The Frozen Sky

by Jeff Carlson

  “Let’s reconfigure 4117 through 4124,” Frerotte said. “We should be able to track their sonar calls if we don’t lose them behind the thermal vents. At least we can map a few spaces inside the colony.”

  “Good.” Metzler touched Vonnie’s arm. “The more we know, the better chance we’ll have with the next tribe,” he said.

  If there’s another tribe, she worried, but she kept her concern to herself. She didn’t want to sound negative when he was giving his best.

  The people on Earth will think they won today, she thought. They’ll order new missions. Then our mecha will chase the sunfish from every safe zone inside Europa, stealing DNA and mining the ice—

  “Holy shit,” Metzler said.

  His soft, ominous tone roused Vonnie from her despair. She glanced through the spies’ datastreams. She sat up straight when she saw why he was afraid. “Koebsch! Koebsch!” she yelled as Metzler struck a Class 1 alert.

  “What are you doing?” Ash said.

  “Frerotte, get our surface mecha away from— No, wait! Have them drag the hab modules out of here!”

  “Roger that,” Frerotte said.

  Ash frowned, skimming through their defense grid. “I don’t see…” she said.

  Vonnie almost laughed at the irony of Ash thinking like the FNEE gun platform, looking skyward first. How long would it take before people learned to evaluate this environment like its natives?

  The sunfish had bypassed the tunnels where their smaller cousins had built the retaining wall. They’d gone lower, missing likeliest spots for an air lock into the colony. Vonnie had supposed they were lost or hunting blindly. Now she zoomed her display as the sunfish clumped against the steep side of a ravine, joining their bodies into one immense muscle.

  “They’re tearing at the hot springs,” Vonnie said.

  Koebsch appeared on the group feed, projecting calm with his open hands. “Let’s not panic,” he said, studying the sims from Metzler’s display.

  The spies’ telemetry showed only blurs and reconstructions.

  “The sunfish are too far away,” Koebsch said. “You can’t be sure what they’re doing. They could be digging a new entrance into the colony.”

  “No, sir,” Vonnie said. She and Metzler took several images from the sims, letting an AI enhance each frame with preexisting data from their listening posts, their spies, and their probes.

  During the past weeks, they’d mapped the local web of heat branching up from the mountain into the frozen sky. Its topmost reaches were the melted ice and cooling gas pockets west of the ESA camp. Further down, liquid water collected in shafts and lakes. Lower still, hot springs boiled from the rock, providing the colony with warmth and nutrients.

  It was a powder keg.

  Day by day, the ice dripped and slumped, blocking the vents. The rock eroded and did the same. Mostly the water and gases burned through, but sometimes geysers were plugged or gases were backed up, perturbing the live magma deep within the mountain.

  “We’ve mapped two of the main conduits for the hot springs that feed Tom’s home,” Vonnie said. “Both rise through a trunk of compressed rock about fifty meters beneath the tunnel where they built their retaining wall. I think they’ve been repairing the trunk for years.”

  “That’s why there’s a stream down there,” Frerotte said, identifying a current of noise beneath the louder, crunching sounds of the digging sunfish. “There are leaks spraying from a cliff face.”

  Metzler had run his own calculations. “The pressure must be enormous,” he said. “Those hot springs push up through 2.4 kilometers of rock and ice, and that’s just at the top where we can see. The network of gas and heat is more extensive. If they tear into the rock—”

  “They wouldn’t,” Ash said. “They’d die.”

  “That’s not going to stop them,” Vonnie said. “That’s why their pack is all-male. They’re expendable.”

  “We need to get this lander off the ground,” Metzler said.

  They were connected to auxiliary structures like the jeep charging post and the maintenance shed, which accessed Lander 04’s power and data/comm. They should have installed an auto detach, but no one had imagined the old vents could become active in a matter of minutes, not the mission planners on Earth, not the crew on Europa.

  “I’ll tell the mecha to cut us loose,” Vonnie said.

  “What about everyone in the hab modules?” Ash said. “We can’t leave them.”

  “We’ll lift them clear.”

  “They should drive over.”

  “We don’t have that much time. They’re better off inside their modules than a jeep if we— Oh!”

