The Frozen Sky

21.

There was only one survivor. They pulled her from the ice after four days alone in the dark, coated with blood and dust, her suit damaged at its knee, chest, gloves, and helmet.

The rock dust and frozen water vapor encrusted on her armor were extraterrestrial. So was the organic tissue. It belonged to Europa’s sunfish.

The blood inside the crippled suit was her own.

“You can’t delete him!” Vonnie said from her hospital cot, trying to sit up.

Administrator Koebsch shook his head. “We’ll leave most of the files intact.”

“I owe him my life. If you erase his personality—”

“Your AI is badly corrupted.”

“That’s not his fault. It’s mine.” Vonnie’s hand throbbed as she held a comm visor near her face, allowing them to see each other. Her cot was in a separate structure from Koebsch’s command module. Fresh muscle grafts on her temple and cheek kept her from using the visor properly, but her hand wasn’t much better off. Five bones in her fingers and wrist had been set with glue, and that was her good hand, her right hand. Her left was a swollen club. Otherwise it wouldn’t have been such a struggle to sit up.

As Vonnie rose, her blanket fell away, leaving her naked above the waist. By trade, astronauts could not be body conscious in their perpetually crowded living quarters.

Maybe she let the visor dip to her breasts and bandaged shoulder on purpose. Koebsch was a politician. If he was agitated by her body, it might rattle him enough to listen. Despite her injuries, Vonnie was lean and well-toned with clear skin and a long, slender belly.

“Let me help,” she said. “We can copy the files you want, then isolate them.”

“That’s what we’re doing.”

“But don’t delete the rest! Lam was a Chinese national. Human-based AIs aren’t illegal in his country. I know we can’t send him back to them. He knows too much. But we can give him sanctuary with us. It would be wrong to strip him down to pure data.”

“I disagree.”

Koebsch was forty-eight, blond, and Earthborn like Vonnie. Unlike Vonnie, he’d arrived on one of the high-gee launches five days ago. He had yet to adapt to low gravity. His face was always flushed. Vonnie wasn’t sure if she’d embarrassed Koebsch, so she tried again.

“You’re afraid of him,” she said. “I get it. You don’t need any legal problems on top of running our operation, but Lam is a proven resource. He’s the only one who’s communicated with the sunfish.”

“The sunfish are a separate matter,” Koebsch said.

Like everyone in the ESA crew, he’d adopted her name for the Europans. Her experience had been too sensational. The media loved everything about her odyssey, and, according to the news feeds she’d seen in the past day, most people were using the term sunfish across the solar system.

Her fame gave her leverage. “The sunfish are the only thing that matters,” she said, but Koebsch wouldn’t let her change the subject.

“Your AI attacked our diagnostics,” he said.

“That was a misunderstanding. Let me talk to him.”

“No. You’re… emotional.” Koebsch obviously intended to say more, but checked himself. “Get some rest,” he said. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

Vonnie shouted. “Wait!”

He cut the connection.

What should she do? The medics had stuck two intravenous lines in her arm, delivering simple fluids and complex mood stabilizers. She had trouble walking in any case. But she couldn’t let her friend die again even if that was what the real Lam might have wanted.

The ghost was too human. It had found its equilibrium while it was limited to her suit, using her armor like its own body, but after they were rescued, it had destabilized when it was subjected to an interface with their central AIs.

That didn’t mean he shouldn’t be saved. Vonnie knew he could be a formidable ally, and yet she had another incentive to save him besides the relationship they’d developed. More important than her personal loyalty was Second Contact with the sunfish. Koebsch needed every tool available before they went back into the ice.

Vonnie tugged her IVs loose and stood up, although there was no way to sneak out of the lander where the medical droids had operated on her skull and hands. Her med alerts chimed as soon as she disconnected the IVs.

A young woman in a blue insulated one-piece stepped into the compartment. Her freckled nose and big hazel eyes gave her harmless look, which she dispelled by barking like a cop. “What are you doing? Get back in bed.”

“I can’t,” Vonnie said. “There are complications with my suit. I need to assist with data recovery.”

“You need time to heal.”

“I’m okay.” Vonnie squeezed by the young woman, then nodded to the two men in the next compartment as she hurried past.

The lander’s floor was only fifteen meters square, but it held eight rooms, many of them as small as closets. Striding through the lander felt like running through a maze of steel. It reminded her of the ice. Vonnie realized she was grinding her teeth, driven by a rising sense of hysteria. She moved faster and faster until she reached the ready room, the largest compartment in the lander.

The young woman caught up and said, “Stop. We talked about your trauma levels. Your injuries aren’t just physical.”

“Koebsch asked me to come over,” Vonnie lied. Then she tried a different argument. “It’s good therapy, isn’t it? I should stay busy.”

“I guess.” The young woman gestured to the men behind her.

Vonnie heard one of them on the radio. “This is Metzler in Zero Four,” he said.

