Life After Wartime

by Paul McAuley

  Her suit’s microphone picked up the sound of footsteps, boots rattling on loose plastic tiles whose adhesive had given way in the intense cold. Going past, dying away.

  Indira stayed still, counting out a minute and then another minute, before she dared to crack open the door. Dark and silence beyond. She saw cleated bootprints in a drift of ice crystals, leading away down the curving corridor.

  The airlock had definitely been alarmed. Someone had come to check. To look for her.

  A new section of corridor had been roughly welded to an opening cut in the dome’s skin. Aluminium stairs led down. As Indira descended, her suit reported that it was growing warmer, a strange inversion given that warm air should rise. But then she reached the highceilinged corridor at the foot of the stairwell and discovered the heat engines which crouched on either side, humming labouriously, their coils shining with frost. Heat was being pumped out of the dome and transferred . . . where?

  To somewhere behind a doglatched door with the universal trefoil symbol for biological hazard in black on fluorescent orange.

  Indira hesitated only for a moment. She was still fully suited. If she was exposed to any biological agent she could sterilise her suit by returning to the nearvacuum and 150 degrees Celsius of Europa’s surface.

  The heavy metal door was latched but not locked. Its seals gave only momentary resistance. It swung open on its massive hinges and she stepped over the sill.

  It was an airlock. She waited while it cycled. When the door on the far side opened, her suit’s temperature sensor registered a sharp rise in temperature as air gusted around her, and lamps came on in the big room beyond. They hung from chains under the high ceiling. They registered only in infrared. Indira swept the beam of her helmet’s light from side to side. Beneath the lamps were rows of big square tanks linked by grey plastic pipework, crusted with yellowish salts and holding various levels of still, black water. Seawater, she realised, the salty, sulphurous water of Europa’s ocean. The temperature was just above zero. The air was ninety per cent nitrogen and ten per cent carbon dioxide, with traces of hydrogen sulphide, sulphur dioxide and hydrogen.

  All of the tanks were empty. The recirculating pumps were switched off; a row of incubators held only racks of flaccid saltcrusted plastic sleeves; a tiled work bench was empty, marked with chemical stains and the places where machines had once rested. A brown glass vial had fallen behind a strut. Indira turned it over in her clumsy gloves, smudged frost from its label. It had held the mixture of restriction nucleases and DNA ligases commonly used to insert genes into bacterial plasmids for cloning, either for identification of gene product or use in bioengineering.

  Indira secured a sample of water from one of the tanks and went out through the airlock on the other side of the room. It cycled her into a long, rising corridor. At its far end, she stepped through an open hatch and found herself in the curved corridor of the dome which capped the monastery. Down the curve of the corridor, a red light flashed insistently. It was the emergency beacon of her luggage pod.

  * * * * *

  ‘Several people came after you left,’ the luggage pod said. ‘They tried to open me. I responded with a class two defence as specified in subsection two paragraph three of the —’

  Indira set the helmet of her pressure suit on the floor and said, ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I activated my alarm and gave two warnings. After these were ignored, I passed a high amperage, low voltage current through my outer frame. One of the men who were trying to force me open was rendered unconscious.’

  ‘Did they manage to open you?’

  ‘Of course not. After I defended myself, they went away.’ The pod added, ‘Two of them had to carry the man who had been incapacitated.’

  ‘By incapacitated, do you mean dead?’

  ‘The shock was sufficient to cause unconsciousness but not death in a healthy adult human, as specified in subsection —’

  ’You’ve probably landed me in a whole world of shit.’

  The pod said that it did not understand this remark.

  ‘Trouble.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ the pod said. ‘I had believed that I had adequately dealt with the problem.’

  ‘Open up. I need to stow my pressure suit.’

  * * * * *

  By the time Brother Halga appeared, announcing that Rothar would speak with her again, Indira had desuited and run the sample of water through her chemical sniffer. Brother Halga did not mention the attempt to open the luggage pod; neither did Indira.

