Jeff Carlson - The Frozen Sky

As she clawed at the ice, she felt another aftershock. Maybe she’d set it off by undermining a weight-bearing formation. There was a ponderous groan. Then the ice heaved, slamming at her knees and chin. Her surroundings gave way and she fell tumbling into the white.

“Help me!” she screamed. “Lam!?”

— Online .

“Stabilizers! Get my suit turned around!”

Grabbing at loose hunks and powder, she couldn’t tell up from down. Huge pieces crashed against her. The rest of the avalanche felt like quicksand or a waterfall. It rushed and billowed, taking the burrower away from her. In seconds, the burrower’s signals faded.

Her suit was equipped with gyroscopes, but her gyros were one of the systems she’d hacked to make room for the ghost. That was why she’d reawakened him.

With his help, Vonnie located an enormous wedge. She clutched at it as the flowing ice pounded on her helmet and back. Radar indicated a house-sized slab. Unfortunately, it began to rotate beneath her weight. In a minute, maybe less, it would roll and dump her. She scraped at it with her fingers and boots, trying to keep her balance — trying to locate a bigger chunk — but her sensors were inundated with noise and motion.

“Analyze my datastreams!” she shouted. “Which way should I go?”

— What is your destination ?

“Solid ground. Anywhere.”

— Where are we now ?

Certain she was in her grave, Vonnie gave him limited access to her mem files, enough to explain that the fallen vent where he’d died must have flattened out against the surrounding area, causing other networks to collapse. Now those implosions were also pushing down or sideways.

The ghost handled this job well. Based on her data and current sonar readings, he created sims to predict the worst of the ice falls.

Vonnie labored to free herself, sinking ever deeper through the mayhem. She struggled for nine hours.

To keep up her stamina, she ate more than she wanted, barely tasting the venison-flavored protein or faux baked potato. Nonstop exertion also took its toll on her oxygen supply. Each bite, each breath, shortened the time she had left.

Losing hope, a queer thought struck her.

This was no ocean into which she was descending — it was Europa’s sky. Captured here, native species would have no concept of anything further up. They would look for the mountains or the liquid seas below, so she began to dig beneath herself instead of laterally, no longer fighting the avalanche but using it to her advantage, sifting, swimming.

Eventually she fell onto a vast, black slope of lava rock. Whether it was an island suspended in the ice or a true mountain, she couldn’t say, but she had come down out of the frozen sky.

The catacombs had formed eons ago when liquid magma cooled irregularly, leaving tubes and caverns within a larger mass. Running water cut through every opening as geysers, rivers, and slow-draining seas. Quakes opened new fractures and closed others — and the ice was always there, dripping or pushing or smashing into the rock.

In solitude, in silence, Vonnie thought about her dead friends too much as she walked.

The darkness led in every direction. There were pits and outcroppings and blind corners and slides. Once she found a sheer abyss that plunged for hundreds of meters. More often, she couldn’t see more than a stone’s throw as she picked her way through the maze.

Using an inertial compass to maintain her heading east wherever possible, she tried to keep busy with her maps and data. The atmosphere in these lava tunnels was mostly water vapor, carbon dioxide, and the ever-present nitrogen along with trace poisons. It was also warm — a few degrees below freezing.

Vonnie assumed she’d entered a fin mountain. Most of the rock formations near Europa’s surface were ejecta, cast into the ice by ocean-floor eruptions or broken off from mountaintops by the pressure of the frozen sky. If she’d discovered a dead block of lava floating in the ice, it might absorb the sparse amounts of heat generated by friction, distant lava flows, and hydrothermal vents. These catacombs were too warm. Some areas were ringed with scum like filth on a bathtub. Her suit detected sulfur, salt, oxidizing rust and minerals, all evidence of past floods and smoke and ash.

She was inside a volcano.

Europa’s molten core, silicate mantle, and low gravity created towers of unimaginable heights. The great ocean cooled many fissures and vents, driving the lava upward. Because siliceous magma was cohesive — like syrup — it trapped gases within it, lifting each eruption even further.

On Earth, in full gravity, the Hawaiian volcano of Mauna Loa rose seventeen kilometers from the Pacific floor. On Mars, in 0.38 standard gravity but without an ocean to support it, Olympus Mons rose twenty-five kilometers into the Martian atmosphere. On Europa, in 0.13 standard gravity, Lam’s sims had predicted unstable piles of rock as tall as sixty kilometers. He assumed the ocean floor wasn’t uniform. There must be shallower regions were the mantle formed plateaus. The volcanoes that scraped the surface rose from these highlands.

Fire and ice.

The volcanoes eroded and reformed at speeds much faster than any Earth equivalent, so Vonnie listened for seismic activity and swept her infrared through the caverns, looking for hot spots.

She found specks of condensation, then puddled ice before she walked into a length of catacombs that had been invaded by a creeping swamp. Giant lumps of ice sat on the tunnel floor beneath pillars and stalactites. Frozen lakes flowing at less-than-glacial speeds made waves and swirls against every strewn hunk of rubble.

The landscape was stunning, but it couldn’t soothe her as she hurried into a light wind. The pressure differential indicated an even higher temperature somewhere ahead. Maybe there were gas vents or bubbling springs.

Vonnie had seen bacterial mats and a few spores of what appeared to be fungi. She took samples of these pale bulbous growths, glad to find life of any kind, but only the ice truly thrived in this environment. When her radar identified another sun-shape on the wall, she thought it was a carving.

It moved.

“Hey!” Vonnie began to jog. Just as suddenly, she stopped. The creature was 1.2 meters wide, a round body with eight arms. She didn’t want to scare the little thing. She was three hundred meters away, and there was a chance she’d gone unobserved.

It might be best if the creature hadn’t seen her. She wasn’t trained to initiate First Contact. The decision she made could affect nine billion lives across the solar system as humankind collided with another thinking race for the first time… but she didn’t have it in her to walk away, not here, not now. She needed this success to balance everything that had gone wrong.

Besides, what the hell was it breathing?

Vonnie felt a stab of pride and melancholy at the thought, a bittersweet mix. Bauman and Lam would have given anything to be with her.

Infrared made it clear that this creature was warm-blooded. Despite the tough, insulating layers of cartilage and blubber beneath its skin, its body heat radiated in this cold like a furnace.

In that way, it genuinely was a sun. Like a beacon or a lamp, it drew her closer.

The creature disappeared, edging behind a bump of rock. Vonnie paced toward it, sweeping her radar and X-ray up the cavern wall. Where had it gone? The wall was pocked with fissures and holes.

As she paused at a hundred meters, thinking again of Lam, she realized the carvings they’d found were literal portrayals of these creatures’ bodies. They’d thought each eight-armed sun was a letter or a word. Instead, the shapes were three dimensional images of the carvers themselves.