Then, he realized with a faint shock of surprise, that the last several impacts had been farther off, less intense. “Okay!” Campanelli called over the platoon circuit. She was senior NCO present, and in charge of the section watch. “Move out!”
The outer lock slid open, and the twelve Marines filed out into the cold, dark emptiness of Europa. The E-DARES facility still seemed firmly attached to the ice wall; the Pit continued, as always, to boil and steam meters below. They trotted up the zigzag of the fire-escape ladder and fanned out onto the ice.
“Incoming hostiles now at two kilometers,” Chesty’s maddeningly calm voice announced. “Intended LZ appears to be east, repeat, east of the base crater.”
A tractor was waiting for them there, with a sled—a five-meter-long makeshift pallet on runners pieced together out of fragments of bug and radio mast—chained behind. Peterson clambered into the tractor’s bubble cockpit and fired up the fuel cell engines; the rest climbed onto the sled, grabbed hold of the lifelines strung around the edge, and hung on. The tractor started forward with a lurch, dragging the section along on the ice.
Lucky looked up in time to see the glint of sunlight on steel as one of the Chinese landers passed overhead to the south. Were both of them headed for the same LZ, or were they going to try to split up and divide the Marine defending forces between two attacking columns?
The tractor picked up speed, its cleated tracks hurling up a fine spray of ice, a frosty roostertail that quickly coated the Marines hanging on astern.
Several new craters were apparent across the floor of the main crater, and another notch had been blasted out of the northwestern rim. Kaminski’s Cannon, shielded from overhead view by a number of large sheets of white fabric, was intact, as were the surface storage sheds and the surviving bug and hoppers.
The tractor dragged them three-quarters of the way up the inner slope of the east rim. They spilled off and made the rest of the trek on foot. The ice here was soft on top after the bombardment, but with harder ice below that took the hard-stomped cleats of each tiring step. Lucky dropped to his belly and crawled the last few meters, with his laser rifle cradled in the crooks of his elbows; several Marines had been killed by snipers firing from cover out in the Chaos Badlands to the east, until the rest of them had learned to be more cautious.
“Alert Five in position!” Campanelli called. “We have one new lander down, range 849 meters, bearing nine-eight degrees. Enemy tanks and troops are visible.”
“Roger that, Five,” Major Warhurst’s voice replied. “You are clear to fire.”
“Thank you for those kind words,” BJ said. “Okay, Marines. You heard the man! Take ’em down!”
Lucky propped his 580 on a convenient ice chunk, pivoting it by the pistol grip as he watched the cursor shift back and forth on his HUD. By zooming in on high magnification with the rifle’s sighting system and bringing up the image on the helmet display, he could peer at the base of the Chinese lander with detail enough that it seemed like he was less than a hundred meters away. He could see the lowered ramp, and space-suited troops filing out. Those odd, flat-topped zidong tanke were deploying in a rough, defensive arc.
Movement caught his eye—a Chinese soldier crossing an open area between one upended tumble of ice and another. Range—345 meters. He shifted the cursor and closed his gloved finger over the firing button. The Chinese soldier vanished; Lucky couldn’t tell if he’d hit him or not.
“Here comes that second incoming,” BJ said. “Nodell! Get that Wyvern in operation!”
Lucky glanced up. Shit! The second lander was very close, coming in tail-first in a descending arc that would carry it across the southern part of the crater. He wondered for a moment if the Charlies were trying to fry the Marine ground troops with the star-hot plasma exhaust of their drives, or if the threat was accidental. It hardly mattered; BJ had tried frying a tank the other day with a much smaller plasma jet than that thing sported!
Sergeant Sherman Nodell was carrying the section’s M-614. He braced himself on the inner rim slope, aiming the ungainly Wyvern launch tube into the black sky. “Targeting!” he called. “I have tone! Firing!”
There was a silent flash, gasses spewing from the vents around the load tube, and the SAM streaked vertically into the sky, arcing to the south to close with the huge, gray globe of the Chinese lander. From the opposite side of the crater, a second Wyvern soared into the night; the Marines out on work detail when the raid had begun were emerging from their crude shelters now and joining the fight.
White-yellow flame blossomed against the lander’s stern…and then again. There was no change in the craft’s course; it continued drifting across the sky, from west to east, chasing its own shadow now as it grew closer to the ice.