Authors: Allen Steele
“This isn’t Earth,” Jose said.
“No, it isn’t.” Walter shrugged. “And that’s a good point. We’ve been on Europa for only a few weeks. Do we really think we’ve learned everything there is to know about this place?”
“You sound like you’re defending her.” Yvonne’s eyes narrowed.
Walter frowned, but before he could respond, Danzig politely coughed in his hand. “I think we’d all benefit from looking at this a bit more even-handedly. We’re still investigating the matter. That’s why I’m here … and why she’s here, too.”
“Yeah … right.” Jose raised a skeptical eyebrow. “I’m sure she’s eager for you to unearth all the facts.”
“In fact, she is. She requested to join me when I came here … and she’s also asked to do something else.” Danzig looked at Yvonne again. “We’d like to take down DSV-2.”
Her eyes widened in disbelief. “You
what?
”
“We want to go for another dive. Evangeline will be the pilot, and I’ll be the passenger.” He smiled slightly. “As I said … this is her idea, not mine.”
“She … what …?” Yvonne shook her head as if to clear it. “Why does she want to …?”
“She continues to insist that there’s a large creature down there, and she wants another crack at confirming its existence.” Danzig paused. “Given the accusations made against her, I think she deserves that chance. So I’m going with her as an impartial witness.”
Yvonne stared at him; for the first time since they’d sat down at the conference table, she was utterly speechless. Jose nodded in agreement, albeit reluctantly. “I think she’s right,” Walter said at last. “If there’s any way she can prove her story, she should be given the opportunity to do so.” He turned to Yvonne. “Can you prep DSV-2 for another dive in—” he glanced at his watch “—four hours? Five?”
Danzig was startled by the immediacy of Walter’s request. Then he remembered that Europa’s day was almost 43 hours long. It was still morning in the Conamara Chaos; sunset wouldn’t come for many hours yet. There was no point in waiting longer than they needed to send down DSV-2. Yvonne reluctantly nodded, and Walter pushed back his chair.
“Very well, then,” he said as he stood up. “Jose, would you be so kind as to help Otto prepare for his mission? I’ll inform Evangeline that her request is being granted.”
Without waiting for an answer, Walter left the conference room. Yvonne waited until he was gone, then she looked at Danzig. “Are you sure you want to do this?” she asked, her voice very quiet. “You may not be safe.”
“Yes, I am. After all, you yourself said that the DSV is reliable.”
“The sub is, yes. It’s the pilot I don’t trust.”
D
OWN, DOWN, DOWN …
The cable creaked from the frost that sheathed it, sang with the chill wind funneling through the narrow chasm. The bathyscaphe swayed back and forth as it descended from the surface far above. Silver-blue walls of ice as old as recorded time, tinted with thin red streaks of sulfur, towered to either side of the submersible, becoming darker with each passing meter. Down, down, down …
Danzig saw little of this through the DSV’s small portholes, and the flatscreen in the center of the wraparound control console didn’t reveal much more, until Evangeline switched on the forward searchlights. Lying face-down upon a padded cushion, he watched the lidar readout only a few centimeters from his face. The bathyscaphe was more than a half-kilometer deep within the crevasse, but it still had another 400 meters to go until it reached the hole that the drill had bored through the ice pack.
“You okay there?” Evangeline asked. “Not nervous, are you?”
She lay prone beside him within the tiny cabin, propping herself on her elbows. Although DSV-2 was superficially similar to DSV-1, it was smaller, designed to carry two people instead of three. Nor did it have a separate observation blister; the cabin was the bathyscaphe’s only interior compartment. The face-down arrangement of the couches, albeit uncomfortable, was meant not only to conserve space, but also to give the pilot and passenger the best possible view through the three saucer-sized portholes arranged left, right, and center of the console.
“No,” he said, “I’m fine.” Which was a lie. The swaying of the bathyscaphe upon its cable, the high-pitched whine of the wind, made him all too aware of the danger they faced. If the cable broke, it would be a long plummet to the bottom of the crevasse; even if they survived the fall, rescue would be all but impossible. Nor would he and Evangeline be able to reach the surface on their own; their skinsuits would allow them to keep breathing if the DSV’s hull was breached, but wouldn’t protect them for very long from the elements. If anything went wrong, they would face a cold and lonesome death.
