Angel of Europa (3 page)

She uncurled her legs and started to rise from the bed, but Danzig raised a hand. “No, no,” he said, making his way across the room.” I can manage.” He carefully lowered himself into the desk chair. “This is the first time I’ve been out bed since they woke me up. The doctor says it’ll be a while before my arms and legs get used to working again.”

“Well, yeah. That and the fact that you were practically dead when they pulled you out of there.” Evangeline’s smile was pleasantly amused. “Serves you right for playing in the airlock,” she added, wagging a finger at him. “Bad boy. Don’t do that again that.”

“I won’t.” He’d already heard much the same thing from Martha. Coming from Evangeline, though, it sounded less like a scold than a sisterly jest.

Yet there was no way he’d ever consider Evangeline Chatelain to be a sibling; she was much too attractive for that. It wasn’t merely her obvious sexuality, although it was hard to miss the fact she clearly wasn’t wearing a bra today; he had to consciously refrain from studying the nipples of her breasts pushing against the front of her tank top. It wasn’t even the soft contralto of her voice, with just a hint of a lisp that only added to the sensual way in which she spoke. It was her face that appealed to him the most: slightly oval, framed by shoulder-length hair the color of summer wheat, with a nice, soft-lipped mouth beneath a fox-like nose that evoked her Gallic heritage. The tenderness of her expressions, the mysterious way she’d regard someone with aquamarine eyes, only added to her beauty.

When they’d first met, during the press conference where the ISC announced the final crew selection for the International Jupiter Survey, Danzig thought Evangeline was appropriately named, for she reminded him of an angel. Not the sort one might see painted on a cathedral ceiling, though, but a more earthbound kind: an angel a man would worship upon silk sheets, her body a temple, her eyes the gates to heaven.

“You can probably guess why I’m here,” Danzig said. “The captain has asked me to speak with you about …”

“What happened on Europa.” The smile faded. “You’re here as arbiter, aren’t you?” Danzig nodded and Chatelain sighed. “I should have known Diaz wouldn’t have you brought out of hibernation just to keep me company.”

“You haven’t had any visitors?”

“No.” Evangeline picked up a remote and pointed it at the wallscreen. Danzig caught a quick glimpse of ballet dancers before the screen went blank and disappeared. Evangeline tossed the remote aside, then stretched her long legs out upon the bed, crossing her ankles together and letting her feet dangle above the floor. “The captain has given orders that no one is to see me until the investigation is complete. Even Maggie is leaving me alone. She keeps her door shut, and refuses to talk to me when I happen to see her in the bathroom.”

“Sorry to hear this.” Evangeline’s tights fit her like a second skin; it wasn’t hard for him to imagine her without them. Deliberately shifting his gaze toward the porthole, Danzig decided not to mention what Diaz had said about most of the crew wanting to avoid her. “I’ll speak to the captain about this. At any rate, I doubt my investigation would be hindered by you having visitors.”

“
Merci
… I mean, thank you. I would appreciate it.” Evangeline’s eyes flickered toward the door, and Danzig wondered if she suspected that Diaz was hovering just outside. “Have you been told what happened down there?”

“Very little. The captain suggested that I ought to hear your side of it.”

“Considerate of her.” Evangeline folded her arms across her chest. “Not much to tell, really. John, Klaus, and I had started going down in DSV-1, trying to see if we could find larger forms of life. During our second dive, something attacked the sub …”

“Something attacked you?”

“A creature, yes. Very large, very aggressive.” She studied her toes as she absently wiggled them. “It came at us almost before we knew it was there, repeatedly charging the sub and slamming into us.”

Danzig was astonished by what she’d just said. The captain had already told him about the tiny, shrimp-like invertebrates spotted by the RSV; most of the expedition scientists hadn’t been expecting anything more than that. For Evangeline to report having encountered something considerably bigger …

“Did you see what it looked like?” he asked.

She shook her head. “With my own eyes, no. There’s no windows in the upper passenger cell, only the periscope and the video screen. John and Klaus were down in the observation blister, though, so they could see it through the porthole … what they were able to see, I mean, before it happened.”

“What was that?”

