Europa Strike (4 page)

“Maybe they don't like depending on us and the Japanese for handouts,” Jeff suggested.

“It probably does come down to a question of control,” Altman said. “The military regime in Beijing has been on shaky ground ever since the end of communism and their Second Civil War. They can't afford to let the people have unrestricted access to the new technologies, not without risking falling out of power. They need to be seen as the saviors of China, and they need to control how fast the e-tech comes in—which is probably a lot faster than we've been able to provide it ourselves. The IES doesn't like releasing their findings prematurely.”

The Institute for Exoarchaeological Studies—the foundation in New Chicago coordinating e-tech research—was notorious for its cautious advance into unknown territory ranging from advanced materials processing to nanotechnology to faster-than-light communications.

Considering the fact that many of the e-tech findings were of a scope and power guaranteed to utterly transform all of human civilization into something quite new, Jeff had always felt that that caution was more than justified. No one had any idea what lay around the corner in the near future; there were bound to be surprises, and some of them might be unpleasant ones.

“Regardless of the political pros and cons,” Altman continued, “our interests on Europa must be protected. If the Chinese are planning on intervening there, it's up to us to stop them. Washington is cutting the orders now. One-MSEF's deployment has been moved up by five weeks. The
Roosevelt
will boost on September 29. And you
will
be ready.”

Jeff looked up, startled. “Sir, that's two weeks!”

“Do you have a problem with that, Marine?”

“The scheduled boost was in seven weeks. The men are still in their training cycle—”

“They should be ready to go, anytime, anywhere. That's what the Corps is all about.”

Jeff wanted to say that training and equipping a Marine Space Expeditionary Force to the frozen wastes of Europa was a bit different from hitting the beach in Borneo or Iran or Cuba or any other LZ on Earth. Instead, he said, “Aye, aye, sir.”

“They should be familiarized with the Mark II armor by now.”

“Yes, sir. They won't have time for training with it on the Moon, though.”

“You'll have to hope that Earthside practice is enough. We're going to want to start shuttling them up to the
Franklin D. Roosevelt
as soon as possible.”

Practice on Earth, with one G and a full atmosphere of pressure, could not possibly replace training with the new suits in vacuum and Luna's one sixth G. Again, though, he knew better than to argue. Marines learned how to carry on.
Improvise! Adapt! Overcome!
No matter what.

“You've had a chance to evaluate the Manta.”

“Today was my first day, General. It looks like a beautiful craft. I don't know yet how well it'll serve as a transport on Europa.”

“Frankly, Major, that's not your job. Mr. Garroway here will make sure the Manta is up to Corps specs. You just have to have your people ready to board ship and boost.”

“Yes, sir.”

“In one week. With boost a week after that.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“Good man.” Altman seemed to relax a bit. “I know it's asking a lot of you and your people, Major. And…in the long run, we don't even know if you'll be needed up there. But we
have
to be ready, just in case.”

“We'll be ready, General. It'll be tight, but we'll be ready.”

“You were selected for this command, Major, because we know you can deliver the goods. Not because your grandfather is a former Commandant. Not because of political connections. You have consistently demonstrated superior skills, training, and knowledge throughout your Marine career, and especially since you were selected for the Marine Space Force. We know we can count on you.”

“Thank you, General. That means a lot, coming from you. I'll do my best.”

But later that night, as he rode the hypersonic transport from Nassau to Los Angeles, he thought about General Altman's pep talk and wondered if he
could
deliver.

Major Jeffrey Warhurst was a peacetime Marine. Although the United States had been involved in several nasty little skirmishes around the globe since the end of the UN War in '42 and the breakup of the old UN, he had never been in combat. His family's heritage of service in the Corps had not yet been seriously tested. Packing two companies of the 1st Marine Space Expeditionary Force up in an A-M drive transport and shipping them off to a place as implacably hostile as Europa with him second in command under Colonel Norden could be an easy way to lose almost three hundred men—even without the possibility of a shooting war with China. Quite frankly, he wondered if he had what it took to take on a job this size.

A hundred kilometers above the northern Gulf of Mexico, Jeff broke out his PAD and opened it up. He would have to talk this one over with Chesty.

