Portal-eARC (24 page)

Joe shrugged. “I’m sure she wasn’t
designed
for an underwater plunge, unlike the probe capsule on
Athena
. But the fact I’m not seeing water down there at the bottom is a good sign. She’s holding the pressure—and it’s a fair amount of pressure. If we live through this, I’ll want to give her designers a big ol’ hug.She could spring a leak any minute, but we just have to hope that doesn’t happen.”

The elimination of immediate panic gave her a moment to realize something else was wrong. “Maddie? Larry? Anyone? Are you there?”

“Don’t bother,” Joe said. “Radio waves won’t penetrate water, at least not at the high frequencies we usually use.”

“Can we change the frequency?”

Joe thought a moment. “You know, we probably can. Most radios these days are actually just given a factory setting that locks the wavelength. They’re not like the radios from forty years ago that were built to handle only a very narrow band. And I’ll bet somewhere in the settings of
these
things there’s some flexibility. Maybe not enough, though. Getting through…” he glanced again at the rope, measuring, “…um, two, three meters of water and another half to one meter of ice with
stuff
dissolved in it, that’s going to be a challenge. In
theory
the software-defined radios are capable of almost any frequency, but in practice I dunno if I can get us down from the gigahertz range we generally play in—higher for some applications—and into the low megahertz I’ll need to penetrate the water.”

“Worth trying. We need to get some kind of contact going.” She glanced up again.
So close
. “Will they even be able to
receive
a signal like that, though?”

“If I don’t miss my guess, A.J. will be scanning every wavelength known to man until he gets you back. Don’t worry, if I start transmitting and it gets through, he’ll hear us.”

She sat on the back of one of the other chairs for a few moments, thinking. “What
happened
up there? I mean, I understand we had a quake, but I thought the water would keep on going up.”

“So’d I. I’m not sure, but I’d guess the cavern got sealed off, the evaporating water filled it with gas, and the floor was rising in the quake, squeezing the pressure higher.” He shrugged. “The fact is we’ve done a lot of lab playing with these things, but as anyone who’s worked with models can tell you, sometimes you get very strange shifts in behavior when you get enough bigger or smaller. We’ve never actually spent time on a planet at cryogenic temperatures and played around with massive amounts of water and supercooled ice. The physics doesn’t change, but the interactions of all the elements can surprise you sometimes. Probably some factor, or factors, that we just don’t know right now.”

He looked up from the panels he had been checking. “Well, it doesn’t matter what happened, it happened, and we didn’t get crushed, or worse caught in a short-lived tidal bore that froze us inside it. And we’re not going to freeze to death; temperature’s levelled out at 12 degrees C—almost 54 Fahrenheit.”

After a pause, she glanced down. “You know, the water’s actually not all that clear. I mean, it’s
clear
, so to speak, probably clearer than any water I’ve seen in an ocean back home…but there’s stuff drifting in it.” She let herself drop slowly to the rover’s rear window, stopping herself just short. “I can stand on this, can’t I?”

“Probably, but it’s taking a lot of pressure from the outside. Be on the safe side and don’t.”

She got her face closer to the curved reinforced diamond laminate window. “Definitely little particles. And the way the light shades—you can see that the water has very slow currents in it with different distributions of dissolved material, probably why you get that wavy striping in the ice.”

“So it’s circulating? Interesting. Why would that be happening? There’s no open ocean, no winds, no interaction with an atmosphere.”

“Well, you’ve got the squishing motion of Jupiter, first of all. If it’s dissipating enough energy to keep a hundred kilometers of ocean liquid, it’s moving it quite a bit.” She found the view somewhat vertiginous; there were no steady reference points, and as they were in fact over an effectively infinite abyss…“Larry and Anthony were torn over whether there’d be enough energy to give Europa an active rocky center, but if it is, then you’d have rock movement affecting things too. And—”

She froze for a moment, long enough for Joe to turn and say, “And?”

“Joe,” she said, very carefully, moving nothing but her lips, “get me camera three, the one we left in here. Make sure it’s set for minimum distance.”

