Europa Deep, page 22
Arthur Medina, Cassie realized with a shock: one of two biologists on the first expedition. And, according to Chastain, a killer.
Before continuing, Chastain leaned back slightly, looking to either side as if to make sure he was alone. “Except what we didn’t know,” he continued, his attention shifting back to his wristcomm, “is that Arthur wasn’t working alone. By the time we got back, Joe had destroyed our comms and sabotaged our lander.” He shook his head. “Kat’s trying to find some way to fix the lander, but I’m telling you right now, there’s no way we’re getting back into orbit.”
Cassie reached past Harrow and touched the keyboard. Chastain froze mid-sentence.
“Arthur Medina and Joseph Wojtowicz,” she said. “They were both biologists. If anyone on the first expedition was qualified to develop bioweapons, it’d be them.”
Lebed’s expression was grim. “You need to hear the rest.”
When the video jerked back into motion, Chastain’s eyes glistened with tears. “Hannes still wants to try to send word back home so people know what happened. He thinks we can rig up an alternate relay to contact one of the satellites, but between me and…whoever eventually listens to this, I’m not feeling hopeful.”
“Jesus Christ,” Harrow muttered. “None of them stood a chance, did they?”
Chastain’s voice took on a defiant edge. “The only good thing about all this is knowing those two sons of bitches are never going home, either.” He leaned closer to the lens, hunching forward. “I don’t think Hannes has accepted how bad things really are. Brian started talking about the vents and came up with this…insane idea he’s somehow convinced himself is all we have left. He got into a fight with Tracey after she told him to shut the hell up, but he keeps insisting. Tracey, meanwhile, wants to get everyone together to talk about options, but…let’s face it. Nobody’s coming to rescue us. Nobody even knows what’s happened to us. And we can’t survive down here, whatever Brian and Chris are saying.”
The sound of her brother’s name felt like a soft punch to Cassie’s belly.
Chastain fell silent for almost a full minute, and they listened to him breathing. The view of the man’s face trembled slightly, and Cassie realized his hands must be shaking.
“I don’t know when I’ll ever get a chance to talk like this again,” he said at last. “So if you ever see this, Carly,” he continued, his voice raw, “just remember that I love you.”
Chastain opened his mouth like he was about to add something more, then shook his head. Fingers reached towards his wristcomm and the video ended.
“I guess,” Harrow said into the silence that followed, “this answers a lot of questions.”
Lebed regarded him incredulously. “Surely the opposite? It raises even more questions.”
Cassie nodded, her throat tight and her heart hammering in her chest like she’d gone for a ten-kilometre run. “Is there any more like this?”
Harrow shook his head, looking regretful. “I couldn’t dig any further. Most of the network’s data is secured under some kind of hardcore encryption.”
Lebed nodded at the screen. “And you heard what Chastain said—their comms were deliberately crippled, the same as our own on the Veles.”
Cassie thought for a moment. “But if the network’s encrypted,” she said, “then how did you find this video?”
“It was backed up on a flimsy lying around on the upper level,” Lebed explained. “Outside of that, there’s a lot we can’t access—comms logs, daily summaries, requests for information from back home or data previously uploaded to the satellites.” He let out a long, heartfelt sigh. “That’s why Chastain left that video where we found it—it was the only way he could leave a message in case anyone ever came looking for them.”
Harrow absent-mindedly scratched one cheek, looking badly in need of a full night’s sleep. “Could be Wojtowicz and Medina scrubbed the hard drives of evidence showing what they were up to. In which case, there might not be anything left for you to find, Cassie.”
Cassie took out the interface key and studied it in her hands. She’d known there was a risk she’d come all this way for nothing—but knowing it was one thing, and experiencing it was another.
She wasn’t ready to give up. Not yet.
“Ketteridge gave this to me,” she said, holding the key up where both men could see it.
They looked at it with blank expressions.
“And it is?” Lebed enquired.
She hesitated, then told them.
“The actual fuck?” Harrow exclaimed, looking scandalized. “Sentient malware?”
“And what exactly,” Lebed enquired, his gaze fixed on Cassie, “is it that you want to do with it?”
“What Ketteridge asked me to do,” she replied. “Plug it into the computers here and…let it do its thing.”
“Which is?” Lebed prompted, disbelief written across his features.
Cassie swallowed, finding her throat was suddenly dry. “I don’t really know,” she said weakly. “He told me it was programmed to hunt out the evidence he wanted.”
