Edge of Infinity

Sandra McDonald and Stephen D. Covey

NOT THAT HE was paranoid, but in the forty-eight hours prior to departure, Rahiti Ochoa ate and drank only from the supplies he’d been stockpiling under his bunk. He compulsively checked the oxygen levels in his tiny quarters. He didn’t go near the crew bar on level four (someone might drug his beer), skipped working out in the gym (someone might rig the treadmill), and kept to himself on shift, glaring at anyone who got within ten or fifteen feet (because someone might just try the direct approach, a crowbar to the head). He warned Will Danton to keep the same precautions.

“Crazy Samoan,” Will muttered. “Relax, will you? You won the contract. Orbital’s not going to try and sabotage you.”

Better crazy than dead, Jovinta might say, if she were talking to him.

Maybe Will didn’t take the threat seriously enough, or maybe he was distracted by someone on purpose, or maybe (just maybe) it was really an accident, but when the silver crate toppled over, smashing Will against a sled – when he began to scream, wild and raw, accompanied by the wail of the emergency siren – when all that happened, Rahiti’s first thought was: Son of bitches found a way to stop me.

“Ra!” Will screamed.” Get it off me!”

The Orbital arena supervisor, Hal Carpenter, shouted over Rahiti’s headset.”I’m on it! Someone shut him up!”

Rahiti leaped twenty metres forward in two slow bounds. The arena was well lit, as always, the Europa sky dark and glittering far above. No sign yet of the sun breaking over the horizon, but already a sliver of Jupiter was sunlit and their scheduled departure was imminent. He could see how Will was pinned and could tell instantly there was no way to get him loose without a loader. The nearest driver, a new kid, was spinning his treads back and forth on the ice, panicking.

“Don’t cut off my arm,” Will wailed. “Ra! I need my arm.”

“No one’s cutting off anything,” Rahiti promised. Although it was useless, he threw himself against one of the hundred-ton crates.”Hold on, okay?”

A more experienced driver took over from the newbie and with a few deft manoeuvres got the crate shifted away. Will went limp. Rahiti pulled him free, ignored the twisted and flattened look of the arm, and wrapped his arm around Will’s waist. He jumped them toward the nearest hatch.

“Emergency crew’s on its way,” Carpenter said over the headset, the useless bastard.

“I’ve got him,” Rahiti bit out. “Open airlock six.”

By the time Rahiti got them both into the lock, Will was beginning to stir back to consciousness. His face was glassy under his mask. The skinsuit had sealed over any tears or breaches, but his arm was still hanging so gruesomely that Rahiti couldn’t look at it.

“Sorry, sorry,” Will mumbled as he came around. “Didn’t see it. Don’t cut it off.”

The airlock cycled up. Rahiti got his helmet off, then slid Will’s off too. “It’s okay. Not your fault.”

Will’s skin was sweaty-clammy, a ghastly shade of grey. “Messed up the plan.”

“I built in an extension,” Rahiti said. “We’re good.”

The inner hatch rolled open. A young med tech with bright red hair poked her head in. “How is he?”

“How would you be?” Rahiti snapped. “Where’s the stretcher?”

She blinked at Will. “They said minor accident.”

“Minor, my ass.” Rahiti hopped and pulled, using the handholds, and got Will into the passage. He’d never seen the tech before. Asterius Outpost wasn’t a huge place, three hundred people maybe, but it was the pass-through for any personnel heading up or back from North Pole Station and Conamara. “He’s in shock, his arm is crushed, you didn’t check the feeds?”

“My arm’s fine,” Will said, his voice slurring. He gave the tech a lopsided smile. “What’s your name?”

She was young and new, but at least trained enough to ignore his flirting and plant a round disk to Will’s neck. “Telemetry’s on, we’re on our way,” she said briskly into her own set, and only then did she answer. “I’m Anu.”

“Anu,” Will said. “Watcha doing later, Anu?”

Rahiti pulled him into the lift and said, “Shut up, Will.”

The infirmary waiting room was half-full, but the doctor on duty hustled them immediately into a cubicle. Rahiti didn’t think much of Dr. Desai – in his experience, she was as snooty as the rest of them – but she was both concerned and efficient as she slipped Will a painkiller.

“Mr. Ochoa, you can wait outside,” she said.

Will’s good hand came up and snagged Rahiti’s arm. “No. Stay with me.”

Desai said, “Only family or next of kin.”

