Europa Strike(29)
The bug was similar to lobbers and other short-haul transports used by the Marines during various Lunar operations. Intended solely for operation in vacuum, it was completely unstreamlined—a chunky, squared-off bottle shape housing command deck and passenger/cargo spaces, plus spherical fuel tanks and a chemical rocket engine all crammed together inside a webwork of titanium/carbon fiber struts, with six landing legs, powerful external spotlights, and small maneuvering thrusters on flanks and belly. It was an ungainly-looking vehicle, well deserving of the Marines’ pet name for them: bugs. Each was thirty-three meters long, with space aboard—with some creative cramming—for one platoon, in this case the forty-one men and women of Second Platoon, Bravo Company, plus six of the Navy SEALs with the DSV team.
The Roosey carried two bugs, plus four similar craft used strictly for transporting cargo. The Ops Plan called for using both bugs to ferry all of Bravo—eighty-one Marines and six SEALs—to the CWS Cadmus Research Station on Europa. They would then refuel and rendezvous with the Roosey to take aboard the headquarters and support platoons in the next run, and finally return a third time for Charlie Company. The cargo landers would be shuttling back and forth between the surface and orbit for the next two days, bringing down not only the four Manta submersibles and all of the Marines’ supplies, but a load of consumables for Cadmus Station as well.
Cadmus Station consisted of twenty-five men and women from six nations. Most had been on Europa since the station had been established over a year before, and they were totally dependent on occasional ships from Earth for food and spare parts.
Water, at least, they had plenty of. Europa’s surface was a sheath of solid water ice, enclosing an ocean fifty to one hundred kilometers deep—five to ten times deeper than the deepest ocean abyss on Earth.
“Eight seconds to release,” Lieutenant Walthers said from the bug’s command deck. “Hang onto your lunches back there! And three…and two…and one…release!”
There was a slight jar as the mechanical grapples connecting the bug to the Roosey’s spine swung open, and a half-second burst from the dorsal thrusters set them in motion. The admonition to the Marines to retain their lunches seemed uncalled for…until the thrusters fired again and the bug rolled sharply to port.
Through his narrow window view on the starboard side, Jeff saw the Roosevelt swing ponderously into view, all light and midnight-dark, a long, slender rail with bulbous water tanks attached along her entire length, her habs like four sledgehammers attached at the handles still slowly rotating just aft of the forward tank. During acceleration, the rotation was halted and the habs folded back against the ship’s spine, preserving the up-down conventions of each deck. Once the Roosevelt had entered orbit around Europa, however, the habs had redeployed while the bugs were made ready for the descent. Heat radiators spread astern like enormous, squared-off tailfeathers. Getting rid of excess heat in vacuum was always a major spacecraft design problem, and the antimatter reaction of the drive created a lot of excess heat.
Those last twelve hours that the drive had been running, with the Marines on board stewing in their own overheated juices, had been a nightmare.
The bug continued its roll, dragging the Roosevelt out of Jeff’s line of sight. He was hoping for a glimpse of Jupiter, but the next thing he saw was a vast arc of darkness swallowing the stars one by one. The lights illuminating the bug’s passenger deck were dim and amber, but still bright enough that he couldn’t see any detail in the night outside the craft. They were falling over Europa’s night side.
He’d seen Europa during their final approach, as well as during training sims, of course. The moon looked like nothing so much as a straw-colored marble heavily crisscrossed by long, straight lines of a deeper, reddish color.
The bug’s main engines fired their deorbit burn, and Jeff’s stomach lurched at the sudden resumption of acceleration, a huge hand clamping down across his chest. Then, just as suddenly, the hand was gone and he was weightless again.
But the Roosevelt was falling away above and ahead, continuing to orbit the moon while the bug descended rapidly toward the surface, following a long, descending curve that would take them halfway around the moon. He thought he could make out something of the Europan surface now, irregular patches less black than their surroundings, glossy smooth areas, perhaps, illuminated by starlight. Then, quite suddenly, black gave way to darkest gray, lightening swiftly as the far horizon, still curved, took fire from the fast-rising Sun.
The bug swept across the terminator, passing from night into day. Jeff blinked, then adjusted his helmet’s polarization. The surface now was ice, reflecting sun-dazzle in brilliant white patches interspersed with tan and ocher-colored regions. Jeff stared at the surface turning below, fascinated, no matter how many times he’d seen computer simulations and vids already. The surface looked remarkably like old, early twentieth-century notions of the planet Mars, complete with long, straight canals, called lineae. A kind of plate tectonics worked here; Europa’s core, molten from tidal flexing in the tug-of-war between Jupiter and the other major Jovian satellites, kept Europa’s ocean liquid. The upper few kilometers of that ocean, however, were frozen. As the tides continued to stretch the tiny world, the icecap cracked, refroze, and cracked again, until it looked like a frosted crystal ball with a surface crazed by thousands of straight-line cracks and fissures. There were almost no craters that he could see. Here and there, however, he could make out large, circular features, the maculae, which looked like spots on an iced-over pond in early spring where someone had chucked a rock through, and the resulting hole had been closed over by thin skim ice. And that, as a matter of cold fact, was almost certainly a precise analogy. Traditional craters couldn’t last on that landscape of constantly resculpted ice and intense radiation bombardment for more than a few hundred thousand years, if that. Once in a while, though, a rock big enough to leave a lasting impression must impact with the surface and leave its footprint, even if for only a short time as planets and moons measured such things.