Europa Strike: Book Three of the Heritage Trilogy

by Ian Douglas

  “Oh, it’s no secret. I haven’t decided, but it’s damned tempting. It would be nice to have a life again. Get to see my family.”

  “It’s funny. When I think of you, Colonel, I think of the Corps as being your family.”

  “It is. That’s what makes being caught in between so damned hard.” She gave him a cross look. “And speaking of which, Major…where’s your uniform?”

  He made a face. “I thought I would be a bit less conspicuous in civvies.”

  “You just don’t like showing off the blue button.” She grinned. “Shame on you!”

  Jack Ramsey, then Corporal Ramsey, had won the Medal of Honor at Tsiolkovsky twenty-five years before. Kaitlin had been there, with the Marines that had secured the UN base, allowing a team of Marine AI experts—including Jack—to come in and crack a UN computer and stop the detonation of an antimatter stockpile.

  “The way they have me running around with the professorial crowd, I’m not sure whether I’m in the Marines anymore or not.”

  “You’re still drawing service pay, right?” She fingered the eagle of her rank tab on her lapel. “And you answer to a guy who wears one of these. You’re still in the Corps, believe me.”

  “It’s nice to know some things remain constant. And I guess I do have to pay them back for my education!” After Tsiolkovsky, the Corps had sent him to college—including a graduate program at the Hans Moravec AI Institute in Pittsburgh—then given him a commission and put him to work designing better AIs. Artificial intelligence promised to be the big field of technological innovation in the next few years, a means of creating some very powerful friends and fellow workers for humankind, minds at least as good as any organic brain—and much, much faster.

  Some thought the AIs would ultimately be man’s replacement rather than his assistant. Those working in the field rebutted the doomsayers by pointing out that the future belonged to both types of mind, that each needed the other to reach its full potential.

  Jack had a natural flair for AI design. He’d started off before he’d joined the service, reconfiguring some limited commercial AI software into an impressively interactive program he called Sam, which he still used as his personal secretary. A descendent of Sam’s, Sam Too, had been installed aboard humankind’s first genuine star ship, the unmanned probe Ad Astra, now, after six years of voyaging, decelerating into the dual planetary system of Alpha Centauri.

  “So…how goes your part of the mission?” she asked. That was Project Chiron, one small but extremely important, and classified, portion of the Ad Astra program.

  He nodded. “Braking and final course correction maneuvers are almost complete. She’ll be entering orbit in another three days. But then, that’s also been on the news, so you must’ve heard. It can’t all be preempted by the latest news from China.”

  She sighed. “Haven’t had much chance to watch, though. Or even read my daily high-points download. But I know it must be exciting for you.”

  “It is. I’ll be going to Mars at the end of the week. That’s almost the best part of all, to be at Cydonia when the link is made.”

  They were still trying to piece together the scope of the discovery beneath the war-and weather-torn ruins on Mars—in particular, the Cave of Wonders, the colossal sphere of holographic displays that appeared to show tantalizing glimpses of hundreds of alien worlds beneath other stars.

  “Well, I wish you luck with it. And Sam too, of course.” She twinkled at the pun.

  “Thank you.” If he’d heard the joke, he didn’t react to it. In fact, Kaitlin thought as she watched him, he seemed a bit preoccupied.

  “Problem?”

  “Eh? Oh, no. Not really. Was wondering if you’d heard anything about the Chinese mystery ship. I mean, anything you could tell me.”

  “I don’t know much, and none of it is classified,” she admitted. “It’s called Heavenly Lightning, and it used a gravitational slingshot assist to put it into a retrograde solar orbit between Mars and Earth. The Chinese haven’t released much, except that it’s on a peaceful mission of a scientific nature.”

  “From what I’ve been able to gather, it’s not going near Mars, though.”

  “Uh-uh. Mars is on the far side of the sun right now. If they were trying to stop you from getting to Cydonia and carrying out Project Chiron, they’re about 400 million kilometers off course.”

  “Well, that’s a relief, at least.”

