The Jupiter War Page 17

  But the human psyche is not based on sense, and the military mind is rigid. Once molded into shape it cannot adjust to the preposterous without breaking. Eight troops in hardsuits started to move onto the ice. They were joined by three more, who set down in jetpacks and began to walk.

  On the opposite edge near the perimeter the other six marines held a firm guard. Maybe there were more in the compound. I could check later, but I didn’t think it likely.

  Jimmy stepped back further, glancing over his shoulder at me. I couldn’t see his face but I’d lay money he was smiling, proud of himself for making such a display. He gestured with his rifle, vaguely waving it in the direction of the marines still in the perimeter. Then he jerked his thumb up.

  I wanted to shake my head vigorously, but in a hardsuit that is not only difficult to do but impossible to see. He wanted me to jet over and take out the troops waiting behind. Great. I would be exposed, a perfect target for any of them, and they must have had the long-range guns out. Not that I could see clearly, for the steam hazed everything over-which was perfect cover.

  I still hesitated. Not out of fear, naturally, but because if the marines out on the ice caught the flash of a jetpack in action it might lure them back to reality. Back to the universe where enemies have flesh and blood and can be killed, where Io is an active geological entity and where conditions are irregular. To wake from their own demonic nightmare. No sudden moves. Nothing at all to disturb the illusion of hell.

  And then the ice split. The small crack gave in to the forces below and opened beneath them. Maybe the weight of eight fully equipped marines in hardsuits and jetpacks had something to do with it.

  As soon as the rift opened I moved. It was like I had been waiting all my life for that one second. The jetpad responded under my hard glove faster than. I could credit and I came skimming across the ice.

  The enemy never saw me. They were all running out over the smooth flats to where their comrades had disappeared under the ice. I had all the leisure in the world to cut them off one at a time. Too heavy, too clumsy to move quickly, there was little they could do when the energy rifle melted the thin crust under their feet. Io itself did the rest. Without a decent atmosphere the sound of cracking ice didn’t travel at all. In the swirling steam they didn’t see me, not when they had been concentrating on the ground.

  Jimmy met me back in the airlock. He had come off the ice, stripped off the softsuit, and made a cup of coffee for me, hot and thick when I got in. The warmth radiated into the internal glow of having done something incredible, something amazing. The Order of St. George or St. Michael for sure. Or maybe both. McAllister would commit suicide at the very thought of it. Vindication in combat, where it matters.

  “Well, we’re going to have something to present to the quartermaster general at the next inspection,” I said, praising Jimmy roundly. “Tomorrow we’ll go in and take inventory of what they had. Excellent indeed. No doubt we’ll both get merit ratings in our personnel files.”

  But Jimmy didn’t seem entirely satisfied. “What if they come back?” he asked slowly.

  “They won’t,” I reassured him.

  “I mean to look for the others. If they don’t hear from them they’ll come looking,” Jimmy refused stubbornly.

  However, no matter how badly stated, he did have a point. There would be a search party coming, and they would be coming in heavily armed and ready for trouble. And the inspection team on the way at the same time. I didn’t like it at all. Not at all.

  But I refused to think about it, to let it disturb the pleasure in a job well done. I had that much right, so to celebrate I had Jimmy break out the Christmas rations and we each ate two portions of pudding, which was the best food we’d had since either of us had arrived. We went to bed on full stomachs, and warm with the knowledge that we were heroes.

  And I had nightmares. All night I dreamed about demons, about Mephistopheles coming to claim Faust’s soul, about the ghost warriors of the buffalo dance who it was predicted would return to the Plains. I woke arid slept and woke, but the dreams recurred. There were the three witches of Macbeth and the monster Grendel—all lived in my subconscious mind and refused to submit to the rational truth. Another truth, older and more dangerous because it was less controlled, surfaced.