She ignored him and opened the first locker on the wall. Inside was a pressure suit. It weighed twelve times less than the armor she’d worn, but the pressure suit felt heavier. It was inert, whereas her armor had walked with her, magnifying every nerve impulse.

“Why don’t we sit down for a minute,” the young woman said.

Vonnie donned the pressure suit with her ruined hands. Nearby, three sets of armor hung on chain winches like empty metal giants. Vonnie might have climbed into one if the biometrics weren’t calibrated for each individual. She could use someone else’s armor, but clumsily, and the likelihood of hurting herself was too real.

“Stop,” the young woman said. “If you won’t—”

“Help me.” Vonnie met her eyes. “Please. You can drive me to the command module.”

The young woman nodded uncertainly. Behind her, the man leaned into the room and frowned. Vonnie knew they were all a little in awe of her, and, thinking like a sunfish, she stood erect and shrugged into the sleeves of the pressure suit, projecting confidence with her shoulders and chin.

“Koebsch is making a mistake,” she said.

22.

Vonnie’s thoughts quieted as the air lock cycled, depressurizing to match the near-vacuum outside. Beside her stood the young woman, who’d joined her.

They didn’t speak. The young woman flitted through a display inside her visor, while Vonnie’s thoughts consumed her.

Was it claustrophobia that had driven her to suit up and leave Lander 04? She expected to have nightmares the rest of her life, but she was loaded with no-shock and antidepressants. She wanted to believe she was in control of herself. Yes, it was out of character for her to have flashed her body at Koebsch. She wasn’t a show-off. But she also felt like she was beyond foolish little things like shyness or self-doubt.

She’d changed. Some parts of her had died in the ice, and the woman who remained was impatient to set things right.

Her entire race was watching. Every decision would be scrutinized across the solar system and in history files for centuries to come, which was why Koebsch had his stiff caution and why Vonnie thrummed with compassion and fear.

If humankind failed again, if she failed again, they might doom every living thing inside Europa, and she’d seen much to admire as well as savagery.

Unfortunately, the violence was difficult to overlook.

Sunfish had become a popular term across the system, but not everyone consented to humanizing them with a name. Some of the exceptions were military spokespersons, who referred to the sunfish as the aliens, and public officials of the ice mining ventures and utility companies, who put their own spin on the situation by saying organisms or things.

Many politicians and commentators had also played it safe, either hedging their bets or supporting the interests of various corporations. Vonnie knew the mining ventures, their distributors, and many industries were hollering because Earth’s governments had demanded that the mining ventures reevaluate their sites, then screen and analyze the ice before processing it, all of which created delays and extra costs.

Public debate had grown into a firestorm in part because the ESA had kept Vonnie under wraps, asking Koebsch to speak to the media on her behalf and releasing no more than a few, brief, sanitized clips of her journey beneath the ice.

None of those sims included live recordings of the sunfish, only still shots and diagrams. Nevertheless, their beaks and arms had a lot of people scared, especially in combination with the progress reports listing her surgeries.

I need to make sure everyone sees I’m okay, she thought. They have to know that I don’t blame the sunfish — that the fighting was my fault.

The air lock finished its cycle with a clunk. The exterior door opened.

As they walked onto the lander’s deck, Vonnie hardly glanced at the fat, banded sphere of Jupiter or the radiant dots where spacecraft hung overhead. Instead, she looked for their command module. She couldn’t see it. The icy plain was busy with floodlights, mecha, listening posts, and other hab modules.

From where she was standing, there didn’t seem to be any pattern. Then she activated her heads-up display. Most of the hab modules and a second lander were spread in a broad ring over an area of a square kilometer. Vonnie felt a wan smile. In another age, the pioneers of the American West had circled their wagons in the same way. Long before then, in Germany, her ancestors had built their castle walls to guard all sides as well. Old habits.

Command Module 01 was on the far side of camp. “Can we take the jeep?” Vonnie asked, turning to the young woman.

“Yes.” Ash Sierzenga was one of their new pilots as well as a medic and the head of the cybernetics team. All of them had multi-disciplinary training and degrees. It cost too much to boost three people if one would do.

Every meal, each piece of equipment, had been factored into the mission. They were a long way from replacements, a reality that played in Vonnie’s favor. She knew they’d discussed sending her home, but no one wanted to use a ship for her, not even the slowboat in which she’d arrived.

The jeep was a low-slung vehicle with an open cockpit and wide-tracked wheels. Ash made a point of entering first. Was she concerned Vonnie might steal it? Where was there to go? Vonnie didn’t like it that Ash distrusted her, but she was an outsider among the new team. Even if they understood her motives, they would tend to support each other instead of her.

I need to be careful, she thought. I can’t raise my voice or wave my arms. They don’t like it that I don’t hate the sunfish.

They think I’m crazy.

The jeep rolled into the hectic lights and mecha, communicating with the other self-guided machines.

