Angel of Europa

  PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF ALLEN STEELE

  * * *

  “An author with the potential to revitalize the Heinlein tradition.” —Booklist

  “The best hard SF writer to come along in the last decade.” —John Varley, author of Slow Apocalypse

  “One of the hottest new writers of hard SF on the scene today.” —Asimov’s Science Fiction

  “No question, Steele can tell a story.” —OtherRealms

  Orbital Decay

  Winner of the Locus Award for Best First Novel

  “Stunning.” —Chicago Sun-Times

  “[Steele is] the master of science-fiction intrigue.” —The Washington Post

  “Brings the thrill back to realistic space exploration. It reads like a mainstream novel written in 2016 A.D.” —The New York Review of Science Fiction

  “A damned good book; lightning on the high frontier. I got a sense throughout that this was how it would really be.” —Jack McDevitt, author of Cauldron

  “An ambitious science fiction thriller . . . skillfully plotted and written with gusto.” —Publishers Weekly

  “A splendidly executed novel of working-class stiffs in space.” —Locus

  “Reads like golden-age Heinlein.” —Gregory Benford, author of Beyond Infinity

  “Readers won’t be disappointed. This is the kind of hard, gritty SF they haven’t been getting enough of.” —Rave Reviews

  The Tranquillity Alternative

  “A high-tech thriller set against the backdrop of an alternative space program. Allen Steele has created a novel that is at once action-packed, poignant, and thought provoking. His best novel to date.” —Kevin J. Anderson, bestselling author of the Jedi Academy Trilogy

  “Science fiction with its rivets showing as only Steele can deliver it. This one is another winner.” —Jack McDevitt, author of The Engines of God

  “With The Tranquility Alternative, Allen Steele warns us of the bitter harvest reaped by intolerance, and of the losses incurred by us all when the humanity of colleagues and friends is willfully ignored.” —Nicola Griffith, author of Ammonite

  Labyrinth of Night

  “Unanswered questions, high-tech, hard-science SF adventure, and action—how can you fail to enjoy this one?” —Analog Science Fiction and Fact

  The Jericho Iteration

  “Allen Steele is the best hard SF writer to come along in the last decade. In The Jericho Iteration he comes down to a near-future Earth and proves he can handle a darker, scarier setting as well as his delightful planetary adventures. I couldn’t put it down.” —John Varley, author of Slow Apocalypse

  Rude Astronauts

  “A portrait of a writer who lives and breathes the dreams of science fiction.” —Analog Science Fiction and Fact

  Angel of Europa

  Allen M. Steele

  Contents

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  About the Author

  I

  THE TRANSITION FROM life to death to life again was almost instantaneous.

  First there was the decompression alarm, a loud and repetitive gong like a brass cymbal being struck again and again. Then a gust of wind, almost as if he was on a beach and feeling an ocean breeze coming in over the seawall. Then the breeze became a gale, and he turned away from the hardsuit he’d been inspecting just in time to see the outer airlock hatch open, a tiger-striped portal to an airless and star-flecked darkness.

  Danzig grabbed the door rung of the open suit locker and yelled for help even though he knew there was no one on the other side of the closed inner hatch; he’d been alone on Hub Deck 2 when he entered the airlock. The roar of escaping air drowned out his voice, and his ears propped painfully when he yelled again. His feet tore loose from the deck; when he looked down at them, he saw that one of his sneakers had been ripped from his left foot.

  He was cold, colder than he’d ever been before, and although he clutched the door rung as hard as he could, his hands were becoming numb. He tried to take a deep breath, but couldn’t fill his lungs. Blood spurted from his nostrils as a viscous red stream that was caught by the escaping air and sucked toward the open hatch. Pressure pounded against his temples and the sockets of his eyes; the very pores of his skin felt as if they’re on fire. His fingers loosened from the rung, and then he was lying in an infirmary bed, gazing up at Dr. Philips.

