Читать книгу Europa Strike - Ian Douglas, Matthew Taylor - Страница 8

20 SEPTEMBER 2067

The Palace of Illusion

Burbank, California

2130 hours (Zulu minus 8)

Why, Colonel Kaitlin Garroway asked herself, do I come to these damned functions?

The answer was obvious, of course. Because the Corps wants well-rounded, well-balanced, socially ept officers and it wouldn’t look good if you turned down too many invitations. She had to ask the question nonetheless. She always felt so damned out of place at these affairs; at least the proverbial fish out of water had managed to evolve legs and lungs after a few million years. She held no such hopes for herself.

Once upon a time, social gatherings of this sort had been held in private homes—well-to-do private homes, to be sure, but homes all the same. If the guest list was simply too big for the living room, a reception hall might be rented for the occasion.

Nowadays, an entire minor industry thrived to provide suitable ambiance for the evening. The Palace of Illusion was run by a major area theme park to cater expressly to formal social events. She wondered how much all of this had cost—the lighting and special effects, the live music, the endless tables of food, the sheer space: the grounds and gardens outside on a hilltop overlooking the dazzling horizon-to-horizon glow of Greater Los Angeles; a Grand Hall so large the walls were lost in the artificial mists and play of laser holography designed to create a sense of infinite space; and elsewhere, private rooms, conversation bubbles, or even private VR spheres designed to accommodate social and conversational groupings of every size and taste.

Several thousand people were in attendance. Kaitlin felt completely lost. She wished Rob, her husband, was here, but the lucky bastard was on the other end of the continent right now, CO of the Marine Space Training Command at Quantico, and he’d been able to plead schedule and a meeting with the Joint Chiefs to duck the invitation. It was harder for Kaitlin. Her current assignment had her in command of the 1st Marine Space Regiment, which consisted of the 1st and 2nd Marine Space Expeditionary Forces, and various support elements. Normally, she was in Quantico too, but for the past month she’d been stationed at Vandenberg, commuting by HST on those few weekends she had free.

All of which had left her without an acceptable excuse for being here tonight.

She wandered the fringes of the Great Hall, looking for someone she knew. She had her personal pinger on, set to alert her if she came within fifty meters of any other pinger broadcasting an interest in things that interested her: the Corps, recovered ET technology, science fiction, programming—especially cryptoprogramming—chess, anything involving Japanese language or culture. It was also searching for any of a handful of people she knew who might be here. So far, no luck. Senator Fuentes was here, of course; it was her party. Twenty-five years ago, Colonel Carmen Fuentes had been her CO in the desperate fight for Tsiolkovsky on the Lunar far side. Unfortunately, the senator was surrounded five deep just now by well wishers, sycophants, politicians, and social climbers. Kaitlin didn’t have a chance in hell of breaching those defenses.

She wandered through the crowd, amusing herself by observing the variations in dress and social custom. Kaitlin was wearing the new formal Blue Dress Evening uniform—long skirt, open jacket with medals and broad red lapels over ruffled white blouse, and the damned silly gold braid epaulets that made her feel like she was walking around with boards balanced precariously on her shoulders. And heels. She hated heels. Heels had been abandoned by progressively thinking women fifty years ago. All she needed to feel a perfect fool was a sword and scabbard.

There were quite a few of those in the room. Most of the male Marine officers were in full Blue Dress A uniform, with swords—the famous Mameluke blade first presented to Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon for the capture of Derna in 1805—at their sides.

Corps tradition. It was everywhere she looked. Those red stripes on the legs of their pants, for instance, symbolized the bloody Battle of Chapultepec in the Mexican War, the “Halls of Montezuma” immortalized in the Marine Corps Hymn.

Most of the people at the gathering, however, were civilians, and Kaitlin found herself feeling quite out of place with the creatures—as alien to her way of thinking as the Builders or the An or any of the myriad species glimpsed from the Cave of Wonders at Cydonia. Their dress ran the colorful gamut from full traditional formal to almost nude; complete nakedness was still frowned upon in most social circles in all but small and informal gatherings, but donning nothing but footwear, suitably fashionable technological accessories, and skin dyes or tattoos was customary for larger parties, if still mildly daring.

The creature confronting her now was a case in point. He was clad in the new technorganic-look, half hardware appliqué, half dyetooed skin. He wore a visible pinger on his right shoulder which was pulsing orange light at the moment, an indicator that he was interested in sexual diversions of any kind. Orange dyettooes covered half his body in what looked like Sanskrit characters, including his genitals—just to make sure that everyone knew he was available for play.

