by Ian Douglas
He recognized the space suits. Chinese!…
Lucky held very still as several PRC troops walked past; one gave him a curious glance as he stepped across Lucky’s chest. Several more passed, and then one actually stooped at Lucky’s side, turning his helmet, trying to peer in through the visor.
Lucky could see the man’s lips moving inside his helmet, but heard nothing. Then, the enemy troops were gone. Lucky decided they must have seen the blood on the inner curve of his visor and figured he was dead or dying.
Well, face it, he thought. You are dying. The cold was chewing its way through his legs, his torso. These Mark IIB suits were well insulated, but he was in contact with solid ice at a temperature of-140°; any heat his suit still held would swiftly trickle away. Not as fast as an ordinary suit, perhaps, and a quick freeze might be a blessing. It was ironic. He might very well wish he didn’t have so efficient a suit before long.
Two-B, or not two-B? he asked himself, and started giggling hysterically.
His indicators weren’t telling him how much air he had; which would kill him first, air loss? Or the cold?
He wished he’d been able to get to know Liss better. She seemed nice, full of bounce and fun.
So…why do you like sims better than the real thing? Funny, but he’d never asked himself that. He’d always kind of assumed the answer had to do with Becka, who’d called off the wedding two weeks before the date, who’d told him that he was too domineering, too possessive, too much of a damned control freak, that she never wanted to see him again.
Well, sure he was a control freak. That was why he’d joined the Marines, right? Because he always wanted to have things his own way? He chuckled at the thought, but the slight movement sent pain lancing down his side and leg.
It hadn’t helped that she’d ended up marrying his best friend just a month later.
Well, maybe it was time to face the fact that he and Becka just hadn’t been right for each other. If he was domineering, she was demanding. Their times in bed hadn’t been all that good, not with her trying to boss him every step of the way. No, it was a good thing she’d wised up and dumped him; they’d both have been miserable if they’d gone through with it.
What was that? He thought he’d felt a faint, far-off jolt transmitted through the ice.
Couldn’t have been anything.
Or…maybe it was. Those Chinese troops had been going somewhere in a hurry. Maybe they were hitting the base right now. He tried moving again, ignoring the pain. Damn it, he had to move!
More jars and jolts. Yeah, detonations of some sort, definitely. Who was winning?
He’d never had a lot to do with women after Becka. Hell, why should he, with Mr. Virtuality and on-line sex services all so readily available? Man, you could lose yourself in those tailor-made wet dreams, lose yourself and never come back.
And the best part of all was that your partners never nagged and never demanded. You were the boss and they did it the way you wanted.
Okay, so they didn’t care. The illusion was good enough. The fantasy…
What the hell had Liss meant by that crack about never having tried her? Was she really interested in him? Or just setting him up for the punchline?
Nah. Women were all the same. Demanding. Controlling. Whining. And ready to drop you in an instant for someone they thought would be a better opportunity for them. His best friend had been in law school. That was why she’d dropped Lucky and grabbed him…right?
He was better off without her. He was just fuzzy-headed with the cold and the low oxy, and, okay, maybe he was missing his regular sessions at Mr. Virtuality and the pent-up pressures were fogging his brain. Hell, he’d had to make do with the movie clips on his PAD since he’d left Earth, and they just weren’t the same as a real woman’s soft and loving touch.
No, not a real woman.
Damn, where was Lissa? Had she run off and left him?
Had those Charlies gotten her?
Damn, if only his radio was working.
He hadn’t felt any more thumps through the ice for quite a while now. He was also vaguely aware that quite a bit of time had passed. He thought he’d been unconscious again, but couldn’t tell.
Lissa hadn’t abandoned him. She might be a woman, but she was a Marine, and Marines never abandoned their own.
What had happened? Maybe she was lying dead or wounded somewhere, just out of his sight. Damn, if only he could get up. He was feeling lots better now, almost warm and cozy. Maybe his suit heaters had kicked in again. Maybe his suit wasn’t as badly damaged as he thought. May be…
Something bumped him, and pain clawed at his leg again. It felt like someone was tugging at him from above and behind, where he couldn’t see.
