by Ian Douglas
“What’s the problem, Carlyle?”
It was Chief Garner. He’d walked up behind me and put a beefy hand on my shoulder.
“Nothing, Chief. Well . . . not really.”
“Spit it out, son.”
I glanced around the compartment, making sure no one else was close enough to overhear. “Shit, Chief. I’m scared.”
“Glad to hear it. You wouldn’t be human if you weren’t.”
“No . . . I mean I’m scared of fucking up.”
“Doc Francis put the fear of God in you?”
I blinked. “You know about that?”
“What do you think?”
He would have downloaded the report, yeah. And of course he would have been following Howell’s case. Chief Garner was the enlisted department head for the whole company. Hell, there were probably AI recordings of the whole emergency up on B Deck. Garner had downloaded them, allowing him to literally watch over my shoulder the whole time.
I nodded. “I know. Look, Chief, I’m not FMF yet, y’know? I’m not sure I have what it takes.”
“You’ve been through most of the training, Carlyle. You’ve missed, what? A training deployment to Europa, and your final boards. If you don’t have what you need now, you ain’t gonna find it.”
“That’s just it. What if I don’t?”
Garner sighed. “And I don’t have any answers for you.” He got a kind of faraway look in his eyes for a moment, and I knew he was accessing records from somewhere. My records.
“You’ve been consistently top ten percent in your class,” he said. “First in A and P. Third in exoenvironmentals. Fourth in nanotech applications.” He pursed his lips. “Twenty-first out of forty in S and T. You could use some work there. You want to go greenside, you need to be up on your Strategy and Tactics. Third in biochem, though. That’s good.”
“Yeah. Like my head is so damned stuffed with crap it’s going to explode. But my anatomy and physiology scores didn’t help when I saw Howell at sick call. I gave him aspirin.”
“I know,” he told me. “There’s a big difference between head knowledge and gut knowledge.” He held up his hands, one forefinger pointed at his forehead, the other at his stomach. “That much, and it might as well be a hundred light years. But it’ll come together for you, once you deploy for real.”
I must not have looked like I was convinced. He grinned. “Put it this way, Carlyle. We’ve taught you everything you need to know for you to swim. Now we’re going to toss you into the deep end, kerplunk. It’s scary as hell, yeah. But the training is there, you do know what you need to know. You’ll be fine.”
I wasn’t so sure. His analogy wasn’t very comforting, because knowing how to swim isn’t about knowing how to do the strokes or knowing that most people tend to float naturally. It’s about knowing in your muscles, knowing in the autonomous portions of the brain. I knew what he was saying—that once I was on that fire-swept beach for real, the training—all of those sims and all of those hours of downloads—it would kick in and I’d find myself doing what I’d been trained to do.
But why the hell did I keep seeing Paula lying on the well deck of that sailboat in Maine, staring up at the unforgiving sky?
We weren’t heading for Bloodworld. Our first stop would be Gliese 581 VI.
In the earliest days of the great extrasolar planet hunt, back when we were just learning how to detect the planets circling other suns by their gravitational effects on their primaries, the International Astronomical Union had laid down the rules for cataloguing and naming new planets as they were discovered. Astronomers gave newfound planets lowercase letters to identify them, and did so in the order in which they were discovered. The star itself—in this case, Gliese 581—was listed as a; the first planet discovered in the system was Gliese 581 b; the second planet c, and so on.
I suppose it made sense to the astronomers of the IAU, but eventually, this led to an ungodly tangle that made no sense at all, especially once we began actually physically exploring those planetary systems closest to us. For Gliese 581, for instance, the discovery of its first planet, b, was followed by c and then d, all in nice, neat order from innermost to outermost . . . but then planet e was detected with an orbit inside that of b. Not long after that, planet g was picked up orbiting between c and d, and planet f was found well outside of d, so the planetary order ran, from innermost to outermost, e, b, c, g, d, and f.
