by Jeff Carlson
This was no ocean into which she was descending — it was Europa’s sky. Captured here, native species would have no concept of anything further up. They would look for the mountains or the liquid seas below, so she began to dig beneath herself instead of laterally, no longer fighting the avalanche but using it to her advantage, sifting, swimming.
Eventually she fell onto a vast, black slope of lava rock. Whether it was an island suspended in the ice or a true mountain, she couldn’t say, but she had come down out of the frozen sky.
11.
The catacombs had formed eons ago when liquid magma cooled irregularly, leaving tubes and caverns within a larger mass. Running water cut through every opening as geysers, rivers, and slow-draining seas. Quakes opened new fractures and closed others — and the ice was always there, dripping or pushing or smashing into the rock.
In solitude, in silence, Vonnie thought about her dead friends too much as she walked.
The darkness led in every direction. There were pits and outcroppings and blind corners and slides. Once she found a sheer abyss that plunged for hundreds of meters. More often, she couldn’t see more than a stone’s throw as she picked her way through the maze.
Using an inertial compass to maintain her heading east wherever possible, she tried to keep busy with her maps and data. The atmosphere in these lava tunnels was mostly water vapor, carbon dioxide, and the ever-present nitrogen along with trace poisons. It was also warm — a few degrees below freezing.
Vonnie assumed she’d entered a fin mountain. Most of the rock formations near Europa’s surface were ejecta, cast into the ice by ocean-floor eruptions or broken off from mountaintops by the pressure of the frozen sky. If she’d discovered a dead block of lava floating in the ice, it might absorb the sparse amounts of heat generated by friction, distant lava flows, and hydrothermal vents. These catacombs were too warm. Some areas were ringed with scum like filth on a bathtub. Her suit detected sulfur, salt, oxidizing rust and minerals, all evidence of past floods and smoke and ash.
She was inside a volcano.
Europa’s molten core, silicate mantle, and low gravity created towers of unimaginable heights. The great ocean cooled many fissures and vents, driving the lava upward. Because siliceous magma was cohesive — like syrup — it trapped gases within it, lifting each eruption even further.
On Earth, in full gravity, the Hawaiian volcano of Mauna Loa rose seventeen kilometers from the Pacific floor. On Mars, in 0.38 standard gravity but without an ocean to support it, Olympus Mons rose twenty-five kilometers into the Martian atmosphere. On Europa, in 0.13 standard gravity, Lam’s sims had predicted unstable piles of rock as tall as sixty kilometers. He assumed the ocean floor wasn’t uniform. There must be shallower regions were the mantle formed plateaus. The volcanoes that scraped the surface rose from these highlands.
Fire and ice.
The volcanoes eroded and reformed at speeds much faster than any Earth equivalent, so Vonnie listened for seismic activity and swept her infrared through the caverns, looking for hot spots.
She found specks of condensation, then puddled ice before she walked into a length of catacombs that had been invaded by a creeping swamp. Giant lumps of ice sat on the tunnel floor beneath pillars and stalactites. Frozen lakes flowing at less-than-glacial speeds made waves and swirls against every strewn hunk of rubble.
The landscape was stunning, but it couldn’t soothe her as she hurried into a light wind. The pressure differential indicated an even higher temperature somewhere ahead. Maybe there were gas vents or bubbling springs.
Vonnie had seen bacterial mats and a few spores of what appeared to be fungi. She took samples of these pale bulbous growths, glad to find life of any kind, but only the ice truly thrived in this environment. When her radar identified another sun-shape on the wall, she thought it was a carving.
It moved.
“Hey!” Vonnie began to jog. Just as suddenly, she stopped. The creature was 1.2 meters wide, a round body with eight arms. She didn’t want to scare the little thing. She was three hundred meters away, and there was a chance she’d gone unobserved.