For the most part, the listening posts and beacons had settled down, becoming stationary obstacles. They resembled short trees with their dishes and antennae serving as leaves, although a few members of the metal forest tottered or crept in restless patterns.

The larger mecha were more active. Twice the jeep drove beneath hulking rovers. The first was poised like a giant, feeding tick, its head lower than its legs as it drilled into the ice. The second was on patrol. Bristling with sensors and digging arms, it bore down on them, but neither Vonnie nor Ash flinched. They were accustomed to the machines’ flawless dance. The rover passed with meters to spare, and their jeep continued through the long shadows and pools of light.

There were open crevices in the ice. The main fracture yawned through the center of camp, over three hundred meters long yet rarely wider than a person could jump.

The new ESA camp was twelve kilometers southeast of the trench where Vonnie, Bauman, and Lam entered the frozen sky. When that system of vents collapsed, it had destroyed the carvings as well as any chance of venturing back into that region of ice. The collapse had left an uneven, unstable pit in Europa’s surface 1.3 kilometers across.

Someday the glacial tides or an upswell in the ocean would fill the hole. For now, it was a scar and a grave.

Lam and Bauman’s bodies had been abandoned after religious services and commendations were delivered near the pit by ESA, NASA, and PSSC teams while Vonnie watched from her bed in the new camp.

Their rovers and satellite analysis had located another system of catacombs, which could be accessed through the crevices where they’d assembled their hab modules and flightcraft. Too often, there were only a few meters of ice separating the caverns below from the fissures leading up to the surface. That was why the mecha were on high alert.

Studying their datastreams, Vonnie made sense of their grid at last. Koebsch wasn’t an idiot. On Europa, any threat would approach from beneath them, not from outside their ring, so he’d spread his assets for mapping purposes, measuring the ice with radar, sonar, neutrino pulse, and seismographs…

…and weapons systems. The jeep was tied to their defense net, its dashboard winking with steady updates from the Clermont, the ESA ship in orbit above Europa.

But we don’t need to be on alert, Vonnie thought. “The sunfish won’t come,” she said.

“What?” Ash turned in her seat to bring her helmet around, revealing a face full of suspicion.

Vonnie kept her voice tranquil. “They won’t come,” she said. “The ones who chased me know we’re outside the ice. They might be listening, but they’ll never risk a blow-out by coming to the surface.”

“They seemed like they, uh, like they did anything to kill you even if it meant suicide for them,” Ash said. “Koebsch is worried they’ll dig away the ice beneath us.”

“I don’t think so. They must be even more afraid of vacuum than we are.”

“You can’t know how they think.”

“We’ve been in space for nearly two hundred years. We were watching the stars before our species learned how to talk. Their sense of distance is limited. All they’ve ever known are their ears and their sonar.”

“Right. You’re right.”

Ash was humoring her, but Vonnie saw an opportunity to sway the younger woman. “They think the universe ends here,” she said. “They have no concept of the stars or other planets or anything past the surface. Only death. Try to think how many times their populations must have asphyxiated when eruptions or quakes ripped open their homes.”

“You found air locks in the ice.”

“They’re smart.” Vonnie couldn’t stop herself from saying it. “They’re marvelous.”

“They’re monsters.”

“They’ve never had a chance to be anything else.”

Ash didn’t answer. They’d reached the command module, and Ash busied herself with the jeep’s console. She seemed to be receiving a radio call that only she could hear.

“We need to get back into the ice and figure out how to talk to them,” Vonnie said.

ESA Camp Map

23.

Koebsch wasn’t happy to see either woman. He met them at the air lock as they stowed their pressure suits, obstructing their way into the module. To his left was the mission’s primary data/comm room. To his right was one of the multipurpose labs where they’d brought Vonnie’s armor.

“I could have sent your jeep back to medical, but let’s get this over with,” Koebsch said.

Vonnie tried to cover for Ash. “She told me not to come,” she said.

“Did you think you could sneak in and steal your AI?”

“No, sir.”

“Nothing happens on our grid without my knowing it.”

“No, sir.”

“All right.” Koebsch gestured for them to go left toward data/comm, not to the lab. Vonnie hesitated, but she wouldn’t get another chance to prove she wasn’t a head case. She dutifully followed him into data/comm.

The cramped room had two chairs. Koebsch leaned back in his seat as Vonnie perched on the edge of hers. Ash stayed at the hatch with her arms folded.

“You want to go back into the ice,” Koebsch said.

He tapped the radio in my pressure suit, Vonnie thought, feeling irate. But she didn’t show it. “I think we should mount another expedition this week,” she said.

“It’s not going to happen. Not yet.”

“I don’t mean people at first. We should send in mecha. The best choice would be probes that are the same size and shape as the sunfish.”

“We’re building them now.”

Vonnie flared at his imperturbable calm. “Then we can program some of those probes with my AI! Lam will have more success than anything new.”

Koebsch shook his head. “You have to realize, there are people on Earth who’ve proposed sealing off the ice.”