“It could also trash the computers—assuming they aren’t already trashed—and shut down the life-support,” Harrow warned. “In fact, we’ve no idea what it might do, assuming Ketteridge was being honest with you.”
“And let’s face it, Cassie,” Lebed added. “Being honest and moral are not traits normally associated with a man like Ketteridge.”
She nudged the interface key where she’d placed it on the table between them. “But if nothing else works…?”
Lebed looked incredulous. “Are you insane?” He gestured at the interface key. “Do you know how many millions lost their entire digital footprints when things like that were first unleashed on the world?” He snapped his fingers. “Medical records, savings, pensions, all gone. Bank records, gone. A global disaster followed by an even worse global recession.”
“I have an idea,” said Harrow. He tapped at his wristcomm. “Marcus? Can you hear me?”
“He’s most of the way to the borehole station by now,” said Lebed. “Unlikely he’ll hear you with all that ice in the way.”
“Hello?”
Lebed stared at Harrow’s wristcomm with consternation. “I…how can you hear us, Marcus? All that ice—?”
“The first expedition must have set up a relay for this precise purpose,” the machine explained. “Or so I concluded when I spotted a transceiver placed up on top of a penitent.”
“Where are you now?” asked Cassie.
“I’m just approaching the borehole station.”
“How does it look?”
“Operational,” the machine replied. “Why place the two stations so far apart?”
“Safety,” said Lebed. “Because by necessity the borehole station must be placed where the ice is thinnest, the ice is therefore prone to shifting. This habitat, by contrast, was placed on older, more stable ice.”
“Cassie,” said Harrow, “tell Marcus about the key.”
Cassie quickly explained her idea for using Ketteridge’s malware to break into otherwise unresponsive computer systems.
“All this time you had something like that on you,” the machine said in apparent disbelief, “and you didn’t tell me? Why?”
“It just…never occurred to me.” It sounded preposterous even to her own ears.
“Then let me assure you that you have no idea what that thing might do if you let it loose in the station’s computers, whether they’ve been wiped or not. Remember, that’s the same kind of thing that shut down the cryo bay. It took me subjective hours to destroy that malware, and it’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.”
Lebed’s brow formed into deep furrows. “You can really do that?” he demanded. “Disarm sentient malware?”
“They’re old tech by now, frankly,” the machine responded. “A necessary step towards truly sentient autonomous systems such as myself, but primitive by comparison. Let me add, Cassie—with me along, you don’t need Ketteridge’s malware.”
It took a moment for Cassie to realize what the machine was suggesting. She sank onto a chair, wondering how it hadn’t been obvious before now: of course she didn’t need Ketteridge’s viral software. The machine that had taken on Marcus’ identity was infinitely more sophisticated in its design.
“Then we need your help,” she said. “Evan says the computers here are encrypted. He can’t figure out a way to bypass it.”
“Then grant me access to them,” the machine replied. “As long as I’m in radio contact and I have the right permissions, I can work on the problem from here.”
“Fuck it,” said Harrow, standing now. “Might as well try. Give me one second, Marcus.”
Harrow stepped over to another console and tapped at its keyboard without sitting down. “I’m patching all our behemoths into the station’s computer network,” he announced. “You should have full access now, Marcus.”
“I’ll be in touch as soon as I have something,” said the machine.
Half an hour later, the machine got back to them.
“The good news,” it said, “is that the encryption on Verne’s computers was pretty weak. But there’s nothing there. The backups and memory storage are all completely corrupted. If there was anything there before, it’s long gone, I’m afraid.”
Lebed swore—or so Cassie assumed, given his tone—in Ukrainian.
Oddly, Cassie felt relieved by this development. If the evidence she had been sent to find no longer existed, then her mission was over, and she owed Ketteridge nothing more. She was free to search for Chris, or at least to find out what had happened to him and the others.
“There’s still Station Nemo,” the machine pointed out. “It might be whoever wiped the computers in Verne didn’t have the chance to do the same thing down there.”
Assuming, thought Cassie, that Station Nemo hadn’t long since been flattened to a pancake by the staggering pressure at the bottom of the Europan ocean.
“We know we have to go there anyway,” said Harrow, pushing his chair back from the console to stand. The chair’s legs gave out a muffled screech in response. “If there are more answers, I’m guessing that’s where we’ll find them.”