It might be best if the creature hadn’t seen her. She wasn’t trained to initiate First Contact. The decision she made could affect nine billion lives across the solar system as humankind collided with another thinking race for the first time… but she didn’t have it in her to walk away, not here, not now. She needed this success to balance everything that had gone wrong.
Besides, what the hell was it breathing?
Vonnie felt a stab of pride and melancholy at the thought, a bittersweet mix. Bauman and Lam would have given anything to be with her.
Infrared made it clear that this creature was warm-blooded. Despite the tough, insulating layers of cartilage and blubber beneath its skin, its body heat radiated in this cold like a furnace.
In that way, it genuinely was a sun. Like a beacon or a lamp, it drew her closer.
The creature disappeared, edging behind a bump of rock. Vonnie paced toward it, sweeping her radar and X-ray up the cavern wall. Where had it gone? The wall was pocked with fissures and holes.
As she paused at a hundred meters, thinking again of Lam, she realized the carvings they’d found were literal portrayals of these creatures’ bodies. They’d thought each eight-armed sun was a letter or a word. Instead, the shapes were three dimensional images of the carvers themselves.
Searching the wall, she discovered a crevice teeming with warm bodies, eight of them — the number eight again — and yet she saw no exhalations in infrared.
Vonnie forgot everything else, although she made sure not to let her smile show inside her visor. Teeth might be threatening. She moved gently even as her head raced with astonishment and delight. She knelt to make herself smaller. Then she drew one finger in the dust, merely trying to communicate the idea of communicating. She must be a surprise to them.
I’m a friend, she thought.
Furless, streamlined, they had almost certainly evolved in water. They had no bones, only strands of cartilage through their bodies and arms. They also had no front or back that she could see, no eyes, no nose, nothing to differentiate one side from another.
On top, their albino skin was peppered with spines. Some of those defensive needles were colored with a tinge of yellow or red, likely from sulfur or mineral absorption. They had no need for pigmentation in this lightless world.
Underneath, their arms were lined with gripping nubs and richly laid bands of tube feet and pedicellaria — fine, clasping tendrils in the thousands. Some were as delicate as her hair. Others were short cords like wire.
Their squirming whiskers gave them personality. Hanging on the rock, clinging in a group, most of the creatures held up one or two arms to show their undersides, and Vonnie’s sensors let her see through their bodies in any case. They wriggled and flexed.
Are they communicating with each other? she thought. How? By touch?
They danced with their arms, brushing against each other. Vonnie imagined they used physical contact like a combination of sign language and Braille. They might read their carvings in the same way — and everything inside Europa — as they groped through the dark.
Ears were their only visible sensory organs. In the grooves between their arms, protected by knuckle-like muscles, were sphincters that opened to short auditory canals. Following their ears into their bodies, Vonnie’s X-rays lit up dense, specialized cochlear and bundles of nerves. She also saw complex fatty lobes associated with the same nerves. What were those for? The fatty structures augmented their hearing somehow.
Otherwise they had no orifices of any kind except on their bellies. Vonnie noted a few slits which she suspected were well-protected gills and genitals. Each creature also had a snub beak evidently used both as mouth and anus. Her initial scans revealed a very basic digestive system, four lungs, two hearts, two hypertrophied kidneys, a huge liver, and more brain tissue than she would have envisioned in a meter-wide creature.
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You’re perfect, she thought.
They were small enough to subsist on minimal food, yet large enough to build. Lungs and gills also allowed them to travel in any medium. Did they still make their homes in water? Where were their children?
“What should we call you?” she asked, forgetting herself and speaking out loud.
She remembered her friends’ energized laughter. Bauman might have called the natives octopods or aquatic mammals. More politically minded, Lam would have said Europans.
“Sunfish,” Vonnie said.
Naming them, she felt wistful and right. Sunfish was pretty. It was poetry. They looked like giant starfish, but starfish would have been demeaning.
