by Ian Douglas
What if the ice crumbled away beneath him? He’d heard that the Europan sea beneath the ice here was eighty to a hundred kilometers deep…sixty miles of cold, dark water, straight down.
And he knew his suit wouldn’t float.
Somehow, he managed to keep walking, though his knees were shaking now as he expected each step to plunge him through the ice and into those black, frigid depths. It took him another dozen steps to remember that he was unarmed. His M-580 had spun off into the ice, somewhere, and he had no idea where it was.
He kept struggling toward the crater rim, however. His assigned position was there, not here in the crater bowl. The Chinese orbital bombardment had swept the Marines off the rim with appalling ease. And the enemy troops must be surging up the outer slope at this moment.
“Weapons free! All units, weapons free!” The red light in his HUD winked off. LOADED now read WEAPONS FREE.
He needed a weapon. He saw one, three meters to the right. A Marine lay on his back, clutching his M-580 against his armored chest. His legs and torso from the ribcage down were…gone. Nothing left but a fast-freezing trail of blood and internals. The inside of the visor was opaque with blood and vomit, a horrible sight, but a merciful one. Lucky couldn’t see the person’s face.
He had to work the stiff, gloved fingers open two at a time, but at last pulled the laser rifle free. Only then did he see the name tag: HUTTON, J.
Sergeant Joseph K. Hutton. A lean, rail-skinny kid from West Virginia, friendly, likable, if a little naïive. Shit…
He knelt in the freezing slush, punching keys on the programming pad on the side of the rifle, praying the mechanism hadn’t succumbed to shock and cold. Each laser rifle had to be tuned to the user’s suit frequency so that it could feed target information and aim points to the helmet HUD. The tuning took a few seconds…and Lucky was afraid he didn’t have them.
A low, flat shape was shouldering its way onto the crest of the crater rim now. Lucky had seen those things in sims and tech briefings: zidong tanke…robot tanks.
Other figures were appearing on the ridge above him now: human shapes in bulky white suits, like the ones the Marines wore, though different in detail of helmet shape, PLSS outline, and the look of the rifles they carried.
He waited for the rifle to charge. Come on…come on!…
Lucky preferred the M-29 ATAR, the primary Marine weapon. Some genius on Earth had decided that the Europan MSEF should carry M-580s, though, because with laser rifles, you didn’t have to ship all of that ammunition across the solar system.
Unfortunately, you had to tune the damned things, and it took them a godawful long time to cycle up to firing charge. Maybe too long.
“Leckie!” It was the major’s voice. He would be jacked in back in C-3, getting feeds from all of the Marines, their suits, their weapon systems. “Where’s your weapon?”
It was like having God looking over your shoulder.
“Tuning a pickup, Major! It’s coming…”
“Breakthrough on the ridge, above your position! Watch yourself! Get some fire on that ridge when you’re charged!”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
The red crosshair reticle lit up on his HUD, accompanied by a shrill, reedy tone signaling the rifle was ready to fire. About time!
Still on his knees, he raised the boxy M-580, swinging it up and around until the reticle centered on one of the space suits clambering over the ridge. His gloved finger slid into the outsized trigger guard and touched the firing button.
There was no flash, no beam, of course. There was no atmosphere to ionize, no dust to illuminate the pulsed thread of coherent light that snapped from his weapon’s muzzle…but the chest of the soldier’s space suit erupted suddenly in a puff of white smoke, water vapor freezing in an instant as it exploded from his ruptured suit. His arms cartwheeled, his rifle spun back down the ridge behind him, and then he fell in an agonizing slow motion, toppling onto the ice.
Lucky struggled to his feet and started jogging forward. With the ground covered by fast-freezing slush, he couldn’t pull the distance-eating bunny bounce, and had to push forward one glue-footed stride at a time. Clumsy…clumsy. He couldn’t move. Warning lights flashed on in his HUD array. His suit was being painted by half a dozen targeting lasers and radar beams.