“Who the f*ck can afford to bring family here?” Rahiti asked hotly.

“Language, please,” she said. “Are you registered partners?”

Will’s grip grew only tighter. “Don’t let them cut off my arm.”

“I’m married. My wife’s in Hawaii,” Rahiti said. Half a billion miles away, maybe on a beach somewhere. Javinta liked beaches, but hated to swim; who wanted to bathe in tiny bits of seaweed and dead fish and ocean pollution? Maybe even now she was sitting in the sand, watching the waves, thinking about breaking the six months of silence that stretched all the way to Europa.

The scanner in Desai’s hand shed green light on Will’s crushed arm, piercing the skinsuit and displaying the injury overhead. Desai gave up on trying to eject Rahiti from the cubicle and instead spoke quickly into a transcriber. Rahiti didn’t understand all the words – distal radius, proximal something, perfusion? The med tech watched with frank interest from a corner.

Desai put a patch on Will’s shoulder. “Here’s the really good stuff. When it kicks in, you won’t feel anything below your shoulder for twelve hours or so. Surgery’s up next.”

“Surgery?” Rahiti asked, the word a rock in his throat. “How long?”

Will protested, “I can’t have surgery. We’re leaving in an hour. Driving to NPS.”

The med tech blurted out, “That’s you? The Crazy Samoan?”

Rahiti’s face flushed. “Yeah, that’s me.”

“Anumati!” Desai said sternly. The girl looked away. Desai said, “The surgery will take an hour or two, then we have to monitor the perfusion to make certain you don’t lose your arm. You’ll be in a splint for at least three weeks. No skinsuits.”

Will banged his head against the exam table. “I’m sorry, Ra. Damn.”

Rahiti didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t quite sure what he felt, either, except that it was a lot like free-fall, sickening and plunging with no end in sight.

“It’s okay,” he said, in a voice that sounded as distant as Javinta on her beach. “I’ll do it alone.”

“You better do it soon,” Desai said. Her gaze was focused solely on her patient. “An accident like this means an incident report. The safety team’s going to want to interview any witnesses. That could take all day.”

Rahiti’s free-fall came to a sudden slamming halt.

“If I were you,” she continued, “I might think about leaving here through the freight lift. Take a right over there, second hatch.”

Rahiti didn’t thank her. He didn’t even say goodbye to Will, or wish him luck. When he was inside the lift, black rage rose up and made him kick the bulkhead. Damn, damn, damn. Hundreds of hours of planning, thousands of hours of worrying, his tiny living cube overflowing with schedules, maps and supply lists, and he’d never considered what he would do if his co-driver got himself crushed by a crate.

Just before the doors closed, Anu slid her boot between them.

“I can help you,” she announced. “Take me.”

Rahiti didn’t even stop to think about his reply. “Absolutely not.”

She gave him a pleading look. “My boyfriend works at NPS. We’ve been z-mailing for months. I left college to come out here to see him, but I ran out of money. You need someone to help you on this trip, and I can do it.”

He kicked her foot free. “I don’t need you.”

The lift doors slid closed, blocking her unhappy face.

When he reached the interior docks, he saw two people in Asterius white-and-red safety suits talking to Hal Carpenter, that son of a bitch. Carpenter had a direct line-of-sight on the flex tunnel leading to his snowcat. But Rahiti still had his skinsuit on, still had his helmet. He could go out the aux lock, come up underneath the cat, board out of sight of the cameras. More precious time ticking on the clock. He backtracked, got his helmet on, and went downladder to the auxiliary locks. The minute he opened one, Carpenter would notice. He needed some kind of diversion –

A shrill alarm cut through his headset. Fire drill. Rahiti winced and slapped at the volume and thanked whoever had probably set the thing off by accident.

Outside, approaching the cat with two easy bounds, he eyed the extra tanks carrying hydrogen and oxygen for the fuel cells. The vehicle looked ungainly with all the added weight, but they were necessary for the trip up and back, and for extra mass to give more weight and traction. The dozen sleds lined up behind the cat were twice as many as Rahiti had ever hauled before. Without the extra weight, his treads would spin uselessly on the ice instead of pulling the load.

Crazy plan, yeah. But he’d done the math a dozen times, had convinced himself that the loaded cat could drag three thousand tons of payload, and had won the contract fair and square.

He had eighty-five hours – one Europa day – to either earn five years’ pay or put himself into horrible debt, probably forever.