These weren’t simple, mindless sea creatures. They were clever and brave. For the sunfish to cover as much distance as they had to the top of the ice was remarkable. It spoke again of strategy, organization, and engineering. That they’d mastered this environment was even more impressive because their lungs were too compact to hold air for long. They must have evolved some trick of oxygen compression… saturating their blood… breathing water or good air before leaving one safe zone for another…
The air locks implied they weren’t nomads. Instead, they constructed strongholds.
Am I near their home? she thought.
Then she was out of time. The sunfish leapt at her and Vonnie stepped back, stunned, as they burst off the cavern wall like shrapnel.
The sunfish were spectacular in flight. Four of them ricocheted through the crags overhead, banging into spaces she hadn’t noticed until they darted in and out. The others kicked off the tunnel floor. As soon as they were airborne, they somersaulted, leading now with their undersides and their beaks. They came in a swarm with all arms outstretched.
In that split second, Vonnie realized their carvings were a lie. The shapes etched into the trench had been smooth, stylized, and immaculate. Those carvings showed the top portions of sunfish without age or injuries, when in reality their undersides were rough with scar tissue and missing hunks of pedicellaria.
Their true selves were as grotesque as those wounds.
The first sunfish struck her helmet off-center, attacking her gear block. Others collided with her arms and chest, trying to bring her down. Vonnie staggered, but her suit kept her upright.
Her retreat was confused. She tripped over a boulder and fell as three bodies clawed at her.
She stood like a drunk, flailing with adrenaline. Many of them seemed to have disappeared. She struck wildly at the sunfish hooked around her face.
They dropped the ceiling on her. A hundred flecks of rock clattered against her suit, and she looked up as a ragged hunk as big as a car slammed down. When most of the sunfish had bounced away from her, they’d leapt up and scrabbled at the rock, digging and prying, using themselves as pistons to accelerate their weapon.
They were ruthless. Impact killed one of their own and hurt three more. It also destroyed her.
Inside her helmet, her skull whacked against the buckling armor, where torn circuitry scraped open one of her corneas. Then she hit the ground. Systems failure was total for 3.1 seconds and Vonnie sprawled in the dark, bleeding and twitching.
12.
“Are you there?” she gasped, blinded by a wet mask of gore.
—Online.
“Run! Get me up!”
She felt the sunfish against her suit, snaking through the rubble to reach her foot, her arm, her shoulder. Their arms beat at her like clubs.
Pain speared through her elbow as the suit twisted free. She rose. Inside her helmet, she shook her head, squeezing her left eye shut, but her vision wouldn’t focus and she couldn’t get her other eyelid to close at all. That eye was a numb, oozing bag mashed in a crater of flesh.
I can’t see, she realized.
Her fear became a firebrand, scalding her brain. She couldn’t think. “Run,” she said, but the ghost needed more information.
—Destination?
Something hit the back of her head. More impacts dropped her to her knees, and she screamed, “Run! Run!”
—Destination?
Vonnie summoned the words she needed. “Retrace my path for two kilometers! Retrace my path exactly! Run into the lava tunnel!”
A faint blue glow reached her good eye as the suit staggered up and turned. Probably it was displaying her maps.
My visor is intact or I’d be dead, she thought.
She leaned toward the light, peering through her bloody eye. The ruined circuitry slid into her cheek like a dozen pins. She jerked back, but she couldn’t escape. Her face was hemmed in by the sharp mesh.
Sobbing, she felt herself carried by the suit. It dashed forward, jarring her head wounds.
Then it tripped or it was knocked down. Vonnie moaned, expecting another assault. “What do you see!?” she gasped as the suit stood again.
—Define request.
“Where are they? Is there any way out?”
—There are four lifeforms in pursuit. The closest is ten meters behind us.
“No!”
—Radar indicates several branches from this tunnel, but your instructions were to remain on your path.
“Turn! Lose them!”
—Displaying options.
“Just turn! Run! Don’t let them catch me!”
