Europa Strike (2 page)

15
SEPTEMBER
2067

“Incredible,” Major Jeffrey Warhurst said, his face pressed against the forward viewing port like a kid experiencing his first visit to a seaquarium. “It's like a whole different world!”

Golden light exploded, a shower of drifting sparks. In the inky blackness, a line of blue-green lights rippled through the water beyond the port, a spectacular display of deep-sea luminescence. Close by, something like a translucent shrimp exhaled a cloud of yellow fire like a tiny rocket's exhaust, scooting off through the night, while in the distance, silver hatchet fish glowed with ghostly radiance.

“It's all of that,” Mark Garroway said. The cramped DSV bridge was almost in total darkness, so that their eyes could remain sensitive to the light show outside. The two men were lying face-down on narrow, side-by-side couches so they could see forward. The sub's pilot occupied a closed-in, padded seat above and behind them. “You see some of the weirdest damned things down here. Bill Beebe called it ‘plunging into new strangeness,' until ‘vocabularies are pauperized and minds are drugged.'”

“Beebe?”

“He helped develop the bathysphere, back in the 1930s, with Otis Barton. The first true deep sea exploration vessel…if you can call a steel sphere dangling at the end of a thousand-meter cable a vessel. He was the first scientist ever to see some of these deep forms…alive, at any rate. He made his dives off of Bermuda.”

“And he saw creatures like these?” Jeff asked. Something collided with the port, exploding in a storm of drifting sparks and leaving behind a pale, iridescently glowing smear. “Wow! Marvelous!”

The third man on the DSV control deck shifted in the pilot's seat, both hands on the attitude-control joysticks ball-mounted on the arms of the padded chair. “Time, gentlemen,” he said. “We should be getting back to the surface.” He was a stocky, powerful man with a body-sculptor's muscles. His square-jawed face was all but covered by the bright red VR helmet he wore, which fed him a constant 3-D and 360-degree image of the submersible's surroundings.

“I thought these subs had a thirty-day endurance,” Jeff said.

“They do,” Mark said, “when they're fully supplied, which this one is not. Even so, we have expendables enough to stay down for three or four days, at least. But that's not what's affecting our deadline. General Altman's scheduled to arrive in another hour, and we should be topside to meet him, don't you think?”

“Damn,” Jeff said, continuing to watch the soft-glowing fireworks beyond the port. “I could stay down here for days!”

Mark chuckled. “Yeah, I know exactly what you mean.”

Jeff Warhurst glanced sideways at the older man, at the rugged face in profile faintly illuminated by the red-hued glow of the bridge lights. Mark Garroway was seventy-one years old but showed no sign at all of slowing down, and his face was alive now with pleasure and wonder. He looked as excited as Jeff felt, for all that he was thirty-two years older.

The man was a legend in the Marines—“Sands of Mars” Garroway, the then-Marine Corps major and electronics expert who'd led a small band of Marines across 650 kilometers of the Vallis Marineris back in '41 to defeat a UN garrison at Mars Prime and go on to recapture the U.S. xenoarcheological base at Cydonia.

Jeff had been a Marine since 2050—seventeen years now—and had all but worshipped Garroway as his personal hero for longer than that. It was still a little hard to realize that he was lying next to the hero of Garroway's March…in an environment even more alien, in most ways, than the frozen surface of Mars.

“I guess this is all pretty old to you. You probably get tired of this after awhile, huh?”

“What?” Garroway said, startled. “Tired of
this?
When I do, I'll be tired of life!”

From what Jeff had heard, the elder Garroway hadn't slowed down much at all in the past quarter-century. Shortly after his return from Mars, he'd worked as a consultant with the Japanese, helping to make sense out of the flood of new technology arriving from the ET finds on Mars and the Moon. After that, he'd retired here, to the Bahamas, to open his marina, but even then he continued to work as a government consultant. AUTEC—the big U.S. submarine testing and research station on Andros Island—was only a few kilometers down the coast. With the building of the Bahamas seaquarium next door at Mastic Point twelve years ago, Mark Garroway had become both moderately wealthy and something of a public figure. Garroway's marina had been offering both realworld and virtual commercial submarine tours of the reefs for tourists for years now; his undersea tour service was a part of the Oceanus Seaquarium's exhibits and one of the most popular tourist attractions in the Islands.

