of this race was without hope. The sunfish had a phenomenal will to live, but the concept of hope required a sense of future. It required the idea of somewhere to go.
The sunfish had never imagined the stars, much less reached up to escape this black, fractured world.
This damned world.
No less than four Earth agencies had landed mecha on the surface to strip its resources. Then they’d sent a joint team in the name of science, handpicking three experts from China, America, and Europe — and Bauman and Lam had both died before First Contact, crushed in a rock swell. Would it have made any difference?
The question was too big for her. That the sunfish existed at all was a shock. Humanity had long since found Mars and Venus stillborn and barren. After more than a century and a half, the SETI radioscopes hadn’t detected any hint of another thinking race within a hundred and fifty lightyears of Earth.
Looking so far away was like a bad joke. The sunfish had been inside the solar system for millennia, a neighbor and a counterpart. It should have been the luckiest miracle. It should have been like coming home, but that had been Vonnie’s worst mistake: to think of the sunfish as similar to human beings. They were a species that seemed to lack fear or even hesitation, which might be exactly why her trap would work.
She decided to risk it. She was exhausted and hurt. If she stopped running, she would have time to attempt repairs and regain the advantage.
I hope they don’t come, she thought.
But she found a small shelf in the cliff above the rock slide, then settled in to kill more of them.
2.
Jupiter’s sixth moon was an ocean, a deep, complete sphere too far from the sun to exist as liquid on its surface — not at temperatures of -162° Celsius. Europa was cocooned in ice. The solid crust ran as thick as twenty kilometers in some regions, which meant that for all intents and purposes, it enveloped Europa like a single continent
Human beings first walked the ice in 2094, and flybys and probes had buzzed this distant white orb since 1979. Europa was an interesting place.
For one thing, it was as large as Earth’s moon — nearly as large as Mercury — which meant it could have been a planet in its own right if it orbited the sun instead of Jupiter. It also had a unique if extremely thin oxygen atmosphere caused by the disassociation of molecules from its surface. It was water ice.
It was a natural fuel depot for fusion ships.
Before the end of the twenty-first century, the investment of fifty mecha and two dozen more in spare parts was well worth an endless supply of deuterium at the edge of human civilization. The diggers and the processing stations were fusion-powered, too. So were the tankers parked in orbit.
Spacecraft came next, some with crews, some piloted by robots, and eighteen years passed.
That quiet period might have been much longer. The mecha were on the equator, where it was easiest for the tankers to hold position above them without constantly burning fuel, fighting Jupiter’s gravity and the tug of other moons — but Jupiter’s mass created other conflicts.
Deep inside Europa, its rocky core flexed, generating heat and volcanic activity. The ocean rolled with murderous tides. On the surface, the ice suffered its own turmoil, creating different environments such as "canyons," "melts," "domes," and "chaos terrain." Especially on the equator, the ice bulged and sank and turned over on itself.
Only the smoother, so-called "plains" were deemed safe by the men and women who guided the mecha by remote telepresence. Looking ahead, they sent rovers in all directions, surveying, sampling.
At the southern pole was a smooth area that covered nearly thirty square kilometers.
Many rovers went there.
3.
Vonnie shivered, an intensely ugly sensation inside her suit. She’d locked the joints and torso to become a statue, preventing herself from causing any movement whatsoever, and yet inside it she was skin and muscle.
The feel of her body against this shell was repulsive. She squirmed again and again, trying to shrink away from it, which was impossible.
The rut in her thinking wasn’t much better. She wished Choh Lam hadn’t tried to… She wished somehow she’d saved the rest of her crew. Lam understood so much so fast, he might have already found a way out, a way up.
She’d cobbled together a ghost using his mem files, but she couldn’t give it enough capacity