Europa Strike

by Ian Douglas

  “Jefferson, there is no relief expedition, and we do not have properly logged flight plans for your boost, which appears to be aimed at Jupiter space. You are directed to cease acceleration at once! Jefferson! Do you read?” There was a long hesitation before the speaker added, “Over!” She could hear the frustration in his voice as he handed the ball back to the outbound A-M cruiser, as he wondered what else to say, how else he could convince, before beginning the next interminable lag-time wait.

  Kaitlin exchanged another long look with Marshal, then shrugged. “I’m having a lot of trouble hearing him, Captain. How about you?”

  “Well, that’s the trouble with these steady-thrust ships,” he told her. “With Earth almost directly astern, we’re trying to hear signals coming straight up our exhaust trail. Hot plasma plays the very hell with reception.”

  She picked up the microphone. “Space Control, this is the Jefferson,” she said. “I am having trouble hearing your transmission.” Technically, either Reynolds or the Captain should be speaking for the ship, but she’d insisted. This plot had been her idea, after all, and she wanted to assume full responsibility.

  Even for the lies.

  “Space Control,” she continued, “this is Colonel Kaitlin Garroway, of the One-MSEF. We are deploying on extended…maneuvers. We are exercising our right of free passage through open space, as allowed by all current international space treaties. We are not engaged in any relief efforts, nor do we intend to challenge any vessel or military force unless we are challenged first.

  “Colorado Springs…your signal is very weak, and breaking up. I cannot hear you, repeat, I cannot hear you. Over!”

  She checked a time readout on the bulkhead. It would be five minutes before they heard back.

  The Jefferson, carrying her cargo of 175 Marines of Alpha and Delta Companies, 1-MSEF, had been under one G acceleration for twenty-seven hours now; they were already three-tenths of an astronomical unit out from Earth and traveling at over 950 kilometers per second. At that distance, it took nearly two and a half minutes for a radio or laser signal to travel from the Jefferson to Earth, and a like time for the reply to make the trip back.

  And the distance was growing greater with every passing second.

  Kaitlin knew she was taking a fearful risk; in all probability, her career was over. She could play games with Colorado Springs now, but when she returned to Earth, there would be a hearing, and the Jefferson’s radio logs and comm buffer storage would prove her lie.

  She just hoped they would let her take the blame herself. The worst part of her act of career suicide was that, most probably, it wouldn’t be just her who took the fall. Captain Marshal was putting his neck on the block as well. Hell, there was even the chance that Rob would be tainted as well, by sheer association.

  But the real problem was Captain Steve Marshal, a lanky Texan with a blond buzz cut whom she’d first met through Rob ten years ago, at a party in Alexandria, Virginia. He’d been a close friend of the family ever since, and—to hear him tell it, at any rate—had battled his way through the e-work barricades in the Pentagon to win assignment to the Europa Relief Expedition for the Jefferson over the Washington, the Reagan, and the Dole.

  He’d flown out to Quantico when he’d heard about Rob Junior, sat up all night with them, cried with them.

  “You look…unhappy, Kait,” Steve said.

  “I don’t like dragging my friends down with me,” she told him. “I still can’t say I’m sorry that I got you involved in this, Captain, because this wouldn’t be possible without you. But I hate the thought that you could find yourself facing a court martial because of me. Damn it, Steve, you could lose your command! You should never have agreed to this.”

  He smiled. “Colonel, in the first place, I never could say no to a beautiful woman.

  “In the second place, I had friends on both the JFK and the Roosey. Jeremy Mitchell and I grew up together outside of San Antonio—and I ended up marrying his sister. And…there was Rob Junior. The way I see it, either all of those people died for some reason, or they died for no reason. I kinda prefer the first option, don’t you?”

  “But—”

  He held up a hand. “And third, Colonel, it’s not just you Marines who can be too impossibly damned heroic for words. I happen to think those people on Europa are getting a damned raw deal. I’m not going to see them hung up out there and left to flap in the breeze!”

  “Europa doesn’t have much of a breeze.”

  “Okay. Hung out to freeze-dry in the proton flux, then.”

