Europa Strike(70)

What if the ice crumbled away beneath him? He’d heard that the Europan sea beneath the ice here was eighty to a hundred kilometers deep…sixty miles of cold, dark water, straight down.

And he knew his suit wouldn’t float.

Somehow, he managed to keep walking, though his knees were shaking now as he expected each step to plunge him through the ice and into those black, frigid depths. It took him another dozen steps to remember that he was unarmed. His M-580 had spun off into the ice, somewhere, and he had no idea where it was.

He kept struggling toward the crater rim, however. His assigned position was there, not here in the crater bowl. The Chinese orbital bombardment had swept the Marines off the rim with appalling ease. And the enemy troops must be surging up the outer slope at this moment.

“Weapons free! All units, weapons free!” The red light in his HUD winked off. LOADED now read WEAPONS FREE.

He needed a weapon. He saw one, three meters to the right. A Marine lay on his back, clutching his M-580 against his armored chest. His legs and torso from the ribcage down were…gone. Nothing left but a fast-freezing trail of blood and internals. The inside of the visor was opaque with blood and vomit, a horrible sight, but a merciful one. Lucky couldn’t see the person’s face.

He had to work the stiff, gloved fingers open two at a time, but at last pulled the laser rifle free. Only then did he see the name tag: HUTTON, J.

Sergeant Joseph K. Hutton. A lean, rail-skinny kid from West Virginia, friendly, likable, if a little naïive. Shit…

He knelt in the freezing slush, punching keys on the programming pad on the side of the rifle, praying the mechanism hadn’t succumbed to shock and cold. Each laser rifle had to be tuned to the user’s suit frequency so that it could feed target information and aim points to the helmet HUD. The tuning took a few seconds…and Lucky was afraid he didn’t have them.

A low, flat shape was shouldering its way onto the crest of the crater rim now. Lucky had seen those things in sims and tech briefings: zidong tanke…robot tanks.

Other figures were appearing on the ridge above him now: human shapes in bulky white suits, like the ones the Marines wore, though different in detail of helmet shape, PLSS outline, and the look of the rifles they carried.

He waited for the rifle to charge. Come on…come on!…

Lucky preferred the M-29 ATAR, the primary Marine weapon. Some genius on Earth had decided that the Europan MSEF should carry M-580s, though, because with laser rifles, you didn’t have to ship all of that ammunition across the solar system.

Unfortunately, you had to tune the damned things, and it took them a godawful long time to cycle up to firing charge. Maybe too long.

“Leckie!” It was the major’s voice. He would be jacked in back in C-3, getting feeds from all of the Marines, their suits, their weapon systems. “Where’s your weapon?”

It was like having God looking over your shoulder.

“Tuning a pickup, Major! It’s coming…”

“Breakthrough on the ridge, above your position! Watch yourself! Get some fire on that ridge when you’re charged!”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

The red crosshair reticle lit up on his HUD, accompanied by a shrill, reedy tone signaling the rifle was ready to fire. About time!

Still on his knees, he raised the boxy M-580, swinging it up and around until the reticle centered on one of the space suits clambering over the ridge. His gloved finger slid into the outsized trigger guard and touched the firing button.

There was no flash, no beam, of course. There was no atmosphere to ionize, no dust to illuminate the pulsed thread of coherent light that snapped from his weapon’s muzzle…but the chest of the soldier’s space suit erupted suddenly in a puff of white smoke, water vapor freezing in an instant as it exploded from his ruptured suit. His arms cartwheeled, his rifle spun back down the ridge behind him, and then he fell in an agonizing slow motion, toppling onto the ice.

Lucky struggled to his feet and started jogging forward. With the ground covered by fast-freezing slush, he couldn’t pull the distance-eating bunny bounce, and had to push forward one glue-footed stride at a time. Clumsy…clumsy. He couldn’t move. Warning lights flashed on in his HUD array. His suit was being painted by half a dozen targeting lasers and radar beams.

He dropped for the ground, snapping off another shot as the reticle drifted across another target. Slush splattered and boiled half a meter in front of him…and several fast geysers spurted as rifle slugs tore into the freezing sludge.

To his right, a shoulder-launched Wyvern rocket streaked low across the ice, rising up the face of the hill, striking one of the zidong tanke in the left track with a dazzling flash and sending fragments hurtling. A second robot tank fired, sending a surging splash of ice and water into the black sky, and eliciting a shrill, keening shriek from some Marine.