Angel of Europa Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Rita …?” The captain turned to the astrobiologist.
    “There’s no sense of scale.” Rita nodded toward the screen. “This thing could be twenty meters in length, or twenty millimeters … we don’t know because we can’t tell how close it was to the lens. The way it was lit by the forward floodlights suggests that it may have been very near, but —” she shrugged “—like I said, there’s no real way of knowing. Not without sonar or lidar contacts, at least, which we didn’t get.”
    “Why didn’t you?”
    “Their arrays were pointed straight down so that the pilot could get a fix on what lay directly below the bathyscaphe. There’s always a risk of a collision with an ice shelf, even that far down. So if this thing came at the DSV from sidelong direction, it wouldn’t have been seen. But …” Rita looked up at the captain; Diaz nodded, and she went on. “A couple of things don’t add up. I think you need to listen to something.”
    Reaching into a nylon pouch on her console, Rita pulled out a spare prong. She handed it to Danzig and waited while he fitted it into his right ear, then she typed another command into her keyboard. A rectangular window opened at the bottom of the screen: the wavefile of an audio track.
    “This is the last transmission received from DSV-1,” Rita said. “It’s everything said in the sub just before the ELF failed.” She tapped the ENTER key and the red bar of the wavefile began to creep from left to right, spiking slightly with each sound.
    “Thirty-seven fathoms, range seventy meters.” Evangeline’s voice, steady and routine.
    Silence for four seconds.
    “Oh, my … that’s interesting.” A male voice, mildly curious; its American accent indicated that it belonged to John Connick.
    “I see that, yes. Want me to …?” Definitely Klaus Werner; his German accent was obvious.
    Connick: “No, that’s all right. I don’t