by Jeff Carlson
"Stop it," Ash said as Harmeet added, "This is a helpless fury. Blaming yourself or Peter cannot bring back those who are gone."
Vonnie stared at Peter with her haggard, baleful eye. "Most of our mecha are gone, too. You're glad 114 was destroyed, aren't you? That was a good order as far as you're concerned."
"Stop it," Ash said, but it was Peter who persisted in arguing with her.
He said, "If we'd disappeared into the catacombs, the PSSC would have picked a fight with NASA or the FNEE. They would have destroyed our ships and our mecha no matter what. Cutting us off at the knees was their real objective, and you said it yourself -- they don't care about the sunfish. We're the fools who spent months chasing around with the tribes. I did everything I could to facilitate our dealings with the sunfish even when you or Ben or O'Neal went against orders."
"Where is Ben?"
"He's with Ribeiro and Tavares. They're extracting Module 02 from the ice."
"I want to see him."
"He'll be back in an hour." Peter said. Then he stood up. Harmeet attempted to stop him, tugging on his leg, encouraging him to stay.
"Let him go," Ash said. "Sir, get some food. Then I'll join you outside."
She always tries to be his little girl, Vonnie thought, but Peter obviously approved.
"Thank you, Ash," he said.
He walked to a counter where they'd arranged several cases of rations. He stood with his back to them and ripped open a cereal packet.
Vonnie lowered her gaze. She wanted to snarl at Ash but kept her mouth shut. Beside her, Harmeet's body language was sorrowful. Araújo looked uneasy like a stranger might feel at a bad family gathering.
Ash was livid, although she said nothing. She scowled at Vonnie. Then she got up and walked after Peter, positioning herself at his side. She grabbed a tube of zucchini paste. She began to eat.
Araújo seemed to consider leaving, too, but there wasn't anywhere to go in the small room, so Araújo busied himself with his display.
Vonnie took a breath. "Peter," she said.
He kept his back to her. He dug his cereal out of the packet with his hands, which wasn't like him at all. Normally he was extra neat.
She tried again. "Peter."
Softly, Harmeet said, "Leave him be. Let him cool down. You don't realize how little sleep we've had or how hard we've worked. He's led every shift."
"I shouldn't have yelled at him."
"You two have been unresolved for too long. There are other tensions at play."
"I'm not mad at Peter because of..." Vonnie didn't want to talk about her love life in front of Araújo. She changed the subject. "What's the new mission into the ice? Are we trying to gather our sunfish?"
"We have two goals," Harmeet said. "First we want to minimize the possibility that we can be used as hostages by the PSSC. We're going to construct a heavily defended base where most of us will dig in until more ships arrive."
"It's too late to hide now. Berlin just wants us to sit here?"
"No, sweetheart. We want to find the source of the radio transmission. The Americans intend to adapt some of their mecha. They'll turn them into probes. Washington and Berlin have also discussed building a submarine. We might send people into the Great Ocean. Whatever we do, you'll assist our engineers. We need the sunfish to show us an open chimney."
Exhilaration spread through Vonnie's chest. Bright and bold, it reenergized her, and she smiled against the white bandage on her face. "Peter!" she said. "Is that what you wanted to tell me? I..."
He didn't move except to continue eating, his shoulders hunched. She'd antagonized him when he wanted support, condemned him when he deserved applause.
Her voice fell. "How soon do we start?"
"That depends on you and the sunfish," Harmeet said. "The Americans will be here tonight. If they decide to send probes, redesigning their mecha won't take long. Maybe we can beat the PSSC to the ocean. You've seen our intel. Ash stole a few signals from PSSC beacons, and NASA has radar and seismography. The PSSC didn't have a clear route into the ice. They bulled their way down through a series of hot springs, digging and blasting, but their progress had been incremental with more than one setback. If we're guided to a chimney, we'll have a much easier path."
