by Ian Douglas
“Aquí!”
“Hastings.”
“Hoo-yah!”
“Kaminski.”
“Ooh-rah!” A Marine battlecry challenging the SEAL’s hoo-yah. He saw Kaminski grin at the SEAL and wink.
“Lang.” Maybe she was Leckie’s love interest, a good-looking black girl from Virginia. She was married, though, with both a husband and a wife at home. Not that that meant anything, necessarily.
“Nodell.” Big, rugged, and a hard drinker, in and out of trouble, but deadly with a SLAW, a 580, or his hands. Three times divorced, a Marine lifer.
“Yeah.”
“O’Day.” A quiet, red-haired corporal and a member of Humanity First, though he never voiced any political opinions that Jeff knew of.
“Yo.”
“Peterson.” A straight-laced black kid from Ohio. Seemed determined to prove himself, no matter what. Another Wyvern ace.
“Present.”
“Wojak.” One of the company clowns, but a good man.
“Right here.”
“And…Doctor Ishiwara.”
“Hai! Yes.”
As he called off each name, a status light winked green on the list scrolling down the side of his HUD. Chesty, still resident in his PAD as well as in the E-DARES computer system, was interrogating each suit as he called off the name, and reporting back that the suit systems were powered up, intact, and go.
Twelve men and women, plus the two SEALs up front and the lone civilian passenger. Fourteen Marines—if you counted the two SEALs, and their experience and training was worth their mass in antimatter. Twelve more on Manta Two, under the command of Lieutenant Biehl. Twenty-seven men and women to challenge the Europan Ocean, followed by the main Chinese base on this world.
The longest and slimmest possible of long, slim shots.
“Cold Zebra, this is Icebreaker One,” he said over the Company frequency. “We are loaded, hot, and tight. Ready to proceed.”
“Icebreaker One, Cold Zebra. Icebreaker Two reports ready to swim.”
“Very well. Single up on all moorings. Stand by for release.”
“Roger that, One. Singling up on all moorings.”
Ashore, working parties of Marines would be releasing the webwork of cables securing the two research subs to the ice and taking in the electric blankets, though he couldn’t see them. The Manta had only the two tiny windows forward, plus a dorsal navigation dome amidships still covered over by a protective shell. The only one with a view out was Carver, using the HUD optic feed on his VR helmet.
“Icebreaker, Zebra. Lines singled up. Ready for release.”
Jeff looked at Carver. “You ready?”
“Engines green. Intakes green. All green. Let’s get it on.”
“Zebra, One. We’re go here.”
“Hang on, then, Icebreaker. All boats away!”
“Very well, Zebra. Let ’er slide!”
He felt a gentle lurch, and the soft, grinding slide as the sub slid backward into the water, pushed by a team of Marines linked together by safety lines in case the surface ice broke. The slide picked up speed, and Jeff heard the loud cracking and popping of ice giving way outside the hull.
Then there was a single shock, a roll to port, and the gentle, rocking sway of a small boat on a heavy swell. Ice continued to crack and snap as the hull flexed slightly, breaking the half-melted icy coating that had embraced the craft.
Jeff almost immediately felt an unpleasant tug at his stomach as seasickness took hold. It was worse, he thought, with an empty stomach. All he could do was hang on and hope he didn’t disgrace himself with a fouled helmet.
The Manta was heavier than water, though, and was settling fast, stern first. Carver tapped some icons on his touch console, and was rewarded by the throaty, rising hum of the sub’s engines. “Zebra, Icebreaker One,” he said. “I have power. Engines at 20 percent. I have helm and maneuvering. Ice is coming off the wings. Cast off the safety.”
A single safety line, the end run through an eye on Manta One’s nose and back to the shore to double it up, had remained in place during the launch. Mantas didn’t rely on ballast tanks, but literally flew through the water like an aircraft through air. If the engines hadn’t started, the boat would have sunk, and only that doubled-up line through the nose eye would have saved them from a very long fall into the abyss.
With the engines whining smoothly, though, the shore party released one end of the safety line and dragged it rapidly through the eye and back to shore. “Icebreaker One, you are clear to navigate.”
