by Gwynn White
This time it was Magnus Kristiansen who raised his hand. His brow was furrowed in distress. He clearly thought he was trapped in a colony run by loonies. “Why, sir? Are they dangerous? What are hamsters doing on Ganymede, anyway?”
“Sigh,” Shyaka said. “Stop me if I’m boring you …”
He explained that Ganymede had from the get-go specialized in cutting-edge scientific research. Not only physics and xenogeology, but also biotechnology, had made great strides under the watchful eye of Jupiter. Originally, the biotechnologists had focused on optimizing crops for Ganymede’s extensive subterranean farms. They had since branched out into adjacent markets, and now— “as some of you may have noticed, if you’ve been out of this hotel—” Ganymede offered the most advanced human augmentation and alteration services in the solar system.
Elfrida nodded; the woman she’d hooked up with last night had come to Ganymede to become a cyborg, she had said. She was planning to get a prehensile tail. It seemed like a funny way to spend your life savings.
Genetic engineering, too (Shyaka continued.) Elective gene modification had been outlawed on Earth, but legal loopholes allowed Ganymede’s providers to stay in business. The industry had flourished in direct response to Earth’s fogeyish banning of its core technologies. Nowadays, the rich flocked to Ganymede for rejuvenation therapy, and well-heeled couples came to buy designer embryos. Shyaka managed to convey by his tone that UNSA strongly disapproved of this kind of thing, but was constrained by red tape from doing anything about it.
Elfrida had an insight, inspired by the reckless freedom she’d enjoyed last night. She texted Colden, “I bet I know why UNSA doesn’t crack down. If they piss the locals off, Ganymede might just declare independence.”
“Yeah, and they could probably get away with it, being so far from Earth,” Colden agreed.
So—don’t rock the boat; turn a blind eye; let the unlicensed surgeons in the Y-Zone continue on their merry way, grafting bionic tails onto people’s perfectly nice bottoms (the woman had shown Elfrida pictures of what she would be getting). Elfrida shifted restlessly in her chair.
“Now that you know the context,” Shyaka said, “you’ll understand how the POCKs came to exist. The early biotechnologists experimented with a variety of livestock. Hamsters are a good protein source, as it happens. But mistakes were made in modifying their DNA to adapt to our environment, and so the POCKs cannot be eaten … yes? You have a question, Ms. Gilchrist?”
“Sir, I was just thinking, there isn’t much eating on a hamster, to begin with? I mean, they’re kind of small?”
Suppressed laughter rocked the room. Shyaka waited it out. He pointed at the picture of a hamster on the screen behind him. It was blown up to the size of a collie.
“This picture is life-sized.”
★
YM City consisted of twenty-six linked domes, inside the great dome of ice that held in the atmosphere. These interior “zones,” each designated with a letter of the alphabet, held in enough warmth that the grads could eat lunch outdoors.
Food trucks idled outside their budget hotel in the M-Zone. The 77’ers dared each other to try local specialties such as kasha with fried grasshoppers. Elfrida and Colden went for hot dogs from a truck bearing the legend C.M.O.T. Sandwiches.
They took their food up to the roof garden on top of the hotel. Elfrida could almost have reached up and touched the ceiling of the dome. The rockwool insulation was frayed and holey. Clearly, things roosted in it. Sunlamps dotted the ceiling, radiating unsubtle white light. On Ganymede, it was either night or day. The lamps were either on, or they were off.
“So,” Kristiansen said, speaking with his mouth full. “We’re here to help out with the great annual POCK cull. Am I the only one who finds this more than a little shady?”
“It’s a test,” Elfrida and Colden chorused.
“It’s an expensive test,” Kristiansen said. “Have you seen the price of helium-3? It doesn’t make sense, even by UN budgeting rules, to transport hundreds of delinquent adolescents to the Jovian system, just so a few of them can kill things.”
Sophie Gilchrist’s face wrinkled up. “Yeah!” she exclaimed. “Like, we’re not Marines? We’re not training to fight or anything? We’re the Space Corps! We’re supposed to help and protect people?”