18
SEPTEMBER
2067

The sign above the place on Highway One, just outside of Vandenberg Air Force Base, read “Nude Girls! Girls! Girls!” and Corporal George Leckie had to admit that they did deliver. He and his buddy Tony were stretched back on piles of oriental cushions, naked, completely surrounded by nude women. He had seven attending to his needs alone, each and every one of them paying full and sensuous attention to
them
.

The room was decorated with appallingly bad taste in something that possibly resembled an adolescent boy's idea of what a Near Eastern harem might look like. One woman cradled his head on her lap, her more than generous breasts undulating with her movements just above his face; another offered a bunch of green grapes; three more ran their hands up and down his torso while a sixth massaged his feet and the seventh slowly kissed her way up the inside of his right thigh toward his groin, the tantalizing touch of her lips making him gasp and shudder.

“Oooh,” the one with the grapes said. “You're so
big
, Lucky! I don't know if there are enough of us to take proper care of you!”

“S'all right, Becka,” he replied, grinning. “Just take improper care of me. It's getting a bit crowded in here, and I wouldn't want any of you to feel left out!” She placed one grape in his mouth and he savored its cool, wet flavor. There was a faint alcoholic bite to it…one of the gene-tailored varieties of fruit that included a drop of brandy in their chemical makeup. He'd been hitting the tequila and beer pretty heavily before coming to this back room, and the grapes were adding to the pleasant buzz.

The best part was knowing there'd be no problems with performance, and no hangover later.

He raised his head slightly, turning to see what Tony was doing. He couldn't see the other Marine at the moment, but a crowd of blondes—Tony
really
liked blondes—was huddled together on the cushion pile a few meters away, and the way one of them was sitting upright in the middle of the group, back arched and mouth agape as she bobbed happily up and down told him that Tony was already getting into the scene in a serious way. “Hey, Tone!” he called. “Howzit goin' over there?”

“Every…thing…
uh!…
go…for…
uh!…
launch…” the other Marine called back.

“Was I right? Huh? Is this a great place or ain't it? I…
ohhh!…
” The woman between his legs had reached a particularly and exquisitely sensitive spot, and one of the women working on his torso had joined her. For the next few moments, Lucky George could say very little coherent at all.

He was hoping to get off seven times tonight, once with each of them. Theoretically it was possible, but sheer exhaustion had overcome him each time he'd tried it in the past. But tonight he was feeling pretty good, and maybe…

“Leckie!”

The voice boomed from the pink and purple curtains draping the harem chamber's vaulted ceiling, echoing as though from speakers with the volume cranked up high.

It was a voice he recognized. “Oh, shit….”

“Leckie! This is God speaking! Liberty's been canceled for all hands.”

“Aw, Sergeant Major! Have a heart, will ya? We just got here!”

“
Now
, Leckie. Come out of there before I crawl in and pull your plug myself!”

And
that
conjured visions Lucky didn't even want to try imagining.

“Hey, Lucky?” Tony called. “Did Sergeant Major Kaminski just—”

“Yes, goddamn it, he did.” He sighed. “Sorry, girls.”

“Aw! You have to leave so soon?”

“Safeword ‘bail-out,'” he said. Instantly, the boudoir, the grapes, the naked women, all faded out into the purple-charged blackness one sees with closed eyes. A moment later, he blinked, and he was staring at the inside of a grungy-looking metal sphere just barely roomy enough to hold a synthleather-padded couch.

A quarter of the sphere's shell, to his left, was missing, a large, circular hatch. Sergeant Major Frank Kaminski was standing there in his khakis, fists on hips as he glared belligerently into the virtuality capsule. “
So
sorry to interrupt your pleasant dreams,
Mister
Leckie,” Kaminski said. “But your presence
is
required back at the squad bay!”

Lucky sat up and swung his legs out of the sphere. He was wearing nothing but a terry cloth wrap and a number of skin attachments connected to slender feed cables, gently adhering to five places on his scalp, and on his chest, wrists, back of the neck, and groin.