Vonnie’s heart stopped. “We can’t do that.”

“Yes, we can. A few explosive charges—”

“We’ve discovered intelligent life.”

“I believe you. I want to believe you. Everyone involved with the agency has wanted to find something like this since we were kids, right?”

Vonnie stared in surprise. Koebsch was a government appointee. She’d thought the ESA was just a job to him.

“We’re not sure the sunfish are intelligent,” he said.

“They use language and engineering.”

“They seem to, yes. There’s good evidence. But their intelligence hasn’t been so well demonstrated that no one is questioning it. If we send in your AI and he’s glitchy, we’ll be giving the wrong people more ammunition.”

“Let me talk to him.”

“You’re acting a little glitchy, too,” Koebsch said, leaning forward and patting Vonnie’s arm. “Do you know what the Stockholm syndrome is? Sometimes a hostage will begin to defend the people who grabbed her.”

“That’s bullshit. The sunfish are amazing. Hell, there’s no question they’ll be profitable, too,” Vonnie said, stewing with contempt. “The military and pharmaceutical lobbies must be screaming for DNA samples.”

“Yes.”

“We need to help whatever’s left of the sunfish empire.”

“How? Are you proposing an evacuation? To where?”

“I don’t know. We should send down food and oxygen. We could lead them to safer areas. They don’t have radar. They might not know the best places to hide. That would be an easy way to demonstrate our goodwill.”

“It might come to that, but there are only eleven of us. My first responsibility is to make sure we’re safe. That includes maintaining our food and air supplies for the duration of our mission.”

“There will be supply ships.”

“Vonnie, the sunfish look like they’ve been down there for thirty thousand years. They’re as old as the last existing populations of Neanderthal Man, maybe older. A little more time won’t matter.”

“They’re telling each other about us right now. They’re telling each other I killed dozens of them!”

“You acted in self-defense.”

“They must think we’re the monsters. The longer we wait, the worse it will be. They’ll build more defenses. They’ll prepare for war. We need to try again before they get too entrenched.”

“We will. Vonnie, we will, but not before we’re ready. Meanwhile, you need to help me. Let us use what we can from your AI’s mem files and delete its personality.”

“I…”

“If the next stages of our operation don’t go right, everything we’ve planned will be in jeopardy.”

Vonnie looked away from him. She didn’t want Ash to see her expression either, because if they were going to work together, Ash needed to believe that Vonnie would always put the team first. In space, a crew was family.

Now she had to let them erase Lam forever. If she needed to choose between her AI or the sunfish, there wasn’t a choice at all.

“Okay,” she whispered. “Take him apart.”

24.

During the next few days, they began to settle in for the long haul. Even if there was no further contact with the sunfish, Vonnie had gathered enough data to occupy thousands of experts for years. Instead, they had eleven people. Datastreams let them back-and-forth with universities, laboratories, and government agencies on Earth and Luna, where other programs were underway, but the eleven of them were the front line.

The pressure might have been overwhelming, except Koebsch was right. The ESA crew were elite volunteers. Every one of them had dreamed of adventure since they were children.

Metzler, the lead biologist, went a hundred hours without rest until he was incoherent with stims and caffeine, and Koebsch ordered him to take the same sedatives Vonnie used to sleep.

She’d been allowed to field ten interviews in which prominent newsmen and commentators gushed over her survival while she tried to cast the sunfish in a sympathetic light. “I smashed through their homes like some kind of giant,” she said. “To them, I was the alien.” But the newsmen were baffled by this point of view, and their feeds tended to play clips of her speaking well of Bauman and Lam, as if her friends had died during her encounters with the sunfish.

It was infuriating. Vonnie recorded her own interviews and asked permission to put them on the net, haggling with Koebsch, yelling at an assistant director on Earth, finally setting the matter aside because she believed the truth would come out as soon as they contacted the sunfish again.

Everybody experienced some level of mania except Ash, who remained cool. Ash seemed to have taken it upon herself to be the vigilant one — the grown-up. At the same time, Koebsch became more and more of a toucher, punching shoulders, whacking backs, participating in their excitement.

Ash had a nice smile, especially when the men were around, but she was intense for someone in her early twenties. As a wunderkind, she’d probably spent her brief adulthood fighting people’s assumptions that she was a child. Vonnie supposed that was why she insisted on Ash, not Ashley, because her abbreviated name was sharp while the longer version sounded soft. The chip on her shoulder was as big as a sword.

Vonnie liked her. She liked all of them. They were honest, dedicated people who embraced their work.

One piece of business took priority. Vonnie had encountered bugs, bacterial mats, and fungi in addition to the warring breeds of sunfish. There were bacteria in the bugs, a parasitic growth on the fungi, and what appeared to be viral infections in the smaller sunfish.

For several days, the biologists were given the lion’s share of lab time and computing power. It was critical to know if Europan microorganisms were harmful to human beings.

