by Ian Douglas
No plan of battle survives contact with the enemy.
Ice Station Zebra, Europa
0730 hours Zulu
Enemy fire was coming in heavily from three directions now, east, west, and south, as enemy snipers and riflemen planted themselves at the top of the crater rim. The riflemen, firing Type 80 rifles at extremely long range, were woefully inaccurate, but the snipers with Type 104 laser rifles were deadly. Corporal Kenneth Dalton took a laser burst squarely through his helmet visor, killing him instantly. Vince Cukela had a bolt graze his left shoulder, rupturing his suit, but Tom Pope got to him in time with a sealer patch and stopped the leak. Worse were the zidong tanke, which were hard to hit and harder to kill, and fired much more powerful bolts from their 104 lasers. Lance Corporal Porter was hit by a shot from one of the robot tanks and nearly torn in half. Ten meters from Lucky’s hole, Sergeant Riddel rose to his knees in his firing pit, aiming the squad’s one Wyvern, and was burned down before he could fire.
Some of the tanks were already venturing down the inner slope of the crater. It was clear the Chinese planned to rush the Marine position and overrun it with armor, following up with troops on foot.
Lucky killed a rifleman sliding down the east slope, but his fire wasn’t having any effect on the Charlie tanks. “This is gonna get us dead!” he shouted.
The Marines returned fire, sweeping the crater rim with highly accurate, concentrated laser fire, driving the enemy gunners back, but it was clear their position was hopelessly exposed and vulnerable.
“Alert Five, this is Melendez! The enemy is too strong! We’re shifting to Plan Omega!”
“Fall back to the E-DARES!” Pope yelled. “Two at a time! Dade! Cukela! Go!”
Omega was a literal last-ditch plan, to be employed in case the Chinese swarmed into the crater in such numbers that fighting them on the surface was clearly suicide. The Marines would withdraw to the E-DARES facility and wait. Maybe the enemy would try to cut their way in, in which case the Marines would fight them deck by deck. Or perhaps the enemy would simply say the hell with it and blow the entire facility.
The operations planners had decided that the chances of that last were small. The PRC forces still needed to recover whatever information the CWS scientists had turned up, and saving the scientists themselves would be a plus. Besides, the E-DARES facility was ready-made for attempting to contact the Singer, and there were nine Chinese prisoners on board.
The Chinese might even decide an assault was more trouble than it was worth and leave them alone, hoping to starve them out. They might also be withdrawn to meet the unexpected assault on their rear, back at their LZ.
Lots of possibilities, but they depended on the seven surviving Marines of the Alert Five getting back inside the E-DARES hull and sealing it off.
The Marines intensified their fire, sweeping the crater rim. Dade and Cukela rose from their firing pits and ran, clumsily, toward the E-DARES access walk, a few meters away. Ice and steam erupted in a silent blast close beside them, knocking them both down. Coughlin opened up with his SLAW, hosing the tank that had fired at them, giving them cover as they scrambled to their hands and knees and kept going, sliding the last couple of meters on the peroxide-slicked ice.
“Mayhew! Owenson! Go!”
Lucky kept firing, switching from east rim to west rim and back again, with an occasional shift to check the south. There were too many Chinese troops inside the crater now to count, and at least five of those damned robot tanks.
A zidong tanke fired, the bolt exploding Mayhew’s helmet in a gory flash. Owenson kept running, slipped and fell on the ice, then got up and made it to the ladder. A sniper fired from the south rim, and missed.
It was just him, Coughlin, and Pope left now, and entirely too many Chinese troops. “Coughlin! Leckie!” Pope called. “Take off!”
Instead, Lucky rose from his foxhole and bolted for Riddel’s firing position ten meters away. The Wyvern was lying on the ice; Riddel’s body, horribly twisted and torn, was inside the position—most of it.
“Leckie!”
“You two move! Now!” he shouted back. Slinging his 580, he shouldered the Wyvern, checked its system readouts, and connected its data link with his helmet HUD. Red targeting brackets appeared, which he swung to embrace one of the zidong tanke.
