The Jupiter War Read online

  “How much food you got?” Nye wanted to know while Russ was figuring.

  “I’m not carrying any,” Russ answered levelly.

  “Huh?” Like most cynics, Nye was also a little slow.

  “I’m carrying the warhead.”

  “What!” Nye actually got to his feet, as though outraged.

  “Regs, Sergeant,” Russ said slowly. “Never leave a fusion head for the enemy.”

  “We got to survive out here! We can’t be-“

  “We are,” Russ said. “That’s an order.”

  Nye’s mouth worked silently. After a while he sat back down, looking irritated and sheepish at the same time.

  Russ could almost sympathize with him, perhaps because he had more imagination. He knew what lay ahead.

  Even if no patrol craft spotted them, they couldn’t count on their carrier to send a pickup ship. The battle throughout the inner Jovian system was still going on—he had seen the flashes overhead, far out among the moons. The Northern Hemisphere forces had their hands full.

  He looked down at his own hands—four dampfingers with delicate tools embedded in the tip of each. Combat pilot hands, technological marvels. Back on the cruiser they could detach these ceramo-wonders and his normal hands would work just fine.

  But out here, in bitter cold and high sucking vacuum, he couldn’t get them off. And the chill seeping into them sent a dull ache up his arms.

  The pain he could take. The clumsiness might be fatal.

  “Get up!” he called. “Got klicks to go before we sleep, guys.”

  3

  They spotted the auto-truck the next day at noon.

  It came grinding along beside a gouged trench. The trench looked man-made but it was a stretch mark. Ganymede’s natural radioactive elements in its core had heated the dark inner ocean, cracking the ice shell.

  But the strip beside the natural groove was a route the automated truck used to haul mined ores.

  Or so Russ figured. He did know that already, after just over a day of hard marching, his crew was wearing out fast. Zoti was limping. Maybe she had spent her gym time on her back. He didn’t give a damn one way or the other, but if she slowed them down they might have to leave her behind.

  But the truck could change all that. He stopped, dead still, and watched it lumber along. Its treads bit into the pale blue ice and its forward sensors monotonously swept back and forth, watching for obstructions.

  Russ was no infantry officer. He knew virtually nothing about flanking and fire-and-maneuver and all the other terms that raced through his head and straight out again, leaving no residue of useful memory.

  Had the Feds put fighting machines in the trucks? The idea suddenly occurred to him and seemed utterly logical. He could remember nothing in the flight briefing about that. Mostly because the briefing officer expected them to either come back intact or be blown to frags. Nobody much thought fighter-bombers would crash. Or have surviving crew.

  Could the truck hear his suit com? He didn’t know.

  Better use hand signals, then. He held up a claw-hand. Nye kept walking until Kitsov grabbed his arm. They all stood for a long moment, looking at the orange-colored truck and then at Russ and then back at the truck again.

  One thing was sure, Russ thought. If the truck was carrying a fighting machine, the fighter wasn’t so hot. His crew made beautiful targets out here, standing out nice and clean against the dirty ice.

  He waved with both arms. Drop your packs.

  Somewhat to his surprise, they did. He was glad to get the bulk off his shoulders.

  The truck kept lumbering along, oblivious. He made broad gestures. Pincer attack.

  They closed the distance at a dead run. The truck didn’t slow or turn.

  They all leaped the deep groove in the ice with no trouble. They cleared the next forty meters quickly and Nye had reached the truck when a small popping sound came from the truck rear and Kitsov fell.

  Russ was headed for the hatch in the front so he couldn’t see the rear of the truck at all. The popping came again and Nye fired his M18 at something, the whole clip at once, rrrrrrrtttt!

  The popping stopped. Russ ran alongside the truck, puffing, Zoti beside him. Nye had the back of the truck open. Something came out, something ail pipes and servos and ripped aluminum. Damaged but still active. Zoti brought up her M18. Nye hit the thing with the butt of his M18 and caved in an optical sensor. The fighter didn’t stop. It reached for Nye with a knife that suddenly flipped up, standing straight out at the end of a telescoping arm. Zoti smashed the arm. The fighting machine tumbled out and went facedown on the ice. Russ shot it in the back of its power panel. It didn’t move anymore.

