Edge of Infinity

RAHITI PULLED HIMSELF upright in the darkness. “Anu?”

All was quiet but for the hum of the air and power system.

More scratching.

“Anu, wake up!” he yelled.

She shouted back, “Go to hell!”

“I need you. There’s something outside!”

He heard her move forward through the tunnel. “If you’re joking –”

“What do you see out there?”

She paused. “Nothing. It’s all black. Eclipse, remember?”

“You should at least see our headlights on the ice.”

“No. No headlights.”

He swallowed hard, panic flaring. “Are they on?”

“Of course –”

Something scraped against the forward hull, loud and distinctive. Anu stopped talking.

Rahiti groped at the panel. “Turn on the infrared.”

A switch flipped. Anu said, “There’s some kind of weird pattern on the windshield. Like a quilt. It’s... moving. Pulsing. Like a heart.” Her voice dropped into a whisper of awe. “It’s something alive, plastered there.”

“Impossible. There’s no life on Europa –”

Something flopped on the roof.

“We discovered it!” Anu said, much louder now, almost giddy. “First aliens ever!”

Rahiti cursed. At her enthusiasm, at Europa luck, at the gods determined to ruin him. Whatever was scraping at their hull had probably come up through the fissures from Europa’s vast sea. The heat cells must have attracted them.

Well, if they wanted heat, he’d give them heat.

“We have a lot of hydrogen and oxygen,” he said. “We’ll have to make a blowtorch and burn them off.”

“What? You can’t kill them!” Anu exclaimed. “They might be intelligent, they might have a civilisation –”

“They sound like jellyfish,” he said. “We don’t know what they can do or how much damage they can cause. They could clog up our vents, drip acid through the hull –”

“You’ve seen too many movies,” she scoffed.

“You want to take that chance?” he asked.

“I’m not going to make a blowtorch for you,” she said stubbornly. “If we have water, why don’t we just hose them off?”

“It’s not that easy. If it freezes on the snowcat, the hull might crack. We’d have to spend the rest of our trip in skinsuits.”

“But we’d live,” Anu said. “And they’d live. You can’t just kill off the greatest discovery in the history of space exploration.”

“We can if they’re trying to kill us first.” He reached for his bandages. “If you won’t do it, I will.”

The immensely good news was that his eyes could distinguish light from dark, and her blurry face, and the general outline of the sled. The bad news was that little details were still beyond his ability – how many fingers she was waving at him, for instance, or which buttons controlled the airlock.

“I think you’re totally wrong and I disagree with you on every moral and philosophical level,” Anu said. “But I’ll go out there and try to scare them off.”

Both of them got back into their skinsuits in case the snowcat lost atmosphere. Anu dragged an empty waste container from the sleep sled and filled it with hot water. She climbed into the airlock, cycled it, and opened the outside hatch. A yelp followed.

Rahiti snapped, “Talk to me!”

“There’s one right below me. Kind of brown, with a frilly fringe, oval shaped. Like a bathroom rug. My mom’s going to love this picture –”

“Stop taking vids and hop past it. You’ll be safer away from the warm snowcat.”

For several moments he heard only her breathing. Then she said, “Okay. I’m away. There’s lots of them. The baby ones are only a metre across, there’s about six of them. Then there are a few teenagers, I guess, two or three metres across. But there’s a big mama one at least five metres wide. She’s on top of the sleepsled. Wait – two of the teenagers just dropped off the snowcat. They’re sliding toward me.”

“Squirt them with the water.”

Her voice ratcheted higher. “The water doesn’t work – they like it!”

She screamed.

“Anu! Answer me!”

Her radio clicked off. Rahiti pulled on his helmet, squinted his way to the airlock, and sealed the inner door. Without waiting for the cycle he pulled the handle.

The computer said, “Warning: Airlock pressure not –”

“Override!”

The vacuum alarm sounded as oxygen vented. He unlocked the outer door. A last puff of pressure blew out. A creature that had been crawling up the hull fell away and writhed at the burst.

“Our air!” he shouted. “They don’t like it!”

Because of course Europa had oxygen, deep in the seas and thin in its atmosphere, but not concentrated and gaseous, not mixed with nitrogen the way humans liked it, and especially not warm. The creature’s writhing agony reminded him of that time Will didn’t understand “no” and got a face full of pepper spray. Rahiti jumped away from the airlock, trying to make out Anu in the blurry landscape. One of the creatures slammed into him from behind. Rahiti fell on his side under a smothering blanket of pitch darkness. Pain shot through his right leg and hip. He jammed his hand beneath the pulsing mass, found the zipper sealing his mask, and pulled it slightly open.

His vacuum alarm sounded as he broke the seal. Precious breathing mix leaked out. His ears popped and air drained from his lungs. Stupid, crazy thing to do. But the creature sitting on him dropped off and began to flop as if he’d burned it with a torch. Rahiti re-sealed his facemask, got himself upright, and squinted at the icy blur around him.

“Anu! Where are you?”

Something flopped off to his right. He hopped across the icy surface until he found her with one of the aliens covering her head and shoulders. A blast of gas from his mask sent it scurrying away. Rahiti hauled Anu up.