  I felt like I had not slept at all in fact, as if the visitations of the nightmares were a message from my own mind, if I could only read it. But no matter how little rest I’d had, I knew I was awake and there was nothing at all I could do about it. So I got up, threw some cold water over my face, and reheated the coffee from the night before. I carried it over to my station in front of the screens by habit, which was the only way I could function at all.

  There on the screen was the message. I read it through twice before the full impact hit me. “Quartermaster general’s inspection postponed due to emergency supply conditions. Will notify with resched.”

  They weren’t coming. I drained the mug numbly, my mind an irrational mess of demons and the quartermaster general and the whole of Io, too. And then I saw it, perfect and pristine. I couldn’t help smiling.

  Jimmy, however, wasn’t smiling when I ordered him into a softsuit. “How come we got to haul half that stuff out onto the ice?” he demanded. “It’s just going to sink and go to waste and we could use it. And they’re going to come back for it, too.”

  I don’t like people who are afraid to work and I told him so in brusque terms. He groused, but went because he had no choice. He would have the chance to see it all.

  Somewhere in that battery dome was a homer, emitting a traceable frequency so that no group would be completely lost. On a place like Io where there didn’t seem to be much danger of an attack that made good sense. And that’s what I had to move.

  By midday (on our independent rotation schedule) Jimmy was done. He would see. They would come, more Confederates, to find out what had become of their troops. And they would land at the site of the beacon, moved a mere hundred meters. Moved a hundred meters onto the ice. The cracks we had opened the day before had sealed with cold. Always the battle between the interior and the surface, now erasing all marks of violence. No trace of the Marines who had died beneath the surface remained. Perhaps their hardsuits held, and they were trapped forever in the magma of Io until their oxygen ran out, watching the red-hot floes of lava sheeting their visors. I hope they died quickly, but I feared the other was more likely.

  So the camp was set, looking perfectly peaceful and assured out on a flat expanse. Innocent and deserted, it had the air of something left just for the moment. I set the homer off and walked away. I didn’t want even the heat of my jetpack scorching a clue into that virgin trap.

  Jimmy had pulled the shrimp scampi from the ration shelves for that night’s dinner. Either he was in a very good mood or he didn’t trust me at all. I wanted wine, but that wasn’t permitted. (The French had lobbied hard to insist that it be exempted from the general ban on alcohol in all military installations and aboard ships, but they’d lost. It was the one incident in the entire history of the U.N. that made me question the level of civilization in the Western world.)

  Searchers would come. I could feel it. And when they spotted the camp, set up exactly according to textbook case, they would have to come have a look. Set down a little ways away, perhaps, in case the camp was trapped. But by then it would already be too late. The heat of landing even a scout would weaken the ice, and the weight of it fully loaded would do the rest. Simple. And the marine outpost on Io would join the other ghosts of history, scoffed at and remembered for generations.

  “So what do we do now?” Jimmy asked.

  I smiled and silently thought of McAllister in a hardsuit, come to investigate . . .“We wait.”

  THE MOST fuel-efficient orbit directly from the Earth/Moon system to Jupiter took over two years to travel. A ship that expended methane to accelerate, or decelerate
the entire time could cover the distance in just under four months. To accomplish this, a ship had to dedicate about eighty-five percent of its initial mass to fuel.

  The length of the supply lines in the Jupiter War predicated two developments. The first was the growth of the asteroid settlements of both sides. The asteroids were unofficially considered neutral ground by both sides. Since there were literally millions of asteroids neither side could claim sovereignty over even a small percentage of them. While rich in minerals, the asteroids were also totally lacking in any other resources.

  As the war continued the neutrality of the asteroids was maintained, but the war zone moved closer to them. Eventually any ship farther out than the bulk of the belt was considered fair game. Had the war continued for an extended period, there was no question that one side or the other would violate the asteroid truce. Once one side was losing, the temptation to interdict the enemy’s supplies farther down the line would become irresistible. After the asteroids, attacks on the U.N. holdings on Mars, and then both antagonist’s bases on the Moon, would soon follow. After that, it could only be hoped that wisdom would prevail before Armageddon.

