Europa Strike(74)
“Do it, Marine! On the double!”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
Leckie started moving up the slope.
Niemeyer
On approach to Ice Station Zebra,
Europa
1607 hours Zulu
Corporal Duane Niemeyer peered over the side of the lobber, convinced that they were descending entirely too fast. “Damn it, BJ! Doesn’t this thing have brakes?” he demanded.
“Screw that. Just get that 580 in action!”
Campanelli had both of her hands on the lobber’s attitude controls. The strain had tightened her voice. They were falling toward the Zebra crater, completing their long, arcing trajectory from OP Igloo far over the curve of the horizon to the southwest.
Reaching down, he unstrapped his 580, which had been secured beside the lobber’s right-side seat. He spent the next few seconds concentrating on the warmup procedure, and bringing the weapon up to charge.
The battle was a sprawling, confused affair. From a hundred meters up and southwest of the crater, he could see tiny, running, moving figures, but he couldn’t determine who was who. All of them wore white, and were moving against a background of dappled, twisted whites lightly tainted with browns, blues, and greens. There were some vehicles of some sort lined up along the west rim—probably robot tanks. He’d need something with more kick than a 580 to more than annoy one of those.
He could see the Chinese lander to the north, squatting on the ice like a gray, four-legged soccer ball.
“Don’t look at them,” BJ warned. She must have seen him turning in his seat to see.
“Huh? Why not?”
“They’ve been tracking us since we came over the horizon, and trying to use lasers on us. Low-watt, point-defense stuff. Not much punch at this range, but they’ve put some holes in our undercarriage already, and the targeting beams’ll fry your retinas if you’re looking when they flash.”
He turned his head away quickly, concentrating instead on the crater ahead. They were already holed? Hardly reassuring…
His rifle beeped readiness. Raising it, he watched the crosshair bob and weave across the scattering of tiny figures. Damn! The movement of the lobber kept him from holding any one target long enough to get off a shot. He tried increasing the magnification on his HUD, but that also magnified the movements of the crosshairs. He couldn’t brace himself still long enough.
“Can you hold us still?”
“Negative! Not unless we want that lander to punch us out of the sky!” An attitude control jet fired, rolling them sharply right. His stomach rebelled and he almost vomited.
Somehow he managed to hold steady on one running man, but when he touched the interrogate button on the side of his rifle, the figure on his HUD lit up green, with the word FRIENDLY.
Hastily, he shifted targets. There was someone standing beside one of those flat-topped tanks, just visible through the swirl of freezing steam, and the IFF interrogation brought up the word HOSTILE. He clamped down on the firing button before he could lose the target.
Leckie
Ice Station Zebra, Europa
1609 hours Zulu
Lucky never would have made it so quickly if the ground hadn’t been pulverized by the bombardment at the beginning of the fight. When he’d climbed this slope before—had it only been twenty-five minutes ago?—the ice had been hard. Once moving, he could maintain his momentum with a kangaroo hop, but footing was treacherous, and each time he touched the slope there’d been the danger of having his feet go right out from under him.
Now, the surface of the slope had crumbled to a mushy blend of powder and ice-cube-sized chunks, like blue-white gravel in snow. The stuff dragged at his feet with each lurching step, holding him back, slowing him.
A red light, indicating a paint by an enemy laser, winked on in his HUD. He threw himself flat, searching for the source. To his right, the nearest of the enemy tanks rested hunkered down in the ice rubble, partly enveloped in glittering dust…water freezing in hard vacuum. A space-suited figure moved behind the tank, aiming a Type 110 rifle with a laser sight.
The drifting crystals above the figure’s helmet strobed, suddenly, with blue-white light, like the popping of a camera flash. The figure dropped to its knees, clawing at its helmet, and in that second, Lucky shifted his targeting cursor to the center of the suit and fired, blasting a fist-sized hole from the chest.
He looked up. A lobber was coming in, high and fast. That first laser bolt, partly absorbed and scattered by the frozen vapor, had come from there.
Lucky didn’t stop to think about it. He had a good angle here, halfway up the crater rim, almost looking up the belly of the nearest Chinese tank. He thumbed his 580’s selector switch from pulse to beam, aimed at the tank’s glacis, and fired.