The Frozen Sky
© 2007 Jeff Carlson
Originally published in the
Writers of
The Future XXIII
anthology
Cover art by U.K. Ben and Meghan Mahler
Jeff Carlson
[email protected]
www.jverse.com
Don Maass
Donald Maass Literary Agency
121 West 27th St., Ste 801
New York, NY 10001
Phone: 212-727-8383
www.maassagency.com
Table of Contents
ADVANCE PRAISE
“The standout [of this anthology] is Jeff Carlson's
The Frozen Sky
, a pulse-pounding account of an
encounter with extraterrestrial life beneath the
surface of Jupiter's moon Europa.”
—
Publishers Weekly
“A tense adventure story.”
—
Locus Magazine
“A beautiful story about exploration of Europa and
what happens to a researcher as she tries to survive
contact with a rather unusual but interesting alien
race. This story completely absorbed me.”
—Brent Knowles, Your Other Mind
“A brutal hard sf adventure.”
—Sci Fi Catholic
For Joe & Gay
1.
Vonnie ran with her eyes shut, chasing the sound of her own bootsteps. This channel in the rock was tight enough to reflect every noise back on itself and she dodged through the open space between, weeping, crashing one shoulder against a slant in the wall. She fell. She glanced back, forgetting the danger in this simple reflex.
The bloody wet glint in her retinas was only a distraction, a useless blur of heads-up data she couldn't read.
Worse, her helmet was still transmitting sporadically, the side-mount and some internals crushed beyond saving. She'd rigged an ELF pulse that obeyed on/off commands, but her sonar and the camera spot were dead to her, flickering at random. And the spotlight was like a torch in this cold.
Vonnie clapped her glove over the gear block on her helmet, trying to muffle the beam. Bootsteps were one thing. This entire moon groaned with seismic activity, rattling, cracking, but heat was a give-away. Heat scarred the ice and rock, and for her to look back was to increase the odds of leaving a trail. Stupid. Stupid.
Even now she didn't want to fight. They were beautiful in their way, the amphibians — quick little starfish rippling with muscle. Rippling with ideas. They'd outmaneuvered her twice and more than anything what she felt was regret. She could have done better. She should have waited, instead of letting her ego make the decision.
In some ways Alexis Vonderach was still a girl at thirty-six, single, too smart, too good with machines and math. She was successful. She was confident. She fit the ESA psych profile to six decimal points.
Now all that was gone. She was down to nerves and guesswork and whatever momentum she could hold onto.
She lurched forward, groping with one hand along the soft volcanic rock. Her face struck a jagged outcropping in the wall and then her hip, too, safe inside her armor.
Vonnie didn't think they could track the alloys of her suit but they seemed able to smell her footprints, fresh impacts in the ice and lava dust, and there was no question that they were highly attuned to warmth. She'd killed nine at the ravine and covered her escape with an excavation charge, losing herself behind the storm... and they'd followed her easily.
Could she use that somehow? Lead them into a trap?
She was no soldier. She had never trained for violence or even imagined it, except maybe at a few faculty budget meetings. That was an odd flicker of memory. Vonnie held tightly to it, because it felt clean and bright. She would've given anything to have that life again, those tiny problems, her tidy desk.
She fell once more, off-balance with her hand against her head. The suit protected her, though, and she scrabbled over what appeared to be a cave-in.
Maybe here. Burn the rock, leave a false trail, then drop the rest of the broken wall on them. They'd give up. Didn't they have to give up? Nine dead at the ravine, two more in the ice, could they really keep soaking up casualties like that?
Vonnie could only guess at the amphibians' psychology. Even blind, she knew there was light. Alone, she knew someone would find her. Yet she thought the history of this race was without hope. Unrelenting strength, yes, but the idea of hope requires a sense of
future
. The idea of somewhere to go.
They'd never imagined the stars, much less reached up to escape this black, fractured world.
This damned world.
No less than four Earth agencies had landed mecha here to strip its resources, then sent a joint team in the name of science, and Lam and Bauman were both dead before First Contact, crushed in a rock swell. Would it have made any difference?
The question was too big for her. That the amphibians existed at all was a shock. Humankind had long since found Mars and Venus forever barren, not just stillborn but never started, and after more than a century and a half the SETI radioscopes had yet to catch any hint of another thinking race within a hundred and fifty lightyears. Some joke. All that time the amphibians were inside the solar system, a neighbor, a counterpart. It should have been the luckiest miracle. It should have been like coming home. But that had been Vonnie's worst mistake, to think of them as similar in any way. They were an intelligence that seemed to lack fear or even hesitation, and that might be exactly why her trap would work.
She decided to risk it. She was exhausted and hurt, and staying in one place would give her time to attempt repairs again, regain the advantage.
She found a small shelf in the crumbling rock face above the slide and settled in to kill more of them.
2.