  “Hello, Otto.” In keeping with expedition protocol, she spoke to him in English rather than his native German. Her voice was quiet, her eyes searching. “How are we feeling?”

  Somewhere above his head was the staccato beep of the bed’s sensors, registering his cardiac rhythm and respiration. The bed sheets were cool and crisp, the pillow soft against the back of his head. His body was utterly weak, his muscles drained of all energy. It was all he could do just to keep his eyes open.

  “Like … hell.” His throat was a dry tunnel behind a parched mouth. “Water.”

  Dr. Phillips — he’d always had trouble thinking of her as Martha, her first name — favored him with worried smile. “You shouldn’t be dehydrated,” she said, glancing up at the IV drip bag suspended above the left side of his bed; its narrow plastic tube carried a glucose solution to the stent inserted in the crook of his left elbow. “I’ll get you something to drink in a moment.” She looked down at him again. “Do you know where you are?”

  “Here,” he managed to croak.

  “Think you can be a little more exact?”

  “Ship … Zeus … Explorer.”

  “Yes. Very good.” A satisfied nod. “And your name is …?”

  “Otto … Danzig.” Irritation accompanied thirst. “Water … please.”

  “Of course.” Phillips strolled over to a water dispenser, filled a paper cup, inserted a straw. Returning to the bed, she pushed a button on its right side. The bed purred softly as it raised halfway to a sitting position. “Just a little,” she said, bending the straw and fitting it between his lips. “Don’t gulp or you’ll get sick.”

  The water was as lukewarm and flat as only the recycled urine of twenty men and women can be; just then, though, it was as sweet as wine. Ignoring the warning, Danzig sipped greedily at the straw, savoring the water as it rolled down the desert cave of his mouth and throat. He wanted to take the cup away from her, but his hands only twitched a little when he tried to raise them.

  “That’s enough,” Phillips said, even though he’d barely slaked his thirst, and gently pulled the straw from his mouth before he was through. “Now … do you remember what happened?”

  “I was … I was … in … the airlock. Outer door … opened and …” He struggled to remember, but the only image that came back to him were his feet, one of his sneakers missing, dangling a couple of meters from the open hatch. “That’s all.”

  “Shock. Don’t worry, it’ll come back to you.” Philips took the cup over to a recycling tube and poured the remaining water into it. “You’re fortunate to be alive,” she continued as she crumpled the cup and shoved it into a disposal chute. “They managed to shut the hatch before you were blown outside, but you were dead when they pulled you out of there.”

  Danzig stared at her. “Dead?”

  “Uh-huh.” Philips turned to a nearby counter, started to do something Danzig couldn’t see. “Severe pulmonary barotrauma, coupled with acute ischemia. You’re just lucky you didn’t have an embolism … I’m not sure I could’ve saved you then. Otherwise, everything that could happen to someone who’s been in a blowout, happened to you.”

  “How did … how did …?”

  “They got you out of there in
time. Once I managed to resuscitate you, I put you on life support, pumped you full of medical nanos, and programmed them to repair your organs and blood vessels. Then I stuck you in the emergency hibernation tank to heal.”

  Philips turned away from the counter. She held a syringe gun, its barrel half-filled with a milky fluid. “Now that we don’t need them anymore, it’s time to kill the little demons.” She placed the gun’s tip against the side of his neck and squeezed the trigger. Danzig felt a wasp sting. “There. That should do it.”

  Danzig knew that he should be grateful to the doctor for saving his life, but he could barely stay awake. “Danke,” he whispered, then remembered expedition protocol. “Thanks,” he added, using English instead. Another question occurred to him. “How … long?”