  As before, Rothar was standing on front of the roaring fire. If the room was a symbol of his power, then the fire was its focus. Her breakfast waited for her on the little table. Gruel, watery coffee, and a sticky, pale yellow liquid that was, Rothar said, mango juice.

  Her pressure suit could supply better food, but she drank the coffee to be polite. It was weaker than any of the excuses she had made up, as she had walked down the helical corridor with Brother Halga, to try and explain why she had trespassed in the old mining station.

  ‘You will work for me after all,’ Rothar said. ‘There have been . . . developments.’

  ‘I’m not sure that I want to. And surely a man would be better than a mere woman.’

  ‘Ah. You have been researching us.’

  ‘A little. But I only need to know a little to realise how much I dislike the entire idea of you and your crew.’

  Rothar smiled. He had small, widely spaced teeth, like those of a young boy. He said, ‘We do not despise women. We pity them as we pity all of humanity. We are a contemplative order that prays for redemption from the mark of Satan that is imprinted in each of our cells.’

  ‘That’s very nice of you.’

  His smile went away. ‘You will work for us, Ms. Dzurisin. Or forfeit the penalty clauses of the contract you have already signed.’

  ‘From which you released me.’

  ‘Only verbally. Do you have a recording? I thought not. Then you have no proof that it ever took place.’

  ‘For a holy man you don’t set much store by truth or trust.’

  ‘None of us are holy, child. And besides, a small lie can often serve a higher truth.’

  Which could justify anything, Indira thought. No wonder organised religion had caused so much trouble on Earth.

  Rothar said, ‘It should not take long. You are an experienced hunter, and I will provide experienced divers to help you. We have men here from all trades. We aim to be selfsufficient. By the way, I hope our laboratory impressed you.’

  Indira looked at Rothar but said nothing. If he wanted to accuse her, she could accuse him of trying to tamper with her equipment. She had a pretty good idea of what the monks had been after. And there was the matter of what she had found in the water sample from the laboratory.

  ‘We no longer use that facility,’ Rothar said, ‘but it has provided the basis of our farm’s profitability. Which is why —’ his smile came back— ‘we will have to search you thoroughly after you have finished. Whether you catch the monster or not.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll catch it.’

  Meaning, I’ll show you what a woman can do, and shame you for your presumption that I’m inferior to you because of my sex.

  She didn’t put the two things together. Her discovery, Rothar’s aboutface. After all, the story about the weed was entirely plausible; he couldn’t know that she had evidence that he must be lying. She thought that it was a matter of pride. His. Hers.

  * * * * *

  The two men who had been assigned to accompany her, Brother Fergus and Brother Finn, were competent and professional, but did not bother to hide their distaste for having to work with a woman. Fergus was dark and wiry and nervous; Finn was blond and burly and quiet, and one of the tallest men Indira had seen, overtopping her by half a metre. His head, covered with the hood of his dry suit so that only his face showed, was as big and bumpy as a boulder. His beard was white, and as fine as cornsilk. Both monks made it quite clear that t
hey thought that this duty was an insult to their dignity. Neither offered any information about the dragon. No sonar signals, no video grabs, no chemical traces.

  ‘We know it is there,’ Finn said.

  ‘Still, I would like to see what evidence you have,’ Indira said. ‘It would confirm that it is a dragon. The neurotoxins I use are class specific.’

  ‘It is a terrible monster,’ Fergus said. ‘That’s all you need to know. We can no longer work the farm because of it.’

  They were suited up and sitting in the pressure chamber. Finn and Fergus wore black dry suits and black stabilisation jackets; Indira’s suit was white, her stab jacket yellow. Their scooters made the chamber crowded; they had to rest their feet on them. They were ready to go, but Indira insisted on talking first. She wanted to establish a plan of action and emphasise that they must stick to it. She did not trust them. She had filled her airtanks herself, and done all her suit checks alone.

  Finn said, ‘We know where its lair is.’

  Indira said, ‘It has a lair?’

  The big macroforms were creatures of the open water, spending long periods drifting in upwelling plumes, fixing carbon and storing energy for their attacks. And occasionally reproducing. They had been designed to operate for years – overdesigned, as it turned out. The Quiet War had been a rout.

