The sounds were muffled and soggy, but there were several distinct noises—the shrill hiss and snap of ice turning to steam beneath the searing torch of a plasma engine, and the longer, deeper, creaking and popping sounds of ice establishing a new equilibrium with a very heavy weight settling down on top of it.
The sounds, transmitted through the ice from the surface, were shrill and loud.
“You people hear that?” Jeff shouted to the Marines who were watching quietly from their seats. “That is the sound a target makes when it’s settling down on the ice!”
Wojak burst out with a loud, “Ooh-rah!” Several others joined him, and then they all cheered. If the Chinese had hydrophones planted beneath the ice, the secret was out now, but it was too late for them to do anything about it.
“Right!” Jeff said, still shouting. Fresh, somewhat fainter cracklings sounded from the penetrator seismometers, marking the landing of a second spacecraft. “We know the bad guys are landing right now, this second! When we surface, we’ll catch ’em right where we want them—confused, unprepared, and vulnerable. Wyvern gunners, you two start acquiring and tracking as soon as you’re clear of the water. Hawse runners, you got your lines?” Cartwright and Wojak, both with heavy rolls of white line coiled over their left arms, waved assent. “Okay. You know what to do. The rest of you, head for high ground and find cover. Don’t let yourselves get caught at the bottom of the crater! It’ll be confusing out there, but just align yourselves with the Manta’s bow and head in that direction. You’ll be okay!
“Okay…everybody set? Seal up, charge your weapons, and hang on tight. This is gonna be one hell of a ride!”
He took his own seat, fastening his helmet in place, pulling on and locking the gloves, and readying his M-580.
“Manta Two reports ready to go,” Carver told him.
“Okay, tell ’em to follow us, and let’s put this thing on the roof!”
“Aye, aye!”
Manta One dipped her left wing and went into a sharp, descending spiral. Picking up speed, she straightened out, then began angling up…up…until she was aimed almost directly at the patch of thin ice marking the impact crater of the International Gun.
“Torpedo away!” Carver called, and Jeff felt the bump and hiss as another remote instrument package, this one loaded with several grams of antimatter in a soccer ball-sized containment sphere, slid clear of the Manta’s probe release tube. Chief Carver, using the VR helmet, teleoperated the drone as it sped up out of the depths, pulling his helmet off just before impact.
Seconds later, the Manta rocked heavily, and Jeff felt his stomach try to rebel. The SEAL pilot slipped his red helmet back on. “I see daylight!” he yelled, and the Manta began accelerating.
Jeff felt the sub’s angle of climb increasing, heard the whine of the MHD impellers shrilling to their highest pitch.
Manta One hit the shattered, seething ice at the surface seconds later, emerging from the water at nearly a sixty-degree angle. Traveling at almost fifty knots, she exploded from the water, clearing it completely. In Europa’s.13 gravity, she sailed gracefully, an aircraft—or, rather, a spacecraft—for a scant few seconds as she dropped again toward the ice.
She struck the thicker ice at the rim of the open patch, which seethed and boiled now with clouds of freezing white fog. As she hit, the ice beneath her belly gave way, but she kept traveling forward, her nose grinding through crumbling ice until the hurtling vessel ground onto ice thick enough not to give way beneath her keel.
Beached now, like a whale that had attempted to fly and failed, the winged sub continued sliding forward across protesting ice, until the grinding friction at her keel slued her to a halt.
For a terrified few seconds, Jeff sat in his seat, listening to the creak of the sub as it shifted slightly on the ice.
“We’re set!” Carver shouted. “Solid ice. We’re not moving. Go!”
“You heard the man,” Jeff called over the squad channel. “Move out! Let’s go, devil dogs! Hit the beach!”
The Marines began filing through the airlock, entering it two at a time. It took several minutes to clear the lock, minutes that were an agony of waiting for Jeff. If the Chinese figured out what was happening and intervened in this deadly, vulnerable first few minutes…
The first two out, by plan, were Cartwright and Nodell, volunteers both. Cartwright’s job was to run forward and attach her line to a mooring eye on the Manta’s nose, then run forward across the ice, find a solid spot on the ice, and drive home the stakes secured to the end of the line. That would provide a solid mooring for the submarine, just in case incoming fire cracked the ice beneath it and sent it back into the water. Nodell would cover her with a SLAW, then move toward the crater rim.