Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.
–Part II, Stanza 9
Mary stared out the port, tweaking the zoom for a better look. The view was promising. The Cabeza de Vaca had established polar orbit about a planet that looked remarkably Earthlike, at least if you ignored the reddish-yellow illumination. If she switched out the room lights her eyes would soon adapt so she could do just that, but she didn’t bother. Red or white, the sight below was the most beautiful thing she’d seen in months. Sheets of fluffy clouds Coriolis-spun into storm whorls, with dark ocean below occasionally reflecting sunlight. Nothing but ocean below, by the look of it. Maybe they had lucked out after all. God knew, they were due for some luck.
Well . . . She stretched her arms wide, yawning. She’d just awakened from SloMo, and was still getting her brain and body back up to speed. You can’t tell much just by eyeballing the monitor, she told herself. Have to get to work.
She sat down at her desk, put the headband on, and keyed the ID/initialization command into the desktop. Her surroundings faded – not so much visually as in importance – as she digested what the ship’s sensors had already recorded.
She saw that the planet had low density, just from the Cabeza de Vaca’s orbital parameters. That meant it wouldn’t have much of a rocky core. Presumably it had started out as an ice-rich ball, something like the Jovian moons Ganymede or Callisto in the Home System, and had thawed much later when its sun ran out of hydrogen fuel and expanded into a red giant.
Mary checked to see what the ship had found about the rest of the system: Two rocky planets in closer, much closer. One was about Earth-sized, about 1 AU from the star; the other was about the same distance from its star as Mars from Sol. The same stellar metamorphosis that had thawed this outer world had turned the close ones into cinders. If they had oceans now, they were lava oceans.
No gas giants, she noted with satisfaction. Norm would be pissed. He’d never apologize, but he’d know her comparator program had worked.
The ship’s computer had obviously made the right choice, bringing them here. No place else in the system had the volatiles they needed. Mary returned her attention to it. They were going to need atmosphere composition and density, water composition – Hmm. It sure looked like water oceans on the world below them, but she’d better check that, too.
She started collating information, mentally directing the acquisition of new data. It would have been nice to have a sampling laser, just zap a point on the surface and read an emission spectrum. But the original mission was supposed to be a fast flyby from light-hours away, not a close study, so they hadn’t brought such equipment, nor the templates for the nanofabs to make it. Templates for scientific equipment were expensive.
Anyway, plain old reflectance spectroscopy should be plenty, even in red and IR wavelengths – the only ones the dull star put out in any quantity.
Time ceased to flow, as always happened when a person sank into a task using the mindlink. It could have been minutes or it could have been days, but eventually Mary had the results of the reflectance specs.
Bizarre. She shook her head at the analyses. Oxygen, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, virtually no argon or other noble gases; traces of carbon monoxide and sulfur oxides. So far so good, but why so much oxygen? She ran a quick calculation, pulling out the models from the computer’s database. No, it couldn’t be from photodissociation. This ember didn’t put out enough UV to sunburn a butterfly, much less split a water molecule and blow the hydrogen away into space. Life, then? Maybe photosynthetic microbes. She felt some excitement at the prospect of discovering the first extraterrestrial life, but it was excitement tempered with the knowledge of their predicament. Maybe someday somebody could come back to investigate, but the moment the Cabeza de Vaca’s crew regained what they had lost, they would have to return to their mission.
It was hard to determine atmospheric pressure with the instruments she had at her disposal, but she could estimate with pressure-broadening on some of the spectral lines, check that against atmospheric stellar occultations. With dawning misgivings, she considered her preliminary results. There was a lot of oxygen in that atmosphere. In fact, with the low surface gravity, that meant even more than the pressure alone suggested, because the air density dropped off so slowly with height. That atmosphere was deep. As she thought, the numbers worked themselves out in her mind, as the mindlink automatically performed the calculation.
She gave a low whistle. Maybe their luck wasn’t so good after all.
