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Chapter Text

NOW

Sophia stood looking at the red smear on the ice for a long time. 

It was a few metres long, and that was mostly the drag marks: drops and smears and pink slush surrounded it. She assumed, from half-remembered nature documentaries, that it had been a seal once. But now there was little left of it even for scavengers to pick over, and whatever bear had eaten it was probably long gone.

Even so, she was very glad to be inside. She’d had no idea they got wildlife this close to the launch pad.

She could picture the seal’s death: the wrong turn underwater, or perhaps a long, exhausting chase; head engulfed in the bear’s mouth, skull pierced through with canine teeth, the sudden darkness and the fatal crush. Dragged to the surface afterwards, its trailing weight between the bear’s front legs forcing the bear to waddle until it came to the spot of its choosing, dropped its prey, looked around, and began to eat. Well, good for the bear, she supposed: God knew there were few enough of them around, any more.

Some time ago, probably in a course on art history in undergrad, she’d heard about some artist one-upping another at an exhibition by adding a little dot of vermilion to a painting of the sea, thereby fascinating more onlookers than his rival (Turner, maybe?). Sophia wasn’t an artist; she was a writer. But journalism came with its share of arresting images, and a stark spot of red amidst all that white certainly held the attention, even through a thick glass wall.

“Sophia Cracroft?” somebody said.

Sophia was too disciplined to startle; instead she looked around with an automatic smile. Her new escort was an Inuk man, with the name KOVEYOOK neatly embroidered on his uniform patch beside the Commonwealth Space Commission’s logo. She thought she recognised the name from the files she’d read on the way over. Sophia stuck out her hand, and he shook it. “It’s good to meet you,” she said, and hazarded, “Will you be the Lyra’s flight engineer?”

Koveyook smiled widely and said, “That’s right,” and Sophia felt herself relax almost reflexively. “And you’re our reporter, huh? I think I read one of your features about Mars, a few years back. You got a prize or something, right?”

She’d won the Orwell Prize and been nominated for a Peabody, in fact. It had been the highlight of her career, a reward for two gruelling years of investigation and damn near missing the rocket launch that could take her home again. Koveyook had clearly read up on her before she arrived.

He had a friendly, reassuring presence; the kind of person, she assumed, who was perfectly pleasant to travel with for months or years. Her uncle had the same kind of manner. He’d always told her that being easy to get along with was one of an astronaut’s most underrated skills. 

“That’s right,” Sophia said, allowing herself a modest shrug. “I’m going to be writing features on this mission as we go.”

Koveyook waved a hand in the direction of the security doors and said, “Sounds like interesting work. Come on, I’ll take you to see Ross.”

Sophia followed him, answering friendly queries about her flight and accommodation, her work, her perspective - far too nice and lighthearted to be an interrogation, but it was obvious that Koveyook was trying to get an impression of her. It occurred to her that there were likely several people lower on the totem pole who might have been sent to fetch her.

She kept her face fixed in a light, agreeable expression that she had perfected through years of practice: open, receptive, and curious, all the things that put people at their ease. It was her interview face, her camera-ready face, her face for deescalating confrontations and accepting awards alike. She saw it reflected in the retinal scanners of each security door they passed through, and it stayed in place all the way to Sir James Ross’ office, where Koveyook told her he was pleased to have met her, and left her at the door.

The expression even survived the moment when Ross looked up, recognised her, and said, “Ah,” in a way that, for the space of a single syllable, could not disguise his dismay.

She stayed smiling, and held out her hand again. “Good to see you, Commander,” she said, “It’s been years. How’s Ann?”

“She’s well,” Ross said, shaking her hand, while his face cycled through a variety of emotions before settling on resignation. “Very well, thank you. So you are the journalist that Lady Jane is sending with us?”

“You didn’t know?” Sophia said.

“And that’s not a conflict of interest?” he asked.

“Not according to my editor,” she said, still smiling.

“Of course,” he said, patting his thighs in a gesture that was almost, not quite, like wiping his hands. “Well then, have a seat,” and he gestured at a chair by his desk.

It was a surprisingly pokey little office, now she was looking around it: a lot of screens (she glimpsed graphs on one, a live feed of what seemed to be the rocket lab on another), a surprising amount of paper, two tablets (one of which displayed something she thought might be flight path calculations), and a series of model spaceships. She thought the models might actually be hand-painted, and amused herself for a few seconds imagining the great Sir James Ross hunched over a kitset wielding a fine-pointed brush.

He cleared his throat, tapping at his keyboard, and said, “When was your last spaceflight?”

“Two years ago,” she said. “It was just a jaunt to the moon, to cover the Ullrich decompression incident, but I have gone further before, of course.”

“Mm,” he said, eyes fixed on the screen. He knew about her time on Mars. “Have you requalified?”

“I passed the psychological evaluation three weeks ago, and the physical last week,” she said briskly. As if the CSC would have accepted her for the mission without either of them. She tilted her head and eyed him. “You really didn’t know I was coming.”

Ross sighed, and sat back. “We’ve had to rather crunch the planning of this mission; as such, I have focused on the ship and the selection of our command crew. That does not include participants such as yourself - I left that up to the Commission.” 

“Mm,” Sophia said. He was going to command the Lyra - he ought to have dossiers on all his crew by now. The information must have been available to him, because Koveyook knew who she was. This interview was supposed to be a formality, it was true - her qualifying meetings had taken place in England a fortnight ago - but that only meant that there had been several weeks in which he might either have sought out the information or had it mentioned to him. She suspected ‘crunch’ might be putting it mildly: this must be the first time he’d come up for air.

“Lady Jane stipulated that she was sending a journalist along with us. I didn’t find it strange that she’d want some public accountability, considering...” He hesitated. 

Sophia waited, and then said, “Considering that she’s funding it?”

“Most of it,” Ross corrected. “But yes. A journalist was the string that came attached to the funding.” He looked away for a long moment, and then back to her. “I didn’t ask. It occurred to me that it could be you. I just didn’t think she’d risk you.”

Sophia let herself stop smiling.

The thing about knowing someone since she was a bright and shining undergraduate was that there was space and time for her to have turned into a completely different person, and for him to not have noticed. Was she still nothing but Lady Jane’s niece in his eyes? 

God, she’d had such a crush on Ross when she was young - a really heady infatuation that had felt so true and mature at the time, and that was only saved from disaster by the fact that he’d never deigned to notice. Of course, then she’d gone after his best friend instead, which had been rather good until it had gotten messy. The thing was, even with the way it had ended with Francis - all the things they hadn’t been able to give up for one another - she didn’t think of that as a disaster. 

It occurred to her that Ross might. Which, everything else aside, would be very inconvenient at this moment.

He looked at her, and she looked back at him, and she let the silence spool out for just long enough to get uncomfortable before she said, “My aunt doesn’t tell me where to go. My editor does.” Another pause. “Is this going to be a problem?”

He blinked first. “No,” he said. “You’re qualified and experienced, and you’re here to do a job.”

“Yes, I am,” she said.

He sat back in his chair, and she let herself mirror him. “You know the mission brief?” he said. “The timeline?”

She recited, “The Jupiter satellites have told us that Erebus is on her way home early, with a trajectory that is predicted to get them to Mars where they will likely need to refuel. We are to intercept, aid if necessary, and investigate why we’ve had no transmissions since the day after they landed on Europa. If nothing unexpected happens, we should rendezvous with Erebus in thirteen months’ time and be back here inside three years. But sod’s law says something unexpected will happen, so we’re equipped for a five-year mission. Have I got that right?”

“Yes,” he said, “Near enough.” He hesitated, worked his jaw, and said, “Except for the bit about the transmissions.”

THEN

Silna awoke on the 376th day of the journey and thought, not for the first time, I can’t do this forever.

In the dark of her sleeping pod, she sat up. The air cycled cool over her face, and the motion sensor brought the light on, very low at first and getting brighter as she sat and squinted in her little box. Faintly, through the walls and beyond the little door, over the ever-present hum of Erebus’ engines, she could hear voices.

She’d been dreaming. She couldn’t remember much, but she’d been alone, headed towards the horizon: a dark line of water beyond the snow, but it seemed to curve away from her, up and up as if on the inside of some huge wheel. She hadn’t seen a horizon in so long. Even longer since she felt that kind of peaceful solitude.

The voices outside sounded excited. Silna spent a couple of minutes blinking at the screen at the foot of her bed, which had come on with the lights. It was doing what she’d programmed it to do on standby, cycling through pictures she’d put on there, mostly of home, her dad, her colleagues, pictures she’d taken out on the ocean.

Like she was trying to make herself homesick.

She wiped the crusts out of her eyes and swung her legs out of bed, into the tiny strip of floor that constituted all the private space she had outside of her bunk. It had taken her weeks to learn how to get dressed without whacking her elbows on something, but it was still a pretty luxurious amount of personal space by the standards of spaceflight. Some company ships still strapped their crews into bags in zero gravity. This was a multinational government contract: it was cushy.

Her heels bumped the drawer where she kept her personal items, and she felt the answering clunk from the soapstone qulliq that she’d sacrificed a third of her weight and volume allowance to bring along, even though she had no way to light it, and no intention of trying on a spaceship. Occasionally, it felt like an absurd thing to bring in place of something she could use. But she remembered going on her first long space flight with her dad when she was a teenager, and he’d brought his then. She hadn’t seen the point of it, until he said, Space is the coldest, darkest place we can go. So the ship has to be home, right?

Right. 

She wished her dad could have come along. He’d been representing the territory for so long, and then got sick two months into the training simulation, had to be evac’d out. And he was better now, but better wasn’t a passing physical. So it was just Silna now. And she missed her dad, and felt stupid for being a grown adult with a PhD on the most exciting opportunity of her life missing her dad, and angry at herself for feeling stupid, around and around like a whirlpool.

She swung her heel back just to hear the clunk again. 

It was no good to wish she was somewhere else. She was here, so here was home, and she had work she had to do.

She scraped her hair back from her face and spent a few minutes pulling it out of the sweaty braid, combing it, and re-braiding it. Then she tugged at her sleep clothes until she was sure she wasn’t showing underwear, and stood up. She hit the switch on the wall to turn the lights and screen off at the same time she tugged open the door.

The bright lights of a daytime cycle on Erebus’ residential ring made her eyes water a little, and the noise got a whole lot more obvious. The floor and ceiling curved away in either direction. She shuffled down the little corridor of sleep pods, where other crew were stirring, and saw Esther Blanky standing on the cushioned pad on top of her own pod, hands on her ample hips, grinning out at the windows.

“What’s happening?” Silna said, looking up at her.

“We’ve made eye contact!” Esther said, gesturing clockwise. “It’ll come around again in a minute.”

Silna leaned against the wall, rubbing her eyes, as Thomas Blanky emerged from Esther’s pod. Silna presumed he’d spent the night there, squeezed in and happy, and frankly, she was just glad he had bothered to put his shorts back on. They’d all lost a lot of formality, travelling together for over a year - at first it was all politeness, wriggling into their flightsuits in the confines of their pods before stepping out to greet each other, but nowadays only a couple of the more senior astronauts still bothered (and it was rumoured Commander Franklin slept in uniform). What made it worse was that all the pods had been built for single occupancy, despite the handful of married couples on the crew, and that didn’t take into account how much the singles liked to mingle. She’d gotten an eyeful more than once from some of these guys heading back to their own pods in the small hours without bothering to put their clothes back on, just bundles of cloth clutched to their nethers as they sprinted bare-assed down the ring to hoots and whistles from the rest of the crew. Thomas and Esther were right next to each other, but they were also shameless.

“Eye contact?” she asked, as Blanky climbed up and sat down by his wife with his prosthetic leg stretched out in front of him.

“Rite of passage! You’ve not been out this far before,” Blanky said. (It wasn’t a question: they all knew by now which of the crew had never been further than the asteroid belt, or Mars, or even the Moon.) “Now you’ll be able to say you’ve looked Jupiter in the eye. Here it comes!"

And there it came, as the ring rotated. Jupiter was always visible to the naked eye, and they had satellites in geostationary orbit above the Europa facility that beamed back images of the moon and Jupiter that they could access whenever they wanted. But now they were close enough to see the great red spot swirling in its gasses, glaring at them across the millions of miles. A handful of other crew were walking down the ring to follow it, but Silna barely paid them any attention, because she was so arrested by it. It really did seem like it was staring at her, and she felt compelled to walk right up to the window so she could stare back.

Erebus was, from every standpoint, maybe the best possible ship to spend years of your life on. The double rings rotated to provide a decent simulation of gravity for the living and laboratory areas, and the windows let her see stars in every direction. If she didn’t want to jog loops around the rings, there were VR headsets attached to the exercise machines so that she could pretend for a little while that she was running through a forest or cycling along a coastline. They all had duty rotations in the food garden so that they could touch something green and living once in a while. Their combined pool of films and shows, which one of the comms guys, Bridgens, had taken pains to correctly label and organise for ease of use, allowed them to run movie nights and genre binges without ever having to repeat viewings, except on popular demand. It still wasn’t enough to stop her from wanting to climb the walls from time to time - which was also an encouraged activity in the right circumstances, but the point was. The point was. Silna wanted off this ship.

The sight of Jupiter this close, meant that it was happening soon. Intellectually, she’d known it, but it was another thing to see it.

“And there’s Europa,” Blanky said, pointing to the gleaming white dot emerging from the shadows, picking it out from among all of Jupiter’s moons. “A few months now, and we’ll be on solid ground again.”

Silna muttered fervent thanks for that in her own tongue, the same one she mouthed every time she’d ever landed back on Earth with all her limbs attached - which Blanky and Esther understood well enough that they laughed in agreement.

There weren’t a lot of people on Erebus who spoke her language. She’d gotten used to career astronauts who hung around the CSC bases in Nunavut, who tended to learn at least a little, and since she didn’t spend a whole lot of time socialising with Captain Crozier, their flight engineer, the occasional exchange with Thomas and Esther was one of the few ways she got to have a conversation in her own tongue. Funnily enough, the Blankys had started out in commercial asteroid-mining just like her dad, a different path from the professional astronauts on this crew who’d started out in a national aeronautics agency, or her fellow researchers who’d only ever been passengers.

Erebus was ostensibly a pan-commonwealth project, but in practice it was one of the whitest crews she’d ever been a part of; most of the crew was British, with one Irishman (she had learned the distinction was important), a handful of Australians and Canadians, and one half-Brazilian payload specialist, Fitzjames, who she was pretty sure had grown up in Brighton and attended the same school as half the other career astronauts aboard. Silna was certainly the only Inuk aboard, and the longer she went without speaking Inuktitut, the more paranoid she felt that she might forget how. One way she kept it up was by teaching it to Harry Goodsir, and here he came now, part of the scrum chasing Jupiter around the turning ring, curls in his eyes and sheepskin slippers on his feet. He spotted her and said, “Ullakkut!” the way she’d taught him to, and it still made her smile.

Over his shoulder, she caught the eye of Lieutenant Gore, the pilot. She’d heard he and Captain Fitzjames used to climb mountains together, and absolutely believed it: he was one of those intensely energetic guys who managed to give off the impression that he was kicking around a soccer ball even when he was in the middle of an astronavigation lecture. He jogged towards them, waving up to the Blankys, and said, “I was just saying, Isn’t it brilliant that we get to see that spot with our own eyes? It’s only been going for a few hundred years, and probably won’t last much longer. And we developed space travel in that window of time! We’re so lucky.”

“It’s a lucky solar system, when you think about it,” Harry said, placidly. “I think the size of the moon relative to the distance of the sun is still my favourite thing - what a lovely coincidence, that they look the same size from Earth.”

Silna’s personal favourite coincidence was that she got to be alive at the same time as the blue whale, which as far as anyone knew was the biggest animal to ever exist. She liked to tell that one to little kids - but it didn’t have anything to do with the solar system. She turned her head to the storm and said, “Looks like it’s staring right at you.”

“Ah, to be around when it blinks - that might be interesting too,” Esther said. “Storm’s got to collapse at some point.”

“Aye, but another will pop up, most likely,” Blanky said. “Hairy ball theory, isn’t it?” which made Esther snigger.

“One eye closes and another opens,” Gore said. “Imagine where it’ll go next.” 

And it was around this point that the rest of the crew came crowding in to follow Jupiter around the station, sweeping Harry and Gore up in it, and Silna took it as a sign to put some real clothes on and go get breakfast.

The commissary was in a spot between two of the sleeping areas, and it was unusually crowded for this early on the day shift. At least, she thought it was, until she looked at the clock and realised she’d woken up early enough to catch the night shift having their supper.

Silna heated up a ration pack of mackerel and another one of scrambled eggs, picked something hot and astringent from the tea selection, and carried it over to the corner of the least-occupied table. She sat down with a polite nod to its only other occupant: Crozier, who paused in scraping something brown out of the bottom of a silver bag to spare her a nod back. Amid the clatter of the commissary, they ate in a little bubble of mutual silence, until Silna had finished the fish and was poking at the packing-foam blob of eggs, and Crozier started piling up his empty packs. 

Something compelled her to ask, “Not long now?”

He paused with a faint look of surprise, then with a small smile said, “Forty days, give or take.”

She nodded, trying not to let her relief show on her face. It was a little embarrassing to tell the flight engineer how much she wanted off his ship. “Be good to do what we came to do,” she offered.

Crozier nodded like maybe he bought that, or maybe he didn’t, but he’d allow it either way. “Be interesting to see what the drill brings up,” he said.

That was an understatement. As far as Silna understood it, the Europa ice drill, which was even now boring a hole through the 25 kilometer-thick crust, was Crozier’s special project going back decades. He’d been around for its design, conception, and development, and his last Europa mission had been spent deploying it, and setting the machines down on the surface to build their habitat. She didn’t know much about that kind of engineering, but apparently it was complex enough that they couldn’t just program the machines and let them run, and they couldn’t control them remotely from Earth because of the huge time delay between Earth and Jupiter. So the last mission to Europa had been Crozier, Blanky, and a bunch of other engineers sitting in orbit above it, remote-controlling machines the size of multi-story buildings on a surface with ice fissures big enough to swallow any one of those machines whole. 

At least, that was the impression she’d gotten. The seminar had been a while back, and unlike Fitzjames (who seemed convinced that everyone was as interested in rockets as he was) Crozier wasn’t inclined to repeat lectures with the same audience.

Silna thought this, nodded, and resumed digging eggs out of the foil bag.

But before he left, Crozier asked, “What are you hoping we find?” He emphasised the you, like it was a question he asked everyone. Probably it was. But he had to know it was a hell of a question to ask her.

Silna was here because she was a marine biologist who specialised in the life that formed around hydrothermal vents, the kind so far from the sun that it didn’t factor into the food chain. If Europa had life, it would almost certainly have to originate around those kinds of vents. She was here to test for signs of life in the ice core samples, and then eventually in the seawater if they managed to drill down far enough to drop probes. At the very least, she hoped for CO2 bubbles and heavy metal traces that could indicate the right biogeochemical processes were happening.

But there were a whole lot of marine biologists in the world, so the other reason Silna was here was because she represented Nunavut’s interests in Europa’s water ice. Whatever countries - or companies - managed to land representatives to work on the surface of a celestial body got a claim on that body. Boots on the ground meant resource shares. And since water was in demand wherever humans went, it was very, very good to have a claim on a body with abundant ice.

The ice was vanishing from Nunavut now. You could cruise from Greenland to Russia most years, and people did, and the tourism helped, but it wasn’t enough to make up for everything they’d lost - the coastlines, the fauna, the ways of being and doing. The terms that let the CSC build infrastructure on Nunavut also meant that whatever missions went up with personnel, one of her people was on it. That meant whatever rock they set foot on, Nunavut got a claim. 

So Silna was here. Hoping with one half of her heart for proof of alien life beyond her wildest dreams. Hoping with the other half for nothing but pure water ice, enough to secure their future for decades or more.

She said, “Maybe tube worms.”

Chapter Text

NOW

The Devon Island Europa Simulation was rarely referred to by its acronym, for obvious reasons that Sophia thought should have prompted someone in the CSC to rename the damn thing long before Erebus left Earth’s orbit. They could have called it the Tallurutit Europa Simulation and nobody would have gotten morbid about it.

From a distance, the Europa Simulation looked like a cluster of barnacles, clinging to what was left of the Devon ice cap. Inside, it was a one-to-one replica of the robot-built habitat on the surface of Jupiter’s moon. Every hallway, hatch, bunk, lab, cupboard, and cranny that Erebus’ crew would find there was built here, just to test that the prospective crew members would be able to stand a full year of each other’s company in an enclosed habitat with peculiar procedures, and ingrain in them the muscle-memory necessary to carry out emergency procedures under any circumstances. 

Testing new-build space habitats like this was standard safety practice for older space agencies. It was the kind of thing that distinguished an extraplanetary research facility from more corporate infrastructure, where all kinds of awful shit could happen.

Still, she supposed that if it turned out that any of the hundred-strong crew hated each other’s guts, it was better to find out while they were still on the surface of Earth. There had been three drop-outs for health reasons in that time, but nobody had failed the psych tests on exit.

Of course, it wasn’t a perfect simulation: they couldn’t simulate Europa’s weak gravity, or the violent surface radiation, and even here on Devon Island, where the compasses spun around a constantly wandering magnetic pole, the weather could not approach Europa’s surface temperatures of -177 Celsius (and that, she recalled her uncle telling her, was a balmy day at the equator).

The idea of the habitat on Europa had been that it would host a succession of crews, rather like an Antarctic research station, with new blocks of researchers fired off in a rocket whenever the planets were aligned - as long as they could pass a season in this place first - and act as a base for long-term ice mining. Right now the simulation was abandoned, pending the resolution of their investigation into Erebus’ disappearance. But the lights still turned on, and all the hatches still opened. Sophia stood in its wide hallways and took pictures.

She had access to a floorplan, of course. But it was different, being able to stand inside it.

The hallways were more spacious than she thought they’d be. It echoed. But she could see wear marks in the paint on certain areas of the wall, perhaps where multiple bodies over the course of a year had habitually put a hand out, or leaned their weight in mid-conversation. She found the mess hall: above the door, someone had painted the words “ARK EUROPA” and a little sailing ship. She wondered if the sign painter had replicated it on the real base. She snapped a picture.

She wondered if the sign painter had attempted to send back pictures of their own.

She called up the floor plan again and squinted at it, trying to read the text on the tiny screen. Annoyed at herself, she asked, “What does the control room look like?”

Ross, standing with arms folded in his bright red parka, said, “This way,” and led her down another corridor and then up a staircase, until they came to a room that she realised must be right above the common room, which explained her trouble reading the map. There were two doors, and the walls were otherwise covered in screens. All black now, of course.

“It must have good soundproofing,” she said, because it was the first thing that came to mind. Otherwise the noise drifting up from the common area would surely make this the worst possible place to stick the communications shift.

“It does,” said Ross. “They got to test for it.”

“And absolutely everything would be transmitted through here,” she muttered, looking about. There were scuff marks faintly visible on the floor, she noticed. Some equipment looked like it had been disconnected; a few screens were at an angle that would be nobody’s ergonomic preference, but would allow a tech to unplug something from the back. “I assume your lot ran tests on it all when the communication failures became apparent.”

“Of course we did,” Ross said, sounding a touch impatient. “That was part of the initial inquest. Surely you’ve read it.”

She had, but not closely enough, apparently, to notice just how much work the word ‘intelligible’ had been doing in those initial reports. ‘No intelligible transmissions’ from the surface of Europa. They had sent weekly reports on their continued failures to receive anything coherent to Aunt Jane until she’d told them to stop and come back to her when they had something positive to report, and then they never had.

That had been about the point when her aunt had started seriously campaigning for a rescue attempt. She got it, of course. But even Lady Jane Franklin, MP, hadn’t been able to influence the planets into a more favourable alignment.

For six months, all they’d had was that last look at uncle John, surrounded by his crew, all beaming with joy. A shuffle of photographs of a party in a dining hall on an alien moon, that she and every other family member of the expedition must have combed over for every trace, every crumb, of the last known fate of someone they loved.

