Life After Wartime

by Paul McAuley

  Unlike the green plants which decorated Phoenix’s public and private spaces, weeds did not need light to grow; the lights were for the workers who maintained the rafts and cropped mature blades. Green plants harvested light energy and used it to transfer hydrogen ions and electrons from water to carbon dioxide, forming the simple sugar glucose, with oxygen as a byproduct. But no light penetrated Europa’s kilometresthick ice crust and there was no free oxygen in all its deep ocean: a fish would drown as quickly as a human. Like the indigenous microbes of Europa and chemolithotrophic bacteria of Earth, the weed used reduced inorganic compounds containing nitrogen or sulfur or iron instead of water and light to turn carbon dioxide into sugars.

  Most available carbon on Europa was in the form of carbon dioxide dissolved in the ocean beneath its thick icy crust. There had been proposals to crash a carbonaceous chondrite asteroid onto Europa to supply carbon which could be processed by vacuum organisms, but no one had been able to work out how to do this without splitting the crust and resurfacing half the moon. There had been a halfhearted attempt to reach agreement between the five inhabited moons to establish a carbonmining facility at one of Jupiter’s Lagrangian points, but the plan had foundered in acrimonious arguments about sharing the startup costs of purchasing mining rights to a suitable asteroid and moving it into orbit.

  Before the Quiet War, Europans had augmented their expensive greenhouses by drawing up water and using it to grow engineered yeasts in big tanks, utilising metabolic pathways copied from the indigenous microbes which grew in the crushing blackness at the bottom of the ocean, around the hydrothermal vents which opened along ridge faults. The Europan vent microbes had been the only known extant lifeforms in the Solar System other than those of Earth. Their genetic code had been based on triplet base sequences strung on a DNA double helix, confirming the modified HoyleWickramasinghe panspermia hypothesis that all life in the Solar System, including the longextinct Martian microflora, had a common ancestor. On Earth, certain bacteria had combined and evolved into multicellular eukaryotes – into plants and fungi and animals. Perhaps this step required an oxygen atmosphere and the more efficient energygenerating metabolic pathways it could support; in Europa’s anaerobic ocean, nothing had evolved beyond the level of colonial microbes, which had formed crusts and sheets, lacework baskets and vases, and vast beds of long filaments, around the hot, black, mineralrich water which issued from the vents. Life had not spread from these refugia; the rest of the ocean had been a sterile desert.

  Tailored biowarfare viruses released in the Quiet War had destroyed the industrial yeasts and the native microflora. Afterwards, a Pacific Community cartel had introduced licensed strains of chemolithotrophic weed. Even with the premium license tax, the weeds were a cheaper source of fixed carbon than algal ponds or hydroponic greenhouses, and provided the base input of fixed carbon to Europa’s expanding population, just as vacuum organisms growing on the methane and carbon monoxide ices and tars of carbonaceous chondrites supplied fixed carbon to the new Kuiper Belt settlements.

  In the midst of the monastery’s huge weed farm, Indira overtook Finn and Fergus and turned her scooter to face them as they vectored towards her. Her arms ached slightly and she worked one and then the other. Her headache had crept downwards, a mantle of numbing cold that penetrated the dry suit and its three underlayers – a fleece liner, a quilted undersuit with a little skull cap, the liner from her vacuum suit. Her fingertips were numb inside the thin gloves; the little bits of exposed skin between hood and face mask were slivers of stinging pain. This would not go away. This would get worse. Yet she felt a thrill of elation vibrating in her core. She was here. She was doing her job. The close possibility of death made her more alive than at any other time. It was not something she could talk about, even with Carr. Only other hunters could understand it.

  Above, a thick, rippling forest of weed blades trailed from a ceiling of hexagonal arrays of racks; below, fifty kilometres of black water. There was no sign of any movement on her sonar and the chemical sniffer which sampled water every few seconds showed no trace of metabolites specific to biowar macroforms. Her regulator valve rattled; dry air hissed. She checked the elapsed time on her mask’s headup display – she had six hours of air in the two tanks she carried on her back, another hour in the emergency bottle clipped to the scooter.