"We shouldn't send probes. We should send a submarine," Vonnie said, glancing from Harmeet to Araújo. She needed him to tell Colonel Ribeiro. She needed the FNEE soldiers on her side. "Every reason for sending people into the ice applies to sending people into the ocean. Our countries want to stake a claim on the water. There may be precious metals or fishing rights. The main thing is we want to expand our influence. Native populations are more likely to respond well to people than to mecha. That's how it's worked with the sunfish."
"Peter made the same arguments," Harmeet said.
"Yes, he argued well," Araújo said. "I hope I am not out of line by sharing my opinion. Colonel Ribeiro and Administrator Koebsch have engaged in several conversations with Brasilia and Berlin. They both endorsed sending a crewed submarine rather than probes."
Vonnie felt another spike of excitement. Restlessly, she rose onto her knees as if to stand up. "I need to talk to the matriarchs."
"You need rest and rehabilitation," Harmeet said. "There's nothing you can do now. Our scout suits are ruined. We'll have to borrow new ones from the Americans. Sit down. Please. Tomorrow is another day."
Vonnie looked at Peter again, regretting how she'd behaved. She turned to Araújo. "What can you tell me about the native radio installation? Are there sims?"
"Yes." He seemed relieved. He was more comfortable with his data than her personal conflicts. He opened a new file, showing her a mock-up of long transmitters built up and down the fin mountains. "The installation will be large," he said. "ELF communications are uncommon on Earth because the wavelengths exceed thirty-five hundred kilometers. Receivers may be small, but even with our advancements in nanostrands, the required length of a transmitter is one thousand kilometers. Naval forces and civilian mining operations accomplish this with ground dipoles. In space, filaments can serve as transmitters."
She nodded. "We use ELF on Mars for data/comm with our colonists underground."
"My country utilizes it in the Andes and on the floor of the Pacific," he said with evident pride. He'd forgotten that Brazil's occupation of Colombia, where they exploited the Andes for nickel and gold, was a point of contention between the West and the South American superpower.
Vonnie had zero doubt that Berlin and Washington would continue to ignore Colombia's plight in order to keep Brazil in their alliance. The Colombian invasion had taken place before she was born. At school, she'd watched media accounts of rioting and hunger strikes. Her classmates had organized "online marches" for solidarity.
Earth's geopolitical scene was a patchwork of holocausts - German history included - and she couldn't hold Araújo's nationalism against him.
He wants to serve a cause, she thought.
Araújo said, "If the alien cities are communicating through salt water and mountains, ELF is one of the few solutions available to them. It's probably how they communicated between their moons, assuming they were a spacefaring civilization. The energy requirements to put their signals through the crusts of Europa and Io would be stupendous. Sergeant Tavares and I are developing sims models, which we'll refine after we compare data with the Americans."
"I'd like to see those sims when you're done. We can look for power plants as well as radio installations."
"Their plants may be nuclear. Hydroelectric turbines could deliver the energy required for local broadcasts, but unless they positioned ten thousand turbines in the strongest currents, I cannot explain broadcasts from one moon to another. Of course they are not burning oil or coal. This will aid us in our search. Our probes can scan for thermal discharges from reactor cooling systems or immense fields of turbines. Also, assuming they don't have nanotechnology, their radio installations may exceed twenty kilometers in length."
Vonnie nodded again, but there were more things she couldn't say to him. Peter believes we aren't beaming messages at Io or into the Great Ocean so the PSSC won't know if we heard the ELF broadcast or not.
I think Berlin told us to stay quiet for another reason. Giant installations should be easy to spot. We can locate the native cities without telling them we're coming.
We can surprise them so we’ll start with the upper hand... but we don't want to seem too warlike... it will take finesse... and there are so few of the FNEE soldiers left, we can probably limit their involvement.
We saved their lives. We've fed and equipped their survivors. They owe us.
Brazil has always been a wild card. This is our chance not only to control First Contact with the native cities but to control the FNEE. Peter might be able to make them stand aside. Then we can run a joint ESA/NASA operation without Ribeiro, Araújo or Claudia.
Plans inside plans, lies within lies.
