The Jupiter War Read online

  Already he had to be careful in dividing up their rations. Last meal, Nye and Zoti had gotten into a petty argument about half a cereal bar. They knew there wasn’t much left, even with the packs of Kitsov and Columbard.

  He rode along, not minding the cold yet, thinking about fried eggs and bacon. Zoti came topside. She had been copilot and she shared his dislike of the cramped, blind cabin, even if it was warm. They were used to fighting from a cockpit, enveloped in 3D graphics, living in an all-seeing electronic world.

  “I could do without this mud-bugger stuff,” Zoti said on short-range suit com.

  “Mud, now that I’d like,” Russ said.

  “Yeah, this ice gets to me. Brrrr! Pretty, though.” Russ studied the gray-blue valley they were entering. Gullies cut the slopes. Fans of ‘rusty gravel spread from them across the rutted, rolling canyon floor. It did have a certain stern beauty. “Hadn’t noticed.”

  “Wouldn’t mind living here.”

  He blinked. “Really?”

  “Look, I grew up in a ten-meter can. Rockrats for parents. “

  “How you like this grav?”

  “A seventh of a G? Great. More than I ever got on a tether.”

  “Your parents ever hit it big?”

  “Last time I was home, we still measured out our water in cc’s.”

  He waved at an ice tower they were passing. He hadn’t been able to figure whether they were eroded remnants or some kind of extrusion, driven by the oddities of ice tectonics. “So to you this is real wealth.”

  “Sure.” She gave him a quizzical glance. “What else is better’n ice? You can make air with it, burn the deuterium for power, grow crops—even swim.”

  “You ever done that?”

  “In grav? Naw—but I sneaked into the water reserve tanks at Ceres once. Strangest thing I ever did.”

  “Like it better than zero g?”

  She nodded enthusiastically. “Everything’s better in gravs.”

  “Everything?”

  “Well,” she gave him a veiled glance. “I haven’t tried everything yet.”

  He smiled. “Try Earth normal sometime.”

  “Yeah, I heard it’s pretty bad. But grav keeps everything steady. It feels better.”

  He had wrenched his back carrying the fusion warhead and felt a twinge from it as the truck lumbered through a depression. “Not so’s I’d notice,” he said moodily.

  “Hey, cheer up. This’s a holiday, compared to fighting. “

  “This is fighting. Just slow-motion, is all.”

  “I love it, ice and gravs.”

  “Could do with some better rations.” It was probably not a good idea to bring up food, but Russ was trying to find a way to keep the talk going. For the first time he was feeling differently about Zoti.

  “Hell, at least we got plenty water.”

  The truck lurched again and Russ grunted despite himself. “Maybe we should carve out some more?”

  “Sure,” she said lightheartedly. “I’m getting so I can spot the pure water. Tastes better’n cruiser supply. “

  “Wait’ll we get onto the flat. Don’t want this truck to speed up and leave you behind.”

  “Take it off auto.” They had already nearly left Zoti once when she laser-cut some water ice.

  “Don’t want the risk. We override, probably’ll show up in a control system back at Hiruko.”

  “I don’t think the Feds have had time to interface all these systems. Those Dagos don’t know zip.”

  “They took Hiruko pretty easy.”

  “Snuck up on it! Listen, those oily bastards . . . “ And she was off on a tirade. Russ was a Norther, too, born and bred, but he didn’t have much feeling about political roots that ran back to lines drawn on Earth’s old carcass. He listened to her go on about the filthy Feds and watched the lurching view, and that was when he saw the bat.

  It came over the far ice hills. Hard black against the slight haze of a yellow ammonia cloud, gliding when it could, jetting an ivory methane plume when it couldn’t.

  “Inside!” he whispered.

  They scrambled off the truck roof. Zoti went in the rear hatch. He looked over the lip of the roof and saw the bat veer. It had seen them. It dove quickly, head-on toward them.