  ‘I think she’s made a point,’ Fergus’s thin, processed voice said in her earpiece, as the two monks swung in beside her.

  Boy’s games.

  She said, ‘I want to look at the damage this monster did.’

  Finn: ‘That’s where we’re going.’

  Fergus: ‘It’s at the southern edge of the farm.’

  Finn: ‘You follow us. Enough hotdogging.’

  Yes, boy’s games.

  She let the men lead.

  They travelled a long way through the cold and the dark. Two kilometres, three. The farm was deserted. No one was working amongst its racks, tending and harvesting mature plants, stringing new ropes seeded with sporelings. Everything had been abandoned, because of the monster.

  Indira wondered how the monastery could manage to run such a huge farm. Where were the facilities for servicing the huge numbers of divers that must be needed? Rothar had shown her the crowded refectory, no doubt to demonstrate his power and importance, but it had contained no more than a hundred men. Even if all of them worked full time, they’d be stretched to maintain a farm this size . . . .

  At last, an hour after they had set out, they finally reached the damaged section. It was near the edge of the farm. It was extensive: at least a hectare. Lights were blown, or dimmed to a greenish glow. Long strips of racks had been wrenched free from their supporting pylons, and dangled disjointedly. Other sections were completely missing: presumably they had fallen away to crushing darkness at the bottom of the deep ocean.

  Weed grew over broken racks and wire stringers, thick growths of fronds and straps that streamed out in a strong southerly current. Indira had to keep blipping her scooter’s throttle to stay in place. There were patches in the weed which looked like they had been harvested very recently. The cuts were fresh, no more than two of three days old, done by someone who knew to leave a length of blade to allow swift regeneration. Had the monks tried to salvage their crop after the monster had wrecked this section?

  Indira drifted along the wreckage, powered back to where the two monks were waiting. ‘I’ve only seen pictures of what a dragon can do,’ she said, ‘but the damage to the racks is suggestive.’

  ‘I told you,’ Finn said. ‘I told you that I caught one.’

  Indira ignored this. She repeated what she had told them when they had first met. ‘We’ll check out the surrounding volume, set up bait points and static cameras. And then we’ll go back and wait to see what turns up.’

  She would identify and kill the monster tomorrow, or the day after, and then she could go home.

  Fergus switched on his lights and took shots of Indira against the wreckage, moving around her with dainty frogkicks. ‘Just for the record,’ he said, when she protested that they were wasting time.

  ‘She feels the cold,’ Finn said.

  ‘I feel the cold,’ Fergus said.

  ‘She feels the cold because she fears the monster,’ Finn said. ‘Now she has seen what it can do, she is afraid. She knows she cannot fight it. She wants to run away.’

  ‘I want to find out what it is before I face it,’ Indira said.

  ‘I can show you,’ Finn said. ‘I know where it lives.’

  ‘Macroforms don’t make nests,’ Indira said.

  Finn sculled close to her, his gaze furious and dark behind the visor of the face mask.

  ‘Are you calling me a liar?

  ‘I think you’re mistaken.’

  ‘I think you a coward. It’s only natural, because of what you are. It’s only natural that you lack a hunter’s heart,’ he said, and thumped his chest.

  Indira turned to Fergus and said, ‘I
thought you said that your brother knew what he was doing.’

  ‘I know what I know,’ Fergus said. ‘Follow me, and I’ll prove it. If you don’t, I’ll know exactly what you are.’

  And then the big man was powering off into the dark beyond the edge of the farm. Against her better judgement, Indira followed, riding the smooth water in his scooter’s wake to conserve her own scooter’s power. She did not believe the story about a lair, but she knew that she would have to look.

  Another long fall through black cold water. Once, she looked over her shoulder to check that Fergus was following, and saw that the lights of the farm had dwindled far behind: a little constellation of sparks set in the vast cold night of the ocean. They were skimming along just beneath the icy roof. It undulated in long smooth swales, eroded by the relatively warm upwelling current. It glistened blue and green in the wide beam of the lamp of Indira’s scooter. Fringes of ferny platelet ice hung down everywhere, delicate growths that softened the swelling contours of the ice.

