Europa Strike

by Ian Douglas

  “What, the hints and tips guide?” Tonelli said. “Fuck, I think I managed to sleep through most of it.”

  “That water might look like it’s boilin’ hot, but its temperature is just below freezing. The salt and sulfur and stuff mixed with it lets it get a couple degrees below zero without freezing solid.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Kane said. “To boil water, it’s gotta be hot!”

  “Uh-uh. The lower the air pressure, the lower the temperature you need to boil water, remember?”

  “Yeah,” DePaul said. He was the scholar of Bravo Company, a kid from Maryland who’d dropped out of college to join the Corps. “Remember your basic physics? Back on Earth, if you want to boil water on top of a mountain, you have to cook it extra long to get it hot enough to kill the bugs in it. That’s ’cause the boiling point of water is lower at high altitude than it is at sea level.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Tonelli said. “Like I always remember my basic physics!” The others laughed.

  “A wright, you people!” a new voice growled, cutting in on the chat circuit. “No one said you were on leave! Get your asses up here, on the double!”

  Lucky held the guard rail and leaned back, looking up. Although the white, bulky suits they were wearing were fairly anonymous, there was no mistaking Gunnery Sergeant Kuklok’s perpetually angry stance, or the stripes and rocker painted onto his shoulder and helmet. First Platoon’s gunny was a twenty-year veteran with five years’ experience as a boot camp DI, and three years more as an instructor at the Quantico Space School.

  Not a man, in Lucky’s opinion, to keep waiting.

  “On our way, Gunny!” he called, taking the metal steps three at a time as he jogged toward the surface. Movement in Europa’s.13 gravity was easy, a lot like moving on Earth’s Moon in the long, low lope the Marines called the “bunny rabbit bounce.” The tricky part was turning and stopping, once you got yourself plus the mass of eighty kilos or so of space suit and equipment moving. Eighty kilos on Earth might only weigh something like ten and a half kilos here, but it still acted like eighty, tending to keep moving and to do so in a straight line once you got it up to speed.

  Lucky reached the top of the ladder, and used a double-handed grip on the railing to jerk himself to a more or less elegant halt a few meters from the glowering, fists on hips form of Sergeant Kuklok. Tone, Killer, and D.P. came off the ladder at his back, colliding with him and nearly sending the lot of them into an untidy sprawl.

  “Hey, get off!” Lucky shouted. As he turned, he felt a powerful shove from Tonelli’s suit…the like-charge repulsive effect of his SC field against Lucky’s. Lucky took a step back, trying to keep his balance. His boot slid in a puddle of boiling hydrogen peroxide, and he fell—slowly—to his knees.

  His descent, fortunately, was slow enough that he was able to grab hold of the handrail and avoid the complete embarrassment of falling flat on his ass.

  “Jesus!” Kuklok bawled. “If I’d known we’d had the Keystone Cops on board, I’d’ve invited the Three Stooges along too! Fall in, Marines! Get yourselves squared away! Damn it to hell, don’t get so close there, or you’ll send each other scooting into next week! Uh-tenn…hut!”

  It took a few moments more to get untangled, but the four Marines sorted themselves out and fell into a more or less straight line.

  “Okay, Marines,” Kuklok said. “You four have just volunteered for a working party. Right…face! Forrard…harch! Gimmee your left! Your left! Your left-right-a-left!”

  Marching in 13 percent gravity proved to be an interesting and largely futile exercise. It did keep them from bunching up, however, and risking another fall as the magnetic fields coursing through the superconducting weave of the Marines’ suits tried to push each other apart. Kuklok, Lucky decided, was definitely an old Corps Marine.

  Since his helmet hid his head, he could rubberneck a bit as they marched, peering out the side of his visor. The magnificent grandeur of Jupiter in the eastern sky was staggering…utterly transfixing, a vast, swollen, cloud-banded bow aimed at the shrunken but still brilliant sun just above the horizon. Someone had told him that Jupiter covered more sky than a hundred full Moons on Earth; statistics like that didn’t come close to describing the reality, though. He found he could just make out the faintest of glows within the black circle of Jupiter’s night side and, here and there, he could actually see tiny, pinpoint twinklings of white light. It took him a moment to realize that what he was seeing were lightning storms—storms that must be as big as North America, with lightning bolts discharging in an instant energies equivalent to all the fusion power plants running in the United States right now.

