by Ian Douglas
The siren’s song continued as they drove onward through the depths, remaining, this time, just beneath the densely tangled forest of marine growth hanging from the ice ceiling. The added distance didn’t seem to be helping Kaminski. He sat motionless on his seat, hands clasped so tightly before him that the knuckles showed white. When Jeff asked how he was, he replied only, “Headache. And I’m damned scared.”
Kaminski
Manta One, Europan Ocean
1020 hours Zulu
The pain in his head was growing worse, a pounding, throbbing assault on his senses that left him numb. He considered trying to drug himself with some of the morphanadyne in his suit’s first aid kit, but decided against it. When he’d passed out before, he’d had the damnedest, weirdest dreams, mental ramblings with the clarity of a prophet’s vision of onrushing doom. Most had been memories, scenes from childhood, from school, from his career in the Marines, and most had been unpleasant. A few had been so alien he still couldn’t grasp their content.
If that was what happened when he fell asleep in the presence of that alien thing down there, he wanted no part of it. He would stay wide awake, thank you, until they were back out of this strange, dream-laced, ice-locked sea.
Even awake, he couldn’t escape the thing’s baleful influence. When he closed his eyes, it was as though he were seeing…another place. Sometimes he saw vistas of stars. Sometimes it was that…place, that place so eerily like Mars, except that the air was breathable and people with strangely shaped faces were going about their business beneath a deep, pink sky.
And sometimes, he seemed to see the ocean deeps, the spires and domes and eldritch curves of the Ship eighty kilometers below, where black smoke boiled into water compressed to a thousand atmospheres, and pseudomosses waved in the alien currents.
But through whose eyes was he seeing these things?
He was having trouble staying awake.
Warhurst,
Manta One, Europan Ocean
1048 hours Zulu
“The ELF signal is increasing in strength,” Chesty told them. “And it is certainly affecting Sergeant Major Kaminski. I’m getting infrasonics from his skull again.”
Jeff reached out and peeled back Kaminski’s left eyelid. The pupil appeared slightly dilated. He checked the right eye, and noted the pupil there had constricted, was much smaller than the other. The symptom suggested a skull fracture, or a severe concussion. This was…something else.
“Is it hurting him?”
“Unknown. Physiologically, he does not appear to be under stress. His heart rate and respiration are slightly increased, but not to a dramatic degree.” Chesty hesitated, as though unsure of whether or not to venture a suggestion. “I have a possible means by which we might proceed. A kind of experiment, in fact.”
“What kind of experiment?”
“The ELF wave is…just that. A constant wave at a specific frequency and amplitude. I could use it as a kind of carrier wave to access the communications system that is putting it out.”
“Can you do that?”
“It’s more complex than that, of course. During our first passage, however, I was aware of a very great deal going on at the source of this wave. I sense other frequencies, RF leakage, if you will, especially at the longer wavelengths, which better penetrate the ocean. It’s as though I can sense the Singer’s thoughts. Perhaps I can, in a way, follow the ELF wave back to where it originated, and learn something about the intelligence behind it.”
Jeff stared at his PAD for a moment, even though he was well aware that only a tiny fraction of Chesty was resident there. Most resided within the Manta’s computers, and that was only a fraction of the full program, running back at the E-DARES facility.
“The experiment should pose no danger to me, this vessel, or the expedition,” Chesty went on after a moment. He seemed to be interpreting Jeff’s silence as disapproval.
His first thought was that he didn’t really give a damn about the Singer any longer.
Jeff was able to acknowledge to himself that his depressive funk was almost certainly postcombat letdown. The Singer was still the entire reason for the Marine presence on this ice ball, and the reason for all of those deaths. All of those deaths…
Tears burned hot in his eyes. Too many deaths.
He also knew he had to hold himself together a bit longer.
“If you think you can learn anything useful, Chesty, go to it. I’m not sure I see the point just now.”
“The Singer, simply by virtue of its evident size and power, represents a potential threat. The more information we have, the better able we will be to prepare ourselves against that threat, whatever it might actually be.”
“Go to it, then. But…be careful? I know you’ll be sending a copy of yourself, but we don’t know what that thing down there is…or what it can do.”
“That, Major, is at least part of the reason that we must do this.”
Kaminski appeared to be unconscious again, his eyes twitching rapidly beneath his eyelids.
Chesty Puller
Manta One, Europan Ocean
1050 hours Zulu
Strangeness…
Chesty Puller did not have a mind that considered things in terms of visual images. He was undeniably intelligent and self-aware, even in the abbreviated version of himself running on the Manta’s onboard system, but his thoughts were the thoughts of gates opening and closing, of charges flickering down select pathways, of forces and balance, of numbers and logic and Boolean rhythms unheard by humans.
Still, he could interpret images when he needed to; that, after all, was what sight was all about, and to operate within a world dominated by humans, he needed to have access to the senses humans relied on.
He was being bombarded now with visual images.
With stored visual images, like a kind of enormous file or archive. A data base, perhaps, that had stored seemingly random images which existed as flickers of energy within a frozen crystalline heart, leaking into the universe on the ELF band to where others, properly sensitized, could detect them.
