Europa Strike(18)

“Maybe…”

“You don’t look convinced.”

“Colonel, Europa and Mars are the two keys to the biggest, most important puzzle the human race faces right now. A breakthrough at either site is going to completely transform both us and the way we think about the universe—more than the An revelations, more than the discovery that we’re not alone in the universe. The Beijing government knows that, and they’d be nuts not to try to grab a piece of the action. We know they’re interested. We know they’ve been getting their big A-M ships ready to boost. And they did a quick refit of the Lightning and launched her in a hell of a hurry. It’s just damned hard not to believe they’re all connected somehow.”

“Well, the Peaceforcer cruisers are in place,” she said. “They’ll be watching every Chinese launch, you can be sure of that. And they’ll be positioned to act if the Chinese ships make a move in either direction. Beijing’s only hope at this point is to play the game our way. Join the CWS, make nice, and take a cut of the profits.”

“Beijing,” he replied, “isn’t exactly known for how well they play with others. Especially barbarians like us.”

He was right, of course. A struggle was shaping up, a struggle that might well determine the nature of humanity for the next ten thousand years.

And Kaitlin and Jack and the rest of the U.S. Marines were going to be at ground zero—the proverbial eye of the storm.

As usual.



Squad Bay

1 MSEF Barracks

2135 hours Zulu



“Bumfuq!” Lucky exploded. “We’re bein’ sent to Bumfuq!”

Bumfuq, Egypt, was an old, old expression current throughout all branches of military service, referring to a place, a duty station so far removed from the civilized amenities that you might as well be on another planet.

Which, in stark, cold point of fact, was exactly where they were going.

“Aw, c’mon, Lucky!” Staff Sergeant BA Campanelli said, laughing. “How bad can it be? Anyway, you always said you wanted to go to space!”

“Shit,” Lance Corporal Dick Wojak said. “He just doesn’t want to lose access to his virtual girlfriends!”

“Hell,” Sergeant Dave Coughlin said. “He should just download one of ’em into his PAD and bring her along! Then we could all share in the wealth!”

“Why don’t you like girls, Luck?” Kelly Owenson said. “Real ones, I mean?”

“I like girls fine!”

What he didn’t like talking about was the fact that virtual relationships just didn’t fucking hurt as much as the real ones. Damn, Becka. Get out of my head….

He took another swallow of the drink BA had mixed for him—a pineapply something that was quite good. What had she called it?

Sergeant Sherman Nodell was weaving a bit in his seat, despite the fact that he outmassed Lucky by a good twenty kilos, and he didn’t seem interested in discussing Lucky’s sex life. “Just give me another one of those…things you were talkin’ about a little bit ago,” he said. He was being very careful how he enunciated his words.

The nine of them, all members of First and Second Platoons, Bravo Company, were sitting at a folding table in the barracks squad bay. The huge and otherwise bare room which had once been an aircraft hangar was decorated with green-painted concrete floor, steel storage lockers, a display case near the entrance with trophies and battalion honors, and a wall-sized flatscreen on one bulkhead that was displaying the Marine Corps emblem at the moment. Normally, they all would have been out tonight, hitting the bars and sensies in Lompoc, but the 1st Marine Space Expeditionary Force had been restricted to the base ever since word had come down of the early deployment to Europa.

Staff Sergeant Campanelli had come to the rescue, though. She’d been a bartender as a civilian—“in a former life,” as she liked to call it—and she occasionally hauled out a small, portable bar-in-a-suitcase that was her prized possession and entertained the others in the platoon with some of her strange and wonderful concoctions. Mixing drinks in a nondesignated area probably violated half a dozen different regs, but she hadn’t been caught yet. There were rumors to the effect that she had been caught, once, but gotten off in exchange for a bottle of scotch.

Her full name was Brenda Allyn Campanelli, so inevitably she’d picked up the handle “BA,” for Bad Ass, even though she claimed her ass was very good. No one in the platoon claimed personal knowledge of that fact, however, though there’d been a great deal of speculation.

“So…what’ll it be, big boy?” she asked Nodell, taunting him.