  “Damn!” Nye said. “Had a switchblade! You ever—”

  “Get in front!” Russ yelled, turning away.

  “What? I—”

  “It’s still armed,” Russ called, already running. If Nye didn’t want to follow orders that was fine with him.

  They had all nearly reached the front of the truck when the fighter went off, a small crump. Shrapnel rattled against the truck.

  “Think it’s dead now?” Zoti asked, wide-eyed.

  “Leave it,” Russ said. He walked to where Kitsov lay facedown.

  The man had a big hole in his chest and a bigger one in back. It was turning reddish-brown already. The thin atmosphere was sucking blood out of the body, the stain spreading down the back and onto the mottled ice. It made a pool there that fumed into a brown vapor.

  Russ looked at it, his mind motionless for a long moment as he recalled Kitsov once saying some dumb reg made his blood boil. Well, now it was.

  Russ knew that even the skimpy gear on Asskicker II could have kept Kitsov running long enough to get back to the cruiser. Out here there was utterly no hope.

  Two days, two crew. Three remaining.

  And they had maybe six days of air left. Plenty of time to get their dying done.

  4

  Russ wondered what shape and size of man had designed the forward seat. He peered out through a smeared viewport, barking his knees against the rough iron. The auto-truck had been fashioned from Ganymede ore and nobody had bothered to polish rough edges. The seat bit into him through his skin suit and somehow the iron· smelled bitter, as if some acid had gotten in at the foundry.

  But, far more important, the cabin was warm. The Ganymede cold had seeped into them on the march and they kept the interior heaters on high, basking in it.

  He watched the rutted terrain ahead closely. There had been no sign of activity during the day they had ridden in the auto-truck. The truck was sluggish, careful, dumb. It had stopped twice to pick up ore canisters from robot mines. The ore came out of a hole in the ground on a conveyor belt. There were no higher order machines around to notice three stowaway humans.

  Russ got out of the seat, having to twist over a ceramic cowling, and jerked a thumb at Nye to take over. They switched every half hour because after that you couldn’t stay alert. Zoti was asleep in the back. He envied her. He had caught some downtime but his nerves got to him after a few hours.

  “Helmet,” he called. Russ pulled his on and watched Nye zip up. Zoti slept with hers on, following orders. The simple pleasure of the cabin’s cozy pressure was hard to give up.

  He climbed out the broken back hatch. Nye had riddled it but the pressure seal inside self-healed. Russ used handholds to scramble onto the corrugated top of the truck. He could see much farther from here. Watching the rumpled hills reassured him somehow. Scrunched down below, staring out a slit, it was too easy to imagine Feds creeping up on them.

  Overhead, Jupiter eclipsed the sun. The squat pink watermelon planet seemed to clasp the hard point of white light in a rosy glow, then swallowed it completely. Now Europa’s white, cracked crescent would be the major light in the sky for three and a half hour
s, he calculated. A rosy halo washed around the rim of Jupiter’s atmosphere as sunlight refracted through the transparent outer layers.

  He wished he could get the crazy, whirling geometry of this place straight in his head. The Feds had knocked down all navsats, and he couldn’t stay on the air long enough to call for a position check with the carrier.

  This truck was carrying them away from Hiruko Station, he figured. It would be reassuring to get some sort of verification, though. No pickup mission would risk coming in close to Hiruko.

  He took out his Fujitsu transponder and tapped into the external power jack. He had no idea where the carrier was now, so he just aimed the pistol-grip antenna at the sky and got off a quick microwave “mayday” burst. That was all the carrier needed to know they were alive, but getting a fix on them would be tough.

  Job done, he sat and watched the slow swirling dance of the sky. No flashes, so maybe the battle was over. Only for a while, though. Neither side was going to give up the inner moons. Russ grinned, remembering how just a few years back some of his Earthside buddies had said a real war out here was pointless. Impossible, too.