Evangeline sat forward, pulling in her legs to clasp her knees within her arms. “When the creature attacked, it caught me … caught us … completely by surprise. We were thirty-eight fathoms down, about seventy meters from the entrance hole at the bottom of the drill shaft. The sub was still connected to the surface by the umbilical cable, but otherwise we were on our own. The only light we had were the floodlights. To make matters worse, the tide was starting to come in. When that happens, the water can push the surface ice upward as much as thirty meters …”

“I don’t know what this means.”

Evangeline stared Danzig straight in the eye, almost as if daring him to look away. “It means we were deep underwater, in the dark, and bucking one of the strongest tides in the solar system. So when it … the creature, that is … attacked the sub, and kept ramming us again and again, the last thing on my mind was making a zoological study.”

“What
was
on your mind?”

“Survival.” She let out her breath, looked down at the floor. “I just wanted to get out of there alive. The third time the creature rammed us … maybe it was the fourth, I don’t remember … an alarm went off, signaling that the hull had been breached. A second later, John yelled that water was coming into the blister. That’s when …”

Evangeline fell silent. For a few moments she said nothing. Danzig waited for her to go on, and after a little while she took a deep breath. “That’s when I grabbed the escape lever beneath my seat,” she said. “The upper cell sealed itself off from the rest of the bathyscaphe, then the lower part was jettisoned. The support crew on the surface received the automatic SOS beacon … by then I’d lost the comlink … and reeled in the cable and hauled me back up the hole.”

“And the other two?”

“Went down with the bathyscaphe.” She wouldn’t look at him. “I couldn’t help it, Otto. When you’re down that deep, you’re lucky if you’ve got even a second or two. I had to save my life …”

“Even if it meant giving up Klaus and John?”

Evangeline seemed to be fighting back tears. “I had no choice. If I hadn’t jettisoned the rest of the sub, I … I wouldn’t be here now. I would have perished as well.”

“I understand.” Danzig hesitated. “So why do you think you’re in trouble?”

“The others don’t believe me.” She raised her eyes to him again; they were bleak with remorse, moist and rimmed with red. “The RSV they’d sent down earlier hadn’t seen anything like what attacked us. And since we lost communications as soon as the creature hit the sub, they received only one video image.” She paused. “It’s not very good. I know what it is, but they don’t … I mean, they’re not sure.”

“Okay. I see.” Danzig made a mental note to ask the captain to show him the video. “And there was nothing else? No sonar contact, no lidar …?”

“No.” Evangeline shook her head. “Nothing they can access, at least. The sub recorded more, I’m sure, but …”

“It’s gone to the bottom of the ocean.” Which might be as much as 150 kilometers in depth; no one knew for certain. In any case, it appeared as if Evangeline had scant little evidence to support her story.

But why did Diaz doubt her in the first place? Two men had lost their lives, yes, but there was no reason to believe that Evangeline wasn’t telling the truth. Europa was a world the expedition had only begun to explore; there was always the possibility that it might harbor life forms larger than any they’d seen thus far. Something else was going on.

“Well, then …” Leaning heavily upon his cane, Danzig slowly pushed himself up from the chair. “This gives me much to think about. Thank you for …”

“Not at all.” Evangeline lowered her bare feet to the floor and stood up from the bed. “Thank you for hearing my side of the story.” She raised her arms straight above her head and stretched like a cat, the bottom of her tank top rising up for a moment to reveal a flat and well-tanned stomach. “This is more than anyone else has allowed me.”

Danzig tried not to look at Evangeline as he shuffled past her, but the room was very small and he couldn’t avoid brushing against her. For an instant, he felt the soft pressure of her breasts against her arm; he felt his face grow warm, but she didn’t back away.

“I may … um … have other questions later,” he said as he headed for the door, realizing even as he spoke how this might be interpreted.

“Of course. Feel free to come by again.” When Danzig glanced back at her, he saw that she’d sat down on the bunk once more, her long legs curled up around her. “And Otto …?” A soft smile appeared. “I’d be grateful for any help you can give me.”

He could be wrong, but nonetheless he had a sense that she’d just given him a hint of how she might express her gratitude. Danzig didn’t respond, but instead slid open the door and left her quarters.

