The Frozen Sky

28.

“We don’t want to cause problems for you back on Earth,” Vonnie said, “but your team needs to stop the bombing.”

“We have no bombs,” the Brazilian woman said.

“That’s a lie. We know you’re blasting in the ice.”

“Our mecha have been tunneling, yes. Sometimes there are cave-ins. We have no bombs.”

“Are you killing sunfish?”

The Brazilian woman frowned, then looked to her left. Vonnie wished they were standing face-to-face instead of talking on a showphone. Vonnie couldn’t know if someone else was standing off-camera, and, in truth, Vonnie might have acted differently herself if she was alone.

Hiding teammates off-camera was only part of the deception allowed by electronic communications. Seated beside Vonnie in Command Module 01, out of sight, Ash was both recording and hacking the FNEE transmission while Koebsch stood ready to upload any of eight different sims.

Twenty-two days had passed since they’d stopped the Brazilians’ incursion into the ice. All four Earth agencies had begun to send their own mecha beneath the surface, including the ESA, but there were seismic shocks radiating from the terrain explored by the FNEE.

The job of approaching the Brazilians belonged to Koebsch. Vonnie had convinced him to try another way, allowing Ash to open a comm link in the Brazilians’ main hab module when she thought their only female crew member was alone.

“I’ll ask again,” Vonnie said. “Are you killing sunfish?”

“Why have you called me?” the woman asked. “You are not the European commander, and I am not in charge of our base.”

“My name is Alexis Vonderach.”

“I know who you are. Everyone has seen your mem files.” The woman frowned again, then said, “I am Sergeant Claudia Tavares.” “Claudia. Call me Von.”

“My name is Sergeant Tavares,” the woman said. She was barely older than Ash, and yet she seemed a hundred times more prim. Was that due to FNEE training, a difference in national character, or her concern that Ribeiro would catch her talking to the enemy?

The ESA and NASA were civilian operations, although the Americans often seeded their teams with Space Force officers. The Chinese and Brazilian crews were exclusively military. China’s fleet and the FNEE were offshoots of their countries’ armies. That meant Sergeant Tavares was taking a substantial risk. If Vonnie failed in her effort to communicate, she could try again, whereas if Tavares was deemed disloyal, she might lose rank or find herself sent to a courts martial. Vonnie approved of her willingness to stay online.

It’s got to be difficult being the only woman in their crew, Vonnie thought. Especially in a macho culture. Especially because she’s pretty.

Even with her black hair woven into tight, cornrow braids and the collar of her uniform buttoned high on her neck, Tavares couldn’t hide her femininity. Her cheekbones were like sculpted bronze, and she had warm brown eyes.

What was the sexual dynamic in the FNEE camp? Were they celibate or promiscuous?

Fraternization was discouraged among the ESA but not enforced because they were under enough strain without forbidding Homo sapiens’ most basic drive — to procreate. In the past, the ESA had tried all male and all female crews, chemically neutered crews, and mecha-only ships, too often with subpar results. Sexually active, mixed gender groups brought the highest versatility to any non-combat mission. It was messy, which the bureaucrats hated, and often heated, which the crew leaders didn’t like — but in mixed groups, there was a deep-seated urge to excel, outperform any rivals, and win a mate.

Harnessed correctly, that motivation led the group to attain its greatest potential. It heightened their stamina. It helped preserve them. The men and the woman struggled to protect each other physically and emotionally.

Last week, Vonnie had finally begun to date again herself, stealing three hours with Pärnits and then another with Metzler, playing holo games and chess, talking, and watching comedy shows. After preparing two plates of fruit, cheese, and crackers, she’d even held Metzler’s hand across the table as they ate, quietly rubbing her thumb on his knuckles.

But if the Brazilians were promiscuous, when the hell did Tavares get any sleep?

Vonnie grinned, which appeared to startle the younger woman. Tavares leaned back from her camera as Vonnie said, “I’d like to send you two sims.”

“No unauthorized files.”

Vonnie shrugged. “I’m offering the sims to you as a courtesy. We haven’t shared this data with Earth yet. We don’t want to, but the bombing needs to stop.”

“I told you—”

“If you don’t know what your guys are doing, it’s because they’ve hidden it from you or because you don’t want to know,” Vonnie said. “I’m sorry.”

Six men and one woman was a bad imbalance. Brazil had hurried its mission to Europa. Maybe they’d experienced a last-minute complication that caused them to switch the seventh man for Tavares.

She must feel restless, always waiting behind while the men go into the ice, Vonnie thought. She wants a friend. I can see it in her face, but she’ll never admit it.

I wouldn’t, either. That’s why I have the best chance of reaching her. If the personnel records we filched are accurate, Tavares is a lot like me and Ash, too nosy for her own good, hyper-educated, and committed to doing the right thing. Otherwise she wouldn’t have answered my call, and she hasn’t kept talking to me to practice her English.

“Please,” Vonnie said. “Just let me send two sims.”

“I… I will have an AI screen your files first,” Tavares warned her.

“Understood. I’m transmitting now.”

“My people are not killing sunfish,” Tavares said. “You will not have proof of it.”

“We have exact numbers and coordinates of the blasts. If your guys aren’t trapping or fighting the sunfish, what are they doing? Why do they isolate you when they’re programming your mecha?”

“I do not like you watching us.”

Vonnie shrugged again. “You’re watching us, too, you know. It’s part of the job.”

After a moment, Tavares nodded. “Do not leave,” she said. Then she blanked her screen, and Vonnie questioned Ash and Koebsch with one hand.

“We’re mute,” Ash said. “She can’t hear us.”

“I think she already suspected what her guys are doing. She resents not being included.”

“You don’t know how she feels,” Koebsch said.

“I think I do. It doesn’t help that they put her at the bottom of their totem pole — a woman sergeant with all those captains and colonels.”

“Ribeiro is the only colonel, Von.”

“You know what I mean. They have two captains, three lieutenants, and one noncommissioned officer. Guess who it is? The woman.”

“She’s a support tech, not a FNEE specialist like the rest of them,” Koebsch said. “You’re reading too much into the situation. I hate to tell you, but you always read too much into it.”

“If I didn’t, you’d never—”

“Tavares looks like she’s back online,” Ash said, stopping Vonnie from bristling at Koebsch.

The two of them had made their peace, but it was an uneasy truce. Partly that was because Koebsch wasn’t old enough to be Vonnie’s father, yet struck a paternal tone with her. Mostly it was because he constantly gave her more leeway than she expected, then second-guessed her. Why?

Vonnie thought he was attracted to her. Koebsch took his job seriously and wouldn’t compromise his own authority by wooing a subordinate, but they were a long way from home, and there were only four women including Vonnie among the eleven members of the ESA crew. Adding fuel to the fire, she was a celebrity. Koebsch had been compelled to give her too much of his attention, first in overseeing her recovery, then in debriefing her and fielding endless media requests for interviews and sims.

The rest of his time went into his job. In addition to managing the ESA crew, Koebsch was their liaison to the thousands of scientists back home who wanted specific data, experiments, or new missions into the ice. He also dealt with administrators and politicians who had their own questions. He’d been given a staff on Earth to assist with these demands, but he couldn’t have been busier if he’d given up sleeping, showering, and eating.

More than once, he’d mentioned to Vonnie that overseeing her media sessions was the most fun he’d had in weeks, a subtle kind of praise. Did he want more time with her?

Peter Günther Koebsch wasn’t bad-looking. Gene smithing had made age differences of ten or twenty years irrelevant. In many countries on Earth, the average lifespan had increased to a hundred and ten with the bulk of those years spent in active good health. But when Koebsch acted protective and possessive of her, Vonnie felt annoyed.

She didn’t need a daddy.

“Reopen channels,” she said, making sure she tamped down her irritation with Koebsch before turning to the showphone. “Hi.”

“I will need to study this data,” Tavares said.

“Please share it with Ribeiro. We’re prepared to denounce his actions to the Allied Nations if necessary.”

“Do not think you would be alone in that,” Tavares said. “Three weeks ago, we filed protests for a cyber assault on our operations.”

“I know,” Vonnie said.

Tavares stared at her. She opened her mouth to answer, stopped herself, then began again. “Was it you?”

Being a celebrity has its advantages, Vonnie thought. Like Koebsch, Tavares was more inclined to listen because she thought Vonnie was a living legend.

“The assault was non-lethal and it was a preventive action in accordance with A.N. Resolution 4545,” Vonnie said. “Ribeiro brought gun platforms into the ice in violation of international law.”

“That resolution has changed. Even your team has mecha in the ice.”

“Our mecha are intended for scientific and diplomatic efforts, not war.”

“And yet you have spies near our operations.”

“Claudia, the blasts we’re hearing aren’t small,” Vonnie said. “The NASA base is forty klicks from your base. They’ve confirmed the biggest explosions. My guess is you’ve felt the explosions yourself.”

“Sometimes there are cave-ins,” Tavares said, but now she sounded uncertain.

“We’ll give you eight hours,” Vonnie said. “Quit shooting. Extract your team. Maybe we can work together to repair the damage you’ve caused.”

“I will ask Colonel Ribeiro.”

“Thank you. We want to be friends, but if you’re killing sentient creatures…”

Tavares lowered her brown eyes, hiding her dismay and something else. Anger? Recrimination? “I will ask, Von,” she said, allowing Vonnie the smallest victory of calling her by name. Then she cut their connection.

29.

Thirty minutes later, after helping Koebsch arrange their next response to the Brazilians, Vonnie and Ash suited up and left Module 01. As usual, Ash took control of the jeep. Not letting Vonnie drive had become a private joke between them, deepening their friendship.

Vonnie loved being outside. There was room to stretch. She’d been trained to endure being cooped up inside their landers and hab modules, but she didn’t like it — and after five weeks of living inside Lander 04, it was a relief to look around.

Europa’s sky was peppered with other moons. Vonnie identified Io and Himalia as they trundled across camp, and there were other dim shapes set against the stars.

Jupiter had seventy-one satellites. That number included the four largest Galilean moons such as Europa and Io, four medium-sized bodies like Himalia, and sixty-three hunks of rock in a variety of prograde, retrograde, or irregular orbits. They formed a dizzying system which would have been deadly to ships without navigation AIs, which were vital to piloting spacecraft through the ever-changing revolutions.

In time, some of those tiny moons would be drawn too close to Jupiter, where its gravity would crush them into dust. A very few would drift away, expanding their orbits and tugging loose of Jupiter’s grasp.

Which is better? Vonnie thought, feeling a familiar touch of melancholy. The moons that break free will survive, but they’ll be lost forever, while the moons that disintegrate will become a part of Jupiter’s rings. Eons from now, they’ll help create new moons. They’ll stay home.

She knew she was projecting her own emotions on an inanimate system, but her head felt as chaotic as the debris surrounding Jupiter. Did she have the right to feel like she belonged to Europa? Or would she always be an outsider?

It was a short drive to Lander 04. Inside, Ash and Vonnie took off their pressure suits and stripped down to their blue jump suits. Then they joined Metzler and Frerotte in the living quarters.

Metzler had folded up three of their bunks, leaving one of the low beds open as a bench. A table was extended from the wall. He gestured to the box of fruit juice he’d set out. Vonnie declined. She was too riled to sit down, and it increased her agitation when Ash sat between Metzler and Frerotte, smiling at both men.

The girl was nowhere near as hard-edged as she’d first been with the group. Vonnie wished she weren’t so skittish herself, but everyone knew she was in trauma therapy. That made her self-conscious.

She said, “Did you watch me talk with Tavares?”

“Yeah.” Frerotte nodded. “She won’t help us.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I don’t think they’re hunting sunfish.”

“They wouldn’t go down there with explosives for anything else. Six men don’t have the resources to build a subsurface base. Even if they did, the blasts are spread over nine kilometers. They’re chasing something.”

“What if they’re chasing Lam?”

Vonnie sat down, taking the last spot available on the bed beside Metzler. Then she grabbed the juice and filled a bulb for herself, delaying the question as long as possible. “You heard another signal?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“Don’t tell Koebsch.”

“He’s going to find out,” Metzler said, and Frerotte said, “The Brazilians will tell him if we don’t. That’s their excuse for blowing things up. They can use it against us. They wouldn’t be using explosives if we hadn’t programmed one of their mecha with your AI.”

It’s nice of you to say ’we,’ Vonnie thought. Frerotte could have distanced himself from Vonnie and Ash, leaving them to take the blame. Instead, he’d kept their secret. So had Metzler.

Vonnie supposed their decision was one more example of the cohesion of a mixed-gender group. If she and Ash weren’t eligible females, would Metzler and Frerotte have been less inclined to protect them?

“I’d like to see Lam’s data bursts,” she said.

Frerotte handed his pad to her. “The signal’s attenuated,” he said. “Most of it we can’t read. There must be three or four kilometers of ice between him and our closest spies. The Brazilians are jamming him, too, which explains the distortion. He’s trying to bounce his signals through tunnels and caves.”

“It can’t help that he’s in a FNEE digger,” Ash said. “Our mecha have better data/comm.”

“Is he trying to reach us?” Vonnie said.

“You tell me,” Frerotte said. “Maybe he doesn’t know where we are. He might not know where he is.”

“No, he was active until you pulled me from the ice. He tapped NASA and FNEE signals before Koebsch shut him down. Even if he wasn’t able to co-opt the digger’s memory banks, he must have a decent idea what part of Europa he’s in.”

“Then he is looking for us.”

“Maybe he’s trying to convince the Brazilians to stop shooting. He’s no threat to them.”

“They don’t see it that way, Von.”

“This is my fault,” Ash said. “I should have kept him in storage. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” Vonnie looked at Metzler and Frerotte to clarify. “Ash and I thought Lam would disappear, then we’d pick him up later. Maybe a lot later. He was supposed to be like a long-term scout.”

“Well, now we’re up to our ears in shit,” Metzler said, taking the sting out of his words with a friendly nudge. “Koebsch is going to hit the roof.”

Vonnie leaned into Metzler and bumped him back, both apologizing and flirting. Dealing with Koebsch and the Brazilians wasn’t how she wanted to spend her time. She wanted to study the sunfish, but managing the human factions outside the ice was almost as critical as dealing with the aliens below.

Ruefully, she thought, We’re so selfish.

As a species, we’re self-important and self-involved. I guess that’s the primate in us, always obsessed with what the other guy has and how to get it.

In prehistory, base reflexes like envy and desire had propelled early man to develop better tools, better organization, and better dreams — but thousands of years later, those same drives left them permanently divided.

Vonnie wasn’t sure if the sunfish were less greedy. Competition had made them tough and clever. Maybe no race could increase its intelligence without conflict of some kind, and yet she’d seen them act without regard to self. For the sunfish, the whole seemed to come before the individual, which would be a fundamental difference between them and Homo sapiens.

“Let me talk to Koebsch,” Vonnie said.

“I’ll call him, too,” Ash suggested.

“There’s no reason to get you guys in trouble. Tell him you were surprised to hear ESA signals from FNEE territory. I’ll swear I’m the one who uploaded Lam’s files to their digger.”

“Koebsch won’t believe you.”

“He’ll pretend he does. He doesn’t want to take more disciplinary actions, so he’ll go along with it. First let’s see if we can exchange signals with Lam. That’s the evidence we need to show it’s really him. How close are we?”

“I’ve moved nine spies inside the FNEE grid,” Frerotte said. “Most of our eyes and ears are still a few kilometers out. It helps that they’re blasting. The vibrations cover most of the noise our spies make in the ice.”

Vonnie scrolled through the lay-outs on Frerotte’s pad, examining the dots and lines representing the tiny mecha he’d arrayed against the Brazilians. Some of his pebble-sized spies hadn’t moved in weeks. Others had drilled, squeezed, and melted their way toward the Brazilian’s territory, advancing with painstaking care to avoid detection.

Mecha this size were unable to host AIs. Spies had only the barest level of self-awareness. Linked together in groups of ten or more, they could muster enough judgment to think as well as a cat, but these spies had been running silent, each separate from the rest. They needed human input.

Frerotte’s a spy just like his mecha, Vonnie thought, admiring his work.

Henri Frerotte was a pale Frenchman with a slight build and slim, agile hands. Nominally, his role in the ESA crew was as an exogeologist with secondary responsibilities in suit maintenance and in data/comm. That was why Koebsch had put Frerotte in charge of their perimeters. Distributing sensors was easy work. The mecha did most of it automatically. But for an assistant, Frerotte was too skilled with systems tech, and he was too eager to interfere with the Brazilians.

Vonnie believed he was an operative sent by one of the European Union’s many intelligence agencies such as Germany’s BFV or France’s newly-formed Directorate of Internal Security. Ash probably worked for an agency, too, and Vonnie wasn’t sure how to feel about that. What if Ash had seeded the FNEE digger with Lam’s mem files not to preserve him, but purposely as a disruptive weapon?

“I don’t know if Colonel Ribeiro will pull back,” Vonnie said. “If he does, or if he calls us, that could be the right time to signal Lam.”

“We’ll be ready,” Frerotte said.

“Thank you.”

“Thank me, too,” Metzler said, nudging her again. “I’ve got big news. Eat lunch with me and I’ll show you. Otherwise you have to wait for the group presentation tonight.”

Vonnie smiled. “Tell me now or I’ll break your arm.”

Do we have at least this much in common with the sunfish? she wondered. Sex affects everything we do even when those urges are subliminal. It’s part of our self-absorption, I think. We can’t leave each other alone.

I like it. I like watching him and feeling him watching me. It’s a distraction, but it gives us energy, too.

I want him to want me.

Looking at her three friends, Vonnie saw the same spark in Ash’s face. They were young, in close quarters, and subjected to unending stress and excitement. Pheromones were merely part of the spell. The ape in them yearned for physical contact, grooming, and reassurance.

Gene smithing also made their society more free in its sexual norms. Western Europe had already been more sophisticated than most of Earth’s cultures, placing few taboos on nudity or female equality. By the twenty-second century, the defeat of venereal diseases and infallible birth control had led to an era called the Age of Love. Sharing partners, threesomes, and group sex were common experiences for young men and women in the European Union.

Vonnie’s main consideration now, away from Earth, was to avoid disrupting her professional relationships. None of them wanted to waste time on jealousy or drama.

“We can have lunch,” she promised. “Don’t make me wait if you’ve had a breakthrough.”

“Well, sort of. The fucking Brazilians are causing problems we don’t need,” Metzler said. Was he posturing for her benefit? “The explosions scared off most of the lifeforms in the area, so it’s taken longer than we anticipated finding sunfish. The good news is we think we’re near a colony because Tom came back again this morning.”

“I love Tom!” Vonnie said, yelling in celebration.

Tom was the name they’d bestowed upon the most easily identifiable sunfish. Others were Jack and Jill and Hans and Sue.

One of Tom’s arm tips had healed in a whorl after a partial amputation. His deformity made him unique. It seemed to have affected his thinking. He was the only sunfish who’d signaled their probes instead of attacking. Then he’d run from them. With further contact, they hoped to coax Tom into a dialogue… opening the door to meaningful contact between humans and sunfish…

Vonnie kissed Metzler’s cheek, smelling the faint, pleasant salt of his skin. He touched the back of her neck. His fingertips caused an erotic thrill. Beside her, Vonnie saw Ash glance at Frerotte, and she knew they all felt the same adult heat.

We have this lander to ourselves, she thought. We could do whatever we want in here.

30.

“Uh, let me show you the latest sims,” Metzler said, rubbing his face where she’d kissed him. He tried to cover the gesture by looking for his pad, but he couldn’t find it, flustered by the two women.

Ash had blushed. Vonnie felt a similar warmth in her cheeks. Even adapted to Europa’s gravity, their hearts were too strong not to betray their arousal. Vonnie basked in it. She enjoyed feeling healthy even if she hadn’t gotten over the fear of making herself vulnerable.

Be patient with me, she thought.

Metzler was a good man. He acted as if he’d heard her say it. Maybe her anxiety showed in her eyes. He linked his pad to the wall display and said, “Look at this,” drawing everyone’s attention away from Vonnie.

Four days ago, ESA Probes 112 and 113 had stolen into a branch of catacombs occupied by the smaller breed of sunfish. Each probe carried a dozen spies with it, like beetles clinging to its top, because spies weren’t capable of covering as much ground as probes yet were better suited for surveillance.

Spreading through the ice and rock, patiently forming themselves into a dish-like array, the spies had watched the sunfish for fifty-two hours before Probes 112 and 113 emerged from hiding.

Technically, it wasn’t Second Contact. The Americans had pursued two groups of sunfish into the ice. They’d also reported more carvings, fungus, bacterial mats, and eel-like fish in a cavern half-flooded by a fresh water sea. More startling, the Americans had also found a vein of shells and dirt suspended in the ice with the corpse of what appeared to be a warm-blooded, shell-eating creature like a ferret. The corpse had been ravaged by compression, but it was unquestionably a fur-bearing animal — an eight-legged thing with beaver-like teeth, talons, and an elongated body made for burrowing and climbing.

If the Chinese were having similar success, they’d made no announcements. Vonnie thought the Brazilians must have encountered sunfish even if their focus had turned to destroying Lam. The FNEE mecha were too deep. At the very least, they must have found carvings or ruins.

In both of their encounters, NASA’s probes had been attacked. The first time, NASA rolled its mecha into balls, meekly accepting the sunfishes’ beatings. That had cost them every probe in the scout team, which they deemed an acceptable loss. Vonnie fretted it sent the wrong message. She’d told a NASA biologist that now the sunfish thought their metal doppelgangers were easy prey. “No,” the biologist said. “Now they know the probes are inedible and nonaggressive. Next time they might accept us.”

The next time, the sunfish had dropped three tons of rock on NASA’s probes before swarming the sole survivor. Attempts to communicate via sonar and the sunfishes’ shaped-based language were ignored.

NASA had tagged four sunfish with nano darts, expecting to monitor the tribe with these beacons… but the sunfish tore open the infinitesimal holes in their skin, then bared their wounds to their comrades, who chewed into their flesh before regurgitating the gory meat. The biologists agreed the sunfish were extremely sensitive to parasites. That indicated a prevalence of other bugs or microorganisms as yet undiscovered. On Europa, it appeared, pests and disease were as virulent as the higher lifeforms. Contagion and blight might have done as much damage to the sunfish empire as volcanic upheavals.

“Here’s what’s driving me crazy,” Metzler said, opening a sim full of mathematics. Vonnie recognized some of the data as Lam’s.

“There’s not enough food in the biosphere for predators their size,” she said.

“Not by a third.”

“We know they’re omnivores. They could get a lot of the mass they need from vegetation.”

