Surreptitiously, Vonnie instructed her station to copy the FNEE datastreams. She could broadcast the massacre systemwide. Billions of people would be outraged… and yet… and yet the gene corps and the politicians had what they wanted. Worse, they could claim they were innocent. The sunfish had attacked them, not vice versa.
At least it’s over, she thought. But the activity in the ice wasn’t done.
“Oh no,” she said, reacting to an alarm.
The second pack of sunfish — the group who’d elected not to pursue their smaller cousins and hurried toward the mecha instead — were about to make their own appearance on the battlefield. There were sixteen of them. They had no chance where fifty-two warriors had failed.
42.
“We need to stop the sunfish or Ribeiro,” Vonnie said. “There’s no excuse for more killing. Ash! They have all the captives and tissue samples they need.”
“I can’t make the sunfish go away,” Ash said stubbornly.
“What about sonar calls from our spies? Anything. Maybe we can distract them. They might recognize a warning.”
“Got it,” Metzler said, but Frerotte acted first. He uploaded their linguistic databases to the spies, selecting a short menu of sunfish calls. “Here,” Frerotte said.
The spies mimicked Tom’s screech from his encounter with Probe 112. Pärnits believed the sound was a challenge and a boast that Tom’s tribe was a ferocious entity. Unfortunately, the spies relied primarily on radar and passive sensory arrays. They weren’t designed to transmit signals other than encrypted data/comm, so their sonar was short range.
Frerotte shook his head. “The spies probably aren’t loud enough. I’m not sure—”
The new sunfish changed course, swinging away from the FNEE mecha. As they did, they piped and shrieked at the rock separating them from the blood-soaked cavern.
Were they sounding out the mecha? Not with so much rock between them, Vonnie thought. She believed the sunfish were teasing their enemy, trying to provoke the machines into rushing after them. Was that to set an ambush? Did they plan to bring a tunnel down on the mecha?
The sunfish dove through the catacombs, taking one, two, three turns to maintain the same heading. They were moving in the direction of the ESA spies.
“They heard us,” Vonnie said.
“Did they?” Metzler asked. “They’re trending toward our spies, but there’s another place they could be going. They must know where to find Tom and Sue’s abandoned colony even if they’ve never been inside it.”
“You think they always intended to run for the colony.”
“Yes. Our AI tagged something weird in the FNEE datastreams. This group is exclusively male. From their size, they might be immature males.”
“But the smaller breed evacuated,” Vonnie said. “There’s nothing in the colony.”
“Maybe the smaller sunfish left their old and wounded behind,” Metzler said. “There might be farms. This is the larger breed’s chance to raid the place.”
“Smart,” Frerotte said.
“Raccoons and dogs raid garbage cans,” Ash said. “I’m sorry. Dawson’s right. Nobody with any brains sends unprotected troops at a gun emplacement.”
“We employed ’human wave’ tactics in World War One,” Frerotte said, coming to Vonnie’s aid again. “The Americans did it at Gettysburg. The Chinese nearly won the North-South Korean War with mass infantry charges.”
“That’s different,” Ash said.
“Is it?”
“Those soldiers carried weapons.”
“The sunfish used rocks like shotgun fire,” Frerotte said. “They tried to bring down the ceiling again. You can’t fault them for not having our technology. The Zulu overwhelmed the British Army using spears and human waves.”
Why are you helping me? Will you keep helping me? Vonnie thought as she waited and watched.
The sunfish were masters at feinting, traps, and decoys. Their lives were an endless game of hide-and-seek, so why hadn’t they gone after their smaller cousins instead of attacking of the mecha? Because they’d been drawn to the carnage on the battlefield? They might have hoped to find the mecha weakened by their cousins, then destroy the machines themselves, claiming all of the dead for food.
Did they realize the mecha weren’t living creatures?
How intelligent are they really? she thought, feeling a pang of doubt. Ash had raised an excellent point. Frontal assaults on a gun platform would have resulted in heavy casualties for armored human commandos. The sunfish tribes had lost more than fifty lives. Twenty more had been wounded and captured. That wasn’t intelligent. It was unreasoning instinct.
Metzler saw her eyes and said, “Von, they couldn’t have understood what they were getting into. They’ve never met war machines.”
“They fought me. They should know what machines can do.”
“That was probably a different tribe.”
“They’re drifting out of range,” Frerotte said.
“I wish we could piggyback a spy onto one of the sunfish,” Metzler said. Blatantly trying to ease the tension, he added, “I’d give my left testicle to see what’s inside the colony. Are there pools? Beds? Maybe it was a penthouse.”
“Let’s reconfigure 4117 through 4124,” Frerotte said. “We should be able to track their sonar calls if we don’t lose them behind the thermal vents. At least we can map a few spaces inside the colony.”
“Good.” Metzler touched Vonnie’s arm. “The more we know, the better chance we’ll have with the next tribe,” he said.
If there’s another tribe, she worried, but she kept her concern to herself. She didn’t want to sound negative when he was giving his best.
The people on Earth will think they won today, she thought. They’ll order new missions. Then our mecha will chase the sunfish from every safe zone inside Europa, stealing DNA and mining the ice—
“Holy shit,” Metzler said.
His soft, ominous tone roused Vonnie from her despair. She glanced through the spies’ datastreams. She sat up straight when she saw why he was afraid. “Koebsch! Koebsch!” she yelled as Metzler struck a Class 1 alert.
“What are you doing?” Ash said.
“Frerotte, get our surface mecha away from— No, wait! Have them drag the hab modules out of here!”
“Roger that,” Frerotte said.
Ash frowned, skimming through their defense grid. “I don’t see…” she said.
Vonnie almost laughed at the irony of Ash thinking like the FNEE gun platform, looking skyward first. How long would it take before people learned to evaluate this environment like its natives?
The sunfish had bypassed the tunnels where their smaller cousins had built the retaining wall. They’d gone lower, missing likeliest spots for an air lock into the colony. Vonnie had supposed they were lost or hunting blindly. Now she zoomed her display as the sunfish clumped against the steep side of a ravine, joining their bodies into one immense muscle.
“They’re tearing at the hot springs,” Vonnie said.
Koebsch appeared on the group feed, projecting calm with his open hands. “Let’s not panic,” he said, studying the sims from Metzler’s display.
The spies’ telemetry showed only blurs and reconstructions.
“The sunfish are too far away,” Koebsch said. “You can’t be sure what they’re doing. They could be digging a new entrance into the colony.”
“No, sir,” Vonnie said. She and Metzler took several images from the sims, letting an AI enhance each frame with preexisting data from their listening posts, their spies, and their probes.