Jeff Carlson - The Frozen Sky

“Holy shit,” Metzler said.

His soft, ominous tone roused Vonnie from her despair. She glanced through the spies’ datastreams. She sat up straight when she saw why he was afraid. “Koebsch! Koebsch!” she yelled as Metzler struck a Class 1 alert.

“What are you doing?” Ash said.

“Frerotte, get our surface mecha away from— No, wait! Have them drag the hab modules out of here!”

“Roger that,” Frerotte said.

Ash frowned, skimming through their defense grid. “I don’t see…” she said.

Vonnie almost laughed at the irony of Ash thinking like the FNEE gun platform, looking skyward first. How long would it take before people learned to evaluate this environment like its natives?

The sunfish had bypassed the tunnels where their smaller cousins had built the retaining wall. They’d gone lower, missing likeliest spots for an air lock into the colony. Vonnie had supposed they were lost or hunting blindly. Now she zoomed her display as the sunfish clumped against the steep side of a ravine, joining their bodies into one immense muscle.

“They’re tearing at the hot springs,” Vonnie said.

Koebsch appeared on the group feed, projecting calm with his open hands. “Let’s not panic,” he said, studying the sims from Metzler’s display.

The spies’ telemetry showed only blurs and reconstructions.

“The sunfish are too far away,” Koebsch said. “You can’t be sure what they’re doing. They could be digging a new entrance into the colony.”

“No, sir,” Vonnie said. She and Metzler took several images from the sims, letting an AI enhance each frame with preexisting data from their listening posts, their spies, and their probes.

During the past weeks, they’d mapped the local web of heat branching up from the mountain into the frozen sky. Its topmost reaches were the melted ice and cooling gas pockets west of the ESA camp. Further down, liquid water collected in shafts and lakes. Lower still, hot springs boiled from the rock, providing the colony with warmth and nutrients.

It was a powder keg.

Day by day, the ice dripped and slumped, blocking the vents. The rock eroded and did the same. Mostly the water and gases burned through, but sometimes geysers were plugged or gases were backed up, perturbing the live magma deep within the mountain.

“We’ve mapped two of the main conduits for the hot springs that feed Tom’s home,” Vonnie said. “Both rise through a trunk of compressed rock about fifty meters beneath the tunnel where they built their retaining wall. I think they’ve been repairing the trunk for years.”

“That’s why there’s a stream down there,” Frerotte said, identifying a current of noise beneath the louder, crunching sounds of the digging sunfish. “There are leaks spraying from a cliff face.”

Metzler had run his own calculations. “The pressure must be enormous,” he said. “Those hot springs push up through 2.4 kilometers of rock and ice, and that’s just at the top where we can see. The network of gas and heat is more extensive. If they tear into the rock—”

“They wouldn’t,” Ash said. “They’d die.”

“That’s not going to stop them,” Vonnie said. “That’s why their pack is all-male. They’re expendable.”

“We need to get this lander off the ground,” Metzler said.

They were connected to auxiliary structures like the jeep charging post and the maintenance shed, which accessed Lander 04’s power and data/comm. They should have installed an auto detach, but no one had imagined the old vents could become active in a matter of minutes, not the mission planners on Earth, not the crew on Europa.

“I’ll tell the mecha to cut us loose,” Vonnie said.

“What about everyone in the hab modules?” Ash said. “We can’t leave them.”

“We’ll lift them clear.”

“They should drive over.”

“We don’t have that much time. They’re better off inside their modules than a jeep if we— Oh!”

The floor heaved as their displays turned white. The spies’ sensors had overloaded. The last images were of the sunfish peeling a hunk of rock from a damp cliff face.

A tsunami of broiling water, gas, and rubble shoved through the team of sunfish. It flash fried them. It ground their corpses to bits.

The tunnel containing the spies erupted next. Their telemetry shut off, but Frerotte had duped the command feed from the FNEE mecha, which lasted seconds longer.

Steaming water drowned the war machines and their captives. It shoved the floor of the cavern into the ceiling. Then the mashed remains were swept away. Two of the FNEE mecha issued damage reports as they tumbled with the cascade, rising toward the surface at speeds exceeding seventy kilometers per hour.

On top of the frozen sky, Lander 04 tipped again, conveying some of the violence beneath the ice.

Vonnie’s display became a liability, dizzying her with static and dead links. On the group feed, Koebsch yelled as Command Module 01 tipped over, jerking loose from its mooring cables. A data pad spun into his head as meal tubes and a jacket fluttered past.

“Pressure suits! Pressure suits!” he shouted.

Vonnie grasped her chair, steadying herself as Metzler and Ash ran to the ready room. If all of them went at once, nobody could suit up, so she stayed. Frerotte did the same. They hung onto their stations as the floor swayed.

“Exterior cams,” she said.

Her display flickered with various camera angles across camp. As always, most were radar or infrared signals modified into holo imagery.

Their mecha rolled past the stationary listening posts toward the hab modules. Someone had also given evacuation commands to their jeeps, which turned on their headlights. The first vehicle began to drive.

Much closer to Lander 04, three mecha approached, obeying Vonnie’s order to disconnect the lander from the maintenance shed and the charging post.

Gouts of opaque dust and gas spurted from the surface, blasting the mecha. A crack opened ahead of them. Two dropped out of sight. In the minimal gravity, the third mecha lifted on the billowing gas, but the crack opened wider than the deluge could carry the machine. It dipped like a kite and vanished.

Six listening posts and a storage container disappeared as the surface split in a dozen places. Segments of ice plummeted away. Others tilted and bashed together.

Plumes of water vapor mushroomed into the night. Astonishing formations of ice crystals zigzagged above the camp, popping and spraying like gossamer rain. The haze obscured their satellite imagery. Then it actually touched the satellites, spilling up from Europa into naked space.

A black maw took Hab Module 03. Suddenly the rectangular trailer was gone, dragging the cables of its jeep charging post after it.

“Pärnits!” Vonnie gasped. She looked for him among the group feed, but 03’s data/comm shut off.

Beth Collinsworth was in there, too, she thought. The linguists had plastered the walls of their lab with a thousand holos of carvings and sunfish, trying to memorize hundreds of combinations of shapes. They were batty, fun geniuses, and they loved their job.

“Can you give me any projections from our listening posts!?” Vonnie shouted at Frerotte. “If the quakes are over—”

“It’s going to get worse before it stops.”

“Von! Von! Frerotte!” Ash screamed from the ready room. “You need your suits!”

“Oh shit.” Vonnie twisted herself out of her seat. Leaving her station, abandoning Pärnits to his fate, took more self-discipline than she could bear.

Wobbling with the lander’s floor, Vonnie bruised her elbow on the hatch. She welcomed the pain. Unfortunately, Frerotte was behind her. He fell and slid into her foot, knocking her onto his chest. Outside, ice rang against the lander’s hull like gunfire.