Europa Strike (10 page)

Those last twelve hours that the drive had been running, with the Marines on board stewing in their own overheated juices, had been a nightmare.

The bug continued its roll, dragging the
Roosevelt
out of Jeff's line of sight. He was hoping for a glimpse of Jupiter, but the next thing he saw was a vast arc of darkness swallowing the stars one by one. The lights illuminating the bug's passenger deck were dim and amber, but still bright enough that he couldn't see any detail in the night outside the craft. They were falling over Europa's night side.

He'd seen Europa during their final approach, as well as during training sims, of course. The moon looked like nothing so much as a straw-colored marble heavily crisscrossed by long, straight lines of a deeper, reddish color.

The bug's main engines fired their deorbit burn, and Jeff's stomach lurched at the sudden resumption of acceleration, a huge hand clamping down across his chest. Then, just as suddenly, the hand was gone and he was weightless again.

But the
Roosevelt
was falling away above and ahead, continuing to orbit the moon while the bug descended rapidly toward the surface, following a long, descending curve that would take them halfway around the moon. He thought he could make out something of the Europan surface now, irregular patches less black than their surroundings, glossy smooth areas, perhaps, illuminated by starlight. Then, quite suddenly, black gave way to darkest gray, lightening swiftly as the far horizon, still curved, took fire from the fast-rising Sun.

The bug swept across the terminator, passing from night into day. Jeff blinked, then adjusted his helmet's polarization. The surface now was ice, reflecting sun-dazzle in brilliant white patches interspersed with tan and ocher-colored regions. Jeff stared at the surface turning below, fascinated, no matter how many times he'd seen computer simulations and vids already. The surface looked remarkably like old, early twentieth-century notions of the planet Mars, complete with long, straight canals, called lineae. A kind of plate tectonics worked here; Europa's core, molten from tidal flexing in the tug-of-war between Jupiter and the other major Jovian satellites, kept Europa's ocean liquid. The upper few kilometers of that ocean, however, were frozen. As the tides continued to stretch the tiny world, the icecap cracked, refroze, and cracked again, until it looked like a frosted crystal ball with a surface crazed by thousands of straight-line cracks and fissures. There were almost no craters that he could see. Here and there, however, he could make out large, circular features, the maculae, which looked like spots on an iced-over pond in early spring where someone had chucked a rock through, and the resulting hole had been closed over by thin skim ice. And that, as a matter of cold fact, was almost certainly a precise analogy. Traditional craters couldn't last on that landscape of constantly resculpted ice and intense radiation bombardment for more than a few hundred thousand years, if that. Once in a while, though, a rock big enough to leave a lasting impression must impact with the surface and leave its footprint, even if for only a short time as planets and moons measured such things.

The icy surface was remarkably flat. No mountains. No cliffs. This close, he could see that the major, straight cracks were supplemented by myriad smaller ones, until the reddish lines resembled a cascade of long, red hair matted across the moon's pale surface.

The image of red hair made him think of Carsyn, back in California. That homesick thought jarred, superimposed as it was on the alien majesty below. He'd been thinking about her a lot during the voyage out from Earth.

He'd promised to give her an answer when he returned, at the end of this deployment. Yeah…six months on this ice box ought to give him the time he needed to make a decision like that.

The bug's engines fired again, a savage, bucking kick through the hard seat upright at his back. The curve of the horizon was definitely flatter now. It was impossible to estimate their altitude by eye, however. The landscape below was simply too alien, too far beyond common human experience and lacking in any recognizable features, for him to make even a guess. In places, the terrain was jumbled and broken; elsewhere it was absolutely flat. They could have been ten kilometers up, or looking at a snow field from an altitude of two meters.

