Four dead Chinese lay piled atop one another inside the airlock like cordwood. More lay inside the Squad Bay, where lockers and furniture had been stacked up to create a makeshift barricade. It was clear enough what had happened here. The question was whether any anyone at all had survived.
“Zebra, this is Icebreaker. Zebra, Icebreaker. Does anyone hear me?”
“Major?” A voice responded on his headset.
“Who is this?”
“Dr. Vasaliev. Is that Major Warhurst?”
“Speaking, Doctor. What the hell’s going on here?”
“Thank God! Ah…one moment, Major. Let me patch you through to Sergeant Pope.”
“Staff Sergeant Pope,” Jeff corrected. He walked toward the hatch leading down. Several Chinese bodies lay scattered about here as well.
A moment later, another voice came through on the command channel. “Major Warhurst?”
“Affirmative. Good to hear your voice, son.”
“Sir! Where are you?”
“In the Squad Bay. Moving to the main corridor hatch.”
“Freeze, Major! Do not open the hatch. We have it wired.”
He’d been reaching for the hatch access. “Roger that.”
“We’re on the way up.”
“What happened to the radio?”
“Main connection to the outside antenna was cut. Chesty is running a mini-Worldnet down here off of a PAD for strictly local communications, but we don’t have any range.” There was a pause, and some confused noises over the channel. “Sir, are there any Charlies up there?”
“Just dead ones. If any of them were alive, I don’t think I’d be having this conversation.”
“Hang on, sir. We’ll be there in a few minutes.”
Jeff remembered his thoughts about Europa paralleling Wake Island. In some ways, it was less like that battle than it was the fight at Camerone on 30 April, 1863. The Third Company of the First Battalion, sixty-two French Foreign Legion troops in the service of the Emperor Maximillian, had engaged Mexican troops near Camerone, Mexico. Fighting against overwhelming odds, cut off from help, surrounded in a farm house and walled courtyard, they’d held out for over eleven hours. Finally, and after repeated demands for their surrender, only six men were left on their feet. When their ammunition had run out, those six had charged the Mexicans with bayonets. In the end, three Legionnaires had stood back to back, bayonets at the ready, as the Mexicans closed in. “Now will you surrender?” one of the Mexican officers said.
“On condition we keep our weapons and you look after our wounded officer,” was the reply.
“To men such as you one refuses nothing.”
“Truly these aren’t men—they’re demons,” Colonel Milan, the Mexican commander, had said, upon hearing of the costly victory over a foe that had very nearly fought to the last man. Over one hundred Mexicans had been killed in the fight, and twice that many wounded, at least.
Camerone…or the Alamo.
Jeff heard some clattering sounds beneath the deck, the hatch to the central corridor airlock opened up, and men and women started coming through. Tom Pope. Sergeant Vince Cukela. Lance Corporal Kelly Owenson. Corporal Christie Dade. Sergeant Lucky Leckie.
Five Marines left.
“It’s damned good to see you, sir,” Pope said. The SC wrapping on his armor was torn, unraveling, and charred.
“Where’s Captain Melendez?”
“Dead, sir. And Lieutenant Graham.” Pope looked at the handful of other men, unshaven, dirty, exhausted, hollow-eyed. “I, uh, sort of had to take command.”
“You did okay, Lieutenant. Good job.”
“We lost so many…so many…” He blinked. “Lieutenant?”
“Field commission. I need officers to help pull what we have left together. And right now I need someone to take a repair party in and get our commo back up.”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson
1 million kilometers from Europa
0201 hours Zulu
“Sorry, Colonel,” LCDR Reynolds said. “Still nothing from Ice Station Zebra. Not even a beacon.”
“Then we were too late,” Kaitlin said. “The base was already overrun.”
Sixteen days of stress and grief came crashing down about her. Robbie, dead. Jeff Warhurst, whom she’d known since he was a kid, dead. Kaminski. All of the men and women of the Marine expeditionary force to Europa, dead.
Not to mention her own career and, likely, the career of Captain Marshal, dragged down by her damned, hyperromantic long-shot gamble.
The Thomas Jefferson was nearing the vast, sky-filling sweep of Jupiter now. On the repeater screen on the bridge, the awesome complexity of the giant world, with each eddy and turbulent twist of clouds in that banded ocher and salmon and pink-brown and white atmosphere starkly and crisply displayed in a single, titanic display of gas dynamics and Coriolis effect.