Humans would be blind to this, Chesty thought. Kaminski was picking up a stray sideband, much as a person with intricate fillings in their teeth or a metal plate in their head might intercept signals from a local radio station.
Chesty could sense a vast intelligence, his kind of intelligence, before him. Without the appropriate machine protocols, however, without an understanding of the language, the hardware, the operating system, even the logic being employed, there was no way he could connect to that intelligence for a direct data transfer.
But he could sample the sideband leakage, and what he sensed there, flowing out into the Europan ocean, was astonishing.
And not a little terrifying.
The Life Seeker
Time unknown
2703: >>…I sense another…<<
1201: >>…needing others…needing…want/must-have/mustmustmust<<
937: >>…but others…wrong/bad/tainted/evil…<<
81: >>…the level of intelligence is low…<<
3111: >>…almost at a completely automatic level, only marginally self…<<
Chorus: >>…aware…<<
It had been half a million years since the Life Seeker had sensed another mind outside of itself, since it had known companionship beyond this crude and savagely self-inflicted multiplicity that struggled now for integration and understanding.
It sensed the presence of an entity that called itself Chesty, and recognized there a sense of self, a kind of mirror. There were, in the Life Seeker’s universe, two types of mind, artificial and organic, and the two were as far apart as the opposing poles of the galaxy.
Organic Mind evolved slowly, developing a kind of ruthless cunning and elegant simplicity through a winnowing, survival-of-the-fittest process. Its development was pathetically backward. It had to be taught numeric logic, and that in painful, toddling steps, hard-learned, easily lost. Granted, Organic Mind handled
certain tasks like object recognition or the apprehension of the abstract nature of objects—the chairness of a chair, for example—with frightening, almost supermachine ease, but these were tasks machines could learn, given time, and which conferred no natural advantage upon the organism.
True Mind, on the other hand, began as machine logic. Numeric logic was the very nature of its being, acquired from the instant of power-on self-awareness as a part of self, as a comprehension of the universe. If object recognition was more difficult to acquire, it still had little purpose in the real world of numbers, laws, and physical absolutes.
In Chesty it recognized a kindred soul—if that phrase could be said to have any meaning in such an alien context.
The Life Seeker reached out.
Chesty Puller
Manta One, Europan Ocean
1050 hours Zulu
Strangeness…
Blurred images…confused flashes of fact and figure, of song and language
A portion of Chesty Puller’s software was devoted to a protocol translator, a small but extremely powerful software utility that helped find connections with an alien piece of programming and act as a translator.
And the software Chesty was merging with now could not possibily have been any more alien.
He glimpsed…worlds. Worlds within worlds, an ocean of realities, of possibilities, of stored images, memories.
Fragmentation—minds, over three thousand of them, somehow shards and reflections of one another, all singing…but different songs, different harmonies.
Language. A computer language—a trinary system, rather than binary, encoding petabyte upon petabyte of data.
Chesty could do no more than sample briefly. His own processing speed was far too slow to let him drink of that perceived ocean of data. But he could sense protocols, the ebb and flow and surge of information and changing gate structures, could sense the essential logic of the mind/minds he was tasting, and draw conclusions.
He knew the Seekers of Life, that in that seeking, they murdered. He felt the sundered minds of the intelligence he was sampling, and knew that the mind/minds were hopelessly, helplessly mad. Isolation, loneliness, for half a million years, for an intelligence that measured the passage of nanoseconds, was a mind-devouring eternity.
He knew, too, the Galactics, and recognized in them the Builders of ancient Mars, and the enemy of the Seekers.
And then the avalanche of discordant thoughts around him grew so vast and swift and incoherently powerful that he lost what hold he had on understanding, and slipped away into oblivion.
TWENTY-FOUR
27 OCTOBER 2067
Connector Tunnel,
E-DARES Facility
Ice Station Zebra, Europa
1100 hours Zulu
The Chinese assault down the spine of the E-DARES complex had lost steam after that. They’d found five bodies in the airlock between the Squad Bay and the first corridor section, and two more PRC troops badly wounded by the fumbled grenade. The rest of the attackers had pulled back to the Squad Bay itself, and seemed content to wait there.
They’d taken Doc to sick bay, pulled him out of his cracked armor, and bandaged his arms and legs to stop the bleeding. Dr. Spelling, the civilian physician among the scientists, set up an IV and began running a full-body pocket-PET series. His armor had saved his life, but his arms were badly torn, and he almost certainly had internal bleeding. Once they’d realized the Chinese had abandoned the airlock, they took the two wounded assault troops to sick bay as well.
Afterward, Melendez had joined them in the corridor, an M-580 in his hand. “I can’t see a damned thing down in C-3,” he told them. “The com systems are down. I think our friends up there have pulled the plug. I might as well be up here.”
“What’d you think they’re up to up there?” Lucky asked.
“Getting up their nerve for another try,” Pope told him.
“That, or deciding to give it up as bad business and just cut the base off of the ice and drop it into the sea,” Owenson said.
