Europa Strike(30)

The icy surface was remarkably flat. No mountains. No cliffs. This close, he could see that the major, straight cracks were supplemented by myriad smaller ones, until the reddish lines resembled a cascade of long, red hair matted across the moon’s pale surface.

The image of red hair made him think of Carsyn, back in California. That homesick thought jarred, superimposed as it was on the alien majesty below. He’d been thinking about her a lot during the voyage out from Earth.

He’d promised to give her an answer when he returned, at the end of this deployment. Yeah…six months on this ice box ought to give him the time he needed to make a decision like that.

The bug’s engines fired again, a savage, bucking kick through the hard seat upright at his back. The curve of the horizon was definitely flatter now. It was impossible to estimate their altitude by eye, however. The landscape below was simply too alien, too far beyond common human experience and lacking in any recognizable features, for him to make even a guess. In places, the terrain was jumbled and broken; elsewhere it was absolutely flat. They could have been ten kilometers up, or looking at a snow field from an altitude of two meters.

On closer inspection, the linea turned out to be less like the canals of Percival Lowell’s Mars than they were arctic pressure ridges. Those dark-colored lines were in fact elevations in the landscape, rising a hundred meters or so above the surrounding terrain. The dark color was partly the effect of sunlight reflecting from slopes instead of flats, but also seemed to be the result of coloring of some sort contaminating the ice. Current theory held that as separate plates of the Europan ice cap ground together or cracked apart, water upwelled from beneath, bringing with it a concentrated soup of organic molecules that were frozen in the slow-rising pressure ridges. Europa’s global sea was rich in sulfur, iron, and iron-sulfur compounds; the life forms discovered there so far metabolized sulfur, analogues of the deep-ocean life discovered over eighty years before around some of Earth’s sea-bottom volcanic vents.

Before much longer, it became apparent that Europa’s billiard-ball flatness was largely an illusion. There were vast, smooth-ice plains, but most of the surface was chaotic, a blind jumble of blocks and chunks and fragments repeatedly fragmented, mashed together, refrozen, then broken again. The surface, Jeff thought, looked like an endless sea of icebergs packed together into a solid mass. His Marine training looked at the tangle sweeping past below, and decided that combat in that labyrinthine tangle would be…a challenge.

In Marine OCS, at Quantico, Jeff had repeatedly faced impossible problems, everything from doing the required number of chins and push-ups to making it up a sheer, wooden obstacle-course barrier ten meters tall to figuring out a particularly knotty problem in close-combat tactics. His senior DI, a gunnery sergeant named Matlock, had had the habit of leaning over and screaming in Jeff’s ear, “It’s a challenge, Marine! Think of it as a challenge!”

Yeah…right.

“Okay, boys and girls,” Lieutenant Walthers’s voice said in his helmet. “We have the CWS beacon. On final.”

Jeff turned, as best as he could bundled in his heavy suit, and looked at the motionless rows of other suited-up Marines, waiting. Without their weapons, they looked less like Marines than passengers strapped in aboard a suborbital HST flight. Their gear was stowed aft, however; the bug’s cabin was far too cramped to accommodate this many space-suited men and women and their weapons. No matter. This was neither training nor a live drop into a hot LZ. More like a commercial flight into a new duty station Earthside.

Hell, yeah, just like Lompoc, California, he thought, grinning to himself behind his dark visor. No unpleasant neighbors to worry about. Just think of it as a new shore station in California…with no air, malls, tattoo parlors, traffic, or girlie shows, with high radiation, no palm trees, and a summertime high of minus one-forty.

He looked back out the port. The bug had swung to the right, and he could see the base, now, spread out beneath a midmorning sun. There was actually very little to see, but the handful of surface structures was enough to bring a feeling of scale to the otherwise scaleless terrain…though they could have been toys left scattered across a flat layer of snow in someone’s winter-bound backyard.

The CWS research station was located on the Cadmus Linea, one of the bolder of the red-hued cracks following a great circle route halfway across the moon’s circumference. This close, you couldn’t really see the concentration of red pigments so visible from space; the surface was simply ice, a bit darker-hued, perhaps, than fresh, new ice, but still colored a dull white with a bluish cast and occasional, brighter highlights.