Europa Strike

The crowding, the stifling lack of privacy, the stink all seemed unendurable.

Somehow, they endured. It was one of the things Marines did, along with the bitch sessions.

Jeff turned from the screen to study the crowded common room behind him. Laughter barked, mingled with the clatter of weapons being assembled, the hum of overhead ventilators struggling against the mingled smells of sweat, food, and oil. A lot of skin was visible. Six men and four women sat around the mess table cleaning and reassembling their M-580LR rifles, and there weren’t three T-shirts among the lot of them. With so many people crowded into so tiny a vacuum-enclosed space, getting rid of excess heat was a real problem, even as the Sun dwindled astern and the Roosey plunged deeper and deeper into the emptiness of the outer Solar System. The temperature in any of the hab areas was rarely less than thirty-five degrees, and it was steamy with the accumulated sweat and exhaled moisture from so many bodies. The ship’s dehumidifiers simply couldn’t keep up with the load. The stated uniform of the day was tropical shorts and T-shirts, but officers and NCOs alike tacitly ignored the fact that most of the Marines aboard, male and female both, were casually topless, and stripped down to briefs or less when they could. Anything cloth worn anywhere on the body quickly became soaked; Jeff’s shorts, T-shirt, and socks were clinging to his skin now like a wet swimsuit, until he felt like he had a permanent case of diaper rash.

Skin was better. Hell, it wasn’t as though the setting was particularly conducive to sexual interest…or to privacy. The daily shipboard routine was a steady grind of cleaning, study, stripping and cleaning weapons and gear, and exercise. For most of the trip, everyone aboard was too busy, too crowded, and too damned hot to take an interest in any fellow Marine’s attire…or lack of it.

Still, Colonel Richard Norden was a tough and by-the-book officer who insisted on his Marines being “four-oh, high and tight.” He rarely left “A” Hab, however—some of the Marines had begun calling him “Mopey Dick” for that reason—and impending surprise inspections were telegraphed to the other habs by the Marines in his section…plenty of time to make sure everyone in a soon-to-be-visited grunt locker was properly in uniform when he arrived.

Jeff Warhurst was Norden’s Executive Officer, and as such he knew he should generate the same respect for regulations, both as XO and as CO of Bravo Company. But he also knew that a mindless adherence to form and outward show would do little but make sure he was on the alert list in all four habs, and further depress morale as well. As far as Jeff was concerned, the entire MSEF could run around buck naked when it was this hot and humid, so long as discipline was maintained, the work got done, and the men and women under his command weren’t afraid to come to him with their problems.

“So what’s the latest skinny, Major?” Kaminski wanted to know.

Jeff considered his reply carefully. Regular news reports were passed on to the men each day, but those had the stamp of institution thinking about them—and the faintest whiff of propaganda. What he told Kaminski now would be passing down through the ranks within a few minutes. A Marine rifle company was a better—and often faster—communications conduit than Earthnet. He could swear sometimes that scuttlebutt traveled faster than light.

“It looks like we’re going to have company after all,” Jeff replied. “The Star Mountain left Earth orbit fifteen hours ago. They’re on the way, a high-energy vector, at 2 Gs.”

“Shit. How long do we have?”

“Five days, if they boost the whole way with a turnaround in the middle.”

Kaminski frowned. “Doubling the Gs only knocks two days off the flight time? That doesn’t seem right.”

“The unforgiving equations,” Jeff said. “To halve the time you have to multiply the speed by four. To cut time down to a quarter, you square that, sixteen times the speed. The faster you push, the less time you have to take advantage of your high speed.”

“If you say so, sir. Still sounds like two plus two equals five.”

“They do,” Jeff said, grinning, “for moderately large values of two.”

“Well, anyway, we’ve got a Chinese transport on the way. Do we have a Peaceforcer running interference? I thought the JFK was covering our ass this month.”

The A-M cruiser John F. Kennedy was currently onstation in the Asteroid Belt, about four astronomical units out from the Sun.

“Right. The word is, the Kennedy’s tracking the Mountain, and will be moving to intercept. It’s going to be tight, though, to match course and speed with a Chinese bat coming straight out of hell. We have to be prepared for the possibility that the Mountain gives our people the slip.”

“And that other Chinese ship?”

