Europa Strike(93)
“Then I suggest you take it up with your Chinese counterparts, sir.” He glanced at a time reading on his PAD. The bug’s scattergun volley ought to be reaching the Star Mountain by now.
Jeff glanced at Shigeru Ishiwara, who was trying not to look him in the eye, then at Frank Kaminski. Ishiwara looked discomfited at his boss’s outburst. He was surprised at how many Marines had crowded into C-3 to witness the firing. Frank, still looking groggy from his unexplained collapse, was sitting in a chair, staring at the time readout.
They should know soon.
It was a colossal throw of the dice. They would not get another shot with the makeshift railgun, no matter what happened. On the big monitor on the bulkhead, Kaminski’s cannon lay in upended, twisted ruin. The recoil of the single shot lobbed at the distant enemy LZ had been so great the superconductor cables had been shredded, the microwave tower bent back, its rear biting into cracked ice, the A-frame ripped from its frozen moorings and fallen. There would be no second shot, and not much of a target for the oncoming Star Mountain.
No matter. The bug’s warload was on the way, was arriving on target at this moment—almost seven hundred kilos of deep-frozen human waste, leavened with another couple of hundred kilos or so of scrap metal from the destroyed bug. The waste, stored in five-kilo plastic packets and frozen as hard as granite, made a peculiar sort of ammunition at best, but it ought to work.
The CWS station had been under special orders to minimize biological contamination of what was, after all, the first alien biosphere, the first life found outside of Earth. As with research stations in Antarctica a century before, or on Mars and the moon later on, all wastes were either recycled or, in the case of a facility such as Cadmus Base, without the wherewithal to recycle feces as fertilizer, dehydrated, carefully packaged by automatic machinery, and allowed to freeze for later disposal. In the year that Cadmus Station had been manned, they’d accumulated several tons of the stuff, which had been collected in and stored inside one of the surface storage sheds.
The Chinese ship captain would have been keenly aware that destroying the oncoming bug would send a cloud of high-speed fragments his way. Point defense lasers couldn’t get all of them, and it was a simple matter to change the ship’s speed, raising or lowering the orbit slightly. Fifty meters would be enough to miss the hurtling cloud of wreckage.
Which was why Chesty had carefully aimed those garbage cans of meticulously packaged and frozen human feces, aimed them like shotgun blasts along the paths most likely to be taken by a Chinese A-M craft maneuvering to avoid a collision.
His point defense lasers might get some of those hurtling, icy packets, but he couldn’t possibly get them all.
Each ten-kilo package of freeze-dried waste, traveling at 4.8 kps, carried with it the equivalent of 115.2 megajoules of energy, or just over twenty-three kilograms of high explosives.
It was, Jeff thought, a new low in field-expedient weaponry. The weirdest part of it, though, was that he couldn’t shake the mental image of angry primates shrieking as they flung handfuls of feces at a threat.
“A hit!” the Marine sitting at the radar console announced. “Damn! He’s tumbling! I’ve got debris spilling off the target like a pinwheel!”
“Bull’s eye!” Leckie shouted, laughing. “How’s that for letting the shit hit the Shan?”
The other Marines in C-3 burst into cheers, catcalls, and shrieks of joy.
“Hey!” BJ shouted. “That EMP is gonna keep traveling outward at the speed of light, right? Well, what if a thousand years from now, some alien radio astronomer hears it and thinks it’s a message?”
“Yeah,” Pope added. “And how long before they figure out that what it means is, ‘Duck! Here comes a load of shit!’”
The hoots and shrieks redoubled.
Angry primates…
SEVENTEEN
22 OCTOBER 2067
Radio Shack, U.S.S.
Thomas Jefferson
U.S. Synchorbital Shipyard, L-3
1527 hours Zulu
“Please, God,” Kaitlin said with a rush of emotion that came close to despair. “Please don’t tell me they’re killing the relief expedition!”
She was adrift in the radio shack on board the A-M cruiser Thomas Jefferson, sister vessel to the Roosevelt and the Kennedy, already destroyed. The Jeff’s hab modules had been spun up to provide artificial gravity as soon as the Marines had begun arriving and certain “special packages” had been attached to the ship’s forward water storage tank, but the com shack was located abaft of the bridge, in the long vessel’s central axis, so she kept her left foot anchored in a fabric loop on one bulkhead while staring at the open screen of a microPAD strapped to her left forearm. Linked in through the Jefferson’s communications suite, she had a direct, scrambled channel to the office of California Senator Carmen Fuentes.