  Now the roof angled down – a smooth intrusion in the ice, an upsidedown hill. Indira followed Finn down the long slope. Her depth gauge pinged at every twenty metre contour. She had nanoformed scavengers in her blood which prevented both nitrogen narcosis caused by high pressure and bubble formation caused by tooswift ascents, but the scavengers only worked within certain limits.

  They went down almost two hundred metres; then the slope steepened into a vertical wall, and they dragged below its inverted crest. Beyond was a chaos of slab ice where part of the crust had broken away and reformed. Habitatsized chunks of ice stuck out at all angles, blue pressure ice shot through with white stress marks, like a jumble of giant, roughcut gems. Finn slowed and Indira slowed too. They drifted beneath the jagged chaos and came to a stop near a black rift that led back into the ice – a long gently curving slot like a grinning mouth.

  ‘This is where they went.’

  Indira did not know if Finn or Fergus had spoken – the distortion of their treated subvocalisations and a sudden surge of adrenalin in her blood obliterated the subtle distinction.

  ‘We will get them back.’

  Was that the same voice? Fergus had drifted a little way beneath Finn, who was shining a strong lamp into the rift. Fluted ice reflected its red light in a thousand splinters.

  ‘We finish the matter now.’

  That was definitely Finn.

  Indira’s chemical sniffer was flashing urgently. She called up the display. Strong metabolic traces, but no positive identification. Were there several types of macroform here? She started the sniffer’s analytical program. There was definitely something in there.

  ‘Watch my back,’ she told the two monks, and turned up all her lights and cautiously edged into the mouth of the rift. A faint but steady current issued from it. The sniffer started to flash spiky lines as it separated the unknown metabolites. She called up the chemical signature of a dragon as an overlay. And there it was, buried amongst traces of other complex chemicals which the sniffer was unable to match against its library.

  ‘Got you,’ she said, and something flew past her, a quick flash leaving a wake of bubbles that rose around her like a silvery rope.

  Her backbrain recognised what it was and she turned away in reflex before she realised that someone – Finn or Fergus – had fired some kind of selfpropelled explosive charge into the rift.

  Then it exploded.

  The pressure wave clamped around Indira, lifted her, shoved her against the roof of the rift, dragged her down amongst the glistening smooth hummocks of its floor. Big chunks of ice fell with her, tumbling through a haze of chips and fragments that washed to and fro in the crosshatched froth of aftershock currents.

  Someone was shouting, a thin voice like tearing metal. ‘Not this way! Not yet!’

  Somehow, Indira had kept hold of her scooter. She killed its lights and dropped down to the floor, crouched behind a fallen ice block. Strong, freezing currents washed across her. There were lights hung beyond the slot of the rift’s mouth – the two monks, shining the high beams of their scooters here and there. She realised that she had been set up. They planned to kill her here, and blame the monster. Because of what she had seen, even if she did not understand what she had seen. Because she was a woman who had dared to trespass on men’s territory.

  Her sonar bleeped. She started to turn, and something big and fast shot past. Someone screamed and one of the lights went out.

  * * * * *

  It was the dragon.

  It doubled back, quick as thought. Indira tried to untangle her spear gun. She had an impression of something black and sleek, with two big fins or flippers that curled around a mansized bundle.

  Then it was past, swimming strongly into the depths of the rift. Gone.

  It had taken Finn. Fergus’s small figure hung some distance from the entrance. ‘Keep away,’ he said, as she angled towards him. ‘Keep away. I’m armed.’

  She kept going. A spear trembled past, a wide shot that disappeared into the black water. She gunned her scooter and slammed into Fergus before he could recock his gun, spun him around, uncoupled the air hose from his face mask.

  His masked face was obscured by a sudden flood of silvery bubbles. He waved his arms in blind panic. She counted to ten, then placed the end of the hose in his hand, hung back as he struggled to plug it into his mask.

