by Ian Douglas
He shifted his aim and drove upward with the hilt still clenched in his hand, smashing the guard against the enemy soldier’s visor. And again. And again…
Kaminski
Ice Station Zebra, Europa
1606 hours Zulu
Kaminski saw the desperate fight taking place forty-five meters to his left. One Marine—Leckie, according to the IFF tag on his HUD—was flat on his PLSS with a PRC trooper on top of him; a second Chinese soldier was getting to his feet after a fall, while two more lay on the ice nearby, one moving, the other still. Raising his 580, he targeted the lone enemy soldier as he moved to help his friend, blowing out the back panel of the man’s PLSS unit, which exploded in a burst of fast-venting oxygen.
He was drawing a careful bead on the bad guy on top of Leckie when the Marine’s repeated blows to the man’s helmet visor got through. The PRC trooper rolled off of Leckie, gloves scrabbling at his faceplate, which was crazed like a ball of crystal smashed by a hammer.
Leckie must have opened a pinprick of a crack; the visor hadn’t blown, but the soldier had panicked. Kaminski calmly shot him through the chest, putting him down.
“Leckie! You okay?”
The Marine picked up his dropped rifle, waved, and got to his feet. “O-okay, Sergeant Major. Thanks!”
Kaminski was measuring angles with his eyes. Leckie was close to the bottom of the crater slope, close enough, maybe, that the tanks on top couldn’t depress their fire enough to hit him. “Leckie! Can you get back up that slope? We need someone to paint those tanks!”
“Okay! I’ll try!”
“Do it, Marine! On the double!”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
Leckie started moving up the slope.
Niemeyer
On approach to Ice Station Zebra,
Europa
1607 hours Zulu
Corporal Duane Niemeyer peered over the side of the lobber, convinced that they were descending entirely too fast. “Damn it, BJ! Doesn’t this thing have brakes?” he demanded.
“Screw that. Just get that 580 in action!”
Campanelli had both of her hands on the lobber’s attitude controls. The strain had tightened her voice. They were falling toward the Zebra crater, completing their long, arcing trajectory from OP Igloo far over the curve of the horizon to the southwest.
Reaching down, he unstrapped his 580, which had been secured beside the lobber’s right-side seat. He spent the next few seconds concentrating on the warmup procedure, and bringing the weapon up to charge.
The battle was a sprawling, confused affair. From a hundred meters up and southwest of the crater, he could see tiny, running, moving figures, but he couldn’t determine who was who. All of them wore white, and were moving against a background of dappled, twisted whites lightly tainted with browns, blues, and greens. There were some vehicles of some sort lined up along the west rim—probably robot tanks. He’d need something with more kick than a 580 to more than annoy one of those.
He could see the Chinese lander to the north, squatting on the ice like a gray, four-legged soccer ball.
“Don’t look at them,” BJ warned. She must have seen him turning in his seat to see.
“Huh? Why not?”
“They’ve been tracking us since we came over the horizon, and trying to use lasers on us. Low-watt, point-defense stuff. Not much punch at this range, but they’ve put some holes in our undercarriage already, and the targeting beams’ll fry your retinas if you’re looking when they flash.”
He turned his head away quickly, concentrating instead on the crater ahead. They were already holed? Hardly reassuring…
His rifle beeped readiness. Raising it, he watched the crosshair bob and weave across the scattering of tiny figures. Damn! The movement of the lobber kept him from holding any one target long enough to get off a shot. He tried increasing the magnification on his HUD, but that also magnified the movements of the crosshairs. He couldn’t brace himself still long enough.
“Can you hold us still?”
“Negative! Not unless we want that lander to punch us out of the sky!” An attitude control jet fired, rolling them sharply right. His stomach rebelled and he almost vomited.
Somehow he managed to hold steady on one running man, but when he touched the interrogate button on the side of his rifle, the figure on his HUD lit up green, with the word FRIENDLY.