“I recall the speculation was of equipment failure at the site,” she said. That something had gone wrong with the robot-built double to this test site, undetectable by all the hundreds of sensors built into it and transmitting for the whole of Erebus’ journey. It invited all kinds of terrible speculation, for if something were to go wrong with building the transmitter, surely it could go wrong in life support, or leave the facility with structural weaknesses that would become deadly over time, letting out the precious heat and air, letting in the killing frost and deadly radiation.

“That was one theory,” Ross said. “It seemed plausible, early on, until the satellites told us that Erebus was coming home. Now, some kind of cascading software glitch seems more likely.”

He meant the satellites that belonged to other nations, orbiting other moons. The CSC satellites above Europa had gone dark two weeks after the Erebus crew touched down.

Sophia stood for a while with her arms folded, staring blankly at the blank black screens in front of her. This was what she hadn’t understood, for the last few years: the thing that had been downplayed or elided in the CSC’s reports. She didn’t want to use the word coverup, but she could feel the words seriously misled on the tip of her tongue. She had thought - the public had thought - that there were no transmissions from the Europa base after that first two days, but that wasn’t true. The radio bursts CSC had picked up were all on the expected channel and from the expected source, at expected times. It was just that those bursts were absolute gibberish.

Sophia said, “Did my aunt get to hear any of those transmissions?”

“Some,” Ross said, quietly. “She had the clearance for it. And now, so do you.”

So Aunt Jane got to hear those unintelligible packets of noise. The ones that sounded sometimes like scraping, and sometimes like shrieking, and didn’t sound or look any more like audio or video or any kind of coherent data no matter what program or filter they were run through or what expert assessed them. They were just noise. Horrible, horrible noise.

Sophia took more pictures. Rotely, she found good angles, interesting compositions, crouched, snapped. They’d look good in the feature article.

After a few minutes, there was a rustle of parka fabric, and Ross said, “You have twenty-six minutes left, and then we really must get back on schedule.”

THEN

“Now, I know you’re all very keen to get to work,” Sir John Franklin said, his voice buoyant and his face rosy in the warm light of the bar. “I can assure you, we are all eager to see the results of this project that is decades in the making,” and here he glanced pointedly - almost theatrically - at Crozier, who took the ensuing whoops with a bemused expression. “We have the privilege of being the first custodians of this research station, and surely there will be many more missions to come, all centred on this base. A bright and brilliant future of research lies ahead of us all. But I must insist you settle yourselves in, first!”

General laughter, and some cheering, from the whole assembled crew, shoulder-to-shoulder in the Europa common room. The real Europa common room. Silna was as caught up in the mood as anyone, thrilled to be here, finally here, at their destination. It was amazing. It was exciting. It was a huge relief.

It was also strange. This whole place was familiar - identical to the Tallurutit simulation down to the last hatch, at least on the inside - but with incredibly weak gravity. They bounced more than they walked. More than one person had misjudged their stride and careened into a wall or even the ceiling, and it was funny for now, but she bet it was going to get a whole lot less funny when they were moving delicate samples.

It sounded different, too. The walls of this base were incredibly thick - metres of concrete and insulation, and then metres more of ice, to shield them from the surface radiation. But under the expected hum of life support systems, there was also a persistent vibration, more felt than heard, that she had realised pretty quickly was from Crozier’s drill.

She’d caught a glimpse of it from the shuttle as they transferred down from Erebus: a monstrous apparatus, nearly half the size of the habitat, a combination of mining rig and tunnel boring machine that squatted above the ice a few kilometres from their base, hiding the borehole itself from view. It was many kilometres beneath the surface now, chewing and chewing, never stopping. No wonder that they could hear it, even now, crowded into this room together, with their mission commander mid-speech.

It was a hectic day. After Franklin had finished hyping them up, they all had a tight half hour to set up their bunks. As on the ship, they had their own rooms, though a little less tight: there was a metre-wide strip of floor, a fold-down desk and chair with storage straight ahead, and, to the side, a bunk either at ground level to your right or up a ladder on your left, depending on which of the interlocking L-shapes you’d been assigned. Silna had a ground level bunk, the opposite to what she’d had on Earth, and it occurred to her that they might all have been given the opposite kind of bunk to thwart muscle-memory that could send a person on Europa head-first into the concrete ceiling, when all they wanted was to climb a ladder fast. When she’d made the bed (weirdly difficult with almost-weightless sheets), she unpacked her clothes and personal items, putting everything neatly away - everything but the qulliq, which she set out on her desk.

She actually did feel better, seeing it there.

Time was up, and now they were on rosters to unpack their equipment and at least begin setting up their work areas. For Silna, that meant four hours shoulder to shoulder with the drill guys: Crozier, not allowed out to see his baby yet, was overseeing the assembly of the mass spectrometer in its own room, but had assigned his small army of engineers to help Blanky set up the hangar-sized ice core analysis lab.

The drill guys listened to Blanky and Esther when it came to wrestling the machinery into place - and putting up the shelves in the massive ice-core storage freezer - but were lousy at grasping the concept of anticontamination protocols. Silna glared at Hartnell around the third time he stepped on her plastic sheeting, and he backed up like she’d pointed a gun at him. But in her defense, there were miles of the stuff that still had to be hung up, and most of the drill crew was too preoccupied with cooing at the toys (conveyor belt, ice core melting system, chromatograph, laser water isotope analyser) to do the boring work of making sure all the surfaces those toys were on could be separated and sterilised. 

The real lab work was going to have to be done in PPE. They were hunting for alien life here, and there was going to be hell to pay if Silna got excited about cell tissue and it turned out to be from someone’s spit.

Admittedly, though, the low gravity made it a lot easier to manoeuvre all that equipment into place than it would otherwise have been, and they made good progress. Around the second hour, Peglar (short, acrobatic, married to Bridgens the comms guy) arranged a work detail to help Silna prepare all the surfaces of the room, and things moved much faster after that, and conversation naturally turned to the drill, and the work ahead.

“So even if the newer ice nearer the sea is faster to cut through--” said Billy Orren, flicking out a plastic sheet which settled to the floor with all the speed of a single-ply tissue paper above a heating grate.

“Big if,” said Peglar, watching it very slowly drift downwards, “But on average, yeah.”

“--It’s still five klicks to go until it hits water!” finished Orren, passing the end of the sheet up to Esther, who was up a stepladder where she’d just affixed the rail for hanging it. “That’s months off.”

“Aye, and we’ve got five years worth of ice core samples to look at in the meantime,” Esther said. “Sure you won’t get too bored, Billy,” which prompted several people in the crowd to suggest other ways that Orren could occupy himself in the meantime. It got bawdy fast.

By the fourth hour, Silna had established her corner nook, with its benches and testing sites, sample fridge, microscope, steriliser, and a crate containing the really optimistic equipment like tanks and petri dishes. She had to keep readjusting the amount of force she had to use to do anything.

And all the while, she felt that constant low hum as the distant machine bored down into the ice. She lifted one of the full crates, marvelling that it felt like a box full of air, and her feet were in just the right position that the vibrations from that distant drill travelled up her body and made all the pyrex in the crate rattle audibly, until she set it down again.

Goodsir caught up to her at dinner time, his curly hair positively droopy as he joined her in the queue. By that point, Silna felt overstimulated and exhausted, all the excitement and effort catching up to her at once, and Harry looked like she felt. “All set up?” she asked.

“Somebody has already managed to concuss themselves on the ceiling,” he said, so woefully that it made her laugh.

Dinner turned into a party pretty quickly: when Commander Franklin arrived, he produced a huge chocolate sheet cake from somewhere in their stores. Silna could not figure out where or when they could have baked it, but she assumed it had to be somewhere on Erebus, because nobody would have had time today. It tasted, nostalgically, like the freezer aisle cakes that she remembered getting brought out at childhood birthday parties. Alcohol was banned on CSC missions, but people still managed to get pretty silly, which was probably because they were all tired, wired, and full of sugar - also like a kid’s birthday party. She even saw Fitzjames getting a smile out of Crozier, and she’d thought those two could barely stand each other. 

Gore took a lot of photos, which must have been to send back to Earth. About an hour into the party, the screen on the wall lit up with a video call from Earth, showing the CSC control room full of cheering personnel, also eating cake, and a few veteran astronauts front and centre saying congratulations, how proud, great work, just the beginning, etcetera.

So it was a good night, but it had been a long day, and between the hectic afternoon, the noise of the party, and that constant drill vibration, she was going to bed with a headache. 

But, when she turned in to her little room, she made sure to first record a video for her dad. And she told him she missed him, and she described the sight of Europa’s surface as the shuttle approached, bright as twilight under a water sky, the crags of unfathomably thick and ancient ice whose fissures turned out to be vast canyons as they got closer to the ground, cast with otherworldly shadows by the reflected light of Jupiter which loomed over the landscape. She told him about the vibration of the drill, and showed the camera around her little room, lingering on the qulliq, and shared her theory about the reason for the bunk swap, and Harry’s story about the concussion, which only supported her theory. She was grinning again by the time she finished; she could feel the ache in her cheeks and the way they must be creasing up her eyes, and her headache was not gone, but much less than it had been.

She hoped he could see how happy she was to be here. She told him she loved him. And then she added her video to the mail queue for Jopson or Bridgens or Gibson, one of the control room guys, to send out in the morning. Then she went to sleep.

She dreamed she was home again. She was walking over ice, solid and dry on top, that barely even creaked under her weight. She walked for a while, enjoying the stretch in her legs and the swing of her stride, and stopped at a place where the ice became very clear, thick and solid, showing the dark water underneath. And she walked further out, until she was standing on a blue pane suspending her above perfect blackness. And she watched the black water, her eyes searching for any movement in the deep stillness, until she saw some: a shape, moving, indistinct through the warping of the ice. And then it got bigger, and bigger, and almost as if in slow motion Silna realised that it was something vast, surfacing, coming right towards her, and even if she started running now she was too far out and it was too late.

She woke up with her heart in her throat.

She reached out with too much force and barked her knuckles on the wall, and the sudden pain was what woke her up all the way. She readjusted and hit the light panel, which came up soft and showed her her little concrete room.

She was fine. Everything was fine. But something was off, and it took her a while to figure out what it was. It was quiet, yes, but she could still isolate the hum of the generators, the hush of the air circulation, even muffled footsteps further down the corridor. Hurrying steps.

And then she realised what it was. The sound that was missing.

Half-rising, she opened her bedroom door just in time to see Crozier striding past, pulling on a jacket over his t-shirt and shorts, his hair standing up in tufts. He noticed her and paused, his face still set in fierce alarm.

She whispered, “The drill.”

Crozier’s face was grim enough to be an answer all its own, but he said, in an equally low voice, “Back to sleep, doctor.” And then he strode away, towards what she knew was the monitoring lab.

This couldn’t be happening. The drill wasn’t supposed to stop until someone on this crew stopped it. It was a nuclear-powered tunnel-boring machine that had been drilling independently since it was set off four years ago, and it was supposed to go until it hit seawater and not a moment sooner. Had someone stopped it somehow? How? Why would they?

She wasn’t a drill engineer, so she didn’t fucking know. She couldn’t do anything about it, so she went back to bed, and lay awake for an hour hearing the faint sounds of other people - drill people - getting up and scurrying down the corridor, until between one blink and the next she fell asleep again.

She woke up to the beeping of her comm, and when she tapped it she saw that there was an alert for an emergency assembly in the common room. It was in ten minutes. Outside her room she could hear doors slamming, and raised voices. She dressed hastily, and pushed her way out into the crowd. She saw tall Collins, a terrible expression on his face, and realised the person he was leaning on was Blanky. Half the crowd seemed to be in shock, and the other half looked as confused as she felt.

She ran into Harry Goodsir near the common room door, and he was one of the ones looking shocked, so she asked him, “What happened? I know the drill stopped, but…”

“It’s Orren,” Harry said, and that was all he got to say, as the crowd swept them into the room, where Commander Franklin was standing up the front, frown carved in his face like it was chiselled there, Crozier and Fitzjames and Gore all lined up beside him.

Billy Orren? All she could do was wonder what the hell could Billy Orren have had to do with the drill stopping in the middle of the night. Why would he do that? What could he have done? He was a PhD candidate who won a lottery to be picked for this mission - he had no more access to the drill than Silna did.

And then Franklin opened with, “It is my grave responsibility to inform you all of a death amongst our number,” and the whispers shot through the room around her like cracks across the surface of thin ice.

Chapter Text

NOW

The worst-kept secret of long-range, long-term, or interplanetary travel was that it was in many ways more comfortable than a trip to the moon, or those wretched jaunts between corporate stations in the asteroid belt. Most publicly-owned space agencies had hangups about letting their publicly-funded astronauts get absolutely wretched from bone and muscle atrophy, thus shortening their careers and forcing those space agencies to spend even more money training even more astronauts - so all the space stations and long-range ships had at least one ring section, where the centrifugal force mimicked gravity well enough for the astronauts to not come home utterly withered. 

In other words, there might not be gravity in space, but spin your crew hard enough and their bodies wouldn’t really know the difference - give or take some weirdness from the coriolis forces. Thus, instead of ping-ponging around in zero-g, one could instead enjoy leisurely walks around the ring, proper sleep in a bed where you didn’t have to be strapped in for the night, and all the other accoutrements that made it a bit less like being hurtled through the void on a rocket, and more like a train ride in a sleeper cabin. If, that is, the train ride lasted several years, and you weren’t ever allowed off.

Fine, Sophia’s analogy failed her here. But thinking about it that way made her feel a bit more sane about going in literal circles all day.

The Lyra was a modest ship by interplanetary standards, with a relatively tiny crew, consisting of Commander Ross, Koveyook the flight engineer, a pilot named McClintock, a doctor named Cook, a linguist named Retter, and herself. The first few days involved some tricky work sling-shotting themselves around the Moon, and so Sophia spent as much of that time as possible being seen rather than heard, content to simply prove herself an obedient and unobtrusive presence.

But now they were out on the long part of the journey, where many months of spaceflight would stretch on between now and the rendezvous, so it was about time Sophia got down to work. The Lyra, barrel-shaped, laden with supplies, carrying equipment for an unknown disaster, nevertheless had ample space for all of them to keep out of one another’s way, and do the work they had each been assigned.

She had several terabytes of research to get through: letters and videos sent back by the Erebus crew that she’d persuaded some families to share with her, a few years’ worth of CSC reports on the Europa communication failures, and, of course, all those garbled transmissions. The reports were tedious and technical, and she had to brush up considerably on her knowledge of interplanetary communications just to understand how little they actually said. 

The letters and videos took a lot more time, and it was hard to watch them with an impartial eye for detail, because they were simply too personal: a potent mix of intimate, charming, and ordinary that made her heart twist in her chest.

She had watched the messages from Uncle John enough times in the last year to know them almost word for word, but it was different watching them sequentially with videos from other crew members. Europa was a new focus for him, but he’d earned his knighthood by his work advancing the possibility of helium extraction on Jupiter, so he was a logical choice to lead the expedition: he had experience in keeping a large crew together for a voyage of that length. In his messages, he always seemed enthused about the crew’s myriad projects, many of which he was hearing about for the first time. But in every message of any significant length, he’d always wander back to the topic that preoccupied him the most: his recent ousting as the Governor General of Australia, and what he might still do to prove his detractors wrong. It had been a terrible time for him, Sophia knew, that poisoned his enjoyment of politics and sent him straight back to the space agency that had made his reputation. Sophia felt for him, always, and if she had her own private opinions about how he’d handled the matter, she kept them to herself.

It was only when Sophia lined these messages up with those of other crew members that she began to get a real sense of the expedition, and how removed Uncle John seemed from it. The experiments the crew talked about - in between private jokes, tender sentiments, and requests for updates about family members - were the work of years, sometimes decades. Even the astronauts her uncle had picked for the voyage, few of whom had ever actually been as far as Jupiter before, spoke of the project like they’d been keeping track of it all their lives. Fitzjames was third in command despite the fact that, as far as Sophia could discover, he’d never been further than Mars, and that as part of an armed force to protect Britain’s interests during the Tharsis/Orinoco merger and associated worker revolt. His videos to his foster brother were so ebullient; he talked about the Europa project like it was a childhood dream come true to be part of it.

(Funny, that she and Fitzjames had been on Mars at the same time for the same crisis, but she’d never met him. Ships passing in the night, she supposed.)

This voyage of the Erebus was the fourth crewed voyage of a project at least twenty years in the making, and all the crew, from the old-timers to the fresh-faced PhD candidates, were there to reap the benefits of all that had come before. Especially the Europa superdeep ice boring machine - or as she had always thought of it, Francis’ bloody great drill.

He and Ross had flown that drill all the way to Europa, as well as all the machines for building the habitat, on Erebus’s previous voyage. Four years, there and back, while she’d waited, and worked, and had her own brilliant career whose milestones he’d missed. And it wasn’t like she hated him for it - how could she? But she also had the terrible realisation, about two years in, watching his earnest face in a message that had taken 90 minutes to cross the distance to her at lightspeed, that she didn’t love him any more. All her fire had burned down to fondness, and then to the polite interest with which you might listen to a friend describe their hobbies. He hadn’t done anything wrong, and neither had she; all that space between them had simply starved her heart of oxygen. Even when he returned to Earth, returned to her, pulled her into his arms, it still hadn’t been enough to stir an ember back into flame.

She waited to tell him that it was over until he had had a month to enjoy being back on Earth, because it seemed the decent thing to do. But she hadn’t conceived that he might be surprised by it - that he could have spent those four years every bit as attached to her as he had been the day he left. How did he do that? She wished she knew.

So she didn’t have any messages from him for this voyage. It felt like a big gap in her research, a nasty reminder that she might, in fact, be a bit too close to this story for professional comfort. An actual stranger might have had more luck asking his sister or his best friend for copies of their messages from him. But because she was Sophie, who’d seen the inside of Charlotte Crozier’s kitchen on Christmas day, and covered for Ann Coulman and James Ross when they snuck away from a party for some privacy - because she had had the poor taste to have a change of heart, she got nowhere.

And the really fucking frustrating part of it was - she wanted to see them because she missed him. Because she wanted to see the way his eyes got very blue and bright when he was rambling on about, oh, ice density, or surface radiation, or how big you could make the equipment when you didn’t have to worry about it being torn apart under its own weight by Earth gravity. Because, all the mess aside, he’d been her friend for so long, and she resented the idea that she didn’t get to be worried about him, too.

Maybe one of the transmissions from Europa had been marked for her. They must have known that their messages weren’t getting through any more, right? How had it changed them? Were the messages they were getting from Earth equally garbled?

Sometimes, she listened to the Europa messages, trying to hear something, anything human in the sound - perhaps a snatch of a voice, like car radio passing out of range of a tower. But there was nothing human in it. If it was just static, that might have been tolerable, but it was stranger than that: sometimes it was a long, deep crackle, enough like a growl to convince her nervous system to raise all the fine hairs on her body; sometimes it was a high, almost mechanical squealing sound, reminiscent of a sound she’d once heard from two pieces of sea-ice grinding past one another, but hollower somehow, more massive, as unpleasant as nails on a blackboard.

She’d made the mistake of falling asleep while listening to one of the Europa transmissions only once on this voyage. 

Sophia rarely remembered her dreams: something about her brain could just never hold onto them for more than a minute after waking, and after that she’d remember no more than a mood, or even just that she’d dreamed about something. But the nightmare she’d had then, of the whole ice crust of Europa opening like a set of jaws and crushing the habitat between its gigantic teeth, had stuck with her in her waking hours ever since she’d had it.

She hadn’t told anyone about that. She’d been upfront with everybody about her purpose and her publishing schedule. By now, she’d established a regular card game with Cook and Koveyook; she had had many interesting conversations with Retter about their experiences traveling through Europe and Asia, and through Retter she had found that McClintock could be drawn into talking about cross-country skiing or mountaineering. Sophia had even managed to make Ross smile a few times at team meals. They were all getting along perfectly well. There was no need to bring horrible dreams into it. The last thing this voyage needed was pessimism.

No, what she needed was useful research. And frankly, there was one great source sitting aboard this ship that she had not, until now, really made an effort to crack. But they were well on their way now, approaching that part of the voyage where a lot of them would take turns sleeping a great deal of the time away.

It was time for her to get an interview with the illustrious James Ross.

“Is it necessary?” he said, hand hovering on the rung of a ladder. He said it politely, even jovially, his face set in a slightly flustered smile; considerably friendlier than a few months ago, even if he did look as if he meant to flee at her first hesitation.

She matched him, letting a tinge of sheepishness colour her smile. “I’m afraid so. You are the mission commander, and know more about its logistics than anyone, so you are the most valuable interviewee aboard. That would be true even if you weren’t, well, who you are.” And she gestured vaguely at him as she said it, as if his importance were self-evident.

She watched the flattery register, and then work anyway. He opened his mouth, closed it, then sighed through his nose. He said, “I suppose it’s best to get it over with, isn’t it?”

“I think of it as establishing a baseline early in the voyage,” she said. “Would you prefer to do this in your lab, or in the crew lounge?”

He chose the crew lounge - thinking, no doubt, that there was a higher chance of them being interrupted there. In fact, McClintock and Retter were on their sleep shifts, Cook was taking her hour of resistance training, and Koveyook had just gotten a large packet of messages from his family twenty minutes ago - and Sophia knew him to be a diligent and enthusiastic correspondent. The crew lounge was large, comfortable, framed by many windows full of stars, and totally empty.

“Queensberry rules, is it?” Ross said, sounding mostly like he was joking.

“How hostile do you expect me to be, Commander?” Sophia said, her eyebrow raised. She set her handheld recorder on the table, where it slid against rotation, but fetched up gently against the raised lip of the table. Sophia folded herself into one of the soft couches bolted to the floor, and gestured for Ross to do likewise.

Ross put his hands up. “I expect you to be thorough, that’s all. After all, I believe you know more about me than most of your interview subjects.”

“You underestimate my background research,” Sophia said, smiling, “But you may be right in this instance.” Then she recited, “Sir James Clark Ross, OBE, PhD, FRS, FLS, FLAS, FBIS - gosh, you’re a fellow in a lot of societies - born in London, married to Ann Coulman, father of James Ross the second, Commander of this expedition. That’s the condensed version. Have I got the right man?”

“You do,” Ross said, dry.

“How is little James?” Sophia said. “It’ll be his first birthday soon, won’t it?”

A flash of warmth in Ross’ eyes, a curl at the corners of his mouth. Then he said, “Queensberry rules, Ms Cracroft.”

Sophia’s eyebrows rose, but she nodded. “Understood.” Family off-limits: a normal boundary to have. “Right to it, then. What is your theory about what happened to the Europa expedition?”

“Given Erebus’ current trajectory, we are working off the theory that, when the crew lost communication with Earth, they decided that the safety of the expedition would be best served by their leaving Europa ahead of schedule. Now, unfortunately we cannot know what the condition of the crew will be, or whether they experienced any difficulties apart from the communications blackout - we simply don’t have that data. However, satellite imagery provided to us by American and Chinese satellites around Ganymede, Enceladus, and Jupiter have given us enough information to track Erebus’ movements since it left orbit above Europa. Our calculations suggest the ship would not be able to make it to Earth right now - the planets are not positioned favourably, the distance will be too great - but the satellites captured images of the ship getting a gravity assist from Ganymede, and that might be enough to get them safely to the orbit of Mars, where they can be refuelled.”

“Do you worry about the Martian situation causing difficulty with that?” Sophia asked. “There are some aboard Erebus who were ranking Navy officers when Britain helped to pacify the cross-corporate strike.”

Ross waved a hand. “It won’t be a problem - there will likely be no interaction between Erebus and any of the corporate colonies. You’ll recall one of the reasons for the strikes was that the workers don’t have a way to leave the planet, and that situation hasn’t changed, so we don’t expect any hostile action. The board has assured me that the situation is stable and they have prioritised a refuelling mission that can meet with Erebus in orbit.”

Sophia nodded. “That will be reassuring to the families, Commander, thank you. So what, in your view, is the Lyra’s mission?”

“Mercy,” Ross said. “And investigation.”

“You fear they might not make it to Mars on their own?” Sophia said. It was certainly a thought that kept her up at night.