“The Lightning? Still in a retrograde solar orbit, at one a.u. out. No new activity since they detonated that nuke three weeks back. S-2 is pretty sure she’s just carrying out weapons tests. No direct threat to us. They probably mean it as some kind of warning or message to Washington.”

“Yeah, and I suppose the Star Mountain is another message. Whatever happened to delivering messages by e-mail?”

“If she is, the JFK will stop the delivery. Just in case, though, I want to make sure our people have a shot at the latest CI-PLA sims.”

Current Intelligence sims—in this case, the latest information on the People’s Liberation Army—their equipment, logistics, weapons, armor, and technology—were basic software packages used in field training. They let the troops experience firsthand what was known about a potential enemy’s weapons and tactics.

“Affirmative, sir. We won’t have time between now and landing for everyone to head-cram. Especially with full inspections on the sched.”

“I know. We have a week before they get here, if they get here. Set up a sim-access schedule for after we land. Squad leaders and above should get first crack.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“Before landing, they should all have reviewed sims on extreme arctic conditions.”

Kaminski chuckled. “Those’ve been on the sched, Major. Don’t know how well they’ve sunk in, though, when it’s this hot and humid. The joke goin’ about the squad bay is that we’re using the ice-training sims to save on the air conditioning. The other is that the squad leaders watch the ice sims instead of porn. They’re more fun.”

Jeff grasped the bottom of his o.d. T-shirt and flapped the sodden material uselessly. When the air was this humid, things simply couldn’t dry through evaporation. It was as bad as being deployed in the jungle. “Well, I can’t see why anyone in his right mind would want to raise their body temperature aboard this bucket.” Tucking his shirt back in, he added, “Are the bugs all checked out?”

“Affirmative, Major. Everything except the final go/no-go launch checklists. The numbers’re uploaded to the Force data base.”

“Well, then, I guess we’re on track.” What else is there? He wondered. What am I missing?

“I’ll pass the word about the inspection, sir. With the major’s permission?”

“Carry on, Sergeant Major.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

He checked the time—LED numerals within the skin on the back of his hand—and decided he had time for a quick sim-link himself. Walking past the table, he picked up a link helmet in an equipment locker against the bulkhead, then found a swivel-seat chair in one of the small office cubicles off the main compartment, and sat down.

The helmet, equipped with a dozen pressure-connection electrodes imbedded on the inside, nestled over his head with room to spare. He touched the adjustment key and let the smart garment software tighten the device gently into place. After pulling his PAD from its belt holster and plugging in the connection with the helmet, he slid the opaque eyeshield down, folded his arms, and leaned back in the chair as the soft buzz of the up connect trilled against his skull. Old-fashioned links had required surgically imbedded sockets, but low-frequency pulses could penetrate bone and stimulate the appropriate parts of the cerebral cortex.

There was a flash as the VR program booted up, and then he was standing in complete darkness, the sensations of lying back in the chair fading as they were overridden by software-generated illusions. A Marine general in long-obsolete o.d. utilities faced him…a belligerent-looking, wide-mouthed scowl, the man’s trademark expression, splitting a square and ugly face.

“Hello, Marine,” the figure rasped. “Whatcha need?”

“Some advice, Chesty. As usual.”

The image of General Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller hooked his thumbs in his Sam Browne belt and nodded. “Fair enough. Shoot.”

The AI he’d had patterned after Chesty Puller was resident in his PAD, though pieces of it also roamed the ship’s computer system, and the base network back at V-berg as well. The real Puller—the man was a legend in the Corps, a five-time winner of the Navy Cross—would never have spoken so informally with a major.

Or, on second thought…maybe he would have. Puller had had a rep for looking out for the men under his command, and for his lack of patience with idiots further up the chain of command than he. His attitude toward the brass, legend had it, had delayed his promotion to general until he’d been in for thirty-three years.

“We’ll be grounding on Europa in twenty-four, General,” he said. “I need to know what the hell I’m forgetting.”

That wide mouth shifted slightly in what might have been a lopsided smile. “There’s always something. You’ve taken care of the checklist shit.” It was a statement, not a question. His AI software multitasked with his PAD’s operating system; Chesty had attended the staff meeting a few moments ago, albeit invisibly, listening in through the computer’s audio, and was aware of everything Jeff said and did.