Kaitlin preferred the old days, when there’d always been a hint of mystery, even suspense, with any new and casual meeting.

The times, the culture, were simply changing too damned fast.

“Blue stellar!” the dyed apparition said. “You’re Colonel Kaitlin Garroway, First Marine Space Force! Your pat was Sands of Mars Garroway, your—”

“I do know who I am,” she said, a bit more sharply than she’d intended. She still couldn’t get used to the new habit people had of announcing themselves by announcing you…an ostentatiously irritating means, basically, of proving they had a good Farley program running in their PAD assistants.

“Tek! Been progged to ’face with ya, Colonel. Saw you on the list when I dunelled it and nearly maxed.”

Kaitlin blinked. She had the general idea that the kid—he couldn’t have been older than his early twenties—was glad to see her, but she still wasn’t sure why. He had a decided technological edge on her. He was wearing some pretty sharp-edged tech, including a partial sensory helmet—it covered only the left side of his head, leaving the primitive right half free and “natural”—with a flip-aside monocular for his data HUD. He was probably tapping all the data on her that he could find at this moment, while she had nothing to query but the AI secretary resident in her PAD. She was damned if she would let herself appear interested, though, by opening her personal access device just to electronically query the local net server for a Farley on this guy’s name, background, and interests.

“And you are?” she asked, her voice cool.

“Oh, vid. Handle’s Hardcore. Wanted to link with ya on some prime throughput. Like what the milboys are runnin’ landing on Jupiter. I run, like, the Masters might get the wrong feed, c’nect?”

Kaitlin was abruptly conscious of just how many people in the room around her were wearing sensory communications gear of some sort, from appliqués like Hardcore’s to full helmets with darkened visors and internal HUD displays. Resident AIs with the appropriate dialect and slang interpreters made talking cross-culture a lot easier than trying it null-teched.

“To begin with,” she said slowly, trying to sort her way through the tangle of techculture slang, “the Marines aren’t landing on Jupiter. A Marine Space Expeditionary Unit is deploying to Europa. That’s one of Jupiter’s moons. As for the Masters…I suppose you mean one or another of the A-Squared cultures?”

“Absopos, cybe! Like, I run the An made us what we are, linkme? And, like, I run they might not log our peaceful nature with the mils goosestepping into their domain.”

A-Squareds. Thank the newsies for that bit of cuteness, meaning Ancient Aliens. There were two known, now, and a third inferred, thanks to xenoarcheological digs on Mars, the Moon, and even, lately, on Earth, now that the diggers knew what to look for. The Builders had left the enigmatic structures and fragments on Mars half a million years ago, and presumably had tinkered with human genetics at the same time, creating archaic Homo sapiens from the earlier populations of Homo erectus. The An had been something else entirely, a nonhuman spacefaring species that had enslaved a fair-sized fraction of humanity ten thousand years ago, and left their imprint in human myth, legend, and architecture across the Fertile Crescent, in parts of Africa, and in both South and Central America before being annihilated by the presumptive third Ancient Alien culture, the Hunters of the Dawn.

“The Builders have been extinct for half a million years,” she told Hardcore. “The An appear to have been wiped out ten thousand years ago. If the Hunters of the Dawn are still out there, we haven’t seen any sign of them. I can’t see that any of them would mind us going to Europa. And the Marines are going there to protect American interests.” As always. First to fight. Too often, the first to die.

“But that runs totally null, cybe. Like, they upgraded us, so we have to be jacked in tight and one-worlding it when they return….”

Kaitlin at last was beginning to take the kid’s measure. An Ancient Astronut.

There were literally hundreds of new cults and religions about, spawned by the recent discoveries elsewhere in the Solar System that were continuing the ongoing process of displacement for humankind’s place in the universe begun by Copernicus so long before. The Builders had tinkered with human DNA, and a few civilized members of that new species had died on Mars when the facilities there had been attacked by unknown enemies. The An had established bases on the Moon and colonies on Earth, enslaving large numbers of humans to help raise their monumental and still enigmatic structures at Giza, Baalbek, Titicaca, and elsewhere, before infalling asteroids deliberately aimed by another unknown enemy had wiped most of the An centers away in storms of flame and flood. Twice, it appeared, humans had narrowly escaped the fates of more advanced, alien patron races.