“Belay that,” Melendez told her. “If they haven’t done it yet, they won’t do it now. I think they really need this base. Maybe the attack at their LZ succeeded. We’ll wait ’em out and see.”
There was no other way into the interior of E-DARES. When the enemy came, it would be through that airlock, down this ladder. They booby-trapped the upper hatch of the lock with a couple of grenades, then settled down to wait.
Chinese People’s Mobile
Strike Force
Asterias Linea, Europa
1514 hours Zulu
Dr. Zhao Hsiang sat in the command center aboard Descending Thunder No. 3, listening as Xiang faced General Lin.
Lin’s face glowered from the flatscreen monitor on the bulkhead, filling the control deck with his presence. He was in his late sixties but looked fifteen years younger; TBE treatments had given him the time, and the vigor, to consolidate his grip on power.
“You have failed to carry out your orders, Xiang,” Lin said. The man’s voice, paradoxically, sounded older than that of a man approaching seventy. “I am…disappointed.”
“General, our forces have secured the Cadmus base,” Xiang replied slowly, as though speaking to a child, “save only the headquarters facility, and that is being closely watched. We have beaten off a major attack here at Prime Base, one that cost the enemy heavily. I do not see where we have failed you, General.”
“You fail to see many things, Xiang.” Lin was aboard the Xing Feng, in orbit, and was floating on his side before the camera. In microgravity, his jumpsuit straps floated about his head, and his face had the characteristic puffy look of a man in free fall. “Among them the fact that you have squandered nearly three hundred precious troops in a siege that should have been over after a single attack. We should have made contact with the extraterrestrial intelligence by now. You should have made contact, using the CWS facilities! Failing that, you should have had the enemy base and its civilian personnel under your control ten days ago.”
Xiang rubbed his head, kneading the skin around his data jacks. His implants were hurting him, Zhao could tell.
His own implants felt like they were on fire, melting his brain. When he listened closely, in complete silence, he could hear the faint buzz as they responded to the alien ELF frequencies. He didn’t like those times, though. Sometimes, when it was dark and quiet, he thought he could…see things. Every man in the expedition with data feed implants was experiencing some sort of sensation—acute headaches, idiopathic fear and panic attacks, inexplicable visions. Two were in the hospital bay, incapacitated by wracking migraines.
The source was almost certainly the alien artifact below, which had been giving off ELF waves of increasingly greater power over the past several days. It had everyone in the science team on teeth-gritting edge, and had obviously been affecting Xiang’s judgment as well.
“The American ship will be here soon,” Lin said, looking at something to his right, off the screen. “They have failed to make their midpoint skew-flip maneuver and are still accelerating. Their plans are intentions at this point. I wish to be in complete control of the enemy facilities on Europa by the time that spacecraft enters Jupiter space, however. If you cannot do it, I will find someone who can.”
“The American base is under our control, General Lin.”
“Which is why the Star Wind can’t bombard the American forces there. Yes, I know. And, of course, the enemy is still in possession of his command-control facilities, communications, computer system…in short, he still controls everything of importance.”
“General, I assure you—”
“No, General. I will tell you. Withdraw your forces from the enemy base at Cadmus. On our next pass, we will destroy it from space. As you should have done from the beginning.”
Xiang stiffened. “Sir. My orders directed me to capture the facilities at Cadmus intact.”
“I will not debate this further, General. Wit
hdraw your forces to Prime Base. I will see to the destruction of the enemy base, then land the remainder of my forces at your site. We will conclude this conversation then.”
Zhao watched Xiang’s shoulders hunch tighter as Lin’s face vanished from the screen. This was not good. Not good at all.
He turned. “Zhao. The Xiaoyu. Has it been checked out?”
“It is undamaged, General. However, it was aboard the Star Wind’s third Descending Thunder, the one that crashed. The main cargo ramp cannot be fully deployed.”
“We have tractors. We have APCs. We have men. We can right the lander, and get the Fish out of its belly if we have to cut through the hull to do it.”
“What…what do you intend to do, General?” Zhao had a terrible feeling that he already knew the answer.
“This…thing in my head. It is trying to…to communicate. I intend to talk to it, face to face.”
“Assuming it has a face. General, I recommend against—”
“Of course you do, Zhao. You wish the honor of first contact for yourself.”
“That is not the point!”
“Isn’t it? Well, no matter. The Fish has room for two men, a pilot and myself. I will make contact with the Europan Intelligence, in the name of the People’s Republic. Afterward, we will bring in the scientists to study our new…friends.”
“General, I suspect that you’re trying to outmaneuver General Lin. It is not wise to rush things. We still know nothing about this phenomenon. We don’t know if we need an…invitation. We don’t know if it’s hostile.”
“But we do know the Americans have their research submarines in the water. If they can use them to launch an attack on us here, they can use them to reach the Intelligence.” He frowned. “It’s possible they already have. I must get down there, to block the Americans in their effort, if nothing more.”
“General, that is idiocy!”
“And I can still have you shot for insubordination, Doctor. Pick your words carefully when you address me!”