“What kind of vegetation? We haven’t found anything more advanced than fungi, and I don’t think we will. Not without photosynthesis. There won’t be anything like terrestrial plants or algae.”

“Maybe sunfish don’t need as many calories as we would if we were their size,” Ash said. “Couldn’t their intake be explained by a difference in Europan metabolism?”

“If they hibernated for extended periods, I’d say yes,” Metzler said, “but their genome doesn’t show protein expression patterns that resemble anything like hibernating species on Earth. The only behavior we’ve recorded has been sustained activity. They never stop. They don’t even sleep.”

“I’ve seen them rest,” Vonnie said, remembering the very first group of sunfish she’d met.

“That was in a low-atmosphere environment with almost zero oxygen,” Metzler said. “We think they were harvesting fungal spores from the rock. They were moving at half-speed to conserve their time in the area. Uh, they also might have bled one of their friends for the oxygen in his system.”

“What?”

“We’ve put together a few sims using your files. At the back of the crevice, it looks like they were holding down the smallest sunfish. They were drinking from him. Then he might have been dinner, too.”

“God.” Vonnie shook her head. “That would fit with their pack mentality, but you’re making a lot of assumptions.”

“Yeah. Presumably there are more diverse food chains further down, or the sunfish are farming somewhere we haven’t found yet, or both. It would be fantastic if we could get some mecha down to the ocean. A lot of our answers will be there.”

The ocean, Vonnie thought. “Have you asked Koebsch? There are soft spots on the equator where the ice is only five kilometers thick. We could drill through.”

“It’s under consideration. We already have our hands full.”

She smiled at the understatement. Earth had dispatched another high-gee launch loaded with new mecha and supplies, but the ship was piloted by an AI. They didn’t foresee adding more people soon. The costs were too steep.

“Tell me about Tom,” she said.

“Our star pupil.” Metzler opened a new file without playing it. “Listen, I should’ve warned you not to get your hopes up. What happened this morning was incremental at best.”

“You might get another kiss anyway.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“Would you two knock it off?” Ash said, but her tone was encouraging, and Vonnie was glad to be teased. Their friendship made the sunfish less intimidating.

She still had nightmares.

The emotions she felt toward the sunfish bordered on awe and reverence, but she still had bloody nightmares.

Surface of the Southern Pole Map

31.

Constructed mostly of ceramics, ESA spies were stealthed against radar, X-ray, and infrared. That served them well in tracking the Brazilians, who hadn’t mastered neutrino tech and couldn’t buy it, since none of the major powers had made their neutrino instruments for sale.

Unfortunately, the sunfishes’ sonar abilities were exquisitely honed. There was no way to hide smooth, rounded objects from them — not even objects as small as a pill.

The ESA’s answer had been to house each spy in a rough camouflage shell. Wearing these shells, which included real water or native basalt, the spies possessed the same reflective signature as ice or rock.

Advancing through the catacombs, the spies had begun to gather useful information before they came within .5 km of the sunfish, discerning activity by vibrations and sonar calls. Then the spies had approached within a few hundred meters, and their datastreams grew richer.

“The sunfish are moving in fours just like the rows of carvings,” Vonnie said. “Look how they stay together.”

“I don’t see it,” Ash said.

“Watch.”

There were twenty-three sunfish within range of the spies’ array. They scurried and pounced through thirty meters of tunnel. Some of them shoved hunks of lava into the air like baseballs or bricks. Others collected these missiles against one wall. In between, more sunfish dragged larger rocks across the floor.

Vonnie was struck again by the alien beauty of this environment. There were hot spots spread through the rock measuring a toasty -46° to -41° Celsius. Those temperatures were far below freezing, but enough heat had radiated through the spongy old lava to bake the few water molecules in the area. Then the moisture had recondensed. Film-thin drips of ice speckled the tunnel floor. In radar, the ice looked like bright coin— but as always, it was the lithe, powerful sunfish who fascinated her.

They were nearly uniform in size and skin texture. Tom had his crippled arm. Sue and nine others wore scars or bite marks. Otherwise they appeared to be an indistinguishable swarm, yet that was an illusion.

Lost in the ruckus was an astonishing degree of coordination. Not one of the sunfish were ever hit or caught off-guard by the missiles. On the tunnel floor, despite rushing back and forth, they did not trample their comrades.

Vonnie tapped at Metzler’s pad, superimposing a color code on the sunfish. She started with Tom. Near the edge of the group, he struggled with three others to pry loose a desk-sized section of rock, ignoring two more sunfish who hopped into his work space and bounced away in order to throw smaller bits of lava across the tunnel.

“Tom’s diggers are blue,” Vonnie said. “The scavengers who passed through his team are red, this group is yellow, and here’s purple, green, and orange.”

“Twenty-three isn’t divisible by four,” Ash said.

“Green is one short,” Vonnie said. “That’s probably why they paired with orange to do the heavy lifting. Look at what’s happening. They spread apart and mix together, but they constantly reform in the same quartets.”

“We think they have a compulsion toward fours and eights, which is what you’d expect given their physiology,” Metzler said. “Their math is probably based on sums of eight like ours is based on tens.”

“They’re building something,” Vonnie said.

The sunfish weren’t crudely stacking rock against the side of the tunnel. They worked expertly on a column as well-fit as a puzzle, using shape and weight to hold this mass. Each sunfish also left urine or dung in key places. Their waste would freeze like adhesive.

“It’s not a shelter,” Vonnie said. “It looks like a retaining wall, but it’s in the middle of nowhere. Why are they here? There’s no food. No water. The air’s barely any good. Is anything behind that side of the tunnel?”

“We’re not sure. It’s warm. We think there’s a channel of magma not too far away.”

“We need to get a probe close enough to scan through the rock. Maybe there are hot springs on the other side, or bacterial mats, or their home. Do they have an air lock nearby?”

“We don’t know.”

“Right.” Vonnie clenched and unclenched her hands, her nerves flickering with anticipation.

Where were sunfishes’ children? Did they protect them like humans protected their young or were their eggs left to live or die like those of Earth’s frogs and fish? She wanted the answer to be the first possibility. More likely it was the second.

From gene sequencing, X-rays, and her mem files, the biologists said the packs of sunfish included both males and females. The females were physically larger, less in number, and seemed to dominate, calling out more often than the males.

Every one of these physical and sociological aspects were the opposite in humankind. Homo sapiens had typically banned their females from hunting and combat until very recently in history, when technology had provided women with as many advantages as men.

It was another clue to the sunfishes’ mentality. Each time a group left home, they brought enough fertile adults to persevere if their colony was annihilated behind them.

The biologists also knew the sunfish didn’t gestate their unborn because they had no wombs. They laid spawn — hundreds of eggs at once — which the males either sprinkled with milt during the act of laying or soon afterward.

The sunfish might have mating rituals, but they did not make love. They might not have a sex act at all. Equally significant, because they were warm-blooded and semi-aquatic, they probably laid their eggs in hot springs. There was no sunlight to incubate their spawn. They relied on the environment as part of their reproductive cycle, but the environment was catastrophic.

Metzler theorized that the females felt no attachment to their spawn, only bonding with successful newborn. They were predisposed to abandon their eggs.

Nature seemed to have compensated. If the gene smithing of the sunfishes’ hormones was correct, their females laid spawn as often as six times in an Earth year. That was a staggering birth rate. It could have meant disastrously high population pressures, except most of the eggs never became adults. Maybe they ate their failed spawn or performed infanticide to weed out their weaker offspring.

That doesn’t mean they’re not affectionate, Vonnie told herself. The sunfish huddled for warmth, cared for each other’s wounds and infections, and there was poetry in the fluid, detailed ruffling of their arms and bodies.

Did they know joy?

They seemed well-suited for a love of life. They moved like birds or dolphins. They built and succeeded. But they were short-lived. Their telomeres indicated an average lifespan of no more than twenty years.

By now, ESA and NASA biologists owned samples from seventeen different sunfish, dozens of bugs, and any number of bacterial mats and fungi. Most of the blood and tissue had been gathered from Vonnie’s suit. Five more blood pricks had been secured by NASA’s probes during the past week, and it was a toss-up which set of samples had caused the loudest uproar.

The botanists, entomologists, exobiologists, and gene smiths each had different arguments that their results were the most spectacular.

Europan DNA wasn’t wildly distinct from Earth DNA. The sunfish genome was composed of sequences using the same four nucleic acids as terrestrial lifeforms. The one difference was in their blast scores for hemoglobin. The sunfish had evolved with a remarkable concentration of iron atoms in this globular protein, which allowed them to carry extra oxygen through their bloodstream.

The sunfish also had little genetic variation from each other. They were nearly clones, like cheetahs, which was another species that had been reduced to a bare minimum of breeding pairs in its past.

“Tell me what happened with Tom,” Vonnie said.

“It was hours later,” Metzler said, forwarding through his sim. “The sunfish ran out of material for their wall. They sent scouts into the side channels, including his team. Tom seems to go farther than anyone else. They might consider him expendable because of his injuries. Maybe he’s earned a leadership role for being so resilient. I don’t think most of them would have survived losing part of an arm.”

“They’d eat him,” Ash said.

“Yeah.”

Metzler’s recording showed Tom leap into view at a steep angle from the tunnel floor to its ceiling. He flew with his arms spread, screeching at the space ahead of him. Then he landed on a crag in the rock and stuck to it, bunching his arms with his body poised like a rocket, ready to jump again.

He’d obviously sensed 112, which sat twenty meters away. In flight, Tom had wavered in a clockwise motion, bending back each of his arm tips, including his stub. Curling inward might have pantomimed grabbing at the probe or bringing an object to his beak. This motion was a gesture more like releasing something.

“That means ’Hello’ or ’Yes’ depending on the context,” Metzler said. “We found the same pose at the center of every wall of carvings. It’s a starting place. The sunfish don’t read in straight lines like we do. We think they read outward from the ’Hello’ stance.”

“I saw Pärnits’ report,” Vonnie said absently, staring at the display. Then she glanced at Metzler, wondering why she’d mentioned his friend’s name.

He knew she was also dating Pärnits. Was the instinct to test potential mates so innate that it had spoken for her? Vonnie wasn’t coy, and she wasn’t mean, and yet she’d just undermined Metzler by giving credit to Pärnits.

Awkwardly, she scrambled to make up for it. “These sims are amazing,” she said.

“Well, here’s where everything goes wrong,” Metzler said.

Was he annoyed with her?

Probe 112 repeated the ’Hello’ gesture, then showed the undersides of two arms, undulating its pedicellaria.

It didn’t have the effect they’d intended.

Tom lifted his underside to show his beak, a hostile gesture. He screeched into the catacombs behind him, alerting his companions. As soon as they answered, he turned and called in the probe’s direction. Most likely he was scanning for other strangers. Possibly he was shouting threats at the probe not to come any closer.

“What if we’re putting Tom in danger by talking to him?” Vonnie said. “The other sunfish might not like it.”

“Jesus, you’re strange,” Ash said. From the way her hazel eyes searched Vonnie’s face, she was only half kidding. “I know you have a huge crush on those monsters. Now you’re more on their side than ours?”

“None of us want him to get hurt.”

“It’s a chance we have to take,” Frerotte said. “If we’re going to talk to them, we have to start somewhere.”

Tom finished screeching into the dark. He leapt away from 112, escaping it but not the camouflaged spies, who recorded his flight. First he rejoined his quartet. Then they formed up with the rest of the pack.

At the same time, Probes 112 and 113 fled.

When the sunfish returned in force, the probes were gone. The sunfish clung to the rock. They did not pursue. Instead, they screamed at the empty tunnel.

“What are they doing?” Ash said.

“That looks territorial,” Vonnie said. “They’re claiming this space.”

“We thought so, too,” Metzler said. “Their sonar would carry after the probes for a long way, maybe as far as three kilometers. Watch what they do next.”

The sunfish quit screeching. They returned to the tunnel where they’d built their wall. Then they assembled in a pack and began screeching again, using the rock to amplify their shrill voices back on themselves.

Ash put her hands over her ears. “They’ll go deaf!”

“They’re worried the probes will try to flank them,” Vonnie said. “Remember, they’re always exposed on all sides, up and down. So they’re repeating the warning.”

“It seems more intense than that,” Metzler said. “What if it’s an affirmation ritual? They could be promising each other to defend the colony or memorizing a new voice key. Look at their modulation. They’re not just screaming. There’s a carefully refined harmony.”

“Why did Tom run from the probe?”

“We’re not sure. They must find loners or survivors from other packs sometimes.”

“They probably eat them, too,” Ash said.

“Maybe not. Survivors from another area could lead them to new food supplies or thermals. There’s also a biological imperative. Accepting newcomers into the pack would be good genetics. They need the diversity.”

“Maybe the probe said the wrong thing,” Ash said.

“I don’t think so. It was docile. It responded to Tom’s overture.”

“You did great,” Vonnie said, bumping his shoulder.

“Pärnits programmed its secondary movements,” Metzler said. “Maybe something in those gestures was too abrupt or he used the wrong arms.”

The subtext of that comment wasn’t difficult to interpret. Metzler had undercut his rival for Vonnie’s affections, opening a divide between the two men, which was exactly what she didn’t want.

“This encounter went better than anything else we’ve done,” she said. “You guys are spectacular.”

“We probably should have told the probe to stay,” Metzler said. “The sunfish would never accept a loner without assessing him as a group. That would also reduce their odds of sustaining casualties. If it’s a trap, if he’s sick or feeble, they’d smash him.”

“Are we sure the probe had the right sound?” Ash said.

With help from their gene smiths, Vonnie and Ash had grafted synthetic blubber and skin onto the probes’ exteriors. Naked metal wouldn’t sound like a living creature, nor smell like one. Metzler was certain that the hundreds of tube feet commingled with the sunfishes’ pedicellaria were a sensitive scent-and-taste organ. Even in areas where there was no atmosphere, the sunfish must be attuned to each other’s smell, the mineral content in the rock, toxins, moisture, and the tracks of anything that had passed before them.

“The probe’s skin wasn’t the problem,” Metzler said.

“What about its density?” Vonnie said. “We can’t make a probe as light as a sunfish unless we dump most of the hardware. If we—”

An alert chimed on the display. Frerotte rose to his feet, ducking through the hatch into data/comm.

“What’s up?” Ash said.

“Our probes are on the move,” Metzler said. “The sunfish just reentered the catacombs.”

“Contact in three minutes,” Frerotte called. “Pärnits and O’Neal are coming online. Koebsch is signed in, too. They need us in one.”

“Got it.” Metzler looked at Vonnie and said, “Can you redesign the probes if we have to?”

“Yes.” She stood up, eager to join Frerotte in data/comm. “We’d need to leave most of the data gathering to the spies. That’s worked pretty well so far, but it’ll be an issue if the probes move out of range. What if we’re lucky enough to be invited into the sunfishes’ homes?”

“We can send down ten thousand spies,” Ash said. “In another year, they’ll be everywhere.”

“That doesn’t help us now.”

As the three of them walked toward the hatch together, Vonnie caught Metzler’s elbow, letting Ash move ahead of them. She drew Metzler away from the hatch. Then she reached her arms around his neck and kissed him.

32.

He ran his hands down Vonnie’s ribs to her waist. She pressed herself against him. Her lips parted, and she chuckled at the simple pleasure of touching each other.

Her laughter was a low, wanting sound. It invited more. His hands slid to the small of her back.

Frerotte shouted, “Ben! Fifteen seconds!”

“Oh, hell,” Vonnie said as they broke their embrace. Metzler looked into her eyes, checking to see if she was okay. She nodded. Then he moved past.

Vonnie lingered behind, hugging her arms across her breasts to fill the void he’d left. Her mouth worked with a grin that she couldn’t control.

A kiss was an odd thing. In most cultures, kissing had come to have many meanings — affection, sympathy, friendship — but it had originated as a trick of reproduction. By sharing saliva, the man transferred testosterone to the woman, increasing her boldness and her arousal. The emotional component was harder to decipher. There were undertones of devotion and ownership.

The sunfish will have their own tricks, Vonnie thought, trying to cool off. She’d been celibate since leaving Earth. Her body ached and burned.

She must have moved differently as she stepped through the hatch into data/comm, because Ash looked at her sharply. Vonnie grinned again without meaning to.

“Sign in,” Frerotte said.

Frerotte, Metzler, and Ash stood in virtual stations, each of them enveloped in a shaft of holo imagery. Frerotte had prepped a fourth station. Vonnie walked into it, donning mesh gloves as she activated her temp files and preferences with a voice key. “Vonderach,” she said.

Her display included a group feed for most of the crew. A few people were too busy with their own projects to join in. Everyone else wanted to observe their next encounter.

Probes 112 and 113 had squirmed into a new section of catacombs above the tunnel where they’d met Tom. The rock was less dense here. It had bubbled. Most of the openings were scrawny, lopsided pockets. The probes’ line-of-sight never stretched more than twenty meters, although their radar signals bounced as far as three hundred meters before the catacombs slumped over a precipice, creating a blind spot.

Hidden beyond the obstruction were sunfish. The rock echoed with their shrieks, which grew louder and louder.

Vonnie grimaced. The reality was that mecha were ideal for this world. She couldn’t have fit into those holes even if she’d had the guts to try, and, worse, she expected the sunfish to greet the probes with violence. They all did.

“How far away is our next team?” Koebsch asked.

“110 and 111 are five kilometers out,” Frerotte said. “114 and 115 are even further. I didn’t want to pull them from their grids.”

The sunfishes’ screaming resolved into a physical presence. Radar identified three contacts — then four — seven — eight. Tom and Jill led the pack. They fluttered through the jagged rock, their voices flooding every crevice.

112 and 113 answered them. If Pärnits was right, the probes’ tone was welcoming, but the voices of the sunfish increased in pitch, exceeding frequencies over 100,000 Hertz. Their screams became a war cry.

“Here we go,” Koebsch said.

Four sunfish spun out of a gap in the ceiling and latched onto the rock above the probes, clenching their arms, their bodies poised to leap again. It was the same menacing pose Tom had assumed in the tunnel.

“They’re going to attack,” Frerotte said, but Vonnie said, “No, they always display aggression. You need to do the same.”

“She’s right. I can improvise those body shapes,” Metzler said. At his command, 112 and 113 mimicked the sunfish, drawing themselves into predatory, piston-like shapes.

Four more sunfish emerged from a hole in the wall. Tom was among this group. They seized positions on the rock overhead. The probes were surrounded.

From this position of strength, four sunfish showed the undersides of their arms — two arms each — two sunfish from each quartet. Intricate patterns rippled through their pedicellaria and tube feet.

“They’re emitting scent!” Metzler said. “Frerotte, take over 113. Talk to them. I want 112 working on sample capture and analysis.”

“Roger that,” Frerotte said. Sweeping his gloves into his display, he led 113 through a new dance. The probe lifted two of its arms like the sunfish.

“We’re not going to be able to match their scents,” Pärnits said. “They’ll realize something’s wrong.”

“They know the probes are different,” Vonnie said. “Don’t run. If we try to get away, they’ll catch us. Let’s see what happens. Keep talking.”

Beside her, Metzler flashed a smile.

Did he like hearing her argue with Pärnits? There wasn’t time to read his expression. This close to the sunfish, every second was a gold mine. The probes’ telemetry filled with X-rays, linguistic algorithms, and 112’s first chem reports.

“Wow!” Metzler said, laughing.

Everyone was entranced. They were spellbound, even Koebsch. The moment was so exceptional he’d forgotten himself and his prudent nature.

“I think they’re accepting us,” Metzler said.

“The computers think so, too,” Pärnits said, highlighting ten clips on the group feed.

He ran an overlay of four different sunfish repeating the same wriggles through their pedicellaria. It was a contracting motion. It looked like a circle closing into a dot.

“That could mean ’Come with us’ or ’Go inside,’” Pärnits said.

“Tell them ’Yes,’” Koebsch said.

Frerotte ordered both probes to spread their arms and curl each tip upward. Like Metzler, he was smiling. Everyone was talking too loudly now, sharing the same electricity.

Vonnie turned at the chime of an alarm. “Wait. There’s movement back where we left our spies.”

“Oh!” Ash cried.

Tom’s sunfish fell on 112 and 113 like rain. Most of the ESA crew shouted as if the probes were their own bodies.

Beaks and arms filled their displays. The sunfish tore through the probes’ false skin, cutting relays and sensors. Tom’s beak scraped the metal beneath. The noise was a grating squeal until Frerotte dimmed the volume.

“Don’t fight them!” Koebsch yelled. “Don’t fight!”

The sunfish destroyed both probes. They were unable to crack or dent the mecha’s alumalloy bodies, but they wrenched several arms loose, then dug into the open sockets with their arm tips. They yanked at the machinery inside even when it cut and tore their pedicellaria.

Did they intend to keep the ravaged metal and plastic? Before the last signals from 113 went dead, the sunfish hooked their arms around the squashed gears and fragments of alumalloy.

“What’s happening with our spies?” Metzler asked as Vonnie scrolled through her display.

She couldn’t let herself feel anything more than tight concentration. She was discouraged, but the real surprise was that the sunfish had interacted with the probes for eighty-one seconds. Now they shocked her again.

“Their colony must be larger than we thought,” she said.

Near the cavern where the sunfish had built their retaining wall, Sue led a new horde within range of the spies’ sensors. There were sixteen of them. Twelve hugged rock clubs against their bodies.

“How can there be so many sunfish?” Koebsch said. “I thought there isn’t enough food.”

“We need to send mecha down to the ocean,” Vonnie said. “What if it’s loaded with fish like those eels NASA found? They might get most of their food there.”

“The ocean’s too far away,” Koebsch said. “They’d need days to transport eels or fish back to the colony.”

“If they freeze their food, that wouldn’t matter.”

“Yes, it would,” Koebsch said. “They’d spend more calories than they’d gain dragging their prey through the ice, and they’d probably have to fight other tribes for it. They’re too high for the ocean to matter.”

“Not if there were geysers and churn in the area,” Metzler said. “There might be sea life frozen in the ice around the colony. Maybe they’re mining for it.”

“An eel mine,” Vonnie said appreciatively.

That could be the missing factor, she thought. Eruptions and rip tides might push sea creatures into the frozen sky, where they’re preserved. If the sunfish located an area where storms seeded the ice with bodies, they’d have a natural food source. It might be enough to last for years or generations.

Sue’s group entered the cavern in a familiar wave formation. Half flew high. Half flew low. They rebounded from the ceiling and floor, colliding in the middle.