“Someday,” Elfrida said gravely, “you may have to defend helpless asteroid settlers against a plague of giant mutant hamsters.”
Colden laughed explosively.
Gilchrist picked bits of hot dog off her front, and shot Colden a dirty look. “I don’t want to kill anything,” she complained.
“Then don’t,” Colden said. “And we’ll get the much-sought-after Venus assignments. Booyah.”
The consensus among the grads was that this was indeed a particularly nasty test. Life as a Space Corps agent would not be all photo ops with spaceborn babies. Nor would they always have the luxury of operating remotely from the comfort of a couch. Someday, they might have to get their hands dirty. So the Space Corps wanted to confirm that they were psychologically ready for anything.
“Bring it on,” Elfrida said. She was not keen on the POCK cull, either. But she had to maintain her reputation. “I just love zapping cute little furballs! Or, not-so-little ones.”
Only Kristiansen continued to pick at the economics of the thing, muttering that it didn’t make sense, doggone it.
In characteristically obstinate fashion, he put his concerns to Shyaka the next day, as they prepared to set off on their hunt.
“Something’s been bothering me, sir. Why can’t drones do this? I mean, you have drones, right? Maybe your agricultural and domestic robots are too slow, or whatever. But surely you have some defensive drones that could do the job more effectively and cheaply than we could?”
“First of all,” Shyaka started, “I have more confidence in you kids than you seem to have in yourselves. I’ve seen several cadres of Space Corps grads undertake this challenge, and none of them failed to perform. Secondarily, Mr. Kristiansen, defensive drones? Inside a habitat? Really?” Shyaka paused for long enough to get everyone laughing at Kristiansen’s expense. “The First Law of Robotics is that sooner or later, something goes wrong. And when that day comes, I do not want to wind up in court, justifying the decision to operate semi-autonomous weapons platforms inside a hab. Does that answer your question?”
“No,” Kristiansen said, white in the face. “Why can’t you do it yourselves? Why have you got to import Space Corps labor?”
“You just answered your own question, Mr. Kristiansen. Because we don’t have to pay you. Ganymede is populated by squillionaire Ph.Ds and sybaritic trustafarians. None of them will get out of bed for the kinds of fees UNSA is able to offer. Now, I think we’ve spent enough time on this discussion. Who’s ready to zap some POCKs?!?”
There was a weak cheer.
The 77’ers—forty-three of them in total—had been outfitted with warm coats and pants, woolly hats, foldover mittens, and laser rifles.
Their first stop was a shooting range in the middle of the fields, where they practised shooting bolts of supercharged plasma into polyfoam targets.
“Don’t worry,” Shyaka encouraged them, when their inability to hit the targets left them downcast. “You’ll be shooting the POCKs at point blank range! Can’t miss. This is just to get you accustomed to handling the weapons.”
Elfrida aimed her rifle at Kristiansen’s back. “We could always just vaporize the competition,” she whispered.
“Don’t do that,” Colden said. “It’s dangerous.”
After a picnic lunch of protein bars and locally grown salad, they climbed aboard a pair of robot dumptrucks. The pink fog made it impossible to judge where they were in relation to YM City, and although they only drove a few kilometers, it felt like an endless journey, past identical fields of kale and soy and dwarf buckwheat, through the dripping rain. The 77’ers grew quiet. Elfrida pushed away thoughts of getting lost out here, deep
beneath the surface of Ganymede.
Suddenly the fog grew brighter, thinner. The roof materialized overhead, and curved down into a wall. The dumptrucks stopped. They got out. In front of them was an arch crisscrossed by police tape.
“Rain’s a feature, not a bug,” said Chung. “They keep the temps just above freezing, so the roof is melting, drop by drop. It’s not a real water cycle, but it does the job.”
No one said anything to that. They were all staring into the darkness beyond the police tape.
After a second, Gilchrist burst out, “I don’t want to go in there! Mr. Shyaka, sir?”
They all looked around.
Shyaka had contrived not to accompany them on the trucks.
