Ian Douglas - The Complete Heritage Trilogy - Semper Mars, Luna Marine, Europa Strike

The plan that they’d arrived at was a compromise at best, but one that offered a fair chance of success if they could clear the ISS framework of enemy troops. Unlike Shepard Station, the International Space Station was not powered by a nuclear reactor. All power came from the solar array, which converted sunlight directly to electricity and channeled it through a series of heavily shielded cables to the battery compartment at the station’s midships area. Fully charged, those batteries could keep the ISS powered for an estimated forty-eight hours, a time period that could be extended somewhat by shutting down nonessential systems.

The Marine plan depended on being able to clear the enemy from the station’s struts and rigging in order to gain unrestricted access to the power conduits from the solar panels. Cut those cables, and the station would be helpless, forced to draw on battery power for temperature control, communications, oxygen recycling, and scrubbing excess CO 2from the air. The problem, then, would be waiting them out. The UN troops could afford to sit tight knowing the Marines couldn’t storm inside and root them out; if the UN could get reinforcements to the station, the Marines would have to withdraw and the siege could be lifted.

And that, of course, was where Shepard and its laser came into the picture. Without reinforcements, sooner or later the ISS would have to surrender. And no reinforcements could approach the ISS so long as Shepard remained intact, with the Hecate HEL. In addition, Shepard could give the Marines a much-appreciated hand by sweeping snipers from the station’s struts and rigging. By timing the HEL pulses to a fraction of a second, the laser wouldn’t damage the station, but any enemy troops who happened to be looking in Shepard’s direction would be blinded.

“Forward, Marines!” Fuentes cried, touching her forward thrust control and holding it, letting her velocity build. There was no sensation of motion save for the slow growth of the ISS in her field of vision, and the steadily dwindling green numbers flickering on her visor HUD at the edge of her field of vision, counting down the meters as measured by her helmet’s laser ranger. Carefully, she unstrapped her ATAR, moving slowly to avoid going into a spin, and planted the rifle’s butt plate squarely in the slot built into the armor just about over her navel. She touched a button on the rifle’s side; a yellow crosshair appeared on the inside of her visor, together with a tiny, inset video image on her HUD’s lower left field.

What she was about to do ought to work, but it had never been tried before…at least, not outside of the microgravity combat training simulators at Vandenberg. She selected a target, a blue-helmeted soldier clinging to an antenna guy, and moved her rifle until the crosshair was centered on his chest.

Lightly, almost delicately, she squeezed the trigger.

Every action has an opposite but equal reaction, and a rifle firing in zero G acts precisely like a small rocket, hurling mass in one direction and kicking the shooter in the other. Each bullet’s mass was tiny compared to Fuentes and her hundred kilos-plus of armor and MMU, but moving very quickly, enough to give a noticeable recoil, enough to slow her forward velocity somewhat…but not enough to stop her or knock her off course. Most important, the center-of-mass-firing technique pioneered in the simulators at Vandenberg worked. If the rifle was badly positioned, the recoil could set her spinning. Careful firing from the center of mass, however, simply slowed her in her headlong charge. All of the Marines in the strike force had practiced firing from free-pivoting microgravity simulators, gangling contraptions made of struts and wires from which an armored Marine could dangle in a frictionless approximation of zero G.

She just hoped the rest of her Marines remembered their training. If one of them went spinning off into the void now, there’d be no way to recover him.

She’d been so concerned about not sending herself into a spin that she hadn’t noticed what had happened to her target. The man was tumbling away from the space station now, arms and legs cartwheeling, a fine white mist of freezing air trailing like a tiny contrail. A second blue-top appeared to her left, but she couldn’t fire at him without turning in place, a maneuver she wasn’t about to try now. She concentrated instead on the part of the ISS she was going to hit, a smooth, curved, surface that was growing from a piece of a Tinkertoy construct to a vast white wall dead ahead. She triggered reverse thrust, then fired off a burst from her ATAR for good measure, reducing her forward velocity to a slow drift.

She hit with a clang that resounded through her helmet, rebounded, and went into a slow, almost graceful spin. For a moment, panic struggled with training; there was no up or down, no easy means of orienting herself. Then as she’d been taught, she put out her left arm to counter the rotation; that slowed her down enough that she could grab a handhold, coming to a bouncing halt.

She’d made it. “Fuentes on target!” she called over the general com circuit. The idea was to keep everyone apprised of where everyone else was, but she could already tell that the sheer confusion of the situation was going to overwhelm any attempts at organization or battle management.

Turning herself about, she tried to reacquire the UN trooper she’d glimpsed on the way in, but she was confused. Not that way…damn! He could be behind her for all she knew. She turned again. The sky was filled with incoming Marines; a few blue-tops clung to station rigging or used handheld jets of some kind to propel themselves along the station’s length toward one of the airlocks. Earth was enormous, a blue-white arc across half the sky. Over her headset, she could hear the crackling calls of her Marines.

“Wheeoo! Comin’ in!”

“Watch it, Sandy! Bad guy on your four o’clock!”

“I got him!”

“I’m down! Ortega on target!”

“Help me! This is Kelly! I’ve got a malfunction! Someone help me!”

She looked around for Private Kelly but couldn’t see him. The battle was a tangle of confusion, with unfamiliar shapes and movement in unexpected directions. She had an excellent vantage point, midway along the length of the ISS, somewhere in the vicinity, she thought, of the computer module. The station’s keel—a massive structure of zigzagging struts and long, aluminum beams supporting the modules—was just over that way…and she could see the great, black wings of the solar panels when they eclipsed the glare of the sun.

That gave Fuentes her bearings, and she started moving toward the station keel.

Other Marines around her were doing the same, their active camo armor showing odd, almost abstract designs of black and white. The camo, she thought, worked well in space; it was hard to recognize anything human in those shapes, though the MMUs, which were not camouflaged, provided anchor points for the eye that helped her pick out individual features like helmets, gloves, or ATARs.

Several Marines, she saw, had reached the station dead, their armor torn open, a frosting of frozen water or atmosphere forming around gaping entry or exit holes. Others had missed the station and were receding into the black void beyond. She called up a visual on her platoon life-support readouts. It looked like five dead out of twenty-two…not good, but not as bad as it could have been, and there was always the tiny but defiant hope that some of those listed as dead were alive, but with damaged transmitters.

“Eagle, this is Marine One,” she called. “We’re down to eighteen effectives, but we’re on the station. Can you clarify the tacsit, over?”

“Ah, copy that, One. Sorry, it looks like a real furball from here. Can’t see much of anything.”