The group collected a carry cart at one of the base surface hangars beside the landing field, a bright yellow cargo dolly, basically, with a broad, mechanized flatbed on six oversized spiked wheels. Kane hopped into the cab and drove the vehicle across the landing deck to the nearest bug, where the cargo bay doors had already been opened and one of the funny-looking, stingray-shaped submarines with close-folded wings was already being lowered by the bug’s onboard cargo winches. Under Kuklok’s direction, they parked the cargo transport beneath the dangling Manta, then gathered around to help guide it to rest in the cradle on the mech dolly. The work was tricky and potentially dangerous; even here, one of those submarines weighed over twenty-five tons, and once it was moving, it had all the inertia of a 200-ton lump of metal, easily capable of crushing a man who got careless.
They settled down to the work in a brisk, efficient, no-nonsense manner. There was no more skylarking, and only occasional jokes over the chat channel to punctuate the sounds of heavy breathing and one-two-three cadences and orders.
No matter what the antics of Tone and the rest might suggest, Lucky knew, Space Marines were not stupid. The selection process and competitive testing saw to that. But a lot of them seemed to wear ignorance like some kind of badge of honor—a means, perhaps, of distinguishing them from the college-educated officers.
Lucky didn’t subscribe to that. Ignorance was bad, a character flaw that could make you very, very dead in an environment like this one. He’d never gone to college; no way could a poor family from the Upper West Side slum projects of New York City have managed that. But a government-subsidized home computer and its access to Earthnet had offered him a lot more than the virtual sex that had attracted him in the first place. He might have the rep of preferring electronic virtual dates to real ones, but he’d learned a few things along the way.
You couldn’t see the stars from Manhattan, but thanks to the Net, astronomy had captured him at an early age and never loosed its grip. His love of space—the landscapes and star vistas revealed by various telescopy projects, the wonders promised by the Ad Astra when her observations of the Alpha Centauri system made it back to Earth in another four or five years, the Earthnet shows and documentaries and virtual explorer links you could tap into at the touch of a keyboard—all that and more had led him to find the one way a poor kid from the New York projects could get into space…by joining the Marines and getting himself selected for the MSEF.
Someday, he knew, he was going to the stars. There were other races out there—the discoveries cataloged so far in the Cydonian Cave of Wonders proved that much. There were things, people out there stranger than anything ever imagined by generations of Hollywood movie makers or VR sensory download techs. One day, humans would be going out there to meet them.
And the Marines would be along, to protect the ships and people, to protect human interests, to protect all those new worlds that would be opening to human exploration.
Yeah, fuckin’ A. He was going!
TEN
16 OCTOBER 2067
Europan Space
0250 hours Zulu
General Xiang Qiman sat strapped into his couch, watching the evolution unfold on a small flatscreen monitor on the console in front of him. Like grapes detaching from their stem, the last of the spherical Jiang Lei landers were separating from the long, slender axis of the Xing Shan and aligning themselves for their deorbit burn. Thirty-two minutes to go.
He glanced at the man strapped in beside him, swaddled like himself in a heavy, white-fabric space suit, with helmet and gloves not yet donned. Dr. Zhao Hsiang’s bland face showed no emotion, but Xiang knew that the man was fuming. They’d discussed the problem often enough during the burn out from Earth.
“Do not fear, Doctor,” he said. “If your friends have barely reacted to the American presence on Europa, they don’t even know we are here yet.”
“I very much hope that is so, General Xiang. If we’re wrong, we may find we have awakened a giant. An angry giant.”
“The Americans used antimatter charges to drill their hole thorough the Europan ice, yes?”
“Yes…”
“And there was no response from the Singer.”
“None that we know of. But if the Singer intelligence knew the Americans were simply drilling a hole through the ice…”
“And how are they to know that this is any different?”
“The point is, General, we have no way of knowing what they know! And starting a war on their world…”
Xiang shrugged, a bony-shouldered movement all but lost in his bulky space suit. “The potential gains outweigh the risks, Doctor. And it is important to remember that there are two aspects to our mission.”