9.
The first one came from behind, undetected, almost certainly airborne. It clamped its eight arms around her helmet and the fissure exploded with bodies.
Vonnie screamed, uselessly. Thrashing was no better. The roping muscles cinched down on her face were lined with cilia — fine, gripping pinchers in the thousands — and the amphibian had landed its body against the rough patch where her gear block had been, chewing there with its beak. The sound was a high squeal, rubbing and scraping.
She flailed at it with both hands. Somehow she managed another sweep of the chasm at the same time.
The echoes of her ELF pulse were close and frantic, overlapping. A swarm. She'd seen it before. The amphibians were spectacular in flight, all arms outstretched like suns. Their hieroglyphs were a literal portrayal of their bodies. To
a species that saw in sonar, language consisted of stance and gesture. They always knew each other's mood and seemed to share it, like a school of fish. At a guess there were twenty in the tightly choreographed launch and too many had gotten past her explosives—
"You still there?" she shouted.
—
Von, listen, don't close me down again, please
.
She was already talking over the ghost. "Auto assault, max force! Lam! Combat menu AP, auto assault, do you understand?"
The delay felt like another kind of blindness and separation. She almost froze. She screamed again. She punched at the small monster wrapped around her head but its hard cartilage skin was like pounding on rubber. Only her cutting tool had pierced that hide before, and she was afraid to use the laser against her own face.
Then she jerked sideways, wrenching her spine. At first she thought she'd been hit by a mass of bodies.
—
Auto assault
.
The suit carried her. The suit spasmed and leapt. It put her fist to her temple and drew the laser across the amphibian's arms, a precise stutter of four burns, even as it threw her onto her hip and met the incoming wave with a kick.
Impacts shook Vonnie's foot and shin, and then she was up again. Then three tentacles clunked against her back. Some of the amphibians must have gone overhead when she dropped — they must have completely surrounded her — and the suit spun and surged into the rock, scraping itself clean.
So fast. She lost all sense of up and down. She lost herself. Whatever triumph she’d felt in that first instant gave way to blunt, claustrophobic terror.
The suit did not use its shape like a human would. The suit pinned one monster with its face, and then it hurled itself into the rock again and again. It wasn't squeamish, either. It did not flinch at the wretched shrilling of an amphibian caught between its hands, nor turn from the burst of entrails.
In normal gravity, against larger enemies, Vonnie would have been seriously injured. Even here she was shaken so badly she didn't immediately realize it was over.
Nor did she remember when she'd regained her right eye.
Surprise and hope lifted through her in that moment of clarity. "I can— Lam?"
The suit stood at the top of the landslide beneath her small, broken shelf, just short of the explosive charges. Her visor glowed with heat signatures but the only living shapes were fading, retreating deep into the fissure. Eleven more bodies drifted in the minimal gravity or lay impaled against the rough black lava. The air was fogged with blood.
Mute, she tried to turn away.
Crying out, she knew she was paralyzed. "Lam? Lam, it's over. Offline. Lam, offline."
If they attacked again— If the ghost had corrupted all suit functions— Her body choked with that heavy new fear again and she fought without thinking inside her shell.
He spoke in a hush:
—
I have an additional threat
.
"Let me go!"
—
Von, quiet. Something's coming
.
"What?"
—
There were new sonar voices right before the amphibians broke away. Something that scared them off
.
His voice was different, cooler, more confident. Had he finally written out his glitches? With access to so many more systems, he could have duped himself and then cut away the flaws in a microsecond. Vonnie was overdue for a little luck.
"Is it one of our probes?"
—
No. New lifeforms, also in a pack.
Of course. Food here was scarce. Any commotion would draw every predator within hearing, and she shouldn’t have expected anything else. Still, the disappointment in her felt like a new, raw wound.
—
Do you want to stay and fight? I estimate them at two hundred meters
.
Vonnie cursed bitterly, hating this dark place, hating her own seesaw of emotions. She felt like apologizing even though he was just a goddamn program. She felt grateful.
"Run for it," she said. "All these bodies, that's a big meal. We should be able to get a good head start."
10.
She landed their slowboat on Europa more than a week before the new high-gee launches would arrive, but they were ordered to wait. The two larger ships now en route carried a good many of the experts who'd lost out the first time, and not a small number of bureaucrats — and there was real truth to the idea that this crowd would be better able to process the site.
Still, Lam smoldered. "You see what's happening," he said, his back to the hab module window as if testing himself.
Vonnie couldn't leave the bubble alone and Bauman made her wipe off her fingerprints every night. The ice was fantastic. "I know it's tough," she said, barely glancing at him.
"You're already talking like them."
"Hey, easy. I'm on your side."