The Charlies! They must have come back for him and were trying to drag him out from beneath the ice fall. His right hand groped at his chest, where his knife was strapped inside its scabbard. Damn. His arm wouldn’t move either.
He was dimly aware that someone was kneeling over him. He felt a click of a connection being made, of the jack for a sound-powered suit intercom being snapped home in the side of his helmet. “Lucky? Lucky! Are you okay?”
It was Lissa.
He’d known it would be Lissa. She was a Marine. Marines never left their own.
“Lucky! It’s me! Corporal Cartwright! You were unconscious, and I couldn’t dig you out from under the ice! I had to go back for help! Can you hear me? Wake up!”
“I’m…awake…” Just barely. He wasn’t able to feel his feet or hands, but he was feeling warm. He could see her face through the smear of blood on his visor, as she peered down into his helmet.
He could see tears glistening on her cheeks.
She looked…beautiful.
“’Lo, Liss,” he said. “I missed you.”
“You didn’t think I’d left you, did you? I couldn’t move you by myself, so I had to go get a little help. Then it turned out the Charlies were launching another assault. We had a bit of a fight on our hands there. But the bad guys got beat, and now we’re back. You know I wouldn’t ever leave you.”
“Nah,” he mumbled, sliding off into unconsciousness. “Marines…look after…own…always…”
NINETEEN
25 OCTOBER 2067
C-3 E-DARES Facility
Ice Station Zebra, Europa
1310 hours Zulu
“Gentlemen, it’s about damned time we took this fight to the enemy.”
He was closeted with his senior personnel in C-3, some of them seated around the makeshift map table in the center of the compartment, the others standing around the perimeter of the small room. They watched him with drawn, haggard faces; the enemy assaults had been coming fast and furious these past few days, as though the enemy commander was trying to overrun the CWS installation before reinforcements arrived.
It might, Jeff thought, be a matter of saving face. Or it might mean something more…a timetable he was unaware of.
“This is our situation, as of time now,” Jeff said. “Combat-trained personnel are down to thirty-two Marines and four SEALs. Four more are in sick bay with injuries. Overall morale is good, but we are desperately short of food, ammo, and items such as tractors. We have no way of knowing what the enemy’s losses are, or the condition of his morale. However, we do know that a second enemy ship will arrive in two days—actually, forty-two hours from now.
“At that time, we will again lose aerospace superiority and come under direct enemy bombardment, and the enemy will be reinforced, perhaps heavily. We can expect to be hit by overwhelming force within the next three to four days. Given Chinese superiority in numbers, armor, and air, this command, quite frankly, cannot be expected to hold out.
“Now. There’s one bit of light in all the gloom and doom. As you all know by now, an American ship is on the way…the Thomas Jefferson. She boosted at about 1930 hours Zulu on Sunday, two days ago.
“HQ has been vague about what’s going on. They report that the Jeffe
rson has suffered a communications failure of some kind, but have been insisting in the clear that there is no relief expedition. This seems to mean either that they’re trying to fox the Chinese into thinking a warship headed this way is not coming to help us, which doesn’t sound all that plausible, or that the Jefferson is operating on her own—which is less plausible by far. Until the TJ’s motives are clear, we should be careful about accepting her deployment at face value.”
Lieutenant Biehl held up a hand.
“Yes, Moe?”
“Sir, does that mean…” he stopped, his face the image of puzzlement. “I’m confused, sir. Are we getting help from Earth or not?”
Jeff smiled. “If the Jefferson is trying to confuse the enemy, I’d have to say she’s doing one hell of a good job. If we’re a little confused about her intentions right now, think what Charlie must be going through!
“Now…on her current trajectory, there’s no other reasonable destination for her except Jupiter space. We’ll know for sure at oh-one hundred hours on the twenty-seventh. That’s when she would have to flip end for end and begin deceleration, assuming one G all the way, but nothing else makes sense. If she doesn’t decelerate, she goes zipping past us at almost four thousand kps, headed for nowhere but deep space.”