Then they sprang away from each other in individual trajectories. The four sunfish who weren’t carrying rocks used themselves as a centering mass. Kicking, bouncing, slamming, spinning, they propelled the others outward.

They crushed the spies with stunning precision, terminating eleven of the tiny mecha in a coordinated strike. Vonnie thought they’d turn on the rest, but they were done. They killed eleven spies without effort, then paused, leaving the majority untouched.

“That’s weird,” Frerotte said. “If they can tell our spies are there—”

“They memorized the walls!” Metzler said. “That’s what they were doing with their group song. They memorized the walls, then came back and spotted the differences. Look. They killed every spy that’s moved since they left. 4071 only changed its position by five centimeters, but they got it, too.”

Sue’s group picked at the remnants of the spies. They ate a few specks, then cinched their arms around the rest. Later, they might compare these bits of ceramic armor and nanocircuitry to the junk Tom’s pack had salvaged from the larger probes. For the moment, Sue’s pack gathered on the cavern floor.

They screeched and screeched. They were memorizing the cavern again. The group ritual also served as a warning to everything that could hear them — a cry of possessiveness and defiance. Then they fled into the dark.

“They must have noticed a spy earlier,” Vonnie said. “They were suspicious, and they wanted to make sure nothing bothered their retaining wall.”

“How are they processing so much detail in the rock?” Koebsch said. “We couldn’t do it without AI.”

“They’re wired differently.”

“They might not be as smart as you think, Von,” Dawson said.

“What?”

“They used to be intelligent,” Dawson said. “I can’t deny the carvings we’ve found. Those are written histories. But the carvings are ten thousand years old. These sunfish are just animals. We’re wasting our time trying to talk to them.”

33.

“Bullshit,” Vonnie said. “Are you looking at the same transcripts I am?”

“Yes indeed.” William Dawson was in his seventies and their oldest crew member. Wrinkles spread from the corners of his eyes through his paper-fine skin, but his hair remained black, and he was spry and elflike.

Vonnie hadn’t spoken with him much. She felt blindsided by his announcement. “How can you think we should leave them down there to die?” she said.

“I don’t. Not at all. Perhaps our approach should change. We’ve spent five weeks pussyfooting around in hopes of talking to them. I submit that this is like attempting to chat with porpoises or seals.”

“Seals!”

“Porpoises may be a better comparison. I don’t know if you’ve seen the mem files on attempts to communicate with cetaceans in the twentieth century.”

“I have.” Vonnie had watched everything she could find on interspecies communication.

“Some marine biologists were convinced the whales were intelligent,” Dawson said. “The complexity of their songs was bewitching. Other people were obsessed with dolphins. They frittered away their careers proving themselves wrong.”

“They learned more than you think. Their work is part of the database we’re using now, but the whales never said anything like this.” Vonnie brought an excerpt from the newest sunfish translations onto the group feed and played it.

TOM: Hello.

PROBE 112: Hello / Yes.

TOM: I am Top Clan Two-Four, Pod Four.

ALL SUNFISH: I am Top Clan Two-Four, Pod Four.

ALL SUNFISH: Close / Too close.

TOM: You are too close / Hello.

“This supports my theory,” Dawson said. “The sunfish are pack animals, not individuals. Look at the group response. It’s imitative.”

“Hold on,” Pärnits said. “Repetition is a natural function of the way they communicate. They can only hear the shapes they detect in any given sonar pulse. Of course they repeat the same information. It’s like a circle or a chain. They confirm and reconfirm until every member in the group acknowledges the message. Their speech patterns are more fluid than human conversation.”

“It’s obviously language,” Vonnie said. “They use numbers and names.”

Dawson’s smile was condescending. “You’re the one who’s given them names,” he said. “All I’ve seen is the same limited repertoire of shapes repeated over and over.”

Vonnie glared. It was true that she and Metzler had tried to personalize the sunfish, but she refused to concede the point. “The sunfish always begin with the same shapes because they’re at war with each other,” she said. “Their priority is to announce their claim to their area.”

“Indeed. It’s a territorial response.”

“He said ’I’m Top Clan Two-Four, Pod Four.’”

“They all said it. It’s not intentional, Von.”

“The sunfish NASA found said they were Top Clan Four-Eight, Pods Two and Six. They’re organizing themselves by tribes, then by squads.”

“Are they?” Dawson asked. “The AI is assigning identifiers like ’clan’ and ’pod’ for our benefit, and not with a lot of confidence. Check the scores. The AI won’t guarantee the accuracy of our transcripts. Most are ranked lower than seventy percent.”

True again, she thought. Their AIs had interpreted the sunfishes’ carvings with a fair amount of certainty, but following the shape-based language in real time was a work in progress. Too much of it was open to guesswork.

“The sunfish appear to use their pronouns interchangeably,” Dawson said. “’I,’ ’we,’ ’ours,’ ’mine’ — there’s no differentiation. Their arm shrugs may not be counting at all. I don’t dispute that the manner in which they show ’eight’ or ’four’ is unique to each group, but those postures look like displays of conformity and aggression to me.”

“Then they’ll keep destroying our probes,” Koebsch said.

“An animal doesn’t learn, it merely reacts,” Dawson said. “That’s why every encounter is the same. I’m grateful for the data brought to us by NASA and our own probes, but I question if we can afford to let the sunfish keep smashing mecha.”

You bastard, she thought. You despicable, pretentious bastard.

Why was he doing this? Because it would put him at the forefront of the academic debate and the latest news feeds? Dawson didn’t care how much money the ESA spent on probes and spies. Like the Brazilians, he wanted to generate his own notoriety and enjoy its rewards.

“Granted, the sunfish have extraordinary ratios of brain to body mass,” he said. “Their ratio is actually greater than ours. But with eight arms, too much of their brain mass is dedicated to motor control. An elephant uses a considerable portion of its brain to operate its trunk. We use much of ours to operate our fingers and arms. The sunfish developed enough brain mass to gain sentience for a time, but their undoing was their need for multi-sensory input. Allow me to demonstrate.”

Accessing the group feed, Dawson opened a sim of a sunfish brain. It had two hemispheres like a human brain, although it was flatter and wider.

Dawson highlighted several internal structures.

“Here is an olfactory cortex,” he said. “Here is an auditory cortex. Here is a second auditory cortex, and this is no less than a third auditory cortex.”

“So what?” Vonnie said impatiently.

“So in addition to the scent-and-taste organ of their tube feet and their ability to use broadband sonar calls in atmosphere environments, the sunfish are also capable of generating and processing narrow-band high frequency clicks underwater. That’s why they possess these cartilage nares beside their larynx. It’s why these fatty lobes share the same nerve bundles as their cochleae. The lobes are for echolocation.”

“I’ll say it again — so what?”

Dawson smiled at her, unperturbed. “The sunfish also possess a shark-like ability to perceive bioelectrical impulses and subtle changes in temperature and pressure. The tiny pores commingled with their pedicellaria can sense living creatures, even those hiding behind rock or underwater. That’s how they followed you no matter what you tried, Von. They sensed your body through your suit.”

“Impossible,” Frerotte said. “Scout suits are insulated plastisteel.”

“The sunfish have had to become remarkably sensitive to find prey in the ice,” Dawson said. “Perhaps they reacted to the suit itself. Sharks were known to attack phone cables in the earliest years of telecommunications. One of the suit’s systems could have attracted them, but I think not. You were hurt. Wounded creatures emit stronger signals than normal as the electrical activity controlling their heart rate and respiration increases.”

Vonnie felt her face lose its color. Her memories of screaming and killing would always be with her, and Dawson had unlocked that terror with a few words.

Then she got mad. Why is he smiling? she thought. Is he deliberately trying to weaken me? She was the loudest proponent of treating the sunfish like equals. If he dominated her, he might win this argument.

“Finely-developed sensory inputs are what elevated the sunfish to sentience,” she said.

“On the contrary,” Dawson said. “They no longer have enough mass left for higher thinking. Certainly they don’t have the emotional quotient we do. They might be smart like our spies are smart — like termites or bees or prairie dogs. They’re able to build structures in a step-by-step manner as a group, but without real initiative or independence. Too much of their capacity is dedicated to pure survival.”

“I disagree,” Metzler said. “They have spindle cells like human beings and the great apes.”

“Dolphins, elephants, and giraffes have spindle cells in similar concentrations,” Dawson said. “No one considers giraffes intelligent.”

Vonnie glanced at Metzler, who said, “Spindle cells are neurons without extensive branching, sort of like free-floating processors. They play a crucial role in the development of cognition and decision-making.” He turned back to Dawson. “Sunfish brains are also more convoluted than ours, and they have faster brain stem transmission times.”

“So do rats,” Dawson said. “Their brain stem transmission time is an adaptation to living in eternal darkness, not evidence of superhuman thinking. That their brain mass ratio is greater than ours also means nothing. It’s a necessary result of their hemispheric asymmetry during sleep.”

“They don’t sleep.”

“They do, Dr. Metzler.” Dawson opened a series of medical imaging scans of the sunfish. He turned to Vonnie and said, “In addition to motor function, most of any creature’s brain is dedicated to involuntary functions such as heartbeat, digestion, and respiration. In sunfish, breathing is voluntary. They must decide to inhale or use their gills or hold their breath.” He looked at Metzler. “We’ve recorded EEG patterns which very much resemble REM activity, but only in one hemisphere at a time.”

“Then they’re technically awake.”

“Indeed. Because the sunfish are voluntary breathers, they would asphyxiate as soon as they relaxed and failed to breathe. They must also remain vigilant for predators. Therefore it’s uncommon that both of their hemispheres are simultaneously awake. In essence, they have two small brains, not a single large one. They alternate between which small brain they use throughout the day.”

Enough, Vonnie thought.

“Their carvings talk about the future and the past,” she said. “They had laws. Some of it looks like philosophy! At the very least, there was tribal rule, and a warlord strong enough to form an empire.”

“It’s interesting that their carvings invariably show perfect sunfish,” Pärnits added. “They never exhibit wounds or age. That suggests a desire for beauty.”

“We’ve dated the youngest carvings at nine thousand years,” Dawson said. “Something happened between now and then. Perhaps the sunfish didn’t always have such dependence on dual forms of sonar or their bioelectric sensing organs.”

“You think they evolved away from sentience?” Pärnits asked. “That would be unprecedented.”

“Everything in this world is unprecedented,” Dawson said.

“Nine thousand years is too quick,” Metzler said. “It’s not enough time for the sunfish to degenerate without an outside cause like massive radiation, and they don’t have the resources or the technology for a nuclear war.”

“Nothing so dramatic is necessary,” Dawson said. “Jupiter’s magnetic field is, in essence, a gigantic particle accelerator. It blasts Europa’s surface with octillions of high-speed ions and electrons every hour.”

“They don’t live on the surface,” Vonnie said. “They’re safe inside the ice.”

“No. The ice shields them from the primary radiation, but there are elements dissolved in the ice like iodine and potassium. When those elements are bombarded, they turn into short-period isotopes, which are sinister little poisons. Churn brings the hazardous material down into the ice. Periods of violent churn exacerbate the contamination.”

“It’s still too fast,” Vonnie said, running a calculation in her head. If the lifespan of a sunfish was twenty years… “It’s only been five hundred generations since they were writing.”

“I’m afraid it’s more than that,” Dawson said. “Male sunfish don’t mature until six years of age. Until then, they may be expendable, leaving only the hardiest to procreate. But their females reach adolescence at two years. They’re fertile at three. It’s been four thousand generations since the carvings.”

“Where’s the evolutionary pressure to give up their intelligence?” Metzler said. “Sentience is the greatest weapon any species can develop.”

“Not necessarily. As nourishment became more difficult to find, they grew more instinctive — more aware in other ways — trading their intelligence for improved sonar and detection. It all fits. We know they’re severely limited genetically. There’s been inbreeding. Unfavorable mutations took hold because those adaptations serve them well. They don’t need intelligence to roam the ice. In fact, their self-awareness worked against them, making them all too conscious of what they’d lost in the turmoil of Europa’s crust. They suffer less without their intelligence, and we should feel lucky indeed at this twist of fate.”

“What do you mean?” Koebsch said.

“Our ancestors had scarcely invented the most primitive forms of agriculture and herding when the sunfish began their decline. Their empire fell. Then they regressed. Otherwise they might have traveled to our world before we visited theirs.”

34.

“Imagine if a superior race had landed among us when we were tribal nomads without science, only fire and spears,” Dawson said. “That’s why the sunfish run away. That’s why they fight us even though they’re impossibly outmatched.”

Silence filled the group feed. Brooding, Vonnie saw troubled looks in her crew mates.

The far-away feeling she’d experienced weeks ago when the Chinese rover discovered the first carvings was with her again now, richer and more poignant.

How close did we come to exchanging destinies with the sunfish? she thought. If there had been more supervolcanoes on Earth… If another meteor strike like the one that killed the dinosaurs had pushed us to the brink while the sunfish were given another 10,000 years of peace… What if they’d discovered iron and steam power, then steel, electronics, and finally the atom? We might have been a few starving bands of cavemen when they brought spacecraft to Earth.

“I have to admit I’m disappointed in how the sunfish have responded,” Koebsch said.

“Sir, we’ve only been here for six weeks,” Metzler said. “I know you’re under a lot of scrutiny from Berlin, but I think we’ve made inroads.”

“Really?” Dawson said. “All I’ve noticed are the same attacks on our mecha.”

“He’s right,” Koebsch said.

“We should capture some of them,” Dawson said, and Vonnie exploded: “You son of a bitch! People stopped hunting whales because they’re too close to sentience to treat like cows or sheep. Even if you’re right about the sunfish, the same principle applies here.”

“I don’t want to eat them,” Dawson said with his elfin smile.

“But you want to take them apart! Who have you been talking to? Is there a gene corp offering you money or a job?”

“That’s offensive.”

“So is pushing us to treat the sunfish like a commodity. You’re demonizing them.”

“It’s ludicrous to expect a single lab to sequence and develop the material we’ve gathered thus far,” Dawson said. “There aren’t enough of us. We need to send tissue samples to Earth — dozens if not hundreds of samples. Live specimens would serve even better.”

“I can’t believe you’ve been hiding this bullshit from the rest of us.”

Koebsch said, “Look, Von, let’s calm down—”

“I am calm!”

“—and maybe get some lunch,” Koebsch said. “We can talk again later. Let’s meet again on the group feed in an hour. Frerotte, I want to talk to you on Channel Thirty.”

“I need to talk to you, too,” Vonnie said.

“Not now,” Koebsch said, cutting his connection with the group feed.

Vonnie stayed online, watching Dawson, who ignored her as he closed his sims. If he had more to say to the group, she wanted to hear it. But he signed off.

“Sorry, Von,” Frerotte said. He lifted a privacy screen on his station. From the outside, the screen left Frerotte visible yet fuzzy as his display components turned to gray blotches, including his link to Koebsch. The privacy screen also canceled their voices.

Vonnie paced in the confines of data/comm. Metzler tried to make room for her, clearing his station and hanging back. Ash wasn’t so tolerant. Ash took her hand and dragged her into the ready room, where Vonnie at least had space to wave her arms.

“Son of a bitch!”

“Walk it off,” Ash said. “Just walk a little.”

Metzler followed them into the L-shaped area between the lockers and the empty scout suits. “Don’t let Dawson get to you,” he said. “We’ve only had a few encounters with the sunfish, and most of those were with different tribes. It’s been like starting from square one every time.”

Vonnie shook her head. “Dawson’s an asshole, but he’s right that we can’t keep repeating the same cycle. We approach, they attack. We approach, they attack. There has to be some way to get through to them.”

She laid a hand on her suit — a new suit calibrated to her biometrics. Then she turned abruptly. Metzler and Ash both pretended they hadn’t been watching her.

They were nice to worry. Vonnie wanted to promise she was fine, but she was afraid they’d see right through her.

She felt estranged and shut out.

“Let’s get to work on the new probes,” she said. “If we can make them lighter, that might help. Maybe the sunfish won’t know they’re fakes.”

“The only way to reduce the probes’ weight is to pull their radar and X-ray,” Ash said. “Koebsch won’t like it.”

“Koebsch has different objectives than we do. He has to pay attention to the budget. You noticed how Dawson got fussy about how much the mecha cost? He was sucking up to Koebsch. But we don’t need more maps. We don’t need more body scans, either. We need to convince the sunfish to listen to us before glory hounds like Dawson decide they belong in a zoo.”

“Or on a menu,” Ash said with a glint in her hazel eyes.

Vonnie laughed, glad for any chance to break the tension. “I’ll put you on a menu,” she said.

Metzler draped his arms around both women. “You two go ahead,” he said. “I’ll make lunch. No sunfish. Then I want to go over Dawson’s sims. Maybe I can shoot some holes in his data.”

“Marry me,” Vonnie said, laughing again, but Metzler nodded sincerely.

“Be careful what you ask for,” he said.

They left the ready room. In data/comm, Frerotte continued to talk inside his privacy screen. Vonnie took the next station and unfolded the chair. Ash sat beside her, glancing after Metzler as he ducked into the next compartment. Now the young woman’s eyes were characteristically shrewd.

“He really likes you,” she said.

Vonnie didn’t answer. As a teacher, she had learned to be charming. It was part of the job. She was less comfortable with her newfound charisma. She’d become a polarizing figure in their group, a crusader and a leader.

People want to be inspired, she thought. Are they helping me because I’m famous?

What if Dawson went out of his way to take an opposing view for the same reason? Because he resents seeing me in the limelight and wants it for himself?

Vonnie hoped her friends appreciated her for her own qualities, not the image of the hero created by the media buzz, and yet she found herself playing into that role more and more. Most of the crew respected her conviction. Some of them, like Metzler, even welcomed her volatility.

As she opened their schematics of the new probe, she said, “Can you hack our own datastreams?”

“Yes,” Ash said. “Why would I do that?”

“Everyone has different encryption packets depending on who they’re communicating with on Earth. I’m curious who’s on Dawson’s lists.”

It would be easy to conceal illicit transmissions in their data bursts. All of them were linked with a myriad of government agencies, labs, universities, and media outlets — but if Dawson stood to profit from his decisions, if he was saying what a corporation wanted to hear in order to classify the sunfish as animals, Vonnie was well-positioned to stop him. She could use her celebrity to burn him in public opinion.

“What if Dawson’s in a gray area legally or flat-out breaking the rules?” she said. “He’s got his nose turned up so far, it makes me think he knows something we don’t. He might be taking bribes. Hell, he probably has a deal with someone. That’s why he’s taunting us.”

“I’ll peek,” Ash said. “The tough part will be getting a minute without Koebsch online to see what I’m doing. Maybe while he’s sleeping. Let me wait until I’m in the command module tonight or tomorrow.”

“Tonight.”

“I need an excuse to drive over, Von.”

“Here.” She opened the remote operation link to the armory, which, like Koebsch’s central data/comm post, was in the command module. “The forge doesn’t work right with our link. We can take the jeep after we finish our redesign. Koebsch will want to tell me everything I did wrong anyway, so I’ll keep him busy. Trust me.”

“I do trust you,” Ash said.

Vonnie met her gaze, then responded with total candor. “You’re my best friend in this place,” she said, which was true, but inside, she thought, I wish I knew who you were working for.

She needed Ash’s help to stop Dawson. But who would stop Ash if the girl was on the payroll of MI6 or another intelligence agency? Vonnie took it for granted that Ash’s directives were ultimately identical to Dawson’s: to own and control everything of value on Europa while disrupting the efforts of any other group to do the same.

Once upon a time, Vonnie might have laughed at the predicament they’d brewed for themselves. Instead, she cursed herself.

Face it, she thought. You’re outclassed.

The only people who’d been sent to Europa without covert training might be the poor, honest fools who’d volunteered when no one imagined there was anything more than bugs in the ice, namely Vonnie, Bauman, and Lam. Too much was at stake. As soon as Earth realized the larger ramifications, new players had been sent for a different game.

If the Allied Nations accepted the sunfish as a sentient race, that might affect who was permitted to mine the ice, where they were licensed to operate, and how much they paid the sunfish in trade goods.

If any country or gene corp got a head start on developing useful applications of Europan DNA, that could lead to the priceless first-to-market position for new meds or treatments.

Cryogenics and improved cancer resistance were top priorities for Earth’s military and civilian space forces. Astronauts who could sleep safely for months at a time would allow ships to travel farther than ever. Soldiers who could be stored, forgotten, and yet come up fighting would act both as deterrents and as first strike weapons. They could be stashed all over the solar system until needed.

Germany had spliced cockroach and black fly genes into some of their Special Forces commandos with solid results. China was known to have tried rat and chimpanzee DNA. The side effects were minor, and there would always be volunteers eager to trade their health for glory and strength.

Dawson was correct that Europan lifeforms dealt with high levels of radiation in addition to extreme cold. Christmas Bauman had felt that many of them must have evolved the ability to suppress and repair cellular damage, and Bauman’s word was enough for Vonnie. If she’d believed there were revolutionary genetics here, Vonnie wanted that magic for the human race, too — but it wasn’t fair for any single group to own it, and it wasn’t right to condemn the sunfish for anyone’s profit margin.

Vonnie felt like she was standing in a mine field. She didn’t know where to step. Someone she depended on today might betray her tomorrow, and she remembered when she’d met Ash. She’d done everything possible to convince Ash that she would put the team first.

Could the same be said for Ash’s intentions?

35.

Ash will be my friend as long as it suits her, Vonnie thought. I think she genuinely likes me. That’s part of why she saved Lam. But no matter how she feels about me or the sunfish, eventually we’ll go home. She’s made a career for herself there, so she’ll lie or steal from me if that’s what they tell her to do. Won’t she?

What can I promise her that they haven’t? I don’t have a lot of money. Even if I was a division leader, any promotion I offered would be a joke compared to the job they’ve given her.

Who can I trust? Metzler? Koebsch?

Sitting with Ash in front of their holo display, Vonnie hid her reproach by tapping at the probe’s schematics. Removing the radar array created complications in the probe’s power grid.

In silence, the two women made corrections, needing no words to fulfill this task. Vonnie traced a line to bridge the hole in the grid. Ash added a secondary net so the probe could reroute its energy needs if it was damaged.

“Simple,” Ash said.

Vonnie wished everything was so easy. She felt sad and resentful, and she tried to shake her mood.

She copied the newest data from Probes 112 and 113 to her station, then let an AI collate those files with their existing programs. Each interaction with the sunfish would refine the movements of their probes’ arms.

But we need to do more than upgrade our mecha, she thought. We need a new approach. Instead of waiting for the sunfish to accept us, what would happen if we marched straight into their homes? They understand certainty.

