Ian Douglas - Europa Strike

For Dave Plottel, who helped with the numbers; for

Heather Foutz, research assistant and first editor, par

excellence; and, as always, for Nina.

Prologue

The sounds of celebration—the bang and snap of firecrackers,…

One

“Incredible,” Major Jeffrey Warhurst said, his face pressed against the…

Two

The sign above the place on Highway One, just outside…

Three

Why, Colonel Kaitlin Garroway asked herself, do I come to…

Four

Major Jeff Warhurst made his way along the narrow access…

Five

Captain Jeremy Mitchell entered the officer’s wardroom with his tray…

Six

Rena Moore came down the stairs to the e-room and…

Seven

By the second half of the twenty-first century, there was…

Eight

Major Jack Ramsey stared into the monitor, shock transforming into…

Nine

Major Jeff Warhurst looked up from his desk as the…

Ten

General Xiang Qiman sat strapped into his couch, watching the…

Eleven

The refueling was almost complete.

Twelve

Descending Thunder No. 4 bucked and kicked as the pilot…

Thirteen

Jeff Warhurst was linked in.

Fourteen

Jeff had designated a small room off of the compartment…

Fifteen

Jeff shook his head sadly. “What the hell were you…

Sixteen

“So,” Jeff said with a wry grin. “Is this wonder…

Seventeen

“Please, God,” Kaitlin said with a rush of emotion that…

Eighteen

The steady, rattling vibration of the Tommy J’s A-M drives…

Nineteen

“Gentlemen, it’s about damned time we took this fight to…

Twenty

The Mantas rested side by side, their tapering aft sections…

Twenty-One

The city illuminated the night, holding it at bay with…

Twenty-Two

“Hold it!” Hastings said. “I’m getting something!”

Twenty-Three

Two of the Chinese assault troops were down, fist-sized holes…

Twenty-Four

The Chinese assault down the spine of the E-DARES complex…

Twenty-Five

“I’ve got something, sir,” Hastings said. “Ten Kilometers ahead, and…

Epilogue

Major Jack Ramsey looked up at Dr. Alexander. “What did you…

Other Books by Ian Douglas

Copyright

About the Publisher

10 JULY 2067

People’s Bureau of

Astronomical Sciences

Beijing, People’s Republic

of China

1925 hours (Zulu plus 8)

The sounds of celebration—the bang and snap of firecrackers, the cheers of the crowd, the rattle and throb of drums—rose from the street, hammering at the broad window overlooking the mob-packed Dongchan’an Jie. Dr. Zhao Hsiang sipped green tea from a porcelain cup and watched the festivities a moment. A huge dragon was snaking through the throng almost directly below the office window, making its sinuous way on dozens of human legs along the block midway between the southern gates of Tiananmen Square and the burned-out ruin of the old McDonald’s restaurant.

Zhao sighed. Great Zhongguo reunited at last. China, the Middle Kingdom, a major power once more. It would have been politic for Zhao to have joined the revelers, to have attended, perhaps, the ongoing parties at Tiananmen Square and the Hall of the Revolution in order to be seen by the Authorities celebrating the end of the Great Division, but he’d been too excited by this new insight. He had to know…had to. There would be time for parties later, once the results of his discovery had been confirmed and published.

“The simulation you requested is ready, Doctor,” a cool, male voice said in singsong Mandarin. The voice’s source was the IBM KR4040 on his desk—archaic technology by global standards, but the best available for the Bureau.

“Xièxie,” Zhao said, thanking his secretary. Turning, he set the cup down on a table by the window, walked across to his desk, and seated himself in the power chair, which lowered its back as he stretched against it. Taking a trio of colored leads, he began plugging in…the red in the socket behind his left ear, the green at the base of his neck close by the Atlas vertebra, and the white into the nerve plexus on the inside of his right wrist. “I am ready,” he said, enunciating the words carefully. “Safeword ting-zi. Run program.”

A crackle of static snapped somewhere in the back of his brain, and his vision winked out in a white fuzz of electronic snow. As with the Bureau’s computers, the virtual reality interfaces available to the researchers were not the most up to date, and the transition to cyberspace was always a bit disconcerting.

But they served. The static faded, replaced by a ghostly black emptiness, with a faint, blue-green glow in the depths below. He was adrift in an ocean and at a considerable depth. Lishu phonograms and numbers scrolled past the right side of his visual field, giving figures for depth, temperature, pressure, salinity, and other factors of the deep ocean.

The illusion was perfect, or nearly so. The data jacks surgically implanted in his skull allowed incoming data to override his normal processing circuitry, replacing what he saw and heard with records residing within the IBM’s fifty terabytes of storage.

He scarcely noticed the visual feed, however, for as soon as he linked in, his ears were filled with the deep and sonorous ululation of the Singer. Eerie, lonely, moving, the enigmatic voice trilled, moaned, and slid across alien scales, weaving intricate melodies the human ear had trouble grasping.

“Time compression,” he told the secretary. “Factor one to ten thousand. Compensate for my hearing range.”

“Time factor one to ten thousand. Compensating.”

The Song—how like the songs of Earth’s vanished great whales!—changed in character, pitch, and tone. Now, with the pace of the sound vastly slowed, he could hear rich, new variations, chirps and warbles and keenings his brain had been too slow to hear before. Zhao listened and marveled. There could be universes of meaning in those shifting, sliding, singsong tones. What, he wondered, was it saying?

The Singer’s benthic hymn was gloriously beautiful, with melodies and tonalities alien to Chinese ears…or to Western, for that matter. There could be no possibility that the music, or the message it carried, had anything, to do with Earth or humankind. The ocean within which Zhao was now virtually adrift was over six hundred million kilometers removed from any of Earth’s abyssal depths. The sounds filling the black depths around him were being generated by…by something deep beneath the surface of Europa’s global, ice-sheathed ocean.

It was the nature of that something that he was testing now.

“Give me a countdown to the start of the next ping,” Zhao said.

“Twenty-two seconds.”

“And take me lower. I want to see it.”

To Zhao’s senses, he seemed to be descending rapidly, though he still felt only the synthleather of the chair pressing at his back, not the cold, wet rush of the sea streaming past his face. That was just as well; the ambient water temperature was slightly below zero; its freezing point had been lowered slightly by its witch’s brew of sulfur compounds and salts. Even with Europa’s scant gravity,.13 of Earth’s, the pressure at this depth amounted to over a thousand atmospheres—something like 1,058 kilos pressing down on every square centimeter of his body, if his body had actually been plunging through the Europan depths.