by Jeff Carlson
Behind the Lewis, their magnets and flares drew one torpedo into a magnetic well, where it self-destructed.
Another torpedo was deflected by the concussion. In the split second it needed to reacquire, a smart mine killed it. The third and fourth were caught by interceptors.
The fifth lanced through.
Adjusting their ice busters to Ash's piloting, Troutman was almost too late. Hunt assisted with CEW and electronic flak, but the torpedo had learned from the nineteen that failed. It juked toward the Lewis.
Troutman disengaged several tool pods and the two nearest busters, creating a wall. He blocked the torpedo. It exploded, gutting the first buster. Shrapnel punched into the second one.
A shockwave of water billowed over them like a tsunami. The Lewis rolled sickeningly, but they were alive.
The sunfish screeched in triumph.
"Nice job!" Ash shouted as she turned east. She kept the ruined ice buster between herself and their enemy.
Troutman detached the line connecting them to the last ice buster. He sent it behind them, adding its bulk to the wreckage of the other ice busters and the few mines and flares that remained.
The Lewis continued to sweep the water with active sonar and neutrino pulse.
"Sir, no sign of enemies ahead," Troutman said.
"And no launches behind us," DeBrun said. "They may have depleted their offensive capabilities."
"Don't believe it," Ribeiro said. "At the very least, they can use themselves as kamikazes. Sierzenga, don't let them catch up. Hunt, can you give her more power?"
"No, sir. This is max speed."
"The HKs west of us are in pursuit," DeBrun said. "They followed their torpedoes, then peeled away to the north to avoid our mines. The HKs to the south haven't moved."
Vonnie paged through DeBrun's sims. As their countermeasures and the torpedoes collided, the first pair of HKs had come within 3.4 klicks, a distance that grew again to 4.1 klicks as Ash guided the Lewis eastward and downward. They were approaching the black ragged peaks.
"Take us between those mountains," Ribeiro said. "We'll lose them on the far side."
"Sir, I'd rather stay and fight," Ash said.
"That's an order, Sierzenga."
"Sir, we don't know what's past the mountains."
Ribeiro didn't reply, and their displays ticked with maddening slowness. The green symbol of the Lewis crawled toward the peaks. Behind them, the ice buster blazed with CEW and data/comm, futilely attempting to distract the HKs.
The HKs crept further north.
In the water, everything moved at a snail's pace except for the current sliding between the mountains.
Ash tilted the Lewis into a steeper descent, intending to enter the current. They would reach the gap between the peaks in eighty seconds.
"Attention all crew," Ribeiro said. "Attention all crew. We have new directives - our mission has changed. Our primary goal is survival -- and by engaging the PSSC, we've already attained our secondary goal. They know we're here. This will put them on the defensive."
"They didn't look defensive to me, sir. They kicked our butt." Ash's voice was caustic. She sounded very much like Biting Female, wounded and upset.
Vonnie had to physically restrain the sunfish, urging them not to shriek or snap their beaks. She didn't want Ribeiro to remove Harmeet from hab one, but she felt like she'd been hijacked. Worse, Peter and Jan must have known what was coming. They'd manipulated their own people.
Peter, how could you do this to us?
"We cannot leave the PSSC unopposed beneath the ice," Ribeiro said. "Therefore we'll play a game of attrition. If we compel them to spend time and resources accounting for the Lewis, we'll impede their progress. We came here to open a new battlefront."
"Christ," Ash said.
Ribeiro ignored her. "As soon as we're safe, we will deploy an ELF transceiver and confirm our presence in the ocean. Administrator Koebsch and Commander Palmquist will forward our datastreams to Earth."
"We're a bargaining chip?" Vonnie's inflection was biting, too. "What about exploration?"
"Von, everyone is angry, and we should be because of what the PSSC did to us -- but our orders are specific," DeBrun said, adding his clout to Ribeiro's authority. "If we had more subs, it would be different. We don't. Hit-and-run tactics are the best we can do."
"I'm not a conscript. I want to see those orders. I need to hear it from Admiral Cornet."
"As soon as we're safe."
