Europa Strike(31)
The facility had been built in the middle of a circular depression—the shadow of a small, ancient macula, perhaps—but the floor was Kansas-cornfield flat. The visible components of the station consisted of a dark-gray landing pad the size of a football field marked with an enormous red crosshair, a twenty-meter radio mast, a satellite dish, two storage sheds, and a scattering of equipment—bulldozers, surface crawlers, and several hoppers parked at the edge of the landing field. Nearby, a couple of hundred meters, perhaps, from the edge of the field, was a black circle, as precise and as artificial as the mouth of a tunnel, leading straight down through the ice, covered over by a billowing cloud of fog.
The Pit.
A single white building, almost invisible against the ice, clung to the artificially sheer side of the circular hole into the moon’s interior. Most of the station was safely buried, out of reach of the invisible but deadly sea of radiation bathing the moon’s nakedly exposed surface.
The bug turned again, Jeff felt a series of heavy thumps transmitted through the deck, and then they were gentling toward the red crosshairs. In another moment, he couldn’t see any of the base, but he did catch a glimpse of the bug’s sharp-edged shadow racing across the gray-white surface to meet them as they drifted lower. A cloud of ice crystals swirled briefly past the porthole, and then they were down.
“Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for flying Air Navy,” Walthers’s voice said. “The weather here in Miami Beach is clear and sunny, wind zero out of the southeast, and the temperature is a balmy minus one forty-six Celsius. Please be sure not to leave personal gear adrift, and watch your step exiting the spacecraft. The bleach puddles can be treacherous!”
A chorus of groans, curses, and catcalls answered the bug pilot’s cheerfully humorous litany. Jeff unstrapped, then stood, crouched over with one gloved hand bracing himself against the low overhead, as Kaminski began calling off names.
“Cukela! Brighton! Jellowski! Hutton! Vottori! Garcia! You’re up!”
Six by six, the platoon began leaving their seats and filing in a slow shuffle aft, between the rows of seats. The central passageway fed onto a ramp leading down into the bug’s cramped main lock. That compartment was only large enough for six suited-up Marines at a time, so the disembarkation process took some time.
Jeff waited through the slow cycling of the lock, exiting with Kaminski and the last three men of the platoon. By ancient tradition, the senior officer was the last one onto a boat, and the first one off…but such quaint niceties didn’t apply here, when Jeff wanted to be able to personally give the suits of each of his people a once-over eyeballing as the Marines shuffled past.
The suits were essentially Mark IICs, later models of the armor that Marines had worn on Mars and the moon a quarter of a century before. These were a bit bulkier, with thicker armor laminates, better on-board computers and life support, and, instead of the old chameleon surfaces which adjusted the color to match the surroundings, these were covered with a thick and heavy but flexible material, like white canvas. The intent was not camouflage, however. The “canvas” material was actually a weave of superconducting fibers and microscopic tubes. A weak electrical current flowing through the covering should serve to trap and deflect incoming particulate radiation, specifically the flood of protons sleeting into Europa’s surface from Jupiter’s intense radiation belts.
Even so, each man’s exposure on the surface would be carefully monitored for the next six months. Doc McCall, the company corpsman, had already passed out badges that would record cumulative totals for each man and woman and alert Jeff’s secretary if they picked up a dosage of 30 rems or more.
He and Kaminski gave one another a visual suit check, and then they locked out with the last three Marines in the queue.
When the outer lock hatchway cycled open, Jeff stepped down into a cold and eerie silence. His suit heaters were working fine—he felt them kick on in his legs when his boots touched the landing pad deck—but the surroundings looked as cold and bleak as a deep Siberian winter.
Of course, the actual temperature was far lower than anything Earth had ever experienced.
The horizon was the rim of the crater chosen as the site of the base, knife-edged and brilliant in the sun. The sky was a dull, dead black, the stars washed away by the brilliance of a shrunken sun just above the ridge line. And above, higher in the sky…
Jupiter hung above the sun, an immense crescent bowed away from the light, embracing a bloated disk of night. The crescent spanned over twelve degrees of the sky—twenty-four times the diameter of Earth’s Moon back home. For a dizzying moment, Jeff wrestled with the sensation that the planet was falling on him…and then he took a deep breath and mentally nailed it in the sky. He could easily make out the banding on the crescent from here, turbulent stripes of ocher, red, white, and tan, a spectacle of unparalleled beauty too rich, too intense to look real. If he thought of it as a photographic backdrop, or as an extremely detailed vid or sim, he could push back the almost claustrophobic feeling that the planet was about to drop from the sky and crush him.