Putting the telescope down for a moment, I said to them, “So we’re some kind of black ops thing? Is that it?”
“I’ve hacked into Cytex’ accounts,” said Kell.
“You have?” I said, staring, amazed. “How’d you do that?”
“One day I just realized I knew how to do it. Just like magic. Funny, eh?”
“Right,” I said, still astonished.
Airlie cut in, “We’ve all got different special abilities. I’m supposed to be some kind of astronomer or astrophysicist. I can talk your head off about stellar phenomena. Why? I don’t know. I guess I’m going undercover as a scientist once Cytex rolls us out.”
Kell nodded, smiling, and went on, “They’ve got a surprisingly large budget item marked ‘Miscellaneous Revenue’ which they claim comes from third-party sources, like goodwill and reputation credits. There’s a lot of deeply dubious stuff going on deep in the bowels of their accounts.”
I nodded, listening. “Surely the company doesn’t encourage that kind of snooping about?”
“What they don’t know, Zette…” he said, grinning wickedly.
“We’ve got some homebrew crypto wrapped around this part of the cloud,” said Airlie. “To the techs, it looks like we’re going through routine training stuff. Conversation tactics. Personality conflict resolution. All that crap.”
“And you’re sure they don’t know you’ve hacked them?”
“There’s been no retaliation.”
“That doesn’t mean they don’t know you did it. That could mean they’re waiting for a—”
Kell interrupted, not rudely, but like someone who knows more than you do, and would just like to set things straight. “I know. I’ve thought of that. I’ve built some preventive measures into the crypto. If they twig to what we’re doing, we’ll know about it right away.”
“Hmm,” I said. “Nice of them to give you all these useful skills.”
“Not all of us got them. Depends on our future missions.” This was Airlie. “I can’t do the hacking and crypto work, for example. Wonder what you’re destined for?”
Bewildered, but also increasingly intrigued, I said, “In my story you’re a retired scientist.”
“Yeah,” she said, laughing, “a dead one!”
I remembered the recording of Airlie’s murder. I felt very confused, even upset. Too much was going on. All of this felt real, but all of the stuff with Gideon felt real. Maybe the actual truth was that none of it was real, and I was just crazy, and making it all up while dosed heavily with mood-controlling drugs.
Was I some kind of sleeper agent part of a secret black ops deal? I didn’t like the idea that I was a weapon of some sort. But then I didn’t particularly like being an android trying to pass for human either, along with a confusing swirl of complicated emotions — to say nothing of just about dying any number of times, and not knowing what to make of my feelings for Gideon.
But then, what did it matter? He was just a character.
Right?
Right?
Suddenly, the world shifted again, one reality sliding out as another slid in, replacing it.
I could neither see nor hear anything. There was terrible vibration and jostling. I was full of burning, biting pain, sloshing about completely submerged in some kind of big tank of warm, tingling fluid. There was a respirator in my mouth.
My headware chimed to report new mail.
It was a note from Gideon:
McGee — You’re awake. Good. Sorry about the turbulence. You collapsed back at the bank. You can tell me about it later, if we make it out of Europa alive.
Listen. We’ve got a bit of a situation. The wreckage of the Otaru Emulation ship crashed into a fairly thin bit of Europa’s crust at very high speed. The crust cracked all the way down to water. Before the Emulation ship crashed, surviving nodes sent our ship down under the ice to the bank to rescue us, and flashed us aboard. Now we’re trying to get out of Europa the hard way. Projections suggest the whole moon could crack open, lose its oceans, or even have its orbit destabilized. Your guess is as good as mine right now. What we do know for sure is that it will not take long.
Oh, and when Hydrogen Steel attacked the Emulation ship, it knocked out their displacement thing. Apparently this includes ours. We have to fly out through the crack. Which is getting bigger. God knows what’s happening at the surface, but it’s bound to be rough as rough gets. Just hang in there, McGee. — Smith
CHAPTER 30
First, I panicked and tried to get out of the tank, which proved impossible; the controls were outside. Settling down, I read through Gideon’s note about twenty or thirty times, growing more astonished with each reading, and trying to imagine what things must look like up on the moon’s surface. Would the water jet out into the vacuum of space, turn to steam, and escape Europa’s gravity? Or would it fall back on the remaining surface as snow? Would the rate at which the water boiled out of the hole be insufficient to prevent the ice reforming, sealing the remaining ocean in? Which would present problems for us, tooling along in submarine mode. Did this ship have any kind of weapons with which we might be able to punch through perhaps ten kilometers of ice and slush? I had no idea. I was a copper, not a planetary scientist.
Or was I?
The panic shifted around in my head as I thought about my conversation with Airlie and Kell back in the Cytex Systems cloud. Was I really all right because this whole thing was a story we’d all written? Could I just lie back and say to myself, “nah, it’s just a story” and not worry about anything?
