by Jeff Carlson
"I've already taken one."
"You..." Vonnie couldn't switch gears in her mind. She wanted to attack. She knew the feeling was irrational.
Harmeet reached for her arm.
"Don't touch me!"
"Colonel, permission to--" Harmeet said, and Vonnie growled, "Don't you dare." Her hands were shaking again. Her heart thundered. She looked at the sunfish. They would defend her. "Tom!" she yelled.
"Sweetheart, no," Harmeet whispered as the seven-armed male twitched, his body coiling as if to spring toward Vonnie and Harmeet. Angelica, Brigit and Hans also moved apart, dividing from their foursome. They lifted their arms, listening and scenting. They regarded the human females for an instant. Then their attention shifted to Harmeet.
"Tom, I need your help!" Vonnie said. Cruelly, insanely, she enjoyed the lightning bolt of terror in Harmeet eyes.
You can't control me, she thought. Not me.
But they could. Ribeiro said, "Command override Vonderach Zulu Six Medical."
Vonnie's suit injected her and she went black.
There were no dreams. No memories. Nothing. When she woke, she was in her bunk. She felt drowsy and warm. Her HUD showed the viewpoint of someone walking through a green forest with cheery birds and the robust sound of a waterfall and she knew it was a lie but still she felt better. She felt clear. She also felt horror and guilt.
I told the sunfish to attack Harmeet. I wouldn't have let them hurt her. Not really. I only wanted her to back off, but she didn't know that.
Damn it. I must have been crazy.
She turned off the sim and sat up, wondering what she'd said under the drugs.
Harmeet sat on the next bunk and looked at her warily. Harmeet also wore her suit, but the ESU panels in the floor had closed. That meant they were safer if not safe, and Vonnie glanced at the display.
The Lewis hadn't left its position in the sluggish water near the ice and the seven mountains.
Harmeet said, "Good morning. I apologize for... for telling you what to do. And the drugs. We didn't want you to suffer any longer."
"It's morning?"
"If it's ever morning." Harmeet dredged up a smile, trying to placate her. Vonnie decided to smile, too, and Harmeet relaxed. "We let you sleep for ten hours. Do you want breakfast?"
"Yeah."
"You can take off your helmet. I'll prepare something for you. Then we'll talk."
Vonnie popped her collar assembly. The sunfish were quiet. They were dozing again, recovering from the multiple disruptions of their cycle, although Brigit slept inside the sonar interface, where she could immediately respond to any danger.
Two of Brigit's arms were intertwined with Tom, whose arms were curled around Angelica and Han. Vonnie watched them breathe. She envied their harmony. She listened to the hull. The Lewis was silent. She heard no activity inside or out.
Harmeet brought her eggs and juice. Vonnie read from the display as she ate.
They'd lost one probe and thousands of nanotags to PSSC assaults while she was unconscious. The enemy was hunting throughout their grid, but the ocean was too large, too complex. By now, riptides and currents had distributed their nanotags more than a thousand kilometers from the Lewis.
Bound by the currents' whims, the tags had missed enormous swaths of territory. They tended to be drawn into the deep, fast water, but enough of them had passed among far-away mountains and valleys to paint an impression.
Most of the ocean floor was a wasteland.
The exception was this bowl cradled beneath the sluggish sea. The display showed nine alien cities spread over an area of ten thousand square kilometers. Eighty kilometers from the Lewis, a probe was scanning another site where magma flows might have buried a tenth city.
They'd also located fourteen solitary structures beyond the cities' walls. Thirteen of the fourteen resembled watchtowers. The rounded, dome-topped fixtures looked big enough to hold a few creatures, no more. The fourteenth was a bunker-like hole in a mountainside. It lay within a few meters of a tower. The bunker wasn't deep and its ceiling had collapsed long ago. It also looked big enough for a few creatures. Possibly it had contained food or weapons.
The overall picture was that of a sprawling race who had dominated the polar land mass. Who had they been? How long had they flourished?
Learning those answers would require decades of work by Earth's top experts.
