CHAPTER 32.
Joe sighed loudly, then glanced with concern in Helen’s direction. Fortunately, she showed no sign of waking up. She needs her rest, and I damn well better not deprive her of any. Joe had insisted she rest once she’d filled an entire archive chip with ultra-high-detail images of the tiny creatures which had danced—were still dancing—in front of the windows of Zarathustra. She’d dropped off to sleep almost instantly, showing that the panic and stress of the day had definitely taken a toll on her.
“They’re not good for me either,” he muttered. But he had to admit that one advantage of apparently being God’s chew-toy was that you got used to perilous situations. He didn’t feel utterly strung out yet. Of course, he’d also had that nap in preparation for driving them back.
But that doesn’t solve any of the immediate problems. He grimaced and finally dismissed the suit radio’s option menu. After he’d recalled some of the design and instruction work, he’d managed to figure out how to call up the customization functions, but the lowest he could reasonably configure the radio for was about 150MHz, which at the power he could generate—even with the power he could relay through Zarathustra, if her antennas were still intact—would never penetrate the four meters of ice and water that he estimated lay between them and the surface.
Assuming that there was a surface above. He winced and tried to shove the thought away, but he remembered the last glimpse he’d had of the cavern, tons of ice formations crumbling and dropping in slow-motion catastrophe. There wasn’t any guarantee that the entire cavern hadn’t collapsed afterwards; they might be suspended here because the mass of all Europa was holding those ropes in place.
He shook his head. If that was true, they were dead right here; even if Athena could be pointed directly at them, it might take longer than their supplies would hold out to get that far down, and even if it did, what then? If she punched through, Athena would most likely end up getting shot up her own bore like a bullet from a cannon, or would have to stay there as a plug. Which would make a rescue…rather difficult.
Communication’s the key. He had to find a way to talk to the surface. If Maddie was alive (the if hurt more than he really wanted to think about), or if A.J.’s sensors were active above, any reasonable signal would get through. They’d figure out a way to understand him, however he did it.
“Okay, Joe, think,” he mumbled to himself. “Radio’s out. I’m sitting in salt water, no transmission I can make will get six inches in this crap. Never deployed the umbilical, so we’ve got no direct connection to…”
And he trailed off, gaze resting on the perfect “V” of carbonan-reinforced line holding them suspended in the ocean. There’s a connection, all right. But can I use it?
He considered using it as a transmission line somehow. Electrical won’t work. There’s a carbon core, but soaked in water I’d never get a signal through. Besides, I’d have to run a line to it. That would require him to go outside. Zarathustra did have an airlock, but he seriously doubted that the pumps could handle water, or the extreme pressure needed. It was something of a miracle that the seals were holding as well as they were.
But it still was a connection, and a tight one. He connected his suit to the controls and slaved the forward manipulators to his arms. Now when he reached out, the manipulators moved with him. He could also switch his helmet view to Zarathustra’s external cameras.
He reached out and plucked at the cable. Zarathustra weighed in at about ten metric tons, but it wasn’t that much more dense than water given the large volume of air inside, maybe one point fifteen or so. That meant that buoyancy supported eight point seven tons of her mass, leaving one point three tons to exert a downward force; in Europa’s gravity, that meant the equivalent of a hundred seventy four kilos weight, or a little over three hundred eighty pounds. That made the slender line pretty taut; a faint, deep thumping twang thrummed through the ship. He tried plucking and striking the line in different ways. He was pretty sure that this sound would carry a long, long way in the water, but the problem was, as he thought about it, that the two meters of ice it was sealed in would probably damp out the vibrations. Maybe A.J. could pick it up, but probably not.
Still, that wasn’t the only way. The line would be very poor at transmitting energy from one side to another. But it could have another use.
The manipulator arms were rated at a pull-and-lift capacity of well over a ton, earthside; that meant that a hundred seventy kilos was easy. Joe reached out and grabbed the line and pulled gently.
Zarathustra rose slowly in the water, closer to the icy surface. Holding with one manipulator, Joe pulled the other back and then punched forward.
Tactile feedback gave him the feel of punching through water, but there was a significant jolt from the impact with the icy surface. He struck several more times, then turned on the external microphones.
The result startled him. Instead of the effectively dead silence, there was a sensation of sound everywhere, a background level that was like standing in a forest with breezes going through the leaves. Faint sounds that grumbled or moaned or squeaked, with a rumbling tone behind it. The sounds were almost familiar.
After a moment, Joe recognized it. The sounds were similar to recordings he’d heard from near the “black smoker” vents on Earth, places where the magma below the crust came in contact with seawater and vaporized it, sending boiling water at hundreds of degrees, filled with dissolved minerals, spewing back into the chilled ocean above. That explains a life cycle here where no sunlight will ever penetrate. But it still doesn’t—
He froze, then smacked his forehead. That’s it!
Once more he levered Zarathustra up, up until the nose was almost touching the ice above…and then he triggered the headlights, on, off, on, in the old pattern that even the most casual fan of adventure novels had to know: three short bursts, three long bursts, three short.
S. O. S.
He repeated it three times, waited. Then did it again. Even two meters of cloudy ice can’t stop those lights completely, not when everything above’s going to be blacker than Hades. Wait. Still everything above was dark as pitch.
A third time he triggered the cycle, but in spite of himself he was feeling his gut tighten. Anyone up there would see it, see it pretty easy. They’d have to.
If there’s anyone there.
The third repetition ended and he stared up into velvet darkness.
