The sub skimmed the mountain ridge. As rock and the waving sea grasses dropped away astern, Jeff was struck by an uneasy thought. The average depth of the seabed here was eighty kilometers; that suggested that the mountain range they’d just crossed thrust some twenty-nine kilometers into Europa’s sky, if you thought of the moon’s ocean as its atmosphere. Twenty-nine thousand meters—three and a third times the height of Mount Everest in the Himalayas. Two point eight times taller than Mauna Kea, as measured from that mountain’s base at the bottom of the Pacific.
It seemed strange to think of tiny Europa, a world only a quarter of Earth’s diameter, with mountains three times higher.
“Those mountains,” Shigeru said, as though reading Jeff’s thoughts. “So high, compared to Earth’s. Proof of the violence of this tiny world.”
“How so?”
“Europa is next out from Io, with an orbit only half again larger. The tidal strains on Europa are nearly as great as those that tear at Io—and Io, as they say, is a moon in the process of turning itself inside out. Huge lakes of molten sulfur, volcanoes spewing sulfur hundreds of kilometers into space.
“Europa is not that extreme, but the tidal action is what keeps this ocean liquid. There are volcanoes here, you know, in the depths, and the equivalent of Earth’s “black smokers” as well, spewing sulfur and nitrates and various minerals and compounds into the ocean. There must have been considerable tectonic activity and mountain building.”
“Maybe the lower gravity makes for higher mountains,” Jeff suggested.
“That’s certainly part of it. But the forces within this world’s crust—they make Earth seem tame by comparison.”
Six hours. The song was louder, sharper, more insistent.
Kaminski was looking…not worried, exactly. It was hard to imagine the Sergeant Major being worried by anything. But he was looking uncharacteristically tired and drawn out, his eyes dark hollows, and he was staring at the overhead as though the Singer’s song was wearing at him.
“Ski?” When Kaminski didn’t respond right away, Jeff called louder. “Sergeant Major!”
“Sir!”
“A word with you, please.”
Kaminski rose from his seat and made his way forward, stooping to avoid hitting the overhead. “Yes, sir?”
“You doing okay, Ski? You’re looking a bit ragged.”
“I’m okay, sir. I’m just tired, is all. Have a bit of a headache.”
“You take something?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay. Hang in there. I need everyone alert and gungho—especially my senior NCOs.”
“Yes, sir. There’s no problem, Major.”
“Glad to hear it. I want to go over the specs on those jury-rigged torpedoes, if we could.”
They were soon immersed in a technical discussion. Kaminski seemed alert enough, but Jeff couldn’t shake the feeling that he was in fact not entirely there, that he was pausing from time to time to listen to something else, something calling from far away.
The whalesong of the Singer made him think of the Greek myth of the sirens, temptresses who bewitched sailors with their songs, drawing them to their deaths upon the rocks. Kaminski was normally stolid to the point of imperturbability. What siren’s song had ensnared him?
Eight hours. The Marines were beginning to cramp and grumble over their long, enforced imprisonment. Jeff and Kaminski had them, two at a time, stand, press their hands against the overhead, and stretch, working out the kinks. He then had them eat. They were still on short rations—two meals in twenty-four hours instead of three—but there was more food to go around than had been planned for originally. The unit’s high casualty rate could be blamed for that.
Nine hours, and the Singer’s lament was loud enough to ring from the bulkheads. Most of the Marines had replaced their helmets to muffle the sound. Jeff left his off so he could listen. There was something…something tantalizing, just beyond his grasp…
Their depth was seventy-eight kilometers, with an outside pressure of over one thousand atmospheres—1,058.5 kilograms pressing down on every square centimeter of hull. The bottom was coming up to meet them, a shadowy roughness just visible through the black-blue haze beneath them.
“Major?” Carver was back at the helm. “I think you should take a look up ahead. Tell me if I’m imagining things.”
Carver’s VR feed was a lot more sensitive—and to a far larger stretch of the EM spectrum—than Jeff’s eyes, but he crawled onto one of the viewing couches and wiggled forward. At first, he saw nothing but the Manta’s lights illuminating the omnipresent swirling clouds of dancing white motes.