by Ian Douglas
“Chinese ship! This is the Confederated World States Europan research base!” Yang heard the words through the earphones he wore, rather than within the virtuality program. This software could handle visual input, but nothing more. “Please halt all unloading activities and open a com munications channel! Please respond! Over!”
“Sounds like they want to talk, Colonel,” the voice of Major Hu, leading the assault, said in Yang’s ears. Yang could hear the rasp of the man’s breathing in his helmet, hear the exertion as he struggled ahead across the ice. “No sign of resistance yet.”
“Keep your people well dispersed,” Yang directed. “And stay close to the tanks.”
Giving a series of mental commands to the lander AI, Yang brought up the camera view relayed from Hu’s helmet and from several of the other troops as well. All of the scenes showed much the same so far…the flat and endless ice occasionally interrupted by the suited shape of another soldier, or the low, white lurchings of a robot tank.
“Chinese force!” The enemy’s voice repeated. The words were in putonghuà, and Yang realized that the speaker must be an AI programmed to translate into his language. Had the Americans been expecting the Chinese landing? Or was the AI expert in a number of languages, simply as a matter of course? The answer might be important. If the Chinese force had been expected, if the enemy was waiting for them now, on the reverse slope of the crater rim…
“Continue the advance!” he snapped, speaking on the command frequency. “Secure the crater rim, and they will surrender!”
Leckie
Ice Station Zebra, Europa
1545 hours Zulu
Corporal Lucky Leckie jogged up the inner rim of the crater in long, loping kangaroo bounds, reaching the top, dropping to his heavily padded knees, then jamming the butt of his M-580 laser rifle into the ice to lower his body full-length. All movement in this light gravity seemed surreal and slow, a kind of slow-motion dance that left him with heart pounding and his breath coming in short, ragged gasps through a dry mouth. A guy could get shot eight or ten times in the long seconds it took him to hit the dirt.
“Dirt” in the figurative sense, of course. Some of the ice looked pretty dirty, but it was still ice.
“Where are they?” he called. He was on the west rim of the base crater, with the sun high behind him, at his back. He could see the Chinese landing craft, like a round, gray Christmas tree ornament on the far horizon, but he couldn’t see anyone on the ground.
“Use your optics, Lucky,” Gunnery Sergeant Kuklok called. “Radar has seventy-three targets out there right now, fanning out and moving this way!”
He used his chin to toggle his helmet’s HUD overlay. On infrared, he could see movement—a dozen blobs of yellow and green against the cool greens and deep blues of the background terrain. Range: nine hundred meters, and closing.
He switched to the radar feed, and the targets proliferated, a scattering of tiny green squares behind a horizontal line of six triangles. Rali units set along the crater rim were picking up the advancing Chinese troops and vehicles and feeding their positions to the Marines’ helmet HUDs by way of the submerged E-DARES command center.
He selected a target—one of the triangles indicating a moving vehicle of some sort—and raised his M-580LR. Switching the weapon on, he started the warm-up cycle, and heard the rising whine in his headset indicating the power buildup in the capacitor pack. At the same time, a bright red cross hair reticle appeared on his HUD as the targeting unit on the rifle transmitted his aiming point to his helmet electronics.
A red light winked in the upper left corner of his HUD, along with the word LOCKED. C-3 had locked out the laser weapons of everyone in the company, a precaution against someone jumping the gun. “Take it easy, people,” Major Warhurst’s voice said over the company frequency. “Let’s see what they want.”
“I don’t think they’re waiting for an invitation to come aboard!” Lance Corporal Porter said.
“Maybe they want to surrender!” Sergeant Quincy said, laughing.
“We know what they freaking want!” Tone’s voice added, just a little shrill. “They sure as hell ain’t coming over here to borrow coffee!”
“Keep it down, Tonelli,” Kuklok said. “The Major knows what he’s doing. All of you, can it! Com discipline!”
The chatter stilled, and the only sound Lucky heard was the hiss-rasp of his own breathing inside his helmet, the pounding of his own heart.