"You think I'm mad because they might grab some of the glory? Because I had to put up with living in a closet with two beautiful women for eleven weeks?"
She turned at
beautiful
, a little wary. So far he'd been scrupulous about keeping his distance.
"Von, you've seen their org chart,” he said. “Who do you think's in charge, the people like you and me?" His brown eyes searched her face, then shifted to gaze at the window behind her. "It's being politicized," he said. "The fuel. The water. You have to listen to what they're really saying."
The ice. Everyone was still digging along the equator and even now a CSA robot ship was carefully unfolding in orbit, dropping new mecha. Miners. They had been funded years ago and had been in transit for months, and that kind of inertia was fundamental to nearly every aspect of modern civilization.
The ice. It held barely more than a hundredth of a percent deuterium but that precious gas could be compressed and boxed, and easily lobbed up out of Europa's weak gravity. The tankers filled faster than they could be built. Escaping Jupiter wasn't expensive either, diving close and then slinging away, and the old god was perfectly positioned to feed the inner planets. More and more, surface catapults had been hurling packets equipped with nothing more than a radio beacon into slow, sunward trajectories... and if they didn't arrive for years, even if one or two went missing along the way, no problem, they were lined up like endless supply trains and as cheap as dirt.
The ice. Deuterium-deuterium fusion reactors kept people alive on Luna and Mars and on a hundred rocks in the asteroid belt, and everywhere in between — and water/oxygen futures had become more than stiff enough to make tearing up the ice itself worthwhile. The solar system was in bloom. The Chinese had expanded with total commitment and other cultures were growing as fast as they could just to keep from being left behind.
"They've already given up on most of this world," Lam said, still angry over dinner. "It's too easy. They've been ripping it apart for twenty years with every reason to keep at it, right? I even helped them. Look. They're all posting my sim like it's proof, like this safe zone is definitely the only one."
"Okay," Bauman said. "Okay. We all know SecGen Kokubo is going to ride the expedition like a nine hundred pound gorilla." The Japanese minister was spaceborn, and represented six thousand colonists who made up a crucial part of the Earth-orbit economy. "What do you want to do about it?"
"We've got a little time,” he said, “long enough to post enough info that they can't bury it. You know what I mean — delays for more surveys, delays for safety, maybe send in a few crawlers, five or six months goes by, downplay the whole thing."
"What do you want to do, Lam?"
"I want to go in."
11.
All she wanted was
out
but in fifty meters they changed direction seven times through the black, ragged rock, dodging through gaps and pockets, jumping one crack and then two loose slumping hills of debris. Vonnie had to grit her teeth. Letting the suit run in this gravity felt too much like fighting — grab, kick, kick again, swimming off the walls and ceilings.
It felt too much like they were going in a circle.
The ghost followed every possible way up but again and again they lost as much elevation as they'd gained, ducking and weaving for open space. They couldn't even maintain a lateral bearing, forced left and then left and then left again.
"Go back! Lam, go back to that last branch!"
—
Radar suggests another upward trend ahead of us
.
"You." She was almost unable to say it. "Aren't you headed right where we came from?"
—
We've paralleled several caverns, yes
.
"Christ." She'd pulled the explosive charges before they left, so it would be easy to blow the channel behind them, shut off any pursuit, but what if they ran into yet another threat? What if this tunnel was ultimately a dead-end?
These catacombs had formed millennia ago when liquid water cut through the rock in a mix of geysers, rivers and slow-draining seas. Since then, quakes and fractures had opened new holes and closed others — and the ice was always there, dripping or pushing or smashing its way in.
Between radar sims and actual footsteps covered, her maps went eighteen kilometers, although most of that was tangled into a pyramid just four kilometers on a side — and long sections of her trail had gone unrecorded or were literally nonexistent now, destroyed in the rock swell.
It was unlikely she could retrace her steps even if she wanted to, even knowing that something was behind her.
"What was coming, can you tell me?"
—
They were a little bigger than the amphibians. Louder. By my estimate there were only six or seven, but the amphibians retreated as soon as they heard the other sonar
.
Vonnie measured a broad slab of rock as they approached, using her own gut hunch as well as radar analysis. It looked like a good place to drop the roof. All she wanted was
out
. No more data, no more diplomacy, no more trying to vindicate her friends' deaths. No more guilt.
"Is there any way to know if they're ahead of us?"
—
I've continued to see traces of prints and spoor. Look there. And there
.
Across her visor, the ghost highlighted two faint smears of feces close together on a small, level spot on the tunnel floor. Neither was much more than a few frozen molecules. In this place, nothing went to waste or was left behind.
Somehow that made her feel badly again. Somehow...
