by Ian Douglas
His own fear centered on the unit. After what they’d seen back there, after Kaminski’s scream and collapse, would they still be able to fight? Peterson had put it best earlier, in an overheard conversation with Nodell and Wojak. “You know, I get the feeling that we’re like soldier ants fighting over a piece of the backyard, and we just now got our first glimpse of a human, the guy who really owns the place.”
“So?” Nodell had said. “He ain’t said nothing. As long as he leaves us alone—”
“As long as he doesn’t reach for the bug spray,” Wojak said.
Morale was definitely shaken. The long silences said as much—even the lack of grumbling as suits grew uncomfortable, muscles grew stiff, and stomachs grew empty. The danger was that one final straw would bring the whole morale structure of the unit crashing down.
And the terrifying, even humiliating encounter with the alien artifact was more Sequoia than straw.
Kaminski woke up with a start around 0300 hours. “Jesus! Where…” he looked around the compartment, eyes staring. “God…what a dream.”
“Hey, Frank,” Jeff said, kneeling next to his seat. “How you feeling, Marine?”
“Like elephants have been stampeding in my head.”
“Elephants are extinct, man,” Wojak said.
“Not in my skull, they aren’t. Not yet, anyway.” He looked at the glowing numeral on the back of his hand. “What time…Je-sus! What the hell happened?”
“As near as we can tell,” Jeff told him, “The Singer has been putting out extremely long radio waves that are interacting somehow with the computer implants in your brain, making them vibrate at a low frequency, too low to be heard by the human ear. Infrasonics. Probably had you feeling pretty jumpy.”
“Like itching powder on the brain. Well…it’s nice to know there’s an explanation for stark, unremitting terror coming out of nowhere,” he said. “I thought I was having panic attacks, and couldn’t figure out why. What was it? A weapon?”
“Don’t know yet. I don’t think so, though. That…that thing down there was big enough to swat us like a fly. You were the only one affected. I think it was accidental.” Jeff was worried by the hollow look in Kaminski’s eyes. “What is it? You still hurting?”
“My head hurts, yeah,” Kaminski said, “but…it’s the memories…”
“What memories?”
Kaminski shook his head. “I’m…not sure, sir. It’s like jumbled dreams, and you can only remember a few of ’em, you know? And what you remember don’t make sense.”
“Well, with those damned implants vibrating against your brain…maybe they were generating those dreams somehow.” Jeff had read somewhere that surgeons had first begun unlocking the brain’s secrets when they found that touching or stimulating specific points on the surface of the cerebellum would spontaneously evoke memories or sensations, as though the human brain were literally a recorder that could play back what it had stored.
At 0420 hours, they approached the patch of ice where the International Gun’s shell had fallen just five days before. As Jeff had predicted, the open water had frozen over since then, but the new ice was thin enough yet that he could actually see a faint, blue-white glow outside, the light from the sun shining down almost directly into the hole.
The problem now was how to know when the Chinese reinforcements were arriving. For Jeff’s plan to have the maximum effect, the two subs would have to surface just when the landers were making their approach to the Chinese LZ. Break through too early, and the newcomers would be warned off. Break through too late, and they would emerge on the upper surface of Europa to find the enemy already landed, deployed, and waiting for them. Twenty-two Marines and one scientist would not be able to take on several hundred well-prepared PRC soldiers, robot tanks, and whatever else they would have waiting for them up there.
Since the exact arrival time of the enemy ship was known only approximately, and since it might well make several orbits before deploying its landers, they’d needed to find a way to know exactly when the landers were touching down.
He’d discussed a number of ideas with his staff back at Cadmus. Deploying a lobber with an OP team back to within sight of the Chinese LZ to warn of the ships’ approach. Signaling from Cadmus by detonating a fair-sized jolt of antimatter deep in the ocean…
And what, Jeff wondered wryly, would the Singer have made of that?