“Right here, kids,” his voice crackled from the radio on Gilchrist’s belt. She yelped. “You’re on your own now. Ahead of you is the entrance to Farm Dome 3. At least, it will be Farm Dome 3, when it is cleared of POCKs. Oh, and Ms. Gilchrist? As I made clear during my presentation yesterday, the POCKs are not dangerous.”
Gilchrist fumbled with her radio. “Hello, sir? Like, I quit?”
A staticky sigh. “Your choice, Ms. Gilchrist. Anyone who does not wish to participate, stay on the trucks. They will return you to town.”
In the end, six people left with the trucks.
Elfrida said to Colden, “Notice how everyone that left was a girl?”
“Sigh, yes, I did notice that. We’ll just have to uphold the honor of our sex by ourselves.”
There were eleven other women left, but Elfrida and Colden did not rate any of them as competition. They were the type to gratefully accept assignments on Ceres, in the same spirit as their great-great-grandmothers might have sallied forth to work in the slums of Mumbai or Sao Paulo. Pfuh. Elfrida believed that helping and protecting humanity should not be a sacrifice but an adventure. OK, it was a self-serving belief, but that didn’t make it wrong.
The rowdiest male grads led the way, whooping. They tore down the police tape and tied bits of it around their heads like tribal decorations. The rest followed more cautiously. All had been given headlamps. The weak semicircles of light illuminated the treads and chassises of construction machines. Their headlamps did not reach the tops of the machines, let alone the roof. Underfoot, the ice had been torn up in great chunks, so you had to watch your step.
The boys roamed out into the cave, staying in a group. Elfrida saw a flash of lightning. Someone had pulled the trigger.
“Did you get one?” she shouted.
Get one … one …
“No! That was just Malone shooting himself in the foot!” Laughter echoed back.
Colden said, “They’re never going to find any POCKs, sticking together like that. Let’s go the opposite way.”
“Sure.” Elfrida turned, and her headlamp found a pair of legs. They were Kristiansen’s. He was standing there in the dark. “Hey!”
“The smart thing is not to use your headlamp,” Kristiansen said. “Think about it. That will scare the POCKs off.”
“We’ll bear that in mind,” Colden sniffed. “Aren’t you going with them?”
“They’re making way too much noise. I was thinking of going with you.”
“We were just going to go by ourselves.”
“Well, we should all go together. I used to do some spelunking, back in Switzerland. I know about caves.”
Colden raised her eyebrows at Elfrida. Anticipating a text, Elfrida raised her eyebrows back. They both realized at the same moment that they were out of network. Kristiansen, annoyingly, looked amused.
“Excuse us,” Colden said. She grabbed Elfrida’s sleeve and pulled her a short distance away. “That’s a pain in the ass.”
“Seriously.” It was scary to be cut off. Elfrida reminded herself that they still had their radios. The medium-band FM signals would penetrate the ice, if necessary.
“Well,” Colden said, “should we let him come?”
“He just wants your body.”
“Hur, hur. Actually, he isn’t that gross. I thought he was a pureblood, but if he comes from Switzerland, with a name like Kristiansen, he can’t be.”
“Eh, let’s take him along.”.
They went back to where Kristiansen was waiting. “OK,” Colden said. “You can come with us.”
The trio walked away from the entrance. The wall of the cave was not a smooth curve, like the wall of Farm Dome 1, but toothed with promontories. You could see how the machines had gone into the wall nose-first, melting ravines in the ice, leaving buttresses to support the roof. The groundplan of the dome was star-shaped, according to the map that Shyaka had sent them. But it was so big that even after walking for twenty minutes, they were still heading out towards the tip of one of the star’s points, which, itself, was serrated with smaller protrusions of ice and rock.
They reached another pair of buttresses, like gargantuan gateposts. Kristiansen halted and glanced into the darkness between them. “We’re going to have to go down one of these canyons at some point.”
“Why?”
“We’re not finding any POCKs like this, are we?”
“We’ve probably gone too far already,” Elfrida said. “The POCKs come out and steal the crops, which is the whole problem, right? They couldn’t do that if they had to trek for days to get out of this … this place.”
“Hamsters have pouches in their cheeks where they store food,” Kristiansen said. “So they could conceivably go weeks between foraging trips.”