This
submarine, though, was not one of the tourist boats, not by about five thousand meters. Nicknamed Manta, the boat was a blunt, stubby, cigar shape eight meters long melded smoothly with rounded wings that gave it an elongated saucer look. Her hull was jet-black carbon-boron-Bucky fiber weave, or CB
₂
F, a process back-engineered from ET finds on the Moon, and stronger by a factor of five than anything based on purely terrestrial materials processing. The boat was driven by a magnetohydrodynamic jet, an MHD drive that compressed water drawn through intakes forward and expelled it aft like a rocket's exhaust; the craft's flattened shape, complete with upswept stabilizer tips on the ends of the circular “wings,” was that of a lifting body designed to literally fly through water as an aircraft flew through the air. Originally developed by the U.S. Navy for abyssal trench research and exploration, the Manta could dive to depths in excess of ten kilometers, enduring hull pressures of well over a ton over each square centimeter of its hull. Mark Garroway had been asked to earn his consultant's pay this month by evaluating the Manta for use as an undersea transport for Marine raiding parties. And Jeff was here because of Project Icebreaker.

As the sub's pilot pulled back on the joystick controlling the vessel's attitude and increased thrust with a shrill, whining hum, the Manta began rising through the darkness. Something like a golden, shell-less snail flew past on undulating wings, leaving in its wake a faintly phosphorescent trail. The life here, Jeff thought, just a few hundred meters beneath the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, was as alien as anything that humankind might one day encounter among the stars.

“This is why you retired here, isn't it, sir?” he asked. “To be able to play with the Navy's high-tech toys? Maybe keep doing a bit of exploring…new worlds, and all that?”

“Oh, in part, I guess. Though I never did much in the way of exploring, even during my deployment with the MMEF. When I got out of the Corps, mostly what I wanted was to run my own marina. Oceanus and the rest just sort of happened.” He grinned. “But I'm damned glad it did.”

“Hey, Mr. Garroway?” the pilot said. “We've got company.”

Mark frowned, rolling sideways on his couch to look up at the pilot. “What is it?'

The helmeted man touched a control on the arm of his chair, and a monitor on a console beneath the forward port lit up with a rotating, computer-drawn view of a small, twin-outrigger submarine with a large, high-pressure viewing bubble.

“Reads as a commercial teleoperated job. Looks like one of the Atlantis remotes.”

“Anyone ever tell those jokers these are restricted waters?” Mark growled.

“It
looks
like a commercial job,” the pilot repeated. “But it could be our friends again.”

“What friends?” Jeff asked.

“Someone's been
very
interested in our activities down here,” Mark explained. “Now, Carver here is a Navy SEAL and suspicious by nature. But sometimes it pays to be paranoid. We think it might be the
Guojia Anquan Bu
, keeping tabs on our deep-submersible work.”

Jeff frowned. “China's overseas intelligence bureau? Why would they be using a commercial teleop drone?”

“Probably because Atlantis is close by, with remote drones that can innocently stray into government-restricted waters ‘by mistake.' And they can link in from anywhere, remember.”

Atlantis was another seaquarium resort, much like Oceanus but located in Florida, just south of West Palm Beach. Three hundred kilometers wasn't exactly “close by,” but it was close enough that teleop drones could operate comfortably for extended periods.

“Range?” Mark asked Carver.

“Seventy meters.” The whine of the Manta's jet drive increased as the SEAL sub driver boosted the power. “Sixty. We're closing.”

Outside, all was still in complete blackness, save for the constellations of luminous deep-sea life. According to the readouts, they were at 495 meters depth now, with an outside pressure of nearly fifty atmospheres squeezing at the hull. A tense minute passed as the Manta climbed through the high-pressure dark.

“They're running,” Carver said. “They know we're on to them.”

“Run 'em down!” Mark said.

“Range ten meters,” Carver said. “I'm gonna hit the lights.”

“Do it,” Mark replied. A harsh white glare stabbed through the sea outside, turning drifting bits of detritus into a blizzard of glowing flecks. Ahead, a bubble-topped vessel less than a meter long, with twin outriggers and a yellow and red paint scheme, twisted in the Manta's beam.

