CHAPTER 40.
“They should have started trying to break us out by now,” Helen said. She knew it sounded like she was whining, but it had been more than two weeks since they had been stuck under Europa’s steel-hard ice. Quick sponge baths, especially ones taken in ten-degree C air, did not make up for lack of even the Spartan cleaning regimen available in Nebula Storm, let alone the comparative luxury of the hot showers in Europa Base.
And Zarathustra was starting to stink as well. The air was okay to breathe, but she suspected that being suspended vertically was impairing the plumbing. If there’d been more of us, I bet the tank would be overfull by now…and we’d have a pool of something unmentionable on the bottom.
“It’s not all that easy, you know,” Joe said. “There’s a lot of space to fill.”
“I’m not entirely innumerate,” she snapped, then closed her eyes. “Sorry, Joe. I shouldn’t take it out on you. But I could look up a few things, and make a few guesses, and things don’t make sense. When you turn ice to steam you get about sixteen hundred times as much gas as you had water, a little less with ice because it expands a few percent. But even if the area they had above was a box sixty meters on a side and twenty high—and I know it’s not, it’s more a cut-off triangular pyramid, which has less volume—that’s only about 45 cubic meters of water they have to vaporize to fill it. Even at its old speed Athena should have gone through that in an hour and a half.”
Joe grinned, but there was a sad edge to the grin. “That’s not bad back-of-the-envelope guessing there. Actually, if all your principles held, they only needed about fifteen cubic meters. But…they don’t hold. First, a lot of it’s freezing out as they go, so they have to replace it. Second, that volume’s at standard temperature and pressure. We have to build the pressure from nothing, and then keep going. Remember, ten times the pressure, which means we need a lot of melted ice.”
A low humming rumble transmitted itself through the air as she absorbed that. Athena’s violent conversion of ice and water to steam caused vibrations throughout the ice that echoed into the ocean. The noise grew louder as the nuclear melt-probe drove downward, then stopped for a short time as the probe was pulled back up and repositioned, to start faintly again and grow louder. So far she hadn’t seen any new visitors, but the longer that utterly-unknown noise went on…“You’ve known this for a long time.”
“Figured most of it out as soon as I realized what the situation was, yeah. And I didn’t tell you because there wasn’t much point.” Joe shrugged. “Now that you’ve asked—the lowdown is that I’m giving us a one-in-five they can pull it off.”
She nodded. “Better odds than I guessed.” She looked at the control panel. “Have we got a leak yet?”
Joe studied readouts on the panel and in his VRD. “Not yet, but…I’m guessing soon. No liquid water, but the humidity keeps going up in the seal area.”
“How soon is soon?”
He shrugged. “If I plot a rough graph…maybe a day or two. Once the leak starts, I think we’ve got another day before it becomes critical for the inner door. If the inner door can hold the pressure, then we may be fine.”
She looked at him, and could see even through the helmet that Joe’s usual casual expression was absent. “But you don’t think it will.”
“No. If you want my honest opinion…?”
“Might as well.”
“I figure the door will blow right in as soon as the pressure hits six or seven atmospheres. Then we die very fast.”
She nodded again.
For a long time neither of them said anything. The buzzing hum of Athena ceased, then faintly restarted. She chuckled suddenly.
“I could use a laugh. What’s so funny?”
She looked upward, grinning faintly. “I just realized, it must look like Swiss cheese, or a beehive, by now. All those holes spaced all over the floor…”
Joe chortled. “I’ll bet it does. And you’d better watch out where you walk now.”
She glanced down. No sign of movement below. She watched a few minutes, but saw nothing yet.
More minutes passed.
“Joe,” she said finally.
“Yes?”
“We’ve done a hell of a lot, haven’t we?”
He snorted. “Let’s not start the pre-death farewell yet.”
“I can’t help it; I’d like to be ready.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have told you the odds.”
She shook her head. “Joe, I wanted to know the truth.”
“Well, maybe I should have told you the other odds.”
She stared at him, puzzled. “What ‘other odds’?”
He pointed up. “Up there? That’s Madeline Fathom. Madeline Fathom Buckley, a woman so far out of my league that I didn’t even realize just how far out she was for years. But for some reason she took a hell of a liking to me. She’s crazy enough to marry me.
“She’s also just crazy enough to figure out some way to rescue us, because that’s exactly what she does. So I figure that our real odds are pretty damn good, because I’m down here, and she’s up there, and that’s not the way she wants it.”
She laughed suddenly, and gripped his hand. “I guess you’re right.”
“Damn straight. She held up Mars when it was trying to collapse on us, what’s a meter or two of ice?”
Without warning, a thundering thrumming noise vibrated Zarathustra like the string of an enormous bass, a sound like a jet in an earthquake. “What the—”
At the same time Joe let out a whoop that almost deafened her, even over that frightening noise. “That’s it!”
“What? What’s it?” She couldn’t imagine what could be making a sound like that, but Joe obviously knew.
“Athena! They’ve built up pressure! They’ve let her break through and take on the whole damn Europan ocean as a feedstock!” With a little difficulty, Joe spun his seat around in a victory circle. “The odds just went way, way up, like one in two now. They don’t have to move Athena, and the fact that we’re still hearing that beautiful, beautiful noise means that the pressure of the ocean hasn’t kicked Athena back up her bore. She’s taking everything Europa has and vaporizing it out the back.”
Lights flashed. “Joe?”
“I hear it, Maddie! Good news!”
“Very good news, Joe!” Helen could hear tentative, strained relief in the other woman’s voice. “So far she’s holding, and Jackie says if she stays put another few minutes she’ll be confident that nothing’s going to move Athena out of position. You can almost see the pressure rising.”