All of this might be an illusion, but from the all-over burning sensation of countless zillions of medical nanobots working on my body to the sloshing and bumping as this small ship jerked and jinked its way through uncertain, perilous waters, it felt real enough. I could hear the strain of the powerplant as the ship struggled through lightless ocean with conventional fusion propulsion not designed for underwater work. The ship trembled and heaved. Occasionally, I heard the powerplant give out and restart. Gideon would be furious, trying to coax engines not rated for operation in these conditions to keep firing.
Meanwhile, I tried not to think about the colossal water pressure. Here and there we collided with some kind of undersea rock formation or seamount, and that made my nano-fluid bath slosh and shake inside the tank, banging me about with it — and I wondered if the spaceframe would hold. Surely it would take only the most minute crack or flaw in the ceramocomp hull to instantly tear us wide open and the unthinkable weight of the sea would crush us so fast we’d never feel it. Most ships are built to handle a certain amount of underwater pressure in case of an emergency, and the materials used in spacecraft construction these days were phenomenally strong. But were they strong enough? I kept brooding about it, and trying to keep myself from dwelling on what such a death might be like. The speed of it fascinated me. I had often thought that the final moment of death must be beyond human perception, simply because the equipment required to perceive this final moment — a brain at least slightly conscious — would be, by definition, no longer conscious. You would never know that final moment of transition. Thinking about that from my current perspective, in which the hull could crack and countless tonnes of water could flood in instantly, smashing both the ship and its passengers to atoms, it was almost comforting to think that the entire thing could happen faster than your perception could catch it and show it to your conscious mind.
I was actually grateful to be in the tank, spared the worst of the experience. I imagined Gideon tightly strapped in somewhere, gritting his teeth, trying to keep up with warnings from sensors not designed to work underwater.
Working around the discomfort of having a respirator in my mouth, I managed to radio Gideon. “Smith, are you there? How are you doing with the navigation?”
The ship swerved suddenly a
nd I heard something graze the hull. Gideon called back: “I’m keeping rather busy, McGee. The Otaru fellow is helping out, tinkering with the displacement drive, but the actual hardware is not aboard the bloody vessel. There’s vacuum energy converters and some small fusion reactors, yes, but the actual engines are elsewhere!”
I thought about this at length. “What do you mean, the displacement drive is somewhere else? Where else is there if not on the bloody ship?”
A few minutes later, after some violent, nausea-inducing maneuvering and some disturbing sounds from the powerplant, Gideon replied. “The bloody Otaru fellow knows all. Ask him!”
“So we’re relying on the fusion powerplant thing?”
“It’s not meant for propulsion,” Gideon said after a few tense moments “And we’re venting plasma from exhaust systems not intended for the purpose so we can move, yes. Sorry about the ride.”
We carried on, driving through the stygian, roiling ocean, dodging certain death, praying for a fusion reactor — used mainly to provide emergency heating and life-support for the “engines” — to keep firing, and praying that we would get out of the crack alive. The turbulence was getting much worse. I took this, perversely, as a good sign. We must be approaching the crack. I asked Gideon, quickly, for a ShipMind feed. Some minutes later he routed the displays through to my headware so I could watch what was happening.
We were nearly at the crack. But there were complications.
The priority comms channel announced that emergency engineering teams out of Ganymede had arrived, and wanted to know if there was anybody in need of rescue or other assistance, because they were about to start plugging the vast hole.
They were going to do what? I swore, nearly losing my respirator in the process. The crack, I gathered, was now several kilometers across at its widest point. The pressure of water rushing out was forcing the edges of the hole to erode and fall upwards. Smaller chunks were reaching escape velocity; the larger chunks were falling back to the surface nearby, a potentially deadly rain of ice boulders, some very large indeed.
Gideon was trying to contact the emergency team to let them know we were still inside, but the comms systems were receiving but not sending. The engineers had no way to know we were down here.
The ship’s powerplant was screaming and approaching overload. Navigation was more and more difficult the closer we came to the tumultuous vortex. Mountainous quantities of water were moving around us.
Horrified but strangely fascinated, I watched as the polydiamond plug built itself out of the fastest engineering nano I’d ever seen, first stabilizing the outside to keep it from further erosion, then gradually creating a solid, secure foundation perimeter several kilometers deep, encasing the hole in multiple cross-woven layers of polydiamond, the toughest but also one of the cheapest materials known to human science.
I could hear Gideon swearing, insisting the powerplant stay online. “Keep going, you useless bastard! If only out of your professional pride as a bloody machine!” Things were bad when Gideon started appealing to a machine’s sense of pride.
I saw on the newsfeeds pouring into my headware that the plug would be complete in less than one hour, give or take.
Gideon’s best estimate suggested that we would arrive in the heart of the vortex in about one hour twenty minutes. This estimate assumed the “engines” kept going at more than 115 percent maximum rated output, as they were currently. I could see from ShipMind data that engine reliability started to fall away to next to nothing from 116 percent and up. Gideon clearly would like to get them working even harder, but he dared not, at least not yet.
“This doesn’t look good!” I shouted.
We hit something, hard, head-on, killing our forward speed.
I swore and prayed in about equal measure.