  Too far away, they said. Too hard.

  Even after the human race had moved into the near-Earth orbits, scattering their spindly factories and cylinder-cities and rock-hopping entrepreneurs, the human race was dominated by nay-saying groundhogs.

  Sure, they had said, space worked. Slinging airtight homes into orbit at about one astronomical unit’s distance from the sun was—in retrospect—an obvious step. After all, there was a convenient moon nearby to provide mass and resources.

  But Earth, they said, was a benign neighborhood. You could re-supply most outposts within a few days. Except for the occasional solar storm, when winds of high-energy particles lashed out, the radiation levels were low. There was plenty of sunshine to focus with mirrors, capture in great sheets of conversion wafers, and turn into bountiful, high-quality energy.

  But Jupiter? Why go there?

  Scientific teams had already touched down on the big moons in the mid twenty-first century, even dipped into the thick atmosphere. By counting craters and taking core samples, they deduced what they could about how the solar system had evolved. After that brief era of quick-payoff visits, nobody had gone back. One big reason, everyone was quick to point out, was the death rate in those expeditions: half never saw Earth again, except as a distant blue-white dot.

  Scientists don’t tame new worlds; pioneers do. And except for the bands of religious or political refugee/fanatics, pioneers don’t do it for nothing.

  By 2050 humans had already begun to spread out of the near-Earth zone. The bait was the asteroids—big tumbling lodes of metal and rock, rich in heavy elements. These flying mountains could be steered slowly from their looping orbits and brought into near-Earth rendezvous. The delta-V wasn’t all that large.

  There, smelters melted them down and fed the factories steady streams of precious raw materials: manganese, platinum, cadmium, chromium, molybdenum, tellurium, vanadium, tungsten, and all the rare metals. Earth was running out of these, or else was unwilling to pollute its biosphere to scratch the last fraction out of the crust. Processing metals was messy and dangerous. The space factories could throw their waste into the solar wind, letting the gentle push of protons blow it out to the stars.

  For raw materials, corporations like Mosambi and Kundusu grubstaked loners who went out in pressurized tin cans, sniffing with their spectrometers at the myriad chunks. Most of them were duds, but a rich lode of vanadium, say, could make a haggard, antisocial rockrat into a wealthy man. Living in zero-gravity craft wasn’t particularly healthy, of course. You had to scramble if a solar storm blew in, and crouch behind an asteroid for shelter. Most rock-hoppers disdained the heavy shielding that would ward off cosmic rays, figuring that their stay would be short and lucky, so the radiation damage wouldn’t be fatal. Many lost that bet.

  One thing they could not do without, though, was food and air. That proved to be the pivot-point that drove mankind still farther out.

  Life runs on the simplest chemicals. A closed artificial biosphere is basically a series of smoldering fires: hydrogen burns with oxygen to give water; carbon burns into carbon dioxide, which plants eat; nitrogen combines in the soil so the plants can make proteins, enabling humans to be smart enough to arrange all this artificially.

  The colonies that swam in near-Earth orbits had run into this problem early. They needed a steady flow of organic matter and liquids to keep their biospheres balanced. Supply from Earth was expensive. A better solution was to search out the few asteroids that had significant carbonaceous chondrites—rock rich in light elements: hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen.

  There were surprisingly few. Most were pushed painfully back to Earth orbit and gobbled up by the colonies. By the time the rock-hoppers needed light elements, the asteroid belt had been picked clean.

  Besides, bare rock is unforgiving stuff. Getting blood from a stone was possible in the energy-rich cylinder-cities. The loose, thinly spread coalition of prospectors couldn’t pay the stiff bills needed for a big-style conversion plant.

  From Ceres, the largest asteroid, Jupiter loomed like a candy-striped beacon, far larger than Earth. The rockrats lived in the broad band between two and three astronomical units out from the sun-they were used to a wan, diminished sunshine, and had already been tutored in the awful cold. For them it was no great leap to Jove, hanging there 5.2 times farther from the sun than Earth.