So much was known now, a revelation at least as stunning as the knowledge that humankind predated Bishop Usher’s date of special creation in 4004 BC. But so much was still unknown, and in the mystery, in the undiscovered, there was plenty of room for speculation…and for radical new forms of faith. From the sound of it, Hardcore was a member of one of the new denominations that actually gloried in the knowledge that humanity had once been engineered as slaves. It certainly made the question of existence simple: Humankind was here to serve the Masters. Obviously, the Masters weren’t about right now, but when They returned, they would expect an accounting of their faithful servants for the world they’d left in the servants’ care.

Kaitlin wondered what Hardcore would do if she posed as a member of one of the other cults and political spin-off groups—a Humanity Firster, say, who’d vowed to venture forth to the stars and eradicate the alien scum who’d once tried to enslave Mankind, and failed.

She decided that the Senator would probably prefer that she keep a low profile. In any case, members of the U.S. Armed Forces weren’t allowed to express political or religious opinions of any kind while in uniform.

“I can’t share your view of the aliens,” she told him, blunt, but as diplomatically as possible. “We do know that there might be…people out there we’re going to want to protect ourselves from. Isn’t it reasonable to want to find out all we can about them, as far from Earth as we can manage?”

“Hey, I can’t ’face with that, cybe. I mean, we can’t run different than our progamming, right? And we were made to serve the Masters.”

A tiny chirp in her left ear told her that her pinger had just detected one of the people on her tell-me list. “Who?” she subvocalized.

“Dr. Jack Ramsey,” her earpiece’s voice whispered. “He has just entered the palace of Illusion.”

“Thank God.”

“Sorry?” Hardcore said, puzzled. “I don’t ’face ya.”

“And a good thing it is, too,” she told him. “I’ve got to go. I’m meeting a friend.”

“But, like, we gotta ’face on the issue, cybe. Don’t log me off!”

“Please. Excuse me.” She turned and started to walk away. “Which way to Jack Ramsey?” she asked her pinger.

“Five degrees left, now sixteen-point-one meters, closing…”

“Like, we should clear this.” He was following her, matching her stride for stride.

“Hardcore!” another voice said. “Hey, you found her!”

“Found but not downed. She won’t ’face, Slick-Cybe.”

The newcomer was more conventionally dressed in a two-tone green tunic with a stiff, tight collar, but he sported many of the same technical accouterments Hardcore wore. He stepped in front of her, blocking her way. “Hey, Colonel. My des is Slick. We were hoping you’d give us a few moments of your time.”

“Who is ‘we’?” she demanded. She was losing patience with this crew.

“C’mon in,” the newcomer said, grinning…obviously speaking for someone else’s benefit. Kaitlin saw with alarm that several people were detaching themselves from various parts of the crowd around her and walking her way.

Ambush…

She couldn’t help but think of it in military terms. They’d pinpointed her location with a scout, called in a blocking force, and now the main body was closing in.

And, damn it, she couldn’t run in heels. She would have to stand and fight it out.

Their dress ran from Hardcore’s stylish nudity to an elaborate Elizabethan ball gown that looked heavier than the man wearing it. One woman had her head shaved, wore golden, slit-pupiled contacts, and had dyetooed her entire body in a green scale pattern that gave her a vague resemblance to an oversized and rather too mammalian-looking An.

The oldest of them was conservatively dressed and appeared to be in his late thirties.

“Colonel Garroway!” that man said. “I’m Pastor Swenson, of the Unified Church of the Masters. I was hoping to run into you this evening!”

“You must excuse me,” she told him. “There’s someone I have to meet.” She wished she was wearing a comlink right now, or at least a full-link-capable pinger. It would have been nice to punch in Jack’s ID right now and call for help.

“This will only take a moment, please! We’re afraid that the U.S. government and the CWS Planning Committee are making a serious mistake, one that could have the most serious repercussions for our entire species!”

“If they are, there’s not a damned thing I can do about it, Pastor. I’m just a soldier, not a politician or a government planner.”

“But the young men and women who are going to Jupiter are under your command, after all. You must have some say in how they’re being used. And the news media would listen to your opinions. We believe these are extraordinarily critical and dangerous times, you see, and we—”

“As I told this gentleman, Pastor,” she said, nodding at Hardcore, “I don’t agree with your opinions about extraterrestrials. I certainly don’t believe that something that happened thousands of years ago to tribes of primitives living thousands of kilometers from here requires us to somehow surrender our minds and integrity and will.’

“Ah, well, Colonel,” Swenson said with an ingratiating smile, “you must accept that the Bible tells us about these things, that it told us a long time ago! Signs and wonders in the heavens, and blood upon the Moon! You fought a battle on the Moon, Colonel! You know that the prophecy is being fulfilled right here in our lifetimes! Prophecy written down two thousand years ago, telling us that—”

“Telling us nothing, Pastor, except that some people have either a remarkable imagination or an astonishing will to believe.”

