“What?”
“We’ve put together a few sims using your files. At the back of the crevice, it looks like they were holding down the smallest sunfish. They were drinking from him. Then he might have been dinner, too.”
“God.” Vonnie shook her head. “That would fit with their pack mentality, but you’re making a lot of assumptions.”
“Yeah. Presumably there are more diverse food chains further down, or the sunfish are farming somewhere we haven’t found yet, or both. It would be fantastic if we could get some mecha down to the ocean. A lot of our answers will be there.”
The ocean, Vonnie thought. “Have you asked Koebsch? There are soft spots on the equator where the ice is only five kilometers thick. We could drill through.”
“It’s under consideration. We already have our hands full.”
She smiled at the understatement. Earth had dispatched another high-gee launch loaded with new mecha and supplies, but the ship was piloted by an AI. They didn’t foresee adding more people soon. The costs were too steep.
“Tell me about Tom,” she said.
“Our star pupil.” Metzler opened a new file without playing it. “Listen, I should’ve warned you not to get your hopes up. What happened this morning was incremental at best.”
“You might get another kiss anyway.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“Would you two knock it off?” Ash said, but her tone was encouraging, and Vonnie was glad to be teased. Their friendship made the sunfish less intimidating.
She still had nightmares.
The emotions she felt toward the sunfish bordered on awe and reverence, but she still had bloody nightmares.
Surface of the Southern Pole Map
31.
Constructed mostly of ceramics, ESA spies were stealthed against radar, X-ray, and infrared. That served them well in tracking the Brazilians, who hadn’t mastered neutrino tech and couldn’t buy it, since none of the major powers had made their neutrino instruments for sale.
Unfortunately, the sunfishes’ sonar abilities were exquisitely honed. There was no way to hide smooth, rounded objects from them — not even objects as small as a pill.
The ESA’s answer had been to house each spy in a rough camouflage shell. Wearing these shells, which included real water or native basalt, the spies possessed the same reflective signature as ice or rock.
Advancing through the catacombs, the spies had begun to gather useful information before they came within .5 km of the sunfish, discerning activity by vibrations and sonar calls. Then the spies had approached within a few hundred meters, and their datastreams grew richer.
“The sunfish are moving in fours just like the rows of carvings,” Vonnie said. “Look how they stay together.”
“I don’t see it,” Ash said.
“Watch.”
There were twenty-three sunfish within range of the spies’ array. They scurried and pounced through thirty meters of tunnel. Some of them shoved hunks of lava into the air like baseballs or bricks. Others collected these missiles against one wall. In between, more sunfish dragged larger rocks across the floor.
Vonnie was struck again by the alien beauty of this environment. There were hot spots spread through the rock measuring a toasty -46° to -41° Celsius. Those temperatures were far below freezing, but enough heat had radiated through the spongy old lava to bake the few water molecules in the area. Then the moisture had recondensed. Film-thin drips of ice speckled the tunnel floor. In radar, the ice looked like bright coin— but as always, it was the lithe, powerful sunfish who fascinated her.
They were nearly uniform in size and skin texture. Tom had his crippled arm. Sue and nine others wore scars or bite marks. Otherwise they appeared to be an indistinguishable swarm, yet that was an illusion.
Lost in the ruckus was an astonishing degree of coordination. Not one of the sunfish were ever hit or caught off-guard by the missiles. On the tunnel floor, despite rushing back and forth, they did not trample their comrades.
Vonnie tapped at Metzler’s pad, superimposing a color code on the sunfish. She started with Tom. Near the edge of the group, he struggled with three others to pry loose a desk-sized section of rock, ignoring two more sunfish who hopped into his work space and bounced away in order to throw smaller bits of lava across the tunnel.
“Tom’s diggers are blue,” Vonnie said. “The scavengers who passed through his team are red, this group is yellow, and here’s purple, green, and orange.”
“Twenty-three isn’t divisible by four,” Ash said.
“Green is one short,” Vonnie said. “That’s probably why they paired with orange to do the heavy lifting. Look at what’s happening. They spread apart and mix together, but they constantly reform in the same quartets.”
“We think they have a compulsion toward fours and eights, which is what you’d expect given their physiology,” Metzler said. “Their math is probably based on sums of eight like ours is based on tens.”
“They’re building something,” Vonnie said.
The sunfish weren’t crudely stacking rock against the side of the tunnel. They worked expertly on a column as well-fit as a puzzle, using shape and weight to hold this mass. Each sunfish also left urine or dung in key places. Their waste would freeze like adhesive.
“It’s not a shelter,” Vonnie said. “It looks like a retaining wall, but it’s in the middle of nowhere. Why are they here? There’s no food. No water. The air’s barely any good. Is anything behind that side of the tunnel?”
“We’re not sure. It’s warm. We think there’s a channel of magma not too far away.”
“We need to get a probe close enough to scan through the rock. Maybe there are hot springs on the other side, or bacterial mats, or their home. Do they have an air lock nearby?”
“We don’t know.”
“Right.” Vonnie clenched and unclenched her hands, her nerves flickering with anticipation.
Where were sunfishes’ children? Did they protect them like humans protected their young or were their eggs left to live or die like those of Earth’s frogs and fish? She wanted the answer to be the first possibility. More likely it was the second.
From gene sequencing, X-rays, and her mem files, the biologists said the packs of sunfish included both males and females. The females were physically larger, less in number, and seemed to dominate, calling out more often than the males.
Every one of these physical and sociological aspects were the opposite in humankind. Homo sapiens had typically banned their females from hunting and combat until very recently in history, when technology had provided women with as many advantages as men.
It was another clue to the sunfishes’ mentality. Each time a group left home, they brought enough fertile adults to persevere if their colony was annihilated behind them.
The biologists also knew the sunfish didn’t gestate their unborn because they had no wombs. They laid spawn — hundreds of eggs at once — which the males either sprinkled with milt during the act of laying or soon afterward.
The sunfish might have mating rituals, but they did not make love. They might not have a sex act at all. Equally significant, because they were warm-blooded and semi-aquatic, they probably laid their eggs in hot springs. There was no sunlight to incubate their spawn. They relied on the environment as part of their reproductive cycle, but the environment was catastrophic.