It didn’t help that planets g and f were, for several decades, unconfirmed, and official lists of the Gliese 581 planetary system kept losing one or both planets, then regaining them, and the whole issue wasn’t settled once and for all until the first interstellar survey actually reached the star, early in the twenty-second century.
What made the old system even more confusing was the fact that the stars in multiple star systems were also given letter IDs. You might have a multiple star system, like Alpha Centauri, with the three stellar members designated as A, B, and C, and so the first planet to be discovered there would be labeled with a lowercase d. And when astronomers began detecting moons around all of those new planets, things really got twisted.
Which is why, by the time the survey ship Human Endeavor reached Gliese 581, planets were given numbers—expressed as Roman numerals—showing their order out from their primary rather than their order of discovery. The three suns of Alpha Centauri are A, B, and C, while Chiron is designated Alpha Centauri A II and not as d. Lowercase letters are reserved for the moons: Chiron’s three satellites, Hippe, Chariclo, and Carystus, are therefore designated as Alpha Centauri A II a, b, and c.
Much simpler, and much more usefully practical. I understand that the IAU still protests the change from time to time, but then, that august body was the obsessive-compulsive bunch that raised such a furor three and a half centuries ago by declaring that Sol IX was not a planet. They’re hardcore traditionalists, and the old naming scheme goes back to the letter IDs given to the individual rings of Saturn as they were discovered, a mishmash that puts the E ring innermost, the D ring outermost, and the C, B, A, F, and G rings in between, an order that hasn’t been changed in three hundred years because no one but the astronomers have to keep track of them.
And so MRF-7 slipped silently into orbit around Gliese 581 VI rather than f, a frozen ice giant the Human Endeavor Expedition had named Niffelheim.
At about 108 million kilometers from Sol, the planet Venus has been trapped in a runaway greenhouse effect that has resulted in a surface temperature hot enough to melt lead, and with a surface pressure of around 91 atmospheres. Gliese 581 VI is less than six million kilometers farther out from its primary than is Venus—for all intents and purposes the same distance—but its climate is startlingly different. Its primary has a luminosity of just 0.013 of Sol, that’s a bit over one percent. As a result, Niffelheim is an ice giant, a smaller version of Neptune with about eight times the mass of Earth, with a solid rock core smothered beneath 1,000 kilometers of ice and ice slush, and a dense and frigid soup of methane and ammonia for an atmosphere above that. Its primary is a sullen, ruby disk slightly smaller than the sun seen from Earth.
Niffelheim has rings, though the light level is so low it’s tough to see them, and it possesses a small coterie of moons; Niffelheim-e is as large as the planet Mercury back home, ice sheathed and big enough to hold an atmosphere, mostly of nitrogen and methane. The surface temperature stands at around minus 200 degrees Celsius.
Of particular interest is the fact that tidal forces between Niffelheim and Niffelheim-e keep the moon’s deep interior hot. The heat works its way up out of the core, and warms the surface a bit more than would be the case otherwise. According to the initial surveys, there’s an ocean down there, liquid water maybe 100 kilometers deep, more water than is contained in all of the oceans of Earth, locked away beneath an ice cap ten kilometers thick.
It turns out that Niffelheim-e, which we of course began calling “Hymie” before we even dropped into orbit, is a large version of Eu
ropa, one of the Jovian satellites back in the Sol system.
I wondered if there were local equivalents to the Europan Medusae undulating beneath the ice.
The fleet stayed in orbit around Hymie while the suface exploration team shuttled down to the surface in a Cutlass. Interstellar transports like the Clymer and the Puller and heavy cruisers like the Tikki are strictly orbit-to-orbit vessels, too clumsy and too massive to maneuver inside a planetary atmosphere. A second Cutlass carried forty tons of rawmat from the Clymer’s stores. We needed to grow a base on the surface, but the only building materials present were water ice, nitrogen, methane, and a few organics. We dumped the rawmat onto the icy surface and turned loose a few trillion nanocon ’bots; within a couple of hours, the ’bots had pulled carbon, iron, aluminum, and silica from the pile and grown them into a dome thirty meters across, complete with furnished interior compartments, including the lab, personal quarters and rec area, a heavily shielded power plant, and the big central moon pool. A portable nano air factory began pulling oxygen from water ice and nitrogen from the local atmosphere, until the dome was pressurized at one standard atmosphere.