Ash brought them into the current and the Lewis swayed, shoved from behind. With their increased speed, they were twenty seconds from the mountains.
"Shut off active sonar and pulse," Ribeiro said. "Let's go dark. Once we're through the gap, we'll feint to starboard, then dive hard to port. Metzler, you have our planetary and ecology units. Program a thousand nanotags. Distribute them in this current. Before we dive, I want the tags to generate weak electromagnetic signals like a sub. With luck, the HKs will pursue them, not us."
"Got it," Ben answered, conspicuously forgetting to say sir. Like the sunfish, his allegiance was to Vonnie and Ash. He shared their discontent.
Bravely, others spoke up.
"Sir, we're not equipped for guerilla actions," Wester said. "I'm a linguist. Most of us are scientists and engineers. We could have sent mecha for combat."
"I think most of us would like to hear from Admiral Cornet," Harmeet said.
"I demand to speak to the proxies," Dawson said.
"Not now," Ribeiro said. "We did not seek confrontation, nor will we. The PSSC fired on us. We are to serve as a nuisance -- a stalking horse. We'll evade their forces if possible."
"Distributing probes and tags should be the extent of it, and we were gonna do that anyway," DeBrun said. "They just need to know we're here."
DeBrun knew the astronauts were divided. Vonnie worried about what was happening in the conn. DeBrun, Troutman and Hunt were the "security" personnel on NASA's org chart. The three of them, plus Ribeiro, were more than enough to prevail over Ash. Four versus one. From everything she'd said, Ash hadn't been privy to Ribeiro and DeBrun's classified orders... but if they had the proper authorization codes, Ash would go along with them.
The FNEE officer, the NASA cops and Ash had the conn. Everyone else was corralled in the aft sections of the Lewis.
They had been led like lambs to their pens. They were prisoners. Short of mutiny, Vonnie saw few options. Literally making noise by banging on the hull -- or, in Ben's case, by mishandling the nanotags -- would draw a bull's eye on the Lewis for the PSSC.
Hush, she gestured to the sunfish. "It's okay," she told Harmeet. She hated how they'd been swindled, but she could see how the secret objective was justified.
In their camp, on the surface, the PSSC could have manufactured their new-look HKs weeks ago. She didn't believe they'd been in the Great Ocean for long. They'd needed time to set their traps around the many egress points beneath the chimney. Hours? Days?
If they'd been in the ocean for days, they would have ascended into our chimney and hit us there. They're not that far ahead of us. They have mecha and possibly human crews in the water, but they were scrambling to find us. We can make it harder on them, make them chase their tails.
I need to voice my support for Ribeiro. I'll probably gag on it, but he's doing the right thing.
Vonnie shook her head, but she didn't bother to hide her bittersweet grin. The sunfish had followed every thought, of course. Harmeet was the only one in the room who was unnerved by the change in Vonnie's face from resistance to a hawkish mood.
"What are you--?" Harmeet asked.
"Colonel Ribeiro, I'm sorry I questioned your orders," Vonnie said. "I understand we may need to fight. So do the sunfish. They'll continue to scan for threats."
"Good," he said. Nothing else.
Vonnie thought she heard puzzled silences from Ben and Ash. Wester fell quiet, too. Harmeet stared at her, but Vonnie remembered shouting at Peter: "We can't let them
take sole possession of Europa, and I'd rather die than rot in a Chinese prison." That thrill of history was with her again.
This is our stand, she thought. Win or lose, the message is larger than the fourteen of us.
We'll build on our alliance between the sunfish, the EU, America and Brazil. More of our people will land on the ice. More subs will come through other chimneys. We don't need to hold out long. If we can knock the PSSC on their heels a few times, if we make new discoveries in the Great Ocean...
Tom rustled jubilantly, praising the solidarity she'd expressed and her willingness to hurt their enemy.
First they needed to gain the initiative. The HKs had fallen further behind as Troutman blocked them with the ice buster. Soon the machines would exchange fire.
The Lewis had increased its lead as it arrowed into the saddle between the mountains. The gap was a narrow, vertical slot 1.9 kilometers wide at its base. Far overhead, the peaks rose three kilometers before they punched into the ice, where the peaks were still only 2.6 kilometers apart.