“Roger that, Zebra. Going down. See you in a couple of days!”
Jeff felt the deck tilt sharply to port as the Manta turned away from the dock. The rolling subsided too, a clear indication that they were now beneath the surface. He wished he could see what Carver was seeing on his VR input; it might alleviate the dank and claustrophobic closeness of the compartment a bit.
Reaching up, he broke his helmet seal, then pulled the heavy half-sphere off his head. He stowed it with his M-580 on a bulkhead rack, and unsnapped his gloves as well.
“Okay, people,” he said. “You can unseal. But stay in your suits, and no unnecessary moving around.” Carver was going to have enough on his hands flying this thing through the murky waters beneath the ice without having his Marine passengers constantly changing his center of mass. “There’s space for your helmets and gloves beneath your seats,” he continued, “and racks behind you for your weapons. Move two at a time, and watch out for that overhead. It’s a killer.”
Carefully, he lay down on his stomach on the starboard forward couch, pulling himself along with the handholds to either side until his face was a few centimeters from the viewing port, a tricky maneuver given the ungainly reach of the PLSS perched mass-high on his back and shoulders.
Outside, the water was a deep and murky blue-green, with pale green light still filtering down from above. Powerful searchlights mounted on the upswept stabilizer tips of the Manta’s wings illuminated a swirling blizzard of particles trapped in the brilliant white beams. At the moment, pools of light were sweeping across the gray, white, and black surface—all smooth planes and crisp angles, but lightly covered with uneven patches of fuzzy brown growth.
He felt someone sliding into the port-side couch, bulky in his space suit. Shigeru pressed his face close to the view-port, his face illuminated by the bright, white reflections from outside. “I had to see,” he said. “You have no idea how I’ve wanted to see these things with my own eyes, instead of through the optics of teleoperated probes!”
“Is that Europan life, then?” Jeff asked. Some of the brown stuff looked a lot like moss, with long filaments waving in the current created by hot, upwelling water.
“We think so.”
“You think so? Don’t you know? Haven’t you gathered specimens?”
“Oh, certainly. And we’ve given it the provisional genus name of Muscomimus, the ‘moss-mimic.’ But Dr. Red-mondson, our chief of exobiology, is not yet convinced that it is a true life form. It may simply be an unusual accretion of sulfur and carbon compounds in long-chain molecules, a purely nonorganic process.”
“It looks like it’s growing…and reproducing. All over the E-DARES’ hull.”
“We’ve seen whole forests of the stuff growing on the bottom of the ice. And it is gathering raw materials, food, if you will, from the water, and it seems to carry on this process by drawing energy—in this case, thermal energy from the hot water coming up from the E-DARES’ anti-icers—from its surroundings. But, well, we’re still working on finding a good definition for the word life.”
Jeff chuckled. “That’s a hell of a note.”
“What?”
“That the more we learn, the more we find out about the universe around us, the harder it is to answer the simple questions, like ‘what is life?’”
“Basic questions, Major. Not simple. In fact, that one may be one of the most complex questions there is.”
&nbs
p; “Yeah?”
“Yes. Just ask any AI.”
The Manta continued its slow turn, and the E-DARES hull slid out of view off to the right. Tiny motes danced in the sub’s searchlight beams, a snowstorm of particles.
“Europamegabacter sulfurphilos,” Shigeru said. “That is alive.”
“It looks like dirt,” Jeff said. “Or snow.”
“It appears to be a close analogue of a life form known on Earth. Not related, of course, but an example of convergent evolution.”
“Yes?”
“A bacteria discovered off the coast of Angola seventy years ago. A single cell, yet it’s large enough to be seen by the naked eye—about the size of a period in a sentence, in fact, thousands of times larger than an ordinary bacterium. Most of that size is taken up by a huge vacuole, in which it stores nitrates to help in the metabolism of sulfur.”
“That stuff looks a lot bigger.”
“It is. Some specimens reach ten to fifteen millimeters in diameter. But they are single-cell organisms, nonetheless.