  The floor heaved as their displays turned white. The spies’ sensors had overloaded. The last images were of the sunfish peeling a hunk of rock from a damp cliff face.

  A tsunami of broiling water, gas, and rubble shoved through the team of sunfish. It flash fried them. It ground their corpses to bits.

  The tunnel containing the spies erupted next. Their telemetry shut off, but Frerotte had duped the command feed from the FNEE mecha, which lasted seconds longer.

  Steaming water drowned the war machines and their captives. It shoved the floor of the cavern into the ceiling. Then the mashed remains were swept away. Two of the FNEE mecha issued damage reports as they tumbled with the cascade, rising toward the surface at speeds exceeding seventy kilometers per hour.

  On top of the frozen sky, Lander 04 tipped again, conveying some of the violence beneath the ice.

  Vonnie’s display became a liability, dizzying her with static and dead links. On the group feed, Koebsch yelled as Command Module 01 tipped over, jerking loose from its mooring cables. A data pad spun into his head as meal tubes and a jacket fluttered past.

  “Pressure suits! Pressure suits!” he shouted.

  Vonnie grasped her chair, steadying herself as Metzler and Ash ran to the ready room. If all of them went at once, nobody could suit up, so she stayed. Frerotte did the same. They hung onto their stations as the floor swayed.

  “Exterior cams,” she said.

  Her display flickered with various camera angles across camp. As always, most were radar or infrared signals modified into holo imagery.

  Their mecha rolled past the stationary listening posts toward the hab modules. Someone had also given evacuation commands to their jeeps, which turned on their headlights. The first vehicle began to drive.

  Much closer to Lander 04, three mecha approached, obeying Vonnie’s order to disconnect the lander from the maintenance shed and the charging post.

  Gouts of opaque dust and gas spurted from the surface, blasting the mecha. A crack opened ahead of them. Two dropped out of sight. In the minimal gravity, the third mecha lifted on the billowing gas, but the crack opened wider than the deluge could carry the machine. It dipped like a kite and vanished.

  Six listening posts and a storage container disappeared as the surface split in a dozen places. Segments of ice plummeted away. Others tilted and bashed together.

  Plumes of water vapor mushroomed into the night. Astonishing formations of ice crystals zigzagged above the camp, popping and spraying like gossamer rain. The haze obscured their satellite imagery. Then it actually touched the satellites, spilling up from Europa into naked space.

  A black maw took Hab Module 03. Suddenly the rectangular trailer was gone, dragging the cables of its jeep charging post after it.

  “Pärnits!” Vonnie gasped. She looked for him among the group feed, but 03’s data/comm shut off.

  Beth Collinsworth was in there, too, she thought. The linguists had plastered the walls of their lab with a thousand holos of carvings and sunfish, trying to memorize hundreds of combinations of shapes. They were batty, fun geniuses, and they loved their job.

  “Can you give me any projections from our listening posts!?” Vonnie shouted at Frerotte. “If the quakes are over—”

  “It’s going to get worse before it stops.”

  “Von! Von! F
rerotte!” Ash screamed from the ready room. “You need your suits!”

  “Oh shit.” Vonnie twisted herself out of her seat. Leaving her station, abandoning Pärnits to his fate, took more self-discipline than she could bear.

  Wobbling with the lander’s floor, Vonnie bruised her elbow on the hatch. She welcomed the pain. Unfortunately, Frerotte was behind her. He fell and slid into her foot, knocking her onto his chest. Outside, ice rang against the lander’s hull like gunfire.

  Ash hauled Vonnie to her feet. She wasn’t wearing her helmet. She held a spare suit over her arm and said, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

  “Where’s your helmet?”

  “Here!” Metzler yelled. He was fully suited. He extended a helmet to Ash as Vonnie took the suit on Ash’s arm. She sat down and stuffed her feet into the pant legs, not bothering to remove her clothes or to connect the sanitary features.

  The four of them were thrown in a pile when the lander seesawed. Frerotte stood up first, bleeding from his mouth.

  Vonnie shoved her arms into her sleeves. “The only mecha that can reach us are busy with Module 02,” she said. “I’m going outside.”