The irony was she wanted the sunfish to be more uncertain. For their own welfare, they needed to question themselves.

Were they capable of ending their kill-or-be-killed aggression once they realized there was more to existence than the frozen sky? Even if they hadn’t grasped the notion that the ESA probes and spies came from outside the ice, they must feel as if they’d encountered brand-new lifeforms.

Earth had agreed that the next stage in communicating with the sunfish might be an attempt to provide gifts — fabric, meat, steel tools, and tanks of compressed oxygen — but they were concerned this wealth would draw new attacks, not only from the sunfish but from other species. Also, they were undecided if giving steel to the sunfish was worth the impression they wanted to make.

Would the sunfish accept the ESA’s technological superiority and welcome humankind in expectation of receiving more tools? Or would they become more aggressive, fighting for as much metal as they could scavenge from destroyed mecha?

The sunfishes’ rock clubs had been surprisingly effective against Vonnie’s scout suit. With steel blades beaten from shovels and air tanks, the sunfish might penetrate a suit through its joints or collar.

Authorizing gifts was Koebsch’s decision. He’d tabled the idea, suggesting it was too soon to gamble even with token presents of soft fabric or delicacies sealed in vacuum packs.

What if we poison them with our food? he’d said. What if they’re allergic to the fabric?

Metzler was positive he’d identified the starches and sugars in human food that would harm sunfish. Poisoning them was unlikely — but a month ago, while Vonnie was still recuperating, Pärnits had sunk her plans to bribe the sunfish.

We don’t know what gift-giving means to them, Pärnits had said. They’re perpetually on the edge of starvation. What if showing excess food is an insult? We could go down there with the best intentions, give them everything, and offend them so badly they’ll never forgive us.

Since then, Pärnits had apologized to her, but he stood by his assessment. So did Koebsch.

It seemed to Vonnie that hundreds of years of in-fighting must have left the sunfish primed to negotiate. They would always look for new allies and resources. Given the right circumstances, the ESA might bond with one tribe. Those sunfish could act as a doorway to more tribes. Together, they could begin to form a new, stable empire — as stable as the sunfish allowed.

In comparison, on Earth, the European Union had contracted and expanded several times since the twentieth-first century, gaining new states and losing them. Partly that was because none of its members had surrendered their national identities or languages. English was common yet not required by law. To this day, their members maintained separate armies in addition to the E.U. military.

How many languages and individual tribal customs did the sunfish possess? Dozens? Only a few? They were homogenous in so many ways.

Metzler had compared their situation to the arrival of Caucasian settlers in North America. With superior technology and plague-hardened immune systems developed in the congested terrain of Europe, those settlers had ended life as the Native Americans knew it within a few hundred years.

That the Native Americans had been demoralized was a significant factor. Some tribes fought long and well, but only a small percentage of their losses had been in battle. The settlers had taken their lands with sickness, with commerce, and with well-meaning religion or greed or ignorance. They’d corrupted the natives in a million ways like sunlight evaporating snow.

Vonnie didn’t want the same thing to happen here. Assholes like Dawson would compromise the sunfish at every turn, and for what? For money?

On the American frontier, the clash between two worlds had been so varied and lawless that some white settlers sold guns to the natives in exchange for pelts or safe passage, arming the indigenous population against their fellow whites.

On Europa, the points of contact were far fewer and closely supervised, but there would always be people who wanted the short-term gain. Men like Dawson lacked her moral center. He had no empathy. He wanted his prize, whereas Vonnie didn’t think her adventures on this moon would be complete even if she lived to her hundredth birthday. Aiding the sunfish, teaching and guiding them, was a project that could last decades.

I need to prove Dawson wrong by showing that the sunfish will accept us, she thought.

She was pleased with the design work she’d accomplished with Ash. They’d recalibrated their probes to be lighter and more responsive. Now she needed to convince Koebsch to upgrade their tactics as well.

“Can you excuse me?” she said to Ash.

“Why?”

Vonnie saved their files and made a shooing motion with one hand. “Please. Go get lunch. I’ll come in a minute. There’s a little job I need to do.”

Ash hesitated, but she nodded and stood up. “All right.” Then she left data/comm.

Vonnie heard her say something to Metzler in the next compartment. Metzler laughed, and Vonnie raised a privacy screen around her display.

She’d decided to up her own gamesmanship. She needed to be cagey even with her friends, delaying what they knew, earning favors, and, most of all, uniting them against Dawson.

I’ll be a spy, too, she thought — a spy on her own — a spy by herself — as sensitive and paranoid as a sunfish.

Cutting into the channel between Koebsch and Frerotte took longer than she’d anticipated. Frerotte’s encryptions repelled her hack. Trying a new strategy, she mastered control of his audio, then used this opening to further her gains into his virtual station. Unfortunately, his display went blank as soon as she broke in.

“—eep tracking,” Koebsch said before he looked at Vonnie. “This is a secure call, Von. Get out.”

“I need a minute.”

“I’ll call you as soon as I can.”

“We’re set to go with our new probes, but they’re not right for carrying supplies down into the ice,” she said. “I need to know if I should be building more probes or larger mecha.”

“Build the new probes. We’re not bringing down food or anything else.”

Vonnie shook her head. “I think we’re past holding back. It’s right to worry about cultural contamination and pushing the sunfish too fast, but this colony represents our best chance for a breakthrough, and they’ll never go back to the lives they had before we came along.”

“Von, I’m dealing with bigger problems.”

“Like what?”

“Sir, she might as well know,” Frerotte said. “We need our engineers.”

Koebsch grunted and reopened his display, giving Vonnie access to their datastreams. “This is for your eyes only until we decide how to handle it,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

The map was Frerotte’s. It showed their perimeter with the Brazilians, where Probes 114 and 115 had coordinated the actions of their spies.

“This is thirty minutes ago, then ten,” Frerotte said, playing two sims for Vonnie. In the first segment, the telemetry from 114 spiked across the board — radar, sonar, seismographs, and data/comm.

“That’s not sunfish,” Vonnie said.

“Not unless some of them have radios,” Koebsch said.

Something lunged toward 114, a bear-sized mass that had crept impossibly close, without noise, without vibrations, using a vein of rock to shield itself until it was within two kilometers of the probe. Then it lumbered forward in a blaze of electromagnetic activity, masking itself with sabotage and control programs.

The intruder’s SCPs must have been underway for hours. It was sophisticated enough to have blinded the spies to its presence altogether. 114 suffered the same false reads and distortions. 114’s sensors were unable to get a clean picture. There were only shadow-like glimpses.

Whatever it was, it was ten times larger than the probe. It hooked two arms above itself like weapons, and yet physically, it was slow. It covered the last kilometer in eight minutes, which was an eternity to mecha.

114 should have had time to run if it couldn’t defend itself. Instead, 114 shut off.

“We’re under attack,” Frerotte said.

Probes and Sunfish Map

36.

Vonnie scrolled through their maps, measuring the unguarded space left by the loss of 114 and most of its spies. “How close is 115?” she asked. “Do we know where the intruder went?”

“No,” Frerotte said. “115 is on the move, but it’s three minutes away. I had 14 and 15 in different catacombs to spread our coverage.”

“They should have been together,” Koebsch said. “That’s why we sent them down in pairs. We probably wouldn’t have lost 14 if the probes were able to support each other.”

Privately, Vonnie doubted it. Whatever hit 114 would have walked right over 115 as well. Frerotte’s decision to separate the probes was the sole reason they had the ability to bring new eyes and ears to the scene quickly.

There were two more probes in the ice, 110 and 111, but those mecha were seven kilometers northwest of 115. Except for their spies, there were no other ESA mecha beneath the surface other than a hundred beacons and relays, none of which were mobile, equipped with AI, or combat capable.

“I want you to call Sergeant Tavares again,” Koebsch told Vonnie. “Maybe you’ll have better luck than I did.”

“You called the Brazilians?”

“Yes. They’re not answering. But I can’t figure out what they think they’ll accomplish. That’s why I want to keep this quiet. Mecha can be replaced. What we don’t need is an international incident.”

“Tavares said they didn’t like us monitoring their grid,” Vonnie said. “Maybe this is the end of it. They kill our spies. Then they retreat. You don’t think they’d invade our zone, do you?”

“Maybe they’re distributing their own spies. Right now they could march a hundred probes through the border without us knowing it.”

“115 will reach the gap in thirty seconds.”

“We’ve been blind for nine minutes. Even if nothing’s there now, I’ll be forced to waste time and resources hunting FNEE mecha inside our lines.”

Vonnie nodded, considering Koebsch’s change from ’we’ to ’I.’ For him, the attack was a blemish on his record.

“115 is on site,” Frerotte said.

She looked through the probe’s eyes. As always, the environment was as dark as obsidian. Her display was modifying 115’s radar into holo imagery.

Sprawled on the rock were the battle-scarred remains of a FNEE digger. It had been a sleek, six-legged machine with two cutting blades like a scorpion’s claws. One leg was missing. Two more appeared inoperable, shredded and crushed. There was also laser scoring on its head where its sensor array had been slashed open.

“114 couldn’t have caused those burns,” Koebsch said. “They must have hit some of their own diggers while they were blasting. Then they decided those mecha were expendable. They used their damaged mecha to lead the assault.”

“I guess.”

Scattered nearby were pieces that may or may not have belonged to different FNEE mecha. 114 was missing. There was not a trace of ESA wreckage. There were no sounds or vibrations of mecha leaving the site in any direction. Nor did 114 respond to 115’s signals.

“I think 114 fought the digger and won, but there were other FNEE mecha,” Koebsch said. “They took 114. That’s what they were after. They want to copy your design work, Von.”

She watched as 115 crawled up the side of the cavern, trying to analyze the scuffing and chip marks in the dusty floor. There were marks in the wall, too, where 114 had vaulted onto the rock like a real sunfish.

Microdating the prints was impossible. Too many tracks had been laid within seconds of each other, and yet 114’s tracks were all on the ESA side of the perimeter.

That means our probe wasn’t led away by a Brazilian slavecast, Vonnie thought. Had they carried it? Or did 114’s last set of tracks lead back into ESA territory?

“Let me call Tavares,” she said, leaving her station.

The showphone was on the other side of the compartment, no more than three steps away. She didn’t make it that far. Frerotte left his own station and said to her, quietly, “It wasn’t the Brazilians.”

Vonnie didn’t answer.

“There’s no way their software could trump ours, especially not in a stand-off between 114 and a wrecked pile of junk like that digger,” Frerotte said. “Its gear block is half gone. You heard its signals. It was modifying its SCPs to broadcast through every transmitter it had left — infrared, sonar, X-ray. Hell, I saw coherent light signals like Morse code. It couldn’t have been less efficient, but it subverted our probe anyway. It knew exactly how to hack in.”

“It was Lam,” she said.

“So what happened? He transferred from the digger to the probe?”

“Yes.”

“Von, I think the situation’s starting to get out of hand. We need to tell Koebsch.”

“I will. I swear. Let me call Tavares first.”

Frerotte clutched her arm more roughly than necessary, pulling her back from the showphone. Was there fear in his eyes?

“I know Lam was your friend, but that’s not him any more,” Frerotte said. “He’s been down there for weeks. That’s a long time for an AI.”

“Tavares might have some idea what he’s been through. I think he’s trying to reach us.”

“Why won’t he answer 115? You don’t know what he’s thinking or even how he’s thinking. FNEE hardware is barely compatible with our AI, especially a human-based AI. He would have adapted. That means deleting some parts of himself and absorbing FNEE programming to compensate. What if the conversion included some of their security protocols? He might think we’re the enemy.”

“I thought you were a biologist,” Vonnie said. She was fishing for some admission that Frerotte worked for an intelligence agency, but he said, “This is biology. AIs are living systems. They break under strain just like people do.”

“Let’s wait and see.”

His grip tightened on her arm. “Human-based AI are illegal because they’re more likely to fragment,” he said. “They turn into something… more virulent than any machine-based program. Lam is in one of our probes now, which will make it easier for him to hack into other mecha. If he clones himself, he could multiply through our camp.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I watched it happen on the Ensley 2.”

Vonnie laid her fingers over his, gently removing his hand from her arm. “You’re not old enough,” she said.

Ensley 2 had been a joint NATO/PSSC orbital station that tumbled into the Pacific in 2087, the flaming shrapnel of its hull missing Indonesia by a few scant kilometers.

Constructed during the early years of the new space race, after the Chinese revolution but prior to formation of the Allied Nations, the Ensley series were primarily a Western effort that had involved China’s space agency as a means of easing poor relations between NATO and the People’s Supreme Society. By treaty, they were civilian stations intended for science, solar power generation, crops like wheat which also produced oxygen, and the export of those food and oxygen supplies.

The Chinese astronauts among the Ensley crews had numbered less than forty… and they’d died with their Western colleagues in the AI attacks that initiated the brutal, eighteen days of World War III.

“I was right out of school,” Frerotte said. “I had a good head for zero gravity and I get by on six hours of sleep a night, so they slotted me in three jobs in hydroponics. That’s why I lived. I was working when the SCPs shut down life support and smothered half the crew in bed.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You must have been a kid. You’ve watched the sims, but it’s not the same. I felt our station come alive. I ripped the controls out of our escape pod when the SCPs tried to jump.”

“Frerotte, I’m sorry. My aunt died in the war. But this is different. Lam was never a military-grade AI.”

“Today’s civilian AI are twenty times stronger than any program during the war. You don’t know what subroutines he’s picked up from the Brazilians. It was one thing when he was harassing them. Now he’s inside our grid.”

“He must have a lot of FNEE data. What if he can lead us to more sunfish or carvings?”

“We need to assume he’s a problem until proven otherwise. I’m not saying we have to terminate him. We do need to raise our alert level. Tell Koebsch or I will.”

“All right.” Vonnie wasn’t convinced, but Frerotte had covered for her when Lam was uploaded to the FNEE digger. She owed him.

Calling Tavares would have to wait.

“I’m going to the command module,” she said. “Koebsch and I do better in person. Maybe you can listen in and keep him from killing me.”

“We shouldn’t have let it get this far,” Frerotte said. “I never thought Lam would survive over there.”

You and Ash decided to sacrifice him to screw with the Brazilians, she thought. To you, he’s a tool. But if he’s sane, I can bring him in safely. If he’s erratic, I can run my own system checks and help him. Either that or I’ll kill him myself.

“Ash!” she said.

The young woman appeared in the hatch. She was drinking a soup bulb, which she closed as she followed Vonnie into the ready room. “What’s up?”

“We’re in trouble. It’s Lam. I’ll fill you in as soon as we’re moving.”

They opened the lockers to their pressure suits.

As they dressed, Vonnie called back to Frerotte. “What is Koebsch doing with Probes 110 and 11? Are they returning to camp or intercepting Lam’s routes toward the sunfish?”

“Right now those are almost the same compass headings,” Frerotte said. “10 and 11 need to come toward the surface before they can access the catacombs where Lam will be. That’s what they’re doing now.”

“Can you patch my helmet into your display?”

“Roger that,” Frerotte said.

Vonnie felt sure Koebsch would send 10 and 11 to stop Lam from reaching the sunfish before dealing with the possibility that Lam might approach the ESA camp. They were fortified by dozens of mecha, many of which were equipped for electronic warfare. Lam wouldn’t dare to face them head-on. He would be obliterated.

Where else could he go?

In all probability, Lam had co-opted 114’s mem files when he took control. That meant he knew of the inhabited zones they’d explored during his absence. Did he have any motive for approaching the sunfish? Maybe not. They couldn’t predict how he’d act, but Vonnie didn’t want him to contact the sunfish on his own. He might upset everything if he was irrational.

“I’m set,” Vonnie said. She and Ash were dressed. They buddy-checked each other’s collar locks, then cycled the air lock and hurried outside.

After they climbed into the jeep, Vonnie cut her radio in case Koebsch was listening. She tipped her helmet against Ash’s. Conductivity allowed their voices to reverberate from one helmet to another. “This is your chance to get into our mainframe,” she said. “Koebsch and I need to talk.”

“Okay. I still don’t know what’s happening.”

On the ride over, Vonnie explained everything she’d learned about Lam. “The Brazilians have been shooting at him, not sunfish,” she said.

“He’s been on the run all this time? Jesus. I shouldn’t have loaded him into their net.”

It was the right thing to say. Vonnie put her glove on Ash’s leg and squeezed. “Don’t apologize. I’m glad you didn’t let Koebsch erase him.”

They reached the command module. Ash parked the jeep, and they entered the air lock. It completed its cycle and the inner door opened.

Koebsch stood waiting, his expression flat with displeasure.

“Sir,” Ash said, “I came to help with data/comm until we get a handle on things.”

“Good,” Koebsch said. Then he dismissed Vonnie with a tone obviously meant to chastise her. “Von, you’ll have to wait here. Some of our information is classified.”

“I can help.”

“No. You’ll wait.” Koebsch watched as they removed their pressure suits. Maybe he wasn’t conscious of how hungrily his gaze traveled up and down the women’s figures. He’d been celibate as long as Vonnie, and he hadn’t found an outlet in dating any of the crew.

She didn’t mind his eyes. His interest in her would make it easier for her to distract him. Doing so was cruel, but she couldn’t miss this opportunity to steal Dawson’s contact lists and mem files.

37.

Koebsch led Ash through the short corridor to data/comm as Vonnie stood at the air lock with her suit in her hands, keeping her head bent to watch her helmet’s visor.

Frerotte continued to feed imagery to her heads-up display as 110 and 111 scrambled through the ice. On their perimeter with the Brazilians and near the sunfish colony, their surviving spies had turned to listen for Lam.

How could he have disappeared?

Maybe he’d hunkered down within a short distance of the perimeter, ceasing all external activity. He could be dealing with any number of hurdles integrating himself with 114’s data banks. More likely, he was analyzing 114’s maps and short-term records, which were new to him.

Koebsch startled her when he returned. “What are you looking at?” he said.

Trying not to look guilty, Vonnie set her helmet against a mag lock on the wall. “Let’s go to the armory,” she said. “I’d like to talk about our probes’ capabilities.”

“Finding your AI comes first,” he said.

“That’s what I mean. I can help. We need to figure out how well he’ll operate inside a probe.”

Koebsch studied her wordlessly. Then he glanced at her helmet and said, “You’re popular with a lot of the crew, Von. Sometimes that’s a good thing. But I can’t keep dealing with your insubordination.”

“Sir, I didn’t mean—”

“Have I been too lenient with you?”

“No, sir.”

“I considered revoking your status with our mission. You could be in charge of our meals or stay in suit maintenance full-time, something with zero systems access. Your choice. You like to cook. Is that what you want?”

“No, sir.”

“Then stop working against me. I need the truth. Who uploaded your AI to the Brazilian digger?”

“I did,” she said, selling the lie by holding his gaze. It would be what Koebsch wanted to believe. Anything else verged on a wider mutiny, which would cast him in a bad light as their leader.

“Let’s go,” he said.

He strode down the short corridor and turned right toward the armory. As she passed data/comm, Vonnie looked in. Ash was speaking to a group feed with Metzler, Frerotte, Pärnits, and O’Neal. “If we move those listening posts, we might be able to triangulate any new activity,” Pärnits said.

“Not if he’s beneath the rock,” Ash said.

Koebsch shut the door to the armory behind Vonnie. The room was a small, crowded box like all of the compartments in their hab modules and landers. Welding gear and nanoforges hung from two walls and the ceiling. Folded into the other walls were work benches, hand tools, sensors, and holo displays.

“We’ll tell Berlin it was my decision,” Koebsch said. “We used Lam’s basic files as a temporary countermeasure against the Brazilians, but somewhere we made a mistake. We included too much of his personality. He persisted instead of fragmenting.”

“That’s what happened.”

“Show me.” Koebsch extracted one of the holo displays from the wall. “I want a transcript of every move you made.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Then you’re off the team.”

“Sir, I logged in through Ash’s G2 account and deleted the record afterward,” Vonnie said. With each word, she was digging herself in deeper, but the lie was about more than saving Lam. She was also protecting Ash. “Why does it matter how I did it?” she asked.

“You’re going to help me write a series of kill codes,” he said. “Then we’ll broadcast the codes into the ice. We might be able to reach him. But if Lam only hears part of a code, it needs to be specifically tailored if we want it to penetrate his systems.”

“This is wrong.”

“You can either help me or you’re done. I’ll see what I can do about getting you a ride home, but we won’t be sending a ship back to Earth for another year. That’s a long time to cook and fix suits.”

“Goddamn it, we don’t know what kind of data Lam collected over there or if he’s a danger to us! Your kill codes could wipe everything he’s seen and heard.”

“We’ll scrub his mem files after we find him. That’s not the issue. If you ask me, I’m starting to think Dawson is right. Our entire operation has become a fiasco. The sunfish are unresponsive. They’ve done nothing but attack, and now we’re chasing our own tails. A change is warranted. We might use your new probes for reconnaissance and gathering tissue samples.”

“You can’t start hunting sunfish!”

“Our cost sheet is through the roof, and you haven’t helped.” Koebsch frowned. “I warned you, Von. There are a lot of people on Earth who don’t see the magic in this place. They want returns on their investments.”

“You don’t have to listen to them.”

“I can’t keep making exceptions for you.” Koebsch lifted his hand as if to touch her shoulder, stopped, and set his palm on the holo display instead. “Help me. That’s the best way I can cover for you. They understand our little skirmish with the Brazilians. It’s part of the price of doing business.”

“What about Tom and Sue and the other sunfish we know? You’d let Dawson put them in captivity or vivisect them?”

“There are more tribes down there. If we have some success, maybe we can start over with a new group. First we need that success.”

“You mean we need to make money.” Vonnie said it with disgust, but he nodded earnestly.

“There are three billion euros tied up in this mission,” he said. “It’s nice that activist groups are campaigning for humane treatment and rescue operations for the sunfish, but the reality is we’ve taken too long to show results. We can’t pay for ourselves with new deuterium production or bulk water claims. The pay-off is in gene smithing.”

I should hate you, she thought. But I need you on my side.

She was deciding how to respond when Ash appeared on the small intercom panel. “Sir, I have Colonel Ribeiro online,” Ash said.

“I’ll be there in a minute.” Koebsch looked at Vonnie and said, “This might get sticky. You come, too, but let me do the talking. If Ribeiro knows Lam was ours, he could send his mecha through our perimeter, and we can’t stop him — not if he uses gun platforms.”

“He wouldn’t dare.”

“Wouldn’t he?” Koebsch opened the door from the armory and paced toward data/comm.

Vonnie followed with her stomach in a knot.

