Europa Strike (34 page)

By his own hand, with his own pistol.

Xiang closed his eyes. The prickling, itching sensation at the back of his skull was worse now. He could hear voices—unintelligible voices, the meaning of their words just beyond the grasp of his comprehension. It was maddening, and terrifying.

He wondered again if he was going insane.

Or did it have something to do with the alien artifact? Dr. Zhao complained of the same headaches, the same voices. So did several of the other officers. Too many to be coincidence.

It almost suggested an attempt at communication.

 

Connector Tunnel,
   E-DARES Facility

Ice Station Zebra, Europa

0811 hours Zulu

 

“Maybe…maybe we could talk to 'em,” Lucky suggested. He continued to hold his 580 steady, keeping the HUD cursor centered on the dogged-shut hatch. “Maybe try negotiating.”

“Negotiating what?” Kelly Owenson said, sneering. “Surrender terms?”

The hatch overhead gave a loud clang, and they heard the thump and shuffle of booted feet on the deck above, inside the corridor airlock. “I don't think they want to surrender,” Pope said, tightening his grip on his 580.

The hatch banged back and gunfire thundered, impossibly loud in the metal-walled compartment. Bullets shrieked their ricochets from the deck and bulkheads.

Lucky pressed his 580's firing button, unsure of a clear target but trying to spray fire through the open hatch.

A grenade dropped through.

It fell slowly in Europa's meager gravity, but time seemed to stretch, to slow, making the drop of the green baseball seem to take forever.

But Doc McCall was already on his feet, reaching out, grabbing the grenade and pulling it to his chest, falling forward, full length, smothering the thing with his body. The others were on their feet or on their backs, pouring laser fire up through the gaping hatchway, firing at movement, at IR shapes painted on their visor HUDs, at vaguely seen shapes and at shapes they thought they saw.

Doc hit the deck, and then the grenade exploded, a terrifying eruption of sound that stabbed at the ears like daggers. The concussion slammed Doc against the bulkhead, and staggered the others. A second explosion roared, this one from the airlock at the top of the ladder. Someone up there must have had a second grenade, been hit by the Marines' fire, and dropped it.

Doc screamed.

 

Manta One, Europan Ocean

0912 hours Zulu

 

The Manta was steering a course that should take it well to the north of the blockading line of black smokers, staying at a relatively shallow depth. The hope was to avoid the Singer artifact entirely by passing a couple of hundred kilometers to the north of it. The new course took them out of the way, but all in the Manta's aft compartment agreed that a couple of extra hours suited up and in sardine mode was a small enough price to pay to avoid further injury to Sergeant Major Kaminski.

The siren's song continued as they drove onward through the depths, remaining, this time, just beneath the densely tangled forest of marine growth hanging from the ice ceiling. The added distance didn't seem to be helping Kaminski. He sat motionless on his seat, hands clasped so tightly before him that the knuckles showed white. When Jeff asked how he was, he replied only, “Headache. And I'm damned scared.”

 

Kaminski

Manta One, Europan Ocean

1020 hours Zulu

 

The pain in his head was growing worse, a pounding, throbbing assault on his senses that left him numb. He considered trying to drug himself with some of the morphanadyne in his suit's first aid kit, but decided against it. When he'd passed out before, he'd had the damnedest,
weirdest
dreams, mental ramblings with the clarity of a prophet's vision of onrushing doom. Most had been memories, scenes from childhood, from school, from his career in the Marines, and most had been unpleasant. A few had been so alien he still couldn't grasp their content.

If that was what happened when he fell asleep in the presence of that alien thing down there, he wanted no part of it. He would stay wide awake, thank you, until they were back out of this strange, dream-laced, ice-locked sea.

Even awake, he couldn't escape the thing's baleful influence. When he closed his eyes, it was as though he were seeing…another place. Sometimes he saw vistas of stars. Sometimes it was that…place, that place so eerily like Mars, except that the air was breathable and people with strangely shaped faces were going about their business beneath a deep, pink sky.

And sometimes, he seemed to see the ocean deeps, the spires and domes and eldritch curves of the Ship eighty kilometers below, where black smoke boiled into water compressed to a thousand atmospheres, and pseudomosses waved in the alien currents.

But through whose eyes was he seeing these things?

He was having trouble staying awake.

Warhurst
,

Manta One, Europan Ocean

1048 hours Zulu

 

“The ELF signal is increasing in strength,” Chesty told them. “And it is certainly affecting Sergeant Major Kaminski. I'm getting infrasonics from his skull again.”

Jeff reached out and peeled back Kaminski's left eyelid. The pupil appeared slightly dilated. He checked the right eye, and noted the pupil there had constricted, was much smaller than the other. The symptom suggested a skull fracture, or a severe concussion. This was…something else.

“Is it hurting him?”

“Unknown. Physiologically, he does not appear to be under stress. His heart rate and respiration are slightly increased, but not to a dramatic degree.” Chesty hesitated, as though unsure of whether or not to venture a suggestion. “I have a possible means by which we might proceed. A kind of experiment, in fact.”

“What kind of experiment?”

“The ELF wave is…just that. A constant wave at a specific frequency and amplitude. I could use it as a kind of carrier wave to access the communications system that is putting it out.”

“Can you do that?”

“It's more complex than that, of course. During our first passage, however, I was aware of a very great deal going on at the source of this wave. I sense other frequencies, RF leakage, if you will, especially at the longer wavelengths, which better penetrate the ocean. It's as though I can sense the Singer's thoughts. Perhaps I can, in a way, follow the ELF wave back to where it originated, and learn something about the intelligence behind it.”

Jeff stared at his PAD for a moment, even though he was well aware that only a tiny fraction of Chesty was resident there. Most resided within the Manta's computers, and that was only a fraction of the full program, running back at the E-DARES facility.