“So far, all of the life we’ve discovered on Europa is carbon based, like ours, but dependent on sulfur for metabolic processes. Just like the giant bacteria on Earth, or the sulfur-loving life discovered at the openings of volcanic vents in Earth’s oceans, at the intersection of seismic plates. You see, it doesn’t need light, as photosynthetic life does.”
Jeff could only shake his head. Here, things that looked like they were alive and growing might well not be alive at all, at least in the conventional sense, while stuff that looked like dirty snow caught in the Manta’s lights was following the same patterns of life laid down by organisms on Earth.
“Whoa,” Carver said suddenly. “Hey, Major. You hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“Listen.”
Yes…he did hear something. It was so faint at first he’d not been able to hear over the background conversation, the hum of the air ventilation system, the hollow rush of water across the vessel’s hull. Slowly, though, it grew louder, swelling to a low, eerie ululation, mingled with rattling clicks and keening, high-pitched shrieks, but still so distant you had to strain to make it out.
“The Singer, Chief Carver,” Jeff said.
“Affirmative, sir. I was picking up some as soon as we hit the water, but it didn’t really become audible until we got down beneath the ice. It’s muffled quite a bit by the hull. Must be pretty loud outside, for us to hear it this clearly.”
“Yes,” Shigeru said. “We didn’t hear it until we lowered hydrophones well beneath the icecap and into the ocean proper. But the sound, especially the lower registers, travels quite well for astonishing distances. The sound waves reflect between the ice and the bottom, you know, and can travel all the way around the moon.”
Jeff had heard recordings, of course, but something about the real sound set the hair on the back of his neck aprickle. It was hard not to hear patterns in those mournful cries—and intelligence, a meaning of some sort just beyond the grasp of human understanding.
“Not exactly Top Forty pop, is it?” Wojak observed.
The subs veered toward the southwest and accelerated, Manta One moving well out into the lead to avoid having both boats lost by the same accident. For a time, the ice ceiling gliding past overhead remained visible, a slowly receding jaggedness fading into water thick with drifting particles, like fog. Shigeru was right; much of that ceiling was coated with vast patches of brown, mossy tendrils, a weird, upside-down forest in the night.
Then ice and forest were lost in darkness, with black night above and black below, and only the lonesome gleam of the Manta’s lights to mark out a small, fuzzy domain of warmth and illumination. After an hour, Icebreaker Two, Carver reported, was about three kilometers astern, its lights lost in the gloom.
It made the loneliness, the isolation more intense, somehow, with the Manta a tiny bubble of heat and mind adrift in stark isolation alone in the abyssal black.
Another hour passed. A third. The men and women talked quietly among themselves, or lost themselves in PAD novels or spoke quietly into their PAD pickups as they assembled e-mails for the next scheduled uplink. Jeff had already told them that if they had any mail home they wanted to finish up, to do it on the trip and store it in the Manta’s computer.
That way, so long as the Manta made it back at all, the mail would be delivered, no matter what.
Everyone knew what that meant.
He spent some time studying the men and women in the aft compartment, trying to peer inside their minds, to see, to feel how they were reacting to…everything, from being marooned on an alien world, to the isolation of the tiny CWS base, to suffering a heart-numbing 47 percent casualties on this campaign so far, to being sealed inside this carbon-boron-bucky-fiber can and dropped into an ink-black ocean eighty kilometers deep, a blackness alive with the eerie cries of an alien voice.
Hell, they’d been through enough already to break damned near anyone, and they kept on going. Wojak, Garcia, and Nodell all looked nervous but were working their PADs; Nodell couldn’t seem to get his to work and was muttering a long, steady stream of obscenities to no one in particular. Peterson looked calm and was quietly reading a novel on his. Amberly was asleep. Campanelli and Cartwright were talking to each other. Kaminski worked his PAD. Hastings stared at nothing, his blue eyes very cold.
Or perhaps he was staring at the Singer in his mind’s eye.
The sounds grew louder, slowly, as the kilometers rolled away in the Manta’s wake. It seemed to Jeff they were steadily becoming more complex as well, as new over-and undertones, harmonies, and blended sounds trilled and chirped and groaned in the deep distance. It sounded, he thought, like a chorus of some vast, majestic sea beast—like the extinct great whales were supposed to have been. Could there be whales on Europa?