Hastily, he shifted targets. There was someone standing beside one of those flat-topped tanks, just visible through the swirl of freezing steam, and the IFF interrogation brought up the word HOSTILE. He clamped down on the firing button before he could lose the target.
Leckie
Ice Station Zebra, Europa
1609 hours Zulu
Lucky never would have made it so quickly if the ground hadn’t been pulverized by the bombardment at the beginning of the fight. When he’d climbed this slope before—had it only been twenty-five minutes ago?—the ice had been hard. Once moving, he could maintain his momentum with a kangaroo hop, but footing was treacherous, and each time he touched the slope there’d been the danger of having his feet go right out from under him.
Now, the surface of the slope had crumbled to a mushy blend of powder and ice-cube-sized chunks, like blue-white gravel in snow. The stuff dragged at his feet with each lurching step, holding him back, slowing him.
A red light, indicating a paint by an enemy laser, winked on in his HUD. He threw himself flat, searching for the source. To his right, the nearest of the enemy tanks rested hunkered down in the ice rubble, partly enveloped in glittering dust…water freezing in hard vacuum. A space-suited figure moved behind the tank, aiming a Type 110 rifle with a laser sight.
The drifting crystals above the figure’s helmet strobed, suddenly, with blue-white light, like the popping of a camera flash. The figure dropped to its knees, clawing at its helmet, and in that second, Lucky shifted his targeting cursor to the center of the suit and fired, blasting a fist-sized hole from the chest.
He looked up. A lobber was coming in, high and fast. That first laser bolt, partly absorbed and scattered by the frozen vapor, had come from there.
Lucky didn’t stop to think about it. He had a good angle here, halfway up the crater rim, almost looking up the belly of the nearest Chinese tank. He thumbed his 580’s selector switch from pulse to beam, aimed at the tank’s glacis, and fired.
Set for continuous beam, the M-580 lost most of its punch. Certainly, it couldn’t hurt the centimeter-thick armor laminate of a Chinese zidong tanke.
“Kaminski!” he shouted over the company channel. “Painting! Take him! Now!”
Kaminski
Ice Station Zebra, Europa
1610 hours Zulu
Kaminski’s optics couldn’t see the laser paint from this angle, but he could see Leckie far up the inner rim slope and knew what the Marine was doing. He slapped Jellowski’s helmet. “Laser lock! Fire!”
“You’re clear, Jelly!” Kaminski called, verifying that no one was standing behind Jellowski, in the threat zone of the Wyvern’s vented backblast.
Jellowski squeezed the trigger, and the rocket slashed into the black sky on a plume of white exhaust.
“She’s targeting!” Jellowski called. “Tone! Lock!”
Kaminski was already releasing the spent load tube and slamming and lock-twisting another into its place. On the crater rim, a tank exploded, with bits of armor and unraveling track spinning through the sky.
The angle was too severe from down here for a decent paint, but Leckie had a good position, and was close enough to hold a sharp, steady beam on the target. Once the Wyvern was free from its tube, its sensor picked up the reflected backscatter of laser light and homed in with deadly accuracy.
“Second target!” Leckie yelled over the radio. “Painting!”
Jellowski loosed a second tank killer, and seconds later, a second tank staggered as its left track was blown away, then began a slow-motion tumble from its perch atop the rim, rolling over
and over in a silent avalanche of debris all the way to the crater floor.
Descending Thunder No. 4
Two kilometers west of Ice Station
Zebra, Europa
1611 hours Zulu
Colonel Yang winced as the shoulder-launched missile slammed into his face. The shock of the disconnect didn’t hurt, exactly, but it shook him. There was no word for the sensation in any language, but it was as strong as pain, and as startling. He’d been killed several times now in rapid succession—or the steeds he’d been riding had been—and the successive shocks had left him feeling muzzy-headed, a little dizzy. Hu was dead, cut down by laser fire moments ago. Most of the troops were scattered, pinned down, or isolated in small, savagely fighting pockets.
The tide of battle was turning against him. He could feel it. Every battle has a rhythm, a pacing…and the pacing of this one was swiftly slowing, from a surging beat of victory to chaos and defeat.
