Europa Strike

“Frankly, Major, that’s not your job. Mr. Garroway here will make sure the Manta is up to Corps specs. You just have to have your people ready to board ship and boost.”

“Yes, sir.”

“In one week. With boost a week after that.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“Good man.” Altman seemed to relax a bit. “I know it’s asking a lot of you and your people, Major. And…in the long run, we don’t even know if you’ll be needed up there. But we have to be ready, just in case.”

“We’ll be ready, General. It’ll be tight, but we’ll be ready.”

“You were selected for this command, Major, because we know you can deliver the goods. Not because your grandfather is a former Commandant. Not because of political connections. You have consistently demonstrated superior skills, training, and knowledge throughout your Marine career, and especially since you were selected for the Marine Space Force. We know we can count on you.”

“Thank you, General. That means a lot, coming from you. I’ll do my best.”

But later that night, as he rode the hypersonic transport from Nassau to Los Angeles, he thought about General Altman’s pep talk and wondered if he could deliver.

Major Jeffrey Warhurst was a peacetime Marine. Although the United States had been involved in several nasty little skirmishes around the globe since the end of the UN War in ’42 and the breakup of the old UN, he had never been in combat. His family’s heritage of service in the Corps had not yet been seriously tested. Packing two companies of the 1st Marine Space Expeditionary Force up in an A-M drive transport and shipping them off to a place as implacably hostile as Europa with him second in command under Colonel Norden could be an easy way to lose almost three hundred men—even without the possibility of a shooting war with China. Quite frankly, he wondered if he had what it took to take on a job this size.

A hundred kilometers above the northern Gulf of Mexico, Jeff broke out his PAD and opened it up. He would have to talk this one over with Chesty.

TWO

18 SEPTEMBER 2067

Mr. Virtuality

Lompoc, California

1750 hours

The sign above the place on Highway One, just outside of Vandenberg Air Force Base, read “Nude Girls! Girls! Girls!” and Corporal George Leckie had to admit that they did deliver. He and his buddy Tony were stretched back on piles of oriental cushions, naked, completely surrounded by nude women. He had seven attending to his needs alone, each and every one of them paying full and sensuous attention to them.

The room was decorated with appallingly bad taste in something that possibly resembled an adolescent boy’s idea of what a Near Eastern harem might look like. One woman cradled his head on her lap, her more than generous breasts undulating with her movements just above his face; another offered a bunch of green grapes; three more ran their hands up and down his torso while a sixth massaged his feet and the seventh slowly kissed her way up the inside of his right thigh toward his groin, the tantalizing touch of her lips making him gasp and shudder.

“Oooh,” the one with the grapes said. “You’re so big, Lucky! I don’t know if there are enough of us to take proper care of you!”

“S’all right, Becka,” he replied, grinning. “Just take improper care of me. It’s getting a bit crowded in here, and I wouldn’t want any of you to feel left out!” She placed one grape in his mouth and he savored its cool, wet flavor. There was a faint alcoholic bite to it…one of the gene-tailored varieties of fruit that included a drop of brandy in their chemical makeup. He’d been hitting the tequila and beer pretty heavily before coming to this back room, and the grapes were adding to the pleasant buzz.

The best part was knowing there’d be no problems with performance, and no hangover later.

He raised his head slightly, turning to see what Tony was doing. He couldn’t see the other Marine at the moment, but a crowd of blondes—Tony really liked blondes—was huddled together on the cushion pile a few meters away, and the way one of them was sitting upright in the middle of the group, back arched and mouth agape as she bobbed happily up and down told him that Tony was already getting into the scene in a serious way. “Hey, Tone!” he called. “Howzit goin’ over there?”

“Every…thing…uh!…go…for…uh!…launch…” the other Marine called back.

“Was I right? Huh? Is this a great place or ain’t it? I…ohhh!…” The woman between his legs had reached a particularly and exquisitely sensitive spot, and one of the women working on his torso had joined her. For the next few moments, Lucky George could say very little coherent at all.

He was hoping to get off seven times tonight, once with each of them. Theoretically it was possible, but sheer exhaustion had overcome him each time he’d tried it in the past. But tonight he was feeling pretty good, and maybe…

“Leckie!”

The voice boomed from the pink and purple curtains draping the harem chamber’s vaulted ceiling, echoing as though from speakers with the volume cranked up high.

It was a voice he recognized. “Oh, shit….”

“Leckie! This is God speaking! Liberty’s been canceled for all hands.”

“Aw, Sergeant Major! Have a heart, will ya? We just got here!”

“Now, Leckie. Come out of there before I crawl in and pull your plug myself!”

And that conjured visions Lucky didn’t even want to try imagining.

“Hey, Lucky?” Tony called. “Did Sergeant Major Kaminski just—”

“Yes, goddamn it, he did.” He sighed. “Sorry, girls.”

“Aw! You have to leave so soon?”

“Safeword ‘bail-out,’” he said. Instantly, the boudoir, the grapes, the naked women, all faded out into the purple-charged blackness one sees with closed eyes. A moment later, he blinked, and he was staring at the inside of a grungy-looking metal sphere just barely roomy enough to hold a synthleather-padded couch.

A quarter of the sphere’s shell, to his left, was missing, a large, circular hatch. Sergeant Major Frank Kaminski was standing there in his khakis, fists on hips as he glared belligerently into the virtuality capsule. “So sorry to interrupt your pleasant dreams, Mister Leckie,” Kaminski said. “But your presence is required back at the squad bay!”

Lucky sat up and swung his legs out of the sphere. He was wearing nothing but a terry cloth wrap and a number of skin attachments connected to slender feed cables, gently adhering to five places on his scalp, and on his chest, wrists, back of the neck, and groin.

The wrap was to keep him from making a mess on the couch. The cold, sticky spot he felt against his skin on the inside told him it had already served its purpose, even though he hadn’t been inside for very long. “Jeez, Sergeant Major!” he complained, starting to pull off the skin connectors. “It couldn’t have waited another couple of hours?”

“No, it damned well couldn’t!” He turned to glare at the half-naked man crawling out of the virtuality sphere next to Lucky’s. “And you, Tonelli! Get your ass in gear! Both of you!”

Mamasan Koharu, the manager of the Virtuality, all prim and proper in a conservative woman’s business suit, held out a hot, warm towel with a slight bow and a smile. “You have good time, yes?”

“I want a refund, Mamasan! We paid you one hundred dollars each for four hours! That was the deal, see? We ain’t been inside there thirty minutes!”

Her eyes widened. “Oh, no! No refund! Cost same, you thirty minute, you four hour!”

“No! I want my money back!”

“It cost same! Still must program computer!” She pointed at the couch. “Still must clean you cum off equipment! Cost same!”

He snatched the towel from her. “Christ, what a gyp!” He tossed the terrycloth wrap on the floor and began toweling off his legs. “I got rights! You can’t rip us off this way. I’ll get some of my buddies together an’—”

“Corporal Leckie!” Kaminski snapped.

“Yeah?”

“Put a cap on it. Get your clothes on, both of you, and muster with me at the entrance. You’ve got ten minutes. Move it!”

Lucky entertained the notion of arguing for all of perhaps two seconds. It wasn’t right, getting taken for a ride that way! He and Tone had spent twenty minutes in the virtual bar with the tequila and beer, and had only just gotten down to the good stuff deeper in. Damn it! He’d wanted to go with all seven women! Man oh man, what a barracks story that would have made! While his physical body had—um—responded almost at once to the sensations he’d been experiencing inside the sphere, the interactive AI program running through his brain should have easily let him experience seven orgasms in a row in his head.