The Frozen Sky (2 page)

4.

Europa's great ocean encased a solid rock core, and volcanic activity contributed to the chaos in the ice.  Below many of the “stack” and “melt” environments, in fact, sub-surface peaks of lava had proved common, long bulges and spindles that could not have existed if this moon had more than a tenth of Earth's gravity.  The tides distributed the rock everywhere, and it was a small problem for the mecha.  It damaged blades and claws.  It jammed in pipes.  Even dust would make a site unattractive, and ESA Rover 011 was quick to give up on a wide area of the southern plain when it brought up contaminants in its drill cylinder.

Still, the rover was well-engineered.  Belatedly, it noticed the consistency of shape among the debris.  Then its telemetry jumped as it linked with a tanker overhead, using the ship’s larger brain to analyze the smattering of solids.

Finally the rover moved again, sacrificing two forearms and a spine flexor to embrace its prize, insulating the sample against the near-vacuum of the surface.

Impossible as this seemed, given the preposterous cold and the depth from which the sample came, the contaminants were organic lifeforms, long dead, long preserved: tiny, albino bugs with no more nervous system than an earthworm.

5.

Vonnie opened her blind eyes to nothing and her ears were empty, too.  But she was sure.  Something was coming.  Inside the hard shell of her suit, she moved but could not move, a surge of adrenaline that had no release.

Trembling, she waited.  Brooding, she cursed herself.  But she'd spent a lifetime making order of things and couldn't get her head quiet.  She made everything familiar by worrying through it again and again.

The trap.  She'd split her next-to-last excavation charge in two, placing one half in the ceiling just beyond her rock shelf, the other below and to her left.  The blasts would shove forward and down, but there would be shrapnel.  In this gravity there was always blowback, if only from ricochets.  Good.  The amphibians fought like a handful of rubber balls slammed down against the floor, spreading in an instant, always working to surround her. 

Without her eyes that was even more of a problem.  Her ELF pulse was far better at sounding out large shapes than at tracking movement, but it was all she had —  so she'd smash everything within a hundred meters.  Her armor could sustain indirect hits from the porous lava rock.  She planned to bait them, bring them close, then roll into the crevice behind her and hit the explosives, clean up any survivors with her laser.

It was a cutting tool, unfortunately, weak at the distance of a meter.  Worse, if she overheated the gun she would probably not be able to repair it.  Her nanotech was limited to organic internals, and a good part of the toolkits on her chest and left hip had been torn away or lost—

"Stop thinking.  Jesus, stop talking," she murmured, the words as quick as her heartbeat.

Just stop it
.  

Could they really hear her mind?  They definitely had an extra sense, maybe the ability to... feel weight, density, that would serve them well in the ice.  So they would be able to separate her from the environment.

For once that was what she wanted.  She reactivated the suit and rose into a crouch, strobing the fissure below with an ELF pulse.  She thought her extra-low frequency signals were outside the amphibians' range of hearing, but either way she'd committed herself just by standing.

Nothing.  There was nothing. 

"God—"  She choked back the sound and swept the long, bent spaces of the chasm repeatedly now, quickly locating pockets in the ceiling that she could not scour, not from this high angle.  It was like turning on a light in what she thought was a closet and finding instead that half the house was gone.  And her enemy needed only the thinnest of openings.

Were they already too close?  She’d seen it before, a dozen amphibians upside down on the rock like fat, creeping muscles.

She held up her laser even as she groped with her other hand for a chunk of rock.  There was gravel, too, and a good boulder, everything she’d been able to gather.  Throw it now?  Try to provoke them? Her thumb gritted in the jagged lava as she clenched down on it.

Vonnie was a decent shot with a ball — she grew up with three brothers — but the suit itself was a weapon.  The suit had voice programs that made her something like a passenger inside a robot, auto-commands designed for activities like climbing or welding.  Humans got tired.  The suit did not.  Even better, it still had use of the radar targeting that she could not see, and it would limit the velocity of its throws only to avoid damaging her shoulder and back.

She didn't trust it.

She'd had to use that low-level AI as a base imprint for her ghost, another mistake.  The programming was rotten with Lam's mem files and twice now the ghost had caused interrupts, trying to clean and reconfigure itself, trying to find control, and yet Vonnie was afraid to purge it.  She might lose the suit's amplified speed and strength at the same time.

"You still there?" she hissed.    

—
Von, listen, don't close me down again, please
.

The same thing it always said.  God.  Oh God.  No time to argue.  "Combat menu," she told it.

—
Online
.   

But she hesitated.  Right now, the ghost was still somewhat contained.  That would change as soon as she gave it access to defense modes, a bad gamble.  The extra capacity might be exactly what the ghost needed to self-correct... or the stupid, damned thing might corrupt the most basic functions of her suit.  Was there any other way? 