  War, if expensive in almost any currency you consider, does stimulate technology. The second development was an explosion in the research and development of nearly every aspect of space travel. Necessity still remained the mother of invention. This particularly included experimentation on new forms of ship’s drives. After fifteen years of asking, scientific institutions found themselves fully funded for even such esoteric and exotic programs as developing a faster-than-light drive.

  Many of the facilities for this research had been located in the Jovian system. The purpose of this was to protect the Earth from accidents that were in some cases potentially earth shattering. Many of these new technologies proved dead ends. The MAM—matter-antimatter drive—came too late to affect the outcome of the war. It did have an immediate effect on a few small actions, and laid the groundwork for the power sources so badly needed only a few years later. Like many scientific advances, MAM development was both hurried and nearly eliminated by the vicissitudes of war.

  THE OFFICE was well appointed but obviously Navy. Behind the huge mahogany desk was a plush chair whose back was just a little too straight; the bookcase had several carefully selected classics, including Spock’s World, arrayed on the top shelf, but the lower shelves all contained books of naval tactics and regulations; the pictures on the wall were elegantly framed but all of great naval encounters. The walls were covered in dark-grained wood, bespeaking more money than mere naval pay. Incongruously, the desk sported a replica of the long-lost space shuttle Challenger, nose-up and ready for its last flight, and a detailed model of the first probe to leave the solar system, Voyager.

  In the plush chair sat a gaunt, wiry naval captain. The naval captain was attired in dress uniform, declaring to every knowledgeable onlooker that here was an officer who spent more time in the staff room than on the bridge. In front of him, in front of a much less well-appointed chair, in fact a standard issue chair, stood a navy lieutenant at attention.

  Captain Poindexter allowed himself one more intimidating minute of staring at the lieutenant, one eyebrow arched, before he growled: “At ease.” As the lieutenant unbent, he added: “Be seated.”

  Trudeaux was not standard navy issue. For one, she was a woman. That was not terrible in itself but she was also a test pilot, an engineer, a physicist, and just about everything the navy frowned upon. And—Poindexter’s eyes narrowed—she was so plump as to be almost overweight. All these, however, were to be expected of the navy’s experimenters. The rumors about her singing in the rare times that she was not talking to either her computers or their ghosts he dismissed as unimportant.

  However, her Officer’s Evaluation Reports followed a disturbing pattern as she moved from post to post: always they started off warm and glowing until, as time passed, her superiors slipped from praise to insult and innuendo. Such OERs could be read two ways: either Trudeaux’s ineptitude was hard to discern immediately or she was so brilliant that her commanders sought to discredit her. Poindexter had seen both. What was unusual, however, was Trudeaux’s continued requests for combat duty or command, preferably both, More alarming were her superiors’ refusals on the grounds that she was “too valuable in her present position” to let her go.

  Even more unusual was the fact that she was nearly one billion kilometers from her post. That fact prompted the court-martial papers now lying in plain view on Poindexter’s desk, and this preliminary investigation.

  “They tell me that the Dasher’s right engine is mere shrapnel somewhere back in Jovian orbit, and that the left engine has fused,” Poindexter began, civilly. He saw her relax somewhat and chided himself, barking: “You’ve set back the navy’s Matter/Anti-Matter propulsion project a good ten years! Explain!”

  Margaret Trudeaux winced, clearly upset and uncertain.

  “Dasher was ambushed.” Maggie began.

  “Ambushed!” Poindexter roared. “Ambushed! Dasher has the best stealth electronics in the navy!” He spluttered: “Ambushed!”

  “Ambushed,” Margaret maintained icily. Good! Poindexter thought to himself, pleased that his antagonizing tactics had worked. He raised an eyebrow to indicate that she should continue, reminding himself that he was supposed to be the hard captain, intent only on the facts.