  The M18s were lashed to the roof. There wasn’t time to get Zoti back out so he yanked an M18 free—making sure he got the one loaded with HE—and dropped off the back of the truck, slipping and landing on his ass. He stooped far over and ran by kicking back on the ice, so that he didn’t bounce in the low gravity. He used the truck for cover while he got to the shelter of some jagged gray boulders.

  It made one pass to confirm, sweeping in like an enormous thin bird, sensors swiveling. He wedged down among the rocks as it went over. It banked and turned quickly, coming back. Russ popped his helmet telescope out to full extension and saw that it carried rockets under the wings.

  It lined up on the truck’s tail and swooped down. It looked more like a kite from this angle, all airfoil and pencil-thin struts.

  The bat was looking at the truck, not at him. He led it a full length and opened up with the HE shells. They bucked pretty bad and he missed with the first two rounds. The third caught it in the narrow fuselage. He saw the impact. Before he could grin a rocket fired from under the right wing and streaked straight for him, leaving an orange trail.

  He ducked. The rocket fell short of the truck but close to him. The impact was like a sudden jar. He heard no sound, just found himself flat on his back. Mud and ice showered him.

  The bat went on, not seeming to mind the gaping hole in its thin fuselage, but it also didn’t rise anymore. Then it started a lazy pitch, yawed—and suddenly was tumbling end over end, like a thrown playing card.

  It became a geyser of black fragments against a snowy hill.

  5

  Russ had caught all the right signals from her, he thought.

  It was dumb, he knew that, and so did she. But somehow the tension in them had wound one turn too many and a mere glance between them set all the rest in motion.

  Sure enough, as soon as Nye left by the forward hatch to recon over the hill, Zoti started shucking her skinsuit. Then her thin green overalls.

  He wasn’t far behind her. They piled their clothes on the deck and got down on them. He suggested a sitting position but she would have none of it. She was feverish and buoyant in the muted phosphor glow of the cabin, swiveling on him with exuberant soft cries. Danger, sweat, piercing cold—all wedded into a quick, ferocious, hungry battering that they exacted from each other, rolling and licking and slamming among the machine-oil smells and rough iron rub. Fast and then, mysteriously, gravely slow, as though their senses stretched time in pursuit of oblivion.

  It was over at last, and then maybe not, and then definitely not, and then, very fast this time, over for sure. They smiled at each other through a glaze of sweat and dirt.

  “Lord!” she gasped. “The best!”

  “Ever?” Frank disbelief.

  “Sure . . .“ She gave him a sly smile. “The first, too.”

  “Huh? Oh, you mean—”

  “First in real gravity, sure.”

  “Gravity has a way of simplifying your choices.”

  “I guess. Maybe everything really is better in gravs.”

  “Deck of an auto-truck isn’t the best setting.”

  “Damn straight. We’ll give it a try in some place better.”

  “You got a date.” He got to his knees and started pulling on his blue long johns.

  Automatically he reviewed their situation, shifting back into reality after a blissful time away. He replayed events, trying to see it whole, to look for problems, errors.

  They had been forced to override the truck’s controls. The bat had undoubtedly reporting something, maybe even direct
vid images of them. So Zoti and Nye had conferred over the board and got the truck off its designated route.

  They left the marked track and ground gears to work their way up among the jagged hills. An hour later two bats came zooming over. By that time Nye had gotten the truck back into a cave. They had left the snow two klicks back, picking their way over rocky ridges, so the bats had no tracks to follow.

  They sat there edgily while the bats followed a search pattern, squaring off the valley and then other valleys, gradually moving away.

  That had given Russ time to think and get hungry and eat. They didn’t have much food left. Or time. Unless the Norther fleet kept Hiruko busy, the Feds would have time to send a thorough, human-led search party.

  So they had to change tactics. But keep warm.

  Hiruko probably had this truck identified by now. Which meant they needed another truck. Fast.

  Once they’d broken the code seal on the truck’s guidance, they had access to general tracking inventory. Nye had found the nearest truck, about fifteen kilometers away. They had edged out of the cave when an ivory fog came easing in from the far range of rumpled mountains.