  “About six and a half months.” Philips reached up to the monitor and tapped a finger against its screen. “To be exact,” she added, studying the readout, “six months, one week, six days, seven hours and thirty-six minutes. Today is September 19, 2112. And before you ask …”

  She walked across the compartment to a large square porthole. Its outer shutters were closed; Philips touched a wall button and the shutters rolled up like Venetian blinds. Beyond the window lay darkness, jet black and fathomless. Then a grey orb slowly glided into view, as densely cratered as the Moon but much larger. Looming behind it was an immense sphere, yellow and orange bands slowly moving across its width, a large red ellipse swirling just south of its equator.

  Callisto, with Jupiter in the background.

  Danzig stared at them. When he’d entered the airlock, the Zeus Explorer had just crossed Mars orbit. If he’d been in hibernation for as long as Philips said, then the expedition must have reached Jupiter and its moons several months ago.

  “We … made it.” Danzig forced a smile. “Thanks for … waking me up.”

  “Yeah, well …” The doctor absently brushed back her blonde hair; she was kind of pretty, Danzig sleepily decided, in a stern sort of way. “If it was up to me, I would’ve let you sleep all the way back to Earth. You’re not fully healed yet. But the captain insisted that we wake you up.”

  “Why did …?”

  His eyes closed. He was unconscious before she had a chance to reply.

  II

  DANZIG SPENT THE NEXT two days slipping in and out of sleep. Dr. Philips was there each time he woke up, ready to feed him or give him a bedpan. He was her only patient, so he had her undivided attention, and before long he felt comfortable enough with her to start calling her Martha. He gradually regained enough strength to stay awake and by the end of the second day all he wanted to do was get out of bed, although Martha warned him that he’d probably have to use a cane to get around. Six months of hibernation had atrophied his muscles; it would be awhile before his legs were strong enough to support him again.

  It was not until then that the captain paid him a visit. He was sitting up in bed, reading a thriller on his pad — Martha had fetched it from his quarters, three levels down on Arm A from the infirmary, along with his clothes — when Consuela Diaz gently knocked on the recovery room’s half-open pocket door.

  “Hello? Otto? Are you awake?”

  “Yes, I am.” Danzig bookmarked his place and put down the pad. “Hello, Captain. Come to see if I’m still among the living?”

  “That I knew already.” Captain Diaz slid the door shut behind her. “Dr. Phillips told me after the accident that you’d probably make it through, provided that you remained in hibernation long enough for the nanos to do their stuff.” A tentative smile on her nut-brown face. “I’m sure she’s told you that she was reluctant to wake you up. I figured, though, you’d be disappointed if you got all the way back to Earth only to find out that you’d missed your chance to see Jupiter.”

  Danzig shrugged. Compared to what he’d been through, whether or not he was an active participant in the International Jupiter Expedition was the least of his concerns. In fact, he’d asked Martha to keep the shutters closed; the sight of Callisto spinning past the porthole every few minutes gave him vertigo, even if it was only caused by the habitat arms rotating clockwise around the Explorer’s hub.

  “Is that why you had her wake me up?” he asked.

  “No … no, I’m afraid it isn’t.” The smile faded as Diaz sat down on a vacant bed. “Something’s come up that … well, we need your particular skills.”

  “As suit tech? Kevin should have been able to cover for me.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about.” The captain hesitated. “As arbiter, I mean.”

  Danzig now understood. Maintaining the EVA gear was only one of his jobs. His principal role in the expedition was arbiter, the crew member responsible for investigating and settling disputes among the twelve women and eight men aboard the Zeus Explorer.

  Several years earlier, the International Space Consortium had determined that, during long-term space missions, it would be best if the captain didn’t deal with fights or quarrels among the crew, but instead delegated that responsibility to someone else. Major disagreements among crewmembers often involved decisions made by the commanding officer, so there was always an expectation that the captain would not be impartial. This had led to a mutiny once already, and the ISC wanted to avoid repeating that incident.