  “They took out the right engine, combustion chamber, and feed lines, in the first bolts. They also hulled the ship. In the next, they got the communications gear and the Reaction Control System.”

  “And just where were you when they attacked?”

  “I was indisposed.” Trudeaux replied.

  In response, Poindexter slammed his finger on a naval-issue voice-recorder. “I want every detail.”

  Margaret Trudeaux nodded slightly, closed her eyes, and remembered.

  Dasher was the Navy’s test ship for MAM, Matter/Antimatter propulsion systems. It was a modified courier, unarmed, relying on its incredible speed and unsurpassed stealth electronics to protect it. It had been the test ship for the Polarized Radiation MAM engines until two pilots had died from gamma radiation poisoning, and now it was the Navy’s Chaotic Flow Chamber MAM test bed. CFC had proved a winner: computer-controlled injections of a secondary propellant (hydrogen) had not only given the Dasher a specific impulse of 0.05 c but had produced a control room that was absolutely free of any radiation other than space-normal levels. And it was so safe “Even a woman can drive it!” as Dr. Brenschluss had crowed. Margaret had refrained from giving the professor a chance to examine his heart firsthand, in order to be selected as the female to prove his boast. The old Prussian had done it to needle her, resentful of the breadth of her engineering skills.

  Dasher had already made three flights from retrograde Sinope to Amalthea, the satellite most blindingly near to Jupiter, and the test results had been perfect, the test pilots almost boring in their praise of the reliability of the engines and the handling of the modified courier. The most intriguing episode of the three flights had been one pilot’s recounting flying straight through an enemy fleet without causing the slightest blip on their radar; Dasher’s stealth electronics and hull coating were the best the navy could boast.

  So Margaret Trudeaux, test pilot, chief engineer, leading and only architect of MAM combustion chambers, was selected for the fourth and final flight of the Dasher before it was replaced by a larger ship equipped with a production version of the CFC MAM drive—the drive that would give humankind, particularly U.N. humankind, the stars.

  * * *

  In mis-response to Margaret’s outrage at being chosen to fly Dasher only when it was proven safe—those were her engines, dammit!—the chief test pilot, “Red” Nelson, a relic from prehistoric times, had consoled: “Don’t worry, it’ll be a milk run.” A milk run! She had hoped she would not be bored silly, and prayed that Red was merely
displaying his usual cultivated calm.

  In fact, Margaret Trudeaux was in the galley trying to figure out how quickly to eat her ice cream when the enemy ships attacked. A sudden savage lurch of the ship was immediately followed by tearing noises and the hiss of vacuum. She clapped her hand over her mouth, with no time to swear as she leaped up and lurched to the control room. The air in the control room was fogged with water vapor condensed by the sudden pressure drop. She strapped herself into her chair and saw a sea of red lights glaring balefully on the control panels. First, hull integrity was gone. Ship’s internal oxygen lines were functional. Margaret turned her seat, grabbed a facemask, and slipped it on, pulling the straps over her head and tightening them. She set the regulator and was soon breathing pure oxygen. As a precaution, she located and started charging the portable oxygen system. With the regulator set at a mild overpressure she could work until the ship’s own pressure dropped below two percent of standard. After that she would have to don a hardsuit.

  “Let’s see what we’ve got here,” she said to the ship’s computer in her best “pilot’s calm.” Another blast shook the ship.

  Margaret checked her radar: two destroyers were hot on her tail. A quick look forward showed only Jupiter. Another scan of the panels showed no new major damage. Outside, the stars were visibly moving in response to the roll of the crippled ship. The brighter star, Margaret guessed, was Amalthea, not that it would do her any good. The navy kept no ships on that tiny dustball.

  “They’ve got you pegged,” she said to the computer, expecting it to plan evasive actions. Somehow they must have found out about the Dasher and the navy’s experiments and simply waited until a reliable engine had been developed. Now they wanted to steal it.