“The enemy has shown unexpected flexibility, General,” he said, speaking into the satellite-relayed channel back to the main base. At the same time, he used the optics of one of the surviving zidong tanke to stare over the edge of the rim, down into the crater. Men were moving everywhere, loping along as if in some slow-motion dream, a tangled confusion impossible to sort out.
“The enemy is heavily armed and quite determined,” he continued. “The bombardment had little effect and we have had heavy losses. I request permission to pull back to the lander and abort the attack.”
“We can have reinforcements at your position within fifteen minutes, Yang,” Xiang’s voice said. “Can you hold until then?”
“Not without risking complete destruction. What are your orders, General?”
There was a long pause. “Fall back to the lander. Save what you can and fall back. We will need to deal with the Americans in a different way.”
Yang heard the anger in Xiang’s voice. “We have hurt them badly,” he said, needing, somehow, to justify the losses.
There was no reply, and he began issuing the orders for the withdrawal.
Niemeyer
On approach to Ice Station Zebra,
Europa
1607 hours Zulu
“What the hell are you trying to do?” Downer shouted.
“I was trying to fry a tank,” BJ replied. “But I think we just lost the engines!”
“Oh…shit!”
The crater rim was rushing toward them now. “Unstrap!” BJ shouted. “Get ready to jump!”
“What?”
“No more thrust! We’re going down hard!” She was unfastening her own harness as she spoke, and Downer followed suit. They were dropping now, the lobber almost on its side, falling toward the flat, wedge shape of one of the Chinese robot tanks. Campanelli, he realized, had been trying to pass the lobber above the tank with the plasma thrusters on—a difficult and dangerous tactic that, if it had worked, might have fried the robot’s circuits.
Unfortunately, the damage they’d taken from the enemy lander’s point defense lasers had junked their engines, and they were in free fall now.
“Ready…set…go!” BJ shouted, launching herself from the seat. Downer closed his eyes and jumped in the other direction.
It took a long time to fall, and when he hit it felt as though someone had smashed him hard in the legs with a hard-swung baseball bat. Fortunately, the ice wasn’t as hard as it looked. When he hit, the surface gave way a bit, and he found himself sliding feet first down the crumbly, broken surface in a small avalanche of broken ice.
Several Chinese soldiers were running past, stumbling up the slope. He realized that his laser rifle was gone, lost in the jump and the impact that followed. He lay still and watched them pass.
“BJ! BJ, where are you? Are you okay?”
“I’m okay!” was her reply. “Had the wind knocked out of me, a bit.”
He found that he could stand, though pain shot through his left ankle. He started back up the slope, limping heavily. Well, if he could walk, it wasn’t busted.
Downer found BJ sitting on the ice, slowly getting to her feet. “Looks like the bad guys are on the run,” he told her. From here, atop the crater rim, he could see several dozen men streaming back across the ice plain toward the Chinese lander. Two surviving robot tanks backed slowly away, covering the retreat.
“I think,” she said, a bit unsteadily, “I think we won!”
“Damn!” he replied. “And we missed it!”
“Don’t sound so disappointed, son,” the major’s voice said over his radio. “They will be back, you know!”
FOURTEEN
18 OCTOBER 2067
CO’s Office, E-DARES Facility
Ice Station Zebra, Europa
1120 hours Zulu
Jeff had designated a small room off of the compartment now employed as C-3 as his office. There was a folding cot in there—comfortable enough in.13 G—so that he could sleep close to the command center without having to take the elevator all the way down from the sleeping quarters in an emergency.
It also gave him a place to talk to people in private. “My God, Frank! Do you really think this will work?”
Kaminski tugged at his long nose. “Ought to, sir. The physics work out right. I’ve been going over these figures with Lieutenant Walthers, and he’s convinced it’ll work.”
“And we have all the materials to build it?”