  ‘It lives in the ice,’ Finn said.

  ‘Near the farm,’ Fergus said.

  They were a double act. The idea appeared to be to give away as little information as possible. It didn’t matter. Indira had worked with less – although of course she had never worked against a dragon.

  ‘We can do most of the work,’ Fergus said.

  ‘In fact,’ Finn said, ‘if you give us the neurotoxins we can do it all.’

  The neurotoxins, expensive and hard to obtain, had been tailored to specific classes of biowar macroforms by the wizards who had engineered them. They were bought on licence from the Three Powers Occupying Force, and only hunters were licensed to use them. Grey chemists had tried to isolate the specifics, but they were mixed with several thousand closely related chemicals. Indira had guessed that the phials of neurotoxin were what the monks had been trying to take from her luggage pod when it had zapped one of them. Having failed to get the neurotoxins, they were stuck with her.

  ‘I have already caught and killed one like it,’ Finn said, deadpan.

  ‘She doesn’t need to hear that,’ Fergus said, with sudden violence. ‘You were told —’

  Finn punched him on the side of the head and the little monk shut up, glaring at Finn with resentful anger. But Finn was smiling at Indira. He seemed to have about a hundred teeth, as gleaming white as fresh ice. His gaze glittered with psychotic intensity.

  He said to Indira, ‘I really did. Do you want to know how?’

  ‘You’re making a fool of yourself,’ Fergus said, and flinched when Finn stuck his massive fist in front of his face.

  ‘I didn’t have any fancy gear,’ Finn said. ‘No nets or shock bombs or toxins. I fought it one on one. We fought for days. The water boiled with the fury of our struggle. It took me down to the bottom of the ocean, thinking it would crush me and drown me. But I was too strong. It tried to escape then, but I held onto it. I broke open a vent and seared off its fins and its teeth with the lava that spewed out.’

  As he spoke, in a low voice as monotonous as Rothar’s, he brought his face closer and closer to Indira’s. His pupils were hugely dilated. Sweat stood out like oily droplets on his smooth, pale skin. His breath smelled bad: acetone, butanol, sweet rot.

  Indira was sure that he was flying on something. Perhaps drugs were part of the devotions of these strange, sinister monks. She said, as calmly as she could, ‘That’s a good story.’

  ‘It’s the truth,’ Finn said. ‘You don’t believe it but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.’

  ‘We don’t know how many are out there,’ Fergus said. ‘No one knows how often they reproduce. There could be hundreds out there. Thousands.’

  ‘We didn’t need to bring anyone in,’ Finn said, still staring at Indira. ‘I can handle it.’

  Indira thought of the tanks in the laboratory under the old mining camp. The analysis had showed traces of metabolites and degradation products consistent with the presence of animal metabolism, although her sniffer had not been able to identify the type of animal. Perhaps Finn had caught a monster. Perhaps they had kept it in one of the tanks they had used to develop their strains of weed. Indira doubted that it had been a dragon; even a hatchling would have torn up the lab. A spinner, perhaps, or a juvenile mako. What had they done to it?

  Fergus leaned over and dared touch Indira’s arm. His black eyes brimmed with what Indira thought was genuine concern. ‘Brother Finn is always wired up before he goes out into the deep dark. But out there, he’s all business, and so am I. We both know what we’re doing. Don’t worry. We’ll take care of you.’

  Finn said, ‘No more talk. We go.’

  Indira told him to wait. She had already checked her equipment, but now she wanted to check it again in front of the two monks, to show them what she had, to show them that she meant business. The spear gun with its hollow tipped spears. The taser. The percussion bomblets, the sticky bomblets, the flares. The diamond mesh drift nets. The bait traps, which leaked chemicals that attracted monsters. Static cameras that could be stuck to structures or spiked to ice. The sonar. The motion detector. The sniffer.

  The two monks watched with studied disinterest. They were equipped with ordinary spear guns and knifes. Fergus carried a video rack, and a mesh bag of the kind of explosive squibs used by construction workers hung from Finn’s harness, but that was it.

