Analog SFF, March 2009 Read online

  “I suppose they get out together, and then the criminal escapes until the next episode.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “What made you think of that now?”

  “The caves, I guess.”

  “Right,” said Bart. “Well, since I'm following you, I must be the good guy.”

  So much for conversation. Bart was being competitive, and this was no time for that.

  I hesitated. For a breath or two I could have sworn I smelled something funny. “Like licking an envelope,” I told Bart.

  “I've never licked an envelope.”

  “Wedding invitations,” I explained, cringing. We never did officially tie the knot.

  “Does it taste like glue?”

  “I guess so. Any glue in these suits?”

  “Maybe in the lamination.”

  The smell did not return, so we marched on, my thoughts wandering to the wedding. Sharron had wanted a picture-perfect event, and I went along with it. Imagine seeing your veiled bride approaching you at the altar during rehearsal—the fifth rehearsal—and you're growing suspicious with her every step. Something is wrong. Your best man leans over and whispers, “She hired a Hollywood bride.” The veil is lifted at the proper moment, and you see your fiancé's “stunt double.”

  A Hollywood bride is a stand-in, just for show. Brides hire them when they are insecure with their looks or want a trophy version of themselves to appear in the wedding photos. I loved Sharron, but her neurosis got me spooked, and I called a halt to the wedding. We were already shacked up, so I didn't have anything to lose.

  We slid down Nixon's Nose. The left line went up some vertical pipes called the Sinuses that led straight up to the Throat. The line to the right led to the labyrinth we called the Bowels. We reached the entrance to the Bowels and paused by the broad opening for a map check. We didn't need a map under normal circumstances, but when your telemetric breadcrumbs are malfing, it could save your life.

  “We follow the main into the Bowels. We come back through Cats and Dogs, swinging by the Sinus, in case they tried to get out that way.”

  I expected an argument, but he said, “Roger that.”

  Bart took the oxygen sensor from his side pocket. “I'm going to check you for leaks.” He was thinking of the glue I'd smelled. It was possible that some contaminant was leaking into the rebreather. He ran the probe carefully around the Opack and my seals—neck, wrists, boots, hoses. Then a once-over of the whole suit. I didn't have a fartometer, or we'd have used that. (You break a vial of noxious gas inside your suit, and the coating on the outside of the pressure suit turns blue at the site of any leaks. The fartometer was based on those UV indicator creams that turn your skin blue when it starts to sunburn.)

  “All good.”

  We checked the breadcrumbs. The breadcrumbs were coded magnetic buttons built onto the main lines or snapped onto secondary lines. They worked independently of the active telemetry. When you passed near them, your console recorded your position, and the crumbs recorded your passage. It wasn't a very good system, but it was the best one that would work. The breadcrumbs didn't need power—they were just what they sounded like—markers with unique signatures. The consoles did all the work, and they were easier to maintain. Unless they were down, like mine.

  The breadcrumbs showed that Colleen and Miller, the engineer, had gone down this way yesterday, but had not come up.

  We spooled out to a precipice for a look. Our lights shone across toward the cliff, revealing only the charcoal-shaded wall beyond. Sometimes if you covered your lights you could see a faint orange glow from down below. It always faded a few seconds after the lights were doused. A geologist thought they came from fluorescing diamonds. We doused, looking for any lights giving away someone's position. We never turn lights off. The more times you switch them on and off, the more likely the switch is to fail and stay off forever. We saw no lights.

  We returned to the main line, Bart winding his jump line onto the spool by hand. Since the early days of space flight, there had been many attempts to make self-winding tethers. They all jam up pretty much every time.

  We continued toward the enormous room known as Cats and Dogs. This mess of a boulder field just didn't lend itself to the body motif. So “Cats and Dogs.” Hundreds of roughly rectangular boulders stood scattered on the floor like miniature skyscrapers that had been knocked over by Godzilla. The main ran through the middle, to an edge, and then over a scramble to the base of the Sinuses.

