Europa Strike. Ian Douglas

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…”