  She returned his smile. “You can always claim that I pulled a gun on you.”

  “That the Marines hijacked a twelve billion-dollar spacecraft to Jupiter to fight an illegal war? They might frown on that.”

  “No more than you throwing in with my little mutiny. That’s what this is, you know. At the very least we’re guilty of trying to write our own version of U.S. foreign policy here. At worst, we’re pirates!”

  “Yarrr!” he growled, a mock pirate’s battlecry. “I always wanted to be a space pirate!” She laughed, and he added, “Look, I’ll be okay, Colonel. We were scheduled for boost, and I boosted on the mark. What I disregarded was the fact that Space Command put me on hold and didn’t give me a final boost clearance.” He shrugged. “I queried both STAN-NET and L-3 Traffic Control and got a clear to boost from both. End of story. At worst, I’m pegged for not double-checking with Earth, but I was well inside the envelope. And they obviously haven’t checked yet to see that a flight plan has been logged. We’re scheduled now to carry out training exercises en route to Jupiter, and in Jovian space.”

  “At one G all the way? Those are pretty damned expensive exercises!” They would be using enough antimatter on this one run to power all of North America for months.

  “Yeah, but I want to get back to Earth in a hurry. Gotta be home in time for Thanksgiving. The Marshals all get together for a big family do down in Texas, y’see, and—”

  “Steve, you’re impossible.”

  “Only highly improbable, my dear. In any case, I don’t think either of us has a whole lot to worry about.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Simple. If we manage to save your Marines, we’re going to have to do it by winning, right? We beat that second Chinese cruiser, save the CWS base, make contact with the alien, whatever it takes. If the Chinese lose hard enough, it should swing things around on Earth too. They make peace, we give them some concessions in sharing alien technology, everybody’s happy.

  “And our superiors are not going to court-martial us for success! Not when we’re in the public eye as heroes!”

  “Well, that’s all very well. But there’s so damned much that can go wrong! What if we fail?”

  What if I fail? That was the thought that had been plaguing her for two days.

  “If we fail, Colonel, you and I are going to be dead. And we won’t care a bit about what they say about us when we’re gone.”

  West of Cadmus Crater, Europa

  0956 hours Zulu

  Lucky brought his gloved thumb down on the firing button. Fifty meters away, ice exploded in an outlashing cloud, a savage detonation, death-silent. The shock was transmitted through the ice as a sharp, brief shudder, but there was no other indication that the charge had even fired.

  Dropping the trigger box back in a thigh pouch, Lucky snatched up his 580 and started crawling forward. To his right, Liss Cartwright aimed her rifle from a prone position, covering him.

  The badlands east of Cadmus were a jumbled tangle of mounds and jagged berg shapes crammed together by pressures deep within the ice into a patchwork labyrinth kilometers across. The only way to cross it was on the labyrinth floor, threading along twisting, narrow pathways with sheer ice walls ten meters high in places. The Chinese had been using the chaotic terrain to slip close to the base of the crater rim. Several times now in the past week, lone soldiers or small groups had worked their way up the crater slope,
avoiding or disabling perimeter sentinels, and firing rockets or sniping lasers into the compound.

  The Marines had countered by sending out two-and four-man patrols to place booby traps and set ambushes. Grenades buried in the ice walls and triggered by pressure switches or proximity were recorded in Chesty Puller’s data base so that he could steer friendlies clear of them, painting them on the Marines’ HUDs as red warning flags. Better were traps that could be fired by hand in an attempt to ensnare enemy troops.

  The Warhorse, scuttlebutt said, was trying to capture a Chinese soldier who knew something about the incoming PRC ship. Lucky thought the whole idea was pretty silly. Hell, they didn’t have room for the prisoners they held already, and the POWs they had weren’t willing to talk. Lucky had pulled guard detail over the Charlie prisoners a couple of times already; they were a smugly arrogant bunch, with facial expressions ranging from bland to sullen, who refused to even look at their captors. Adding to the catch was begging for trouble in Lucky’s opinion.

