking. And that’s one thing a grunt never wanted to start doing.

I’d done it once, way back, and regretted it to this day.

First I’d started thinking, like why were we doing this kind of shit anyway. Earth was pretty well evacuated except for the Indians hiding behind their beam weapon that could scorch anything out of their half of the sky, and the Aussies and Kiwis hiding under their impenetrable energy dome. The rest of us were scattered across the system in habs and domes—yet nations were still fucking each other over worse than an English lord working his way through a herd of Highland sheep.

And the job of stopping the fucking, without any of the joy?

That was us, the Royal Delta Marines.

My mistake was when I started asking about that kind of shit out loud.

Command got even with me by making me squad leader. Now they were recommending officer training—like I wanted to spend a year on my ass out at Phobos Military College so that I could become one of them. No, ma’am! I was a Loonie, born and bred. If my ass was going down, it was going to be here.

I’d been very careful to never ask shit since, but I hadn’t been able to stop thinking it.

Maybe now with the Russians gone, things could settle down. The American and Chinese habs had already done their mutual annihilation dance—cyberattack and sabotage, respectively. Other than the Night Stalkers jumping ship over to the Brits, and a few other smart folks skedaddling early, those nations were no longer a factor.

Now I was thinking about how a couple of Scottish Delta Marines had gotten our arses dumped here.

The moonquakes from the French attacking the Brits on Farside had sent some hellacious shit around the sphere. The Frenchies had lost the final round in the thousand-year war. (Though some traced it back fifteen hundred to Charlemagne and others blamed the French troops of the Roman Empire over two millennia back. See? That thinking shit? Mighty hard to shut it down.) Didn’t matter who was counting, this time they’d botched the job so thoroughly that they’d never be a factor again. Space didn’t leave a lot of places to hide when you suddenly lost atmo, as the Russians had just learned.

A big quake on Luna was a Magnitude 3—the kind you could feel if you were paying attention. Having a friendly rumble together in the sack? You’d miss it going by.

Tycho Dome was built back before we knew that was about as big as the old girl kicked out, so it could take an 8 and come out smiling.

Nobody had counted on the Frenchies firing a thousand-kilo block of steel out of an orbiting railgun, several actually. A couple gigatons of energy had been slammed into the Lunar regolith.

Camryn, our squad’s geek had explained it just before a surviving Russian sniper had sniped her (before I ended him with a twenty-mike mini-rocket—strictly illegal by international accord because they reached Lunar escape velocity in the first two seconds and didn’t stop until they ran into something and blew a helmet-sized hole in it, but what the hell did international accord mean anymore).

Anyway, before the sniper clipped her, Camryn had said that after bouncing around inside the Moon, the shock waves had gathered into nodal points. One of those nodes had delivered a Magnitude 10+ quake under Tycho City. Eight gigatons of TNT-equivalent punching up your ass from inside the Moon made a whole lot of mess.

Tycho’s big dome never stood a chance.

Nor should any Russians.

We Scots of New Glasgow on Farside were never ones to waste an opportunity, and we sent a trio of the Night Stalkers Stinger-class gunships to Tycho to check things out—meaning, they dumped their load of us Royal Delta Marines and scooted back to safety while we did the dirty work.

All scooted back except one?

I ran back my suit’s vid to confirm that thought.

Sure enough, out over the remains of the Tycho Kremlin (all but one of its big spires had gone down and the last bubbleheaded onion dome had been cracked to shit by the quake), my vid had caught a view that my mind had been a little too busy with that Russian sniper to notice.

Maybe the same damned sniper had tagged the Stinger in the tail fins before targeting Camryn. At least I hoped there was only one last sniper left by the quake. I’d split my squad into three teams of three—just hoped the other two were doing better than ours.

“They’ve all gone to the crash site,” I told Grant. Maybe wishful thinking but I was in command; it was my job to at least sound like I knew things.

“Crash site? Why didn’t we hear shit? What crash?” He’d been covering my six like a good grunt, facing the wrong way for even his vid to pick it up.

