Europa Strike (36 page)

 

PRC Cruiser Xing Feng

In orbit, one hundred kilometers
    above Europa

1651 hours Zulu

 

The
Star Wind
was approaching firing point, 100 kilometers above the rolling, ice surface of the moon. General Lin had joined Captain Tai Hsing-min on the bridge, determined to see with his own eyes the obliteration of the CWS base.

“I must point out, General,” Tai was saying, “that our orders explicitly require the preservation of key CWS facilities. We are at war with the American government, not with the CWS scientific community.”

“Pah!” Lin replied. “Legalistic nonsense. This base has already cost us far too much in terms of time, life, and materiel. We
end
this. Now.”

Tai began to reply, then thought better of it. Lin was not known for his reasonable manner. “Yes, sir.”

“The firing will be under the control of the ship intelligence,” Tai said. “Your specific order, however, will be necessary to enable the launch.”

“Very well. I—”

“Captain Tai!” a lieutenant at the sensor suite console shouted. “Incoming projectiles! We are under attack!”

“Ship computer! Analyze attack and maneuver to clear!”

“Affirmative. Analyzing dispersal of incoming projectiles.”

The
Star Wind
's main engines fired, slamming Lin and Tai to the deck. They floated again when the thrust died. Then they hit a bulkhead—or, rather, the bulkhead hit them—as a thundering detonation wrenched the ship.

The bridge lights flickered and died, and gravity returned—a pale imitation of gravity, at any rate—as the front third of the
Star Wind
, severed from the rest of the vessel, began spinning end over end. A ten-kilo mass impacting at over 171 kps liberated a burst of energy of nearly 310 kilotons—as powerful as a fair-sized nuclear device.

A handful of Chinese soldiers walking on the ice below, outside the Cadmus perimeter, saw the flash in the sky and wondered.

28
OCTOBER
2067

The Pit and E-DARES Facility

Ice Station Zebra, Europa

0110 hours Zulu

 

The Manta surfaced in the Pit, cruising with just enough speed to maintain headway in the narrow pool. Jeff stood on the pedestal immediately behind Hastings, who was piloting the craft in, looking out through the observation bubble as they approached the towering metal and ceramic façade of the E-DARES structure.

It was difficult to make out much of anything. The hot water bubbling up from below seemed to explode into dense, expanding fog on contact with vacuum, and the water around the sub was literally boiling, sending up dense clouds of white, freezing vapor. As they neared the base, however, the fog thinned enough for him to begin to see some details.

There were no Marines out to meet them, and none on guard along the ladder leading up the ice cliff to the surface. He felt a chill sense of unease quite unrelated to infrasonics; the base appeared deserted—worse, overrun. The flag still hung from its makeshift staff atop the E-DARES, but at an angle, as though a blast had nearly knocked it down. A gray and white shape at the base of the flagpole puzzled him, until he used a pair of electronic binoculars to zoom in on the form.

It was a Marine's body, suited and armored and still clutching a SLAW in gloved fists. Jeff couldn't tell at this distance who it was, but one thing was starkly clear. There was a serious problem if the other Marines in the garrison hadn't recovered that body as soon as they were able.

He conferred with the others. Four men would go ashore from the Manta, one with a mooring line, three with weapons to protect him, just in case things weren't as eerily quiet as they seemed. After a call for volunteers, Carver took mooring line duty, while Nodell went out with him with a SLAW. BJ and Amberly would follow, as soon as they could cycle through the lock after them.

Hastings brought the Manta around in a gentle turn, nudging up against the icy beach. Jeff watched from the observation dome as Carver, clinging to a safety line on the hull, walked out on the port wing and leaped across onto the ice. Nodell tossed him the mooring line, which he dragged up to a winch mounted on the side of the E-DARES. By the time BJ and Amberly had leaped across with Nodell onto the beach, the winch was turning, slowly dragging the Manta ashore.

There was still no sign of activity in the base, at least anywhere near the Pit. As Hastings took a line tossed across from Manta Two, surfacing out in the middle of the steaming, open water, Jeff led four Marines from Manta One—BJ, Nodell, Amberly, and Wojak—up the ladder toward the E-DARES hatch.

