Which is better? Vonnie thought, feeling a familiar touch of melancholy. The moons that break free will survive, but they’ll be lost forever, while the moons that disintegrate will become a part of Jupiter’s rings. Eons from now, they’ll help create new moons. They’ll stay home.
She knew she was projecting her own emotions on an inanimate system, but her head felt as chaotic as the debris surrounding Jupiter. Did she have the right to feel like she belonged to Europa? Or would she always be an outsider?
It was a short drive to Lander 04. Inside, Ash and Vonnie took off their pressure suits and stripped down to their blue jump suits. Then they joined Metzler and Frerotte in the living quarters.
Metzler had folded up three of their bunks, leaving one of the low beds open as a bench. A table was extended from the wall. He gestured to the box of fruit juice he’d set out. Vonnie declined. She was too riled to sit down, and it increased her agitation when Ash sat between Metzler and Frerotte, smiling at both men.
The girl was nowhere near as hard-edged as she’d first been with the group. Vonnie wished she weren’t so skittish herself, but everyone knew she was in trauma therapy. That made her self-conscious.
She said, “Did you watch me talk with Tavares?”
“Yeah.” Frerotte nodded. “She won’t help us.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I don’t think they’re hunting sunfish.”
“They wouldn’t go down there with explosives for anything else. Six men don’t have the resources to build a subsurface base. Even if they did, the blasts are spread over nine kilometers. They’re chasing something.”
“What if they’re chasing Lam?”
Vonnie sat down, taking the last spot available on the bed beside Metzler. Then she grabbed the juice and filled a bulb for herself, delaying the question as long as possible. “You heard another signal?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Don’t tell Koebsch.”
“He’s going to find out,” Metzler said, and Frerotte said, “The Brazilians will tell him if we don’t. That’s their excuse for blowing things up. They can use it against us. They wouldn’t be using explosives if we hadn’t programmed one of their mecha with your AI.”
It’s nice of you to say ’we,’ Vonnie thought. Frerotte could have distanced himself from Vonnie and Ash, leaving them to take the blame. Instead, he’d kept their secret. So had Metzler.
Vonnie supposed their decision was one more example of the cohesion of a mixed-gender group. If she and Ash weren’t eligible females, would Metzler and Frerotte have been less inclined to protect them?
“I’d like to see Lam’s data bursts,” she said.
Frerotte handed his pad to her. “The signal’s attenuated,” he said. “Most of it we can’t read. There must be three or four kilometers of ice between him and our closest spies. The Brazilians are jamming him, too, which explains the distortion. He’s trying to bounce his signals through tunnels and caves.”
“It can’t help that he’s in a FNEE digger,” Ash said. “Our mecha have better data/comm.”
“Is he trying to reach us?” Vonnie said.
“You tell me,” Frerotte said. “Maybe he doesn’t know where we are. He might not know where he is.”
“No, he was active until you pulled me from the ice. He tapped NASA and FNEE signals before Koebsch shut him down. Even if he wasn’t able to co-opt the digger’s memory banks, he must have a decent idea what part of Europa he’s in.”
“Then he is looking for us.”
“Maybe he’s trying to convince the Brazilians to stop shooting. He’s no threat to them.”
“They don’t see it that way, Von.”
“This is my fault,” Ash said. “I should have kept him in storage. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” Vonnie looked at Metzler and Frerotte to clarify. “Ash and I thought Lam would disappear, then we’d pick him up later. Maybe a lot later. He was supposed to be like a long-term scout.”
“Well, now we’re up to our ears in shit,” Metzler said, taking the sting out of his words with a friendly nudge. “Koebsch is going to hit the roof.”
Vonnie leaned into Metzler and bumped him back, both apologizing and flirting. Dealing with Koebsch and the Brazilians wasn’t how she wanted to spend her time. She wanted to study the sunfish, but managing the human factions outside the ice was almost as critical as dealing with the aliens below.
Ruefully, she thought, We’re so selfish.
As a species, we’re self-important and self-involved. I guess that’s the primate in us, always obsessed with what the other guy has and how to get it.
In prehistory, base reflexes like envy and desire had propelled early man to develop better tools, better organization, and better dreams — but thousands of years later, those same drives left them permanently divided.
Vonnie wasn’t sure if the sunfish were less greedy. Competition had made them tough and clever. Maybe no race could increase its intelligence without conflict of some kind, and yet she’d seen them act without regard to self. For the sunfish, the whole seemed to come before the individual, which would be a fundamental difference between them and Homo sapiens.
“Let me talk to Koebsch,” Vonnie said.
“I’ll call him, too,” Ash suggested.
“There’s no reason to get you guys in trouble. Tell him you were surprised to hear ESA signals from FNEE territory. I’ll swear I’m the one who uploaded Lam’s files to their digger.”
“Koebsch won’t believe you.”
“He’ll pretend he does. He doesn’t want to take more disciplinary actions, so he’ll go along with it. First let’s see if we can exchange signals with Lam. That’s the evidence we need to show it’s really him. How close are we?”
“I’ve moved nine spies inside the FNEE grid,” Frerotte said. “Most of our eyes and ears are still a few kilometers out. It helps that they’re blasting. The vibrations cover most of the noise our spies make in the ice.”
Vonnie scrolled through the lay-outs on Frerotte’s pad, examining the dots and lines representing the tiny mecha he’d arrayed against the Brazilians. Some of his pebble-sized spies hadn’t moved in weeks. Others had drilled, squeezed, and melted their way toward the Brazilian’s territory, advancing with painstaking care to avoid detection.
Mecha this size were unable to host AIs. Spies had only the barest level of self-awareness. Linked together in groups of ten or more, they could muster enough judgment to think as well as a cat, but these spies had been running silent, each separate from the rest. They needed human input.
Frerotte’s a spy just like his mecha, Vonnie thought, admiring his work.
Henri Frerotte was a pale Frenchman with a slight build and slim, agile hands. Nominally, his role in the ESA crew was as an exogeologist with secondary responsibilities in suit maintenance and in data/comm. That was why Koebsch had put Frerotte in charge of their perimeters. Distributing sensors was easy work. The mecha did most of it automatically. But for an assistant, Frerotte was too skilled with systems tech, and he was too eager to interfere with the Brazilians.
Vonnie believed he was an operative sent by one of the European Union’s many intelligence agencies such as Germany’s BFV or France’s newly-formed Directorate of Internal Security. Ash probably worked for an agency, too, and Vonnie wasn’t sure how to feel about that. What if Ash had seeded the FNEE digger with Lam’s mem files not to preserve him, but purposely as a disruptive weapon?
“I don’t know if Colonel Ribeiro will pull back,” Vonnie said. “If he does, or if he calls us, that could be the right time to signal Lam.”