Authors: Ian Douglas
“One-eight. Go.”
“Fuel pressure, O
2
.”
“One-five. Go.”
“Computer.”
“Booted. Up and running.”
Swiftly, they ran through the abbreviated checklist, then BJ fired the engines without the dignity of a countdown. “Hang on to your stomach!” was her only warning as she mashed her thumb down on the engine ignite button. Duane felt the hard, sharp kick in the seat of his suit as the lobber arrowed straight up, climbing rapidly in Europa's light gravity. White vapor and glistening crystals swirled out from the lift-off site, along with the torn-away sheets of camo material, rippling slowly in the ghostly, silent jetblast.
They would have to climb to nearly one hundred kilometers to clear the radio horizon with Ice Station Zebra. They left the rali unit in place on its ridge top OP; there was no time to recover it.
Corporal Duane Niemeyer clung to the edges of his acceleration seat, unable to watch the dizzying panorama as Europa's billiard-ball-smooth surface dropped away beneath him, and unable to close his eyes for fear he would miss something. When he looked up, the baleful eye of Jupiter, now a scimitar-curved slit silver beneath a shrunken sun, glared back. Below, the horizon canted alarmingly as BJ put the ungainly little craft into an unpleasantly tilted attitude, the engine still silently rumbling beneath him. He'd always hated amusement park rides as a kid, and this was as wild as any theme park.
He concentrated hard on not being sick inside his helmet.
Â
Squad Bay
E-DARES Facility, Cadmus Linea
Europa
1538 hours Zulu
Â
“No, no!” Corporal Lucky Leckie said, laughing as the others groaned or shook their heads. “It's
the
way to model all of the different U.S. armed forces! It's called the snake model. You ever hear about it?”
“Leckie,” Gunnery Sergeant Pope said, shaking his head. “If this is another one of your scams, s'welp meâ”
“No! Honest to God, Gunny! It's like this, see? You've got a snake in your AO, right?”
“What kind of snake, Lucky?” Sergeant Dave Coughlin asked.
“Hell, how should I know, Sarge? It's just a snake, 'kay?”
“Is it poisonous?” Corporal Lissa Cartwright wanted to know.
“I don't know! Okay, it's poisonous! And it's in the Area of Operations. So who ya gonna send?”
“The
Marines!
” several of the men sitting in the squad bay growled in chorus. First Section, Second Platoon had gathered there in the large storage compartment volunteered by the civilians at the base to serve as the Marine squad bay and muster area, to pull routine suit and weapons checks. As they worked, Lucky regaled them with his story.
“No,” Lucky replied. “First you send in your Airborne. Now Airborne comes down in the AO, lands smack on top of the snake and kills it. Then they find out that this is the
wrong
AO and they just killed the wrong snake.
“Then you got your armor. They come in, run over the snake, and kill it. Then they go out looking for more snakes, and run out of gas.
“Army Aviation comes in, using a GPS grid to plot the snake's position down to one half of one centimeter. They can't find the snake, and fly back to base for a cool drink and a manicure.”
That brought some booming laughs. The Marines had a poor opinion of the air-ground coordination employed by the other services.
“Okay,” Lucky went on. “Then you have your Army Ranger. He plays with the snakeâ¦then eats it!
“Field artillery masses ten thousand mobile artillery units, launches an all-out TOT barrage with rockets and HE with three FA brigades in support and kills the snakeâ¦
and
several hundred civilians, with massive collateral damage. The mission is declared a success, and all participants, including mechanics, clerks, and cooks, are awarded the Silver Star.”
That brought more hoots and guffaws. Artillery support, long considered an absolute necessity for any battlefield evolution, was fast becoming a dinosaur. You had to mass far too many units to be truly mobile
and
effectiveâand counterbattery fire would savage any concentration of guns that stayed put for more than one shot's worth. “Smart” FA, employing laser-guided munitions, allowed pinpoint accuracy if you had a spotter team near the target or in orbit, but if you didn't, the barrage was likely to be about as surgically precise as a small nuke.
