There was no response, but Phil suddenly shifted in his seat. "I see some faint flashes way off to the left of us. Maybe we should move."
Anna flashed her light several times, waited a few seconds, then did it again and held her breath.
From outside, green lights flickered dimly at first, like a dance of shy fireflies. The lights began near the edges of the nose bubble and moved inward, getting brighter.
"Yes!" said Anna, and she flashed her little penlight again.
The response was immediate and bright; multiple points of flashing green illuminating the ends of branches. There was a scraping sound from the outer hull of the submersible, and suddenly a glowing tendril of green struck the center of the nose bubble and recoiled from it.
"Yikes!" gasped Phil, and with one hand hit the outside lights, while the other reached to start the engine pumps.
The thing outside had extended two branches to grasp the submersible just above the bow planes, and a third branch was now waving slowly back and forth in the bright lights. The jets went on with a whoosh and Phil backed up several meters to get out of its reach.
"Stop! Stop!" yelled Anna, but Phil had already done it. He smiled wanly at Mike, who was still staring at the thing. "Pretty fast for a rock," he said, and then turned to Anna. "I suppose you want samples, now. How do we do that? I could probably break something off with an articulator."
"Absolutely not," said Anna. "It could be a plant, a coral community, or a single, intelligent entity. I will not take a chance on harming it before we have some idea what it is. The response could have been chemically or intelligently directed. If it's a plant, there must be dead ones. Look for debris in the depression it's in."
Phil peered out the side of the nose bubble. "There's more than just this one. I see green lights flickering again from our left, maybe a few meters away."
The object of their attention had pulled its branches in tightly against the main trunk and was now motionless, an abstract statue mottled in bronze and dark brown.
They drew closer. Phil activated an articulator, extended a claw, and poked gingerly at gravel and ice near the object's base. There was a short piece of something white and showing large pores that he placed in the sample box. Plant or animal, there were two small versions of the big one rooted there, but Anna insisted they not be touched. And even though they came within reach of it, the big one remained motionless the entire time the bright lights were on.
"Let's move," said Mike. "There's more to see left of us, but the lights have stopped flashing."
"Okay," said Anna. "Is it possible to dim our lights?"
"No. I'll come in slow this time, and turn off the lights when we get in close."
Phil backed off with a single jet pulse, and veered left in the direction of the other lights they'd seen. They saw another large chunk of ice come down and impact softly with the sea floor, stirring up a cloud of sand and pebbles.
It was twenty meters before they saw reflections from tall stalks rising from the bottom. Phil came in slowly this time. They saw several branched trunks standing close together, and from the end of one branch came a single flash of green. Two meters from the nearest branch, the submersible's lights went out. The interior lights illuminated the scene dimly, an abstract portrait of bronze figures on black.
"They're moving," whispered Anna.
Branches waved ever so gently in still water, the movement synchronous among several thick trunks. Even in dim light there were occasional flashes of green, which they could now see were coming from little nubbins on the ends of the branches. Mike looked off to the right.
"The one we just left is flashing again."
"They're talking about us," said Anna.
"Maybe, or just warning each other of danger. Whatever. You got what you came for, Anna. It's certainly a surprise to me," said Phil.
"You sure you don't want a living sample of these things?"
"I can't do it. There's no precedent for any life form above bacterial level. It's a case for the Council of Nations. If it's allowed, someone else will have to do it, or maybe I'll get a chance to come back someday. We have our pictures and spectra, and all the water samples. That'll have to be enough for now."
Phil used the articulators to scoop up some samples near the bases of the trunks. The occupants of the little depression in gravel and methane clathrate seemed undisturbed by it. Bronze limbs waved gently and decorated themselves in flashes of green. Anna watched, mesmerized, burning the sight into her memory.
"We really have to finish our mapping and look for other vents," Mike finally said.
"Will we have time for another dive?" Anna felt an ache in her chest.