First, though, he led the fire team up the ladder to the crater floor. There had definitely been a battle fought here, a serious one. The tractor they'd used to lower the Mantas into the water lay on its side, its bubble canopy torn open. Bodies,
Chinese
bodies, lay scattered about on the ice, along with abandoned weapons, bits of twisted metal, and holes torn in the surface by explosions and the ice-vaporizing stab of laser beams.

Most of the bodies lay piled up near the walkway leading to the E-DARES facility. It looked like quite a few had died trying to reach the Marine beneath the flag.

The dead Marine turned out to be Dave Coughlin. Several more Marines lay in the prepared weapons positions on the ice nearby.

“Ice Station Zebra, Ice Station Zebra, this is Icebreaker,” Jeff called on the command frequency. “Do you copy?”

There was no response.

Down the ladder again. The circuit box for the airlock controls had been pried open, exposing the wiring inside. He used the manual lever to open the hatch, then entered cautiously.

Four dead Chinese lay piled atop one another inside the airlock like cordwood. More lay inside the Squad Bay, where lockers and furniture had been stacked up to create a makeshift barricade. It was clear enough what had happened here. The question was whether any anyone at all had survived.

“Zebra, this is Icebreaker. Zebra, Icebreaker. Does anyone hear me?”

“Major?” A voice responded on his headset.

“Who is this?”

“Dr. Vasaliev. Is that Major Warhurst?”

“Speaking, Doctor. What the hell's going on here?”

“Thank God! Ah…one moment, Major. Let me patch you through to Sergeant Pope.”

“Staff Sergeant Pope,” Jeff corrected. He walked toward the hatch leading down. Several Chinese bodies lay scattered about here as well.

A moment later, another voice came through on the command channel. “Major Warhurst?”

“Affirmative. Good to hear your voice, son.”

“Sir! Where are you?”

“In the Squad Bay. Moving to the main corridor hatch.”

“Freeze, Major! Do
not
open the hatch. We have it wired.”

He'd been reaching for the hatch access. “Roger that.”

“We're on the way up.”

“What happened to the radio?”

“Main connection to the outside antenna was cut. Chesty is running a mini-Worldnet down here off of a PAD for strictly local communications, but we don't have any range.” There was a pause, and some confused noises over the channel. “Sir, are there any Charlies up there?”

“Just dead ones. If any of them were alive, I don't think I'd be having this conversation.”

“Hang on, sir. We'll be there in a few minutes.”

Jeff remembered his thoughts about Europa paralleling Wake Island. In some ways, it was less like that battle than it was the fight at Camerone on 30 April, 1863. The Third Company of the First Battalion, sixty-two French Foreign Legion troops in the service of the Emperor Maximillian, had engaged Mexican troops near Camerone, Mexico. Fighting against overwhelming odds, cut off from help, surrounded in a farm house and walled courtyard, they'd held out for over eleven hours. Finally, and after repeated demands for their surrender, only six men were left on their feet. When their ammunition had run out, those six had charged the Mexicans with bayonets. In the end, three Legionnaires had stood back to back, bayonets at the ready, as the Mexicans closed in. “
Now
will you surrender?” one of the Mexican officers said.

“On condition we keep our weapons and you look after our wounded officer,” was the reply.

“To men such as you one refuses nothing.”

“Truly these aren't men—they're demons,” Colonel Milan, the Mexican commander, had said, upon hearing of the costly victory over a foe that had very nearly fought to the last man. Over one hundred Mexicans had been killed in the fight, and twice that many wounded, at least.

Camerone…or the Alamo.

Jeff heard some clattering sounds beneath the deck, the hatch to the central corridor airlock opened up, and men and women started coming through. Tom Pope. Sergeant Vince Cukela. Lance Corporal Kelly Owenson. Corporal Christie Dade. Sergeant Lucky Leckie.

Five Marines left.

“It's damned good to see you, sir,” Pope said. The SC wrapping on his armor was torn, unraveling, and charred.

“Where's Captain Melendez?”

“Dead, sir. And Lieutenant Graham.” Pope looked at the handful of other men, unshaven, dirty, exhausted, hollow-eyed. “I, uh, sort of had to take command.”

