by Ian Douglas
“Unless they’ve been building ’em someplace sneaky we don’t know about,” Lissa said. “And we still have three in the inventory. See ya. Raise you five.”
“I dunno,” Campanelli said, studying her cards. “The news feeds haven’t been that encouraging. The CWS isn’t that eager to get into another war right now.”
“Well, they’re not gonna abandon us out here,” Downer Niemeyer said. “Right? I’m out.” He tossed down his cards. “I mean, they couldn’t—”
The sudden rasp of the alarm echoed through the squad bay. “Shit, no!” Lucky screamed.
“Wassamatter, Luck?” Downer said with a nasty chuckle. “Good hand?”
Lucky flipped him an obscene gesture, then snatched up his helmet.
“Attention!” It was the voice of Chesty Puller, the Old Man’s secretary, sounding over the loudspeaker system, the “1MC,” in Marine parlance. “Incoming hostile forces. Range eighteen kilometers, and descending. Two, repeat, two landers. Enemy cruiser on approach. Estimated time of commencement of bombardment run, now thirty-one seconds…”
Lucky seated his helmet in the locking ring and gave it a hard twist to seal it. After checking the connections, O2 feed, and comm and data links, he pulled on his gloves and sealed them as well too. His M-580 was on the rack with the ready weapons for the rest of the section.
By that time, he and the others were crowding into the E-DARES cargo airlock, which was roomy enough for all twelve Marines remaining in the section and then some. He stood there with the others as the seconds bled away with the atmosphere, his eyes fixed on the gray struts and supports of the lock’s overhead, waiting.
They would ride out the bombardment in here.
Over the past three days, the response to each Chinese assault had become almost routine. The Alert Five section stayed suited up inside, weapons ready and warming, until the Star Mountain had passed and the crowbars had stopped falling. Outside, the Marines on working-party details would be scattering, taking cover in shallow trenches cut for the purpose.
The first shock struck, a gentle rumble transmitted through the E-DARES’s bulkheads. It was followed swiftly by a second, a third, a fourth, each shock more powerful, more demanding than the one before.
Another shock, strong enough to make the deck shudder beneath Lucky’s cleated boots. There was no sound in hard vacuum, of course…but a kind of rattle or rumble was carried by deck plates and armor, strong enough to chatter the teeth. His grip on his weapon tightened.
The base is not going to fall off the cliff, he told himself. It’s not.
The upended ship that served as the CWS base was solidly moored to the ice cliff at the side of the Pit, and ultrastrong cables had been run over and through the ice to shore up the cliff face itself, to prevent an avalanche from calving the whole complex into the Europan ocean. For two days, now, they’d had working parties outside drilling arrays of holes in the ice, designed to absorb and diminish incoming shock waves through the frozen surface.
And hell, even if the cliff face shattered and the E-DARES facility did slide into the water, they’d been assured by the science team that the structure was watertight and would float. They would descend beneath the surface, then pop up again, dry and tight, riding like a normal ship, keel down.
But that was all theory. Suppose the facility fell with a mountain of ice tumbling down behind? Suppose it dove so deep it came back up under the ice cap? Suppose the shock was bad enough to spring some joints and flood her compartments? Suppose…suppose…
Another shock, more violent yet. A heavy wrench resting in top of a circuit box on the other side of the compartment jarred loose and fell in dreamlike slow motion, striking the steel deck plating and bouncing, all in complete silence. Kaminski had passed the word that the Charlies seemed to be trying to spare the E-DARES facility and other surface structures, that so far, especially with the shock absorber mountings designed to protect the base from Europaquakes, there’d been remarkably little damage.
We’re gonna be okay.
But he was sweating inside his suit, the stink in his helmet overwhelming now, especially after spending the past several hours locked away in this can. The Chinese could always change their minds, decide that saving the CWS buildings was more trouble than it was worth. The word was that the Star Mountain was uncannily accurate with those crowbars, dropping them on the ice within meters of the intended targets.