Unlikely. According to Shigeru, Europan marine life was primitive, most of it unicellular, though larger, more organized forms existed in the great deep. Throughout the vast, foggy emptiness between ice ceiling and mud bottom, however, there was nothing like a fish, or a whale. Nothing but detritus adrift on the icy currents, and the ongoing, haunting song of the Singer.
Four hours into the voyage, and Carver and Hastings exchanged places. Now Carver sat on the jump seat, absorbed by something in his PAD, while Hastings, face and voice muffled by the VR helmet, guided the Manta through the black depths.
Five hours. Jeff and Shigeru crawled onto the viewing couches again when Hastings warned of interesting terrain ahead. Their depth was fifty-one kilometers; the pressure on the outer hull was 663 atmospheres—9,746 psi by the old way of measuring such impossible-to-comprehend physics, or just over 692 kilograms per square centimeter.
The Manta, still descending on a long, shallow glide, was approaching a mountain ridge upthrust from the Europan ocean’s abyssal depths. As he watched, shadowy forms moved into the glare of the sub’s wingtip lights—a wall of rock, and a forest of gently waving fronds.
“Well, Dr. Ishiwara?” he asked as the scientist settled in next to him again. “What’s the verdict? Life or not life?”
“I wish I could say,” Shigeru replied. He had to raise his voice a bit to be heard above the Singer’s moans and trilling wails. “I’ve never seen these species before. My guess is that they’re alive. They look a bit like sea fans on Earth, or some kinds of seaweed. But they also look a lot like very large clumps of Muscomimus. I don’t know.”
The sub skimmed the mountain ridge. As rock and the waving sea grasses dropped away astern, Jeff was struck by an uneasy thought. The average depth of the seabed here was eighty kilometers; that suggested that the mountain range they’d just crossed thrust some twenty-nine kilometers into Europa’s sky, if you thought of the moon’s ocean as its atmosphere. Twenty-nine thousand meters—three and a third times the height of Mount Everest in the Himalayas. Two point eight times taller than Mauna Kea, as measured from that mountain’s base at the bottom of the Pacific.
; It seemed strange to think of tiny Europa, a world only a quarter of Earth’s diameter, with mountains three times higher.
“Those mountains,” Shigeru said, as though reading Jeff’s thoughts. “So high, compared to Earth’s. Proof of the violence of this tiny world.”
“How so?”
“Europa is next out from Io, with an orbit only half again larger. The tidal strains on Europa are nearly as great as those that tear at Io—and Io, as they say, is a moon in the process of turning itself inside out. Huge lakes of molten sulfur, volcanoes spewing sulfur hundreds of kilometers into space.
“Europa is not that extreme, but the tidal action is what keeps this ocean liquid. There are volcanoes here, you know, in the depths, and the equivalent of Earth’s “black smokers” as well, spewing sulfur and nitrates and various minerals and compounds into the ocean. There must have been considerable tectonic activity and mountain building.”
“Maybe the lower gravity makes for higher mountains,” Jeff suggested.
“That’s certainly part of it. But the forces within this world’s crust—they make Earth seem tame by comparison.”
Six hours. The song was louder, sharper, more insistent.
Kaminski was looking…not worried, exactly. It was hard to imagine the Sergeant Major being worried by anything. But he was looking uncharacteristically tired and drawn out, his eyes dark hollows, and he was staring at the overhead as though the Singer’s song was wearing at him.
“Ski?” When Kaminski didn’t respond right away, Jeff called louder. “Sergeant Major!”
“Sir!”
“A word with you, please.”
Kaminski rose from his seat and made his way forward, stooping to avoid hitting the overhead. “Yes, sir?”
“You doing okay, Ski? You’re looking a bit ragged.”
“I’m okay, sir. I’m just tired, is all. Have a bit of a headache.”
“You take something?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay. Hang in there. I need everyone alert and gungho—especially my senior NCOs.”