Half an hour later she sat at the meeting table, Norm and George and Ivan already mindlinked and looking at her expectantly. She considered making a joke: I have good news and bad news. No, she thought, shaking her head. Humor can lighten things up, but it’s not the right time.
She cleared her throat. “Well,” she said, “we’ve found our volatiles. Liquid water, even. But it looks like they won’t be easy to get. I’ve prepared a briefing in the database.”
The others acquired rapt expressions for a minute as the onboard database briefed them.
When they’d absorbed the information, everyone looked at Mary again. “As you can see,” she continued, “it’s a chemical cauldron down there. The total pressure is over 5 atmospheres, with a hell of a lot of oxygen – something around 70 percent.
Apparently there are some primitive photosynthesizers down there.”
“How can that be}” Ivan asked. “They showed long ago that oxidation of surface materials limits oxygen content in an atmosphere. Especially if there’s life. It would burn itself up! Something’s wrong with your calculations.”
Mary snorted. “The numbers are right. Based on the planet’s density, it’s got very little rock inside. It was probably mostly ice before it melted when the star went red-giant. Thus, there’s probably nothing but water at the surface. Anything that was going to oxidize did it long ago, so the oxygen just built up.”
George closed his eyes momentarily, link-thinking, then said, “If your density figure is correct, then that ocean is not only worldwide but very deep.”
“That’s right,” Mary agreed. “Probably hundreds of kilometers deep. A solid bottom probably just forms when a highdensity ice phase becomes stable. Ice V or ice VI or something. Depends on the temperature at the sea bottom.”
“We’re getting off the subject,” said Norm. “We have a planet that’s made of water here. It looks like our prayers have been answered. Why is there a problem?”
“The oxygen pressure,” Mary replied. “Virtually everything becomes not just flammable, but explosive in an atmosphere like that. Our equipment will burn up before it can even reach the surface.”
There was silence around the table for a minute. Then Norm demanded, “How can you be sure of those pressure estimates? The briefing indicated there’s a great deal of uncertainty in them.”
Of course Norm would contest the results. Mary sighed inwardly. She could have said white is white, and he would have argued with her. With as much patience as she could summon, she said, “Yes, there is slop in the estimates. But you saw in the briefing how much error is probable. Maybe a factor of two either way. But whether it’s two atmospheres of oxygen, or 10 atmospheres, it’s not going to make any difference! Things like metals and plastics become explosively flammable.”
“I think it would be prudent, to say the least, to get some ground truth,” Norm pronounced. “Remote sensing often leads you astray. Especially when your instruments aren’t designed for it. An awful lot is riding on the calibration of instruments doing things they really weren’t designed to do.”
And especially when a woman tells you things you don’t want to hear. Mary bit her lip. “What do you suggest, then?” she made herself ask mildly.
“Use one of the shuttles,” Norm replied promptly. “Get some hard data. Before we build up new bogeymen for ourselves, we need to hav
e some better information.”
Mary reddened. “Damn it, Norm, you can see the data as well as I can!”
Ivan said, “Why don’t we build better sensors instead?” but he realized his mistake almost instantly. “Ah, templates. We don’t have the templates.”
“That’s right.”
There was silence for a moment.
“Mary,” George asked, “what’s wrong with sending a shuttle down?”
“We’ll probably lose the shuttle, that’s what.”
“Better risk a shuttle than risk the entire ship. We don’t have time to mess around. Besides, Norm is right. Do you really have a factor of two confidence in your measurements? It seems like it could be an order of magnitude at least.”
Before she could defend her figures, Ivan said, “And anyway, even if we lose the shuttle, it’s not critical. We do have the templates for more shuttles, and the raw material. Better to lose it than more water.”
Norm, for once, had the sense not to say anything.
Outnumbered, Mary said, “All right, you win. But you’d better get the nanofabs going on a new one, ‘cause I can guarantee you it’ll burn.”
The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrows followed free;
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.
