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Europa Strike
Ian Douglas
It’s time for humanity to claim its rightful heritage…2040: Ruins of ancient civilization uncovered on Mars reveal startling truths about the creation of humankind.2042: In the grey dust of the Earth's Moon, an extinct enslaving race left behind more answers, more questions…and a grim warning.2067: As Earth's warring factions clash in space for scraps of alien technology, a strange artifact lies trapped beneath the ice-locked oceans of Europa: a machine that holds the key to the final human destiny.It is called "The Singer" for the eerie tone it emits. An artificial intelligence built aeons ago, it may ultimately solve the mystery of the vanished alien races responsible for the birth and development of humanity. But after decades of war, the hostile nations of Earth care more for power than for knowledge.And now all that stands between the coveted Al and an all-out Chinese assault is a vastly outnumbered contingent of U.S. marines, dug in beneath the baleful red eye of Jupiter. As terrifying events light years distant begin to converge –- with confrontation imminent and annihilation inevitable –- a secret history of creation and doom must at long last be contended with… if humankind is to finally claim its glorious heritage among the stars.
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 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.
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.”