The solution turned out to be quite simple. The science team at Cadmus had a number of delicate seismographic probes, penetrators fired deep into the ice in order to measure the stresses forming pressure ridges, Europaquakes, and Europa’s equivalent of plate tectonics. It had been a simple enough task to adapt several of the drone probes the Mantas were using as torpedoes to carry seismic recording gear. Circling the west side of the crater, Carver took his bearings from the glow of the sun on the ice above and launched two of the seismic probes.
At high speed, using MHD thrusters that propelled them through the sea at nearly seventy knots and guided by software gnomes spawned by Chesty, the probes dove deep, then curved around and up, rising…faster and faster, slamming at last into the jungle-covered belly of the ice sheet overhead, both planted deep in the ice in the general area where the first PRC landers had touched down. Long wires trailed behind the probes, serving now as antennae to transmit any sounds they picked up via radio. Radio waves tended to be absorbed by water, but at low frequencies at this power, a signal could be picked up across several hundred meters.
Then, alert for the probes’ signals, the two Mantas circled quietly beneath the ice, like great, black sharks, killers waiting for the first sign of activity.
C-3, E-DARES Facility
Ice Station Zebra, Europa
0625 hours Zulu
The final assault on the E-DARES facility began with blunt-trauma suddenness. An explosion in the badlands registered on seismic sensors, indicating movement through the labyrinth east of Cadmus. Twelve seconds later, two of the surviving sentries perched on the west rim detected movement and the IR signatures of PRC space suits. Navy Lieutenant Fred Quinlan, then covering the C-3 watch, ordered the alert-five scramble.
Lucky was in the Squad Bay, playing poker with Staff Sergeant Tom Pope; Sergeants Dave Coughlin, and Vince Cukela; Lance Corporal Kelly Owenson; and Doc McCall. All save McCall were suited up, except for gloves and helmets, and on the Alert-Five.
“All I’m sayin’, Doc,” Lucky was insisting as he drew a card, “is that you didn’t need to say all that stuff about torn ligaments and shit. If you’d just said I had a sore leg, maybe I could’ve gone along.”
“What, falsify my records? No way, Lucky! The skipper’d skin me alive!”
“A man of action, huh?” Tom said, grinning. “I tried to get in on the fun too, and was told off. Two.”
“Well, I for one don’t mind a bit of peace and quiet while someone else roughhouses with the bad guys,” Vince said. “Just for a change. Gimme one.”
“Yeah, it’s a tough job, sitting around on your ass,” Dave said, “but someone’s got to—”
The alarm brayed, shrill and insistent. Cards scattered as the Marines scrambled to their feet and jogged for the gear lockers. Other members of the Alert-Five were already there, snapping gloves to wrist locks, pulling on helmets, dragging weapons off the racks.
“Battle stations, battle stations,” Lieutenant Quinlan’s voice called from the overhead speaker. “We have Charlies on the east and west rims, repeat, east and west rims! Recommend Defense Delta.”
A two-pronged attack, then. They’d tried it before, an obvious enough plot since they had three intact ships out there, to the east, west, and south of Cadmus Crater. They’d had trouble coordinating their attacks in the past.
Unfortunately, with only fourteen defenders, the Marine garrison wasn’t going to be able to rush to meet any of the attacks on the high ground of the crater rim as they’d done in the past. Plan Delta, devised for a flexible defense with too few personnel, call
ed for them to take cover on the ice near the E-DARES facility itself, and pick off the enemy as they came over the rims in any direction. Trenches, foxholes, and firing pits had already been dug and were waiting for them. All they needed to do was get there before the enemy reached the high ground where he could begin firing down into the crater.
Lucky crowded through the airlock with his squad, listening to the helmet tone as his 580 charged to full power. The outer hatch opened, and he filed out into the Europan night, careful to watch his footing on the slick metal walkway above the Pit.
Jupiter glowed balefully at him above the east rim, a vast, orange eye. Beneath him, the black, boiling water of the Pit was nearly obscured in a fog of tiny crystals of ice. He started up the zigzag ladder to the surface.
