“Can you make this whole room like a window again?”
Again she shook her head, trying to look amused. “If you like.” Suddenly he saw; she thought he was too ignorant to be afraid, while she, knowing more, was rattled by their situation. Making it look as if they were inside a clear bubble in the sulphur magma would not help her nerves. The Ionians were afraid of Io, no doubt with good reason. But he was pretty sure he remembered enough of Aurora’s lessons to judge their safety better than Hera could. At their levels of material and field strength, melted rock was not a difficult habitat.
She changed the walls of their chamber into a continuous screen, and now they seemed to float like a soap bubble in a liquid mix of yellow, orange, and red—the false colors arranged to indicate heat in a way immediately comprehensible. Patches of bright red flowed by their bubble’s ovoid space, darkening the angriest oranges, which shaded into the most violent of yellows. In theory it should not have been any more alarming to descend through molten rock than through frozen ice. But in fact it was.
“So your ship will follow channels to the underside of Loki, where we will get shot out of one of the sulphur plumes?”
“Yes.”
“And then?”
“We will disable their base’s power plant. That will force them to use their ships to power their settlement. Their ships will thus have to stay on Io.”
“You plan to disable their power plant? That’s all?”
She appeared to think he was being sarcastic. “They’ll be all right. Their ships will serve as emergency power. All will be well with them, but the ships will be confined to their base.”
“Couldn’t you disable their ships directly?”
The light surrounding them shifted all over the fiery portion of the spectrum, washing Hera’s face in color and making it appear as if she were in turn scowling, grimacing, frowning, glaring.
“You don’t understand,” she said at last. “Not all their ships will be in their settlement at any one time, and I want to create a situation where the ones on hand have to stay put.”
“But the ones at large will still be at large.”
“We think most will be on hand. And Ganymede is there.”
Their craft shuddered underfoot, canted to the side. The flowing ribbons of color on the screen had the look of a current, in which their craft struggled to make its way upstream. But the feeling of motion, which came entirely from tiny shifts underfoot, was now a confused juddering that did not add up to a coherent picture of progress in any given direction. Galileo guessed that first they had been falling toward the center of the moon, but were now bumping liquidly along, making their way against resistance. Then it seemed they were rising like a bubble in water, shimmying from side to side as differential resistances caused little horizontal slips. He put his hand to his chair, feeling unsettled almost to the point of nausea.
“Up?” he asked.
“Up. And I’ve got some of my cohort meeting us inside here. We’ll all come up together.”
The drag downward correlated with an acceleration of the yellow flow around them. Hera rubbed a fingertip over her console, watching the flow around them closely as she did.
“Hold on,” she said.
Galileo held on. “Won’t they notice us?”
“They’ll be assuming any approach will be visible,” Hera said, “and some of our colleagues are making an approach from space, to serve as decoys. There are no weapons per se in the Jovian system, as I said, but of course various lasers and explosives can be adapted to the task. We’ll hope that doesn’t go too badly for our decoys, and jump them from behind. This will be the first time they have been attacked from out of the plume of a nearby volcano.” She laughed.
Then he was shoved down at the floor, and understood that they were accelerating upward. The flows around them stabilized to pure yellow. It was like being inside a marigold, and he supposed that this meant they were now moving with the current they were in, but that the magma itself was accelerating in its channel as it approached its release into space. The push down increased in proportion to their speed upward, he was quite sure, even without the knowledge Aurora had given him. He was distracted for a moment as he tried to integrate the sensation with what he had learned during the alchemically enhanced lesson.
The pressure down became stronger. For a moment his body felt some bone-deep familiarity, and he realized they were in exactly the pull of the Earth, and he was feeling his true weight. But quickly he became heavier still—so much so that he let his head rest back in his chair, to keep from hurting his neck. Hera shifted the walls back to their usual gray, and the colors of the flow around them returned to the screens, some of which were filled with color, others with rapidly changing columns of numbers, but none gave him a sense of what was going on. He said, “Can you not display some sort of map that tells us where we are?”
“Oh, sorry. Of course.”
She tapped her console, and the screen in front of Galileo suddenly became like a cabinet holding a little Io. A green thread running from its interior to its surface pulsed brightly from within a tangle of orange intestines. Then the screen changed again, and he was looking at a cross section of the moon that cut the chimney of their volcanic channel, and the widening at its throat. Midthroat, a small cluster of bright green dots rose swiftly. “Your colleagues have joined us?”
“Some of them.”
Then the downward pressure ceased, and he even felt that he might float up and away from his chair, as when they were between moons. A push from below returned, very slight; then nothing; then a slight pressure from above. Hera tapped quickly, and suddenly the walls of the craft became a screen surrounding them again, giving them a view as if they flew freely in space. They were vaulting upward, already many miles above Io. Then they were arcing over the tawny fluxions of the surface. Loki Patera lay beside them and below, and the sulphur mist surrounding them was dotted with the silvery ovoid carapaces of the other ships in Hera’s fleet, floating down like spores after a mushroom explodes.