“What’s up?” Joe asked.

She stared at the window, or rather, at what lay just a few inches beyond it.

Something almost transparent, a shimmer like a tiny sliver of ice.

But ice did not move against the drifting current with the blurred beating of tiny legs.

Joe arrived with the camera, followed her gaze, and stared. “No way.”

“It’s
alive
, Joe. Moving, eating, breathing
extraterrestrial life
!”

She started the camera running, glanced up at Joe, whose grin was slowly widening to match her own. She turned back, making sure the camera followed the little creature precisely. She couldn’t make out exactly what it looked like, but enhancement of the imagery would help there. The important thing was just to make sure this moment was recorded.
Even if we don’t live to be rescued, someone may recover
Zarathustra
eventually. And this will be there, waiting.
“Joe, since we
are
in this ocean, can you give me a reading on the oxygen concentration?”

“Do I look like A.J.?” Joe said, but without rancor. He clambered back up. “The external sensing suite wasn’t made with this in mind, but lemme try.”

A second creature joined the first, and the two moved around each other in a slow spiralling dance that she captured in the memory of the camera.

“Quite a bit,” Joe reported. “I can’t be sure, but I think it’s about ten to fifteen milligrams per liter. There’s a bunch of other stuff dissolved in it too.”

“My god. That’s…that’s more than enough to support just about anything from Earth. Anything water-breathing, anyway. And the temperature’s not much below normal freezing.” She shook her head, amazed. “And that colored stuff…has to be nutrients. Don’t know the source, but there’s an
ecosystem
here, Joe!”

The smile suddenly faded from his face.

“What’s wrong, Joe?”

“I just realized, we were looking at the whole situation wrong.”

Helen tried to figure out what he was saying, gave up. “What situation? What do you—”

“
Our
situation, here, Helen.” He looked up. “It’s not
comfortable
in here, but we can survive—as long as
Zarathustra
doesn’t suddenly decide to give up the ghost—for a long time. But Larry and Maddie—”

Oh, goddamn it.
Joe didn’t have to spell it out. “They’ve got no real shelters, only whatever food their suits has in the units, and however much breathing their current charge can give them.”

He nodded. “Now, that’s not terribly limited—we all charged up prior to this cycle, and if Maddie doesn’t overdo things they might have a week or even two of air. But by that point the waste recycler will be full. Long and the short of it is that
they’re
the ones in trouble.”

“But
Athena
…” she trailed off.

“Yeah,
Athena
. That option was predicated on the—entirely reasonable—assumption that we’d all retreat inside
Zarathustra
and live in cramped but not impossible style for a few weeks while
Athena
bored down to our level.”

“Can’t they speed her up?” Helen realized just what horror they were contemplating. If the tunnel had collapsed, there was no way out.

“Some,” Joe admitted, “but I’m not sure that
Athena
could make a kilometer in that time even if they redline her and ignore all safety interlocks and protocols.

“No, the fact is, Maddie’s not going to be able to rescue us.
We
have to rescue
her
.”

Chapter 31.

“We’re not getting out of this alive, are we?” Larry said slowly.

“I’m not giving up yet, Larry,” Madeline said, staring down at the pathetically small collection of equipment, “But I admit I’m not immediately seeing an answer to this problem.”

Besides the tremendously strong carbonan-reinforced rope, of which they had another hundred meters not committed to the vital task of keeping
Zarathustra
in place, they had about a dozen of the explosive-driven spikes or pitons, three cameras of three different types, small sample collection devices, two space-qualified rock hammers of an alloy that remained tough even in extreme low temperatures, two suit multitools, a couple of scientific instruments, and one recharging pack.

“Well, the recharge pack can recharge our suits, right?” Larry asked.

“It’s a universal connector, so yes.” She checked the charge. “And just about enough for one recharge for one of us, or half a charge for both. If we do a lot of exertion, which I have to assume we will, that leaves about a week of life support, maybe a week and a half, for both of us. The concentrates in the suits will last a few days, so starving won’t be the problem.”

