Jeff had heard recordings, of course, but something about the real sound set the hair on the back of his neck aprickle. It was hard not to hear patterns in those mournful cries—and intelligence, a meaning of some sort just beyond the grasp of human understanding.
“Not exactly Top Forty pop, is it?” Wojak observed.
The subs veered toward the southwest and accelerated, Manta One moving well out into the lead to avoid having both boats lost by the same accident. For a time, the ice ceiling gliding past overhead remained visible, a slowly receding jaggedness fading into water thick with drifting particles, like fog. Shigeru was right; much of that ceiling was coated with vast patches of brown, mossy tendrils, a weird, upside-down forest in the night.
Then ice and forest were lost in darkness, with black night above and black below, and only the lonesome gleam of the Manta’s lights to mark out a small, fuzzy domain of warmth and illumination. After an hour, Icebreaker Two, Carver reported, was about three kilometers astern, its lights lost in the gloom.
It made the loneliness, the isolation more intense, somehow, with the Manta a tiny bubble of heat and mind adrift in stark isolation alone in the abyssal black.
Another hour passed. A third. The men and women talked quietly among themselves, or lost themselves in PAD novels or spoke quietly into their PAD pickups as they assembled e-mails for the next scheduled uplink. Jeff had already told them that if they had any mail home they wanted to finish up, to do it on the trip and store it in the Manta’s computer.
That way, so long as the Manta made it back at all, the mail would be delivered, no matter what.
Everyone knew what that meant.
He spent some time studying the men and women in the aft compartment, trying to peer inside their minds, to see, to feel how they were reacting to…everything, from being marooned on an alien world, to the isolation of the tiny CWS base, to suffering a heart-numbing 47 percent casualties on this campaign so far, to being sealed inside this carbon-boron-bucky-fiber can and dropped into an ink-black ocean eighty kilometers deep, a blackness alive with the eerie cries of an alien voice.
Hell, they’d been through enough already to break damned near anyone, and they kept on going. Wojak, Garcia, and Nodell all looked nervous but were working their PADs; Nodell couldn’t seem to get his to work and was muttering a long, steady stream of obscenities to no one in particular. Peterson looked calm and was quietly reading a novel on his. Amberly was asleep. Campanelli and Cartwright were talking to each other. Kaminski worked his PAD. Hastings stared at nothing, his blue eyes very cold.
Or perhaps he was staring at the Singer in his mind’s eye.
The sounds grew louder, slowly, as the kilometers rolled away in the Manta’s wake. It seemed to Jeff they were steadily becoming more complex as well, as new over-and undertones, harmonies, and blended sounds trilled and chirped and groaned in the deep distance. It sounded, he thought, like a chorus of some vast, majestic sea beast—like the extinct great whales were supposed to have been. Could there be whales on Europa?
Unlikely. According to Shigeru, Europan marine life was primitive, most of it unicellular, though larger, more organized forms existed in the great deep. Throughout the vast, foggy emptiness between ice ceiling and mud bottom, however, there was nothing like a fish, or a whale. Nothing but detritus adrift on the icy currents, and the ongoing, haunting song of the Singer.
Four hours into the voyage, and Carver and Hastings exchanged places. Now Carver sat on the jump seat, absorbed by something in his PAD, while Hastings, face and voice muffled by the VR helmet, guided the Manta through the black depths.
Five hours. Jeff and Shigeru crawled onto the viewing couches again when Hastings warned of interesting terrain ahead. Their depth was fifty-one kilometers; the pressure on the outer hull was 663 atmospheres—9,746 psi by the old way of measuring such impossible-to-comprehend physics, or just over 692 kilograms per square centimeter.
The Manta, still descending on a long, shallow glide, was approaching a mountain ridge upthrust from the Europan ocean’s abyssal depths. As he watched, shadowy forms moved into the glare of the sub’s wingtip lights—a wall of rock, and a forest of gently waving fronds.
“Well, Dr. Ishiwara?” he asked as the scientist settled in next to him again. “What’s the verdict? Life or not life?”
“I wish I could say,” Shigeru replied. He had to raise his voice a bit to be heard above the Singer’s moans and trilling wails. “I’ve never seen these species before. My guess is that they’re alive. They look a bit like sea fans on Earth, or some kinds of seaweed. But they also look a lot like very large clumps of Muscomimus. I don’t know.”