“However, I wouldn’t care to guess what I would do with a gun pressed to my head. Would any man? Would you?”
“I have my duty, Doctor. And my orders.”
“And I have my duty to my science. To knowledge, to an understanding of where we came from and who we are. It is clear we have a heritage, Major, one set somewhere among the stars, and I intend to learn what that heritage is, one way or another.” He cocked his head to one side, looking almost mischievous. “Perhaps you should set one of your Marines as a guard over me, Major. To destroy me as you plan to destroy the Mantas.”
“I don’t think that will be necessary.” Although his orders did mention that very possibility, damn them. How far could he go along with that level of bureaucratic paranoia? “In any case, there’s no guarantee the Chinese would require your services. I’m sure they have their own scientific team over there, and a mistrust of anyone working with the CWS.”
“Quite true.”
“Tell me, Doctor. Just how would you assess the threat of our generating a bad response from our friends downstairs? I have more than enough to worry about with the Chinese knocking at our door, without also being concerned about aliens dropping in.”
“I feel,” Ishiwara said quietly, “like one of the mice in the walls. There is something extraordinarily large, extraordinarily powerful down there. It knows we’re here, but it hasn’t deigned to notice us…yet.
“And we may not like it when it does.”
Crater floor
Ice Station Zebra, Europa
1310 hours Zulu
“Mission control!” Lucky shouted. “We have separation!”
The platoon channel crackled with laughter, cheers and catcalls. “Whoa!” Corporal Jesus Garcia’s voice called above the rest. “Fifteen point two one meters for Lissa, sixteen point oh five meters for Woj! A new world’s record!”
BJ Campanelli laughed. “Well, a record for this world, anyway!”
“Whaddaya mean, this world, BJ?” Lance Corporal Richard Wojak replied, laughing as he picked himself up off the ice. “You think we could do this on Earth, or any other world?”
“Absodamnlutely,” Corporal Lissa Cartwright added. “This has got to be the best ice dancing anywhere in the universe!”
There were ten of them—“volunteers,” in a you-you-you-and-you way—for a working party on the surface well south of the landing deck. Sergeant Major Kaminski had set them to welding together an A-frame scratched together out of struts taken from the wrecked bug, then using plasma torches to melt the ice so that they could raise the frame and have it freeze into an upright position. The work was well under way when Kaminski and Kuklok had retired back to the E-DARES facility to work out some problem or other with the Marine team working on the crater rim to the southwest, leaving the working party under the supervision of Second Platoon’s Gunnery Sergeant Pope.
The A-frame was up, though, in quicker time than anyone had guessed, which left ten Marines more or less on their own for a half hour or so—too short a time to bother hopping it back to the E-DARES and unsuiting, too short a time to do much of anything, in fact, but amuse themselves on the ice.
The dance competition was the result.
Lucky walked over to BJ and executed a stiff half-bow—the best he could do in his SC-swaddled suit. “May I have the honor of this dance, BJ?”
“I thought you’d never ask!” She extended her right glove and he took it, feeling the slight, invisible shove from the magnetic field enveloping her suit. He gave her arm a tug, pulling her against him, torso to torso.
The superconductor weave in the outer cloth layer of their Mark IIB suits held an electrical charge; its endless circulation around the suit generated a fairly strong magnetic field, polarized outside to inside with the positive charge out—their main protection against the proton flux that made up the majority of Europa’s background radiation. As they pulled themselves together, forcing their suits into close contact, the like charges repelled one another, the pressure becoming stronger the more tightly they pulled themselves together.
Standing together, they took a clumsy step and kickoff in opposite directions on the ice, moving into a tight, counterclockwise spin.
In the hours since the battle, the portions of the crater surface partly melted by the bombardment had refrozen. Several areas, reduced to ice mush by the shock waves from the mass-driven impacts, had refrozen to a mirrorlike smoothness, made slick by the radiation-induced dissociation of the surface ice into a sheen of water and hydrogen peroxide. Walking was so tricky in some areas that safety lines had been set up to assist the progress of people moving about on the crater floor, checking damage, retrieving bodies, or engaged in other working party evolutions.