The wrap was to keep him from making a mess on the couch. The cold, sticky spot he felt against his skin on the inside told him it had already served its purpose, even though he hadn't been inside for very long. “Jeez, Sergeant Major!” he complained, starting to pull off the skin connectors. “It couldn't have waited another couple of hours?”

“No, it damned well couldn't!” He turned to glare at the half-naked man crawling out of the virtuality sphere next to Lucky's. “And you, Tonelli! Get your ass in gear!
Both
of you!”

Mamasan Koharu, the manager of the Virtuality, all prim and proper in a conservative woman's business suit, held out a hot, warm towel with a slight bow and a smile. “You have good time, yes?”

“I want a refund, Mamasan! We paid you one hundred dollars each for four hours! That was the deal, see? We ain't been inside there thirty minutes!”

Her eyes widened. “Oh, no! No refund! Cost same, you thirty minute, you four hour!”

“No! I want my money back!”

“It cost same! Still must program computer!” She pointed at the couch. “Still must clean you cum off equipment! Cost same!”

He snatched the towel from her. “Christ, what a gyp!” He tossed the terrycloth wrap on the floor and began toweling off his legs. “I got rights! You can't rip us off this way. I'll get some of my buddies together an'—”

“Corporal Leckie!” Kaminski snapped.

“Yeah?”

“Put a cap on it. Get your clothes on, both of you, and muster with me at the entrance. You've got ten minutes.
Move
it!”

Lucky entertained the notion of arguing for all of perhaps two seconds. It wasn't
right
, getting taken for a ride that way! He and Tone had spent twenty minutes in the virtual bar with the tequila and beer, and had only
just
gotten down to the good stuff deeper in. Damn it! He'd wanted to go with all seven women! Man oh man, what a barracks story
that
would have made! While his physical body had—um—responded almost at once to the sensations he'd been experiencing inside the sphere, the interactive AI program running through his brain should have easily let him experience seven orgasms in a row in his head.

And now they were dragging him back to base, out a hundred dollars and nothing to show for it but a wet crotch and a semen-soaked wrap!

Yeah…he
thought
about arguing. But there was something about Sergeant Major Kaminski's bearing—not to mention the pressed-and-tailored perfection of his khakis and that incredible splash of colored ribbons on his shirt—that made even a veteran griper like Lucky Leckie think twice, then back down. It didn't help that Kaminski was in full uniform while he was stark naked.

The
real
problem was that Kaminski was a lifer. Those campaign ribbons—for Mars and Garroway's March and Cydonia, for Luna, Picard and Tsiolkovsky, for Vera Cruz and Cape Town and Havana, not to mention the Silver Star, the Bronze Star with cluster, the Purple Heart, Expert Rifleman—together they created a truly formidable barrier no mere corporal with nothing but a National Defense Ribbon and an SMEU qualification badge could stand against.

Hell, Kaminski would drop-kick him clear back to V-burg if he even tried.

“Aye, aye, Sergeant Major,” he said. Tossing the wet towel on the floor, he turned and followed Tone into the locker room, where they'd left their clothes. Koharu, who'd modestly turned away at his nudity, was already fastidiously scrubbing at his couch with a disinfectant spray.

Hell, he thought, it wasn't like she hadn't seen naked men before. Everyone knew you could get real girls at Mamasan's, not just the computer-programmed ones. He'd even tried them a time or two, and they'd been okay. It was just that the fantasies made possible in the virtual reality spheres were so much better than anything any flesh-and-blood whore could possibly conjure for you. Especially with the newer equipment that let you experience full, all-body sensation without having to have surgically implanted jacks, gimmicks that had never been all that popular except with the most passionately devoted computer jocks. Better than the real thing.

Besides, linking in to an orgy with a roomful of computer-generated women guided by an entertainment AI was the absolute ultimate in safe sex.

Dressed in their civvies, he and Tone returned to the lounge at the building's entrance, where several pleasant-looking hostesses sat at tables or at the bar. Kaminski was waiting for them.

“Here, you two,” he said, extending two plastic credit slips.

“What are these?” Tone asked.

“Your refunds. I talked Mamasan down to half price for both of you.”