  The cloud bands he could see were rust-red, white, and salmon-pink; a tiny crescent, colored orange-red, rode high in the sky above the swollen planet. He tried to see the rings that were supposed to circle Jupiter, but, edge on and coal-dust faint, they simply could not be seen by the naked eye.

  The group collected a carry cart at one of the base surface hangars beside the landing field, a bright yellow cargo dolly, basically, with a broad, mechanized flatbed on six oversized spiked wheels. Kane hopped into the cab and drove the vehicle across the landing deck to the nearest bug, where the cargo bay doors had already been opened and one of the funny-looking, stingray-shaped submarines with close-folded wings was already being lowered by the bug’s onboard cargo winches. Under Kuklok’s direction, they parked the cargo transport beneath the dangling Manta, then gathered around to help guide it to rest in the cradle on the mech dolly. The work was tricky and potentially dangerous; even here, one of those submarines weighed over twenty-five tons, and once it was moving, it had all the inertia of a 200-ton lump of metal, easily capable of crushing a man who got careless.

  They settled down to the work in a brisk, efficient, no-nonsense manner. There was no more skylarking, and only occasional jokes over the chat channel to punctuate the sounds of heavy breathing and one-two-three cadences and orders.

  No matter what the antics of Tone and the rest might suggest, Lucky knew, Space Marines were not stupid. The selection process and competitive testing saw to that. But a lot of them seemed to wear ignorance like some kind of badge of honor—a means, perhaps, of distinguishing them from the college-educated officers.

  Lucky didn’t subscribe to that. Ignorance was bad, a character flaw that could make you very, very dead in an environment like this one. He’d never gone to college; no way could a poor family from the Upper West Side slum projects of New York City have managed that. But a government-subsidized home computer and its access to Earthnet had offered him a lot more than the virtual sex that had attracted him in the first place. He might have the rep of preferring electronic virtual dates to real ones, but he’d learned a few things along the way.

  You couldn’t see the stars from Manhattan, but thanks to the Net, astronomy had captured him at an early age and never loosed its grip. His love of space—the landscapes and star vistas revealed by various telescopy projects, the wonders promised by the Ad Astra when her observations of the Alpha Centauri system made it back to Earth in another four or five years, the Earthnet shows and documentaries and virtual explorer links you could tap into at the touch of a keyboard—all that and more had led him to find the one way a poor kid from the New York projects could get into space…by joining the Marines and getting himself selected for the MSEF.

  Someday, he knew, he was going to the stars. There were other races out there—the discoveries cataloged so far in the Cydonian Cave of Wonders proved that much. There were things, people out there stranger than anything ever imagined by generations of Hollywood movie makers or VR sensory download techs. One day, humans would be going out there to meet them.

  And the Marines would be along, to protect the ships and people, to protect human interests, to protect all those new worlds that would be opening to human exploration.

  Yeah, fuckin’ A. He was going!

  TEN

  16 OCTOBER 2067

>   Europan Space

  0250 hours Zulu

  General Xiang Qiman sat strapped into his couch, watching the evolution unfold on a small flatscreen monitor on the console in front of him. Like grapes detaching from their stem, the last of the spherical Jiang Lei landers were separating from the long, slender axis of the Xing Shan and aligning themselves for their deorbit burn. Thirty-two minutes to go.

  He glanced at the man strapped in beside him, swaddled like himself in a heavy, white-fabric space suit, with helmet and gloves not yet donned. Dr. Zhao Hsiang’s bland face showed no emotion, but Xiang knew that the man was fuming. They’d discussed the problem often enough during the burn out from Earth.

  “Do not fear, Doctor,” he said. “If your friends have barely reacted to the American presence on Europa, they don’t even know we are here yet.”

  “I very much hope that is so, General Xiang. If we’re wrong, we may find we have awakened a giant. An angry giant.”

  “The Americans used antimatter charges to drill their hole thorough the Europan ice, yes?”