Slick reached out and took her arm. “You mustn’t say things like that, Colonel! We’ve formed a kind of delegation, if you like, to—”

Reaching down with her left hand, she grasped his hand, her thumb finding the nerve plexus at the base of his thumb. As she turned his hand back and over, his face went white and he started to sag at the knees.

“Don’t ever do that,” she told him pleasantly. “And get out of my way, now, or I’ll turn something else numb…permanently.”

“Are you having any trouble, Colonel?” a familiar voice asked. Jack Ramsey walked over to the group, a man in his early forties in civvies, a red and black close-collar smartsuit.

“I don’t know,” she said. She looked at Slick. “Am I having any trouble with you?”

Slick shook his head in a vigorous ‘no.’ She increased the pressure slightly, and he gasped and dropped to his knees.

“Good,” she said, smiling. She released him. “How about you, Hardcore?”

“I…ah…was just gonna go ’face with the food table. ’Scuze.” He bobbed his head and vanished into the crowd, followed closely by his friend. The others—Swenson, the scaled woman—all drifted off into the crowd.

“And what was that all about?” Jack asked her.

“Astronuts,” she replied. “Don’t like the idea of us Neanderthal military types making First Contact.”

He made a face. “I’ve heard that one before. This particular bunch thinks the An gene-engineered Moses, the Buddha, and Jesus Christ as special avatars in order to civilize us. They say they’re waiting for proof that we’ve given up our savage, warlike ways before letting us join them in heaven.”

“How do you know all this?”

He tapped the left arm of his smartsuit, where stylish threads of gold and silver were worked into the black synthetic fabric like a tiny map of an overgrown inner city. The suit was one of the later models, with over fifty gig of access and automatic comlink to any local node or net server. When she looked more closely into his eyes, she saw they were a bit greener than usual; he was wearing contact displays. “They’ve been dropping electronic tracts on anyone they can get an eddress for.”

“Try that again with me and I’ll drop something on them. Why the hell are they here?”

“Swenson is a minor celebrity. On all of the talk shows and media interviews he can swing. I guess the others are part of his entourage.”

“Well, thanks for coming to my rescue.”

“You didn’t look like you needed rescuing.”

“Oh, but I did.” She grinned. “When you arrived, I was in the process of chewing my leg off at the ankle.”

“And such a lovely ankle, at that. I’m glad. How’s the general? And your kids?”

“Rob’s still at Quantico, and I wish I were there with him instead of playing socialite and sometime target for religious activists. Rob Junior’s had his first assignment off-world. Peaceforcer duty. And Kam and Alan are growing up too fast and I don’t get to see them enough by half. You know, I honestly think they’re going to go through life thinking that their cissie is their mother, not me.”

“It’s tough, I know. You thinking about getting out?”

“Who told you that?”

“It’s been around. If you don’t want to say—”

“Oh, it’s no secret. I haven’t decided, but it’s damned tempting. It would be nice to have a life again. Get to see my family.”

“It’s funny. When I think of you, Colonel, I think of the Corps as being your family.”

“It is. That’s what makes being caught in between so damned hard.” She gave him a cross look. “And speaking of which, Major…where’s your uniform?”

He made a face. “I thought I would be a bit less conspicuous in civvies.”

“You just don’t like showing off the blue button.” She grinned. “Shame on you!”

Jack Ramsey, then Corporal Ramsey, had won the Medal of Honor at Tsiolkovsky twenty-five years before. Kaitlin had been there, with the Marines that had secured the UN base, allowing a team of Marine AI experts—including Jack—to come in and crack a UN computer and stop the detonation of an antimatter stockpile.

“The way they have me running around with the professorial crowd, I’m not sure whether I’m in the Marines anymore or not.”

“You’re still drawing service pay, right?” She fingered the eagle of her rank tab on her lapel. “And you answer to a guy who wears one of these. You’re still in the Corps, believe me.”

“It’s nice to know some things remain constant. And I guess I do have to pay them back for my education!” After Tsiolkovsky, the Corps had sent him to college—including a graduate program at the Hans Moravec AI Institute in Pittsburgh—then given him a commission and put him to work designing better AIs. Artificial intelligence promised to be the big field of technological innovation in the next few years, a means of creating some very powerful friends and fellow workers for humankind, minds at least as good as any organic brain—and much, much faster.

