Portal-eARC (30 page)

Free space transmission distance: 0.0000 meters. Damn
. “I think I’ve hit the edge of one of the slabs.
Huge
solid block, beyond the limits of the current network to resolve. Sparse nodes at this point, having to build network around edges to find route farther in.
If there
is
a route farther in.
He felt nausea, now, and swallowed.
There
has
to be a way in.

Transmission distance: 0.0023 meters.
“Found corner, definitely intersection of Alpha and Beta slabs.” He brought his rush of relief up short with two inarguable facts. “Power for network dropping rapidly. Even duty-cycling among all candidate nodes won’t let me keep this going much longer. And we’ve still got a ways to go.”

Have to set up a cycling wave, move out, come back with summary data, minimum calculations, do the calculations at the base station here. Won’t have much left even then, given the volume of data’s going to be pretty big with the incoming relay. Free space transmission distance: 0.0002 meters.
“Solid ice at seventy meters. Seventy five. Eighty…”

Almost out of power.
He heard Jackie whispering something under her breath. It might have been a prayer, or maybe just hope.

“Still ice at ninety meters. Network response very sluggish. Ninety-five meters,
still
ice, dammit, I—”

Free space transmission distance: 52.6010 meters.

For a moment he couldn’t quite read the numbers; they were suddenly all blurry. But he didn’t have to read them after seeing them once. “There’s an empty void fifty-two meters wide at the ninety-six and a half meter mark.
And there!
A flash on the emission band of
Zarathustra
’s headlights!”

He stopped talking. He couldn’t talk for a few minutes, just sat there, feeling tears streaming down his face in relief, and he didn’t give a damn that everyone in the base tent could see it, was probably staring at him. “You did it, Maddie. God-
damn
, you
DID IT!
”

It sounded like ten times as many people were cheering as were actually available in the Europa system. When it finally died down, he heard Maddie’s voice—
was it just a tiny bit unsteady? I guess she’s got every right to be worried too—
say “We
all
did it, A.J. Almost everyone had something to say about this—and I admit it freely—crazy idea. And we were lucky.”

“Seven times lucky,” Brett said. “Best guess was you had one in seven of pulling this off, after all the numbers were in.”

There was a moment of quiet. “Then thank
you
, Brett, for not telling me earlier,” Maddie said finally. “A.J., can we get a message to Joe and Helen?”

Damn again
. “Not now. The last power of my nearby relays is kaput. We’ve got to get into the cavern before we’ll be able to do anything more.”

“Then we should begin doing that immediately,” Hohenheim said. “All those near end-of-shift, please go rest. The remainder, join me and Mia. It is once more
Athena
’s turn.” His smile was bright. “And this time she has only ninety-six meters to go.”

Chapter 38.

“I
hate
this silence,” Helen said. The too-cool interior of
Zarathustra
, its vertical and thus alien orientation, and especially the
not-knowing
were beginning to wear on her, even through the fascination of where she was and what she was learning.

“We’re still alive to hear the sound of silence,” Joe pointed out. “That’s a good thing. And I can give you some more good news.”

“What’s that?”

Joe pointed up. “Well, we knew they detonated the charges—we saw some of that on the relay before it went dead. And I just did some test flashes, and according to the calculations it’s still going into empty air—or rather, vacuum—at about the same level as before. Which means they didn’t completely bury us.”

“That
does
sound like good news,” she admitted, but she couldn’t ignore the nagging nervousness. “They
could
have buried us enough to make the whole rescue impossible, though, couldn’t they?”

“Maybe,” Joe conceded reluctantly. “Though as long as they can reach us at all there’s still a chance. I admit they really
do
need space to work
Athena
, and if
Athena
hits
Zarathustra
—even a glancing blow—we’re probably done. And the vibrations of impact were pretty big, so they
did
bring down one hell of a lot of the ceiling.”

That sparked a thought. “I wonder…” She grabbed up the camera and carefully made her way down to the bottom. “Dim the lights a bit, would you?”

Joe complied. “What’s up?”

