The Frozen Sky

by Jeff Carlson

  Unfortunately, Vonnie had left a path of destruction through whatever civilization they’d managed to hold onto.

  It wasn’t what they deserved. Worse, their kill-or-be-killed aggression would work against them now that the possibility of salvation existed at last.

  What have I done? she thought.

  The mecha gathering above her were American, yet relayed ESA signals. Lam pulled their search grid and told Vonnie how far she’d strayed. She was 9.1 klicks east of the trench where her team had gone in. She was also two-thirds of a kilometer beneath the surface, so the mecha rigged a molecular wire and dropped other lines around her including life support, suit support, and data/comm.

  Another line lowered an emergency seal for her helmet before her visor blew out. Vonnie secured the bag around her neck, then inflated it with the attached air cylinder.

  She let go of the ice. Her suit revolved dizzyingly as the machines lifted her, but the flood of voices was more intense. The men and women up top had accessed her records as soon as the data line connected. At a glance, her mem files must have looked like a running battle. She had gore and black rock mashed into every joint in her suit, her battered helmet, and her blood-stained gloves.

  Someone murmured, “Vonderach, my God.”

  But she was still thinking of the sunfishes’ potential and of the debts she owed, both to Bauman and Lam and to the native tribes she’d devastated. The sunfish were very human after all, with traits both good and evil. If they could be freed from starvation… If they were given a chance…

  “We have to help them,” she said.

  Surface of Europa Map

  TOPSIDER

  21.

  There was only one survivor. They pulled her from the ice after four days alone in the dark, coated with blood and dust, her suit damaged at its knee, chest, gloves, and helmet.

  The rock dust and frozen water vapor encrusted on her armor were extraterrestrial. So was the organic tissue. It belonged to Europa’s sunfish.

  The blood inside the crippled suit was her own.

  #

  “You can’t delete him!” Vonnie said from her hospital cot, trying to sit up.

  Administrator Koebsch shook his head. “We’ll leave most of the files intact.”

  “I owe him my life. If you erase his personality—”

  “Your AI is badly corrupted.”

  “That’s not his fault. It’s mine.” Vonnie’s hand throbbed as she held a comm visor near her face, allowing them to see each other. Her cot was in a separate structure from Koebsch’s command module. Fresh muscle grafts on her temple and cheek kept her from using the visor properly, but her hand wasn’t much better off. Five bones in her fingers and wrist had been set with glue, and that was her good hand, her right hand. Her left was a swollen club. Otherwise it wouldn’t have been such a struggle to sit up.

  As Vonnie rose, her blanket fell away, leaving her naked above the waist. By trade, astronauts could not be body conscious in their perpetually crowded living quarters.

  Maybe she let the visor dip to her breasts and bandaged shoulder on purpose. Koebsch was a politician. If he was agitated by her body, it might rattle him enough to listen. Despite her injuries, Vonnie was lean and well-toned with clear skin and a long, slender belly.

  “Let me help,” she said. “We can copy the files you want, then isolate them.”

  “That’s what we’re doing.”

  “But don’t delete the rest! Lam was a Chinese national. Human-based AIs aren’t illegal in his country. I know we can’t send him back to them. He knows too much. But we can give him sanctuary with us. It would be wrong to strip him down to pure data.”

  “I disagree.”

  Koebsch was forty-eight, blond, and Earthborn like Vonnie. Unlike Vonnie, he’d arrived on one of the high-gee launches five days ago. He had yet to adapt to low gravity. His face was always flushed. Vonnie wasn’t sure if she’d embarrassed Koebsch, so she tried again.

  “You’re afraid of him,” she said. “I get it. You don’t need any legal problems on top of running our operation, but Lam is a proven resource. He’s the only one who’s communicated with the sunfish.”

  “The sunfish are a separate matter,” Koebsch said.

  Like everyone in the ESA crew, he’d adopted her name for the Europans. Her experience had been too sensational. The media loved everything about her odyssey, and, according to the news feeds she’d seen in the past day, most people were using the term sunfish across the solar system.

  Her fame gave her leverage. “The sunfish are the only thing that matters,” she said, but Koebsch wouldn’t let her change the subject.

  “Your AI attacked our diagnostics,” he said.

  “That was a misunderstanding. Let me talk to him.”

  “No. You’re… emotional.” Koebsch obviously intended to say more, but checked himself. “Get some rest,” he said. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  Vonnie shouted. “Wait!”

  He cut the connection.

  What should she do? The medics had stuck two intravenous lines in her arm, delivering simple fluids and complex mood stabilizers. She had trouble walking in any case. But she couldn’t let her friend die again even if that was what the real Lam might have wanted.

  The ghost was too human. It had found its equilibrium while it was limited to her suit, using her armor like its own body, but after they were rescued, it had destabilized when it was subjected to an interface with their central AIs.

  That didn’t mean he shouldn’t be saved. Vonnie knew he could be a formidable ally, and yet she had another incentive to save him besides the relationship they’d developed. More important than her personal loyalty was Second Contact with the sunfish. Koebsch needed every tool available before they went back into the ice.

