Portal-eARC (29 page)

“I will be setting the demolition charges to bring the cavern down in a specific manner in three hours,” Madeline said. Two days had been enough for her to recover and get back into the game; Larry would be resting still for another couple. His brush with death had been
very
close and Petra was not going to take chances.
And none of us want her to, except Larry. We’ve been damned lucky so far, and we’re not even close to out of the woods yet. We can’t afford any chances above and beyond the ones we’ve already determined we’ll take.

“Why three hours?” Horst asked.

“Because I’m going to take a couple hours nap and get a bite to eat, because any time you work with explosives you want to be very, very sharp.”

“Indeed, Agent Fathom,” Hohenheim said. “And as all of you will then be working in an area just recently blasted, and this is of course itself quite dangerous, I insist that all of the rest of us take the same opportunity to rest.”

He’s almost always using our titles and last names. Which ought to feel cold
, mused A.J., even as he heard himself say “No argument here, General.”
But it doesn’t
. In point of fact, A.J. realized, he found General Hohenheim’s constant formality to be somehow comforting. He thought about
why
that might be as he put down an insulating pad and leaned back to rest.
I think it’s because it’s so
civilized
. You get in a lifeboat situation and things get informal, which is sort of nice, but also it can remind you that you’re a long way from the real home, the real
control
, that you’re used to.

A.J. had long since learned to take rest when the opportunity presented itself; he took a nap.

Sometime later, his suit buzzed. “What?”

“You actually slept four hours,” Madeline’s voice informed him cheerfully. “Which is good, because I’m almost done setting all the charges and I want your dust to verify that it’s in exactly the right places.”

“I’ll be ready momentarily. Lemme grab a bite.” He bounced his way to the pressurized shelter they’d put in one of the caves outside the pressure doors, dropped his helmet after entering, and grabbed a sandwich wrap. Once his initial hunger was satisfied, he brought up the displays. “Okay, I used drive dust for this, after Horst pointed out that I ought to be able to get that level of operation out of it. But that means it’ll take a little longer to build up a picture.”

It did
lag
, A.J. had to admit. It reminded him of the old days—what, almost twelve years ago?—when he’d had to wait, and wait, and wait for
Ariel
to send back the pictures from Phobos and then respond to his commands. Slowly, sketchily, a shadowy outline began to build up in the 3-D Virtual Retinal Display image. “Okay, starting to get something…
Damn
this thing’s complex. Horst, it’s a good thing we
are
using the drive dust on this. Mapping out everywhere it’s cracked, all the angles, the sheer
volume
we’re having to cover…It’s ugly. Okay, Brett, you’ve got Maddie’s placement and the characteristics of the charges, I’m sending you the full-scale map. Near as I can tell, she’s in the places she wanted to be, but I haven’t
any
idea if that’s the right place to do the job she wants.”

“Received you fine,” Brett’s slightly New Zealand accent answered. “The model will take a few seconds to run, it’s incorporating everything we’ve learned so far plus the regular models.”

Mentally A.J. crossed his fingers. They had to depend on Maddie’s demolition skills, and the models Brett could give them. They could get
some
advice from back home, but in the end it came down to what they could do HERE.
I love my automation, USVs, all of them—no one loves ’em more than I do. But there isn’t yet an automated system built that could do half the stuff we’ve had to do on Europa, it’s still all really clever artificial stupidity. Of course, on the other hand if human beings weren’t
here
, we just wouldn’t be bothering to do all this crazy stuff—the ships would be left to stay where they crashed, the probe would be stuck under the ice and whoever built it would have to suck it up and take whatever data they’d already gotten.

“All right, Maddie. As best I can tell, you’re in the best position to do the job. No idea if it will really work, though.”

Madeline gave a tired laugh. “
No
idea? Aren’t your simulations giving you
some
idea?”

“Yeah, but I’d rather not look at that.”

Her voice was as serious as A.J. suddenly felt. “Odds aren’t good?”

“They’re great. Given the situation. Which is unprecedented.”

“Never tell me the odds,” A.J. muttered.