A soundless explosion gouted the foxhole he’d just left. He felt the jolt through his boots. He pressed the acquire switch, saw the brackets flash to green, heard the tone of a target lock, and squeezed the trigger. The missile slid free of the launcher, wobbling a bit as it streaked across the ice, its white-hot tail flare matched by a skittering patch of reflected light on the ice beneath.
He didn’t have time for a reload or a second shot. Turning, he jogged back toward the E-DARES facility, following Coughlin and Pope. A trio of laser blasts sent a shudder rippling through the ice. He landed on his face, sliding the last five meters to the ladder.
Pope extended a hand and helped him up. Coughlin braced himself at the entryway to the ladder, firing his SLAW in short, precise bursts. “C’mon, Cog!” Pope shouted.
“You two get down there!” he replied. “I’m right behind you!”
Lucky tossed the missile launcher over the railing and into the Pit. It would be useless inside the E-DARES, and this denied it to the enemy. He jogged down the steps, pausing once to fire at snipers lining the south rim.
Then he was at the still-open airlock. The others were crowded inside, waiting.
“Where’s Cog?”
“He was right behind me!” Lucky said. Turning, he saw the ladder up was empty. “Cog! Where are you?”
“Seal up!” Coughlin replied. “I’ll hold ’em off while you do!”
“Get the hell down here, Coughlin!” Pope yelled. “That’s an order!”
“Negative! Gotta get the flag!”
Pope and Lucky stared at each other for a moment. In the rush, they’d forgotten the American flag raised on a radio mast atop the E-DARES’ stern six days ago.
“I’ll go get him,” Lucky said.
“Uh-uh,” Pope said. “You stay here. I’ll—”
“Get the fuck inside!” Coughlin yelled. “There are too damned many of them. Seal up! Now!” They could hear the soft stuttering of EMP static over the radio each time his rapid-fire laser cycled. He was firing continuously now. “Take it, you bastards! Take it! Take it, take it!…”
Silently, they slid the outer hatch shut. Air hissed in, and the inner lock opened.
Graham, McCall, and the two Navy lieutenants, Quinlan and Walthers, were all inside the squad bay as they stepped through from the airlock. They wore space suits and carried M-580s.
Graham slapped the charge lever on his 580. “It won’t be long now,” he said,
Asterias Linea, Europa
0735 hours
Jeff stood face to face with Lang in the tiny airlock, so close their suits touched and he felt the powerful, repulsive shove of her SC fields. Slowly, the outer hatch slid open, and she slid past him into a dense white fog.
He followed close behind her. Tiny ice particles began coating his suit and rifle almost at once; clouds of steam, freezing almost instantly to fog-ice as it hit vacuum, roiled past from the hole blasted in the ice by the improvised A-M torpedo. The black hull of the Manta was already largely covered. He watched where he stepped, following a rough-surfaced tread line in the CB2F weave of the hull, where fuselage blended smoothly to wing.
Three meters ahead, the tread ended with the wing, and he leaped off into whiteness.
The crater blasted into the ice by the International Gun was perhaps a hundred meters across, and with a fairly flat slope to the rim. The Manta had surfaced on the eastern side of the crater floor. As he kept moving, he cleared the fog, and saw the rest of the squad strung out ahead in a ragged line, moving toward the eastern rim, about thirty meters away. Sergeant Lang was just ahead, running across broken, packed ice to join the others.
Damn it, where w
as the enemy? Was it possible that the Chinese LZ had been abandoned, that all of the PRC troops were now elsewhere—either in orbit, or, far worse, at Cadmus?
Jeff moved around the beached Manta, checking the anchor lines secured by Wojak and Cartwright. The submarine was resting on ice that appeared to be composed of many head-sized chunks and blocks refrozen together, but the surface seemed solid enough to support the vessel’s weight. He informed Carver of the fact by radio, then started following the rest. Their radio chatter crackled over his helmet phones.
“Hey, looks like nobody’s home!”
“Nah, they’ll have left someone behind to tend the fires.”
“Mind the chitchat, people. EM discipline!”
“Hey! Will ya lookit that!”
Garcia was pointing back the way they’d come. Jeff turned in time to see a black shape rise like a breaching whale from the depths, sunlight glittering from its wet curves and in the cascade of white spray exploding into vacuum.