The suit wrenched sideways, yanking Vonnie to her right, left, right, and right again. Reeling in agony and shock, she fought to hold onto a plan.
“Where are they now? What does the tunnel look like?”
—The nearest lifeform is twenty-five meters behind us. Displaying holo imagery.
“Fuck you! Fuck you! I can’t see!”
—Twenty meters.
“Keep running! Tell me what the tunnel looks like!”
—Radar indicates multiple side channels and cavities around the main tube, which is at least another kilometer in length. There is ice beyond it.
“What do I do?”
—Define request.
Vonnie screamed at him, using rage to overcome her panic. “How can they be so close!? You’re stronger than them! You should be faster!”
—The lifeforms are jumping from every available surface, gliding through trajectories as short as one meter or as long as thirty. Their grasp of spatial relations appears significantly more advanced than the same ability in human beings.
That helped. She was able to picture the chase. Her suit ran in leaping bounds as the sunfish flew after her. She was obstructed by boulders and pits. They acted more like arrows or balls, using long and short angles interchangeably.
“When all four of them are in the air, change course! Run into one of the side channels!”
—I anticipate such an instance in six seconds. Five. Four.
“Why don’t I feel my med systems? Fix my eyes!”
—One.
Vonnie winced as the suit flung itself backward. She thought she felt a tick of contact on her shoulder. Had a sunfish grabbed at her as it flew past?
“Where are they?”
—We’ve left the main tunnel for a chasm as instructed. The nearest lifeform is ten meters behind us and gliding further away. I’ve lost radar signals of the other three.
“Keep running! What about my eyes!?”
—Medical response appears to have been subverted by unknown packets and overrides.
“That’s you. Oh, shit, that’s you,” she whispered with a cold new sense of dread. At some point, the ghost had outfoxed the checks she’d established and tried to expand itself, fragmenting as it battled with her computers.
—Initiating diagnostics.
“No. Wait.”
—Corrupted files identified in life support nodes.
“I said wait! Off!”
Her suit froze. Vonnie toppled forward until her arm struck something. She spun around and hit twice more, bruising her leg and her back. Her face throbbed.
The pain was nothing. It was her terror that consumed her. Like a child,
she reached for something to hold onto. The suit responded to manual function, letting her clutch at the rock and churn her legs.
She went four meters before her head clanged into the wall. She moved to her right, then struck something else.
What could she do?
Vonnie didn’t want the ghost to reabsorb whatever packets it had lost in its fight to control her suit. Some of those packets would be junk code. Others would be sleeper cells. If the ghost reconnected with enough of those cells, her suit’s firewalls might not win the next battle for control. But she couldn’t crawl alone through the blackness.
“Are you there!?” she shouted.
—Online.
“Where are the sunfish?”
—Radar shows no indication of pursuit.
Vonnie exhaled in a trembling gust. Were they lurking outside the chasm? Was it a dead end? The next question was the most urgent, and she fixated on it with that child-like desperation. Why? Why? Why are they trying to kill me?
If they were intelligent, they should have felt the same magic she’d experienced when she stood in front of them. They couldn’t have met anything like her before — a tall, bipedal creature in plastisteel — and she hadn’t done anything wrong. Had she?
Vonnie patted at her armor, bewildered by the mangled shapes of her torso and abdomen. Suddenly she reached for her shoulder mount. “Is my electrolysis unit intact?”
—Affirmative.
For an instant, she’d been afraid she couldn’t recharge her air cylinders. She didn’t know if she had enough gear to build a replacement.
“I should have three mecha on my chest plate.”
—Negative.
“What happened to them?”
—One was lost in the attack. Most of your tool kits and sample cases are also damaged.
“But I have two mecha left.”
—Affirmative. 1084 is missing its infrared camera and laser. 1085 registers intact.
“Detach and activate. Slavecast this suit to 85. Your function will be to translate its signals into voice mode and relay my commands.”
—Von, listen, I am more efficient than the mecha.