“In the second place, I had friends on both the JFK and the Roosey. Jeremy Mitchell and I grew up together outside of San Antonio—and I ended up marrying his sister. And…there was Rob Junior. The way I see it, either all of those people died for some reason, or they died for no reason. I kinda prefer the first option, don’t you?”
“But—”
He held up a hand. “And third, Colonel, it’s not just you Marines who can be too impossibly damned heroic for words. I happen to think those people on Europa are getting a damned raw deal. I’m not going to see them hung up out there and left to flap in the breeze!”
“Europa doesn’t have much of a breeze.”
“Okay. Hung out to freeze-dry in the proton flux, then.”
She returned his smile. “You can always claim that I pulled a gun on you.”
“That the Marines hijacked a twelve billion-dollar spacecraft to Jupiter to fight an illegal war? They might frown on that.”
“No more than you throwing in with my little mutiny. That’s what this is, you know. At the very least we’re guilty of trying to write our own version of U.S. foreign policy here. At worst, we’re pirates!”
“Yarrr!” he growled, a mock pirate’s battlecry. “I always wanted to be a space pirate!” She laughed, and he added, “Look, I’ll be okay, Colonel. We were scheduled for boost, and I boosted on the mark. What I disregarded was the fact that Space Command put me on hold and didn’t give me a final boost clearance.” He shrugged. “I queried both STAN-NET and L-3 Traffic Control and got a clear to boost from both. End of story. At worst, I’m pegged for not double-checking with Earth, but I was well inside the envelope. And they obviously haven’t checked yet to see that a flight plan has been logged. We’re scheduled now to carry out training exercises en route to Jupiter, and in Jovian space.”
“At one G all the way? Those are pretty damned expensive exercises!” They would be using enough antimatter on this one run to power all of North America for months.
“Yeah, but I want to get back to Earth in a hurry. Gotta be home in time for Thanksgiving. The Marshals all get together for a big family do down in Texas, y’see, and—”
“Steve, you’re impossible.”
“Only highly improbable, my dear. In any case, I don’t think either of us has a whole lot to worry about.”
“How do you figure that?”
“Simple. If we manage to save your Marines, we’re going to have to do it by winning, right? We beat that second Chinese cruiser, save the CWS base, make contact with the alien, whatever it takes. If the Chinese lose hard enough, it should swing things around on Earth too. They make peace, we give them some concessions in sharing alien technology, everybody’s happy.
“And our superiors are not going to court-martial us for success! Not when we’re in the public eye as heroes!”
“Well, that’s all very well. But there’s so damned much that can go wrong! What if we fail?”
What if I fail? That was the thought that had been plaguing her for two days.
“If we fail, Colonel, you and I are going to be dead. And we won’t care a bit about what they say about us when we’re gone.”
West of Cadmus Crater, Europa
0956 hours Zulu
Lucky brought his gloved thumb down on the firing button. Fifty meters away, ice exploded in an outlashing cloud, a savage detonation, death-silent. The shock was transmitted through the ice as a sharp, brief shudder, but there was no other indication that the charge had even fired.
Dropping the trigger box back in a thigh pouch, Lucky snatched up his 580 and started crawling forward. To his right, Liss Cartwright aimed her rifle from a prone position, covering him.
The badlands east of Cadmus were a jumbled tangle of mounds and jagged berg shapes crammed together by pressures deep within the ice into a patchwork labyrinth kilometers across. The only way to cross it was on the labyrinth floor, threading along twisting, narrow pathways with sheer ice walls ten meters high in places. The Chinese had been using the chaotic terrain to slip close to the base of the crater rim. Several times now in the past week, lone soldiers or small groups had worked their way up the crater slope, avoiding or disabling perimeter sentinels, and firing rockets or sniping lasers into the compound.
The Marines had countered by sending out two-and four-man patrols to place booby traps and set ambushes. Grenades buried in the ice walls and triggered by pressure switches or proximity were recorded in Chesty Puller’s data base so that he could steer friendlies clear of them, painting them on the Marines’ HUDs as red warning flags. Better were traps that could be fired by hand in an attempt to ensnare enemy troops.