Europa Strike (30 page)

“What?”

“That the more we learn, the more we find out about the universe around us, the harder it is to answer the simple questions, like ‘what is life?'”

“
Basic
questions, Major. Not simple. In fact, that one may be one of the most complex questions there is.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes. Just ask any AI.”

The Manta continued its slow turn, and the E-DARES hull slid out of view off to the right. Tiny motes danced in the sub's searchlight beams, a snowstorm of particles.

“
Europamegabacter sulfurphilos
,” Shigeru said. “That is alive.”

“It looks like dirt,” Jeff said. “Or snow.”

“It appears to be a close analogue of a life form known on Earth. Not related, of course, but an example of convergent evolution.”

“Yes?”

“A bacteria discovered off the coast of Angola seventy years ago. A single cell, yet it's large enough to be seen by the naked eye—about the size of a period in a sentence, in fact, thousands of times larger than an ordinary bacterium. Most of that size is taken up by a huge vacuole, in which it stores nitrates to help in the metabolism of sulfur.”

“That stuff looks a lot bigger.”

“It is. Some specimens reach ten to fifteen millimeters in diameter. But they are single-cell organisms, nonetheless.

“So far, all of the life we've discovered on Europa is carbon based, like ours, but dependent on sulfur for metabolic processes. Just like the giant bacteria on Earth, or the sulfur-loving life discovered at the openings of volcanic vents in Earth's oceans, at the intersection of seismic plates. You see, it doesn't need light, as photosynthetic life does.”

Jeff could only shake his head. Here, things that looked like they were alive and growing might well not be alive at all, at least in the conventional sense, while stuff that looked like dirty snow caught in the Manta's lights was following the same patterns of life laid down by organisms on Earth.

“Whoa,” Carver said suddenly. “Hey, Major. You hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“Listen.”

Yes…he did hear something. It was so faint at first he'd not been able to hear over the background conversation, the hum of the air ventilation system, the hollow rush of water across the vessel's hull. Slowly, though, it grew louder, swelling to a low, eerie ululation, mingled with rattling clicks and keening, high-pitched shrieks, but still so distant you had to strain to make it out.

“The Singer, Chief Carver,” Jeff said.

“Affirmative, sir. I was picking up some as soon as we hit the water, but it didn't really become audible until we got down beneath the ice. It's muffled quite a bit by the hull. Must be pretty loud outside, for us to hear it this clearly.”

“Yes,” Shigeru said. “We didn't hear it until we lowered hydrophones well beneath the icecap and into the ocean proper. But the sound, especially the lower registers, travels quite well for astonishing distances. The sound waves reflect between the ice and the bottom, you know, and can travel all the way around the moon.”

Jeff had heard recordings, of course, but something about the real sound set the hair on the back of his neck aprickle. It was hard not to hear patterns in those mournful cries—and intelligence, a meaning of some sort just beyond the grasp of human understanding.

“Not exactly Top Forty pop, is it?” Wojak observed.

The subs veered toward the southwest and accelerated, Manta One moving well out into the lead to avoid having both boats lost by the same accident. For a time, the ice ceiling gliding past overhead remained visible, a slowly receding jaggedness fading into water thick with drifting particles, like fog. Shigeru was right; much of that ceiling was coated with vast patches of brown, mossy tendrils, a weird, upside-down forest in the night.

Then ice and forest were lost in darkness, with black night above and black below, and only the lonesome gleam of the Manta's lights to mark out a small, fuzzy domain of warmth and illumination. After an hour, Icebreaker Two, Carver reported, was about three kilometers astern, its lights lost in the gloom.

It made the loneliness, the isolation more intense, somehow, with the Manta a tiny bubble of heat and mind adrift in stark isolation alone in the abyssal black.

Another hour passed. A third. The men and women talked quietly among themselves, or lost themselves in PAD novels or spoke quietly into their PAD pickups as they assembled e-mails for the next scheduled uplink. Jeff had already told them that if they had any mail home they wanted to finish up, to do it on the trip and store it in the Manta's computer.

That way, so long as the Manta made it back at all, the mail would be delivered, no matter what.

Everyone knew what
that
meant.

