“My head hurts, yeah,” Kaminski said, “but…it’s the memories…”
“What memories?”
Kaminski shook his head. “I’m…not sure, sir. It’s like jumbled dreams, and you can only remember a few of ’em, you know? And what you remember don’t make sense.”
“Well, with those damned implants vibrating against your brain…maybe they were generating those dreams somehow.” Jeff had read somewhere that surgeons had first begun unlocking the brain’s secrets when they found that touching or stimulating specific points on the surface of the cerebellum would spontaneously evoke memories or sensations, as though the human brain were literally a recorder that could play back what it had stored.
At 0420 hours, they approached the patch of ice where the International Gun’s shell had fallen just five days before. As Jeff had predicted, the open water had frozen over since then, but the new ice was thin enough yet that he could actually see a faint, blue-white glow outside, the light from the sun shining down almost directly into the hole.
The problem now was how to know when the Chinese reinforcements were arriving. For Jeff’s plan to have the maximum effect, the two subs would have to surface just when the landers were making their approach to the Chinese LZ. Break through too early, and the newcomers would be warned off. Break through too late, and they would emerge on the upper surface of Europa to find the enemy already landed, deployed, and waiting for them. Twenty-two Marines and one scientist would not be able to take on several hundred well-prepared PRC soldiers, robot tanks, and whatever else they would have waiting for them up there.
Since the exact arrival time of the enemy ship was known only approximately, and since it might well make several orbits before deploying its landers, they’d needed to find a way to know exactly when the landers were touching down.
He’d discussed a number of ideas with his staff back at Cadmus. Deploying a lobber with an OP team back to within sight of the Chinese LZ to warn of the ships’ approach. Signaling from Cadmus by detonating a fair-sized jolt of antimatter deep in the ocean…
And what, Jeff wondered wryly, would the Singer have made of that?
The solution turned out to be quite simple. The science team at Cadmus had a number of delicate seismographic probes, penetrators fired deep into the ice in order to measure the stresses forming pressure ridges, Europaquakes, and Europa’s equivalent of plate tectonics. It had been a simple enough task to adapt several of the drone probes the Mantas were using as torpedoes to carry seismic recording gear. Circling the west side of the crater, Carver took his bearings from the glow of the sun on the ice above and launched two of the seismic probes.
At high speed, using MHD thrusters that propelled them through the sea at nearly seventy knots and guided by software gnomes spawned by Chesty, the probes dove deep, then curved around and up, rising…faster and faster, slamming at last into the jungle-covered belly of the ice sheet overhead, both planted deep in the ice in the general area where the first PRC landers had touched down. Long wires trailed behind the probes, serving now as antennae to transmit any sounds they picked up via radio. Radio waves tended to be absorbed by water, but at low frequencies at this power, a signal could be picked up across several hundred meters.
Then, alert for the probes’ signals, the two Mantas circled quietly beneath the ice, like great, black sharks, killers waiting for the first sign of activity.
C-3, E-DARES Facility
Ice Station Zebra, Europa
0625 hours Zulu
The final assault on the E-DARES facility began with blunt-trauma suddenness. An explosion in the badlands registered on seismic sensors, indicating movement through the labyrinth east of Cadmus. Twelve seconds later, two of the surviving sentries perched on the west rim detected movement and the IR signatures of PRC space suits. Navy Lieutenant Fred Quinlan, then covering the C-3 watch, ordered the alert-five scramble.
Lucky was in the Squad Bay, playing poker with Staff Sergeant Tom Pope; Sergeants Dave Coughlin, and Vince Cukela; Lance Corporal Kelly Owenson; and Doc McCall. All save McCall were suited up, except for gloves and helmets, and on the Alert-Five.
“All I’m sayin’, Doc,” Lucky was insisting as he drew a card, “is that you didn’t need to say all that stuff about torn ligaments and shit. If you’d just said I had a sore leg, maybe I could’ve gone along.”
“What, falsify my records? No way, Lucky! The skipper’d skin me alive!”
“A man of action, huh?” Tom said, grinning. “I tried to get in on the fun too, and was told off. Two.”