“On reflection, I agree with A.J.,” Maddie said, and he saw her flash a grin at him in the display. “Tell me
after
we succeed how bad my chances were.”

“As you wish,” Brett answered. His smile was only slightly forced.

“All right, everyone. I’m coming out.” A.J. watched her make one last check of the position and securing of each of the charges, then come through the two airlock doors. “This is it. Everyone confirm your positions, please.”

“Me and Helen, still under the night-black sea of Europa,” Joe answered dryly.

“Thank you, Joe,” Maddie said with a wry smile; A.J. gave his friend a thumbs-up. “I mean, of course, those on Europa who are in any position to
not
be affected by this maneuver.”

“I’m in the base tent,” A.J. said.

“Same here,” Jackie said.

All the others on Europa echoed this, except for Petra Masters and Larry Conley, both of whom were onboard
Munin
, and Hohenheim, who simply said, “Beside you, Agent Fathom,” since he, also, was standing just the other side of the exterior of the two makeshift airlock doors.

“Then…blast in ten seconds. Nine…”

A.J. found he was holding his breath.
If this doesn’t work…we will have buried Helen and Joe so far under the ice that I don’t think we’ll EVER reach them.
He closed his eyes and gave another silent prayer to whatever might be listening.
I don’t care, too much, what happens to me…

“…six…five…four…”

…
Just let us save her and my friend Joe.

“…two…one…
Fire in the hole!”

Compared to the quake that had caused all the trouble, the detonations weren’t even a quiver. There was nothing to see or feel this far away, and the “technically an atmosphere” was a harder vacuum than almost anything produced on Earth; no sound would penetrate.

And Europa’s feeble gravity conspired to draw out the tension. For a moment, it appeared that all the preparation, all the worry, had been for nothing; A.J. couldn’t see a single sign of movement anywhere. “Um…Maddie…”

“Wait,” she said calmly.

There
. The telemetry showed movement now, one set of Faerie Dust staying where it had been, the other sets moving away from their prior comrades. “We have separation, multiple areas.” He noticed some red dots. “Five charges still undetonated. Is that correct?”

“Confirmed,” Brett and Madeline said simultaneously. “Five charges remain to be detonated.”

A collection of Faerie Dust near the doorway areas transmitted the scene; multiple showers of powdered ice from detonation points, the powder falling ahead of the gigantic slabs now moving downward, shattering the remaining ethereal decorations to powder, destroying beauty a million years in the making for the sake of two lives that still might never be saved.
And I’d sacrifice this and every museum on Earth for Helen,
he admitted to himself, even as he winced in sympathetic horror with the breaking of each unique, irreplaceable formation.

Three huge slabs were in motion now, their bases striking the cavern’s floor almost simultaneously, then tilting ponderously, majestically, terrifying in its vastness, white and deep blue and gray and black moving through the air like the descent of a Jotun’s axe, and suddenly they were shadows, dim suggestion of movement as two of the lights remaining were crushed.

But now the unstoppable collapse was visible in an eldritch outline of innumerable tiny flickers and flashes as the ice collided, cracked, split. “What the hell is
that?
” murmured Horst.

“Triboluminescence, or more precisely, fractoluminescence,” Larry said, awe in his voice as he answered. “Light’s generated by the breaking of the ice itself. I’ve seen it in miniature…but this ain’t miniature.”

Two blazes of actinic light momentarily illuminated the entire cavern, a strobe-light picture of cataclysm in progress; colliding slabs of ice the size of skyscrapers filled the space with flying icy powder. “Oh my
God
…” A.J. heard himself say.
There’s no way this can work, no way, we’ve
killed
them!

“Second-stage detonations complete,” Brett’s voice said calmly. “Alpha slab now cut at the sixty-percent mark. Rotation beginning.”

Watch, dammit. If it works, if it doesn’t, you damn well better
watch
!

The simulations hadn’t given the impression of size, the chaos of collision, and he still could barely make out what Brett was talking about, how the largest slab’s top had just been cut by two charges so it was folding over and sliding slightly backwards.
God, this is
insane
. Yet…it’s the only chance we’ve got.