He spent some time studying the men and women in the aft compartment, trying to peer inside their minds, to see, to feel how they were reacting to…everything, from being marooned on an alien world, to the isolation of the tiny CWS base, to suffering a heart-numbing 47 percent casualties on this campaign so far, to being sealed inside this carbon-boron-bucky-fiber can and dropped into an ink-black ocean eighty kilometers deep, a blackness alive with the eerie cries of an alien voice.

Hell, they'd been through enough already to break damned near anyone, and they kept on going. Wojak, Garcia, and Nodell all looked nervous but were working their PADs; Nodell couldn't seem to get his to work and was muttering a long, steady stream of obscenities to no one in particular. Peterson looked calm and was quietly reading a novel on his. Amberly was asleep. Campanelli and Cartwright were talking to each other. Kaminski worked his PAD. Hastings stared at nothing, his blue eyes very cold.

Or perhaps he was staring at the Singer in his mind's eye.

The sounds grew louder, slowly, as the kilometers rolled away in the Manta's wake. It seemed to Jeff they were steadily becoming more complex as well, as new over-and undertones, harmonies, and blended sounds trilled and chirped and groaned in the deep distance. It sounded, he thought, like a chorus of some vast, majestic sea beast—like the extinct great whales were supposed to have been. Could there be whales on Europa?

Unlikely. According to Shigeru, Europan marine life was primitive, most of it unicellular, though larger, more organized forms existed in the great deep. Throughout the vast, foggy emptiness between ice ceiling and mud bottom, however, there was nothing like a fish, or a whale. Nothing but detritus adrift on the icy currents, and the ongoing, haunting song of the Singer.

Four hours into the voyage, and Carver and Hastings exchanged places. Now Carver sat on the jump seat, absorbed by something in his PAD, while Hastings, face and voice muffled by the VR helmet, guided the Manta through the black depths.

Five hours. Jeff and Shigeru crawled onto the viewing couches again when Hastings warned of interesting terrain ahead. Their depth was fifty-one kilometers; the pressure on the outer hull was 663 atmospheres—9,746 psi by the old way of measuring such impossible-to-comprehend physics, or just over 692 kilograms per square centimeter.

The Manta, still descending on a long, shallow glide, was approaching a mountain ridge upthrust from the Europan ocean's abyssal depths. As he watched, shadowy forms moved into the glare of the sub's wingtip lights—a wall of rock, and a forest of gently waving fronds.

“Well, Dr. Ishiwara?” he asked as the scientist settled in next to him again. “What's the verdict? Life or not life?”

“I wish I could say,” Shigeru replied. He had to raise his voice a bit to be heard above the Singer's moans and trilling wails. “I've never seen these species before. My guess is that they're alive. They look a bit like sea fans on Earth, or some kinds of seaweed. But they also look a lot like very large clumps of
Muscomimus
. I don't know.”

The sub skimmed the mountain ridge. As rock and the waving sea grasses dropped away astern, Jeff was struck by an uneasy thought. The average depth of the seabed here was eighty kilometers; that suggested that the mountain range they'd just crossed thrust some twenty-nine kilometers into Europa's sky, if you thought of the moon's ocean as its atmosphere. Twenty-nine thousand meters—three and a third times the height of Mount Everest in the Himalayas. Two point eight times taller than Mauna Kea, as measured from
that
mountain's base at the bottom of the Pacific.

It seemed strange to think of tiny Europa, a world only a quarter of Earth's diameter, with mountains three times higher.

“Those mountains,” Shigeru said, as though reading Jeff's thoughts. “So high, compared to Earth's. Proof of the violence of this tiny world.”

“How so?”

“Europa is next out from Io, with an orbit only half again larger. The tidal strains on Europa are nearly as great as those that tear at Io—and Io, as they say, is a moon in the process of turning itself inside out. Huge lakes of molten sulfur, volcanoes spewing sulfur hundreds of kilometers into space.

“Europa is not that extreme, but the tidal action is what keeps this ocean liquid. There are volcanoes here, you know, in the depths, and the equivalent of Earth's “black smokers” as well, spewing sulfur and nitrates and various minerals and compounds into the ocean. There must have been considerable tectonic activity and mountain building.”