Some thought the AIs would ultimately be man’s replacement rather than his assistant. Those working in the field rebutted the doomsayers by pointing out that the future belonged to both types of mind, that each needed the other to reach its full potential.

Jack had a natural flair for AI design. He’d started off before he’d joined the service, reconfiguring some limited commercial AI software into an impressively interactive program he called Sam, which he still used as his personal secretary. A descendent of Sam’s, Sam Too, had been installed aboard humankind’s first genuine star ship, the unmanned probe Ad Astra, now, after six years of voyaging, decelerating into the dual planetary system of Alpha Centauri.

“So…how goes your part of the mission?” she asked. That was Project Chiron, one small but extremely important, and classified, portion of the Ad Astra program.

He nodded. “Braking and final course correction maneuvers are almost complete. She’ll be entering orbit in another three days. But then, that’s also been on the news, so you must’ve heard. It can’t all be preempted by the latest news from China.”

She sighed. “Haven’t had much chance to watch, though. Or even read my daily high-points download. But I know it must be exciting for you.”

“It is. I’ll be going to Mars at the end of the week. That’s almost the best part of all, to be at Cydonia when the link is made.”

They were still trying to piece together the scope of the discovery beneath the war-and weather-torn ruins on Mars—in particular, the Cave of Wonders, the colossal sphere of holographic displays that appeared to show tantalizing glimpses of hundreds of alien worlds beneath other stars.

“Well, I wish you luck with it. And Sam too, of course.” She twinkled at the pun.

“Thank you.” If he’d heard the joke, he didn’t react to it. In fact, Kaitlin thought as she watched him, he seemed a bit preoccupied.

“Problem?”

“Eh? Oh, no. Not really. Was wondering if you’d heard anything about the Chinese mystery ship. I mean, anything you could tell me.”

“I don’t know much, and none of it is classified,” she admitted. “It’s called Heavenly Lightning, and it used a gravitational slingshot assist to put it into a retrograde solar orbit between Mars and Earth. The Chinese haven’t released much, except that it’s on a peaceful mission of a scientific nature.”

“From what I’ve been able to gather, it’s not going near Mars, though.”

“Uh-uh. Mars is on the far side of the sun right now. If they were trying to stop you from getting to Cydonia and carrying out Project Chiron, they’re about 400 million kilometers off course.”

“Well, that’s a relief, at least.”

“There’s been a lot of buzz about the Lightning and what she might be up to. The CMC was afraid it was headed for Europa.” Confederation Military Command was the ad hoc committee charged with unifying the disparate elements of the various CWS armed forces—an impossible task, but one that in Kaitlin’s opinion was good for occasional moments of comic relief. “Turns out the Chinese are worried about us making contact with whatever is at Europa first. But the Lightning’s headed in the wrong direction for that. So we don’t know what they’re up to.” She shrugged. “Maybe they’re telling the truth. Research.”

“Maybe…”

“You don’t look convinced.”

“Colonel, Europa and Mars are the two keys to the biggest, most important puzzle the human race faces right now. A breakthrough at either site is going to completely transform both us and the way we think about the universe—more than the An revelations, more than the discovery that we’re not alone in the universe. The Beijing government knows that, and they’d be nuts not to try to grab a piece of the action. We know they’re interested. We know they’ve been getting their big A-M ships ready to boost. And they did a quick refit of the Lightning and launched her in a hell of a hurry. It’s just damned hard not to believe they’re all connected somehow.”

“Well, the Peaceforcer cruisers are in place,” she said. “They’ll be watching every Chinese launch, you can be sure of that. And they’ll be positioned to act if the Chinese ships make a move in either direction. Beijing’s only hope at this point is to play the game our way. Join the CWS, make nice, and take a cut of the profits.”

“Beijing,” he replied, “isn’t exactly known for how well they play with others. Especially barbarians like us.”

He was right, of course. A struggle was shaping up, a struggle that might well determine the nature of humanity for the next ten thousand years.

And Kaitlin and Jack and the rest of the U.S. Marines were going to be at ground zero—the proverbial eye of the storm.

As usual.

Squad Bay

1 MSEF Barracks

2135 hours Zulu

“Bumfuq!” Lucky exploded. “We’re bein’ sent to Bumfuq!”

Bumfuq, Egypt, was an old, old expression current throughout all branches of military service, referring to a place, a duty station so far removed from the civilized amenities that you might as well be on another planet.

Which, in stark, cold point of fact, was exactly where they were going.

