“Any kids?”
“No, sir. Do I take it that I’m being reassigned out-Solar, General?”
“I guess you could say that. It’s volunteers only, and it’s long term. Very long term. But it’s carrying a Career Three.”
“Goddess! Where are they sending me?”
“That,” Cassidy said, “is classified. They won’t even tell me. But they want you back on Earth so they can talk to you about it. Open up and I’ll pass you what I have.”
Ramsey uplinked to the local netnode with a coded thought and tuned to the general’s channel. Information flickered through his awareness, resolving itself into stark words hanging before his mind’s eye. There wasn’t much.
FROM: USMCSPACCOM, QUANTICO, VIRGINIA
TO: THOMAS JACKSON RAMSEY, COLONEL, USMC HQ DEPOT USMC MARS PRIME
FROM: DWIGHT VINCENT GABRIOWSKI, MAJGEN, USMC
DATE: 2 JUN 38
SUBJ: ORDERS
YOU ARE HEREBY REQUIRED AND DIRECTED TO REPORT TO USMC SPACCOM WITH YOUR COMMAND CONSTELLATION, DELTA SIERRA 219, FOR IN-PERSON BRIEFING AND POSSIBLE VOLUNTARY REASSIGNMENT.
THE IP PACKET OSIRIS (CFT-12) WILL BE MADE READY TO TRANSPORT COMMAND CONSTELLATION DELTA SIERRA 219 TO USMC SPACEPORT CAMP LEJEUNE, DEPARTING MARS PRIME NO LATER THAN 1200 HOURS LT 3 JUNE 2138, ARRIVING CAMP LEJEUNE SPACEPORT NO LATER THAN 9 JUNE 2138.
OFFERED MISSION REQUIRES FAMSIT CLASS TWO OR LOWER. RECENT CHANGES IN INDIVIDUAL FAMSITS SHOULD BE UPLINKED TO USMC SPACCOM PRIOR TO SCHEDULED DEPARTURE.
OFFERED MISSION ASSIGNMENT CARRIES CAREER THREE RATING.
SIGNED: D. V. GABRIOWSKI
This, Ramsey reflected, would not be an ordinary duty reassignment. Career Three meant a big boost to his career track…the equivalent of a major combat-command assignment or a long-term independent command, possibly both. The famsit requirement could only mean a long deployment, a couple of years at least.
Where the hell were they sending him, Europa?
Which reminded him…
“They want my whole constellation to go Earthside with me,” he said.
“I know Captain DeHavilland and Sergeant Major Tanaka are at Cydonia,” General Cassidy replied. “A C-5 has already been dispatched to bring them in. The rest of them are here at Prime, aren’t they?”
“Actually, sir, I was thinking of Cassius. He was seconded to Outwatch when I was assigned here. He’s been on Europa for eight months.”
“I don’t have any information about your sym, Colonel. But this is damned hot. I would imagine that Quantico has already made provisions to bring him back as well.”
If so, this assignment was hot, hotter than a class-four solar flare. The Corps was not in the habit of casually shuttling command constellations from Mars to Earth just for a briefing…and sure as Chesty Puller was a devil dog, it wasn’t in the habit of ferrying a lone AI symbiont all the way back from Outwatch duty in the Jovians.
Where were they being sent?
He had a pretty good idea already—there weren’t that many possibilities—and the thought both thrilled and terrified….
2
2 JUNE 2138
Listening Post 14, the Singer
Europa
1711 hours Zulu
And further still from Earth, some 780 million kilometers from the warmth of a shrunken, distance-dwindled sun, a solitary figure crouched on top of the half-surfaced ruin of a half-million-year-old artifact, high above the swarming camps of humans who studied it. The figure was not human, and in this modality didn’t share even a basic humanoid shape with his builders. Humans called this model “the spider,” because of the low-slung, flattened body, the eight spindly legs, and the cluster of eye lenses and manipulators set into his forward armored casing.
He was patient, as only an artificial intelligence could be patient. AI-symbiont CS-1289, Series G-4, Model 8, known to his human companion as Cassius, had waited here in the icy cold for just over 4.147 megaseconds now, some forty-eight days in human terms. By slowing his time sense by a factor of 3,600, however, his wait thus far had seemed more like nineteen hours, and even those hours, passing uneventfully, were accepted without emotion or anxiety, as much a part of Cassius’s environment as the ice and the near-perfect vacuum around him.
The surrounding landscape—icescape would be a more appropriate term—was a jumble of crushed and broken structures, towers, pylons, Gothic arches, and towering stacks of smoothed and round-cornered buildings, all encrusted with mottled gray-black and white ice. The swollen orb of Jupiter hung low in the sky, just above one of the radiation-blasted pressure ridges that crisscrossed the icy moon’s frozen surface. Europa circled Jupiter in just over three days, thirteen hours. With the time compression, eighty-five hours passed in what seemed to Cassius like a minute and forty-one seconds; shrunken sun and unwinking stars drifted across the sky from horizon to horizon in just fifty seconds. The swollen orb of Jupiter itself always remained in the same area of the sky, bobbing with Europa’s libration as the moon orbited in tide-locked step about its primary, but the banded disk waxed and waned through a complete cycle of phases, from full to crescent and dark, then back to full, all in a single time-compressed “day.” The other Jovian moons, from the silvery disk of Ganymede to a handful of stars, circled the giant planet, each at a different pace. Beneath that spectacular light show, across Europa’s frozen surface, shadows swung along the undulating ice, shrinking with the fast-rising sun, vanishing at high noon, then lengthening into the darkness of the short night, a cycle three days long compressed into a perceived handful of seconds.