  Thus, whenever possible, a person trained in psychology and social engineering was included in the crew of deep-space vessels. Although necessity dictated that this individual held another job — a ship’s complement is too small for someone to specialize in only one particular skill — his or her principal responsibility was to arbitrate disputes among crewmembers. It was the arbiter’s task to thoroughly investigate a problem, examining the causes and weighing the evidence, then deliver a judgment in a fair and independent manner. In this way, the commanding officer was absolved of any accusation of taking one side or another; the arbiter’s decision was final, even if the captain is at fault.

  By the time the Zeus Explorer crossed the orbit of Mars, six weeks after the ship departed from Earth, Danzig had already arbitrated a few quarrels. They were all minor disagreements — one person accusing another of swiping stuff from his toilet kit; the life-support chief insisting that a crewman assigned to the hydroponics bay in Arm B neglected her duties and thus allowed some to die; the chef’s claim that a certain individual had been stealing food from the galley — and while not everyone was happy with the decisions Danzig made, at least there had been no incidents that put the expedition at risk. Then he stepped into the airlock …

  “Must be something important,” Danzig said. “Enough for you to have Martha revive me, I mean.”

  “It is … but there’s something I’d like to know first. How did you nearly get yourself blown out?”

  “I don’t know.” He shook his head. “Really. I barely remember what happened. It’s like I’ve lost a couple of minutes there.”

  “Dr. Philips warned me you might have memory loss.” The captain seemed to be studying him. “But we still can’t figure why you were there in the first place. The duty roster didn’t call for you to inspect the suits until we reached Jupiter.”

  “That I remember. Jim Kretsche complained to me that, when he went EVA a couple of days ago —” Danzig corrected himself “— a couple of days before the accident, I mean … his comlink acted up on him. I was checking the suit he’d worn to see if there was something wrong with the radio.”

  “Okay. So we know why you were there. But it doesn’t explain how you …”

  “If I knew, I’d tell you.” Danzig shut his eyes, tried to bring back what he’d been doing just as the airlock opened. “I would’ve shut the inner hatch once I was inside … that’s standard operating procedure. After that—” he opened his eyes again, let out his breath “—it’s a blank. Maybe I hit the void button by mistake.”

  “That’s an awfully big mistake.” Diaz quietly regarded him for a few moments, her expression hard to read, then she shrugged. “I’m sure it’ll come bac
k eventually. Until then, I’d take it as a personal favor if you’d have someone accompany you the next time you visit the airlock. You’re just lucky Dylan picked that moment to visit H2 when you opened the outer hatch.”

  Danzig couldn’t help but grin. Dylan McNeil was the chief engineer, and ever since launch he’d constantly visited the hub’s lower deck to check the major systems, as if the Explorer was a fragile machine that might break at any minute. McNeil’s fussiness had become a standing joke among the crew, but Danzig had to admit that it may have saved his life.

  “I’ll keep it in mind.” Danzig pushed back the covers and sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. Philips had finally relented and allowed him to swap his surgical gown for trousers and a sweatshirt; otherwise, he wouldn’t have let Diaz see him practically undressed. “So let’s get to the important stuff … why did you have me revived?”

  “Okay.” Folding her arms across her chest, the captain looked down at the floor as if to gather her thoughts. “You know we’ve been in orbit above Callisto for the last four months, right? And that we landed on Europa and established a base camp about three months ago?”

  “Uh-huh. All according to plan.” Although Europa was the expedition’s most important target among the Galilean satellites, its orbit lay within the belt of intense radiation surrounding Jupiter. It had been decided that the Zeus Explorer would park itself above Callisto, 1,884,000 kilometers from Jupiter and outside the radiation belt, and survey teams would shuttle back and forth between the ship and Europa, 1,213,000 kilometers away. This way their radiation exposure would remain within tolerable levels.

  “Right. Well, a few of weeks ago, the science team finally broke through the surface ice at Consolmagno Base. They managed to locate a point between two ridges in the Conamara Chaos where it looked like friction between two ice packs temporarily melted through the surface, so they only had to cut a hole just a little more than one kilometer deep.”