  Vonnie tugged her IVs loose and stood up, although there was no way to sneak out of the lander where the medical droids had operated on her skull and hands. Her med alerts chimed as soon as she disconnected the IVs.

  A young woman in a blue insulated one-piece stepped into the compartment. Her freckled nose and big hazel eyes gave her harmless look, which she dispelled by barking like a cop. “What are you doing? Get back in bed.”

  “I can’t,” Vonnie said. “There are complications with my suit. I need to assist with data recovery.”

  “You need time to heal.”

  “I’m okay.” Vonnie squeezed by the young woman, then nodded to the two men in the next compartment as she hurried past.

  The lander’s floor was only fifteen meters square, but it held eight rooms, many of them as small as closets. Striding through the lander felt like running through a maze of steel. It reminded her of the ice. Vonnie realized she was grinding her teeth, driven by a rising sense of hysteria. She moved faster and faster until she reached the ready room, the largest compartment in the lander.

  The young woman caught up and said, “Stop. We talked about your trauma levels. Your injuries aren’t just physical.”

  “Koebsch asked me to come over,” Vonnie lied. Then she tried a different argument. “It’s good therapy, isn’t it? I should stay busy.”

  “I guess.” The young woman gestured to the men behind her.

  Vonnie heard one of them on the radio. “This is Metzler in Zero Four,” he said.

  She ignored him and opened the first locker on the wall. Inside was a pressure suit. It weighed twelve times less than the armor she’d worn, but the pressure suit felt heavier. It was inert, whereas her armor had walked with her, magnifying every nerve impulse.

  “Why don’t we sit down for a minute,” the young woman said.

  Vonnie donned the pressure suit with her ruined hands. Nearby, three sets of armor hung on chain winches like empty metal giants. Vonnie might have climbed into one if the biometrics weren’t calibrated for each individual. She could use someone else’s armor, but clumsily, and the likelihood of hurting herself was too real.

  “Stop,” the young woman said
. “If you won’t—”

  “Help me.” Vonnie met her eyes. “Please. You can drive me to the command module.”

  The young woman nodded uncertainly. Behind her, the man leaned into the room and frowned. Vonnie knew they were all a little in awe of her, and, thinking like a sunfish, she stood erect and shrugged into the sleeves of the pressure suit, projecting confidence with her shoulders and chin.

  “Koebsch is making a mistake,” she said.

  22.

  Vonnie’s thoughts quieted as the air lock cycled, depressurizing to match the near-vacuum outside. Beside her stood the young woman, who’d joined her.

  They didn’t speak. The young woman flitted through a display inside her visor, while Vonnie’s thoughts consumed her.

  Was it claustrophobia that had driven her to suit up and leave Lander 04? She expected to have nightmares the rest of her life, but she was loaded with no-shock and antidepressants. She wanted to believe she was in control of herself. Yes, it was out of character for her to have flashed her body at Koebsch. She wasn’t a show-off. But she also felt like she was beyond foolish little things like shyness or self-doubt.

  She’d changed. Some parts of her had died in the ice, and the woman who remained was impatient to set things right.

  Her entire race was watching. Every decision would be scrutinized across the solar system and in history files for centuries to come, which was why Koebsch had his stiff caution and why Vonnie thrummed with compassion and fear.

  If humankind failed again, if she failed again, they might doom every living thing inside Europa, and she’d seen much to admire as well as savagery.

  Unfortunately, the violence was difficult to overlook.

  Sunfish had become a popular term across the system, but not everyone consented to humanizing them with a name. Some of the exceptions were military spokespersons, who referred to the sunfish as the aliens, and public officials of the ice mining ventures and utility companies, who put their own spin on the situation by saying organisms or things.

  Many politicians and commentators had also played it safe, either hedging their bets or supporting the interests of various corporations. Vonnie knew the mining ventures, their distributors, and many industries were hollering because Earth’s governments had demanded that the mining ventures reevaluate their sites, then screen and analyze the ice before processing it, all of which created delays and extra costs.

  Public debate had grown into a firestorm in part because the ESA had kept Vonnie under wraps, asking Koebsch to speak to the media on her behalf and releasing no more than a few, brief, sanitized clips of her journey beneath the ice.

  None of those sims included live recordings of the sunfish, only still shots and diagrams. Nevertheless, their beaks and arms had a lot of people scared, especially in combination with the progress reports listing her surgeries.

  I need to make sure everyone sees I’m okay, she thought. They have to know that I don’t blame the sunfish — that the fighting was my fault.

  The air lock finished its cycle with a clunk. The exterior door opened.

  As they walked onto the lander’s deck, Vonnie hardly glanced at the fat, banded sphere of Jupiter or the radiant dots where spacecraft hung overhead. Instead, she looked for their command module. She couldn’t see it. The icy plain was busy with floodlights, mecha, listening posts, and other hab modules.

  From where she was standing, there didn’t seem to be any pattern. Then she activated her heads-up display. Most of the hab modules and a second lander were spread in a broad ring over an area of a square kilometer. Vonnie felt a wan smile. In another age, the pioneers of the American West had circled their wagons in the same way. Long before then, in Germany, her ancestors had built their castle walls to guard all sides as well. Old habits.

