Angel of Europa Read Free

personal favor if you’d have someone accompany you the next time you visit the airlock. You’re just lucky Dylan picked that moment to visit H2 when you opened the outer hatch.”
    Danzig couldn’t help but grin. Dylan McNeil was the chief engineer, and ever since launch he’d constantly visited the hub’s lower deck to check the major systems, as if the Explorer was a fragile machine that might break at any minute. McNeil’s fussiness had become a standing joke among the crew, but Danzig had to admit that it may have saved his life.
    “I’ll keep it in mind.” Danzig pushed back the covers and sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. Philips had finally relented and allowed him to swap his surgical gown for trousers and a sweatshirt; otherwise, he wouldn’t have let Diaz see him practically undressed. “So let’s get to the important stuff … why did you have me revived?”
    “Okay.” Folding her arms across her chest, the captain looked down at the floor as if to gather her thoughts. “You know we’ve been in orbit above Callisto for the last four months, right? And that we landed on Europa and established a base camp about three months ago?”
    “Uh-huh. All according to plan.” Although Europa was the expedition’s most important target among the Galilean satellites, its orbit lay within the belt of intense radiation surrounding Jupiter. It had been decided that the Zeus Explorer would park itself above Callisto, 1,884,000 kilometers from Jupiter and outside the radiation belt, and survey teams would shuttle back and forth between the ship and Europa, 1,213,000 kilometers away. This way their radiation exposure would remain within tolerable levels.
    “Right. Well, a few of weeks ago, the science team finally broke through the surface ice at Consolmagno Base. They managed to locate a point between two ridges in the Conamara Chaos where it looked like friction between two ice packs temporarily melted through the surface, so they only had to cut a hole just a little more than one kilometer deep.”
    “That’s pretty lucky.” It had been previously estimated that the ice layer separating Europa’s surface from the global ocean below had an average thickness of ten kilometers. But the Conamara Chaos, a region just north of the equator, has a series of fissures and ridges which hint that it’s an area that has experienced periodic cycles of melting and refreezing due to internal heat caused by ice packs rubbing against each other. The expedition had been gambling on the notion that the ice might be thin enough at the bottom of one of Conamara’s fissures to allow a laser drill to penetrate all the way to the subsurface ocean.
    “Yes it was,” Diaz said. “Once that was accomplished, they dropped a cable down the hole and used it to lower a RSV. The robot showed us a lot, of course …”
    “Life?”
    “Yes, and plenty of it. Rather primitive, though, with the dominant species not much more than something that looks a little like brine shrimp. Not what a lot of us were expecting. So I let the scientists do what they wanted to do all along and send down a bathyscaphe.”
    Among the expedition’s equipment were a pair of tethered submersibles specially designed for this particular mission; two were brought in case one malfunctioned and needed to be replaced. Along with the laser drill, the robotic survey vehicle, and the dome shelters used to establish the base camp, the DSVs were transported to Jupiter aboard an unmanned cargo vessel launched from Earth orbit just a few weeks before the Explorer . The cargo carrier had gone into orbit around Europa; upon arrival at Jupiter, the expedition spent the first few weeks ferrying equipment down to Europa. Io, Ganymede, and Callisto were of only secondary interest; Europa was the Galilean satellite considered most likely to be harboring life, and extraterrestrial life was the holy grail of interplanetary exploration.
    “The scientists must