That looked like a small cargo transport or shuttle of some kind, imperfectly camouflaged beneath a layer of white cloth. Click…locked. Click…fire!
A remarkably easy way to wage war, he thought. He remembered himself and other boys in the village of Huoshan, where he’d grown up, using rubber bands and small pellets to bombard scurrying ants in the dirt, or on a hot summer’s day, using a magnifying lens to roast them one by one. This was like that—only easier.
His first round hit. He saw the blast, a brief throb of light, and a fast-spreading ring that must mark the shock wave of the impact, expanding through the ice. A perfect hit!
His orders were to avoid the various buildings, which might be of use to the army when they captured the base, and to especially avoid the central lake and the partially sunken base facility at its side. Every other target, though, was his for the taking.
That looked like a vehicle of some kind. Click…locked. Click…fire!
Leckie
Ice Station Zebra, Europa
1559 hours Zulu
Lucky didn’t hear the crowbar impact. He felt it, a savage detonation of pure force rising out of the ice beneath him and slamming him up and back like a sledgehammer blow. An insect on a carpet given a sharp snap might have flown as far. He landed on the ice on his back, skittering down and around like an upended turtle on an ice rink until the slope leveled off and he slid into the bottom of the crater.
His fall, fortunately, had been in slow motion, but he’d lost his rifle, a mortal sin for any Marine. His head was throbbing and his neck had an awful crick. The shock must have slammed his head back against the padding of the inside of his helmet. He tasted blood on his lip.
Training took over at once. Was his suit damaged? Was it breached?
His electronics were still working, thank God, and when he chinned up suit status, the display was mostly green. There was damage to his backpack PLSS where he’d landed on it, but it appeared to be limited to his tracking and navigation systems, and to his maneuvering thrusters, which weren’t charged anyway. The suit integrity light was still a bright, steady, and reassuring green…and, more reassuring yet, he heard no shrill hiss, felt no telltale popping in the ears. Rolling over, he scrambled to an all-fours position, looking back up the crater rim. The impact had sent other Marines spinning like bowling pins; there was a ragged new gap in the crater rim where something had speared down out of space and struck deep.
He was still trying to sort out his whirling impressions when a light as bright as a new-risen sun glared into the far-right side of his visor, polarizing the transparency to near black, but only for an instant. Then the ground was yanked from beneath his hands and knees and feet again, flipping him and sending him sprawling once more. A shrill scream sounded in his helmet phones, a shriek abruptly cut off, presumably as the transmitting suit radio failed. He had a moment’s impression of a mass of tangled struts and torn metal somersaulting in slow motion above his head. Desperately, he tried to roll over to get to his feet, slipped not on smooth ice, but on ice that had been pulverized to the consistency of powdery snow, then partly melted. The wreckage of one of the bugs landed twenty meters away, crumpling silently into a twisted heap as fragments continued to rain down across the crater floor.
There was no sound at all associated with the explosion, the whiplashing ground, the falling debris, but his helmet phones babbled a torrent of voices, commands, pleas, terror.
“Watch it! Watch it!”
“Easy now! Don’t panic!”
“Sarge! God! Sarge! Where are you?”
“Has anyone seen Quince?”
“Steady, people! Keep your heads!”
“Oh, my God! My God! My God!”
“Peterson! Wojak! Amberly! Get up here!”
“Help me! Someone! Please! Help me!”
A third flash, closer this time, and an almost immediate flicking of that titanic carpet. Lucky landed on his PLSS for the third time and wondered how long the battered life-support system was going to hold out. His readout showed a leak from one of the oxygen tanks and two of the unit heaters were out, though there was no immediate danger.
Somehow he got to his feet and trudged through mushy ice that was simultaneously boiling and trying to freeze, making his way back to the crater rim. Another impact struck, this time on the east side of the crater floor. He felt the shock, but it was distant, muted somewhat. It didn’t even knock him down. Nor did the next two impacts after that.
The ice has gone soft, he thought. It wasn’t transmitting the shock waves the way it did at first. He wondered if that was something he should worry about. The ice at the floor of the crater was…how deep? Eight or ten meters, he thought, judging by the depth of the pit over by the E-DARES facility. Or…no. He’d read somewhere that nine-tenths of an iceberg was underwater. By that measure, the ice here was ninety meters thick. But did that hold true with a whole icecap?