—
The dung is probably not amphibian. We'd have to stop and test samples. But in retrospect, there's a good probability that the amphibians chased us beyond their own territory and we're already deep into the home of the other lifeform
.
Vonnie just shook her head. Even with her weapons and size, she hadn't been able to make the amphibians run away. Whatever these new creatures were...
Maybe she'd been luckier so far than she thought.
12.
It was the kind of career move you only made once. They would either be heroes or subject to a great many lawsuits, probably jail time in Lam's case. Vonnie suspected he was already thinking of political asylum. The hieroglyphs meant
that much to him, more than home, more than family — and for all the right reasons.
He wanted to range as deep as possible. He wanted proof of the diversity of life implied by the carvings, the complex food chain that must support the carvers.
There would be little or no fossil record here, of course. At best the tides would hold a churned-up mishmash of species carried far from their time and habitats, but that was the point. Diaspora. There must be priceless information everywhere across this moon. There must be life in other places. The mining would never stop, he accepted that, but it could be heavily restricted. It could be more careful.
Bauman only argued for a day. She was too much like them or she wouldn't have been there in the first place, and the men on the radio talked like slaps in the face, hard and quick, controlling. She didn't appreciate that. She had Lam concoct a sim that showed the hieroglyphs in danger, which wasn't untruthful. The mecha had resealed the hole but the hieroglyphs were still reacting to near-vacuum, and who could say what data was being lost as the ice slowly boiled away?
They were given permission to enter the trench, only the trench, and Lam laughed and ran for his armor.
"Game over," he said. "Game over. I mean, once we're inside there'll be all kinds of reasons we have to keep poking around, right?"
"Wait," Vonnie said, and hugged them both, Bauman first, blushing a little as she turned to Lam. "You can't feel anything in a scout suit," she explained.
"Yeah." He smiled, looking for her eyes.
They dropped in through a small cut in the roof and instructed the mecha to close it again, Lam and Bauman already bickering contentedly. He wanted radar and x-ray. She insisted on passive microscopy. Vonnie just grinned and flipped through a heads-up of the preliminary soundings taken by wire probe. Their visors were modifying sonar feedback into holo imagery, to avoid burning the ice with light.
It was densely, overwhelmingly textured: an irregular quilt of dewdrops, smooth spots, swells and depressions. Only the hieroglyphs held a pattern.
She seemed to be standing at the end of a tunnel, which made the symbols even more intriguing. Why invest such effort marking the walls of what must be a low-traffic area? Could this be some sort of holy place? Lam would say that was just more anthropomorphism... and it wasn't impossible that at one time the tunnel had continued on from here, until the tides collapsed it. But what had the carvers been doing so close to the surface?
"You'll never pack up the whole wall and put it in a museum," Lam said. "We're damaging it just by standing here."
"All the more reason to be careful." Bauman shook her head, the big gear block on one side like a misplaced hat. "We don't know how finely detailed the top layer—"
"Exactly. So we get it all in one burst, full spectrum."
"The heat—"
“Specialist Lam," a new voice said. The other ships were still more than two light-minutes away, which could reduce conversation to a series of interruptions. "We'd like to see the first column again, please stand by for auto control."
"Roger that," Lam answered on the coded frequency, and in a moment his suit carefully adjusted his upper body, aiming the gear block with machine precision. It was a little spooky. The suits weren't supposed to accept remote programs without an okay from whoever was inside, but Vonnie wondered. When they started deeper into the tunnel, would their suits lock up? When they tried to send their data on public channels, would the broadcast come out clean or garbled?
Lam had switched back to suit radio. "There's something embedded in the ice!"
"What?"
"Their computers must've seen it in our telemetry. Pellets. Everywhere. Probably organic. Look."
The tiny spheres were as translucent as the ice itself. Eggs? Food? "What if—" Vonnie tried to get a word in edgewise but Bauman was beside herself, rattling her gloves against her thighs as if to grab and hold the little things.
"We can't pull them, not yet,” Bauman said. “We'll have to record and map it first, so I guess your full spectrum burst is the best way to go, Lam, what do you think?"
"I think you're right," he said generously.
"Can we get a wire in, get a sample?"
Vonnie pointed. "What if we pick through the debris against that wall?" The fourth column was the most deteriorated, and among the confusion of arms were several that had crumbled.
"Genius." Bauman clapped her on the back, a dull clank.
Seconds later they had their sample, and Lam and Bauman bent over it together like cavemen protecting a spark, bumping their thick shoulders, both of them chattering into the radio at the same time. They might have stayed all day. They might have stayed until the other ships arrived, happily absorbed in chem tests and new theories.
It was Vonnie who convinced them to move on.