  “That’s crazy!” Metzler shouted. “Von, you can’t—!”

  “Let her go or do it yourself,” Frerotte said. “We need to take off before we fall in like 03.”

  “They’re gone!?” Metzler shouted. But he squared his shoulders and said to the women, “You’re the pilots. You stay.”

  Vonnie bustled past him toward the air lock. “Ben, I can cut us loose before a stupid biologist figures out which end of a wrench works best.”

  She forced a smile as she said it, wanting to kiss him. Instead, she seated her helmet on her collar assembly. She selected a tool kit and emergency pack from the wall. She opened the pack. She grabbed a wad of flexiglue suit patches, which she stuck against her chest, where she could find them easily. Then she turned to Ash.

  “Start your preflight,” she said.

  “I…” Ash’s face was a wretched mask.

  Vonnie opened the inner door to the air lock, stepped in and cycled the lock. As she waited, the floor tipped wildly. She crashed on her knees.

  Were they sliding into the ice?

  43.

  The exterior door opened. It let in a burst of ice shards and dust. Vonnie protected her visor with her gloves. Something the size of a dinner plate caromed off her ribs, but it was mostly air, not solid ice. Otherwise it might have cut her in half.

  As she stood, her boot slipped on a hardening sheet of moisture. Everywhere the air swirled with fog and invisible fingers of gas.

  Spotlights winked a few hundred meters to her left, where mecha tugged at Module 02, increasing the distance between it and her lander. Ejecta smashed down like cannonballs. Vonnie clutched at the tether reel mounted by the door. The tether was intended for extra-vehicular activity in space, but she clipped the line to her waist. She waded down the lander’s steps into the hurricane, where she stumbled and fell.

  She crawled forward with the tool kit in her fist. There was no way to grip the ice. It shuddered and dropped and slammed back into her shins and elbows.

  Maybe it wasn’t so strange that she clung to the sunfishes’ behavior as her example. She drew courage from their heroism.

  They chose to die for their tribe, she thought. Their assault group was a test. They knew the machines had killed the smaller sunfish. When their own warriors failed, the second group sabotaged the hot springs like they were arming a doomsday bomb. They wanted to stop the mecha before their home was threatened, too. They sacrificed themselves.

  Her tether vibrated like a harp’s string, tugging at her waist. Somehow she reached the maintenance shed. She considered opening her tool kit, but the wobbling ice threw her off-balance. She would have lost any tools in hand. It was all she could do to hold onto the kit, using its plastisteel case like a bludgeon against the data/comm and power couplings.

  The data/comm line separated easily. The power line was bolted to the shed. Vonnie was in mid-swing when her tether snapped tight and yanked, hurting her spine.

  As she turned to deal with it, something bit through her left arm. She never saw the object. She didn’t look. Her life shrank down to the slobbering, howling gash in her sleeve.

  Her air cylinders roared through her helmet and chest pack, attempting to compensate for the puncture.

  It was her blood that saved her. The fluid acted as a partial seal, freezing inside her sleeve. She also might have gained a second due to the gauzy clouds around her. The water vapor and gases created a denser-than-normal atmosphere. Even then, the partial vacuum of Europa’s surface was so cold it burned like a branding iron, disintegrating her skin, ruining her muscles and bone.

  Vonnie bent her bad arm to her chest and clamped three patches on it, creating a lumpy, half-solid ball of hemorrhaging flesh and glue. Her air cylinders redoubled the roar of oxygen.

  She didn’t think. She moved. She added another patch to her arm. She keyed no-shock from her helmet dispenser. Then she looked for her tool kit and went back to work, banging at the power line as if freeing it could save her from her agony.

  The coupling broke. The line sparked in her face, and Vonnie scrabbled away from it with her throbbing arm.

  Thoughts and emotions began to return. She raised her head to look for the jeep charging post. Its mass was much less than that of the shed, which was why she’d made it her second target. If necessary, Ash could lift off with the post hanging from the lander’s side. The flightcraft had plenty of thrust. The question was if Ash was pilot enough to compensate for flying off-balance.

  “Ben? Ben?” Vonnie called on her radio. “I can’t find the post!”

