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deeper, clearing the lower colonies of kelp by only a few dozen meters. The kraken dived behind him. If a kraken could grin, it would be grinning now—this was its killing depth.
    Mahnmut reluctantly cleared Sonnet 116 from his visual field and considered his options. Being eaten by a kraken less than a hundred kilometers from Conamara Chaos Central would be embarrassing. It was these damn bureaucrats’ fault—they needed to cull their local subseas of monsters before they ordered one of their moravec explorers back to a meeting.
    He could kill the kraken. But with no harvester submersible within a thousand klicks, the beautiful beastie would be torn to shreds and devoured by the parasites in the flashlight kelp colonies, by salt sharks, by free-floating tube worms, and by other kraken long before a company harvester could get near it. It would be a terrible waste.
    Mahnmut pulled his vision out of virtual long enough to look around his enviro-niche, as if a glimpse of his cluttered reality could give him an idea. It did.
    On his console desk, along with the leather-bound volumes of Shakespeare and the Vendler printout, was his lava lamp—a little joke from his old moravec partner Urtzweil almost twenty J-years ago.
    Mahnmut smiled and re-engaged virtual along all bandwidths. This close to Chaos Central there would have to be diapirs, and kraken hated diapirs . . .
    Yes. Fifteen klicks south by southeast, an entire belchfield of them, rising slowly toward the cap ice just as languidly as the wax blobs did in his lava lamp. Mahnmut set his course to the nearest diapir rising to a lead and added five more knots just to be safe, if there was such a thing as safety within tentacle range of a mature kraken.
    A diapir was nothing more than a blob of warm ice, heated by the vents and gravitational hot zones far below, rising through the Epsom-salt sea toward the ice cap that had once covered 100 percent of Europa and which now, two thousand e-years after the cryobot arbeiter company arrived, still covered more than 98 percent of the moon. This diapir was about fifteen klicks across and rising rapidly as it approached the surface cap.
    Kraken did not like the electrolytic properties of diapirs. They refused to foul even their probe tentacles with the stuff, much less their killing arms and maws.
    Mahnmut’s sub reached the rising blob a good ten kilometers ahead of the pursuing kraken, slowed, morphed its outer hull to impact strength, pulled in sensors and probes, and bored into the glob of slush. Mahnmut used sonar and EPS to check the lenticulae and navigation leads still some eight thousand meters above him. In a few minutes the diapir itself would mush into the thick cap ice, flow upward through fissures, lentinculae and leads, and bubble slush ice in a fountain a hundred meters high. For a short time, this part of Conamara Chaos would look like Lost-Age America’s Yellowstone Park, with red-sulfur geysers geysing and hot springs boiling. Then the spray trail would disperse in Europa’s one-seventh Earth gravity, fall like a slow-motion slushstorm for kilometers on either side of each surface lenticula, and then freeze in Europa’s thin, artificial atmosphere—all 100 millibars of it—adding more abstract sculptural forms to the already tortured icefields.
    Mahnmut couldn’t be killed in literal terms—although part organic, he “existed” rather than “lived,” and he was designed tough—but he definitely did not want to become part of a fountain or a frozen chunk of an abstract sculpture for the next thousand e-years. For a minute he forgot both the kraken and Sonnet 116 as he worked the numbers—the diapir’s ascent rate, his submersible’s forward progress through the slush, the fast-approaching cap ice—and then he downloaded his thoughts to the engine room and ballast tanks. If it worked right, he would exit the south side of the diapir half a klick before glob impact with the ice and accelerate