Europa Strike (11 page)

“Let's get you and all of your men below,” Ishiwara said. “You're not wearing your long-term pliss units.”

Each suit had a PLSS, a Personal Life Support System built into the back, housing most of the suit's power generating and heating systems, as well as reserves of air and water. The crowding aboard the bug had necessitated using PLSS Type Ones, which provided two to three hours of life support, depending on the amount of exertion. Ishiwara was wearing a Type Three, so bulky it looked like it was wearing him, a molded white box with irregular angles grasping him from behind. With that unit, he could survive on the Europan surface for as much as twenty-four hours, assuming he didn't pick up too many rems in the process and fry.

“Our life support is fine,” Jeff replied. “It'll be nice to get out of the wind, though.”

“Meaning the plasma of Jupiter's magnetosphere,” Ishiwara said, laughing. “I understand. If you'll follow me?”

Steps led down of the edge of the landing deck, taking them to a well-worn path through the ice bordered by a slender handrail. Here and there he could see what looked like puddles of clear meltwater on the ice, and, when he looked closely, it seemed to him that some of the puddles were fizzing slightly around the edges of the pools, as ice continued to melt.

“Please watch your step, gentlemen,” Ishiwara warned, pointing to one of the puddles. “Those pools can be
very
slick. The bombardment of protons from Jupiter's magnetosphere is constantly breaking down the surface ice and forming new compounds, especially hydrogen peroxide. The pools then dissociate into oxygen and hydrogen, which escape—but the melting process leaves things slippery.”

“We've been briefed,” Jeff replied. Even so, his first few steps along the path were a bit unsteady, and on the fifth step he felt his heavy right boot slide forward alarmingly. Reaching out, he grasped the handrail beside the path. There was no sense in proving he was some kind of macho Marine who didn't need handrails, not when the alternative was an undignified fall on his ass. Up ahead, he saw several Marines helping a comrade to his feet; yeah, they were learning about dignity the hard way.

Ahead, several space-suited men were carrying large crates toward one of a number of sheds dotting the crater floor. “You store equipment on the surface?” Jeff asked.

“Some,” Ishiwara replied. “Especially the things that explode, like seismic penetrators. We use them to send shock waves through the ice to determine its thickness, and also, sometimes, to cut holes. We'd rather not have those going off inside the E-DARES facility.

“
Those
sheds, though,” he added, indicating the Quonset hut storage structures, “are for the honey buckets.”

“Shit.”

“Exactly. Europa has its own biosystem, and we must avoid contaminating it at all costs. Similar restrictions are used in our explorations of Antarctica, you know. Human wastes are dehydrated, sealed inside plastic bags, then allowed to freeze solid on the surface. After a year here, we've accumulated quite a bit of the stuff—nearly ten tons. We'll need to take it with us when we leave.”

“That ship'll have the damnedest cargo manifest I've ever heard of. But wouldn't the cold and radiation sterilize the stuff?”

“Probably. Almost certainly. But the seawater temperature, remember, is only slightly below zero Celsius. Some organisms would survive and proliferate if they were still viable, and we have to be certain, one hundred percent.”

“Major?” General Puller's rasping voice said suddenly over his headset. His PAD was running, of course, though safely secured inside the suit and tied in to his electronic sensors and the company communications net. “We have important communications incoming on channel twelve.”

“Let's hear 'em.”

“…don't know what it is,” Captain Galtmann's voice was saying. “Incoming at five hundred kps…and, damn!
It's changing course to—
”

The landscape around them grew suddenly brighter. Jeff looked up in time to see an expanding disk of white light above the horizon, about twenty degrees to the right of the sun. The light faded away, and now he was hearing only static in his headset.

“My God!” he said. “What—”

“I have lost contact with the
Roosevelt
,” his AI said.

A second flash, eye-wateringly brilliant, winked on in exactly the same place in the sky as the first, swiftly expanding, bright as a second sun, fading, then vanishing beneath the light of the real sun. The silence heightened the surreal unreality of the moment.

