by Ian Douglas
Because of our own ignorance in the matter, the Commonwealth has made contact with subglacean intelligences a high priority. The base at Conamara Chaos, clinging upside down to the Europan ice cap above the sunless world-ocean abyss, has been studying the Medusae and their bewildering zoo of organic symbionts for a century, now. Conamara base had been the next destination for my FMF class, before the class was cancelled by events at Bloodstar. Our people and AIs there were still just trying to come up with a workable common language, and FMF students, among others, continued to work at trying to catalogue and understand the local biochemistry.
And now we were going to have a peek beneath the ice on Hymie, to see if there were similar exotic life forms down there. I think the Commonwealth government is lonely and looking for friends. We don’t have many of those yet, out here among the uncaring stars.
“Okay!” someone shouted, her voice echoing within the moon pool chamber. “Lower away!”
The four-meter cylinder began lowering on its connector cables until it rested on the ice, nano-face down. A red light began flashing, together with the rasp of a Klaxon.
“Time to leave, Carlyle,” Garner told me. “The drilling might release volatiles as the water ice separates. We don’t want to be in here if it does, even with filter masks.”
“How long will it take?”
The chief shrugged. “The nanodrill should descend at the rate of about four kilometers per hour. Seismic soundings suggest that the ice here is twelve kilometers thick. Do the math.”
Three hours. “Well, I need to get outside and pull some samples anyway,” I said.
“Stay warm,” he told me.
Stay warm. Right. It was minus two hundred-something outside the dome. I grew myself an e-suit, stepped through the external lock, and trudged out across the surface ice. Calli Lewis went with me. Orders were strict. No one went outside alone. Our e-suits were tuned to bright orange, just in case someone had to come looking for us.
Niffelheim was a pale purplish half disk hanging above the horizon, imbedded in a deep ultramarine sky and illuminated by the bloody eye of its sun. A couple of smaller, inner satellites were visible as well, casting dark oval shadows against the cloud tops. The surface beneath our heavily insulated boots was ice beneath a few centimeters of snow. The stuff was loose enough to swirl around us in plumes and streams blowing on the thin wind.
What would happen, I wondered, if we did find intelligence in Hymie’s under-ice ocean? If they were humans, a secondary colony spawned by Bloodworld, it would be a job for the MRF’s intelligence people. But if we found nonhuman locals?
Then it would be a job for the fleet’s science team—and for the Navy Corpsmen. First contact.
And my first chance at the xenotech my dad was so eager to acquire. The problem was, if we actually found anything important, wouldn’t the government step in and take over, just like it always did?
“How far do we need to go?” Lewis asked me. She used her suit’s laser com. We were under strict orders not to use radio or microwave communications. Someone might be listening.
“Far enough that we won’t get false readings from the dome,” I told her. When they’d released the nanoconstructors on the rawmat a few hours ago, some stray atoms and molecules would have spread out into the immediate environment around the dome, leftovers that might skew the readings I’d been sent to take. I needed my samples to be as pristine as possible. We were walking upwind into a gentle breeze in half an atmosphere.
Three kilometers out, I stopped and turned around. The dome . . . I couldn’t even see the dome from here. Its outer surface was coated with reactive nanoflage, a layer of molecule-sized computers that sampled the surrounding light levels and re-emitted wavelengths that perfectly matched the shades and tones of the surroundings. It wasn’t quite true invisibility, but it came damned close. If we went much farther, we might have trouble finding our way back.
“This ought to be good enough,” I told her.
I opened a pouch on the front of my e-suit and pulled out an ES-12 environmental sampler. I squeezed it to open the tripod, and set it down on the ice. Then we backed away a few meters, so that the waste heat from our e-suits wouldn’t affect the readings.
I brought up a display on my in-head circuitry, watching as the sampler pulled in trace amounts of atmosphere and began checking the composition, pressure, temperature, and so on. I then opened a copy of the Clymer’s electronic ephemeris and began cross-checking the results.
Download
Commonwealth Planetary Ephemeris
Entry: Gliese 581 VIe
“Hymie”
Star: Gliese 581, Bloodstar
Planet: Gliese 581 VI
Satellite: VIe
Name: Gliese 581 VIe, Niffelheim-e, Hymie, Niffie
Type: Europan; ice-covered world ocean, rocky core
Mean orbital radius: 725,301 km; Orbital period: 25d 3h 11m 23s
Inclination: 0.0º; Rotational period: 25d 3h 11m (tide-locked with primary)
Mass: 7.87 x 1025 g = 1.07 Luna; Equatorial Diameter: 4,924 km = 0.386 Earth
Mean planetary density: 5.372 g/cc = .973 Earth
Surface Gravity: 1.85 G
Surface temperature range: ~ -200ºC
Surface atmospheric pressure: ~60 x 103 kPa [0.6 Earth average]
Percentage composition: N2 91.5, CH4 8.1, Ne 0.2, C2H6 23 ppm C2H2 5 ppm; others <5 ppm
Age: 8.3 billion years
Biology: Unknown; no surface forms present
Human Presence: None
So far as I could see, there’d been no change from the data collected by the Human Endeavor in the 2140s. Not that I’d expected any change, but you never knew. The universe is good at throwing surprises at us.