Jupiter's sixth moon was an ocean, a deep, complete sphere too far from the sun to exist as a liquid. Not at temperatures of -162 Celsius. Human beings first walked the ice in 2094, and flybys and probes had buzzed this distant white orb since 1979. Europa was an interesting place. For one thing, there was a uique oxygen atmosphere created by the slow dissociation of molecules from the surface. It was water ice.
It was a natural fuel depot for fusion ships.
Before the end of the twenty-first century, the investment of fifty mecha and two dozen more in spare parts was well worth an endless supply of deuterium at the edge of human civilization. The diggers and the processing stations were fusion-powered themselves, as were the tankers parked in orbit.
Spacecraft came next, some crewed, some robots too — and eighteen years passed. It might have been longer. Much longer. The mecha were all on the equator, where it was easiest for the tankers to hold position above them without constantly burning fuel, fighting Jupiter's gravity and the tug of other moons.
Eighteen years. But the glacial tides within the ice gave Europa a great many "environments" — grinds, stacks, chasms, melts — and only the smooth, so-called plains were deemed safe by the men and women who guided the mecha by remote telepresence. Looking ahead, they sent rovers in all directions, surveying, sampling.
At the southern pole was a smooth area that covered nearly forty kilometers. Many rovers went there.
3.
Vonnie shivered, an intensely ugly sensation inside her suit. She'd locked the joints and torso, becoming a statue, preventing herself from causing any movement whatsoever, but inside it she was still skin and muscle.
The feel of her body against this shell was repulsive. Again and again she caught herself squirming and tensing, trying to shrink away from it, trying the impossible.
The rut in her thinking wasn't much better. She wished Choh Lam hadn't tried to... She wished somehow she'd saved them. Lam grasped so much so fast, he might have already found a way out, a way
up
. She'd cobbled together a ghostling using his mem files but she couldn't give it enough capacity to correct its flaws. She would have to shut down her ears or the override she'd programmed into her heat exchanger, each a different kind of death. Better to forget him. Erase him.
But even at three-quarters logic he was useful. He'd suggested a tranquilizer and Vonnie popped one tab, slowed down enough to feel clear again. Clear and cold. She shouldn't be cold, sweating inside her hard shell, but the waiting was like its own labyrinth of ice — the waiting and the listening and the deep bruises in her face.
She didn't care how sophisticated the medical systems were supposed to be. On some level her body knew it was hurt, even numbed and shot full of don't-worry.
Her head had a dozen good reasons why she was safe but her body knew the amphibians would come again.
The lonely dark was alive. That truth no longer surprised her and she strained her senses out into the thin, cold spaces reaching away from her, more afraid of missing the amphibians than of drawing in an attack. It was superstitious to imagine they could hear her thoughts, she knew that, but at the ravine they'd run straight to her hiding place despite three decoys.
She had to learn if she was going to live.
This rock shelf seemed defensible when she stumbled over it, nowhere to retreat but only one approach to cover, and there was a spongework of holes overhead where she could dump her waste heat before leaving. Vonnie was on her belly now facing outward, trying to eat and trying to rest, trying to ignore the ugly, anesthetized pressure of the med beetles slithering in and out of her temple, her cheek, her eye socket.
Both eyes were damaged but she'd elected to deal with one at a time in case something went wrong, in case the nanotech needed to scavenge one to fix the other. Lam's idea. He'd also agreed that her helmet would retain integrity if she broke off the gear block completely and stripped it for parts. What else would he have tried?
The plastisteel of her suit should contain all sound but there was another risk in talking, a risk she ignored just to be with someone even for a moment. Even a ghost.
"You still there?" she whispered.
—
Von, listen, don't close me down again, please
.
"Tell me what Lam would do. Am I safe here? I need to rest. I laid down a false trail like you said."
—
They'll catch us. But listen
.
"Did you check my map? I made it almost three klicks."
—
They will. Eighty-plus percent probability. But I can talk to them, we have enough data now. With temporary control of the suit I could at least establish
...
"No."
—
Vonnie, most of their language is shapes, postures, I can't tell you fast enough how to move
.
"No. Self-scan and correct."
—
Von, wait
.
"I said scan for glitches and correct. Off."
Could a ghost be crazy? If so, it was her fault. This ghost was the first she’d ever made and she'd rushed the process, and she had been angry with him. The real him. So she let him remember how he died and it made him erratic. Maybe he’d never doubted himself before.
Bauman would have been a better friend. Bauman was older, calmer, another woman, but she was a geneticist and Lam's biology/ecology skills were too valuable. The choice had been obvious. Vonnie just didn't have the resources to pull them apart, build an overlay with Bauman's personality and Lam's education.
She waited alone. She itched her fingertips inside her rigid glove and did not know it. Too soon she prompted her clock again and was disappointed. Five minutes until her skull was repaired, thirty before she regained her optic nerve...
Something was coming.