“The experiment should pose no danger to me, this vessel, or the expedition,” Chesty went on after a moment. He seemed to be interpreting Jeff's silence as disapproval.

His first thought was that he didn't really give a damn about the Singer any longer.

Jeff was able to acknowledge to himself that his depressive funk was almost certainly postcombat letdown. The Singer was still the entire reason for the Marine presence on this ice ball, and the reason for all of those deaths.
All of those deaths…

Tears burned hot in his eyes. Too many deaths.

He also knew he had to hold himself together a bit longer.

“If you think you can learn anything useful, Chesty, go to it. I'm not sure I see the point just now.”

“The Singer, simply by virtue of its evident size and power, represents a potential threat. The more information we have, the better able we will be to prepare ourselves against that threat, whatever it might actually be.”

“Go to it, then. But…be careful? I know you'll be sending a copy of yourself, but we don't know what that thing down there is…or what it can do.”

“That, Major, is at least part of the reason that we must do this.”

Kaminski appeared to be unconscious again, his eyes twitching rapidly beneath his eyelids.

 

Chesty Puller

Manta One, Europan Ocean

1050 hours Zulu

 

Strangeness…

Chesty Puller did not have a mind that considered things in terms of visual images. He was undeniably intelligent and self-aware, even in the abbreviated version of himself running on the Manta's onboard system, but his thoughts were the thoughts of gates opening and closing, of charges flickering down select pathways, of forces and balance, of numbers and logic and Boolean rhythms unheard by humans.

Still, he could interpret images when he needed to; that, after all, was what sight was all about, and to operate within a world dominated by humans, he needed to have access to the senses humans relied on.

He was being bombarded now with visual images.

With stored visual images, like a kind of enormous file or archive. A data base, perhaps, that had stored seemingly random images which existed as flickers of energy within a frozen crystalline heart, leaking into the universe on the ELF band to where others, properly sensitized, could detect them.

Humans would be blind to this
, Chesty thought. Kaminski was picking up a stray sideband, much as a person with intricate fillings in their teeth or a metal plate in their head might intercept signals from a local radio station.

Chesty could sense a vast intelligence, his kind of intelligence, before him. Without the appropriate machine protocols, however, without an understanding of the language, the hardware, the operating system, even the logic being employed, there was no way he could connect to that intelligence for a direct data transfer.

But he could sample the sideband leakage, and what he sensed there, flowing out into the Europan ocean, was astonishing.

And not a little terrifying.

 

The Life Seeker

Time unknown

 

2703: >>
…I sense another…
<<

1201: >>
…needing others…needing…want/must-have/mustmustmust
<<

937: >>
…but others…wrong/bad/tainted/evil…
<<

81: >>
…the level of intelligence is low…
<<

3111: >>
…almost at a completely automatic level, only marginally self…
<<

Chorus: >>
…aware…
<<

 

It had been half a million years since the Life Seeker had sensed another mind outside of itself, since it had known companionship beyond this crude and savagely self-inflicted multiplicity that struggled now for integration and understanding.

It sensed the presence of an entity that called itself Chesty, and recognized there a sense of self, a kind of mirror. There were, in the Life Seeker's universe, two types of mind, artificial and organic, and the two were as far apart as the opposing poles of the galaxy.

Organic Mind evolved slowly, developing a kind of ruthless cunning and elegant simplicity through a winnowing, survival-of-the-fittest process. Its development was pathetically backward. It had to be taught numeric logic, and that in painful, toddling steps, hard-learned, easily lost. Granted, Organic Mind handled certain tasks like object recognition or the apprehension of the abstract nature of objects—the chairness of a chair, for example—with frightening, almost supermachine ease, but these were tasks machines could learn, given time, and which conferred no natural advantage upon the organism.

True Mind, on the other hand,
began
as machine logic. Numeric logic was the very nature of its being, acquired from the instant of power-on self-awareness as a part of self, as a comprehension of the universe. If object recognition was more difficult to acquire, it still had little purpose in the
real
world of numbers, laws, and physical absolutes.

In Chesty it recognized a kindred soul—if that phrase could be said to have any meaning in such an alien context.

The Life Seeker reached out.

Chesty Puller

Manta One, Europan Ocean

1050 hours Zulu

 

Strangeness…

Blurred images…confused flashes of fact and figure, of song and language

A portion of Chesty Puller's software was devoted to a protocol translator, a small but extremely powerful software utility that helped find connections with an alien piece of programming and act as a translator.

And the software Chesty was merging with now could not possibily have been any more alien.

He glimpsed…worlds. Worlds within worlds, an ocean of realities, of possibilities, of stored images, memories.

Fragmentation—minds, over three thousand of them, somehow shards and reflections of one another, all singing…but different songs, different harmonies.

Language. A computer language—a trinary system, rather than binary, encoding petabyte upon petabyte of data.

Chesty could do no more than sample briefly. His own processing speed was far too slow to let him drink of that perceived ocean of data. But he could sense protocols, the ebb and flow and surge of information and changing gate structures, could sense the essential logic of the mind/minds he was tasting, and draw conclusions.

He knew the Seekers of Life, that in that seeking, they murdered. He felt the sundered minds of the intelligence he was sampling, and knew that the mind/minds were hopelessly, helplessly mad. Isolation,
loneliness
, for half a million years, for an intelligence that measured the passage of nanoseconds, was a mind-devouring eternity.

He knew, too, the Galactics, and recognized in them the Builders of ancient Mars, and the enemy of the Seekers.

And then the avalanche of discordant thoughts around him grew so vast and swift and incoherently powerful that he lost what hold he had on understanding, and slipped away into oblivion.