"Thank you, Captain," she told Araújo. She wanted to hear more, but she was too anxious to chat. She needed to approach Peter before he went outside.
Rising to her feet, she felt a twinge in her leg. Pain spread through her ribs. She wondered how long it would take before she felt 100% again or even 90%. She wondered what Henri and O'Neal's families were thinking. She wondered if she would be allowed to call them.
She joined Peter at the counter, standing on his left side where she could see him with her one eye. Maybe she hoped her skin grafts would buy her some sympathy. "Can we talk? I was wrong. I shouldn't have said what I did."
Peter stared at his cereal. Beside him, Ash turned her head as if she wanted to be anywhere else.
"I can make it up to you," Vonnie said.
Peter swung on her. "Like with Ben? Forget it. The fact is you enjoy your little game. I'm too busy. We can't keep going in circles."
"I don't... That's not fair."
"Maybe you don't see the pattern. I can't see anything else. It's all I've thought about. You draw me in, you push me out, and I can't figure out why Ben puts up with you."
He couldn't have hurt her more if he'd used a knife, but there was resentment mixed with her humiliation. She caught herself before she shouted at him. She didn't want to fight. She said, "If you and I had slept together first, you wouldn't want me to sleep with Ben, too. That's why you and I have gone back and forth."
He didn't answer and she remembered what Harmeet had told her about unresolved needs. Harmeet had been polite but firm.
Vonnie tried to strike the same tone. "Please," she said. "I don't like it, either. I never meant to hurt you. It's complicated. "
"Let's make it simple." His voice was flat. "You stay inside. I'll finish our repairs on Submodule 07."
"Peter..."
He dropped his half-eaten cereal on the counter like a man discarding his garbage. He didn't look at her. He walked to the hatch and laid his hand on the keypad.
"Peter, please."
He opened the hatch and stepped into their improvised air lock, making room for Ash, who joined him in a rush. Ash kept her eyes down and leaned toward Peter, signaling her attachment.
If I can read you so easily, why can't I get through to him? Vonnie thought.
He reached for the button to close the hatch. At the last instant, he glanced at Vonnie. She knew her face was white. She felt sick. Her heart thudded in her chest.
"I'm done with you," he said.
Then he shut the hatch.
3.
The best medicine was hard work. Unfortunately, Vonnie was put on mandatory bed rest. The drugs, her long naps and the sameness of staying in her bunk blurred the next few days into a dream.
While she slept like a worthless bag, the Americans brought their personnel and every last gram of rations and equipment to the ESA/FNEE site.
Relocating sixteen people, six full-size modules, five APAQS sheds and one hundred and forty mecha was a major undertaking, partly because NASA had lost two of their four flightcraft to SCPs.
Vonnie had been in her coma while the Americans replaced the infected components and AIs. Then the new components failed, spoiled by a sleeper virus. NASA's second in command, DeBrun, led security and ROM. He decided to scuttle both flightcraft before the virus spread. His engineers reduced the electronics to slag, then dismantled the hulls for raw materials.
ESA Lander 04 had become functional again after Tony fixed nav and flight control. Ash flew cargo runs for NASA while Ribeiro accompanied her as a gunner. He carried a FiveSAM as if a shoulder-mounted weapon could stave off the PSSC.
Vonnie believed Ribeiro's generals had sent him to establish personal contact. The U.S. and Brazil were antagonists. Their small Cold War had lasted twenty years before Brazil redirected its ambitions into space, but Earth's governments were arbitrary in their treatment of each other. Every day, their rhetoric waxed and waned. A rival nation who'd been castigated as the devil could become a friend if there was something to gain.
She'd had the same thought about Araújo. The FNEE had been her enemies, partners, enemies, then partners again. Ultimately, human beings were as fluid and immoral as sunfish.
She wished Peter hadn't rejected her. She needed more affection, not less. Worse, he'd burdened her with self-doubt and amplified her frustration at being stuck in bed. She couldn't talk to him if she couldn't go find him. He ignored her calls via showphone.