The fleet stayed in the drift of sulphur slurry, arranging itself as it fell until it was a phalanx, dropping in synchrony with one particular plume of the sulphur. Then in the final drop to the marigold slag on the lower flank of Loki, the whole fleet shot sideways out of the sulphur rain with startling rapidity, and in several heartbeats landed on the perimeter of a small cluster of buildings, apparently Ganymede’s Ionian base. Some of the craft blazed fire as they were touching down, striking buildings in the base and causing brief explosions that seemed as tiny as sparks against the backdrop of the stupendous plume of the volcano.
Galileo was watching all this so intently that he was shocked when a jarring halt to their descent smashed him into his chair.
“We’re down,” Hera said. “Come on.”
“Where to?” he said as he clambered up.
“Their power plant. That’s always the real seat of government.”
The grimness with which she said this gave Galileo the impression she had learned this truth in some personally disastrous way. But there was no time to inquire. She stuffed the pewter box of the tele-trasporta into a satchel-like compartment on the back of her space suit, and then they had the suits on and moved into the craft’s anteroom, putting on their space helmets, which reminded Galileo briefly of her memory celatone. Then they were out onto the blasted yellow of the Ionian mountainside.
OUTSIDE THE CRAFT, standing on the ground, Galileo looked around. Yellow sleet drifted down onto the slag a few miles away, splashing like rain when it struck. Out of this bizarre fountain shot twenty more sleek oval silver things, rocketing sideways with a dreamy speed. One of these craft tried to land right in the gap between two big low buildings of the settlement; a gate shut on it, and the craft buckled as it was caught. Hera shouted at the sight.
“Get their power off!” she snapped viciously, reminding Galileo of his mother. Uneasily he understood her as a general conducting a si
ege; no military officer he had ever met gave him the frisson of fear that he felt now as he regarded her. Imagine Giulia a general! The carnage would have been universal.
“Come on,” she snarled over her shoulder, and started running over the rugged plain toward the base. It had a kind of outer rock wall, it seemed, or was simply built on a broad low plateau. Galileo followed her toward it, struggling to keep up with her. She was big, and fleet of foot in a way he could not emulate, given the light pull of this moon, which caused him to launch up and forward with every stride, landing fearfully but again lightly, so that he could leap forward from one unsteady jaunt to the next, keeping his eye on Hera midleap, as it seemed to help his balance.
The slaggy plain of the volcano’s side was bigger than it looked. Silver craft still fell like stars out of the black sky. Behind them the towering yellow plume of the volcano rained down, plashing onto its previous spew. Figures in helmets, looking like white statues of the Swiss Guard, emerged from the gates of the city and pointed at them. Red afterimages suddenly crisscrossed Galileo’s vision, without him having seen anything to stimulate them in the first place. Hera stopped and held out a hand indicating he should stop too. In the general hissing silence, which was perhaps the rolling impact of the nearby plume striking him through his feet, he could not hear her voice. He could see that she was talking to him and that she thought he could hear her, but something must have gone wrong with his helmet, because there was no sound but the background hiss.
Abruptly she was off again. Galileo hurried after her, fearful of losing her and therefore his way.
They were approaching the village of silver buildings from an unexpected angle, it seemed, for the defenders were all focused on an attack from the other direction. Hera simply leaped forward onto two of these people, flying twenty or thirty feet before smashing into them like something thrown by a trebuchet. Down they went, while she bounced up and with a ferocious punch to the gut leveled another of them. Galileo followed her as fast as he could, but now she was really off, and no matter how hard he tried he could not keep up. He kept bounding off into space, and as he passed through a gate in a wall between two big buildings he crashed into an arch topping the gate, landing hard on his back and driving the wind out of him, and his guts out of his hernia too. He staggered back to his feet, stuck his fingers between his legs and shoved the truss up so that his guts would go back into his torso. After that he gave up on normal locomotion, instead making clumsy painful leaps forward, like a toad or a grasshopper, gasping all the while.
It was truly painful between his legs, but he was moving, and Hera was not far ahead of him when she finally came to a halt. He was mid-leap when he saw her stop and look to her left, and though he tried to twist in midair to dodge her, that of course didn’t work, and he bowled right into her back. It was like running into a wall, slightly padded; even as he was falling to the ground he was recalling the feel of the contact, the rocky substance of her ribs, the hard muscles of her bottom, with a layer of softness over the brick. Then he crashed down on his back and lay stunned at her heels, with his guts once again bulging out of his peritoneum. She had been knocked two or three steps forward by his impact, and in that moment a flash between them blasted him into a red blindness. Blinking through tears and the red bloom of bouncing afterimages, he saw her barking out orders without regard for him, as if he were her dog and had banged into the back of her knees while she was busy doing something.
By the time Galileo had shoved his guts back in and regained his feet, the local situation seemed to have come into compliance with her wishes. Defenders of the city lay twitching on a piazza they came to, looking like fish in the boxes at a market.
She grabbed him by the arm, and he indicated that he couldn’t hear what she was saying. She reached up and twisted at the outside of his helmet, under his right ear.