Rahiti climbed into the cat’s cabin. The thunk of the airlock closing was like the last drop of a guillotine blade. As the fuel cells powered up, the triple beams of the headlights cut across Europa’s bleak landscape. He tapped Javinta’s picture, mounted below the radio. Her smile was sweet and shy, her dimples deep enough to fall into.

“Wish me luck,” he said. And then, over the radio, he said, “Snowcat 89-4A, checklist complete, I’m leaving for NPS.”

Carpenter’s voice was slow and lazy. “Oh, that’s a negative, 89-A. You’ve got some folks here from Safety who need to talk to you about your partner’s accident.”

“I already recorded my statement,” Rahiti said. “It’s in their z-box. Asterius regulation 1732.a, a video statement can suffice for personnel not in the immediate vicinity.”

A pause. “But you are in the immediate vicinity, Ochoa. I’m looking at you through my window.”

Rahiti resisted the urge to lift his hand and give Carpenter an obscene gesture.

“Asterius regulation 1732.a (3), no definition provided for ‘immediate,’” he said. “Wish us luck. 89 out.”

His contract was with Asterius, but he’d had to rent everything except the cargo from his own employer, Orbital. Part of the contract was that Orbital could distribute footage once the operation was completed. The bastards didn’t want him to succeed, but they’d certainly exploit him if he did. Rahiti ran the cells up to maximum, generating excess water that vented as steam through the top of the snowcat. Wasteful, but dramatic. On the cams it looked like an old-style steam locomotive chugging out of the station. He wished his job was as easy as a train driver; how damned convenient, following miles and miles of track someone else had already put down through the wilderness.

Slowly he engaged the motors. Too much power and the treads would slip; too little and the sleds wouldn’t move. The trick was to get each sled moving and sliding before the slack was taken up. Soon three thousand tons of mass payload were following the cat on the road to Conamara. The payload took its own sweet time, however. Even running the fuel cells at maximum, Rahiti barely achieved fifty kilometres an hour.

Still, he was on his way.

No partner, no back-up, no one to talk to for the next eighty-five hours, but he was on his way. Score one for the Crazy Samoan.

He settled into his chair, piped some island music in over the speakers, and downed more coffee. Six hours later, dawn arrived. A triangle of faint Zodiacal light pointed to the rising sun just before it peeked above the hills behind Conamara. The bright limb of the sun overwhelmed the glow from the full Jupiter behind him. Ten minutes later he passed Conamara’s buried domes, gave a status update, and turned onto Agave Linea. Now half of Jupiter painted the horizon. Europa’s shadow crawled below the Great Red Spot, and would for the next three hours.

Pretty, he thought to himself. If you liked that sort of thing. If you ever saw it, instead of spending all of your time working or sleeping or drinking in grey rooms under artificial lights.

No wonder Javinta had stayed on Earth.

Rahiti shook off his gloom and poured more coffee. Everything from here out was new ground, literally. The entire moon was just one giant frozen sea. The lines formed natural roads of fresh ice in a criss-cross maze, with hidden obstacles and freshly opened cracks between him and the pole. As long as he could stay awake, stay alert, and stay on schedule, he’d be fine. The extra eight hours in the schedule gave him time to catnap, and he could trust the autopilot as long as the way was steady and straight.

Two hundred kilometres later, a liquid sound burbled in the access tube to the sleepsled.

What the f*ck?

He checked the path ahead and enabled the autopilot. Four low-gravity hand pulls brought him to the tube. Six crawls through the tube and he was in the dim sled, where the colder temperature made his breath frost.

Anu was sitting on the lone bunk. Meekly, she said, “I had to use the bathroom.”

Rahiti’s vision darkened. His hands fisted, anger flooding up. It took everything he had not to kick at something or punch the bulkhead. “What the hell are you doing here? How did you get in?”

She cringed. “I pulled the fire alarm so everyone was distracted. I have to see Ted. Mom won’t pay, so this is the only way.”

He didn’t believe her. It was more likely that someone had planted her here the same way they had arranged for Will’s accident. For a brief, hot moment he contemplated throwing her out the airlock.

But then he asked, “Your mom?”

“Dr. Desai,” she said.

That did it. He punched the bulkhead and was rewarded with bright hot pain in all his fingers.

Quickly Anu said, “I won’t be any trouble! I can keep you company, maybe even drive. You said you needed help.”