He hated being this afraid.
He’d been the tough guy on the block, back in the projects, the one with the swagger, the jazz, the balls, the one to stand up in front of the enemy gang and face them down—or throw the first one with chain or shiv, with zippie or hobnailed stomper. He’d never been able to admit to the rest of the Skullz how terrified he’d been at every encounter, how dry his mouth was, how hard his heart was hammering. To admit weakness of any stripe would have meant loss of face; the Skullz had been known to turn on their own with the ferocity of a wolf pack killing the weak of their own species. Lucky hadn’t heard of Darwin then, but he recognized the imperative. The strong survive at the expense of the weak.
For three years, he’d been the leader of the Skullz…and terrified the entire time. In the end, the stress had been too damned much; he’d joined the Marines to get away.
And why the Marines, for God’s sake? He watched the moving squares and triangles of light on his HUD, superimposed on the bleak panorama of the Cadmus Linea, and he had to admit that now he didn’t know.
Well, the Marines had the rep for being tough. Always. The recruiting vids for the other services carried the same general type of message: Join the Navy and see the world; join the Army and get a career; join the Air Force and go to college. The Marines, though, were different: We’re looking for a few good men…
…and women. They didn’t bar people on the basis of sex. Hell, since the early ’20s, women had served in frontline combat units just as they did in the other services. But the Marines were exclusive, an elite. They didn’t let just anybody in. You had to be good enough, had to prove yourself, to be one of them.
And he’d been a gangbanger from the Met who’d never even seen the stars, who desperately wanted to get into space. The Navy, more and more, was expanding their credo of “see the world” to “see the worlds,” using their long expertise at training men and women to live in close, artificial environments for months at a time to become America’s space service—but it was the Marines who did the real fighting, the real dirty work, who had the rep as killers.
So he’d joined the Corps, partly because it preserved his tough-kid image, partly because—he could admit it now—he’d been trying to prove to himself that he had what it took to stay on top of the food chain.
Seven hundred meters.
LOCKED.
Damn…when were they going to let him fire?
The tough kid from the Met had survived for perhaps ten days in Boot Camp at Parris Island. Constant supervision, an exhausting schedule balancing physical challenges with intensive training, good food in a supervised diet—a regimen calculated to break him down to nothing both physically and emotionally—had destroyed the old Lucky. They’d then built him back up almost literally muscle by muscle and thought by thought, remaking George Sidney Leckie into a “mean, green fighting machine,” a creature as alien to that ragged street punk as the surface of Europa was to the trash piles of Riverside Drive.
And yet, despite all that, the old fear remained.
He licked his lips, took a sip from the water nipple, then licked them again. He could feel the familiar weakness spreading from the pit of his stomach to his knees, his elbows, his hands. He could taste the hot sting of vomit at the back of his throat.
Marine training was good, but it couldn’t take away the fear. Use your fear, his DIs in boot camp had told him. You can channel the fear into strength. Let your training take over. Use your mind to control the panic, use it.
He’d n
ever been in combat. Oh, he’d faced plenty of problems in tactical combat sims, sure, but no matter how realistic those might be, they were nothing compared to the real thing. This was his first time ever up against a real, live, shooting enemy. Compared to these guys, armed with Type-80 missile launchers and Type-110 auto-assault rifles and Taiyang lasers, a bang-bang with the kids on West Broadway or Morningside Heights was a friendly and somewhat lighthearted session of shooting the shit.
The Chinese had stopped, the nearest still six hundred meters out. What was going on?
“Listen up, everybody.” It was Major Warhurst, speaking over the company channel. “Looks like the ship that brought these guys has changed orbits. It’s just now coming up over the western horizon, and it’ll be passing straight overhead in another few seconds.
“We don’t know what they intend. They haven’t tried to talk to us yet, or responded to our challenges. It’s possible they intend to try softening us up with a crowbar barrage.
“If so, keep down, don’t panic, and remember your training! They’re in orbit, which means they’ll pass overhead pretty quickly, enough for a quick series of strikes, but nothing they can sustain. Listen to your squad leaders, and don’t do anything stupid. You’ll come through okay.”