Ross’ voice was level, soothing. “As I said. We don’t know what difficulties they might have experienced. We have the power to render assistance if they need it, so render it we should. Fingers crossed, they won’t need our help at all, in which case we can ameliorate the communications problem and help transmit their messages back to Earth, which would be a great relief.”

“It certainly would,” Sophia said, smiling, and then asked, “Why didn’t you lead Erebus back to Europa on this last mission?”

Ross blinked at her for a moment, and then said, “I chose to retire instead.”

Sophia nodded; she knew this. “But you are here, now - out of retirement.”

“I wanted to get married,” Ross said. There was a warning note in his voice.

“Yes,” said Sophia, “It’s a very good reason. You commanded two Erebus missions, didn’t you? And you served on the first, before Commander Parry’s retirement. How many years in space is that, cumulatively?”

“Twelve,” Ross said, “On the Erebus missions alone.”

“Twelve years of your life on missions to Europa,” Sophia said, softly. “The project must mean a great deal to you.”

“Of course it does. It’s our best hope for finding extraterrestrial life. It’s been decades in the making - our highest ambitions of what the facility could be are realised. It’s been an absolute privilege to be a part of it.” And she saw the truth of it on his face: something earnest and longing that she knew from the faces of - well, many scientists she had known. Part of something greater than themselves. Worth leaving anything else behind.

“And yet,” Sophia said, gently, “at the culmination of all that work, you chose to step away, and leave another to take the credit for discovering life on another planet.”

A little impatience on Ross’ face. “It isn’t about credit.”

“It isn’t?” Sophia said. “Is your reputation not founded upon the work you’ve done for this project?”

Ross ignored that. “And we haven’t found evidence of life on Europa yet - unless the current expedition has done so, and if they have, they deserve all credit for that.”

“It’s a very large crew, isn’t it?” Sophia said. “Did you hear any concerns raised about that?”

“Yes, of course,” Ross said. “It’s the largest crew ever taken beyond the asteroid belt. The expense alone has been astronomical: simply getting that many people and all their supplies into orbit to rendezvous with Erebus has made it the most expensive part of the project, and then, of course, Erebus herself has had to be reconfigured and expanded to fit so many, and there was the cost of hauling all the equipment to Europa - it just goes on and on. It was a lot of taxpayer money coming from multiple nations. But of course, the tradeoff is the expected return on those nations’ investment: Europa is an enormous asset.”

A jewel in the crown, estimated at tens of trillions of pounds in value. It would help to include the exact figure when she wrote this up. “Was expense the only worry?”

Ross hesitated. “No,” he conceded. “There were also concerns--” (he had a masterful grasp of the passive voice, she thought) “that such a large contingent of civilians would have difficulty coping on such a long and physically demanding expedition. It was projected to be a five-year mission. But that is why they were all rigorously tested for physical and psychological fitness, compatibility, all the requisites. We did have a number of people who had to drop out of the training module for health reasons. The rest passed.”

We, she noticed. Even though, while the mission was getting ready, he had been retired in domestic bliss. “But it can still take an enormous toll, can’t it? Five years of space travel - the isolation, the knowledge that you’re so far from home?”

There was a touch of gravel in Ross’ voice when he said, “Yes, of course it can. People miss home a great deal. That’s inevitable.”

She nodded. “Was there any concern about the fitness of command for this mission?”

He raised his eyebrows, like he hadn’t expected her to address that. But to his credit, he thought about it, and then said, “I heard some criticism of the choice to put Sir John Franklin in command - because of his age, and the… gap in his career in space. But I will say, I thought that criticism was unfounded. He passed the same fitness tests as everyone else, and his record--” she failed to hide a wince; he saw it. “His record as an astronaut is unblemished. He was perfectly qualified for the job.”

“Why was he chosen over a veteran of the project?” Sophia said. “He wasn’t chosen as project leader until the Europa Simulation was concluded. A bit of an outsider choice, wasn’t he?” And the name she wasn’t saying was the name that Ross also wasn’t saying, burning a hole on her tongue. It was like playing chicken, or a blinking contest: first to say ‘Francis’ loses.

Ross said, carefully, “I was not involved in the process of choosing the commander of the last mission, but I know that other prospective candidates turned it down; they weren’t considered unfit, but considered themselves less qualified for the role than Sir John.”

Bullshit, she thought. But God, maybe it wasn’t - maybe Francis really had felt unfit for it. Or else it was such a horrible job that he didn’t want it. What had he said to Ross in private? What might he have said to her if--

She said, “Did you have any concerns about the other astronauts’ fitness?”

A muscle twitched in his jaw. He flatly said, “No.”

“Even though several of the command crew have never been further than Mars?” she said. “Captain Fitzjames, for example?”

Surprise, chagrin, annoyance: she watched them war on his face, and looked back as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.

Eventually, he leaned closer to the tape and said evenly, “It was necessary to expand the roster of astronauts in the command crew from that of previous missions, in order to manage the large number of participants. That required bringing in new people. All the command crew are highly qualified, proven astronauts. I have full confidence that every reasonable measure was taken to reduce the possibility of human error causing problems on this mission. Whatever caused the communications issues, or any other problem that this mission has faced, I am sure the crew will have done everything in their power to ameliorate it.”

“So you have every confidence in the crew?”

“Every confidence.”

“And you were happy to step away from this project?”

“As I said.”

“So why are you here now?” she said. “You walked away for a damn good reason. You got everything you could wish for. Why leave it behind now?”

He stared at her for a long time. “What kind of-- Why did you?”

“Commander, I’m not--”

“You’re here for your uncle, aren’t you?” he said. “Unless I’ve utterly misjudged you. My son’s godfather is on that crew, and I know you know it. Others besides who I have known for twenty years or more. Why else would I be here?”

She noticed herself biting the inside of her cheek; made herself stop. “You’re worried about them.”

“Of course I am.”

“You don’t think it’s just a communications issue, do you? There’s something else.”

“That’s speculation.”

“You’ve got to be basing it on something.”

His mouth was a thin line. “The satellites above Europa stopped sending coherent images two weeks after they landed and twelve days after their last intelligible transmission. Their last image was of a tender drone that had been sent up from the surface.”

“Okay?” She’d already written about this, in her first feature about this mission. People on Earth had read all about it by now.

“But they’re not the only satellites in operation around Jupiter - that’s how we know Erebus is coming back, from other nations’ satellites. Why couldn’t they find a way to use those satellites to transmit something? Yes, there’s all kinds of natural interference that might scramble a radio signal, but how does it persist for all this time, when nothing like it has been noticed on all prior expeditions?” He was gesturing, now, his usual reserved body language loosening, like a dam cracking. “The alignment of planets hasn’t changed it, differing rates of solar activity haven’t changed it, there have been no recorded strange activity on Jupiter that might explain it. It would be one thing if the transmissions had simply stopped, but they haven’t - Erebus is still transmitting, and it’s still just noise to us. What could have scrambled communications so completely, and for so long?”

“Do you-” she said, too quiet. She coughed and tried again. “Do you have any theories?”

“No. All I know is what I don’t know. I cannot build a theory off of no data.”

She let that hang for a moment, and said, “Do you have any further comments, Commander?”

“No,” he said.

She picked up the recorder, paused just in case, but he didn’t say anything. She clicked the stop button. 

Ross’ throat clicked. “Now that we’re off the record: what was that?”

“Like I said,” Sophia said, “A good baseline. Thank you.”

THEN

Commander Franklin’s briefing was so formal it communicated almost nothing, aside from this: the drill had stopped some time in the night. They didn’t know why. Early in the morning, Crozier had led a bunch of engineers and drill crew to the rig site for a visual inspection. And then something had happened that ended up with Billy Orren falling down the borehole they’d cut in the ice, presumably all the way to the bottom where the machine itself sat, inert. Then he gave them their instructions for the day. Option 1: seek counseling and take the day off. Option 2: return to your lab and resume work under manager supervision. 

And then he said some things about what a loss it was, and a tragedy, and of course all participant excursions to the drill rig would be suspended pending completion of the command staff’s investigation into the incident, and he believed in their fortitude and team spirit and at that point it just turned to so much noise in Silna’s ears. In the hush of the crowd, she caught the sound of someone crying.

Goddamn, what a way to die - falling, what, twenty kilometers? More? Right onto that unmoving, nuclear-powered drill. Surely that would be enough to kill him even at this low gravity, right? Was his suit intact? If it wasn’t, that was its own death sentence - as good as dipping the guy in liquid nitrogen to expose him to the temperatures outside. She hoped that was what had happened - that his suit had gotten torn, and frozen him in an instant. 

She remembered being a little kid, hearing the news about some guy - the kind of elder she saw around town, but never talked to - who got drunk, walked out into the night, and went straight through some thin ice. She remembered hearing about it, and all the adults said, what a damn shame. What a waste. Poor soul. At least it was quick.

Quick didn’t mean instant - she learned that later. But better that than a long fall, and somehow surviving it only to realise there was no way back up from the bottom of that pit.

As soon as Franklin stopped talking, Silna heard her own thoughts echoed in the muttering around her. It sounded ghoulish out loud, but it wasn’t like she was any better. Horror and curiosity was a potent mix, and everyone wanted to know what the hell had happened.

So a weird pall hung over the first full day’s work in the ice core lab. Blanky stood at the top of the room when they all filed in, scrolling through his tablet with a preoccupied look on his face. The conversation was a low buzz compared to the cheerful din of the day before, and Silna pulled on her PPE with an uneasy feeling. 

Finally, Blanky raised his voice. “Right! Settle.” The low buzz died entirely, and Silna joined the rest in gathering in the largest empty patch of floor. Blanky said, “This is all of us for today - there’s a few who are taking time for counseling, and if you think you might need some, bloody well take it. If you think you’re alright and realise you’re not halfway through the day, come and tell me. But I know some of us feel better with work to take our minds off it, so: we’ll start on the ice core samples today, as planned.” He raked his hand through his shaggy grey hair. “I know it’s a shock. We all knew Billy. Captain Crozier is leading the investigation, and as Commander Franklin said, there’ll be no participants allowed up to the rig until we’re satisfied it won’t happen again. Are there any questions--” A few hands shot up-- “about how we’re proceeding today?”

The hands sank. There was a little shuffling in the crowd, but no more hands were raised.

“Okay,” Blanky said briskly, “Teams for today will be as follows…”

Silna was rostered on to the ice core melting system with Esther Blanky and Tom Hartnell. They’d set it up and plugged it in to do its software installations yesterday, but now they needed to actually calibrate the thing and do a few tests with dummy ice cores they’d created from their own system’s water. While they were doing that, other crews would be performing similar calibrations, or remotely piloting drones to go and collect the ice core samples from the massive hangar next to the drill rig where they’d been accumulating for the last four years. 

For the first hour, the three of them exchanged barely a word that wasn’t directly related to the work in front of them. Silna wasn’t a big talker, but Esther was, usually; you could pick her out of a crowd by the roar of her laugh. Hartnell, too, was usually chatty. Not today.

Silna didn’t want to pry; she knew they were both drill crew, but didn’t know if everyone had been woken up for the site visit, or if they were just a tight-knit enough group to be feeling it. But, about twenty minutes into waiting for the first dummy sample to melt, Esther heaved a big sigh and said, “Oh, lord. It’s just shit, isn’t it?”

Hartnell nodded, and then looked awkwardly at Silna like he was waiting for her to say something. Silna, who didn’t know what the hell to say, kept silent, but pressed her shoulder to Esther’s as she passed, and got a squeeze to the shoulder in return. She shared a commiserating glance with Hartnell, and they resumed their work.

It was only on the lunch break - still subdued, if not as funereal as the morning - when Silna finally heard about it. It wasn’t from Esther, though - it was from Charles Des Voeux, who was telling the people at the table next to hers.

“Yeah, alright? Yeah, I saw it. It was fucking awful. We were all on the walkway around the pit, and it’s a big hole and all, it’s like a train tunnel, but it’s not like we were all just standing about gawking - there was shit to do, you know? But Orren was on the catwalk above it. There was this little tremor, like, not even hard, just like the ice was cracking a bit, but not enough to make anyone lose their balance. I didn’t see him go over, but we all heard Collins yelling on the open frequency, and it was a slow fall, but - well, Christ. It was like he was falling almost sideways, towards the middle, kind of spinning. I saw him slam into that big suspension cable, and his suit vented, and I suppose that was it, you know? Must have frozen solid. Collins was going spare; I had to stop him from doing something stupid, like diving after him - like that would have done any good. They looked at Orren’s biometrics, so they know exactly when his heart stopped, and it was right then. He was already dead. Suppose he’s at the bottom by now. Twenty-odd klicks down. Poor kid.”

There was a moment of silence, while Silna pictured the whole horrible scene, and looked uneasily at Hartnell, who was staring down at his food, just kind of hovering his spoon over it with a blank expression.

At Des Voeux’s table, somebody piped up, “But if he’s on the drill now, what happens when it turns back on?”

And even Silna had to look around at that, appalled, to see Des Voeux’s face looking like she felt. “Jesus, Evans,” he said. “I’m sure they’re considering it, alright? Christ, that’s me done with lunch.”

Yeah, Silna was feeling that way too. She got up, pausing to awkwardly pat Hartnell on the shoulder, bussed her tray and headed back to the lab.

She checked her messages as she walked, but there was nothing since this morning’s alert. Dad hadn’t sent anything back yet. She was wondering how she’d tell him about this tonight - though, of course, she couldn’t say who it was until command had had a chance to inform the family, so, fuck, maybe she wouldn’t. She wanted a video of home. She wanted to see aunties and kids and animals.

She could feel it starting to hit her - she hadn’t known Orren well, but she’d still shared a ship with him for two years. Everything was starting to feel a little unreal. She walked past the corridor that led to the command crew’s offices, and heard raised voices for a moment until there was the snick of a door sliding shut. She passed the stairway up to the comms room, and Jopson clattered down the stairway and hurried past her with a tablet in his hand. 

The investigation, she guessed. She hurried on, until she hit the soothing cold of the ice core lab.

They worked through the afternoon, though it was another hour before Blanky came back, a very harried expression on his face, to oversee the work of bringing in the real Europan ice core samples from outside. This was tricky work, temperature-wise: the ice came in supercooled by surface temperatures, and therefore had to be transferred to insulated containers outside before they were brought inside so that they didn’t explode at the sudden temperature difference (this was drone work, finicky, Des Voeux’s and Collins’ specialty, and Collins wasn’t here). Once they were in the lab, they had to be labelled to match the ice core’s geotag, then transferred to the freezer in order to come up to what was, proportionally speaking, the swelteringly high temperature of -50°C. Only then would they be at a safe temperature to examine in the lab, or run through the ice core melting system. So, Silna’s first real experiments would have to begin tomorrow. 

Still, everything they did was going to be an all-hands-on-deck affair the first time they did it, so the afternoon passed quickly. Fifty-five pairs of hands made light work: they filled every inch of shelving in their freezer before the end of their rostered shift, though it meant they had to put on the underlayer of their space suits to withstand the cold, and work in shifts so that nobody spent too much time exposed to the freezer’s temperature. It wasn’t hard to do: the ice cores in their sample cases each weighed around 10 kilograms each. That might have made them a little tiring to carry on Earth, but on Europa it made them light as balsa wood. Young and Evans, the two youngest members of the crew, were competing to carry as many as they could at once, playing tough while the other crew indulged them.

In terms of ice core lengths, there was almost a kilometre of Europa’s crust inside the facility now, each one carefully labelled by depth and date.

Blanky blew out a breath, and said, “Well done, you lot,” and received a tepid smattering of - not even cheers, but subdued happy sounds. It felt a little shitty not to cheer when they were off to such a good start, but under the circumstances, Silna didn’t feel like whooping either.

She was scheduled for the gym after work. It was a high-ceilinged room with ten machines that only vaguely resembled Earth exercise machines, but, with friction and springs, would do the job. The crew were rostered on for 90 minutes of exercise daily, which meant that, like the gym on the ship, this room was never empty, and often - like right now, the sweet spot after work and before dinner - completely full.

To be fair, she was a little early. She leaned against a wall, waiting for Irving (command crew, Australian, in charge of a yearlong study of low-gravity hydroponics) to finish his time on the resistance machine. While he grunted his way through his last set of presses, she checked her mail: still no messages. She refreshed it hopefully, poked at the connection just in case, but no, there was just no new mail.

Irving extricated himself, visibly sweaty, and started wiping down the equipment. She nodded to him as he passed, a little awkward, and he smiled at her. Then his eyes dropped to the device in her hand, he said, “Ah,” the smile turned kind of waxy, and he scurried out of the gym like his ass was on fire.

Weird behaviour, even from a guy who had, about six months into Erebus’s journey, gotten flustered in front of forty people when someone had implied that there was anything suggestive about a really big cucumber. “Huh,” Silna said, and then got in the machine and didn’t think about it again until dinner time, where she found just about everyone was complaining about their mail.

“No, I haven’t gotten anything either,” Harry Goodsir said earnestly, “And my family’s sent me group videos for every milestone we’ve had, so I was expecting at least something for us arriving at Europa!” He looked genuinely distressed, and Silna could understand why - she’d seen the Goodsir family group calls. They were cacophonously Scottish, and always made Harry smile for days afterwards.

“Nor me,” Hartnell said, butting in from the next table with wide eyes. “I’ve been waiting for something from my mum and my brother. It’s base-wide, it must be.”

That was the inescapable conclusion. Not much later, Silna’s comm pinged, and she dived for it before realising that everyone else was also scrambling for theirs. It was a command alert: there was going to be a briefing in the dining hall at the top of the hour, which wasn’t far off.

In the next ten minutes, the hall filled to capacity. Then, at exactly 1900 hours, Silna saw Crozier coming in, grim-faced, trailed by Jopson. Her heart sank with a memory - Jopson, who she’d seen scurrying into a contentious command meeting six hours ago. How long had they known this was going on?

Behind them came Commander Franklin, but he didn’t go up to the front of the room. His frown was deep, and he was staring at the back of Crozier’s head like - well, like an expression Silna had never really seen there before. She didn’t think she’d ever seen Franklin look more discontent - not even that morning, when he was reporting a death. He stood in the doorway with his arms folded behind his back, military-straight.

At the front of the room, Crozier cleared his throat, but it was barely audible over the din of gossip. She watched him heave a sigh and then he boomed, “EUROPA!” so loudly that the dim immediately ceased. “Thank you for your attention,” Crozier said, very evenly. “I’m here to update you on the ongoing situation. Our investigation into Billy Orren’s death is continuing, and as we have not yet found a conclusive explanation for the accident, the drill site continues to be off-limits for anyone who is not command staff.” He paused, but there was no grumbling; just an ongoing, silent attention. Crozier scratched the back of his neck. “Additionally: our control room flagged a communications problem this morning, and have been working to resolve the issue since then. You will likely have noticed that you have no new mail.” 

Muttering did arise then, a low, threatening hum. 

“The cause,” Crozier said, pitching his voice to carry over the noise, “has not yet been found, so we will be reassigning some personnel to focus on finding the source of the problem. You will all receive updated schedules. For most of you, it will mean continuing your work.” He darted a glance, then, at Commander Franklin, who was still frowning. Crozier, weariness showing in his face, said, “We do not yet understand the cause of any of today’s problems, and so, in the absence of evidence, I beg you all not to spend too much time speculating. If, in the course of your duties, you discover any information that you believe might be relevant, please log it and bring it to the attention of a member of the command crew. That’s all.”

And he turned and followed Franklin out of the room, which exploded into conversation.

“They’ve known since this morning?” Silna hissed.

“They must have had a good reason,” Harry said, but his big worried eyes didn’t make him look too confident. “With Orren’s death, and everything, they must have worried about… morale, or thought they could get it fixed quickly.”

“Maybe,” Silna said, but now she had a knot in her stomach that was seriously competing with the meal she’d just eaten.

She went to bed early that night, and she wasn’t alone - there were doors opening and closing up and down the corridor already. She glimpsed a weary-looking John Bridgens being led to bed by Henry Peglar, and remembered he was always the first one on shift in the control room, which meant he must have been the one who flagged the communication problems - so he must have been up as long as Crozier.

As long as Crozier. She closed the door behind her, and thought: was it all the same source? Something had stopped the drill, and a few hours later they noticed the transmissions weren’t coming through from Earth. A few hours later, something flung Billy Orren into the borehole. There couldn’t be this many terrible coincidences in one day - surely it was a common source?

Her comm beeped: her updated schedule, which looked exactly like her old schedule.

Guided by impulse, she recorded another video for her dad. She told him everything: about poor Orren, and the drill, and the fact that she knew this video couldn’t reach him right now, and how she really hoped she heard from him soon. She marked the saved file TO DELETE and went to bed, where she slept badly.

On day three, there were no new updates from command, but the rumour going around the breakfast line was that Franklin and Crozier had been arguing all night. Silna didn’t want to have to think about that. She ate some sad reconstituted salmon, and then some much less sad blueberries, the last of Irving’s Erebus crop, which improved the speckly white goo labelled ‘Greek-style yoghurt chia pudding (vanilla flavour)’. Then she went to work.

In the lab, the real work was beginning. It was a slightly smaller crowd than yesterday - a couple of engineers had been reassigned to investigate the comms problem - but Collins was back, looking pale and slightly embarrassed at the sympathy being directed at him.

Harry Goodsir, too, got to join today’s rotation. His secondary specialisation in microbiota meant he got to be Silna’s part-time assistant, and that started today.

“Do you know what’s funny?” he said, pulling on his PPE over his insulating jumpsuit. “During the space race in the 1960s, there was all this worry about astronauts being exposed to alien viruses or bacteria when they went to the Moon. It had been a concern for ages before that, of course.”

Silna nodded. She’d heard something like that. “Like War of the Worlds?”

“Like The War of the Worlds, exactly! But of course, then we got to the Moon and realised, oh, of course - there’s nothing here. There are no alien viruses that can harm us. This is a dead world; they’re all dead worlds. So it got flipped: it became this assumption of no life until proved otherwise, and once in a while people would find evidence that maybe once upon a time Mars had microorganisms before the atmosphere bled off and killed everything, and that was exciting and disappointing all at the same time. And now… well.” He grinned behind his plastic mask and spread his gloved hands. “Suddenly we’re worried again.”

Silna raised an eyebrow in the direction of some of the other guys in the preparation area, who had maybe the suit and gloves on, but not the hoods, or were audibly grousing that they shouldn’t have to wear the foot covers because the grippy soles made them stick on the concrete floor. “We could stand to be a little more worried,” she said.

Harry looked over her shoulder, and his grin turned rueful. “Well, in the worst-case scenario, I get to name an exciting new disease,” he said, not quietly. John Morfin, who’d been peeling his covered shoes off the floor with a tshhk-tshhk noise, frowned at him, and then at Silna for snorting.

Silna covered her smile and said, “Hope for the best.”

“And prepare for the worst!” Goodsir finished cheerfully, pulling back the plastic curtain so she could precede him onto the hangar floor.

The core samples came out in order of drilling. The whole crew fell into a neat rhythm: retrieve the container, decant the ice core onto the refrigerated conveyor belt, weigh, measure, scan, 360 degree microscope photography, and finally it ended up at the ice core melting system, which gave them all about 30 minutes of downtime to coo over the high-resolution images. Once the ice was melted, the resulting liquid was decanted into ten different containers, labelled, and carried away for testing. Silna got to be the proud owner of two of those containers. She had her own fridge to keep them in, in her little nook in the corner of the hangar. The morning was for this processing; the afternoon would be for analysis.

About two hours into this process, Silna realised she actually felt happy. She was in the flow of what she knew how to do, and so was everyone around her. Something awful had happened, but they were here, doing what they came to do. She glanced up at the busy room with its floor-to-ceiling plastic sheets, that rippled in the wake of bustling scientists in silver-white PPE, and thought of a school of sardines all swimming together in one silvery, darting mass. Happy little fish.

They would have to send probes down the borehole to see what was at the bottom. Silna wasn't going to see any of that footage - it was a command crew job, and she wished them well of it. But the rumours going around were that there would probably be no way to retrieve Billy Orren's body. Frozen to more than a hundred degrees below zero and dropped from a great height, he'd have shattered on impact.