“Stand still,” she snapped.
“I’m trying!” he said. “At least I can hear you now.”
He shrugged free of her hold, which reminded him too much of his mother; the old witch had just such a clawlike grip. He swayed upright and held himself steady with a desperate effort of his whole body, glaring hotly at her. She was looking right back at him, both their faces behind clear faceplates that glowed with red numbers and diagrams in the corners, making it a literally red look that arced between them. Then the skin around her eyes crinkled; she was, for some reason, laughing at him.
“Your clumsiness saved my ass,” she said.
Galileo supposed she meant the flash that had blinded him. “I like your ass,” he said without thinking.
Her eyebrows rose. But she was still amused.
She returned to the business at hand. Her commands were still abrupt, but her tone was not so urgent. The situation was apparently in hand. The power station was occupied, she told him, the Gany-medean village therefore in their hands.
Then, listening to voices Galileo did not hear, her expression again blackened. She cursed and gave a quick series of orders under her breath.
“We didn’t shut them down fast enough,” she said grimly to Galileo. “Ganymede and his closest followers escaped. Six craft. Some of them are returning to attack us, presumably so that he can get clean away. We have to get back to the ship.”
“Lead on,” Galileo said.
Following her gamely back out of the city, he said, “Do you know where he’s going?”
“To Europa, I presume.”
“And who is attacking us now?”
“Some of his people. We have to get back to my ship as quick as we can.”
Outside the settlement, the black starry sky looked down on the scene, still eerily silent. The yellow plume to the east looked taller than a summer thunderhead. Even when an explosion flashed white and demolished one of the buildings behind them, there were no sounds, only a trembling underfoot. Galileo heard nothing but his own gasps, which seemed to come from outside his helmet, as if the cosmos itself were short of breath, and scared.
On the run back to her craft, the ground under his feet began to become sticky. It became like running on a viscous mud.
“Shit,” Hera said. “Apparently they set off some underground explosions just now. Big ones. One of my people say it’s the Swiss defense. The whole base will sink into the ground. A magma chamber has been breached, and it’s heating the ground in this area from below.”
“The ground is melting?”
“Yes. We have to hurry.”
“I’m trying.”
But they began to sink farther into the ground as they stepped on it, as if they traversed mud that grew deeper and softer. Very sticky mud, too. Hera’s craft was now visible on the horizon, but they could no longer run. They had to pull up hard at the end of each step to free their feet from the viscous surface, then step forward and sink back into it again. First they were sinking in to their boot tops, then their ankles. Then their shins. The yellow ground, looking granular and knobby with rubble, was quivering and quaking, pulsing under them like a live thing. Soon they were struggling forward, knee deep in it. Knee deep, in the melting surface of Io!
“We keep sinking further in,” Galileo pointed out.
“Just keep walking!”
“I am, of course, but you see how it is.”
“Shove your legs forward hard at first, then they’ll move easier after that.”
Now they were struggling through viscous rock that reached to the tops of their knees.
“Will our suits melt?”
“No. But we do need to stay above the surface.”
“Obviously.”
She wasn’t listening to him. They were wading forward through the molten surface now, thigh deep and working hard. Her craft was still a long way off.
Finally she stopped and pulled something out of her suit.
“Here,” she said, looking around and conferring in a low voice with her colleagues. “I’ve got a sheet here I can sit on, that will keep me afloat long enough for
my friends to get here to pick me up. But I don’t know if it will hold both of us up long enough, so I’m going to use the entangler to send you back to your time.”
“But what about you?”
“I’ll use the sheet and float by myself, like I said. We’re not that much denser than the sulphur.”
“Are you sure?” Galileo exclaimed, wondering if she were preparing to die.
“I’m sure.” She cast a thin silver sheet out over the lava, and they crawled onto it, rolling quickly to the middle to keep the edge of the sheet from shoving too far down into the melting rock. They huddled together in the center of the sheet, and Galileo could see that the friction of the sheet spread over the rock would hold them up, for a while anyway.
“Get in the field of the entangler,” she said as she pulled the box from the pack on the back of her space suit. She patted the sheet before her.
They sat cross-legged, knees touching, sinking rather slowly into the sheet. She placed the flat square box between them and tapped at its surface. Finally she looked up, and they regarded each other face-to-face through their faceplates.
“Maybe you should come back with me,” Galileo said.
“I need to stay here. I’ve got to deal with all this. The situation is completely fucked up, as you see.”
“You’re sure you’ll be all right?”
“Yes. My people are on their way. They’ll be a while, but they’ll get here in time, if you aren’t weighing me down. Now get ready to go back. I don’t have any amnestics with me, so you will remember all this. It will be strange. It could be bad, but—” She shrugged. There was no alternative.
“You’ll bring me back when you can?”
Again a brief moment, a shared look—
“Yes,” she said. “Now,” tapping the teletrasporta, “go.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Always Already
We aren’t even here but in a real here Elsewhere—a long way off. Not a place To go but where we are: there. Here is there. This is not a real world.
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