Rahiti shook his head. “You think you can just drive a rig, no experience? I’m going to have to take you back to Conamara. My whole schedule – Jesus. What you’ve done to me. You don’t even know.”

The sleepsled jerked violently. The snowcat gave off a sharp peal, like a bell being run, as it struck and broke through something on their path. But the cat didn’t stop. It continued to bounce and surge forward. Anu yelped in surprise, started asking questions, but Rahiti was too busy racing back through the tube to care about her curiosity.

He was halfway back to his seat when the cat slammed to a halt with terrible metal shrieks. He couldn’t grab a handhold in time. Momentum slammed him face first into the front console, right below the picture of Javinta.

The last thing he saw was her bright eyes, full of reproach: Crazy Samoan.


HE WASN’T OUT long. Maybe a few seconds. The blare of alarms dragged him back, accompanied by the whine of engines. The autopilot kicked in, shut them down. Lights flickered in his face, bright and annoying, but nothing he could clearly focus on.

“Mr. Ochoa!” Anu’s voice was frantic.”Are you okay?”

Rahiti wiped blood away from his face. His nose was a bright flare of pain. Warm liquid and debris were floating in his mouth. Blood. Broken teeth. He spat out as much as he could. He was dizzy and breathless and maybe even dying.

“Mr. Ochoa? Here, sit down.”

Anu helped him to the driver’s seat. Rahiti thought to ask, “Are you hurt?” but then had to cough out more blood and only caught part of her answer.

“– and my knee, I think. What happened?”

“What do you think?” he snapped. “We hit something.”

Something the autopilot hadn’t seen. A ridge hidden by snow? He should have been at the controls, not babysitting this schoolgirl.

“You’re a mess,” she said. “Medical emergency, first aid program.”

The computer answered. “Hi. How may I help?”

Anu talked to the program. Rahiti tried peering at the sensors, but his eyes were getting worse. He was reasonably sure now that he wasn’t dying, but maybe death would be easier than complete and utter failure. Easier than facing the shame. People like Hal Carpenter would mock him for years to come over this. Couldn’t even follow a straight line.

Despair pulsed through him as his eyes swelled shut. Blind, broken nose, the snowcat jammed –

Uncertainly Anu said, “That’s all I can do for now. Do you want to lie down?”

“No,” he ground out. “Emergency doctor off.”

The speaker went silent. The cockpit consoles were still making small alarmed noises, but Rahiti ignored them. “Did we lose the sleds?”

“I don’t know. How can I tell?”

“Look at the panel lights on the left upper bulkhead.”

Silence for a moment. Then, “They’re all green. That’s good, right?”

Rahiti tried to think clearly. The taste of blood was making him sick.

Anu’s voice was thin. “Can I call anyone for help?”

“We’re out of radio range.”

“They’ll come looking for us, right? Eventually?”

He didn’t answer. Yes, eventually Orbital would come for them. And charge him for the rescue and recovery. Technically he was using his vacation time for these eight-five hours; they’d probably find a way to charge him for any medical treatment he needed, claiming that he wasn’t on duty and therefore not insured. Years and years more work added to his contract, more steel chains of days wrapped around his legs and wrists. But there was one way to avoid it. One way out.

“You’re going to have to drive,” he said.

“What?” she squeaked. “You said I can’t! It’s too hard.”

Rahiti spat out another wad of blood. “If we don’t make it to NPS, I lose all the money I borrowed to rent this equipment and buy fuel. I’ll never be able to go home. I’ll never see my wife again. And you won’t see your boyfriend.”

She was silent. Thinking, fearing, setting herself up for failure. He knew what that was like.

“Okay, so it’s not like driving on Earth,” he admitted. “It’s like a tank pulling a train, just faster and more complicated. But the route is mostly a bunch of straight lines. If you can steer, I can keep us moving.”

“I guess I can try,” she said doubtfully.

“Computer, audio mode,” Rahiti said. “Report configuration changes since departure.”

“Zero configuration changes.” Which was good. All the sleds were still attached.

“Report significant anomalies, priority order.”

“Emergency brakes deployed on all sleds. Tractor is tilted left at 82 degrees to the horizon. Sleeping sled is tilted left at 25 degrees to the horizon. Shock sensors tripped. Fuel feed safety disconnect activated. Autopilot disabled. Satellite telemetry inoperative. No response for medical emergency distress call. Headlamp 1 inoperative. Cameras 1, 3, and 5 disabled or blind.”