They joined Ash at the showphone. “Thank you, Colonel,” Ash said. “Here is Administrator Koebsch.”

Keeping his hand below the camera, Koebsch motioned for Vonnie to step into the background. “Hello, Colonel,” he said. “You must be returning my call about the FNEE digger that crashed through our beacons.”

Ribeiro’s face was severe. Remembering how fiercely he’d cursed them, Vonnie expected him to berate Koebsch, but he tipped his head with a single nod. “Yes,” he said.

“We lost a tremendous amount of equipment and our geologic surveys were ruined,” Koebsch said, piling on the blame. The formality in both men’s postures and voices was well-practiced. Everything they did would be analyzed by their superiors on Earth.

“Where is our digger now?” Ribeiro said.

“It self-destructed, either by FNEE command or because its systems were untenable,” Koebsch said. “Please explain.”

“There has been a rise in ESA transmissions.”

“Is that relevant?”

“I am apprehensive for your safety and ours,” Ribeiro said. “Are any of your mecha missing?”

“One.”

Ribeiro’s face tightened. Here it comes, Vonnie thought, bracing herself for his wrath.

“We have lost three mecha to a rogue AI,” he said. “It captured two diggers, then spread to a third. That is why you’ve heard combat in our zone. We eradicated two of the three while losing a fourth mecha to an avalanche.”

Lam caused more problems than we guessed, Vonnie thought, watching Ribeiro’s dark, tired eyes.

The firm set of his mouth gave way to a scowl. Vonnie realized he wasn’t fighting to master his temper. He was humiliated.

“I apologize that the AI reached your zone,” he said. “The responsibility is mine, but I believe my men and I are best suited to this task. We are soldiers. You are not. I would like to make our services available. I suggest a partnership between your people and mine. We can eliminate the AI before it spreads further.”

A partnership? Vonnie thought, scoffing at the idea. She was offended and incredulous.

But Koebsch smiled. “Thank you, Colonel, I agree,” he said.

38.

“We would welcome working alongside the fine astronauts of Brazil,” Koebsch said. “Thank you for your vigilance and for your willingness to protect your neighbors.”

“What are you doing?” Vonnie whispered at Koebsch’s back. “We can’t let them march into our grid!”

Koebsch shushed her. “I would like to coordinate our mutual efforts immediately,” he told Ribeiro. “First, a written agreement is in order.”

“My government will need to approve any legal documents, but I have been instructed to ask for your terms and conditions,” Ribeiro said. His gaze shifted to Vonnie, then back to Koebsch. What was he thinking? The same as her?

Something’s wrong, she thought. We’ve been at odds with Brazil since the war. On Earth, we keep backing A.N. demands for them to pull their troops out of Columbia and Paraguay. In space, too many of our ships run patrols with American destroyers as a show of strength against the FNEE.

Even here, we’ve allocated hundreds of hours to monitoring them — attacking them — and there are only eighteen people combined between our camp and theirs.

Making a deal with the FNEE was unprecedented.

“I think we can use standard distress contracts including limited liability and salvage rights,” Koebsch said. “Within reason, we’ll waive any claims for damage if the AI can be contained.”

“You are generous,” Ribeiro said. “Thank you.”

“I’ll send a write-up to you in a few minutes. Meanwhile I’d like a proposal detailing the number of mecha you’ll send into our grid, their capabilities, and a compatibility study. Will they be able to function with our mecha?”

“My sergeant can provide this data.”

“Excellent.” Koebsch waved Vonnie toward the showphone, then gestured at Ash. “This is Alexis Vonderach, one of our engineers. You’ve met Ash Sierzenga. Vonderach can troubleshoot any challenges with signal integration while Sierzenga handles file-sharing on our side.”

“The famous Vonderach,” Ribeiro said. “You are as beautiful as you are daring, senhora.”

“Danke schö, Colonel,” Vonnie said. Inside, she was seething at Koebsch. He’d backed her neatly into a corner, saddling her with a workload that would keep her in his sight for the rest of the day — maybe longer.

She’d imagined she could outmaneuver Koebsch and reach Lam before anyone else. Now he’d put her in position to assist the FNEE hunter-killers.

What kind of directives had he received from Earth?

The next moments were hectic. Moving in a daze, Vonnie took the station beside Ash as Koebsch opened another display, speaking with a legal program. Ash refused to meet Vonnie’s eyes, burying herself in her datastreams.

Tavares appeared on Vonnie’s showphone and introduced herself as if they’d never spoken. “My name is Sergeant Claudia Tavares,” she said.

Vonnie didn’t want to put the other woman in a bad spot. “I’m Vonderach. You’re coordinating the FNEE response?”

“Affirmative.” Tavares was visibly relieved.

“Your mecha still use ROM-4 protocols, correct? Our probes can send and receive those signals, but there will be a delay in translation, maybe as much as two femtoseconds per petabyte. Can you lag your response times to match? Otherwise we’ll see progression errors.”

“Affirmative.”

Most of an hour passed in a rapid exchange of adjustments. The AI of the FNEE mecha were dull compared to those of the ESA probes, but in some aspects, the older, larger machines were also more robust. They were built for abuse.

Far below, Probes 110 and 111 stopped advancing through the ice. Koebsch intended to use their sensors like a fence, preventing Lam from moving any deeper into the ESA zone. At the same time, on the perimeter, 115 decrypted most of its datastreams as it was joined by seven FNEE diggers and gun platforms, allowing the FNEE mecha to share its telemetry.

If the Brazilians realized 115 maintained a private channel inside the ESA grid, they said nothing.

Lam’s identity also remained a secret.

Vonnie overheard Ribeiro discussing the AI’s appearance in his mecha with Koebsch. “Our analysts found traces of Chinese programming among its defenses,” Ribeiro said. “They allow human-based AI in their country, you know, and they told us to stay off Europa. They deny unleashing the AI upon our systems, but we believe they tried to hamstring us.”

“That’s not unexpected,” Koebsch said. “Your country buys most of its deuterium from China. They want to protect that income.”

“They are lovers of dogs,” Ribeiro said off-handedly, drawing another smirk from Ash, who covered her mouth by chewing on her thumbnail.

You little sneak, Vonnie thought, not without admiration.

How the heck had Ash made Lam appear like a Chinese AI? Because of his nationality? His original mem files had been based in PSSC ROM-20 protocols, which Vonnie had modified into ESA standard ROM-12 when she assembled him.

Ash could have resurrected his source codes. More likely, Ash had grafted new packets of Chinese code into Lam’s menus. The ESA maintained a library of stolen PSSC encryptions, and Ash had proven masterful at subverting AIs. It helped that her equipment was a cut above everything in the FNEE camp. If she’d laced his menus with PSSC recognition codes, Lam must have sounded like he was trying to hide his origin during his first exchanges with the FNEE when in fact he was only writing that code out of himself. Ash had double-crossed the Brazilians and Chinese, leading one to accuse the other…

What game was Koebsch playing at?

From his indignation with Vonnie, he’d expected the Brazilians to blame the ESA. Yet as soon as the Brazilians asked for help, Koebsch offered them an alliance. That meant the ESA leadership on Earth had prepared Koebsch for either contingency. They’d known about Lam through backchannels with Ash or Frerotte.

I thought I was a step ahead of Koebsch, but he’s left me behind, Vonnie thought. Why? Why is it so important to make the Brazilians our friends instead of leaving them in a loose association with the Chinese?

Down inside the ice, the FNEE mecha crossed into ESA territory. Probe 115 moved with them, then branched away into the catacombs as the surviving ESA spies and Probes 110 and 111 sifted through the ice. They hoped to flush Lam from hiding or to discover his trail.

Near the sunfish colony, the spies registered two flurries of activity — one brief, the other sustained for twelve minutes — but neither was Lam. Both movements were accompanied by sonar calls, and the second included a staccato drumming in the rock. The sunfish were reacting to the mecha invasion.

Other members of the ESA crew appeared on their group feed, indignant and confused.

“Koebsch? Koebsch? Why are there FNEE mecha mixed with our probes!?” Pärnits shouted as O’Neal said, “This goes against everything we’ve accomplished.”

Koebsch shut off access to his station, glancing once at Vonnie. “You explain,” he said. “If they want to haggle, that’s your job. Tell everyone they can monitor our progress if they want, but no one interferes. Frerotte is in control of our spies. I’m in charge of our probes. That’s final.”

Vonnie managed to nod. “Yes, sir.”

I’ve never heard him like this, she thought. He’s flattering with Ribeiro and rude with us. He almost seems like he’s punishing himself, too. Koebsch might agree with Dawson about changing our approach to the sunfish, but he’s loyal to our crew. He hates letting the Brazilians into our grid.

I need to talk to Ash and find out what’s really going on.

The wait was excruciating. Koebsch kept both women at their stations long after Vonnie resolved the progression errors between ESA and FNEE mecha. He made Ash stand by for more file transfers even when Ribeiro said his team was done.

As the FNEE mecha and Probe 115 skittered through the ice, Vonnie worried that a Brazilian gun platform would light up the darkness at any instant, riddling Lam with its 30mm chain guns.

Each of the FNEE war machines looked like a table with eight crab legs and two short-barreled turrets. Ammunition belts sprang from its top in coils sheathed against the cold. The sensor array was small and crude and tucked between the guns. Its legs were sized like those of a sunfish, yet less articulate, with four hinges. Worse, the legs were naked steel and arranged incorrectly in two rows instead of around its circumference. All of these factors would hamper any attempt at communication if the sunfish were unwitting enough to talk to these bulky, jerking mecha, which also carried STAT missile launchers.

A month ago, after erecting their camp, the Brazilians’ statement that they’d deployed the gun platforms for self-defense had been absurd. Gazing through the machines’ sensors made Vonnie want to punch someone — not Koebsch — preferably the bastards on Earth who’d set the ESA/FNEE union in motion.

The gun platforms’ radar was crosshatched by target finding programs that continuously adjusted for range. These were not self-defense mecha. They were weapons.

Vonnie could only try to make sure the gun platforms didn’t mistake 115 for an enemy or key on the movements of the sunfish colony. She advised Tavares again and again as their datastreams jumped. “That’s not the missing probe.”

“Affirmative,” Tavares said.

“These blips here are more sunfish. This is Probe 110. This noise is probably tidal cracking around Gas Vent D-7, but let’s keep tabs on it.”

“Affirmative.”

Three hours later, Koebsch dismissed Vonnie and Ash. He transferred their duties to Gravino, the other member of the crew who wasn’t a biologist or a gene smith. “Thank you for skipping lunch,” Koebsch said. “You must be exhausted. I’ll give you an hour off, but then I want you back again for another three. We need to keep the pressure on until we find Lam.”

“I’d like to stay, sir,” Vonnie said.

“Take a break,” Koebsch said. “Freshen up.”

“The FNEE need help interpreting our signals. They think everything is a target.”

“You did a great job defining our contacts,” Koebsch said. “They know where our mecha are situated and the boundaries of the sunfish colony.”

“But if they—”

“Go.” Koebsch had control of her station. He closed it. “Get out of here. I’ll ping you if something comes up, but this could take all day. Longer. Get some rest. I’ll need you to spell me soon.”

“Yes, sir,” Ash said, tugging at Vonnie’s arm.

The two of them left data/comm for the air lock, where they suited up and went outside.

Ash had a data pad in her leg pocket. She showed it to Vonnie, then cut her fingers at her neck to indicate radio silence.

After they climbed into the jeep, Vonnie tipped her helmet against Ash’s helmet. “What did you find?” she said.

“You were right about Dawson, and I also pilfered some of Koebsch’s orders about the Brazilians,” Ash said. “He doesn’t want to partner with them. He’s under duress.”

“I knew it.”

The jeep drove through camp. Ash craned her neck to gaze through her visor at Vonnie. “Our agreement here with Brazil allows for new talks between us on Earth,” she said. “You have to admit, if we could stop yelling at each other in the A.N., that would be good.”

“It would be good for Earth.”

“Good for everywhere. We don’t need another war. And if there is more fighting, we want Brazil on our side this time — or neutral. Anything to offset the Chinese.”

Vonnie stared at her, unable to hold back any longer. “You set this up from the start,” she said. “We’re going to let them kill Lam just so we can have a job to do together. So we can pretend to be friends.”

“I am your friend,” Ash said.

“Who are you working for? Really?”

“I’m one of the good guys, Von.”

“You used me and Lam. Now the FNEE mecha are getting close to the sunfish. You know the colony will attack. It’s like throwing them into the guns. Dawson will get what he wants.”

“That wasn’t the plan, I swear,” Ash said. “Think about it. If I wanted to capture sunfish, I wouldn’t need Ribeiro’s crew. We brought our own weaponry. There are eight torpedoes and a maser cannon on our ship, and hand weapons in the armory. We’re also packing a quarter ton of excavation charges. If my objective was to take the sunfish by force, I could have made it happen without the Brazilians.”

“Then why, Ash?”

The young woman was characteristically blunt. “We lived in London before the war,” she said. “My parents owned an apartment up the street from my uncle’s house. I had a sister. Three cousins. Only my mom is still alive, and I don’t ever want to see anything like that again.”

The contempt Vonnie felt began to wane. In a more roundabout way, Frerotte had used the same rationale for his support of the ESA/FNEE partnership. Horror, grief, and the desire to keep other people from suffering were noble motivations to serve.

“My job was to make the Chinese look responsible for Lam, then we’d help Brazil,” Ash said. “We thought we’d run a few joint patrols. The main thing is our governments would start talking again.”

“But you underestimated Lam, and you didn’t anticipate Dawson’s influence back home.”

“That’s right.” Ash’s gaze was haunted by the admission. “It’s not about Lam anymore. It’s about the sunfish. Brazil wants access to our site because we found a colony. We want them to do the dirty work so our hands are clean. A rogue AI is the perfect excuse. The point is to make any fighting with the sunfish look like an accident.”

“Collateral damage,” Vonnie said. “That’s what they called London and Paris.”

“I…”

“You screwed up. The sunfish are innocent exactly like those civilian populations.” She was being harder on Ash than she’d been with Frerotte, but she thought Ash would rise to the challenge.

She was mistaken.

“I fulfilled my orders,” Ash said. “It’s better this way. Brazil’s gene smithing programs are crap like their cybernetics. They need us. We need them. If we can establish a science program to develop the sunfish DNA together, we’ll have a long-term investment in each other. We can bring them to our side.”

“What about the families you’ll kill?”

“They’re aliens, Von. People come first. Why can’t you see that? I want to save people first. I’ll always save people first.”

Ash leaned back, pulling her helmet from Vonnie’s. It was an effective way to have the last word, but Vonnie rocked forward in her seat. Trying to catch Ash’s gaze, she realized that during their conversation, Ash had drawn her data pad from her leg pocket. Had she intended to share Dawson’s files? If so, she seemed to have changed her mind. Ash gripped the data pad in both hands, turning her body to protect it, and Vonnie worried that she’d lost Ash as a friend.

Everything’s coming to a head, she thought. Ribeiro. Dawson. Ash. Lam.

Is it still possible for me to protect the sunfish?

39.

The jeep slowed near Lander 04, and Vonnie looked at the sky. As an astronaut, she was accustomed to feeling satisfaction for the spacecraft overhead and grudging acceptance for the spy satellites. One came with the other. The need to guard against opposing nations was a fact of life.

Now we’re importing all of our problems to this world, she thought. And yet without those problems, humankind wouldn’t have traveled so far into the solar system.

They weren’t angels. They were apes. It was mutual suspicion and the hunger for power that drove their species to new technologies. Every advancement in spaceflight had been steeped in an arms race. Germany’s rockets in World War II begat the Soviet sputniks, which begat the American moon landings, which begat the ICBM standoff between NATO and the USSR, which led to a renaissance in global communications.

Briefly, there was peace. But the eyes in the sky continued to improve, aiding the technological nations in a hundred brush wars against men who used caves for fortresses and waged terror attacks on non-military targets to remain relevant.

The eyes combed the globe for patterns and clues. The ears listened. Smart bombs, drones, and robots entered the world’s battlefields as humankind’s first artificial intelligences.

The chess board of today’s political backdrop had started with another Cold War between East and West. Even before their third revolution, the People’s Republic of China had been on a path to usurp America as Earth’s foremost superpower.

In 2028, a military coup reversed China’s gains in freedom and democracy, channeling its economic might inward, then upward. In 2031, the People’s Supreme Society sent a mission to Mars as a stunt, beating Europe and America to the red planet. More significant, they’d constructed a permanent station in low Earth orbit as a launch facility for their Mars craft.

Within five years, there were two stations. Within ten, there were six. They also built a Lunar outpost.

Beijing paid top salaries for Asia’s scientists, bringing its sharpest minds into their heartland. They bought cheap labor in Thailand and Kampucheah. They won their border conflicts with Vietnam, then rotated their best generals, techs, and shock troops into orbit.

Old treaties mandated that space must stay free of nuclear weapons, but warheads were unnecessary to disturb the balance on Earth. From orbit, a dumb, simple chunk of iron could act as a missile. It needed to be meticulously aimed, but it could deliver the same yield as a nuke without radioactive fallout.

The debt-ridden Western nations couldn’t leave China alone in space. They screamed for more laws. They passed new sanctions and denouncements. In time, they ejected China from the United Nations — yet they had no choice except to follow the People’s Supreme Society up from Earth’s surface.

The race to claim Earth’s high ground included new developments in quantum computing and artificial intelligence, which led in turn to long-awaited breakthroughs in cold fusion. Green economies created surpluses in the West.

Meanwhile the world’s computer systems continued to grow and transform. Feinting at each other, stealing codes, infecting their enemies and being infected, they made each other smarter.

In space, Europe and America were pulling even with the People’s Supreme Society when Chinese SCPs stuttered through their defenses, turning off the lights and freezing their missiles in their silos. It was meant to be a death stroke: a one-minute war. Instead, American memes returned the favor, masking Chinese data/comm with false signals.

Both sides opened fire.

Too many missiles went for soft targets.

On Earth, seven hundred and fifty thousand people were vaporized because the AIs thwarted each other, muddling the coordinates for military installations with electronic umbrellas. They routed their weapons toward less-protected sites to chew away at each other’s capabilities.

On the outskirts of the cities, another two million people were blinded and maimed by the fireballs. Neither side won World War III. The armistice led to the creation of the new Allied Nations and the promise to keep war from Earth forever, but it was the West that had absorbed the most devastating losses. The People’s Supreme Society remained the leading force in the solar system, reining in allies like Iran and Brazil.

Vonnie supposed the current political climate was another reason Bauman had won her role as commander of their expedition. The Americans, like Europe, were desperate for any gain in status, whereas the Chinese probably felt that chasing bugs was beneath them. Until they’d discovered the carvings, China had graciously permitted lesser nations to lead the science team in exchange for a bit of international goodwill.

Ash would have been a baby during the missile strikes. She couldn’t possibly have personal memories of her lost family members, although from what she’d said, she’d grown up in their absence with a grieving mother.

In her soul, maybe she was looking for something she’d never known. Likely her formative emotions as a child had been survivor’s guilt and anger. That explained how Ash could be obsessed with politics instead of seeing what was right in front of her, and yet Vonnie refused to give up on their relationship.

The jeep parked. Vonnie clunked their helmets together. “We’re working for the same thing,” she said.

Ash was confrontational. “I don’t think so.”

“We both want to protect people.”

“Being buddies with the sunfish isn’t important. Not compared to national security.”

“They’re part of our future.”

Ash scoffed in Vonnie’s face. “You want to make them citizens? You really are crazy.”

“Don’t be stupid. The sunfish couldn’t handle Earth gravity. We’re not bringing them home. But you can’t ignore them. The sunfish won’t disappear because you’ve got your truce with Brazil, and you don’t want China to build allegiances with the tribes first — not if that puts China ahead of us in bioresearch.”

Ash paused. She frowned and said, “I’m listening.”

“We’re behind the curve on finding Europan lifeforms, not just sunfish, but everything else that should be in the ecosystem. China didn’t blow the hell out of their zone like Brazil did. That noise affected our territory, too. Now Brazil’s mecha are closing in. Our sunfish are on the move. If they don’t run, they’ll attack.”

“That means we’ll have our tissue samples.”

“But it’s a one-time gain. What if there are other, more useful species farther down in the ice? The sunfish could be our guides. They could defend our probes. Christ, if they were willing participants, they could teach us everything we want to know about their life cycle.”

“We…” Ash glanced at her lap, then looked up with new resolve. “You should see Dawson’s mem files. There are three aspects of sunfish physiology that are particularly viable.”

“I believe you. That doesn’t mean we should give up on communicating with them.”

“It’s too late to call off the FNEE mecha.”

“What if I find Lam?”

“Can you? I changed him, Von. If you wrote any back doors into his programming, those codes probably won’t function anymore.”

Shit, Vonnie thought. She’d intended to alter her kill codes to act as slavecasts, compelling Lam to quit hiding. They could track his signals, pick him up and extract him before he — or the Brazilians — went deeper into the ice.

“I want you on our side,” Ash said. “The FNEE incursion is going to happen, but maybe we can minimize the danger to the sunfish. They respect strength. You said so yourself. A few of them will get hurt, but the rest might stop and listen. You can help us.”

Us, Vonnie marveled. Ash, Koebsch, and Dawson were all on the same side now.

She couldn’t fight everyone. She thought Pärnits and Metzler were with her. They were the pure scientists, but the rest of the crew were likely more interested in developing their partnership with Brazil or in securing the genetic material of the sunfish. Those interests made for strange bedfellows.

If Vonnie didn’t want to find herself without any clout whatsoever, she needed to bargain with Ash, so she stiffened her voice with just the right blend of reluctance and disdain.

“I’ll help you if you help me,” she said. “I want to know what Dawson wants.”

“You can’t stop him.”

“I know.” Had she spoken too fast? To convince Ash, she added, “If there’s any chance of saving the sunfish, I need a better feel for what kind of tissue samples he wants, which sexes, how many different individuals, et cetera.”

“Okay.” Ash studied Vonnie’s eyes. Then she looked at her data pad and activated it, unlocking several files before her index finger traced backwards abruptly.

Did she delete one? Vonnie thought.

“I don’t have all of his files,” Ash said. “Some were too well encrypted even for me, but listen to what he says, Von. Really listen.”

“All right.”

“If you’re honest with yourself, I think you’ll realize Dawson’s heart is in the right place.”

“Dawson’s heart is a bank account.”

“He’ll be rich and famous, absolutely,” Ash said as she held up the data pad. “He’s also going to do a lot of good things for people. Our people.”