When Commander Franklin updated them on the third day, it was to say that the source of the communications problem had not been found, but the engineering team was assembling a rocket for a tender drone to inspect their satellites, in case the problem originated there. "We have found no faults whatever with the base, be assured," he said firmly. "The build is exactly as it should be, and we are perfectly safe. Captain Fitzjames and Lieutenant Gore will be taking parties on excursions around the base starting tomorrow. However, until Captain Crozier finishes his investigation into poor Billy Orren's death, the borehole will remain off-limits."

On the fourth day, Silna got to go outside. Europa was spectacular, and extremely rugged: their base was on a low-lying plateau, with dramatic ice cliffs rearing high as mountains in the distance, and crevasses all around. About ten minutes into the walk, there was a little tremor underfoot, and Silna wondered if it was the same kind that had sent Orren pitching into the borehole. "Not to worry!" Fitzjames said over the comm, "We've been monitoring the area, and we know it doesn't get much worse than that. Now, this is a bit cheeky, but I'll just take you as near to the drill rig as we can go--" and led them to the outdoor hangar where the ice cores were stored.

A huge robotic arm connected to a long pipe that extended out the shed wall and all the way through the air to the drill rig, about half a kilometre away, held up the entire way by poles. It kind of reminded Silna of the sluice pipes that fisheries used to restock rivers, but this was part of the apparatus that transported the ice cores from the centre of the drill, all the way up the suspension cable, and finally here, to the shed. A crazy bit of engineering, to transport metre-long cylinders of ice all that way and most of it straight up, but apparently it worked just as it should. Or it had until they got here, and the drill stopped working.

Silna wasn't that interested in being inside a prefab concrete shed when she could be outside, looking at a sky dominated by a gas giant and spangled with dozens of moons, but this was an opportunity to look at the ice cores before they were put into containers and stored in the freezer, and glimpse the variety of their colours. There were thousands, but she saw speckles of black, green, even rusty orange streaks amongst the variegated blue of the ice. David Young pointed out the patch of icy ground covered in tire treads, where the first half-kilometre of samples had already been packed into containers and taken to the lab, and said, "Look how dirty the floor looks! Must be all kinds of stuff in those ice cores."

"Don't tell me you're excited to go back to the lab already," Fitzjames said in a jolly voice, but the denials he got at this were half-hearted. Silna grinned up at the glowering face of Jupiter and thought, if they weren't all enthusiastic to melt some ice in a lab, why else would they be here?

So the work progressed, and the days passed, and the updates from the command crew turned to how they were progressing on the rocket for the satellite tender drone, and the specialist drones for inspecting the borehole. In the meantime, Silna worked on her samples, and logged promising trace elements that could indicate deep-sea hydrothermal activity, somewhere in Europa's ancient past. In this way, the first week passed.

It was the morning of the seventh day when it happened. She was in her corner lab, separated from the conveyor belt by three curtains of plastic, having tucked her latest samples into the fridge, already speculating to herself what kind of chemical analysis she might expect based on colour, density, and opacity. Her back was turned to the rest of the room, though Harry Goodsir was with her again, quietly organising screenshots from the microscope.

So Silna just heard the now-familiar clunk of an ice core container opening, and then a splattering sound, a whole lot of people exclaiming at once, Collins’ moan of horror, and Billie Strong yelping, “Shit!” at the top of her lungs. When Silna lurched out from behind her station and pulled the sheeting back, she saw Strong staggering back into the scattering crowd, and a steaming, bright red slush spilling out of the conveyor belt and all over the floor.

Chapter Text

NOW

The trip to Mars was a long one, but Sophia occupied it with work, riding the high of her first feature article’s success, working hard on the second one. But she’d done the trip to Mars before. She’d thought it made her very seasoned by most journalists’ standards.

Not going mad with boredom while the Lyra travelled beyond Mars and out towards the asteroid belt - now, that was the real test. She’d started learning as much as she could from the others, when they got the downtime to talk to her about their specialties. At first it was just research, but then it became a genuine need to give herself some kind of enrichment. She’d read about Earnest Shackleton in university - it was a first-year management course Aunt Jane had persuaded her to take just in case she changed her mind about journalism - and now she understood what had compelled those men to hold lectures and seminars in their shitty little hut while they were all actively dying of frostbite. It was to stop themselves from walking into a blizzard out of sheer boredom.

The last bit of her background research was like pulling teeth to get hold of, but she did in the end. It took five months for her to persuade James Ross to let her see the videos Francis had sent to him, and when he finally did, she thought his expression was borderline pitying. She almost second-guessed herself, then. Had Francis talked about her, on these? Was she about to subject herself to hours of footage of her ex ranting to his best friend about what a cold-hearted bitch she was?

No; she watched the first chronological video with her arse clenched for no reason. Francis looked wan and glum in the recording, with circles under his eyes like he wasn’t sleeping right. He looked pretty much just like he had the last time they’d spoken to one another, when they were selling their flat in Greenwich and divvying up their stuff and he’d spent the entire time not looking her in the eye, just saying, No, you keep it, if I take it it’ll just end up in storage. She’d ended up shouting at him about making her do all the work here, he’d given her half this crap, it wasn’t her fault he wanted to keep his life small enough to fit into a carry-on bag; and he hadn’t even had the decency to shout back, just stood there rigid with his chin lifted and his gaze fixed somewhere over her left shoulder, just taking it. So he looked sort of like he had that day, before she’d had a go at him, and it made her expect the worst.

But instead of anything about her, she just watched twenty-six minutes of him talking to Ross about his frustrations with the other command crew. Fitzjames, she learned, talked about the Europa project like he’d been a part of it from the beginning, and was cliquish with “all his Mars pals he brought along” as Francis put it. Meanwhile, Francis had found that any conversation with Sir John that wandered into personal territory and lasted over half an hour was guaranteed to turn into Sophia’s uncle relitigating his career as Governor General of Australia. “It’s not that I don’t sympathise,” Francis said, looking frustrated, “I know it was hard for him, I’d just like one conversation that didn’t end up with me telling him he was right to fire a really popular Prime Minister and then write scads of op-ed columns doubling down about it. Surely at some point on this mission, he’s going to let it go? Do you think?” And Sophia found herself nodding because yes, she also hoped that a five-year mission was enough to make her uncle forget his political misfortunes. God, it was worse than Francis talking about her; it was her having a hard time remembering that these were videos meant for someone else. At least, until he said, “Ah, I shouldn’t be ranting to you about this. Listen, tell me about Aston Abbotts, please. Anything. Are they still trying to knock down that pub? And how’s the lad, is he still growing well?”

The journalist part of her brain told her there was an interesting angle there about discord in the senior command of Erebus, and it was a big enough part to spur her on to watch another video, and another, and another. He looked a bit better in every one; started to sound a bit more neutral when he talked about the other command crew, delving sometimes into their projects with evidence of interest, and the participants as well. He had misgivings about the size of the crew which even a year in the simulation hadn’t totally allayed, but he also talked about how many scientific projects would be running simultaneously, and whether their data storage would even be able to handle it or if they’d need to start packaging it and bouncing it back to Earth so they could free up room on Erebus’ servers. On many occasions, he baldly stated that Ross was to be a rubber duck today, because Francis had a problem he needed to work out, and then he’d detail an engineering headache so complicated that even trying to understand what he was talking about felt like taking a test she hadn’t studied for. Month by month, she watched him get less glum and more interested, the jargon he used to communicate some development to Ross so dense and specialised that she had to look it up as she watched and take notes. 

He didn’t mention Sophia once. It was like watching a time lapse of him getting over it.

It took her days to watch them all; days in which she only spoke to the others at mealtimes before going back to her small quarters to binge a bit more. When she was finished - the last video before landing, the now-familiar close-up of Europa gleaming white in front of Jupiter’s sky-filling magnificence, which she’d seen dozens of times by now on other crewmembers’ videos home - she skipped back to the start and watched again, and again, so she could look at Francis, briskly listing his itinerary out loud, unable to hide how excited he was to touch down on that moon and get to work.

So that was a few days of effectively scratching at a scab until it bled. It certainly broke up the monotony, but she wasn’t sure it was worth it, even for the several thousand words of writing she got out of it.

Routine was a wonderful thing. So was work, the combined entertainment system, and when all else failed, masturbation in her blessedly private quarters. But those were solo activities. What actually kept her on an even keel was nudging Retter to explain the history of man-made satellites, or Koveyook to explain gravity assists, or getting Cook to talk about the variety of ways vitamin deficiencies could kill a person, or, God forbid, actually paying attention when McClintock started banging on about mountain-climbing.

“Do you know why no-one’s allowed to climb Mount Everest any more?” McClintock said, in his pleasant, lilting voice. (In a terrible coincidence, his first name was Francis; she was glad that he went by his middle name of Leopold.)

“Because it’s a sacred mountain, and people kept leaving their literal shit on it?” she hazarded. She thought she’d learned about Everest in school, but she doubted she’d given it a second thought since.

“Yes and no,” he continued, with unperturbable cheer. “It is, and they did, but it’s also because they kept leaving their corpses on it, too. Piles and piles of frozen bodies that nobody could get down, clogging the only safe paths.”

“Good lord,” Sophia said, and forced a chuckle. “I bet they didn’t put that on the travel brochures.”

“Probably not,” McClintock agreed. “I think it’s such a strange side-effect of the pioneering spirit, isn’t it? That once something’s been done - even if it was really hard - it gets a little easier for those who come next. But then, once you’re a few generations removed, people get so bold they forget the dangers. What once was a world-first feat of human endurance becomes just another mountain to climb. Isn’t that odd?”

She’d never thought about it like that. The mountain doesn’t get any less deadly, but once the novelty goes, then so does the fear, the caution, the respect, until any twat who can do a chin up thinks he’s the next Edmund Hilary. “Yes,” Sophia said, “It seems very arrogant, when you put it like that.”

And she thought of Europa, sparkling deadly cold on the other side of the asteroid belt, which for most of her lifespan had been the most remote place an astronaut could go, venturing out in highly-trained teams no bigger than the crew of the Lyra. And then, as soon as those decades of careful planning had come to fruition, the CSC tossed together a hundred-strong crew of mostly civilian academics, half of whom had never been to so far as the next planet over, and expected everything to work out.

McClintock’s eyes had a dreamy, distant look. “I wish I could have gotten the chance to climb Everest,” he said. “But I shouldn’t like to climb over any bodies to do it.”

Sophia was grateful that Koveyook chose that moment to walk over and butt in with, “Hey, Retter’s setting up the projector for a movie about wizards or something - want to come?” and the answer was yes, they did.

So they passed the months like that, while the sparkling void of space spun all around them. They watched movies; they worked on their projects; they had conversations that made Sophia, in moments of recollection, stare at a wall for some time; they shared meals. 

And they monitored the progress of Erebus, closing the vast distance at a crawl.

It was in the tenth month that they received a message from the foreman of a Chinese mining base on Ceres. They, like a few other companies in the asteroid belt, had agreed to keep an eye out for Erebus’s approach, and now they came through, promising high-quality close-up images of the ship’s exterior, taken by a probe that had, at the farthest edge of its range, managed to intercept Erebus.

It was a wonderful moment aboard Lyra when they got that news. Not only would the pictures allow them to see the interior and assess the state of the crew, the crew might even be able to visually communicate with them. Also, the updated position meant that the Lyra could adjust course to intercept with their actual position.

But the message continued, and their cheering died away as the foreman bowed her head in apology and said that they had recorded footage that was livestreamed from the probe on its first approach, but unfortunately, subsequent passes had been unusable, and when the probe returned to Ceres base, all the data in it had been corrupted beyond repair. The footage included in this message was all from that first approach. She said that she hoped they could help their comrades, and the message ended.

Nobody said a word; Ross immediately played the footage from the probe. It was several hours long, but it started when the ship was still a speck on the horizon. Ross skipped forward in short increments, and they watched the ship get larger and larger, and finally Ross let it play in real time.

“Lights are on; rotation is good,” Koveyook said, cautious optimism in his voice.

“How high-def is this?” said Retter. “Can we zoom it in a bit?”

Ross did not protest, or even speak, but manipulated the program, narrowing the focus. 

The resolution still wasn’t great, but they could see inside the windows. There was about half a minute of silence where they all huddled around Ross, squinting at the screen, before Sophia asked the obvious question: “Where is everyone?”

At this distance, they couldn’t get a lot of detail, but it didn’t seem like there was any movement inside those windows. They were looking for a hundred-strong crew, but the inside of Erebus looked empty. She heard the click of Ross’ throat as he swallowed, and then he said in a very calm and reasonable voice, “They might be on suspension protocol, if they have to conserve food, or energy, even oxygen.”

McClintock let out an audible breath, and chimed in, “Aye, they might be sleeping whole days away. Even if they have a couple of hands on watch, we’d easily miss them at this distance.”

Sophia felt all the muscles in her shoulders unbunch - she loved that explanation. It was so reasonable.

By now the view was zoomed in too much, and Ross clicked back out to keep the whole ship in frame. The resolution was better, at this distance, and still: not a soul seemed to be aboard. Sophia glanced at her crewmates, and shared a quick smile with Cook; Retter looked very focused, eyes still glued to the screen, as did McClintock; but Sophia didn’t like the creased expression on Koveyook’s face, or the way Ross’ eyes were narrowed. “What is it?” she asked, and Koveyook glanced at her, and then at Ross, who glanced back at Koveyook.

Koveyook, his arms folded, gave a sort of half-shrug and said, “Colour’s a little off. Could be nothing.”

Ross grunted.

“Oh, yeah,” said Retter. “It’s kind of pinkish? Could it just be the camera?”

“Could well be,” said Ross.

Now that she was looking again, Sophia thought she understood what they meant. She hadn’t really noticed until it was pointed out - it was sort of like the colour temperature settings on a monitor - but, while the interior of Erebus was still at a fairly low resolution, there was a sort of orange or pink tint to it that seemed at odds with the cool tones of the exterior. She’d seen plenty of footage of Erebus, but never seen that. She thought of possible explanations while Ross zoomed back out again: the probe’s camera; a trick of the light; interior light settings (which Ross and Koveyook would know about, so that was out); filters on the windows (which would have to be newly installed, which didn’t seem likely). The probe flew ever closer, and the image got sharper. As it did, the vague pinkness resolved into more discrete patches of colour, rather than a uniform tint. They waited, heads bent, focused. Closer again, and…

“What is that?” Cook said, sharply. Ross narrowed the focus again.

On the interior walls of the closest ring, a smear of something red, rotating out of sight. And there, again: another smear. Red. Some of it looked like it was on the glass. The more they looked, the more of it there seemed to be, speckling and smearing the walls, the floor, even the windows. Nobody answered Cook - it was obvious what it looked like, but Sophia didn’t dare say it.

The probe was close now, close enough to slow, and start circling around Erebus. Sophia found herself unconsciously leaning when it did, and righted herself before she could smack her head against Ross. The other ring came in sight, and it, too, showed those same vivid red smears - all interior.

Then - “There’s someone there,” Ross said, low, and narrowed the focus again as the others murmured or exclaimed. It was true: there was a person in that ring, but the angle and the movement meant they only got a glimpse of an upright and moving uniformed body before they lost sight again. Then another flash, then another, like the person was running with the rotation, and then a brief glimpse - dark hair, Sophia thought - and then some kind of sign, pressed against the window, held there in view of the probe before the ring rotated away and the probe pulled back, and back, and Erebus began to retreat once again into the distance.

“What did it say?” Sophia said, and Ross scanned back, found the moment, paused, narrowed in, and in again. 

And just for that moment, they could see the sole crewmember, framed in the window, holding up a sign scrawled with the words:

DO NOT RETURN TO EUROPA.

THEN

Blanky’s voice cut through the panicked noises of the crew and the splattering sounds of the slush still coming out of the container. “Back up, keep it orderly! Clear the floor area, don’t stand there gawking, now!” and bit by bit, the crew formed a wide and orderly ring around the pool of red water that was spreading over the concrete floor.

Silna’s heart was in her throat. She could hear some of the crew swearing, choking. Someone said, “Oh my God, is that--?”

Esther’s voice rose, calm and clear: “That sample’s from 870 metres down - it’s ancient ice. It’s been stored outside for years.”

Because naturally, everyone was looking at what looked like a whole lot of bloody slush with Billy Orren’s death in mind, and leaping to improbably horrible conclusions. It had been Silna’s first thought too - she wasn’t immune. But she cleared her throat and piped up, “It could be a saltwater plume. Like the Blood Falls, in Antarctica?”

There were a couple of responses from the crowd along the lines of, “The what falls?” but Blanky was nodding, and a couple of others were taking up his cue.

“Aye, Silna, thank you. Could be an iron oxide taint, something with antifreeze properties,” Blanky said. “In which case, that’s a bloody interesting sample that’s all over the floor now, so let’s salvage what we can! Come on!” And he quickly picked a dozen people out of the crowd to get containers and scrape down the conveyor belt, and others to skim the top of the puddle, and others to grab the wet vacs so they could clean the floor, because of course the sample after this one might be similar, and now they knew what to expect, they would have to reconfigure their procedures to account for liquid specimens.

Silna, for her part, was already thinking of ways to test the slushy red samples while accounting for the ways they would have been contaminated by contact with the floor. She’d have to do that today, and it would be a pain in the ass and a lot more work, but if this one core ended up being their only sample of the red substance, she had to use it.

As if reading her mind, Harry turned to her with bright eyes and said, “Oh, we have to eliminate what was on the ground, on people’s shoes! We have swabs in the infirmary.”

“Go,” Silna said, grateful, and as he darted out of the hangar, she headed to her corner to set up the tests she’d need to run. At least two separate microscopes on, a few boxes of slides, solution for the swabs…

In five minutes, Blanky had put a new task roster up on the screen, and at that point Harry came back with a box of swabs. Crozier came with him, pulling on the PPE over his command crew jumpsuit while gesturing at the spreading puddle on the hangar floor and saying, “Thomas, what the hell are you showing me?”

“Not sure yet!” Blanky replied with great cheer. “Silna reckons a saltwater plume, but whatever it is, it’s more exciting than I expected, this near the surface.”

Crozier looked over to Silna and said, “What, like the Blood Falls?”

Silna nodded, surprised. 

Crozier pulled his mask over his face. “Dr Goodsir, get your swabs before they clean the floor there.” To Blanky, he said, “How much have you managed to salvage?”

“Des Voeux?” Blanky called, and Des Voeux came bustling over with a rattling container of sample jars - six in all, the labels hastily amended with words like ‘FLOOR’ and ‘CB’ to indicate what surface they’d been collected from. “Not bad,” Blanky said, appreciatively.

Crozier reached out a gloved hand and picked up one of the jars, holding it up to the light. Then he passed it to Silna, who took it gingerly - it was still cold enough to be condensing the air in the jar into ice crystals. “Would you prepare a few slides, doctor?” he said. “Since we can’t photograph it like a normal core, your microscopes will have to be our first look at the stuff.”

Silna nodded, and got to work. While she pipetted out some of the smoking-cold liquid onto a series of slides, the rest of the lab hummed with activity and conversation. Harry had wrangled Evans and Young into helping him swab surfaces, and they went carefully over the hangar floor in sections, skirting around the huge red puddle, while Hartnell and Morfin stood by with the wet & dry vacuums looking impatient to clean it up. Nearer to Silna, Strong was dabbing at her legs with gloved fistfuls of paper towels - her coveralls were still splattered with the red liquid, her feet in particular - and Crozier, Blanky, and Esther were having a conversation about solutions to the problem of liquid cores on the conveyor belt, which ended with Esther saying, “...Or we could just put a bucket under the spot where it comes out of the container.”

“Yeah, or we could do that,” Blanky said.

“Do you have something non-reactive and shatter-proof that’ll fit under that?” Crozier said.

“Hang on,” said Blanky, and shouted across the hangar, “Collins! What size are your ceramic whatsits?”

Collins turned out to have a stash of heavy-duty, shovel-shaped ceramic trays: spare parts for the robots that they used to transfer ice cores into their containers outside, and built to handle the differences between exterior and interior temperatures without exploding from thermal shock. One of those trays was large enough to hold an ice core, and just small enough to fit on the conveyor belt - if they took that section of the cover off it. 

So, the new procedure was improvised: the ice core container opened and deposited its contents onto the freshly sterilised ceramic tray, where it could be inspected for liquid before it was manually tipped out on the conveyor belt to proceed as usual. Simple.

While they did that, Harry prepared his floor swab samples, and Silna put the first slide into the microscope. With her face that near it, it had a surprisingly sharp smell, with an undertone kind of like stale spices. She wrinkled her nose and adjusted the lens.

“Damn,” she muttered, as the red blob came into focus. 

“What is it?” Harry said.

“I think the sample’s contaminated,” she said, and stepped aside. “See?”

He bent over the microscope, and his eyebrows jumped. He said, “Those certainly look like cells.”

“Yup,” she said, frowning at the sample container’s label, which said ‘870m FLOOR’. Goddammit, this was why everyone was supposed to wear the stupid shoe covers. Even so, she was surprised the floor was that dirty already.

Crozier approached them, and said, “What is it?”

“There’s a biological contaminant in the sample,” Silna said, while Harry stepped aside, frowning, and went over to put one of his swab samples in his own microscope. “Have a look.”

Crozier bent over the microscope, frowned, then straightened up and called, “Mr Des Voeux, do you have a sample from the belt there?”

“Yes, Captain!” said Des Voeux, practically bouncing across the hangar floor towards them with a jar in hand. This he handed directly to Crozier, who looked nonplussed and handed it to Silna.

“Thank you, Mr Des Voeux,” Crozier said, and then to Silna he gestured at the other slides and said, “May I?”

He was wearing gloves and a mask, so she said, “Sure,” and concentrated on pipetting out new slides from the sample marked ‘870m CB’. Now it was her, Crozier, and Harry all in a line, Crozier and Harry swapping out slide after slide while she worked.

After a few minutes, Crozier looked up and said, “What have you found, Dr Goodsir?”

“Um,” said Harry, looking up from his microscope with a frown, and then he gestured at the slides he’d been viewing and said in an undertone, “Silna, there were from the swabs I took of the floor right around the puddle,” and stepped aside to let her look.

She looked. She frowned. She swapped out a slide. She swapped out another one. She went back to her own microscope, to a slide stained with the red liquid, teeming with cells that were nowhere in evidence on the slides Goodsir had prepared. She removed the slide, and inserted one from the conveyor belt sample - a surface that nobody had been trampling on.

Something cellular teemed and wriggled on the slide. She increased the magnification, looking for recognisable structures, hearing her own breath come faster, as Crozier said, “Thomas, can we get the core from below this one?”

“Ready to go,” said Blanky, and marched through the plastic sheets that separated this nook from the rest of the hangar. At his signal, across the room came the familiar clunk of an ice core container opening, followed by a loud, slushy thud as the ice core hit the ceramic tray in an only semi-solid state. Silna looked up hopefully. The big screens were displaying the top-down view of the conveyor belt, and what she saw was roughly half a metre of ice and a puddle of red liquid in the bottom of the tray. There was appreciative murmuring throughout the room, and a little cheer from Esther.

“A sample of that, please,” Crozier called, walking out to get it.

Silna’s hands were trembling, and she squeezed them tight. But she looked up and saw Harry, midway through tidying their slides into labelled cases, shooting her a bright-eyed grin. She couldn’t help but grin back, even if she was sure she was going to feel really stupid in a minute for getting excited.

Crozier came back, followed by a small crowd that included Esther, Des Voeux, and even Strong. Crozier handed her the box containing the sample jar labelled ‘871m’ and said, “I’ll put it up on screen.”

Oh great, she thought, getting a fresh pipette, an audience. But she didn’t say anything, because all that mattered was the fresh sample, still so cold that it smoked. Crozier set up the connection between her microscope and the hangar’s display screens, livestreaming to everyone the moment when Silna slipped the 871m sample slide into the microscope and adjusted the focus. 

There was a moment of absolute hush as every head but hers turned up to the screen. And then someone in the crowd choked, “Oh my God,” and just like that, the whole room broke into deafening cheers.