We still all wore facemasks, though. There was a chance that there were toxins or free organics mixed in with the surface ice. The moon pool was a circular pit melted into the ice, perhaps five meters across and a meter deep.
“Why the hell do they call it a moon pool?” I asked. The exposed ice steamed in the warm air of the dome, though it was still so cold we didn’t dare touch it with bare hands. The air inside the sealed chamber was frigid despite the efforts of the dome’s power tap.
“It’s an old term from back when they drilled for petroleum on the continental shelves,” Chief Garner told me, his voice muffled a little by his mask. “The drilling platform or ship had an opening in the underside of its hull, see? The opening was filled with water, and they could lower the drill rig down through it. Some research vessels used them too, as sea access for divers or small submersibles.”
“I pulled down a ’pedia reference from the ship’s library,” I said. “It talked about the title of some old book.”
Garner nodded. “The Moon Pool, by Abraham Merritt. A very early example of twentieth-century horror.”
“Horror?”
“Horror fiction. Really nasty things under the water pulled people down into the pool. And when they drilled through the ice on Europa, of course, they used a moon pool there inside the drilling chamber.”
“And we found the Medusae.”
“Exactly.”
I shivered a bit, and not entirely from the cold. “Do you think there’s anything like that here?”
Garner nodded in the direction of a heavy four-meter disk, a flattened cylinder suspended from gantry rails up by the ceiling of the compartment. “We’ll know pretty soon, won’t we?”
“I guess we will.”
The stop at Hymie, I gathered, was so that our intelligence people could scope out the situation at Bloodworld from the covert safety of Niffelheim-e. At the moment, Planet IV was on the far side of the sun, but it would swing around to our side in another few days, allowing us to see what was going on around it from our base camp at Planet VI. In the meantime, the MRF’s science department wanted to check out Hymie’s iced-over ocean.
Our operational orders gave a couple of reasons for this. First and foremost, it was possible that the colonists on Bloodworld had established a secondary colony here. There were no records of such a thing, but it had been more than sixty years since Salvation’s founding. It could have happened. If there was a human colony here, chances were good that it had been built beneath the ice, within the relative warmth and security of the world-ocean. When the Qesh arrived, such a colony could be expected to lie low and stay out of sight; by entering the ocean ourselves, we would be able to establish sonar contact with them in short order, and the MRF would be able to get some up-to-date intel from the locals.
But the second reason was the possibility of a new First Contact.
Since the final decades of the twentieth century, we’ve known that planets are shockingly common throughout the universe. Most stars have them; hell, the very first extrasolar planets we detected were orbiting neutron of a star 980 light years away from Earth. Apparently, they accreted out of the left-over debris from the supernovae that created the neutron star in the first place. If planets could form there, they could form anywhere.
And since the first manned expeditions to Mars in the mid-twenty-first cent, we’ve known that life is common as well. Right there in our own Solar System, we’ve found six different exotic biochemistries besides what’s on Earth. There are the pseudobacterial mats beneath the Martian permafrost, which we first detected by the isolated puffs of methane they release into the thin air every once in a while. There are the aerial venerarchaea of the upper Venusian atmosphere, happily metabolizing sulfuric acid, water vapor, and sunlight. There are the Jovian aeoleaprotistae drifting on the high-altitude winds of Jupiter, with their enigmatic hints of more complex life farther down within the unreachable depths of the Jovian Abyss. There are the prometheaformes, digesting frigid methane lakes on Titan, and there are the vast and complex ecosystems discovered beneath the iced-over surfaces of both Europa and Enceladus.