Such electronic advisors were usually called secretaries in civilian life, and aides in the military. They were supposed to have the personae of assistants. Jeff had received some grief from fellow Marines over his decision to have his aide programmed to mimic an old-time Marine general, and Chesty Puller himself, no less.

Jeff had insisted on the programming, however, though other officers usually had aides that ran the gamut of personalities from Jeeves-type butlers to eager young junior officers to sharp-creased NCOs to sexy women or, in the case of one Marine officer Jeff knew, a devastatingly handsome young man. His choice wasn’t exactly traditional…but he preferred the electronic persona as a reminder that he needed to tap the command experience of someone who’d been in the Corps for a long time, who knew its ways, its customs, its heritage as no one else.

“Number one,” Puller’s image told him, “is to talk with your men. Work with them. Let them see you.”

“I’ve been discussing things with Kaminski—”

“I’m not talking about your topkicks, son. Yeah, you listen to your NCOs. They’re your most experienced people, and they’ll tell you what you need to know. What I’m sayin’ now, though, is to make yourself accessible to your men. Especially with that gold oak leaf on your collar.”

He wasn’t wearing rank insignia, but he knew what Puller meant. A company was normally a captain’s command, but in a small and isolated detachment like this one, the senior officers tended to double up on their duties and their responsibilities. His 21C, the second-in-command of Bravo Company, was a captain named Paul Melendez; his command duties were divided between Bravo Company, his position on the MSEF’s operations staff, and his responsibilities as XO for the entire detachment.

The higher an officer’s rank, though, the more detached he tended to be from the enlisted men, and a major—usually the commander of an entire battalion—was pretty far up there among the clouds.

“Colonel Norden doesn’t like his officers fraternizing that much with the men,” Jeff pointed out.

“Fraternization be damned! Who’s gonna be on the line out there, son? Mopey Dick or your men? You need to be careful that you don’t make an ass of yourself, of course. You need to hold their respect.” Puller’s grin widened. “Hell, that’s why most officers don’t fraternize. They’re afraid of looking like idiots. But your people deserve better. Let ’em know you’re in the foxhole with ’em. And, by God, when the shooting starts, be sure you are in there with ’em.”

“I understand,” Jeff said. “But…well, Europa is going to have some special challenges for us. Radiation. The cold and ice. And there’s a possibility now we’ll be facing the Chinese as well. I need to know what I’m overlooking. What I’m missing.”

“That, son, is the responsibility of your senior NCOs and your junior officers. You just make sure your men can see you. The hardest part is always the twenty-four hours before you go in. The waiting.” Chesty Puller’s image looked thoughtful, almost musing. “Chinese and ice, huh? Sounds like Chosin all over again.”

Jeff had to think a moment, but the reference came to him. Puller, the original Chesty Puller, had won his fifth Navy Cross and the Army Distinguished Service Cross at the Chosin Reservoir, in North Korea, during a hellish retreat through deadly, bitter cold, under constant attack by Chinese forces. When informed that his regiment was surrounded, he had said, “Those poor bastards. They’ve got us right where we want them. We can shoot in every direction now.” He’d led his men down sixty miles of icy mountain road as they fought their way out of the trap. It was one of the Corps’ prouder memories.

“Shouldn’t be that bad, General,” he replied. “The temperature’ll be 140 below, but we’ll be a hell of a lot better equipped and supplied than you were at Chosin. And the Chinese probably won’t be a factor. Not with the JFK riding shotgun.”

“If you’re lucky, you’re right,” Puller said. “If you’re smart, you’ll be prepared. For anything.”

A mental command, five memorized digits and the word “disconnect” repeated hard in his thoughts three times, broke the VR connection. He blinked at the gray-painted overhead, reestablishing his awareness of what was real and what wasn’t. After a moment, he removed the VR headgear, stowed it, and walked back into the common area.

In one of the arms lockers aft he found a Sunbeam M-228 squad laser weapon, a 10-megawatt SLAW, and carried it forward to the mess table. “Mind if I join you?” he asked, taking a seat with the ten men and women cleaning their M580s.

“Of course not, sir,” one of the men said. He was a skinny, sharp-faced corporal from New York named George Leckie. “Grab some chair!”

