Angel of Europa

by Allen Steele

  A lot of opinions, but very little evidence. The answers were at Consolmagno Base. Two days after Danzig’s revival, Europa and Callisto once again came into conjunction on the same side of Jupiter, thus providing a good launch window for a shuttle flight. Captain Diaz arranged for Hookset to transport Danzig to Europa, but the arbiter was surprised when Evangeline asked Diaz to let her accompany him. Perhaps she just wanted to get off the ship, but Danzig was inclined to believe her when Evangeline said that she wanted nothing more than to clear her name, and that the only she could accomplish this was by returning to Europa.

  All this passed through Danzig’s mind as he made his way down to the lower deck. The shuttle’s three hardsuits were held upright by racks near the airlock. Resembling eggs that had sprouted arms and legs, with the flat vanes of electromagnetic deflectors mounted above their life-support packs, the suits were designed to protect those who wore them from Jupiter’s intense radiation. Cumbersome even in low gravity, they were easier put on while in zero-g.

  Pulling himself over to the nearest suit, Kevin opened its top hatch. He grasped the rack’s horizontal bar and pushed himself feet-first into the suit, wiggling his legs and torso until he was three-quarters of the way into the carapace before shoving his arms through the sleeves.

  “Activate suit,” he said.

  “Suit active,” a male voice said from the helmet’s built-in speakers. “Your name, please?”

  “Otto Danzig.”

  “Hello, Otto. You may call me Charlie.”

  Danzig rolled his eyes; he could have strangled the guy who had the wise idea of giving personality emulation routines to spacesuit computers. Some people apparently liked it when the suits talked to them, but Danzig found it annoying. “Close up and activate all life-support, control, and communications systems,” he said, not bothering to be polite.

  “Certainly, Otto.” The top hatch made a small thump as it automatically closed and locked, then there was a prolonged hiss as the suit began to pressurize. A wraparound heads-up display glowed to life; the suit had no faceplate, so he’d have rely upon the wide-angle camera mounted upon its chest. “Twelve minutes and thirty-six seconds until landing. Would you like to listen to some music?”

  “No. Put me through to Evangeline Chatelain. She’s in another suit.”

  “Of course.” A double-beep. “You’re connected with Ms. Chatelain.”

  “Evangeline? Are you there?” When Danzig turned his head, the external camera followed his movement. The suit next to his own was already closed; he couldn’t see her.

  “Yes I’m here.” An irate sigh. “Never liked wearing these things.”

  Danzig remembered that Evangeline had been one of the crew members who, during the mission training program, had the most trouble learning had to handle a hardsuit. “I’m sure your suit will help you,” he said, then smiled. “Has it told you its name yet?”

  “Betty. Kevin has the one with the A-name. Not sure, but I think I had Charlie last time. She was okay.”

  “I’ve got Charlie this time, only she’s now a he. Guess they must change sex depending on who’s wearing them.”

  “Evangeline wore me last time,” Charlie said. “I’m gender-neutral until I learn …”

  “Shut up, Charlie,” Danzig said, and the suit went quiet. “Y’know, I think these things are out to be as obnoxious as …”

  An abrupt lurch rocked the suit within its rack; the pit of his stomach seemed to drop a few feet. Danzig clenched his teeth as the motion settled into a steady, consistent vibration. “We’re entering the atmosphere,” Evangeline said. “You feel it when the heat shield hits the ionosphere.”

  “Yeah,” Danzig muttered, “I know.” Another bump, a little less violent this time; he imagined a red-hot plasma sheath forming around the shuttle’s cone-shaped hull. This was the part that he hadn’t enjoyed during training: atmospheric entry and landing. Fighting nausea, he fixed his gaze upon a ceiling light and prayed that he’d make it to the ground without throwing up. Vomiting would be just about the worst thing he could do just then.