  The truck moved pretty fast when its cautious nav programs were bypassed. They approached the target truck at an angle, finally lying in wait one hill over from its assigned path.

  And when Nye went out to recon the approaching truck, Russ and Zoti had taken one swift look at each other, one half-wild glance, and had seized the time.

  Nye came back through the hatch as Zoti tucked her black hair into her neck ring.

  “It’s coming. No weapons visible.” Nye looked from Zoti to Russ, puzzled.

  Russ realized he was still flushed and sweaty. “Good,” he said energetically. “Let’s hit it.”

  “Better hurry,” Nye said, his face narrowing again as he concentrated on tactics. “It just loaded up at a mine.”

  “Okay. Come out and help me on with my pack,” Russ said.

  Nye looked surprised. “You still gonna carry that warhead?”

  Russ nodded. “Regs.”

  “Look, we gotta move. Nobody’d expect—”

  “You want to pay for it when we get back?”

  Nye shrugged. “Your hassle, man.”

  “Right,” Russ said evenly.

  The second truck was moving stolidly down a narrow canyon. It had the quality of a bumbling insect, dutifully doing its job.

  “Flank it?” Zoti asked as they watched the truck’s approach.

  “Okay,” Russ said. “You two take it from the sides, just after it passes.”

  “And you?” Nye asked sarcastically.

  “Hit it right where the canyon necks in. See? I’ll come in from the top.”

  It had finally occurred to him that the light gravity opened the choices of maneuver. He leaped from the nearest ledge, arcing out over the canyon and coming down on the top of the truck.

  Zoti and Nye fired at the rear hatch, rounds skipping off the thick gray iron. A fighting machine, Class II infantry, popped out the front hatch.

  It clanked and swiveled awkwardly. It had heavy guns built into both arms and started spraying the rear of the truck, chipping the metal corners. It hadn’t registered Russ yet. When it did a small gun popped out of the machine’s top and fired straight at him. He shot the machine three times and it tumbled over and broke in half.

  Russ didn’t get to see it fall. A heavy round went through his shoulder. It sent a white-hot flower of agony through him and knocked him off the truck. He landed on his neck.

  6

  “Actually,” Nye said with a sly sort of humor, “that shoulder may not be the worst news you got.”

  Russ was not in a terrific mood. Nye’s wit went unremarked. “What?”

  “I got a readout on this truck’s itinerary. Didn’t have to bust into the command structure to do it, either.” Nye grinned proudly.

  “Great.” His neck hurt worse than his shoulder. The truck’s rumbling, shifting progress sent jabbing pains all down his spine. The bandage over his shoulder wound pulled and stung. Aside from this he was merely in a foul mood.

  “We’re going to Hiruko Station,” Nye said. “Drop off the ore.”

  “Well, that doesn’t matter,” Zoti said. “We’ll just jump off somewhere.”

  Russ nodded blearily. His mouth was dry and he didn’t feel like talking. “Right. Steal another. Play musical trucks with the Feds.”

  “Better hurry. We’re less than twenty klicks from Hiruko.”

  “What?” Russ barked.

  Zoti’s mouth made a precise, silent O.

  “Looks like you had us pointing the wrong way all along,” Nye said, his humor dissolving into bitterness.

  Russ made himself take a breath. “Okay. Okay.”

  There didn’t seem much more to say. He had probably screwed up the coordinates, gotten something backward. Or maybe the first truck took a turn that fouled up his calculations.

  It didn’t matter. Excuses never did, not unless you got back to the carrier and a board of inquiry decided they wanted to go over you with a microscope.

  Zoti said carefully, “So close . . . they will pick us up easily if we leave the truck.”

  “Yeah,” Nye said. “I say we ride this truck in and give up. Better’n freezing our tails, maybe get shot at, then have to give up anyway.”

  “We bail out now,” Russ said.