“Combat engineers! They come in and study the damned snake! They prepare an in-depth, five-series field manual on employing countermobility assets to kill the snake that's about as obtuse as a doctrinal thesis. Then they complain that the maneuver forces don't understand how to properly conduct countersnake operations by the book!”
“Combat controllers!” someone in the room shouted, getting into the spirit of things. “They come in and guide the snake elsewhere!”
“Yeah,” Lissa added, laughing. “And Pararescue. They wound the snake on the first pass, then paraglide in and do their damnedest to save its miserable life!”
“Navy SEALs!” Lucky shouted. “They swim in at night, march fifty kilometers inland, take an uncomfortable position which they hold for twenty-four hours just to keep themselves from falling asleep, ambush the snake, expend all of their ammunition, including three cases of grenades,
and
call in naval gunfire supportâ¦
miss
the snake, whereupon the snake bites the SEAL and dies of lead poisoning!”
“Yeah!” Pope added, “Or else the snake gets away, and the SEALs blame the mission failure on poor intel!”
“Hey!” QM1 Mike Hastings growled from a far corner of the compartment. He was one of the SEALs who'd made it down to Europa's surface, and he didn't sound pleased at having his team included in Leckie's rundown. “I'll stuff that damned snake up your ass, Jarhead!”
“Easy, Squid! Easy!” Pope said. “Nothing personal!”
“Air Force!” Lucky called. “We
all
hate the Air Force, right? The Air Force pilot comes in, misidentifies the snake as a late-model Chinese KQ-190 advanced high-altitude interceptor, and engages with smart missiles. He can't tell whether he killed the snake or not, but he goes back to base for a cold one, while the crew chief paints a cool-looking snake silhouette on his airplane.”
“How about Marine Recon?” Hastings said, still glowering. He was wearing an olive-green T-shirt that looked like it had been painted across impossibly massive muscles. “They go out and follow the damned snakeâ¦and get lost!”
“Okay,” Lucky agreed. “I've known some Marine Recon guys. I'll buy that! But then ya got your Army Special Forces. This guy goes in alone and makes contact with the snake. He talks to it in snake language. Builds a goddamn rapport with it, wins its heart and mindâ¦and then teaches it to go out and kill
other
snakes!”
“Military Intelligence!” Pope called out. “They locate the snake using a spy satellite. They study the snake scale by scale and watch its movements. They draw up an extensive report on snakes, snake scales, snake lice, snake shit, and snake movements, and send it up the line to the Joint Chiefs, the CIA, and the National Security Advisor. Meanwhile, the snake disappears, and no one can find it again!”
“I got a better one,” Staff Sergeant Rubio said. He'd been designated the company supply officer, a position he regarded with about as much enthusiasm as a snake in the barracks. “Army Quartermaster Corps! This guy captures the snake, paints it with an NSN, and implements an FOI, after which he has the base commander sign for one snake, green, with scales, poisonous, on a nonexpendable hand receipt. Later, after claiming he doesn't
have
any snakes, he ships it out to a company deployed in the field. Unfortunately, what they
asked
for was one rake, with handle, for area, policing of.”
Everyone in the barracks was howling with laughter over that one, when the deck hatch opened and Major Warhurst clambered up the ladder.
“Attention on deck!”
“Carry on!” he snapped before the Marines could come to their feet. “What the hell's the commotion?” He didn't sound angry. Merelyâ¦interested.
“Sir, we're talking serious tactical snake-killing doctrine here!” Lissa said, laughing.
“Yeah!” Pope added. “Lucky's got the whole damned Armed Forces figured out, Major.”
“Really? Well, maybe you'll explain it to me sometime!”
“Hey, Lucky!” Sergeant Bannacek called. “What about the Marines? What do
they
do with the snake?”
“Just like always,” Lucky replied, “they improvise, they adapt, they overcome! They hunt the snake down in its own backyard and kill it from air, land, sea, and space!”
“Yeah,” Lissa put in, “and then the President declares the deployment a police action, with the Marines, as the Navy's
policemen
, no less, responsible for enforcing the laws about snakes!”
A harsh braying alarm echoed through the compartment. “Major Warhurst! This is Walthers, in C-3! Where are you, sir?”
