The Frozen Sky

by Jeff Carlson

  Her armor could sustain indirect hits from the porous lava rock. She planned to bait them, bring them close, then roll into a crevice behind her and hit the explosives, after which she would slash any survivors with her laser.

  It was a cutting tool, unfortunately, weak at the distance of a meter. Worse, if she overheated the gun, she would probably not be able to repair it. Her nanotech was limited to organic internals. Most of the tool kits on her waist and left hip had been torn away.

  “Stop thinking. Damn it, stop talking,” she murmured, the words as rapid as her heartbeat.

  Just stop it.

  Could they really hear her mind? She’d studied the sunfish with the acute concentration of a woman who might never see anything else again, and with all the skills of a teacher evaluating her newest class.

  The sunfish definitely had an extra sense, maybe the ability to… feel weight or density. That would serve them well in the ice. So they would be able to differentiate her from the environment.

  For once, she wanted them to find her. Vonnie reactivated her suit and rose into a crouch, strobing the chasm below with a terahertz pulse. She thought her signals were outside the sunfishes’ range of hearing, but she’d revealed herself as soon as her armor scraped against the rock.

  Nothing. There was nothing.

  “Oh God.” She choked back the sound and swept the bent spaces of the chasm, quickly locating pockets in the ceiling that she hadn’t anticipated and couldn’t reach with her signals. The angle was too steep. Using her terahertz pulse was like turning on a light in what she thought was a closet and finding instead that half of the house was gone — and her enemy needed only the thinnest openings to surround her.

  Were they already too close? She’d seen it before, a dozen sunfish upside down on the rock like fat creeping muscles.

  Vonnie aimed her laser at the ceiling even as she groped with her other hand for a chunk of rock. There was gravel, too, and a head-sized boulder. She’d gathered every loose piece of lava she could find.

  Should she throw it now? Try to provoke them? Her thumb gritted in the rock as she clenched her fist.

  She was a decent shot with a ball. She’d grown up with three younger brothers. But the suit itself was a weapon. The suit had low-level AI programs that could make her something like a passenger inside a robot. There were voice menus designed for activities like climbing or welding because human beings got tired. The suit did not. It also had radar targeting that she could not see, and it would limit the velocity of its throws only to avoid damaging her shoulder and back.

  She didn’t trust it.

  She’d used most of her AI programs to hold an imprint of her ghost. The suit was rotten with Lam’s mem files. Twice the ghost had caused interrupts, trying to reconfigure itself, trying to seize control, and yet Vonnie was afraid to purge him. Deleting his mem files might affect her suit’s amplified speed and brawn.

  “Are you still there?” she hissed.

  —Von, listen. Don’t close me down again, please.

  That was the same thing it always said. God. Oh God. She didn’t have time to hassle with him.

  “Combat menu,” she said.

  —Online.

  She hesitated. Right now, the ghost was somewhat contained. That would change if she gave it access to defense modes. Doing so was a bad gamble. The extra capacity might be precisely what the ghost needed to self-correct… or the stupid, miserable AI might corrupt the most basic functions of her suit. Was there any other way?

  “I need auto-targeting only,” she said. “Fire by voice command.”

  —Von, that drops efficiency to thirty percent.

  “Fire by voice command. Confirm.”

  —Listen to me.

  Four slender arms reached out of the ceiling.

  6.

  It was easy to be friends with Choh Lam. In his mid-thirties, skinny and short, with big ears, he made a point of being nonthreatening. He was freak smart but also soft-spoken, hiding himself in a kind voice, both eager and shy. He probably didn’t realize he had restless eyes because in every other way he moved like he talked, gently.

  Vonnie’s impression was of a man who’d spent his life holding back. He was a man who wanted to belong.

  Lam made his break with that kind of thinking before the boards agreed how many people to send to Europa. Even before the mining groups had reprogrammed their mecha for new, more intensive searches, Lam let his genius show and posted a sim that guaranteed his slot on the mission — for bugs. Just bugs. That was all the ESA rover had found. No one believed this ice ball could support much else, and yet there were fifteen thousand volunteers in the first week.