Gunnery Sergeant Tom Pope grinned. “Slumming, sir?”

“Gunny, after four hours of staff meetings, I consider it R&R.”

“I hear ya, sir.”

One of the women—with hard muscles and sweat gleaming on her bare chest—said something to the blond woman beside her, and both laughed.

“What was that, Campanelli? Didn’t catch it.”

“Uh…nothing, sir.” When he continued to look at her, she shifted uncomfortably and added, “I just said that that was a damned big gun you had there, and, uh, I wondered if the major knew how to use it. Sir.” Her chest and shoulders flushed dark as she spoke. Marines never used the word gun except to refer to artillery—especially shipboard guns—or a penis. The squad laser was a weapon, a piece, an M228, or a SLAW. Not a gun.

“Well, it’s been a few years,” he said easily. “Maybe you can give me some pointers.” The others laughed, a little nervously, but louder when he grinned.

It had been a good many years since he’d had to do this, but his hands remembered the proper movements. Power off…cable feed disconnect…pull the barrel locking lever back…grasp the barrel with the other hand and pull forward and up…

Yeah, he remembered. And before long, he was trading jokes with them.

FIVE

12 OCTOBER 2067

U.S.S. John F. Kennedy

Solar orbit, 4.2 a.u. from Earth

2002 hours Zulu

Captain Jeremy Mitchell entered the officer’s wardroom with his tray and walked toward the only occupied table. Gone were the days when the other officers present stood until he was seated; the JFK’s officer’s mess was patterned off of the dirty shirt mess decks of Navy aircraft carriers, with food served cafeteria style. It was located in “A” Hab, with the hab rotation set to deliver a gentle third of a gravity.

“Mind if I join you gentlemen?” he asked with an easy drawl. Mitchell was from a small town not far from San Antonio, Texas, and liked to affect the laid-back attitude of Texas and good-natured down-home.

“Please do, Captain!” Commander Varley, the weapons officer, said, gesturing.

He set his tray down and took a seat. “Well, Mr. Lee,” he said, addressing the young Marine officer on his left. “It looks like you and your people might get a chance to prove your usefulness, even in this day and age.”

“Is there any more data on the Star Mountain’s vector, sir?” He sounded eager…and painfully young.

“Nothing new. They’re still vectored for Jupiter—which means Europa—and they’re boosting at 2 Gs, which means they’re in a damned hurry to get there. They won’t be able to sidestep us, however.”

“Peaceforcers save Earth, once again!” Lieutenant Commander Carvelle, the chief communications officer, said, raising a glass in salute.

Peaceforce. It was a new concept, born of one particular horror of the UN War. A French attempt to smash the U.S. will to continue the fight by diverting a small asteroid into an impact on Colorado had been stopped…almost completely. A fair-sized and somewhat radioactive piece of the UN ship that had done the diverting had come down over Lake Michigan and obliterated most of lakeside Chicago.

With the rapid expansion of human activity into the Solar System, the Confederation of World States, struggling to knock together some form of planet-wide government to replace the disintegrating UN, had recognized the danger posed by any world power able to put a spacecraft into the asteroid belt or beyond. A relatively small nudge could put a likely megaton chunk of iron or ice into a new orbit, one that could take out anything from a city to the entire human race, depending on how ambitious the bad guys were.

The threat had resulted in the Peaceforce, a military space force drawn from the United States Navy, the Marines, and the space assets of several allies tasked with patrolling the outer system and preventing just such attempts. The problem was that the Solar System was an awfully big backyard, too vast by far to allow any kind of systematic patrolling.

And the trick was to position just a few ships in strategic orbits, far, far up the side of the Solar gravity well. Orbiting in the Asteroid Belt, 4.2 a.u.s out, and employing extremely powerful sensing and tracking gear, a ship could watch for any launches from Earth. Any boosts not cleared by CWS inspection teams could be intercepted by ships such as the Kennedy and either disabled at a distance, or boarded.

That was why Lieutenant Lee was on board with his platoon of twenty-eight space-trained Marines. The JFK would match course and speed with the hostile, disable her if necessary, then close and grapple for the final round. Mitchell was amused that modern tactical thinking was actually looking at the possibility of using Marines to take an enemy ship by storm, something that hadn’t happened since the boarding of the Mayaguez in 1975.

