by Ian Douglas
“Doctor, think about it, please! The escape velocity for Europa is a little over 2 kilometers per second. Those packages were moving at almost five kps when they were released. The chances that any will be deflected in such a way to land on the surface again—and without being vaporized by the energy released on impact—is so small I can’t even imagine what the odds would be.
“If you want to challenge me on the biological contamination of this moon, you would be better served bringing up the fact that, a few moments ago, two of my men died when their lobber was blasted out of the sky by that Chinese cruiser. Their bodies were not frozen, or fried by radiation, and right now I imagine they’re smeared across a couple of square kilometers of Europan ice.
“Do you want to attack me personally for that? Because if you do I swear will take you apart, Doctor, piece by piece. I’m more concerned about losing two good Marines right now than I am about your Europan biology!
“Or do you want to talk to our Chinese friends out there? Maybe scold them for littering on your pristine moon? I’m sure they’ll be willing to listen to your lecture!”
“I…I…” Vasaliev’s mouth gaped a moment, then he turned away. “I knew there would be problem with military coming here!”
Jeff sighed. “I’m sorry you feel that way, Doctor. At this point, there’s not a lot we can do. You can fire off your report to Earth, and I’ll accept the reprimand. But the damage, if there was any, is done.”
“Major, please,” the scientist said, his manner smoothing like ruffled feathers. “Please. I had not even taken into account problem of men dying up there. This is…is very serious. Fighting must be stopped.”
“Then I suggest you take it up with your Chinese counterparts, sir.” He glanced at a time reading on his PAD. The bug’s scattergun volley ought to be reaching the Star Mountain by now.
Jeff glanced at Shigeru Ishiwara, who was trying not to look him in the eye, then at Frank Kaminski. Ishiwara looked discomfited at his boss’s outburst. He was surprised at how many Marines had crowded into C-3 to witness the firing. Frank, still looking groggy from his unexplained collapse, was sitting in a chair, staring at the time readout.
They should know soon.
It was a colossal throw of the dice. They would not get another shot with the makeshift railgun, no matter what happened. On the big monitor on the bulkhead, Kaminski’s cannon lay in upended, twisted ruin. The recoil of the single shot lobbed at the distant enemy LZ had been so great the superconductor cables had been shredded, the microwave tower bent back, its rear biting into cracked ice, the A-frame ripped from its frozen moorings and fallen. There would be no second shot, and not much of a target for the oncoming Star Mountain.
No matter. The bug’s warload was on the way, was arriving on target at this moment—almost seven hundred kilos of deep-frozen human waste, leavened with another couple of hundred kilos or so of scrap metal from the destroyed bug. The waste, stored in five-kilo plastic packets and frozen as hard as granite, made a peculiar sort of ammunition at best, but it ought to work.
The CWS station had been under special orders to minimize biological contamination of what was, after all, the first alien biosphere, the first life found outside of Earth. As with research stations in Antarctica a century before, or on Mars and the moon later on, all wastes were either recycled or, in the case of a facility such as Cadmus Base, without the wherewithal to recycle feces as fertilizer, dehydrated, carefully packaged by automatic machinery, and allowed to freeze for later disposal. In the year that Cadmus Station had been manned, they’d accumulated several tons of the stuff, which had been collected in and stored inside one of the surface storage sheds.
The Chinese ship captain would have been keenly aware that destroying the oncoming bug would send a cloud of high-speed fragments his way. Point defense lasers couldn’t get all of them, and it was a simple matter to change the ship’s speed, raising or lowering the orbit slightly. Fifty meters would be enough to miss the hurtling cloud of wreckage.
Which was why Chesty had carefully aimed those garbage cans of meticulously packaged and frozen human feces, aimed them like shotgun blasts along the paths most likely to be taken by a Chinese A-M craft maneuvering to avoid a collision.
His point defense lasers might get some of those hurtling, icy packets, but he couldn’t possibly get them all.