Cassie watched as Lebed headed back towards the airlock. “Where are you going?”
“I’m tired of sitting around in here,” he grunted. “I’m going to suit back up and go check that transceiver. See if there’s any way to get it working. Our biggest priority should be getting word back home about what’s been going on out here.”
He nodded to Harrow. “Perhaps you could take another look around and see if you can find any other personal items with information recorded on them. And perhaps,” he said to Cassie this time, “you can drive our sub over to the borehole station and report back what you find there. Then, once we know whether the borehole is still functional, we can decide on our next move.”
Cassie lifted her own wristcomm to her lips. “You catch all that, machine?”
“I did, Cassie.” It affected a weary tone, perhaps because she’d not addressed it by its chosen name. “I’ll wait here for you.”
“And if we can’t get below the ice?” Harrow asked, looking between them uncertainly.
Nobody said anything. But they all knew the answer: drilling a fresh hole through the ice would take weeks, more likely months, and in the meantime they had two murderous spooks trapped aboard the Veles and a potentially hostile foreign force on the way.
“Then I guess we wait until I can find out more,” said Cassie, as much to break the silence than anything.
It took Cassie a couple of hours to negotiate the crawler across the fifteen kilometres of broken ice field separating the borehole from Station Verne.
The station surrounding the borehole had been constructed in the shadow of a tall pillar of ice. She had passed a number of such monolithic formations on her way there: she felt like an ant finding its way through a forest of gigantic petrified trees.
Before they’d fallen out of contact forever, the original Europa Deep expedition had spent three weeks surveying the ice and carrying out sonar tests before locating a subsurface lake at a point where the ice crust was no more than a few kilometres thick. Using custom nuclear-powered drills, they had spent the next month and a half blasting through ancient, densely packed ice to the ocean beneath.
During this process, the borehole had been separated into a series of distinct pressure chambers to prevent the highly pressurized water from rushing up to the surface and wrecking the drilling operation.
Following the borehole’s completion, a much larger submarine—the Europa Explorer—had first explored the seabed beneath the borehole, then been disassembled and reassembled into Station Nemo. A mechanized cradle was used to transport mini-subs up to a four-passenger capacity down through the borehole’s pressure chambers to the hidden ocean below.
The subsurface lake itself was clearly outlined in dark blue on the crawler’s subsurface sonar screen, making it appear as if Cassie were driving over a paper-thin sheet of ice.
Then she guided the crawler over and past an obstruction and caught sight of a clearly artificial structure dead ahead: an ice-covered dome twenty metres across and nine metres tall. An airlock big enough to accommodate the crawler she drove was set into a recess.
Coming closer, she saw a behemoth-suited figure step around from the far side of the borehole station, raising one glove in greeting as she slowed her forward progress.
She leaned towards the comms mike. “Marcus. It’s Cassie. Can you hear me?”
“Loud and clear,” the machine affirmed.
“Follow me in through the garage airlock.”
The outer airlock door already stood open, and she guessed the machine had already been inside. Reducing speed yet further, she guided the low-bellied vehicle and its trailer, carrying their mini-sub, inside.
As soon as the machine had followed her inside, the outer door closed, and the airlock pressurized. The inner airlock door swung open to reveal the dome’s interior, and she drove inside and disembarked.
For the next twenty minutes, she explored each and every corner of the borehole station. Engineering bays, sleeping quarters, a medical bay and various labs were built into the outer part of the dome, but the centre was given over entirely to the borehole. This was concealed beneath a tall cylindrical framework that contained the submarine transport cradle. The framework stood at the centre of a single contiguous space that took up nearly half of the station.
Of more immediate interest to Cassie, however, was the first expedition crawler she found parked in an internal garage, along with a mini-sub mounted on a trailer.
“The outer airlock door was open when you got here?” she asked the machine. They stood together at the entrance to the garage.
“Indeed,” it replied, speaking through an external speaker. For the moment, it had chosen to remain inside its behemoth suit. It felt oddly like having a conversation with a colossal humanoid robot out of some creaky old black and white film.
“I’m going to take a look inside,” she said, and nodded at the crawler. Then she looked back at the behemoth. “You’ll have to wait outside, I’m afraid. You won’t fit unless you want to come out of that suit.”
“I’m fine where I am for now,” said the machine.