  Breakfast stayed in his stomach, though, and after the longest twelve minutes of his life he heard the roar of the main engine, shortly followed by the sudden jolt of the shuttle’s four legs touching down. By then, he’d felt the pull of gravity for the first time since they’d departed from the Explorer. Europa’s surface gravity was only slightly less than the Moon’s, but that was still more than what he experienced in the ship’s habitat arms. Danzig raised an arm and discovered that the suit was heavier than he expected. Wearing this thing was going to be a bitch; he was still recovering from nanosurgery and hibernation.

  Kevin climbed down from the upper deck, shutting the ceiling hatch above him. He wasted no time climbing into his own suit; apparently he’d done this enough times already that he didn’t need the benefit of zero-g. His suit’s name was Albert; Kevin asked it to open a comlink to the shuttle, and then he instructed the shuttle to void the lower deck and open both airlock hatches.

  “It’ll be easier if we all leave at once,” he explained. “The airlock’s only big enough for one of us to cycle through at a time. If I decompress the lower deck, then we don’t have to fool with all that.”

  “And you’re not worried about losing that much air?” Danzig asked.

  Kevin laughed. “Look around. This place is covered with ice. Every forty-two hours or so the Sun comes up and boils off just enough to replenish the atmosphere before it refreezes again. When that happens, the shuttle’s atmospheric converters collect the hydrogen and oxygen to fill the tanks. So the nuclear engine refuels itself and we have enough oxygen for the ride home.”

  “Sort of a free gift for coming here, huh?”

  “Yeah, that’s Europa for you.” The pilot snorted. “Like having Christmas in Hell … all sorts of neat presents, but you don’t notice ’cause you’re freezing to death.”

  Danzig thought about what he said, then asked Charlie to raise the suit temperature to 210 C.

  Once the airlock was open, they switched on the radiation deflectors, then tramped down the gangway. Danzig barely noticed the faint crunch of his boots against the ice as the external camera brought the view into his carapace as a panoramic display. It was morning on the Conamara Chaos, the sun a distant spotlight rising to the east. A kilometer away, a long ridge rose above the terrain like a fortress wall. Silver-blue and streaked red with sulfur deposits, it ran straight across the plains until it disappeared over the short horizon. Jupiter loomed above the ridge, insanely immense, filling the black sky with its majesty.

  Kevin gave him a minute to take in the scenery. “Okay, that’s enough,” he said. “You can gawk later. Right now, let’s get inside.”

  He turned his back to the ridge and began walking toward a pair of low humps about a hundred meters away. “It’s impressive the first time you come here,” Evangeline said, as if to apologize for the pilot’s impatience, “but you get used to it after awhile. And we need to keep moving. The deflectors are good for only about a half-hour at a time.”

  “I don’t think I could ever get used to this,” he murmured, but the warning was taken. The suit’s dosimeter was still safely in the black, but it wouldn’t be long before its bar started creeping toward the red zone. He turned to follow her and Kevin across the ice.

  Consolmagno Base consisted of a pair of igloos, both about eighteen meters in diameter and five in height, connected to each other by a short tunnel. Their construction was simple: two inflatable domes covered by two meters of chipped ice as a radiation shield. A couple of radiation-armored rovers, each resembling fat sausages mounted on caterpillar treads, were parked outside the main airlock; the discarded cargo landers lay fifty meters away, never to fly again now that they performed their task of ferrying all this hardware down from orbit. As they came closer, Danzig saw the flag post planted by the first landing team; the flags of the ISC countries participating in the International Jupiter Expedition
— England, Germany, France, Brazil, and the U.S. — were held erect by the wire braces that allowed them to flutter in a nonexistent breeze.

  The airlock wasn’t big enough for all three of them to cycle through at once; Kevin and Evangeline let him go first. Danzig was surprised to find that he wasn’t reluctant about stepping into an airlock; his memory of the accident may have been afflicted, but at least he hadn’t come away with any lasting phobias. Three minutes later, the inner hatch opened and he stepped into a small room with a low ceiling and orange plastic panels for walls.

  “Otto. How good of you to visit.” Walter Mahr was waiting for him, his voice carried by the prong he was wearing. He came forward to guide Danzig toward a suit rack. “I was afraid I wouldn’t see you again until we returned to Earth.”