“You did okay, Lieutenant. Good job.”

“We lost so many…so many…” He blinked. “Lieutenant?”

“Field commission. I need officers to help pull what we have left together. And right now I need someone to take a repair party in and get our commo back up.”

“Aye,
aye
, sir!”

U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson

1 million kilometers from Europa

0201 hours Zulu

 

“Sorry, Colonel,” LCDR Reynolds said. “Still nothing from Ice Station Zebra. Not even a beacon.”

“Then we were too late,” Kaitlin said. “The base was already overrun.”

Sixteen days of stress and grief came crashing down about her. Robbie, dead. Jeff Warhurst, whom she'd known since he was a kid, dead. Kaminski. All of the men and women of the Marine expeditionary force to Europa, dead.

Not to mention her own career and, likely, the career of Captain Marshal, dragged down by her damned, hyperromantic long-shot gamble.

The
Thomas Jefferson
was nearing the vast, sky-filling sweep of Jupiter now. On the repeater screen on the bridge, the awesome complexity of the giant world, with each eddy and turbulent twist of clouds in that banded ocher and salmon and pink-brown and white atmosphere starkly and crisply displayed in a single, titanic display of gas dynamics and Coriolis effect.

“It's time to strap down, Kaitlin,” Captain Marshal said gently. “It's going to be getting bumpy pretty quick.”

She let herself be led from the radio shack to one of the bridge acceleration couches. She'd been living here, pretty much, since they'd entered Jupiter space. The familiarity, the closeness…helped.

She and Steve had made a key decision three days ago, to delay the skew-slip and continue accelerating, getting them to Jupiter space two days ahead of sched. They still had to slow down, however, and Jupiter offered them their single opportunity to do so.

Aerobraking had been successfully used on numerous earlier space flights. By looping low above a planet with an atmosphere, even one as tenuous as that surrounding Mars, a ship could skim the upper levels of that atmosphere, using friction to slow down. The Apollo missions to the moon a century before had used a rather brutal version of the maneuver to slow their return velocity of 40,000 kilometers per hour to a gentle fall slowed further by parachute. Later, a penny-pinching NASA had developed sophisticated applications of aerobraking to adjust satellite orbits without expending fuel.

Now, the
Jefferson
was doing the same thing, decelerating hard at 3 Gs, and stealing a bit of free deceleration from titanic Jupiter as well as she fell close around the curve of the giant planet. The “special packages” installed on the
Jefferson
's forward water storage tank had been deployed just before the Jupiter approach. Each was a balyute, essentially a collapsible bag of Kevlar-composite materials shaped like the sections of an orange and fastened to the hemispherical storage tank. As water was pumped into the bags, it mixed with a dry powder to create a rapidly expanding nitrogen gas-charged polymer-ceramic foam that expanded the orange-slice bags to full volume, then hardened upon exposure to vacuum.

The result was a tough heat shield that completely shrouded the forward tank, extending out and back far enough to create a pocket of calm behind the blazing, deadly heat playing across the balyute's leading surface. Sir Isaac was flying the
Jefferson
; his superhuman precision and speed were necessary to keep the thrusters balanced, the ship properly aligned as it whipped around Jupiter. Any mistake, any imbalance of forces adjusted too late, and the
Jefferson
would begin tumbling. If that happened, she would vaporize in Jupiter's upper atmosphere long before she could be crushed by the intense pressures of the Jovian deep.

Kaitlin wished she could see out, but the bow cameras were all completely blocked by the balyute heat shields, and the various masts, booms, and projections along the vessel's length that included optical electronics with their sensor suites had been retracted. She had nothing to look at except for the steel-gray overhead of the bridge, as the G pressures grew moment by moment, accompanied by a shuddering, mounting vibration. Dragging a tail of ionized plasma a hundred kilometers long,
Jefferson
plunged into the fringes of Jupiter's upper atmosphere, as Europa set beneath the giant's horizon.

They'd been too late. The thought gnawed at her stomach and throat and in the pain behind her eyes. She felt lost and utterly alone. Everything,
everything
had been in vain.