  But when the action order called for bringing in another prisoner or two, that’s what he was going to try his best to do. Today it was his turn to go play hide-and-seek among the tortured icebergs in the broken ground east of the crater. With Jupiter glaring down at him from above the horizon, he and Liss had found a trail recently used by the enemy, planted a charge to cut them off, and settled down to wait.

  The chances of actually achieving a contact were relatively slim; there were so many possible trails through the badlands. Still, Chesty had worked out the topology of the area and plotted a half dozen main paths between the crater and the Chinese lander still resting on the plain beyond the badlands to the east. Simply blocking Highways One through Six, as they came to be known, wasn’t enough since there were always side trails to let the enemy slip around a blockage. The Marines had better luck mining the paths, or trying to ambush enemy troops while they made the passage.

  Lucky made his way down a sharply sloping surface of rough ice, sliding the last few meters and landing hard on a ledge a man’s height above the path floor. Two Chinese soldiers had been moving along this path moments before; Lucky had set off the charge to block their retreat, and now they should be coming back this way. He leaned against a spur of ice and aimed his 580 down the path, waiting.

  Two minutes later, by his HUD timer, Liss joined him, scrambling down the ice slope from above. She was so close he felt the gentle shove of her SC shielding. “Anything?”

  She spoke over the private channel at minimal wattage. Standing orders required them to use strict EM discipline to avoid being pinpointed by PRC scanners, but down here among the ice walls and tunnellike pathways, a weak signal wouldn’t be picked up beyond line of sight. Lucky was amused that they still tended to whisper, as though they could be overheard.

  “Nothing,” he replied, not taking his eyes from the 580’s crosshair reticle, painted on the claustrophobic opening to a particularly narrow stretch of Highway Five just ahead, where the ice-path crevice was scarcely a meter wide. “Either they’re dead, or…”

  “Or they’re sitting tight in there,” she finished the thought for him, “waiting for us the way we’re waiting for them. Yeah.”

  “So what are we gonna do?”

  “We go in and check.”

  “Uh-uh,” he said. “Not a good idea. I think we try flushing them out.”

  “You have any grenades left?”

  “Two. Cover me.”

  Lowering his rifle, he fished inside a pouch strapped to his suit combat harness, pulling out a steel-gray sphere with an arming button and a locking pin. He hesitated, judging distances. Throwing things was tough; a grenade went a lot further here than it did on Earth. Lucky had gone through low-G vacuum combat training on the Moon, as had all space-qualified Marines, but it was damned hard to just turn off your Earth-born reflexes in something as autonomic as throwing a ball.

  He worked the pin free, set the timer for five seconds, cocked his arm back, pressed the arming button, and let fly, a long, high lob that sailed above the upper surface of the ice. He lost sight of the grenade as it fell somewhere among the crevice paths up ahead. Five seconds later, he felt a slight tremor in the ice.

  More seconds passed. “Well?” Liss asked him.

  “Damn it,” he said. “I hate this hide-and-seek shit!”

  “Cover me,” she said. “I’ll go check it out.”

  “No…wait,” he said. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but he felt an eerie, prickling sensation, almost as though they were being watched—a sensation somehow focused on that narrow crevice just ahead.

  Lucky was a Marine and he’d been in combat. Okay, so his cherry had popped just a week ago; by now, damn it, he was a combat veteran, and there were very few of those who hadn’t learned to listen to that gut-tickling inner warning that something was wrong. Most men and women who’d been in combat claimed to believe in senses science still refused to accept as measurable, testable faculties, ESP for lack of a better term. Lucky wasn’t convinced it was a genuine sixth sense. He held the theory, also popular, that the human brain was very good at picking up subtle clues and details and assembling them in ways that seemed magical, even extrasensory.

  There was also the nagging feeling that if the tables were reversed, if the Chinese were out there hunting him and he was trapped by an ice fall up that narrow crevice, he wouldn’t come running blindly back into the waiting crosshairs of his hunters. No…he’d find a position somewhere behind the crevice opening, take aim, and wait.