Captain Diaz was waiting in the foyer; she’d moved away from the door so that Evangeline couldn’t see her. She said nothing to Danzig until they reached the companionway, then she stopped him before they could begin the long climb back upstairs.

“You’ve heard her side,” she said quietly. “Now will you hear mine?” Danzig nodded. “All right. I know it’s a lot to ask of you, but would you please let me take you to the command center? There’s something I’d like to show you.”

L
OCATED IN THE HUB
, the command center was the
Explorer
’s largest single compartment. Shaped like an shallow bowl, its work stations were arranged in a circle around the control pit, with a ring of LCD screens suspended from its ceiling above them. Danzig seldom had a reason to visit the command center, but he enjoyed its spaciousness; it was one of the few places aboard which didn’t give him a cramped and claustrophobic feeling, particularly since the hub was in zero-g.

As he followed Captain Diaz through the hatch of the rotating carrousel which connected the hub with the ship’s rotating arms, Danzig saw that the screens were displaying images of the Galilean satellites as captured by the ship’s telescopes. He’d seen close-ups of Jupiter’s moons before, of course, but never in real-time. Here: an erupting volcano on Io, plumes of lava spewing upward from its hellish surface. There: sunrise on Ganymede, the immense, ice-covered scars of its surface cast into sharp relief by the coming of dawn. Little could be seen of Callisto save for a crescent moon; the
Explorer
maintained a geosynchronous orbit above the satellite which used it as a shield against Jupiter’s magnetosphere, so at this moment Callisto’s far side lay in darkness.

As always, Jupiter dominated the sky, frightening in its immensity. Like Callisto, only half of the planet was facing the sun from the
Explorer’s
current position, but nonetheless the gas giant’s night side was made visible by the tiny sparks of enormous thunderstorms perpetually raging in its upper atmosphere.

Danzig could have watched the screens all day, but Diaz hadn’t brought him there to admire the scenery. “This way,” she said, then she grasped a ceiling rail and used it to pull herself across the compartment. Danzig was glad that he’d left his cane outside the carrousel; he didn’t need it here, and it would have only been in the way. Grabbing hold of the rail, he let his feet float free as he followed the captain.

A dark-haired young woman was seated at a horseshoe-shaped console, her body kept in place by the leg bar of her ergonomic chair. “Hello, Captain,” she said as Diaz approached her, then she saw Danzig and her eyes widened. “Otto! I’d heard you were awake! Nice to see you again!”

“Thanks, Rita. Good to be back.” Danzig grabbed a foot restraint above Rita Jimenez’s console, then turned himself upside-down and slipped his feet into the rung so that he hung bat-like from the ceiling. Rita didn’t seem to mind; she was used to having crewmen performing gymnastics at her place of work. Danzig glanced past her at Diaz, who was hovering behind the Brazilian astrobiologist. “You wanted to show me something, Captain?”

Diaz tapped Rita’s shoulder. “Would you please bring up the last image captured by the DSV-1 camera?”

Rita’s smile vanished. She nodded, then typed a command into her keyboard. One of the screens directly above her station had been displaying Europa’s chaotic terrain; the screen changed, to be replaced by …

What was it? Danzig squinted at a blurry, out-of-focus image. Off-white and overexposed, it seemed to be a fish — or at least some sort of aquatic animal — captured in motion. He was able to make out what appeared to be a dark, beady eye and a small oval mouth in a blunt head, but the rest was indistinct: he had an impression of a tapering body with what looked like a dorsal fin, but the rest was lost in the jet-black background. Nothing about the creature was identifiable; it could have been anything.

“Is that what Evangeline says she saw?” he asked, then corrected himself. “Oh, right … she says she didn’t see anything.”

“Uh-huh.” Diaz didn’t look away from the screen. “This is the last image sent by DSV-1’s bow camera before we lost ELF telemetry.”

Danzig had to remind himself that ELF stood for Extra-Low Frequency. Although the expedition’s manned and robotic subs were tethered to the surface, Europa’s intense cold — an average of -170
⁰
C at the equator — inhibited the use of fiberoptic cables. So low-band radio transmitters aboard were the only way information could be sent up from the subsurface ocean.

“In fact, it’s the only image,” Diaz added. “No other pictures of the creature were taken … if this
is
the creature, that is.”