Each ten-kilo package of freeze-dried waste, traveling at 4.8 kps, carried with it the equivalent of 115.2 megajoules of energy, or just over twenty-three kilograms of high explosives.
It was, Jeff thought, a new low in field-expedient weaponry. The weirdest part of it, though, was that he couldn’t shake the mental image of angry primates shrieking as they flung handfuls of feces at a threat.
“A hit!” the Marine sitting at the radar console announced. “Damn! He’s tumbling! I’ve got debris spilling off the target like a pinwheel!”
“Bull’s eye!” Leckie shouted, laughing. “How’s that for letting the shit hit the Shan?”
The other Marines in C-3 burst into cheers, catcalls, and shrieks of joy.
“Hey!” BJ shouted. “That EMP is gonna keep traveling outward at the speed of light, right? Well, what if a thousand years from now, some alien radio astronomer hears it and thinks it’s a message?”
“Yeah,” Pope added. “And how long before they figure out that what it means is, ‘Duck! Here comes a load of shit!’”
The hoots and shrieks redoubled.
Angry primates…
SEVENTEEN
22 OCTOBER 2067
Radio Shack, U.S.S.
Thomas Jefferson
U.S. Synchorbital Shipyard, L-3
1527 hours Zulu
“Please, God,” Kaitlin said with a rush of emotion that came close to despair. “Please don’t tell me they’re killing the relief expedition!”
She was adrift in the radio shack on board the A-M cruiser Thomas Jefferson, sister vessel to the Roosevelt and the Kennedy, already destroyed. The Jeff’s hab modules had been spun up to provide artificial gravity as soon as the Marines had begun arriving and certain “special packages” had been attached to the ship’s forward water storage tank, but the com shack was located abaft of the bridge, in the long vessel’s central axis, so she kept her left foot anchored in a fabric loop on one bulkhead while staring at the open screen of a microPAD strapped to her left forearm. Linked in through the Jefferson’s communications suite, she had a direct, scrambled channel to the office of California Senator Carmen Fuentes.
Lieutenant Commander John Reynolds, the ship’s communications officer, had gallantly vacated the compartment so she could have her conversation in private. She was glad of that. At the moment, she didn’t know if she was on the verge of tears or profanity, and neither fit her concept of professional behavior in an officer.
Carmen’s face, displayed on the fabric screen unrolled in the air above Kaitlin’s arm, frowned unhappily. “I wish I had better news, Kaitlin, but I don’t. I’m doing my best to delay the vote, but it’s going to happen, probably by the middle of next week.”
“But—but don’t they understand? We have almost a hundred people out there, under constant attack by the Chinese! We can’t just fucking write them off!”
“Things were a whole lot simpler when there were essentially just two parties,” Carmen replied. “The Democrats and the Republicans are still the two biggest—together they take up seventy-one out of a hundred twelve Senate seats. But now we have the Libertarians with nineteen seats, and the Greens with twelve. Globalists control six seats. The rest are independents.
“So everyone has an agenda, right? The Libs, Greens, and Globies all are against the war. I swear it’s the first time in eight years I’ve seen them align themselves on the same side of any issue! They’re all pushing for different things, of course. The Globalists just want us to be one big, happy global community, even if it means surrendering outright to every tin-plated dictator who gets delusions of grandeur. The Greens
mistrust big industry of any sort, don’t like space technology, and figure we should leave alien contact out of the picture entirely until we clean up the planet first. Besides, most of them still buy into the Geneva Report, and figure we have to unite the planet before we all die. And the Libertarians just don’t think there’s anything out there worth fighting over.
“So we have a solid block of thirty-seven votes aligned against sending a relief expedition, because it will inflame the Chinese, because it could lead to a shooting war here on Earth. In a simple majority vote like this one, well…the opposition only needs to line up twelve more votes. At least four of the independents will automatically go with the antirelief measure, just because they came in on p-and-j platforms.”
“‘P and j?’”
“Peace and joy. Love yourself, love your neighbor, and the whole world will be a better place.”
“So you’re saying the vote is going to pass. We’re not sending help to Europa?”
