They needed more room. Their probes wouldn’t breathe or eat, so they gained space where a sunfish had its gills, lungs, hearts, and digestive and reproductive systems. Unfortunately, their probes required power plants, data/comm, and sonar. Radar and X-ray would also be ideal. Their design was overtaxed, but mounting external components on the probe would defeat its purpose of appearing like a sunfish.
One night over coffee, Ash took Vonnie aside. “Tell me about your AI,” Ash said.
“What do you mean? You deleted him.”
“Me and Koebsch. Yeah, I… What I mean is you did a great job doubling him up with your suit’s systems.”
“That was all I had.”
“I know. He was erratic, but integrating him with basic functions was a nice trick. Maybe we should try the same thing if we can overcome the instability.”
As an apology, it was lacking. Like many people who were too smart for their own good, Ash could be blunt, even graceless, and yet Vonnie appreciated the young woman’s attempt to show curiosity and respect.
“We can look into it,” Vonnie said. “First let’s see how much capacity Pärnits wants.”
Rauno Pärnits, the linguist, also served as an engineering assistant. He consulted with them in developing the prototype’s ability to wriggle and bend, running cables, servos, and flexors throughout its body and arms.
Generating movements like the sunfish would demand a huge amount of memory and computing power — maybe too much. Pärnits wanted to store most of his programs externally. Linking their probes remotely to an AI was the easy answer. They could use relays to maintain their signals, but Vonnie didn’t like it. What if the probes were cut off?
Pärnits was thirty-one, almost Vonnie’s age, lean and hawk-faced. He let her know his bed was open to her. So did Metzler and Frerotte. Vonnie might have paired with one of them if she wasn’t so confused emotionally. It was too soon. Physical comfort would be sweet, but she mourned for Lam even if the two of them hadn’t been lovers.
The compulsive behavior she’d experienced after being rescued had faded. Too much of her fixation had been a defense mechanism, blinding herself to her pain.
She didn’t trust herself anymore. Maybe she hadn’t been broken, but she’d come close. Now she wasn’t sure if the pieces still fit. Her superiors on Earth had told her to attend regular therapy sessions with an AI, which was humbling. She occupied herself with work and cooking and music. In fact, most days she was able to combine her two hobbies, listening to Beethoven while organizing hors d’oeuvres and soup for everybody in Module 02, which was dedicated to living space, exercise machines, and their tiny kitchen. She was a topsider again, which was probably where she was meant to be.
It was Day 16 when Koebsch sounded a Class 2 alert, overriding every data/comm line in camp.
“The Brazilians are going into the ice,” he said.
25.
Koebsch turned beet-red as he played the satellite footage again. “We can’t stop them,” he said. “They’re not answering our signals.”
“What about emergency protocols?” Metzler asked.
“They’re blocking everything,” Koebsch said. “They knew we’d yell as soon as they breached the ice.”
“How long until we hear from Earth?”
“Nine minutes.”
Vonnie grimaced at her showphone. She was in Lander 04 with Ash and Frerotte, but everyone had linked to their group feed, which arranged their faces in miniature around a larger holo display. The display showed fourteen mecha dropping into a rift in the ice, followed by five armored men, then six more mecha.
Five of the machines had been adapted with additional arms — short arms lined with pedicellaria. The Brazilians apparently planned to communicate with the sunfish, but it was a rushed effort. Their other mecha were crawlers, diggers, sentries, and gun platforms.
“There’s no way they’re set,” Metzler said.
Most of the ESA crew wore expressions of exasperation or disbelief. Metzler was pissed off.
In his forties, squat and ugly — so ugly he was cute, like a bulldog — Ben Metzler was a hothead and a wise-ass. In some ways, his biting opinion of people reminded her of Lam.
“The Chinese will go next,” he said. “You watch. They’ll go next and then we’ll be ordered in, too, just to show everyone who’s got the biggest dick. We’re going to contaminate this whole area.”
“I thought the Brazilians agreed to the A.N. resolutions,” Vonnie said.
Koebsch nodded. “They did.”
All sides had declared an intent to coordinate their actions and share information freely. When the time was right, the Allied Nations planned for a unified expedition. The goal was to establish a single party of translators and diplomats, but humankind was as divided as the sunfish.
The ESA wasn’t alone in running spy sats over Europa to watch their human counterparts. Some of their mecha were self-defense units, equipped mostly with electronic warfare systems. Many of their AI were committed to the same game of stealing each others’ datastreams while encrypting their own.
NASA and the ESA were old partners, often pairing with Japan, but China maintained its distance, and the Brazilians were the most recent addition to Earth’s spacefaring groups. They’d cultivated a national spirit as upstarts and underdogs.
Vonnie understood their eagerness. She identified with their need to prove themselves. She’d felt the same emotions when she’d first landed on Europa.
Why hadn’t they learned from her disaster?
As much as Vonnie wanted to contact the sunfish again, it wasn’t envy that made her want to stop the Brazilians. Until they’d run a sufficient number of probes, fully decoded the carvings and mastered the sunfish language, blundering into the ice would only make things worse.
The Brazilians’ swagger was an insult.
“Sir, they’re going in with guns,” Vonnie said to Koebsch. “They’re either hunting specimens or looking for a fight.”
“Brazil’s in trouble,” Metzler said. “They need money to upgrade everything they’ve got — ships, suits, you name it. If they’re the first ones in and they start capturing native lifeforms, they’ll have buyers lined up out the door with cash in hand. It doesn’t matter if they kill a few sunfish. A circus is exactly what they want.”
“We can’t wait for a decision back home,” Vonnie said.
Earth was a quarter of the way around the sun from Jupiter. Each radio burst took eleven minutes to travel from the ESA camp to Berlin, the European Union capital, plus eleven minutes back again. It was a tedious way to have a conversation.
“What do you propose?” Koebsch asked.
“Let me have the display, please.” Vonnie brought up real-time surveillance of the Brazilian camp.
The place looked deserted. FNEE, the Força Nacional de Exploração do Esp, had sent less people and less mecha than any of the other three nations on Europa. Their activities had been limited, which made them easier to monitor, and yet they’d chosen a location above a more extensive system of vents than the crevices beneath the ESA camp.
“Typical,” Metzler grumbled. “We should have predicted they were up to something.”
“If five of them went in, they only left two people behind for command-and-control,” Vonnie said, highlighting one of the Brazilian hab modules where ESA satellites detected the most electronic noise. “Here.”