  Fifteen thousand experts wanted to abandon their families and their homes despite knowing that the trip out to Europa would be two and a half months cramped inside a hab module; that the food would be slop-in-a-bag; that Jupiter seethed with radiation.

  In the virtual meetings for candidates, Vonnie had grinned at the enthusiasm they shared. Homo sapiens’ best traits were heart and curiosity. Despite all of their technology, despite developing spaceflight, AI, and nano medicine, there was still so much of the ape in them.

  Fifteen thousand people suddenly didn’t care about anything except getting their feet on the ice and grubbing around for exotic life. It was a riddle unlike anything else.

  Where did the bugs come from?

  The weak little creatures weren’t burrowers, not with their spherical body shape and dorsal whiskers. Also, there were variations in the ice. The narrow layer containing the bugs was nowhere near as old as the rest of the sample, and loaded with chlorides and minerals.

  Europa possessed every building block of life. There was water, heat, and organic material from comet and meteor strikes. They had long speculated that Europa’s great ocean was not wholly frozen. The icy crust went down an average of ten kilometers, reaching twenty km in places, but beneath it was slush and eventually liquid. In fact, some areas would be as hot as boiling where raw magma or gas pushed up from the moon’s rocky core.

  Was there also life in the ocean? If yes, it must be limited to hardy bacteria like those found near ocean-floor volcanoes on Earth or in the corrosive toxins of mine tailing ponds. Europa’s surface was stained with sulfuric acid and salt. This was evidence of caustic pH levels in the ocean.

  Lam’s school of thought predicted a world inside the ice, a small, unsteady, vertical world. A hundred man-made probes had found nothing for a hundred years, but Lam said that was to be expected. He drew his model in an area where a fin of subsurface mountains partly diverted the crushing, glacial tides. The safe zone was a mere fifteen cubic kilometers in volume — and even within its confines, the ice and rock were burned and torn.

  Lam was among the first to understand the violence of this environment. It mesmerized him.

  Here are the bugs in an open rift, he said. What are they doing? We don’t know. Mating? Migrating? Nearby there is a rumble, and a super-heated geyser floods the rift. It collapses, then gradually freezes with the bugs suspended inside. But there are more pocket ecologies stacked throughout the region, some with tenuous atmospheres of water vapor or volcanic gases such as nitrogen and carbon dioxide, poisonous hydrogen chloride, and explosive hydrogen sulfide.

  The warm holes in the ice were mild compared to the acidic salt ocean. Eons ago, in some of these crannies, bacteria had grown and thrived. The same crude microorganisms had been the first lifeforms to inhabit Earth. They were called chemoautotrophs — self-nourishing chemical reactions that ate iron, sulfur, ammonia, or manganese.

  The bacteria refused to die.

  In time, isolated from the minerals and poisons that fed them, a few strains had adapted to split water molecules as a new energy source, eating hydrogen instead of iron or manganese. The byproduct was oxygen.

  The new bacteria released oxygen gas into some of the pocket ecologies. Oxygen changed things forever. It allowed for larger, faster, more complex organisms. Lif
e on Europa flourished because it had no other choice, evolving and spreading never more than a few steps ahead of constant upheaval.

  7.

  Christmas Bauman was fifty-three and not so new to long-term commitments. That was partly why she won her slot as the expedition commander, as a balance to Lam and Vonderach. Vonnie liked her, too. Bauman pretended sarcasm with them, but it was a way of communicating her experience. Vonnie could measure Bauman’s amusement in each fraction of a centimeter that her brows lifted above her muddy green eyes.

  She was heavier in the chest and hips than Vonnie and more willing to use her body despite her age, dominating conversations by wading into the middle of any group.

  She had her own fascination. “What if—” she kept saying.

