“I…”
“If the next stages of our operation don’t go right, everything we’ve planned will be in jeopardy.”
Vonnie looked away from him. She didn’t want Ash to see her expression either, because if they were going to work together, Ash needed to believe that Vonnie would always put the team first. In space, a crew was family.
Now she had to let them erase Lam forever. If she needed to choose between her AI or the sunfish, there wasn’t a choice at all.
“Okay,” she whispered. “Take him apart.”
24.
During the next few days, they began to settle in for the long haul. Even if there was no further contact with the sunfish, Vonnie had gathered enough data to occupy thousands of experts for years. Instead, they had eleven people. Datastreams let them back-and-forth with universities, laboratories, and government agencies on Earth and Luna, where other programs were underway, but the eleven of them were the front line.
The pressure might have been overwhelming, except Koebsch was right. The ESA crew were elite volunteers. Every one of them had dreamed of adventure since they were children.
Metzler, the lead biologist, went a hundred hours without rest until he was incoherent with stims and caffeine, and Koebsch ordered him to take the same sedatives Vonnie used to sleep.
She’d been allowed to field ten interviews in which prominent newsmen and commentators gushed over her survival while she tried to cast the sunfish in a sympathetic light. “I smashed through their homes like some kind of giant,” she said. “To them, I was the alien.” But the newsmen were baffled by this point of view, and their feeds tended to play clips of her speaking well of Bauman and Lam, as if her friends had died during her encounters with the sunfish.
It was infuriating. Vonnie recorded her own interviews and asked permission to put them on the net, haggling with Koebsch, yelling at an assistant director on Earth, finally setting the matter aside because she believed the truth would come out as soon as they contacted the sunfish again.
Everybody experienced some level of mania except Ash, who remained cool. Ash seemed to have taken it upon herself to be the vigilant one — the grown-up. At the same time, Koebsch became more and more of a toucher, punching shoulders, whacking backs, participating in their excitement.
Ash had a nice smile, especially when the men were around, but she was intense for someone in her early twenties. As a wunderkind, she’d probably spent her brief adulthood fighting people’s assumptions that she was a child. Vonnie supposed that was why she insisted on Ash, not Ashley, because her abbreviated name was sharp while the longer version sounded soft. The chip on her shoulder was as big as a sword.
Vonnie liked her. She liked all of them. They were honest, dedicated people who embraced their work.
One piece of business took priority. Vonnie had encountered bugs, bacterial mats, and fungi in addition to the warring breeds of sunfish. There were bacteria in the bugs, a parasitic growth on the fungi, and what appeared to be viral infections in the smaller sunfish.
For several days, the biologists were given the lion’s share of lab time and computing power. It was critical to know if Europan microorganisms were harmful to human beings.
Mecha had removed Vonnie’s armor in a clean lab after injecting her suit with plastic, encasing her in a protective film. Then they’d transferred her half-conscious body to another isolation chamber where they’d inundated her with UV, nanotech, antibiotics, antivirals, and gene sweeps. It might have made sense to quarantine her from everyone else, but she hadn’t been exposed outside her suit. Nor could they allocate an entire hab module to one person for weeks or months or however long it took Earth to decide she wasn’t infectious.
Coming to Europa was a prison sentence with additional sacrifices. All of them were given the same regimen of meds. The gene sweeps made Pärnits sick, yet he used his chills and nausea to joke with Vonnie instead of blaming her. “I need the meds anyway if I don’t want to glow,” he said, because Jupiter bathed its moons with radiation.
If a person could stand on Europa’s surface unprotected, she would absorb 500 rems every twenty-four hours. One day would make her ill. Two days would be a lethal dose.
Their electromagnetic shields, suits, and hab modules could minimize their exposure but not totally deflect the most lethal hazards such as gamma rays. Each crew member had an Earth-monitored AI calculating his or her individual risk. Merely driving across camp reduced their life expectancies. They would pay for their time here with pills and nanotech in addition to likely surgeries for bone cancer and melanomas — and they were ecstatic.
Everything they did felt significant. Even dinner was cause for celebration. Despite objections, Koebsch required everyone to gather for one meal each day. Otherwise they tended to divide into small groups, communicating across the camp by showphone or by radio if at all.
Dinner was a chance to brag and shout, posing questions, discussing theories, and flirting with other healthy geniuses caught up in the same jubilation.
They teased her about being a media star, although Vonnie sensed that two or three people were truly jealous.
The worst case of envy belonged to William Dawson, a gene smith, an Englishman in his seventies who was the oldest member of their crew. “Do try to leave us some of the limelight,” he said, pretending a smile that didn’t touch the papery wrinkles around his eyes.
Like Ash, Dawson was sensitive about his name. He permitted a certain level of informality. “Among colleagues, it’s not necessary to address me as ’Dr. Dawson,’” he said magnanimously, but he expected to be greeted as William, not Bill or Will.
Privately, Vonnie decided he was a stuffy old royal prick, which was fitting, since he’d mentioned in his official crew bio that he’d been christened after the English kings.
Dawson’s conceit wasn’t unusual. In the mid twenty-first century, many parents had turned to the past. Most people never left Earth, but humankind had begun to ascend into space in real numbers for the first time. They forgot their religions and their holidays, which hastened the decline of same beliefs back home. Babies were born in orbit and on the moon.
Children were given names to remember a heritage they’d never experience. The Americans called their kids silly, showy things like Christmas, Pacific, Birch, or Spring. In Europe, the trend was more elegant. Both cultures honored their ships and stations by celebrating famous historical figures like Washington or Robespierre, but the ESA org chart was littered with traditional names like Dublin O’Neal and Henri Frerotte. There was also an engineer they called Triple O because his full legal name eased off the tongue like Italian music — Antonio Leonardo Gravino.
Vonnie worked with Ash, Metzler, O’Neal, and Frerotte to forge their new sunfish-shaped probes. She joined their team immediately, although Koebsch predicted the job would unsettle her. He was correct that whenever Vonnie entered the machine shop, she cringed.
The eight-armed framework on their work bench looked like it had crawled out of her mind. Every night, despite the drugs, she dreamed of screeching monsters.
Their prototype was a muscular alumalloy sunfish 1.2 meters wide, identical to the smaller breed except for its guts and its missing skin. In real sunfish, the brain massed almost as much as it did in human beings. That was a lot of room to jam with processors and mem cards. Vonnie estimated they could give each probe a Level IV intelligence, but they wanted better. They wanted to surpass the threshold required in quantum computing to create Level III or II intelligences.