“Aw, c’mon, Lucky!” Staff Sergeant BA Campanelli said, laughing. “How bad can it be? Anyway, you always said you wanted to go to space!”

“Shit,” Lance Corporal Dick Wojak said. “He just doesn’t want to lose access to his virtual girlfriends!”

“Hell,” Sergeant Dave Coughlin said. “He should just download one of ’em into his PAD and bring her along! Then we could all share in the wealth!”

“Why don’t you like girls, Luck?” Kelly Owenson said. “Real ones, I mean?”

“I like girls fine!”

What he didn’t like talking about was the fact that virtual relationships just didn’t fucking hurt as much as the real ones. Damn, Becka. Get out of my head….

He took another swallow of the drink BA had mixed for him—a pineapply something that was quite good. What had she called it?

Sergeant Sherman Nodell was weaving a bit in his seat, despite the fact that he outmassed Lucky by a good twenty kilos, and he didn’t seem interested in discussing Lucky’s sex life. “Just give me another one of those…things you were talkin’ about a little bit ago,” he said. He was being very careful how he enunciated his words.

The nine of them, all members of First and Second Platoons, Bravo Company, were sitting at a folding table in the barracks squad bay. The huge and otherwise bare room which had once been an aircraft hangar was decorated with green-painted concrete floor, steel storage lockers, a display case near the entrance with trophies and battalion honors, and a wall-sized flatscreen on one bulkhead that was displaying the Marine Corps emblem at the moment. Normally, they all would have been out tonight, hitting the bars and sensies in Lompoc, but the 1st Marine Space Expeditionary Force had been restricted to the base ever since word had come down of the early deployment to Europa.

Staff Sergeant Campanelli had come to the rescue, though. She’d been a bartender as a civilian—“in a former life,” as she liked to call it—and she occasionally hauled out a small, portable bar-in-a-suitcase that was her prized possession and entertained the others in the platoon with some of her strange and wonderful concoctions. Mixing drinks in a nondesignated area probably violated half a dozen different regs, but she hadn’t been caught yet. There were rumors to the effect that she had been caught, once, but gotten off in exchange for a bottle of scotch.

Her full name was Brenda Allyn Campanelli, so inevitably she’d picked up the handle “BA,” for Bad Ass, even though she claimed her ass was very good. No one in the platoon claimed personal knowledge of that fact, however, though there’d been a great deal of speculation.

“So…what’ll it be, big boy?” she asked Nodell, taunting him.

He leered. “I wanna blow job!”

“Coming right up! But you’ve got to take it the right way!”

“And what way would that be?”

“I’ll show you.”

She began mixing drinks in two shot glasses, half amaretto, half Kahlúa, topped with a generous squirt of whipped cream from a dispenser in the freezer section of her portable bar. “Okay, we really need a low table for this.”

“How about a chair?” Lucky volunteered.

“That’ll do.” She put the drinks on the chair’s seat, then got down on her knees. “You’ve got to do this right!”

Holding her hands behind her back, she bent forward and took one of the loaded shot glasses in her mouth. The other Marines cheered, clapped, and chanted “Go! Go! Go!” as she tipped her head and the glass up and back, draining the liquid and most of the whipped cream into her throat. Snapping her head forward, she returned the empty shot glass to the chair, licked the excess whipped cream from her lips, and held up her hands as the Marines cheered and stomped on the deck.

“And that is how you do a blow job!” she told Nodell.

“All right!” Dave cried, applauding. “You know, we ought to call you ‘BJ,’ not ‘BA’!”

“Hey, I like that! Just don’t go gettin’ any ideas!”

“I always have ideas, Staff Sergeant!”

“Your turn!” Corporal Lissa Cartwright told Nodell.

“Aw, that’s a sissy drink!” he began, but the others began chanting at him.

“Do it! Do it! Do it!”

At last, he awkwardly dropped to his knees, bent over the remaining glass, and took it in his mouth. He didn’t tip his head fast enough, though, and a lot of it ended up dribbling down his chin, together with a small avalanche of whipped cream. He started choking and gagging, and Lucky and Corporal Duane Niemeyer began pounding him on the back.

“Gah!” he said, rising from the floor. “That’s still a sissy drink! I only drink…I only drink…uh…a man’s drink!”

“And what would that be?” BA asked him.

“Hell, just about anything that pours. One at a time or all together, I can take it! I just don’t do sissy drinks.”

“Is that so?” She studied him. “You ever tried a cement mixer?”