The black slopes were gnarled and porous -- full of crevices -- stacked with bluffs and overhangs -- eroded by tides and quakes. Rockslides had opened one face of the tower to their starboard. The saddle between the mountains was littered with jigsaw pieces as big as a house. Anything smaller had been swept away.
The current murmured and whistled through the honeycomb piles of rock. Water played over the peaks like a thousand flutes.
Listening with the sunfish, Vonnie quivered, overwhelmed by the sublime majesty of the sound.
Thousands of years might have passed without anyone to listen to the currents or to watch the mountains' growth and decay. It was a shame that humankind needed a war to bring them through the ice. They should have been able to send dozens of mecha to analyze these peaks, sample the rock, dig for fossils. Instead they were reduced to jettisoning a thousand nanotags as a diversion. Vonnie knew they had to keep their probes in reserve, but she wondered how much they were missing.
She gazed at the sides of the towering peaks. She felt like a child craning her neck to look up between a pair of adults. They loomed above her.
Ben said, "Holy shit, what is that!?"
His nanotags swirled in a cloud around the Lewis, generating sporadic signals and blips. Their data/comm was intended to appear as emanating from the Lewis itself. The tags were also transmitting real information.
Vonnie was afraid they'd spotted more HKs, but Ribeiro didn't say countermeasures or evasive action. He said, "Metzler, report."
"There are structures on our portside!" Ben said, nearly shouting. "I see buildings and walls!"
17.
Vonnie stared at Ben's sims. She saw rock walls protruding from the slope above them -- stout, hardy walls peppered with holes and cracks.
The walls made four concentric circles embedded in the mountain, but the mountain and the walls had worn away with time. Vonnie was sure she was looking at ancient ruins, despite the view being restricted to the drab, smudgy quality of Ben's sims.
The nanotags were operating at low power. Even combined with the cameras on the Lewis's portside, the imagery was poor.
The diameter of the largest circle was approximately 900 meters. Inside it was circle with a diameter of 800 meters, then two more with diameters of 400 meters and 300 meters. All four had been distorted by a bulge in the slope. All four had decayed. The largest circle resembled two smiles missing a lot of teeth, but Vonnie didn't doubt that the circles had been constructed by living creatures. Braces connected all four. She counted twelve of these spokes, which curved rather than extending in straight lines.
Viewed as a whole, the structure was reminiscent of sunfish hieroglyphics. The circles looked like bodies. The spokes looked like arms.
Was the purpose of the walls to reinforce chambers hidden inside the mountain? To gather bacteria or prey? The Lewis's cameras tallied hundreds of dunes on the north-facing sides of the walls, where the rocks had collected silt and debris from the current's upper boundaries. High on the mountainside, the current had less strength than at the floor of the gap.
Vonnie wanted to show their imagery to Brigit, but their visuals wouldn't translate to Brigit's sonar interface. Worse, the Lewis was speeding past and they couldn't stop.
The structures were already behind them. Very soon, the Lewis would ride from the gap into open water.
"Colonel, can we get a better look?" Wester asked as Vonnie said, "Sir, launch more tags! They can explore the mountain after we're gone."
"Negative," Ribeiro said. "Metzler, do not alter your configuration."
"We can fire a handful of tags without--"
"Negative. Dumping nanotags into the current is one thing. Firing them at the mountain is another. If the HKs detect even the smallest launch, they may anticipate our trick. Do you want to take more photos of empty ruins or do you want to live? We have this location on our map. We can return."
"Colonel, there's no reason for a fuss," Dawson said. "That was a natural formation."
"Four and twelve are sunfish numbers," Vonnie said.
"What are you talking about?"
"Four circles, twelve spokes."
"Spokes? Oh, you're referring to the striations. There were considerably more than twelve, although there may have been a dozen major striations. The formation was volcanic. It was a cone that fell dormant."
"Dawson, it was some kind of village," Ben said.
"Poppycock."
"I'll grant you that it began as a natural formation," Vonnie said. "Then it was engineered. Someone expanded and improved those walls. The cone's location above this current was ideal for a hunting village or a farm."