He dropped for the ground, snapping off another shot as the reticle drifted across another target. Slush splattered and boiled half a meter in front of him…and several fast geysers spurted as rifle slugs tore into the freezing sludge.
To his right, a shoulder-launched Wyvern rocket streaked low across the ice, rising up the face of the hill, striking one of the zidong tanke in the left track with a dazzling flash and sending fragments hurtling. A second robot tank fired, sending a surging splash of ice and water into the black sky, and eliciting a shrill, keening shriek from some Marine.
Then the Chinese troops were plunging down the slope into the crater, firing wildly at everything that moved.
And in another moment, Lucky was fighting for his life, a fight far wilder and far deadlier than any he’d ever dreamed of in the trash-strewn streets of New York.
THIRTEEN
17 OCTOBER 2067
C-3 Center, E-DARES Facility
Ice Station Zebra, Europa
1605 hours Zulu
Jeff Warhurst was linked in.
The use of virtual reality—coupled with powerful computers and competent AIs—was transforming the whole idea of warfare. Throughout all of history, any combat involving more than two people had been constrained by the so-called fog of war, that overriding confusion born by the fact that no battlefield commander could know exactly where all of his units were, what they were doing, or how they were reacting—to say nothing of the forces of the enemy.
He was using the Battlestorm: 3000 combat management software package designed by Sperry Rand Defense, together with a tacloc comm system that gathered data from thousands of separate channels, processed it, and fed it into his link display.
The display unfolded in the optical center of his brain, giving him a three-dimensional relief map of the battle area. Transponders inside individual suits provided status, position, and even intent. Scattered robot monitors, ralis, and drones gathered information on enemy deployments and movements. At low res, individual friendly troops and other assets were marked as moving blue dots, while the enemy was shown in red. At high res, each dot became a tiny animation of a space-suited Marine or enemy soldier, and the effect was that of hovering a few hundred meters above the battlefield, giving him a god’s-eye view of the conflict.
In his literal mind’s eye, he could reach out and touch any troop icon, and words and numbers would appear next to it in an overlay window, telling him who the man was, what his status was, what he was doing. Tap and rotate his wrist, and he could see what that Marine was seeing, through the camera mounted on the outside of his helmet. Tap twice, and he was in direct contact with that Marine, speaking over a private channel. In the real world, Jeff was lying on a reclining chair set up in the E-DARES facility, wearing a headset and thread mike with the channels handled by his AI. When he spoke, he was heard by the man or woman he needed to talk to; he was simultaneously hearing the chatter on several channels—Command 1, the platoon channels used by each of his platoon commanders, and the general channel used by all officers and NCOs—and he could eavesdrop on any channel at will.
Jeff was well aware of a terrible danger with this new technology, which had only been available for combat units within the past ten years or so and was still highly experimental. Knowledge was power, and it was embarrassingly easy to assume that he had so much information about the battlefield that he could micromanage the operation, taking control away from his platoon officers, section leaders, and NCOs and try to run everything himself. Battlefield management was both a science and an art, one that required a light touch and dependable, well-trained, and experienced subordinates.
He had to consciously relax a
nd watch, cultivating patience, trusting his NCOs, especially, to rally the unit and get them back into the fight and not try to do everything himself. Even a relatively small action like this one was terribly complex, far more than any one man could comprehend or command by himself. If he hadn’t had Chesty Puller working in the simulation with him, handling the routine details and gently calling his attention to key developments as they unfolded, he never would have been able to keep track of what was happening.
“Move ahead,” he murmured, addressing Chesty. “Let me see the top of the rim. Pan view right, ten.”
His field of view zoomed in and swung right, making him feel like he was flying across the battlefield. There were six zidong tanke, he saw, one already knocked out by a shoulder-launched 5-cm missile, but the others maneuvering for good hull-down positions on the crest of the west rim. From there, they would be able to fire down into the crater floor, where the Marines were struggling to regroup after the devastating bombardment from space.