We were standing there, waiting for the device to do its chemical thing, when I heard a quick, sharp chirp over my helmet electronics.
“What the fuck?” Lewis said.
“Was that an emergency recall?” I asked her. The chirp was a tightly condensed packet of information, but I couldn’t translate it at the moment because I still had the ephemeris data up on my CDF display.
“An emergency alert,” she said. “Pick up your toy, fast!”
I knew better than to argue with her. The sampler should have completed its analyses by now anyway.
A second alert sounded, two chirps this time.
“Hit your nanoflage!” she screamed. “Now!”
Chapter Eight
I landed facedown in the snow and Lewis landed beside me. I thoughtclicked my nanoflage to active, and the eye-catching orange of my e-suit shimmered and melted away into dull white.
I turned my head to look at her. Her helmet was all white now, even the visor, which had shifted to one-way transmission. She held up one hand and wiggled the fingers, then clenched it into a fist.
I got the message: close off all sources of radiation! I thoughtclicked on the IR screen, and almost immediately began feeling warm.
It was mostly my overactive imagination, of course. I wouldn’t be close to stewing in my own juices for an hour or two yet. Still, the insulation of those e-suits is good, so good that the biggest problem in wearing the things is getting rid of waste heat. It builds up as the human body sheds it; there’s a heat sink in a unit at the small of the back, underneath the rebreather pack, but it can only hold so much before it needs to be purged.
Normally, excess heat is just dumped into the environment, but the alert from the dome warned that there were possible hostiles in the area, and to them our waste heat would show up like a couple of hot flares against the ice. We would have to stay very still, store what heat we could, and wait it out until the bad guys left.
Was it the Qesh? Or had the MRF decided that local human colonists qualified as hostiles as well? I lay there motionless for an agony of seconds, wonderin
g what the hell was going on, what the threat was, and where the hostiles might be.
Motion caught my eye, and I lifted my helmet slightly, trying to track it. I wasn’t sure what I’d just seen—a flicker of movement at the horizon, perhaps—but I’d glimpsed it against the dark sky. My helmet optics threw computer augmentation across my field of vision, searching for nearby sources of IR or radio wavelengths.
There . . . against the face of Niffelheim.
There were three of them, from my vantage point looking like flattened ovals with a bite taken out of each. I’d seen those shapes before.
Rocs.
The silhouettes passed across the planet’s purple disk from bottom to top, obviously at high altitude and moving fairly quickly. One by one, they slipped off the face of Niffelheim and vanished; with image enhancement I could just barely see them against the dark of the sky near the zenith.
What were they doing here? A routine patrol of the other planets in the Gliese 581 system? Or had they detected the MRF?
We didn’t know much about Qesh capabilities. We knew that their technology was superior to ours—the equivalent of as much as a century, though the rates of technological advancement in other technic species are always tough to judge. Given a century more of development, how good would our radar, lidar, IR, and neutrino scanners become? What other sensors might be developed? Something that can pick up the warping of spacetime caused by the Plottel Drive across a few astronomical units, perhaps? Or the trace leakage from a vacuum energy converter?
IR scanners can pick up the footprints of people who’ve passed through a room an hour before. Were those Qesh ships now passing almost directly overhead able to detect the heat of the footprints Lewis and I had left in the snow?
I tried to calm the panicky back-and-forth of my thoughts. Our boots were superbly insulated—they had to be to let us work in this environment, and the cold wind and the blowing snow should have erased any IR traces we’d left behind.
Should have . . .
I couldn’t see the Rocs now, not without rolling over to look up and behind. I stayed huddled there on the ice with Lewis for minute upon minute, a literal freeze that dragged on for a good ten minutes, long after the Qesh patrol must have vanished over the horizon behind us. At last, though, a chirp warbled in my ear, another low-power, compressed-data transmission tight-beamed from the dome.
“All clear,” Lewis said over the laser com at the same moment I decrypted the chirp myself. “RTB.”
“You know, Louie,” I told her as I rolled over, “we’ve really got to stop meeting like this. The rest of Second Platoon are getting suspicious.”
“Fuck you, Doc,” she told me, helping me awkwardly to my feet.
I would have come back with the traditional, “Any time,” but didn’t want to sound like Dubois.
Qesh Rocs had been named after the mythological birds large enough to carry off an elephant. According to Intelligence, they served both as spacecraft and as surface assault vehicles—somewhat smaller versions of the Daitya weapons platforms. I wondered if the habit of naming Qesh military vehicles after giant beings and creatures out of Earth’s mythologies was necessarily a good idea. The damned things were scary enough without giving them code names like “Behemoth,” “Leviathan,” or “Roc.”
The base was on full alert, of course, by the time we locked back inside. Chief Garner was waiting for us, and he was looking worried.
“So what’s happening, Chief?” I asked him as I dissolved the e-suit. “Is the MRF okay?”
“They’ve gone,” Garner said. “At least for now.”
“Gone! Where?”
