Chapter 3

Seemedlike we’d run over all of Tycho trying to locate the crashed Stinger, and still weren’t scaring up any friendlies.

Did figure out why that Kremlin tower survived though. They’d carved it right out of the lunar crust, cutting everything away except for the central spire.

The decorative onion dome on the top must have come later, because one side was broken away.

Russians were tricky. Had to keep that in mind. Not that we’d seen any except frozen ones. The streets were impossibly still. Nothing in motion. People, skidders, cats—cats had done just fine on Luna (though not even the Russians could justify the volume of food the dogs consumed)—nobody and nothing moved. There was the occasional flurry of dust as some deep cave let go and released a last puff of air, but it settled plenty fast.

There was a lunar atmo of dust particles bouncing around as charged particles due to the solar wind, but it wasn’t the sort of thing you’d notice much without a microscope—or when having to clean your gear after too long in the field. Lunar dust was sticky shit.

“Sarge!”

Grant was in the lead, but his shout had me double-timing up to his position.

His attention was down a side street.

One look and I knew why. The Stinger hadn’t merely gone down, it had shattered. A two-hundred-meter fall shouldn’t have been quite so catastrophic, but it was in shreds. It had high-centered, impaled on a piece of plas bigger than it was. The piece must have sliced down deep into the soil to still be standing upright, edge-on to the sky.

The Stinger had been sheared in two diagonally. Looking through the plas, it looked as if the two pieces had been neatly dissected to display the interior.

Except it was also blown apart.

“Our guys,” I sighed. Broken past recovery, they hadn’t wanted to leave anything behind, so they’d blown up their own ship. “Let’s check for a radio anyway.”

Five minutes later Grant reported, “No joy.”

“Shit!” Now I was sounding like him. They’d killed the Stinger and cleared off, probably all the way back to Farside. That definitely justified a more emphatic expletive, but nothing was coming to mind to cover the scale of this mess—despite my six stripes.

Grant tapped on the hull where the tail fin still rose up like it was giving us the finger.

Only took me two glances to realize that it absolutely was.

This had been our ship—the one that had delivered us to the wrong Fourth and Trotsky (which we actually passed fifteen blocks into our run, but I hadn’t wasted time pointing that out to Grant). Chances of them looking for us there were probably zero. Where we’d actually been dropped… Anyone likely to remember we were on the ground had probably died in this crash.

“This is not being an easy day.”

“Only easy day was yesterday,” Grant grunted in agreement.

I was just about to tease him for being a Delta Marine using an old Canmerican SEAL curse when a hole the size of Grant’s helmet appeared in the hull close behind his head. He hadn’t seen it, or heard the soundless explosion of the round that had punched it.

I grabbed him by the straps of his breather pack, dragged him down on top of me, and rolled into one of the broken-off exhaust nozzles.

“Yes, I like you, too,” Grant said calmly. “But isn’t this an odd time to fulfill all my fantasies. Come to think of it, my fantasies have very little to do with us both being in spacesuits while in hard vacuum. Could get into taking it off you, though in atmo?—”

I pushed him partway off me, though not out of the throat of the nozzle, then pointed up. Another hole had silently appeared in the top of the nozzle. This time I could feel the explosion of the round. The back of my helmet resting against the lower part of the curve; it conducted the sound plenty loud.

The nozzle was ringing like a gong.

One more hole, halfway down, and I figured out where the rounds were coming from. Or at least what direction—by the entry holes and debris splash on the opposite of the nozzle’s interior. The rounds were coming in high on the left; the debris track was low on the right and just enough forward that neither of us had been punctured.

Yet!

I swung my Recoilless Army Combat Rifle into both hands.

Grant did the same with his RACR.

I held up two fingers…

One!

We both jumped into the proper alignment of the holes and fired back.