Manta Two cleared the surface and the fog, flying toward the icy beach well to the north of Manta One. It hit solid ice and skidded forward, sluing to the side as it came to rest thirty meters from the steaming hole.
“Welcome to Asterias Linea,” Jeff called over the command circuit. “How was the trip?”
“A bit on the rough side,” Lieutenant Biehl said. “What’s the sit?”
“No sign of hostiles. Secure your boat and come on out.”
“Roger that! On our way!”
“Target alert!” Carver’s voice called. “I have incoming, straight up! Uh…bearing one-five-three relative, eighty-one degrees! Range…two-three-five-five meters, descending!”
Jeff stopped and looked up. The sun was almost directly overhead, blinding enough to darken his visor, despite its shrunken size. The Chinese had set up their camp on the side of Europa that never sees Jupiter, and the sky seemed strangely empty without the bloated world hanging overhead.
Then he saw what Carver had spotted with the Manta’s radar—the tiny, round shape of a Chinese Descending Thunder, crescent-lit by the sun as it fell slowly toward the LZ.
“Take it, Amberly!” he shouted.
Ahead, Sergeant Roger Amberly dropped to one knee, his ungainly Wyvern laid across his right shoulder, the muzzle pointed almost straight up. “I got lock! I got tone!”
“Watch the backblast, Rog!”
“I know. Firing!”
Flame splashed on the ice almost directly behind and beneath him, but dissipated in a cloud of white steam. The missile, its exhaust a dazzling white pinpoint, arrowed skyward, sluing from side to side as it went to active tracking and homed on its target.
The missile vanished—and much too soon. The Chinese lander must have spotted the launch and used its a point-defense laser to take the Wyvern out. But Amberly was already lock-snapping a fresh missile load tube home and taking aim again. And Peterson was going to one knee nearby, putting the second Wyvern into action.
“Tone!”
“Tone! Fire!”
Two missiles streaked into the sky, and this time the target was considerably lower. One missile vanished, but the second connected, a startlingly white flash clearly visible from the ground.
The lander continued to descend, apparently unharmed.
“Move up to the top of the rim,” Jeff ordered. “Get those missiles working against the grounded landers!”
Trotting through rough and broken ice, Jeff reached the crest of the crater rim. Beyond, the ice in frozen, undulating waves stretching off toward the east. The surface level was considerably higher outside the crater than within, the elevation of the rim no more than a few meters. Five kilometers away, six Descending Thunder landers rested on the ice, steam wreathing two of them from open exhaust vents; close by was a scattering of pressurized habs, surface storage sheds, tractors and excavating equipment of various types, and several of the ubiquitous zidong tanke robots on patrol.
Jeff raised his rifle, using the 580’s optics as a zoom lens to magnify the center of the base. There were a few space-suited troops about, and a lot of activity near the base of two of the landers. It looked like they were getting ready to disembark their passengers.
“Pick your targets!” he told the others. “Take down those troops!”
The Marines spread out along the rim, lying prone, triggering their weapons. The beams weren’t visible in vacuum, of course, but in the magnified view through his rifle’s optics, Jeff saw enemy soldiers pitch, drop, spin, fall…
Two missiles streaked across the ice, swinging sharply into the sides of the two recently grounded transports. White light blossomed; apparently, the point defense systems had been shut down, or someone wasn’t paying attention. The two reloaded and fired again. One of the landers suddenly erupted in incandescent violence, a savage detonation that devoured its lower half, fragmented the upper, and sent huge, curved sections spinning through the sky, all in perfect silence.
Squad Bay, E-DARES Facility
Ice Station Zebra, Europa
0750 hours Zulu
“What the hell are they doing out there?” Lucky demanded.
“Overriding the airlock controls,” Melendez replied from C-3. “I’m trying to block them, but they’re bypassing the computer lockout and using the manual controls. Hang on down there. It looks like they’re going to try to open both doors at once.”
“Shit!” Pope said. “They’ll evacuate the whole facility!”
“We’re sealed down here. We should be okay if you guys are buttoned up.”