Mecha had removed Vonnie’s armor in a clean lab after injecting her suit with plastic, encasing her in a protective film. Then they’d transferred her half-conscious body to another isolation chamber where they’d inundated her with UV, nanotech, antibiotics, antivirals, and gene sweeps. It might have made sense to quarantine her from everyone else, but she hadn’t been exposed outside her suit. Nor could they allocate an entire hab module to one person for weeks or months or however long it took Earth to decide she wasn’t infectious.

Coming to Europa was a prison sentence with additional sacrifices. All of them were given the same regimen of meds. The gene sweeps made Pärnits sick, yet he used his chills and nausea to joke with Vonnie instead of blaming her. “I need the meds anyway if I don’t want to glow,” he said, because Jupiter bathed its moons with radiation.

If a person could stand on Europa’s surface unprotected, she would absorb 500 rems every twenty-four hours. One day would make her ill. Two days would be a lethal dose.

Their electromagnetic shields, suits, and hab modules could minimize their exposure but not totally deflect the most lethal hazards such as gamma rays. Each crew member had an Earth-monitored AI calculating his or her individual risk. Merely driving across camp reduced their life expectancies. They would pay for their time here with pills and nanotech in addition to likely surgeries for bone cancer and melanomas — and they were ecstatic.

Everything they did felt significant. Even dinner was cause for celebration. Despite objections, Koebsch required everyone to gather for one meal each day. Otherwise they tended to divide into small groups, communicating across the camp by showphone or by radio if at all.

Dinner was a chance to brag and shout, posing questions, discussing theories, and flirting with other healthy geniuses caught up in the same jubilation.

They teased her about being a media star, although Vonnie sensed that two or three people were truly jealous.

The worst case of envy belonged to William Dawson, a gene smith, an Englishman in his seventies who was the oldest member of their crew. “Do try to leave us some of the limelight,” he said, pretending a smile that didn’t touch the papery wrinkles around his eyes.

Like Ash, Dawson was sensitive about his name. He permitted a certain level of informality. “Among colleagues, it’s not necessary to address me as ’Dr. Dawson,’” he said magnanimously, but he expected to be greeted as William, not Bill or Will.

Privately, Vonnie decided he was a stuffy old royal prick, which was fitting, since he’d mentioned in his official crew bio that he’d been christened after the English kings.

Dawson’s conceit wasn’t unusual. In the mid twenty-first century, many parents had turned to the past. Most people never left Earth, but humankind had begun to ascend into space in real numbers for the first time. They forgot their religions and their holidays, which hastened the decline of same beliefs back home. Babies were born in orbit and on the moon.

Children were given names to remember a heritage they’d never experience. The Americans called their kids silly, showy things like Christmas, Pacific, Birch, or Spring. In Europe, the trend was more elegant. Both cultures honored their ships and stations by celebrating famous historical figures like Washington or Robespierre, but the ESA org chart was littered with traditional names like Dublin O’Neal and Henri Frerotte. There was also an engineer they called Triple O because his full legal name eased off the tongue like Italian music — Antonio Leonardo Gravino.

Vonnie worked with Ash, Metzler, O’Neal, and Frerotte to forge their new sunfish-shaped probes. She joined their team immediately, although Koebsch predicted the job would unsettle her. He was correct that whenever Vonnie entered the machine shop, she cringed.

The eight-armed framework on their work bench looked like it had crawled out of her mind. Every night, despite the drugs, she dreamed of screeching monsters.

Their prototype was a muscular alumalloy sunfish 1.2 meters wide, identical to the smaller breed except for its guts and its missing skin. In real sunfish, the brain massed almost as much as it did in human beings. That was a lot of room to jam with processors and mem cards. Vonnie estimated they could give each probe a Level IV intelligence, but they wanted better. They wanted to surpass the threshold required in quantum computing to create Level III or II intelligences.

They needed more room. Their probes wouldn’t breathe or eat, so they gained space where a sunfish had its gills, lungs, hearts, and digestive and reproductive systems. Unfortunately, their probes required power plants, data/comm, and sonar. Radar and X-ray would also be ideal. Their design was overtaxed, but mounting external components on the probe would defeat its purpose of appearing like a sunfish.

One night over coffee, Ash took Vonnie aside. “Tell me about your AI,” Ash said.

“What do you mean? You deleted him.”

“Me and Koebsch. Yeah, I… What I mean is you did a great job doubling him up with your suit’s systems.”

“That was all I had.”

“I know. He was erratic, but integrating him with basic functions was a nice trick. Maybe we should try the same thing if we can overcome the instability.”

As an apology, it was lacking. Like many people who were too smart for their own good, Ash could be blunt, even graceless, and yet Vonnie appreciated the young woman’s attempt to show curiosity and respect.

“We can look into it,” Vonnie said. “First let’s see how much capacity Pärnits wants.”