Cassie regarded the machine for a beat, then nodded at the second crawler. “You’re nervous about what I might find in there?”
“Maybe a little squeamish,” it admitted.
Imagine how I feel, she thought, then realised she was hesitating. Afraid, like the machine, of finally discovering the bodies of the former expedition.
Somehow, she found the will to look inside. The air inside the second crawler was as bitterly cold as elsewhere in the station, and smelled dry and musty. It also carried a faint, rotten-egg scent of sulphides. Her breath plumed frosty white with every exhalation.
She stared around, seeing that the vehicle had been gutted. Panels had been torn open to reveal empty slots and bays where shielded electronics and battery units should have been. Most of the dashboard’s components had similarly been removed, rendering the crawler not much more than a shell.
The mini-sub, by contrast, appeared to be in full working order when she went to investigate it. The first expedition had brought three submersibles, so the other two were presumably still docked at Station Nemo twenty kilometres below her feet.
“If you don’t mind my saying,” the machine commented when she emerged from the mini-sub, “you seem a little more comfortable with me.”
“Comfortable how?”
“You called me Marcus when you arrived at the borehole station. I’d call that progress.”
She started a little. Had she said that? She couldn’t even remember.
“It’s a name, is all,” she said, too tired to argue.
Their next stop was the borehole control room. Consoles and screens were set against one wall, with racks of equipment and behemoth spare parts stacked against the other, on rickety aluminium shelving. It didn’t take long to confirm that the borehole was, indeed, still open and still functional.
Which qualified as downright suspicious, given the number of years that had passed between expeditions.
Cassie paused briefly to eat something and use the tiny, compact toilet in the rear of the crawler she’d arrived in. In the meantime, the machine—which had at last exited its behemoth suit—made a closer investigation of the engineering bays. It soon returned to find her back in the control room, having found no further evidence of the fate of the first expedition’s crew.
They must have left something, she thought. There was Chastain’s video, but that felt less like a message than a fragment of a message, and a hurried one at that.
She couldn’t shake the sense she was missing something.
“What now?” the machine enquired. It had stepped over to a console, tapping slowly and carefully on the keyboard with one of its appendages.
“I guess there’s nowhere to go now except under the ice. As soon as I’ve talked to the others, we should get to work loading the sub into the transport cradle. It’s going to take a while.”
Before continuing, Chastain leaned back slightly, looking to either side as if to make sure he was alone. “Except what we didn’t know,” he continued, his attention shifting back to his wristcomm, “is that Arthur wasn’t working alone. By the time we got back, Joe had destroyed our comms and sabotaged our lander.” He shook his head. “Kat’s trying to find some way to fix the lander, but I’m telling you right now, there’s no way we’re getting back into orbit.”
Cassie reached past Harrow and touched the keyboard. Chastain froze mid-sentence.
“Arthur Medina and Joseph Wojtowicz,” she said. “They were both biologists. If anyone on the first expedition was qualified to develop bioweapons, it’d be them.”
Lebed’s expression was grim. “You need to hear the rest.”
When the video jerked back into motion, Chastain’s eyes glistened with tears. “Hannes still wants to try to send word back home so people know what happened. He thinks we can rig up an alternate relay to contact one of the satellites, but between me and…whoever eventually listens to this, I’m not feeling hopeful.”
“Jesus Christ,” Harrow muttered. “None of them stood a chance, did they?”
Chastain’s voice took on a defiant edge. “The only good thing about all this is knowing those two sons of bitches are never going home, either.” He leaned closer to the lens, hunching forward. “I don’t think Hannes has accepted how bad things really are. Brian started talking about the vents and came up with this…insane idea he’s somehow convinced himself is all we have left. He got into a fight with Tracey after she told him to shut the hell up, but he keeps insisting. Tracey, meanwhile, wants to get everyone together to talk about options, but…let’s face it. Nobody’s coming to rescue us. Nobody even knows what’s happened to us. And we can’t survive down here, whatever Brian and Chris are saying.”
The sound of her brother’s name felt like a soft punch to Cassie’s belly.
Chastain fell silent for almost a full minute, and they listened to him breathing. The view of the man’s face trembled slightly, and Cassie realized his hands must be shaking.
“I don’t know when I’ll ever get a chance to talk like this again,” he said at last. “So if you ever see this, Carly,” he continued, his voice raw, “just remember that I love you.”