Carmen shook her head. “Dear, they need eleven more votes to kill the relief measure. The Democrats are already pretty solidly aligned against relief to begin with. We just came out of a nasty war…we don’t dare risk the utter destruction of humanity over such a faraway issue…ta-da, ta-da, ta-da. And some Republicans I know will side with them just to show their hearts are in the right place. I’m guessing we’ll see the measure passed, oh, eighty to thirty or so, with a couple of abstentions.”
“That’s over two to one!” Kaitlin said, profoundly shocked. “I simply can’t believe the Senate would have that little regard for our people—for people they decided to send out there in the first place!”
Carmen closed her eyes. She looked unbearably tired. “Kaitlin, you know as well as I do that politics always screws up the human equation. Politics deals with the expedient. The practical. Maybe once, a long time ago, government involved rational men making rational decisions, but anymore it has more to do with who’s made the largest campaign contribution or owes who what favor. It’s not that politicians don’t care about people, especially the men and women in the armed forces. If I were a cynical bitch, I’d point out that those military men and women vote. But it’s more than that. We do care. But the system has gotten so damned big and out of control, no individual politician has that much of a say anymore. In a way, that’s good. Checks and balances. No one politician can become a demagogue anymore, or a tyrant.
“But when it comes to supporting our military personnel, it always seems again and again that the practical necessities of politics outweigh duty. Honor. What’s right.”
“I thought,” Kaitlin said carefully, “that contact with the Singer was deemed ‘of vital scientific and national importance.’”
“It was. It is. What does that have to do with politics?” She sighed. “Kaitlin, this is privileged information, you understand.”
“Of course.”
“There’s a small group of senators right now—I think Sam Kellerman’s putting it together—who’re floating the idea of approaching the Chinese and offering to establish a joint mission to Europa. Everything shared. Everything open. The idea is that if the Singer is an alien intelligence, and if it cares, we’ll be approaching it as a united world. As humankind, not as CWS or PRC or American. You understand?”
“I understand that that was what we should have done from the beginning.”
“Yes, well, twenty-twenty hindsight, and all of that. What they don’t want, what they don’t want at all costs, is a shooting war with Beijing while there’s still a chance of resolving things peacefully. We can’t afford another major war right now.”
“Excuse me, Senator,” Kaitlin said, exasperated, “but has anyone told those bozos that the shooting war has already started? That we’ve lost forty men and women on Europa already. Plus over two hundred people on the Roosevelt, and twenty-nine on the Kennedy—including, damn you, my son!”
“Kaitlin—”
“I will not sit by and see the same thing happen to those forty-one Marines still on station!” There was no stopping the tears now, which clung to her face, or drifted, sparkling like stars in the compartment’s lighting. “Not while I’m alive! Not while I’m a Marine!”
“Colonel Garroway! Please!”
“We have a responsibility to the men and women we put in harm’s way!”
“Are you finished?”
Kaitlin was breathing hard. She wiped her face with her free hand, sending teardrops shimmering through the air. “No. But I’ll shut up for now, Senator.”
“Good. Because I want to tell you something. I once had the opportunity to talk to a young woman who wanted to be a Marine. I think she wanted to be a Marine more than anything else in the world. I asked her why.
“She thought for a moment, and then told me. ‘You can be in the Army,’ she said. ‘You can be in the Air Force or in the Navy. But you are a Marine.’ There is no such thing as an ex-Marine, you know. Only formerly active Marines. Or retired Marines.
“I am a Marine, Kaitlin. It’s something you can’t take away from me. No one can. Maybe I retired twelve years ago, maybe I’m a goddamned senator now, but I am still a Marine. And, as it happens, I agree with you. A Marine never leaves another Marine behind, no matter what.
“And so the question is, Marine, what the hell are we going to do about it?”
C-3, E-DARES Facility,
Ice Station Zebra, Europa
1815 hours Zulu
“I’m afraid I have some bad news, Major. Relief is not, repeat not on the way.”