And that’s just what we’ve found so far; there are hints of other exotic ecosystems a hundred kilometers down within the liquid-water mantle of Pluto, and some inexplicable exotic nitrogen chemistry going on within the coldest real estate in the Solar System—Neptune’s moon Triton. With seven—and possibly nine or more—examples of independent organic evolution just in our own system, it’s clear that life will take hold in any environment where it has half a chance.
We discovered the third part of the equation in 2120, with the Olympus Expedition to Jupiter. Besides finding alien biomes in the Jovian atmosphere and beneath the ice of Europa, the Europan survey crew made first contact with what was probably another intelligent species.
Funny, isn’t it? We still don’t know for certain that the Medusae are sapient, at least in the way that humans usually define the term. We know they’re thermovores, attracted by sources of heat. We know they appear to have a symbiotic relationship with something the survey team’s survivors called ectoplasmic kudzu, which might be a different life form altogether, might be a kind of biological technology, or might even be something the Medusae exude from their own filmy bodies. We just don’t know, even now, 125 years later.
Of course, ten years after the Olympus returned to Earth, the first AI translations of the Encylcopedia Galactica were published, and we discovered just how common intelligent life actually is across the Galaxy. The interesting thing was, however, that by far, the majority of the intelligent life out there does not live on planets like Earth. A lot of it is hydrosubglacean, meaning it lives in a layer of liquid water beneath the ice of frigid worlds and moons that are internally warmed either by tidal stresses or by the decay of radioactive elements in their cores.
Intelligent beings like Homo sapiens, evolved to live on the dry, open surface of their world, may in fact be relatively rare by comparison.
We don’t know what the actual ratio might be; after all, very, very few subglaceans ever develop astronomy, radio telescopes, or space travel. The Encyclopedia Galactica lists a number of alien civilizations that live beneath the ice ceilings of their worlds—a few hundred, perhaps—but subglacean intelligence may outnumber other sapient life forms by many thousands to one. The Europan Medusae aren’t listed on the EG, so far as we know, because they’ve never made their existence known to the universe at large.
Because of our own ignorance in the matter, the Commonwealth has made contact with subglacean intelligences a high priority. The base at Conamara Chaos, clinging upside down to the Europan ice cap above the sunless world-ocean abyss, has been studying the Medusae and their bewildering zoo of organic symbionts for a century, now. Conamara base had been the next destination for my FMF class, before the class
was cancelled by events at Bloodstar. Our people and AIs there were still just trying to come up with a workable common language, and FMF students, among others, continued to work at trying to catalogue and understand the local biochemistry.
And now we were going to have a peek beneath the ice on Hymie, to see if there were similar exotic life forms down there. I think the Commonwealth government is lonely and looking for friends. We don’t have many of those yet, out here among the uncaring stars.
“Okay!” someone shouted, her voice echoing within the moon pool chamber. “Lower away!”
The four-meter cylinder began lowering on its connector cables until it rested on the ice, nano-face down. A red light began flashing, together with the rasp of a Klaxon.
“Time to leave, Carlyle,” Garner told me. “The drilling might release volatiles as the water ice separates. We don’t want to be in here if it does, even with filter masks.”
“How long will it take?”
The chief shrugged. “The nanodrill should descend at the rate of about four kilometers per hour. Seismic soundings suggest that the ice here is twelve kilometers thick. Do the math.”
Three hours. “Well, I need to get outside and pull some samples anyway,” I said.
“Stay warm,” he told me.
Stay warm. Right. It was minus two hundred-something outside the dome. I grew myself an e-suit, stepped through the external lock, and trudged out across the surface ice. Calli Lewis went with me. Orders were strict. No one went outside alone. Our e-suits were tuned to bright orange, just in case someone had to come looking for us.
Niffelheim was a pale purplish half disk hanging above the horizon, imbedded in a deep ultramarine sky and illuminated by the bloody eye of its sun. A couple of smaller, inner satellites were visible as well, casting dark oval shadows against the cloud tops. The surface beneath our heavily insulated boots was ice beneath a few centimeters of snow. The stuff was loose enough to swirl around us in plumes and streams blowing on the thin wind.