Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 112 Read online

  My tongue is numb in my mouth; I cannot answer her when she speaks, nor can I fully understand what she has said. She glows, as if she has become one of the salt-loving organisms of the deep. I nod and she seems pleased, vanishing from my sight. We move, but I am not walking. Kotto drags me on the emergency sledge. As if I have broken a leg. As if I am incapable.

  A look down at my legs tells me I am incapable. My suit has split wide again, exposing my legs to the air. At some point, it is clear that Kotto tried to seal the rends, but they split the binding again and again. I cannot fathom why; I do not feel larger, and my body is not shaped differently. But the skin that gleams up from the torn suit is wholly white, as clear as ice, with thousands of blue lineae running beneath.

  This should startle me, but between the evidence and the emotion, there is a great gulf of nothing. One cannot reach the other. I study the legs as if they were Europan ice, following each lineae until I can no longer trace its path. They wind across the legs and disappear under, and I imagine I see patterns within them: sharp-edged stars and the lump that is Zuma Rock. I have only ever seen this rock in images handed down from lifetimes before my own: a gray and hulking lump rising quite suddenly from the trees as if it were dropped from space. My many-times-great grandfather was said to have climbed it; my many-times-great grandmother said that was absurd. And yet, here I am on Europa. I picture my many-times-great grandfather upon this rock and I am calmed.

  Come morning—is it morning?—the idea of the rock still rests within me. I feel it as if upon my tongue, salty and weighting it down so I cannot speak when Kotto looks at me. But I see it upon her face. Something else has happened, something she has no explanation for, and the following morning (the ice so very bright beneath Jupiter’s glowing orb), she will have no explanation for what comes next.

  I want to speak to her; I want to write her a letter. My fingers crave the feel of keys, of a cold glass screen, so that I might tell her how Europa surely followed that trail of broken flowers home. So that I might tell her how Zuma Rock rises black from the greenery, and how my many-times-great grandfather stood upon it, barefoot, naked, the way I will stand upon the ice before the consumed shell of my body falls away.

  KOTTO

  One man should not weigh so much in this gravity.

  The sledge is ingenious, locking Bolaji firmly into place, so he is not jostled no matter the terrain we cover. The runners have blades, but like an ice skate possess something of a toe pick, which I can latch into the ice to keep the entire thing from moving. I do this now, kneeling on the ice as I try to catch my breath. We’ll share our last meal in a few hours; tomorrow will be hungry, and Thrace Terminal is at least another day beyond. Water isn’t a problem, at least; Europa’s ocean water freezes clean, desalinated, and our suits are equipped with a sealed system that will allow me to store and melt ice for drinking.

  Marius should never have come out—it’s easy to convince myself of this. When Marius left the station, shrieking about finding a lost station (the lost station—madness—we had not been here before, had we), Bolaji, in his good nature, followed. No one went onto the ice alone—ever, ever, ever. Going alone was certain death. Not that Marius cared or waited—his discovery, he cried, would not wait. Of course he took an icecat. Of course Bolaji took another to follow. And now—we were nearly fucked, but the universe had surely seen worse, even if we had not.

  I went alone, didn’t I? Charged out after Bolaji without a second, without a third. Just went, and I shouldn’t have. Was it worth two lives, Kotto? This goddamn lost station? What the hell does deep space do to a mind? What did Marius see that I did not?

  “Bolaji.”

  He’s so still, the ice color having creeped up his cheeks. He tries to move his mouth, but cannot open it. His water tube remains tucked in the corner; he’s unable to even tongue that away, which is probably best. A slow trickle is better than nothing. If I can get him back to Thrace Terminal, if we can get him in sickbay—I don’t know. Medicine isn’t my thing—first aid sure, but not this. And this isn’t like anything I’ve ever seen.

  “Can you try to sit up?”

  Bolaji nods at me, but doesn’t move. He should be able to sit up, only his legs secured to the sledge; his hands curl around the handles, but he could move them if he wanted. If he was able. I bite the inside of my cheek and taste salt. Maybe whatever’s happened to him won’t let him. Was this part of what happened to Marius?