Then, he realized with a faint shock of surprise, that the last several impacts had been farther off, less intense. “Okay!” Campanelli called over the platoon circuit. She was senior NCO present, and in charge of the section watch. “Move out!”
The outer lock slid open, and the twelve Marines filed out into the cold, dark emptiness of Europa. The E-DARES facility still seemed firmly attached to the ice wall; the Pit continued, as always, to boil and steam meters below. They trotted up the zigzag of the fire-escape ladder and fanned out onto the ice.
“Incoming hostiles now at two kilometers,” Chesty’s maddeningly calm voice announced. “Intended LZ appears to be east, repeat, east of the base crater.”
A tractor was waiting for them there, with a sled—a five-meter-long makeshift pallet on runners pieced together out of fragments of bug and radio mast—chained behind. Peterson clambered into the tractor’s bubble cockpit and fired up the fuel cell engines; the rest climbed onto the sled, grabbed hold of the lifelines strung around the edge, and hung on. The tractor started forward with a lurch, dragging the section along on the ice.
Lucky looked up in time to see the glint of sunlight on steel as one of the Chinese landers passed overhead to the south. Were both of them headed for the same LZ, or were they going to try to split up and divide the Marine defending forces between two attacking columns?
The tractor picked up speed, its cleated tracks hurling up a fine spray of ice, a frosty roostertail that quickly coated the Marines hanging on astern.
Several new craters were apparent across the floor of the main crater, and another notch had been blasted out of the northwestern rim. Kaminski’s Cannon, shielded from overhead view by a number of large sheets of white fabric, was intact, as were the surface storage sheds and the surviving bug and hoppers.
The tractor dragged them three-quarters of the way up the inner slope of the east rim. They spilled off and made the rest of the trek on foot. The ice here was soft on top after the bombardment, but with harder ice below that took the hard-stomped cleats of each tiring step. Lucky dropped to his belly and crawled the last few meters, with his laser rifle cradled in the crooks of his elbows; several Marines had been killed by snipers firing from cover out in the Chaos Badlands to the east, until the rest of them had learned to be more cautious.
“Alert Five in position!” Campanelli called. “We have one new lander down, range 849 meters, bearing nine-eight degrees. Enemy tanks and troops are visible.”
“Roger that, Five,” Major Warhurst’s voice replied. “You are clear to fire.”
“Thank you for those kind words,” BJ said. “Okay, Marines. You heard the man! Take ’em down!”
Lucky propped his 580 on a convenient ice chunk, pivoting it by the pistol grip as he watched the cursor shift back and forth on his HUD. By zooming in on high magnification with the rifle’s sighting system and bringing up the image on the helmet display, he could peer at the base of the Chinese lander with detail enough that it seemed like he was less than a hundred meters away. He could see the lowered ramp, and space-suited troops filing out. Those odd, flat-topped zidong tanke were deploying in a rough, defensive arc.
Movement caught his eye—a Chinese soldier crossing an open area between one upended tumble of ice and another. Range—345 meters. He shifted the cursor and closed his gloved finger over the firing button. The Chinese soldier vanished; Lucky couldn’t tell if he’d hit him or not.
“Here comes that second incoming,” BJ said. “Nodell! Get that Wyvern in operation!”
Lucky glanced up.
Shit! The second lander was very close, coming in tail-first in a descending arc that would carry it across the southern part of the crater. He wondered for a moment if the Charlies were trying to fry the Marine ground troops with the star-hot plasma exhaust of their drives, or if the threat was accidental. It hardly mattered; BJ had tried frying a tank the other day with a much smaller plasma jet than that thing sported!
Sergeant Sherman Nodell was carrying the section’s M-614. He braced himself on the inner rim slope, aiming the ungainly Wyvern launch tube into the black sky. “Targeting!” he called. “I have tone! Firing!”
There was a silent flash, gasses spewing from the vents around the load tube, and the SAM streaked vertically into the sky, arcing to the south to close with the huge, gray globe of the Chinese lander. From the opposite side of the crater, a second Wyvern soared into the night; the Marines out on work detail when the raid had begun were emerging from their crude shelters now and joining the fight.
