Europa Strike by Ian Douglas

Author:Ian Douglas
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
Published: 2010-03-31T22:00:00+00:00

Kaminski

Ice Station Zebra, Europa

1605 hours Zulu

“Laplace! Waggoner! Jelly! Garcia! Brighton! All of you, with me!”

Frank Kaminski bounded across the ice to the shadow of the wrecked bug, stooping at the side of the body sprawled there, face up. Corporal Gerald Bailey’s left arm had been torn off, leaving a bloody smear behind it across the ice as a seething frost of freezing water vapor and atmosphere settled over the ragged hole in Bailey’s side. Kaminski pulled the Wyvern launcher from Bailey’s right hand and tossed it to Sergeant Jellowski, then rolled the body over to get at the reload pack attached to the side of Bailey’s PLSS. Extracting a 5-centimeter rocket from the pack, he attached it, still in its load tube, to the rear of the Wyvern. Jellowski positioned the weapon with the load tube over his shoulder.

“Shit!” Jellowski yelled.

“What?”

“Can’t get a tone! They’ve muffled in!”

The robot tanks on the crater rim were spaced ten to twenty meters apart, positioning themselves so that only their glacises and their ball-mounted main guns were visible. The surface ice up there had been broken by the ground shock waves from the bombardment, and they’d back-and-forthed to work themselves down into snug, shallow trenches that made them damned hard to get at. Evidently, they were using some sort of venting system to get rid of excess heat down and away from the front of the vehicle; clouds of steam rose from the rear of each tank, rapidly crystallizing into clouds of ice.

Muffled in…

SM-12 Wyvern 5-centimeter smart missiles could track by infrared, magnetic, optical, or laser targeting, or a combination of all four. The robot tanks, though, were shrouded by ice crystals carrying vented heat. The effect smeared their IR signature across a large volume, and probably screwed up their optical configuration as well. Wyverns wouldn’t attack a vehicle shape they didn’t understand.

Waggoner darted forward from the cover of the wrecked bug, dodging past Bailey’s still form and into the open. Two of the tanks fired, the explosions sending shudders through the ice. Waggoner shrieked, then went silent, the radio transmission abruptly chopped off.

Kaminski began looking for options.

The five of them were tucked in behind the wrecked bug, invisible to the tanks above, but nakedly vulnerable if they tried to move. The robots were in hull-down defilade, their laser balls sweeping the entire expanse of the crater.

He was damned if he could see any right now.

Leckie

Ice Station Zebra, Europa

1605 hours Zulu

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