"Not this trip," said Mike. "You'll have to come back again, if you can."
"The base might get swallowed up, and the vents plugged. There might not be another chance."
"I know, but we have to finish the mission plan. Let's go, Phil."
Phil looked over his shoulder at Anna and frowned at the agony written on her face.
"Got to go, Anna. We'll call Kassner right now, and get your discovery on the record."
Anna nodded, and pressed her lips together as they backed away. Green flashes sent them on their way, light from living things anchored in ice at the bottom of a subterranean lake of a tiny, geologically active moon cold beyond belief, in the outer reaches of the Solar System. It was a miracle, a thing to be studied for a lifetime, and she was being forced to leave it.
Mile called Kassner, but there was no response, not even static. "I don't like this. The signal was clear until a while ago."
"Could be scattering," said Phil. "There's a lot of rough topology near the bottom."
"So take us up a hundred feet or so."
Phil did it, and Mike tried again. "Herschel Base, can you hear us? Anna has a major discovery to report. Come in!"
Nothing.
"This is bad," said Mike. "With all those big cracks we saw in the vent, a piece of ice could have sheared off and taken out the transponder."
"Or plugged the vent," said Phil.
Anna's heart jumped. "How long can we stay down here?"
"Oh, another eight hours or so," Phil said calmly.
"I'm not abandoning the rest of this mission, people, but we'll have to hurry it up," said Mike. "Follow the profile, Phil, but double-time it. Finding another vent won't help us; we have no way to survive on the surface. We have to come up at Herschel Base. We have four hours left on the profile. Let's do it in two, and go home."
Mike said it with determination, but all three of them could hear the overtone of fear in his voice.
Getting back to base was suddenly not a matter of reporting an important discovery, but of survival.
Anna said little during the rest of the dive, and was on the edge of tears the entire time. For two hours they made sonar maps of the rest of the cavern, took several samples from the ceiling and walls, and saw what they thought was another vent, though it was too narrow for them to explore it. Mike kept on calling Kassner, but there was only dead silence in return. There was certainly no time for further exploration of the bottom. Anna distracted herself by pointing out several more areas on her sonar maps she was now certain harbored life. The little depressions were where the methane clathrate was so exposed to serve as anchors for the life on Enceladus. But now there would be no time extensions for the mission. After two hours, worry had turned to fear, and they hurried back to the Herschel Base vent under full power.
What they found at the vent matched their worst fears.
A huge boulder of ice had calved from the vent wall, and was plugging it at a steep angle, its tip resting on the shelf that the transponder had been anchored to. As they came up to it, the ceiling above them shuddered and small pieces of ice clattered off the top of the submersible. Phil wiggled the controls, and they backed off to one side of the vent. "Pretty loose inside the vent," he said. "Let's see if my baby can unplug this thing in low gravity."
There was a sudden crash of boulders on the roof of the submersible. "See that?" said Phil. "It wobbled. The tip is wedged where the shelf comes out of the wall. The shelf is holding it up. Maybe if I can break off the tip—"
Phil moved in closer, used the articulators to pull back on the tip of the plug, and wiggled it back and forth. When Anna saw the movement, her hope soared. They were making progress, the base only a hundred meters or so above them, and they had air left for hours.
And then, quite suddenly, they had minutes.
The plug wobbled, and there was a horrible impact on the roof of the submersible. The interior lights flickered, and Anna was momentarily deafened by a shriek of tortured metal from the hull walls. The impact lifted her from her seat and slammed her sideways as she clapped her hands over her ears.
"No, no, NO!" gasped Phil. Mike hadn't strapped in, was on the floor and holding one hand to a bloody gash on his forehead.
"What's that hissing sound?" said Anna.
"We're losing our air and fuel! That last avalanche must have breached the outer hull. Mike, get up and strap in. Hang on, Anna. We've got to do this quick, or we're dead!"
