Lieutenant Graham raised a hand.
“Yeah, Rich?”
“Why don’t they up their acceleration?” he wanted to know. “Couldn’t they beat the Chinese here if they took some heavier Gs?”
“Not with that energy curve!” Melendez said with a chuckle. “Remember, you square your acceleration to halve your time. You’d end up needing more antimatter than has been manufactured in the past hundred years!”
“There is no way that the Jefferson can beat the Chinese ship, even at two gravities. The enemy cruiser will arrive at oh-seven hundred hours on Thursday, the twenty-seventh. We’ll have three more days to wait before the Jefferson gets here.
“Not exactly in the nick of time, is it?” Kaminski put in.
“Not this time,” Jeff agreed. “That’s why I’m looking at options. We can’t sit around and wait for the Jefferson to rescue us. We can’t even take much more in the way of enemy attacks from the Charlies who are already on Europa. If we sit tight, we’re going to be overrun long before help arrives—or forced to surrender.”
“So what’s the alternative, Major?” Lieutenant Quinlan asked.
“We could leave—head off overland into the outback,” Walthers said. “Is that what you’re thinking?”
Jeff shook his head. “Uh-uh. We have one tractor and three lobbers. Without transport, we wouldn’t be able to get far, and we wouldn’t be able to carry shelter along with us, or enough PLSS air reserves to last us more than twenty-four hours. Hell, if we weren’t dead of suffocation by the time the Jefferson arrived, we’d be fried from the radiation flux.”
“Besides,” Melendez added, “we don’t have any way of masking our heat signatures. We already glow in the dark, you know, on IR. The Chinese ship would spot us in one orbital pass overhead.”
“It doesn’t stop the bad guys from taking over this facility, either. No, we need something a bit more direct.
“People, I am not going to surrender, and I am not going to just sit here and keep taking it. I intend to go over to the offensive—to take the battle to the enemy—and to use his back door.”
“Back door?” BJ said. “What back door?”
He moved his PAD on the table top so everyone could see. As he touched the screen, the display was repeated on the bulkhead monitor—two large circles, one slightly smaller and set inside the other.
“Europa, people. A radius of 1,563 kilometers—circumference of 9,820 kilometers. A body composed of layers.” He pointed to the outer circle. “The upper layer is predominately water ice, ranging from ten kilometers to a few tens of meters thick, depending on where you land. The ice here at Cadmus is thin, only about twenty meters.”
He indicated the area between the two circles. “Below that is water, the Europan world ocean. Depth, fifty to one hundred kilometers, averaging about eighty. And below that, a rocky-silicate crust.”
His finger traced a curve along the outer circle, tracing an arc of a bit more than thirty degrees. “If we travel overland—over ice, that is—it’s 1,005 kilometers from Cadmus to the Chinese base on the equator. But there is a shortcut, a shortcut with the advantage of letting us stay completely undetectable.
“All we have to do is travel under the ice, moving along a chord, a straight line from here to there.”
There was a stunned silence, followed by a low murmuring as others in the compartment began talking. “My God,” Lieutenant Biehl said.
“Where’s the back door you were talking about?” Walthers asked. “How do we get through the ice at the other…oh!”
“The goddamned submarines!” Biehl added.
“Right,” Jeff said. “We have two Mantas, each eight meters long, and capable of carrying, with a bit of crowding, maybe ten or twelve Marines, suited up, with weapons and gear. BJ here brought back the images we need.” He touched his PAD screen, and the display shifted to an aerial view, shot from several hundred meters up, of a vast, dark hole in the Europan ice, shrouded by steam and mist. “Our International Gun punched clean through the ice the other day,” he continued. “It must be pretty damned thin in that region, no thicker than here at Cadmus, anyway. By now, the open water has frozen over again, but it can’t be more than a few centimeters thick yet. That, people, is our back door.”
“A shortcut straight through the planet?” Gunnery Sergeant Kuklock asked.
“The chord distance isn’t that much shorter than the Great Circle Route,” Jeff told him. “Works out to about 980 kilometers, so we only save twenty-five. But we’ll be sheltered from observation from topside, above the ice, and we should be able to emerge in their rear and achieve complete surprise. Following the chord will take us to a depth of about eighty kilometers. As it happens, according to the scientists here, that’s pretty close to the average ocean depth between here and the Charlie main base. The Mantas have a cruising speed at depth of about fifty to eighty kilometers per hour. That means a twelve-to eighteen-hour trip.”