Jeff Carlson - The Frozen Sky

“—no beacons or—”

“—secure 02 if you can.”

“I need help up here!” Ash yelled. “Ben, she’s tied in! There’s nothing more you can do!”

“Go,” Vonnie muttered, trying to sit. She winced at the pain in her ribs and feet, but the wounds were manageable now. “You two shouldn’t…”

“Your arm is bleeding,” Metzler said.

“You shouldn’t play doctor with me while I’m unconscious. Where are my clothes?”

“She’s fine,” Frerotte said with a fierce grin. He clapped Metzler on the shoulder, shoving him toward data/comm. Metzler’s eyes were round with terror and affection, but he left.

Vonnie listened to them as the jets thrummed.

“Ben, load these sims into your scout suit,” Ash said. “You might have to cut off 02’s war pods if we can’t wedge it into our cargo lock.”

“Roger that,” Metzler said.

“Ribeiro’s reporting backwash through the FNEE grid,” Frerotte said. “This thing was huge.”

“They swore they’d send mecha to help us,” Ash said.

“There’s a FNEE lander in the air and a few rovers coming across the surface,” Frerotte said. “I’ll coordinate. Koebsch is over the pit with 05. It looks like they’re trying to shoot a harpoon into the ice.”

“How far down is 03?” Metzler said.

“Beacons put them at half a kilometer and sinking fast,” Frerotte said. “They lost pressure six minutes ago. No radio or data/comm. It doesn’t look good.”

“Von, you’ve got to move!” Metzler shouted. “I’m coming to armor up!”

He ran through the hatch. Vonnie scooched on her hip in a web of IV lines and monitors, freeing the space near their scout suits. She felt more coherent. She grimaced as she tallied the deaths among her people and the sunfish.

We’ll dig for 03 if it takes forever , she thought. We’ll start again. But we’ve lost so much.

The sunfish lost even more, but the floods will harden into a solid layer between us. The new ice might be two or three kilometers thick. By the time we get back through, they’ll be long gone. Won’t they?

They gave up their home. We gave up two people.

Despite everything, her crew had underestimated Europa again. The sunfish had won after all.

For now.

Seven hours passed before they recovered Module 03. Working with Koebsch, Gravino had attached a line to the module ten minutes after the catastrophe, but the harpoon tore loose in the first aftershocks. Then the module was pulled deeper. Nearly all of their remaining mecha disappeared in the new quakes. The rims of the canyon collapsed, taking the mecha into the pit, where the ice sluffed away like sand in an hourglass, backfilling the rifts beneath the surface.

Swimming against the sinking avalanche, nine mecha reached safety where the flood had created solid blocks. Twelve more were submerged, yet pried themselves loose and resumed tunneling toward Module 03, fusing the ice wherever possible. The rest of the machines were completely buried, yet remained operational, continuing to function as radar and sonar arrays.

With so many mecha taken by the disaster, the ESA possessed a disorderly spiral of assets down through 1.8 kilometers. Metzler and Frerotte were able to develop sims predicting the next aftershocks.

In a sense, they were fortunate. The new layer formed by the blow-out was a foundation that wouldn’t allow the surface to crumple further. The ice needed to settle, but it should protect them from new cataclysms. Metzler thought the sheet would redirect any currents of water and gas laterally.

Magma was a different hazard. If the quakes had opened new fissures, chain reactions of fire and gas might consume the ESA and FNEE camps. It would be years before this region was stable again.

Vonnie prayed the sunfishes’ work had been well-measured. How accurate were their perceptions of the reservoirs they’d unleashed and the volcanic activity within the fin mountain?

The larger sunfish might have destroyed Tom’s home as an acceptable price for eradicating the mecha, but she didn’t believe they would have fricasseed their own tribe in the bargain.

Lying in her blood on the floor of the ready room, she imagined the flood must have waned before it spread to the colony of the larger sunfish. Maybe a few had suffered scrapes or bruises. Their cartilage skins were so resilient, their bodies so flexible. If the water had cooled, none of them had been boiled to death. They could breathe underwater.

As long as they climbed from the deluge before it froze again, the tribe would persevere. That meant their suicide squad had been fairly certain how the hot springs, ice, quakes, and magma chambers would interact.

Was that possible?

They’ve survived down there for tens of thousands of years, she reminded herself, blinking and struggling to keep her head up as the warm feelings in her body turned to lethargy.

She didn’t remember sleep. She was still fretting when she woke in her bed in Lander 04’s living quarters, her wrists and stomach connected to another med droid.

A display had been unfolded from the wall. It provided her friends with a camera to watch her while she slept. One of the windows in the group feed showed her rubbing her cheek before she realized the bleary-eyed woman was herself, although most of the windows in the group feed were blank. She could only see the people inside Lander 04 with her.

She’d missed most of the rescue. Someone had told their AI to sedate her so they could carry her from the ready room. Leaving her unconscious had also permitted the med droids to operate on her face and her legs, replacing her left eye and disturbing amounts of marrow, muscle, and skin.

Her eye socket felt gritty and too sensitive when she skimmed her display, where Frerotte had posted a summary before he instructed the AI to wake her.

There was also more conversation than usual in the next compartment. The voices weren’t from a group feed. Ash had taken O’Neal and Johal on board. None of them would reoccupy the hab modules until they were positive they’d located a safe place to camp, if there was a safe place. Until then, the crew would remain with their two flightcraft.

Lander 04 sat on the ice three kilometers east of the pit. Its jets were hot — Vonnie felt the deck humming — and the pilot’s command link was designated Ashley Sierzenga .

“Hello?” she said, bending her knees beneath her blankets so she could touch her feet. Her toes and one calf were numb.

“Hey, it’s sleeping beauty,” Ash said on the display as her voice drifted through the hatch. They were three meters apart, but Ash didn’t leave the lander’s controls. They studied each other on their displays.

Ash seemed jittery and distracted. “How do you feel?” she said. “Can you take my seat?”

“You’ve been piloting since the blow-out?” Vonnie double-checked her clock. From their initial call to Tavares, to the probes’ encounter with Tom’s pack, to Lam’s assault on 114, to the four hours they’d spent guiding the FNEE mecha, to the battle with the sunfish and its aftermath, Ash had been on duty for twenty hours straight. “I can fly if someone helps me up,” Vonnie said. “You should sleep.”

“That’s not the issue,” Ash said, glancing at her own window in the group feed.

What was she looking at? Vonnie noticed a medical alert bar on Ash’s display, projecting the limits of her effectiveness.