  “Yes…”

  “And there was no response from the Singer.”

  “None that we know of. But if the Singer intelligence knew the Americans were simply drilling a hole through the ice…”

  “And how are they to know that this is any different?”

  “The point is, General, we have no way of knowing what they know! And starting a war on their world…”

  Xiang shrugged, a bony-shouldered movement all but lost in his bulky space suit. “The potential gains outweigh the risks, Doctor. And it is important to remember that there are two aspects to our mission.”

  Zhao’s mouth set in a hard, bitter line, and he looked away.

  “Doctor?”

  “I…remember. I still do not agree.”

  Xiang laughed. “Your agreement is scarcely necessary, Doctor. We will do what must be done.”

  “‘Mission Directive One,’” Xiang said, quoting. “‘Friendly and cooperative contact with the Singer Intelligence is to be established if at all possible. Mission Directive Two: Friendly contact between the Singer Intelligence and member states of the CWS are to be disrupted at all costs.’ My detailed orders on this point are quite explicit, Doctor. If we cannot make friendly contact with these aliens, we are to make sure they do not establish friendly relations with the Americans and their CWS puppets. Since it is unlikely that the Singer Intelligence has a clear understanding of human political differences, an attack on the Singer Complex should convince them that the Americans are treacherous, not to be trusted.”

  “It should convince them that humans are not to be trusted. These orders are incredibly reckless, General. I fear for our world. For the human species.”

  Xiang waved the protest aside. “If these aliens had that kind of power, why have they spent millennia sunken within the Europan ocean? Either they are native to Europa, and have no spaceflight capabilities at all, or the complex is some sort of base or outpost, again with no capabilities that would endanger our planet.

  “But Greater Zhongguo is threatened by the West. As always, the Middle Kingdom is surrounded by barbarians, and they will bring us down if they receive from the aliens technology immeasurably superior to our own. We must prevent that, even at the cost of our own lives. Do you understand me, Doctor?”

  “I…understand. I love my country. I love my people. You know that. But if we begin a war with the Europan Intelligence, it would be Feizhengyi Zhanzheng.” The term, translated as “Unjust War,” had been basic to Chinese military doctrine for 150 years. It assumed that there were wars that were righteous, and wars that were not—a moral distinction that put those who waged them on the side of right or wrong.

  “Perhaps. But we will arrange things so that the Intelligence assumes it is the Americans who wage unjust war. And you are here to aid us in our understanding of that Intelligence—to establish meaningful communications.” He sighed. “If you carry out your assignment well, there will be no need of unjust wars, or of any war at all, for that matter. I sincerely doubt that this alien intelligence will even know the difference when we sweep the Americans aside and take their place at Cadmus Station.”

  “I hope you are right, General.”

  The minutes trickled away, and then Xiang felt a hard shove against his seatback as the Jiang Lei lander’s plasma thrusters fired…a gentle half G to bring it down out of orbit, but a jolt nonetheless. Jiang Lei meant, roughly, “Descending Thunder.” There could be no noise in hard vacuum, of course, but inside the sphere’s steel and ceramic hull, the steady, rumbling vibration as the engines briefly fired sounded like a roll of summer’s thunder.

  Eight landers, crammed with fifty men apiece plus a small mountain of supplies, descended toward the equatorial landing site close by the dark streak across the Europan surface called Asterius Linea.

  The LZ had been carefully chosen by Chinese astronomers and military planners. The CWS station was located at approximately twenty degrees north, roughly 800 kilometers northeast of the location of the Singer Complex—close enough for study and easy access, far enough to avoid alarming the aliens if, indeed, the aliens were paying attention to the goings-on atop their icy ceiling. The Chinese had wanted a landing site well removed from the enemy base, and similarly safely convenient to the Singer. They’d chosen a site almost on the Europan equator, two hundred and some kilometers southwest of the alien site, and over a thousand kilometers from Cadmus Station.

  Xiang would have liked to have landed closer to the CWS base—right on top of them, if possible, but Beijing, as usual, was being cautious. If any of the shuttles carried by the Franklin Delano Roosevelt had reached the surface before the Heavenly Lightning’s bolts had struck her down, there might be enemy troops on the surface already. A single man with a shoulder-launched SAM could easily take out a thin-skinned Jiang Lei; they needed to get all of the troops and equipment down and assembled first, before risking contact with the enemy.