  The known part was Bolaji radioing back, shrieking that Marius had found it—had found it and we were going to be famous and known and it was better than standing on Zuma Rock naked. Maybe this thing had a hold of him then, too. Was this what extreme cold did to a person? No; cold like this killed a person flat out. Why the hell wasn’t Bolaji dead? Why weren’t we all?

  “Not sitting up is also fine.”

  Bolaji watches me like I’m something he’s never seen instead of someone he’s worked with for seven years. He did a brief stint on Galileo Station, but his heart was never there. When I accused him of wanting a moon of his own, brand new ground he could sink his feet into, he joked that I always wanted an ocean no one had peed in. He wasn’t entirely wrong.

  “Come on. If you stop slowing me down, we can make the spikes, and that means . . . Thrace is still damn far away . . . ”

  The sledge seems lighter when I pull it back into motion. When I dreamed of alien oceans, I dreamed of beasts big enough to pull crafts through them. Not our crafts—their own. These beasts were never not industrious, crafting marvelous cities at the edge of every ocean they possessed—and probably peed in.

  But the beasts here are smaller and according to Bolaji, brighter, glowing green. What had Marius found that could compete with that? We’d found life—goddamn alien life—and he was throwing himself out onto the ice for what. For this?

  I glance back at Bolaji, whose arms are raised, hands reaching for something I cannot see. Something he probably can’t see, either. But what I see turns my stomach; the gloves of his suit are ripped. But more than that maybe, because the fabric looks eaten away. Something in the air, a contaminant we couldn’t detect, something in the ice? The exposure to long, continued cold?

  The penitentes rise like stalagmites from the ice field ahead. The thin blades of ice, some running dark with trapped minerals, are all turned the same direction, as if something has caught their attention. That something is the far-distant sun. I wonder what it would be like, to stretch under its warmth, to watch it melt this entire ball of ice into a whole, free-flowing ocean. Some worlds, I remind myself, are like that.

  I position the sledge within the shelter of two penitentes, and laugh at myself for doing so. It’s not as if there’s someone out here to find us. It’s not as if anyone else is looking. Tomorrow, I’ll be in radio range of Thrace; tomorrow, they’ll know. I draw on my feeding tube, food first, water second, and watch the sky until sleep claims me. I don’t mean to sleep long—Bolaji can’t be left alone—but four hours have passed by the time I look upon the Jupiter-bright sky again.

  “If you pick up the pace,” I tell Bolaji, “we can cover some good ground here—how’s your water, anyhow?”

  I pick my way to the side of the sledge, reaching for the controls on the arm of Bolaji’s suit. His water level is too high—he hasn’t consumed any in the time we’ve been traveling, and when I look at his helmet, I see why. Bolaji is gone. His suit flutters empty, but for a puddle of what looks like water.

  MARIUS

  At this point, Europa’s ocean is one hundred and eleven kilometers straight down, and Marius can see forever. The water swarms with life, hydrothermal vents spewing warmth into the ocean cold. Vast columns of bubbles stream upward, into the dark. Salt bursts across his tongue, but something beyond that, something metallic and true.

  Here, life abounds. Small, insistent. Larger, established. A cr�che of crabs cling to the hot chimneys, hearts fluttering beneath their transparent exoskeletons. Eels, worms, and Othe
rs, so many Others. They have been here a long time, have made nests and smoothed hollows in the Europan rock where the world is forever warm.

  Others carry Marius over the crater and the crab-crusted remains of anchor points rising from the rocky ground. Marius recognizes the broken frame, the shattered drill. A lost station, the lost station—but this lost station is Thrace Terminal, and the markings on the steel legs confirm it. He does not remember Thrace Terminal being lost, but can see it the way he has seen the past—an explosion, a water-pale nebula, debris hurtling through the black salted sea. These simple things Marius understands.

  Marius and Others glide toward still-standing Thrace Terminal; the water tastes of metal, thermal vents scattering bubbles in their wake, broken petals that will perish before they reach the ice cap.

  BOLAJI

  Europa followed flowers; I follow water.

