CHAPTER 28.
Helen squinted uselessly at the darker area underneath a profusion of impossibly delicate icy growths. “I swear there’s something there. A.J.?”
“Sorry, sweetheart, I can’t get any more out of your onboard cameras. Borrow the one Larry’s got for a minute and I can at least tell you if you’re seeing things or not.”
“Larry?”
The astrophysicist sighed. “I was going to have it do a full panoramic imagery scan of the cavern from the edge of the first step…but okay, just for a minute.”
The camera Larry let her take was a high-resolution scanning camera that used multispectral lasers at low power to provide highly detailed, full-color images of the targets while also deriving full three-dimensional spatial data from the laser signals, so that the pictures could be rendered accurately into full immersive environments for study. In addition to the obvious advantages, this meant that—properly arranged for the scan—they projected high-intensity light into even the darkest regions and thus got excellent detail from areas the viewer couldn’t see even with a powerful standard light (which projected diffused white light rather than pinpoint laser scans).
Helen aligned the camera carefully so that the laser scanner had a clear line of sight to the dark region at the base, and set it running. “Okay, A.J., data coming your way.” The radio relays were still doing their business well, although with so many hops to get through and overhead involved in maintaining the link reliably this far down the line, there had been a slight degradation in bandwidth.
“I’m on it.” A few seconds went by as the camera finished the scan. “Okay, got the raw data. Hold on.”
She spent the time looking around. Larry was waiting for his camera back, while Maddie was up on the wall, to the left of Helen, suspended by belaying lines as close as she dared get to a feathery-looking crystal outcropping whose miniature feather-like branches appeared to end in tiny flat hexagons. Joe, presumably still sleeping, had parked the Zarathustra as far out of the way as possible, near the center of the cavern.
But not too near, as the true center of the cavern was that series of concentric, descending terraces that ended in the flat area which, Larry guessed, might be a shell only a few dozen meters thick above the Europan ocean. “We’ll go down and check it a little later, but the key point is the temperature differential. Up here it’s almost a hundred below zero, but down there the ice reads as about forty below—no colder than a really cold day in North Dakota. My guess is that means that we can’t be far at all from the actual ocean. If we had an atmosphere in here, it’d probably even stay breathable since the CO2 wouldn’t be freezing out.”
“Well, will you look at that.” A.J. transmitted the image to her.
Revealed in the scanning image, embedded perhaps a few inches beneath the ice at the base of the profusion of ice growths, was a squat, three-lobed shape of unmistakably organic design, looking to Helen’s startled first gaze like one of the plant samples preserved back in the Vault on Mars. “Oh my god. I’ve got to get better images, better data on that!”
“You can’t go bulling in there and breaking things up,” A.J. reminded her.
“I know!” She restrained herself from saying anything else. In most paleontological digs, it was the fossil that was delicate. No one was usually worried about the ROCK. “What about…um…the remote probes? We have acoustic, a couple of laser probes, and you had a magnetic one?”
“There’s several, yeah. Let me check the specs…” she saw his usual rippling gestures, heard the half-vocalized commands. “Um. Okay, you can use the acoustic, the near-field sensor probe, and the ultraviolet imaging probe. They’re long enough to extend to the base and the specs show they should continue functioning cooled down to ambient there. But make sure you cool them to ambient first, which means take them out of Zarathustra, extend them, and put them on the floor for about ten minutes before you go try using them near that area, okay?”
“Got it.” Helen moved carefully around the perimeter of the room; the combination of ice beneath her feet, the very light gravity of Europa, and the fear of damaging any of the multiplicity of unique formations around the room meant it took her half an hour to work her way back to the big rover. Almost five hours now. We’ll have to leave in three.
She entered through the main lock and glanced over, saw Joe looking up sleepily. “Hi, Joe. It’s—”
“I see, five hours almost on the dot. Guess I’ll get up, get ready to help out for a couple. You didn’t just come here to wake me up, though?”
“No,” she said, heading for the storage bins. “I need the—”
Without warning the whole rover shuddered and bounced. “Another quake—” Joe said.
Helen expected the movement to subside, but this time it didn’t. A second, stronger shock hit, bouncing Zarathustra entirely into the air, the rover coming down slightly tilted as the ground continued to shake; the shaking motion shoved the still-imbalanced rover sideways, and Helen shot a terrified glance towards the forward window.
It all happened in an almost comedic slow motion. Sliding with ponderous grace, Zarathustra began to rotate as first one wheel, then two, then all three on one side went over the edge of the first terrace. Though Joe was lunging for the controls, trying to get the wheels to grip and it was moving slowly, no force they had could stop it now, a multiton mass already in motion, tilting, pitching farther down, rotating now so she was looking down, right at the bottom of the cavern.
That was why she saw the crack as it opened, gaping wide, wider, steam exploding into the air as water at thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, zero centigrade, met near-vacuum at an ambient temperature considerably lower, columns of water screaming upward, boiling and shattering ice in all directions, and she realized they were plunging directly for that black, erupting chasm, and that if they entered that raging storm of water and ice they would be hammered to pieces. She remembered A.J. telling her, “…so a kilometer down, the pressure’s about like a hundred thirty-five meters down on earth—say thirteen atmospheres.”
You can survive a dive to that pressure…she thought with growing fear, but being equalized in pressure all around is completely different from being hit with it!
But now they were sliding faster, another bump as they hit the second ledge, and now Zarathustra was really tumbling, bouncing outward, all the way across the gap as it fell. To her surprise and confusion, the thundering jets of water seemed to be faltering, but it still sounded like a battery of sledgehammers as Zarathustra passed through one of the bubbling, foaming geysers. They rebounded from the wall,spinning, passing the third terrace at a velocity that was no longer laughable, smash against the wall below the fourth terrace, bouncing again as Helen herself was hammered into the wall near Zarathustra’s front port.
The others were shouting something, she couldn’t make sense out of any of it because it was all jumbled together and the big rover was still spinning. Larry was wrong, she thought in an almost detached, clinical fashion. The floor was less than two meters thick, we were walking on the top of the ocean itself.
The pressurized fountains of water, the rising waters that should have filled the vast cavern in moments, were faltering, the pressure dropping even as ice seemed to be appearing everywhere in midair. The water was not going to smash the capsule to pieces…but that was not unalloyed good, because they were now plummeting straight into the crack that now yawned twice as wide, bubbling and spewing icy mist. A smaller object might have been deflected, a falling person buoyed up or even hurled back by the vaporizing water, but Zarathustra was ten metric tons of unstoppable juggernaut moving now at nearly thirty miles an hour, as fast as Athena had in her near-fatal plunge and ten times more massive. There was no time for screaming, just the sound from inside the rover of Joe cursing the universe, and then an impact that stunned her.
And then the slow settling sensation galvanized her to action. “Joe!” she shouted. “We’re sinking!”
“Helen! HELEN!” A.J.’s voice was near to panic, and she shut it out, because she knew that to panic now could get her killed.
Joe tried to scramble up from where he’d fallen, but succeeded in throwing himself against the wall when Zarathustra shifted. The quake’s still going! she realized with horror.
Lazily, yet inescapably, Zarathustra rolled over, dropping into the water another half-meter, and plunging the entire cabin area into the ocean of Europa.
Transformation, N:
1. A change in form, appearance, nature, or character.
2. (Logic) Also called transform. one of a set of algebraic formulas used to express the relations between elements, sets, etc., that form parts of a given system.
3. (Theater) a seemingly miraculous change in the appearance of scenery or actors in view of the audience.