Maybe it wasn't strange that Ben was mad about what Peter had said to her. After so much death, she thought Ben might have shared her with Peter if she had asked. Ben wanted her to smile again.
She wondered if Peter would have agreed to sharing. She wondered what might have happened if he'd been more patient with her.
Ben visited twice and called once while NASA arranged their camp around the truncated hull of ESA Module 01. During his first visit, Ben cuddled with her and kissed her forehead and let her talk. She whispered about how handsome and irritating Henri had been. She whispered about O'Neal's genius. "He was so stupid for a genius," she said, struggling to make light of her friends' deaths. She cried. It was therapeutic.
During his second visit, Ben whispered to her. "We found parts of Lam. There are a couple arms. His internals are junk. Peter says what's left is top secret, but I needed Claudia's help to gather everything and she heard Peter riding me about it. I'm sure she said something to Ribeiro. Tony will run diagnostics as soon as we secure a lab from the Americans. I'll let you know what Tony says -- if Tony says anything. Peter is in a lousy mood and none of us want to piss him off."
That afternoon, everybody transferred to the NASA modules, keeping 01 as a storage unit.
In the American medical wing, a ROM surgeon named Troutman implanted Vonnie's new eye, although she wasn't allowed to use it. Troutman insisted on taping the eye shut for twenty-four hours while her nerves healed and the swelling went down.
Remarkably, he said he'd selected an eye from their clone stock that was the almost same color as the one she'd lost. Then he'd doctored the iris, using nanotech to lighten its hue. The new eye would match her surviving eye. None of this should have been important, but she was exhausted and confused and she worried about looking ugly or weird. She didn't want a brown eye and a blue eye. She wanted to look like herself again.
Troutman refused to let her check. "It’s fine," he said. "You have to wait."
She was powerless.
After the procedure, she napped in the immaculate women's barracks, which was wider and longer than any ESA living quarters. The women's barracks had ten fold-down bunks -- five high, five low -- plus an open corner with chairs and pullout displays. Beyond this sitting area was a bathroom with three private toilets, two shower stalls and a communal laundry unit. The men had their own toilets and showers in a neighboring module. Vonnie appreciated her clean-smelling bed even if it turned out that the "women's barracks" wasn't only for women.
The American men entered to peek at her or to chat with girlfriends or wives. Two
pairs of NASA astronauts had married each other on Europa. The rumor was one couple had only done it to set the record because they slept apart in the appropriate barracks.
The other couple was Gould and Cook. They'd claimed a bunk near the entrance of the women's barracks where Gould squeezed in with Cook. That night when she couldn't sleep, Vonnie listened to them rustling and laughing with an ache in her chest.
She felt like she was in purgatory.
She was able to assist with data recovery, a tedious job sorting files on her display. The ESA had lost nearly all of their research, their maps, their AIs and their proxies, but everything had been copied to Berlin and now Berlin resent all of it to NASA's command module.
Classified information went through Peter. Basic needs went through Vonnie. Most of their files arrived in triplicate. She was asked to q-and-e, place and sync. Concentrating on the process took her away from herself.
Thankfully, Berlin did not order her to face the media -- not when she didn't have a face. Her time for serious interviews and fluff pieces would come.
In the meantime, Peter was their public spokesperson. Vonnie watched his appearances on the net. He was respectful of the dead and optimistic about their future and she marveled at how contained he seemed.
She missed the strong personality he'd unveiled in private. She missed his candid, sturdy interest in her. The man on the net was a facade, not a man.
She was interviewed herself, ironically, by the cybernetic ghosts she'd uploaded from Berlin. There were three sessions, two with AIs, one with a proxy, who coaxed every detail from her memory about her exchanges with Lam.
They seemed like they wanted her to recant what she'd seen and heard. She didn't.
She also met with Harmeet for physical therapy. Nerve stim and toning exercises for her back, neck, arm, upper torso and abdomen were painful. The treatments of optimized blood plasma felt good. Her body was sore, and her eye socket itched like Troutman had packed it with nettles. Otherwise she was alright except for poor depth perception.