“Don’t worry. We’ll be fine.” Evangeline cocked her head toward the cabin ceiling. “The cable is made of carbon nanotubes … the same material the space elevator will be made of, if ISC can ever afford to build the thing. It’s practically unbreakable, even at these low temperatures.”
“And the winch?” Danzig thought of the mass, drum-shaped windlass around which the cable was wound. It was within temperature-controlled main room of the control igloo built on the edge of the chasm, which itself lay on the other side of the ridge he’d noticed shortly after landing, about a kilometer from Consolmagno Base.
“Tested many times before it was sent here.” A tight smile appeared on Evangeline’s face. “Trust me … I’d never climb into this thing if I didn’t think it was safe.”
Danzig said nothing as he peered through the forward porthole at the dark walls looming around them. He may have been reassured about the technology, but he was less confident in the woman who lay beside him. She’d asked him to trust her, but the last two men to do so were dead, their bodies resting at the bottom of Europa’s fathomless ocean. Only the fact that they shared the same compartment gave him any assurance that he wouldn’t suffer the same fate as John and Klaus; she couldn’t kill him without killing herself.
Or so he hoped.
“Com check,” Evangeline said abruptly, pressing her fingers against her headset mike. “CB-2, this is DSV-2. Com check on ELF, one, two, three.”
A few seconds went by, then Danzig heard Walter’s voice within his own headset.
“We copy, DSV-2. ELF reception clear. Confirm distance to hole, please.”
Evangeline glanced at the lidar. “Three hundred meters to entrance hole. Descent nominal.”
“Roger.”
A pause.
“How about you, Otto? Ready to change your mind?”
Danzig grimaced. On the way to the chasm, Walter had tried to talk him out of making the dive. If only to put him off, Danzig told him that, if he happened to change his mind, he’d let him know. Evangeline had been in the other rover, so she hadn’t heard that conversation; apparently Walter didn’t care if she learned about it now.
Danzig tapped his mike wand. “Not at all,” he replied. “Looking forward to seeing what’s down here.”
“We copy,”
Walter replied.
“CB-2 standing by. Over.”
“DSV-2 over.” Evangeline muted her mike, then closed her eyes and gave a long sigh. “Thank you for saying that,” she said quietly. “I appreciate it.”
“He was just kidding.”
“No, I don’t think so,” A reflective pause, then she smiled. “But it doesn’t matter.” She winked at him. “Don’t worry, I’m going to give you a good ride.”
The double-entendre was obvious enough to remind Danzig of what she’d said when he’d visited her quarters:
I’d be grateful for any help you can give me.
There had been an unspoken promise in those words. Once again, he became aware of how close she was to him, their arms, legs and hips nearly touching one another’s. If he wanted to, he could slide his hand a few centimeters to the right and gently caress her buttocks …
He let out his breath, forced himself to look away. “I wish we’d brought along
Doctor Faustus
. We could have done another scene or two.”
“Uh-huh.” There was a sly undercurrent to her voice. “We were just about at the place where Faustus makes his pact with the devil.”
Perhaps her remark was meant to be in jest, but it gave Danzig a chill. He darted a glance at Evangeline from the corner of his eye, but her expression told him nothing. So he didn’t respond, but instead continued to look straight ahead.
Long minutes passed as the bathyscaphe continued its descent. When it was within 50 meters of the borehole, Evangeline used a forefinger to manipulate the trackball controlling the exterior camera. The lens rotated until it aimed straight down, but nothing could be seen until she cut in the infrared filters. The shaft was seven meters in diameter and almost perfectly round. The first team had formed it by lowering a robotic diamond-head drill into the crevasse; once its particle-beam laser melted the first couple of centimeters of ice and turned it into slush, the massive machine was able to dig through the last five hundred meters separating Europa’s surface from its underground ocean. Just before DSV-2 began its descent, the drill was lowered again, this time to clear away the icy crust which had formed over the hole the last time it had been used, when DSV-1 had made its final journey.
