The Jupiter War Read online

  THE FIRST recognized act of the Jupiter War was the destruction of the Johnny Greene by Confederation fighters, but no modern war really starts with bullets. As befits any media event, the Jupiter War started with words—words that had been building in intensity for more than two decades. The consistent failure of the Earth’s nations to form a working planetary government virtually forced every nation to choose sides. In 2041, for the first time in six hundred years, Switzerland joined the United Nations, now a military alliance. What had once been merely a debating society during the twentieth century had turned by the rapprochement of the super powers into a body whose main purpose was to enable the four major powers, the States, Europe, Russia, and Japan, to continue their dominance of the rest of the world. After the failure of the economic aggressions of a failing Japan, the international body evolved into an active military and economic alliance. An alliance whose purpose, once Japan became a desolate backwater, was to ensure that the less powerful nations of the Southern Hemisphere and Middle East continued to supply them with raw materials.

  As their abundant resources propelled the nations of the Southern hemisphere to importance, old grudges against the “exploiting” powers radicalized the nations of the Southern Hemisphere. Controlling an ever greater part of the world’s dwindling resources, the nations of South America, Africa, and Arabia used the massive wealth they were accumulating to modernize their countries, and their armies. Together they formed the Confederation of States, whose expressed purpose was little less than the domination of their former “oppressors.” As these nations grew in both economic and military strength, they began looking for ways to flex their newfound muscles. The older countries, fading in both importance and economic strength, sought to reassure themselves by asserting their own power whenever the opportunity to do so safely arose. Soon minor skirmishes, mostly at sea, constantly threatened to erupt into a greater conflict.

  A worldwide war in the twenty-first century was not a viable alternative. Beyond the suicidal destructive strength of fusion bombs was the even greater power for destruction of the myriad of custom diseases held in every nation’s arsenals. There were simply too many ways to die, and with the Confederation’s newfound prosperity, too much for either side to lose. Grudgingly, peace continued. During the fourth decade much of this competitiveness was directed into the space programs of the two alliances. As the space between the Earth and Moon became cluttered with military hardware, the leaders of both sides discovered that any war directly above the Earth would inevitably prove as destructive to the planet as any other. When each side could shift thousands of men anywhere· on the planet in a matter of hours, no “brushfire war” would remain limited. The contradiction of near-complete peace and a near-constant state of high military preparedness continued for the rest of the first half of the century. The pattern was both familiar and frightening. The world was the home of just too much fear, too much distrust, and an overwhelming amount of lethal weaponry. Forced by circumstances, the nations comprising each alliance had virtually ceased to have meaning. By 2032 the world consisted of two mega-nations and a number of backward neutrals who were completely unable to affect the situation.

  In space the outposts of each side continued the animosity. The nations of the United Nations had staked their claims to the Moon and Mars long before the Confederation became a factor. With the energy of a new convert, the Confederation threw its resources behind the exploitation of the asteroids. Awakening to this new challenge, the United Nations turned its still considerable resources to the settlement of the resource-rich moons of Jupiter. Permanent settlements were established by both sides in 2038.

  Part of the New Year’s Celebration in 2054 was a Peace Festival in almost every capital of the United Nations. Most of these festivals were marked by the most massive displays of military strength seen that century. The Russian leadership of Stalin would have felt quite at home viewing the French display, in which it took over seven hours for all of the units to file past the reviewing stand. ‘The military displays were more appropriate than the announced theme for these celebrations. In reality, freed of the constraints placed on their forces near Earth, both sides had long maintained a low-level conflict. In many ways the moons of Jupiter were ideal for confrontation. Rich enough to be worth fighting over and highly photogenic, this area was also distant enough to give both combatants’ populations a false sense of security.

  There is no reliable record of the first incident. By 2051 each side was losing an average of two ships per month. Virtually all of the fighting occurred in space. They were fighting over the resources of the Jovian moons, and it made no sense to destroy the only means of exploiting them. Then again war is hardly a matter of sense. It took only the one incident to escalate the conflict irreversibly.

  1

  AIRBOYS had it easy, Russ thought. He did not have much time to think this, because he and their ship, the Asskicker II, were falling pretty nearly straight down onto the Ganymede ice fields. Philosophy would have to come later. If ever.

  But atmospheric pilots did have it easier. Air gave your airfoil some lift. Absence of air—that is, pure space-at least let you turn easily, let you swivel and fire attitude rockets without trouble.

  In between was this—the thin, howling scarf of gas boiled out of Ganymede by men. Just enough gas to make trouble, but too skimpy to use for much aerodynamic lift.

  It wrenched and slapped at Asskicker II. Russ fought them down through the skimpy skin of atmosphere, using the air’s rub to brake.

  “Secured?” he called.

  “Aye!” came shouts. From Zoti and Nye and Kitsov and Columbard, all strapped in, watching their subsystems.

  They sounded scared. Usually in this raw war death came fast, and nobody had time to really get their guts snarled up.

  But when the snake had hit Asskicker II they’d patched the punctures, stopped the engine runaway, saved the electricals. Salvaged a few minutes, maybe.

