Europa Strike(55)
“That doesn’t make sense,” Kane said. “To boil water, it’s gotta be hot!”
“Uh-uh. The lower the air pressure, the lower the temperature you need to boil water, remember?”
“Yeah,” DePaul said. He was the scholar of Bravo Company, a kid from Maryland who’d dropped out of college to join the Corps. “Remember your basic physics? Back on Earth, if you want to boil water on top of a mountain, you have to cook it extra long to get it hot enough to kill the bugs in it. That’s ’cause the boiling point of water is lower at high altitude than it is at sea level.”
“Oh, yeah,” Tonelli said. “Like I always remember my basic physics!” The others laughed.
“A wright, you people!” a new voice growled, cutting in on the chat circuit. “No one said you were on leave! Get your asses up here, on the double!”
Lucky held the guard rail and leaned back, looking up. Although the white, bulky suits they were wearing were fairly anonymous, there was no mistaking Gunnery Sergeant Kuklok’s perpetually angry stance, or the stripes and rocker painted onto his shoulder and helmet. First Platoon’s gunny was a twenty-year veteran with five years’ experience as a boot camp DI, and three years more as an instructor at the Quantico Space School.
Not a man, in Lucky’s opinion, to keep waiting.
“On our way, Gunny!” he called, taking the metal steps three at a time as he jogged toward the surface. Movement in Europa’s.13 gravity was easy, a lot like moving on Earth’s Moon in the long, low lope the Marines called the “bunny rabbit bounce.” The tricky part was turning and stopping, once you got yourself plus the mass of eighty kilos or so of space suit and equipment moving. Eighty kilos on Earth might only weigh something like ten and a half kilos here, but it still acted like eighty, tending to keep moving and to do so in a straight line once you got it up to speed.
Lucky reached the top of the ladder, and used a double-handed grip on the railing to jerk himself to a more or less elegant halt a few meters from the glowering, fists on hips form of Sergeant Kuklok. Tone, Killer, and D.P. came off the ladder at his back, colliding with him and nearly sending the lot of them into an untidy sprawl.
“Hey, get off!” Lucky shouted. As he turned, he felt a powerful shove from Tonelli’s suit…the like-charge repulsive effect of his SC field against Lucky’s. Lucky took a step back, trying to keep his balance. His boot slid in a puddle of boiling hydrogen peroxide, and he fell—slowly—to his knees.
His descent, fortunately, was slow enough that he was able to grab hold of the handrail and avoid the complete embarrassment of falling flat on his ass.
“Jesus!” Kuklok bawled. “If I’d known we’d had the Keystone Cops on board, I’d’ve invited the Three Stooges along too! Fall in, Marines! Get yourselves squared away! Damn it to hell, don’t get so close there, or you’ll send each other scooting into next week! Uh-tenn…hut!”
It took a few moments more to get untangled, but the four Marines sorted themselves out and fell into a more or less straight line.
“Okay, Marines,” Kuklok said. “You four have just volunteered for a working party. Right…face! Forrard…harch! Gimmee your left! Your left! Your left-right-a-left!”
Marching in 13 percent gravity proved to be an interesting and largely futile exercise. It did keep them from bunching up, however, and risking another fall as the magnetic fields coursing through the superconducting weave of the Marines’ suits tried to push each other apart. Kuklok, Lucky decided, was definitely an old Corps Marine.
Since his helmet hid his head, he could rubberneck a bit as they marched, peering out the side of his visor. The magnificent grandeur of Jupiter in the eastern sky was staggering…utterly transfixing, a vast, swollen, cloud-banded bow aimed at the shrunken but still brilliant sun just above the horizon. Someone had told him that Jupiter covered more sky than a hundred full Moons on Earth; statistics like that didn’t come close to describing the reality, though. He found he could just make out the faintest of glows within the black circle of Jupiter’s night side and, here and there, he could actually see tiny, pinpoint twinklings of white light. It took him a moment to realize that what he was seeing were lightning storms—storms that must be as big as North America, with lightning bolts discharging in an instant energies equivalent to all the fusion power plants running in the United States right now.
The cloud bands he could see were rust-red, white, and salmon-pink; a tiny crescent, colored orange-red, rode high in the sky above the swollen planet. He tried to see the rings that were supposed to circle Jupiter, but, edge on and coal-dust faint, they simply could not be seen by the naked eye.