  All thoughts of the suit, of Kotto, of Marius, have gone; these came Before. They are not Now. Now and here, there is only the water, the salt having transformed my body into something Other. I spread through the water, following the currents created by the deep thermal vents—even up here, beneath the ice, my body knows the way the water flows; can sense the warmth and cool entwined.

  If there is purpose, it is only in growth. Why do we change? How do we endure? Why do we stretch for depths we have no hope of reaching? What happens when we do reach them? I think briefly of a man upon a rock, sweat-stained and aching. I think of how he must have looked at the land below him, at the froth of impossibly green trees, and this is how I survey the waters beneath me now. They are small, but filled with life.

  I travel as the water, pushing up through the ice clefts as I will, flinging myself into the sky which spreads clear and bright, before raining back to the ocean below. Pieces of me freeze on Europa’s porcelain face, but I am more than these; I spread infinite, seven times as big as Earth’s oceans, butting against the ice cap. Tonguing it into deeper water.

  KOTTO

  Thrace Terminal stands black and skeletal against the ice. The distant sunlight gleams off the towers, off the ice that wraps her steel legs. She’s still far off, but I breathe easier at seeing her familiar shape. If the extraordinary is supposed to become commonplace, then maybe the commonplace also becomes extraordinary, especially when we are forced from its confines. You don’t dream about sex; you dream about familiar walls, your possessions no matter how meager, everyone you know.

  I flick my comms to life, already itching to get inside the station and take my helmet off. I want to breathe the stale, recycled air. I want to walk barefoot down the chilly corridors in morning. I want to attend my next goddamn mental assessment and show them I did it. I made it.

  “Kotto to Thrace Terminal.”

  But the sledge, folded back into the emergency pack at my back, weighs heavy. I made it back, but alone. I did it, but couldn’t bring Bolaji with me. Couldn’t pull Marius back from whatever cliff he’d jumped off. Do you believe Bolaji had anything to do with Marius’s condition? With his disappearance? They will ask, won’t they? What will I answer? Bolaji did not make it, and Marius did not make it—what can I say? The cold has frozen me to the core—envy encases my heart and I cannot feel what perhaps I should for them, for the loss of them.

  “Thrace Terminal—Kotto, fucking Christ.”

  “Not quite that.” But I try to smile at the sound of Rey’s voice—something familiar, something warm. “Have you in sight—probably tomorrow, unless you send an icecat.” I relay my coordinates and hear Rey dispatching a crew for me.

  My steps quicken at the thought; my walk hastens to a run, but when my helmet clouds with breath, I slow. No sense in overdoing it, not if they’re sending people for me.

  What did Marius and Bolaji find? What did they know? Why didn’t you find it? Maybe you couldn’t fucking see it, Kotto—the changes in the ice, the changes in the water. Or did you find it and were simply unable to see the way Bolaji and Marius could?

  When the ground rumbles, I wonder at the speed at which they’ve come. I strain to hear the icecats clawing their way cross the miles-thick ice, but they’re still too far distant. The vibration through the ice is pervasive, and I track it, as if dancing.

  If they say that eventually you don’t notice the cold, must it also come to pass that after a while, you grow so accustomed to the world you inhabit, you forget it’s hostile? You forget that a rumble isn’t always a transplanted icecat; sometimes, it’s the native ice-buried ocean you’ve come to study. Sometimes, it’s a plume of water and vapor erupting from a fissure in the ice. A plume of water that seems to enfold you like an arm, like a garland of flowers, drawing you toward the arctic waters.

  I tumble and when I at last come to rest against a gently curved flexus, I’m breathing hard. The world beyond my helmet is hazy, but I can see the tear in my sleeve. Elbow to wrist, my arm gone to Europan ice. Deep blue lineae trace a new map to new lands upon me. Europa swims gray and I think it’s the condensation of breath on my helmet—but it’s something else.

  I have forgotten the cold.

  Everything blurs.