Chastain opened his mouth like he was about to add something more, then shook his head. Fingers reached towards his wristcomm and the video ended.
“I guess,” Harrow said into the silence that followed, “this answers a lot of questions.”
Lebed regarded him incredulously. “Surely the opposite? It raises even more questions.”
Cassie nodded, her throat tight and her heart hammering in her chest like she’d gone for a ten-kilometre run. “Is there any more like this?”
Harrow shook his head, looking regretful. “I couldn’t dig any further. Most of the network’s data is secured under some kind of hardcore encryption.”
Lebed nodded at the screen. “And you heard what Chastain said—their comms were deliberately crippled, the same as our own on the Veles.”
Cassie thought for a moment. “But if the network’s encrypted,” she said, “then how did you find this video?”
“It was backed up on a flimsy lying around on the upper level,” Lebed explained. “Outside of that, there’s a lot we can’t access—comms logs, daily summaries, requests for information from back home or data previously uploaded to the satellites.” He let out a long, heartfelt sigh. “That’s why Chastain left that video where we found it—it was the only way he could leave a message in case anyone ever came looking for them.”
Harrow absent-mindedly scratched one cheek, looking badly in need of a full night’s sleep. “Could be Wojtowicz and Medina scrubbed the hard drives of evidence showing what they were up to. In which case, there might not be anything left for you to find, Cassie.”
Cassie took out the interface key and studied it in her hands. She’d known there was a risk she’d come all this way for nothing—but knowing it was one thing, and experiencing it was another.
She wasn’t ready to give up. Not yet.
“Ketteridge gave this to me,” she said, holding the key up where both men could see it.
They looked at it with blank expressions.
“And it is?” Lebed enquired.
She hesitated, then told them.
“The actual fuck?” Harrow exclaimed, looking scandalized. “Sentient malware?”
“And what exactly,” Lebed enquired, his gaze fixed on Cassie, “is it that you want to do with it?”
“What Ketteridge asked me to do,” she replied. “Plug it into the computers here and…let it do its thing.”
“Which is?” Lebed prompted, disbelief written across his features.
Cassie swallowed, finding her throat was suddenly dry. “I don’t really know,” she said weakly. “He told me it was programmed to hunt out the evidence he wanted.”
“It could also trash the computers—assuming they aren’t already trashed—and shut down the life-support,” Harrow warned. “In fact, we’ve no idea what it might do, assuming Ketteridge was being honest with you.”
“And let’s face it, Cassie,” Lebed added. “Being honest and moral are not traits normally associated with a man like Ketteridge.”
She nudged the interface key where she’d placed it on the table between them. “But if nothing else works…?”
Lebed looked incredulous. “Are you insane?” He gestured at the interface key. “Do you know how many millions lost their entire digital footprints when things like that were first unleashed on the world?” He snapped his fingers. “Medical records, savings, pensions, all gone. Bank records, gone. A global disaster followed by an even worse global recession.”
“I have an idea,” said Harrow. He tapped at his wristcomm. “Marcus? Can you hear me?”
“He’s most of the way to the borehole station by now,” said Lebed. “Unlikely he’ll hear you with all that ice in the way.”
“Hello?”
Lebed stared at Harrow’s wristcomm with consternation. “I…how can you hear us, Marcus? All that ice—?”
“The first expedition must have set up a relay for this precise purpose,” the machine explained. “Or so I concluded when I spotted a transceiver placed up on top of a penitent.”
“Where are you now?” asked Cassie.
“I’m just approaching the borehole station.”
“How does it look?”
“Operational,” the machine replied. “Why place the two stations so far apart?”
“Safety,” said Lebed. “Because by necessity the borehole station must be placed where the ice is thinnest, the ice is therefore prone to shifting. This habitat, by contrast, was placed on older, more stable ice.”
“Cassie,” said Harrow, “tell Marcus about the key.”
Cassie quickly explained her idea for using Ketteridge’s malware to break into otherwise unresponsive computer systems.
“All this time you had something like that on you,” the machine said in apparent disbelief, “and you didn’t tell me? Why?”
“It just…never occurred to me.” It sounded preposterous even to her own ears.
“Then let me assure you that you have no idea what that thing might do if you let it loose in the station’s computers, whether they’ve been wiped or not. Remember, that’s the same kind of thing that shut down the cryo bay. It took me subjective hours to destroy that malware, and it’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.”