On closer inspection, the linea turned out to be less like the canals of Percival Lowell's Mars than they were arctic pressure ridges. Those dark-colored lines were in fact elevations in the landscape, rising a hundred meters or so above the surrounding terrain. The dark color was partly the effect of sunlight reflecting from slopes instead of flats, but also seemed to be the result of coloring of some sort contaminating the ice. Current theory held that as separate plates of the Europan ice cap ground together or cracked apart, water upwelled from beneath, bringing with it a concentrated soup of organic molecules that were frozen in the slow-rising pressure ridges. Europa's global sea was rich in sulfur, iron, and iron-sulfur compounds; the life forms discovered there so far metabolized sulfur, analogues of the deep-ocean life discovered over eighty years before around some of Earth's sea-bottom volcanic vents.

Before much longer, it became apparent that Europa's billiard-ball flatness was largely an illusion. There were vast, smooth-ice plains, but most of the surface was chaotic, a blind jumble of blocks and chunks and fragments repeatedly fragmented, mashed together, refrozen, then broken again. The surface, Jeff thought, looked like an endless sea of icebergs packed together into a solid mass. His Marine training looked at the tangle sweeping past below, and decided that combat in that labyrinthine tangle would be…a
challenge
.

In Marine OCS, at Quantico, Jeff had repeatedly faced impossible problems, everything from doing the required number of chins and push-ups to making it up a sheer, wooden obstacle-course barrier ten meters tall to figuring out a particularly knotty problem in close-combat tactics. His senior DI, a gunnery sergeant named Matlock, had had the habit of leaning over and screaming in Jeff's ear, “It's a
challenge
, Marine! Think of it as a
challenge!
”

Yeah…right.

“Okay, boys and girls,” Lieutenant Walthers's voice said in his helmet. “We have the CWS beacon. On final.”

Jeff turned, as best as he could bundled in his heavy suit, and looked at the motionless rows of other suited-up Marines, waiting. Without their weapons, they looked less like Marines than passengers strapped in aboard a suborbital HST flight. Their gear was stowed aft, however; the bug's cabin was far too cramped to accommodate this many space-suited men and women
and
their weapons. No matter. This was neither training nor a live drop into a hot LZ. More like a commercial flight into a new duty station Earthside.

Hell, yeah, just like Lompoc, California
, he thought, grinning to himself behind his dark visor.
No unpleasant neighbors to worry about. Just think of it as a new shore station in California…with no air, malls, tattoo parlors, traffic, or girlie shows, with high radiation, no palm trees, and a summertime high of minus one-forty
.

He looked back out the port. The bug had swung to the right, and he could see the base, now, spread out beneath a midmorning sun. There was actually very little to see, but the handful of surface structures was enough to bring a feeling of scale to the otherwise scaleless terrain…though they
could
have been toys left scattered across a flat layer of snow in someone's winter-bound backyard.

The CWS research station was located on the Cadmus Linea, one of the bolder of the red-hued cracks following a great circle route halfway across the moon's circumference. This close, you couldn't really see the concentration of red pigments so visible from space; the surface was simply ice, a bit darker-hued, perhaps, than fresh, new ice, but still colored a dull white with a bluish cast and occasional, brighter highlights.

The facility had been built in the middle of a circular depression—the shadow of a small, ancient macula, perhaps—but the floor was Kansas-cornfield flat. The visible components of the station consisted of a dark-gray landing pad the size of a football field marked with an enormous red crosshair, a twenty-meter radio mast, a satellite dish, two storage sheds, and a scattering of equipment—bulldozers, surface crawlers, and several hoppers parked at the edge of the landing field. Nearby, a couple of hundred meters, perhaps, from the edge of the field, was a black circle, as precise and as artificial as the mouth of a tunnel, leading straight down through the ice, covered over by a billowing cloud of fog.

The Pit.

A single white building, almost invisible against the ice, clung to the artificially sheer side of the circular hole into the moon's interior. Most of the station was safely buried, out of reach of the invisible but deadly sea of radiation bathing the moon's nakedly exposed surface.

The bug turned again, Jeff felt a series of heavy thumps transmitted through the deck, and then they were gentling toward the red crosshairs. In another moment, he couldn't see any of the base, but he did catch a glimpse of the bug's sharp-edged shadow racing across the gray-white surface to meet them as they drifted lower. A cloud of ice crystals swirled briefly past the porthole, and then they were down.

“Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for flying Air Navy,” Walthers's voice said. “The weather here in Miami Beach is clear and sunny, wind zero out of the southeast, and the temperature is a balmy minus one forty-six Celsius. Please be sure not to leave personal gear adrift, and watch your step exiting the spacecraft. The bleach puddles can be treacherous!”

A chorus of groans, curses, and catcalls answered the bug pilot's cheerfully humorous litany. Jeff unstrapped, then stood, crouched over with one gloved hand bracing himself against the low overhead, as Kaminski began calling off names.

“Cukela! Brighton! Jellowski! Hutton! Vottori! Garcia! You're up!”

Six by six, the platoon began leaving their seats and filing in a slow shuffle aft, between the rows of seats. The central passageway fed onto a ramp leading down into the bug's cramped main lock. That compartment was only large enough for six suited-up Marines at a time, so the disembarkation process took some time.

Jeff waited through the slow cycling of the lock, exiting with Kaminski and the last three men of the platoon. By ancient tradition, the senior officer was the last one onto a boat, and the first one off…but such quaint niceties didn't apply here, when Jeff wanted to be able to personally give the suits of each of his people a once-over eyeballing as the Marines shuffled past.

The suits were essentially Mark IICs, later models of the armor that Marines had worn on Mars and the moon a quarter of a century before. These were a bit bulkier, with thicker armor laminates, better on-board computers and life support, and, instead of the old chameleon surfaces which adjusted the color to match the surroundings, these were covered with a thick and heavy but flexible material, like white canvas. The intent was not camouflage, however. The “canvas” material was actually a weave of superconducting fibers and microscopic tubes. A weak electrical current flowing through the covering should serve to trap and deflect incoming particulate radiation, specifically the flood of protons sleeting into Europa's surface from Jupiter's intense radiation belts.

Even so, each man's exposure on the surface would be carefully monitored for the next six months. Doc McCall, the company corpsman, had already passed out badges that would record cumulative totals for each man and woman and alert Jeff's secretary if they picked up a dosage of 30 rems or more.

He and Kaminski gave one another a visual suit check, and then they locked out with the last three Marines in the queue.

When the outer lock hatchway cycled open, Jeff stepped down into a cold and eerie silence. His suit heaters were working fine—he felt them kick on in his legs when his boots touched the landing pad deck—but the surroundings
looked
as cold and bleak as a deep Siberian winter.

Of course, the actual temperature was far lower than anything Earth had ever experienced.

The horizon was the rim of the crater chosen as the site of the base, knife-edged and brilliant in the sun. The sky was a dull, dead black, the stars washed away by the brilliance of a shrunken sun just above the ridge line. And above, higher in the sky…

Jupiter hung above the sun, an immense crescent bowed away from the light, embracing a bloated disk of night. The crescent spanned over twelve degrees of the sky—twenty-four times the diameter of Earth's Moon back home. For a dizzying moment, Jeff wrestled with the sensation that the planet was falling on him…and then he took a deep breath and mentally nailed it in the sky. He could easily make out the banding on the crescent from here, turbulent stripes of ocher, red, white, and tan, a spectacle of unparalleled beauty too rich, too intense to look
real
. If he thought of it as a photographic backdrop, or as an extremely detailed vid or sim, he could push back the almost claustrophobic feeling that the planet was about to drop from the sky and crush him.

He dragged his gaze down from the sky and fixed it on Kaminski's back. Together, they trudged across the landing deck. The rest of the company was filing along a path leading toward the building at the edge of The Pit; someone in a suit identical to Jeff's save for bright blue identifying bands on upper arms and legs stood at the edge of the deck, waving them on.

“Major Warhurst?” a man's voice asked.

He raised his own gloved hand to show who was speaking. “I'm Warhurst, sir. Bravo Company, and XO of the Expeditionary Force.”

“Dr. Shigeru Ishiwara.
Konichiwa!
Welcome to Cadmus Station!”

“Good to be here, sir.” If it was a lie, it was a well-intentioned one.