“That sounds bad,” Anu said, her voice small.

“Most of those are emergency reflexes. They’ll clear when we flip the right switches. The telemetry and tilt are bad. We’ll check the cameras once we’re outside.”

Now her tone shifted to disbelief. “You can’t go outside! Maybe you didn’t notice your severe facial injuries –”

“Stop talking and help me,” he said.

The easy part was having her bandage his eyes. The hard part was struggling into the skinsuit’s tight confines in his personal total darkness, acutely aware of being naked in front of her, not knowing what she was looking at. It took twice as long as normal. Anu hadn’t brought a skinsuit, of course, and had to use the emergency one. And of course she’d never put one on before. He had to instruct her, several times, to make sure she did it right. The last thing he needed was for her to die out there due to cold or oxygen loss.

Once they were outside, Anu tethered Rahiti to the sled so he wouldn’t wander off blindly. He didn’t like that, but then again, he didn’t like any of this. She reported, “The cargo sleds are upright, in a kind of wavy line. The left cameras and headlamps are all smashed up.”

“What about the antenna? It’s on top, dead centre.”

“There’s just some twisted metal.”

“Check out the sleds and tell me if anything shifted. While you’re at it, rewind the grapples. There’s one on each side of the back of every sled. They’re our emergency brakes. It should be easy. The feed button lets out the cable, then you pull the grapple out of the ice, and then flip the retract button. Just keep the points of the grapple facing upward.”

“You’re kind of bossy,” Anu said.

“Do you want out of here or don’t you?”

She went to work.”Why’d you decide to do this, anyway?”

“Profit.”

“I guessed that.”

“Asterius owns all the bases and outposts on Europa, but Orbital operates most of the shipping contracts. To get stuff to NPS they launch a payload into polar orbit, cancel its angular momentum, then de-orbit and land. That all takes fuel, thousands of tons of it. Very expensive, but it’s passed along to Asterius. I told Asterius that I can deliver the same load a lot cheaper, just by pulling sleds. So this is my one chance to prove it.”

“If it’s so easy, why hasn’t anyone ever done it before?” Anu asked.

“Because I thought of it first.”

“And because everyone else thought it was crazy?”

“Yeah.”

“How long have you been here, anyway?”

He knew the answer down to the hour, but all he said was, “Six years.”

It took two hours to inspect the sleds and retract the grapples. Another three hours to drive the loader to the snowcat, tow it out of the ridge, shove it in line with the sleds, and stow the loader again. Anu was a quick learner, but the crash had rattled her, and she was young, and everything was new to her. Every step went slower than Rahiti wanted. Here he was, barely five hundred kilometres into the three-thousand-kilometre trip, and his contingency time was rapidly dwindling. Pain and fear gnawed at him.

Back inside, stripped out of their skinsuits again, Anu asked, “Do you want to sleep for awhile? Then we can go?”

Yes he wanted to sleep. No, he didn’t dare it. “I’ll get us moving, you drive, then we’ll see,” he said.

He started the snowcat’s engine. It made a protesting noise or two, but settled down quickly. It took him several minutes of working by touch and instinct to get the sleds moving again. Anu read out their bearing and the autopilot suggested it take over.

“Maybe that’s a good idea,” Anu said.

Rahiti said, “It drove us right into that snowbank.”

She was quiet for a moment. “On purpose? Like, sabotage?”

He didn’t want to say yes. No use both of them being paranoid. But he couldn’t honestly tell her no. He thought about Hal Carpenter sneaking into the snowcat while he was in the infirmary with Will and making just a few little changes to the program.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “We can’t trust it.”

At 10 kph, Rahiti let Anu operate the controls. She practiced speeding up to 15 kph and down to 5, and tried some slow, gentle swerves. When Rahiti was confident – as confident as he could be, blind and in pain and exhausted – he let her ramp up to 20, then to 30. Finally he let her go to 40. The ride was smoother than he’d hoped.

“You’re not bad at this,” he said, begrudgingly.

She sounded pleased. “Thanks.”

“Just stay sharp. Something could go wrong at any minute.”

And probably would, just when he was least expecting it. Europa luck. Worst kind of luck in the solar system.


SIX HOURS AND two hundred and forty kilometres later, Rahiti gave up trying to nap. Every time he drifted off, he would feel a movement in the sled and start to panic. The total darkness scared him to the bottom of his gut, made everything around him sharp and hard. His face hurt and his broken teeth throbbed, but he didn’t want to pop anything but the mildest painkiller in the kit. Couldn’t afford to, not at the risk of clouding his thinking. Abandoning the bunk, he inched his way forward from the sleepsled.