White-yellow flame blossomed against the lander’s stern…and then again. There was no change in the craft’s course; it continued drifting across the sky, from west to east, chasing its own shadow now as it grew closer to the ice.
It took several long seconds before Lucky realized…it wasn’t slowing down!
The 1,200-ton orbit-to-surface shuttle impacted on the ice nearly half a kilometer beyond the crater’s east rim, well to the north of the first craft. It drifted in tail first, landing gear deployed…but when the landing struts touched the surface they appeared to crumple as the rest of the craft mashed on down into the ice. There was no flame, no blast, not even the boom of an impact.
If there had been any sound, though, it would have been instantly drowned out by the cheers of the watching Marines.
And Lucky cheered with them, half rising to punch a gloved fist into the black sky. Victory was sweet…even if it was only temporary.
SIXTEEN
21 OCTOBER 2067
C-3, E-DARES Facility
Ice Station Zebra, Europa
1215 hours Zulu
“So,” Jeff said with a wry grin. “Is this wonder cannon of yours going to work?”
“All of the systems test out, Major,” Kaminksi replied. “I don’t see what else we can test.”
“And it’s a use it or lose it proposition,” Lieutenant Walthers added. “We’ve been lucky so far, but sooner or later Papa Romeo’s gonna come over and plant a crowbar smack in the middle of that thing. And we won’t be able to patch it up afterward. We don’t have the spares.”
“We used all of that superconducting cable?”
“Most of it.” He pointed at a computer monitor on the bulkhead, which was currently showing the view from a camera set up on the ice. “In any case, we’re not going to get more than one shot, you know. Charlie’ll come down on it like a ton of hypervelocity crowbars.”
Jeff and the other officers were all present, plus Kaminski and Shigeru Ishiwara, who was representing the science team. The compartment was crowded with so many people, but the electronics suite gave them immediate access to all available information, from individual Marines, from sensors outside, from a host of AI and dumb systems both inside and out.
“Yeah. I was figuring that.” Jeff rubbed his jaw. “You know, Sergeant Major, I’ve been thinking about that. We might be able to get your toy out there to pull double duty.”
“In what way, sir? We don’t even know if it’s gonna survive the first shot!”
“It won’t need to. The thing is, when we fire, let’s do it at a time when the Star Mountain can easily shift to a new orbit to overfly us. If we know when he’s going to come over the horizon, and exactly from what direction…”
Walthers’ eyes widened. “You’re thinking of an intercept? With the bug?”
“Exactly.”
“We might lose the bug.”
“We might. It’ll require a volunteer.”
“No problem there, Major. Armament?”
“I was thinking of a shit can. Literally.” Quickly, he sketched out his plan in a few words.
“Jesus Christ!” Lieutenant Biehl exclaimed. “If this works…”
Shigeru’s eyes widened as Jeff explained. “Major, what you are suggesting?”
“You have a problem with it?”
“It’s reckless! Irresponsible! You…you could ruin everything here!”
“Frank,” Jeff said, “get a work detail together and get the, um, supplies. I suggest we strap as many drums to the upper works of the bug as we can. Fill the cans with the special munitions. And might as well chuck in any other small bits we have lying around. Scrap from the other bug. Leftovers from that microwave tower. Whatever you can find.”
Kaminski was grinning. “Aye, aye, sir!”
“You’ll need that volunteer,” Walthers said. He raised a hand. “Here he is.”
“I appreciate that, Lieutenant, but I have something else in mind.” He patted the screen frame to his PAD. “I have to have a talk with Chesty and see what he can suggest.”