  What if the bugs weren’t dead? They might be hibernating or otherwise biologically active. What if their chemistry wasn’t too strange to co-opt, and could be used in geriatrics or cryo surgery? Yes, they appeared to have been scalded in magma-heated water and then gradually mashed and distorted by the freezing process. The bugs appeared very dead indeed, but who could say what adaptations were normal on Europa? Maybe they’d evolved to spread in this manner, like spores, preserved for ages until the ice opened up again. No one could be certain until a gene smith examined the bugs, so Bauman committed to a year’s hardship on nothing more than spectral scans and what if.

  They made a game of it inside the weightless cage of their ship, What if I trade you my dessert tonight for some of your computer time? and What if you turn off your friggin music?

  The three of them spent eleven weeks in that box. There wouldn’t have been room for them to start bouncing off the walls, and Christmas Bauman stepped into her role very naturally as their leader — a little bit of a mom, a little bit of a flirt.

  Bauman kept the pressure low with her jokes and also made sure they paid attention to each other, because the temptation was to look ahead. Lam constantly updated his sims as the mecha sent new data. Vonnie had responsibility for ships’ systems and maintenance. All three of them reviewed and participated in various consultations, boards, and debates.

  Eleven weeks. It could have been long enough to learn to despise each other or even short enough to remain strangers until they arrived, but Bauman set aside much of her own work to invest in her colleagues instead.

  They were eighteen days from Europa when the mecha found carvings in the ice.

  This time it was a Chinese rover, running close to the ESA find. Its transmissions were encrypted and altercast, but the Europeans and the Brazilians each caught enough of the signal to have something to work with. In less than four hours, the naked code went systemwide.

  Vonnie had learned politics at the University of Stuttgart, and, later, as an instructor at Arianespace. Information was power. There didn’t seem to be much sense in withholding the discovery. Too many eyes were watching. Most likely, the Chinese had protected their discovery out of habit and would have shared it within a day or two. Nonetheless, the mood on Earth took a hit. Vonnie and Bauman both received priority messages listing new contingencies and protocols.

  The tension could have ruined them. They could have sunk their energy into the worst kind of distraction, yet Bauman saw them through.

  “What if he is a dastardly chink spy?” she asked straight-faced.

  Vonnie gaped at her, embarrassed by the slur.

  Lam laughed out loud. “Yankee scum,” he said to Bauman, who added, “Hey, let’s not leave her out of this. What do you think, Von? I guess that makes you the Aryan superwoman.”

  “Right.” Vonnie touched her blond hair, so much lighter than Lam’s jet black stubble or Bauman’s sand-colored mop. She didn’t like having their attention drawn to her best feature, which she’d cropped into a buzz cut to keep it out of her face in zero gee.

  Aryan wasn’t the loaded word it had been for Vonnie’s great-great-great-grandparents, but with Germany leading the European Union again, their nation remained self-conscious about its sins in World War II. More recently, they’d seen two generations of conflict with immigrants drawn to Germany’s riches. Some political parties had walked a slippery line between racism and protecting their culture, drawing condemnation from people all over the globe. Vonnie certainly looked the part of Hitler’s master race, fair-skinned, blue-eyed, trim and fit. To her, that meant she’d had to work harder than most candidates to prove herself.

  “We know we’re good people even if she’s gorgeous, you’re too smart, and I’m overbearing,” Bauman said.

  Vonnie and Lam nodded. They were friends enough to realize they were on their own, no matter what played out back home. Inside the ship’s hab module, they gathered around a display to watch their datastreams.

  The telemetry stolen from the Chinese rover was in radar and infrared. It showed the rover’s low-slung perspective trundling forward with gradients of temperature laid over white-and-green imagery. To its left, irregular lumps masked the horizon where warm gas oozed from several vents. The rover turned closer— And the perspective fell sideways.

  In front of the camera, six meters of ice bulged. Gas spewed upward. There was pelting hail. Then the blow-out was over, revealing a trench in the ice. Its roof had thinned with age. Otherwise the rover might have crossed safely, never marking this hollow as anything except another frigid, empty branch of an inactive vent. Instead, the rover extended a wire probe down into the shadows, confirming a glimpse of repetitive shapes molded from the ice.

  In radar, the carvings were stark, extraordinary artifacts.