“My turn to sleep, right?” Anu asked. “I’m exhausted.”

“You can’t leave. I need your eyes.”

“Like I’m going to stay up this whole trip,” she scoffed.

He didn’t answer.

Sharply she said, “I didn’t sign up to do this whole thing without sleep!”

“You didn’t sign up at all. If we don’t get there on time –”

“I know. You lose your money. But seriously. You want me to hallucinate? Go crazy on you? That’s what happens when people don’t sleep.”

“Help me get these bandages off.”

Unwrapped and flushed with water, his eyes still proved useless. He wondered, sickly, if his vision was ever going to come back. What use was sitting on a beach with Javinta if he couldn’t see her smile, or watch her trickle sand through her brown fingers?

“You’re going to have to keep driving,” he told Anu.

Several more kilometres passed. He sensed that she was thinking up new arguments. Eventually she said, “I know you don’t trust the autopilot, but what if we turn it on, and go really slow, and I nap right here? If something goes wrong, you could wake me up. Otherwise I’m going to go crazy from sleep deprivation.”

He didn’t actually think two more days without sleep would drive her psychotic. Then again, it probably wasn’t worth testing.

“Nap for how long?” he asked.

“Four hours.”

“Three.”

“I’ll still be tired.”

“But we’ll be on time,” he said.

They slowed to twenty kilometres per hour and engaged the autopilot. Anu went to sleep. Rahiti fretted. Headset plugged in, he made the computer announce their coordinates and speed every three minutes, and the time every ten minutes, and Jesus, who knew three hours could drag like that? He woke Anu up thirteen minutes early. She grumbled but got herself some coffee and increased their speed.

“So what’s next? Straight line to NPS?” she said around a yawn.

“Not quite. In five hundred kilometres we’re going to make a turn.”

“You should let me speed up now that I’m used to it. How fast can I go?”

He hesitated. “She tops out at fifty.”

“Then fifty it is.”

Almost nine hours passed at the improved speed. They drank coffee like it was water and ate from the rations, although Rahiti’s jagged teeth and sore gums hurt with every bite. Anu complained at the lack of vegetarian options. He told her that next time she stowed away, she should bring her own tofu. She synched her music player into the main console. He hadn’t heard of half the bands she liked. He tried not to worry too much about the upcoming segment from Hyperenor to Athene Linea. It was fifty kilometres of criss-crossed lineae. He wouldn’t know until they got there if they’d be forced to do switchbacks, and if Anu’s driving would up to the challenge.

Four hours from Hyperenor, Anu started talking non-stop about movies, college, and her divorced parents, but mostly about her boyfriend, Ted. Smart Ted, funny Ted, underappreciated Ted, who she’d met through z-mail.

“If he’s so smart, why’s he doing grunt work at NPS?” Rahiti asked.

“He’s helping a friend work off his contract. Then he’s going back to Earth to finish school.”

“He might be totally lying about who is.”

Anu made an exasperated noise. “You sound like my mother. Besides, you’re no expert on relationships. You haven’t seen your wife in six years.”

“That’s different. We couldn’t afford two passages.”

“If she really wanted to be here, she’d be here. I came for Ted –” Anu’s voice halted. Something clicked on the console. “Hey, we’re coming into a snowstorm.”

He was glad for the change of subject. “There’s no such thing as a snowstorm in a vacuum.”

“Well, it looks all white across the horizon. Just like falling snow.”

She slowed to a crawl. Rahiti heard bits of ice sleeting against the cabin. Some larger hailstones hit as well, but none of them sounded big enough to cause damage. Yet. He racked through his memories, trying to figure out what she was seeing.

“Must be a snow volcano,” he offered. “It’s venting water into space, which freezes and comes down as ice.”

“It’s about a kilometre in front of us, blocking the way. It goes as far as as far I can see in both directions. It’s beautiful.”

Rahiti forced himself to think it through. “Hyperenor ridge must have opened up with a fresh crack in the ice. That’s sleet, not snow. Can you see through it at all? If the fissure is small enough, we might just drive fast and cross it.”

“What if it’s not small?”

“We’ll fall in and sink to the bottom of the ocean.”

Anu drew in a sharp breath. “Not funny.”