“Shit,” Lucky said. “How'd you manage that?” Mamasan Koharu had the rep of a polite and civilized female dragon who didn't back down on
anything
where her girls, her boys, or her business was concerned.

“I talked to her
nice
, Leckie. Something you wouldn't know about.” He grinned. “And I told her it would be a shame if word spread among the personnel on the base about what happened to you. I guess she felt that losing a hundred was better than having her business go flatline.”

“Well, hey! Thanks!” He took the credit slip, unholstered his PAD, and slid the data strip end through the reader. His account credited him with fifty dollars as the plastic slip turned from green to black. He tossed the dead slip on the floor.

Kaminski stopped him with a twenty-kiloton-per-second look. “Pick it up.”

“But Sergeant Major—”

“
Pick it up, shithead!
” As Lucky obeyed, Kaminski growled, “Maintaining decent relations with the civilian population in the area is tough enough, asshole, without you vandalizing the neighborhood with your fucking attitude. Now shitcan your garbage and let's get back aboard!” He nodded to the watching women. “Ladies.”

Outside, Kaminski's car, a gray Ford-Toshiba Electric from the motor pool, was parked in the Virtuality lot, tapping a charge from the contact posts. Beyond, traffic whizzed by on Highway One. Tone's car, a neon-red bubbletop Zephyr, was in the recharge slot nearby.

“So, what's all the rush, Master Sergeant?” Lucky asked as they trotted down the steps. “Are we on alert?”

“Affirmative. They just passed the word. The launch date has just been moved up. We're boosting, boys, probably late next week.”

“Holy shit!” Tone said. “I ain't got any of my shit together.”

“Then you'd better take care of it ASAP, Marine. It's a long way to Europa. The long-distance comlink charges'll kill you!”

Europa! Lucky still found it hard to believe. He'd always dreamed of going to space; that was why he'd volunteered for the Space Marines, after all. He'd been hoping to get a chance to see Mars, or at least be posted at one of the naval orbital facilities now sprouting up in Earth orbit.

But Europa! Why anyone would want to attack such a place—or defend it from attack—was beyond him. The briefings he'd had so far emphasized the unbearable hostility of the place—an environment where the temperature never crawled higher than 140 degrees below zero, with no atmosphere to speak of, and intense radiation delivered by the far-flung magnetic fields centered on giant Jupiter. The word was that a small scientific outpost was there, and there were rumors that they'd found something in the ice. Something important.

It was hard to imagine just what could be so damned critical in such a God-forsaken place.

From the way the scuttlebutt was flying, though, the scientists had found anything from one of the ancient ET visitors to a working faster-than-light starship to God Himself. Lucky, a bit jaded by his two years in the Corps, knew better than to pounce on any single rumor and absorb it as fact.

Meeting aliens wouldn't be so bad, he thought. Hell, it'd be a short ticket to fame and fortune for everyone on the expedition who pulled it off. But he didn't for a minute believe that there actually were aliens at Europa. Scuttlebutt, pure and simple. The
real
action in the solar system was on Mars, where scientists from a dozen nations were sorting through the relics left by the enigmatic Builders.
That
was where he'd been hoping to go.

Shit. He'd joined the Marines to see Mars, and here they were sending him to a radiation-drenched ball of ice in the cold and dark of the Outer System.

Tone swung the Zephyr into Vandenberg's Main Entrance. The usual demonstrations were under way, and Tone had to drive slowly through a corridor in the road kept open by police and Air Force MPs.
IT'S BABEL AGAIN!
one prominent sign read.
MAN WAS CREATED IN GOD'S IMAGE TO TEND THE EARTH!
read a long banner held aloft by six scraggly-looking youngsters. Many waved miniature palm trees, the unofficial symbol of the Keepers of the Earth. An enchantingly bare-breasted young woman with a laurel crown sat astride a miniature woolly mammoth gesturing with a sign that read
HEAVEN ON EARTH
NOW
. The better-dressed members of the congregation wore helmet cams and recording gear. It looked like the newsies were out in full force.

Despite the chanting, jeering mob, the sentries looked bored, and Lucky had the feeling this was all pretty routine. Another day, another back-to-the-Earth demonstration.