“Well, aren’t you just a treasure trove of information.”
“I had a hamster when I was a kid.”
Elfrida and Colden both cracked up at that. Their laughter sounded brittle in the silence.
Kristiansen started down the canyon ahead of them.
The two girls hurried to keep him in their headlamps. So far, Elfrida had been careful to walk in the tracks of the construction machines, but now, aiming to cut the corner, she hopped onto the smooth white bank at the foot of the nearest buttress.
It turned out to be a snowbank. Her boots broke through the icy crust. Slowly, as if in a nightmare, she sank down through the fluffy snow. She thrashed, yelled, and kept sinking all the way up to her shoulders.
“Oh my God! Goto! Oh shit!” Colden bounded towards her—and immediately sank into the snow, too.
“I’m OK, I’m OK, I’m OK,” Elfrida chanted. She could move her limbs. The snow was so lightly packed that she wasn’t immobilized. It felt more like she was swimming in a tub of marshmallow fluff. Very cold marshmallow fluff. “Don’t come any closer, go back to the tracks. I’m coming out.” She slid one foot, then the other, over the unseen floor beneath the snow.
Kristiansen came back up the canyon and laughed at them.
“We’ve just made an important scientific discovery,” Colden said with dignity. “There is snow on Ganymede.”
“Probably because of the construction process,” Kristiansen said. “We’d need Chung or someone to explain it. But it’s probably something like, they excavate by melting the ice, right? Which creates a whole lot of water vapor. Which would then condense and fall as snow. Actually, I saw some snow caked on the excavators."
“You know,” Colden said, “smart people, who pretend not to be as smart as they are, because they think it’s uncool or something, are really … dumb.”
She scooped up a double handful of snow and flung it in his direction. It fell, glittering, between them.
Kristiansen snorted. “Here’s a trick that all Swiss children know. If your snow is too dry to make a snowball, you pack it with your bare hands.” He pulled off his mittens and did so. The result caught Colden squarely in the bosom.
“Hey! You are so going to pay for that!”
Elfrida ignored the horseplay. She was focused on getting out of the snow. Left foot, right foot …
She kicked something hidden under the snow.
It moved.
Elfrida screamed.
The snow erupted between he
r and Colden. A collie-sized form burst forth, shedding snow from its luxuriant white pelt. Its leap carried it straight towards Kristiansen, who jumped out of the way. It landed on its hind legs and let out a high-pitched, plaintive squeal.
It resembled a giant white hamster. It was facing Elfrida.
The snow around Elfrida’s feet came alive. Several small furballs, no bigger than her fist, cannoned out of the snow and landed on their mother’s back, grabbing pawfuls of fur to hold on. The mother squealed again and soared off down the ravine.
Elfrida remembered her laser rifle. She pulled it around on its strap, much too late.
“So that was a POCK,” Colden said.
Kristiansen had fallen on his rear when he jumped out of the POCK’s way. Still sitting on the ice, he said, “Of course! They burrow under the snow. It’s a universal survival tactic. Think of Arctic hares. Their DNA must have been modified to give them better resistance to cold.”
“You could have shot it,” Colden said. “You were right there!”
“So were you.”
Elfrida broke free of the snowbank. She brushed off her trousers and jacket. Some snow had gotten inside her neck gaiter. She shivered. “Well, at least now we know where they’re hiding. Who wants to volunteer to jump in the snow, next time?”
★
They came up with a better way to scare the POCKs out of their snowy dens. They used their laser rifles to carve chunks of ice out of the tracks, and threw these into the snowbanks. Fifty meters further down the ravine, this tactic paid of.
Another POCK burst out of the snow. This one was even bigger, with a black band around its body.
But it did not run away. It stood on its hind legs, waving its forepaws, and squealed urgently. Elfrida had the strangest feeling that it was trying to tell her something.
This time, all three of them had their rifles ready. Colden fired first. Her pulse vanished harmlessly into the darkness. Elfrida lined up the POCK in the crosshairs displayed on her contacts. Her hands shook. Just like Shyaka had told them. Point blank. Can’t miss.