“That's an Atlantis boat,” the pilot said.

“It's
tiny
,” Jeff said.

“Unmanned,” Carver told him. “Someone's linked in through its cameras and other sensors and is piloting it from somewhere else. I'm picking up two blue-green laser relays between here and the surface. Chances are, whoever's steering that thing isn't even at Atlantis. They could've linked in through the Net.”

“Damned tourists,” Mark growled. “Can you take him?”

“Working on it. He's slower…but a lot more maneuverable.” As if to demonstrate, the other sub twisted sharply toward the Manta, ascending, passing out of the field of view from the tiny forward port.

“This thing has torpedoes?” Jeff asked.

“She can,” Mark told him. “She was designed to release remote drones for deep exploration…but it's easy enough to plug in a warhead instead of an instrument package. We're not armed today, though. Have to do it the hard way.”

“Huh. Competition between all the new seaquariums must be pretty fierce,” he observed.

Mark glanced at him, as if to see whether or not he was joking. Jeff grinned and shrugged. It
was
a bit surreal. Throughout the last century, by far the largest sector of American business had been the entertainment industry, and theme parks like the big seaquariums and their space-park cousins had proliferated the way movie theaters had the century before. Competition between them was stiff…but this was the first time Jeff had ever heard of a war between rival theme parks.

The Manta surged, rising sharply, then banking right into a tight, tight turn that felt like the boat was hovering at the shuddering brink of a low-speed stall.

“That's screwed him,” Carver said. “I've just interrupted the BG-laser link with our own hull. The target is dropping into wait-and-see mode.”

“That means it will circle,” Mark told Jeff, “trying to reacquire the comlink beam.”

“It means,” Carver added, “that for the next few seconds, it will be
predictable
.”

“Martin 1150.” Mark tapped the screen showing the rotating schematic. “Pretty stupid, actually. No AI. No anticipation. It needs a human remote-driver to do damn near anything at all.”

Jeff still couldn't see the other sub, but the Manta was falling now. A moment later, there was a sharp, hollow-sounding
clunk
from port, transmitted through the hull from the Manta's left wing. “Got him!” Carver said, bringing the Manta's nose high once more. “He's going down, boss. Crushed his starboard flotation tank.”

“Good job.”

“Do you and the Atlantis seaquarium often take out one another's subs?” Jeff asked.

“These
are
restricted waters,” Mark pointed out. “Part of AUTEC's test range. If Atlantis loses a few of their touristride drones, maybe they'll be more careful about keeping track of where they're at. It's not like GPS receivers are
expensive
or anything.”

“But you think it might've been the Chinese actually piloting it.”

“Almost certainly,” Mark said. “They tried getting in here first with drones off one of their big nuke subs, but the Navy chased them off. Lately, we think they're using the commercial teleops to keep an eye on us.”

“Why? The Manta is new, but there's no radical technology, no antimatter, no ET stuff. What's their interest?”

“That,” Mark said, “is an excellent question. I wish I knew the answer.” He glanced at Jeff again. “It could be they know something about Icebreaker.”

“That's not good.”

“No, Major, I wouldn't think it was.”

“I've sent a message to the surface,” Carver said. “They'll send a salvage boat down to collect the BGL relays. I doubt they'll be able to collect the wreckage, though. Depth's almost three thousand meters here. Pretty steep for the salvage boys.”

“They wouldn't learn anything from a damned commercial drone anyway,” Mark replied. “We'll have Intelligence check out the user logs at Atlantic, but whatever they find'll be a front anyway. S'okay. I doubt that they saw anything worthwhile.”

“‘Grains of sand,'” Carver said.

“I know.”

“What's that mean?” Jeff asked.

“Chinese intelligence services work somewhat differently than we're used to here in the West,” Mark replied. “They operate on a philosophy as old as Sun Tzu's
Art of War
, and they can be incredibly patient. They don't rely on spies or moles or intelligence coups as much as they do on many thousands of discrete, tiny, apparently unrelated bits of information all being funneled back to Beijing by Chinese tourists, government workers, scientists, businessmen. The image is of millions of termites, each with a grain of sand, patiently building a mound two or three meters high.”