“There is a text message waiting for you from General Duvall at Marine Space HQ. The situation has been declared a Code One.”
“I…understand.” He touched the PAD’s screen and swiftly scanned the message from Duvall. It merely confirmed the orders he was already well aware of.
“Excuse me,” he said, closing the PAD and rising. “I’ve got to go.”
“Why?” David asked. “What is it?”
“Marine forces on Mars have just been put on alert, Doctor,” he said. “There is a possibility that Chinese forces will try to seize the facilities here. I’ve been told to make sure they don’t do that.”
David seemed thunderstruck. He waved at the flatscreen. “But…but what about this? We’ve got to tell Earth.”
“This will have to wait, David,” he said. “Until we know whether or not we have an Earth left to send it to. I’m afraid all data connected with the project, and with the excavations here, has just been classified.”
“What?” David rose, face darkening, furious. “No! Not again! Not the damned censorship of scientific thought again!”
“I’m sorry,” Jack said, and he meant it. He knew how his uncle detested the very thought of controlling the free dissemination of scientific information. “But we’re at war.”
“Fermi’s Paradox questions why the sky is not filled with intelligent life,” David said, bitter. “The Hunters scenario provides a possible answer—that newly emergent intelligences or civilizations are snuffed out deliberately before they can pose a threat to a few well-established races.
“I’m beginning to think we don’t need to invoke the Hunters of the Dawn, however. Human arrogance, stupidity, and short-sightedness will be as effective as the Hunters ever were!”
Jack was forced to agree.
NINE
13 OCTOBER 2067
E-DARES Facility, Cadmus Linea
Europa
1537 hours Zulu
Major Jeff Warhurst looked up from his desk as the automatic door hissed open and Sergeant Major Kaminski rapped hard on the door frame. “Yes?”
“’Scuse the interrupt, sir. I have those reports.”
“Outstanding. Come on in, Ski. Grab some chair.”
“Thank you, sir.” He set his PAD on Jeff’s desk as he took a seat. “How’s the major feeling?”
“Can the third-person crap, Sergeant Major.” Jeff opened his own PAD, keyed the touchscreen to accept a data transmission from Kaminski’s system, and leaned back again. “I’m doing fine. Johnson says I just picked up a few dings, is all.”
“I’m relieved to hear it, sir.”
“So, how are the boys and girls settling in?”
Kaminski eyed one bulkhead, where a flatscreen showed a dark, fog-opaque haze of dark blue-green. “No problems, Major. Just like living aboard ship.” He chuckled. “Hell, it is a ship.”
True enough. The Europa Deep-Access Research Station—E-DARES, for short—had been constructed in Earth orbit, then boosted to Jupiter space by a low-thrust A-M drive. With no atmosphere to worry about on Europa, and less surface gravity than Earth’s Moon, it had been simple enough to gentle the ungainly craft down on ventral thrusters to land in the pit melted through to Europa’s ocean.
At that point, she’d gone from being a space ship to an ocean-going ship, a research vessel afloat on a 250-meter-wide opening into the Europan depths. And then she’d been deliberately sunk.
Or, rather, half sunk.
A century before, the Scripps Institute and the U.S. Navy had employed a research barge for oceanographic research called Flip. Towed into place by auxiliary vessels, the Flip then flooded ballast tanks to submerge her bow until she was literally flipped a full ninety degrees, with only her stern riding vertically above the surface of the ocean.
The E-DARES complex was designed along the same lines as the old Flip. One hundred twenty-three meters long, but massing only 900 tons since most of her length was in the long, cylindrical wasp-waist connecting her bow and stern sections, she rode now with her bow over 100 meters beneath the Europan surface. Her antimatter drive, in the heavily shielded stern section anchored to the ice wall just above the surface, continued ticking over at low power, providing for the base life support systems, and the heat for warming surface water and pumping it deep; the constant circulation of hot water kept the Pit open, with only a thin layer of surface ice. The stern section was snugly moored against the vertical ice cliff ringing the Pit. A fire-escape type scaffolding of railed ladders and platforms gave access from the surface of the ice to the airlock in the side of the station’s stern section. Elevators connected the stern with the bow, where the research labs, quarters, offices, and mess and recreation decks were located, all safely shielded by a hundred meters of ice and water from the hellstorm of radiation at the surface.