Lieutenant Graham raised a hand.
“Yeah, Rich?”
“Why don’t they up their acceleration?” he wanted to know. “Couldn’t they beat the Chinese here if they took some heavier Gs?”
“Not with that energy curve!” Melendez said with a chuckle. “Remember, you square your acceleration to halve your time. You’d end up needing more antimatter than has been manufactured in the past hundred years!”
“There is no way that the Jefferson can beat the Chinese ship, even at two gravities. The enemy cruiser will arrive at oh-seven hundred hours on Thursday, the twenty-seventh. We’ll have three more days to wait before the Jefferson gets here.
“Not exactly in the nick of time, is it?” Kaminski put in.
“Not this time,” Jeff agreed. “That’s why I’m looking at options. We can’t sit around and wait for the Jefferson to rescue us. We can’t even take much more in the way of enemy attacks from the Charlies who are already on Europa. If we sit tight, we’re going to be overrun long before help arrives—or forced to surrender.”
“So what’s the alternative, Major?” Lieutenant Quinlan asked.
“We could leave—head off overland into the outback,” Walthers said. “Is that what you’re thinking?”
Jeff shook his head. “Uh-uh. We have one tractor and three lobbers. Without transport, we wouldn’t be able to get far, and we wouldn’t be able to carry shelter along with us, or enough PLSS air reserves to last us more than twenty-four hours. Hell, if we weren’t dead of suffocation by the time the Jefferson arrived, we’d be fried from the radiation flux.”
“Besides,” Melendez added, “we don’t have any way of masking our heat signatures. We already glow in the dark, you know, on IR. The Chinese ship would spot us in one orbital pass overhead.”
“It doesn’t stop the bad guys from taking over this facility, either. No, we need something a bit more direct.
“People, I am not going to surrender, and I am not going to just sit here and keep taking it. I intend to go over to the offensive—to take the battle to the enemy—and to use his back door.”
“Back door?” BJ said. “What back door?”
He moved his PAD on the table top so everyone could see. As he touched the screen, the display was repeated on the bulkhead monitor—two large circles, one slightly smaller and set inside the other.
“Europa, people. A radius of 1,563 kilometers—circumference of 9,820 kilometers. A body composed of layers.” He pointed to the outer circle. “The upper layer is predominately water ice, ranging from ten kilometers to a few tens of meters thick, depending on where you land. The ice here at Cadmus is thin, only about twenty meters.”
He indicated the area between the two circles. “Below that is water, the Europan world ocean. Depth, fifty to one hundred kilometers, averaging about eighty. And below that, a rocky-silicate crust.”
His finger traced a curve along the outer circle, tracing an arc of a bit more than thirty degrees. “If we travel overland—over ice, that is—it’s 1,005 kilometers from Cadmus to the Chinese base on the equator. But there is a shortcut, a shortcut with the advantage of letting us stay completely undetectable.
“All we have to do is travel under the ice, moving along a chord, a straight line from here to there.”
There was a stunned silence, followed by a low murmuring as others in the compartment began talking. “My God,” Lieutenant Biehl said.
“Where’s the back door you were talking about?” Walthers asked. “How do we get through the ice at the other…oh!”
“The goddamned submarines!” Biehl added.
“Right,” Jeff said. “We have two Mantas, each eight meters long, and capable of carrying, with a bit of crowding, maybe ten or twelve Marines, suited up, with weapons and gear. BJ here brought back the images we need.” He touched his PAD screen, and the display shifted to an aerial view, shot from several hundred meters up, of a vast, dark hole in the Europan ice, shrouded by steam and mist. “Our International Gun punched clean through the ice the other day,” he continued. “It must be pretty damned thin in that region, no thicker than here at Cadmus, anyway. By now, the open water has frozen over again, but it can’t be more than a few centimeters thick yet. That, people, is our back door.”
“A shortcut straight through the planet?” Gunnery Sergeant Kuklock asked.