Harmeet was now the Lewis's entire science team, although most of the surviving crew were trained in nav, engineering or hab. Their education let them contribute -- imperfectly -- to her archeological and ecological sims.
Troutman maintained that the creatures who fit through the cities' doorways couldn't hoist the largest blocks of granite without cranes, or, at least, scaffolding and pulleys. More than that, the rock had been quarried and transported across unknown distances before each piece was fitted in smoothly undulating, interlocking curves.
No one questioned that the cities were the work of sentient beings. Animals formed hives like bees or tunnel systems like prairie dogs, but the engineering here was on par with the Anasazi, the Inca, the Egyptians.
Where were their tools?
Hunt wanted to find the pits where the rock had been dug. DeBrun was more interested in determining their food production. Had they farmed or ranched? The cities could not have subsisted on catching whatever fish or mantas floated by.
Harmeet's sims put the alien population in the tens of thousands. No one could say if the cities had belonged to a single nation or even if they'd been friendly with each other, although there were indications that they'd shared a common language. The dot-and-bump markings were similar at every site. That their architecture was identical also seemed to indicate a unified society.
Nine cities. A row of pylons. Watchtowers. Hieroglyphics. How much had been lost to time?
The cities were fading into the ocean floor. Without AI-assisted imaging and simulations, the ruins wouldn't even have looked like ruins. Most of the buildings were only nubs. The surrounding walls were thin, withered lines. Not one un-eroded shape protruded into the murky water.
At a minimum, Harmeet thought the cities had been vacant for two hundred thousand years. Carbon dating would be of no help given the apparent absence of organics. The building material was as old as the mountains -- and if this race had used plants or animal hides for awnings or bedding or sails or boats, nothing remained. The ocean's acidity had dissolved every last molecule of organic life.
The consensus was this race had been swimmers. They hadn't walked or crawled, although they might have stayed close to the ground. They must have lived with the constant threat of being swept away by the currents.
Some of them might have gathered at the top of the ocean and scratched out an existence at the edge of the ice. They might have adapted.
Might they have evolved into the sunfish?
Vonnie cared about two things: Were any of them alive in other places? And where was their technology?
Coins, buttons, utensils and blades would be proof of metallurgy. A few relics should have lasted if they'd been blanketed in silt or sealed away by fallen buildings. At the very least, iron tools would have been reduced to telltale blotches of rust.
What she really wanted to see were turbines, wiring and radio equipment. But there was nothing.
In his youthful way, with the positive spark that made him a leader, DeBrun suggested that the aliens weren't extinct. Maybe they'd packed up and left. If they'd taken their gear with them, that could explain why there were no traces for the Lewis to find.
Hunt was more practical. He argued that their cities represented an enormous investment and only war could have driven them away, but there were no signs of conquest.
Not true that a war is required, Harmeet said. A generations-long drought had caused the Anasazi to abandon what had been a sprawling metropolis. In more recent history, climate change had caused exoduses from the Middle East and Southeast Asia, one driven by wate
r scarcity, one driven by extreme rain and floods.
The Great Ocean had a corollary to climate change. Nearby mountains might have crumbled, altering the local currents and temperatures. If their crops or livestock were affected, or if their own health was affected, the city builders might have weakened. They might have been sickened by a disease carried by a super virus or super bacteria.
More likely, their decline was less melodramatic. The city builders must have been choked out by the intensifying poisons in the Great Ocean. Harmeet had speculated that they'd died out two hundred thousand years ago, but it might have been three hundred thousand or even longer. Then the acidity had burned away most of the clues to their existence.
Where were their tools? Ropes, levers, poles and frames fashioned out of reeds or plantlife would have disintegrated, but Harmeet believed stone artifacts would be found in the rubble. Chisels. Hammers. Weapons.
The AIs had analyzed the hieroglyphics and the architecture. Neither the carvings nor the structures required advanced technology. Like the Inca and the Egyptians, they'd erected their cities with masterful engineering and brute force, not machines. They might have used the currents to their advantage by using paddle wheels and sails to cut, haul, shape and set their granite blocks, but there was no indication that they'd developed hydroelectric power.