  ‘All right,’ Indira said at last. ‘Let’s do it.’

  Fergus allowed a little water in. Although it was filtered to remove its chemical load, it still had the rotten egg stench of hydrogen sulphide. Indira could feel its cold through the layers of her suit.

  They busied themselves in the small space, rinsing their face masks in the water and then spitting in them and rubbing the spittle over the inside of the glass of the visors so they wouldn’t fog up, checking the seals of their hoods and the straps which fastened the fins to their feet, their weightbelts and the harnesses which held their tanks, putting on their face masks and adjusting regulator mouthpieces.

  Fergus switched on the lamp of his video equipment: harsh light flooded the chamber, bleaching out all colours. Then he opened the valve all the way and water gushed from the floor vent, filling the chamber in a few moments.

  Although its freezing point was reduced because of its heavy concentration of salts, most of the water in the boundary layer immediately beneath the icy crust was halffrozen slush. Grease ice and firn ice. Brash ice and bergy bits bumping along the roof of the great world ocean. In places, though, currents driven by plumes from hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the sea, fifty kilometres below the surface, carried relatively warm, mineralrich water to the bottom of the ice crust. Sometimes, currents driven by especially active vents melted the ice crust, and water and slush spilled across the surface of Europa like lava.

  Mines and farms were built above vent plumes. Mines sucked up the mineralrich water; farms grew engineered weed in the Europan equivalent of tropical seawater enriched with nutrients. The monastery’s farms were fed by one such plume; even so, the water that flooded the chamber was at a chill 2 degrees Celsius. As it rose around Indira, an intense ring of cold gripped her body, rising with the water and inducing a terrific headache right between her eyes. It was as if she had gulped down a litre of icecream. The cold of the water was already sucking heat through her thin gloves. It stung the little bits of exposed skin where the seal of her face mask did not quite meet the seal of her hood; then the skin went numb. She bit down hard on the soft plastic regulator that filled her mouth and concentrated on her breathing until the first agony of immersion passed. The air that hissed through the regulator at each breath was dry and met
allic.

  Fergus was staring at a little handheld screen. It switched every two seconds to show different views of black water under ice. His voice said in her earpiece, ‘Looks clear.’

  Finn said impatiently, ‘They said it was clear. They switched on the lights to make sure that it was clear.’

  ‘But the thing can travel fast.’

  Their voices were thin and muffled and flat, subvocalisations picked up by throat mikes and processed for clarity.

  Indira said, ‘I hope it does come to us. Then we won’t have to waste time and energy travelling.’

  ‘We’ll find it,’ Finn said, and hit a big red button with his fist.

  The chamber rotated with a grinding noise. They spilled out into the black water, dragging their scooters with them.

  They were in a wide shaft. Above them it was plugged with a massive blister of steel studded with grab rails and red and green lights. Someone moved behind a thick bullseye port. The two men angled away and Indira followed. The white vee of her scooter hummed, vents pushing out water in muscular streams on either side of her, pulling her towards the open water below.

  The two men were moving at a fast clip, past the finned radiators which bled waste heat into the ocean. They had not waited for her. It was a challenge, a typical male gesture. Indira paused to gauge the current, chose a long flat curve that would carry her ahead of them, and throttled up her scooter’s reaction motor.

  She had expected the farm to be big, but it was more than twice the size of her wildest estimate. The maintenance lights were on and she could see that racks of weed stretched away on all sides of the bottom of the shaft, hundreds upon hundreds of them. Each rack was thirty metres long and five metres wide, bolted to its neighbours in a hexagonal array with orange floatation buoys at each corner; each array was linked at its six points to neighbouring arrays and to pylons fixed in the ice roof of the ocean. Weed dangled from ropes attached to the wire stretchers of the racks, filmy ribbons that in the weak lights glistened violet or purplish red or the reddish brown of dried blood. Mature weeds were a hundred metres long. The whole – weed, racks, rack arrays – flexed sinuously in the current, like the hide of a gently breathing beast. A haze of molecular sulphur, the waste product of the weeds’ carbon fixation, smoked off it.