Europa Strike(33)

The landscape around them grew suddenly brighter. Jeff looked up in time to see an expanding disk of white light above the horizon, about twenty degrees to the right of the sun. The light faded away, and now he was hearing only static in his headset.

“My God!” he said. “What—”

“I have lost contact with the Roosevelt,” his AI said.

A second flash, eye-wateringly brilliant, winked on in exactly the same place in the sky as the first, swiftly expanding, bright as a second sun, fading, then vanishing beneath the light of the real sun. The silence heightened the surreal unreality of the moment.

He was stunned…but his mind was still working, processing the too little information he had to work with. “Marines!” he bellowed over the company general channel. “Incoming! Grab on to something!”

“Something,” in this instance, could only be the safety rail. He grabbed on with both hands, instinctively hunkering down. The fact that there’d been two explosions, plus that instant’s warning of an approaching object, suggested that—

White light glared, impossibly brilliant, against the sharp horizon on the far side of the landing deck. An instant later, he could see the ground wave approaching through the ice, a fast-approaching ripple of fragmenting white…and then the shock hit and he felt the ground buck beneath his boots. He lost his grip on the handrail as the railing itself tore free, and he was sent spinning across the white-lit surface like a string-cut puppet.

Then he was lying flat on his back, staring up into a black sky and the sharp-edged slash of Jupiter, a colorful scimitar suspended far overhead.

He was unhurt. But Roosevelt, and Colonel Norden, and over half of the MSEF, were—gone. Dead.





SIX


12 OCTOBER 2067

Garroway-Lee Residence

Quantico, Virginia

1635 hours EDT

(2035 hours Zulu)





Rena Moore came down the stairs to the e-room and checked in on the kids. Both Kamela and Alan were in front of the big wallscreen, watching history. It was a special her secretary had snagged a week ago on the Net, all about the search for extraterrestrial life, starting with prespaceflight speculation and SETI, and following through to the life discovered in Europa’s ocean, and the explosion of new religions and beliefs arising now as a result of the discoveries on the Moon and Mars.

Rena was a bit old-fashioned in such things, a vid-traditionalist. She knew there were plenty of full-interactive sims the kids could use to actually visit just about any desired place or event in history—she used them sometimes, judiciously—but she still preferred flatscreen documentaries and vids for overview work. She’d been educated on the Net and through downloaded vids and she’d turned out fine. She didn’t quite trust the idea of vids and sims played inside a person’s mind. What were eyes and ears for, if not to handle sensory input?

To her credit, she also understood her own bias. Her parents had told her about television, and a time when education, entertainment, and communications had not been inextricably linked, when there’d been no AIs and no Net demons or secretaries to search the vast electronic sea for that tiny percentage of data that might be of interest to them. Things had changed a lot since the early twenty-first century, and Rena knew they would keep on changing in the future. Maybe Kam and Alan’s kids would go to school through a VR sim playing out inside their brains. Or maybe things would be more outlandish than that—downloaded memories or nanobot implants or the gods knew what.

But that was the future. She would teach the Garroway-Lees the best way she knew how, and that was by lots of personal interaction, discussion, and plenty of flatscreen vids.

Rena was a cissie—a professional Child Care Specialist with a DCC in both primary and secondary education, and associate degrees in history, English, and netsearch. There were still teachers—there were still schools, for that matter, a few—but the vast majority of precollege education these days was handled at home, either through straight home-schooling, AI tutors, or with a CCS to guide and supervise the child’s instruction. She’d been working in the Garroway-Lee household—and one other in the neighborhood—for the past five years.

“How’s it going, kids?” she asked.

“’Kay, I guess,” Kam said. She was twelve and had already announced her intention to be a Marine, like both of her parents, her oldest brother, and her grandfather. “They’re talkin’ about new religions now. They mentioned Neopagan Anism a while ago.”

“Yeah,” Alan said. “Freeze program!” he added, halting the documentary. He turned to face her, grinning his challenge. “Maybe they should’ve interviewed you, Cissie. You could’ve put ’em straight! They were talking about Anism like it was all nonsense!” He was fifteen, and had surprised everyone at his Naming Day ceremony by taking his mother’s family name, Garroway, as his own. He was the artist of the family; he’d already composed several fullsense pieces, textural music that could only be experienced as sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and touches over a Net-linked download with added sensory expanders. Rena didn’t understand the art form herself—fullsensories made her queasy—but she could respect the awards Alan had won last year for Girl in the Boy and Fem-de-Lance, and the fact that he was already earning a decent income as an FS composer.