That bombardment had hurt them badly. Twelve Marines were dead, and another would die in minutes from the leak in her suit if someone didn’t get to her quickly. Jeff had already alerted the nearest Marine, who was trying to save Corporal Lissa Cartwright’s life with an emergency patch and sealer. One of the two bugs was destroyed, the other damaged, and two lobbers were smashed. Several surface storehouses had been riddled by splinters; they would have to check to see if the contents of those structures—food and some electronic components, mostly, plus the two Manta submarines—had been damaged.
It could have been much worse. Apparently, the enemy warship had not been targeting the main base structures. Probably they wanted to preserve those for themselves. Why smash a perfectly good base to pieces when you could move in and use it for your own purposes? But in a terrifying five seconds or so of bombardment, the MSEF had suffered a 16 percent attrition rate—a shocking loss that was certain to seriously hurt Marine morale. And unless they could organize themselves up there, those losses were going to be far worse than that. The Chinese troops were spilling down into the crater now, firing wildly at everything that moved. Several Marines had been caught up in wild, savage, hand-to-hand actions. Jeff couldn’t keep track of them all. He didn’t dare try. If he let his attention become focused on any one Marine, and one small group of Marines, he could miss the bigger picture, and maybe get all of them killed.
One thing he could do was release the XM-86 Sentries, letting them seek and fire upon any target that wasn’t broadcasting on the correct IFF frequency. There were two set up along the west rim, still upright after the bombardment, and their elongated, white-metal heads began pivoting rapidly as they sprayed the nearest targets with deadly bursts of 70-megajoule destruction. He’d already released the lock on all personal weapons.
“Chesty! Where are the slaws?”
Two Marine icons, widely separated, lit up with green halos. One, wielded by Sergeant Emilio Gonzales, was already in action, laying down a rapid-fire barrage against the advancing Chinese, taking them from their right flank, chopping them down. The other, with Lance Corporal Ross Muller, appeared to be out of action—a malfunction.
Kaminski was nearby. Jeff tapped twice. “Frank! Warhurst. Check Muller, ten meters to your left! He’s having some trouble with his slaw. Get that weapon into action!”
What else could he do?
Across the open expanse of ice, Gunnery Sergeant Kuklok had rounded up ten Marines and was working his way back up the slope of the inner rim, trying to reach a position where they could fire down on the enemy, and maybe get behind them. The robot tanks, though, posed a difficult problem. Two of Kuklok’s people had already been picked off.
Double tap. “Kuklok! Warhurst! Hold your position!”
Double tap. “Tonelli! Can you pick off those damned tanks on the ridge?”
“Working on it, sir!”
“Do it! Before they cut us to pieces!”
Double tap. “Kaminski! Is that slaw working yet?”
“Negative, Major. Capacitor’s crapped out! Need a spare from stores!”
“Okay! Screw that! I need you to round up a tank-killing team. Grenade launchers. Wyverns. Whatever you can find. Kill those tanks!”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
On the simulation, the icon representing Tonelli darted forward, moving in short, quick dashes, making its way to the tangle of wreckage that was all that was left of one of the Marines’ bugs. The icon was precisely like the figure in some sort of military computer game. It was damned hard to look at that display and not to think of it as a kind of enormous, complex game, with bloodless little icons moving about as he issued his commands.
But those were people out there, and they were dying.
A point of white light flashed from Tonelli’s icon toward the ridge above him, impacting in the ice in front of one of the tanks. Shit! A miss!
The tank returned fire, and the Tonelli icon winked out, replaced an instant later by a grayed-out figure sprawled on the ice, and the grim letters KIA.
Damn it, what more could he do? He felt so damnably helpless.
Kaminski
Ice Station Zebra, Europa
1605 hours Zulu
“Laplace! Waggoner! Jelly! Garcia! Brighton! All of you, with me!”