Anna gulped and grasped the arms of her chair, the hissing sound now loud in her ears. She smelled fuel and her own sweat.
She had never thought about death, especially her own, but now it came to her.
Mike managed to get in his seat and strap in as Phil backed off a few meters from the vent shelf and the shower of debris coming down there.
"Sorry baby," said Phil, not talking to a person, "but we have to do this the hard way."
The submersible lurched forward and rushed toward the shelf at the bottom of the vent, crashing into it hard at a point just below the observation bubble.
"Phil!" screamed Anna, but Phil was backing off again, stopping, and the submersible lurched forward once more. The second crash seemed softer, ice resisting, crumbling, and allowing them a creep forward after contact. The craft jerked backward in a blink, pitching Anna forward in her chair. Outside was chaos, a shattered shelf of ice falling away, the sharp tip of the plug sheared off at a steep angle with it. A huge fang of ice fell out of the vent, and disappeared from view.
The air in the cabin was musty, and Anna had a sudden headache. The submersible accelerated. Small pieces of ice clattered off the hull as they flew up the vent and through an open lock unprepared for them. They came out of the water in a roil of bubbles, and Anna had one glimpse of two shocked technicians jumping away from the pool.
For one moment, while Mike and Phil told their story, Anna was silent and just happy to be alive. But when the men turned it over to her and she described her discovery she was suddenly depressed again, and she came close to crying when Kassner and then Helena embraced and congratulated her.
It was at that moment when Phil climbed off the hull of his battered submersible and grinned at her. He had something wet and glistening in a gloved hand, and he handed it to Anna. "This should lighten your mood. Look what I found stuck between the base of the port articulator and the hull. When that thing grabbed us and I pulled away it must have snapped this off. No wonder the thing was thrashing around so much."
Anna's heart skipped a beat. In Phil's hand was a six-inch section from the end of a branch. The end nubbin was intact, the other end of the section shredded like a torn piece of Yucca stalk. The piece was still wet, but the mottled bronze and brown spots were fading before her eyes.
"Quick, get it in water!"
Mike grabbed a pan from a bench and filled it with water from the tank.
Anna giggled, grabbed Phil's arm and kissed him on the cheek. "Thank you! Oh, I've got to get some ice on this!"
Helena ran for ice. Anna grabbed the pan, and rushed away with her new treasure. Behind her, Phil said something that might have bothered her once, but didn't now in her moment of joy.
"Now there's a mood shift for you," said Phil.
One day out from Enceladus, Anna emerged from her cubicle and joined Mike and Phil on the control deck for a squeeze of tea.
"Ah, the scientist walks among us," said Mike. "Tea?"
"Thanks," said Anna, and accepted a squeeze bottle from him. "I've been writing up a summary of the examinations I made on Herschel. I can't do anything else until we get to Titan."
"Well, you'll have to tell us all about it," said Phil.
Anna took a suck of tea. "There isn't a lot I can say right now. The dead fragment you dug out of the gravel is almost as interesting as the fresh specimen. The closest thing I can think of on Earth is coral, but the structure is silicate, not carbonate. The bronze areas on the surface show iron sulfide. There could be bacteria producing that since there's both iron and sulfur in the dark gravel, and also in the ice, but on the whole I'm seeing a colony of tiny worm-like critters living in a labyrinth of tubules, and my bet is a methane metabolism with hydrogen output. I've frozen the sample in some water mixed with methane clathrate. We even have the little nubbin where the light is emitted. It seems to be silicate with trace sulfur. I radioed all of this ahead, and everyone at the lab is so excited."
Phil looked over his shoulder at her. "When you accept your Nobel Prize, we'll expect an invitation to the ceremony."
Anna smiled. "Well—that isn't going to happen."
"Why not?"
"Even if I got the award I wouldn't be there to accept it."
"I thought you were thinking about cycling back to Earth," said Mike.