“Which leaves you one problem.”
“We’re working on it. The solution may involve explosives.”
“With you involved? I’d be disappointed if it didn’t.”
Helen glanced down as the two continued their conversation, and dropped carefully back down to the rear window. With this new sound, who knew what might happen?
And there it was. A shimmer in the depths, almost invisible. Please, God, not that same thing. Let it have learned its lesson.
She knew that Zarathustra would almost certainly not survive another confrontation.
The shimmer again. No, wait. Two shimmers now. Now one. What am I seeing…? She tried to make sense of the vague, phantom shapes. Could be one big creature that’s sometimes lighting one part of its body, sometimes two. Light seems to be a signaling device here, at least for some species; that’s why the one creature still has eyes. Maybe it’s also a lure. I suppose if you can see and a lot of other species can’t, you might be able to parlay that into an advantage even here. Lure wouldn’t make sense in that case, though.
The lights faded into the distance…then returned from the same direction. Like the other, it was a little closer…Hmm. But that wasn’t the sharklike motion of the first thing. That was something approaching, then backing up. Something curious, I think, checking to see if what it’s seeing is a predator. It might still be dangerous, but it’s not moving the way a shark circles.
Still…“Joe,” she said, “I hate to interrupt, but I think Athena’s noise has attracted another visitor. You should probably strap in.”
“Damn. Maddie, I have to go.” Joe swung himself into the pilot’s seat, grasped the manipulator controls. “Not seeing much on the camera. What’ve you got? Not another of those things, I hope.”
“I don’t think so. It’s not moving at all the same. I haven’t tried doing anything to get a range on it, but if I assume the thing’s generating about the same level of brightness and that the water’s about the same level of transparent as it was last time, then it’s roughly the same size.” The distant-but-a-little-closer light seemed generally similar in shape, maybe a little misshapen, a bulge partway down. But on this scale, fish, sharks, dolphins, and submarines had similar shapes.
Suddenly the misshapen section moved, separated. Two separate animals! One staying near the other, maybe touching the other! Mother and child? The two shapes hovered motionless now; they were somewhat similar, both fairly long, probably a similar body plan to the huge predator. The smaller one was only a few meters long. The larger one seemed broader, not just longer but more heavily built.
She wished that she dared brighten the lights to get a look, but she didn’t want a repeat of the last encounter. Maybe these things wouldn’t react that way…but they might. And if it was a parent and child, the parent would likely react—like many earth animals’ parents—with extreme violence to any perceived threat.
Once more the two rejoined, retreated—though this time to just the limit of visibility—and waited.
“Talk to me, Helen.”
“I’m seeing a pattern of curiosity. Approach, wait, back off, wait. Whatever it is wants to find out what these strange noises and objects are, but wants to make sure it’s not some kind of threat. Lots of animals have similar behavior on Earth, and it’s a perfectly sensible strategy; new events and creatures have potential to benefit you, but they’re also potentially dangerous, and you have to be very careful how you approach them.”
Now the joined shape moved forward, even closer; they separated, and the smaller one darted off to the side and up—on the side, she noted, farthest from the whining rumble of Athena. Now that’s interesting. I wonder what it’s up to?
The larger creature hung motionless; she could just barely make out some projections fore and aft that might be tentacles or fins. That would be similar to the other creature, and again the same body plan we’ve found in the biosphere of our favorite alien visitors.
The smaller creature crossed back over the field of view, closer, but moving quickly, still blurred. There was a bright flash. “What the hell…?”
“What is it?”
“That flash looked like one of our rear lights.”
“The things can mimic packaged LEDs? I’m impressed.”
“Maybe…but it looked almost like a reflection.”
“Nothing says animals can’t have reflective parts. Isn’t that why things like cats have that eyeshine thing going on?” Joe asked.
“Well…yes,” she said, trying to figure out where the small creature had gone now (though “small” was relative; she was pretty sure that even the smaller one was bigger than General Hohenheim). “But I meant it looked like a flash from a mirror. The reflective material in cat’s eyes doesn’t really look like that.”
“Oh. Well, I—”
Helen gave a gasp of startlement as the smaller creature suddenly swam into view from the side, and halted, almost framed in the center of the rear viewport, hanging only ten meters from the end of Zarathustra.
She stared, her mind almost blank, and heard herself say “Oh…my…God.”
“What? Helen—!” Joe didn’t dare unstrap in case it was an emergency. Then he looked in the part of the monitors that covered the rear camera. “Jesus!”
Hovering in the center of the gently-glowing lights of Zarathustra, now drifting forward, now easing back, the creature stared at Zarathustra (or…at me?) through three large, golden eyes, each between a pair of complex tentacles. The whole creature was perhaps four meters long, the streamlined body triangular in cross-section with flaring fins that rippled to move it in its cautious approach-and-retreat.
But that wasn’t the source of Helen’s disbelief; even the fact that the creature, with its multibranching arms and large eyes and tripartite beak, gently gaping and closing as the thing focused its triple stare from one point of the strange invader of its world to another, looked eerily like the reconstructions of Bemmius Secordii could not have shocked Helen into near-speechless incredulity.
No.
What kept her staring raptly back at their visitor, what had Joe sitting immobile and unresponsive to Madeline’s increasingly insistent calls, was what those complex, jointed tentacle-arms were gripping.
Shining silver in the light, shaft curved in strange yet deliberate ways, yet utterly, instantly recognizable. Artificial. Metallic. Impossible.
A spear.