Jeff Carlson - The Frozen Sky

If humankind failed again, if she failed again, they might doom every living thing inside Europa, and she’d seen much to admire as well as savagery.

Unfortunately, the violence was difficult to overlook.

Sunfish had become a popular term across the system, but not everyone consented to humanizing them with a name. Some of the exceptions were military spokespersons, who referred to the sunfish as the aliens , and public officials of the ice mining ventures and utility companies, who put their own spin on the situation by saying organisms or things .

Many politicians and commentators had also played it safe, either hedging their bets or supporting the interests of various corporations. Vonnie knew the mining ventures, their distributors, and many industries were hollering because Earth’s governments had demanded that the mining ventures reevaluate their sites, then screen and analyze the ice before processing it, all of which created delays and extra costs.

Public debate had grown into a firestorm in part because the ESA had kept Vonnie under wraps, asking Koebsch to speak to the media on her behalf and releasing no more than a few, brief, sanitized clips of her journey beneath the ice.

None of those sims included live recordings of the sunfish, only still shots and diagrams. Nevertheless, their beaks and arms had a lot of people scared, especially in combination with the progress reports listing her surgeries.

I need to make sure everyone sees I’m okay , she thought. They have to know that I don’t blame the sunfish — that the fighting was my fault.

The air lock finished its cycle with a clunk. The exterior door opened.

As they walked onto the lander’s deck, Vonnie hardly glanced at the fat, banded sphere of Jupiter or the radiant dots where spacecraft hung overhead. Instead, she looked for their command module. She couldn’t see it. The icy plain was busy with floodlights, mecha, listening posts, and other hab modules.

From where she was standing, there didn’t seem to be any pattern. Then she activated her heads-up display. Most of the hab modules and a second lander were spread in a broad ring over an area of a square kilometer. Vonnie felt a wan smile. In another age, the pioneers of the American West had circled their wagons in the same way. Long before then, in Germany, her ancestors had built their castle walls to guard all sides as well. Old habits.

Command Module 01 was on the far side of camp. “Can we take the jeep?” Vonnie asked, turning to the young woman.

“Yes.” Ash Sierzenga was one of their new pilots as well as a medic and the head of the cybernetics team. All of them had multi-disciplinary training and degrees. It cost too much to boost three people if one would do.

Every meal, each piece of equipment, had been factored into the mission. They were a long way from replacements, a reality that played in Vonnie’s favor. She knew they’d discussed sending her home, but no one wanted to use a ship for her, not even the slowboat in which she’d arrived.

The jeep was a low-slung vehicle with an open cockpit and wide-tracked wheels. Ash made a point of entering first. Was she concerned Vonnie might steal it? Where was there to go? Vonnie didn’t like it that Ash distrusted her, but she was an outsider among the new team. Even if they understood her motives, they would tend to support each other instead of her.

I need to be careful , she thought. I can’t raise my voice or wave my arms. They don’t like it that I don’t hate the sunfish .

They think I’m crazy .

The jeep rolled into the hectic lights and mecha, communicating with the other self-guided machines.

For the most part, the listening posts and beacons had settled down, becoming stationary obstacles. They resembled short trees with their dishes and antennae serving as leaves, although a few members of the metal forest tottered or crept in restless patterns.

The larger mecha were more active. Twice the jeep drove beneath hulking rovers. The first was poised like a giant, feeding tick, its head lower than its legs as it drilled into the ice. The second was on patrol. Bristling with sensors and digging arms, it bore down on them, but neither Vonnie nor Ash flinched. They were accustomed to the machines’ flawless dance. The rover passed with meters to spare, and their jeep continued through the long shadows and pools of light.

There were open crevices in the ice. The main fracture yawned through the center of camp, over three hundred meters long yet rarely wider than a person could jump.

The new ESA camp was twelve kilometers southeast of the trench where Vonnie, Bauman, and Lam entered the frozen sky. When that system of vents collapsed, it had destroyed the carvings as well as any chance of venturing back into that region of ice. The collapse had left an uneven, unstable pit in Europa’s surface 1.3 kilometers across.

Someday the glacial tides or an upswell in the ocean would fill the hole. For now, it was a scar and a grave.

Lam and Bauman’s bodies had been abandoned after religious services and commendations were delivered near the pit by ESA, NASA, and PSSC teams while Vonnie watched from her bed in the new camp.

Their rovers and satellite analysis had located another system of catacombs, which could be accessed through the crevices where they’d assembled their hab modules and flightcraft. Too often, there were only a few meters of ice separating the caverns below from the fissures leading up to the surface. That was why the mecha were on high alert.

Studying their datastreams, Vonnie made sense of their grid at last. Koebsch wasn’t an idiot. On Europa, any threat would approach from beneath them, not from outside their ring, so he’d spread his assets for mapping purposes, measuring the ice with radar, sonar, neutrino pulse, and seismographs…

…and weapons systems. The jeep was tied to their defense net, its dashboard winking with steady updates from the Clermont , the ESA ship in orbit above Europa.

But we don’t need to be on alert , Vonnie thought. “The sunfish won’t come,” she said.

“What?” Ash turned in her seat to bring her helmet around, revealing a face full of suspicion.

Vonnie kept her voice tranquil. “They won’t come,” she said. “The ones who chased me know we’re outside the ice. They might be listening, but they’ll never risk a blow-out by coming to the surface.”

“They seemed like they, uh, like they did anything to kill you even if it meant suicide for them,” Ash said. “Koebsch is worried they’ll dig away the ice beneath us.”

“I don’t think so. They must be even more afraid of vacuum than we are.”

“You can’t know how they think.”

“We’ve been in space for nearly two hundred years. We were watching the stars before our species learned how to talk. Their sense of distance is limited. All they’ve ever known are their ears and their sonar.”

“Right. You’re right.”

Ash was humoring her, but Vonnie saw an opportunity to sway the younger woman. “They think the universe ends here,” she said. “They have no concept of the stars or other planets or anything past the surface. Only death. Try to think how many times their populations must have asphyxiated when eruptions or quakes ripped open their homes.”

“You found air locks in the ice.”

“They’re smart.” Vonnie couldn’t stop herself from saying it. “They’re marvelous.”

“They’re monsters.”

“They’ve never had a chance to be anything else.”

Ash didn’t answer. They’d reached the command module, and Ash busied herself with the jeep’s console. She seemed to be receiving a radio call that only she could hear.