Europa Strike by Ian Douglas Page B

before long, he was trading jokes with them.

FIVE
    12 OCTOBER 2067
    U.S.S. John F. Kennedy
    Solar orbit, 4.2 a.u. from Earth
    2002 hours Zulu
    Captain Jeremy Mitchell entered the officer’s wardroom with his tray and walked toward the only occupied table. Gone were the days when the other officers present stood until he was seated; the JFK ’s officer’s mess was patterned off of the dirty shirt mess decks of Navy aircraft carriers, with food served cafeteria style. It was located in “A” Hab, with the hab rotation set to deliver a gentle third of a gravity.
    â€œMind if I join you gentlemen?” he asked with an easy drawl. Mitchell was from a small town not far from San Antonio, Texas, and liked to affect the laid-back attitude of Texas and good-natured down-home.
    â€œPlease do, Captain!” Commander Varley, the weapons officer, said, gesturing.
    He set his tray down and took a seat. “Well, Mr. Lee,” he said, addressing the young Marine officer on his left. “It looks like you and your people might get a chance to prove your usefulness, even in this day and age.”
    â€œIs there any more data on the Star Mountain ’s vector, sir?” He sounded eager…and painfully young.
    â€œNothing new. They’re still vectored for Jupiter—which means Europa—and they’re boosting at 2 Gs, which means they’re in a damned hurry to get there. They won’t be able to sidestep us , however.”
    â€œPeaceforcers save Earth, once again!” Lieutenant Commander Carvelle, the chief communications officer, said, raising a glass in salute.
    Peaceforce. It was a new concept, born of one particular horror of the UN War. A French attempt to smash the U.S. will to continue the fight by diverting a small asteroid into an impact on Colorado had been stopped… almost completely. A fair-sized and somewhat radioactive piece of the UN ship that had done the diverting had come down over Lake Michigan and obliterated most of lakeside Chicago.
    With the rapid expansion of human activity into the Solar System, the Confederation of World States, struggling to knock together some form of planet-wide government to replace the disintegrating UN, had recognized the danger posed by any world power able to put a spacecraft into the asteroid belt or beyond. A relatively small nudge could put a likely megaton chunk of iron or ice into a new orbit, one that could take out anything from a city to the entire human race, depending on how ambitious the bad guys were.
    The threat had resulted in the Peaceforce, a military space force drawn from the United States Navy, the Marines, and the space assets of several allies tasked with patrolling the outer system and preventing just such attempts. The problem was that the Solar System was an awfully big backyard, too vast by far to allow any kind of systematic patrolling.
    And the trick was to position just a few ships in strategic orbits, far, far up the side of the Solar gravity well. Orbiting in the Asteroid Belt, 4.2 a.u.s out, and employing extremely powerful sensing and tracking gear, a ship could watch for any launches from Earth. Any boosts not cleared by CWS inspection teams could be intercepted by ships such as the Kennedy and either disabled at a distance, or boarded.
    That was why Lieutenant Lee was on board with his platoon of twenty-eight space-trained Marines. The JFK would match course and speed with the hostile, disable her if necessary, then close and grapple for the final round. Mitchell was amused that modern tactical thinking was actually looking at the possibility of using Marines to take an enemy ship by storm, something that hadn’t happened since the boarding of the Mayaguez in 1975.
    â€œWell, it’ll be interesting to see Lieutenant Lee here swing across from the yardarms, cutlass and boarding pistol in hand!”
    â€œI’d need more than two hands for that evolution, sir,” the