“The chord distance isn’t that much shorter than the Great Circle Route,” Jeff told him. “Works out to about 980 kilometers, so we only save twenty-five. But we’ll be sheltered from observation from topside, above the ice, and we should be able to emerge in their rear and achieve complete surprise. Following the chord will take us to a depth of about eighty kilometers. As it happens, according to the scientists here, that’s pretty close to the average ocean depth between here and the Charlie main base. The Mantas have a cruising speed at depth of about fifty to eighty kilometers per hour. That means a twelve-to eighteen-hour trip.”
“Can they break through the ice at the other end?” BJ wanted to know. “Even a few centimeters can be pretty tough, and it might be thicker than we think. Things freeze fast on Europa, you might’ve noticed!”
“The Mantas carry remote drones for carrying instrument packages. Kaminski here has assured me he can rig some drones with a few grams of antimatter as warheads. That ought to break through anything up to a couple of meters thick.”
“Our maker of exotic weapons,” Melendez said.
“Or our icebreaker,” BJ added. “First from above, now from underneath!”
“‘Icebreaker,’” Kaminski mused. “I like that. I’ll be sure to put that on my resume when I get out of the Corps.” The others laughed.
“So…sir, what do we do when we achieve that surprise?” Graham asked. “Especially given that we don’t know the enemy’s strength.”
“We’ll need to work out the details, of course. What I’d like to do, though, is have a fair-sized force emerge from the ice close to the enemy LZ at just about the time those reinforcements arrive.”
“That’s going to require some pretty close timing, sir,” Kuklock pointed out.
“Yes it is. But if we hit them too early, before their landing craft are committed to touching down at their current base, they would just land somewhere else—maybe a lot closer to Cadmus. And if we wait too long, they’ll be down and fully established, maybe with a lot of hardware and some unpleasant surprises.
“What I’d like to try to do is come up out of that hole with a bunch of Wyverns just as those landers are balancing down out of the sky. A few men could do a lot of damage in a short time. Maybe enough to hurt them so badly that they stop hitting us. We need time. If we buy ourselves just three more days past the t
wenty-seventh, the Jefferson will be here. If we’re going to pull this off, though, we have to move quickly. We must launch within the next twenty-four hours if we are to reach the Chinese LZ by 0700 hours Zulu on the twenty-seventh. Are there any questions?”
There were a few scattered questions, mostly of a technical nature relating to how the Mantas would be deployed, and how the men would debark from them. At the end, however, there was a single hand in the air—raised by the lone civilian present in the room.
“Yes, Dr. Ishiwara?’
Shigeru Ishiwara had been granted a special status with the Marines, as liaison between them and the CWS science team. Not everyone trusted Vasaliev, and fewer liked him; Ishiwara, though, seemed to be a man of integrity and trust. Jeff had agreed to let him sit in on planning sessions like this one so that they could have his scientific input—and the cooperation of the civilians.
Jeff had especially wanted him in on this meeting, since his submarines were a topic of the discussion. He wanted the quiet Japanese xenoarcheologist to be on their side in this one.
“Major,” Ishiwara began. “What you propose sounds like a bold and daring plan. I have only one question.”
“Yes?” Here it comes, he thought. If there’s going to be a problem with the scientists, this’ll be it….
“If I understand you right, you’ll be following a straight-line chord from point to point, with the Manta submersibles reaching a depth of approximately eighty kilometers at the midpoint.”
“That’s right,” Jeff replied. “I’ve checked those boats out…even got to take a ride in one in the Bahamas, Earthside. They’re rated as safe to a depth of ten thousand meters on Earth—that’s a thousand atmospheres—or the equivalent of a depth of seventy-seven kilometers here on Europa. And we have a bit of a safety margin to play with. We shouldn’t have any problem at that depth. If we do, we can adjust our path to keep to a shallower level.”
“It was not the depth that was concerning me, Major Warhurst. Are you aware that your proposed course will take you very close to the position of the Singer?”