Shit, Lucky thought. Shit, shit, shit! Crowbars!
You didn’t have to pack high explosives into a shell or warhead, or generate an intense beam of coherent light or antimatter particles to cause some serious damage to a target. The big guns of most naval vessels now, both those afloat and those in space, were mass drivers, long-barreled weapons that used superconductor cable to generate intense, fast-moving magnetic pulses that could grip a steel-sheathed projectile and accelerate it in a fraction of a second to velocities that could kill through the release of kinetic energy alone.
In 2042, the kinetic energy released by a falling fragment of a French spacecraft had wiped out Chicago as effectively as a small nuke; the gentle rain of plutonium dust from the ship’s radioactive pile afterward had been a largely gratuitous extra.
A lump of lead thrown by hand at a few tens of kilometers per hour hurt. The same bullet propelled by expanding gases in a rifle’s firing chamber to velocities of a kilometer and a half per second killed.
And the same bullet, accelerated by a mass driver to a hundred kps, didn’t simply kill. It vaporized.
“Crowbar” was the slang for lumps of inert metal fired from a railgun in low orbit. Usually massing ten kilograms and accelerated at 50 to 100 gravities, they struck with terrible force. Ten kilos coming in at ten kilometers per second released 5 × 108 joules—the equivalent of detonating 100 kilos of high explosives.
And in a few more seconds, a Chinese ship was going to be sailing overhead, spitting out crowbars like machinegun bullets.
No wonder the damned Chinese had stopped their advance out there on the ice field. They were going to wait for the crowbar barrage, then move in and mop up the leftovers.
The seconds dragged by, as Lucky’s panic grew to a shrieking intensity.
Chinese People’s Naval
Strike Cruiser Xing Shan
50 kilometers above
Ice Station Zebra
Europa
1559 hours Zulu
The doctrinal manuals called it air superiority, a concept that remained accurate despite the fact that there was no air involved. In another sense, it could be considered the age-old ploy of grabbing the high ground. The Xing Shan had eliminated the American communications and military satellites already in orbit around Europa, and was moving now to secure a position of unquestioned superiority of position at the top of the Europan gravity well.
Major Li Peng Zhou of the People’s Army Space Force peered into the twin eyepieces of the targeting console, his hand on the track ball to his right. Through the oculars, he could see a magnified view of the CWS base site ahead and below, a large crater with what looked like a tiny lake in the center. Xing Shan’s AI, accumulating tracking data from hundreds of separate sources, condensed that data and displayed it as an overlaid scattering of bright red dots against the faintly blue to green background of ice.
The red dots were possible targets, selected by their infrared emissions or, in some cases, their radar returns. Most were individual troops, scurrying about the illusory shelter of their crater like ants at the bottom of a bowl, stringing themselves out along the western rim to face the advance of Yang and his troops.
The image of the crater was oblique at the moment; Xing Shan was passing almost directly over the Chinese position, and at this altitude, the crater was halfway to the horizon. As the ship continued to drift along its orbit, however, more and more of the crater interior was revealed, until Li was looking almost directly down into the bowl.
He moved his right hand, and the bright green targeting cursor drifted across his line of sight, settling at last on the crest of the crater rim near a thick clustering of red dots. A touch of a button locked the aim point; a click of the mouse button fired the Xing Shan’s main weapon.
The acceleration of ten kilos of inert depleted uranium jacketed in steel gave sufficient recoil that Li could feel the huge vessel lurch slightly, like the kick of acceleration from the firing of a maneuvering thruster. His targeting lock was automatically released; he spun the track ball to lock in on another target.
That looked like a small cargo transport or shuttle of some kind, imperfectly camouflaged beneath a layer of white cloth. Click…locked. Click…fire!
A remarkably easy way to wage war, he thought. He remembered himself and other boys in the village of Huoshan, where he’d grown up, using rubber bands and small pellets to bombard scurrying ants in the dirt, or on a hot summer’s day, using a magnifying lens to roast them one by one. This was like that—only easier.