Rauno Pärnits, the linguist, also served as an engineering assistant. He consulted with them in developing the prototype’s ability to wriggle and bend, running cables, servos, and flexors throughout its body and arms.

Generating movements like the sunfish would demand a huge amount of memory and computing power — maybe too much. Pärnits wanted to store most of his programs externally. Linking their probes remotely to an AI was the easy answer. They could use relays to maintain their signals, but Vonnie didn’t like it. What if the probes were cut off?

Pärnits was thirty-one, almost Vonnie’s age, lean and hawk-faced. He let her know his bed was open to her. So did Metzler and Frerotte. Vonnie might have paired with one of them if she wasn’t so confused emotionally. It was too soon. Physical comfort would be sweet, but she mourned for Lam even if the two of them hadn’t been lovers.

The compulsive behavior she’d experienced after being rescued had faded. Too much of her fixation had been a defense mechanism, blinding herself to her pain.

She didn’t trust herself anymore. Maybe she hadn’t been broken, but she’d come close. Now she wasn’t sure if the pieces still fit. Her superiors on Earth had told her to attend regular therapy sessions with an AI, which was humbling. She occupied herself with work and cooking and music. In fact, most days she was able to combine her two hobbies, listening to Beethoven while organizing hors d’oeuvres and soup for everybody in Module 02, which was dedicated to living space, exercise machines, and their tiny kitchen. She was a topsider again, which was probably where she was meant to be.

It was Day 16 when Koebsch sounded a Class 2 alert, overriding every data/comm line in camp.

“The Brazilians are going into the ice,” he said.

25.

Koebsch turned beet-red as he played the satellite footage again. “We can’t stop them,” he said. “They’re not answering our signals.”

“What about emergency protocols?” Metzler asked.

“They’re blocking everything,” Koebsch said. “They knew we’d yell as soon as they breached the ice.”

“How long until we hear from Earth?”

“Nine minutes.”

Vonnie grimaced at her showphone. She was in Lander 04 with Ash and Frerotte, but everyone had linked to their group feed, which arranged their faces in miniature around a larger holo display. The display showed fourteen mecha dropping into a rift in the ice, followed by five armored men, then six more mecha.

Five of the machines had been adapted with additional arms — short arms lined with pedicellaria. The Brazilians apparently planned to communicate with the sunfish, but it was a rushed effort. Their other mecha were crawlers, diggers, sentries, and gun platforms.

“There’s no way they’re set,” Metzler said.

Most of the ESA crew wore expressions of exasperation or disbelief. Metzler was pissed off.

In his forties, squat and ugly — so ugly he was cute, like a bulldog — Ben Metzler was a hothead and a wise-ass. In some ways, his biting opinion of people reminded her of Lam.

“The Chinese will go next,” he said. “You watch. They’ll go next and then we’ll be ordered in, too, just to show everyone who’s got the biggest dick. We’re going to contaminate this whole area.”

“I thought the Brazilians agreed to the A.N. resolutions,” Vonnie said.

Koebsch nodded. “They did.”

All sides had declared an intent to coordinate their actions and share information freely. When the time was right, the Allied Nations planned for a unified expedition. The goal was to establish a single party of translators and diplomats, but humankind was as divided as the sunfish.

The ESA wasn’t alone in running spy sats over Europa to watch their human counterparts. Some of their mecha were self-defense units, equipped mostly with electronic warfare systems. Many of their AI were committed to the same game of stealing each others’ datastreams while encrypting their own.

NASA and the ESA were old partners, often pairing with Japan, but China maintained its distance, and the Brazilians were the most recent addition to Earth’s spacefaring groups. They’d cultivated a national spirit as upstarts and underdogs.

Vonnie understood their eagerness. She identified with their need to prove themselves. She’d felt the same emotions when she’d first landed on Europa.

Why hadn’t they learned from her disaster?

As much as Vonnie wanted to contact the sunfish again, it wasn’t envy that made her want to stop the Brazilians. Until they’d run a sufficient number of probes, fully decoded the carvings and mastered the sunfish language, blundering into the ice would only make things worse.

The Brazilians’ swagger was an insult.

“Sir, they’re going in with guns,” Vonnie said to Koebsch. “They’re either hunting specimens or looking for a fight.”

“Brazil’s in trouble,” Metzler said. “They need money to upgrade everything they’ve got — ships, suits, you name it. If they’re the first ones in and they start capturing native lifeforms, they’ll have buyers lined up out the door with cash in hand. It doesn’t matter if they kill a few sunfish. A circus is exactly what they want.”

“We can’t wait for a decision back home,” Vonnie said.

Earth was a quarter of the way around the sun from Jupiter. Each radio burst took eleven minutes to travel from the ESA camp to Berlin, the European Union capital, plus eleven minutes back again. It was a tedious way to have a conversation.

“What do you propose?” Koebsch asked.

“Let me have the display, please.” Vonnie brought up real-time surveillance of the Brazilian camp.