  He pulled out his second grenade, stood up, and armed it, setting the timer for three seconds. With a swift, underhand toss, he sent the steel sphere hurtling into the mouth of the crevice opening, where it hit the ice wall behind the opening and ricocheted back down the corridor, out of sight to the left.

  The shudder in the ice was much stronger this time, and a white cloud of ice particles and frost blasted silently from the crevice opening. Chunks of ice rained down on the path from overhead; a shadowy figure staggered into view, outlined for a moment in the cascading avalanche of white as it tried to raise the rifle it was carrying. Lissa pressed the firing button on her 580; a palm-sized patch on the figure’s chest silently exploded, and the figure crumpled, as ice as fine as sand continued to pour across it.

  Carefully, they moved forward, one covering the other for a leapfrogging series of short dashes up the path. The Chinese soldier in the crevice opening was dead; a companion, holding a Type 105 sniping rifle with laser targeting, lay a few meters away, around the corner, the legs of his space suit torn open by Lucky’s grenade.

  “They were waiting for us,” Lissa said. “Damn, Lucky, you’re good!”

  “No prisoners today,” he said. “Let’s get on back to the base.”

  “Roger that.”

  They followed Highway Five back toward Cadmus, Lucky in the lead.

  “So…since it’s just us out here,” Lissa asked, “is it true what they say about you? You only do it in sims?”

  “I dunno.” He didn’t want to talk about it. Not with her.

  “Aw, c’mon. Either you do or you don’t, Lucky! What’s the big deal?”

  He wondered if he should tell her. Damn…he liked Lissa. Liked her a lot. She wasn’t all that pretty—not like the eager, smiling, programmed-to-please beauties at Mr. Virtuality—but she was awfully cute, with short brown hair and small breasts and eyes so bright they could light you up with a glance. It would be nice to…no.

  “Yeah, it’s true,” he told her. “No offense, Liss, but virtual girls are a lot better in the rack than real ones.”

  “The hell they are,” Lissa replied. He was surprised by her laugh. “You’ve never tried me!”

  He wasn’t sure if that was a proposition or not. Of course, if it was, he wouldn’t be able to do anything about it until they returned Earthside. Privacy was nearly nonexistent in the confines of the E-DARES facility—not as bad as on board the Roosey, but there was no place he knew
of for a friendly and uninterrupted boff.

  Even if he could do it.

  “The trouble with real women—” he began…

  …and never finished. A pressure sensor buried beneath a handful of powdered ice clicked home beneath his boot, and the grenade blast caught him in the right side and hurled him to the left. He slammed against the wall of the pathway, then crumpled as several crate-sized chunks of ice smashed down on top of his legs.

  He screamed, more from fear and shock than outright pain. He lay on his back, blinking through a red haze. Blood was splattered on the inside of his visor; it took him a long moment to realize that his head had jerked forward and he’d slammed his mouth against the helmet’s chin console. He tasted salt in his mouth.

  He tried to move, and failed.

  Blinking through the haze, he tried to call Liss, but red lights were winking across his HUD, warning of power failure, of radio failure, of a breach in his backpack PLSS, of air loss, of heater failure….

  His right leg hurt. Not badly, not as bad as a fracture, but it hurt and was uncomfortably twisted. He couldn’t move either leg. It felt as though both legs were pinned under a massive weight.

  Lucky was also starting to feel cold.

  Damn it, where was Lissa? She’d been right behind him when that grenade booby trap went off. Funny…that. Who’d have thought that the Chinese were out trying to trap Americans in the labyrinthine maze, while he and Liss had been trying to trap them?

  He tried clicking other radio channels open. Platoon frequency. Company frequency. Platoon leader frequency. All dead.

  Time…what was the time? He was having trouble focusing on his HUD. It looked like…looked like 0620 hours…but that couldn’t be. It would mean he’d been lying out here on his back with his legs pinned beneath a small ice mountain for over an hour. It had just happened a few moments ago…hadn’t it?

  Or had he been lying here unconscious all that time?

  Movement…a shadow.

  Something moved, a silhouette against the baleful orange-ocher light of Jupiter.