–Part II, Stanza 5
The communications room felt crowded. It wasn’t really – there was room for way more than four people – but any room with both Mary and Norm in it felt crowded, at least to George. Especially when one of them was about to prove the other wrong.
“Aluminum should be okay; it’s coated with a microlayer of oxide, just from exposure to the air,” Norm was explaining to no one in particular. “Hell, that’s why it doesn’t catch fire in ordinary air. The oxide coat can’t burn, and that protects the rest of it.” George looked up from his telepresence controls to see Mary looking skeptical, as usual. He rolled his eyes. Norm could say that water was wet and Mary would look skeptical.
Ivan, standing by the monitor bank, smiled at George’s gesture and shrugged as if to say, “Not my department.”
George turned back to the final checkout. He would be flying the shuttle via a microwave mindlink, and if there were any glitches in the communications channels, he wanted to know about them now. Flying by remote was tricky enough without equipment problems to complicate things. At least from low orbit the lightspeed lag wouldn’t be noticeable, not even with the relay satellites, but he’d never before flown the configuration they’d decided upon, so his reflexes would be slow.
They’d had the nanofabs build a “J-5 Floating Instrument Platform”, basically a raft perched atop aluminum pontoons, which the shuttle would deploy while it hovered above the sea’s surface. The platform held sensors for measuring the composition of the surface seawater, and also a “sinker”, a heavy, instrumented probe that would measure water composition at depth and sonar-chirp data back to a transceiver on the floater.
And for the benefit of the four watchers, cameras would look around from both shuttle and floater with realtime imaging, each view appearing on one of a bank of monitors in the wall in front of them.
“Whenever you’re ready, George,” Norm said.
George nodded without looking up. “Just a minute.” He finished checking the backup comm channels, then put on the heads-up telemonitor helmet. “OK. Here goes.” He breathed deeply and slowly, willing his mind into the state where the VR link felt like a natural extension of his body. Serenity, unity . . .
He imagined himself looking out the shuttle’s windshield; in an eyeblink his screen showed just that view. He reached for the throttle and attitude controls, lit the engine, and the shuttle moved away from the starship.
The descent was normal enough. He had to take it slower – the atmosphere was both deeper and thicker than he was used to – but that presented no unusual problems. The shuttle had plenty of fuel and, as far as he could tell, Norm’s assessment of the oxidation problem was accurate enough. Within an hour he had brought it to the surface, and all its systems were still working perfectly.
“Deploying balloon,” he said, and the mindlink translated his wish into the command. From the shuttle’s upper cargo bay door, a heavy-lift balloon began to inflate with helium. George lowered the engine thrust to compensate for the lift as it filled, until a few minutes later he shut the engine down completely.
“Releasing floater,” he said, shifting his point of view to the shuttle’s underside camera.
The instrument platform dropped half a dozen meters, slapped down gently into the side of a wave, and rode over the crest. Monitors came alive with images; George switched his heads-up display to the main onboard camera and his point of view began rocking up and down with it. Enough data came in through the mindlink to make him feel almost as if he was there. The view was nearly Earthlike: a seascape with gentle swells, catching flecks of sun as they stretched off to a comfortably distant horizon. A soft hissing sound came through the intercom; probably one of the instruments, or maybe just the susurration of the waves.
But George had no time to admire the view. He immediately began invoking the analyzer programs that controlled the instrumentation. He looked through his heads-up display to the data monitor as it began filling with tables and columns of numbers. Atmospheric composition: 67% 02, 31% C02, 1.5% N2, traces of noble gases, water vapor, nitrogen oxides, ozone . . . The numbers flickered back and forth as the instrument package constantly updated them in realtime. Someone whistled slowly when the atmospheric pressure value appeared: 5.2 atmospheres. Right on Mary’s estimate.
Meanwhile, another monitor was also filling with information: seawater composition, dissolved gas content, pH . . . Someone else whistled when the pH value scrolled up. The ocean was about as acidic as gastric juice.