“Well, it’s effectively always black down here, so any living creatures would either have to make their own light, or they’d have to sense things by other means, just as deep-sea creatures on earth do,” Helen answered, trying to let her eyes adapt to the blackness below. “One of the most common senses would be acoustic or vibration sensing. And any kind of unusual vibration would probably be worth investigating—it might be a new food source, unless the type of vibration seemed dangerous. So all the activity up there, culminating in the huge vibrations involved in collapsing the cavern—”

“—might draw something to investigate. Yeah, I see.” Joe glanced up. “But the quakes have got to make a lot of vibrations too, so why would our—comparatively tiny—activity be different?”

“Patterns, Joe,” she said.
Was that…something?
It was very hard to tell, sometimes, if you were seeing anything. Everything from the other tiny creatures moving across the glass to the annoying “floaters” inside her own eye could seem for a moment like distant, phantom objects barely visible against the velvet darkness. “The exact pattern of the sounds will be like a fingerprint.” She smiled. “Remember, I’m married to Mister Sensor himself, he’s given me lots of lectures on the subject of detecting particular signals. Animals are very,
very
good at discriminating between various signals, and I’m sure that the acoustic or vibration signature of a deliberately detonated and collapsed cavern is a lot different from that of a general earthquake.”

Something
is
moving
. She triggered the camera. “I think we have company coming, Joe.”

Joe Buckley did not have an enthusiastic expression at the thought of something unknown being on its way to visit, and—to tell the truth—she wasn’t entirely happy about it. But on the other hand, there wasn’t much either of them could do about it, so she might as well at least record it. “What, exactly, is coming?”

“I haven’t any real idea, Joe. I just know it’s a lot larger than anything we’ve seen before.” The undefinable shape disappeared into the unrelieved gloom. Then it reappeared again, from its original direction, but this time she thought it was just a tiny bit closer.
I don’t know if I like that
. It reminded her of something, and as she watched it vanish again and slowly reappear from another direction, this time definitely closer, a faint luminescence outlining what seemed to be a long winged cylinder, she realized that its motions were very much like those of a deep-ocean shark, slowly examining some unknown object in its patrol area.

“
How much
larger?”

“I’m not sure, it’s hard to tell without any sense of scale.” She thought for a moment. “You know, I’ll bet we
could
get a sense of scale if your computers are up for some instant triangulation.”

Joe raised an eyebrow. She glanced back down, saw the unknown creature disappearing again. “If you flash both side rear lights at max power, and take an image from both rear cameras, you’d get two shadow-cones going off from it which would give you a really good…”

“…stereo match, yes I would. You’ll become one of us engineers yet, Helen. That kind of image comparison’s built right into
Zarathustra
’s autonomic nav circuits. Let me just tweak the parameters a bit…Okay. Next time it shows up, tell me when and I’ll hit the lights for a split second; close your eyes so it doesn’t blind you, you want to still be dark adapted afterwards.”

“Got you.” She watched closely, waiting.

Once more the unknown swam lazily into view, the vague luminous outline hinting at undulation and texture. “Hit it, Joe!”

She closed her eyes; even so, the blaze of light was momentarily dazzling. She blinked her eyes clear. “Joe, did you get it?” There was no sign of the phantom creature visible now.

“Got it. Range was…a hundred meters away. The visible part of the thing covered eight degrees, which means it was about fourteen meters long.”

“Jesus. That’s almost as long as a T-Rex.”

“And ugly, too,” Joe said. “Take a look at—oh,
SHIT!”

Helen looked back down and leapt backward reflexively, smacking herself into the forward port.

Flashing in multiple colors, in patterns sharp and clashing, the creature was rushing up from the depths.
The flash…it must have seemed like a challenge or a threat.
The winged-torpedo shape, something like the body of a squid but tripartite, a familiar body plan indeed, the same body plan that had got her
into
this mess, the thing was several times longer than
Bemmius Secordii
had ever been. Backward pointing spines covered its exterior surface, which in the lowered glow of the rear lights seemed nobbled, gray-green and tough like rhino hide. It broke off the charge only ten meters from
Zarathustra
, and the wash of its passage made the whole ten-ton rover wobble. In that moment it had snapped at the water, a threat-gesture that exposed a three-sided mouth with black cutting planes and shredding points farther in. Short, thick grasping tentacles writhed at each corner of the mouth, and at the base of each tentacle glittered a small, but unmistakable yellow-green eye.

