Europa Strike (27 page)

A green light, relayed by Abe on receipt of Colonel Garroway's message.

The U.S.S.
Thomas Jefferson
was now accelerating out of Earth orbit—on a “training mission.”

And there was nothing that Kellerman or any of his political allies or the Greens or the Globalists or any of the rest could do about it now.

Then the only question was whether Major Warhurst and his people could hold out long enough for the relief expedition to get there.

25
OCTOBER
2067

The steady, rattling vibration of the
Tommy J
's A-M drives buzzed Kaitlin's shipboard deck shoes through the steel grating. It was nearly time for the next exchange.

“Here we go, Colonel,” LCDR John Reynolds said. “Incoming!”

The three of them were gathered in
Jefferson
's communications suite, a narrow, claustrophobic compartment much roomier in zero gravity than when they were under acceleration. Kaitlin looked at Captain Steve Marshal, who was leaning against the doorway combing, watching her with a wry grin. “You're on, Colonel,” he said.

Static blasted from the speaker, mingled with the squeal of hydrogen plasma at starcore temperatures.

“
Jefferson
, this is Colorado Springs Space Control!” a voice said, faint but reasonably clear despite the hiss of
Jefferson
's own exhaust cloud. “I
said
that the Senate has voted to prohibit any relief expedition to Europa!”

This was the third time that Earth had repeated the message. Each time before, Kaitlin had told them that
Jefferson
was not receiving, that she could not understand.

Of course, with each transmission compressed and repeated three times, the ship's AI had little trouble merging the transmissions and extracting intelligible words from the hash of white noise. Even the static was much less than it should have been, the hiss bleached out by the AI's byte-juggling ministrations.

“The Senate voted fifty-one to forty-five,” the voice at Space Control continued. “I repeat, fifty-one to forty-five, with sixteen abstentions,
against
the relief measure!
Jefferson
, do you copy?”

So! The vote had been a lot closer than Carmen had predicted. That must have been one blitzkrieg of a speech.

Kaitlin wondered, too, if there was a kind of hidden message here from the senator. Colorado Springs was making a special effort to make sure she knew the results of the senate vote. Was Carmen behind that? Perhaps telling her that there was more support for the Europa Relief Expedition in Congress than expected?

Damn…no. You could go crazy trying to figure all the hidden angles. She couldn't let that distract her from what she had to do.

The static-blasted voice from Earth was continuing to speak.

“
Jefferson
, there is no relief expedition, and we do not have properly logged flight plans for your boost, which appears to be aimed at Jupiter space. You are directed to cease acceleration at once!
Jefferson
! Do you read?” There was a long hesitation before the speaker added, “Over!” She could hear the frustration in his voice as he handed the ball back to the outbound A-M cruiser, as he wondered what else to say, how else he could convince, before beginning the next interminable lag-time wait.

Kaitlin exchanged another long look with Marshal, then shrugged. “I'm having a lot of trouble hearing him, Captain. How about you?”

“Well, that's the trouble with these steady-thrust ships,” he told her. “With Earth almost directly astern, we're trying to hear signals coming straight up our exhaust trail. Hot plasma plays the very hell with reception.”

She picked up the microphone. “Space Control, this is the
Jefferson
,” she said. “I am having trouble hearing your transmission.” Technically, either Reynolds or the Captain should be speaking for the ship, but she'd insisted. This plot had been her idea, after all, and she wanted to assume full responsibility.

Even for the lies.

“Space Control,” she continued, “this is Colonel Kaitlin Garroway, of the One-MSEF. We are deploying on extended…maneuvers. We are exercising our right of free passage through open space, as allowed by all current international space treaties. We are not engaged in any relief efforts, nor do we intend to challenge any vessel or military force unless we are challenged first.

“Colorado Springs…your signal is very weak, and breaking up. I cannot hear you, repeat, I cannot hear you. Over!”

She checked a time readout on the bulkhead. It would be five minutes before they heard back.

