Jeff Carlson - The Frozen Sky

Was that why they were chasing her? To eat her?

She recalled the admiration she’d felt when she first connected the sunfish with the carvings at the top of the frozen sky. She’d supposed they explored the highest reaches of their world in the spirit of adventure, like people climbed Mt. Everest… like she’d volunteered for this mission… but she’d ignored the reality of Lam’s models.

On Earth, a balanced ecology had reestablished itself after extinction events like the eruption of the Toba supervolcano or the Chicxulub meteor strike. On Europa, vast swaths of the biosphere had vanished completely, either burned to nothing or devoured by the ice.

Their environment was a patchwork mess of isolated survivors. What if the sunfish were so desperate for calories, they had no choice except to sweep through the ice looking for anything to sustain them?

Pity. Empathy. Vonnie was glad to feel emotions other than revulsion. It kindled something new in her.

For an instant, she was optimistic.

“Why would they gather their feces instead of leaving it as markers?” she asked. “To hide themselves from predators? For fertilizer?”

— That implies they’ve developed agriculture.

“Farms, yes. Why not?” She practically smiled. Haggling with the ghost reminded her of talking to the real Lam. “They could grow fungus for food.”

— It may be more likely that they use dung for insulation or cement. It would be difficult to seal rock structures with ice .

“Cement,” she said, brooding out loud.

The sunfish might have camouflaged a hundred passageways around her, covering traps and doorways with matching rock. The ghost would sense any that weren’t airtight, but how many clues had she missed?

“Tell me what you can about the dung and give me a detailed read if we find any more.”

— I believe the feces belonged to the new lifeforms. We’d need to stop for a thorough analysis to confirm, but it contained unique, indigestible nubs of cartilage from the sunfishes’ arms. It also looked to contain high concentrations of sodium chloride.

“You mean salt.”

— Yes. The sunfish carry it in poisonous levels in their skin.

“So whatever pooped here, it eats sunfish.”

— In retrospect, there’s a high probability the sunfish pursued us beyond their territory and we’re now in the home of the new lifeforms. Alternatively, these catacombs may be no-man’s-land where both sides conduct raids on each other.

Vonnie shook her head. Even with her weapons and size, she hadn’t been able to make the sunfish run away. Whatever these other creatures were… if they scared the bloodthirsty sunfish…

Maybe she’d been luckier than she thought.

Her suit scampered into a hole like a storm pipe. Then her right knee gave out. Vonnie smashed into the rock and bounced away. In the air, she tensed, fighting to keep her face from hitting next.

Her suit hurt her neck when it contorted like a cat. Lam patted her left heel and one hand against the wall, correcting her spin before he regained speed and clawed up through the maze with her bad leg trailing awkwardly, protecting it.

“Lam?” she said. “Thank you.”

— Are you injured ?

“No. Uh, no. Don’t interface with the med systems. My leg’s okay. Tell me about the suit.”

— Every anterior cable in the knee snapped and one medial .

They were falling apart. Her armor had never been intended to take this kind of abuse. Vonnie wasn’t doing much better. She was punch-drunk on stress and stimulants. It had been sixty-one hours since she’d slept. She didn’t want to make the wrong decision.

“How long for repairs?”

— Without the proper tools, our best option might be to scavenge material from the ankle, weld it solid, and restore some function to the knee. I estimate that would take an hour .

“No. Keep going.”

If they stopped, she was afraid she’d close her eyes. She should rest, but closing her eyes would feel too much like being blind again.

According to his sims, they were approximately two kilometers down. Soon they needed to transition from rock to ice. This mountain rose up like a fin, always narrowing, disappearing before it neared the surface — but there would be islands suspended in the ice, free-standing hunks as large as Berlin and gravel fields like sheets and clouds. The trick was to find a gas vent that went all the way up. The trick was to ascend without touching off a rock swell.

Vonnie avoided the thought. Too much planning would overwhelm her.

They ducked a bulge in the ceiling and the gap opened into an ancient volcanic bubble. Half of it was glutted with ice, but just to look across three hundred meters of open space was disorienting. Vonnie felt the same uncertainty in Lam. The ghost scanned up and back.

“What do you think?” she said. “There’s definitely some new melt over there. If we dig, we might get into a vent. We could leave this mountain and close the hole behind us.”

He lit her visor with radar frames.

— Look .

“Oh.” Vonnie surprised herself. Even now, after everything, she felt excitement.

There were more carvings on the far side of the cavern, at least ninety columns of eight chiseled into the rock. Lam detected no organic pellets like they’d found in the trench where they’d made camp, but the information or messages contained in the symbols tantalized her.

“How fast can you record it?”

— The degradation to this site appears significant. Detailed recordings may require hours.

Vonnie limped across the cavern and pushed against a rock slab. The decayed fragments of the wall had shifted as water and ice intruded, retreated, and came again. Some wild feeling in her was able to guess which pieces were useless debris and which held carvings on one side or another.

The feeling made the hair stand up on her arms and neck. It felt exactly like… “Wait.”

— Sonar .

Somehow she’d sensed those voices before Lam, but there was no time to speculate at the weird, creeping changes in herself. “How close are they?”

— A thousand meters. What we’re hearing are echoes. They’re deep in the tunnels. They may not know we’re here .

“They know.”

— Their voices aren’t directed this way .

“They will be. Can you pull up this piece? I think it came out of that corner of the wall. If we can scan whatever’s left on it, we’ll have most of this section.”

The suit hobbled forward. How would it hold up in combat? Vonnie knew she didn’t want to fight in the open. She’d have a better chance if she found a hole and used her explosives to create a perimeter.

“It’s not sunfish, is it?”

— No. It’s the other lifeforms .

Vonnie shoved at the rock, moving feverishly now. It felt good and right to stay. She was glad to have purpose again. She would kill as many of them as she had to, but she was more than a rat in a trap, running mindlessly.

She’d worn down to the bedrock of herself and found what she needed, a last supply of courage and determination.

Seven hundred carvings would be priceless in translation efforts. This wall might be their Rosetta Stone. Vonnie couldn’t abandon it. If she ran, even if she survived, the ESA might never find their way to this cavern again. And if she died… well, if she died, some day their probes might venture close enough to communicate with her suit. It would transmit her files even if she was buried and lost.

Vonnie realized she was crying again and wasn’t angry with herself. She wasn’t ashamed. She’d done her best. Maybe that was enough.