Lebed’s brow formed into deep furrows. “You can really do that?” he demanded. “Disarm sentient malware?”
“They’re old tech by now, frankly,” the machine responded. “A necessary step towards truly sentient autonomous systems such as myself, but primitive by comparison. Let me add, Cassie—with me along, you don’t need Ketteridge’s malware.”
It took a moment for Cassie to realize what the machine was suggesting. She sank onto a chair, wondering how it hadn’t been obvious before now: of course she didn’t need Ketteridge’s viral software. The machine that had taken on Marcus’ identity was infinitely more sophisticated in its design.
“Then we need your help,” she said. “Evan says the computers here are encrypted. He can’t figure out a way to bypass it.”
“Then grant me access to them,” the machine replied. “As long as I’m in radio contact and I have the right permissions, I can work on the problem from here.”
“Fuck it,” said Harrow, standing now. “Might as well try. Give me one second, Marcus.”
Harrow stepped over to another console and tapped at its keyboard without sitting down. “I’m patching all our behemoths into the station’s computer network,” he announced. “You should have full access now, Marcus.”
“I’ll be in touch as soon as I have something,” said the machine.
Half an hour later, the machine got back to them.
“The good news,” it said, “is that the encryption on Verne’s computers was pretty weak. But there’s nothing there. The backups and memory storage are all completely corrupted. If there was anything there before, it’s long gone, I’m afraid.”
Lebed swore—or so Cassie assumed, given his tone—in Ukrainian.
Oddly, Cassie felt relieved by this development. If the evidence she had been sent to find no longer existed, then her mission was over, and she owed Ketteridge nothing more. She was free to search for Chris, or at least to find out what had happened to him and the others.
“There’s still Station Nemo,” the machine pointed out. “It might be whoever wiped the computers in Verne didn’t have the chance to do the same thing down there.”
Assuming, thought Cassie, that Station Nemo hadn’t long since been flattened to a pancake by the staggering pressure at the bottom of the Europan ocean.
“We know we have to go there anyway,” said Harrow, pushing his chair back from the console to stand. The chair’s legs gave out a muffled screech in response. “If there are more answers, I’m guessing that’s where we’ll find them.”
Cassie watched as Lebed headed back towards the airlock. “Where are you going?”
“I’m tired of sitting around in here,” he grunted. “I’m going to suit back up and go check that transceiver. See if there’s any way to get it working. Our biggest priority should be getting word back home about what’s been going on out here.”
He nodded to Harrow. “Perhaps you could take another look around and see if you can find any other personal items with information recorded on them. And perhaps,” he said to Cassie this time, “you can drive our sub over to the borehole station and report back what you find there. Then, once we know whether the borehole is still functional, we can decide on our next move.”
Cassie lifted her own wristcomm to her lips. “You catch all that, machine?”
“I did, Cassie.” It affected a weary tone, perhaps because she’d not addressed it by its chosen name. “I’ll wait here for you.”
“And if we can’t get below the ice?” Harrow asked, looking between them uncertainly.
Nobody said anything. But they all knew the answer: drilling a fresh hole through the ice would take weeks, more likely months, and in the meantime they had two murderous spooks trapped aboard the Veles and a potentially hostile foreign force on the way.
“Then I guess we wait until I can find out more,” said Cassie, as much to break the silence than anything.
It took Cassie a couple of hours to negotiate the crawler across the fifteen kilometres of broken ice field separating the borehole from Station Verne.
The station surrounding the borehole had been constructed in the shadow of a tall pillar of ice. She had passed a number of such monolithic formations on her way there: she felt like an ant finding its way through a forest of gigantic petrified trees.
Before they’d fallen out of contact forever, the original Europa Deep expedition had spent three weeks surveying the ice and carrying out sonar tests before locating a subsurface lake at a point where the ice crust was no more than a few kilometres thick. Using custom nuclear-powered drills, they had spent the next month and a half blasting through ancient, densely packed ice to the ocean beneath.
During this process, the borehole had been separated into a series of distinct pressure chambers to prevent the highly pressurized water from rushing up to the surface and wrecking the drilling operation.
Following the borehole’s completion, a much larger submarine—the Europa Explorer—had first explored the seabed beneath the borehole, then been disassembled and reassembled into Station Nemo. A mechanized cradle was used to transport mini-subs up to a four-passenger capacity down through the borehole’s pressure chambers to the hidden ocean below.
