Europa Strike(90)

Asterias Linea, Europa

2049 hours Zulu



Downer Niemeyer wished that BJ were here. Unfortunately, she’d just been given a field promotion to gunnery sergeant and put in charge of Second Platoon, which meant she was no longer as expendable as she’d been before. Since he’d had experience piloting lobbers as had she, he’d been asked to take Lance Corporal Gary Staunton with him on a jaunt a thousand kilometers southwest of the base.

It had been a long, brutal trip, too. The idea was not to let the enemy see them coming, so the approach had been made through a series of short, low, ridge-skimming hops instead of one long, high one. The final approach had been made scant meters above the ice, slipping up to a low pressure ridge east of the enemy LZ. They’d touched down and climbed the ridge on foot in order to avoid enemy radar or lidar sweeps.

It had worked. Four Chinese landers were visible on the western horizon, together with a radio mast and several surface buildings. Through their helmet optics, electronically magnified, they could see space-suited soldiers on sentry-go at the base of the landers, and several of the ever-present robot tanks.

For the past three hours, they’d crouched on the ridge top, taking turns observing the base. They were far over the horizon from the CWS base, and unable to communicate; in any case, they were under orders to maintain strict EM security, with no leakage at all to tip the enemy off that they were there. Instead, they were to watch…unsure of exactly when the package would strike.

Observe the strike, and try to get an idea of the damage, Warhurst had told them before they’d left the base nearly seven hours earlier. If we can hurt them, if we can even just scare them badly enough that they’ll back off, we have a chance for a relief expedition to make it out from Earth.

Downer had just decided that something must have gone terribly wrong, that Kaminski’s cannon had not worked after all, when the Chinese landers were silhouetted by an intense, blinding flare of white light blossoming from the Europan horizon, a light so bright it momentarily outshone the shrunken sun, and caused Downer’s helmet visor to polarize to black.

The shock wave reached them long seconds later, diminished by distance to a rumble felt through the ice.

The landers remained on the horizon, apparently untouched. Through his optics, Downer could see that the radio mast was down and two of the buildings appeared to have collapsed, but there was little other obvious damage.

Beyond the Chinese LZ, a great, frosty white cloud was seething against the night sky. Downer had seen a cloud like that before, a much smaller one—the cloud of freezing steam boiling above the Pit, back at Cadmus.

The package had missed the enemy LZ. It had breached the ice, opening the ocean to space, but it had missed, damn it, and the shot had been wasted.

Gary tapped his shoulder, and pointed. The second member of the OP had been monitoring a tripod-mounted EM scanner, a device designed to pick up the electromagnetic emissions of enemy troops and vehicles. It served as a kind of passive radar, one that read the electronic noise others made, without giving away its own position by broadcasting on the EM spectrum.

Downer looked at the screen, and his eyes widened. As planned, the enemy cruiser Star Mountain was above the horizon, and if the commentary scrolling up the side of the scanner’s screen was any indication, it was changing course from an equatorial orbit to one that that would take it over the CWS base.

Downer nodded vigorously, and pointed back down the ridge. They had to warn the base, hopefully without bringing down the entire Chinese Expeditionary Force around their heads.

By the time the Star Mountain had passed across the sky to the north and vanished again below the northeastern horizon, they’d boarded their lobber, brought the pile temperature up, and started feeding expellant into the main core tanks.

“Kick it,” Downer said. It was the first word spoken since they’d arrived near the Chinese LZ. With a shudder, the open-top spacecraft rose, drifted a moment, then began accelerating, canting over to put some horizon between it and the enemy landers.

“Zebra, Zebra, this is OP Iceberg. Stand by for encrypted transmission.”

He was staring back at the Chinese LZ as he spoke, knowing his suit camera was picking up what he saw. From two hundred meters up, the crater punched by the railgun round was a vast, steaming black oval perhaps a half kilometer across. The round, with the destructive power of a one-to two-kiloton nuclear blast, had punched through the ice all right, but overshot the enemy LZ by a good five kilometers.

“Iceberg, Zebra,” sounded in his headset, blasted by static. “We are reading you, but poorly. Please repeat, over.”