The laser pulse came from behind, from the south rim, catching Mike Vottori in the upper right arm. Lucky was immediately behind and below Mike, and saw the intolerably brilliant flare of reflected light from his Mark II armor, the silently vicious puff of vapor as the material ruptured and atmosphere exploded into vacuum, heard his shriek over the squad channel. He twisted and spun, left glove trying frantically to grab the hole and hold it shut. Lucky was reaching for him, trying to help, wondering if he had time to get at one of the sealer patches in his thigh pouch, when Vottori slammed into the guard rail, overbalanced with his backpack PLSS, and toppled, arms flailing, backward into the Pit. He fell a lot more slowly than he would have on Earth, taking long seconds to plummet twenty meters, his body punching out a man-shaped hole through the fog, then plunging into the cold boiling water with a noiseless splash.
Mark II suits were heavier than water; Mike was gone, vanished into the depths.
Lucky spun, trying to spot where the shot had come from. Switching his HUD to IR imagery, he spotted the enemy sniper, a blob of yellow against blues and greens, prone on the south ridge. He brought his 580 up and triggered three quick pulses in reply as the rest of the Marines filed up the ladder. The yellow blob vanished from sight, though whether Lucky had hit him or simply driven him behind the rim, he couldn’t tell.
Tom Pope was on the open ice, waving the rest of the Marines to their positions. “Move it! Move it!” he yelled. “We don’t have all day!” Ice erupted in a silent geyser of steam to his left. Chinese zidong tanke were on the east rim, taking aim at the tiny Marine detachment on the ice below.
Pope continued to stand in the open, yelling out orders. “Coughlin! Owenson! Get those SLAWs in action. Hit those tanks on the east ridge, damn it!”
Dave Coughlin and Kelly Owenson were humping the squad’s SLAWs. They began hammering off short, accurate bursts of rapid-fire bursts of laser light, sending up blossoming plumes of exploding ice along the eastern rim.
Lucky had already spotted the Chinese troops coming over the west rim, and concentrated his fire there.
Damn…there were a lot of them.
TWENTY-TWO
27 OCTOBER 2067
Manta One
Asterias Linea, Europa
0715 hours Zulu
“Hold it!” Hastings said. “I’m getting something!”
The SEAL was crouched over the Manta’s pilot console, listening intently to a headset pressed against his ear. “I think I’m getting something.”
“Confirmed,” Chesty’s voice added from the console speaker. “I am getting definite ice-cracking noises.”
“Put them on the speaker,” Jeff said.
The sounds were muffled and soggy, but there were several distinct noises—the shrill hiss and snap of ice turning to steam beneath the searing torch of a plasma engine, and the longer, deeper, creaking and popping sounds of ice establishing a new equilibrium with a very heavy weight settling down on top of it.
The sounds, transmitted through the ice from the surface, were shrill and loud.
“You people hear that?” Jeff shouted to the Marines who were watching quietly from their seats. “That is the sound a target makes when it’s settling down on the ice!”
Wojak burst out with a loud, “Ooh-rah!” Several others joined him, and then they all cheered. If the Chinese had hydrophones planted beneath the ice, the secret was out now, but it was too late for them to do anything about it.
“Right!” Jeff said, still shouting. Fresh, somewhat fainter cracklings sounded from the penetrator seismometers, marking the landing of a second spacecraft. “We know the bad guys are landing right now, this second! When we surface, we’ll catch ’em right where we want them—confused, unprepared, and vulnerable. Wyvern gunners, you two start acquiring and tracking as soon as you’re clear of the water. Hawse runners, you got your lines?” Cartwright and Wojak, both with heavy rolls of white line coiled over their left arms, waved assent. “Okay. You know what to do. The rest of you, head for high ground and find cover. Don’t let yourselves get caught at the bottom of the crater! It’ll be confusing out there, but just align yourselves with the Manta’s bow and head in that direction. You’ll be okay!
“Okay…everybody set? Seal up, charge your weapons, and hang on tight. This is gonna be one hell of a ride!”
He took his own seat, fastening his helmet in place, pulling on and locking the gloves, and readying his M-580.
“Manta Two reports ready to go,” Carver told him.
