He lit her visor with radar frames.
—Look.
“Oh.” Vonnie surprised herself. Even now, after everything, she felt excitement.
There were more carvings on the far side of the cavern, at least ninety columns of eight chiseled into the rock. Lam detected no organic pellets like they’d found in the trench where they’d made camp, but the information or messages contained in the symbols tantalized her.
“How fast can you record it?”
—The degradation to this site appears significant. Detailed recordings may require hours.
Vonnie limped across the cavern and pushed against a rock slab. The decayed fragments of the wall had shifted as water and ice intruded, retreated, and came again. Some wild feeling in her was able to guess which pieces were useless debris and which held carvings on one side or another.
The feeling made the hair stand up on her arms and neck. It felt exactly like… “Wait.”
—Sonar.
Somehow she’d sensed those voices before Lam, but there was no time to speculate at the weird, creeping changes in herself. “How close are they?”
—A thousand meters. What we’re hearing are echoes. They’re deep in the tunnels. They may not know we’re here.
“They know.”
—Their voices aren’t directed this way.
“They will be. Can you pull up this piece? I think it came out of that corner of the wall. If we can scan whatever’s left on it, we’ll have most of this section.”
The suit hobbled forward. How would it hold up in combat? Vonnie knew she didn’t want to fight in the open. She’d have a better chance if she found a hole and used her explosives to create a perimeter.
“It’s not sunfish, is it?”
—No. It’s the other lifeforms.
Vonnie shoved at the rock, moving feverishly now. It felt good and right to stay. She was glad to have purpose again. She would kill as many of them as she had to, but she was more than a rat in a trap, running mindlessly.
She’d worn down to the bedrock of herself and found what she needed, a last supply of courage and determination.
Seven hundred carvings would be priceless in translation efforts. This wall might be their Rosetta Stone. Vonnie couldn’t abandon it. If she ran, even if she survived, the ESA might never find their way to this cavern again. And if she died… well, if she died, some day their probes might venture close enough to communicate with her suit. It would transmit her files even if she was buried and lost.
Vonnie realized she was crying again and wasn’t angry with herself. She wasn’t ashamed. She’d done her best. Maybe that was enough.
She dropped the rock and pushed over a smaller boulder with a chipped half-sun of a carving on the underside. “Got it?” she asked, feeling close to him again, the real him and the ghost. He was a potent friend.
—They’re within six hundred meters.
“You got it?”
—Yes. There are more of them this time. Twelve. They’re moving faster.
“Help me with this big rock.”
The truth was she scarcely knew which questions to ask. She wasn’t puzzled that there were sunfish carvings in territory that was no longer theirs. These catacombs must have changed hands regularly or were deserted and reclaimed as the years passed, but she wondered why she hadn’t found more carvings, air locks, or reservoirs.
Even if the sunfish had been exiled from this area for centuries, shouldn’t she have seen other signs of activity?
Some part of the secret might be here. Vonnie was willing to defend it. In fact, she might find the answers she needed in the sunfishes’ rivals.
Was it possible that Europa had given rise to more than one intelligence species? If so, where was the evidence of a second civilization? If not, what sort of animal was strong enough to drive off a thinking race?
—I’ve finished recording this section.
“Good,” Vonnie said.
Then she swung to face the approaching voices with an excavation charge in either hand.
19.
The cavern seemed to stretch as her fear grew. She stayed near the carvings, trying to anchor herself. Deep radar let her track the new creatures while they were still out of sight. There were twelve bodies in the swarm, banging off the walls and ceiling of a gap.
—Sixty meters. Fifty.
Vonnie held her explosives. There were too many entrances, and she had only four half-sticks. She couldn’t throw one until they were almost on top of her. Otherwise they might get away, leaping back into the chasms on the far side.
—Forty.
They would catch her if she ran. She knew she had to stand her ground, but her adrenaline felt like a hundred chittering mice. She felt untamed and inhumanly quick.
—They’re in the third tunnel.
As soon as there was less rock in the way, Lam drew each body into clear resolution. They were no longer twelve overlapping blobs. They were sunfish.
“Christ, you said…”
They were different. These sunfish were larger, with longer arms and different skin, like cousins of the ones she’d fought. Cousins, yet a separate breed. To creatures who saw and spoke in sonar, the new sunfish would stand apart from the others if for no other reason than their size.
As they flitted in and out of sight, Vonnie saw they were darker, too. But they didn’t enter the cavern. Were they trying to envelop her?
Like the smaller sunfish, they must not have any idea what to make of a bipedal creature wrapped in metal and glass. That they hesitated was a positive sign.
Vonnie spoke in a whisper. “You’re recording their sonar calls, correct?”
—Yes.
“Get ready to broadcast some of those calls on my command. Can you tell me what they’re saying?”
—The pitch and intonations of their voices are different than those of the smaller sunfish, although the body shapes they use are similar.
Neither breed would be aware of their skin color. Maybe they smelled or tasted differently, but Vonnie reached one conclusion immediately because she could see. The increased mineral absorption in the skin and defensive spines of the larger sunfish suggested that they lived in the caustic waters of hot springs or the great salt ocean, unlike their smaller cousins, who might be limited to fresh water reservoirs.
Their race diverged, she thought. They grew apart, each kind finding its niche like dark-skinned human beings in Africa and pale-skinned in Europe. What if their differences are more than cosmetic? Can they crossbreed with each other?
More interesting, it wasn’t the larger sunfish who’d written on this rock wall. The size of the carvings was wrong. So was the surface texture, which matched the pebbly skin and spines of the smaller breed. The carvings belonged to the smaller sunfish. So did the nubs of cartilage Lam had identified in the feces they’d discovered.
Vonnie’s thoughts crashed together as the elusive, feinting sunfish revolved around her like a living hurricane. They dodged in and out of the gaps surrounding the cavern.
They’re eating each other! she realized. The two kinds of sunfish are at war.
Were both breeds really intelligent? Did she want them to be? If not, the situation was akin to gorillas hunting people, a larger species preying upon its weaker, smarter relatives. That by itself was horrific. But if yes — if both breeds were sentient — they were cannibals.