Europa Strike(68)
The Chinese had stopped, the nearest still six hundred meters out. What was going on?
“Listen up, everybody.” It was Major Warhurst, speaking over the company channel. “Looks like the ship that brought these guys has changed orbits. It’s just now coming up over the western horizon, and it’ll be passing straight overhead in another few seconds.
“We don’t know what they intend. They haven’t tried to talk to us yet, or responded to our challenges. It’s possible they intend to try softening us up with a crowbar barrage.
“If so, keep down, don’t panic, and remember your training! They’re in orbit, which means they’ll pass overhead pretty quickly, enough for a quick series of strikes, but nothing they can sustain. Listen to your squad leaders, and don’t do anything stupid. You’ll come through okay.”
Shit, Lucky thought. Shit, shit, shit! Crowbars!
You didn’t have to pack high explosives into a shell or warhead, or generate an intense beam of coherent light or antimatter particles to cause some serious damage to a target. The big guns of most naval vessels now, both those afloat and those in space, were mass drivers, long-barreled weapons that used superconductor cable to generate intense, fast-moving magnetic pulses that could grip a steel-sheathed projectile and accelerate it in a fraction of a second to velocities that could kill through the release of kinetic energy alone.
In 2042, the kinetic energy released by a falling fragment of a French spacecraft had wiped out Chicago as effectively as a small nuke; the gentle rain of plutonium dust from the ship’s radioactive pile afterward had been a largely gratuitous extra.
A lump of lead thrown by hand at a few tens of kilometers per hour hurt. The same bullet propelled by expanding gases in a rifle’s firing chamber to velocities of a kilometer and a half per second killed.
And the same bullet, accelerated by a mass driver to a hundred kps, didn’t simply kill. It vaporized.
“Crowbar” was the slang for lumps of inert metal fired from a railgun in low orbit. Usually massing ten kilograms and accelerated at 50 to 100 gravities, they struck with terrible force. Ten kilos coming in at ten kilometers per second released 5 × 108 joules—the equivalent of detonating 100 kilos of high explosives.
And in a few more seconds, a Chinese ship was going to be sailing overhead, spitting out crowbars like machinegun bullets.
No wonder the damned Chinese had stopped their advance out there on the ice field. They were going to wait for the crowbar barrage, then move in and mop up the leftovers.
The seconds dragged by, as Lucky’s panic grew to a shrieking intensity.
Chinese People’s Naval
Strike Cruiser Xing Shan
50 kilometers above
Ice Station Zebra
Europa
1559 hours Zulu
The doctrinal manuals called it air superiority, a concept that remained accurate despite the fact that there was no air involved. In another sense, it could be considered the age-old ploy of grabbing the high ground. The Xing Shan had eliminated the American communications and military satellites already in orbit around Europa, and was moving now to secure a position of unquestioned superiority of position at the top of the Europan gravity well.
Major Li Peng Zhou of the People’s Army Space Force peered into the twin eyepieces of the targeting console, his hand on the track ball to his right. Through the oculars, he could see a magnified view of the CWS base site ahead and below, a large crater with what looked like a tiny lake in the center. Xing Shan’s AI, accumulating tracking data from hundreds of separate sources, condensed that data and displayed it as an overlaid scattering of bright red dots against the faintly blue to green background of ice.
The red dots were possible targets, selected by their infrared emissions or, in some cases, their radar returns. Most were individual troops, scurrying about the illusory shelter of their crater like ants at the bottom of a bowl, stringing themselves out along the western rim to face the advance of Yang and his troops.
The image of the crater was oblique at the moment; Xing Shan was passing almost directly over the Chinese position, and at this altitude, the crater was halfway to the horizon. As the ship continued to drift along its orbit, however, more and more of the crater interior was revealed, until Li was looking almost directly down into the bowl.
He moved his right hand, and the bright green targeting cursor drifted across his line of sight, settling at last on the crest of the crater rim near a thick clustering of red dots. A touch of a button locked the aim point; a click of the mouse button fired the Xing Shan’s main weapon.
The acceleration of ten kilos of inert depleted uranium jacketed in steel gave sufficient recoil that Li could feel the huge vessel lurch slightly, like the kick of acceleration from the firing of a maneuvering thruster. His targeting lock was automatically released; he spun the track ball to lock in on another target.