"I applaud your spectacular ignorance," Dawson said. "It is exceeded only by the manner in which you leap from one fantasy to another."
"Fuck you."
"Hmph!" Dawson sounded amused -- not outraged -- by her vulgarity. She would have to find new ways to irritate him. Maintaining his aloof, superior tone, he said, "What do you believe they were hunting and farming?"
"Anything that swam or drifted past. You saw the deposits of organic materials. The front sides of the walls are gathering soil and bacterial mats."
"Naturally. We'll find similar deposits everywhere."
"Those walls were built, Dawson."
"Quiet," Ribeiro said.
Behind them, the HKs were approaching the mouth of the gap. Troutman had stymied the HKs, but his ice buster was slow. The HKs slipped beneath it.
"Fire," Ribeiro said.
Troutman and DeBrun sent the last of their interceptors at the HKs, which responded with decoys and flares. Hunt strobed the enemy with SCPs.
In the roar of propulsion jets, concussions and electronic noise, the Lewis momentarily lost track of their pursuers. Their interceptors were gone. Explosions blinded their cams. Data/comm from the ice buster had ceased. Only a few mines transmitted to the Lewis, and the mines' sensors were hampered by bursts of wreckage and turbulence.
Brigit had been scrutinizing the water ahead, where the land plunged into a deep, wide sea. She described four columns of heated water. Bits of flotsam whipped past, most likely shredded bacterial mats or mineral flecks. She did not hear HKs or mines holding position in the water, which was good, but she warned that the currents were severe.
The AIs confirmed Brigit's assessment. Their nav charts began to load with a rat’s nest of clashing surges and tides. Temperature readings were contradictory.
"We may reverse course if the HKs were destroyed," Ribeiro said. "Sierzenga, prepare to ascend."
"Sir, I'm sorry they got past me," Troutman said.
"You did well," Ribeiro said. "No one can defend so much space with a single unit. The crucial outcome is that we delayed them," Ribeiro said firmly. He wanted to rally his crew.
The FNEE trained any personality out of him, but he is a good leader, she thought. We've come a long way, Ribeiro and I. Farther than I've gotten with Peter. I guess I don
't have to like him to be honored to serve with him.
"Metzler, the currents are separating your nanotags," Ribeiro said. "Can we still use them as a decoy?"
"We can use 'em as multiple decoys. The trick is to keep them from moving too fast. The HKs know our speed. I can correct the tags' programming but I need to broadcast to them, sir," Ben said, adding sir as conspicuously as he'd omitted it minutes ago.
Ben must have felt the same feelings as Vonnie -- the same knowledge that they'd walked too far on a razor's edge. In combat, he'd set aside his differences with Ribeiro for the unity of their tribe.
His tone made her proud. She didn't want their fight to end. She wanted to deliver a few warheads to the PSSC. She wanted to close their chimney, kill their HKs and guard against future incursions. The Lewis was the underdog but she wanted to believe they could turn the tables on their enemy.
"You have ten seconds," Ribeiro told Ben. "Write your program. Seed it among the tags. DeBrun, cover his broadcast with active sonar and pulse."
"Yes, sir."
Ben said, "Ready, sir."
"On my mark. Now."
Ben sent his modified instructions to the nanotags as DeBrun lit up the gap. DeBrun aimed sonar and pulse at the HKs, pretending to target them.
In response, the HKs pinged the Lewis, but the HKs were farther behind than Vonnie would have guessed.
Ahead, the land dropped. The Lewis was on the verge of the sea, where they could dive or turn as they pleased while the HKs were stuck between the peaks.
Why aren't they coming after us? she thought.
Something about the HKs' lack of urgency bothered Troutman, too. He said, "They're not accelerating. In fact, they may be pushing against the current to stay back."
"For all they know, we left mines in the gap," Hunt said. "They're scanning for--"
--Danger! Brigit screeched.
"Where?" Vonnie asked as her fingers traced the question over Brigit's topside.
--Below us! Swimming up! There are many eights of unknown objects rising toward our belly! Brigit screeched. At the same time, the astronauts and their AIs scrolled through their sensors and their displays.