Europa Strike (8 page)

11
OCTOBER
2067

Major Jeff Warhurst made his way along the narrow access corridor in zero-G, pulling himself along gently until he reached the hab access collar, which was grinding about the tunnel once every twenty seconds in a thunderous cascade of sound. He picked his target—the slow-moving entryway to “C” Hab—then, grabbing the handholds on either side, he swung his feet up and through the opening with an almost graceful ease borne of three weeks' practice.

Lowering himself by the hand-and footholds, a feeling of weight gently returned, growing stronger with every meter of his descent. He emerged on “C” Hab's upper deck, a gray-walled, claustrophobic space crowded with Marines. For three weeks now, “C” Hab had been home to Bravo Company, eighty-one Marine officers and men and one Navy hospital corpsman, living on two crowded berthing decks and one level designated as the squad bay. The air was steamy and thick, stinking of far too many people crowded into too small a space.

“Attention on deck!” someone shouted, and seated Marines began to rise.

Jeff waved them back down with a careless toss of his hand. “As you were!” he bellowed. “Carry on!”

This close to the ship's hub, the spin gravity was only.21 G; you had to watch your footing and your inertia when you were moving, and the Coriolis effect was particularly unpleasant. This level had some berthing spaces, but most was reserved for offices, crew's quarters, and a common room that doubled as a mess deck and galley.

It was also the only space in the hab that provided a view of the outside. A two-meter wall screen mounted on the forward bulkhead was set to display various views from cameras mounted on the
Roosevelt
's hull.

The view now was forward from the transport's prow. Jupiter was centered squarely in the screen, a slightly flattened orange disk, its banding easily visible to the naked eye. Although it was hard to tell from an image on a vid monitor, it looked a little larger than the full Moon did from Earth. All four of the Galilean satellites were visible, three on one side of the disk, one on the other. He didn't know which of those bright-shining points of light was Europa, their destination, but one of them was.

The
Roosevelt
was 11 million kilometers out from the planet, and well within the orbits of the huge world's outer moons. They'd just passed the orbit of Leda, a tiny chunk of rock and ice lost in all that night.

Sergeant Major Kaminski was standing by the screen, a squeeze bottle of coffee in his hand. “Major, sir,” he said, nodding. “How went the meeting?”

“As expected, Sergeant Major,” he replied. “We're to be squared away by sixteen-thirty hours, with inspection at seventeen hundred. Spin-down, turnover, and deceleration are scheduled to begin at twenty-twenty hours. We'll want to make sure everyone's had chow and the mess gear's cleared and stowed before then.”

“Aye, aye, sir. We'll be four-oh, never fear.”

“Good.” He stared a moment at the vid screen. “Which one's Europa? You know?”

Kaminski indicated the middle star of the three on the right. “That brightest one, sir.” His finger moved to the moon nearest Jupiter. “This little red one's Io. You can almost smell the sulfur volcanoes from here.” He indicated the lone moon to the left. “That's Ganymede. Biggest moon in the Solar System, bigger even than Mercury, and the next out from Europa.” His finger slid back to the right. “And Callisto. Outermost of the Galilean satellites, and enough like our Moon back home to make us all nostalgic for cold beer and a hot date.”

“I didn't ask for a travelogue, Sergeant Major.”

“No, sir. Of course not. Sir.”

Oh, stop being a prick
, he told himself savagely. “Sorry, Kaminski. I guess I'm a little on edge.”

“Goes with the territory, sir.”

Damn. Kaminski was always so diplomatic. Always knew exactly what to say. Well, that went with the territory too. Frank Kaminski had been in a long time…almost thirty years. He'd been in during the UN War, a veteran of Garroway's March, of Tsiolkovsky, of half a dozen nasty little actions fought as the old UN broke up and the new CWS began to take shape. He was supremely competent at everything he did, the quintessential Marine's Marine. His little spiel on the Galilean satellites was typical. The man
always
researched the next duty station or deployment, and seemed to command an inexhaustible armory of facts about the place—facts always tempered by long, personal experience.

