Johnny Winger and the Europa Quandary

Johnny Winger and the Europa Quandary

  Copyright 2015 Philip Bosshardt

  Prologue

  It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you, not by angels or by demons, heaven or hell.

  Buddha

  Europa

  September 1, 2120

  On Europa, there is only ice…to the naked eye. Ice cliffs and ice valleys. Ice ravines and ice canyons. Ice bergs, buttes, badlands. Ice continents. Above the ice is the vacuum of space. Below the ice is a vast ocean, black as night. Normally, the two don’t mix.

  In the late summer of 2120, as people on Earth reckon time, a small channel of sluggish, slightly warmer ice surged upward through the badlands of Conamara Chaos, embedded in a column known to geologists as a diapir, and burst through the surface crust. A geyser erupted into space, not in itself an unusual occurrence on Europa. However, this geyser extended over several square kilometers, flinging tons of ice and steam into the heavens.

  This geyser caught the attention of observers on Earth and at Korolev Crater’s Farside Observatory, on the Moon.

  After the Jovian Hammer mission some years before, an orbiting detection network had been put into place around Europa. Known as Europa-Eye, it was designed to provide intelligence on what the Keeper, still thought to be buried in the Europan sea, was doing. The network contained numerous instruments: visual cameras, mass spectrometers, neutron flux devices, radiometers.

  On the first day of September, Europa-Eye detected evidence of some kind of vast swarm movement under the ice. Increased thermals, spikes in electromagnetic activity, even acoustic signals well above baseline were detected and processed through SpaceGuard Center at Farside.

  There was no consensus on what the signals meant, just a growing suspicion that the Keeper, a colossal swarm of nanobotic devices, seemed to be stirring after more than a decade of quiescence. Analysts at SpaceGuard Center, vidconferencing with their colleagues at the UNISPACE Watch Command Center in Paris, concurred that something was happening on the surface of Europa, something different, something unexpected.

  Visual analysis from Europa-Eye was inconclusive. But it was plain to see from the imagery streaming back from Jupiter’s huge satellite, that a newly formed geyser had just erupted on the surface. After some discussion, UNISPACE analysts finally decided to log the event as an icequake, a shifting of ice plates and ice continents, that had opened up a channel to pressurized water beneath. That water, rising through the newly formed channel from the Europan ocean, was now sublimating into space, in a series of spectacular geysers. The phenomenon seemed to be mainly centered along a series of ice grooves, known as linea, starting in the Conamara Chaos and ending at the southern end of Radamanthys Linea, longitude 192 degrees, latitude 12 degrees north.

  Or so they thought. The report issued to CINCSPACE made the conclusion that the geyser field was nothing more than an unusual series of ice plates shifting about, despite growing evidence of massive swarm movements in the ocean below. Europa-Eye would continue to observe and record the event, providing thesis material for astronomers and geologists and glaciologists for years to come. Farside and UNISPACE would continue to monitor the activity that had roiled the surface of Europa.

  But the report was firm in its principal conclusion: natural forces were responsible for a series of new ice geysers erupting on the surface of Europa. It was more violent and spectacular than before, but nothing the investigators hadn’t seen before on countless worlds, even on Europa itself.

  What Europa-Eye could not see, however, was what was actually embedded in the main geyser, hidden from view, obscured by the violence of tons of ice sublimating into space every second. The Keeper swarm itself, once a target of Quantum Corps investigation from close range during the Golden Horde case, was no longer submerged in Europa’s ocean of night. Instead, the Keeper had bored through more than thirty kilometers of ice and arisen to the surface of the satellite. Now residing in a steep ice ravine, surrounded by towering ice cliffs, hidden by geysering spouts of water, the vast swarm boiled away like a festering sore, slamming atoms to maintain itself and expand in the maelstrom of erupting ice and water.

  As it settled onto the icy surface, the Keeper had begun to bud off trillions of replicant bots from its main structure. The Keeper was shedding parts of itself.

  These bots sloughed off and drifted upward, some riding on droplets of water, particles of ice sublimating into the vacuum. Most of the bots managed to achieve escape velocity through infinitesimal nano-scale thrusters, using the available water as propellant. Orienting themselves toward the Sun, the swelling swarm of nanobots soon entered a steep, elliptical heliocentric orbit, an orbit which would intersect the orbit of Earth in less than six months.

  Disguised by the geysers, the swarm escaped Europa and the Jupiter system completely. They now drifted sunward…and Earthward.