“Bad alien,” she said groggily. “I think it was going to eat me.”

“You’re okay now.”

When they got to the cat he had to use his mask again to send two of the baby aliens wriggling away. His reserve was depleting fast and he was dizzy from losing air in bursts, but he groped at the extra oxygen tanks and cracked the feed valves. Streams blew out in white plumes. He aimed them at the mother alien. The creature shrivelled around the edges and lurched off the sled.

“Let’s get out of here,” Anu said. “Please?”

Once inside, with the engine ramping up, Rahiti spun the treads to clear any creatures still attached and then tried to start the train moving. A warning beep sounded from the console. He squinted at the readout, tried to make out what was wrong.

Anu leaned forward. “Did they chew through something?”

He was trying to fight off panic. Bone-splintering, heart-ripping panic. It was impossible that they had come all this way and now –

“The treads are frozen,” he said. “They must have gotten wet when we jumped the fissure. We stopped, and that gave them time to freeze up.”

“But you can build a blowtorch, right? You said you could.”

“Yeah.” Rahiti was having trouble breathing steadily. “But it’s going to take hours to melt all that ice. And in the meantime, if any more of those suckers show up, you’re going to have to kill them.”

“Oh,” Anu said. “Wonderful.”

As usual, it took twice as long as he thought it would to free the snowcat’s treads.

Then he discovered the last three sleds had frozen to the ice as well.

In the end, they arrived at NPS twenty-four hours late. Rahiti had completely failed.


THE ORBITAL REP, a white-haired lady with thick eyebrows, had no sympathy for him. She said, “Obviously this proves that ice sledding is not a viable option for North Pole delivery.”

Rahiti sat on the other side of her desk trying to stay stone-faced. He could see clearly now thanks to medical treatment, but his newly healed nose still ached with every heartbeat. He was glad for the pain. It kept him from focusing on how screwed he was.

He said, “We discovered the first alien life in our solar system. That should call for some kind of bonus.”

She replied, “All discoveries of scientific value are covered by contract clause twenty four, subsection (a) and (b). And thank to the snowcat’s logs, we know exactly where to go to find more. Thank you. It’s very exciting for us.”

He wanted to tell her what, exactly, he thought of her excitement. A ping at the hatch forestalled him.

Anu entered, looking cheerful. “I brought my trip report. I also thought Orbital would want the first chance to buy my documentary.”

Alarm crossed the rep’s face. “What documentary?”

A handsome young man in coveralls followed Anu in. “Hi,” he said to Rahiti. “I’m Ted.”

“Did I tell you that Ted’s father works for the largest media company on Earth?” Anu said brightly. “He’s very excited about my footage of us battling the aliens on the ice.”

The rep floated out of her chair. “All video filmed by Mr. Rahiti, his crew or his equipment is owned by Orbital. You have no rights to anything.”

Goosebumps ran down Rahiti’s arms. “Anu’s not part of my crew. She was a stowaway, and had her own personal recorder.”

“Which is not covered by any contract at all,” Anu added.

The rep pulled herself out of the office as quickly as low-gravity allowed. No doubt off to consult lawyers, Rahiti thought. Once they were alone, he grabbed Anu in a hug.

“You’re amazing!” he said.

“I know,” she answered. “And we’re rich! More than enough to get you out of debt.”

He laughed at the idea. Debt-free. Free.

“I’m using my half to start the Europa Wildlife Protection Society,” Anu added.

Rahiti let her go. “The Europa what?”

“To protect the aliens. Sure, they tried to kill us, but they were just going on instinct. Someone’s got to make sure they’re not exploited or destroyed. Meanwhile you can quit Orbital for good and go back to Earth, or bring your wife out here.”

The administrator’s office had a small porthole in one bulkhead. Rahiti looked out at the harsh landscape and wondered where Earth was in the sky.

“Don’t you want to bring her here?” Anu asked.

“In her last message, she said she wanted a divorce,” he admitted. It was the first time he’d told anyone. “She won’t even reply to me anymore.”

Anu took his hand and squeezed it. “They said you couldn’t make it to the North Pole and here you are. If you want her back, I bet you could do that, too.”

“You never know what might happen,” Ted agreed.

He looked at them both. Young hearts were so innocent, so trusting. He supposed he and Javinta had been like that once, before love was stretched across a half-billion miles of void.

“Come back down to Asterius with us tomorrow on the shuttle,” Anu said.

“Can’t. I’m driving,” he replied. “I have to bring the snowcat and empty sleds back.”

Anu frowned. “All by yourself?”

“Sure.”

She glanced at Ted and then back to him. “No way. Look at what nearly happened this time. If it wasn’t for me, you’d be in a snow ditch right now. Or at the bottom of a trench. Or eaten up by the aliens. We’re coming with you.”

He thought about that.

“Kind of bossy, aren’t you?” he asked.

She grinned. “And rich. Soon to be famous. Just like you.”

Rich and famous. And not so crazy after all. He could live with that.

Javinta, he thought, I’m coming home.