“Contact on all primaries,” Brett said. “Box forming. Top coming down.”

A three-sided box. It was such a simple idea, yet so impossibly hard to imagine even Maddie could pull this off.
And Brett’s tied into the data feeds now, he can see more than
I
can right now.
“Brett, are the sides intact?
Are they holding?
”

“No sign of cracks in the primaries yet,” Brett said. “Top closure impact in four, three, two, one…”

The slab slammed down atop the other three—still settling into uneasy equilibrium—in a spray of atomized ice and a blaze of fractoluminescence.
Stay intact, please…

“Third-stage detonations on schedule.”

Now the final charges went off, and
this
was the most insane part of the entire crazy idea. The area had to be sealed off and held down, held down so securely that over a megapascal of pressure, a hundred fifty pounds per square inch, could be held back over such a volume that the total pressure would be millions of tons. Not all the mass ever lifted into space by the entire human species could hope to resist such absolute power.

But the power of an entire moon just might.

Slowly, inexorably, the top of the cavern crumbled, began to come down. First a shower, barely a trickle, a few thousands of tons of granite-hard ice sifting down about and over the ice-box, which now looked utterly vulnerable, tiny compared to the slow-motion juggernaut of destruction that was bearing down upon it. As more and more of the cavern collapsed, larger chunks rained down, greater fall meaning greater impact…but the box had been designed to reinforce itself, take pressure, and once the first shower started building up around it, that would brace it some, but…
but the model only said it
could
work, not that it
would
.

And now there was nothing to see, the aggregation of Faerie Dust that had served as a camera hammered and scattered, some even crushed, by the impact of the ice all around it. Only scattered sensor readings now, things moving too fast, too
huge
, to be apprehended in their entirety by scattered little sensor motes.

The chaotic vibrations reached a crescendo…and began to diminish. “Topside sensors show a settling in corresponding area. Fractures propagated all the way to surface, settling now.”

“A.J.,” Madeline said quietly. “Your turn.”

For a moment he couldn’t make himself do it.
What if we failed?

But he’d never know one way or another if he didn’t try. “On it. Trying to re-establish network connectivity.”

The problem was of course that he had to force a signal through the ice, and then get it relayed. The motes could vary their transmission frequency quite widely, but the power at their disposal remained exceedingly low even at full charge. The motes were also going to be very low on power at this point; unlike places on Earth or even Mars, there simply wasn’t any energy around to scavenge. What they had left was whatever they hadn’t used yet. He’d charged them fully before this stunt, but still…

Getting something.
“Okay. Preliminary results show I’m down about seventy-three percent in connectivity. Packet relay’s going to be a bitch, especially through ice rather than free space. Network rebuild proceeding from inner lock.” He set the network up to update the free-space transmission range in the direction of
Zarathustra
.

Well, there’s the first good news. Free space transmission distance: 2.4130 meters.
“Integrity of inner lock and surrounding ice appears to be complete. No sign of additional cracking. We’ve lost about half of the entry hallway to the door, but it’s still got two, two and a half meters of clear space on the other side. Rest is filled with ice.

Now the hard part.
God
my gut hurts, I’m so tense.
“As we expected, all connection with
Zarathustra
was lost; no relay circuits survived and if any internal relays near the floor of the cavern still exist they can’t transmit through this much ice anyway. Network rebuild continuing.”

He tried to keep the tension and fear from his voice as he went on. “Network now extends ten meters out from original entryway.”
Free space transmission distance: 0.0005 meters.
“Ice is still compacting, some sign of slow pressure-driven flow.”

“That’s good,” Jackie said, her tone not fooling A.J. any more than his was probably fooling them. “That’ll do a lot of the sealing for us, before we start venting water vapor.”

“Twenty meters, still all ice.” He swallowed. Zarathustra
’s one hundred twenty meters out and about thirty down. And we need at least twenty meters of clear space around them to operate
Athena
in.

Free space transmission distance, 0.0060 meters.
“Forty meters, ice mostly larger chunks here, but still cracking under pressure. Picking up some fractoluminescence. Ice sand is sifting down, probably will end up binding to the larger chunks.”