“You need time to heal.”
“I’m okay.” Vonnie squeezed by the young woman, then nodded to the two men in the next compartment as she hurried past.
The lander’s floor was only fifteen meters square, but it held eight rooms, many of them as small as closets. Striding through the lander felt like running through a maze of steel. It reminded her of the ice. Vonnie realized she was grinding her teeth, driven by a rising sense of hysteria. She moved faster and faster until she reached the ready room, the largest compartment in the lander.
The young woman caught up and said, “Stop. We talked about your trauma levels. Your injuries aren’t just physical.”
“Koebsch asked me to come over,” Vonnie lied. Then she tried a different argument. “It’s good therapy, isn’t it? I should stay busy.”
“I guess.” The young woman gestured to the men behind her.
Vonnie heard one of them on the radio. “This is Metzler in Zero Four,” he said.
She ignored him and opened the first locker on the wall. Inside was a pressure suit. It weighed twelve times less than the armor she’d worn, but the pressure suit felt heavier. It was inert, whereas her armor had walked with her, magnifying every nerve impulse.
“Why don’t we sit down for a minute,” the young woman said.
Vonnie donned the pressure suit with her ruined hands. Nearby, three sets of armor hung on chain winches like empty metal giants. Vonnie might have climbed into one if the biometrics weren’t calibrated for each individual. She could use someone else’s armor, but clumsily, and the likelihood of hurting herself was too real.
“Stop,” the young woman said. “If you won’t—”
“Help me.” Vonnie met her eyes. “Please. You can drive me to the command module.”
The young woman nodded uncertainly. Behind her, the man leaned into the room and frowned. Vonnie knew they were all a little in awe of her, and, thinking like a sunfish, she stood erect and shrugged into the sleeves of the pressure suit, projecting confidence with her shoulders and chin.
“Koebsch is making a mistake,” she said.
22.
Vonnie’s thoughts quieted as the air lock cycled, depressurizing to match the near-vacuum outside. Beside her stood the young woman, who’d joined her.
They didn’t speak. The young woman flitted through a display inside her visor, while Vonnie’s thoughts consumed her.
Was it claustrophobia that had driven her to suit up and leave Lander 04? She expected to have nightmares the rest of her life, but she was loaded with no-shock and antidepressants. She wanted to believe she was in control of herself. Yes, it was out of character for her to have flashed her body at Koebsch. She wasn’t a show-off. But she also felt like she was beyond foolish little things like shyness or self-doubt.
She’d changed. Some parts of her had died in the ice, and the woman who remained was impatient to set things right.
Her entire race was watching. Every decision would be scrutinized across the solar system and in history files for centuries to come, which was why Koebsch had his stiff caution and why Vonnie thrummed with compassion and fear.
If humankind failed again, if she failed again, they might doom every living thing inside Europa, and she’d seen much to admire as well as savagery.
Unfortunately, the violence was difficult to overlook.
Sunfish had become a popular term across the system, but not everyone consented to humanizing them with a name. Some of the exceptions were military spokespersons, who referred to the sunfish as the aliens, and public officials of the ice mining ventures and utility companies, who put their own spin on the situation by saying organisms or things.
Many politicians and commentators had also played it safe, either hedging their bets or supporting the interests of various corporations. Vonnie knew the mining ventures, their distributors, and many industries were hollering because Earth’s governments had demanded that the mining ventures reevaluate their sites, then screen and analyze the ice before processing it, all of which created delays and extra costs.
Public debate had grown into a firestorm in part because the ESA had kept Vonnie under wraps, asking Koebsch to speak to the media on her behalf and releasing no more than a few, brief, sanitized clips of her journey beneath the ice.
None of those sims included live recordings of the sunfish, only still shots and diagrams. Nevertheless, their beaks and arms had a lot of people scared, especially in combination with the progress reports listing her surgeries.
I need to make sure everyone sees I’m okay, she thought. They have to know that I don’t blame the sunfish — that the fighting was my fault.
The air lock finished its cycle with a clunk. The exterior door opened.
As they walked onto the lander’s deck, Vonnie hardly glanced at the fat, banded sphere of Jupiter or the radiant dots where spacecraft hung overhead. Instead, she looked for their command module. She couldn’t see it. The icy plain was busy with floodlights, mecha, listening posts, and other hab modules.
From where she was standing, there didn’t seem to be any pattern. Then she activated her heads-up display. Most of the hab modules and a second lander were spread in a broad ring over an area of a square kilometer. Vonnie felt a wan smile. In another age, the pioneers of the American West had circled their wagons in the same way. Long before then, in Germany, her ancestors had built their castle walls to guard all sides as well. Old habits.
Command Module 01 was on the far side of camp. “Can we take the jeep?” Vonnie asked, turning to the young woman.
“Yes.” Ash Sierzenga was one of their new pilots as well as a medic and the head of the cybernetics team. All of them had multi-disciplinary training and degrees. It cost too much to boost three people if one would do.
Every meal, each piece of equipment, had been factored into the mission. They were a long way from replacements, a reality that played in Vonnie’s favor. She knew they’d discussed sending her home, but no one wanted to use a ship for her, not even the slowboat in which she’d arrived.
The jeep was a low-slung vehicle with an open cockpit and wide-tracked wheels. Ash made a point of entering first. Was she concerned Vonnie might steal it? Where was there to go? Vonnie didn’t like it that Ash distrusted her, but she was an outsider among the new team. Even if they understood her motives, they would tend to support each other instead of her.
I need to be careful, she thought. I can’t raise my voice or wave my arms. They don’t like it that I don’t hate the sunfish.
They think I’m crazy.
The jeep rolled into the hectic lights and mecha, communicating with the other self-guided machines.
For the most part, the listening posts and beacons had settled down, becoming stationary obstacles. They resembled short trees with their dishes and antennae serving as leaves, although a few members of the metal forest tottered or crept in restless patterns.
The larger mecha were more active. Twice the jeep drove beneath hulking rovers. The first was poised like a giant, feeding tick, its head lower than its legs as it drilled into the ice. The second was on patrol. Bristling with sensors and digging arms, it bore down on them, but neither Vonnie nor Ash flinched. They were accustomed to the machines’ flawless dance. The rover passed with meters to spare, and their jeep continued through the long shadows and pools of light.
There were open crevices in the ice. The main fracture yawned through the center of camp, over three hundred meters long yet rarely wider than a person could jump.