“Oh, that’s no problem. I got the idea looking at that fallen microwave antenna. That’s the hardest part. And we have enough superconductor cable. The only question is how many shots we’ll get before the Xing Shan arrives and spoils the party.” He pointed at the schematic showing on Jeff’s PAD. “We won’t be able to hide the damned thing, or move it. But considering that it might not survive even one shot, that’s not a big drawback.”
“Well, the other question is whether one shot would do us any good.”
“Well, normally we’d need to fire for effect, but as Lieutenant Walthers pointed out, we have what you might call an ideal situation here. No atmosphere. That means no friction. No drag. No windage. Nothing but gravity, mass, acceleration, and speed. We know the first two to enough accuracy that we can be very precise with placement. We can control the third, which gives us the fourth. My guess, Major, is that we’ll be accurate to within, say, a hundred meters.”
“That’s still one hell of a big bull’s-eye, Sergeant Major. I wonder if we’d be better advised—yes?”
He looked up as Sergeant Matthews knocked on the office door, then stepped inside. “Uh, excuse me, Major. Dr. Ishiwara is here. He said you’d agreed to see him.”
Jeff glanced at the time readout on his PAD. Damn. He was falling behind sched.
“Very well. Tell him just a moment.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“I’m sorry, Frank. Ishiwara has been trying to see me since reveille this morning.”
“Not a problem, sir.”
“I’d say…let’s go with this idea. It’ll give our people something to stay busy with. Keep up morale.”
“Ay-firmative, Major. They’re pretty high right now. Nothing like beating off a sneak attack to boost morale. But the losses will hit ’em pretty soon, and then they’ll start thinking about why they’re here. Why them. It’ll be good to have them working at a project this complex.”
“See to it, then, Frank. Keep me posted.”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
“One more thing.”
“Sir?”
“In the inventory of stuff we brought down on the bug…might there have been an American flag?”
“I always have an American flag, Major. You know that! Tradition.”
Jeff knew how seriously Kaminski took that particular tradition. During the mission on Mars twenty-five years earlier, Kaminski had happened to have a small American flag with him…and that flag had been raised above the Cydonian base when the Marines captured it back from UN forces. A photograph of the raising, a space-suited analogue o
f the famous flag-raising over Suribachi in 1945, had become enormously popular, both within the Corps and outside.
“Find a staff and have it raised above the E-DARES facility. I’m sure you can rig up a rod or something from hoist to fly. To keep it visible, even in vacuum.”
Frank grinned. “Yes, sir!”
“Maybe it’ll help remind ’em why we’re here. Dismissed.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
He executed a ninety-degree left-face and strode from the compartment. Jeff used the comm channel on his PAD. “Send in Dr. Ishiwara, please, Sergeant.”
“Yessir!”
Shigeru Ishiwara was a small, compact man with a guarded manner. The CWS science team had withdrawn to their own labs and personal spaces in the E-DARES facility since the Marines had come aboard, and Jeff had rarely seen, much less had a chance to talk to, any of them. Lately, Ishiwara had become more and more of a spokesperson, a liaison of sorts, between the civilian and military branches of the base personnel.
“Konichiwa, Dr. Ishiwara.”
“Konichiwa, Major.” Shigeru Ishiwara was a traditionalist, bowing, rather than shaking hands. “Thank you for seeing me.”
“My pleasure.” Well, that was a lie, but a polite one. Jeff was facing a small mountain of work in the wake of the attack yesterday, and didn’t have time at the moment for civilian or scientific concerns. He was especially worried about the morale of the company, especially after losing twenty-two men. That was a 37 percent unit loss; 10 percent lost in a single action could cripple a unit, break down discipline, destroy morale. That was why he’d okayed Kaminski’s rather wild-sounding special project.
Still, he was here to protect these people, and that meant keeping the lines of communications open. “Have a seat. What’s on your mind, sir?”
The scientist seated himself across the desk from him and handed him a data clip. “That, Major,” Ishiwara said, “is a complete list of the damage suffered by the base yesterday during the attack. It includes an inventory of supplies damaged or destroyed.”