Europa Strike: Book Three of the Heritage Trilogy Read online

  Europa Strike:

  Book Three of

  the Heritage Trilogy

  Ian Douglas

  For Dave Plottel, who helped with the numbers; for

  Heather Foutz, research assistant and first editor, par

  excellence; and, as always, for Nina.

  Contents

  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

  PROLOGUE

  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 t
emperature 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.

  The light seemed to be growing brighter, and he was beginning to make out the fuzzy forms of walls, towers, domes…

  The image was not being transferred by light in this lightless abyss, of course, but by sound. The Song itself, echoing repeatedly from the surface ice around and around the Jovian satellite, reflected from those curiously shaped alien architectures. Microphones at the surface retrieved those reflections, and advanced imaging AIs created a rough and low-resolution image of what human eyes might have seen, if in fact they were suspended a mere few hundred meters above the object and not nearly seventy-eight kilometers. The object was twelve kilometers across, roughly disk shaped, but with myriad swellings, blisters, domes, and towers that gave it the look of a small city. Experts were still divided over whether it was an underwater city, built for some inscrutable purpose deep within the Europan ocean, or a titanic spacecraft, a vessel from Outside that had crashed and sunk here thousands of years ago…or more. So far, the evidence seemed to support the spacecraft hypothesis. The thing couldn’t be native; Europa was a small world of ice and water over a shriveled, stony core, incapable of supporting any sort of technic civilization. The Singer had to be a visitor from somewhere else.

  One end appeared sunken in a thickening of the darkness below—the point at which the sea’s pressures grew so great that the water became a kind of ice-water slurry. Deeper yet was the core, where tidal flexing of the satellite in the immense tug-of-war between Jupiter and its moons had warmed the frozen world’s heart, and deep sea vents spewed forth hot water and clouds of organic chemicals. There was life on Europa, thriving in the deeps near the volcanic vents. The CWS expedition had confirmed that a year ago.

  But the Singer was as alien to the simple microorganisms swarming in the Europan sea as it was to humankind.

  To Zhao’s slowed time sense, the sonar ping sounded like the reverberation of a deep, resonant gong, the one-second pulse dragging on and on interminably, muted by the software running the simulation. He closed his virtual eyes, shutting off the glowing, sea-wavering towers, concentrating wholly on the alien song.

  “There! You hear it? When the probe frequency shifts, the tonal range of the song shifts the same way. It’s very subtle….”

  “Too subtle for a promising analysis,” his Secretary said, speaking in his thoughts. The AI’s name was Albert, for Albert Einstein, a persona it adopted when it was necessary to manifest itself in a simulation or on screen. Zhao did not share the Secretary’s name with his compatriots at the Bureau, however. Things Western bore a particularly strong and unpleasant odor just now. “I cannot be certain that I hear what you believe you hear…and my hearing is considerably more sensitive than yours.”

  “Ah. But I hear it through putonghuà,” Zhao replied. The word meant “common speech,” the Beijing dialect, what foreigners still called Mandarin.

  “As do I.”

  “Of course. Perhaps I am more sensitive to shifts of relative tone than are you. You have been programmed to interpret tonal shifts in speaking the language. I have grown up with it.”

  “Perhaps, though I fail to see the difference in the two.” Albert did not sound convinced, though it was always risky reading emotion of any kind into the AI’s words. Most of his coworkers thought of AIs as completely lacking in emotion or feeling, but Zhao knew better.

  “There is no question about it!” Zhao said. For the first time, he was beginning to allow himself to be excited. “The Singer is responding in realtime to the sonar signals transmitted from the surface. Do you realize what this means?”

  “If true,” Albert replied, “it means that the Singer is not a recording or automatic beacon of some sort, as current theory suggests, but represents an active intelligence.”

  “It means,” Zhao said, excited, “a chance for first contact….”

  “It is likely that the CWS expedition has precisely that in mind. The Americans’ sudden interest in submarines designed for extreme high-pressure operations suggest that they plan to visit the Singer in person.”

  And that, Zhao thought, could well be a disaster for China.

  “We will have to inform General Xiang, of course,” Albert reminded him. “With the current political situation, the Americans are unlikely to grant us access to this find.”

  “Of course.”

  It was imperative that Great Zhongguo be the first to make face-to-face contact with alien visitors from Beyond. The nation’s survival—as a world power, as a technological power—depended on it. China’s population, now approaching three billion, could not be sustained by the capricious handouts of foreign governments.

  And so, China would go to Europa to meet for themselves these song-weaving visitors from the stars.