He was stunned…but his mind was still working, processing the too little information he had to work with. “Marines!” he bellowed over the company general channel. “
Incoming! Grab on to something!
”

“Something,” in this instance, could only be the safety rail. He grabbed on with both hands, instinctively hunkering down. The fact that there'd been
two
explosions, plus that instant's warning of an approaching object, suggested that—

White light glared, impossibly brilliant, against the sharp horizon on the far side of the landing deck. An instant later, he could see the ground wave approaching through the ice, a fast-approaching ripple of fragmenting white…and then the shock hit and he felt the ground buck beneath his boots. He lost his grip on the handrail as the railing itself tore free, and he was sent spinning across the white-lit surface like a string-cut puppet.

Then he was lying flat on his back, staring up into a black sky and the sharp-edged slash of Jupiter, a colorful scimitar suspended far overhead.

He was unhurt. But
Roosevelt
, and Colonel Norden, and over half of the MSEF, were—gone. Dead.

12
OCTOBER
2067

Rena Moore came down the stairs to the e-room and checked in on the kids. Both Kamela and Alan were in front of the big wallscreen, watching history. It was a special her secretary had snagged a week ago on the Net, all about the search for extraterrestrial life, starting with prespaceflight speculation and SETI, and following through to the life discovered in Europa's ocean, and the explosion of new religions and beliefs arising now as a result of the discoveries on the Moon and Mars.

Rena was a bit old-fashioned in such things, a vid-traditionalist. She knew there were plenty of full-interactive sims the kids could use to actually visit just about any desired place or event in history—she used them sometimes, judiciously—but she still preferred flatscreen documentaries and vids for overview work. She'd been educated on the Net and through downloaded vids and she'd turned out fine. She didn't quite trust the idea of vids and sims played inside a person's mind. What were eyes and ears for, if not to handle sensory input?

To her credit, she also understood her own bias. Her parents had told her about television, and a time when education, entertainment, and communications had
not
been inextricably linked, when there'd been no AIs and no Net demons or secretaries to search the vast electronic sea for that tiny percentage of data that might be of interest to them. Things had changed a lot since the early twenty-first century, and Rena knew they would keep on changing in the future. Maybe Kam and Alan's kids would go to school through a VR sim playing out inside their brains. Or maybe things would be more outlandish than that—downloaded memories or nanobot implants or the gods knew what.

But that was the future. She would teach the Garroway-Lees the best way she knew how, and that was by lots of personal interaction, discussion, and plenty of flatscreen vids.

Rena was a cissie—a professional Child Care Specialist with a DCC in both primary and secondary education, and associate degrees in history, English, and netsearch. There were still teachers—there were still
schools
, for that matter, a few—but the vast majority of precollege education these days was handled at home, either through straight home-schooling, AI tutors, or with a CCS to guide and supervise the child's instruction. She'd been working in the Garroway-Lee household—and one other in the neighborhood—for the past five years.

“How's it going, kids?” she asked.

“'Kay, I guess,” Kam said. She was twelve and had already announced her intention to be a Marine, like both of her parents, her oldest brother, and her grandfather. “They're talkin' about new religions now. They mentioned Neopagan Anism a while ago.”

“Yeah,” Alan said. “Freeze program!” he added, halting the documentary. He turned to face her, grinning his challenge. “Maybe they should've interviewed you, Cissie. You could've put 'em straight! They were talking about Anism like it was all nonsense!” He was fifteen, and had surprised everyone at his Naming Day ceremony by taking his mother's family name, Garroway, as his own. He was the artist of the family; he'd already composed several fullsense pieces, textural music that could only be experienced as sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and touches over a Net-linked download with added sensory expanders. Rena didn't understand the art form herself—fullsensories made her queasy—but she could respect the awards Alan had won last year for
Girl in the Boy
and
Fem-de-Lance
, and the fact that he was already earning a decent income as an FS composer.

He was also the family's smart mouth. He enjoyed baiting her about the Faith.

“Not everyone understands N.A.,” she said primly. It was as much as she could say within the boundaries of her oath, which included the injunction to teach children to think for themselves, rather than filling them with one's own belief system.