  They went for the liquids. Three of the big moons—Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto—were immense iceballs. True, they circled endlessly the most massive planet of all, 318 times the mass of Earth. That put them deep down in a gravitational well. Still, it was far cheaper to send a robot ship coasting out to Jupiter, and looping into orbit around Ganymede, than it was to haul water up from the oceans of Earth. The first stations set up on Ganymede were semiautomatic—meaning a few unlucky souls had to tend the machinery.

  And here came some of that machinery now.

  Russ slid back and lay down on the truck’s flat roof. Ahead a team of robos was digging away. They had a hodgepodge of tracks and arms and didn’t look dangerous. The biggest one threw out a rust-red stream of ore that the others were sampling.

  One of the old exploration teams, then. He hoped they’d just ignore the truck.

  “What’ll we do?” Nye whispered over comm.

  “Shut up,” Russ answered.

  The truck seemed to hesitate, deciding whether to grind over to the robos. A small robo noticed this and came rolling over on balloon tires.

  Russ froze. This robo looked intelligent. It was probably the team leader and could relay an alarm.

  Still lying flat, Russ wormed his way over to the edge of the truck roof. He brought his heavy pilot’s hands forward and waited, hoping he blended into the truck’s profile.

  The robo seemed to eye the truck with swiveling opticals. The truck stopped. The robo approached, extended a telescoping tube. Gingerly it began to insert this into the truck’s external socket.

  Russ watched the robo’s opticals focus down on its task. Then he hit it carefully in the electrical cowling. His hand clanged on the copper cowling and dented it. The robo jerked, snatching back its telescope arm.

  The robo was quick. It backed away on its wobbly wheels, but just a little too fast. They spun. It slewed around on the ice.

  Russ jumped down while the robo was looking the other way. It might already be transmitting an image. He hit the cowling again and then pried up the copper sheet metal. With two fingers he sheared off three bundles of wire.

  The robo stopped. Its external monitor rippled with alarm lights. Russ cut some more and the alarms went off. MECHANICAL DAMAGE, the robo’s status digitals said.

  The other robos just kept on studying the soil.

  Zoti was coming out of the rear
hatch when he climbed back on the truck. “Back inside,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  They got away fast. Those robos had been easy only because no Feds had gotten around to reprogramming them.

  Soon enough, somebody would. They were in for a long war out here. He could feel it in his bones.

  Trouble was, Earthly interests swung plenty of weight—and mass—even out here. The old north-south division of wealth and ability was mirrored in the solar system, though warped. The Southern Confederation Feds wanted a greater share of the Jovian wealth. So they had seized a few Northern Hemisphere ice-eating bases, like Hiruko Station. Those robos now labored for the Fed factories waiting in near-Earth orbit for the ore.

  The shock of actual war, of death in high vacuum and biting, unearthly cold—that had reverberated through Earthside politics, exciting public horror and private thrills.

  Earth had long been a leafy preserve, over-policed and under-armed. Battle and zesty victory gave the great publics of the now-docile planet a twinge of exquisite, forbidden sin.

  Here was a gaudy arena where civilized cultures could slug it out, all the while bitterly decrying the beastly actions, the unforgivable atrocities, the inevitable horrific mischances.

  And watch it all on 3D. In full, glossy color.

  The economic motivations sank beneath the waves of eager surrogate participation. Unfortunately, the two were not so easily separated in the Jovian system. The first troops guarded the automatic plants on’ the moons. Thus they and the plants became first targets for the fleets that came accelerating into the system. Bucks blended with blood.

  Hiruko Station was the first to fall to the Feds. Now the only way to root them out was to blast the surface, hoping the ice mines would escape most of the damage. That had been Asskicker II’s job.

  Russ wished he could get news of the fighting. Radio gave only meaningless coded buzzes, flittering through the hiss of the giant Van Allen belts. News would have distracted him from his other preoccupation: food. He kept remembering sizzling steaks and crisp fries and hot coffee so black you had to sip it slow.