“Nah. What is that, another sissy—”

“A man’s drink,” she told him. “With a name like ‘cement mixer,’ what would you expect?”

“Now that sounds more like it! What’s in it?”

“Here, I think I have the ingredients. Yup. You do this in two stages.” Deftly, she poured out two shot glasses, one with lime grenadine, the other with Bailey’s Irish Creme. She handed him the Bailey’s. “Here. Take this…but don’t swallow. Hold it in your mouth.”

He tossed the shot back.

“Now,” she told him, “take this in your mouth and swish it around with the other.”

Lucky had seen this gag pulled before. The lime juice curdled the Bailey’s, turning it to the consistency of cottage cheese. It didn’t taste bad—sort of like sweet tarts, in fact—but the sensation of having that stuff congeal in your mouth out of nowhere generated the most wonderful expressions of disbelief, shock, and dawning I’ve-been-had horror imaginable.

Nodell was just starting to work at it when the far door opened and Major Warhurst walked in.

“Attention on deck!” Dave cried. There was a swift rattling and shuffling as shot glasses and bottles somehow vanished into BJ’s porta-bar, which closed and locked and made it to the floor as the rest of them stood up.

Warhurst didn’t seem to notice—likely a deliberate oversight on his part—but he seemed fascinated by the expression on Nodell’s face. “Carry—” he started to say, and then stopped. “Nodell? Are you okay?”

“Um…mmm-mmm…mmm!” He was working his jaws furiously, trying to swallow the mess in his mouth without parting his lips.

“That’s ‘Mmm-mmm, sir,’ Nodell. What have you got in your mouth?”

Lucky stood at attention, wondering what was going to go down. V-berg wasn’t dry, but the only drinking allowed was at the various designated watering holes, the enlisted bars and NCO clubs and such. They could all be in a world of shit if Major Warhurst decided to be a prick.

With several more vigorous workings of his jaw, Nodell managed to get the congealed mess chewed and swallowed. “Uh, sorry, sir. You caught me with my mouth full.”

“Of what?”

“Uh…my girlfriend sent me some cookies.”

Warhurst glanced at the suspiciously empty table—no wrappings, no crumbs. “I see.” He sniffed. “Lime cookies? Smells good! I don’t suppose you have any for your CO.”

“Uh, sorry, sir. That was the last one!”

“Very well. Carry on, then!”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

“Almost taps, people. You’d better break this up. We start weapons training early tomorrow. M-580, stripping, cleaning, and troubleshooting. You’ll need clear heads.” He gave Nodell a hard look. “All of you!”

He turned and walked out, as the Marines at the table slowly, ever so slowly, relaxed again.

“Jeez! We coulda all been busted!” Lucky said.

“I don’t think so,” BJ said. “He knew!”

“Nah,” Dave said. “No way.”

“So…what kind of skipper is he?” Corporal Mayhew asked. He was the company’s current newbie, newly arrived from Space Training School at Quantico.

“Damned tough,” BJ told him. “So tough I’d follow him to hell.”

And the others agreed. Lucky wasn’t quite that trusting…but was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. He was willing enough to consider following the guy to hell.

But…to Europa?

23 SEPTEMBER 2067

Tiantan Shandian

Solar Orbit

1412 hours Zulu

They’d been extending the tether for the past thirty hours, allowing the fifteen-kilometer cables to play themselves slowly out into the night. At the far end of the four superconducting cables, a twenty-ton doughnut of steel, ceramics, and titanium used electrostatic forces and tiny rocket motors to maintain tension against the cables as they unspooled from the Heavenly Lightning’s blunt prow. Lasers ensured perfect alignment, while powerful optical and infrared telescopes assured proper tracking and aim.

On the Lightning’s bridge, drifting beside the communications suite, Captain Lin Hu Xiang grasped a handhold and pulled himself alongside the communications officer, head down. “Do we have our final word?”

“Yes, Captain!” The comm officer’s young face betrayed the flush of excitement. “It is confirmed both by Mission Control and the Star Mountain. Jia you!”

Go.

“I can’t help but feel certain…misgivings,” Lin said. “We advance blindly into an unwise war…”

“Sir! The Space Military Directorate would never—”

“It’s not the Directorate I’m worried about. It’s our inspired leaders in the Great Hall of the People. The men who put us here, who decided we should begin a war launched against the entire world.”

The comm officer looked shocked. Evidently, he’d never expected to hear a commanding officer criticize the government. “I…I am sure they have their reasons.”

“No doubt. And urgent ones, I imagine. Still…how is your military history, Lieutenant?”