  Command Module 01 was on the far side of camp. “Can we take the jeep?” Vonnie asked, turning to the young woman.

  “Yes.” Ash Sierzenga was one of their new pilots as well as a medic and the head of the cybernetics team. All of them had multi-disciplinary training and degrees. It cost too much to boost three people if one would do.

  Every meal, each piece of equipment, had been factored into the mission. They were a long way from replacements, a reality that played in Vonnie’s favor. She knew they’d discussed sending her home, but no one wanted to use a ship for her, not even the slowboat in which she’d arrived.

  The jeep was a low-slung vehicle with an open cockpit and wide-tracked wheels. Ash made a point of entering first. Was she concerned Vonnie might steal it? Where was there to go? Vonnie didn’t like it that Ash distrusted her, but she was an outsider among the new team. Even if they understood her motives, they would tend to support each other instead of her.

  I need to be careful, she thought. I can’t raise my voice or wave my arms. They don’t like it that I don’t hate the sunfish.

  They think I’m crazy.

  The jeep rolled into the hectic lights and mecha, communicating with the other self-guided machines.

  For the most part, the listening posts and beacons had settled down, becoming stationary obstacles. They resembled short trees with their dishes and antennae serving as leaves, although a few members of the metal forest tottered or crept in restless patterns.

  The larger mecha were more active. Twice the jeep drove beneath hulking rovers. The first was poised like a giant, feeding tick, its head lower than its legs as it drilled into the ice. The second was on patrol. Bristling with sensors and digging arms, it bore down on them, but neither Vonnie nor Ash flinched. They were accustomed to the machines’ flawless dance. The rover passed with meters to spare, and their jeep continued through the long shadows and pools of light.

  There were open crevices in the ice. The main fracture yawned through the center of camp, over three hundred meters long yet rarely wider than a person could jump.

  The new ESA camp was twelve kilometers southeast of the trench where Vonnie, Bauman, and Lam entered the frozen sky. When that system of vents collapsed, it had destroyed the carvings as well as any chance of venturing back into that region of ice. The collapse had left an uneven, unstable pit in Europa’s surface 1.3 kilometers across.

  Someday the glacial tides or an upswell in the ocean would fill the hole. For now, it was a scar and a grave.

  Lam and Bauman’s bodies had been abandoned after religious services and commendations were delivered near the pit by ESA, NASA, and PSSC teams while Vonnie watched from her bed in the new camp.

  Their rovers and satellite analysis had located another system of catacombs, which could be accessed through the crevices where they’d assembled their hab modules and flightcraft. Too often, there were only a few meters of ice separating the caverns below from the fissures leading up to the surface. That was why the mecha were on high alert.

  Studying their datastreams, Vonnie made sense of their grid at last. Koebsch wasn’t an idiot. On Europa, any threat would approach from beneath them, not from outside their ring, so he’d spread his assets for mapping purposes, measuring the ice with radar, sonar, neutrino pulse, and seismographs…

  …and weapons systems. The jeep was tied to their defense net, its dashboard winking with steady updates from the Clermont, the ESA ship in orbit above Europa.

  But we don’t need to be on alert, Vonnie thought. “The sunfish won’t come,” she said.

  “What?” Ash turned in her seat to bring her helmet around, revealing a face full of suspicion.

  Vonnie kept her voice tranquil. “They won’t come,” she said. “The ones who chased me know we’re outside the ice. They might be listening, but they’ll never risk a blow-out by coming to the surface.”

  “They seemed like they, uh, like they did anything to kill you even if it meant suicide for them,” Ash said. “Koebsch is worried they’ll dig away the ice beneath us.”

  “I don’t think so. They must be even more afraid of vacuum than we are.”

  “You can’t know how they think.”


  “We’ve been in space for nearly two hundred years. We were watching the stars before our species learned how to talk. Their sense of distance is limited. All they’ve ever known are their ears and their sonar.”

  “Right. You’re right.”

  Ash was humoring her, but Vonnie saw an opportunity to sway the younger woman. “They think the universe ends here,” she said. “They have no concept of the stars or other planets or anything past the surface. Only death. Try to think how many times their populations must have asphyxiated when eruptions or quakes ripped open their homes.”

  “You found air locks in the ice.”

  “They’re smart.” Vonnie couldn’t stop herself from saying it. “They’re marvelous.”

  “They’re monsters.”

  “They’ve never had a chance to be anything else.”

  Ash didn’t answer. They’d reached the command module, and Ash busied herself with the jeep’s console. She seemed to be receiving a radio call that only she could hear.

  “We need to get back into the ice and figure out how to talk to them,” Vonnie said.

  ESA Camp Map

  23.

  Koebsch wasn’t happy to see either woman. He met them at the air lock as they stowed their pressure suits, obstructing their way into the module. To his left was the mission’s primary data/comm room. To his right was one of the multipurpose labs where they’d brought Vonnie’s armor.

  “I could have sent your jeep back to medical, but let’s get this over with,” Koebsch said.

  Vonnie tried to cover for Ash. “She told me not to come,” she said.