The place looked deserted. FNEE, the Força Nacional de Exploração do Esp, had sent less people and less mecha than any of the other three nations on Europa. Their activities had been limited, which made them easier to monitor, and yet they’d chosen a location above a more extensive system of vents than the crevices beneath the ESA camp.

“Typical,” Metzler grumbled. “We should have predicted they were up to something.”

“If five of them went in, they only left two people behind for command-and-control,” Vonnie said, highlighting one of the Brazilian hab modules where ESA satellites detected the most electronic noise. “Here.”

“You’re not talking about storming their base,” Koebsch said.

“Nothing so heavy-handed. They’ll be overwhelmed with their telemetry, and I know we’ve hacked into their net,” Vonnie said, looking at Ash and Frerotte.

Ash pursed her lips, but she nodded.

“We can shut down some of their mecha and lose the rest,” Vonnie said. “That’ll stop ’em.”

“We don’t want to hurt anybody,” Koebsch said.

“If they get stuck, they’ll send a mayday and we can walk them out. Piece of cake. That’s why we need to stop them before they go too far.”

“What do the Americans say?” Metzler asked.

“They’ll help us if they can, but we’re right on top of the problem,” Koebsch said. The ESA and Brazilian camps were only sixteen klicks apart, whereas the Americans and the Chinese were closer to the southern pole. “Ash?”

“Sir, we’re lightyears ahead of anything Brazil has in AI,” she said. “We can do it.”

26.

Vonnie’s crew went on the offensive even as they continued to send urgent queries to Earth. Koebsch wanted the cover of waiting for instructions. Later, if necessary, he could present a convincing record that his team had been frantically, helplessly observing the Brazilians and nothing more.

Ash spearheaded the assault. She already had her elements in place. Part of her job was to ensure the ESA camp was equipped to repel cyber invasions. By necessity, some of those guardians were made to counterstrike. The most insidious weapons in her arsenal were SCPs. Sabotage and control programs were dark cousins of AI, as far evolved from their origin — computer viruses — as people were evolved from the first small hairy mammals of the Mesozoic Era two hundred million years ago.

A malevolent, replicating intelligence whose sole purpose was to corrupt healthy systems, an SCP normally included the seeds of its own destruction, a kill code, like a fuse, to prevent it from coming back at its master. Now Ash specifically tailored fifteen SCPs to pirate and transmit the Brazilians’ datastreams to the ESA camp, which would let her substitute her own signals into the Brazilian grid.

Koebsch swiftly double-checked and authorized her plan. But when she began her uploads, he questioned her.

“What were those? You sent five packets that weren’t on our list, didn’t you?” Koebsch asked, and Ash said, “I always have a few tricks up my sleeve, sir.”

Listening to the group feed, Vonnie, Metzler, and Frerotte donned their armor and walked outside, needing room to operate. They entered a maintenance shed where they would be hidden from spy sats.

Inside the shed, Vonnie studied her companions, itching to go, remembering Bauman and Lam. For the moment, no one said anything. They simply monitored their link with Ash.

She danced.

Surrounded by a virtual display, Ash tapped her gloves into a hundred blocks of data, moving like a conductor. “Slow down, slow down,” Ash said to one program as she cut her fingers through its yellow alarm bars.

Most of her SCPs operated at speeds beyond human understanding, but others required checkbacks or multiple launches. All but the most sinister fed reports to her station. Three AIs helped her govern this mayhem.

“We’re in,” she said. “Go.”

They could have used five people in armor — one each for the five Brazilians — but Koebsch needed most of their crew to generate a hubbub of ordinary activity to maintain appearances. At short notice, they also lacked the structures to conceal more than three sets of armor from the satellites overhead.

Vonnie’s helmet showed her an environment that was not the crowded interior of the maintenance shed. It seemed like she was beneath the ice. Ash had ghosted Vonnie’s systems into the armor of the FNEE commander, Ribeiro, allowing Vonnie to look and listen through his sensors.

Static leapt across her visor as the muscles in her left arm clenched into a severe, painful knot. The hack was imperfect. She began to get a headache.

“Ash, can you correct my feed?” she said. “Cut my neural contacts until you do.”

“I’m trying!”

Ribeiro’s squad was 1.9 kilometers in. They’d navigated a slumping old labyrinth of vents, cutting through veils of stalactites. The ice was coated with minerals in this area. The minerals made the ice more durable, which had helped preserve these catacombs. The map on Ribeiro’s heads-up display showed they were pushing toward the upper reaches of a distorted rock mountain another 2.2 kilometers down.

They’d left beacons and sentries behind them. That was more than enough for Ash to piggyback into their net.

Her take-over was subtle at first. Four mecha reported integration failures. They came back online, failed again, then repeated the pattern.

Inside Ribeiro’s helmet, alarm codes winked on and off like white noise. At the same time, Vonnie introduced contrary movements to Ribeiro’s stride. When he swung his leg forward, she kicked it to the left. As he lifted his arm to compensate, she resisted. The conflicting feedback caused an interrupt. His armor shut down to run emergency diagnostics.