General Altman’s image wavered and slipped, before steadying again. The signal, heavily encrypted and compressed into a very tight, short data squirt, had suffered some resolution loss in its forty-minute voyage out from Earth.
Jeff’s jaw tightened, his fists closed. Beside him, Melendez stiffened slightly. Kaminski shook his head. Biehl muttered something beneath his breath. The others kept their faces expressionless, watchful.
“Alpha Company is loaded aboard the Jefferson,” Altman continued. “Plus an ad hoc company of volunteers from Two-MSEF. They’re ready to hump. However, the Senate is now debating whether to even allow a relief expedition to go to Europa.
“Major, I know this is really bad news for you people. I’m not going to try to run your show from five astronomical units away, but it’s beginning to look as though surrender may be your only option.”
There it was. The surrender option, the S-word, as he and his subordinates had begun jokingly referring to it. His communications exchanges with Earth over the last few days had been carefully avoiding the topic, especially with the company holding its own so well. But the word had been certain to surface sooner or later.
But damn the forty-minute time delay that required communications with Earth to be, not a conversation, but a series of monologues, alternating between Earth and Europa. It left him unable to respond directly to anything his superiors might say, leaving a gulf that only emphasized how isolated, how very much on his own, he really was.
“Colonel Garroway and some others here are exploring alternative options,” Altman was saying. “I suggest that you continue to hold out as long as you can, while we see if any of those options prove feasible. However, if your command is in danger of being overrun, you are authorized to negotiate the best terms of surrender you can manage. There’s no sense in throwing your lives away to no good purpose.”
And what the hell did that mean? What about the men and women who’d died on the ice already? Had everything they’d done so far been for nothing?
“And…one more piece of bad news, I’m afraid. Our tracking sources report that the Chinese A-M transport Xing Feng has left cis-lunar space and is en route for Jupiter. She appears to be using constant acceleration, so you can expect her arrival there within five days. No word on her cargo, though she is carrying at least six Descending Thunder landing craft. I think we can safely assume that Beijing has decided to reinforce her forces on Europa.
&nbs
p; “I am sorry to have nothing but bad news for you fellows. It’s beginning to look as though our only real hope to salvage anything out of this mess is a political settlement. We’ll keep you informed of all developments.
“This is Marine Space Force Headquarters, going over to you, awaiting reply.”
Altman’s face winked off the monitor, replaced by the Marine Space logo and the words AWAITING REPLY.
“Well,” Lieutenant Biehl said. “I guess that’s that.”
“Why do you say that, Moe?” Jeff asked, keeping his voice light. “A lot can happen between now and when the Xing Feng gets here.”
“Sir,” Lieutenant Graham said. “You heard the general. Another Charlie transport is on the way. The enemy’s gonna be stronger than ever!”
“I’ll tell you what’s worse than that,” Melendez added. “They’ll have another damned ship in orbit! They’ll be able to blast this base to rubble as soon as they get here, and this time we don’t have an International Gun and we don’t have a bug loaded with shit! My God, do you think the Charlie CO is going to maintain a hands-off policy when he gets a second chance? He’d be a fool to do it.”
“Sergeant Major? What’s your assessment? How are the men holding up?”
Kaminski grinned. He appeared to have recovered completely from his momentary blackout of the day before. “No problems on that front, at least, sir. Morale is sky-high after we bagged that cruiser yesterday. And even the one shot for the International Gun made ’em feel like they were hitting back. They’re charged, Major, charged and ready to go, any damned place you tell them.”
“Yes. Of course, the question is, what I should tell them?”
“I can’t help you there, sir. I guess Major Devereaux was in the same fix as you.”
Major Devereaux, yes. That Marine hero had been very much on Jeff’s mind these past few days. The hero of Wake Island…the man who’d held out against overwhelming Japanese forces for sixteen days with 449 Marines. He’d been discussing Wake Island a lot lately with Chesty. The parallels with Europa, especially the early victories against enemy ships, were tantalizingly close.