The
Jefferson
, carrying her cargo of 175 Marines of Alpha and Delta Companies, 1-MSEF, had been under one G acceleration for twenty-seven hours now; they were already three-tenths of an astronomical unit out from Earth and traveling at over 950 kilometers per second. At that distance, it took nearly two and a half minutes for a radio or laser signal to travel from the
Jefferson
to Earth, and a like time for the reply to make the trip back.

And the distance was growing greater with every passing second.

Kaitlin knew she was taking a fearful risk; in all probability, her career was over. She could play games with Colorado Springs now, but when she returned to Earth, there
would
be a hearing, and the
Jefferson
's radio logs and comm buffer storage would prove her lie.

She just hoped they would let her take the blame herself. The worst part of her act of career suicide was that, most probably, it wouldn't be just her who took the fall. Captain Marshal was putting his neck on the block as well. Hell, there was even the chance that Rob would be tainted as well, by sheer association.

But the real problem was Captain Steve Marshal, a lanky Texan with a blond buzz cut whom she'd first met through Rob ten years ago, at a party in Alexandria, Virginia. He'd been a close friend of the family ever since, and—to hear him tell it, at any rate—had battled his way through the e-work barricades in the Pentagon to win assignment to the Europa Relief Expedition for the
Jefferson
over the
Washington
, the
Reagan
, and the
Dole
.

He'd flown out to Quantico when he'd heard about Rob Junior, sat up all night with them, cried with them.

“You look…unhappy, Kait,” Steve said.

“I don't like dragging my friends down with me,” she told him. “I still can't say I'm sorry that I got you involved in this, Captain, because this wouldn't be possible without you. But I hate the thought that you could find yourself facing a court martial because of me. Damn it, Steve, you could lose your command! You should never have agreed to this.”

He smiled. “Colonel, in the first place, I never could say no to a beautiful woman.

“In the second place, I had friends on both the
JFK
and the
Roosey
. Jeremy Mitchell and I grew up together outside of San Antonio—and I ended up marrying his sister. And…there was Rob Junior. The way I see it, either all of those people died for some reason, or they died for no reason. I kinda prefer the first option, don't you?”

“But—”

He held up a hand. “And
third
, Colonel, it's not just you Marines who can be too impossibly damned heroic for words. I happen to think those people on Europa are getting a damned raw deal.
I'm
not going to see them hung up out there and left to flap in the breeze!”

“Europa doesn't have much of a breeze.”

“Okay. Hung out to freeze-dry in the proton flux, then.”

She returned his smile. “You can always claim that I pulled a gun on you.”

“That the Marines hijacked a twelve billion-dollar spacecraft to Jupiter to fight an illegal war? They might frown on that.”

“No more than you throwing in with my little mutiny. That's what this is, you know. At the very least we're guilty of trying to write our own version of U.S. foreign policy here. At worst, we're pirates!”

“
Yarrr!
” he growled, a mock pirate's battlecry. “I always wanted to be a space pirate!” She laughed, and he added, “Look, I'll be okay, Colonel. We were scheduled for boost, and I boosted on the mark. What I disregarded was the fact that Space Command put me on hold and didn't give me a final boost clearance.” He shrugged. “I queried both STAN-NET and L-3 Traffic Control and got a clear to boost from both. End of story. At worst, I'm pegged for not double-checking with Earth, but I was well inside the envelope. And they obviously haven't checked yet to see that a flight plan has been logged. We're scheduled now to carry out training exercises en route to Jupiter, and in Jovian space.”

“At one G all the way? Those are pretty damned expensive exercises!” They would be using enough antimatter on this one run to power all of North America for months.

“Yeah, but I want to get back to Earth in a hurry. Gotta be home in time for Thanksgiving. The Marshals all get together for a big family do down in Texas, y'see, and—”

“Steve, you're impossible.”

“Only highly improbable, my dear. In any case, I don't think either of us has a whole lot to worry about.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Simple. If we manage to save your Marines, we're going to have to do it by winning, right? We beat that second Chinese cruiser, save the CWS base, make contact with the alien, whatever it takes. If the Chinese lose hard enough, it should swing things around on Earth too. They make peace, we give them some concessions in sharing alien technology, everybody's happy.