Evangeline continually reported their range to the control igloo as DSV-2 began to slow its descent. Her tone of voice had become tense, her attitude utterly serious. By then the hole was directly beneath them, a bottomless pit yawning open within the icepack floor. Danzig barely had time for any last regrets being there before the bathyscaphe was lowered into it. The chasm vanished as DSV-2 slowly moved down a narrow shaft, its searchlights reflected by the ice walls which surrounded them. The crimson tint of sulfur within the ice became more pronounced; to Danzig, it bore a disturbing resemblance to trails of frozen blood.
“Look there.” Evangeline pointed to the forward porthole, and Danzig crawled a little closer to see clusters of black, granular objects clinging to the sulfur deposits. “Cryptogams. Sort of like fungus, only a lot hardier. They were the first life-forms we found down here.”
“They grow within the ice?”
“No. We think they’re transported by diurnal tides and take root wherever they can find sulfur to feed upon.” She nodded toward the shaft walls. “They weren’t here when the hole was first made, but by the time I made my first dive in DSV-1 they’d been carried upward by the high tide.”
“The tide gets high enough to flood the hole?”
“Every 85 hours, yes.” Evangeline glanced at him. “Don’t worry. We’re at low tide now, so we should be out of here before Europa swings close enough to Jupiter for orbital resonance to affect the ocean levels.”
The cryptogams gradually increased in number, at times resembling irregular patches of carpet, as the bathyscaphe continued downward. “DSV-2 to CB-2,” Evangeline said, tapping her mike wand again. “Range 50 meters to aqualayer.” She listened as Walter made a terse response, then looked at Danzig. “Hold on … there may be a bit of bump when we hit water.”
She was right, although it was nowhere as violent as Danzig had braced himself to expect. One second, the bathyscaphe was surrounded by the shaft’s icy walls. The next, an abrupt jar that felt like an automobile jumping a curb and the portholes were awash with water.
“We’re here.” A tight grin appeared on Evangeline’s face. “DSV-2 to CB-2 … we’ve made interface with the aqualayer. Preparing to dive.”
A long pause, then they heard Walter’s voice, now carried by the ELF transceiver.
“We copy, DSV-2. Have a good trip.”
Evangeline snapped a series of toggles above her head, and there was a muted gurgle of water as the ballast tanks began to fill. Bracing herself against the deck cushions, she grasped the bathyscaphe’s twin joysticks. She engaged the impellers, then gently moved the sticks forward, manipulating the pitch and yaw while keeping a sharp eye on the sonarscope and the eight-ball of the attitude control display.
On the other side of the portholes was a pitch-black darkness broken only by the sullen glare of the searchlights. Yet the darkness wasn’t absolute; as the bathyscaphe moved downward, every now and then Danzig caught momentary glimpses of light, like fireflies winking in the perpetual night. He was about to comment on this when something moved quickly past the porthole to his left. It was gone before he could see what it was, only to reappear in the forward porthole, hovering for a second or two in the glare of the searchlights before vanishing again, leaving behind only another brief flash of bioluminescence.
“Mariner,” Evangeline said before he could ask. Another shrimp-like creature appeared, then disappeared as quickly as the first. “That’s two,” she added. “That probably means they’re hunting … oh, yes, there they are.”
A sparse white cloud floated into view. At first Danzig thought it was nothing more than sediment until he noticed that it seemed to have a slow, lazy movement of its own. He’d just realized that the cloud was a school of tiny creatures, each no larger than an insect larva, when a mariner darted into their midst. The cloud scattered as the creatures fled from the predator, only to reform just at the edge of the searchlight’s range.
“Ice darters,” Evangeline said. “A mariner’s favorite treat.” She seemed thoughtful as she gazed through the center porthole. “There’s an entire world down there. We’re the only people to see this with our own eyes.”
“Besides Klaus and John, you mean,” Danzig said.
For a brief instant there was a flash of anger in her eyes. “Besides Klaus and John … yes, of course. What I meant was that we’ll be the only ones who’ll tell people what we saw.”
Danzig didn’t reply. What she’d said, though, seemed significant in some way he didn’t quite understand.
Evangeline pushed the joysticks forward, taking the bathyscaphe farther down. DSV-2 had a limited range of mobility, its tether preventing them from traveling very far from the hole, but it would be able to descend to 55 fathoms before it reached the cable’s maximum length. The darkness seemed to swallow the searchlight; every now and then, another mariner or school of darters would flit across its beam, but otherwise they were surrounded by a dark, cold abyss.