Europa Strike(5)

The lighting in the wetbay was poor enough that the colonel couldn’t possibly have noticed the color of Jeff’s skin, so the comment had to be a joke. It hit near enough the mark, however, that Jeff suppressed a wince. “Squared away and shipshape, sir.”

“I’m relieved to hear it.”

In fact, the large ship, with her broad, outrigger construction, was remarkably steady even in rough seas, so he no longer felt the pronounced roll of the ocean’s swell. By the time he’d followed the other officers up a level to the O1 deck and forward to the plot room, he was feeling somewhat better. A crushed ice machine in the wardroom along the way provided him with something cold and wet to hold in his mouth and thin his rising gorge.

General Altman arrived less than ten minutes later. They watched the approach of his UV-20 Condor on one of the plot room’s PLAT cam monitors as it swung in over Neried’s landing pad, hovered a moment on furiously howling tilt-jets, then lowered itself to a gentle touchdown. Altman and three members of his staff disembarked from the craft and were led below through a deck hatch, as a team of sailors rolled the aircraft forward into the upper deck hangar, one of the few above-deck structures on the carrier.

“I don’t know whether to be honored or terrified,” Jeff observed. “Generals don’t usually give briefings. And they sure as hell don’t fly out to meet you. They make you come to them.”

“Altman’s a decent guy,” Mark said. “He’s a rifleman.”

Jeff chuckled. In the Corps, it was said that every Marine—whether recruit or general, computer maven or tank driver or pilot or cook—was an infantryman, a rifleman, first. As with all aphorisms, there was some truth in the saying—as well as some wishful thinking. The every-Marine-a-rifleman concept sounded fine, but as with any large organization, the idealism tended to be lost after a while within the accretions of bureaucracy and daily routine.

But the saying was a popular one, and high praise indeed for a general.

“It is possible,” General Altman told them, an hour later, “that Icebreaker has been compromised. Two days ago, the Chinese government formally filed a protest with our embassy in Beijing, demanding that we stop all attempts to recover ET artifacts on or in Europa, pending the arrival of a PRC transport.”

Altman was a big, bluff man, a twenty-eight-year veteran of the Corps who’d won the Silver Star at Vladivostok and the Navy Cross and Purple Heart in the Cuban Incursion in ’50. An African American, he rejected all labels or political euphemisms as they applied to race; if the subject ever came up, he referred to himself only as a “dark-green Marine.” He had a reputation for bluntness—and for being willing to talk to his men and hear their gripes.

They were seated around an electronic table in the plot room, using the big, flat-screen computer monitor on one bulkhead to display graphics. One of the general’s aides had used his PAD to link into the room’s computer and put up a blurry vid-image of a spacecraft, obviously shot at extremely long range. It was a typical A-M drive ship design, a long, central spine with multiple reaction mass tanks, a heavily shielded drive unit aft with enormous heat radiator fins, a complex arrangement of slowly turning spin-gravity modules forward for the crew. Smaller craft, dwarfed by their huge consort, drifted in her shadow.

“Reconnaissance drones and tracking satellites have been keeping an eye on their two A-M drive ships in geosynch,” Altman went on. “The Xing Feng and the Xing Shan. They appear to be making preparations to get under way. In the past two weeks, cargo and manned launches from Xichang have gone from one a week to one or two a day. They also appear to be loading supplies aboard the research vessel Tiantan Shandian. Everything seems to indicate the Chinese are taking a much stronger interest in their political and military presence in space. Coupled with their ultimatum yesterday, their activities in space are taking on something of a sinister connotation.”

Jeff looked up from his own PAD, where he’d been studying the Chinese ship in detail. “Question, sir?”

“Go ahead, Major.”

“Why would Beijing be so hot about space now? They’re still recovering from their war.”

And it had been a nasty war, at that. Greater China had split into North and South after their civil war earlier in the century, with Tibet going her own and independent way. North China had fought on the European side during the UN War, mostly in the hope of settling old claims to parts of Siberia and Russia’s East Maritime Provinces, while Canton had sat the war out as a watchful neutral. Stopped cold at Vladivostok, she’d refused to sign the Treaty of London, but she’d also pulled her forces back behind the Amur. Within fifteen years, North China had invaded the south. The fighting had been vicious and fratricidal, including chemical and biological weaponry, though no nukes, thank God. The war had lasted twelve years and cost an estimated one and a quarter billion lives and uncounted trillions of yuan in damage. Since most of the fighting had been fought with Maoist guerrilla tactics, there’d been relatively few major battles in all that time, but vast parts of the South, especially, had been completely wrecked, and several major cities, including both Shanghai and the South China capital of Kuangchou, were now uninhabitable ruins.