  About the Author

  E. Catherine Tobler is a Sturgeon Award finalist and editor at Shimmer Magazine.

  Extraction Request

  Rich Larson

  When they finally shift the transport’s still-smoldering wing enough to drag Beasley out from where he was pinioned, for a moment all Elliot can do, all anyone can do, is stare. Beasley’s wiry arm with its bioluminescent tattoos is near sheared from its socket, and below his hips he’s nothing but pulped meat and splinters of bone.

  He’s still alive, still mumbling, maybe about the woman Elliot saw in a little holo with her arms thrown around his neck, back before Beasley’s dreadlocked mane was shaved off and a conscript clamp was implanted at the top of his spine.

  “His impact kit never triggered,” someone says, as if that’s not fucking obvious, as if he could have been ragdolled out of the transport otherwise.

  “Is the autosurgeon trashed?” someone else, maybe Tolliver, says. Elliot’s ears are still ringing from the crash and his head swimming from what he was doing before it and all the voices seem to blend. He knows, dimly, that he should be giving orders by now.

  “An autosurgeon can’t do shit for him. What’s it going to do, cauterize him at the waist?”

  “Get him some paineaters at least. Numb him up.”

  “Shock’s done that already.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I fucking hope that.”

  Beasley is still trying to talk, but it’s all a choking wet burble from the blood in his mouth. The nudge, though, comes through. It slides into the corner of Elliot’s optic implant, blinking poisonous yellow. A little ripple goes through the rest of the squad, which means they got it, too. A couple of them reflexively clap their hands to the backs of their necks, where the caked scar tissue is still fresh enough to itch.

  Elliot realizes that down here in the bog, cut off from command, the clamp at the top of Beasley’s spine no longer needs official permission to trigger its nanobomb. All it needs is consensus.

  “I’d want it done for me,” Tolliver says, wiping a glisten of sweat off his face. His upvote floats into the digital queue. He chews at his lip, shoots Elliot a look that Elliot carefully ignores.

  “Yeah,” Santos from the lunar colony says, which is as much as she’s ever said. “Trigger him.” Another upvote appears, then another, then three more in a cascade. Elliot sees that he has a veto option—something they didn’t tell him when they stuck him as squad leader. He looks into Beasley’s glazed eyes and completes the consensus, floating his vote to the queue.

  The nanobomb goes off, punching a precise hole through the brainstem and cutting every string at once. Beasley slumps.

  Apart from that, injuries are minimal. Everyone else’s kits went off properly, as evidenced by the gritty orange impact gel still slathering their uniforms. Elliot picks it of
f himself in clumps while he surveys damage to the R12 Heron transport settling in its crater at the end of a steaming furrow of crushed flora and shed metal. The anti-air smartmine shredded their primary rotor when it detonated, and the crash itself did the rest of the work. The Heron’s not going to fly again.

  “Should get them fuel cells out of her,” says Snell, who is scarecrow skinny with a mouth full of metal, and dark enough so his shaved scalp seems to gleam blue-black. “In case there’s leakage.” Aside from Beasley, who’s being wrestled into a body bag, Snell is the only one who knows flyers worth a damn. They conscripted him for smuggling human cargo on a sub-orbital.

  “You do that,” Elliot says, when he realizes Snell is waiting for go-ahead. “Get one of the Prentii to help. They’re digging.”

  “You mean one of the twins?” Snell asks, with a grin that makes his metallic teeth gnash and scrape. Elliot did mean the twins, Privates Prentiss and Prentiss. The nickname slipped out, something Tolliver calls them the same way he calls Snell “The Smell” and Mirotic “Miroglitch.” If he has one for Elliot, too, he doesn’t use it when they’re together.

  “Yeah,” Elliot says. “Get one of the twins.”

  Snell pulls on a diagnostic glove and clambers into the Heron carcass; Elliot turns to check on the perimeter. If they hadn’t gone down over swampland, where the rubbery blue-purple ferns and dense-packed sponge trees provided a cushion, the crash might have been a lot worse. Their impact cleared a swathe on one side of the transport. On the other, Mirotic is calibrating the cyclops.

  Elliot watches the red-lit sensory bulb strain on its spindly neck and spin in a slow circle. “What’s it see?” he asks.