at the last possible moment, executed a course change for intercept and almost missed. Kennedy’s sudden maneuver—firing forward thrusters to reduce her orbital velocity—almost caused the Chinese missile to pass across her bows.
But a second course change countered the Kennedy’s move, and the force package struck far forward, ripping through the thin metal shell of the Peaceforcer cruiser’s forward reaction mass tank. The electromagnetic bottle anchoring a pea-sized fragment of antimatter in the hard vacuum of the package’s warhead failed, the antimatter slammed into metal and water, and then a fireball as hot as the surface of the sun blossomed into deadly radiance.
Water flashed into steam and exploded into space. The cruiser, almost 200 meters long, was whip-snapped by the detonation into a sudden and violent spin, tumbling end over end. Two of the hab modules, their coupling and spin mechanisms overstressed by the sudden off-balance acceleration, wrenched partly free, then broke away entirely, hurtling into the night with hundreds of smaller fragments as the great vessel began to tear itself apart.
The second package, homing on the heat and radiation of the first explosion, had more time to correct its intercept vector, and slammed into the Kennedy’s wreckage amidships. The explosion engulfed half the ship, and left only spinning fragments behind.
At its present position, the twin bursts of radiation marking the Kennedy’s destruction would take twenty minutes to reach Jupiter—and twenty-eight to make it across the void to Earth.
12 OCTOBER 2067
In Europa orbit
2007 hours (Zulu)
“Thirty seconds to release,” the voice of the Roosevelt’s skipper, Captain Galtmann, said in Jeff’s ear. “How’re you boys and girls making out over there?”
“Squared away, sir,” Jeff replied. “Ready for drop.” He tried to force some semblance of discipline on his unpleasantly twisting stomach. He hated zero G.
“Happy landings, then. We’ll see you again in six months!”
“Remember the surface radiation,” Colonel Norden’s voice added, rasping. “Get your people under cover stat, until we can give those suits a full checkout in field conditions.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” Jeff replied. “We’ll set a new speed record for cross-country ice-jogging.” Although, damn it, if the suits didn’t work, none of them would live long enough to even reach shelter. The surface of Europa, despite the cold, was hot….
“Keep me posted up here. I’ll be down in two orbits—say, 180 minutes.”
“Roger that. We’ll be waiting, sir.”
Jeff craned his head, trying to see out the tiny porthole beside his seat and get a glimpse of the Roosevelt. His suit, with its cumbersome helmet, and the fact that he was strapped down in the narrow, hard-backed seat, kept him from seeing much of anything. All that was visible through the port was the dead-black of space, and a few scattered stars, plus a little bit of the bug’s framework embracing the pressurized passenger module.
The bug was similar to lobbers and other short-haul transports used by the Marines during various Lunar operations. Intended solely for operation in vacuum, it was completely unstreamlined—a chunky, squared-off bottle shape housing command deck and passenger/cargo spaces, plus spherical fuel tanks and a chemical rocket engine all crammed together inside a webwork of titanium/carbon fiber struts, with six landing legs, powerful external spotlights, and small maneuvering thrusters on flanks and belly. It was an ungainly-looking vehicle, well deserving of the Marines’ pet name for them: bugs. Each was thirty-three meters long, with space aboard—with some creative cramming—for one platoon, in this case the forty-one men and women of Second Platoon, Bravo Company, plus six of the Navy SEALs with the DSV team.
The Roosey carried two bugs, plus four similar craft used strictly for transporting cargo. The Ops Plan called for using both bugs to ferry all of Bravo—eighty-one Marines and six SEALs—to the CWS Cadmus Research Station on Europa. They would then refuel and rendezvous with the Roosey to take aboard the headquarters and support platoons in the next run, and finally return a third time for Charlie Company. The cargo landers would be shuttling back and forth between the surface and orbit for the next two days, bringing down not only the four Manta submersibles and all of the Marines’ supplies, but a load of consumables for Cadmus Station as well.
Cadmus Station consisted of twenty-five men and women from six nations. Most had been on Europa since the station had been established over a year before, and they were totally dependent on occasional ships from Earth for food and spare parts.
Water, at least, they had plenty of. Europa’s surface was a sheath of solid water ice, enclosing an ocean fifty to one hundred kilometers deep—five to ten times deeper than the deepest ocean abyss on Earth.
“Eight seconds to release,” Lieutenant Walthers said from the bug’s command deck. “Hang onto your lunches back there! And three…and two…and one…release!”
There was a slight jar as the mechanical grapples connecting the bug to the Roosey’s spine swung open, and a half-second burst from the dorsal thrusters set them in motion. The admonition to the Marines to retain their lunches seemed uncalled for…until the thrusters fired again and the bug rolled sharply to port.
Through his narrow window view on the starboard side, Jeff saw the Roosevelt swing ponderously into view, all light and midnight-dark, a long, slender rail with bulbous water tanks attached along her entire length, her habs like four sledgehammers attached at the handles still slowly rotating just aft of the forward tank. During acceleration, the rotation was halted and the habs folded back against the ship’s spine, preserving the up-down conventions of each deck. Once the Roosevelt had entered orbit around Europa, however, the habs had redeployed while the bugs were made ready for the descent. Heat radiators spread astern like enormous, squared-off tailfeathers. Getting rid of excess heat in vacuum was always a major spacecraft design problem, and the antimatter reaction of the drive created a lot of excess heat.
Those last twelve hours that the drive had been running, with the Marines on board stewing in their own overheated juices, had been a nightmare.
The bug continued its roll, dragging the Roosevelt out of Jeff’s line of sight. He was hoping for a glimpse of Jupiter, but the next thing he saw was a vast arc of darkness swallowing the stars one by one. The lights illuminating the bug’s passenger deck were dim and amber, but still bright enough that he couldn’t see any detail in the night outside the craft. They were falling over Europa’s night side.
He’d seen Europa during their final approach, as well as during training sims, of course. The moon looked like nothing so much as a straw-colored marble heavily crisscrossed by long, straight lines of a deeper, reddish color.
The bug’s main engines fired their deorbit burn, and Jeff’s stomach lurched at the sudden resumption of acceleration, a huge hand clamping down across his chest. Then, just as suddenly, the hand was gone and he was weightless again.
But the Roosevelt was falling away above and ahead, continuing to orbit the moon while the bug descended rapidly toward the surface, following a long, descending curve that would take them halfway around the moon. He thought he could make out something of the Europan surface now, irregular patches less black than their surroundings, glossy smooth areas, perhaps, illuminated by starlight. Then, quite suddenly, black gave way to darkest gray, lightening swiftly as the far horizon, still curved, took fire from the fast-rising Sun.
The bug swept