Jeff touched one of the keys on the vid display, and a computer-generated image of the
Roosevelt
appeared center-screen, showing the transport's current attitude. She was an impressive vessel, 200 meters long from the blunt, water-tank prow ahead of the stately pirouette of her hab modules to the massive ugliness of her A-M plasma drives safely far astern. Still, at that resolution she looked damned small adrift in so much emptiness.

The single most revolutionary advance in spacecraft propulsion during the mid-twenty-first century was the steady-thrust antimatter engine, or A-M drive. Developed in parallel during the UN War by both the U.S.-Japanese Alliance and by the European Space Agency, A-M drives transformed space travel within the Solar System from long, lazy, energy-saving Holmann transfer orbits to relatively simple, straight-line, point-and-shoot affairs. Antimatter enthusiastically converted itself plus the equivalent of its own mass in ordinary matter into raw energy and plasma with a
very
high specific impulse…meaning high efficiency. By mixing matter and antimatter in a one-to-one ratio, a few tons of fuel was enough to take a ship, boosting steadily at one G for half the distance, then flipping over and decelerating for the second half, all the way to Jupiter in a matter of days.

Unfortunately, antimatter was tremendously expensive to produce. Enormous solar-power facilities at L-3 and on the Moon were used to transform sunlight into energy, which in turn was used to create and accumulate antimatter in microgram amounts, using techniques unchanged in principle since the late twentieth century. Because of the expense, most A-M spacecraft employed either conventional fuels “heated” by the insertion of very small amounts of antimatter to increase their I
_sp
, or plasma thrust engines that used a little antimatter to turn a
lot
of reaction mass—usually water—into plasma, but at much lower thrust-to-weight efficiencies. Spacecraft like the
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
and the other big A-M cruisers
could
employ steady-thrust acceleration at one G and reach Jupiter space in a week, but since doing so would consume the entire antimatter output of the U.S. A-M facility at L-3 for the past thirty months, simple economics required a more conservative approach.

Instead of hammering away at One G for the entire trip, the
Roosevelt
boosted at one G for just twelve hours out of Earth orbit, achieving in that time a velocity of just over 420 kilometers per second. She then coasted for the next twenty-four days, slowing steadily under the gravitational drag from the Sun, but still crossing 900 million kilometers of empty space in twenty-four days rather than years.

But Marines, being Marines, grumbled. They all knew the voyage out
could
have taken a mere seven days. Instead, they were crowded aboard the transport for over three weeks during the claustrophobic passage to Europa. During her twenty-four-day coast, the
Roosey
provided a semblance of gravity by rotating the hab modules. Her four boxlike habs spanned sixty meters; by rotating them about the ship's axis three times per minute, a spin gravity of.3 G was maintained in the lowest decks of each module, with lower gravities on each deck going up toward the axis. The idea was to give the Marines a compromise between acclimating to Europa's surface gravity of.13 G and letting them maintain muscle tone and general fitness.

In fact, so far as Jeff Warhurst was concerned, three weeks at.3 G was just enough to make the coast phase of the voyage completely miserable. The queasy sensations of Coriolis forces affected everyone's inner ears, and half of his company was affected by space motion syndrome—“space sickness,” to the layman. The passenger quarters—the “grunt lockers,” as they were called—were jam-packed with humanity sleeping in racks stacked six high and using the common rooms/mess decks, the tiny shower cubicles, and the heads on rotating schedules. A single one of the
Roosevelt
's four hab modules could modestly quarter thirty people on three decks; this trip out, the
Roosey
carried a complete Marine Landing Force—two companies, Bravo and Charlie, plus a recon platoon, headquarters and medical element, and the twelve-man Navy SEAL platoon who'd shipped out with them to run the Manta subs—280 men and women in all, plus the ship's usual Navy complement of fifteen.

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.”