  A beep and a flash of my readout stopped my feet and jump-started my heart. “Telemetry?” All I got was the alert, not the data.

  “I read it!” Bart said. “It's a suit transponder!”

  “Colleen?”

  “Can't tell. It's dropping packets. But it's moving! Colleen, is that you?”

  No answer.

  “I've got a fix.” Bart moved around me.

  “Lead the way,” I said, though he had already started. If Bart was that pegged about it, maybe the best thing was to give him some slack.

  He raked his primary light around and checked the reflective lines that stretched and sagged into the gloom. He led us past the jumble of Cats and Dogs and onto a pitted area that tilted steeply to the right. As I followed, I could see him checking his heads-up display. “She's making a beeline for the air cache at Anklebone.”

  “Are you sure it's her?”

  “No, but whoever it is, is sucking CO2.”

  “I see her!” I cried, shining my light across a boulder field. “Near the cache!”

  In microgravity, we could bound over this rock pile, but if you get overconfident, you can get stuck or wreck your equipment. We saw a suited figure moving erratically at the edge of our lights.

  “Hurry—she needs help!”

  We watched in horror as the figure began pulling at her gloves, as if to take them off. Quickly giving that up, she fell to her knees and struggled with her helmet release.

  “Don't do that!” we both shouted into our helmet mikes.

  Forfeiting caution, Bart jumped onto a boulder and then another. I followed, leaping from rock to rock, trying to watch our comrade at the same time. Our lights bounced about madly. Surely Colleen would see them and sit calmly until we caught up.

  Instead she yanked the collar release all the way left and pulled the helmet off. She fell behind a rock. Bart was hopping and swearing, and I could not keep up.

  Bart stooped over. “It's not her,” he said. “It's Miller.”

  I rounded the boulder to see Miller twitch and then stop, his helmet lying on the ground next to him.

  I had a flashback to an image from my cave diving with Colleen. There were a couple of curious accidents where some guys, with plenty of air, had gotten lost and panicked, probably when their lights gave out. They'd swum into some muddy corner and torn off all their scuba gear, as if it was the equipment that was killing them. One of the victims was nearly naked.

  “He's dead,” Bart said, checking the engineer's console.

  “Look, his light is still working. All he had to do was make it to the cache—it's right over there.”

  “He never trained like we did. Once he ran out of air, he lost it.”

  Leaving Miller, we checked the cache. Untouched. My heart was sinking deeper into this place, and for the first time, Callisto felt wretched to me. This was the second untouched air cache. The chances of Colleen being alive were decreasing.

  “Miller wouldn't go anywhere without Colleen,” I said. “Something happened to her, and he left her to get help.”

  “Let's find her. Mind if I lead?”

  “Be my guest,” I said. At the moment, his hope was greater than mine.

  He took off, not in the direction Miller had come from, but along a waffled wall called Six Pack.

  “Bart, don't you think it's time to clear the air?”

  “Okay,” he said. “You first. Have you ever slept with her?”

  “Of course not!”

  �
��I know, you're a happily married man,” he said, knowing full well I wasn't technically married. “But admit it, you did have a little thing going.”

  Son of a bitch. Why the hell was he distracting us? The best thing to do was to roll with it. “I admit,” I said, “that we flirted some. The truth is, I think she saw me as safe, because I wasn't chasing her.”

  “You never did it.”

  “Certainly not. What about you? On Mars, maybe?”

  “I wish.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Never,” he said. “At least I'm not so secretive about it. Hell, I even joined a sculpture club, just to get close to her. That was Philadelphia, not Mars. Next to caving, sculpting is the most consuming thing she does.”

  “And here I thought you had a fling with her.”

  We laughed like net spuds drinking fruit beer and lamenting a girl neither had won. It drew us closer, except that with heavy suits, in the dark, and in a vacuum, we were really very far apart.

  Bart stopped. He was shining his plasma onto the far wall, over the boulder field. “I thought I saw something shiny,” he said, sweeping the light in a switchback pattern. The high wall leered over us with a prow like the nose of an Easter Island stone god.