“Okay, tell ’em to follow us, and let’s put this thing on the roof!”
“Aye, aye!”
Manta One dipped her left wing and went into a sharp, descending spiral. Picking up speed, she straightened out, then began angling up…up…until she was aimed almost directly at the patch of thin ice marking the impact crater of the International Gun.
“Torpedo away!” Carver called, and Jeff felt the bump and hiss as another remote instrument package, this one loaded with several grams of antimatter in a soccer ball-sized containment sphere, slid clear of the Manta’s probe release tube. Chief Carver, using the VR helmet, teleoperated the drone as it sped up out of the depths, pulling his helmet off just before impact.
Seconds later, the Manta rocked heavily, and Jeff felt his stomach try to rebel. The SEAL pilot slipped his red helmet back on. “I see daylight!” he yelled, and the Manta began accelerating.
Jeff felt the sub’s angle of climb increasing, heard the whine of the MHD impellers shrilling to their highest pitch.
Manta One hit the shattered, seething ice at the surface seconds later, emerging from the water at nearly a sixty-degree angle. Traveling at almost fifty knots, she exploded from the water, clearing it completely. In Europa’s.13 gravity, she sailed gracefully, an aircraft—or, rather, a spacecraft—for a scant few seconds as she dropped again toward the ice.
She struck the thicker ice at the rim of the open patch, which seethed and boiled now with clouds of freezing white fog. As she hit, the ice beneath her belly gave way, but she kept traveling forward, her nose grinding through crumbling ice until the hurtling vessel ground onto ice thick enough not to give way beneath her keel.
Beached now, like a whale that had attempted to fly and failed, the winged sub continued sliding forward across protesting ice, until the grinding friction at her keel slued her to a halt.
For a terrified few seconds, Jeff sat in his seat, listening to the creak of the sub as it shifted slightly on the ice.
“We’re set!” Carver shouted. “Solid ice. We’re not moving. Go!”
“You heard the man,” Jeff called over the squad channel. “Move out! Let’s go, devil dogs! Hit the beach!”
The Marines began filing through the airlock, entering it two at a time. It took several minutes to clear the lock, minutes that were an agony of waiting for Jeff. If the Chinese figured out what was happening and intervened in this deadly, vulnerable first few minutes…
The first two out, by plan, were Cartwright and Nodell, volunteers both. Cartwright’s job was to run forward and attach her line to a mooring eye on the Manta’s nose, then run forward across the ice, find a solid spot on the ice, and drive home the stakes secured to the end
of the line. That would provide a solid mooring for the submarine, just in case incoming fire cracked the ice beneath it and sent it back into the water. Nodell would cover her with a SLAW, then move toward the crater rim.
Next out were Campanelli and Wojak, BJ with the second SLAW and Wojak with a second mooring line which he would put down well removed from Cartwright’s.
Then Peterson and Amberly with the two Wyverns, Garcia and Hastings, and finally Lang and Jeff. Carver would stay aboard and at the controls for the moment just in case a sudden retreat or water maneuver was necessary, and Ishiwara, a noncombatant, would stay with him. He’d also ordered Kaminski to stay aboard, since he wasn’t yet fully recovered from his ordeal with the Singer.
“We’re on the ice!” Nodell shouted over the radio. “No hostiles, repeat, no hostiles! Can’t see worth a damn, though.”
“Line attached!” Cartwright added a moment later. He could hear her labored breathing as she moved. “I’m moving out onto the ice!”
“Deploying to cover her! Still no hostiles!”
Yeah, but there would be, and soon. The question was, how much longer?
A new concern assaulted him, a possibility he’d not thought of. They’d heard two Chinese landers, but suppose what they’d heard were landers taking off? Suppose they’d arrived at the Chinese LZ just as the Chinese were deploying a new and heavier attack against Cadmus?
Suppose there was nothing at the enemy LZ at all but some deserted buildings, that the enemy was now a thousand kilometers away, attacking Melendez and the handful of Marines left behind?
No plan of battle survives contact with the enemy.