“Well, it’ll be interesting to see Lieutenant Lee here swing across from the yardarms, cutlass and boarding pistol in hand!”

“I’d need more than two hands for that evolution, sir,” the lieutenant replied. “I think we’ll stick to M580s, and hope the bad guys aren’t in the mood for much of a fight when we get there.”

“Doesn’t sound like the fire-eating Marines I know,” Varley said.

“Hey, if it can be done without a firefight…”

“Do you anticipate problems with your mission, Lieutenant?”

“A good officer always anticipates problems, sir. Boarding a hostile spacecraft is at least as hairy as a houseclearing operation—and it’s complicated by being in zero gravity and the possibility of explosive decompression.” He grinned. “Playing with weapons inside a thin-skinned spacecraft isn’t exactly a real bright idea.”

“I imagine the whole question is academic,” Varley said with a shrug. “The Chinese can’t beat the laws of physics. Even accelerating at 2 Gs, they can’t outrun us because we have the metaphorical high ground in the Solar System. They can’t maneuver and accelerate both. When we close and match velocity, they’ll have to surrender…or risk a mass driver round through their drive unit.”

“They must have something in mind,” Lieutenant Zynkowovec said. He was the ship’s third engineering officer. “They know we’re out here, and they know physics as well as we do. They’ve gotta have something up their sleeves.”

“They just don’t know about our secret weapon!” Varley said, laughing. “The U.S. Marines!”

The radio clipped to Mitchell’s collar chirped. Damn. Always when he was sitting down to dinner. “What is it?”

“We are tracking an incoming object, Captain,” the voice of Jackie, the JFK’s AI, said in unhurried tones. “There is a threat to the ship.”

He was already on his feet and jogging for the access corridor that would take him to the ship’s hub, then forward to the bridge. “What threat?”

“The object is small—less than ten kilograms’ mass—but it is on an approach vector with a velocity of five hundred kilometers per second. Range, 15,000 kilometers, closing.”

The calm words chilled. Thirty seconds to impact.

“Why the hell didn’t we see it on radar?”

“The object is quite small, less than three meters long, and appears to exhibit stealth characteristics. Its radar cross-section is less than two centimeters across.”

A stealth missile? They still should have picked up the IR footprint of its exhaust!

“The object has just executed a minor course change,” Jackie continued. “It was unpowered until now. Definitely now on an intercept course…and accelerating.”

“Maneuver!” Mitchell bellowed. If the incoming was changing course…

He was in the access tube now, hand-over-handing rapidly into lower and lower gravity as he raced for the hub. But he knew there wasn’t time to reach the bridge.

He felt the thump, the surge of weight sideways, as the Kennedy’s maneuvering thrusters fired.

Seconds later, something struck the ship. Jeremy Mitchell was slammed against one side of the access tunnel by a savage, sudden acceleration. It felt as though the ship was tumbling, pressing him against the wall of the access tube with centrifugal force.

He heard metal shrieking protest—a screech, followed by a succession of loud pops and bangs, and the shrill whistle of air escaping to vacuum.

Then the entire universe seemed to explode in raw noise rapidly dwindled to vacuum-muffled silence, and the Kennedy’s captain found himself pinwheeling through black and cold and fragment-filled space, dying in a cloud of fast-freezing blood even as he tried to grasp the enormity of what was happening to his ship…and him.

U.S.S. John F. Kennedy

Solar orbit, 4.2 a.u. from Earth

2007 hours Zulu

Two force packages had been accelerated at the Kennedy—or rather, at that area of space the Kennedy would orbit through precisely nineteen days after the Heavenly Lightning fired them. The first, detected at the last possible moment, executed a course change for intercept and almost missed. Kennedy’s sudden maneuver—firing forward thrusters to reduce her orbital velocity—almost caused the Chinese missile to pass across her bows.

But a second course change countered the Kennedy’s move, and the force package struck far forward, ripping through the thin metal shell of the Peaceforcer cruiser’s forward reaction mass tank. The electromagnetic bottle anchoring a pea-sized fragment of antimatter in the hard vacuum of the package’s warhead failed, the antimatter slammed into metal and water, and then a fireball as hot as the surface of the sun blossomed into deadly radiance.