  “Shiny like what?” I was thinking diamonds.

  Theory has it that the core of Jupiter is a moon-sized diamond, and that an ancient meteor smashed some fragments loose. A diamond ring formed around Jupiter, the shards colliding and breaking each other up. In an atmosphere, the surfaces of diamonds bond with gas molecules, capping them off. But in a vacuum, the surfaces had nothing to bond to, except when they bumped into each other. Slowly turning diamond shards recrystallized, bit by bit, until they looked like flat, spiraling snowflakes the size of dinner plates. Or so say the computers.

  Something changed, and the diamond necklace unclasped, sliding to the outer moons. Great barbed diamonds spun like whirlpools, snowing onto Callisto, to be there entombed for millions of years. The whole theory could be proven by finding diamonds that showed traces of the snowflake structure. Then we'd learn about Jupiter's inner structure. Callisto would be the easiest place to find them, since its minerals have not settled.

  I wrote a poem about it. The Great Red Spot was a bleeding wound where Jupiter's treasure was cut from his heart. Callisto stole Jupiter's diamond necklace before he could reclaim it. She swallowed it, then spurned the old boy, turning her back forever. That's why her orbit is locked—to avoid his gaze.

  Romance aside, these theoretical diamonds would be hot items. Nanomite and Alchemetrix long ago perfected the technique of manufacturing diamond and nanotube structures, using gas solvents to intercalate the molecular planes into any shape. Colleen called such diamonds slenters, after some old term for fake jewels made from Coke bottles. But on paper, the space elevator fell like the Tower of Babel. The carbon nanotubes couldn't be woven strong enough.

  Enter Schwarzites, nanostructures with negatively curved surfaces. Where nanotubes made of carbon-60 were built of hexagons, the theoretical Schwarzites could also have some heptagons and pentagons interlinked. These made the structures much stronger, breaking up the symmetry that invited clean cleavage. It also caused the surfaces to curve themselves into pretty little beads. Among the applications of such knotted lattices were molecular chain links, woven together with traditional nanotubes. This type of “diamond necklace” could loop from the Earth to a space station, forming a viable space elevator.

  No one could make Schwarzites, but they could occur naturally, possibly as a result of the Jupiter diamond robbery, with a fair chance that some were stashed on Callisto. That's what Colleen was after.

  I was all for it, but someone else had to figure out how to make it all work. My role was to find the raw materials and bring them home without too many people getting killed.

  “There it is!” Bart said. He was holding his beam fixed on the nearer wall.

  I added my light to his. From a crack in the ceiling, a trickle of something dark and shiny broadened, following paths of least resistance, all leading down. On a vertical slab was the area Bart focused on—a slick of liquid, some evaporating off, some refreezing, and some tiptoeing through those sleeping cats and lazy dogs.

  “Water,” said Bart. “The water and oxygen plant is not far from here. This is melt-off.”

  “It's too cold to melt.” Then a thought struck me. “Colleen said that if anything happened to her, no one should come after her. I thought she was just looking out for us, but what if there was some other reason for the warning?”

  Bart flailed his arm at a rock, thought better of it, and slapped his thigh instead. “Great!” he said. “Just great. A warning like that, and you don't even think to tell me.”

  “I'm sorry.”

  “Damn it!” He hit his leg again and turned to face me. His helmet light shone directly in my eyes so it hurt. “You should have told me! We're in serious trouble, Chief.”

  He looked around again, shining his light first down the tunnel, then up at the dripping wall again. “Come on!” he said, taking off down the tunnel to the Bowels.

  “Line!” I reminded him, but he wasn't slowing down. I hastily looped a jump line to the main and checked the orientation to make sure it wasn't spooled tails out. The ridges could lead us the wrong way if it was backwards.

  Bart was a good way off. I was winded, and I heard Bart's heavy breathing too. This sort of situation can quickly crumble into chaos, without anyone knowing why.

  “Bart,” I said. “Take it easy.”

  “Hurry up!” He stopped to wait for me. “Okay. Now let's get moving.”