Now the atmospheric reading was showing traces of hydrogen. Hydrogen? In that atmosphere? Puzzled, George looked again at the air composition readings. Something nagged at the back of his mind; acidity, hydrogen, aluminum –
Elementary chemistry came flooding back as the comm link picked up on his new train of thought and fed him information from the main database. Hydrogen ions in acid solutions react with active metals to release metal ions – and gaseous hydrogen. Good God! The floater was dissolving in that acid sea!
And the reaction also produces heat. Lots of heat. And with all that oxygen around, the situation couldn’t last long.
Quick, deploy the sinker, he commanded the computer, but before it could comply his viewpoint lurched crazily, and half the other monitors spun as well. The intercom filled with crackling noises. Then a sheet of fire billowed up along one side of the floater, and his heads-up helmet display went blank. He looked through it at the monitor bank, where three of the camera views were also blank, the screens now hissing with static. The remaining views shifted even more dizzily, offering glimpses of sky, sweeping wildly along the horizon, dipping momentarily under the water, where dark shapes, fast and unrecognizable in the dim light, flitted in and out of the camera’s field of view. One by one, each view washed into static.
The last view from the remaining camera showed a mouth with multiple rows of big teeth, approaching, engulfing . . . then the scene also vanished into static.
The others’ reactions filtered in through the mindlink. “What the –?” “Told you so.” “Christ, what was that}”
George, momentarily stunned, shook his head and then returned to his teleprojection, shifting his perspective to the shuttle nose camera as he did so.
A bizarre scene appeared on the sea surface. Appalled, he saw flaming pieces of the floater skittering around atop the sea like water drops on a hot plate, practically exploding as hydrogen bubbled up around them to catch fire. Pursuing them, nightmare shapes seized, ripped apart, and gulped the pieces of flaming metal with apparent impunity.
When the feeding frenzy died, George muttered, “I’m getting outta there.�
�� He switched his attention to the shuttle’s flight controls. Start the H2 flow and just give her a little squirt of antiprotons, just enough thrust to hold it while the balloon –
There came a blinding flash, and the shuttle monitor abruptly went blank, as did the entire telemetry stream.
Stunned again, George just sat for a moment, his mind as blank as his monitors. Then he tore off the comm helmet and growled, “What the hell happened?”
“The shuttle blew up,” Mary said with an air of self-satisfaction.
George said nothing, just lowered his head into his hands. Insensitive bitch; he felt as if a part of himself had just died, and all she could do was gloat because she’d been right. He willed himself again to breathe deeply and slowly, trying to recover his equilibrium, to cut through the disorientation.
“Did you get any data from the sinker before the floater blew?” Norm interrupted.
“No.” Either it never got free, or whatever was in the water had clobbered it right away. It really didn’t matter which. It didn’t matter . . .
Norm persisted. “Did we get any data before the shuttle blew up? What caused it to go?”
George finally looked up. Norm stood over him like an inquisitor, fists clenched. Behind him, Mary was actually grinning. Next to the monitors, Ivan was tapping instructions into a keyboard, not bothering with the mindlink. “Probably a hydrogen leak somewhere,” Ivan said as the monitors switched off. Norm turned his attention toward him, and George sighed in relief.
Ivan said, “Enough must have diffused out of the tank to set up a little chemical explosion in the shuttle itself. And that let out the antimatter.” He laughed, a little grimly. “At least the explosion will have wiped out those things ripping the floater apart.”
“Hah,” Norm grunted. “What about the acidity? Where did that come from?”
Ivan didn’t have an answer, nor did George. Mary put on a mindlink and closed her eyes. A moment later she snorted, “Obvious. Should’ve been obvious, anyway. All that oxidation. Most of the nonmetallic oxides that dissolve . . . sulfur, nitrogen, whatever . . . make acids. That’s got to be where it comes from.”
The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction Page 26