“And our superiors are
not
going to court-martial us for success! Not when we're in the public eye as heroes!”

“Well, that's all very well. But there's so damned much that can go wrong! What if we fail?”

What if
I
fail?
That was the thought that had been plaguing her for two days.

“If we fail, Colonel, you and I are going to be dead. And we won't care a bit about what they say about us when we're gone.”

 

West of Cadmus Crater, Europa

0956 hours Zulu

 

Lucky brought his gloved thumb down on the firing button. Fifty meters away, ice exploded in an outlashing cloud, a savage detonation, death-silent. The shock was transmitted through the ice as a sharp, brief shudder, but there was no other indication that the charge had even fired.

Dropping the trigger box back in a thigh pouch, Lucky snatched up his 580 and started crawling forward. To his right, Liss Cartwright aimed her rifle from a prone position, covering him.

The badlands east of Cadmus were a jumbled tangle of mounds and jagged berg shapes crammed together by pressures deep within the ice into a patchwork labyrinth kilometers across. The only way to cross it was on the labyrinth floor, threading along twisting, narrow pathways with sheer ice walls ten meters high in places. The Chinese had been using the chaotic terrain to slip close to the base of the crater rim. Several times now in the past week, lone soldiers or small groups had worked their way up the crater slope, avoiding or disabling perimeter sentinels, and firing rockets or sniping lasers into the compound.

The Marines had countered by sending out two-and four-man patrols to place booby traps and set ambushes. Grenades buried in the ice walls and triggered by pressure switches or proximity were recorded in Chesty Puller's data base so that he could steer friendlies clear of them, painting them on the Marines' HUDs as red warning flags. Better were traps that could be fired by hand in an attempt to ensnare enemy troops.

The Warhorse, scuttlebutt said, was trying to capture a Chinese soldier who knew something about the incoming PRC ship. Lucky thought the whole idea was pretty silly. Hell, they didn't have room for the prisoners they held already, and the POWs they had weren't willing to talk. Lucky had pulled guard detail over the Charlie prisoners a couple of times already; they were a smugly arrogant bunch, with facial expressions ranging from bland to sullen, who refused to even look at their captors. Adding to the catch was begging for trouble in Lucky's opinion.

But when the action order called for bringing in another prisoner or two, that's what he was going to try his best to do. Today it was his turn to go play hide-and-seek among the tortured icebergs in the broken ground east of the crater. With Jupiter glaring down at him from above the horizon, he and Liss had found a trail recently used by the enemy, planted a charge to cut them off, and settled down to wait.

The chances of actually achieving a contact were relatively slim; there were so
many
possible trails through the badlands. Still, Chesty had worked out the topology of the area and plotted a half dozen main paths between the crater and the Chinese lander still resting on the plain beyond the badlands to the east. Simply blocking Highways One through Six, as they came to be known, wasn't enough since there were always side trails to let the enemy slip around a blockage. The Marines had better luck mining the paths, or trying to ambush enemy troops while they made the passage.

Lucky made his way down a sharply sloping surface of rough ice, sliding the last few meters and landing hard on a ledge a man's height above the path floor. Two Chinese soldiers had been moving along this path moments before; Lucky had set off the charge to block their retreat, and now they should be coming back this way. He leaned against a spur of ice and aimed his 580 down the path, waiting.

Two minutes later, by his HUD timer, Liss joined him, scrambling down the ice slope from above. She was so close he felt the gentle shove of her SC shielding. “Anything?”

She spoke over the private channel at minimal wattage. Standing orders required them to use strict EM discipline to avoid being pinpointed by PRC scanners, but down here among the ice walls and tunnellike pathways, a weak signal wouldn't be picked up beyond line of sight. Lucky was amused that they still tended to whisper, as though they could be overheard.

“Nothing,” he replied, not taking his eyes from the 580's crosshair reticle, painted on the claustrophobic opening to a particularly narrow stretch of Highway Five just ahead, where the ice-path crevice was scarcely a meter wide. “Either they're dead, or…”