  “Just a minute,” I said. “Tell me where we're going, and what this is about.”

  “Sharron is expecting any day now, isn't she?” he said.

  “Cut the crap, Bart.”

  “You think she's gonna break water, just stick around here!” With that, he was off again.

  Water breaking? So the dripping water on the walls above was just a beginning. The trickles were fed by a source that could only be the lake above. There was a hell of a lot that Bart knew that I didn't.

  “Bart!” I shouted. A waste of air. The radio would clip the volume anyway. Bart said something, but I couldn't make it out. Com failure or just my heavy breathing? I shouted again, and stopped, to listen in relative silence.

  “Hurry...” Words again, mixed with static.

  “Bart, I've got a com problem. Copy, Bart. Com problem, over.” I degraded to push-to-talk, remembering the resin smell from a while ago. At a starting mix of 100 percent oxygen, an exposed wire would be a fire hazard.

  The radio was dead. Through my helmet, I thought I heard sounds, though. Sounds like rushing water, or maybe steam evaporating violently, somewhere far away. Through it all, an imagined voice, like Colleen whispering, “Where are you guys?” as though she was trying to keep me and Bart together just a little longer.

  A crackle, and then: “Copy, com problem, over. You there, Chief?”

  “I'm here, over.” I walked on until I saw Bart's light. He was waiting for me. “No more rushing ahead.”

  “Roger that.”

  “Now tell me exactly what's going on, before we lose radio completely. The lake is melting above us, isn't it?”

  “Yes,” he said, as we continued down together. There was still an edge to his voice, but he was being dutiful. “I'm guessing the bottom is still frozen, but the warmth is breaking through.”

  “Mind telling me about that?”

  “It's supposed to be a secret, and Colleen thought that if you knew, you'd feel obligated to put a stop to it.”

  “So this is a scheme to find her diamonds.”

  “Of course,” said Bart. “Someone got the idea that if there were some frozen in the lakes, you could melt the ice, and let them sink to the bottom.”

  “Good God,” I said. “The whole outpost is practically vacated, so she vented the excess reactor therms into the lake.”


  “She or her engineer friends.”

  “I knew nothing of all this.”

  “Well, I'm sorry,” Bart said.

  “And you didn't think it was important to tell me when we set out to find her?”

  No answer.

  “Copy?” I insisted.

  “I hear you.”

  We were at the bottom of the cavern system, near the Sinuses. From there, a nearly vertical shaft led to a broad tunnel, and then back to the Throat—a shortcut for lowering equipment. The ground flattened onto the bowl that sat at the deepest part of the Sinuses.

  As we neared the bottom, our lights illuminated something that shouldn't have been there. It was wide, very tall, and dark. We probed it with our beams.

  A peculiar apparatus had been constructed in my absence, a huge lattice of wide metal bands, sitting upright on heavy legs at the nadir of the cavern. It was a broad cage, the size of a Martian sand blower.

  “What the hell is that?” I said, but I don't think Bart heard me. Then I noticed an object inside the cage, resting at the bottom. It was obscured by some of the bars.

  “What is it?”

  This time he heard me, and he stopped cold. “It's her.”

  I didn't understand, but looked to where his beam was pointed, at the object in the bottom of the structure.

  It was Colleen, lying motionless, trapped in the cage. Her lights and instruments were dark, and I realized we'd picked up no telemetry. The metallic green and purple of her suit glittered, and I thought of how it used to shimmer in front of me as my light shone on her treading form.

  She was dead, and it didn't seem right that she glittered like that. My head grew hot and light, and my stomach hardened as if I'd swallowed a potato whole. Colleen's faceplate was frosted on the inside, but her face was outlined through the fog. A rivulet of steaming water was collecting directly under her.

  “What the hell did Miller do to her?” I said.

  “I don't think he did anything.”

  “Well, who the hell put her in this cage?”

  “Chief, there's an opening right here.” He pulled at a crossbar, and a large gate opened. “See? The top's open too. No one locked her up.”