Jeff Carlson - The Frozen Sky

There was another ripple among them as Lam shifted and flexed. Did they understand?

Please , Vonnie thought. Please .

But he’d kept the half-sticks against her forearms with magnetic locks. Now he released two with a click.

— Watch out .

The dual waves of sunfish struck the ceiling and floor. They bounced toward her, intersecting with each other to create a single group.

“Please!”

They came with their beaks open, shrieking. They came with their arms thrown wide to grasp and tear.

— Auto assault .

Vonnie wept for them, monsters all of them. The intelligence she knew existed here was stunted and cold like everything inside Europa.

Lam bashed her fist up through the first sunfish, then turned to swat the next. The rest never reached her.

“Fire,” she said.

He put both charges in the wall and shattered the carvings, ducking beneath a blast of rock.

Then she turned and ran.

The four survivors kept after her, of course. She’d dreamed the show of force would be enough, but these sunfish were no different than the smaller breed. Even with two-thirds of their group dead or bleeding out, they were relentless.

Vonnie reached a tunnel and drove herself into the ceiling, crushing a sunfish on her shoulder. Lam pulled at the rock with both hands and cancelled her momentum, flinging debris back over her head. The shower hit the next three sunfish and Lam kicked downward with the suit’s arms out, clubbing them.

She left the wounded to live or die, knowing it was a mistake to let them summon more of their tribe. She knew she would always be wrong for trespassing.

For nearly an hour, Vonnie heard them behind her, crying into the mountain. The echoes faded as she climbed, except once when there were fresh voices. Had the larger breed brought reinforcements? Was there a third kind of sunfish? Their sonar calls were too diffuse to know for certain, and she was glad, dimly, muffled in exhaustion and grief.

She climbed.

She climbed without end.

Even carried by the suit, she passed her limit, her tendons straining. Something in her back gave out above her pelvic bone, grinding with each step — and in her mind it was the same, one hurt which was more exquisite than the rest.

She dug her way into a vent, leaving the monotony of the catacombs. But there was no escaping her sorrow.

The leaning shaft up through the ice looked like the sink hole where Lam and Bauman had died, although her radar showed no dust and few mineral deposits within the melt. That was a positive sign. Geysers and swells meant instability. This vent looked solid. Vonnie thought she could ascend without bolts and wire, although her hands were sore and beaten.

She climbed.

She climbed slowly, evaluating the ice, scanning ahead. Suddenly there was a new sound. Dit dit dit dit dit dit . It was the rescue beacon of a probe overhead.

Vonnie rasped out a noise like laughter as Lam returned the probe’s signals in the only manner available to him, a cacophony of terahertz and radar pulses. He repeated the chatter until the probe answered in the same way.

— We made it, Von .

“Yes.”

— Let’s wait here. Can you wait? Seven bones and tendons in your hand are damaged, and your elbow isn’t much better. I don’t want to risk a fall .

“Yes.”

— They need fifteen minutes. Can you sleep? You should eat and rest.

“No.” She couldn’t relax, hanging on the ice several hundred meters up with another quarter-kilometer to go. She kept one file open on her visor and let the data burn into her, staring through it even when she tipped her head to watch above.

Lam had put together a preliminary transcript of the carvings. With it, they had an explanation.

She was wrong.

The error made her feel not like a teacher but like a student again, because just as Scandinavian and Inuit peoples had developed multiple words for snow, the sunfish had thirty-two stances to indicate surprise and danger. Sixteen more postures spoke of moving inward to protect the pack.

Their all-or-nothing behavior wasn’t sadism or the result of animal stupidity. It was premeditated. It was a survival trait.

The sunfish possessed more imagination and mental agility than she’d believed. Like every culture on Earth, they wrote stories of other worlds and nightmares. Their carvings hinted at places and legends similar to Atlantis, vampires, and poltergeists, but their past was saturated with real-life encounters with ancient ruins and strange creatures from distant pockets in the ice and separate lines of evolution.

The sunfish had been confronted with aliens throughout their existence. That they’d never met anything like Vonnie before, that she mimicked their language and wore metal and carried tools — none of this would stop them.

To the sunfish, everything beyond the pack was a competitor for safe zones and oxygen. Everything was food. By necessity, most lifeforms in the ice had learned the same vicious reflex.

The sunfish attacked even when they were outsized or outnumbered. They’d learned to put the fight on their own terms. If they won, the pack expanded its territory. If they lost, not only did they have less mouths to feed, their dead became food for the survivors.

Until they could conceive of anything else, until they were able to conceive of anything else, their first response would always be violence.

The warring breeds she’d met seemed to be the remnants of an empire that had spread to the top of the frozen sky. Millennia ago, there had been a dormant period in Europa’s volcanic activity. Maybe someday there would be again. The carvings were short histories intended to aid the next alliance to rise from the chaos, offering commandments to share and proven methods to govern themselves in a hierarchy of scouts, warriors, workers, and breeding pairs.

Unfortunately, Vonnie had left a path of destruction through whatever civilization they’d managed to hold onto.

It wasn’t what they deserved. Worse, their kill-or-be-killed aggression would work against them now that the possibility of salvation existed at last.

What have I done ? she thought.

The mecha gathering above her were American, yet relayed ESA signals. Lam pulled their search grid and told Vonnie how far she’d strayed. She was 9.1 klicks east of the trench where her team had gone in. She was also two-thirds of a kilometer beneath the surface, so the mecha rigged a molecular wire and dropped other lines around her including life support, suit support, and data/comm.

Another line lowered an emergency seal for her helmet before her visor blew out. Vonnie secured the bag around her neck, then inflated it with the attached air cylinder.

She let go of the ice. Her suit revolved dizzyingly as the machines lifted her, but the flood of voices was more intense. The men and women up top had accessed her records as soon as the data line connected. At a glance, her mem files must have looked like a running battle. She had gore and black rock mashed into every joint in her suit, her battered helmet, and her blood-stained gloves.

Someone murmured, “Vonderach, my God.”

But she was still thinking of the sunfishes’ potential and of the debts she owed, both to Bauman and Lam and to the native tribes she’d devastated. The sunfish were very human after all, with traits both good and evil. If they could be freed from starvation… If they were given a chance…

“We have to help them,” she said.