CHAPTER 41.
“Bemmie? There’s a living Bemmie down there?” Jackie said, incredulously. “I don’t believe it!” She drove another securing spike down, making sure Athena was now thoroughly immobilized. She let the fountain of steam blow her backward, kept working her body to shake off any ice that tried to form. Less is forming now, a lot less. Temperature is really starting to go up.
Helen gave a laugh that still sounded like a woman half in shock. “Don’t believe it. That’s not Bemmius Secordii, or even an adapted version.”
“Huh? What do you mean?” A.J. demanded. Jackie wiped off her faceplate and moved over to where they were starting to assemble a rig to try and break through the ice. “What else could it be?”
“There’s several morphological differences I’m seeing—small ones probably from your point of view, but enough so I’m pretty sure this is a very different animal; for example, the forward manipulative tendrils bifurcate, they don’t trifurcate twice and then bifurcate, and there’s four stages, so they have sixteen fingers instead of eighteen. If there were actual Bemmies living in Europa—after being bioformed to fit the environment—they died out millions of years ago. I can’t imagine such a lifeform staying stable for sixty-five million years. But I can easily imagine that other lifeforms, maybe domestic ones that then went feral, could eventually evolve to intelligence, and to us they’d look very similar indeed.” There was a catch in her voice. “Enough that it does, I admit, get to me. I’m…meeting Bemmie, or as close as is possible.”
“I do not understand, though,” said Horst. “How can they have metal? That is an ocean. No refineries, no forging, nothing of that sort. And what sort of metal could they use in that salty sea, that would not dissolve too fast to use?”
“Well,” said Joe, “I can answer the last question. According to the spectral returns I can get off our friend’s spear—a spear he’s now using to gently poke our hull,and if he starts getting near the wrong areas I’m going to have to find a way to discourage him—he’s using something that’s almost pure titanium.”
“Titanium?” The disbelief was echoed by multiple voices. “Joe, are you sure you’re getting the right breathing mix down there?” asked A.J., only partially in a joking tone. “Hallucinations are starting to sound like the more reasonable explanation for what you’re seeing.”
“I know it sounds crazy, but blame your sensors for what I’m seeing, not my air. Which other than being a lot more, er, fragant than Helen or I would like, is just fine, thanks.
“Damn. I wish there was some way to get a good high-bandwidth channel down there. I’d like—”
“Hey!” Joe said. There was the sound of Zarathustra’s wheels spinning in water. “Yeah, watch where you stick that thing, guy,” he muttered. He spoke up again to the others. “Our native explorer was getting awfully close to the lock. He backed off when I revved, though.”
Jackie was thinking, even as she helped A.J. move one of the supports for the icebreaking rig into place. “Titanium. Why does that seem familiar somehow?”
It was something about Ceres, she suddenly thought with certainty. Something she’d heard, something that the news had included…
And then she had it. “Helen, back on Ceres—the plants and other engineered sessile things. Didn’t the report say some of them seemed to be concentrating metal?”
“Oh…” Helen went silent for a moment, and then continued, “Ohh, now, that’s very clever, Bemmie. You knew you were preparing to colonize somewhere completely underwater, so how would you deal with that problem? Make a way to grow your tools, of course. Then even if a disaster happens to your infrastructure, you’re not stuck back before the Stone Age.”
A.J. scratched his head; this was a very silly-looking gesture when one was wearing a suit. “Er…I guess, yeah, that’s actually very smart, but…titanium?”
“It’s not at all unprecedented,” Helen said, sounding more certain. “Some varieties of Earth plants—horsetails, and I think nettles—can have upwards of eighty parts per million of titanium. Design a plant or something like it that concentrates titanium into its tissues and give that concentration some useful advantage for the plant, and the general trait will probably propagate itself for a long, long time. And when this species reached intelligence, perhaps it found these very tough species and started farming them, choosing the most tractable and performing a sort of…of bonsai on them, creating spear trees or something like that.”
“Spear trees. I like that,” A.J. said with a grin. “So what’s Bemmius Newguy doing?”
“Bemmius Novus sapiens, so to speak, has come back. He has eyes, so I wonder if he can see inside here. Sometimes I think he can see me.”
“He might,” Joe said. “I dunno if he’s going to realize that you’re a separate animal.”
“Separate or not, I’m going to try to communicate with him,” Helen said. “They use light patterns for something, so I’m going to see if I can get anything from him using light.”
“Just be careful. Don’t want to trigger a feeling of threat.”
“I’ll be careful, believe me. I’m going to use the spot illuminator on my helmet, not the main lights on Zarathustra. That shouldn’t be panic inducing.”
“Well, keep us informed,” Jackie said. “We need to concentrate on getting you out of there.”
“Yeah,” Joe said. “And soon. That seal’s really starting to go bad, and I expect a leak any minute now. Do we expect explosions?”
“Not yet, I’m afraid,” Madeline responded, trying to sound cheerful. “First we have to get far enough down that what I have left will be able to break up everything and let us remove the chunks of ice.”
“What, my super-spy wife is running out of things that go boom?”
“I’m afraid so, Joe. Everyone thought I’d brought a far larger supply of, to quote the military jargon, ‘energetic materials’ than we could possibly need and I was wasting valuable space and mass; now I wish I’d brought three times as much. As it is I’m probably going to have to improvise something.”
“So what, you’re going to bash on it with hammers?”
Jackie managed a laugh. “Basically, yes. Unfortunately, the specialized digging equipment that was supposed to be used for digging a base at Enceladus is way too big to fit through the bores we’ve made. So,we’ve rigged the heavy cutters and punch machines we got from Odin for machining to provide the force to drill or drive holes into the ice at intervals; then as we can break off chunks we can throw them away. Since Athena isn’t moving anymore, we can get the power from her—she doesn’t need any motive capability. When we get far enough down, Maddie blows the rest to pieces and we pull Zarathustra up. We’ve got a winch already set to do that on the line holding you.”
“Heh. You sure your name isn’t Montgomery Scott?”
“What?” She blinked. Then light dawned. “Oh, I didn’t know that was his first name.”
“Your geek powers are weak, young girl,” A.J. said in an exaggerated bass voice.
“Bah!” she sneered with a grin that relaxed the tension in her gut. “I am the actual captain of a spaceship! Even if my spaceship is on the ground at the moment. That gives me more geek cred than all of you except the General combined!”
A.J. and Joe laughed together. “Aye, Captain, that it does!”
“Far be it from me to compete in your geek wars,” Helen said, a smile in her voice as well, “but I’d point out that a super-spy who helped fight the first interplanetary ship-to-ship battle probably outranks you, too.”
“Hey, are you trying to deflate my ego?” demanded A.J., instantly adding, “No, don’t answer that, of course you are. But my ego is impervious to your puny attacks!”
Her side displays showed the General and Dr. Masters looking somewhat bemused at the juvenile byplay. “Don’t worry, General. It relieves the tension.”
“If it gets the job done, Dr. Secord,” Hohenheim said gravely, “I really do not care if you decide to start wearing clown makeup on your suits.”
“I want pictures,” said Joe.
“If that happens,” Maddie answered, “I will certainly get you some. Now let us concentrate on this so we can get you out of there.”
Joe’s voice was suddenly deadly serious. “Yeah. You’d better.”
With a sinking feeling in her gut, Jackie was sure she knew what Joe was about to say, and his next words proved her right.
“Indicator just went red. Outer seal’s sprung a leak,” Joe Buckley said. “It’s just a guess…but I’d say we have less than a day.”