This had not been a civilization with radio, much less rocketry or spacefaring capabilities.
"I don't understand," Vonnie said slowly. Her breakfast had cooled, uneaten, and she'd grown cold herself. "There were sunfish on Io. The mummified remains we found... Something traveled between Jupiter's moons. I thought the sunfish empire might have co-opted technology from an older race like these city builders. That's still possible, isn't it? We've only seen a tiny fraction of the ocean floor. Christ, we haven't explored more than a small part of the ice."
Harmeet nodded. "It's possible."
"You don't believe it."
"I'd like to. I don't."
"I need to speak to Admiral Cornet."
"Let's talk about this first."
"You think I'm avoiding the subject."
"I think you've been through an incredible ordeal," Harmeet said carefully. "You're in mourning. You should be. Ben was a extraordinary man."
"Sometimes he was an ass," Vonnie said, but she grinned. She pressed her glove against the tears that sprang from her eyes. "Do you think there are sunfish on Ganymede or Callisto? What if they sent colonists or exiled their criminals to other moons like our countries brought settlers to North America and dumped convicts in Australia? Europa might have been a living world before the sunfish arrived."
"You're close," Harmeet said.
"What?"
"You're close. That's almost the truth."
A bleak mix of emotions weighed on Vonnie. Grief. Desolation. Anxiety. But there was another, stronger feeling inside her, too -- a cold, growing rage. She closed her fingers on Harmeet's arm and said, "No more games. You've kept your secret long enough."
"Von, it wasn't my decision."
"Did your secret kill Ben?"
"No. I promise."
But Harmeet didn't say anything else, and Vonnie jerked at her arm. "What aren't you showing us? Why are we wasting time if you know more?"
"I was given orders by Berlin. They classified some of our genesmithing. They said Peter would arrest us if we didn't hide our results. William wanted to tell you anyway."
"Dawson wanted to...?"
"He adored you, Von. He said you were the daughter he never had. Otherwise he wouldn't have been so hard on you. William didn't bother with people who didn't impress him. He thought you were special. We talked about you a lot. 'She's immature for her age,' he said. 'She's stubborn, but her potential is top shelf.'"
"I don't want to talk about Dawson." Sadness would undermine her rage, so she fought to hang onto it. "You lied to us," she said.
"I did not."
"We treated you like you were our mom! We thought you were looking out for the whole team!"
"I've been under orders from Berlin and Admiral Cornet."
"Then I'll talk to him."
"Let me explain. By my orders now, I can share everything with you, but you'll have to follow the same rules as the rest of us."
"What difference does it make? We’re trapped down here."
"We'll get out. Peter will come for us or we'll climb up. Colonel Ribeiro plans to take us into the ice."
Vonnie snorted. "Right." She knew how difficult it would be for seven people with six scout suits to ascend through the frozen sky. What in the world were they going to do with their seventh crewmember? Even barring that complication, six suits lacked the firepower to survive against PSSC mecha if they made it that far. The chimney had collapsed in many places. They had only three of their own mecha to escort them.
They had achieved Berlin's goal of opening a new front against the PSSC, but the cost hadn't yet been paid in full. Did Ribeiro think he'd stay and go down with his ship? She wouldn't let him do it -- not alone.
"OK, tell me," she said.
"Before we go, we'll transmit everything we've learned. That includes our mem files. If you say the wrong thing, they'll put you in jail."
"Uh huh." She could have laughed. A trial and a jail sentence didn't frighten her. "In the unlikely event that we get out, Berlin will have enough problems explaining why some of us are dead. They won't prosecute any of us."
"Vonnie, please. I've done what I can to protect you."
"Does that include allowing them to put Ben on the Lewis so we could say we were a civilian operation? I'd say it worked. We fooled the PSSC. Now we'll leave our probes and tags to keep them busy. It's just icing on the cake that we found proof of an ancient civilization."
Harmeet refused to lower her gaze. "I'm not in command and I wasn't involved in mission planning," she said. "You know I didn't want to fight. I believe all life is sacred."