The subsurface lake itself was clearly outlined in dark blue on the crawler’s subsurface sonar screen, making it appear as if Cassie were driving over a paper-thin sheet of ice.
Then she guided the crawler over and past an obstruction and caught sight of a clearly artificial structure dead ahead: an ice-covered dome twenty metres across and nine metres tall. An airlock big enough to accommodate the crawler she drove was set into a recess.
Coming closer, she saw a behemoth-suited figure step around from the far side of the borehole station, raising one glove in greeting as she slowed her forward progress.
She leaned towards the comms mike. “Marcus. It’s Cassie. Can you hear me?”
“Loud and clear,” the machine affirmed.
“Follow me in through the garage airlock.”
The outer airlock door already stood open, and she guessed the machine had already been inside. Reducing speed yet further, she guided the low-bellied vehicle and its trailer, carrying their mini-sub, inside.
As soon as the machine had followed her inside, the outer door closed, and the airlock pressurized. The inner airlock door swung open to reveal the dome’s interior, and she drove inside and disembarked.
For the next twenty minutes, she explored each and every corner of the borehole station. Engineering bays, sleeping quarters, a medical bay and various labs were built into the outer part of the dome, but the centre was given over entirely to the borehole. This was concealed beneath a tall cylindrical framework that contained the submarine transport cradle. The framework stood at the centre of a single contiguous space that took up nearly half of the station.
Of more immediate interest to Cassie, however, was the first expedition crawler she found parked in an internal garage, along with a mini-sub mounted on a trailer.
“The outer airlock door was open when you got here?” she asked the machine. They stood together at the entrance to the garage.
“Indeed,” it replied, speaking through an external speaker. For the moment, it had chosen to remain inside its behemoth suit. It felt oddly like having a conversation with a colossal humanoid robot out of some creaky old black and white film.
“I’m going to take a look inside,” she said, and nodded at the crawler. Then she looked back at the behemoth. “You’ll have to wait outside, I’m afraid. You won’t fit unless you want to come out of that suit.”
“I’m fine where I am for now,” said the machine.
Cassie regarded the machine for a beat, then nodded at the second crawler. “You’re nervous about what I might find in there?”
“Maybe a little squeamish,” it admitted.
Imagine how I feel, she thought, then realised she was hesitating. Afraid, like the machine, of finally discovering the bodies of the former expedition.
Somehow, she found the will to look inside. The air inside the second crawler was as bitterly cold as elsewhere in the station, and smelled dry and musty. It also carried a faint, rotten-egg scent of sulphides. Her breath plumed frosty white with every exhalation.
She stared around, seeing that the vehicle had been gutted. Panels had been torn open to reveal empty slots and bays where shielded electronics and battery units should have been. Most of the dashboard’s components had similarly been removed, rendering the crawler not much more than a shell.
The mini-sub, by contrast, appeared to be in full working order when she went to investigate it. The first expedition had brought three submersibles, so the other two were presumably still docked at Station Nemo twenty kilometres below her feet.
“If you don’t mind my saying,” the machine commented when she emerged from the mini-sub, “you seem a little more comfortable with me.”
“Comfortable how?”
“You called me Marcus when you arrived at the borehole station. I’d call that progress.”
She started a little. Had she said that? She couldn’t even remember.
“It’s a name, is all,” she said, too tired to argue.
Their next stop was the borehole control room. Consoles and screens were set against one wall, with racks of equipment and behemoth spare parts stacked against the other, on rickety aluminium shelving. It didn’t take long to confirm that the borehole was, indeed, still open and still functional.
Which qualified as downright suspicious, given the number of years that had passed between expeditions.
Cassie paused briefly to eat something and use the tiny, compact toilet in the rear of the crawler she’d arrived in. In the meantime, the machine—which had at last exited its behemoth suit—made a closer investigation of the engineering bays. It soon returned to find her back in the control room, having found no further evidence of the fate of the first expedition’s crew.
They must have left something, she thought. There was Chastain’s video, but that felt less like a message than a fragment of a message, and a hurried one at that.
She couldn’t shake the sense she was missing something.
“What now?” the machine enquired. It had stepped over to a console, tapping slowly and carefully on the keyboard with one of its appendages.
“I guess there’s nowhere to go now except under the ice. As soon as I’ve talked to the others, we should get to work loading the sub into the transport cradle. It’s going to take a while.”