Frank Kaminski bounded across the ice to the shadow of the wrecked bug, stooping at the side of the body sprawled there, face up. Corporal Gerald Bailey’s left arm had been torn off, leaving a bloody smear behind it across the ice as a seething frost of freezing water vapor and atmosphere settled over the ragged hole in Bailey’s side. Kaminski pulled the Wyvern launcher from Bailey’s right hand and tossed it to Sergeant Jellowski, then rolled the body over to get at the reload pack attached to the side of Bailey’s PLSS. Extracting a 5-centimeter rocket from the pack, he attached it, still in its load tube, to the rear of the Wyvern. Jellowski positioned the weapon with the load tube over his shoulder.
“Shit!” Jellowski yelled.
“What?”
“Can’t get a tone! They’ve muffled in!”
The robot tanks on the crater rim were spaced ten to twenty meters apart, positioning themselves so that only their glacises and their ball-mounted main guns were visible. The surface ice up there had been broken by the ground shock waves from the bombardment, and they’d back-and-forthed to work themselves down into snug, shallow trenches that made them damned hard to get at. Evidently, they were using some sort of venting system to get rid of excess heat down and away from the front of the vehicle; clouds of steam rose from the rear of each tank, rapidly crystallizing into clouds of ice.
Muffled in…
SM-12 Wyvern 5-centimeter smart missiles could track by infrared, magnetic, optical, or laser targeting, or a combination of all four. The robot tanks, though, were shrouded by ice crystals carrying vented heat. The effect smeared their IR signature across a large volume, and probably screwed up their optical configuration as well. Wyverns wouldn’t attack a vehicle shape they didn’t understand.
Waggoner darted forward from the cover of the wrecked bug, dodging past Bailey’s still form and into the open. Two of the tanks fired, the explosions sending shudders through the ice. Waggoner shrieked, then went silent, the radio transmission abruptly chopped off.
Kaminski began looking for options.
The five of them were tucked in behind the wrecked bug, invisible to the tanks above, but nakedly vulnerable if they tried to move. The robots were in hull-down defilade, their laser balls sweeping the entire expanse of the crater.
He was damned if he could see any right now.
Leckie
Ice Station Zebra, Europa
1605 hours Zulu
Lucky fired his laser weapon from the hip, tracking the targeting cursor rapidly across his HUD while simultaneously trying to move, duck, and weave, making himself as tough a target as he possibly could. Four Chinese soldiers were closing on him from three directions. A golf ball-sized hole exploded in the vi
sor of one, venting a cloud of red fog, instantly freezing. Lucky dropped in the same second, landing hard on his left shoulder and letting his momentum carry him in a leg-flailing slide across the ice. He tried to target on a second PRC soldier, but missed as the target’s feet slid out from under him and he collapsed in an untidy, scrambling sprawl.
Rounds from the Chinese Type-110 assault rifles blasted sprays of ice from either side as he continued his slide. One round grazed his helmet, the shock ringing his ears and setting him spinning, but his helmet warning display continued to show he still had suit integrity. Sliding now flat on his PLSS, he bent up and forward hard at the waist, trying to reacquire his attackers on the HUD. With the 580 lying flat down his body and aiming between his wide-flung boots, he saw the cursor snap across one of the enemy troops and managed to stab the firing button at the same instant. The man’s space suit blew out at the right knee, blood and white vapor silently exploding into vacuum as the man toppled backward, arms waving.
Then Lucky, still sliding, collided with the fourth Chinese soldier and sent him sprawling, the two of them tangled in a desperate embrace, the other man on top of him.
There was no time, no thought, no elegance for finesse. Lucky’s right hand found the hilt of his K-bar, sheathed on his hip, popped the locking strap, dragged the knife free. The PRC soldier—Lucky could see the man’s face just above his through the dark visor, could see the terror-widened eyes—reached down and pounded at Lucky’s hel met with clenched, gloved fists, trying to smash the visor.
Lucky slammed the point of the knife up against his opponent’s throat as hard as he could. The black blade glanced off the helmet locking ring and snapped off clean at the hilt, the metal made brittle by the extreme cold.