“The colonel did not choose to share that information with me,” he said. He sounded almost disapproving. “Their options, though, would have been deep space—or into close orbit around Niffelheim. Someplace where Qesh EM sensors couldn’t pick them up.”
That made sense. If they’d stayed in orbit around Hymie, the Rocs would have caught them by radar or lidar as they approached the moon. They would have seen the approaching Rocs by their high-G drive signatures; by engaging their Plottel Drives at very low power, possibly while on the far side of the moon from the approaching enemy, they could have nudged themselves clear of Hymie and far enough out into space that, in all of that emptiness, the chances were good that the Qesh ships wouldn’t see them. With enough warning, they might have finessed their trajectory to drop them into orbit around the nearby ice giant, where they would be lost in the planet’s radiation belts, or blend in with the orbiting debris of its ring system. In space combat, the trick was always to detect the enemy before they managed to detect you.
Which begged the question: Had the Qesh picked up the fleet from Bloodworld? Or had that flight of Rocs been a routine patrol?
“So what are the Qesh doing now?” I asked.
“They appear to be searching the surface,” Garner replied. “They’re over the horizon now, but they could be back.”
“Did we do something that attracted their attention?”
Garner shrugged. “Hard to say. They might have sniffed a whiff of our drive signature when we entered orbit. Or maybe they’re worried that the Bloodworlders have other bases out here.”
“So we just sit and wait them out, Chief?” Lewis asked.
“Exactly. They didn’t see through the base nanoflage just now. If we lie low and keep quiet, we should stay off their radar. We’ll be okay.”
As we talked, we were walking into the dome’s interior from the airlock, and entered the observation compartment overlooking the moon pool. A wallscreen gave a BTL view of the drilling operation. The pool now was a literal pool of black water, with the tunneler’s support and program cables vanishing into the surface. As the nanodisassembler surface broke ice molecules into gaseous hydrogen and oxygen, most of it began recombining into liquid water, and the reaction released enough heat to keep the deep and water-filled pit liquid, despite the frozen sides of the tunnel. The technicians were helping the process along by pumping hot water into the pit, keeping it both full and open.
Somewhere down in the depths of that pool, the tunneler was continuing to eat through the kilometers of rock-hard ice.
“Is it possible the Qesh picked up on our operation here?” I asked.
“Don’t see how,” Garner said. “Not across hard vacuum, anyway.”
“Yeah, but once they got here, they might detect the vibrations of the tunneler. Maybe they have surface monitors on Hymie somewhere.”
“That’s a bit far-fetched, isn’t it, Doc?” Lewis said.
“Maybe,” Garner said. He shrugged. “It’s not all that likely, though. From what we know of the Qesh so far, they’re not much for careful scientific exploration and measurement. They’re more into smash-and-grab.”
“I’m just saying that this operation could be putting out enough noise or vibrations or whatever that they could pick them up through the ice, or even through the air.”
“Well, you know, Carlyle,” Garner said, “we can’t just hide under a rock because the Qesh might be able to pick up our heartbeats. At some point, we have to do what we need to do and to hell with what the bad guys could be capable of.”
“Maybe the question,” I said, “is whether we’re really at war with the Qesh.”
“I doubt that the Qesh understand what we mean by war,” Garner said. “That’s a distinctly human concept, you know.”
I’d never really thought about it, but the chief was right. Carl von Clausewitz wrote that war is a political instrument, a continuation of politics by other means. We’d downloaded a lot of von Clausewitz in our Strategy and Tactics classes at Camp Lejeune, and that line, from his unfinished Vom Krieg, may be his most famous quote.
But how relevant are the writings of von Clausewitz to modern warfare, or to alien politics, for that matter? Politics assumes that two governments
have something in common, enough so that they can communicate with each other. When we humans entered the galactic stage, we learned that actually communicating with any of the myriad civilizations described by the Encylopedia Galactica was going to be a lot harder than anticipated. Ninety-five years ago, we encountered the Durga, at Delta Aquarii V, 160 light years from Earth.
The name Durga is drawn from Hindu mythology. The word is Sanskrit for, roughly, “difficult to reach.” She was a goddess who existed, supposedly, in a state of svatantrya, meaning complete independence from the rest of the universe, an attitude that appeared to fit the introverted worldview of those hulking, 3-meter-tall siphonapterans. Since they used modulated sound rather than, say, tentacle waving or color changes on their abdomens, to communicate, we actually learned the principal Durgan language fairly quickly. After a century, however, we were still trying to figure out how they were using it, or how their peculiar and isolationist mental map of the universe aligned with ours.
The Encyclopedia Galactica shows only a bare-bones sketch of the races and civilizations it lists. The EG gives the dominant Qesh societal drivers as “clan/hunter/warrior/survival”—but what does that mean, really?
And what we humans really needed to know was what it meant to the Qesh.
We think we know what the concept of “war” means, at least to us—using military force to project our political will, or to defend our way of life, or to protect our herds, or even to settle political, territorial, or ideological disputes. Add to that modern refinements like “total war” or “limited war” or “rules of engagement,” and things get really confusing, just within the boundaries of our own species.