  First, though, the Americans and their puppets would have to be taken out of the way.

  ONE

  15 SEPTEMBER 2067

  U.S. Navy Deep Submersible

  Research Center

  AUTEC, Andros Island

  Bahamas, Earth

  1055 hours (Zulu minus 5)

  “Incredible,” Major Jeffrey Warhurst said, his face pressed against the forward viewing port like a kid experiencing his first visit to a seaquarium. “It’s like a whole different world!”

  Golden light exploded, a shower of drifting sparks. In the inky blackness, a line of blue-green lights rippled through the water beyond the port, a spectacular display of deep-sea luminescence. Close by, something like a translucent shrimp exhaled a cloud of yellow fire like a tiny rocket’s exhaust, scooting off through the night, while in the distance, silver hatchet fish glowed with ghostly radiance.

  “It’s all of that,” Mark Garroway said. The cramped DSV bridge was almost in total darkness, so that their eyes could remain sensitive to the light show outside. The two men were lying face-down on narrow, side-by-side couches so they could see forward. The sub’s pilot occupied a closed-in, padded seat above and behind them. “You see some of the weirdest damned things down here. Bill Beebe called it ‘plunging into new strangeness,’ until ‘vocabularies are pauperized and minds are drugged.’”

  “Beebe?”

  “He helped develop the bathysphere, back in the 1930s, with Otis Barton. The first true deep sea exploration vessel…if you can call a steel sphere dangling at the end of a thousand-meter cable a vessel. He was the first scientist ever to see some of these deep forms…alive, at any rate. He made his dives off of Bermuda.”

  “And he saw creatures like these?” Jeff asked. Something collided with the port, exploding in a storm of drifting sparks and leaving behind a pale, iridescently glowing smear. “Wow! Marvelous!”

  The third man on the DSV control deck shifted in the pilot’s seat, both hands on the attitude-control joysticks ball-mounted on the arms of the padded chair. “Time, gentlemen,” he said. “We should be getting back to the surface.” He was a stocky, powerful man with a body-sculptor’s muscles. His square-jawed face was all but covered by the bright red VR helmet he wore, which fed him a constant 3-D and 360-degree image of the submersible’s surroundings.

  “I thought these subs had a thirty-day endurance,” Jeff said.

  “They do,” Mark said, “when they’re fully supplied, which this one is not. Even so, we have expendables enough to stay down for three or four days, at least. But that’s not what’s affecting our deadline. General Altman’s scheduled to arrive in another hour, and we should be topside to meet him, don’t you think?”

  “Damn,” Jeff said, continuing to watch the soft-glowing fireworks beyond the port. “I could stay down here for days!”

  Mark chuckled. “Yeah, I know
exactly what you mean.”

  Jeff Warhurst glanced sideways at the older man, at the rugged face in profile faintly illuminated by the red-hued glow of the bridge lights. Mark Garroway was seventy-one years old but showed no sign at all of slowing down, and his face was alive now with pleasure and wonder. He looked as excited as Jeff felt, for all that he was thirty-two years older.

  The man was a legend in the Marines—“Sands of Mars” Garroway, the then-Marine Corps major and electronics expert who’d led a small band of Marines across 650 kilometers of the Vallis Marineris back in ’41 to defeat a UN garrison at Mars Prime and go on to recapture the U.S. xenoarcheological base at Cydonia.

  Jeff had been a Marine since 2050—seventeen years now—and had all but worshipped Garroway as his personal hero for longer than that. It was still a little hard to realize that he was lying next to the hero of Garroway’s March…in an environment even more alien, in most ways, than the frozen surface of Mars.

  “I guess this is all pretty old to you. You probably get tired of this after awhile, huh?”

  “What?” Garroway said, startled. “Tired of this? When I do, I’ll be tired of life!”

  From what Jeff had heard, the elder Garroway hadn’t slowed down much at all in the past quarter-century. Shortly after his return from Mars, he’d worked as a consultant with the Japanese, helping to make sense out of the flood of new technology arriving from the ET finds on Mars and the Moon. After that, he’d retired here, to the Bahamas, to open his marina, but even then he continued to work as a government consultant. AUTEC—the big U.S. submarine testing and research station on Andros Island—was only a few kilometers down the coast. With the building of the Bahamas seaquarium next door at Mastic Point twelve years ago, Mark Garroway had become both moderately wealthy and something of a public figure. Garroway’s marina had been offering both realworld and virtual commercial submarine tours of the reefs for tourists for years now; his undersea tour service was a part of the Oceanus Seaquarium’s exhibits and one of the most popular tourist attractions in the Islands.