  Certainly they hadn’t salvaged the mission. The ship had been venting methane from the aft tanks, a giant fart. They could not possibly complete the dive around Ganymede and lay their egg on Hiruko Station.

  The Feds had probably seen the blowout and figured they were dead. So Russ and Columbard had let their ship tumble into Ganymede’s upper air, arcing around the rim of the moon so that the main Fed cruiser couldn’t see them.

  “We gotta get down!” Columbard called.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Russ answered. His copilot knew the zigs and zags of space nav, but knifing down through this shrieking air rattled her.

  “Got one-nine-zero sec till we come out from behind Ganymede,” Columbard said rapidly. “The Feds—“

  “Nosing in,” Russ said.

  He fired their remaining engines. The methane flared and sputtered and then growled, angry as a damaged hornet.

  The sudden hard thrust threw his stomach into his throat. He gulped, eyes watering.

  They dipped and banked and the speckled ground was coming up like a big hand swatting them.

  “Slam it!” he called.

  Columbard gave them max power. Russ saw a blue-white peak slice by them like a snowy hook. He tried to find a level spot. Asskicker II had to come down vertically and had never been designed for more than scooping through the upper layers of atmospheres, to feed its ramscoops.

  Damn this soup! he had time to think—and then they hit.

  Hard.

  And bounced.

  And split.

  Their reserve air blew out, whoosh!, taking debris with it. Russ felt a painful jab in his side and then they flipped over.

 
Shouts, shrieks . . .

  A bone-jarring, splintering crash . . .

  His board went solid red . . .

  Power gone, armory down, life support . . .

  Columbard’s tracer showed red. Then blue. Outside, Ganymede was a broad, dirty-gray plain.

  Russ found that a shattered strut was poking him in the ribs. One more centimeter and it would have punched through his skinsuit.

  He would be sucking on the whole solar system, trying to inhale it—like Columbard.

  He found her in the: tangle, legs crushed and her eyes wide open, as though looking into some fresh truth he could not see.

  2

  Russ flexed his four-fingered damp-hands and surveyed the landscape. They were on the nightside of Ganymede, though pale crescents of the other moons sliced the darkness, and Jupiter hung like a fat, luminous melon above the distant horizon. He counted three distinct shadows pointing off at angles, each differently colored.

  “Maybe these’ll help us sneak by optical patternrecog detectors,” he said to Zoti, pointing.

  “Shadows?” she asked, puffing up a slope even in the light gravity. She carried a big supply pack. “Think so?”

  “Could be.” He didn’t really think so but at this point you had to believe in something.

  “Better get away from here,” Zoti said.

  “Think the Feds got a trace on us?”

  She shook her head, a tight movement visible through her skinsuit helmet. “Our guys were giving them plenty deceptors, throwing EM jams on them—the works.”

  Russ respected her tech talents, but he never relied on tricks alone. Best thing was to get away before some skimmer craft came to check for the wreck.

  “We’ll hoof in three minutes,” Russ said.

  He looked back at the crushed metal can that a big blue-black ice outcropping had made of Asskicker II. It didn’t look like a fabulously expensive, threatening bomber now, just a pile of scrap. Nye and Kitsov came up the hill, lugging more supplies.

  “Got the CCD cubes?” Russ asked Nye.

  “Yeah, I yanked them.” Nye scowled. He never said much, just let his face do his complaining for him.

  “Think they’ve got good stuff?” Russ asked.

  “Some fighter stuff,” Nye said. “Then a big juicy close-up of the snake that got us.”

  Russ nodded. Snakes were the thin, silvery missiles that their Northern Hemisphere tech jockeys couldn’t knock out. “Well,” he said, maybe that’ll be worth something. “

  Kitsov said, “Worth to Command, could be. To Natwork, no.”

  Zoti said, “Natwork? Oh-look, Network can’t use anything that’s classified. A snake shot will have TS all over it.”

  Russ asked, “TS?”

  Zoti grinned. “They say it means Top Secret, but as far as we’re concerned, might as well be Tough Shit. Means we make no loot from it.”

  Russ nodded. He hated this mercenary shit. If everything had gone right, Asskicker II would have lobbed a fusion head smack onto Hiruko Station. Earthside network royalties for the shot would’ve gone to them all, with Russ getting twice the share of the others, since he was captain and pilot.

  Had that made any difference? You could never really be sure that some subconscious greed hadn’t made you rush the orbit a little, shade the numbers, slip just a hair off the mark. Could that be what had let the snake through?

  He shook his head. He’d never know, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to.

  “Still think we’ll see a single yen out of it?” Zoti asked him. He realized she had interpreted his shaking head as disagreement. They would be reading him closely now. The crew wanted reassurance that they weren’t doomed and he was the only authority figure around. Never mind that he’d never led a ground operation in his life.

  “I think we’ll get rich,” Russ said, voice full of confidence he had dredged up from somewhere. He wondered if it rang hollowly but the others seemed to brighten.

  “Is good!” Kitsov said, grinning.

  “It’ll be better if Vie get out of here,” Russ said. “Come on.”

  “Which way?” Nye asked.

  “Through that notch in the hills there.” Russ pointed. Nye frowned, black eyebrows meeting above his blunt nose. “What’s that way?”