  “There’s been a lot of buzz about the Lightning and what she might be up to. The CMC was afraid it was headed for Europa.” Confederation Military Command was the ad hoc committee charged with unifying the disparate elements of the various CWS armed forces—an impossible task, but one that in Kaitlin’s opinion was good for occasional moments of comic relief. “Turns out the Chinese are worried about us making contact with whatever is at Europa first. But the Lightning’s headed in the wrong direction for that. So we don’t know what they’re up to.” She shrugged. “Maybe they’re telling the truth. Research.”

  “Maybe…”

  “You don’t look convinced.”

  “Colonel, Europa and Mars are the two keys to the biggest, most important puzzle the human race faces right now. A breakthrough at either site is going to completely transform both us and the way we think about the universe—more than the An revelations, more than the discovery that we’re not alone in the universe. The Beijing government knows that, and they’d be nuts not to try to grab a piece of the action. We know they’re interested. We know they’ve been getting their big A-M ships ready to boost. And they did a quick refit of the Lightning and launched her in a hell of a hurry. It’s just damned hard not to believe they’re all connected somehow.”

  “Well, the Peaceforcer cruisers are in place,” she said. “They’ll be watching every Chinese launch, you can be sure of that. And they’ll be positioned to act if the Chinese ships make a move in either direction. Beijing’s only hope at this point is to play the game our way. Join the CWS, make nice, and take a cut of the profits.”

  “Beijing,” he replied, “isn’t exactly known for how well they play with others. Especially barbarians like us.”

  He was right, of course. A struggle was shaping up, a struggle that might well determine the nature of humanity for the next ten thousand years.

  And Kaitlin and Jack and the rest of the U.S. Marines were going to be at ground zero—the proverbial eye of the storm.

  As usual.

  Squad Bay

  1 MSEF Barracks

  2135 hours Zulu

  “Bumfuq!” Lucky exploded. “We’re bein’ sent to Bumfuq!”

  Bumfuq, Egypt, was an old, old expression current throughout all branches of military service, referring to a place, a duty station so far removed from the civilized amenities that you might as well be on another planet.

  Which, in stark, cold point of fact, was exactly where they were going.

  “Aw, c’mon, Lucky!” Staff Sergeant BA Campanelli said, laughing. “How bad can it be? Anyway, you always said you wanted to go to space!”

  “Shit,” Lance Corporal Dick Wojak said. “He just doesn’t want to lose access to his virtual girlfriends!”

  “Hell,” Sergeant Dave Coughlin said. “He should just download one of ’em into his PAD and bring her along! Then we could all share in the wealth!”

  “Why don’t you like girls, Luck?” Kelly Owenson said. “Real ones, I mean?”

  “I like girls fine!”

  What he didn’t like talking about was the fact that virtual relationships just didn’t fucking hurt as much as the real ones. Damn, Becka. Get out of my head….

  He took another swallow of the drink BA had mixed for him—a pineapply something that was quite good. What had she called it?

  Sergeant Sherman Nodell was weaving a bit in his seat, despite the fact that he outmassed Lucky by a good twenty kilos, and he didn’t seem interested in discussing Lucky’s sex life. “Just give me another one of those…things you were talkin’ a
bout a little bit ago,” he said. He was being very careful how he enunciated his words.

  The nine of them, all members of First and Second Platoons, Bravo Company, were sitting at a folding table in the barracks squad bay. The huge and otherwise bare room which had once been an aircraft hangar was decorated with green-painted concrete floor, steel storage lockers, a display case near the entrance with trophies and battalion honors, and a wall-sized flatscreen on one bulkhead that was displaying the Marine Corps emblem at the moment. Normally, they all would have been out tonight, hitting the bars and sensies in Lompoc, but the 1st Marine Space Expeditionary Force had been restricted to the base ever since word had come down of the early deployment to Europa.

  Staff Sergeant Campanelli had come to the rescue, though. She’d been a bartender as a civilian—“in a former life,” as she liked to call it—and she occasionally hauled out a small, portable bar-in-a-suitcase that was her prized possession and entertained the others in the platoon with some of her strange and wonderful concoctions. Mixing drinks in a nondesignated area probably violated half a dozen different regs, but she hadn’t been caught yet. There were rumors to the effect that she had been caught, once, but gotten off in exchange for a bottle of scotch.