Then why do I feel like I’m dealing with the devil? Vonnie thought. I guess that makes Ash the devil.

40.

Vonnie took the data pad and Ash clapped her glove on Vonnie’s leg, an authoritative gesture like a judge banging her gavel to seal an agreement.

“Don’t hate me,” Ash said.

“I don’t.”

“Von, you couldn’t fake how you feel if your life was on the line. Don’t ever play cards. That’s my advice. I know you’re cross with me, but you have to believe me when I say I want to be on your side.”

“You did what seemed best to you. You shouldn’t feel bad.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Let me watch Dawson’s files.”

“I don’t feel bad,” Ash said, still protesting.

“I need a few minutes.”

“Fine.” Ash left the jeep and stalked toward the lander, radiating a puzzled hurt with her tight, brisk, scissor steps.

Vonnie smiled sadly, feeling branded by her own guilt. She’d definitely found the Achilles’ heel in Ash’s toughness. Friendship might be new to a girl trained almost from birth to rely solely on her mother, then an agency handler. Vonnie would have bet her teeth that Ash’s boss was a woman. Her personal history was too ripe. Her boss would use her dependencies as a goad and a leash.

I want to be her sister, not her mom, Vonnie thought. She needs positive influences, not another commander. She’d reject me if I tried. But I think I’m getting through. Otherwise we wouldn’t have felt so stung by each other.

Nearby, Ash walked up the lander’s steps and touched the air lock controls. The exterior door opened. She bolted inside.

Vonnie looked at the sky again, wishing they didn’t need to spend so much energy manipulating each other. She plugged the data pad into a jack in her wrist. Her visor brought up a short menu of sims. The time stamps ranged from six days ago to yesterday.

She opened the first file, which had been recorded from Dawson’s view of a group feed with fifteen people on Earth. Vonnie didn’t recognize them. The sim didn’t include a company patch, but Ash had filtched their identities by using voice keys and recognition software. She’d superimposed names, titles, and bio links.

Ten of the strangers were mid-level executives with LifeNova, a prominent Dutch health services corporation. The rest were gene smiths. Got you, Vonnie thought, contemplating their faces with cool malice.

Dawson was making a presentation. Two of the boxes in the group feed flickered with datastreams as he lectured. At the same time, the execs and gene smiths on Earth posted questions in an ongoing scroll. Their comments were out of sync with Dawson’s speech due to the lag in radio transmissions, but they’d uploaded an AI to his side to manage their remarks.

As the sim began, the AI said, “Why would that be true?”

“The sunfish appear more closely related to their primordial ancestors than we are to our predecessors on Earth,” Dawson said. “Bacteria like thermophiles and lithotrophs — heat lovers and rock eaters — were the earliest lifeforms on both worlds, but life on Europa appears to have made the leap from single-cell organisms to higher lifeforms in a shorter span. That’s how the sunfish maintained the ability to use iron to survive. Iron is one of their most prevalent catalysts.”

The AI highlighted a manager’s comments. “Less technical, please,” it said.

“Hydrothermal vents were probably the first environments to generate life on Europa,” Dawson said, “and volcanic eruptions release dissolved iron onto the ocean floor. Higher lifeforms like the sunfish retained that affinity for iron, but they can’t have more hemoglobin than us. That would turn their blood into sludge. They’d be too likely to die of strokes and heart attacks. So they use a mutated hemoglobin. It has extra iron atoms and additional twists compared to ours, which allows it to bond with a greater concentration of oxygen molecules.”

“Again, less technical,” the AI said.

Dawson was triumphant. “If we can fashion the same hyper intense hemoglobin in human beings, it would mean increased stamina and acuity, especially in combination with a second aspect of sunfish physiology. You’ll need both to reach the fullest potential.”

“We’ve arranged to negotiate your contract,” the AI said.

“I want royalties in addition to a secured position with your laboratories,” Dawson said. “In two years, every police force and military in the West will be using this gene tech. In five, it will be in construction and sports. I want a percentage.”

“We will pay a flat fee.”

“Nonsense.”

“We will absorb the legal costs. We will absorb the research, development, manufacturing, and marketing costs. Your compensation is a flat fee in addition to a salaried five-year contract with option to renew.”

“I’m the one skirting federal law.”

“We recognize the risk inherent in your position and will reward it,” the AI said.

“Perhaps you’d name an amount.”

The AI superimposed two lines of text on the group feed, numbers that must have been predecided on Earth: €1,000,000.00 bonus, €325,000.00 annual sa.

Dawson’s composure slipped. His eyes widened and his nostrils flared. Then he reverted to his normal mannerisms as a gentleman. “We can discuss this further without the AI,” he said smoothly. “I guarantee you’ll be impressed with my work.”

“Explain the second half of your proposal,” the AI said.

“Indeed.” Dawson opened a new datastream. “Sunfish are able to maintain body temperatures above that of the surrounding water or atmosphere due to a complicated heat exchange system between their muscles, digestive system, and blood vessels. They conserve and store heat like batteries. In duress, they release it. By raising their internal temperatures, they create spikes in reaction time. The heat also allows an increase in the absorption of nutrients. Combined with their mutated hemoglobin, these factors provide them with ’burst speed’ like tigers or sharks, except that the sunfish are able to sustain these bursts far, far longer than any Earth equivalent.”

“You’re in possession of intact sunfish for our labs?”

“I will be,” Dawson said.

Vonnie shut off the sim. She’d seen enough. She tucked the data pad into a leg pocket and left the jeep, retracing Ash’s path to the lander.

The sim couldn’t have been more damning. Dawson’s attitude toward the sunfish was based on raw arrogance.

How did he intend to get past the government’s claim on Europa? Was that what the LifeNova executive meant by ’legal costs’? The ESA wasn’t equipped to design biotech on par with treatments developed by private corporations. Berlin could profit handsomely by licensing the rights to sunfish DNA, gaining much-needed cash which could be fed back to select companies in exchange for cutting edge, clandestine military applications. One hand washed the other. That was how society functioned.

Vonnie climbed onto the lander’s deck and whacked her fist against the control panel for the air lock, opening the exterior door. She stepped in, then cycled the lock.

I’ll give Dawson one chance to back off, she thought. Not for his sake. For the sunfish. It doesn’t sound like Koebsch or our top management will stop him. Swearing to cause a public uproar is the best shot I have left.

What if they call my bluff?

The inner door opened. Vonnie stepped inside the ready room and removed her pressure suit. Metzler ducked through the hatch as she stowed it in its locker. “Hey,” he said.

Vonnie took his hand and squeezed. “Ben, you’re who I think you are, aren’t you?”

He tried to joke. “Am I?”

“Do you work for anyone besides the ESA?”

His bulldog face turned serious. “I’m with you,” he said.

Vonnie squeezed his hand again. “We have one more thing to do that’ll get us in trouble,” she said.

“Fabulous.” His tone was happily sarcastic. He kissed her cheek, and Vonnie turned to bring his lips to her mouth. Metzler hadn’t shaved since she’d seen him hours ago. His beard was dark sandpaper. The stubble felt rough and exciting.

Inhaling sharply, Vonnie broke their kiss. Holding him, she whispered her plan.

“I’ll do what I can,” he said.

“Let’s go.”

In the next compartment, Ash and Frerotte were locked in an argument behind a privacy screen, but he deactivated it when Vonnie entered. Ash turned and left the compartment for their living quarters, avoiding everyone’s eyes.

“Where are the FNEE mecha?” Vonnie asked.

“Closer by the second,” Frerotte said. “They’ll reach the sunfish colony in an hour if they’re not attacked.”

That’s why Koebsch relieved me, Vonnie thought. He wanted me out of the way, where I couldn’t interfere. He wants a fight. If the FNEE and our probes are bloodied together, that will be another bond between us.

“Where do you stand?” she asked Frerotte. “Do you support Koebsch on this?”

“It’s… not fun to take. I’ve been fighting Chinese and FNEE assets most of my life, but Ash is right. The greater good comes first. If we can jockey an alliance with Brazil, we might get our troops out of Argentina and Ecuador. The Americans could stand down in Panama. We have to look at the larger picture.”

“Then you don’t want to be a part of this call,” Vonnie said, activating her station. She held Ash’s data pad in her free hand. Before she turned it on, she added, “Thank you for helping me with Lam.”

“You’re welcome,” Frerotte said.

His station was busy with 3-D maps of the ice and Brazilian mecha. He stepped into his display as Vonnie raised her own privacy screen. Metzler took the station beside hers, and she expanded the privacy screen to include him.

From the data pad, she selected an image from the sim of Dawson’s conversation with the LifeNova execs and gene smiths. Then she entered Dawson’s crew code.

The old man answered with his false smile. “To what do I owe the pleasure—” he began. He glanced at the image behind her, taking in the labeled faces of the LifeNova personnel, but his recovery was swift and he chuckled. “I was told those broadcasts were encrypted, but this changes nothing.”

“I thought you were offended when I asked if you’d been offered a fat salary,” Vonnie said.

“I was. I am. Money isn’t why I’m doing this.”

“Really?”

“God’s truth.”

“You looked pretty excited when they offered you a million right up front.”

“The corporate brass don’t give credence to any project unless there are sums on the table, Von. It’s a show of integrity, that’s all.”

“’Integrity.’ She laughed at him. “The public won’t see things that way. It looks like you sold out the biggest discovery of our lifetimes for your own gain. It looks like money is the only thing you want.”

“Are you implying there will be a scandal?”

“Indeed,” she said with all the venom she could muster. “Do you know how many people logged onto petitions calling for equal rights for the sunfish? If what you’re planning with LifeNova gets out, there will be lawsuits and boycotts—”

“Your information is out of date,” Dawson said. “I wondered why you used an image from the LifeNova board. They withdrew their bid days ago.”

“It’s the same whoever you’re working with.”

“No, it’s not,” Dawson said.

Beside her, Metzler tapped her hip and indicated his display. He’d been speeding through the other sims on Ash’s data pad. Now he slid three new images to her station. Ash had labeled the men and women in these group feeds, too. They worked for Japanese, French, and American interests — private gene tech companies like LifeNova.

Vonnie shared the new images with Dawson and said, “You’ve been shopping for the highest price. You’re a liar and a mercenary.”

“You’re a fool. Who gave you those sims?”

“If I go public, I can make your life miserable. You’ll spend years in court. Activist groups will stalk you forever. You know how rabid some of them can be. You won’t be able to show your face online without someone hacking your feed or launching homemade SCPs. They’ll crucify you. That’s not the kind of attention any corporation wants.”

“On the contrary, it’s splendid publicity when the lunatic fringe resorts to violence. Are you done with your little intimidation scheme?”

“Somebody will stop you. Too much of the world believes the sunfish are intelligent.”

“The world wants what we can deliver.”

“Super soldiers and athletes are nothing new, Dawson. We don’t need to kill sunfish for that kind of gene tech.”

He cocked his head, examining her. “Indeed, our military is interested,” he said. “I’ve encouraged the appropriate parties to take notice, but heightened speed and reflexes are secondary applications. The real promise is in longevity treatments.”

Life extension, Vonnie thought, staring at the old man."Go ahead,” he said. “Shout to the news feeds that we’re developing sunfish proteins and DNA. Who doesn’t want to live another fifty years? Our research will lead to spectacular breakthroughs in reoxygenating aged tissues, organs, and bone marrow.”

“But you’ll kill sunfish to do it.”

“You only seem to have one note to play, Von. Move past it. I’m acting with the knowledge and support of Berlin, Washington, and Tokyo. If things progress as anticipated, we’ll include Brazil in our consortium soon enough.”

Ash warned me, Vonnie thought. Damn it.

There must have been sims of Dawson talking with government agencies as well as private gene corps, but Ash hadn’t been able to crack those files. If she had, would it have made any difference?

“This isn’t over,” Vonnie said. “I want to talk to your contacts in Berlin or I’ll make as much noise as I can. Tell them! You don’t need living sunfish. We can find intact specimens frozen in the ice. It’s asinine to ruin the progress we’ve gained with the local colony.”

“You’re incorrect,” Dawson said. “Dead sunfish won’t have the metabolic activity essential to our research. If they’re decomposed or crushed, they’ll be even more useless. There are also political considerations you’re missing.”

“I know we want to work with Brazil. That doesn’t mean we can’t conduct search and salvage—”

The floor vibrated.

“What was that?” Metzler said. A delicate bass roar filtered through the lander. Oom. The sound was as ephemeral as a thought, but it repeated itself twice as the floor shimmied again.

Boom. Oom.

Alarms filled Vonnie’s station with red bars. The same alerts flashed on Dawson’s screen, creating a haze of targeting systems, threat analysis, and hull integrity checks. As his gaze flickered through the data, Dawson’s expression was pleased.

“You bastard,” Vonnie said.

Frerotte issued a Class 2 alert, overriding every data/comm channel in camp. “We’re tracking explosions almost directly below us at a range of two point three kilometers!” he said.

Vonnie couldn’t access the links between the ESA and FNEE without Koebsch’s authorization, but she was able to open the datastreams from their spies near the sunfish colony. The spies’ radar signals were obstructed by tons of rock and ice — but using sonar, the spies were able to draw crude sims to estimate what they were hearing.

Each explosion washed through the sims like an eraser, blanking parts of the spies’ calculations. Between these waves, the spies traced a maelstrom of gunfire, lesser vibrations, electromagnetic activity, and ultrasound.

Vonnie watched in anguish as small dots pounced at two bulkier outlines. The spies identified the larger shapes as a digger and a gun platform.

Twenty sunfish swarmed the rock overhead, screeching as they dodged twin streams of gatling fire. They were trying to pull down a section of the roof.

The Brazilians anticipated it. Their mecha spun aside as three packs of sunfish shoved chunks into the floor. The digger slapped two sunfish from the air with its cutting arms. Seconds later, the gun platform caught the groups above. The thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk of its bullets striking the rock turned to wetter, plopping sounds as seven sunfish came apart.

Vonnie put her hand over her mouth. On her display, the sunfish and the mecha were monochromatic outlines. But when the dots representing the sunfish shattered, she remembered the visceral shock of blood and entrails.

The sunfish were dying.

Dawson wins, she thought. It’s happening. Oh God, it’s happening exactly like he wanted.

She’d tried everything to keep her people on course. From the beginning, their mission’s objectives had been science and diplomacy — good, intellectual goals separate from the myopic demands of Earth.

Until this morning, she’d thought she was succeeding in bringing the FNEE to her path. She’d thought they could move forward together. But even here, they weren’t far enough from their past. Maybe they never would be. The angel strived for better, but the ape corrupted.

Once again they’d invented the destiny they wanted with their fear and their greed.

The human race had found a new war inside the frozen sky.

41.

The fighting escalated as a third FNEE mecha plunged into the fray behind the sunfish, barricading any retreat. It was another digger. It cut one sunfish with its legs and swatted two more with its cutting arms.

Before the digger leapt at the rest of the sunfish, it wedged an excavation charge into the cavern wall. If shoving the explosive stick into the rock made any sound, the noise went unheard beneath the gunfire, but the ESA spies picked up a new radio signal between the digger and the charge. The spies traced it to its source.

“They’re going to blow the cavern if they—!” Vonnie quit shouting when she turned her head.

Frerotte had altered his display to show Koebsch’s link with the Brazilians, revealing their sims. Had he forgotten his privacy screen or had he purposefully shut it off?

Beside Vonnie, Metzler had accessed a different datastream, scrolling through the ESA beacons and listening posts. What was he looking for? As Vonnie stared, Ash sprinted into the compartment and took her station. Somehow that broke Vonnie’s spell.

“We need to jam the FNEE det codes!” she said.

“You can’t interfere,” Frerotte said, but he allowed Vonnie to clone his display.

She swam through fifty reports salted with white noise. FNEE sims were poor compared to ESA sharecasts. The Brazilians’ mecha-to-mecha radar targeting included a half-second lag, which left false images in their net. Their diggers tended to stab at sunfish who’d moved farther than the mecha anticipated, whereas the gun platform overcompensated, leading its targets too far.

The lag was increased by modifying FNEE signals into holo imagery for the benefit of human controllers. Vonnie needed five seconds to pinpoint the active key among a myriad of inventory, select, arm, and detonation codes, partly because the writing was in Portuguese.

In that time, another sunfish died. Two more scored hits against the digger, bashing its sensors with rock clubs.

One of those sunfish was Sue. Clinging to the digger with four arms, she stretched and contracted and stretched again, hammering her primitive weapon on its gleaming alumalloy skin. For an instant, Sue seemed to have stunned the machine.

The digger shrugged her off. It tossed her into the wall. Simultaneously, it stabbed up with its arms, slicing open the belly of Sue’s companion. Then it advanced on Sue.

Run! Vonnie thought. She reached for the FNEE det code, hoping to countermand it—

—and the digger decided it was clear of the blast zone. Its telemetry winked. The charge exploded, bringing down two hundred meters of rock in a shuddering chain reaction. Rubble clanged against the digger. The machine stumbled, lunging through the ricochets and blowback.

Where was Sue?

Dead and wounded sunfish mingled with the rock. The digger snared two small, twitching bodies as it clattered from the avalanche, then squeezed them tight against its underside. It rejoined the battle, using its arms to chase a third sunfish toward the gun platform.

The chain guns fired. The sunfish fell. The digger also took five rounds, which killed one of its captives in a splash of blood. The mecha looked pitiless, but Vonnie knew there were human beings behind every decision.

Who was controlling the FNEE gun platform? Ribeiro?

Ash was equipped to stop them. If she hacked into the FNEE grid, the combat would end — but the young woman’s face was like stone. She’d become the strict, sober Ash again, not the secret friend who’d whispered and laughed with Vonnie.

That left Metzler and Frerotte. Frerotte had said he wouldn’t interfere, and yet in the same breath he’d given Vonnie access to the ESA/FNEE command feed. Part of him must be glad to see the Brazilian mecha destroyed. Would he help her?

“The FNEE used the noise of their guns to conceal the second digger’s approach,” Vonnie said. “My guess is the rest of their machines are closing fast.”

“Leave them alone,” Ash said.

“Can our spies generate sonar calls for the sunfish? If we locate the other mecha, the sunfish might run before they’re boxed in.”

“Don’t do it.”

Vonnie snarled at Ash with bitter reproach. “You have your specimens and your alliance with Brazil. You don’t need to kill the whole colony, do you?”

“Hey! Enough!” Metzler said. “I have some funny readings from our spies.”

Vonnie glanced at the sims he’d posted on her displays. While she was bickering with Ash, Metzler had aimed thirty percent of their spies away from the battle to scan the surrounding area. New blurs of motion and sound were rapidly approaching the fight from below.

“Those aren’t FNEE diggers,” Vonnie said.

“No,” Metzler said.

Is it Lam? she thought. The signatures were too varied. The blurs weren’t a single entity. Forty distinct contacts bunched and spread and revealed eight more behind them, threading through the catacombs in packs.

“It’s the larger breed of sunfish,” Frerotte said. “Our spies recognize the ultrasound.”

Vonnie smiled a thin, savage smile.

Earth was so far removed from this moon, the men and women who’d given the orders to approach the sunfish had yet to learn the results of their operation. The radio delay meant several minutes would pass before the politicians and gene corps personnel knew if the mecha had been successful. But they must be happy. They must have congratulated each other on arranging the charade between the ESA and the FNEE.

It wasn’t fair. They were comfortable in their board rooms and offices. They had unlimited luxuries and the promise of years more of the same. Their homes weren’t being invaded. Their families weren’t under the gun.

Vonnie imagined them casually checking their datastreams. Would they even bother to look at the reality of their crime? If they found it distasteful to see the guts strewn across the cavern, they could turn off their displays. They could count their numbers instead: how many sunfish captured; how many bodies secured; their stock projections and trade agreements.

I hope the sunfish rip you apart, she thought.

They should have realized other tribes would come. The larger sunfish had heard their cousins screaming. They’d smelled blood and wounded prey. Had they brought every warrior in their colony?

“Tell the FNEE to get out,” Metzler said.

“Too late.”

Metzler looked at her with embarrassment and determination. “If the mecha set more charges, they might be able to seal themselves off from the larger sunfish,” he said.

Frerotte opened a channel to Koebsch. “Sir, there are more sunfish closing on the FNEE mecha — the larger sunfish. I count forty-eight or fifty-two.”

Koebsch nodded. His face was harried. “Let me patch you to Colonel Ribeiro,” he said.

“Yes, sir.” Frerotte tapped at his display, adding the spies’ data to the ESA/FNEE command feed. Through a short audio malfunction, Vonnie heard a blip of male voices shouting in Portuguese. An AI in her station automatically translated Ribeiro’s words: “Regroup. Regroup. Where is Platform 2?”

Their melee with the smaller breed was winding down. The gun platform chattered once more, nailing a wounded sunfish digging pitifully at the cavern ceiling. The intact digger pursued four sunfish to the wall, catching three, pummeling them, but the slower, limping digger dropped its specimens to enact repairs on its breastplate.

The gun platform sidled toward the digger to assist. The mecha hunched together like living animals, although the illusion faded when they extended micro arms and a welding torch between them. All three mecha were splattered with gore and dust.

“Contact in ninety seconds,” Frerotte said.

“I’m picking up another group of lifeforms approaching from the south,” Metzler said.

“More sunfish?” Koebsch said.

“Too soon to tell.”

You wanted a goddamned war, Vonnie thought. You’re about to get more than anyone expected.

Her eyes brimmed with tears. She couldn’t bring herself to look at Ash. Instead, she counted the dead sprawled throughout the cavern, mourning each of their nimble little shapes. Her AI had identified Sue among the corpses.

“There’s a third group in the area to the southwest,” Metzler said. “This one is moving away from the battlefield.”

“Let me see,” Vonnie said.

Beyond the end of their maps, west of the coordinates where they thought Sue and Tom’s colony was situated, vague rustles of movement led away into the ice. There were no sonar calls mixed with the activity. The smaller sunfish were operating with as much stealth as possible even if moving by feel and scent hindered their escape.

“They’re evacuating,” Vonnie said with relief.

“They might be flanking the mecha or trying to intercept the larger sunfish,” Frerotte said.

“Not likely. Too much of the rock collapsed in the blasts. The FNEE only left a few ways in or out. None of those openings connect with the colony.”

“I think Sue led a diversion,” Metzler said. “Her pack went after the mecha to buy the others time to get away. If Sue won, they’d come back. But they heard Sue’s pack dying, and the blasts were too close to their home.”

“The whole region is unstable now,” Vonnie agreed, highlighting the spies’ radar. “We might see a wider collapse.”

“Fifteen seconds,” Frerotte said.