  “More important, what isn’t that way,” Russ said. “We’ll be putting distance between us and Hiruko Station.”

  Nye’s forehead wrinkled. “You sure?”

  “We don’t have any nav gear running, I had to sight on the moons.” Russ said this confidently but in fact he hadn’t done a square, naked-eye sighting since tech school.

  Zoti said tentatively, “How about a compass?”

  “On ice moon?” Kitsov chuckled. “Which way is magnetic pointing?”

  “That’s the problem,” Russ said. “No magnetic field. Let’s go.”

  They moved well in the low gravity. None were athletes but they had kept in shape in the gym on the voyage out. There wasn’t much else to do on the big carriers. Columbard had said that Zoti got all her workout in the sack, but then Columbard had always been catty. And not a great enthusiast in the sack herself, either. Not that her opinion mattered much, Russ thought, since she wasn’t around anymore to express it.

  A storm came sweeping in on them as they climbed away from the wreck. It was more like a sigh of snowflakes, barely buoyant in the thin, deadly methane air. It chilled them further and he wondered if they would all get colds despite the extra insulation they all wore over their combat skinsuits.

  Probably. Already his feet tingled. He turned so that his bulky pack sheltered him from the wind. They’d all get frostbite within a couple of days, he guessed.

  If they could survive at all. A man in a normal pressure suit could live about an hour on Ganymede. The unending sleet of high-energy protons would fry him, ripping through delicate cells and spreading red destruction. This was a natural side effect of Jupiter’s hugeness—its compressed core of metallic hydrogen spun rapidly, generating powerful magnetic fields that whipped around every ten hours, These fields are like a rubbery cage, snagging and trapping protons spat out by the sun. Io, the innermost large moon, belched ions of sulfur and sodium into the magnetic traps, adding to the sleet. All this rained down on the inner moons, sputtering the ice.

  Damn it, he was a sky jock, not a grunt. He’d never led a crew of barracks rats on a mud mission.

  He kept his mind off his bulky pack and chilled feet by guessing what the Feds were doing. The war was moving fast, maybe fast enough to let a downed bomber crew slip through the Fed patrols.

  When Northern Hemisphere crews had held Hiruko Station they’d needed to work outside, supervising robot ice-diggers. The first inhabitants of Ganymede instead used the newest technology to fend off the proton hail: superconducting suits, Discovery of a way to make cheap superconducting threads made it possible to weave them into pressure suits. The currents running in the threads made a magnetic field outside the suit, where it brushed away incoming protons. Inside, by the laws of magnetostatics, there was no field at all to disturb instrumentation. Once started, the currents flowed forever, without electrical resistance.

  He hoped their suits were working right. Asskicker II’s strong magnetics had kept them from frying before, but a suit could malf and you’d never know it. He fretted about a dozen other elements in a rapidly growing list of potentially deadly effects.

  Already he had new respect for the first Hiruko crews. They’d been damn good at working in this bitter cold, pioneering against the sting and bite of the giant planet. They had carved ice and even started an atmosphere. What they hadn’t been so good at was defending themselves.

  No reason they should’ve been, of course. The Southern Hemisphere had seen their chance and had come in hard—total surprise. In a single day they had taken all Ganymede. And killed
nearly every Northerner.

  The bedraggled surviving crew of Asskicker II marched in an eerie dim glow from Jupiter. Over half of Ganymede’s mass was water ice, with liberal dollops of carbon dioxide ice, frozen ammonia and methane, and minor traces of other frozen-out gases. Its small rocky core was buried under a thousand-kilometer-deep ocean of water and slush.

  The crust was liberally sprinkled by billions of years of infalling meteors. These meteorites had peppered the landscape, but the atmosphere building project had already smoothed the edges of even recent craters. Ancient impact debris had left hills of metal and rock, the only relief from a flat, barren plain.

  This frigid moon had been tugged by Jupiter’s tides for so long that it was locked, like Luna, with one face always peering at the banded ruddy planet. One complete day-night cycle was slightly more than an Earth week long. Adjusting to this rhythm would have been difficult if the sun had provided dear punctuation to the three-and-a-half-day nights. But even without an atmosphere, the sun seen from Ganymede was a dim twenty-seventh as bright as at Earth’s orbit.

  They saw sunup as they crested a line of rumpled hills. The sun was bright but curiously small. Sometimes Russ hardly noticed it compared to Europa’s white, cracked crescent. Jupiter’s shrouded mass flickered with orange lightning strokes between the roiling, somber clouds.

  Ganymede’s slow rotation had been enough to churn its inner ocean, exerting a torque on the ice sheets above. A slow-motion kind of tectonics had operated for billions of years, rubbing slabs against each other, grooving and terracing terrain.

  They leaped over long, strangely straight canyons, rather than try to find ways around. Kitsov proved the best distance man, remorselessly devouring kilometers. Russ watched the sky anxiously. Nothing cut the blackness above except occasional scruffy gray clouds.

  They didn’t stop for half a day. While they ate he ran an inventory on air, water, food. If their processors worked, recycling from the skinsuits, they could last nearly a week.