Silna looked up from the microscope, where cellular life was wriggling unmistakably in the red liquid of an untainted sample, and felt her eyes sting. It was only day seven. “We’re not even a kilometre down,” she said to Harry, who just grabbed both her hands in his and shook them, beaming. “Oh shit,” she said, “We have to decontaminate, don’t we?”

“I’m afraid so,” he said, misty-eyed with joy.

“Alright!” roared Crozier over the cacophony of the lab. “Now, since we’ve just discovered an unknown microscopic organism--” redoubled cheering-- “And spilled it all over the floor, you all know what that means! Procedures will go up on the boards, and like we practiced at the simulation--” and the rest of the morning was lost to the decontamination protocol.

Hours later, Silna sat in the commissary, freshly scrubbed, in clean clothes, and smiling at the food in front of her, just like everyone else who had been in the ice core lab. 

The precious liquid samples had been stored in Silna’s fridge before they all downed tools and filed into the three-roomed chamber adjacent to the hangar. The announcement had already gone around the whole base within minutes, and Commander Franklin had come around to shake everyone’s hand personally as they emerged from the decontamination chamber. 

After their lunch break, they’d have to don biohazard suits, split into teams, and reenter the hangar to remove all their computer equipment, take down all the plastic sheeting, replace everything that could be replaced and disinfect the hell out of everything that couldn’t. That would probably take the rest of the day and maybe a little into the evening, when all she and probably any of them wanted to do was go right back in there and study the alien life-form they had discovered in their first damn week on Europa.

“God, it sucks that we can’t contact Earth right now,” Hornby said, staring into the middle distance with a wistful expression, and Silna nodded in sympathy.

“How do you reckon it’s not dead of the heat?” Peglar said, and it took Silna a second to realise he was asking her. “I mean, if it’s native to here, shouldn’t room temperature be boiling it?”

Silna glanced around at all the faces turned her way, swallowed her nerves, and said, “I mean, we don’t know yet, but… if it’s a chemosynthetic lifeform that forms on undersea hydrothermal vents, well, the ones on Earth can expel water that’s up to 460 celsius. For all we know, it likes the heat.”

Peglar whistled, and Hartnell grinned. Strong, who had actually gotten a tiny bit of frostbite on her shins from being splattered with the supercooled slush, said, “So it can survive that, and being frozen down to, what, fifty ticks off absolute zero? That’s a pretty extreme extremophile.”

“An ancient extremophile,” Evans put in, “If it was only a kilometer down.”

There was a moment of appreciation, and then Silna watched the implications of that roll across some of the more junior scientists’ faces. She sipped her tea, not at all minding the smell of the decontamination wash that clung to her damp hair.

Peglar said, “Bet you’re all glad of that shower now,” and got a round of nervous chuckles for it, even from Silna.

The rest of the day, as predicted, was taken up with decontaminating the ice core laboratory, which they did in small coordinated teams, while wearing full hazmat gear. It was easy to lose track of people under those circumstances, so it was approaching dinner time when she thought to ask, “Anyone seen Dr Goodsir?”

“He had to go be a doctor,” Des Voeux said, not looking up from his tablet. “Young had a tummy ache.”

“It was a bit more than that,” Peglar said, hanging up his hazmat suit. “He threw up everywhere, it was pretty bad.”

Des Voeux tutted, “And who’s decontaminating that, then? The last thing we need around here’s a gastro outbreak.”

“Is he okay?” Silna asked, hanging up her own suit, but Peglar just shrugged - no idea.

Poor kid. Silna went with Peglar to the dining hall, where he made an immediate beeline for Bridgens. In fact, Silna could see that all three of the comms guys were there at once, which she assumed either meant they’d been kicked out of the control room - unlikely - or had one last chance to get a full meal in before they had to work all night. So the tender rocket to inspect the satellites must be going up tonight.

Silna got herself dinner and sat down next to Jopson, who was shoveling food into his mouth with a kind of fixed, mechanical determination, elbows pinned on either side of his tray like he thought somebody was going to take it from him. She didn’t attempt conversation. Besides, she could just about hear the talk at Billy Gibson’s table: in contrast to Jopson, he was surrounded by people asking him questions, and clearly enjoying himself. So Silna ate slowly, and learned that the comms team had been going over all their equipment with a fine-toothed comb for a week, then doing it again with the help of a team of engineers, and none of them could account for the incomprehensible garbage that they were getting instead of reports from Earth, so the problem had to be with the satellites. “We’re doing our jobs right,” Gibson finished

Silna glanced sidelong at Jopson, who looked back with a sort of fervent energy in his pale eyes, and then drained an entire mug of coffee in one go. Then he stood up and left, as neat and silent as an owl.

On her way out, she grabbed a foil pouch of chocolate pudding, and made her way to the infirmary, where Dr Stanley was reading something off a tablet with a bored expression. She knocked tentatively on the doorframe and asked, “Is David Young still here?”

Stanley looked up at her from under his heavy brow with an expression she couldn’t interpret. Then he said, “Visiting hours end in ten minutes.” He held out his hand. “He can’t have that.”

“Oh,” said Silna, and handed over the chocolate pudding. Slightly embarrassed, she wandered in.

It wasn’t a big place. There was a ward with six beds, and an operating theatre at the back. Young must be in the one curtained alcove, but Silna saw Harry first, assembling a tray of what looked like blood samples. He looked - worried. He smiled when he saw her, but it was a wan, preoccupied thing. He twitched the curtain, and said softly, “David, you have another visitor.” Then at a murmur, he nodded and pulled the curtain aside.

Young looked terrible - a shocking decline from that morning. He was sweaty and sallow, hooked up to all kinds of IV fluids and monitors. On his arms, she could see livid purplish spots, like bruises. Silna sat down on a stool at the foot of the bed and scooted it closer. “Geez, David,” she said, “I heard you got sick, I’m sorry.”

“‘S alright,” Young said, bluish lips pulling back into a smile. “I’m just a bit hungry. Can’t have dinner yet because I’m supposed to have surgery.”

Silna blinked. “Surgery?”

“Endoscopy. The doctors reckon I’ve got a GI bleed,” Young said. “I think Dr McDonald’s setting up the surgery, so at least I won’t have to wait long.”

Silna nodded.

“Bit embarrassing, really. I had a stomach ache for days, but I thought it was just because… you know. Everything.”

"I- yeah, it's been a lot."

"You'll tell everyone I'm fine, won't you? It's just, I made a mess. Strong brought me and I think I freaked her out. I don't want anyone worried."

"Sure," Silna said, although she was pretty sure Strong had good reasons for worrying.

“Don’t want to miss too much in the lab,” Young went on, still smiling. “It was so electric today. Still can’t believe it.”

Silna smiled back. “Me neither.”

“I wish I could tell my sister about it,” Young went on. “Oh! Dr Goodsir, do you reckon it’s alright if I do a video? When Commander Franklin visited, he said we’ll have the satellites fixed soon. I could tell her everything.”

“Alright, David,” Harry said. His voice was still very gentle.

That sounded like Silna’s cue to leave, so she stood up. “Good luck for your surgery,” she said.

“Thanks,” Young said, his sunken face beaming. “Hope I’m back in the lab soon!”

And she stepped back, and Harry dropped the curtain and walked with her to the entrance. Faintly, she heard David Young start talking, recording his letter to his sister.

“Is he going to be okay?” Silna asked Harry in an undertone. Which was kind of a stupid question, because medical confidentiality still held even in space, but the preoccupied look on Harry’s face and the awful bluish tinge on Young’s skin compelled her to ask.

“We’ll do our best,” Harry said, wringing his hands. "We might need to--"

There was a soft harrumph from Dr Stanley.

Harry cleared his throat. “And I’m afraid that’s visiting hours up.”

“Right,” Silna said, and left, reeling a little, wondering what kind of previously-undetected condition could make a healthy young man who’d been fitness-tested to the moon and back start bleeding into his stomach.

In Silna's dream, there were sirens blaring, and when she woke up, they were real.

It took her a second to place it - it was the klaxon that sounded every time the outer door opened. And since every time it went off was usually scheduled and signposted hours ahead, it was really weird to hear it in the middle of the night. She sat up groggily and turned the lights on, hearing running feet in the corridor. She squinted at her clock - 4:16am - and wondered with a wave of despair what the hell had happened now. 

She got up and pulled her uniform on, shoved her feet into her shoes, stumbled out into the corridor, where the klaxon was still going, and ran smack into Harry. His face was white, his hair standing up in tufts. Dr McDonald was behind him, looking almost as harried, and others were beginning to spill out into the corridor. “What’s happening?” she said.

“David!” Harry said. “He left!”

“What-- you mean, outside?”

“What’s happened to David?” Strong said, squinting groggily in her doorway.

“He can’t get far in his condition,” McDonald said, but he was pulling his tablet out of his pocket as he said it, tapping at it. Young’s vital signs, Silna realised - all of their locations and vital signs were tracked, though only the doctors had permission to access that stuff. That’s how they’d known the moment of Orren’s death.

The klaxons stopped - which meant the outer door was closed and locked again, and the airlock repressurised and at a safe temperature. Down the corridor, Lieutenant Gore appeared at a jog, with Lieutenant Irving behind him. “What’s all this?” Gore said. “Has there been an unauthorised exit?”

“It seems so,” McDonald said, and showed Harry the screen.

At this point, Commander Franklin turned up, his hair and uniform neat despite the early hour, striding into the ever-increasing crowd with Lieutenant Irving on his heels and saying, “Now what has got everyone up at this hour?”

So Harry and McDonald explained that their patient had woken up in the middle of the night and apparently donned an EVA suit and walked out of the habitat. “He might be disoriented, or in an altered state - I doubt he’d feel fit to walk otherwise,” McDonald said.

“It’s my fault,” Harry said miserably, “I fell asleep on call. I didn’t hear the machines.”

“Neither did I, and I was just in the next room,” McDonald said soothingly.

“Well, then, if he has gone out, we will simply have to bring him back,” Franklin said calmly. “Lieutenant Gore and I will go and retrieve him.”

“Sir, can I go with you?” Harry said. “He’s my patient.”

“Very well, Dr Goodsir, but we should probably go quickly,” Franklin said. “Come along,” and strode confidently towards the airlock with Gore and Harry in his wake.

Irving said sharply, “Would everyone please clear the corridor for the doctors,” and the other inhabitants of the corridor broke into muttering and began returning to their rooms, even as McDonald continued to tap at his tablet. Over his shoulder, Silna saw three new dots join the ghostly map on it - Franklin, Gore, and Harry, she assumed.

She asked McDonald, “Is there anything I can do to help?”

Irving held a hand up and said, “Please return to bed, it’s under control.” 

“Actually,” McDonald said, “I could use help with the gurney, if you’re willing to scrub in.”

She wondered where Stanley was, or if he could somehow have slept through the klaxon, but she nodded and followed anyway, and Irving followed behind them.

In the infirmary, Silna scrubbed alongside McDonald and got a mask and gloves on while he prepared a gurney. Irving had set up a three-way video stream on his tablet from the cameras on Franklin, Gore, and Harry’s EVA suits, and was evidently on comms with them too. Silna couldn't quite hear what he was getting in his earpiece, but she thought she recognised the pitch of Franklin's voice.

"Done. Silna, if you would?" McDonald said, and she gripped the back of the gurney to help him, just as Captain Crozier and Captain Fitzjames met Irving outside the infirmary. Like Franklin and Irving, they were also in full uniform, although they both looked a little more rumpled, like they’d been up all night. The rocket launch, Silna remembered - the satellite. 

“John, what’s this about?” Crozier said, and Silna ended up helping Dr McDonald to wheel the gurney down the corridor for their prospective patient, with Crozier and Fitzjames walking behind them as Irving updated them on the situation. McDonald wheeled the gurney to a stop about three metres clear of the airlock. “Christ, there he is,” Crozier said suddenly, and Silna looked over her shoulder to see the three command crew huddled around Irving’s tablet. “He’s going for the rig.”

McDonald frowned at his own tablet again. “Young’s travelling fast,” he said.

“Did you say he had surgery last night?” Fitzjames said, sounding incredulous.

“Not major, but I wouldn’t have said he was up to this,” McDonald said.

If Silna craned her neck, she could see Irving’s screen, and the three first-person views of that landscape, and the distant figure of David Young bounding across the surface of Europa towards the hulking rig. So she saw it when Harry tripped and sprawled on his hands and knees, eliciting indrawn hisses from Irving and Fitzjames. She heard the faint radio chatter through Irving’s earpiece, and recognised the apologetic tone, even if she couldn’t perfectly make out the words. When he got upright again, Gore and Franklin were well ahead.

That meant that Harry was several dozen metres behind with a good view when Gore and Franklin went inside the rig, just as there was a tremor that sent Harry to his knees again. In Gore and Franklin's camera views, Young stood poised at the edge of the borehole, and then staggered.

“Oh, hell,” McDonald said, gripping his tablet.

“Commander Franklin, what is your status?” Irving said. And Silna couldn’t make out words, but even she could hear the sudden shout, and then on the screen, two of the cameras went dark.

On Harry’s view, the whole damn rig buckled suddenly, then slumped abruptly sideways, and as a cacophony of shouting came through Irving’s earpiece, the whole structure - metal scaffold, walkway, cable, all - was abruptly torn down straight into the hole. As the ice core pipe whipped like a snake overhead, Harry, screaming, threw himself flat, and then that screen too went black.

Chapter Text

NOW

It was a moment’s work for Sophia to find a name to match the face in that video, and bring up all the information she had on her. “That’s Dr Silna Aua, of Gjoa Haven,” she reported. “She did her PhD on the detection of chemosynthetic archaea in ancient ice beneath the Ong Valley in Antarctica. I don’t know what that is, but I suppose it must have been quite useful for this expedition’s purposes.”

“I know Silna,” Koveyook said. The still image of the woman’s solemn face reflected as a gleam in his eyes. “I’ve worked with her dad. Knew her since she was a kid.”

Sophia, brought up short, said, “Oh.”

“They were supposed to go together,” Koveyook said, “But he got sick a couple months into training. He’s one of the real old-timers, you know? Been working at the CSC since the foundations were laid.” He looked at Ross. “I want to tell him that his daughter’s alive.”

“You’ll get to,” Ross said softly. “You might have to ask him to keep it to himself for now, though, until the CSC works out how to report this.”

Koveyook nodded.

“What can they report?” McClintock said. “If this footage is released, there’s going to be a panic.”

That was the closest anyone had come to voicing what the video looked like, which was that Dr Silna Aua was the sole living passenger aboard a ship whose every inner surface appeared to be smeared with blood. What the hell was anyone supposed to make of it?

“Well, then,” Ross said, “We’d better scrape it for all the information we can. The more we know, the better.”

So they divvied up the work. While McClintock and Koveyook readjusted their heading and calculated the most immediate possible rendezvous with Erebus, Cook was to research if the red stains were consistent with blood spatter patterns or something else. Retter was to look at the whole of the footage and see if the ways in which the probe’s data broke down after the first fly-by was consistent with the messages they’d been receiving from Europa and Erebus, and if it gave her any insights at all. Ross was scheduled to report to the CSC in approximately seven hours; they had until then to gather their preliminary findings.

As for Sophia, “Given the sensitivity of the information,” Ross said, “I would appreciate it if you would follow CSC guidelines on when to release it.”

“I was hardly going to drop a tabloid exclusive, Commander,” Sophia said curtly. “Besides which, all our communications go through the CSC. If they want to hold back anything I send out, they can and will.” She folded her arms. “Now, is there anything I can do to assist?”

Ross considered it. “I’ll be working with Retter. Cook might use a research assistant.”

So Sophia found Cook, who indeed accepted her help. Sophia’s job was practical and rather interesting: they had on file a detailed 3D computer model of Erebus as it was configured on this latest journey. Cook asked her to go through the probe footage and mark out the locations of all visible red streaks, as accurately as possible. This wasn’t something Sophia had really done before, but within an hour she got the hang of it, and it allowed Cook to concentrate on giving herself a crash course in bloodstain pattern analysis - not something the good doctor had ever had to do before. Between the model, the footage, and Cook’s research, they were able to come to the pre-call meeting with Ross and present their limited findings. 

“I don’t think they’re bloodstains,” Cook said plainly. “I’ve put all our data we’re basing it off in the file, but - look, I’m not an expert in forensics, and I’m sure they’ll have people more qualified than me on this in a heartbeat, but those stains aren’t drips or spatters. The shape and spread of these patterns looks more to me like some kind of mold or other contaminant.”

“What kind?” said Ross.

“No idea,” said Cook. “Erebus has the same filters and scrubbers that we do, but obviously there’s no eliminating fungus and bacteria - we take that stuff with us wherever we go, on our skin, in our mouths. I did spend two hours combing through our database of common contaminants, though, and none of them were a visual match for that scarlet stuff.”

Ross sat back, glanced around at them all, and said, “Doctor, what are you suggesting?”

Cook spread her hands. “I’m saying I don’t know what it is. I don’t think it’s blood. But I acknowledge that I could be biased.”

“And if you are wrong about it not being blood?” Ross said. “What is the worst-case scenario?”

Koveyook rubbed his face; all of them shifted in some way, a sort of physical ripple of discomfort. Sophia personally found herself leaning back, as if from some bad odour. Cook said, “The worst case scenario would be some kind of massacre, with maybe only one survivor. And I don’t know how that could happen.”

Ross looked at Sophia, who immediately said, “Speculation will go that way if you do not present an alternative scenario. If that footage is released to the public, it certainly will.”

“An alternative scenario,” Ross said flatly. “All we have is speculation about a possible unknown contaminant. Are we going to suggest an alien lifeform?”

Cook scrunched her nose, but didn’t say no.

“She had one chance to send a message,” McClintock said tentatively, “And it was a warning about Europa. Whatever happened must have started there, not on Erebus.”

Ross didn’t look any happier at that. He said, “How soon can we rendezvous?”

“Fifty-six days,” Koveyook said.

Ross looked at Retter - apparently a cue for her to speak about what the two of them had been working on. She said, “So, there’s something else. We analysed the rest of the footage from the probe. Remember, what we got is a recording of the livestream from the Ceres base - the foreman said the probe itself was unsalvageable, right? Nothing left on it. We looked at the footage, and about eighteen seconds after Dr Aua’s message, the probe sent a network request to the ship. I guess the idea was that if the comms aren’t working, maybe direct file transfers might. It got accepted instantly, which shouldn’t happen; that kind of request has to be reviewed by someone with admin access. Then, a few seconds later… no more footage, no more comprehensible data from that probe. Which indicates that there is something catastrophically wrong with Erebus’ systems. Maybe some kind of malware that originated on Europa and then proliferated to all their systems? If so, it might explain why their satellites went down when the tender drone went up, because it would have initiated the same kind of network request. I think that whatever killed this probe is the same thing that killed the satellites, all their communications problems, and it started when they landed on Europa.”

“Wait,” Sophia said, “You’re saying they killed their own satellites? But that’s a massive crew full of some of the best engineers on the planet; how do they mess up that badly?”

McClintock said, “When you put it like that, it sounds like someone sabotaged them.”

“We have no grounds for that,” Ross said.

“That’s what it’s going to look like,” Sophia said, and oh God, this was a hell of a story unfolding right there, but whether the CSC would let it out was another matter entirely. The idea that their psychological tests failed and they let a saboteur in to destroy their multi-billion dollar plan…

Cook said, “But if it’s on Erebus, that means none of them could find it, or fix it, or purge it. If that ship’s carrying malware like that, then sending it back to Earth is like launching a plague ship.”

“Belay that talk,” Ross said sharply.

Cook held up her hands. “Commander, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean… I don’t mean to cast aspersions on the crew.”

Ross nodded. He had his hands on his knees, sort of rubbing the palms back and forth there. Sophia had seen him do it now enough times to recognise it as a sort of restrained agitation; she assumed it was a habit learned at the dinner table, in the same way she’d learned to refold her napkin whenever she wanted to fidget. Ross said, “I imagine the CSC will have these very same questions, and more time in which to answer them. Have you all sent me your findings?” Nods, murmurs of assent. “Good; I’ll package them and send them to the Commission along with an oral report. Thank you all. I want all of you to think about our approach. We’re going to have to exercise a great deal of caution. We have fifty-six days to plan this, so let’s get it right.”

THEN

“It’s my fault,” Harry said, sitting on the gurney with his knees pulled up to his chest. “If I hadn’t lost David…”

“Unless you managed to engineer the destruction of the drill rig,” Crozier said, “I highly doubt this is your fault, Doctor Goodsir.”

Harry looked at him, stricken, and said, “No! But… oh.”

Crozier wiped a hand over his face. He looked tired. Fitzjames, leaning against the wall with his arms folded, looked worse, red-eyed and unmoored. It was the two of them who had gone and retrieved Harry, once the last tremors had died away, and all the remnants of the drill rig, David Young, Graham Gore, and Commander Franklin had disappeared into the great borehole. They’d gone and got him, and Silna and McDonald had got him back to the infirmary, and Crozier had gone to brief the rest of the command crew. Silna had heard the shouting from a room away. It still wasn’t quite 5am.

She wasn’t supposed to be here; she wasn’t medical staff, and she wasn’t command crew. What she was was Harry’s friend, and something told her to stick to him like a burr when something this awful had just happened, with the way he wanted to blame himself. Her best hope was to assist McDonald and hope that, scrubbed up and masked like she was, nobody noticed that she was out of place.

Crozier said, “What was wrong with David, Dr Goodsir?”

Harry took a deep, shuddering breath, and said, “He was suffering an unexplained gastrointestinal bleed; we confirmed the diagnosis with an endoscopy, but it wasn’t all. He was also showing purpura on his arms and chest; he reported that he had been suffering stomach aches and headaches for several days. We tested his white blood cell count, and found leukopenia.”

Like he feared the answer, Crozier asked, “And what do you think was the cause?”

“They were symptoms consistent with acute radiation poisoning. Dr McDonald and Dr Stanley agreed with me on this. But David had no idea when he might have been so exposed,” Harry said.

“Radiation poisoning?” Fitzjames looked incensed. “And you didn’t think to inform the command crew of this?”

“But we did,” Harry said. “I informed Commander Franklin directly! He came to visit David before the launch, when he heard he’d taken ill, and I told him my suspicions.” He looked desperately at Dr McDonald, who nodded a corroboration.

“And what did he say?” Crozier said, in a hard voice. Silna almost flinched to hear it, and understood what it meant: Commander Franklin had been told. Commander Franklin hadn’t told anyone else.

“He said to inform him the moment anyone else showed symptoms. He assured me that it couldn’t have happened inside the habitat, because our instruments would have caught it, but he would ensure that the habitat was surveyed from top to bottom in the morning.” 

“Right,” Crozier said, and turned around to the huddle of command crew at the back of the infirmary. “Edward!” Lieutenant Little started, but stepped forward. Crozier told him, “I want a radiation survey of every room in the habitat, and check all our monitoring instruments. If there’s been a failure, I want to know why.” Then he looked straight at Silna with a stare that pinned her and said, “Was Young in the ice core lab every day?”

Fuck it. “Yes,” she said. “And he was on the same outdoor excursion as I was, when we visited the ice core shed.”

Crozier turned his sharp gaze to Fitzjames, who stood upright and said, “That excursion was without incident. All the EVA suits were checked afterwards and not one of them showed damage.”

“It’s a factor to consider, nonetheless,” Crozier said. “We’ll suspend work this morning; gather everyone at breakfast, tell them the news.”

“Captain Crozier,” Harry said, earnestly, “The rocket launch last night - are the satellites fixed?”

Crozier looked at Harry, and for a moment there was a terribly empty expression on his face. Worse was Fitzjames, behind him, who simply looked away and covered his mouth. Crozier said, “No. There’ll be an update at 7am; I hope you can attend it. Get a little rest in the meantime.”

7am in the dining hall: half the people there had been awake since 4:16, and Silna guessed at a dozen more who didn’t look like they’d been to sleep at all, including a lot of the command crew. There was Dr Stanley, though, who’d apparently rolled over at the klaxon and gone right back to sleep: he looked fresh, and was frowning in confusion.