  “Thanks, Walter.” Danzig said. “I just wish it could be under more pleasant circumstances.”

  The smile faded from Walter’s broad Bavarian face. “So do I,” he said as he bent down to clamp the rack’s foot restraints. “This could have gone better.”

  Danzig had always liked the Explorer’s executive officer; as the IJE’s second in command, his perpetual joviality was a welcome contrast to Diaz’s no-nonsense stoicism. It was unfortunate timing that two men had perished while he was on Europa; Danzig remembered how, the first night out from Earth, Walter had waxed euphoric about the prospect of setting foot on what he considered to be Jupiter’s most interesting moon. Danzig had little doubt that his sense of wonder had been tampered by the tragedy. Walter and Klaus had been close; he was probably still hurting from the loss of his friend.

  But that wasn’t the most important issue just then. Evangeline had the next turn to cycle through; she was already in the airlock, and it was possible she might tap into the comlink and hear anything he had to say to Walter.

  “Wen wire in Minute erhalten, mochte ich Sie treffen,” Danzig said as he opened the suit’s top hatch. “Jose und Yvonne, auch … in privatatum.”

  “Ich dacht, dass Sie wurden.” Walter lowered the rack’s horizontal bar so that Danzig could reach up to grasp it with his bare hands. “Ich habe die um um anderen gebetum, um uns Konferenzsall in einer ungefähr Stunde zu treffen.”

  “Danke. Ich Schatze es.”

  A short buzz signaled that the airlock was about to open. By then, Walter had agreed to bring Jose Amado and Yvonne Benoit, the two other expedition members currently at Consolmagno Base, to the conference room in about an hour for a private meeting. As Danzig pried himself from the hardsuit, Walter went over to help Evangeline. He was as cordial as usual, but Danzig noticed that his hospitality was guarded.

  And even after she opened her suit and he was able to see her again, it was impossible to tell what Evangeline was thinking.

  VI

  “I HAVE NO DOUBTS whatsoever. She killed Klaus, and John, too.”

  Yvonne Benoit glared across the conference table at Danzig. Although not as attractive as Evangeline, the expedition’s only other French member possessed a dark beauty that, if anything, seemed to be enhanced by her anger. Danzig gazed at the paper coffee cup in her left hand and wondered if she was about to crush it within a clenched fist.

  “I see.” Danzig kept his expression neutral. “And do you have any particular reason to believe this?”

  “Tell him what you told us.” Jose Amado sat next to her, arms folded across his wool Peruvian serape. Everyone here wore two or three layers of clothes; the igloo heaters couldn’t quite keep the cold at bay, and Danzig had to borrow an extra sweater from Walter. “He may not know this yet.”

  Yvonne glanced at Walter; the executive officer nodded, and the engineer reached forward to tap her fingers against a table touchscreen. A wire-frame image of DSV-1 appeared on the table’s glossy black surface, then slowly floated upward to become a holo. As before, the bathyscaphe reminded Danzig of a horseshoe crab: a broad, streamlined hull, with impellers mounted on both port and starboard sides, the observation blister bulging like a swollen belly, tapering back to a long, thin rudder at its tail. Its tether cable was attached to the upper hull just forward of the recessed dorsal hatch.

  “My company has been manufacturing submersibles for over a hundred and fifty years,” Yvonne said as the holo rotated on its vertical axis. “The ones we made for the expedition were adapted from a design that has been successfully used for deep-ocean exploration back on Earth. It can withstand pressures up to 1,500 psi.”

  “Very commendable,” Danzig said. “And your point is …?”

  “Even if some sort of —” Yvonne sighed, shook her head in disbelief “—sea monster were to attack this craft, there is no way … no way! … it could cause enough damage to sink it.” She pointed to the small window in the center of the lower bulge. “Even the observation blister porthole is one-third of meter thick. You could fire a gun straight at it and it wouldn’t shatter. So when Evangeline claims she heard John say that water was coming in, she’s lying.”

