Europa Strike(28)

The calm words chilled. Thirty seconds to impact.

“Why the hell didn’t we see it on radar?”

“The object is quite small, less than three meters long, and appears to exhibit stealth characteristics. Its radar cross-section is less than two centimeters across.”

A stealth missile? They still should have picked up the IR footprint of its exhaust!

“The object has just executed a minor course change,” Jackie continued. “It was unpowered until now. Definitely now on an intercept course…and accelerating.”

“Maneuver!” Mitchell bellowed. If the incoming was changing course…

He was in the access tube now, hand-over-handing rapidly into lower and lower gravity as he raced for the hub. But he knew there wasn’t time to reach the bridge.

He felt the thump, the surge of weight sideways, as the Kennedy’s maneuvering thrusters fired.

Seconds later, something struck the ship. Jeremy Mitchell was slammed against one side of the access tunnel by a savage, sudden acceleration. It felt as though the ship was tumbling, pressing him against the wall of the access tube with centrifugal force.

He heard metal shrieking protest—a screech, followed by a succession of loud pops and bangs, and the shrill whistle of air escaping to vacuum.

Then the entire universe seemed to explode in raw noise rapidly dwindled to vacuum-muffled silence, and the Kennedy’s captain found himself pinwheeling through black and cold and fragment-filled space, dying in a cloud of fast-freezing blood even as he tried to grasp the enormity of what was happening to his ship…and him.



U.S.S. John F. Kennedy

Solar orbit, 4.2 a.u. from Earth

2007 hours Zulu



Two force packages had been accelerated at the Kennedy—or rather, at that area of space the Kennedy would orbit through precisely nineteen days after the Heavenly Lightning fired them. The first, detected at the last possible moment, executed a course change for intercept and almost missed. Kennedy’s sudden maneuver—firing forward thrusters to reduce her orbital velocity—almost caused the Chinese missile to pass across her bows.

But a second course change countered the Kennedy’s move, and the force package struck far forward, ripping through the thin metal shell of the Peaceforcer cruiser’s forward reaction mass tank. The electromagnetic bottle anchoring a pea-sized fragment of antimatter in the hard vacuum of the package’s warhead failed, the antimatter slammed into metal and water, and then a fireball as hot as the surface of the sun blossomed into deadly radiance.

Water flashed into steam and exploded into space. The cruiser, almost 200 meters long, was whip-snapped by the detonation into a sudden and violent spin, tumbling end over end. Two of the hab modules, their coupling and spin mechanisms overstressed by the sudden off-balance acceleration, wrenched partly free, then broke away entirely, hurtling into the night with hundreds of smaller fragments as the great vessel began to tear itself apart.

The second package, homing on the heat and radiation of the first explosion, had more time to correct its intercept vector, and slammed into the Kennedy’s wreckage amidships. The explosion engulfed half the ship, and left only spinning fragments behind.

At its present position, the twin bursts of radiation marking the Kennedy’s destruction would take twenty minutes to reach Jupiter—and twenty-eight to make it across the void to Earth.

12 OCTOBER 2067

In Europa orbit

2007 hours (Zulu)



“Thirty seconds to release,” the voice of the Roosevelt’s skipper, Captain Galtmann, said in Jeff’s ear. “How’re you boys and girls making out over there?”

“Squared away, sir,” Jeff replied. “Ready for drop.” He tried to force some semblance of discipline on his unpleasantly twisting stomach. He hated zero G.

“Happy landings, then. We’ll see you again in six months!”

“Remember the surface radiation,” Colonel Norden’s voice added, rasping. “Get your people under cover stat, until we can give those suits a full checkout in field conditions.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Jeff replied. “We’ll set a new speed record for cross-country ice-jogging.” Although, damn it, if the suits didn’t work, none of them would live long enough to even reach shelter. The surface of Europa, despite the cold, was hot….

“Keep me posted up here. I’ll be down in two orbits—say, 180 minutes.”

“Roger that. We’ll be waiting, sir.”

Jeff craned his head, trying to see out the tiny porthole beside his seat and get a glimpse of the Roosevelt. His suit, with its cumbersome helmet, and the fact that he was strapped down in the narrow, hard-backed seat, kept him from seeing much of anything. All that was visible through the port was the dead-black of space, and a few scattered stars, plus a little bit of the bug’s framework embracing the pressurized passenger module.