  ‘You don’t get a second chance,’ she said. ‘Tell the truth. Tell me everything.’

  ‘It came right at us,’ Fergus said. ‘I looked right into its face. And then it took Finn . . .’

  ‘You expected it to kill me.’ Indira said. ‘And you wanted to show it on video.’

  Finn nodded, up and down.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Rothar said it was necessary. He said you would be bait for the monster.’

  ‘Because I’m only a woman. Foolish, weak. Helpless. And if I somehow escaped, or if the dragon didn’t come, you would have killed me anyway, and made up a story.’

  Fergus didn’t deny it. He said, ‘Finn should have waited.’

  ‘He was an angry man. And a fool. Well, he’s dead now. That’s what dragons do.’

  ‘It has our workers,’ Fergus said.

  Indira said, ‘If it took them into that rift, they’re as dead as Finn.’

  How many had the dragon killed? There were about a hundred monks now, but many more than that would have been needed to maintain the farm . . . . Indira was very cold, and found it hard to follow any thought to its conclusion. Every few seconds a tremor passed over her entire skin. That sleek black shape. Bigger and faster than anything she had every seen before.

  Fergus made a choking, squealing noise. It was laughter, translated by his throat mike. ‘It didn’t eat them,’ he said. ‘It befriended them. They came out to feed, just yesterday. The dragon was with them. They ripped up the perimeter of the farm and disappeared before we could get at them. You though, you’re dead. Rothar saw to it. You’re dead, but you don’t know it.’

  Then he kicked out with surprising strength and broke free. She let him go. If Rothar was determined to kill her, one little monk wouldn’t be much of a bargaining chip.

  Fergus was a solitary star dwindling through the ocean’s black volume towards the distant constellation of the farm. His voice came faintly to her.

  ‘Finn really did kill one. It was small, but he killed it.’

  And then: ‘Don’t try to follow me. You don’t have enough air . . .’

  Indira had almost used up one of her two airtanks. With a sudden queasy feeling of dread, she switched to the second. Gas hissed through the regulator, but she suddenly couldn’t get her breath. Nitrogen. The fuckers had somehow filled her second tank with nitrogen. She switched back, breathed in. She had about twenty minutes’ air left, and the trip back would take at least an hour. She had insisted on filling her airtanks herself, but Finn or Fergus must have done some kind of switch, changed the compressor’s outlet from the standard nitro
x mix to pure nitrogen. She checked the emergency bottle in her scooter, even though she knew what she would find. It had been filled with nitrogen, too.

  It was a simple, deadly trick, but it had one flaw. Something that Fergus, in his panicky flight, had forgotten. The two men hadn’t counted on the monster targeting them, instead of her. Finn’s scooter with its emergency bottle was gone, still falling towards the true surface of Europa, a fifty kilometre fall that might take three days. But his main air tanks might still be intact.

  She had no other choice. And there was the mystery of the workers. Still alive, Fergus had said. Something had harvested patches of weed. Something was producing the chemical traces which overlay the dragon’s metabolic signature.

  She realised then what the workers must be. What the laboratory had been used for.

  She turned and powered back into the rift.

  * * * * *

  Finn’s explosive charge had brought down a lot of ice, but the dragon had punched a hole in it. Indira shot through the ragged gap. She didn’t have time to waste.

  The passage was long, rising in a gentle lefthanded curve. It was as smooth as a gullet. The gleaming ice walls confused Indira’s sonar, so she switched it off. The sniffer told her all she needed to know: increasing concentrations of the complex mixture of metabolic exudations, including the dragon’s fingerprint of methylmalonic acid semialdehyde, alphaketoisovaleric acid, and a triple peak of phosphatidic acids.

  When the passage suddenly opened out on all sides, Indira slewed to a stop and fired off a fan of flares. They ignited as they floated away, a string of harsh white stars that starkly illuminated the lower half of a vast chamber. Indira’s heart was beating quickly and lightly, driven by anticipation and dread. If this wasn’t the monster’s lair, if she was wrong about the workers, she was fucked. She did not have enough air to get back out into open water.