Europa Strike(66)
As the lander settled on yielding hydraulics, the cargo bay ramp came down and a sextet of low, flat-topped, tracked vehicles rolled out, their treads spinning glittering bits of ice into the sunlight as they bit the frozen surface. Cameras mounted forward between the tracks relayed separate views to the lander’s AI, which processed them and fed them through to Yang’s virtuality suite.
Each vehicle was two and a half meters long, a meter wide, and just over fifty centimeters high. Each possessed a ball turret set into the forward glacis, mounting a seventy-five megawatt pulse laser. The machines were called zidong tanke, or “automatic tanks.” In fact, they were robot tanks that could either run on a simple hunt-kill program or be teleoperated from a distance. They’d been painted white so that they would blend in with their surroundings, though after a few moments, enough white powder covered their upper decks to camouflage them completely.
The robot tanks spread out in a rough line abreast, grinding silently toward the crater two kilometers away. Behind them, Chinese troops in heavy, white-camo suits with SC-weave radiation shielding, bounced down the lander’s ramp and began dispersing across the plain. The ground here was uneven, but not broken, and gave no cover. The squad leaders had been directed to get their men to the shelter of the crater’s outer rim as quickly as possible. They could begin taking fire at any moment.
“Chinese ship! This is the Confederated World States Europan research base!” Yang heard the words through the earphones he wore, rather than within the virtuality program. This software could handle visual input, but nothing more. “Please halt all unloading activities and open a com munications channel! Please respond! Over!”
“Sounds like they want to talk, Colonel,” the voice of Major Hu, leading the assault, said in Yang’s ears. Yang could hear the rasp of the man’s breathing in his helmet, hear the exertion as he struggled ahead across the ice. “No sign of resistance yet.”
“Keep your people well dispersed,” Yang directed. “And stay close to the tanks.”
Giving a series of mental commands to the lander AI, Yang brought up the camera view relayed from Hu’s helmet and from several of the other troops as well. All of the scenes showed much the same so far…the flat and endless ice occasionally interrupted by the suited shape of another soldier, or the low, white lurchings of a robot tank.
“Chinese force!” The enemy’s voice repeated. The words were in putonghuà, and Yang realized that the speaker must be an AI programmed to translate into his language. Had the Americans been expecting the Chinese landing? Or was the AI expert in a number of languages, simply as a matter of course? The answer might be important. If the Chinese force had been expected, if the enemy was waiting for them now, on the reverse slope of the crater rim…
“Continue the advance!” he snapped, speaking on the command frequency. “Secure the crater rim, and they will surrender!”
Leckie
Ice Station Zebra, Europa
1545 hours Zulu
Corporal Lucky Leckie jogged up the inner rim of the crater in long, loping kangaroo bounds, reaching the top, dropping to his heavily padded knees, then jamming the butt of his M-580 laser rifle into the ice to lower his body full-length. All movement in this light gravity seemed surreal and slow, a kind of slow-motion dance that left him with heart pounding and his breath coming in short, ragged gasps through a dry mouth. A guy could get shot eight or ten times in the long seconds it took him to hit the dirt.
“Dirt” in the figurative sense, of course. Some of the ice looked pretty dirty, but it was still ice.
“Where are they?” he called. He was on the west rim of the base crater, with the sun high behind him, at his back. He could see the Chinese landing craft, like a round, gray Christmas tree ornament on the far horizon, but he couldn’t see anyone on the ground.
“Use your optics, Lucky,” Gunnery Sergeant Kuklok called. “Radar has seventy-three targets out there right now, fanning out and moving this way!”
He used his chin to toggle his helmet’s HUD overlay. On infrared, he could see movement—a dozen blobs of yellow and green against the cool greens and deep blues of the background terrain. Range: nine hundred meters, and closing.
He switched to the radar feed, and the targets proliferated, a scattering of tiny green squares behind a horizontal line of six triangles. Rali units set along the crater rim were picking up the advancing Chinese troops and vehicles and feeding their positions to the Marines’ helmet HUDs by way of the submerged E-DARES command center.
He selected a target—one of the triangles indicating a moving vehicle of some sort—and raised his M-580LR. Switching the weapon on, he started the warm-up cycle, and heard the rising whine in his headset indicating the power buildup in the capacitor pack. At the same time, a bright red cross hair reticle appeared on his HUD as the targeting unit on the rifle transmitted his aiming point to his helmet electronics.