  “What if everything down there was killed when the air went out?” Vonnie asked, thinking like an engineer, but Bauman said, “No, this trench is abandoned. It’s isolated. ”

  “She’s right,” Lam agreed.

  Vonnie smiled, glad for their excitement. Then she saw Lam’s face and frowned, feeling one step behind.

  “Look,” he said as he ducked his eyes in disappointment.

  “This is good, isn’t it?” Vonnie said. “There’s no way the bugs cut those patterns in the ice. That means there’s something else on Europa — something bigger.”

  “Yes.” But he was unhappy.

  Puzzled, Vonnie turned back to the display, trying to see what Lam had seen.

  The carvings repeated one shape over and over in eight vertical columns of four apiece, a form much like an eight-pointed star. From tip to tip, each symbol measured 1.2 meters wide. Each one was set deep enough in the ice that it was half a meter thick through its middle, like small domes with tapered limbs.

  Every arm was knuckled and bent seemingly at random. Vonnie thought the carvings could be a sun calendar. She started to say so, then stopped herself.

  Jupiter was five times farther from the sun than Earth. Their star would look like a compact spark in Europa’s sky. Because its atmosphere was nonexistent compared to Earth’s, with no clouds or moisture to deflect sunlight, Europa’s surface would actually appear brighter than a summer day in Germany… and yet she’d soaked up enough biology from Lam to realize there had never been anything walking on top of the ice.

  Is he mad at what people are saying? she wondered.

  The first theories from Earth dismissed the carvings as the result of hive behavior by the bugs. They cited termite mounds, ant mounds, spider pits, and even the mud nests of cliff swallows.

  The math in the carvings implied something more. Eight times four times eight looked like a pattern that had been done on purpose, but many insects on Earth created symmetrical designs. Some biologists proposed the carvings were territorial markings or an attempt to reinforce the tunnel wall with interlocking shapes. A species whose existence depended upon the ice could have developed construction techniques like gophers or ants. The symmetry might be incidental.

  No one was ready to go on record that the carvings were a written language, although efforts to translate the wall were percolating on the net. Early human civilizations had used repetitive symbols such as cun
eiform and hieroglyphics before developing alphabets. Some people insisted the carvings held a message. There were too many exact, subtle alignments among the sun-shapes’ two hundred and fifty-six arms.

  Regardless, the growing consensus was that the carvings demonstrated at least chimpanzee-equivalent intelligence.

  “Why are you upset?” Vonnie asked.

  “Because we missed them,” Lam said. “We’re too late.”

  “There could be inhabited chambers nearby. You don’t know what’s down there.”

  Lam shook his head, scrolling through their displays. “The trench is older than you think,” he said. “Too old. Look at the drift.”

  The three columns furthest to the east side appeared sloppy, as if they’d been carved in a hurry, but that was because the ice had swelled, deforming the trench — and in this safe zone, the surface tides could be measured in millimeters per century.

  Vonnie felt a weird quiver down her spine. Were the carvings actually words? If so, the message was more ancient than the dim, half-forgotten histories recorded in the Bible.

  “Cheer up,” Bauman said. “Even if we don’t find anything except bones, this will be the greatest archeological dig of all time.”

  “We’ll be on the cover of every ’zine in the system,” Vonnie said, trying to make Lam smile, but he only grimaced and looked away.

  “Whoever made those carvings has been dead for ten thousand years,” he said.

  8.

  Vonnie landed their slowboat on Europa a week before the new high-gee launches would arrive, each carrying new teams of eight to twenty-four people sent by the Brazilians, the Chinese, NASA, and the ESA.

  Seven days should have been enough for Vonnie, Bauman, and Lam to begin exploring the site. Wire probes had confirmed that one end of the trench slumped deep into the ice, becoming a tunnel. It crooked sideways and down before shrinking into a series of pockets and holes too dense for their radar arrays to penetrate. For all anyone knew, there were more carvings farther down, but they were directed to wait. The larger ships carried many of the experts who hadn’t been picked the first time. Also included were a number of bureaucrats.