“I have to tell you all a lot of bad news this morning, so I will be as brief as I may,” said Crozier. “The first is that I must report the deaths at approximately 0430 this morning of Commander John Franklin, Lieutenant Graham Gore, and David Young. The cause of the incident has yet to be determined, but the infrastructure of the drill rig was also destroyed.” He had to raise his voice to get the last few words out, and pause while the room convulsed - not uproar exactly, when so many had been awake for the incident, but a confirmation of worst fears, a crashing wave of incredulity, grief, fear. Crozier stood in the middle of it like a rock in a rough sea and said, “There’s more. You are all aware of our ongoing efforts to restore communications with Earth; last night, we launched a rocket to investigate potential problems with our geosynchronous satellites. It did not work. We still cannot get through to Earth.” Confusion and horror rippled through the room at this, but Crozier did not seem aware of it. He rubbed his hands together now, slowly; he looked like he was considering his words carefully. “In light of… all of this, we must consider the wisdom of staying on Europa as we had planned to do. We can’t leave immediately; Earth and Jupiter are only moving farther apart at present, and we’d never make the distance with our fuel reserves. However, Lieutenant Irving has been calculating our best options, and if we leave in six months’ time we could make it as far as Mars, and find help there. At worst, that means six months without contact with Earth - six months rather than a year. Your schedules have been cleared for the day. Command crew will be conducting equipment surveys throughout the habitat, so let us work. Talk to one another. If you have questions, please send them to me; I’ll address them this evening. Dismiss.”

And the room fell to discussion and commiseration, but Silna caught the sidelong look that Blanky sent Crozier’s way, and thought to herself: he didn’t mention Young’s radiation poisoning. He slipped in the command crew’s survey at the end there like it was business as usual, no explanation, a break in routine lost in the calamity. 

But he couldn’t think it would be secret forever, did he? Or did he just not want to cause a panic when everyone was already at the peak of their anxiety?

She rubbed her face. Everything sucked and she needed to pee. She could do something about one of those things.

So she went to the bathroom, the one near the dining hall and the crew bedrooms - the one on the opposite side of the habitat from the ice core laboratory. And when she saw the growth in the corner under the row of sinks while she was washing her hands, her first thought was to wonder how somebody had gotten blood there but nowhere else. Then she thought maybe she was wrong, because it was a scarlet stain that wasn’t only on the floor but crept up the walls a little way, in a manner that reminded her more of bathroom mould than a blood spatter. Except she’d never seen mould that colour.

She crouched and looked at it, wondering just how much she wanted to probe this mystery. Maybe someone had accidentally - what? Flung a tampon in the corner of the room? Or maybe it was just a strange mould. Mould that had grown in the space of a week. It was bright, bright red, and powdery-looking.

Damn. They hadn’t been allowed back in the ice core lab since decontamination yesterday - only yesterday, a lifetime ago. Where could she get a microscope at short notice?

In the end, she slipped into the food garden: a hangar almost as large as the ice core lab, with floor-to-ceiling racks of growth medium. Some of them already showed tiny seedlings sprouting under the purple grow lights. There wasn’t a soul in there to catch her rummaging through the cupboards and drawers for disposable gloves, slides, and a microscope, but she still conscientiously signed them out. Lieutenant Irving was uptight about his equipment, and if he was going to yell at somebody about it she’d rather it was her than anyone else. She found a plastic box, and piled in the microscope, box of slides, a half-empty box of disposable gloves, a couple of swabs in sterile packaging, and a handful of disinfectant wipes. 

Then she took the whole thing to the bathroom. It was hardly a sterile environment, but she wiped down a section of the counter and set out her equipment. Someone came in while she was working and went to piss, but Silna paid that no mind. She snapped on her gloves, got her swab, took a careful sample of the red substance, which was almost powdery, and sent up a sharp, almost spicy smell when she disturbed it.

Frozen in a crouch half-under a bathroom counter, her heart beating like a hare’s, a part of Silna’s brain still took time to marvel at how sensitive a human nose could be. A couple of airborne molecules passing over her olfactory nerves, and she already knew what she’d brought all this sophisticated equipment in to find out.

It smelled stronger when it wasn’t at a temperature cold enough to make her hands sting.

But she needed more than knowledge; she needed proof, so she took the sample up to the microscope on the counter, put it on a slide, slipped it in, and looked at the red substance there. And she pulled out her tablet, found the archived pictures from yesterday morning, just to compare. Just to confirm she wasn’t going absolutely crazy.

A toilet flushed, a door opened, and the sound of a sink running, and Esther Blanky said, “Silna? What the hell are you doing?”

“Could you look at this for me? I found it under the sink,” Silna said, and Esther, drying her hands, looked at her like she was crazy anyway. But she did it.

And then she jerked back from the microscope, and said, “What?” and “Are you having me on?” and then, “Where did you say you found it?” and then, staring at the stain under the sink, “Ah, fuck. Fuck. Let’s find Frank.”

And so Esther led Silna out to track down Captain Crozier, and tell him that the unknown Europan organism they discovered yesterday had escaped the decontamination protocols.

Captain Crozier stared at her with an expression that she thought might be misery. Then he sat back with a deep breath and said, “Tea?”

Silna stared at him. “You don’t think this is urgent?”

“Well, let’s see,” he said, tapping at his tablet. “We could stop people from going in there until it’s been decontaminated - there, I’ve just sent an out-of-order notice. I have a feeling decontamination’s going to be an uphill battle, though. I sent Edward to the ice core lab an hour ago to survey for radiation. Do you know what the first thing he saw was?”

She had a feeling her face told him exactly what she guessed.

Crozier nodded. “Big red patch on the floor.”

“Balls,” sighed Esther. 

“Well, now,” said Crozier, “Would you like that tea?”

“Coffee, please,” Silna said, and a moment later she got it, black instant that she already knew was going to make her tongue feel furry. She brought it close and let it warm her hands up, while Crozier passed Esther a mug of tea - he’d added creamer and one sugar to i without having to ask her - and then tipped four sugar packets into his own cup. 

Silna had a sudden pang for the simple days of postgrad, when the student pantry had been stocked with instant coffee and cans of sweetened condensed milk, because the fresh stuff was for people who had money. Even instant coffee had felt like a treat with canned sweet milk in it. She’d never had it anywhere else, just that sad underfunded college lounge. 

She sipped the bitter coffee and got up the courage to ask, “What was the second thing?” Esther and Crozier glanced at each other, and Silna amended, “That lieutenant Little saw in the ice core lab? There was something, wasn’t there?”

“I’ll be making an announcement as soon as the survey’s complete,” Crozier said, but even as Esther shifted impatiently beside her, he was going on to say, “But you may as well both know: the survey showed multiple ice cores stored in the freezer are highly radioactive - specifically the ones from between 954 metres and 962 metres down. And our instruments didn’t go off. The equipment shows the spike, but no alarms tripped anywhere between the transfer from outside to inside, or in the lab, or while they were in storage, and we don’t know why.”

“Oh God,” Esther said, looking stricken. “Young. He was carrying them piled in his arms.”

“He wasn’t the only one,” Silna said, thinking of Evans, who’d been racing to keep up with him, but also… “Lots of people carried ice cores in. How many people were exposed?”

Crozier said, “We have to assume everyone in the ice core lab, including you two. You’ll all have to have to be tested, and monitored for symptoms. That’ll happen this afternoon.”

Esther shook her head. “Hang on. The alarms just… didn’t go off?” She looked almost angry. “We can’t get messages in and we can’t send them out, and our radiation alarms don’t work? What the hell other systems are being messed around with?”

“We’re trying to find out,” Crozier said, grimly.

“You’ve been holding things back,” Esther guessed.

“Yes,” Crozier said. “The fact is, the communications problem is… stranger the longer we look at it. We’ve got to assume an error with our own systems that is proliferating in unpredictable ways, whose source is unknown. Even some of our drones are affected. I sent some down the borehole to look for poor Orren. They became unusable halfway down. We lost them entirely. I have not yet tried the same for Sir John.”

“Are you thinking sabotage?” Silna said, already dreading the idea of a hunt for the perpetrator inside their already-frightened crew.

“I genuinely don’t know,” Crozier said, “Which is a bad position to be in.” He put his teacup down and said, “And I have to request that you put yourself in a worse one, Dr Aua.”

The hairs stood up on the back of Silna’s neck. “What?” she said, and braced to refuse.

Crozier said, “I have to ask you to prioritise researching that red organism. As far as you safely can, I want you to find out everything you can about it: what it does, what mischief it might cause, how it proliferates, and how to destroy it.”

“Oh,” Silna said. 

Crozier looked between them. “If it doesn’t cause a mutiny, I will have to request that all our lab work continues, although I believe we should proceed with greater caution than before. Because we have approximately nineteen weeks until we can leave Europa. Looking at the disasters that have happened in only one, I think we will need to know a lot more than we do now.”

Chapter Text

NOW

56 days to approach, and they made it count. 

A probe could get to Erebus much faster than the Lyra. It had two jobs: to do a more thorough visual sweep, and to communicate with the inhabitants - even if it was only one inhabitant. No networking attempts, no handshake: only visual information. The probe would circle around Erebus to cover every angle, while flashing a message in morse code like they were scouts playing with torches, then return to the Lyra. Simple, straightforward, with no way for whatever was corrupting Erebus’ systems to transfer.

The thing that made Sophia’s head hurt was that radio waves were part of the exact same electromagnetic spectrum as light, but visuals of Erebus were fine and radio from it was nonfunctional, all because it ran through their computer systems. But at one point Sophia said, “Maybe if they’d gone to Europa with a ham radio they wouldn’t be in this mess,” and Ross hadn’t found it funny, because assembling a radio was quite straightforward and the Erebus crew should have done it, so they almost certainly would have done it, which meant there was an additional mystery of why that wasn’t working either. He looked so frustrated it almost made Sophia sorry she’d asked.

She’d been fairly insulated from the rumours on Earth about their mission, but from some of the things Aunt Jane and her editor let slip, the speculation had gotten rather grotesque. Sophia was in the position of having to write a thorough, newsworthy article on their efforts to contact Erebus and the information they’d gleaned from their own probe, while somehow not throwing fuel on the fire. She feared that was impossible, so she had to hold out for the flyby, in the hopes that the knowledge they got from that improved the situation.

Then the Lyra’s probe did its pass, and the knowledge they got from it did not, in fact, make things better.

The probe flashed a concise message, identifying the Lyra as a CSC ship, and the projected time and date of the rendezvous. What it saw inside was a more thorough view of the ship’s interior. A majority of the sleeping pods had a rime of red showing around their doors; God alone knew what that indicated. More straightforward were the messages written on the interior walls. Sophia recognised the shade of marker, the exact same kind they had on the Lyra. And the messages said:

56 ABOARD

SUSPENSION PROTOCOL

QUARANTINE

BIOHAZARD

DO NOT ATTEMPT NETWORK

“Fifty-six?” Sophia said, bleakly. “Fifty-six left alive?”

The probe flew around the second ring, where the majority of the labs were, and they saw a lone figure emerging in mask, gloves, and gown.

“There’s Silna,” said Koveyook. He was standing with his hands clasped over his head, everything about him wound tight.

“That’s the horticulture lab,” Ross said, signaling the probe to slow and keep pace with the turn of the ring, the flash of its signal lights a constant stuttering presence in the bottom corner of the camera. There was a glimpse inside the ship’s garden, and it was hard to tell in the purple glow of the grow lights, and couldn’t be confirmed until they could review the footage in detail, but the racks inside looked… dirty. Like they were stained all over with a dark substance that wasn’t the growth medium. There were plants growing, though - probably desperately needed, if the half-sized crew were having to sleep most of the voyage away for lack of food or oxygen.

Dr Aua had noticed the probe, and was standing there stripping off her red-stained PPE. She took off her goggles last, and then booted up a monitor, which showed… garbage. Glitching, static, just like the end footage from the Chinese probe, but Silna stayed at it for a minute, calmly going through the motions. Then she stood up, found a pen, and began writing on a clean section of wall in letters big enough for the probe to pick up: food stocks, water levels, oxygen saturation.

“That’s not enough food for fifty-six people,” said McClintock. “Even on suspension protocol and strict rationing, they’ll run out before they get to Mars for sure. They took off without enough food?”

“Air’s no good either,” said Cook. “That’s too low a saturation.”

“The plants must be helping,” Sophia said, in a fit of optimism.

“But costing them water,” Ross said. “They should have more than that in the system.”

“I’m sorry, but what was she doing at that monitor?” Retter said. “We all saw that, didn’t we? There wasn’t anything on that screen she could have been reading.”

There was a pause. “Do you think she was making up those numbers?” Sophia said.

“No. Why would she do that?” Koveyook said.

“He’s right,” Ross said, firmly. “We should assume those numbers are correct, and bring resources to bear accordingly.” Then he paused again, watching Silna continue to write on the wall:

ALIEN CONTAMINATION

DO NOT ALLOW ABOARD

QUARANTINE

This last she underlined several times. “Got it,” Koveyook said softly.

Alien contamination: there, confirmation. They’d found life on Europa. It should have felt like bigger news, huge, wonderful, universe-altering news. Instead it was going to come to Earth wrapped in forty-four dead and a biohazard marker.

“Fuel’s running out on the probe,” Ross said, and typed a message on the screen: 355 HOURS TO RENDEZVOUS. The flash pattern on the probe changed, and Silna squinted at it for a while as it repeated, tapping at a tablet; noting the message down, Sophia assumed, translating it. It wasn’t like she herself could read morse code off the top of her head. Then the probe accelerated, pulling away from Erebus, swinging back towards the Lyra, where it would return in three days.

“Fifteen days,” Ross said. “We better sort out how to transfer the supplies without inviting anything else aboard.”

THEN

The red organism was found in traces on the airlock floor, the corridor, and David Young’s room. It was found in much greater concentration, visible to the naked eye, on the bootsoles of several EVA suits, including those belonging to Silna and Captain Fitzjames. “The ice core shed,” Fitzjames said, despairing. “We stood in it. We tracked it inside.”

Silna remembered that day, Jupiter looming in the moon-dappled sky, David Young stepping in the tread marks where the first kilometre of ice cores had been before they were transferred inside. Their suits were always decontaminated on the way in, because they’d been irradiated to hell and back while they were out on the surface, but they had established by now that there was very little that decontamination seemed to do against this particular agent.

She and the entire crew of the ice core laboratory had had their blood samples taken for an absolute lymphocyte count. Her own had been fine, apparently, and nobody else had puked blood as far as she knew, but she wasn’t privy to everybody’s medical information. They didn't talk about it, on the days he helped her in the lab. There was just too much to test for, and he was already red-eyed and sleep-deprived.

The red organism wasn’t what had poisoned Young - those radioactive ice cores had yet to be dealt with, beyond using Des Voeux’s and Collins’ drones to pack them in a lead-lined box at the back of the freezer - but it still made the whole crew nervous to see it cropping up. A protocol had been established to contain and eliminate the red stains wherever they became visible, but it seemed to be about as effective as trying to kill a fungus by plucking its mushrooms. 

There was no indication that the red organism was dangerous per se. It was a little radioactive, “But only about as much as tritium,” Crozier said, and then clarified, “So we’ll be fine as long as we don’t ingest the stuff. Still, best to take ordinary precautions.”

She had been taking those ordinary precautions, as she worked on the samples in her corner of the lab. Blanky and his crew were continuing to work through the ice cores, but much more slowly and methodically. Every morning, the lab had to be scrubbed clean of the red stain that kept coming back to the lab floor. Every bit of data was uploaded to the staff network, pored over and discussed on team channels. 

Silna didn’t spend a lot of time reading the staff chat, and she had the notifications muted on her lab computer because she found it very distracting when she was working. But even she couldn’t avoid seeing some of the weirder ideas that were starting to go around.

The speculation had started when the command crew made the information about their communications problems public on the network - a huge amount of data that they had been keeping back from the participant crew until now. Everything from their radio telescope, for instance: they had, in fact, been receiving scheduled data packets from Earth, and those files were labelled with date and time of receiving, but they were all just noise. Silna had tried listening to some of it, but even when she could make one of the files play on her device, she had to immediately scramble to mute it. The sound was that awful: a scraping, screeching, roaring noise that raked claws of awful stimulus down her spine. She shuddered and tried a different file, but it was equally bad. What the hell could have converted their messages from Earth into that?

It took two days after the data was first made available for someone to joke that the alien organism was causing all their problems. It took two days after that for it to gain traction as an actual theory.

There was footage on the network from the probes that Crozier dropped down the borehole, after Orren’s death but before Young’s - you could tell, because the rig was still there. He’d sent down four in all, two that went one at a time, then two together with one fixed on the other. Three videos in all, none over four minutes, and of that time, only a minute and a half of coherent footage. On three different occasions, the probe went down blazing light on the inner walls of the borehole, before the footage started glitching out and the minimal sound was replaced by that grinding, hackle-raising screech. The first probe dropped down in freefall - it got about ten kilometres down before the footage cut out. The second was a slower, controlled descent, so it didn’t get as far - it still cut out after 94 seconds. For the third video, the two probes focused on each other, but there was no visual indication of anything happening to either robot before they, too, failed. The probes were not retrieved. They were now, presumably, at the bottom of the borehole, along with Billy Orren, David Young, John Franklin, Graham Gore, and the whole wrecked rig that had come down on top of them all. 

Pulled down, seemed to be the consensus, not fell down - the footage from Harry Goodsir’s camera had been viewed several hundred times, and some of the engineers on the crew drew attention to the sudden tension on the suspension cable. Had the drill suddenly turned on again and barrelled right through the ice, pulling the rig down with it? Had its nuclear core melted the ice around it while it sat immobile, causing it to surge forward when it was reactivated with too much violence for the structure to handle? Had the rig been weakened by years of exposure to Europa’s climate?

Also on the network were the drill’s activation and sensor logs. None of them showed any sign of reactivation.

There is something down that hole, wrote John Morfin in the ice core lab chat, and it fucking hates us.

Silna sat in her room with her qulliq cradled in her lap, heavy and cold when it should be blazing, trying to feel like she was home, like she was where she was supposed to be. Trying not to let her brain spiral into some catastrophic direction. Failing.

The ice they’d extracted the red organism from was hundreds of millions of years old. What organisms were alive right now, in the sea beneath the ice, twenty-four kilometres down? Had the life beneath the surface been aware of the drill grinding a hole in the crust that protected the sea from the radiation and freezing temperatures above? Had it known, when they landed? Had it sat there at the bottom of the ocean with tangles in its hair and rage in its heart, while they stumped around on the ice unaware of the offense they gave with their very presence?

The thing was, Silna had been spending every day experimenting with the red organism. The samples from the ice core were very easy to culture. She was working on mapping its internal structures, both like and unlike anything she’d seen on Earth. Crozier was working in his mass spectrometry lab to identify its chemical makeup. All of that so they could try to predict what it might do to them long-term. All of that so they could figure out how to eradicate it from their habitat. 

She tried a few things in the first month. Standard antimicrobial wipes: ineffective. Bleach: ineffective. Copper: ineffective. Dehydration shrunk the cells and made them immobile, but at the first sign of atmospheric moisture they just popped right back up and got multiplying again. Strong acids, violacein, microwaving the damn stuff: nothing killed it completely.

Strong had started coming to the lab with bandages bulking her lower legs. “It’s a rash,” she said, with an embarrassed shrug. “Just itchy, is all.”

And nobody said anything or gave her any shit for it, because everybody liked Strong, who had made friends with all the youngest crew, who volunteered extra time in the horticulture lab, and who looked forward to turning twenty-five on an alien planet. And because everybody remembered how close she’d been standing to the conveyor belt when the red core had sloshed right through it.

Two months in, Silna’s lab computer started glitching so badly that she had to replace it. She handed in her old one to Lieutenant Hodgeson, who gave her a nervy sort of smile and held out a bag, saying, “Just drop it in there, please.”

It was a biowaste bag. “Aren’t you going to repair it?” she said, confused. Their equipment was limited, built to be easily repaired on the job - they couldn’t exactly order spare parts out here. She didn’t know much about computers, but she thought the glitching screen and frequent crashes could be fixed somehow.

“Mm,” said Hodgeson. “Well. The thing is. Mr Young’s computer was behaving the same way, and when we opened it up, we saw your lovely red mould, all over the inside of it.”

“What?” she said, horrified, because of course she hadn’t exactly cracked open the casing herself and looked. (She wanted to correct him about it being a mould because it wasn’t a fungus, and the truth was she wasn’t even sure it could be classed as a eukaryote, but that was just a part of her brain that knew its business and couldn’t shut up about it.)

“It was on a lot of his possessions, actually,” Hodgeson continued, with a forced sort of cheer. “Poor lad must have put his hands all over his EVA suit. Just touched everything. Best to just throw out the whole thing, really.” He handed her a pristine laptop. “There you go. Good luck!”

Those EVA suits had been locked away now, inaccessible except with command crew authorisation. The inner door to the airlock was sealed. Nobody wanted another incident like Young’s inexplicable jaunt outside. 

The group chat channels started to get more and more obscure as people split off into smaller subgroups for different problems. Silna kept having to mute them to get work done, and then finding that enormous discussions were taking place at mealtimes that she’d missed the first half of in a subchannel somewhere. But one of them blew up one day hard enough that even she couldn’t ignore it, because Billy Gibson had asked if anyone else was finding that the message packets had started to make more sense the longer they listened.

Some people were of the opinion that this meant Gibson had started hallucinating from listening to static too long, or that he perhaps wasn’t getting enough sleep. But others, like Strong, said yes, sometimes they thought the same thing. It sounds awful most of the time, said Strong, But then sometimes for a minute or so it sounds like my mum calling me in from the garden or something like that. Spooky, sort of. And Chambers said it sometimes sounded like a football stadium to him, and Genge said they were making it up, and Farr reiterated the theory about audio hallucinations from prolonged exposure to white noise, and Collins asked how the hell anyone could think that counted as white noise when all it sounded like to him was screaming, and by that point Silna realised she’d wasted fifteen minutes following this conversation when she was supposed to be finding out some way to unravel the proteins in a goddamn alien lifeform.

She hadn’t started hearing anything in the static because she hadn’t tried listening to it after the first time, and didn’t know how anyone could be enough of a masochist to keep trying unless it was their job. She had dreamed sometimes about that noise, or about something like it: icebergs crashing together, or dogs howling, or a blizzard screaming between buildings, while something watched her. She woke up at times with her heart in her mouth, convinced she was in the middle of a crisis for the first minute of her day.

Maybe it was because her work felt so wrong. She had come out the farthest a human had ever gone with the faint hope of finding alien life. She’d found it in her first week, and now all she could do was try to find ways to kill it. And she wasn’t even succeeding.

She got stuck on the idea of exposing the organism to higher temperatures, since everything else she tried had failed. It was, in fact, damn hard to find a way to get temperatures above the boiling point of water, since fire was proscribed, and microwaves could only take her so far. She had to apply to Crozier directly.

“You want a kiln?” he said, incredulously.

“Or something that can heat my specimens to something higher than a hundred degrees,” she said. “Hydrothermal vents can put out water at nearly five hundred degrees on Earth--”

“Five hundred--”

“So I need something that goes at least that high,” she said.

“Even if that worked, even if it wasn’t the worst kind of safety hazard,” Crozier said, “How the hell would we practically apply it?”

“I don’t know yet,” she said. “But no chemical avenues have worked.”

He frowned like she was his own personal headache, and not pursuing exactly the course of action he’d told her to pursue. “We’ll see,” he said.

But four days later, she got it. It was essentially a really small, bulky oven, an insulated box with an electric heating coil and a thermometer, cobbled together out of whatever parts the engineers had been able to scrounge up, with a set of ceramic tiles for holding specimens. She had to go through a checklist with an assistant standing by, and give the command crew at least one hour’s notice before she turned it on. But she was able to heat her samples up to two hundred, three hundred, four hundred, and eventually five hundred degrees.

Her assistant for the first day was Harry; for the second day, Tom Hartnell. For the last experiment, it took hours for the oven to cool down enough that she could retrieve her samples, and when she did, she tested them and logged the results. “Nothing but ash,” Hartnell said happily.