Chesty Puller
Ice Station Zebra, Europa
2045 hours Zulu
The program known as Chesty Puller was commercial software, a design known as Aristotle 3050 characteristically running at 2.97 × 1015 operations per second, approximately at human levels, on a system network with a memory capacity of 1.2 terabytes of fast cache buffer and 2.33 petabytes of nonvolatile memory. Normally resident within Jeff Warhurst’s PAD, he’d been uploaded recently to the Sperry-Rand CVAC-1280 system within the Europan E-DARES facility. And now, a broad-band communications channel had been opened between the E-DARES C-3 suite and the remaining bug, which in the past few hours had become festooned with large storage canisters strapped to the side and dorsal struts of the craft’s framework. Marines were completing the finishing touches, attaching a series of “squibs,” or small explosive packages to the aluminum strips securing the canisters to the spacecraft.
At the moment, however, a larger portion of Chesty’s mind was focused on the input from a number of optical sensors mounted on the twenty-meter, spindly-framework jury-rig wrapped in superconductor cable and pointed, with the front end lifted off the ice by cables attached to the A-frame, toward the southwest. The alignment had to be perfect, and Chesty had labored carefully for the past twenty hours with a Marine working party under Kaminski’s direction, figuring out the theta—the angle between the cable-wrapped microwave tower and the surface—to an accuracy of a part or two in a hundred thousand. That level of accuracy was almost impossible to achieve even with the proper tools. What they’d accomplished here, with few tools beyond military laser sights adapted to the effort and human muscle power, had been startlingly impressive, the result of trial and error, with calculations so fussy that Chesty had been forced to take into account the slight expansion in the supporting cables as the sun came out from behind Jupiter and warmed them by a handful of degrees. When the time came, he would be able to fine-tune the trajectory by slightly increasing or decreasing the power he fed to the SC cables; the really critical adjustments were made by shifting the back end of the tower back and forth on the ice in centimeter increments, aligning the muzzle with a laser beacon on the crater rim 215.7 meters away. The survey data for the placement of that beacon had come from a careful photometric analysis of photographs relayed to Earth by the Farstar deep space telescope, which had managed to pinpoint—to within a few tens of meters—the precise location of the Chinese LZ at Asterias Linea.
The principles of railguns—magnetic linear accelerators—were well known. The first prototype had been built in 1937 by Edward Fitch Northrup, an eccentric inventor who’d worked out the details in a work of fiction. Electricity fed through the superconducting coils generated an intense, fast-moving magnetic field which could be pulsed to increase acceleration. The math involved was trivial; the most uncertain elements in the equation, as always, had to do with human uncertainties.
The Marines had just finished loa
ding the cannon. The round—another canister, this one wrapped tightly with superconducting cable attached to a small fuel-cell power generator inside—floated now in the magnetic grasp of the makeshift linear accelerator. Inside, fifty-five grams of antimatter rested in magnetic suspension inside an A-M carry sphere. The power feed had been carefully packed with foam to let it withstand the sudden shock of ultra-high G acceleration; the trigger was a simple two-stage switch armed by one shock exceeding 100 gravities and fired by a second. The round should arm itself when fired; on impact, the magnetic suspensor field in the A-M containment sphere would fail, and fifty-five grams of antimatter would instantly annihilate fifty-five grams of matter, liberating some 1010 joules of energy, roughly equivalent to two thousand tons of high explosive—about the same punch as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
“Everything is ready for firing,” Chesty announced to the personnel gathered in C-3. He could tell from their heart rates and breathing, from the pitch of their voices as they made jokes with one another, that they were all nervous.
Understandable. If something went wrong, a rather large crater would suddenly appear uncomfortably close to the E-DARES facility—within a couple of kilometers, in fact. That was entirely too close to ground zero for a base anchored to the face of an ice cliff.
“Thank you, Chesty,” Jeff said.
“I suggest that you give orders to move all surface personnel well back from the cannon,” Chesty added. “We have no way of predicting what the recoil effects might be.”
“Already taken care of, Chesty. Wait one.”
He waited.
Kaminski
C-3, Ice Station Zebra, Europa
2045 hours Zulu
Frank Kaminski was holding his breath. The idea had not been original, but if this thing didn’t work, he was going to be the one responsible. Antimatter was such damnably touchy stuff. Any mistake, any mistake, and they would end up shooting themselves in the foot. There might not be much left for the Charlies to come in and take over.