Yes, she thought. The word held a gruesome finality. I think the answer is yes.
The larger sunfish used group tactics like the smaller breed. These weren’t animals. Their voices rose and fell, calling to each other as individual members of the pack maneuvering for position.
They’re analyzing me. Confusing me.
Eating their cousins was disgusting, but their war with each other was the more despicable crime. It was why she’d discovered so few traces of social organization. Instead of building more safe areas, instead of farming or writing, they fought.
Their competition had been more than either side was able to withstand. In fact, she couldn’t be certain if the smaller sunfish she’d encountered were members of a single tribe or two or more. How far had their race lapsed into anarchy?
“Broadcast your sonar calls,” she said. “Let’s talk to them. You said you can…”
—Here they come.
The new sunfish sprang into the cavern, a dual wave of bodies high and low. Vonnie’s chance to kill them cleanly would be gone in seconds. She had learned not to wait, but she’d also remembered who she was and why she’d come to Europa.
“Lam, talk to them! Try to talk to them with body shapes!” she yelled.
Her suit dropped down as the sunfish flew closer. Lam greeted them by altering his stance, lowering one shoulder and waggling her hands alongside her stomach.
It was the right decision. Vonnie believed it. These sunfish were a new, separate population. She hoped they would answer her.
20.
The new breed reacted to Lam’s posture as they soared across the cavern. With a ripple of motion, their bodies shared an idea. Was it astonishment at Lam’s attempt to communicate? Vonnie realized they also used the fine pedicellaria beneath their arms to convey information. Lifting one arm or more, they showed each other dense, writhing patterns.
Many of those arms were damaged. With radar targeting, Lam identified dozens of old scars and deformities. Vonnie had seen similar gashes among the smaller sunfish. She’d thought they’d sustained those wounds on the lava rock.
The injuries were beak wounds.
When the sunfish fought, they led with their undersides, snapping and slicing at each other. In all likelihood, the smaller sunfish were better at getting inside their cousins’ reach. They would sustain more deaths, yet left more marks on their adversaries.
“Lam, hurry!” she shouted.
He was limited by her form. He was also canny enough not to try to replicate the carvings or mimic what they’d seen of the smaller sunfish. The warring breeds might have separate languages, so Lam improvised, holding Vonnie in an uncomfortable ball as he stuttered her fingers against her torso. Her visor flickered with sun-shapes as he compared these twelve individuals with sims and real data.
There was another ripple among them as Lam shifted and flexed. Did they understand?
Please, Vonnie thought. Please.
But he’d kept the half-sticks against her forearms with magnetic locks. Now he released two with a click.
—Watch out.
The dual waves of sunfish struck the ceiling and floor. They bounced toward her, intersecting with each other to create a single group.
“Please!”
They came with their beaks open, shrieking. They came with their arms thrown wide to grasp and tear.
—Auto assault.
Vonnie wept for them, monsters all of them. The intelligence she knew existed here was stunted and cold like everything inside Europa.
Lam bashed her fist up through the first sunfish, then turned to swat the next. The rest never reached her.
“Fire,” she said.
He put both charges in the wall and shattered the carvings, ducking beneath a blast of rock.
Then she turned and ran.
The four survivors kept after her, of course. She’d dreamed the show of force would be enough, but these sunfish were no different than the smaller breed. Even with two-thirds of their group dead or bleeding out, they were relentless.
Vonnie reached a tunnel and drove herself into the ceiling, crushing a sunfish on her shoulder. Lam pulled at the rock with both hands and cancelled her momentum, flinging debris back over her head. The shower hit the next three sunfish and Lam kicked downward with the suit’s arms out, clubbing them.
She left the wounded to live or die, knowing it was a mistake to let them summon more of their tribe. She knew she would always be wrong for trespassing.
For nearly an hour, Vonnie heard them behind her, crying into the mountain. The echoes faded as she climbed, except once when there were fresh voices. Had the larger breed brought reinforcements? Was there a third kind of sunfish? Their sonar calls were too diffuse to know for certain, and she was glad, dimly, muffled in exhaustion and grief.
She climbed.
She climbed without end.
Even carried by the suit, she passed her limit, her tendons straining. Something in her back gave out above her pelvic bone, grinding with each step — and in her mind it was the same, one hurt which was more exquisite than the rest.
She dug her way into a vent, leaving the monotony of the catacombs. But there was no escaping her sorrow.
The leaning shaft up through the ice looked like the sink hole where Lam and Bauman had died, although her radar showed no dust and few mineral deposits within the melt. That was a positive sign. Geysers and swells meant instability. This vent looked solid. Vonnie thought she could ascend without bolts and wire, although her hands were sore and beaten.
She climbed.
She climbed slowly, evaluating the ice, scanning ahead. Suddenly there was a new sound. Dit dit dit dit dit dit. It was the rescue beacon of a probe overhead.
Vonnie rasped out a noise like laughter as Lam returned the probe’s signals in the only manner available to him, a cacophony of terahertz and radar pulses. He repeated the chatter until the probe answered in the same way.
—We made it, Von.
“Yes.”
—Let’s wait here. Can you wait? Seven bones and tendons in your hand are damaged, and your elbow isn’t much better. I don’t want to risk a fall.
“Yes.”
—They need fifteen minutes. Can you sleep? You should eat and rest.
“No.” She couldn’t relax, hanging on the ice several hundred meters up with another quarter-kilometer to go. She kept one file open on her visor and let the data burn into her, staring through it even when she tipped her head to watch above.
Lam had put together a preliminary transcript of the carvings. With it, they had an explanation.
She was wrong.
The error made her feel not like a teacher but like a student again, because just as Scandinavian and Inuit peoples had developed multiple words for snow, the sunfish had thirty-two stances to indicate surprise and danger. Sixteen more postures spoke of moving inward to protect the pack.
Their all-or-nothing behavior wasn’t sadism or the result of animal stupidity. It was premeditated. It was a survival trait.
The sunfish possessed more imagination and mental agility than she’d believed. Like every culture on Earth, they wrote stories of other worlds and nightmares. Their carvings hinted at places and legends similar to Atlantis, vampires, and poltergeists, but their past was saturated with real-life encounters with ancient ruins and strange creatures from distant pockets in the ice and separate lines of evolution.