Jeff Carlson: The Frozen Sky

But the rover was well-engineered. Belatedly, it noticed the consistency of shape among the debris. Then its telemetry jumped as it linked with a tanker overhead, using the ship’s brain to analyze the smattering of solids.

Finally the rover moved again, sacrificing two forearms and a spine flexor to embrace its prize, insulating the sample against the near-vacuum on Europa’s surface.

Impossible as this seemed, given the preposterous cold and the depth from which the sample came, the contaminants were organic lifeforms, long dead, long preserved: tiny, albino bugs with no more nervous system than an earthworm.

Vonnie opened her blind eyes to nothing and her ears were empty, too — but she was sure. Something was coming. Inside the rigid shell of her suit, she moved but could not move, a surge of adrenaline that had no release.

Trembling, she waited. Brooding, she cursed herself. She’d spent her life making order of things, and she couldn’t get her head quiet. She made everything familiar by worrying through the mechanics of her trap again and again.

She’d snapped her next-to-last excavation charge in two and rigged a second detonator, setting one charge in the ceiling beyond her rock shelf, the other below and to her left. The blasts would shove forward and down, although in this gravity, she could expect ricochets and blowback.

Good.

The sunfish fought like a handful of rubber balls slammed down against the floor, spreading in an instant, closing on her from every angle. Their group coordination was beyond belief. To a species whose perceptions were based on touch and sonar, language consisted of gesture and stance. They always knew each other’s mood and seemed to share it like a flock of birds.

Without her eyes, their synchronized attacks were an even greater threat. Her terahertz pulse was better at sounding out large, immobile shapes than at following objects in motion. Vonnie knew she would lose track of some of them, so she’d smash everything within fifty meters.

Her armor could sustain indirect hits from the porous lava rock. She planned to bait them, bring them close, then roll into a crevice behind her and hit the explosives, after which she would slash any survivors with her laser.

It was a cutting tool, unfortunately, weak at the distance of a meter. Worse, if she overheated the gun, she would probably not be able to repair it. Her nanotech was limited to organic internals. Most of the tool kits on her waist and left hip had been torn away.

“Stop thinking. Damn it, stop talking,” she murmured, the words as rapid as her heartbeat.

Just stop it .

Could they really hear her mind? She’d studied the sunfish with the acute concentration of a woman who might never see anything else again, and with all the skills of a teacher evaluating her newest class.

The sunfish definitely had an extra sense, maybe the ability to… feel weight or density. That would serve them well in the ice. So they would be able to differentiate her from the environment.

For once, she wanted them to find her. Vonnie reactivated her suit and rose into a crouch, strobing the chasm below with a terahertz pulse. She thought her signals were outside the sunfishes’ range of hearing, but she’d revealed herself as soon as her armor scraped against the rock.

Nothing. There was nothing.

“Oh God.” She choked back the sound and swept the bent spaces of the chasm, quickly locating pockets in the ceiling that she hadn’t anticipated and couldn’t reach with her signals. The angle was too steep. Using her terahertz pulse was like turning on a light in what she thought was a closet and finding instead that half of the house was gone — and her enemy needed only the thinnest openings to surround her.

Were they already too close? She’d seen it before, a dozen sunfish upside down on the rock like fat creeping muscles.

Vonnie aimed her laser at the ceiling even as she groped with her other hand for a chunk of rock. There was gravel, too, and a head-sized boulder. She’d gathered every loose piece of lava she could find.

Should she throw it now? Try to provoke them? Her thumb gritted in the rock as she clenched her fist.

She was a decent shot with a ball. She’d grown up with three younger brothers. But the suit itself was a weapon. The suit had low-level AI programs that could make her something like a passenger inside a robot. There were voice menus designed for activities like climbing or welding because human beings got tired. The suit did not. It also had radar targeting that she could not see, and it would limit the velocity of its throws only to avoid damaging her shoulder and back.

She didn’t trust it.

She’d used most of her AI programs to hold an imprint of her ghost. The suit was rotten with Lam’s mem files. Twice the ghost had caused interrupts, trying to reconfigure itself, trying to seize control, and yet Vonnie was afraid to purge him. Deleting his mem files might affect her suit’s amplified speed and brawn.

“Are you still there?” she hissed.

— Von, listen. Don’t close me down again, please .

That was the same thing it always said. God. Oh God. She didn’t have time to hassle with him.

“Combat menu,” she said.

— Online .

She hesitated. Right now, the ghost was somewhat contained. That would change if she gave it access to defense modes. Doing so was a bad gamble. The extra capacity might be precisely what the ghost needed to self-correct… or the stupid, miserable AI might corrupt the most basic functions of her suit. Was there any other way?

“I need auto-targeting only,” she said. “Fire by voice command.”

— Von, that drops efficiency to thirty percent .

“Fire by voice command. Confirm.”

— Listen to me .

Four slender arms reached out of the ceiling.

It was easy to be friends with Choh Lam. In his mid-thirties, skinny and short, with big ears, he made a point of being nonthreatening. He was freak smart but also soft-spoken, hiding himself in a kind voice, both eager and shy. He probably didn’t realize he had restless eyes because in every other way he moved like he talked, gently.

Vonnie’s impression was of a man who’d spent his life holding back. He was a man who wanted to belong.

Lam made his break with that kind of thinking before the boards agreed how many people to send to Europa. Even before the mining groups had reprogrammed their mecha for new, more intensive searches, Lam let his genius show and posted a sim that guaranteed his slot on the mission — for bugs. Just bugs. That was all the ESA rover had found. No one believed this ice ball could support much else, and yet there were fifteen thousand volunteers in the first week.

Fifteen thousand experts wanted to abandon their families and their homes despite knowing that the trip out to Europa would be two and a half months cramped inside a hab module; that the food would be slop-in-a-bag; that Jupiter seethed with radiation.

In the virtual meetings for candidates, Vonnie had grinned at the enthusiasm they shared. Homo sapiens ’ best traits were heart and curiosity. Despite all of their technology, despite developing spaceflight, AI, and nano medicine, there was still so much of the ape in them.

Fifteen thousand people suddenly didn’t care about anything except getting their feet on the ice and grubbing around for exotic life. It was a riddle unlike anything else.

Where did the bugs come from ?

The weak little creatures weren’t burrowers, not with their spherical body shape and dorsal whiskers. Also, there were variations in the ice. The narrow layer containing the bugs was nowhere near as old as the rest of the sample, and loaded with chlorides and minerals.