“We’re suited and sealed,” Lieutenant Graham said. “But when that door opens, there’s going to be quite a—”
A shrill whistling pierced their ears as the inner airlock slid open. The whistle grew to a roar, then crashing thunder as the air inside the Squad Bay blasted out into Europan emptiness. Four soldiers in white armor and colored helmets were visible inside the airlock, safety lines clipped to their combat harnesses as they crouched against the howling gale. As soon as the inner door was halfway open, they began to fire, sending a fusillade of full-auto rounds hammering into the squad bay.
But the Marines had used the last few minutes to drag equipment racks, lockers, tables and chairs, and everything else that wasn’t bolted down into the middle of the bay, where they’d created a makeshift redoubt. As the wind howled around them, a chair fell from the stack and slid across the deck, but the rest held firm as bullets cracked and snapped—almost unheard beneath the thundering wind—past the waiting Marines.
“Fire!” Pope yelled, and bullets were met with hissing, snapping lasers.
Asterias Linea, Europa
0751 hours Zulu
The enemy was trying to get sorted out, but complete chaos had descended on the Chinese base. Men ran for cover, cowered in the shadow of the landers, or crumpled and died. A trio of robot tanks started trundling toward the crater, but Nodell and Campanelli took aim with their Sunbeam M-228 Squad Laser Weapons, set to rock and roll at five 10-megawatt bursts per second. Tanks that small couldn’t carry armor more than a centimeter or so thick, and the staccato rattle of bursts each equivalent to 200 grams of high explosives quickly degraded armor, shredded tracks, punched through to vital circuitry. One of the tanks stopped, frozen in place. Another skidded to the side and pitched, nose down, into a missile crater. The other backed away into cover.
Jeff risked another look up. The lander overhead was still descending, passing well toward the southeast now. It didn’t appear outwardly damaged, and was still under power. Amberly sent another missile toward it, but its antimissile defenses were engaged and the Wyvern SAM flashed into white vapor halfway to the target and vanished.
Moments later, the ten-meter sphere lightly touched down on the ice half a kilometer away. One of its landing legs, however, didn’t support the craft’s weight as it settled, and the sphere pitched to the side, the useless leg crumpling beneath its weight. The leg’s hydraulics must have been ruptured by the hit. The sph
ere lay almost on its side, its main hatch blocked shut by the ice and the ruin of the leg.
Several Marines cheered. “Keep firing, damn it!” Jeff yelled. “Hurt them! Hit ’em where it hurts!” Seconds later, a Wyvern streaked low through the encampment, baffling the tracking radars aboard the ships, swinging suddenly left and flying right up the ramp of one of the Descending Thunders. The interior cargo bay of the vessel flashed brilliantly, and then all of the internal lights winked out.
The Marines cheered again. One of the seven landers was destroyed, three more either destroyed or badly damaged and certainly out of the fight.
Lieutenant Biehl reached the crater rim at a jog with his eleven people, but the tide already seemed to be turning. With surprise lost, the Chinese were beginning to return fire, both from robot tanks and from the point defense laser weaponry mounted in ball turrets on the upper hulls of the landers. Carver warned of more incoming, two more landers at high altitude, and they appeared to be maneuvering to stay clear of the deadly crater.
“Major Warhurst!” Biehl said, striding to the top of the rim. And then the upper quarter of his body was gone, vanished in a sudden burst of light and fine, red mist. His M-580, his gloved hand and forearm still grasping the pistol grip, landed on the ice half a meter from Jeff’s boots. Fifteen meters away, Peterson fell back from the rim, a gaping hole opened in his chest. Wojak scooped up the dropped M-614, locked in another round, raised the weapon to his shoulder, and fired. The missile slammed into a pressurized hut on the ice, detonating with savage brilliance.
More and more eruptions flashed and strobed along the ridge as heavy lasers pulsed from the Chinese camp, spraying them with ice. The Marines returned fire, sending missile after missile into the base, setting off dozens of explosions. Whitehead and Jellowski, from First Platoon, kept launching missiles after Wojak and Amberly both ran out of reloads. Then Klingensmith and Brighton were hit by laser fire from the enemy landers.
“Carver! Anderson!” Jeff called, radioing the SEAL pilots of the two subs. “Things are getting hot here. How’re preparations for embarkation going?”
