“It’s time to strap down, Kaitlin,” Captain Marshal said gently. “It’s going to be getting bumpy pretty quick.”
She let herself be led from the radio shack to one of the bridge acceleration couches. She’d been living here, pretty much, since they’d entered Jupiter space. The familiarity, the closeness…helped.
She and Steve had made a key decision three days ago, to delay the skew-slip and continue accelerating, getting them to Jupiter space two days ahead of sched. They still had to slow down, however, and Jupiter offered them their single opportunity to do so.
Aerobraking had been successfully used on numerous earlier space flights. By looping low above a planet with an atmosphere, even one as tenuous as that surrounding Mars, a ship could skim the upper levels of that atmosphere, using friction to slow down. The Apollo missions to the moon a century before had used a rather brutal version of the maneuver to slow their return velocity of 40,000 kilometers per hour to a gentle fall slowed further by parachute. Later, a penny-pinching NASA had developed sophisticated applications of aerobraking to adjust satellite orbits without expending fuel.
Now, the Jefferson was doing the same thing, decelerating hard at 3 Gs, and stealing a bit of free deceleration from titanic Jupiter as well as she fell close around the curve of the giant planet. The “special packages” installed on the Jefferson’s forward water storage tank had been deployed just before the Jupiter approach. Each was a balyute, essentially a collapsible bag of Kevlar-composite materials shaped like the sections of an orange and fastened to the hemispherical storage tank. As water was pumped into the bags, it mixed with a dry powder to create a rapidly expanding nitrogen gas-charged polymer-ceramic foam that expanded the orange-slice bags to full volume, then hardened upon exposure to vacuum.
The result was a tough heat shield that completely shrouded the forward tank, extending out and back far enough to create a pocket of calm behind the blazing, deadly heat playing across the balyute’s leading surface. Sir Isaac was flying the Jefferson; his superhuman precision and speed were necessary to keep the thrusters balanced, the ship properly aligned as it whipped around Jupiter. Any mistake, any imbalance of forces adjusted too late, and the Jefferson would begin tumbling. If that happened, she would vaporize in Jupiter’s upper atmosphere long before she could be crushed by the intense pressures of the Jovian deep.
Kaitlin wished she could see out, but the bow cameras were all completely blocked by the balyute heat shields, and the various masts, booms, and projections along the vessel’s length that included optical electronics with their sensor suites had been retracted. She had nothing to look at except for the steel-gray overhead of the bridge, as the G pressures grew moment by moment, accompanied by a shuddering, mounting vibration. Dragging a tail of ionized plasma a hundred kilometers long, Jefferson plunged into the fringes of Jupiter’s upper atmosphere, as Europa set beneath the giant’s horizon.
They’d been too late. The thought gnawed at her stomach and throat and in the pain behind her eyes. She felt lost and utterly alone. Everything, everything had been in vain.
E-DARES Facility
Ice Station Zebra, Europa
0415 hours Zulu
“Major Warhurst?” Chesty announced over the bulkhead speakers. “I have an incoming radio message.”
Jeff was alone in C-3, still going over the details of the assault that had so nearly overrun the base while he was gone. “Great! The Jefferson?”
“No. It appears to be one of the Chinese scientists, a Dr. Zhao. He is using a private channel relayed through one of the Chinese communications satellites.”
“A scientist.” Jeff had to think about that one. What was going on over there? “Put him on.”
“This is Dr. Zhao, calling the CWS commanding officer,” a new voice said.
“This is Major Jeffrey Warhurst, U.S. Marines. I am in command of Cadmus Base. Go ahead.”
“Ah, yes, Major.” The voice carried the somewhat metallic flatness of an AI translator program, a rather simple-minded one, from the sound of it. Chinese AI technology was still considerably behind the Western tech curve. “We need to…talk.”
“I am not surrendering this base,” Jeff replied. Only a few hours ago, he’d been willing to consider the possibility, but with the Star Wind knocked out of commission by the Jefferson in a hurtling fly-by shooting, the Marines were now in a somewhat better situation.
“It may be too late to discuss such things as who has won, or who has lost, Major,” Zhao replied. “I needed to tell you…”
“To tell me what, Doctor?”