“We
might
be able to get to you in that time,” A.J. said. “The quake and collapse actually gave us a route down to the tunnel region that goes at least halfway down to where you are. No telling how long the crack will stay open, but we’re bringing
Athena
up fast and we’ll drag her over and get down—”

“Absolutely
not.
” Madeline said. “I don’t want
more
of us getting potentially trapped down here!”

“Agent Fathom,” Hohenheim’s voice said, “as a commanding officer I appreciate your sentiments, but I believe that there is not one of us who will accept them, any more than you would accept such orders in our circumstances. If you and the others still have even the slightest chance of being rescued, you must realize that we must, and will, do all in our power to do so.”

She smiled wryly. “You’re…correct, General. I would not accept anyone telling me not to effect a rescue, I shouldn’t expect anyone else to pay attention to me in that area. But—
realistically,
A.J.—what chances do you think we have?”

“To rescue you…fair. If that gap doesn’t close up on us, which it sure could. Depends on where the blockage is. Without another rover, we’ll have to drag
Athena
there and lower her with hand devices. None of us are decent hands with explosives, and anyway even if we were, and had enough, no telling what would happen if we tried to blow our way through whatever obstacles there are, so melting’s our only option.”

Something about “melting” nagged at Madeline, but rather than try to force the thought out, she just noted it carefully for later contemplation. “You’ll have to run her laterally. Can she
handle
that?”

“Er…not my department. Mia, you have anything?”

“Let me think.” A few moments went by. “If we can fabricate something like some simple rails for it to rest on…Brett?”

“If you’ll help me with the design, we should. The heavy workshop equipment from
Odin
made the rails for the centrifuge, the same basic operations should give you what you need. It just has to be portable enough to go down with
Athena
, and we have to figure out a connector that allows the probe to keep the rails sliding forward with her.”

“That still leaves Helen and poor Joe,” Jackie said quietly. “How can we get
them
back?”

“Assuming they’re still alive,” Horst said bluntly. “There is no telling if there was damage to Zarathustra. You have heard nothing from them yet, yes?”

“No,” Maddie said, trying to ignore the chill that had nothing to do with her surroundings. “But based on the angles and how much line was used, they’re hanging suspended in water slightly more than two meters down. Their radios simply can’t reach us through that.”

“Can they adjust the wavelength to get through?”

“I…don’t think so,” A.J. said glumly. “Water’s a bitch to transmit through at reasonable frequencies, and from what the sensors picked up during that…event, there’s a fair amount of salts dissolved in that water. At the power levels they can transmit, they’d have to drop the transmitter wavelength to about forty to fifty kilohertz, and it’s not designed to vary
that
much.”

There was a pause, a dead space of air that caused the waiting gloom to try to close its cold, aching hand around her heart. Then General Hohenheim spoke.

“Well, we have limited time. Jackie, right now Mr. Baker is the only man topside on Europa, and he cannot move all the components by himself. We must immediately go to help. Is it possible to perform orbital transfer with the reaction mass we have?”

“General, you’re saying you want to move
Odin
now?”

“If it is possible, yes. There is urgency now that there was not before, and if we can place
Odin
in orbit about Europa, the entire operation will be made easier. Can it be done?”

“Well…Yes. We wanted another load from
Munin
so we had more margin, but there’s enough to make the transfer of orbit now. I would feel a
lot
more comfortable if we could take some more time to check the auxiliary systems, but in theory we could start right now. Well, whenever we hit the right point in orbit for transfer.”

“And when will that next transfer window arrive?”

Andrew LaPointe answered immediately. “Twenty-seven hours, seven minutes, General.”

“Then you have a full day, Dr. Secord. I would recommend we take full advantage of that time to ready anything else we believe will be useful.”

“Thank you, General,” Madeline said. “The major remaining problem I must still discuss, however. Assuming that we can be reached, the problem is still reaching our friends under the ice.”

“I do not wish to sound pessimistic,” Dr. Masters said, “but are we sure it is ‘under’ and not ‘within’ the ice?”