Immediately we got moving again, but Gideon’s maneuvers were little less than suicidal. After a moment, something rammed us from behind, even harder. While I worried if my tank would stay put and stay sealed, I glimpsed a sensor display. Something big was moving around us, shoving the ship this way and that. I swore, and tried to get some sensors on it. As far as I was aware, there were no big life forms living under Europa’s ice. But then I was hardly an expert. As I worked the interface, trying to get some kind of information about the creature, my mind was filled with ancient tales of sea monsters.
“Any idea what that was?” Gideon shouted.
“Checking now!” I said, blasting every active sensor we had outwards in all directions, without result. I swore and thumped the tank walls.
The ship’s hull integrity display was showing a slight flaw in the forward section.
Gideon was screaming into the comms system, trying to get a signal out to the engineers.
I discovered I could contact the Otaru node, who was busy trying to bring up the displacement drive. “Excuse me,” I said, using my hands and feet to stay in one place in my tank despite the wild sloshing and turbulence, “what’s up with the comms gear?”
“Inspector McGee. Many critical ship’s systems are offline as a result of Hydrogen Steel’s attack on the Emulation vessel,” the node said over the phone. “The combat viroids the firemind deployed copied themselves into every system and subsystem on not only the Emulation vessel but into all the small craft as well. I am presently using my own onboard headware systems to provide much of the functionality of this vessel’s ShipMind, while also attempting to hunt down and remove these intruders and repair the damage. There is a considerable danger, however, that the viroids will infect my onboard systems as well. Please accept Otaru’s profound apologies for this problem.”
It was eerie the way his voice remained perfectly calm and modulated while telling me all this, and while Gideon flew the ship like a desperate fighter pilot trying to avoid certain death.
I heard Gideon’s voice cut in. He was talking to the node: “Could we use the drive plume to punch another hole through the ice?” He actually said this in three panicked blurts; that enormous thing out there was still pounding the ship. The hull integrity display was showing another minute flaw to the rear on our port side, not far from the exhaust vents. How many more hits would it take to knock out the powerplant?
The Leviathan rammed us again. Even from inside my tank, I heard the spaceframe creak.
Then, before I could think of glancing at the hull integrity display, we lost main power.
There were a few terrifying seconds of cold darkness. With main power out, ShipMind was out. Even I realized we’d be sinking. We had been close to the crack, and close to the ice crust’s undersurface. The pressure was hellish, but survivable. If we sank much further though… It would only take a few k’s.
The creature slammed into us again, swooping in from above, and driving us down. My hands and feet lost their grip on the inside walls of the tank, and I tumbled about, banging my head against the glass. I was scanning the hell out of everything around us, and still couldn’t find the damned beast. Where the hell was it? More to the point, what the hell was it?
Emergency power came up. ShipMind flicked online. Artificial-g was back, but it flickered on and off. Almost immediately I felt ill.
“Hang on!” Gideon called over the radio. He was coughing badly.
He stood the ship on its tail and punched the engines for maximum burn.
The diamond plug would be finished very soon. We were nowhere near it.
The Otaru node called Gideon and reported, “Your idea of using the drive plume to cut through the crust has some merit. I must inform you, however, that this vessel has only limited means of providing counter-thrust. This means that aiming the drive plume at the ice would have the effect of causing the ship to dive rapidly, taking it away from the ice.”
I was watching external sensor feeds, which for the first time showed our enormous assailant circling the
ship, but keeping clear of the drive plume. It was about half the size of the ship and had three long grippers trailing behind it at least two-hundred meters long. I was too terrified to realize we were making an astonishing scientific discovery.
“Try pointing the drive plume at the creature!” I yelled at Gideon.
“Hold on. Getting Otaru feed,” said Gideon coolly.
The creature smashed us this way and that. The artificial-g grew more erratic. The engines started failing; the powerplant whined at a pitch I’d never heard before. Overload warnings were constant. The ship was thinking about exploding.
“Brace yourself!” Gideon shouted.
To the best of my ability, I braced. My ShipMind displays showed, for the first time, the actual displacement drive powering up.
The creature smashed us again, from the port side. The drive field collapsed. Gideon swore.
“I am once more in phase,” the Otaru node said over the radio.
The displacement drive again started to come up to full power.
Gideon flew the ship like a madman, now doing his best to slew and spin the ship to rake the creature with our fusion plume; he began to score some hits. The creature grew more wary and kept its distance.
Displacement drive power hit the critical value; the field held; and Gideon blinked us out of Europa.
We burst into real space again more than a thousand kilometers above Europa’s dazzling surface.
Emergency power choked and failed. The spaceframe, no longer exposed to unthinkable water pressure, flexed and cracked. We started losing atmosphere extremely quickly.
“Working on it!” Gideon called over the radio.
I saw through the vessel status channel that scores of automated maintenance bots were crawling out of their storage pods and spidering around the ship’s outer hull, looking for holes. Finding them, they sat on them until the ship’s crew could repair things from the inside. If the cracks were too big, the bots began extruding sealant materials through their spinnerets to patch the holes.
Hydrogen Steel Page 30