  Danzig nodded. Yvonne’s role was to maintain both the robots and the manned submersibles. No one in the expedition knew the equipment better than she did … arguably, not even Evangeline, although she’d had five years experience as a DSV pilot before being recruited by the ISC. On the other hand, Yvonne would be expected to defend her company’s reputation. Given a choice between admitting design failure or putting the blame on the pilot, she’d probably choose the latter.

  “And that’s another thing,” Jose said, raising a hand as if to make a point during a science lecture. “Putting aside for a moment the fact that there’s only one picture of the creature …”

  “And not a very good one at that,” Yvonne added.

  “Yes, right … anyway, I’m a geologist and not a biologist, but even I know that it’s unlikely that something that big would be down there, given what we’ve learned about Europa’s other animal species.”

  “How diet limits size, you mean?” Danzig asked, and Joe nodded. “Yes, Rita said much the same thing when I spoke with her.”

  “With all due respect to Dr. Jimenez,” Walter said, “I disagree.” Jose and Yvonne looked sharply at him as he went on. “She overlooks the fact that a large animal can subsist on a diet of smaller creatures if they’re consumed in sufficient quantity. For example, arctic wolves survive largely upon mice when caribou aren’t available. Before they became extinct, humpback whales consumed krill which they strained through their baleen from seawater.”

  “This isn’t Earth,” Jose said.

  “No, it isn’t.” Walter shrugged. “And that’s a good point. We’ve been on Europa for only a few weeks. Do we really think we’ve learned everything there is to know about this place?”

  “You sound like you’re defending her.” Yvonne’s eyes narrowed.

  Walter frowned, but before he could respond, Danzig politely coughed in his hand. “I think we’d all benefit from looking at this a bit more even-handedly. We’re still investigating the matter. That’s why I’m here … and why she’s here, too.”

  “Yeah … right.” Jose raised a skeptical eyebrow. “I’m sure she’s eager for you to unearth all the facts.”

  “In fact, she is. She requested to join me when I came here … and she’s also asked to do something else.” Danzig looked at Yvonne again. “We’d like to take down DSV-2.”

  Her eyes widened in disbelief. “You what?”

  “We want to go for another dive. Evangeline will be the pilot, and I’ll be the passenger.” He smiled slightly. “As I said … this is her idea, not mine.”

  “She … what …?” Yvonne shook her head as if to clear it. “Why does she want to …?”

  “She continues to insist that there’s a large creature down there, and she wants another crack at confirming its existence.” Danzig paused. “Given the accusations made against her, I think she deserves that chance. So I’m going with her as an impartial witness.”

  Yvonne stared at him; for the first time since they’d sat down at the conference ta
ble, she was utterly speechless. Jose nodded in agreement, albeit reluctantly. “I think she’s right,” Walter said at last. “If there’s any way she can prove her story, she should be given the opportunity to do so.” He turned to Yvonne. “Can you prep DSV-2 for another dive in—” he glanced at his watch “—four hours? Five?”

  Danzig was startled by the immediacy of Walter’s request. Then he remembered that Europa’s day was almost 43 hours long. It was still morning in the Conamara Chaos; sunset wouldn’t come for many hours yet. There was no point in waiting longer than they needed to send down DSV-2. Yvonne reluctantly nodded, and Walter pushed back his chair.

  “Very well, then,” he said as he stood up. “Jose, would you be so kind as to help Otto prepare for his mission? I’ll inform Evangeline that her request is being granted.”

  Without waiting for an answer, Walter left the conference room. Yvonne waited until he was gone, then she looked at Danzig. “Are you sure you want to do this?” she asked, her voice very quiet. “You may not be safe.”

  “Yes, I am. After all, you yourself said that the DSV is reliable.”

  “The sub is, yes. It’s the pilot I don’t trust.”

  VII

  DOWN, DOWN, DOWN …

  The cable creaked from the frost that sheathed it, sang with the chill wind funneling through the narrow chasm. The bathyscaphe swayed back and forth as it descended from the surface far above. Silver-blue walls of ice as old as recorded time, tinted with thin red streaks of sulfur, towered to either side of the submersible, becoming darker with each passing meter. Down, down, down …