It was an oath she took at least as seriously as physicians had taken the Hippocratic a century before.
First, do no harm…

“Well, this guy was sayin' the Anists are just taking over the old, conservative neopagan churches and sneaking the An in to replace the old nature spirits and elementals, kind of to, like, dress them up in modern garb, y'know? Give themselves gods that are up to date!”

He was goading her, she knew, looking for a way to get through her armor, a way to make her overstep herself, maybe look foolish, or at least give him the opportunity to pick a few amusing holes in her logic. She refused to take the bait. “That assumes,” she said, “that a religion is
consciously
constructed by its worshippers. That it's a charade. A game at best, and self-deception at worst. Is that what you're saying?”

“Well, not exactly. I mean—”

“This sounds like a perfect topic for a talk. Both of you.”

“
Awww!
” both kids chorused.

“Twenty minutes, minimum, with any visuals you want to pull off the Net. Convince me logically, and with
facts
, not dogma, that religion is nothing more than people creating the gods in their own image.”

“We know we can't do
that!
” Alan said with a snort.

“You may take the other side, if you prefer. But either way, be sure to discuss what role faith plays in religion. How people can be willing to die for something that they know is a fraud.”

“Wait a minute, Cissie,” Kam said, all of the indignity possible for a bright twelve-year-old burning behind those large dark eyes. “
I
didn't make fun of your religion! Why should
I
be punished?”

“First, it's not punishment,” Rena said. “It's a chance for you to show off what you know. Second, I didn't hear him making fun of my religion—which is something no well-mannered young man would do in any case, am I right?” Both shook their heads solemnly. “Of course not. He was telling me about what you two saw in the documentary, which we would have discussed in any case. And finally, I want
your
talk, Kam, to be on how the Marine Corps deals with different religions, different religious beliefs among their men and women. Your mother and father both might have some good input there, especially about things like prayer times, services, special foods, and religious icons, tattoos, and the like. Both talks due…next Friday.”

“
Awwww…
”

“If you're going to be a Marine officer, you'll have to learn about
people
. And religion is one of the few things left that's distinctly human. Most people have religious beliefs of some sort, even the ones who have faith that there aren't any gods at all!”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Hey, Cissie!” Alan said, pointing at the wall screen. “There's a pickup for us!”

The house spider—the limited-AI that crawled the Netweb looking for programs and announcements of particular interest to the family—had brought up a flashing window in one corner of the screen. From the unfolding logo, Rena saw that it was a Triple-N special report.

“Go ahead. Bring it up.” As Marine family, the Garroway-Lees had programmed the spider to pick up, among other things, any news stories that had a bearing on the world political situation. It might be an announcement of new trouble with China, or a—

“Enlarge window,” Alan said, and the frozen documentary swapped places in the tiny window with the news story, which now covered the wall.

“…arrived here at Net News Network a few moments ago,” the announcer was saying. “At 4:03 Eastern Standard Time this afternoon, sensors and cameras aboard a Triple-N monitor satellite in Earth orbit detected two explosions in deep space, several seconds apart. Analysis of the apparent position in the sky of these explosions suggest that they may have taken place on board the U.S.S.
John F. Kennedy
, which is currently in solar orbit in the Asteroid Belt on CWS Peacekeeper patrol. Unconfirmed reports indicate that military facilities here on Earth have lost radio and laser contact with the
Kennedy
in what could be a terrible space disaster. For more, we take you now to our special military correspondent at the Pentagon, Janine Sanders.”

“Thank you, Fred. At this time, there is a firm ‘no comment' from officials here at the Pentagon, who…”

Rena no longer heard the words, but stared in numb fascination at the grainy images of a star field, fuzzy and indistinct…at the brief pulse of light, a new star that appeared briefly in the scene and then faded away…then repeated with a second, much brighter pulse at the same spot. The announcer was talking about radiation, about the high gamma component in the EM spectrum of the flashes that indicated that both explosions had probably involved matter-antimatter annihilation, and that the
Kennedy
was an A-M cruiser.

“Cissie…” Kam said, and there was a flutter in her voice. “
Robbie
's on the
Kennedy
!”