  Besides, a thousand kilometers of separation offered maneuvering room and a chance to determine the best approach to the enemy base. Europa’s surface was sufficiently chaotic that Xiang was planning on using the Asterius Linea itself as a kind of high-speed highway northeast to its near-intersection with Cadmus Linea, but there were other routes, and the best one would need to be determined by reconnaissance parties and flying drones. He was supremely confident of the outcome of this struggle, but he would not yield to the temptations of overconfidence.

  On his console screen, the surface of Europa was drifting rapidly past, a maze of rust-brown lines against blue-white ice, like dirty cracks in white crystal.

  And what awaits us beneath that icy barrier? he wondered. Two of the landers carried miniature abyssal research submarines, similar to those Intelligence had reported the Americans were adapting to this mission. Dr. Zhao, he knew, was determined to meet the Singer Intelligence firsthand.

  And Xiang was determined to accompany him.

  It might well be man’s first face-to-face encounter with beings from another world—the first within recent historical times, at any rate.

  He sincerely hoped that the second option explored by his orders proved to be unnecessary.

  Because, despite his calming words to Zhao, they were taking a fearful risk.

  Combat Command Center

  E-DARES Facility, Cadmus Linea

  Europa

  0329 hours Zulu

  They were gathered in C-cubed, the compartment in the sunken bow of the E-DARES designated as the Marines’ Combat Command Center—Jeff Warhurst; Captain Paul Melendez; Lieutenants Graham, Biehl, Quinlan, and Walthers; Kaminski; and four senior NCOs, the eleven of them scarcely able to move in the cramped quarters as they listened to a static-blasted hiss of relayed radio traffic.

  “Yibai mi,” the voice said. “Shang bai fen zhi wushi…”

  “‘One hundred meters,’” Chesty Puller translated, speaking over the command center’s int
ercom. “‘Up fifty percent.’”

  “Rongyi…rongyi…”

  “It would kind’ve been nice if we could have had some advance warning about where the bastards were coming down,” Lieutenant Ted Graham said, angry. “A couple of men in place with Wyverns would’ve spoiled their party real fast!”

  “Liushi mi…Wushi mi…Diao ershi gongli xiaoshi…”

  “‘Sixty meters…fifty,’” Chesty translated. “‘Descent at twenty kph.’”

  “Any idea yet where they’re coming down?” Jeff asked.

  “Negative, sir,” Staff Sergeant John Wolheim, at the radio console, said with a curt shake of his earphones-encased head. “Southwest and well over the horizon. If I had to guess, at least five hundred kilometers…no more than twelve hundred kilometers. I can’t give you closer than that without triangulation.”

  Jeff’s fists closed, slowly and tight. I should have thought of that…had at least one more lobber out there.

  In fact, he hadn’t thought about it because it was inherently impractical. Lobbers required a human pilot, and positioning one a hundred kilometers away or so meant either exposing the Marine to unacceptable levels of radiation or rotating the lobber’s crew every few hours, an exercise that would quickly become futile in terms of energy expended and men exposed to Europa’s deadly surface conditions.

  As it was, Gunnery Sergeant Cukela, a volunteer, was in the sky right now, jockeying a lobber some kilometers directly over the base, gentling the four-legged contraption high enough that it could see over the horizon and pick up the Chinese fleet’s radio chatter.

  If he’d known just when the Chinese fleet was going to land, he could have had another lobber ready some distance off, set to ascend at the same time and provide a second bearing that would pinpoint the enemy’s LZ.

  Might as well just wish for the LZ coordinates, he thought. And, while you’re at it, a regiment or two of Space Marines in reserve.

  The worst part was being this damned blind. On Earth, any Marine unit on the planet had almost instant access to whole constellations of military satellites, including battlefield observers that, on a clear day, could literally look over an enemy officer’s shoulder and read his maps and communications printouts. And there were IR sensors in orbit that could see warm flesh through the concrete roofs of buildings and bunkers.