His first round hit. He saw the blast, a brief throb of light, and a fast-spreading ring that must mark the shock wave of the impact, expanding through the ice. A perfect hit!
His orders were to avoid the various buildings, which might be of use to the army when they captured the base, and to especially avoid the central lake and the partially sunken base facility at its side. Every other target, though, was his for the taking.
That looked like a vehicle of some kind. Click…locked. Click…fire!
Leckie
Ice Station Zebra, Europa
1559 hours Zulu
Lucky didn’t hear the crowbar impact. He felt it, a savage detonation of pure force rising out of the ice beneath him and slamming him up and back like a sledgehammer blow. An insect on a carpet given a sharp snap might have flown as far. He landed on the ice on his back, skittering down and around like an upended turtle on an ice rink until the slope leveled off and he slid into the bottom of the crater.
His fall, fortunately, had been in slow motion, but he’d lost his rifle, a mortal sin for any Marine. His head was throbbing and his neck had an awful crick. The shock must have slammed his head back against the padding of the inside of his helmet. He tasted blood on his lip.
Training took over at once. Was his suit damaged? Was it breached?
His electronics were still working, thank God, and when he chinned up suit status, the display was mostly green. There was damage to his backpack PLSS where he’d landed on it, but it appeared to be limited to his tracking and navigation systems, and to his maneuvering thrusters, which weren’t charged anyway. The suit integrity light was still a bright, steady, and reassuring green…and, more reassuring yet, he heard no shrill hiss, felt no telltale popping in the ears. Rolling over, he scrambled to an all-fours position, looking back up the crater rim. The impact had sent other Marines spinning like bowling pins; there was a ragged new gap in the crater rim where something had speared down out of space and struck deep.
He was still trying to sort out his whirling impressions when a light as bright as a new-risen sun glared into the far-right side of his visor, polarizing the transparency to near black, but only for an instant. Then the gr
ound was yanked from beneath his hands and knees and feet again, flipping him and sending him sprawling once more. A shrill scream sounded in his helmet phones, a shriek abruptly cut off, presumably as the transmitting suit radio failed. He had a moment’s impression of a mass of tangled struts and torn metal somersaulting in slow motion above his head. Desperately, he tried to roll over to get to his feet, slipped not on smooth ice, but on ice that had been pulverized to the consistency of powdery snow, then partly melted. The wreckage of one of the bugs landed twenty meters away, crumpling silently into a twisted heap as fragments continued to rain down across the crater floor.
There was no sound at all associated with the explosion, the whiplashing ground, the falling debris, but his helmet phones babbled a torrent of voices, commands, pleas, terror.
“Watch it! Watch it!”
“Easy now! Don’t panic!”
“Sarge! God! Sarge! Where are you?”
“Has anyone seen Quince?”
“Steady, people! Keep your heads!”
“Oh, my God! My God! My God!”
“Peterson! Wojak! Amberly! Get up here!”
“Help me! Someone! Please! Help me!”
A third flash, closer this time, and an almost immediate flicking of that titanic carpet. Lucky landed on his PLSS for the third time and wondered how long the battered life-support system was going to hold out. His readout showed a leak from one of the oxygen tanks and two of the unit heaters were out, though there was no immediate danger.
Somehow he got to his feet and trudged through mushy ice that was simultaneously boiling and trying to freeze, making his way back to the crater rim. Another impact struck, this time on the east side of the crater floor. He felt the shock, but it was distant, muted somewhat. It didn’t even knock him down. Nor did the next two impacts after that.
The ice has gone soft, he thought. It wasn’t transmitting the shock waves the way it did at first. He wondered if that was something he should worry about. The ice at the floor of the crater was…how deep? Eight or ten meters, he thought, judging by the depth of the pit over by the E-DARES facility. Or…no. He’d read somewhere that nine-tenths of an iceberg was underwater. By that measure, the ice here was ninety meters thick. But did that hold true with a whole icecap?