“I know, I know, Kam. But we don't know
anything
yet. You heard them. These reports are unconfirmed. Right now, they're just guessing.”

Alan sat slumped on the floor, glassy-eyed, almost unresponsive. Kam took a couple of shy steps closer, then grabbed hold of Rena's legs, trembling. Rena sat down and let the child snuggle closer into her arms. Both of the kids adored their older brother.
Oh, gods…why? Why
this?

“Screen off,” she said. When both faces turned and looked up at her, she added, “They're just repeating the same stuff over and over, now. They don't
know
anything.”

“I'd like to keep watching, Rena,” Alan said. “Please? My brother's out there.”

“Kammie?” she asked. “Do you want to keep watching?”

The girl shook her head, clinging tighter.

“Okay, Alan. Go ahead. Kam and I are going to go make a couple of vid calls. You tell us if they report anything new.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

Her PAD was in the other room. She could call General Lee from there, and then call Kaitlin in California, unless he wanted to do that himself. Her first duty, though, was to be with the kids, make sure they rode through this all right.

Oh, gods, oh, Gaea, oh, ancient starfaring An, not Robbie!

 

Suborbital Shuttle, Flight 217

En route, LAX to Dulles

60 km over Colorado

2025 hours MDT
   (0225 hours Zulu, 13 October)

 

Kaitlin leaned back in her seat and tried, desperately, to think. The last three hours were a near-total blur, a whirlwind of voices and images now fragmented in a chaos of broken memories, some recent, some old. Her thoughts kept slipping back to that spectacular graduation ceremony at Marine OCS at Quantico four years ago. There'd been three generations of Marine officers there that day: her dad, a retired colonel; Rob, a general, and Kaitlin, a colonel; and Rob, Jr., the newly commissioned Marine second lieutenant, looking so
very
smart in his Class As. The party had gone on all night. There'd been so much talk, so much toasting, of the all-Marine family, of the Corps heritage…
semper fi!

Of course, all of them had known that the more of them who were in the Corps, the more likely it was that sooner or later something like this would happen. A career in the Marine Corps was not as safe or as predictable as, say, life as a journalist, or a databroker, or a simware designer. But why, dear God, did it have to be Robbie?

Pull yourself together, Marine!
She told herself harshly.
Order your thoughts! Dad, Rob, and Robbie all would have you centered on the hatch for gear adrift in your head!

The call from Rob at the Marine Space Training Command had come through at 1350 hours, California time, while she was working on regimental requisitions, of all goddamned mundane things. The next call had been from Rena, at home, to tell her that the kids knew and were okay…and the next one after that had been General Talbot, her CO at V-berg.

Very little was known. As usual, Triple-N had known more, sooner, than any of the government agencies, sooner even than Navy Intelligence, and had hit the Net with the story before the president had even been informed that there was a problem. She'd heard that for the past seventy-some years, the president, the CIA, and several other defense intelligence agencies all maintained staffs watching the network news services full time and monitoring their broadcasts, simply because they were more efficient than any government service.

All General Talbot had been able to add was that contact with the
Kennedy
had been lost at 2035 hours, Zulu, and that the speed-of-light time delay from the
Kennedy
's position, 4.2 a.u.s out, meant she'd gone missing at 2007 hours Zulu. There was also the possibility—Talbot had called it a likely possibility—that the
Kennedy
had been deliberately attacked. The fact that two explosions had been seen suggested that it wasn't, as Triple-N was suggesting, an accident with her on-board A-M reserves, but that she'd either been hit by two A-M missiles, or she'd been hit by one missile which had triggered an onboard explosion an instant later.

“But that means a
ship
launched those missiles,” Kaitlin had told General Talbot. “How could a ship get close enough to fire missiles without being picked up?” Peaceforce cruisers had the best sensor nets of any spacecraft or orbital facility in the system. They could track ships leaving Earth orbit from out in the Asteroid Belt, for God's sake. How could they close the range enough to launch missiles or railgun projectiles without being spotted and tracked all the way in?

“We are looking at a possibility,” Talbot had said. “This is still classified, mostly because we don't want Triple-N to be jumping to conclusions just yet.”