"I need auto-targeting only,” she said.  “Fire by voice command." 

—
Von, that drops efficiency to thirty percent
.

"Fire by voice command.  Confirm."

—
Listen to me
.

Four slender arms reached out of the ceiling.

6.

It was easy to be friends with Choh Lam.  He was freak smart but also patient, hiding himself in a quiet voice, both eager and shy at the same time.  He probably didn't realize he had restless eyes because in every other way he moved just like he talked, gently.  Vonnie's impression was of a man who'd spent his life holding back.  A man who wanted to belong.

He made his break with that kind of thinking before the boards had even agreed how many people to send.  Even before the mining groups had reprogrammed their mecha for new, more intensive searches, Lam let all of his intelligence show and posted a sim that guaranteed his place on the mission — for bugs. Just simple, stupid bugs.  That was all that had been found and no one believed this iceball could support much else, and there were fifteen thousand volunteers in the first week.  Fifteen thousand, even knowing that the trip out would be two and a half months cramped up inside a hab module; that the food would be slop-in-a-bag; that Jupiter seethed with radiation.

Vonnie still had to smile looking back on it.  So much heart and curiosity.  So much of the monkey in them still.  Fifteen thousand people suddenly didn't care about anything but getting  their feet on Europa and grubbing around for exotic life.  It was a riddle unlike anything else.

Where did the bugs come from
?

These weak little creatures were not burrowers, not with that spherical body shape, not with those dorsal whiskers —  and there were variations in the ice.  The narrow layer that had the bugs in it was a lot younger than the rest of the sample, and loaded with chlorides and minerals. 

Lam's school of thought predicted a world inside the ice, a small, uneasy, vertical world.  

They had long known that Europa's great ocean was not wholly solid.  The freeze went down as much as ten kilometers, but beneath that was slush and eventually liquid, as hot as boiling where raw magma or gas pushed out of the moon's rocky core.

It had all the building blocks of life — heat, water, organic material from comet and meteor strikes — but this moon was not so gentle a place as Earth.  For over a hundred years, a hundred probes had found nothing.  No surprise.  Lam confined his model to a mere six kilometers, where a fin of sub-surface mountains partly diverted the force of the tides, yet even in this safe zone the ice and rock were burned and torn.

Lam was among the first to understand the violence of this environment, and it fascinated him.

Here are the bugs in an open rift, he said.  What are they doing?  We don't know.  Mating?  Migrating?  Nearby there is a rumble, and a super-heated geyser floods the rift.  It collapses, then slowly freezes.  But there are more pocket ecologies stacked all through this area, some with thin atmospheres of water vapor from the ice or volcanic gases such as nitrogen and carbon dioxide, poisonous hydrogen chloride, explosive hydrogen sulfide.

Eons ago in some of these holes, in warm water, single-cell organisms had grown and thrived.  Much later there was algae and then vegetation to break down the CO2, releasing free oxygen into at least some of the pocket ecologies.  At least for a time.

Life here flourished because it must, evolving and spreading never more than a few steps ahead of constant upheaval. 

7.

Vonnie's head sang with the low buzz of their sonar, too strong to be just one.  They were all around.  A hint of arms, the clack of a falling pebble—

She stepped back without intending to, thinking only with her nerves, and in response the amphibians' voices rose up like a flood, wild and thick.  Her emotions were a different storm but there was one clear idea at the center of it.

She didn't want to die badly.  More than that, she didn't want the wrong reasons to be her last.

Then the ghost said:

—
Von, listen, I have six to eight targets but they're all concealed.  Nine targets now.  If we're going to pick them off before they jump, I need full system access.  

But they hadn't jumped.  Not yet.  For the first time, the amphibians were being cautious.  Curious?  Maybe it was an overture.  Vonnie moved forward again to the edge of the cliff and made herself small, tucking both arms into her chest.

—
What are you doing
?

The posture was submissive but at the same time she tried to project resolve and strength, keeping her head up, keeping it turning from side to side.  They understood at least that much of the way she was built.  They'd come after her face every time. 

—
Von, listen.  It's the only chance
.

"No," she whispered, making her decision.  "Off."

—
Wait
.

“I said off.”

She couldn't hate him.  She was to blame for everything that was wrong with Lam’s ghost.  He was just a program, and it had been his idea to try to talk without words.  A great idea.  It was incredibly dangerous but at the same time it held every bit of hope.

The amphibians sang and sang and sang, measuring her, crowding her. Would they show themselves without attacking?

8.