Warhurst walked to a bulkhead intercom and pressed the talk switch. “I'm here, Lieutenant. Squad bay. What's up?”
“We got hostiles incoming, sir. OP-Igloo just called in the report. One Fat Boy, coming in at five kilometers, ETA two minutes!”
Warhurst spun from the intercom. “All right, Marines!” he bellowed in a DI's stentorian bark. “
Saddle up
! We got snakes to kill!”
“You heard the Major!” Pope added. “Suit up! Suit up! Move it! Move it! Move-move-move-move-move!”
Lucky was already dragging his Mark II armor from its squad bay ready-rack and stepping into the bulky legs. All around him, the other Marines swiftly made the long-practiced moves to don their suits, grab their weapons, and move toward the ladder leading up to the airlock and the outside.
This is it
, he thought, wildly if unoriginally.
The momentâ¦
He had never been so terrified in his life.
Descending Thunder No. 4
bucked and kicked as the pilot cut in the four main engines, killing the spherical craft's velocity and gentling it to an unsteady hover above the icy plain. Clouds of vapor boiled away beneath those invisible blasts of white-hot plasma as landing legs extended, reaching for the vehicle's slow-crawling shadow.
Colonel Yang Zhenyang was strapped into the command seat, a complex-looking barber's chair tucked into an alcove on the flight deck just off the cramped bridge. With leads jacked into his skull and wrists, he could follow the situation directly as it unfolded.
For millennia, the so-called fog of war had dominated every battlefield, and “no plan survives contact with the enemy” was war's prime postulate. That was changing now, though, with the advent of AIs and virtual linkage. The images flickering in his head now were crudeâgrainy and shot through with staticâbut they could give him simultaneous views from a dozen cameras carried by troops or vehicles. At the moment, only one camera was active, showing the panorama to the east as the lander settled slowly to the steaming, fuming ice. The crater holding the CWS base was visible only as a slight rise against the endless blue-white flat of the Europan landscape. There was no sign of any immediate military response. It was certain that the enemy knew they were here, however. The
Descending Thunder No. 3
had been fingered by radar and painted by laser ranging beams from the moment they'd swept in over the horizon.
As the lander settled on yielding hydraulics, the cargo bay ramp came down and a sextet of low, flat-topped, tracked vehicles rolled out, their treads spinning glittering bits of ice into the sunlight as they bit the frozen surface. Cameras mounted forward between the tracks relayed separate views to the lander's AI, which processed them and fed them through to Yang's virtuality suite.
Each vehicle was two and a half meters long, a meter wide, and just over fifty centimeters high. Each possessed a ball turret set into the forward glacis, mounting a seventy-five megawatt pulse laser. The machines were called
zidong tanke
, or “automatic tanks.” In fact, they were robot tanks that could either run on a simple hunt-kill program or be teleoperated from a distance. They'd been painted white so that they would blend in with their surroundings, though after a few moments, enough white powder covered their upper decks to camouflage them completely.
The robot tanks spread out in a rough line abreast, grinding silently toward the crater two kilometers away. Behind them, Chinese troops in heavy, white-camo suits with SC-weave radiation shielding, bounced down the lander's ramp and began dispersing across the plain. The ground here was uneven, but not broken, and gave no cover. The squad leaders had been directed to get their men to the shelter of the crater's outer rim as quickly as possible. They could begin taking fire at any moment.
“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 farâ¦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
putonghuÃ
, 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 rimâ¦
“Continue the advance!” he snapped, speaking on the command frequency. “Secure the crater rim, and they will surrender!”
Â
Leckie
Ice Station Zebra, Europa
1545 hours Zulu
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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 movementâa 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 targetâone of the triangles indicating a moving vehicle of some sortâand 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 downâor 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 Skullzâ¦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 menâ¦
â¦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 serviceâbut 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 becauseâhe could admit it nowâhe'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
.
Damnâ¦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 dietâa regimen calculated to break him down to nothing both physically and emotionallyâhad 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 never 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 Ã 10
8
joulesâthe equivalent of detonating 100 kilos of high explosives.