“I am a graduate of the Beijing Academy, sir. First honors!”

“Which guarantees nothing. Do you know the name Zhu-gang?”

“No, Captain.” He looked puzzled. “Is that a place in the homeland?”

“No. But our actions today will draw inevitable comparisons. I hope our leaders are prepared to accept the consequences.” Turning carefully in midair, he addressed the Lightning’s weapons officer. “Mr. Shu. Are we on target?”

“We are, Captain. Target One is locked in. The computers are programmed to execute a five-degree yaw to bring Target Two to bear, as soon as Packages One and Two have been released.”

“And our little distraction is ready?”

“Ready for launch, Captain.”

He looked at Commander Feng Sun Wa, the Executive Officer. “And the crew?”

“All crew members report themselves strapped in and ready for action.”

“Very well.” There could be no further delay. “Mr. Shu, launch the decoy.”

An eight-ton Zhuongshu missile sped from the Lightning’s launch bay, accelerating in a burst of energy at nearly twenty Gs. Its course took it back along the path traversed by the Lightning, chasing after a bright blue star and its tiny, grayish consort—the Earth and the Moon, now 50 million kilometers distant. Before long, the fast-moving missile had canceled the original velocity imparted by the Lightning away from Earth and begun closing with the distant planet.

Not that Earth was the target. After six minutes, the range between the Lightning and the missile had opened to 20,000 kilometers. A quick targeting check made certain that the missile was precisely aligned between the Lightning and distant Earth, and then the Weapons Officer pressed a key, triggering the detonation sequence over a lasercom link.

The missile’s 100-megaton thermonuclear warhead detonated in a savage, death-silent flash.

“Radio communications with Earth is now interrupted,” the comm office said. “Nothing but static on all channels.”

“Confirm that all hands are strapped in.” Best to double check. This was going to be a rough ride.

“Confirmed, Captain.”

“Very well.” Lin took a deep breath. “Fire main weapon. Package One.”

“Package One, launch at three hundred forty thousand gravities. Fire.”

The Heavenly Lightning lurched as the egg-shaped, ten-kilo mass hurtled down the channel formed by four taut, superconducting cables. Accelerated by a fusion-charged magnetic pulse at an acceleration of 340,000 Gs, it traveled the fifteen-kilometer length of that immense gun barrel in just under a tenth of a second, emerging from the doughnut at the end with a velocity of over 316 kilometers per second. Ten kilos, compared with the Lightning’s 25,000-ton mass, would normally have been insignificant, but hurled into the void at that speed, it imparted a significant recoil to the huge ship. Lin felt the nudge, a hard kick transmitted through the back of his acceleration seat.

Seconds passed as the main weapon powered up for a second pulse…and then Package Two was launched, hurtling after the first. The range to target was just under 525 million kilometers. At 316 kps, the warheads would reach their target in nineteen days.

After a flurry of checks, confirming that both packages were on target, Lin gave the order to execute the five-degree yaw, bringing Target Two under the railgun’s muzzle. It took nearly an hour to adjust the aim—with a “gun barrel” composed of four charged tethers fifteen kilometers long. The cloud of plasma from the detonated nuclear warhead continued to expand, however, effectively screening the Lightning’s actions from any Earth-bound observer. Sensitive detectors in Earth orbit might pick up the EMP surges of the main weapon each time it fired, but they wouldn’t be able to tell what was happening.

With all targeting information again checked and double checked, Captain Lin ordered the main weapon fired again. This time, acceleration was set to one million gravities, and the Force Package flicked clear of the tether railgun with a velocity of 543 kilometers per second. The recoil was significantly greater with this launch, a savage lurch that sent the Lightning drifting backward like a burst from a maneuvering thruster.

That shot was followed by a second…and then a third, at which point an overstressed coolant feed in Lightning’s main fusion reactor melted. The reactor’s core temperature skyrocketed, forcing an automatic scram and shutdown.

No matter. Two packages on Target One, and three on Target Two. It was enough.

Target Two was at a much greater range than Target One—almost 900 million kilometers. With the higher muzzle velocity of the weapons, however, they would reach Two in just nineteen days…within about an hour of the attack on Target One.

Lin gave the order to reel in the tethers and readjust the ship’s orbit after being shoved off course by five high-G railgun shots. Engineering crews began working on the rather serious problem of bringing the main fusion reactor back on line. It scarcely mattered. His orders now were to remain on station, in case further shots were needed, but he doubted that the CWS Peaceforce would give him the luxury of a second try.

He continued to think about Zhugang.