“It’s not supposed to be,” Rahiti replied. “It’s about sixty miles deep.”

She let her breath out in a long sigh. “I can’t see through it. Can we drive around it?”

He recalculated in his head. “If we go northeast, parallel to the fissure, up to Sandus. It’s a lot longer than I wanted to go.”

“Will the ice here beside the fissure be strong enough to hold us?”

“Yes,” he said, and hoped real hard.

She made the turn.

“Tell me what you see,” he told her.

“It’s like driving through a snow tunnel – there’s snow rising up on the left, swirling overhead, and then landing on our right. Kinda psychedelic. Mom’s going to die when she sees my vid.”

The roar from the fissure pummelled Rahiti through the snowcat’s hull and seat. His head started hurting all over again.

“Sooner or later I’m going to need another nap,” Anu said.

Rahiti forced himself to sound calm. “Let’s worry about the big deadly crack first, okay?”

They followed Hyperenor northeast for several hours. Anu periodically informed Rahiti about the diminishing height of the fountain. The snow tunnel narrowed in response, and fatigue strained her voice.

“It’s past midnight,” she said. “If I were home, I’d be in bed now.”

“We’ve got five hours until Sandus. That’ll be a good place.”

Anu made a rude sound. “I’ve had a total of three hours sleep. You try driving all this on three hours sleep.”

“I would if I could,” he snapped.

She kept driving.

They reached Sandus on time, but Anu had bad news: the fissure was still open. “The tunnel is down to about a hundred metres wide. Steady, no sign of letting up. It was maybe a kilometre wide when we first started. Can I sleep now?”

“Not yet,” he said. “You’re going to have to jump it.”

Fatigued or not, her response was full of energy. “Absolutely no possible way!”

Rahiti replied, “If you don’t jump it, we’re going to have to drive to the next linea two hundred kilometres away and hope it’s closed there. By then I’ll be bankrupt.”

“But if we jump, we might end up dead. Dead is worse.”

“I’ll take that chance,” he said.

“Crazy Samoan,” she said. And then was silent, and he couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

“You can do this,” he told her.

“What do you know?” she grumbled. “I don’t know how.”

“Bring her into a two-hundred seventy degree turn to the right and get as close to the southern bank as you can. You’ve got to get all the sleds around before you floor it. It’s going to be like jumping over an upside down waterfall. If you don’t hit it perfectly straight and level, we’ll flip over.”

“You’re not helping my confidence.”

“Straight and level,” he repeated.

The sound of the fissure faded as the engine revved up. Sleet pounded on the hull as they passed through the snow wall. He clutched the armrest so hard his fingers ached. A few minutes later they returned through the snow wall as Anu completed the turn.

“If we die, I’m going to haunt you for the rest of the afterlife,” she said. “Hold the f*ck on.”

She floored the engines. Moments later, the blast of water from the fissure lifted the snowcat off the surface. Rahiti remembered taking Javinta to see an eruption of Manua Loa. She hadn’t wanted to watch and spent most of the time with her head buried against his shoulder, her dark hair silky on his chin. It’s okay, he’d told her. Perfectly safe. Now he remembered the smell of it, and awful white ash pluming into the sky, and the way the whole world seemed on the verge of cracking open.

No ash here, just ice and snow and the awful sensation of falling until they touched down again. The cat lurched and shuddered but held steady.

Anu gave him a big kiss on the cheek. “We made it!”

Rahiti’s heartbeat felt wild in his chest. “You did it.”

“Yeah, now I get to sleep.”

“There’s an eclipse in about two hours –”

“No. I’m the boss now.” She stopped the snowcat. “I’ll be in the back. Wake me up, and I’ll kill you. I’m not kidding.”

Forty-eight hours since they’d left the equator. Eighteen hundred and twenty five kilometres down, but re-routing to Sandus had added another two hundred. If she slept until the end of the eclipse and they averaged fifty after that, they could still be on time. Barely.

He’d still have his money.

Cautiously optimistic, he wrapped himself in a blanket and waited for her to wake up. Exhaustion dragged him down faster than he could fight it. Dreams sucked him under. He was trapped under Europa’s frozen surface, swimming in crystal green water with Javinta. Her dark hair streamed around her head as she swam away from him. Always swimming away. Funny, considering how much she hated the ocean. He opened his mouth to call her name but only scratching noises emerged; persistent and annoying scratching, somewhere outside his dream.

Something was scratching on the hull.