Christmas Bauman was fifty-two and not so new to success or failure, and that was partly why she won her slot on the expedition, as a balance to Lam and Vonderach.  Vonnie had liked her, too.  Bauman pretended sarcasm with them but it was only a way of communicating her experience.  You could measure her amusement in each fraction of a centimeter that her brows lifted above her muddy green eyes.

She had her own fascination.  "What if—" she kept saying. What if those bugs weren't dead at all, but hibernating or otherwise still biologically active?  What if their chemistry wasn’t too strange to co-opt, and could be used in geriatrics or cryo surgery?  Yes, they appeared to have been boiled in magma-heated water and then gradually mashed and distorted by the freezing process — they appeared very dead indeed — but who could say what traits were normal here?  It wasn’t impossible that the bugs had evolved to spread in this manner, like spores, preserved for ages until the ice opened up again.

Until a gene-smith landed on Europa there was no way to know, and Bauman committed to a year's hardship on nothing more than spectral scans and
what if
.

They made a game of it inside the thin, weightless cage of their ship,
what if I trade you my desert tonight for some of your computer time
and
what if you turn off that friggin music
? Eleven weeks in a box.  There wouldn't have been room for them 

to start bouncing off the walls and Christmas Bauman emerged naturally as their leader, a little bit of a mom, a little bit of a flirt.  She kept the pressure low with her jokes and also made sure they paid attention to each other, because the temptation was to only look ahead.  Lam constantly updated his sims as the mecha sent new data, and Vonnie had full responsibility for ships’ systems and maintenance, and all of them reviewed and participated in various conferences and boards and debates. Eleven weeks.  It could have been long enough to learn to hate each other, or even little enough to still be strangers when they arrived, but Bauman set aside much of her own work to invest in her colleagues instead.

The hieroglyphs changed everything.

It was a Chinese rover this time, running close to the ESA find.  Its transmission was both encoded and altercast, but the Europeans and the Brazilians each caught enough of the signal to have something to work with.  In less than four hours the naked code went system-wide.

Vonnie had learned politics at Stuttgart and, later, consulting for Arianespace.  Information was power.  There didn't seem to be much sense in withholding the discovery — likely it was just reflex — but the mood back on Earth took a hit.  Their radio surged with new worries and protocols, and they were still two and a half weeks from Europa.  It could have ruined them.  It could have sunk all of their energy into the worst kind of distraction.

Bauman saw them through.  "What if he
is
a dastardly chink spy?" she said, straight-faced.  Vonnie blushed at the slur but Lam laughed out loud. 

They were friends enough to understand that they were on their own, no matter what played out back home.

The video was in radar and infrared, the mecha's low-slung perspective trundling forward with gradients of temperature laid over the green imagery.  Far left, irregular lumps masked the horizon, warm gas oozing from several vents.  The mecha turned closer—  And the perspective fell sideways.  In front of the camera, six meters of ice bulged like a muscle.  Gas spewed upward.  Pelting hail.  Then it stopped and the mecha extended

a wire probe down into the quiet, confirming a glimpse of repetitive shapes in the ice.

In radar the carvings were stark, perfect, inarguable.

"What if we just killed somebody when the air went out?" Vonnie asked, thinking like an engineer, but Bauman said, "No, it's old.  And isolated.”

"She's right," Lam agreed.

They had grouped around the best monitor and Vonnie smiled, glad for their excitement.  Then she saw his face and frowned, feeling one step behind.

“Look,” he said as he ducked his own eyes in disappointment.

“Very old,” Bauman said.  “Still...”

The hieroglyphs repeated one shape over and over in eight vertical columns of four apiece, a symbol much like an eight-pointed star, with every arm knuckled and bent.  From tip to tip each carving was more than a meter wide, and set deep enough into the ice to be nearly half a meter thick through the middle: small domes with tapered limbs.

Vonnie thought it could be a sun calendar.  She started to say so, then caught herself.  This far out, the sun was barely brighter than any other star, and she'd soaked up enough from Lam to believe that there had never been anything walking around on the surface of this moon.

"Too old," Lam said.  "Look at the drift."

The three right-most columns appeared sloppy, hurried, but that was only because the ice had swelled there, distorting the symbols — and in this safe zone, surface tides could be measured in millimeters per century.  Vonnie felt a weird shiver down her spine.  These symbols might be several times older than the dim, half-forgotten histories recorded in the Bible.

"Cheer up," Bauman said, running her finger across the scroll pad.  The first theories from Earth were a mating ground, a food cache, maybe only territorial markings, but consensus was that the site demonstrated at least chimpanzee-equivalent intelligence.  "Even if they've all been dead for a thousand years, I guarantee you'll be up for the Nobel and the cover of every magazine you can think of."

"What?  He's not
that
smart," Vonnie said, trying for a laugh, but Lam just grimaced and shook his head.