“Dammit, that’s pissed it off. What do we do now?”

Helen had no idea. On the one hand, lighting it up had triggered the problem; on the other, if they didn’t do it again that might be taken as a sign of weakness.
Compound the error or be too cautious?
Still…the thing had other senses. “Wait and hope, Joe. We’re
not
living, and this thing might be able to tell that in a few minutes.”

“Maybe, I guess.” She saw him strapping into the seat. “You’d better get braced, though.”

She had already had the same thought; even so, she had barely grabbed one side of the seat straps when the thing tore through the water at them again, this time missing
Zarathustra
by less than five meters, the short tentacles lashing out at closest approach and nearly brushing the rover’s side. “What the hell can we do?”

Joe’s face was grim, reflected in the curved forward port. “Improvise.”

As the thing appeared again, Joe engaged the drive, spun the wheels quickly; the force against the water bounced
Zarathustra
upward and sideways, and at the unexpected movement the monster balked, sheered off at the last minute. She shuddered as she heared a rumbling shriek and realized the exterior microphones had just transmitted the thing’s vocalization of anger.

This time it arrowed in from the side, coming in to grasp the entire rover, tentacles whipping out, curling around the rear end of
Zarathustra
.

The jolt nearly gave her whiplash as the creature let go,
thrust
the rover away and ran with a screech of obvious pain. “Ow…What happened?”

Despite the gravity of the situation, Joe chuckled. “Grabbed the radiators, that’s what happened. Bet he’s sucking his burned little tentacles and wondering what
that
was.”

Helen wondered if it was over, now. But she remembered studying about apex predators. It depended on what
type
you were dealing with, and exactly what instinctual triggers you set off. She was suddenly very afraid she knew what was coming next.

And there it was, looming up, cruising at speed along the very top of the ice.
We’re a rival, something challenging it in its section of this huge ocean, and once a duel like this happens it won’t back down unless we beat it in some way it understands.

The thing curved around, circled once, then shrieked another challenge and lunged.

But at that same time she saw Joe make a convulsive movement in the control chair.

Both manipulator arms, rated at a ton and a quarter lift capacity, lashed outward. One of the reinforced carbonan arms tore straight through one of the Europan monster’s grasping tentacles; the other smashed directly to the side of the open mouth, shattering two of the cutting plates—and plunging into the yellow-green eye.

It wasn’t so much a sound as a red-hot dagger slammed through both her eardrums, and
Zarathustra
rang like a bell with a final smashing impact. But the thing was fleeing, trailing phosphorescent blood, yielding the field to this immobile yet painfully dangerous foe.

“Good work, Joe.”

He grunted. “I hope so. As long as he doesn’t have any friends.” He indicated a light on the control panel. “And as long as
our
friends don’t take too long.”

She could see the slow amber blink, and a sinking lead weight seemed to form in her gut. “What is it?”

“Outer lock seal,” he said. “I’m not showing any water in the lock
yet
…” he continued, “but it’s damaged somehow. In some ways, we’d better
hope
it’s going to start leaking soon.”

She stared at Joe, puzzled. “Um…why?”

“Because one of the
other
ways it could have been damaged is to have the door warped enough that it
won’t open
.”

Chapter 39.

A dull
thuddoom!
echoed through Madeline’s suit and vibrated in her boots as all the compressed water vapor in the tunnel abruptly vented, the momentary hurricane tearing at her and the others before turning back to essential, silent vacuum.

“We’re
through!
” Jackie shouted, and Maddie joined in the cheer. “Maddie, A.J.’s sacked out. Do you think—”

“No problem. Just get
Athena
far enough out of this tunnel so the rest of us can get out too. Then I’ll want to check the whole area’s integrity before we start faking up the atmosphere.”