  “You hear what I said?” Nye leaned over Russ, trying to intimidate him. “That’s dumb! They’ll—”

  Russ caught him in the face with a right cross that snapped Nye’s head around and sent him sprawling.

  For once his pilot’s hands proved useful. They were heavy and hard and in his weak condition gave him just enough edge. Russ was sitting on the floor of the truck cabin and he didn’t want to bother to get up. He also wasn’t all that sure that he even could throw a punch while standing, anyway. So when Nye’s eyes clouded and the big man came at him Russ kicked Nye in the face, lifting his boot from the deck and catching Nye on the chin. Nye fell facedown on the deck. Russ breathed deeply and waited and let his neck stop speaking to him. By that time Zoti was standing over Nye with a length of pipe. He waved her away.

  “Now, I’m going to pretend you just slipped and banged your head,” Russ said evenly. “Because we got to get out of here fast and I don’t want to have to shoot you for insubordination or cowardice in the face of the enemy or any of those other lawyer’s reasons. That would take time and we don’t have time. So we just go on like you never did anything. Got that?”

  Nye opened his mouth and then closed it. Then he nodded.

  “Do you . . .” Zoti hesitated. “Do you think we can get away?”

  “We don’t have to,” Russ said. “We just have to hide.”

  “Hide and freeze,” Nye said sourly. “How’s the carrier gonna—”

  “We won’t hide long. How much time will it take this truck to reach Hiruko?”

  “Three, maybe four hours. It’s going to a smelting plant on the rim of the first bubble. I—”

  “Close enough for government work,” Russ said.

  He felt infinitely tired and irritable and yet he knew damn well he was going to have to stay awake until all this was done.

  Zoti said, “Are you sure you can . . . ?”

  Russ breathed in the stale cabin air. The world veered and swam.

  “No, matter of fact, I’m not.”

  7

  The fusion warhead went off prettily on the far horizon. A brilliant flash, then a bulging yellow-white ball.

  Nye had rigged the trigger to go if anybody climbed through the hatch. He further arranged a small vid eye and stuck it into the truck’s grille, so they got a good look at the checkpoint that stopped the truck. It was within sight of the rearing, spindly towers of Hir
uko Station. The town was really rather striking, Russ thought. Some of the towers used deep blue ice in their outer sheaths, like spouts of water pointing eternally at Jupiter’s fat face.

  Too bad it all had to go, he thought.

  The three of them were lying beneath an overhang, facing Hiruko. They ducked their heads when they saw a Fed officer scowl at the truck, walk around it, then pop the forward hatch. He looked like just the officious sort Russ hated, the kind that always gigged him on some little uniform violation just as he was leaving base on a pass.

  So he couldn’t help grinning mirthlessly when the flash lit the snow around them. The warhead was a full 1.2 megs.

  Of course, it was supposed to be a klick-high airburst, delivered from orbit. Designed to take out the surface structures and Feds and leave the mines.

  This was a ground-pounder. It sent a shock wave they watched coming toward them across the next valley. He didn’t have time to get to his feet. He rolled out from under the ledge. The wave slammed into their hill and he felt a soft thump nearby. Then the sound slapped him hard and he squeezed his eyes shut against the pain in his neck.

  When he opened them Zoti was looking into his face anxiously. He grinned. She sat in the snow and grinned back saucily.

  He looked beyond her. The hill had folded in a little and the ledge wasn’t there anymore. Neither was Nye.

  If it had just been snow that fell on him they might have had some chance. He had gotten partway out from under the ledge, nearly clear. But solid ice and some big rocks had come down on him and there wasn’t any hope. They dug him out anyway. It seemed sort of pointless because then all they could think to do was bury him again.

  The bomb cloud over Hiruko dispersed quickly, most of the radioactive debris thrown clear off the moon.

  They sat in a protected gully, soaking up what sunlight there was, and waited. As a signal beacon the fusion burst couldn’t be beat. Carrier ships came zooming over within an hour.