  Her full name was Brenda Allyn Campanelli, so inevitably she’d picked up the handle “BA,” for Bad Ass, even though she claimed her ass was very good. No one in the platoon claimed personal knowledge of that fact, however, though there’d been a great deal of speculation.

  “So…what’ll it be, big boy?” she asked Nodell, taunting him.

  He leered. “I wanna blow job!”

  “Coming right up! But you’ve got to take it the right way!”

  “And what way would that be?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  She began mixing drinks in two shot glasses, half amaretto, half Kahlúa, topped with a generous squirt of whipped cream from a dispenser in the freezer section of her portable bar. “Okay, we really need a low table for this.”

  “How about a chair?” Lucky volunteered.

  “That’ll do.” She put the drinks on the chair’s seat, then got down on her knees. “You’ve got to do this right!”

  Holding her hands behind her back, she bent forward and took one of the loaded shot glasses in her mouth. The other Marines cheered, clapped, and chanted “Go! Go! Go!” as she tipped her head and the glass up and back, draining the liquid and most of the whipped cream into her throat. Snapping her head forward, she returned the empty shot glass to the chair, licked the excess whipped cream from her lips, and held up her hands as the Marines cheered and stomped on the deck.

  “And that is how you do a blow job!” she told Nodell.

  “All right!” Dave cried, applauding. “You know, we ought to call you ‘BJ,’ not ‘BA’!”

  “Hey, I like that! Just don’t go gettin’ any ideas!”

  “I always have ideas, Staff Sergeant!”

  “Your turn!” Corporal Lissa Cartwright told Nodell.

  “Aw, that’s a sissy drink!” he began, but the others began chanting at him.

  “Do it! Do it! Do it!”

  At last, he awkwardly dropped to his knees, bent over the remaining glass, and took it in his mouth. He didn’t tip his head fast enough, though, and a lot of it ended up dribbling down his chin, together with a small avalanche of whipped cream. He started choking and gagging, and Lucky and Corporal Duane Niemeyer began pounding him on the back.

  “Gah!” he said, rising from the floor. “That’s still a sissy drink! I only drink…I only drink…uh…a man’s drink!”

  “And what would that be?” BA asked him.

  “Hell, just about anything that pours. One at a time or all together, I can take it! I just don’t do sissy drinks.”

  “Is that so?” She studied him. “You ever tried a cement mixer?”

  “Nah. What is that, another sissy—”

  “A man’s drink,” she told him. “With a name like ‘cement mixer,’ what would you expect?”

  “Now that sounds more like it! What’s in it?”

  “Here, I think I have the ingredients. Yup. You do this in two stages.” Deftly, she poured out two shot glasses, one with lime grenadine, the other with Bailey’s Irish Creme. She handed him the Bailey’s. “Here. Take this…but don’t swallow. Hold it in your mouth.”

  He tossed the shot back.

  “Now,” she told him, “take this in your mouth and swish it around with the other.”

  Lucky had seen this gag pulled before. The lime juice curdled the Bailey’s, turning it to the consistency of cottage cheese. It didn’t taste bad—sort of like sweet tarts, in fact—but the sensation of having that stuff congeal in your mouth out of nowhere generated the most wonderful expressions of disbelief, shock, and dawning I’ve-been-had horror imaginable.

  Nodell was just starting to work at it when the far door opened and Major Warhurst walked in.

  “Attention on deck!” Dave cried. There was a swift rattling and shuffling as shot glasses and bottles somehow vanished into BJ’s porta-bar, which closed and locked and made it to the floor as the rest of them stood up.

  Warhurst didn’t seem to notice—likely a deliberate oversight on his part—but he seemed fascinated by the expression on Nodell’s face. “Carry—” he started to say, and then stopped. “Nodell? Are you okay?”

  “Um…mmm-mmm…mmm!” He was working his jaws furiously, trying to swallow the mess in his mouth without parting his lips.

  “That’s ‘Mmm-mmm, sir,’ Nodell. What have you got in your mouth?”

  Lucky stood at attention, wondering what was going to go down. V-berg wasn’t dry, but the only drinking allowed was at the various designated watering holes, the enlisted bars and NCO clubs and such. They could all be in a world of shit if Major Warhurst decided to be a prick.