I checked my vid again. The Stingers only needed the tail fins for atmo work, like only when we had to go back down to Terra because some power-that-be had forgotten his fucking toothbrush—or left behind the secrets to the universe while shitting their pants during The Lift that had evacuated so few, but not for lack of our trying.

The vid-res was marginal when zoomed all the way in. But…it still looked like just a tail fin strike. However, she’d plummeted like a brick. Which wasn’t like an Earther brick falling, but still. From two hundred meters up, it had taken her over fifteen seconds to fall. Slamming down at thirty-plus meters per second was bound to bust a thing or three.

Troops would converge to protect the “bird”—actually I’ve never seen a real one of those. Heard they shit all over everything. Not real popular in the domes or the habs. The few that had been brought aloft had disappeared right quick. My parents said slingshots were a big thing when they were kids.

Still, a tail strike shouldn’t have done it.

I tried comms.

Nothing on the long range.

Not even static.

Bad sign.

“Russian bastards hit Camryn with a micro-EMP round. Cooked our long range, but not our local.” Otherwise Grant and I would have been doing a whole lot of quiet between ourselves. The long-range antenna must have focused the electromagnetic pulse into someplace bad inside our suits. I wasn’t some technical girl like Camryn had been, I was just a grunt if you ignoring the questions and squad leader bits.

“Well…shit!” Grant’s carefully not-deep thought on our sit rep.

Now was when being in command sucked. Camryn was gone, barely enough left in one place to gather her suit tag, so no real worry about not leaving a soldier behind. Felt bad for Grant because I was pretty sure they’d been shacking up lately, but he was being chill. We’d both survived enough missions to know the drill: survive now, mourn later. We’d raise a dram for her, assuming we made it back to New Glasgow.

After the Russian had taken her out, and I’d returned the favor, we’d scooted into this snug little hideaway.

A trashed skidder had propped up two big chunks of fallen dome-plas. It formed most of a three-sided bubble against the corner of some Russian project building that had probably looked ugly as shit before the quake. It now looked worse. Fused Luna soil was dull gray. Untreated, but exposed to oxygen, the gray slowly bled a dark rust red. Every Loonie with a brain at least sealed their plas, and the colonies not trying to create deep depression inside their people’s noggins actually colored them something happier than bleeding-gray as well.

Not so much with the Russians.

So, we had depressing gray walls slowly bleeding to death at our backs. In front of us we had good visibility through the plas—except for some slight micrometeor hazing from the last two centuries since they’d put up their showpiece—and a few handy gaps between the two pieces to shoot through.

Even though I was sure (mostly, like ninety percent at least) we were at Fourth and Trotsky, I was betting that after that crash only two people remembered that order—and we were both here.

If we moved out, we’d avoid dying before our suits ran out of atmo. But we’d risk dying bigtime, if we hadn’t run out of upset Russian snipers.

“We’re on the move.”

“Aw, shit.” He was pretty much a one-curse grunt.

“You got three stripes, Grant.”

“That only makes me a sergeant. You’ve got six, master sergeant. So?”

“Wartime promotions happen fast sometimes. But my point is, stop being a numpty. You gotta be using at least three curses to go with your three stripes. It’s in the regs.”

“Aw…bat-shit.” Bats were even more obscure than birds. Nobody, but nobody had wanted them aloft.

“Doesn’t count, Grant. And don’t you dare go backing into some lame-ass soft crap or damn kinda shit.”

“Whatever the heck you say, Sarge.” I could feel Grant grinning at me through his visor. Uppity grunt.

With a couple quick hand signs, I indicated that we were going to bolt out opposite sides of our hideaway—just in case there was a sniper watching.

“Hoping they get my ass instead of yours, Sarge?”

“Damn straight.” Fifty-fifty one of us living was better than two going down together. Plus, I figured the momentary distraction of two targets at once might move us up to a sixty or seventy percent chance of both surviving.

We bolted.