The FNEE mecha separated from each other. The two diggers hurried to form a triangle with the gun platform, protecting it on either side.

Metzler posted sims of the three separate contacts around the mecha — the smaller sunfish in flight — the approaching swarm of the larger breed — and the third, unknown group of lifeforms, who were also closing on the scene. As he sifted through his data, the spies recorded sonar cries from the third group and tagged it: Sunfish, Breed II.

“More of the larger kind,” Vonnie said.

Were they from a new colony or were they a hunting party rejoining their tribe? They were well-positioned to head off the smaller sunfish, but they did not angle toward their fleeing cousins. They dropped through the catacombs toward the mecha.

“They’re confronting the loudest enemy instead of the easier prey,” Metzler said. “Why?”

The FNEE gun platform opened fire as eight sunfish sailed into the open. Its twin guns traversed from low to high. Ribeiro had anticipated the sunfishes’ tactic of bouncing off the floor and ceiling.

His foresight was effective. 20mm rounds pierced the sunfish, killing six. The two survivors didn’t fly much longer. The gun platform crossed its fire again, winging both. One sunfish was dashed against the rock. The other spun backward in a veil of blood.

“Like shooting pigs in a farmyard,” Ash said.

Vonnie turned to bark at her, but what was the use? She has to believe they’re just animals, Vonnie thought. Otherwise we’re murderers.

A second wave leapt into the breach. FNEE radar counted twenty-eight sunfish. Their small bodies rocketed through a new pattern, four high, four low, twenty bouncing sideways or straight at the mecha. Most of them hurled rocks as they jumped, adding to the bedlam in the air.

The gun platform overreacted. It centered its fire on the upper part of the storm. Its programs surely included AMAS surface-to-space defense systems. By default, it considered the overhead targets most critical.

It shot three sunfish and nine rocks unerringly. Then the sunfish in the lower half of the wave reached the diggers. More sunfish entered the cavern as the mecha flailed at their small adversaries — and when the diggers were enveloped, the gun platform raked its fire over the diggers and sunfish alike.

Ricochets sprang from the diggers’ alumalloy frames, shredding sunfish, annihilating a digger’s gear block. Bullets careened from metal and rock like high velocity hail.

The digger slumped and went down in a heap of bloody sunfish, kicking as it fell.

They’re winning! Vonnie thought, feeling sick and exultant. The cost to the sunfish would be staggering. Dozens were dead. But they were winning.

Four sunfish reached the gun platform. They clubbed its eyes. They screeched in its ears. The gun platform reeled from the disruptions, unable to track its targets or to process new commands. Vonnie cheered silently.

Beside her, Metzler uttered one sound. “Christ.”

A second FNEE gun platform waddled into the cavern through the gaping fractures left by the explosion. Behind it lurched another digger. Too many of the sunfish were engaged with the original mecha. They launched themselves at the new gun platform, but they were too far away.

It squeezed off eight controlled bursts. With each burst, a sunfish died. Then it swept its guns across the cavern, concentrating on the biggest groups.

That quickly, the tide was turned. The new gun platform cleaned off its brother. It freed the battle worn digger.

Working together, the two gun platforms wasted every living thing in sight, firing continuously until a meter-long slab dropped from the ceiling and two hunks crumbled from the walls.

The roar of the guns couldn’t mask the high-pitched screams as the last sunfish cavorted and dodged among the ruptured bodies of their tribe.

There was no mercy offered except to a few crippled, spasming sunfish. Some individuals could barely raise an arm in self-defense before the FNEE diggers collected them, gumming up their wounds with foam spray, binding them in wire. Many others were left to bleed out.

“I can’t watch,” Metzler said, raising his glove in front of his eyes. Then he dragged his arm laterally. He wiped the FNEE sims from his display and turned his attention to the sharecasts from the ESA spies.

Surreptitiously, Vonnie instructed her station to copy the FNEE datastreams. She could broadcast the massacre systemwide. Billions of people would be outraged… and yet… and yet the gene corps and the politicians had what they wanted. Worse, they could claim they were innocent. The sunfish had attacked them, not vice versa.

At least it’s over, she thought. But the activity in the ice wasn’t done.

“Oh no,” she said, reacting to an alarm.

The second pack of sunfish — the group who’d elected not to pursue their smaller cousins and hurried toward the mecha instead — were about to make their own appearance on the battlefield. There were sixteen of them. They had no chance where fifty-two warriors had failed.

42.

“We need to stop the sunfish or Ribeiro,” Vonnie said. “There’s no excuse for more killing. Ash! They have all the captives and tissue samples they need.”

“I can’t make the sunfish go away,” Ash said stubbornly.

“What about sonar calls from our spies? Anything. Maybe we can distract them. They might recognize a warning.”

“Got it,” Metzler said, but Frerotte acted first. He uploaded their linguistic databases to the spies, selecting a short menu of sunfish calls. “Here,” Frerotte said.

The spies mimicked Tom’s screech from his encounter with Probe 112. Pärnits believed the sound was a challenge and a boast that Tom’s tribe was a ferocious entity. Unfortunately, the spies relied primarily on radar and passive sensory arrays. They weren’t designed to transmit signals other than encrypted data/comm, so their sonar was short range.

Frerotte shook his head. “The spies probably aren’t loud enough. I’m not sure—”

The new sunfish changed course, swinging away from the FNEE mecha. As they did, they piped and shrieked at the rock separating them from the blood-soaked cavern.

Were they sounding out the mecha? Not with so much rock between them, Vonnie thought. She believed the sunfish were teasing their enemy, trying to provoke the machines into rushing after them. Was that to set an ambush? Did they plan to bring a tunnel down on the mecha?

The sunfish dove through the catacombs, taking one, two, three turns to maintain the same heading. They were moving in the direction of the ESA spies.

“They heard us,” Vonnie said.

“Did they?” Metzler asked. “They’re trending toward our spies, but there’s another place they could be going. They must know where to find Tom and Sue’s abandoned colony even if they’ve never been inside it.”

“You think they always intended to run for the colony.”

“Yes. Our AI tagged something weird in the FNEE datastreams. This group is exclusively male. From their size, they might be immature males.”

“But the smaller breed evacuated,” Vonnie said. “There’s nothing in the colony.”

“Maybe the smaller sunfish left their old and wounded behind,” Metzler said. “There might be farms. This is the larger breed’s chance to raid the place.”

“Smart,” Frerotte said.

“Raccoons and dogs raid garbage cans,” Ash said. “I’m sorry. Dawson’s right. Nobody with any brains sends unprotected troops at a gun emplacement.”

“We employed ’human wave’ tactics in World War One,” Frerotte said, coming to Vonnie’s aid again. “The Americans did it at Gettysburg. The Chinese nearly won the North-South Korean War with mass infantry charges.”

“That’s different,” Ash said.

“Is it?”

“Those soldiers carried weapons.”

“The sunfish used rocks like shotgun fire,” Frerotte said. “They tried to bring down the ceiling again. You can’t fault them for not having our technology. The Zulu overwhelmed the British Army using spears and human waves.”

Why are you helping me? Will you keep helping me? Vonnie thought as she waited and watched.

The sunfish were masters at feinting, traps, and decoys. Their lives were an endless game of hide-and-seek, so why hadn’t they gone after their smaller cousins instead of attacking of the mecha? Because they’d been drawn to the carnage on the battlefield? They might have hoped to find the mecha weakened by their cousins, then destroy the machines themselves, claiming all of the dead for food.

Did they realize the mecha weren’t living creatures?

How intelligent are they really? she thought, feeling a pang of doubt. Ash had raised an excellent point. Frontal assaults on a gun platform would have resulted in heavy casualties for armored human commandos. The sunfish tribes had lost more than fifty lives. Twenty more had been wounded and captured. That wasn’t intelligent. It was unreasoning instinct.

Metzler saw her eyes and said, “Von, they couldn’t have understood what they were getting into. They’ve never met war machines.”

“They fought me. They should know what machines can do.”

“That was probably a different tribe.”

“They’re drifting out of range,” Frerotte said.

“I wish we could piggyback a spy onto one of the sunfish,” Metzler said. Blatantly trying to ease the tension, he added, “I’d give my left testicle to see what’s inside the colony. Are there pools? Beds? Maybe it was a penthouse.”

“Let’s reconfigure 4117 through 4124,” Frerotte said. “We should be able to track their sonar calls if we don’t lose them behind the thermal vents. At least we can map a few spaces inside the colony.”

“Good.” Metzler touched Vonnie’s arm. “The more we know, the better chance we’ll have with the next tribe,” he said.

If there’s another tribe, she worried, but she kept her concern to herself. She didn’t want to sound negative when he was giving his best.

The people on Earth will think they won today, she thought. They’ll order new missions. Then our mecha will chase the sunfish from every safe zone inside Europa, stealing DNA and mining the ice—

“Holy shit,” Metzler said.

His soft, ominous tone roused Vonnie from her despair. She glanced through the spies’ datastreams. She sat up straight when she saw why he was afraid. “Koebsch! Koebsch!” she yelled as Metzler struck a Class 1 alert.

“What are you doing?” Ash said.

“Frerotte, get our surface mecha away from— No, wait! Have them drag the hab modules out of here!”

“Roger that,” Frerotte said.

Ash frowned, skimming through their defense grid. “I don’t see…” she said.

Vonnie almost laughed at the irony of Ash thinking like the FNEE gun platform, looking skyward first. How long would it take before people learned to evaluate this environment like its natives?

The sunfish had bypassed the tunnels where their smaller cousins had built the retaining wall. They’d gone lower, missing likeliest spots for an air lock into the colony. Vonnie had supposed they were lost or hunting blindly. Now she zoomed her display as the sunfish clumped against the steep side of a ravine, joining their bodies into one immense muscle.

“They’re tearing at the hot springs,” Vonnie said.

Koebsch appeared on the group feed, projecting calm with his open hands. “Let’s not panic,” he said, studying the sims from Metzler’s display.

The spies’ telemetry showed only blurs and reconstructions.

“The sunfish are too far away,” Koebsch said. “You can’t be sure what they’re doing. They could be digging a new entrance into the colony.”

“No, sir,” Vonnie said. She and Metzler took several images from the sims, letting an AI enhance each frame with preexisting data from their listening posts, their spies, and their probes.

During the past weeks, they’d mapped the local web of heat branching up from the mountain into the frozen sky. Its topmost reaches were the melted ice and cooling gas pockets west of the ESA camp. Further down, liquid water collected in shafts and lakes. Lower still, hot springs boiled from the rock, providing the colony with warmth and nutrients.

It was a powder keg.

Day by day, the ice dripped and slumped, blocking the vents. The rock eroded and did the same. Mostly the water and gases burned through, but sometimes geysers were plugged or gases were backed up, perturbing the live magma deep within the mountain.

“We’ve mapped two of the main conduits for the hot springs that feed Tom’s home,” Vonnie said. “Both rise through a trunk of compressed rock about fifty meters beneath the tunnel where they built their retaining wall. I think they’ve been repairing the trunk for years.”

“That’s why there’s a stream down there,” Frerotte said, identifying a current of noise beneath the louder, crunching sounds of the digging sunfish. “There are leaks spraying from a cliff face.”

Metzler had run his own calculations. “The pressure must be enormous,” he said. “Those hot springs push up through 2.4 kilometers of rock and ice, and that’s just at the top where we can see. The network of gas and heat is more extensive. If they tear into the rock—”

“They wouldn’t,” Ash said. “They’d die.”

“That’s not going to stop them,” Vonnie said. “That’s why their pack is all-male. They’re expendable.”

“We need to get this lander off the ground,” Metzler said.

They were connected to auxiliary structures like the jeep charging post and the maintenance shed, which accessed Lander 04’s power and data/comm. They should have installed an auto detach, but no one had imagined the old vents could become active in a matter of minutes, not the mission planners on Earth, not the crew on Europa.

“I’ll tell the mecha to cut us loose,” Vonnie said.

“What about everyone in the hab modules?” Ash said. “We can’t leave them.”

“We’ll lift them clear.”

“They should drive over.”

“We don’t have that much time. They’re better off inside their modules than a jeep if we— Oh!”

The floor heaved as their displays turned white. The spies’ sensors had overloaded. The last images were of the sunfish peeling a hunk of rock from a damp cliff face.

A tsunami of broiling water, gas, and rubble shoved through the team of sunfish. It flash fried them. It ground their corpses to bits.

The tunnel containing the spies erupted next. Their telemetry shut off, but Frerotte had duped the command feed from the FNEE mecha, which lasted seconds longer.

Steaming water drowned the war machines and their captives. It shoved the floor of the cavern into the ceiling. Then the mashed remains were swept away. Two of the FNEE mecha issued damage reports as they tumbled with the cascade, rising toward the surface at speeds exceeding seventy kilometers per hour.

On top of the frozen sky, Lander 04 tipped again, conveying some of the violence beneath the ice.

Vonnie’s display became a liability, dizzying her with static and dead links. On the group feed, Koebsch yelled as Command Module 01 tipped over, jerking loose from its mooring cables. A data pad spun into his head as meal tubes and a jacket fluttered past.

“Pressure suits! Pressure suits!” he shouted.

Vonnie grasped her chair, steadying herself as Metzler and Ash ran to the ready room. If all of them went at once, nobody could suit up, so she stayed. Frerotte did the same. They hung onto their stations as the floor swayed.

“Exterior cams,” she said.

Her display flickered with various camera angles across camp. As always, most were radar or infrared signals modified into holo imagery.

Their mecha rolled past the stationary listening posts toward the hab modules. Someone had also given evacuation commands to their jeeps, which turned on their headlights. The first vehicle began to drive.

Much closer to Lander 04, three mecha approached, obeying Vonnie’s order to disconnect the lander from the maintenance shed and the charging post.

Gouts of opaque dust and gas spurted from the surface, blasting the mecha. A crack opened ahead of them. Two dropped out of sight. In the minimal gravity, the third mecha lifted on the billowing gas, but the crack opened wider than the deluge could carry the machine. It dipped like a kite and vanished.

Six listening posts and a storage container disappeared as the surface split in a dozen places. Segments of ice plummeted away. Others tilted and bashed together.

Plumes of water vapor mushroomed into the night. Astonishing formations of ice crystals zigzagged above the camp, popping and spraying like gossamer rain. The haze obscured their satellite imagery. Then it actually touched the satellites, spilling up from Europa into naked space.

A black maw took Hab Module 03. Suddenly the rectangular trailer was gone, dragging the cables of its jeep charging post after it.

“Pärnits!” Vonnie gasped. She looked for him among the group feed, but 03’s data/comm shut off.

Beth Collinsworth was in there, too, she thought. The linguists had plastered the walls of their lab with a thousand holos of carvings and sunfish, trying to memorize hundreds of combinations of shapes. They were batty, fun geniuses, and they loved their job.

“Can you give me any projections from our listening posts!?” Vonnie shouted at Frerotte. “If the quakes are over—”

“It’s going to get worse before it stops.”

“Von! Von! Frerotte!” Ash screamed from the ready room. “You need your suits!”

“Oh shit.” Vonnie twisted herself out of her seat. Leaving her station, abandoning Pärnits to his fate, took more self-discipline than she could bear.

Wobbling with the lander’s floor, Vonnie bruised her elbow on the hatch. She welcomed the pain. Unfortunately, Frerotte was behind her. He fell and slid into her foot, knocking her onto his chest. Outside, ice rang against the lander’s hull like gunfire.

Ash hauled Vonnie to her feet. She wasn’t wearing her helmet. She held a spare suit over her arm and said, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

“Where’s your helmet?”

“Here!” Metzler yelled. He was fully suited. He extended a helmet to Ash as Vonnie took the suit on Ash’s arm. She sat down and stuffed her feet into the pant legs, not bothering to remove her clothes or to connect the sanitary features.

The four of them were thrown in a pile when the lander seesawed. Frerotte stood up first, bleeding from his mouth.

Vonnie shoved her arms into her sleeves. “The only mecha that can reach us are busy with Module 02,” she said. “I’m going outside.”

“That’s crazy!” Metzler shouted. “Von, you can’t—!”

“Let her go or do it yourself,” Frerotte said. “We need to take off before we fall in like 03.”

“They’re gone!?” Metzler shouted. But he squared his shoulders and said to the women, “You’re the pilots. You stay.”

Vonnie bustled past him toward the air lock. “Ben, I can cut us loose before a stupid biologist figures out which end of a wrench works best.”

She forced a smile as she said it, wanting to kiss him. Instead, she seated her helmet on her collar assembly. She selected a tool kit and emergency pack from the wall. She opened the pack. She grabbed a wad of flexiglue suit patches, which she stuck against her chest, where she could find them easily. Then she turned to Ash.

“Start your preflight,” she said.

“I…” Ash’s face was a wretched mask.

Vonnie opened the inner door to the air lock, stepped in and cycled the lock. As she waited, the floor tipped wildly. She crashed on her knees.

Were they sliding into the ice?

43.

The exterior door opened. It let in a burst of ice shards and dust. Vonnie protected her visor with her gloves. Something the size of a dinner plate caromed off her ribs, but it was mostly air, not solid ice. Otherwise it might have cut her in half.

As she stood, her boot slipped on a hardening sheet of moisture. Everywhere the air swirled with fog and invisible fingers of gas.

Spotlights winked a few hundred meters to her left, where mecha tugged at Module 02, increasing the distance between it and her lander. Ejecta smashed down like cannonballs. Vonnie clutched at the tether reel mounted by the door. The tether was intended for extra-vehicular activity in space, but she clipped the line to her waist. She waded down the lander’s steps into the hurricane, where she stumbled and fell.

She crawled forward with the tool kit in her fist. There was no way to grip the ice. It shuddered and dropped and slammed back into her shins and elbows.

Maybe it wasn’t so strange that she clung to the sunfishes’ behavior as her example. She drew courage from their heroism.

They chose to die for their tribe, she thought. Their assault group was a test. They knew the machines had killed the smaller sunfish. When their own warriors failed, the second group sabotaged the hot springs like they were arming a doomsday bomb. They wanted to stop the mecha before their home was threatened, too. They sacrificed themselves.

Her tether vibrated like a harp’s string, tugging at her waist. Somehow she reached the maintenance shed. She considered opening her tool kit, but the wobbling ice threw her off-balance. She would have lost any tools in hand. It was all she could do to hold onto the kit, using its plastisteel case like a bludgeon against the data/comm and power couplings.

The data/comm line separated easily. The power line was bolted to the shed. Vonnie was in mid-swing when her tether snapped tight and yanked, hurting her spine.

As she turned to deal with it, something bit through her left arm. She never saw the object. She didn’t look. Her life shrank down to the slobbering, howling gash in her sleeve.

Her air cylinders roared through her helmet and chest pack, attempting to compensate for the puncture.

It was her blood that saved her. The fluid acted as a partial seal, freezing inside her sleeve. She also might have gained a second due to the gauzy clouds around her. The water vapor and gases created a denser-than-normal atmosphere. Even then, the partial vacuum of Europa’s surface was so cold it burned like a branding iron, disintegrating her skin, ruining her muscles and bone.

Vonnie bent her bad arm to her chest and clamped three patches on it, creating a lumpy, half-solid ball of hemorrhaging flesh and glue. Her air cylinders redoubled the roar of oxygen.

She didn’t think. She moved. She added another patch to her arm. She keyed no-shock from her helmet dispenser. Then she looked for her tool kit and went back to work, banging at the power line as if freeing it could save her from her agony.

The coupling broke. The line sparked in her face, and Vonnie scrabbled away from it with her throbbing arm.

Thoughts and emotions began to return. She raised her head to look for the jeep charging post. Its mass was much less than that of the shed, which was why she’d made it her second target. If necessary, Ash could lift off with the post hanging from the lander’s side. The flightcraft had plenty of thrust. The question was if Ash was pilot enough to compensate for flying off-balance.

“Ben? Ben?” Vonnie called on her radio. “I can’t find the post!”

No answer.

“Ben!”

She groped at her wrist controls, wondering if she was on the wrong frequency, but she couldn’t touch her arm without keening like a dog. Her eyes didn’t want to stay on the read-out, which was obscured by blood and glue.

More quakes buckled the ice. Rising on her good hand and knees, Vonnie caught a puff of crystals across her shoulder. She ducked and crept alongside the lander, trying to get her bearings. Was she going the right way?

A monstrous shape reared above her in the storm.

She thought something had come out of the frozen sky — a new lifeform — a rhino or a dragon that had been tossed from the ice. It was five times larger than a human being. Its teeth glinted like steel.

Screaming, she clawed sideways. She intended to hide beneath the lander until an orange light on her wrist flashed with a familiar homing pattern. One, two, three, blank. One, two, three, blank.

The monster was their jeep. The spikes on its back were radio antennae. Its ’teeth’ consisted of the bars and pods of its forward sensor array.

Vonnie choked and laughed, nearly hysterical. She rammed her head against the lander’s underside as she emerged, but she forgot her fear when she discovered she could stand. Were the quakes subsiding or was that wishful thinking?

She peered through the eddies of fog. Belatedly, she realized walking was so difficult because the surface canted up thirty degrees. Ahead of her, one of the lander’s grappling hooks had gouged the ice, preventing the lander from sliding more than a few meters. The jeep shared their strange angle, and the ice jutted up behind it for fifty meters.

That was where the surface ended. They were on a broken slab of ice. Vonnie glanced over her shoulder to measure the slab in the other direction.

The maintenance shed had vanished. The edge was four meters away. She couldn’t see more than jagged ice and shadows.

How far would they drop if the slab went in?

All around her, other blocks had capsized or tilted or sunk. Many were adhered together by smoother bumps of water that had shot from the ice, then solidified. Gases and vapor continued to waft up from the shattered plain. Module 02 was farther away than it had been, towed to safety by the mecha, but everything between 04 and 02 was gone.

Vonnie hiked toward the jeep. Why hadn’t Ash lifted off? Because of the charging post?

Wheezing, she sagged after a few steps. The jeep eased toward her as if wanting to help, then stopped. Was it damaged? She assumed it was trying to respond to rescue commands from Metzler or Frerotte. Why couldn’t she hear them?

In her exhaustion, she seized an idea.

I don’t need to reach the charging post. I can order the jeep to ram into it for me.

“Jeep Four, where is your post?” she murmured.

It didn’t answer. Nor did its homing signal change. That meant it recognized her suit, but it hadn’t heard her voice.

Idiot, she thought, staring at her mangled arm. She hadn’t switched on her radio before she ran from the lander. Now she activated it to a blare of voices.

Ash yelled: “We’re not leaving her, Koebsch! The jeep is balancing us!”