  With several more vigorous workings of his jaw, Nodell managed to get the congealed mess chewed and swallowed. “Uh, sorry, sir. You caught me with my mouth full.”

  “Of what?”

  “Uh…my girlfriend sent me some cookies.”

  Warhurst glanced at the suspiciously empty table—no wrappings, no crumbs. “I see.” He sniffed. “Lime cookies? Smells good! I don’t suppose you have any for your CO.”

  “Uh, sorry, sir. That was the last one!”

  “Very well. Carry on, then!”

  “Aye, aye, sir!”

  “Almost taps, people. You’d better break this up. We start weapons training early tomorrow. M-580, stripping, cleaning, and troubleshooting. You’ll need clear heads.” He gave Nodell a hard look. “All of you!”

  He turned and walked out, as the Marines at the table slowly, ever so slowly, relaxed again.

  “Jeez! We coulda all been busted!” Lucky said.

  “I don’t think so,” BJ said. “He knew!”

  “Nah,” Dave said. “No way.”

  “So…what kind of skipper is he?” Corporal Mayhew asked. He was the company’s current newbie, newly arrived from Space Training School at Quantico.

  “Damned tough,” BJ told him. “So tough I’d follow him to hell.”

  And the others agreed. Lucky wasn’t quite that trusting…but was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. He was willing enough to consider following the guy to hell.

  But…to Europa?

  23 SEPTEMBER 2067

  Tiantan Shandian

  Solar Orbit

  1412 hours Zulu

  They’d been extending the tether for the past thirty hours, allowing the fifteen-kilometer cables to play themselves slowly out into the night. At the far end of the four superconducting cables, a twenty-ton doughnut of steel, ceramics, and titanium used electrostatic forces and tiny rocket motors to maintain tension against the cables as they unspooled from the Heavenly Lightning’s blunt prow. Lasers ensured perfect alignment, while powerful optical and infrared telescopes assured proper tracking and aim.

  On the Lightning’s bridge, drifting beside the co
mmunications suite, Captain Lin Hu Xiang grasped a handhold and pulled himself alongside the communications officer, head down. “Do we have our final word?”

  “Yes, Captain!” The comm officer’s young face betrayed the flush of excitement. “It is confirmed both by Mission Control and the Star Mountain. Jia you!”

  Go.

  “I can’t help but feel certain…misgivings,” Lin said. “We advance blindly into an unwise war…”

  “Sir! The Space Military Directorate would never—”

  “It’s not the Directorate I’m worried about. It’s our inspired leaders in the Great Hall of the People. The men who put us here, who decided we should begin a war launched against the entire world.”

  The comm officer looked shocked. Evidently, he’d never expected to hear a commanding officer criticize the government. “I…I am sure they have their reasons.”

  “No doubt. And urgent ones, I imagine. Still…how is your military history, Lieutenant?”

  “I am a graduate of the Beijing Academy, sir. First honors!”

  “Which guarantees nothing. Do you know the name Zhu-gang?”

  “No, Captain.” He looked puzzled. “Is that a place in the homeland?”

  “No. But our actions today will draw inevitable comparisons. I hope our leaders are prepared to accept the consequences.” Turning carefully in midair, he addressed the Lightning’s weapons officer. “Mr. Shu. Are we on target?”

  “We are, Captain. Target One is locked in. The computers are programmed to execute a five-degree yaw to bring Target Two to bear, as soon as Packages One and Two have been released.”

  “And our little distraction is ready?”

  “Ready for launch, Captain.”

  He looked at Commander Feng Sun Wa, the Executive Officer. “And the crew?”

  “All crew members report themselves strapped in and ready for action.”

  “Very well.” There could be no further delay. “Mr. Shu, launch the decoy.”

  An eight-ton Zhuongshu missile sped from the Lightning’s launch bay, accelerating in a burst of energy at nearly twenty Gs. Its course took it back along the path traversed by the Lightning, chasing after a bright blue star and its tiny, grayish consort—the Earth and the Moon, now 50 million kilometers distant. Before long, the fast-moving missile had canceled the original velocity imparted by the Lightning away from Earth and begun closing with the distant planet.