Europa Strike. Ian Douglas

a moment, he removed the VR headgear, stowed it, and walked back into the common area.

      In one of the arms lockers aft he found a Sunbeam M-228 squad laser weapon, a 10-megawatt SLAW, and carried it forward to the mess table. “Mind if I join you?” he asked, taking a seat with the ten men and women cleaning their M580s.

      “Of course not, sir,” one of the men said. He was a skinny, sharp-faced corporal from New York named George Leckie. “Grab some chair!”

      Gunnery Sergeant Tom Pope grinned. “Slumming, sir?”

      “Gunny, after four hours of staff meetings, I consider it R&R.”

      “I hear ya, sir.”

      One of the women—with hard muscles and sweat gleaming on her bare chest—said something to the blond woman beside her, and both laughed.

      “What was that, Campanelli? Didn’t catch it.”

      “Uh…nothing, sir.” When he continued to look at her, she shifted uncomfortably and added, “I just said that that was a damned big gun you had there, and, uh, I wondered if the major knew how to use it. Sir.” Her chest and shoulders flushed dark as she spoke. Marines never used the word gun except to refer to artillery—especially shipboard guns—or a penis. The squad laser was a weapon, a piece, an M228, or a SLAW. Not a gun.

      “Well, it’s been a few years,” he said easily. “Maybe you can give me some pointers.” The others laughed, a little nervously, but louder when he grinned.

      It had been a good many years since he’d had to do this, but his hands remembered the proper movements. Power off…cable feed disconnect…pull the barrel locking lever back…grasp the barrel with the other hand and pull forward and up…

      Yeah, he remembered. And before long, he was trading jokes with them.

      FIVE

      12 OCTOBER 2067

      U.S.S. John F. Kennedy

      Solar orbit, 4.2 a.u. from Earth

      2002 hours Zulu

      Captain Jeremy Mitchell entered the officer’s wardroom with his tray and walked toward the only occupied table. Gone were the days when the other officers present stood until he was seated; the JFK’s officer’s mess was patterned off of the dirty shirt mess decks of Navy aircraft carriers, with food served cafeteria style. It was located in “A” Hab, with the hab rotation set to deliver a gentle third of a gravity.

      “Mind if I join you gentlemen?” he asked with an easy drawl. Mitchell was from a small town not far from San Antonio, Texas, and liked to affect the laid-back attitude of Texas and good-natured down-home.

      “Please do, Captain!” Commander Varley, the weapons officer, said, gesturing.

      He set his tray down and took a seat. “Well, Mr. Lee,” he said, addressing the young Marine officer on his left. “It looks like you and your people might get a chance to prove your usefulness, even in this day and age.”

      “Is there any more data on the Star Mountain’s vector, sir?” He sounded eager…and painfully young.

      “Nothing new. They’re still vectored for Jupiter—which means Europa—and they’re boosting at 2 Gs, which means they’re in a damned hurry to get there. They won’t be able to sidestep us, however.”

      “Peaceforcers save Earth, once again!” Lieutenant Commander Carvelle, the chief communications officer, said, raising a glass in salute.

      Peaceforce. It was a new concept, born of one particular horror of the UN War. A French attempt to smash the U.S. will to continue the fight by diverting a small asteroid into an impact on Colorado had been stopped…almost completely. A fair-sized and somewhat radioactive piece of the UN ship that had done the diverting had come down over Lake Michigan and obliterated most of lakeside Chicago.

      With the rapid expansion of human activity into the Solar System, the Confederation of World States, struggling to knock together some form of planet-wide government to replace the disintegrating UN, had recognized the danger posed by any world power able to put a spacecraft into the asteroid belt or beyond. A relatively small nudge could put a likely megaton chunk of iron or ice into a new orbit, one that could take out anything from a city to the entire human race, depending on how ambitious the bad guys were.

      The threat had resulted in the Peaceforce, a military space force drawn from the United States Navy, the Marines, and the space assets of several allies tasked with patrolling the outer system and preventing just such attempts. The problem was that the Solar System was an awfully big backyard, too vast by far to allow any kind of systematic patrolling.

      And the trick was to position just a few ships in strategic orbits, far, far up the side of the Solar gravity well. Orbiting in the Asteroid Belt, 4.2 a.u.s out, and employing extremely powerful sensing and tracking gear, a ship could watch for any launches from Earth. Any boosts not cleared by CWS inspection teams could be intercepted by ships such as the Kennedy and either disabled at a distance, or boarded.

      That was why Lieutenant Lee was on board with his platoon of twenty-eight space-trained Marines. The JFK would match course and speed with the hostile, disable her if necessary, then close and grapple for the final round. Mitchell was amused that modern tactical thinking was actually looking at the possibility of using Marines to take an enemy ship by storm, something that hadn’t happened since the boarding of the Mayaguez in 1975.

      “Well, it’ll be interesting to see Lieutenant Lee here swing across from the yardarms, cutlass and boarding pistol in hand!”

      “I’d need more than two hands for that evolution, sir,” the lieutenant replied. “I think we’ll stick to M580s, and hope the bad guys aren’t in the mood for much of a fight when we get there.”

      “Doesn’t sound like the fire-eating Marines I know,” Varley said.

      “Hey, if it can be done without a firefight…”

      “Do you anticipate problems with your mission, Lieutenant?”

      “A good officer always anticipates problems, sir. Boarding a hostile spacecraft is at least as hairy as a houseclearing operation—and it’s complicated by being in zero gravity and the possibility of explosive decompression.” He grinned. “Playing with weapons inside a thin-skinned spacecraft isn’t exactly a real bright idea.”

      “I imagine the whole question is academic,” Varley said with a shrug. “The Chinese can’t beat the laws of physics. Even accelerating at 2 Gs, they can’t outrun us because we have the metaphorical high ground in the Solar System. They can’t maneuver and accelerate both. When we close and match velocity, they’ll have to surrender…or risk a mass driver round through their drive unit.”

      “They must have something in mind,” Lieutenant Zynkowovec said. He was the ship’s third engineering officer. “They know we’re out here, and they know physics as well as we do. They’ve gotta have something up their sleeves.”

      “They just don’t know about our secret weapon!” Varley said, laughing. “The U.S. Marines!”

      The radio clipped to Mitchell’s collar chirped. Damn. Always when he was sitting down to dinner. “What is it?”

      “We are tracking an incoming object, Captain,” the voice of Jackie, the JFK’s AI, said in unhurried tones. “There is a threat to the ship.”

      He was already on his feet and jogging for the access corridor that would take him to the ship’s hub, then forward to the bridge. “What threat?”

      “The object is small—less than ten kilograms’ mass—but it is on an approach vector with a velocity of five hundred kilometers per second. Range, 15,000 kilometers, closing.”

      The calm words chilled. Thirty seconds to impact.

      “Why the hell didn’t we see it on radar?”

      “The