“Something’s wrong,” he said in Portuguese, Vonnie’s suit automatically translating his words. “Santos, I’m getting a lot of interference.”

His lieutenant couldn’t answer. Beside Vonnie, Metzler and Frerotte were randomizing the Brazilians’ communications.

“Base, this is One,” Ribeiro said. “Do you copy? Base, this is One. I’m switching to open channels at max gain. Can you hear me?”

Malfunctions took three more of his mecha off-line as Vonnie kicked his leg again. There was no need for her armor to move in reality. Her suit conveyed Ribeiro’s actions to her body and likewise transmitted her intent to him. Inside the maintenance shed, Vonnie’s armor remained still except for the most dramatic gestures. Frerotte waved his hands again and again as he scrolled through FNEE internal menus.

They harassed Ribeiro’s squad for thirty-six minutes.

Alternately blind, deaf, or lame, the Brazilians verged on losing themselves in the ice. Vonnie didn’t want to sympathize, but those memories were too fresh. Inside her suit, she began to sweat. Her hands balled into fists, cramping and stiff. It was another impairment that haunted Ribeiro. He became unable to open his gloves.

He was very brave. He rallied his squadmates with crisp, rapid-fire decisions, consolidating their few unaffected systems. He obviously suspected their problems were no accident, and he thoroughly cursed the Americans, the Europeans, and the Chinese in turn. “Cowards!” he said. “Rapists! You lick between your sister’s legs!”

Ash snickered at that. “Oh, yuck.”

Ribeiro was almost a cliché, a swarthy macho man, but there was more to him than his bluster. Like the ESA crew, the FNEE were the best of their best. Someday he might learn who was behind the raid on his team, which could be unpleasant. He would make a dangerous foe

“Okay, Koebsch says we’ve done enough,” Ash said. “Looks like Ribeiro’s about to get the order to pull out.”

“Nice work,” Vonnie told her.

Ash hesitated. “On my mark, let’s slam them one more time. Ready? Mark.”

Vonnie blinded Ribeiro again as she caused interrupts in both legs, causing him to crash against the tunnel wall — but in the next heartbeat, she reactivated his radar and infrared. She needed to see.

Behind him, a digger and two gun platforms were convulsing. The digger shook so ferociously it bounced from the tunnel floor. As it rolled over, Vonnie realized what had drawn her attention. Its legs writhed in familiar patterns like a sunfish.

But that’s impossible, she thought.

Although the digger was shaped more like a scorpion than a sunfish with its claws and a cutting tail, the Brazilians must have programmed their mecha to mimic everything they’d gleaned from the public data of her time beneath the ice. If not, there was only one explanation for the digger imitating sunfish shapes.

Vonnie saw two more diggers caught in identical seizures — only the diggers. None of the other mecha used sunfish shapes. They shuddered and jerked. Ash must have hit the diggers with the same SCP while she used other weapons against the rest of the FNEE mecha.

In unison, the diggers quit shaking. The nearest one hunched on the floor with sudden poise, scanning back and forth as if waking up for the first time. The other two assumed standby positions, although none of them acknowledged the abort code relayed through Ribeiro’s suit.

“Get out,” his people radioed from camp. “Get out.”

The Brazilians retreated with less than half their mecha. Some might be saved later. Five kept dropping their response codes or were destroyed internally. Before Ribeiro lost sight of the abandoned machines, Vonnie thought the diggers turned to scurry deeper into the ice.

She opened a private channel to Ash. “I’d like to buy you a drink,” she said.

“Nobody brought any money, did they?” Ash said. “I appreciate it, but I’m going to be swamped with cleaning up data/comm and writing my report.”

“One drink,” Vonnie said. “Later.”

27.

That night, instead of alcohol, Vonnie brought Ash a piece of carrot cake she’d baked herself after running over to Module 02 and its small oven. “Better for you than vodka,” she said.

“Thank you,” Ash said cautiously.

“What happened to their mecha at the end?”

“Total systems override,” Ash said. “I burned out their AIs with disposable subsets of our own.”

“You appreciate a good program.”

“It’s what I do.”

Vonnie glanced over her shoulder, but the two of them were alone. “I think you couldn’t bring yourself to kill Lam,” she said.

Ash stopped eating the cake. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“Maybe you broke Lam into components like Koebsch said, making him look like an SCP, but you kept all of his files, and you knew you couldn’t hide him in our system forever. That’s why you uploaded him into the Brazilian diggers.”

Ash was either a superb actress or innocent. “That sounds like a lot of work,” she said, looking Vonnie right in the eye. “Nobody but a top programmer could fox our system and the FNEE grid at the same time.”

“Someone like you.”

The corner of Ash’s mouth ticked with a smile. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, and Vonnie laughed.

Lam was alive somewhere inside the frozen sky.

ESA and FNEE Camps