  No answer.

  “Ben!”

  She groped at her wrist controls, wondering if she was on the wrong frequency, but she couldn’t touch her arm without keening like a dog. Her eyes didn’t want to stay on the read-out, which was obscured by blood and glue.

  More quakes buckled the ice. Rising on her good hand and knees, Vonnie caught a puff of crystals across her shoulder. She ducked and crept alongside the lander, trying to get her bearings. Was she going the right way?

  A monstrous shape reared above her in the storm.

  She thought something had come out of the frozen sky — a new lifeform — a rhino or a dragon that had been tossed from the ice. It was five times larger than a human being. Its teeth glinted like steel.

  Screaming, she clawed sideways. She intended to hide beneath the lander until an orange light on her wrist flashed with a familiar homing pattern. One, two, three, blank. One, two, three, blank.

  The monster was their jeep. The spikes on its back were radio antennae. Its ’teeth’ consisted of the bars and pods of its forward sensor array.

  Vonnie choked and laughed, nearly hysterical. She rammed her head against the lander’s underside as she emerged, but she forgot her fear when she discovered she could stand. Were the quakes subsiding or was that wishful thinking?

  She peered through the eddies of fog. Belatedly, she realized walking was so difficult because the surface canted up thirty degrees. Ahead of her, one of the lander’s grappling hooks had gouged the ice, preventing the lander from sliding more than a few meters. The jeep shared their strange angle, and the ice jutted up behind it for fifty meters.

  That was where the surface ended. They were on a broken slab of ice. Vonnie glanced over her shoulder to measure the slab in the other direction.

  The maintenance shed had vanished. The edge was four meters away. She couldn’t see more than jagged ice and shadows.

  How far would they drop if the slab went in?

  All around her, other blocks had capsized or tilted or sunk. Many were adhered together by smoother bumps of water that had shot from the ice, then solidified. Gases and vapor continued to waft up from the shattered plain. Module 02 was farther away than it had been, towed to safety by the mecha, but everything between 04 and 02 was gone.r />
  Vonnie hiked toward the jeep. Why hadn’t Ash lifted off? Because of the charging post?

  Wheezing, she sagged after a few steps. The jeep eased toward her as if wanting to help, then stopped. Was it damaged? She assumed it was trying to respond to rescue commands from Metzler or Frerotte. Why couldn’t she hear them?

  In her exhaustion, she seized an idea.

  I don’t need to reach the charging post. I can order the jeep to ram into it for me.

  “Jeep Four, where is your post?” she murmured.

  It didn’t answer. Nor did its homing signal change. That meant it recognized her suit, but it hadn’t heard her voice.

  Idiot, she thought, staring at her mangled arm. She hadn’t switched on her radio before she ran from the lander. Now she activated it to a blare of voices.

  Ash yelled: “We’re not leaving her, Koebsch! The jeep is balancing us!”

  Vonnie felt a fresh swell of nausea when she realized what would have happened if she’d been able to give her orders to the jeep. I can’t move it. Its weight might tip the slab. They’re using it to stabilize the lander.

  “I’m going outside,” Metzler said as Koebsch yelled, “Four of us are missing or hurt! The last thing we need is more casualties!”

  “This is Vonderach,” she said by rote. Then, with more feeling, she added, “Take off.”

  “Are you all right!?” Metzler shouted. “I’m coming outside!”

  “No. Take off. My tether’s attached.”

  “You’ll swing into the jets!”

  “Reel me in. The ice…”

  It creaked. The slab was tottering.

  “I’ll get her,” Frerotte said. “Ash, hit the jets. Low power. You keep our adjustments to the jeep.”

  The last remark was aimed at Metzler. Vonnie understood his words that well. Then she coughed blood onto the inside of her visor. Spluttering, she coughed again. My side? she thought, tracing the worst pain to her ribs.

  She grayed out.

  When her mind sharpened again, she was shuffling on her knees and her good hand, following her tether as it pulled at her waist. Someone was yelling. Frerotte. He was either cranking the tether reel manually or from inside the lock. Inside would be smarter, where he was protected from eruptions and shrapnel.