And then the darkness flickered. Flickered again, and again, in a rhythm too fast to easily follow. But he had the signal processing on board to do vastly harder problems, and old Morse Code was in Zarathustra’s onboard library. Decoded, the flashes read:
Thank God. Are both of you all right? End.
He barely restrained a whoop of triumph combined with relief. He realized also that Maddie—it almost had to be Maddie, he doubted Larry knew Morse code—was using “end” somewhat the way old telegrams used “stop,” except here it also signaled the other person that they could send—since if the two of them were to try to signal at once, the reflection of their own light from the surface would drown out the fainter signal from the other.
Both fine. Line holding us. No leaks yet. How are you? End.
Larry and I both fine. Cave-in trapped us. Plan to get us out. Maybe you. Take time. End.
Get A.J. to rig comm scan and code, he sent back. Use different light wavelengths, modulate signals, can talk after that. End.
He can’t program Zarathustra. End.
Tell him simple encoding, send me parameters. Can tweak Zarathustra’s systems myself. End.
Understood. Wait. A few minutes went by. A.J. says will have answer in ten minutes. End.
Got you. End.
The next ten minutes dragged by like an eternity, but he wasn’t going to interrupt them. Sure enough, after about eleven minutes, the flashing started, but this time accompanied by a much brighter and more defined spot that sparkled. Using multispectral scanning probe, Maddie sent. Set for distinctly different area of spectrum than Zarathustra headlights.
Several more messages were sent, detailing the characteristics of the simple amplitude modulation scheme A.J. had devised, with Mia’s help. Joe had to do a bit of hacking on the code for the rover’s headlights in order to allow high-speed amplitude variation, but the sealed solid-state emitters were more than capable of it. He then keyed the modulation to go to the radio receiving portion of his suit, transmitting a copy to Helen’s update buffer for whenever she woke up. Here goes…“Maddie?”
“Joe!” Her voice was distorted, muffled, but it was Madeline’s voice. “Neither of you are hurt?”
“No. That slow-motion crash is pretty deceptive—I got my leg wedged between two seats and it could’ve broken bad—but the suits are designed to keep that from happening. Helen’s sleeping now, but she’s fine.”
“Glad to hear that,” A.J.’s voice came blurrily on. “Good thinking on this approach, Joe. Light penetrates just fine at this range.”
“Hey, I haven’t been working with you all this time without learning to think about sensor stuff,” he said quietly. Helen was still sleeping, stretched out across the backs of two chairs. “What’s the bandwidth on this?”
“A little less than three kHz,” A.J. answered.
“Ick. No data transfer worth talking about,” Joe said, disappointed. “It’d take me, what, five minutes to send a megabyte down that pipe.”
“We’re lucky to get that with this MacGyvered rig. Besides, what data do you need to send?”
“How about photos of extraterrestrial lifeforms?”
The light-radio was silent for a moment, and then so many voices tried to talk at once that it was nothing but a hash of noise. Finally it quieted down and Maddie was speaking: “…nough, enough! Joe, are you serious?”
“Dead serious. Helen made the discovery and we’ve spent about half the time we’ve been down here filming them.” He summarized the analysis of the water and what they’d seen thus far. “Sometimes I see faint glints that might even be from something bigger farther down, but we weren’t built for sonar or anything.”
“Unglaublich,” Hohenheim said. “Unbelievable that you would happen to encounter life so soon. What sort of odds are those?”
“Not as bad as you might think, General,” Helen’s voice said, making him glance down in startlement. The xenopaleontologist grinned back. “The oxygen concentration is much higher than in the deep oceans of Earth, and something’s circulating it. If there’s some sort of nutrient and energy source like our black smokers—”
“I think there is. I heard something that sounded like that,” Joe interjected.
“Well, then, there’s nutrients, oxygen, energy, and the squeezing motion from Jupiter is circulating it all. This ocean’s probably full of life. The top part of the ocean may be their equivalent of the bottom, the desert area—and everything might be attracted by Zarathustra’s presence. Heat, vibration, maybe even light, all these things mean change, and change can mean nutrients.”
“Do you think this is actually native Europan life, or is this…seeded, I guess you’d say?” Madeline asked.
“That’s a good question, Maddie,” Helen said. “A lot of what I’ve seen—past the microscopic scale—could be something descended from Bemmie’s biosphere, I see a lot of trilateral symmetry so far. But there’s nothing saying that kind of design couldn’t develop naturally on Europa, either. We’ll have to get samples and do extensive testing. Somehow.”
“If the Bemmies did this kind of thing regularly,” A.J. said, “I’d bet you’ll find a mix. If they’re bioforming colonizers, they’d want to be compatible with whatever was there to begin with, so that the stuff already present served a useful purpose for your colonizing species.”
“Assuming there was anything here before they arrived,” Maddie said.
“A much smaller assumption now that we know for a fact that at least two separate solar systems evolved life; this means that life isn’t the terribly unique phenomenon some people thought it might be,” Helen said. “We already had good reason to think life evolved separately at least two or three times on Earth alone, so it would seem likely to me that Europa had life on it to begin with. But samples will tell the story for sure.”
“And we won’t get any of those until we can get out of here,” Joe pointed out. “Have you guys got an answer for that?”
“A jury-rigged one, yes, but it might work,” Maddie said, and described their current plan. “Odin will be on its way to Europa orbit—actually, one of the Europa Lagrange points, a bit more than a hundred thousand kilometers away from Odin at the moment—in about, what, General, nineteen hours?”
“About that, yes. Once on-station most of us will be free to assist.”
“Sounds like you guys have everything under control,” Joe said, grinning. “I guess all Helen and I have to do is hang around.”