Europa Strike. Ian Douglas

dragon who didn’t back down on anything where her girls, her boys, or her business was concerned.

      “I talked to her nice, Leckie. Something you wouldn’t know about.” He grinned. “And I told her it would be a shame if word spread among the personnel on the base about what happened to you. I guess she felt that losing a hundred was better than having her business go flatline.”

      “Well, hey! Thanks!” He took the credit slip, unholstered his PAD, and slid the data strip end through the reader. His account credited him with fifty dollars as the plastic slip turned from green to black. He tossed the dead slip on the floor.

      Kaminski stopped him with a twenty-kiloton-per-second look. “Pick it up.”

      “But Sergeant Major—”

      “Pick it up, shithead!” As Lucky obeyed, Kaminski growled, “Maintaining decent relations with the civilian population in the area is tough enough, asshole, without you vandalizing the neighborhood with your fucking attitude. Now shitcan your garbage and let’s get back aboard!” He nodded to the watching women. “Ladies.”

      Outside, Kaminski’s car, a gray Ford-Toshiba Electric from the motor pool, was parked in the Virtuality lot, tapping a charge from the contact posts. Beyond, traffic whizzed by on Highway One. Tone’s car, a neon-red bubbletop Zephyr, was in the recharge slot nearby.

      “So, what’s all the rush, Master Sergeant?” Lucky asked as they trotted down the steps. “Are we on alert?”

      “Affirmative. They just passed the word. The launch date has just been moved up. We’re boosting, boys, probably late next week.”

      “Holy shit!” Tone said. “I ain’t got any of my shit together.”

      “Then you’d better take care of it ASAP, Marine. It’s a long way to Europa. The long-distance comlink charges’ll kill you!”

      Europa! Lucky still found it hard to believe. He’d always dreamed of going to space; that was why he’d volunteered for the Space Marines, after all. He’d been hoping to get a chance to see Mars, or at least be posted at one of the naval orbital facilities now sprouting up in Earth orbit.

      But Europa! Why anyone would want to attack such a place—or defend it from attack—was beyond him. The briefings he’d had so far emphasized the unbearable hostility of the place—an environment where the temperature never crawled higher than 140 degrees below zero, with no atmosphere to speak of, and intense radiation delivered by the far-flung magnetic fields centered on giant Jupiter. The word was that a small scientific outpost was there, and there were rumors that they’d found something in the ice. Something important.

      It was hard to imagine just what could be so damned critical in such a God-forsaken place.

      From the way the scuttlebutt was flying, though, the scientists had found anything from one of the ancient ET visitors to a working faster-than-light starship to God Himself. Lucky, a bit jaded by his two years in the Corps, knew better than to pounce on any single rumor and absorb it as fact.

      Meeting aliens wouldn’t be so bad, he thought. Hell, it’d be a short ticket to fame and fortune for everyone on the expedition who pulled it off. But he didn’t for a minute believe that there actually were aliens at Europa. Scuttlebutt, pure and simple. The real action in the solar system was on Mars, where scientists from a dozen nations were sorting through the relics left by the enigmatic Builders. That was where he’d been hoping to go.

      Shit. He’d joined the Marines to see Mars, and here they were sending him to a radiation-drenched ball of ice in the cold and dark of the Outer System.

      Tone swung the Zephyr into Vandenberg’s Main Entrance. The usual demonstrations were under way, and Tone had to drive slowly through a corridor in the road kept open by police and Air Force MPs. IT’S BABEL AGAIN! one prominent sign read. MAN WAS CREATED IN GOD’S IMAGE TO TEND THE EARTH! read a long banner held aloft by six scraggly-looking youngsters. Many waved miniature palm trees, the unofficial symbol of the Keepers of the Earth. An enchantingly bare-breasted young woman with a laurel crown sat astride a miniature woolly mammoth gesturing with a sign that read HEAVEN ON EARTH NOW. The better-dressed members of the congregation wore helmet cams and recording gear. It looked like the newsies were out in full force.

      Despite the chanting, jeering mob, the sentries looked bored, and Lucky had the feeling this was all pretty routine. Another day, another back-to-the-Earth demonstration.

      At the gate, past the lines marking the secure perimeter, they handed over their pads for a security check and pressed their thumbs against DNA reader screens proffered by the Air Force Blue Beret sentries. Security at the base was very high; Vandenberg was one of only three primary launch centers in the United States, and there were entirely too many people about, both foreign nationals and U.S. citizens, with reasons to sabotage America’s space access capability.

      Lucky turned in the seat for another look at the woman on the dwarf mammoth. Funny how the antitechies were always so selective about the technologies they wanted banned. This bunch obviously didn’t mind cloning frozen mammoth carcasses, but they wanted humankind out of space. There were others who didn’t mind space travel, but who thought tampering with genetics was blasphemy. You could usually find them demonstrating outside major theme parks that maintained genetically tailored and resurrected herds.

      He wondered what would happen if both groups tried demonstrating on the same day at the same gate. Might be amusing.

      Through the gate, then, and into the base. Vandenberg was still officially an Air Force base, even though the U.S. Navy seemed to have positioned itself as the principal builder and operator of deep spacecraft. Congressional and intra-Pentagon warfare continued over funding and jurisdictional disputes, but in general, the Air Force controlled airspace up to the 100-kilometer mark, and operated the military shuttles carrying men and materiel to Low Earth Orbit. The Navy, with its long history of procuring, building, and operating large ships at sea for long periods of time, had responsibility for everything beyond the 100-km line. The Marines—the Navy’s police force, as one misguided former U.S. president had called them—had followed the Navy into deep space, despite ongoing attempts by the Army to establish an Army Space Operations Group.

      There were rumblings, as always, over the possible creation of a military space arm independent of all of the older armed forces. Lucky didn’t think that would ever happen, though. Too many high-rankers and politicians had too much invested in too many past decisions to yield on such a politically charged and expensive issue. The arguments would continue, nothing critical would be decided, and Lucky would get to go to space.

      If only it wasn’t a damned tech-null hole like Europa!

      The Zephyr swung into a curve, then crested a long, low ridge. Beyond, almost at the horizon, Launch Center Bravo sprawled across 8,000 hectares of scrub brush and rock. Their timing couldn’t have been better. Seconds after they came over the ridge, an intensely brilliant strobe of blue-white light pulsed from one of the dozen launch towers bristling from the landscape like thick, white whiskers. Tone pulled the car over so they could both watch.

      The strobe winked rapidly, ten times a second, a fluttering pulse of light from the base of the tower. A cargo transport rose into the sky, a squat, white cone with a broad and oddly flared base. As it cleared the tower, four more strobes began flashing at widely separated points scattered across the landscape. The effect was a warning, not the glare of the lasers themselves.

      The sound, a far-off roll of thunder, didn’t reach the two Marines for a number of seconds. The transport, its circular base now glowing white-hot, accelerated rapidly into the clear, deep blue of the early evening sky.

      “Whee-oo!” Tone said, excited. “What a ride! What you think, Luck? They’re pulling maybe eight Gs?”

      “Cargo launch,” he replied. “Betcha it’s unmanned and pulling twelve Gs, easy!”

      The hurtling transport began arching overhead as it slid into an easterly launch path. When Vandenberg had first been converted to launch operations in the last century, all launches had