"Three people died who didn't need to be here! The rest of us don't look like we'll make it, either. Now you're telling me that you and Dawson had another secret. What could be so important?"
"Panspermia," Harmeet said. "We're related to the sunfish. We share sixty-seven percent of their DNA."
22.
Vonnie opened her mouth, shut it, opened it again, but she couldn't find the words. Her head was a rogue current. Stray thoughts whipped up and through her like silt.
The Bible has accounts of visitations by what sound like alien spacecraft, Peter had said. So do Indian writings from 4,000 B.C., Egyptian writings from 1,500 B.C., and other cultures all over the world. Could those have been ships from the sunfish empire?
The broadcast was not FNEE, Araújo had said. It was not ESA or NASA. The PSSC were at least five kilometers from the ocean so they did not send the broadcast. It had none of the hallmarks of ROM-20 data/comm.
It wasn't encrypted at all, Ash had said. It was a message in ultrasound, two squeals and eight chirps. The squeals are louder and overlap the chirps, which are spaced as four pairs of two. Our guess is it's an identifier, maybe a name. The mentality seems like a sunfish.
We know they had eyes in their past, Peter had said. They saw the stars, and the low gravity made it easier for them to achieve escape velocity than it ever was for humankind.
Vonnie heard herself, too. She had said, If they didn't launch their ships from the Great Ocean, they must have come from Ganymede or Callisto. Maybe Titan. Hell, their empire could have begun on Mars. There were glaciers and running water on the Red Planet before its atmosphere boiled off.
We've barely scratched Europa's surface, O'Neal had said. If there's a native civilization, it will exist in the Great Ocean. After we discovered complex lifeforms in the ice, we knew equally complex lifeforms must swim in the water.
Something's kept the tribes out of the Great Ocean, Ben had said. Maybe it's the Low Clans or predators. Maybe it's a foreign empire.
Lam had warned her. With his savage males, he'd tra
cked the PSSC mecha as they brought their HKs down to the slushy pockets at the top of the ocean, but she'd misinterpreted his final body shapes before she burned his core into slag.
---The dark ocean, he'd signed. --Larger enemies. New threats. They'll pounce on you, but we can ambush them if you lead us.
Lam had done everything except predict the ELF broadcast. He'd placed the HKs for her, drawing their location near the surface of the Great Ocean. He'd warned her that the PSSC were waiting in the ocean, but even then she'd failed to connect the dots. The Lewis crew had been seduced by their infatuation with Europa. They'd wanted to find a civilization so badly, they'd fooled themselves.
They had denied the logic of their eldest, wisest heads, who also happened to be their genesmiths.
Allow me to predict, Dawson had said. Like us, the PSSC are wasting their time with probes in the ocean. Our efforts would be better spent on the tribes.
The ocean is a dead place, Harmeet had said.
Bacterial growths like the mantas were the only living things inside Europa's Great Ocean. Everything else was gone. Earth's crews were hundreds of thousands of years too late.
Sitting together in hab one, Harmeet let Vonnie churn through her memories. They waited together, gazing at the sunfish. Brigit groaned in her sleep. Tom flexed the stump of his missing arm. Harmeet wore a trim, inscrutable Mona Lisa smile, but Vonnie's eyes were as wide as a child's. She felt like she'd never seen the sunfish before.
They weren't aliens. They were her cousins.
All this time, we've feared and killed each other -- saved each other -- befriended each other -- and we're family, she thought. Is that why Berlin doesn't want anyone to learn about Harmeet's genesmithing?
No. There's more. There must be more. We're a hell of a lot closer to our enemies in China, Pakistan and East Africa than we are to the sunfish tribes.
We fight people all the time. Hearing that we're related to the sunfish shouldn’t mean a thing.
Vonnie reached for Harmeet's hand. The smile on Harmeet's face grew. Harmeet loved to research, compare and teach. The two of them shared that thrill of discovery, and Vonnie admitted to herself that suppressing this revelation about the sunfish had been a burden for her friend. A burden and a curse.