Vonnie felt a fresh swell of nausea when she realized what would have happened if she’d been able to give her orders to the jeep. I can’t move it. Its weight might tip the slab. They’re using it to stabilize the lander.

“I’m going outside,” Metzler said as Koebsch yelled, “Four of us are missing or hurt! The last thing we need is more casualties!”

“This is Vonderach,” she said by rote. Then, with more feeling, she added, “Take off.”

“Are you all right!?” Metzler shouted. “I’m coming outside!”

“No. Take off. My tether’s attached.”

“You’ll swing into the jets!”

“Reel me in. The ice…”

It creaked. The slab was tottering.

“I’ll get her,” Frerotte said. “Ash, hit the jets. Low power. You keep our adjustments to the jeep.”

The last remark was aimed at Metzler. Vonnie understood his words that well. Then she coughed blood onto the inside of her visor. Spluttering, she coughed again. My side? she thought, tracing the worst pain to her ribs.

She grayed out.

When her mind sharpened again, she was shuffling on her knees and her good hand, following her tether as it pulled at her waist. Someone was yelling. Frerotte. He was either cranking the tether reel manually or from inside the lock. Inside would be smarter, where he was protected from eruptions and shrapnel.

Each breath was a chore. The pain made her hurry. The pain lessened when she kept pace with the tether, allowing hints of slack in the line. At some point, she’d broken a rib. The bone must have nicked her lung. Only the no-shock and her adrenaline had kept her from noticing.

Vonnie found herself at the front of the lander. The tether had brought her back. She needed to climb the steps and she’d reach the air lock—

—but she screamed when the horizon flipped, pivoting the ice beneath her—

—as she whacked into the steps—

—and rose with Lander 04 as it hovered over the abyss. Below her, the jeep dropped away. Something else flopped toward the lander’s belly. It was the charging post. It swung into the invisible exhaust of the fusion jets.

Vonnie couldn’t see most of what happened. The lander’s steps and armored skirt concealed its fusion jets, where the post was vaporized in a searing blue-white flare. She blinked and blinked and couldn’t regain vision in her left eye. Radiation burns cooked her feet. Dangling from the harness felt like being impaled on a sword, and she oozed tears that tracked up her forehead into her hair.

Losing consciousness would have been a mercy. But she fought. Trying to right herself, Vonnie squinted with her good eye as the jets tore into the ice below, buffeting her with freezing water vapor.

Normally their landers had deployed foil shields for each lift-off, preserving the ice. Now there was nothing to spare, although Ash banked around the center of the massive hole, where lights stabbed up from the debris or glowed beneath the surface.

Vonnie glimpsed a listening post and the gray corner of a metal structure. “I have a visual on Module 03,” she groaned.

Ash cried on the radio: “Von! Von!? Are you there!?”

“…yes.”

“I’m putting us down! Wait for me! Von!? I’m putting us down in thirty seconds!”

She really is sorry, Vonnie thought distantly. Maybe she smiled. She wanted to smile. She’d saved her friends. That should count for something, but she ached. Her body had been beaten, gashed, baked, and chilled. It was impossible to feel anything except her misery.

They left the chaos behind. Glancing back, Vonnie saw an oval-shaped canyon with a separate, smaller sink hole to one side. The canyon was at least two kilometers long and half as wide. It had swallowed most of the ESA camp.

“Maps,” she whispered.

Through the gore on her visor, her display awoke with beacons and data/comm. Module 02 was safe. Several supply containers and Module 01 also remained on the surface, although 01 laid on its side near a cliff.

Their other flightcraft, Lander 05, was among the survivors. It took to the air in a white gust and crossed toward 01 instead of attempting to latch onto 03.

“Why…”

The low-level AI in her visor responded to her disoriented stare. It coupled her display of the battered ESA surface grid with threat analysis from ESA and NASA satellites.

Growing fractures cleaved through the ice beneath Module 01. Soon the cliff side would give way. The crew in Lander 05 were evacuating Koebsch before he toppled into the devastation with 03.

There was ongoing activity beneath the ice. Geysers and hot gas continued to erode vast pockets in the pit. There would be aftershocks.

Heedless of their own vulnerability, squads of mecha tugged at Modules 01 and 02, dragging the modules westward. Other mecha trundled across the ice. They formed chains into the pit. Already the mecha were evaluating the debris. Welding torches licked at the shadows, fusing the ice into pathways and bridges.

New pain woke Vonnie from her dream. Her harness pulled on her waist and her legs clunked against the underside of the lander’s steps, folding her over her broken rib.

Frerotte leaned over her, but his voice seemed to come from far away. “Can you hear me?”

He was attached to his own tether. He hefted Vonnie from the steps. Their lander was still in the air, although it was sinking toward an open, solid plain.

“Clear! We’re clear!” he shouted.

Another white cloud exploded beneath the lander as they touched down, scorching the ice.

Frerotte unclipped Vonnie’s line. Up the steps, the exterior door of the air lock stood open. Frerotte jogged inside with her limp body in his arms, smacking her helmet against the wall as he punched the controls. “Fuck! Fuck me! Are you—?”

“Aft.. shocks…” she slurred.

“We know. It’s okay. We know.”

The inner door opened. Metzler was waiting. He helped Frerotte set her down. It felt like the lander had taken off again. Vonnie wasn’t sure if the feeling of acceleration was real. Her thoughts rose and fell in waves.

Pleasant feelings brought her back. A gentle warmth coursed through her body. She was on the floor of the ready room near the hatch to data/comm, where Ash was shouting. Vonnie remained blind in her left eye, but she saw Metzler and Frerotte had stripped off her pressure suit and the jump suit she’d worn inside. A medical droid hung between the two men where it had extended from the ceiling, connecting her heart, neck, wrists, and stomach to emergency systems.

Nanotech and optimized blood plasma fed through her veins from subdermal packets and intravenous lines. The frostbite in her arm felt like simmering oil. The radiation burns on her legs felt like snow. Everywhere her nerves sang and twitched.

“Another quake dropped the west side of the pit!” Ash yelled as other voices shouted from their group feed:

“The mecha lost visual on 03—”

“—no beacons or—”

“—secure 02 if you can.”

“I need help up here!” Ash yelled. “Ben, she’s tied in! There’s nothing more you can do!”

“Go,” Vonnie muttered, trying to sit. She winced at the pain in her ribs and feet, but the wounds were manageable now. “You two shouldn’t…”

“Your arm is bleeding,” Metzler said.

“You shouldn’t play doctor with me while I’m unconscious. Where are my clothes?”

“She’s fine,” Frerotte said with a fierce grin. He clapped Metzler on the shoulder, shoving him toward data/comm. Metzler’s eyes were round with terror and affection, but he left.

Vonnie listened to them as the jets thrummed.

“Ben, load these sims into your scout suit,” Ash said. “You might have to cut off 02’s war pods if we can’t wedge it into our cargo lock.”

“Roger that,” Metzler said.

“Ribeiro’s reporting backwash through the FNEE grid,” Frerotte said. “This thing was huge.”

“They swore they’d send mecha to help us,” Ash said.

“There’s a FNEE lander in the air and a few rovers coming across the surface,” Frerotte said. “I’ll coordinate. Koebsch is over the pit with 05. It looks like they’re trying to shoot a harpoon into the ice.”

“How far down is 03?” Metzler said.

“Beacons put them at half a kilometer and sinking fast,” Frerotte said. “They lost pressure six minutes ago. No radio or data/comm. It doesn’t look good.”

“Von, you’ve got to move!” Metzler shouted. “I’m coming to armor up!”

He ran through the hatch. Vonnie scooched on her hip in a web of IV lines and monitors, freeing the space near their scout suits. She felt more coherent. She grimaced as she tallied the deaths among her people and the sunfish.

We’ll dig for 03 if it takes forever, she thought. We’ll start again. But we’ve lost so much.

The sunfish lost even more, but the floods will harden into a solid layer between us. The new ice might be two or three kilometers thick. By the time we get back through, they’ll be long gone. Won’t they?

They gave up their home. We gave up two people.

Despite everything, her crew had underestimated Europa again. The sunfish had won after all.

For now.

Recovering Module 03 Map

44.

Seven hours passed before they recovered Module 03. Working with Koebsch, Gravino had attached a line to the module ten minutes after the catastrophe, but the harpoon tore loose in the first aftershocks. Then the module was pulled deeper. Nearly all of their remaining mecha disappeared in the new quakes. The rims of the canyon collapsed, taking the mecha into the pit, where the ice sluffed away like sand in an hourglass, backfilling the rifts beneath the surface.

Swimming against the sinking avalanche, nine mecha reached safety where the flood had created solid blocks. Twelve more were submerged, yet pried themselves loose and resumed tunneling toward Module 03, fusing the ice wherever possible. The rest of the machines were completely buried, yet remained operational, continuing to function as radar and sonar arrays.

With so many mecha taken by the disaster, the ESA possessed a disorderly spiral of assets down through 1.8 kilometers. Metzler and Frerotte were able to develop sims predicting the next aftershocks.

In a sense, they were fortunate. The new layer formed by the blow-out was a foundation that wouldn’t allow the surface to crumple further. The ice needed to settle, but it should protect them from new cataclysms. Metzler thought the sheet would redirect any currents of water and gas laterally.

Magma was a different hazard. If the quakes had opened new fissures, chain reactions of fire and gas might consume the ESA and FNEE camps. It would be years before this region was stable again.

Vonnie prayed the sunfishes’ work had been well-measured. How accurate were their perceptions of the reservoirs they’d unleashed and the volcanic activity within the fin mountain?

The larger sunfish might have destroyed Tom’s home as an acceptable price for eradicating the mecha, but she didn’t believe they would have fricasseed their own tribe in the bargain.

Lying in her blood on the floor of the ready room, she imagined the flood must have waned before it spread to the colony of the larger sunfish. Maybe a few had suffered scrapes or bruises. Their cartilage skins were so resilient, their bodies so flexible. If the water had cooled, none of them had been boiled to death. They could breathe underwater.

As long as they climbed from the deluge before it froze again, the tribe would persevere. That meant their suicide squad had been fairly certain how the hot springs, ice, quakes, and magma chambers would interact.

Was that possible?

They’ve survived down there for tens of thousands of years, she reminded herself, blinking and struggling to keep her head up as the warm feelings in her body turned to lethargy.

She didn’t remember sleep. She was still fretting when she woke in her bed in Lander 04’s living quarters, her wrists and stomach connected to another med droid.

A display had been unfolded from the wall. It provided her friends with a camera to watch her while she slept. One of the windows in the group feed showed her rubbing her cheek before she realized the bleary-eyed woman was herself, although most of the windows in the group feed were blank. She could only see the people inside Lander 04 with her.

She’d missed most of the rescue. Someone had told their AI to sedate her so they could carry her from the ready room. Leaving her unconscious had also permitted the med droids to operate on her face and her legs, replacing her left eye and disturbing amounts of marrow, muscle, and skin.

Her eye socket felt gritty and too sensitive when she skimmed her display, where Frerotte had posted a summary before he instructed the AI to wake her.

There was also more conversation than usual in the next compartment. The voices weren’t from a group feed. Ash had taken O’Neal and Johal on board. None of them would reoccupy the hab modules until they were positive they’d located a safe place to camp, if there was a safe place. Until then, the crew would remain with their two flightcraft.

Lander 04 sat on the ice three kilometers east of the pit. Its jets were hot — Vonnie felt the deck humming — and the pilot’s command link was designated Ashley Sierzenga.

“Hello?” she said, bending her knees beneath her blankets so she could touch her feet. Her toes and one calf were numb.

“Hey, it’s sleeping beauty,” Ash said on the display as her voice drifted through the hatch. They were three meters apart, but Ash didn’t leave the lander’s controls. They studied each other on their displays.

Ash seemed jittery and distracted. “How do you feel?” she said. “Can you take my seat?”

“You’ve been piloting since the blow-out?” Vonnie double-checked her clock. From their initial call to Tavares, to the probes’ encounter with Tom’s pack, to Lam’s assault on 114, to the four hours they’d spent guiding the FNEE mecha, to the battle with the sunfish and its aftermath, Ash had been on duty for twenty hours straight. “I can fly if someone helps me up,” Vonnie said. “You should sleep.”

“That’s not the issue,” Ash said, glancing at her own window in the group feed.

What was she looking at? Vonnie noticed a medical alert bar on Ash’s display, projecting the limits of her effectiveness.

“Most of us are on stims and no-shock,” Ash said. “I’m okay for more, but I need to get outside. I’m the medic. They need me outside.”

She’s not okay, Vonnie realized. She’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Staving off exhaustion with chemicals caused elevated blood pressure, slight memory loss, and clumsiness. Other side effects were more conspicuous. During Vonnie’s run through the frozen sky, she’d experienced the same obsessive mood Ash was exhibiting now, dealing with her hyper-sensitive state by speaking and acting with careful repetition.

Ash would feel like someone fighting to keep her balance on a high wire. No amount of masochism could atone for her role in the butchery, yet Vonnie knew better than to insist she should rest. Ash would need to ride through the drugs until Koebsch or their med droids shut her down.

Vonnie shifted her legs out of bed. Her left foot was dead from nerve blocks. It felt like a sock full of meat had been attached to her ankle, where the skin was new, raw, and pale. “Where are Pärnits and Collinsworth?” she asked.

“O’Neal, help her,” Ash said.

No one answered Vonnie. O’Neal entered the living quarters and knelt to disconnect her IVs.

In his forties, with the physique of a dedicated gym buff, O’Neal was a fussy introvert with big curly hair. Weeks ago, the clash between his personality and his lush mane had perplexed Vonnie until she decided he was acting out against his own subdued nature. She liked him for it.

“Don’t take off your monitors,” he said, indicating the electrodes on her chest. “Keep your weight off your foot.” He took hold of her waist as she crooked her elbow around the back of his neck. Together, they stood and hobbled toward data/comm.

His silence meant the worst. No miracles had accompanied the retrieval of Module 03.

They’re dead, she thought, recalling her friend’s lean, hawk-nosed face and sly grin. She had just begun to know Rauno Pärnits intimately. He was as educated as Metzler, as devoted, as passionate.

He’d defended the sunfish. Like Collinsworth, Pärnits had reveled in their bizarre language, trading everything in his life for the chance to stand on Europa, listen, learn, and develop roughhewn dialogues with scouts like Tom and Sue. In the end, his own species had been responsible for his death.

Vonnie and O’Neal entered data/comm. Frerotte had the station beside Ash, but he didn’t look up, engrossed in a field of holo imagery. Beside him was Harmeet Johal, one of their gene smiths, a dusky woman in her fifties who fit the same bill as O’Neal. She was composed and considerate.

Johal looked like she was supervising mecha with Frerotte. Vonnie didn’t see Metzler. Where was he? O’Neal brought her to an open station, where she said, “Maps and grid.”

Ash tried to stop her. “Wait.”

“I have to see where we are,” Vonnie said, dropping into her chair as voices filled her display.

“Ben, stop it,” Koebsch said on the radio.

“I won’t! I can’t!”

The two ESA landers sat side by side on the surface with Module 03, which they’d dragged from the pit. Outside, Metzler and Koebsch were on the ice. They wore scout suits joined to the flightcraft by tethers. Vonnie also saw two more landers nearby, a NASA heavy lifter and a FNEE suborbital fighter, and Koebsch had opened a data link with the Chinese camp. Their neighbors had come to their aid for the duration.

Why couldn’t they pretend there was always an emergency? If so, Earth would be at peace. The small, isolated crews of astronauts were proof of humankind’s nobility… but she knew Earth’s populations were neither small nor isolated.

Later, she would mourn. For now, Vonnie scanned their grid with calculating eyes.

The NASA and FNEE craft were parked six kilometers from the pit, where ESA Modules 01 and 02 had been dropped with nine storage containers and one jeep. The two ESA landers were half that distance from the lost camp. Dawson and Gravino were aboard Lander 05. Gravino had the helm. Dawson was in sick bay. His vitals listed a concussion and a broken wrist. Nano repairs were ongoing to maintain a reduction of swelling in his parietal lobe.

Vonnie wasn’t sure how to feel about the fact that he’d been hurt. Should she feel happy?

To make room inside their landers, she supposed Ash and Gravino could have offloaded her and Dawson to the NASA flightcraft, but the ESA took care of its own.

That’s what we’re doing now, she realized.

Outside, Koebsch stood at the crumpled box of Module 03 with a squad of mecha, which had painstakingly removed parts of the module’s floor. Away from the module, Metzler paced alongside a single mecha carrying an emergency plastic bubble.

Under Koebsch’s guidance, the other mecha extended lasers and cutting tools. “Let me concentrate,” Koebsch said as Metzler shouted, “We should have left them down there! We should’ve left them down there like Bauman and Lam!”

Chunks of ice had filled 03 when it was breached. Before the power shut off, some of the ice had melted. Then the liquid resolidified, adhering to the module’s equipment, its furniture, and its inhabitants.

They’re taking out the bodies, Vonnie thought with pride. Koebsch is doing the dirty work himself. It’s his duty.

Why are they yelling?

She aimed some of the mecha’s sensors to the emergency bubble that Metzler was steering toward her lander.

The bubble held a grotesque shape approximately the same width and depth as the inflatable kids’ pool her parents bought when she was five. She and her brothers had splashed in the shin-deep pool for days, tracking grass and dirt into the water, crowding it with buckets and toys. This shape was a lumpy, frozen disc. Bones and clothing jutted from the black ice.

“Oh God.”

“Turn off your station,” Ash said.

“No,” Vonnie said, opening a new comm link. “Ben? Ben, it’s Von. I’m here.”

Metzler kept shouting at Koebsch. “How am I supposed to fit this thing into the lander? Are you going to thaw him?”

“Ash, I really need you,” Koebsch said.

“I’m on my way, sir,” Ash said. “Von’s awake.”

She felt like she was dreaming.

Pärnits and Collinsworth hadn’t made it to their pressure suits, although having air wouldn’t have mattered. The linguists had been squashed. Their tissues had boiled in near-vacuum, then merged with the native ice.

Strung out on stims, Metzler wouldn’t stop raving. “He looks like a fucking pancake! He’s two meters wide! The blood—! His body—! He doesn’t even look like a person anymore!”

Ash switched off their craft-to-suit data/comm and turned to Vonnie with contrite, downcast eyes. “Take the pilot’s seat,” she said. “I have to go outside.”

“He’s right to be upset,” Vonnie said.

“He’s refusing tranquilizers and he’s scaring Koebsch. He’s scaring all of us.”

“I can help,” Johal said, rising from her seat.

“Let’s go.” Ash sent her virtual controls to Vonnie’s station, where the pilot’s command designation switched to Alexis Vonderach. “Do you see our alerts? Frerotte has an early warning system patched into the AI. We might have thirty minutes before the next aftershock.”

“Roger that,” Vonnie said.

“Get into the air five minutes before it starts. A mid-range hover is fine. We haven’t seen any more ejecta, and the pit hasn’t spread. It’s just a precaution. We’re carrying more people and armor, so 05 will keep a tether on 03.”

“Roger that.”

Ash stood up, then paused to bring her mouth down to Vonnie’s ear. “Skim through our mecha,” she whispered. She and Johal walked into the ready room.

Vonnie frowned, but she didn’t alter her pilot’s display. She was prepared to fly at a moment’s notice. What did Ash want her to see? Did she suspect the FNEE rovers were pirating codes from the ESA while they were vulnerable? Vonnie opened new windows on either side of her station, examining the signals from their mecha on the surface.

From the ready room, she heard the assists clicking as Ash donned her scout suit. Johal had taken a pressure suit. Then the women exited. Ash hurried to join Metzler while Johal stayed on the lander’s deck, where they’d erected a temporary tent as storage space.

Leaving Pärnits and Collinsworth in the pit would have been cleaner than exhuming their corpses. The ice could have become a mass grave of humans, sunfish, and mecha.

There was a cold beauty in the idea, but they hadn’t fallen as deep as Bauman and Lam, and people had trouble letting go of anything that belonged to them. When all was said and done, wasn’t that why they’d fought with the sunfish? Because they believed they owned a part of this world after paying for their crews and mecha?

Vonnie needed to convince everyone on Earth to change. It would be several days until they were organized again, maybe longer before they finished their next batch of probes, but they should bring down the food and oxygen they’d originally allocated as gifts. They had an obligation now more than ever.

“The sunfish proved they’re intelligent,” she said, baiting the men on either side of her.

O’Neal glanced up, but Frerotte doggedly focused on the telemetry from the ESA mecha trapped in the ice.

“They knew what they were doing,” she said. “I think they’ve done it before to seal off air leaks or to separate themselves from an enemy. The larger breed must have scouted the mountain beneath Tom’s colony during raids or negotiations. They remembered the weak place in the rock, but they didn’t destroy Tom’s colony. They saved the possibility for when they needed it. Those aren’t the actions of an animal.”

“Von,” Frerotte said. He and O’Neal traded an uncomfortable look. “During the blow-out, we heard new signals from a safe area west of the flood.”

She stared at them, stunned. “What signals?”

“The connection is weak. It’s not routing through emergency channels, so I managed to hide it from Koebsch. Then I locked it down.” Frerotte tapped at his display, revealing an active mecha 3.6 kilometers from the rest of the ESA machines beneath the ice. “It’s Probe 114,” he said.

Lam, she thought. He survived.

More important, Frerotte’s sims had recorded changes in the signal’s location. Lam was mobile.

Vonnie leaned forward, grilling both men like she’d caught them in a lie. “You told me Lam is dangerous,” she said. “Why would you hide him from Koebsch?”

“Ash wanted to, and I agreed,” Frerotte said. He gestured at O’Neal. “All of us did. You risked your life for us when everything that happened… Ash said you’re a better person than we are. I think she’s right. You’re right. The sunfish are intelligent, and we couldn’t have screwed up any worse.”

Vonnie almost said ‘A hundred of them died with our crewmates.’ She almost nodded. Instead, she gave him an excuse. “You didn’t cause this,” she said.

“Ash and I…” Frerotte ducked his head, leaving his confession hanging in the air.

Nobody works harder than someone trying to make up for accidental deaths, she realized. They want redemption, like I did.

“Right now Lam is the last asset we’ve got,” Frerotte said. “If we’re going to find the sunfish, it starts with him.”

“Then what?” Vonnie said.

“We apologize to them. We try to help.”

“Tell me about Lam.”

“I snuck some diagnostics into our telemetry. For the most part, he countered with the correct responses. He seems up-to-date on our situation, but he’s glitchy. He’s hostile. He says he has to talk to you.”