“Maybe the lower gravity makes for higher mountains,” Jeff suggested.

“That's certainly part of it. But the forces within this world's crust—they make Earth seem tame by comparison.”

Six hours. The song was louder, sharper, more insistent.

Kaminski was looking…not worried, exactly. It was hard to imagine the Sergeant Major being worried by anything. But he was looking uncharacteristically tired and drawn out, his eyes dark hollows, and he was staring at the overhead as though the Singer's song was wearing at him.

“Ski?” When Kaminski didn't respond right away, Jeff called louder. “Sergeant Major!”

“Sir!”

“A word with you, please.”

Kaminski rose from his seat and made his way forward, stooping to avoid hitting the overhead. “Yes, sir?”

“You doing okay, Ski? You're looking a bit ragged.”

“I'm okay, sir. I'm just tired, is all. Have a bit of a headache.”

“You take something?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Okay. Hang in there. I need everyone alert and gungho—
especially
my senior NCOs.”

“Yes, sir. There's no problem, Major.”

“Glad to hear it. I want to go over the specs on those jury-rigged torpedoes, if we could.”

They were soon immersed in a technical discussion. Kaminski seemed alert enough, but Jeff couldn't shake the feeling that he was in fact not entirely there, that he was pausing from time to time to listen to something else, something calling from far away.

The whalesong of the Singer made him think of the Greek myth of the sirens, temptresses who bewitched sailors with their songs, drawing them to their deaths upon the rocks. Kaminski was normally stolid to the point of imperturbability. What siren's song had ensnared him?

Eight hours. The Marines were beginning to cramp and grumble over their long, enforced imprisonment. Jeff and Kaminski had them, two at a time, stand, press their hands against the overhead, and stretch, working out the kinks. He then had them eat. They were still on short rations—two meals in twenty-four hours instead of three—but there was more food to go around than had been planned for originally. The unit's high casualty rate could be blamed for that.

Nine hours, and the Singer's lament was loud enough to ring from the bulkheads. Most of the Marines had replaced their helmets to muffle the sound. Jeff left his off so he could listen. There was something…something tantalizing, just beyond his grasp…

Their depth was seventy-eight kilometers, with an outside pressure of over one thousand atmospheres—1,058.5 kilograms pressing down on every square centimeter of hull. The bottom was coming up to meet them, a shadowy roughness just visible through the black-blue haze beneath them.

“Major?” Carver was back at the helm. “I think you should take a look up ahead. Tell me if I'm imagining things.”

Carver's VR feed was a lot more sensitive—and to a far larger stretch of the EM spectrum—than Jeff's eyes, but he crawled onto one of the viewing couches and wiggled forward. At first, he saw nothing but the Manta's lights illuminating the omnipresent swirling clouds of dancing white motes.

Then, gradually, he was aware of something else—a glow behind the lights.

“Can you turn off the wing lights a sec?” he asked.

“Right.”

The outside lights died, and for a moment, Jeff saw only a Stygian blackness as deep and as opaque as any at the bottom of a deep-buried cavern.

Then, gradually, as his eyes became accustomed to the darkness again, he thought he could make out a faint, background glow. It was hard to see, and it vanished completely when he tried looking straight at it. But with averted vision, he became increasingly aware of a pale, blue-green glow in the deep distance.

“Water temperature's up,” Carver said. “Five point eight Celsius, and rising. My God. Look at that!”

It looked like a wall, a billowing, fuming wall of black ash rising slowly, blurred by distance. Jeff thought of pictures he'd seen of sandstorms in the Sahara or on Mars, or of a forest fire spewing black smoke into the sky.

“What is it?”

“Black smokers,” Shigeru said, his voice softened by awe. “
Big
black smokers. Ah, I don't think we want to get too close.”

“Damned straight we don't,” Carver said. “Outside temperature now eleven point one, and climbing. I didn't know it
got
this hot on Europa!”

“It is possible that the water temperature will get considerably hotter,” Shigeru said. “At this pressure, the water
can't
boil. That glow suggests the water being expelled into the ocean is extremely hot.”