Europa Strike. Ian Douglas

In another moment, he couldn’t see any of the base, but he did catch a glimpse of the bug’s sharp-edged shadow racing across the gray-white surface to meet them as they drifted lower. A cloud of ice crystals swirled briefly past the porthole, and then they were down.

      “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for flying Air Navy,” Walthers’s voice said. “The weather here in Miami Beach is clear and sunny, wind zero out of the southeast, and the temperature is a balmy minus one forty-six Celsius. Please be sure not to leave personal gear adrift, and watch your step exiting the spacecraft. The bleach puddles can be treacherous!”

      A chorus of groans, curses, and catcalls answered the bug pilot’s cheerfully humorous litany. Jeff unstrapped, then stood, crouched over with one gloved hand bracing himself against the low overhead, as Kaminski began calling off names.

      “Cukela! Brighton! Jellowski! Hutton! Vottori! Garcia! You’re up!”

      Six by six, the platoon began leaving their seats and filing in a slow shuffle aft, between the rows of seats. The central passageway fed onto a ramp leading down into the bug’s cramped main lock. That compartment was only large enough for six suited-up Marines at a time, so the disembarkation process took some time.

      Jeff waited through the slow cycling of the lock, exiting with Kaminski and the last three men of the platoon. By ancient tradition, the senior officer was the last one onto a boat, and the first one off…but such quaint niceties didn’t apply here, when Jeff wanted to be able to personally give the suits of each of his people a once-over eyeballing as the Marines shuffled past.

      The suits were essentially Mark IICs, later models of the armor that Marines had worn on Mars and the moon a quarter of a century before. These were a bit bulkier, with thicker armor laminates, better on-board computers and life support, and, instead of the old chameleon surfaces which adjusted the color to match the surroundings, these were covered with a thick and heavy but flexible material, like white canvas. The intent was not camouflage, however. The “canvas” material was actually a weave of superconducting fibers and microscopic tubes. A weak electrical current flowing through the covering should serve to trap and deflect incoming particulate radiation, specifically the flood of protons sleeting into Europa’s surface from Jupiter’s intense radiation belts.

      Even so, each man’s exposure on the surface would be carefully monitored for the next six months. Doc McCall, the company corpsman, had already passed out badges that would record cumulative totals for each man and woman and alert Jeff’s secretary if they picked up a dosage of 30 rems or more.

      He and Kaminski gave one another a visual suit check, and then they locked out with the last three Marines in the queue.

      When the outer lock hatchway cycled open, Jeff stepped down into a cold and eerie silence. His suit heaters were working fine—he felt them kick on in his legs when his boots touched the landing pad deck—but the surroundings looked as cold and bleak as a deep Siberian winter.

      Of course, the actual temperature was far lower than anything Earth had ever experienced.

      The horizon was the rim of the crater chosen as the site of the base, knife-edged and brilliant in the sun. The sky was a dull, dead black, the stars washed away by the brilliance of a shrunken sun just above the ridge line. And above, higher in the sky…

      Jupiter hung above the sun, an immense crescent bowed away from the light, embracing a bloated disk of night. The crescent spanned over twelve degrees of the sky—twenty-four times the diameter of Earth’s Moon back home. For a dizzying moment, Jeff wrestled with the sensation that the planet was falling on him…and then he took a deep breath and mentally nailed it in the sky. He could easily make out the banding on the crescent from here, turbulent stripes of ocher, red, white, and tan, a spectacle of unparalleled beauty too rich, too intense to look real. If he thought of it as a photographic backdrop, or as an extremely detailed vid or sim, he could push back the almost claustrophobic feeling that the planet was about to drop from the sky and crush him.

      He dragged his gaze down from the sky and fixed it on Kaminski’s back. Together, they trudged across the landing deck. The rest of the company was filing along a path leading toward the building at the edge of The Pit; someone in a suit identical to Jeff’s save for bright blue identifying bands on upper arms and legs stood at the edge of the deck, waving them on.

      “Major Warhurst?” a man’s voice asked.

      He raised his own gloved hand to show who was speaking. “I’m Warhurst, sir. Bravo Company, and XO of the Expeditionary Force.”

      “Dr. Shigeru Ishiwara. Konichiwa! Welcome to Cadmus Station!”

      “Good to be here, sir.” If it was a lie, it was a well-intentioned one.

      “Let’s get you and all of your men below,” Ishiwara said. “You’re not wearing your long-term pliss units.”

      Each suit had a PLSS, a Personal Life Support System built into the back, housing most of the suit’s power generating and heating systems, as well as reserves of air and water. The crowding aboard the bug had necessitated using PLSS Type Ones, which provided two to three hours of life support, depending on the amount of exertion. Ishiwara was wearing a Type Three, so bulky it looked like it was wearing him, a molded white box with irregular angles grasping him from behind. With that unit, he could survive on the Europan surface for as much as twenty-four hours, assuming he didn’t pick up too many rems in the process and fry.

      “Our life support is fine,” Jeff replied. “It’ll be nice to get out of the wind, though.”

      “Meaning the plasma of Jupiter’s magnetosphere,” Ishiwara said, laughing. “I understand. If you’ll follow me?”

      Steps led down of the edge of the landing deck, taking them to a well-worn path through the ice bordered by a slender handrail. Here and there he could see what looked like puddles of clear meltwater on the ice, and, when he looked closely, it seemed to him that some of the puddles were fizzing slightly around the edges of the pools, as ice continued to melt.

      “Please watch your step, gentlemen,” Ishiwara warned, pointing to one of the puddles. “Those pools can be very slick. The bombardment of protons from Jupiter’s magnetosphere is constantly breaking down the surface ice and forming new compounds, especially hydrogen peroxide. The pools then dissociate into oxygen and hydrogen, which escape—but the melting process leaves things slippery.”

      “We’ve been briefed,” Jeff replied. Even so, his first few steps along the path were a bit unsteady, and on the fifth step he felt his heavy right boot slide forward alarmingly. Reaching out, he grasped the handrail beside the path. There was no sense in proving he was some kind of macho Marine who didn’t need handrails, not when the alternative was an undignified fall on his ass. Up ahead, he saw several Marines helping a comrade to his feet; yeah, they were learning about dignity the hard way.

      Ahead, several space-suited men were carrying large crates toward one of a number of sheds dotting the crater floor. “You store equipment on the surface?” Jeff asked.

      “Some,” Ishiwara replied. “Especially the things that explode, like seismic penetrators. We use them to send shock waves through the ice to determine its thickness, and also, sometimes, to cut holes. We’d rather not have those going off inside the E-DARES facility.

      “Those sheds, though,” he added, indicating the Quonset hut storage structures, “are for the honey buckets.”

      “Shit.”

      “Exactly. Europa has its own biosystem, and we must avoid contaminating it at all costs. Similar restrictions are used in our explorations of Antarctica, you know. Human wastes are dehydrated, sealed inside plastic bags, then allowed to freeze solid on the surface. After a year here, we’ve accumulated quite a bit of the stuff—nearly ten tons. We’ll need to take it with us when we leave.”

      “That ship’ll have the damnedest cargo manifest I’ve ever heard of. But wouldn’t the cold and radiation sterilize the stuff?”