“I’ll get excited when it’s still ash tomorrow,” Silna said. “Still, it’s something,” and she smiled back at him.

It was Strong’s birthday party that night. Evans and Chambers had made her a birthday parfait out of pudding packs, cookies, and freeze-dried fruit, and the ice core lab staff and horticulture lab staff filled up the crew lounge to play games until midnight. Silna enjoyed herself enough to stay past her usual bedtime, and went to bed while the party was still going. It was a good night - genuinely, the first time she’d felt relaxed in way too long.

So she was completely unprepared to startle out of bed at 2am to the sound of the klaxon for the outer door, again. It had been months now since she’d last heard it, and she felt an instinctive surge of horror, thinking of the night David Young died, and then confusion, thinking that the EVA suits were locked away, and then - it must be command crew. The command crew must have authorised an emergency night-time excursion for some reason, because nobody else could have authorised it.

Then the screaming started in the corridor, and the klaxon was still going, and Silna bolted upright and stumbled out of her room. The next few minutes were a confusion of shouting crewmembers checking cameras, and checking sensors, and finding out that Strong and Evans were outside without EVA suits, dead and gone and mangled by the frost and decompression, and nobody knew why or how it had happened, and it was too late to do anything about any of it.

In the following hours, a review of security footage showed Strong entering the airlock in the same clothes she’d worn to her birthday party, strolling slowly, her shaved head wagging like she was hearing a beat. Then it showed Evans rushing in, too late to stop Strong from operating the airlock, and the footage at that point was obscured by a swirl of frost, but not quite fast enough to miss the awful consequences.

How the hell Strong had overridden the inner door, nobody knew. She didn’t have those kinds of overrides. It was like it had just opened for her.

Silna sat in the dim dining hall with her hands over her eyes, and said in a thick voice, “I just don’t think it’s a coincidence.”

“I’m not certain it is either,” Harry whispered. “I’m sure Strong wasn’t suicidal, nor was Evans. I’ve heard of people sleepwalking into deadly situations - maybe it disrupted her sleep…”

“Her legs,” Silna said. “That rash she had. Was it--?”

Harry looked miserable. “It was in her skin. There was a little bit of frostbite on her shins, and then the affected skin ulcerated. We found the organism growing in the damaged tissue. We monitored it, supported her with bandages and topical antiseptics, but it kept spreading upward. She didn’t report anything worse than itching, but after tonight, I just don’t know. We’ll have to do an autopsy.”

“Oh, God,” Silna murmured. She hadn’t thought of that. But of all the people who had died so far, Strong and Evans were the only ones who’d left bodies behind. Then a horrible thought occurred to her, and she said, “What if it’s growing in the food?”

Harry looked confused - he must have thought she meant the sealed packets they brought from Earth, and she was about to correct herself, and then his brow cleared and he said, “The horticulture lab.”

“I got the microscope from there the day I found it growing in the bathroom,” she said. “If it can grow on a person’s skin…”

“...It might grow inside Lieutenant Irving’s vegetable garden,” Harry finished. “Well, surely he knows it’s a possibility; people must have tracked it in and out of that lab a thousand times by now. Strong worked there twice a week. We can’t eat that.”

Silna had a moment of selfish sadness that none of them were going to get to eat the crop of courgettes that were so close to harvest. The horticulture lab crew had been buzzing about it; they were all excited to eat a fresh vegetable for once. They had to hand-pollinate every flower. It was months of labour. “I’m sorry,” she said, “What a thing to be thinking about.”

“Why shouldn’t we think about it?” Harry said. “All the implications of it. We don’t know what it is or what it does.”

Silna rubbed her temples. It felt so wrong, so antithetical, to discover the organism and then bend all her effort into destroying it. It wasn’t what she was here for, and it had never been her job. The role of a hunter didn’t sit easily on her. But she could be patient, and she could be observant. Follow, wait, and watch. Her father had taught her how.

“There’s got to be a way to find out where it is,” she muttered. “We can’t just keep waiting for it to grow so much that we can see it with the naked eye - we can’t possibly get rid of it that way. Something might show it up to distinguish it on other surfaces from all the other organisms we leave everywhere. Some way…”

Harry’s comm went off. “Oh,” he said, “I’ve got to-- they’re. They’re bringing the bodies in.”

She wished him luck, and he left. And, bereft of anything else to do, she went to bed for the few hours left of the night, and had the same dream she’d been having for a month: of the deep dark borehole on the surface of this white world, like a pinprick pupil in a staring eye.

The organism was in Strong’s brain, Harry told her later. He’d helped Dr McDonald and Dr Stanley with the autopsies, and, even with the condition her body had been in, they could tell. It was in her bloodstream, in her nerves, nestled in the folds of her temporal lobe. “But it was in Evans, too,” he confided. “We couldn’t test his brain, but it was in his bloodstream.”

Silna stopped herself from asking why they couldn’t test his brain just in time. She didn’t want to know, she decided. The look on Harry’s face was bad enough.

The dining hall was miserably quiet tonight. Aside from the shock of Strong and Evans’ deaths, everyone who’d worked in the horticulture lab today had gotten to witness Irving chopping up one of his underripe courgettes to find a bright red seam twisting through the middle of it. It was in the soil, they said, the growth medium, the water they recycled and piped back into it, and most especially, it was in every plant they cut open. She didn’t think what Harry had told her about Strong was widespread information yet, but it didn’t seem to matter - the idea seemed to have already taken hold. The organism could thrive in a living body, so why not their own?

At the end of the next day, she got summoned to Crozier’s office again, in the corner of the mass spectrometry lab. Little was lurking against a wall, looking nervous.

“Dr Aua,” Crozier said. “Can I offer you tea? Coffee?”

“No, thank you,” she said.

He sighed. “To business, then. Have you had any results from the kiln?”

“The colonies I fired at one hundred and two hundred degrees celsius are starting to grow back. Not the other ones, yet, but I’d want a few more days to be sure.”

He nodded, tight-lipped. “No further chemical successes?”

“No,” she said. He’d been sending her recommendations based on the organism’s chemical composition, and she’d sent him back her results. He knew damn well none of it had worked.

“Dr Goodsir has told me,” Crozier said, “That he believes it has adapted to us. That it’s living on our skin, as part of our… microbiota.”

She swallowed. She hated the idea of it on her skin, mingling with the other Earth-born microbes there, but that wasn’t really fair, was it? She nodded.

“But it can get in, he says. Through broken skin. Into the bloodstream. Even into the brain.” Crozier looked exactly as comfortable with this idea as she felt. It was like he was challenging her to squirm first.

Maybe it was that idea that made her say, “How did Strong get out?”

Crozier’s mouth hardened, and his eyes sharpened to a glare, but he didn’t act like she’d changed the subject. “We don’t know,” he said.

“Like you don’t know why the radiation alarms didn’t go off?” she said. “Or our messages don’t make sense?”

“We don’t know,” he said, and now it was a glare. “We have no idea what the hell kind of mechanism is at work, or if it bears any relation at all!”

“So you have an idea,” she said.

“It’s not based in anything!” he said. “I can’t make decisions based on group apophenia! Without evidence it’s just superstition!”

She folded her arms. “So you have no reason to believe the organism is dangerous,” she said, “Since, according to you, there’s no compelling evidence that it’s killed anyone.”

He glowered. “How do we get rid of it?”

She threw up her hands. “Heat it to five hundred degrees!”

“How do we kill it without killing ourselves in the process?” he said, loudly, like he was speaking to a willful idiot. “Without making this whole place uninhabitable?”

“I don’t know!” she shouted, like something was coming unravelled in her throat, flying dangerously loose. “But maybe it should be uninhabited! We came all this way to discover life, and we’ve discovered it, and what is the cost? Is this planet worth it? It’s covered in ice that we can’t harvest for fear of what we’ll bring home! Something is already here, and it doesn’t want us! Who can blame it? We tunnelled right through the only thing protecting it from space! And you want to know how to get out of this so we can turn around and do it again!”

“No!” he shouted. “What the hell do you think I am? Of course we can’t come back!”

And they both stood there for a second, panting slightly, while Little shuffled like he wanted to sink backwards into the cupboard.

Crozier looked at her, then at Little, then her again. “Of course we can’t come back,” he said, something like despair in his voice. “This might end up being the most expensive sunk cost in human history. We’ve been here not seventy days, and we’ve already lost six people, the drill, our comms, our safety… and we’ve still got to stick it out another sixteen weeks before we can leave.”

She shook her head. “We’ll bring it with us,” she said. “We’ll be a plague ship.”

“Well, we can’t stay here,” he said. “Apart from anything else, it’d just bring more people looking for us.”

She stared at him, and in that horrible moment understood his despair. Duty to preserve the crew. Duty to prevent a biological contaminant from spreading. No way to communicate with anybody outside.

“Help me,” he said.

She said, tentatively, “I had one idea. Not a way to kill it, but… I want to map it. I need a way to see it, wherever it is, not just wait for it to multiply until it’s visible. We don’t even know how big the problem is.”

Little shuffled again, conspicuously enough that both Crozier and Silna looked at him. He said, “Er. It is a bit radioactive, isn’t it? Does it fluoresce under ultraviolet light?”

“Yes,” she said impatiently, “But so do a lot of things,” and then she felt her brow unknit as realisation hit her. “But most things can be eradicated with antimicrobial agents. It can’t.”

“So… scrub a surface down and then check it?” Little suggested

“Do it,” Crozier said, “Test a few areas and tell me if it works. If it does, we’ll organise a work detail. God knows we’ve a few comms and horticulture people bereft of purpose at the minute.”

“Okay,” Silna said.

Crozier scratched his brow. “Thank you, doctor,” he said. “I’m sorry. I know you’ve been working hard.”

She shrugged, slightly embarrassed. They were all working hard. But it did help, to understand what the purpose of all that work was, and now she did.

Chapter Text

NOW

It had almost come to a row, figuring out who got to go aboard Erebus when they docked with it. Sophia was not even in the running, though she believed she’d argued her case well: she was an impartial civilian observer, a counterbalance to the CSC presence, who wanted to give a first-hand account of the encounter. It didn’t get her far. Ross kindly didn’t scoff when she called herself impartial, but then, he hadn’t a leg to stand on in that regard. Neither did Koveyook, for that matter. But in the end - when Ross put his foot down - it was the two of them. Ross and Koveyook would go aboard Erebus, leaving McClintock behind with the three participants as their acting commander.

God, she hoped this wasn’t about to all go catastrophically wrong.

“How does the CSC propose to treat the Europa crew when they return to Earth?” Sophia asked Ross, the next minute she could find him alone.

“Are you asking on the record?” he said, with a hint of tiredness.

“If you’re offering? Yes,” she said, and held out the recorder.

Ross smiled, thinly. “Well, the boffins at the CSC are proposing that we initially treat them in an orbital or even lunar facility that will have to be specially built to house and treat them, and return them to Earth when they are free of contamination. After all, the crew of Erebus have taken great pains to warn us of the organism’s virulence, even in the face of their communications difficulties, so we must honour their efforts, and work with them to avoid letting it loose on Earth.”

That sounded like the first draft of a press release, complimentary and solution-focused enough that it almost disguised the substance of it. “They’ll be kept from reaching Earth?” she said.

“That is the current plan, pending further communication with the crew of Erebus that might yield a more timely solution,” he said.

She nodded. She hit stop and put her recorder away. “And off the record?” she said.

“Off the record,” he said. “Off the record.” He paused, and it was one of those moments where he was very still, too controlled to fidget. He was looking at some spot over her shoulder, but she didn’t think there was anything really there. It was something far away that he was looking at. “You know there have been… processes, procedures for this kind of thing, since the mid-twentieth century?” he said. “I read as many of them as I could, some years back, and there’s so often a sort of playfulness to it. What to do if you meet an alien, sort of thing. References to science fiction. Real plans, too, of course, in case of some unprecedented contaminant. But the thing is - the thing that sort of drove Frank to despair, I think, sometimes - nobody ever seemed to actually think it would happen. So we have procedures. I don’t know if anyone who made them ever thought they’d be tested.”

He mentioned Francis so rarely to her. It was so strange - he’d allowed her to see the letters, so she knew how dear and deep that friendship ran, but he never wanted to talk to her about it. She couldn’t draw him out; he guarded his own feelings too jealously. It felt like an act of trust just to hear him say his name. “Despair,” she repeated. “No-one took it seriously?”

Ross folded his arms. “There was an exercise once.”

“Once?”

“On Parry’s last voyage.”

“So - what, twenty years ago?” she said incredulously, and he shrugged an affirmation. “The things we’re doing now, on CSC’s advice… they’re just winging it?” she said.

“There has to be a first time for everything,” he said. “A specialty of the field, you might say. But that’s no reason for us to go in blind now.”

So they planned as thoroughly as they reasonably could, doing test runs of their planned procedures, refining, and gathering more data whenever possible. They achieved another fly-by with the probe, which got them a little more information in the days before the rendezvous. This time, Dr Aua was nowhere to be seen, and did not emerge in the few minutes they had before the probe, with its limited fuel, had to make its way back. Nobody else was visible. The ship seemed totally empty. But there were new signs written on the interior, including a long list consisting of thirty-nine names, which began:

CONFIRMED DEAD

BILLY ORREN

DAVID YOUNG

GRAHAM GORE

JOHN FRANKLIN

“Oh,” Sophia said, and for the next few seconds didn’t feel anything but surprise. Then she felt Koveyook’s hand settle on her shoulder, and the meaning of it hit her like a car. She wanted to shrug him off, get up, like the information was a thing she could outrun. But there were more names, and she had enough discipline that she was going to sit here and read them, even though she wanted to leave the room before she did something humiliating like weep. Instead she stayed, and her vision blurred and the tears went down her cheeks, hot and terrible, while she pressed her lips together hard enough to hurt.

“I’m sorry, Sophia,” Ross said, and he genuinely sounded it.

But Sophia was reading on, and said in a thick voice, “Do the numbers match? She said fifty-six aboard. Look, it’s written there. There should be forty-four names. Are there?” And she squeezed her eyes shut because God knew she was going to be useless at counting for the next minute.

There was a long pause, in which Sophia did her absolute best to collect herself. “Yes,” Ross said. “Yes, there are forty-four names.” And the steadiness of his voice told her, without needing to ask, of the name that was missing from that list of the dead. 

Then he let the probe pull away, and took it to the other ring. There another message was written:

ORGANISM CAN BE KILLED

TEMPERATURES >300°C

Which would shape their quarantine preparation somewhat. If no agent had been found yet that could kill it aside from intense heat, they would have to proceed with every caution.

They had hazmat suits - one of those absurd, worst-case-scenario supplies that they’d hoped not to need, but look at them now. The suits were lightweight, but gas-tight and tough, with self-contained breathing apparatus. They weren’t rated for space, though, so Sophia expected that they would all have to simply pray that the seals aboard Erebus hadn’t been compromised when they had to transfer over. And of course, they had to come up with a way that Ross and Koveyook could exit the hazmat suits into a sterile environment so that the contaminated suits could then be spaced, and leave the Lyra unsullied. It would be a pain to fabricate that kind of barrier, but they could do it and they had time; Cook took to that part of the preparation with some zeal. A part of the living quarters, too, had to be sealed off, for a quarantine area: that was where Ross and Koveyook would live and work from when they returned.

The rendezvous itself was a bloody tricky bit of manoeuvring, so Sophia stayed well out of the way with Cook and Retter while Ross, Koveyook, and McClintock did their work. The CSC ships were designed to dock in this way, but that didn’t make it any less terrifying to feel the shadow of Erebus’ rotating rings fall across their smaller ship, and know they were a badly-timed blink away from absolute disaster. But when the ships connected, it was with a hiss, and a series of mechanical clunks that sounded exactly like pieces interlocking as they should. The clasp was good. Their vectors were matched. The airlock was pressurising. Green, green, green, across the board.

Some parts of Erebus looked so close that if Sophia could have reached through the windows, she might touch them. She could see inside those rings with her own eyes, in great detail: the red stains speckling the glass, dark patches on the furniture. Empty, abandoned-looking. Like they had tied themselves to a corpse.

If Sophia craned her neck, she could see Silna watching them from Erebus. She walked counter to the ring’s spin to keep pace with them for a while, her dark hair in neat braids, her face unsmiling. From this close, Sophia could see that even her worn-out flight suit was stained with the organism. For a brief moment, they locked eyes, and then Silna stopped walking, and soon the turning of the ring took her out of sight.

What was she thinking? Was she going to wake the others? Was there even anyone else to wake? It was a thought that Sophia couldn’t help but have, slipping in like a draft of icy air. Yes, suspension protocol could keep crewmembers asleep for days at a time, waking for brief periods to eat and move, but none of their passes with the probes had spotted another crewmember yet. Had she actually been alone up there, isolated, for a year? Were those sleeping pods holding any living bodies at all?

“Cracroft,” murmured Retter, “Can you keep an eye on the sensors while I handle the drone?”

“Right,” Sophia said. “Yes, of course.” And she sat down at the comm station and got to work.

Ross and Koveyook weren’t going across immediately: the first thing to cross that airlock would be a simple camera drone with a few sensors attached, to scout the situation and confirm whatever information they could. Best not to have any nasty surprises if they could help it. Retter would pilot it, and Sophia would assist with comms, while Cook monitored Ross and Koveyook’s vital signs, and McClintock operated the Lyra.

Ross and Koveyook got into their hazmat suits, took the drone, and climbed into the central shaft, where the Lyra’s rotation had no hold over them. Sophia and the others watched on monitors as the two command crew floated gently down the shaft towards the airlock, and the multiple layers of protective sheeting that Cook had set up between the airlock and the rest of the ship. They closed the layers behind them as they went.

In front of Sophia was the display showing the feeds from three cameras: Ross’, Koveyook’s, and the drone’s. Ross and Koveyook’s cameras showed a corner of Ross’ tablet, displaying the drone camera’s footage. The airlock opened with a hiss that carried loudly through the drone’s microphone, and Sophia filtered the sensors on it as Retter flew the little craft into Erebus’ airlock. The door closed behind it, with Ross and Koveyook on the other side, still waiting on Lyra’s doorstep. 

The door to Erebus was scrawled with handwritten warnings. There was a pause as the drone hovered, and they waited for permission to enter. Then with a hiss, the door opened, and admitted the drone aboard.

It was obvious from the visuals that the red organism that stained the interior of the rings was also in this main trunk, clinging to equipment, pipes, and readouts alike, coating the walls in strange patterns. The audio picked up standard engine noises and the distant grind of the turning rings. Other readings began to come through, too: moisture, air pressure, oxygen saturation, all of which lined up with their earlier intelligence, and more things besides. Sophia had to concentrate in order not to let her voice wobble. “Do those radiation levels seem a bit high?” she said.

Ross’ voice crackled over the comm. “Yes.”

Sophia glanced at Cook, who was looking at those same levels with the kind of grimace she never hoped to see on the face of a doctor. Not an optimistic outlook for the Erebus crew’s good health, then.

Retter steered the drone into Erebus’ central section, where the main junction could take it left or right. “Left, please,” Ross said, and Retter turned it towards the farthest ring section, where the living quarters were. The drone had been in the air for about a minute and a half, and as it passed through the hatch into a radial arm that would lead to the ring section, and the force of the rotation began to pull the drone forward, the picture fuzzed badly. Retter, losing control of the drone, swore as the picture glitched out entirely, and then the ambient noise of Erebus’ interior was replaced with a horrible mechanised screech that raised all he hair on Sophia’s arms and had her clawing to mute the feed.

“Report,” Ross said.

“Contact lost,” Retter said. She was rubbing her ear. “That was - that sounded just like the signals, right?”

“Yes,” Sophia said. The camera had lasted not quite two minutes. There had been no network attempt - just being aboard that ship had produced the result. “Commander Ross,” she said, “I don’t think we’re going to have contact with you in there.”

“It seems not,” Ross replied in his even, conversational way. There was a pause, but on their body cameras, Sophia could see him speaking with Koveyook. She’d never been much of a lip-reader, but body language was another thing - they were serious, emphatic, but not, it seemed, in disagreement. Ross switched back to the main channel and continued, “So we’ll simply have to find an alternative. You can see into the rings - keep us on visual as best you can, and we’ll signal to you the old-fashioned way. We’re heading in.”

“Sir,” McClintock said, “Your orders if we don’t see you?”

There was another pause. “Proceed with delivery of the supplies and the planned escort.”

McClintock said, “Aye, sir,” not sounding terribly happy about it.

“Open the airlock.”

On the body cameras, the Lyra’s door opened again, and Ross and Koveyook crossed the gap into the space beyond, where the airlock door on the other side loomed, covered in its dire warnings. Then the Lyra’s door closed, the other door opened, and the stained hulk of Erebus swallowed them.

THEN

It took another month to map the organism’s spread through the habitat: to disinfect the facility from top to bottom, room by room, without disrupting ongoing work, and then shine an ultraviolet light on it and record the results. They worked in teams, rotating in and out. The process of mapping gathered a lot of useful data.

Silna got the impression that a lot of the crew wished she hadn’t bothered.

Under the blacklight, the organism glowed an icy blue, in long, winding branches, nodes, thin strands multiplying fractally, or else sending out one long runner to attach one node to another, all across the walls and floor, interconnecting everywhere, covering, as far as they could find, the entire interior of the Europa habitat. In some places, like the floor of the ice core laboratory, her corner workstation, the airlock where the EVA suits were stored, the horticulture laboratory, the main bathroom, the control tower, and the abandoned rooms of Young and Strong, there was so much of it over all the equipment that in the ultraviolet glow it seemed to wrap every object like a thin, fluorescent membrane.

It was fascinating. It was also a little demoralising. It didn’t help that she and every other person also glowed in certain places - in mysterious splats on their skin, in the material of their clothing, their teeth and eyes, around their nail-beds. There wasn’t really a nice way of telling people that they were just dirty. But it was also probably not true to assure them that none of it was the organism.

Harry and the other doctors tested members of the crew from time to time, but the data they were collecting was too private to put on the network. She wasn’t privy to the results of anyone’s skin and blood tests but her own.

At least it was a distraction from the tremors. There’d been a few more, since the day Commander Franklin died. They hadn’t caused any structural problems yet, but Blanky was keeping the network updated with the source and results of all of them; it was a lot more complicated for him to update the maps when they didn’t have functioning satellites any more, but he said it was a good challenge. The landscape around them was full of fissures and crevasses, immense continents of interlocking ice all pushing at one another over the liquid sea. Their habitat and its infrastructure was built on a stable plain, but it didn’t mean the shocks of nearby rifts didn’t shudder through to them all the same. Their facility, insulated in ice, was inextricably part of the landscape.

“Do you know what I wonder about?” said Jopson, his pale eyes gleaming in the blacklight. “Say it is affecting our comms somehow, and that’s not a different problem altogether. Why just the ones in and out?”

Jopson and Bridgens stood in the doorway of the control room with the cleaning supplies at their feet, watching her work. It was the night shift - Gibson’s time to sleep, and he clearly hadn’t wanted to make an exception for this - but it was rare for the lights in this room to be off at all. The walls were lined with monitors that acted like windows, displaying a live feed of the moon’s surface from cameras embedded in the surface of the habitat: a 360-degree visual of Europa’s true day/night cycle, and a view of their infrastructure outside the habitat, like the radio telescope, the drill rig (now just a hole), the ice core shed (half-destroyed), and the covered launch platform where the shuttle was stored. 

All those screens were dark, now: there was just the glow of standby lights. Bridgens and Jopson were barely lit, little more than silhouettes to Silna’s eye. But under the blacklight, their computers and equipment glowed from every angle, and when she held the light to the seams in the casing, she could see the filaments disappearing within. Squinting inside a control panel, she said, “Um. I don’t know.”

“It certainly is a network,” Bridgens said. He looked faintly mournful, standing there. “Reminds me of a slime mould, but more… fractal.”

It reminded Silna of a basket star, personally, but she could see where he was coming from.

“Is it sending signals, then?” Jopson said.

