Europa Strike(72)
It could have been much worse. Apparently, the enemy warship had not been targeting the main base structures. Probably they wanted to preserve those for themselves. Why smash a perfectly good base to pieces when you could move in and use it for your own purposes? But in a terrifying five seconds or so of bombardment, the MSEF had suffered a 16 percent attrition rate—a shocking loss that was certain to seriously hurt Marine morale. And unless they could organize themselves up there, those losses were going to be far worse than that. The Chinese troops were spilling down into the crater now, firing wildly at everything that moved. Several Marines had been caught up in wild, savage, hand-to-hand actions. Jeff couldn’t keep track of them all. He didn’t dare try. If he let his attention become focused on any one Marine, and one small group of Marines, he could miss the bigger picture, and maybe get all of them killed.
One thing he could do was release the XM-86 Sentries, letting them seek and fire upon any target that wasn’t broadcasting on the correct IFF frequency. There were two set up along the west rim, still upright after the bombardment, and their elongated, white-metal heads began pivoting rapidly as they sprayed the nearest targets with deadly bursts of 70-megajoule destruction. He’d already released the lock on all personal weapons.
“Chesty! Where are the slaws?”
Two Marine icons, widely separated, lit up with green halos. One, wielded by Sergeant Emilio Gonzales, was already in action, laying down a rapid-fire barrage against the advancing Chinese, taking them from their right flank, chopping them down. The other, with Lance Corporal Ross Muller, appeared to be out of action—a malfunction.
Kaminski was nearby. Jeff tapped twice. “Frank! Warhurst. Check Muller, ten meters to your left! He’s having some trouble with his slaw. Get that weapon into action!”
What else could he do?
Across the open expanse of ice, Gunnery Sergeant Kuklok had rounded up ten Marines and was working his way back up the slope of the inner rim, trying to reach a position where they could fire down on the enemy, and maybe get behind them. The robot tanks, though, posed a difficult problem. Two of Kuklok’s people had already been picked off.
Double tap. “Kuklok! Warhurst! Hold your position!”
Double tap. “Tonelli! Can you pick off those damned tanks on the ridge?”
“Working on it, sir!”
“Do it! Before they cut us to pieces!”
Double tap. “Kaminski! Is that slaw working yet?”
“Negative, Major. Capacitor’s crapped out! Need a spare from stores!”
“Okay! Screw that! I need you to round up a tank-killing team. Grenade launchers. Wyverns. Whatever you can find. Kill those tanks!”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
On the simulation, the icon representing Tonelli darted forward, moving in short, quick dashes, making its way to the tangle of wreckage that was all that was left of one of the Marines’ bugs. The icon was precisely like the figure in some sort of military computer game. It was damned hard to look at that display and not to think of it as a kind of enormous, complex game, with bloodless little icons moving about as he issued his commands.
But those were people out there, and they were dying.
A point of white light flashed from Tonelli’s icon toward the ridge above him, impacting in the ice in front of one of the tanks. Shit! A miss!
The tank returned fire, and the Tonelli icon winked out, replaced an instant later by a grayed-out figure sprawled on the ice, and the grim letters KIA.
Damn it, what more could he do? He felt so damnably helpless.
Kaminski
Ice Station Zebra, Europa
1605 hours Zulu
“Laplace! Waggoner! Jelly! Garcia! Brighton! All of you, with me!”
Frank Kaminski bounded across the ice to the shadow of the wrecked bug, stooping at the side of the body sprawled there, face up. Corporal Gerald Bailey’s left arm had been torn off, leaving a bloody smear behind it across the ice as a seething frost of freezing water vapor and atmosphere settled over the ragged hole in Bailey’s side. Kaminski pulled the Wyvern launcher from Bailey’s right hand and tossed it to Sergeant Jellowski, then rolled the body over to get at the reload pack attached to the side of Bailey’s PLSS. Extracting a 5-centimeter rocket from the pack, he attached it, still in its load tube, to the rear of the Wyvern. Jellowski positioned the weapon with the load tube over his shoulder.
“Shit!” Jellowski yelled.
“What?”
“Can’t get a tone! They’ve muffled in!”
The robot tanks on the crater rim were spaced ten to twenty meters apart, positioning themselves so that only their glacises and their ball-mounted main guns were visible. The surface ice up there had been broken by the ground shock waves from the bombardment, and they’d back-and-forthed to work themselves down into snug, shallow trenches that made them damned hard to get at. Evidently, they were using some sort of venting system to get rid of excess heat down and away from the front of the vehicle; clouds of steam rose from the rear of each tank, rapidly crystallizing into clouds of ice.