"I was. I was thinking about it seriously until a few days ago." "Ah," said Mike, and winked at Phil. There was a pause while Anna took another suck of tea, and then said, "Commander Kassner said he and his crew are cycling out in two months. I'm coming back with the replacement crew. That will give me six months for dives to study the Ice Corals."
"That's what you're going to call them?" asked Mike.
"For now. I'll let some official give them a Latin name. I have a lifetime of work to do on this project, and I'm not going back to Earth to do it."
"Well, I guess we'll be seeing you around here, then," said Phil.
"You bet," said Anna, "just as long as the articulators work the first time."
"Ouch," said Phil.
* * *
Release
Jacob A. Boyd | 6305 words
You push the button.
Suddenly, the tumbling stars are stilled.
Your corps fighter is nose to nose with a Tivhari fighter, suspended inside a zero bubble. The bubble glides in low orbit around Melville IV, heading toward the northern pole, its speed marked by the gradual dimming of the planet as you pass over where it is dusk, then twilight, then night. Fiery volcanic plumes pancake against the high atmosphere of grey clouds, their immense size betrayed by how they linger and seem to churn in slow motion.
With her two rows of tiny, black, chitinous arms, the Tivhari pilot scrabbles against the glass of her cockpit. You have stolen something from her, your death. Even if you now push the button and release the zero bubble, at this range, momentum nullified, her kamikaze would be no more than a fender bender. For all her effort to kill you, she has only separated you from your wing and sealed her fate.
The Tivhari came from beyond the edge of the galactic arm, out in the far, thin expanse above you, perhaps from one of the few pinpoints of light you see that if magnified would fractal and expand to reveal a galaxy hidden in plain sight.
You blink stinging dryness from your eyes.
You're staring. The expanse is so flat, so black, with so little for your eyes to catch on, you fear your mind might claw at it, find a soft spot, dig a hole, crawl inside, and pull it closed behind you.
You take a deep breath and wet your lips with your tongue.
Without food or water, Tivhari die within four days. You can do that. You can wait her out.
You can do that.
The Pilot Academy trains you not to hit the button.
Inside the cockpits of corps fighters, there is only one button. The button. Press it once, you start the zero bubble. Press it again, you end it. Press it a third time, it restarts, but by draining its energy from your nav computer and jump drive. It is for emergencies only. You control your fighters' attitude and thrust with hand motions inside a Liquid Interface Chamber the size of a baby's incubator; the weapons, comms, and various other moving parts by touching fingertip contacts together in sequence. With synaptic therapy, it's second nature. Your hindbrain pulses with flight recordings from the best pilot classes who came before you—irrevocable yet imperfect. You have no recording from inside a zero bubble.
After your final pilot therapy session, you are restrained and the skin at your elbows is flensed free, then the major tugs it and rolls it up over your wrists so it bunches in bloody inverted tubes.
Under the dry, heated breeze from the station's atmosphere scrubbers, it feels like your arms end in exposed nerves licked by fire. You try not to move pulsing red sinew. You scream until your voice is a bloody squeak, and flail against your bonds. You try not to think of red salmon flesh and how it chars when laid on white, smoking coals, then flakes apart when dry. It is a distant memory, like something dreamed, not something experienced.
"Relax," the major says. He is an older class of pilot than you. He shows you clean scar lines ringing his smooth, muscled forearms.
"You've had the therapy. You'll think of salmon flesh," the major says. "Then you're past it."
Your breathing calms, and he rolls the skin back to your elbows.
The major leads you through the station to a long, quiet hall crowded with doors. He keys one open and herds you into to a room large enough for a mock cockpit— LIC and grav-cradle, though no viewer or 3-D field dome. Black sound-canceling baffles rib the walls in rows of tiny pyramids. Interface liquid bio-luminesces through the LIC's clear panels, causing the contact gloves to glow sapphire. The contents under pressure, the gloves protrude from the LIC like they are reaching at you.
Analog Science Fiction and Fact - September 2014 Page 11