“Yes,” Silna said. “I think. There is a chemical change that moves along strands like this. I don’t know what the change does. I haven’t written the paper yet, but. The data’s on the network, if you want to look.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Jopson nod. “That’s what I don’t understand,” he said, a half-grin on his face that didn’t seem very cheerful. “We’ve got our network. Internal comms are working. Occasional access issues pop up, but nothing we can’t fix. Individual devices fail sometimes, because they’re full of this stuff, and when they do, it looks quite a lot like signals from Earth do. Sounds like some kind of mad cackling. But even though that… stuff there is winding its way into our equipment for who knows what purpose, we can talk to one another just fine. I can get any camera feed from within the base, or talk to somebody in a group chat. I could call up Captain Crozier from here and he’d pick up. But sending messages out and getting them in… that’s not for us. Why?”

Silna straightened up. She had no idea what he expected her to say, so she didn’t say anything.

It was a relief when Bridgens said, “I wonder if we’d see this stuff on the radio tower. Or anywhere that’s surface temperature.”

Well, at least she knew the answer to that. “We haven’t found it on the surface ice,” Silna said. “Freezing doesn’t seem to damage it, but take it below minus ninety-eight, it goes dormant.” She moved her light, and crouched to shine it under a console. On her tablet, the newly lit area overlaid that section of the 3D model of this room more or less perfectly. She’d be done in a few more minutes.

“What’s sending the signals from the hole, then?” Bridgens muttered. 

Silna stood up fast enough that she almost bashed her head on the console. “The what?”

Jopson was giving Bridgens a look - neutral face and too-wide eyes - like he was signalling the man to shut up, which Bridgens gracefully ignored. “A signal from the borehole, about forty seconds long. We picked it up last night,” Bridgens said. “It’s on the network.”

She didn’t think she’d ever seen Jopson’s mouth so thin. Oh, she bet it was on the network, but she hadn’t seen anyone in the group chats discussing it. “You didn’t flag it?”

“We notified command,” Jopson said flatly.

“What kind of signal?” she said.

“Unintelligible,” Bridgens said.

“It’s a new development,” Jopson said. 

“No kidding,” Silna said, amazed and a little appalled. What could it mean? She didn’t know. She completed her map of the room, and when they switched on the lights and monitors again, every surface looked perfectly clean.

The same couldn’t be said of the horticulture lab - there was a limit to how much of that place could be scrubbed down, or how many false positives she could eliminate.

The grow lights were partially ultraviolet, but when she tested the space, she could see why none of the shifts there had noticed the organism: the growth medium also fluoresced, and so did many of the plants, and several kinds of benign bacteria and fungi. The organism didn’t distinguish itself until the blacklight was turned on the floor and walls, which glowed with absolute coverage, thicker in footprints or areas of dropped fertiliser, the tendrils of the organism spreading down the legs of every planter and stretching outwards. 

Lieutenant Irving had turned his attention to studying the organism’s effect on the growth of his plants; a logical direction for his research to take, she supposed. But he didn’t look happy about it. He looked around at his walls and ceiling, and said, “It seems perverse, but everything’s been growing so well.”

Silna nodded; it was lush in here. A balm to the eyes.

“A little to your left, please,” Irving said. He was the one holding the tablet this time, and she let him direct her as she raked the light slowly and steadily up the wall. In its way, the actual mapping was mindless work.

But the smell of the fresh vegetation - tantalising, when they couldn’t eat the stuff - made something occur to her. “How are we going to eat enough on the way back?”

“Hm?” Irving said.

“The new flight path,” she said. “When we leave, it’s gonna take seven months longer to get to Mars than it would take to get to Earth if we waited the full year. So, where are we going to get seven extra months of food from?”

“Ah,” Irving said. “I’ve accounted for that. We’ll have to re-use the supply rocket to bring back all our unused food with us. That’s a six month supply, so that ought to make up most of the deficit. At the absolute worst, we might need to put some crew on suspension protocol to save calories, but with a little rationing, we won’t even need that.”

It was a relief to hear that. Of course, that meant Fitzjames would have to figure out how to synthesise even more rocket propellant in half the time they were supposed to have, but she knew the crew in charge of that were very busy and none of them had recently burst into tears in the dining hall (a growing trend amongst the crew), so she had to assume it was going well.

It took a few hours to map the lab, going over the walls, floor, and ceiling with careful sweeps of the light, while Irving murmured directions. When it was over, he stared pensively down at the tablet, turning the map this way and that, like he was inspecting it for a spot they’d neglected.

“It’s such a good thing to do, growing a garden,” he said. His grip on the tablet was tight. “It’s so very good for one’s health, mentally and physically. The oxygen it produces, of course, the fresh food. When it’s done right, I think, it might be the closest thing there is to pure good. If people were put on Earth to do anything, I think it’s making things grow.” He looked at his vertical planters, row on row, lush with courgette plants, blueberry bushes, sunflowers, and chamomile. None of it edible. “Even if we can’t eat them, I… I would never want my team to stop their work here. It would be wrong to take it away.”

It was a strange perspective to her. Silna came from a place that was snowbound most of the year. People didn’t have gardens. The plains turned purple with aupilaktunnguat in the summer, and late in the season she knew people who gathered it for tea, but the flowers grew themselves.

She didn’t know what people were put on Earth for. Maybe just to be there. Maybe just to see it. It seemed pointless to talk about it when they were so far from it right now.

The infirmary was one of the last places she did, but it was also, perversely, the least stressful part of the mapping project. When she found large clusters of the organism, Dr McDonald and Dr Stanley both calmly discussed what might have caused a particular concentration in that area. Strong’s autopsy, for example, had left a stubborn area that, like the floor beneath the conveyor belt in the ice core lab, had to be scrubbed regularly. 

“There was a drape, of course,” Stanley said, “But we had to seal it away with the rest of the waste. It is a unique challenge, to be unable to incinerate medical waste. Particularly when,” he turned his gaze to her, “You have demonstrated that it is the only proven method of destruction for this organism.”

“Three hundred degrees,” McDonald said, and gave a little chuckle. “That’s actually quite a way below standard temperatures for a medical incinerator, you know. There are pathogens with much higher heat tolerance. I find it comforting that our alien friend here isn’t completely invulnerable."

Stanley said, “It’s a pity we can’t apply that knowledge,” and then looked over Silna’s shoulder at the tablet screen and said, of a new node she’d just revealed, “Oh, yes. Young was sick there.”

In the fourth month, she was able to upload her fully mapped model of the organism in their habitat to the network. It made it pretty obvious that the thing had effectively engulfed them: it was in every single room of the habitat.

And by that time, a number of the crew started complaining about headaches and nausea. The doctors had started monitoring everyone’s white blood cell counts; an appointment began popping up every month on Silna’s schedule. She often had a headache now, and was frequently tired, but couldn’t tell whether that was some kind of exposure symptom or just stress. 

“Your white cell count is trending downward,” Harry told her softly, “But it’s not anywhere worrying yet. I’m going to give you a B12 supplement, since you’re a little low, and I recommend getting more sleep. I know you’ve been working late.”

“There’s still too much I don’t know,” she said. It felt like the quiet of the lab gave her more space to think, but she couldn’t say it had given her any useful results yet.

“I know,” he said. “I feel the same.”

She caught signs in others. One day there was a small commotion in the ice core lab, because Seeley’s nose started bleeding and he couldn’t get it to stop. Darlington had to lead him out to the infirmary while Seeley held a wad of cloth to his face. 

The next day at breakfast, she saw Bridgens turn over his husband’s hand on the table, running a worried thumb across the bruised inner flesh of Peglar’s forearm.

“I thought you said it wasn’t that bad,” she said to Crozier, desperately, after Morfin missed his third shift in a row with a debilitating headache. “Like tritium.”

“I said tritium’s not harmful as long as you don’t ingest it,” Crozier said in a low voice, raking his hand over his head. “The organism’s on everything now - if it’s on our skin, all we have to do is bring hand to mouth.”

If that was true, then the constant scrubbing that the crew had taken up to limit the organism seemed futile. But maybe it was limiting their exposure. Maybe it would be worse, without their constant efforts to exert control over it.

By now, they were more than halfway to the day they could leave Europa, and efforts bent towards that. Fully the last month of their original schedule would have been dedicated to preparing for their departure, but speeding up their departure would mean twice the work. Gore had been their navigator, but Crozier worked with Le Vesconte to calculate the new flight path. Fitzjames’ efforts were bent on synthesizing enough propellant to get their shuttle and their supply rocket out of orbit so they could rendezvous with Erebus, something which took a lot of time, effort, and volatile chemistry to achieve.

The time was ticking down, and Silna had written multiple reports on her findings, but still didn’t have a way to kill the organism except with heat. Worse, she was frightened that she might succeed. She’d used the kiln many more times since the first time, but what about the first time she used whatever miracle substance she hoped to find that would eradicate it from their habitat, or their bodies? She had nightmares often, and the worst ones weren’t about the borehole, or something beneath the ice: in the worst dreams, it was the middle of the night, and she was being woken up by the wail of the klaxon. 

It didn’t matter if she couldn’t prove the connection: in her mind it was fixed. She found a way to destroy the organism, so it flexed its own power. 

Something had compelled Orren to fling himself into that hole as soon as he looked down into it. Something had called David Young out of his hospital bed to do the same. Something had drawn Strong out of their safe habitat without even a space suit to protect her, smiling as she went. Something had caused their radiation alarms to malfunction, a locked door to open without authorisation, and something had pulled a massive, overengineered, titanium and aluminum drill rig down into that borehole, and she could not bring herself to believe that it wasn’t the same thing that was transmitting signals from the bottom of that hole.

In the fifth month, she tried listening to the signals again. The comms crew had uploaded more signals from the borehole, though still without any fanfare, burying them quietly alongside all the unintelligible signals from Earth. 

With all the information being uploaded to the network daily, and communications written off as a lost cause, she wasn’t surprised that no other participants had noticed them yet. 

She had, though. And now she tried listening. It was so frustrating - like being at sea, off the coast of some place, alone but for the radio, and that radio was just on the edge of a station’s range. There was a terrible sound amidst all that static, but it was almost, almost like speech she understood.

She had a notion that if she tried listening directly from the base of the radio telescope, maybe she’d understand. But she asked Crozier about going there to map the inside of it, and he said, “I thought the organism was dormant at surface temperatures?” He shook his head. “No, doctor, I’m sorry. It’s too risky to allow people outside for anything but essential tasks. There’s still too much we don’t know.”

As he said it, there was another tremor - not hard, but long enough to make the labware rattle in the cabinets, and several lighter objects scatter like paper in a breeze. Crozier gave a little gesture as if his point had just been proven, and got up to tidy. 

Silna restrained the urge to tell him that she could know more if he’d just let her go out there. She knew she couldn’t make it sound logical to him. She could barely justify it to herself.

At last, they hit six months.

There were a few people by now who were too sick to work. Morfin rarely left his quarters now; he could barely cope with the noise of an ordinary day, or the lights overhead. Silna was one of the people who brought him meals when he didn’t come out. Sometimes, when she’d worked late again, she would head to bed and meet him coming the other way, squinting even in the dim lights of the night cycle. He wasn’t the only night owl these days: she often met Harry in the dining hall at midnight, or woke from a nightmare at 3am too flooded with adrenaline to go back to sleep, and found Collins pacing the halls like a ghost.

The klaxon had been sounding again, but not in her dreams: it was during the day shift, authorised, on the schedule for everyone to see. Fitzjames was leading the efforts to refuel their shuttle and the separate supply rocket, taking teams out to the shuttle hangar in groups to do the heavy mechanical work of transferring the propellant and their spare food supplies. Each member went out tethered together, their vital signs actively monitored by two doctors and a spare lieutenant, and watched through external camera feeds by every crewmember with a spare moment, including Silna.

Part of her was terrified that something would happen despite their precautions; another part envied them for being out there, doing important work. Here she was eating her reconstituted lunch, preparing for another afternoon of banging her head against the wall. But those excursions all seemed to be working out. Steadily, the hope of getting free of Europa was turning into a reality.

The morning she woke up to a party invitation, she almost couldn’t believe it. “What the hell is this?” she said, waving her tablet at Harry at breakfast. The Last Hurrah, scheduled for the night before their departure. There was revolving glitter text that hurt to look at.

“Oh, that,” he said. “Yes, it seems a bit much, doesn’t it? I suppose it was Captain Fitzjames’ idea; he does like parties.” He squinted at her tablet. “Silna, do you need a new tablet? That one’s screen looks… glitchy.”

It looked fine to her, but she said, “I’ll get it looked at,” just to make his worried expression go away. And then Hartnell bounced over to enthuse about the party, and he got distracted anyway.

But Blanky and Esther were also in favour of the party, she found out. “It’ll let us say goodbye to the place,” Esther said. “Give everyone a chance to form one last good memory.”

“Besides,” said Blanky, “We’re about to be on Erebus for a lot longer than we had to be here. It’ll be hard sticking it out that long, if we don’t get a chance for levity once in a while.” He grinned, and added, “Personally, I’m gonna miss bouncing everywhere. My knees are going to feel it when we get back to that ring section, I’ll tell you.”

It was a good point. She’d spent a solid month paying careful attention to every surface of the habitat, but she hadn’t really thought of it as a place to say goodbye to, and maybe she should. Maybe she’d look back on this place one day, and count herself as one of the lucky few who ever got to set foot in this place, before they knew the danger.

The day before departure, she packed her small number of belongings. She took her qulliq down from her desk, wiping the dust off it, and it occurred to her that she could put it in the kiln and clean it properly - it was heat-resistant enough to withstand those temperatures. There’d be one thing in her possession that, for however limited a time, was free of the organism.

So she did. She sent the notice to command, a little worried that they might question its use on the very last day. But command were used to authorising her requests by now, and she saw the authorisation get ticked within five minutes by Dr Stanley, who must have been one of the few people who was cooling his heels as the crew prepared to leave. Silna turned on the kiln, fired her qulliq at 300 degrees, and felt a great satisfaction that it had, if only for this brief time, held a fire inside it.

She left it in there to cool down, and went back to helping with the pack-down. As the afternoon wore on, she started to see more and more people smiling. She heard bursts of music playing, and caught sight of some crew playing the dumb games they’d played in the first few days: jumping up to touch the ceiling, running up walls, having fun with the low gravity while they still had a chance. Making a few last, good memories.

When the party started properly, the hallways of the habitat got loud as hell. The playlists were cranked to maximum, the common room was full of people playing games, and all the tables in the dining hall had been shoved to the walls and covered in food so people could dance in the middle of it. It was too loud for her, really, but she grabbed herself enough snacks to make dinner, returned smiles sent her way, and dodged Esther Blanky’s invitation to dance by physically shoving Harry at her, making both of them laugh. She ducked out while Esther was spinning him.

She just needed a little break from the noise. The kiln would be cold by now - it was a good time to retrieve the qulliq. She slipped into the ice core lab, where the party music was more felt as a rhythmic thud than heard, and over to the enclosed, blast-proof space the engineers had built her kiln. She frowned to see her qulliq sitting outside it, pushed into a corner of the space. She was sure she hadn’t taken it out - it would have been too hot. So who had?

(What she didn’t do was look inside the kiln, and later, she’d blame herself for that. Maybe if she had, she would have found the bundled cloth.)

But as it was, she picked up the qulliq, checking it over for damage, and finding it good, she took it back to her little room, and placed it on top of her belongings. She thought about just staying in her room, though the music was audible enough through the walls that she was unlikely to get much sleep without earplugs, and she never liked the way they felt. 

She was just thinking it over when she heard the unmistakable start of the klaxon, just the first rise before it became a shriek, and then it cut out.

She knew there were no excursions scheduled for today - there was no good reason to hear that sound. Her heart thudding, she flung herself out of her room and sprinted down the corridor towards the airlock. Faintly through the camera monitor, she saw a figure exiting the habitat. She checked the door panel, where the credentials of the crewmember who had authorised the unlock and the klaxon override still showed: Dr Stephen Stanley. 

Four seconds left before the automatic log-out. This could be an opportunity - a chance to get the answers she was looking for, to try what Crozier hadn’t authorised her to try. Before she could think about it, she tapped the screen and authorised the door to open again. The screen reset, and she held her breath while the room cycled through repressurisation, and then it opened with a hiss and a rush of cold air.

Her mind was blank, but she was in motion. She knew the rack that held her EVA suit, even if she hadn’t gotten to wear it in months, and she remembered just how to put it on and run through the checks. She turned on the headlamp. It was dark out there right now, she knew. But she wanted to be out there. There was so much she wanted to know.

She hit the exit for the airlock. There was no klaxon. She didn’t wonder why. She just felt relief that nobody would come to stop her.

It was dark, but Jupiter was high and luminous, and she had headlamps on her helmet to light the way. She hadn’t been outside in so long, the sky above was almost overwhelming. The Milky Way stretched out overhead like the inside of a wheel, and it was spangled here and there with other moons. It was a beautiful sight all the way to the borehole.

Wait. Did she want to go to the radio tower instead?

No, some inner certainty said. She wanted to go to the borehole. She’d understand much better if she went to the source.

She stood there for a long time, torn between the urge to go forward and the question she kept coming back to, which was what am I doing? But a much deeper calm said to her that it was okay. She knew what she had to do. Here was a hostile place, but there was somewhere safer she could be. A liquid sea, no radiation, a cover from all that sky. There was a way to get to the safety of deep water. 

She was so tired of being uncertain, frightened, and frustrated. There were answers to be had. She just had to go out on the ice and go where the airhole was, patient and observant, like any good hunter. When the truth came up to breathe, she could see it then. Her legs moved forward. Her mouth opened.

Her teeth clamped around her tongue and she bit down with all her strength.

The pain shocked her, and the salty blood that flooded her mouth brought her to her senses. She was outside without authorisation or even anyone knowing where she was, and something was trying to control her from the inside. She screamed, an agonised sound that rattled inside the confines of her helmet. The borehole was visible now, no more than a few hundred metres, and she knew she did not want to meet whatever was down there. The ice beneath her feet trembled. She staggered back, turned around, and began to run.

There was a disturbance in the ice outside, but she didn’t know of what. She was spitting out the blood so she didn’t choke on it, but there was so much, and she was getting dizzy. 

She managed to get back inside, and there was the klaxon now, earsplitting until the airlock door came down. The minute that it took the room to repressurise and come back to a safe temperature felt like the longest of her life. She barely had the strength to get her helmet off, and fumbled it onto the rack. The air chilled the wet blood on her chin and neck. She didn’t have anything left to take the suit off too. She reached for the door control. 

She staggered forward into the corridor, where the music from the party was still loud enough to rattle the floor, hoping to find someone. Anyone. Harry.

The air smelled weird and sharp. There was something smeared on the walls, glistening, puddled on the floor. She didn’t know what it was. She coughed, and spat out the bitten-off end of her tongue.

The music died down, and she heard a muffled voice, but one she recognised. Crozier. She went towards it, careening off a wall as she did. There were the lights of the party, LEDs set to every colour; the smell and murmur of the crew, their turned backs, looking in. Then as she staggered closer, she saw Harry Goodsir turn around, and with wide horrified eyes he lunged towards her, and caught her as she staggered into him.

She sank to her knees, Harry trying to hold her up by her elbows, babbling something she couldn’t seem to understand. She wanted to tell him. She wanted to tell him what she’d found, what she knew. Not the breakthrough, but vital. She couldn’t. She just made sounds. Everyone was talking at once.

From here, on the ground, at the edge of the crowd, she could see down the corridor, which meant maybe she and Crozier were the first ones who saw Dr Stanley come over and stand there, outside the room but looking in. Amidst all the confusion, he looked at her without curiosity. There was something strange about the light on him, like he was lit from the side with a warm and flickering glow. Something in the distance burst and crashed, roared and sizzled, and Stanley glanced to the side towards that light, and then lifted up a flask of what she recognised at Fitzjames’ rocket propellant, and he poured it all over himself.

The last thing Silna heard was Crozier yelling, “Stop him! The doors! Get the doors! Seal the fire doors!” and then the fire Stanley had started in Silna’s kiln finally reached him, and he and the habitat both were engulfed in its bright and cleansing flames.

NOW

Silna didn’t know that the visitors were real until they came on board. 

The probe had been interesting to interact with, but she’d imagined something like it so many times that she couldn’t really be sure. She did take recordings, though, and she supposed the signs she wrote couldn’t hurt. Wouldn’t be the worst things staining this place. 

When the ship appeared in the night sky, she watched it through the glass, peering with interest at the distant crew. She thought maybe she recognised some, maybe it was just her brain playing tricks. It had been a week since she last heard another voice, and none of them were much for conversation any more.

She supposed, when Erebus shuddered with the successful docking, that she should go and wake the sleepers.

It was probably bad that she slept so little nowadays. She was healthier than most, though, more capable than some. Cancer hadn’t set in yet, nor radiation sickness taken her like it had two dozen others. Sleep made life less unpleasant for most, and helped put off the hunger. 

Even with the losses they’d suffered, it was hard to make up for six months’ supply left behind on the surface of Europa, stored on a rocket rendered unusable by Dr Stanley cracking it open for its fuel, letting the rest spill all over the ice.

She didn’t like to think much about that night, or the morning afterwards, finding the bodies that hadn’t been able to get behind a fire door in time. She didn’t remember much about getting back to Erebus; she’d passed out in the shuttle on the way up. But she remembered the all-staff meeting aboard ship, where the command crew had done the cold equations and realised that they’d have to ration pretty hard to reach Mars with what they had aboard.

If they’d had a full crew, they’d probably not have made it at all. They’d infected Erebus with the organism they carried with them, and it corroded physical objects and computer systems alike in ways that made it hard to maintain the ship. She was one of the only people aboard who could read the screens any more. It was hard as hell to fix atmosphere and fuel leaks when most of the crew couldn’t see the alerts for static.

She’d had the time to write a few papers, now, on the uneasy symbiosis that could be achieved with the organism.

When the crew of the other ship sent the drone aboard, she felt it as a little intrusion, and then it was gone. Probably rolling around on the floor of the other ring by now, a frazzled husk. She checked the readouts of the crewmembers in their drugged hibernation, and saw a few whose brains were showing up as being in the lightest stage of sleep. She pounded on the doors of their pods. Just in case. Just in case it was real.

When the hatch opened in the ceiling, her breath caught. She saw the visitors, two of them - not in space suits, like she’d been picturing. Hazmat. Smart. No point wasting a good space suit when it would have to be burned or ejected into space. She watched them descend the ladder, saw the ways the faux gravity of the centrifuge caught their bodies and dragged them down to her. She stood watching them until they reached the floor.

Their faces were hard to see through the face shields. One stepped forward and said, voice crackling, “Dr Aua? I don’t believe we’ve formally met, but I’m Commander Ross of the CSC Lyra, and this is--”

“Silna,” said the other one, and she frowned in recognition. She took a half-step forward, and Koveyook grinned at her from behind the big faceplate and said, “It’s good to see you. Your dad sent me messages to give you.”

And Silna hadn’t seen or heard from her dad in so long and thought maybe she’d never see him again, never hear his voice again, and she choked out some sound and stepped forward again and Koveyook caught her, rested a big hand on her shoulder, and he was real, solid and real, people had actually come and found them. Her vision blurred with tears.

Across the ring, there was the thump of a pod door sliding open, and Commander Ross turned sharply around. Silna heard Thomas Blanky’s rough and scratchy laugh, and he said, “Oh, there you are. What in the name of God took you so fucking long?” and Ross let out a squawking laugh and ran to his side.

Koveyook had his arm around her now, which she didn’t think was the protocol in a hazmat suit, but she didn’t pull away. “We got food,” he said, “We got oxygen and water. Gonna have to signal through the windows for it, but it’s coming, don’t you worry.”

They were only halfway home, if any of them ever saw home again. But they were going away, away, far away from that frozen world, and the message could be passed on now not to stay, never to return. A warning passed from speaker to listener without any interference.

There were other pods opening now. The sleepers awakening would be groggy, in awful physical condition, but those sleep-clogged voices were rising now, Esther groaning, Crozier swearing in his raspy voice and Ross calling his name in joy, other hands pounding on doors, the whole ship coming to life. It was a babble that she couldn’t join, but which reached her ears like a rope in deep water, like a blanket around her shoulders, like coming out of a blizzard and into a warm and lighted room.

END