The Krill Enigma: Hard Science Fiction, page 2
"This time it's his shoulder," said Alan.
Isabella sniffed. She cast a sorrowful glance at the remaining slides and finally nodded, though of course Alan couldn’t see it.
"When do I need to be there?"
"The reconnaissance team is already out. I think we can send the first group out at ten-thirty."
"Is everyone going out?"
"Pretty much. Since yesterday’s excursion was canceled, nobody wants to miss the outing today."
She hadn’t even noticed that the landing was canceled the day before. She’d spent the whole day dealing with the retrieval of the probe. Now she’d have to put on really warm clothes. As a biologist, she would spend the whole time on the mainland, explaining gentoo penguin behavior to one group after another.
"Got it. But I’ll need Tarja here."
The intern would have to take over the workshop. Isabella shook her head. She wouldn’t be happy about that. Tarja was a smart young woman, just a little shy. But she’d do fine. She definitely knew enough about the larval stages of krill.
"No problem. I'm not supposed to send her out on a boat on her own yet, and she’d just take up one more place."
"I’ll see you later then, Alan."
"I'm glad you’ll be here. We don’t get to see enough of each other."
The corners of Isabella's mouth turned up into a smile. This was ridiculous. Alan was just being nice. She was ten years older than he was, after all. She terminated the connection without saying anything more, then placed the slides neatly next to each other. She left Tarja's surprise specimen in the microscope. When the intern came for the slides, she would quickly see that her boss had discovered the special one.
She stood up, straightened her blouse, and walked to the door, where she flicked off the light switch. The lab was now completely dark, since it had no windows. They were deep in the belly of the cruise ship. This, of course, had something to do with how important the cruise line considered her research to be. They were lucky to have a laboratory at all. Since the Antarctic Ocean was no longer considered vulnerable, there were hardly any research ships in its waters. Nowadays the gigantic garbage patch in the North Atlantic was a bigger problem.
A red light flashed on the microscope, signaling that something on the slide had changed. Isabella looked at the ink clock on the palm of her hand. The clever tattoo told her it was ten after ten. She needed to hurry. The microscope's software would record what there was to see.
Gex mission control, October 17, 2041
Today there were three of them in mission control. MOM wasn’t there, but Bavin had expected that. He sat down at the end of the front row, on the right. It wasn’t his seat, but it was the one furthest away from Mark and Joanna, who were sitting next to each other in the second row. Joanna giggled from time to time. It was as if the two of them were watching a funny movie together. They probably had nothing to do, but had already used up their home office quota for the week.
That was fine by Bavin. He was searching the internet for possible explanations, and the corners he looked into smelled pretty foul. He used an anonymous account so that nobody would wonder why a JPL employee was visiting these websites. The Ganymede crash had long since vanished from the mainstream media, but it still played a starring role on the internet. Some people had, of course, noticed that the Gex probe had reportedly stopped transmitting twenty seconds prior to the crash.
Bavin came across "Now Revealed: The Secret Twenty Seconds" and other films with similar titles. Sometimes it was possible to tell straight away that they were fake. In one video, for example, a kind of dragon swallowed the probe. Others were made to look really professional with the help of AI. Intriguingly enough, the amateur films attracted far more viewers than the professional ones. Apparently, people craved dragons more than secret American space bases on Ganymede.
Bavin sighed. Searching here was a crazy idea. Why would the US government send a probe to Ganymede and then destroy it so it wouldn't reveal that it had built a base there? It made no sense at all.
"They want to discredit our discovery by presenting it as unlikely or absurd," said a certain Believer.
"That’s ridiculous. The military base was built by the Deep State," KnowsItAll amended. "The civilian parts of the government had nothing to do with it and don’t know anything about it."
"Sorry if this is a stupid question, but what was the base for?" asked TheSheep. "Does it have to do with the Andromedans?"
"Hey, Admin, please kick TheSheep out of here, he's spreading conspiracy theories," wrote one Kai The Kai.
"That's where they store the alien corpses," KnowsItAll answered. "Everybody knows that. Before they opened Area-51, they sent all the evidence to Ganymede."
Following these arguments was exhausting. Bavin rested his head on his arms. How would the people in these forums react if they knew about the Gex recordings? For a moment, he was tempted to upload them. But they’d probably just prove to him that they were fake. They would have to be fake, because there was nothing spectacular to be seen on them.
There was a knock. One half of the double door leading into mission control opened and a man came in. He had light skin and a moustache, and he was wearing overalls and carrying a toolbox. He mumbled something, then walked purposefully through the room to the air conditioning unit. It was about time. The unit whirred so loudly that Bavin sometimes couldn’t hear himself think. Couldn't they have fixed it when there were still twelve of them sitting in this room?
Bavin shook his head. He had to keep working, but he wasn’t going to find what he was looking for with these lunatics. If only there was a spaceship close by that could observe the crash site! Gex had originally been planned as an orbiter-lander mission, like the legendary Cassini probe to Saturn. Then they would have had a satellite orbiting the icy moon that could observe Gex and its crash – and everything that came after it – live. But NASA needed to reduce the cost of the mission by 200 million dollars, so the orbiter had had to land itself.
Pling. A new message. Bavin sat up. The e-mail contained a photo, and he went ahead and opened it. Maybe... But no. The image, which he’d asked a friend at the Webb telescope to take, showed no evidence of an increased release of ice, as would have been expected from such an impact. But Gex had already slowed down considerably. Dang it. It wouldn’t be possible to determine anything outwardly, and if there had been witnesses, he wouldn’t be able to question them.
Wait a minute. If something had opened a window in the ice up there at the last moment of the landing, it must have existed beforehand, right? Gex had scanned the icy moon with all its instruments for three months before it was set to land. It provided so much data that scientists would be analyzing it for years. Shouldn't there be something in there that would point to the reasons for the crash? Perhaps the conspiracy theorists' arguments weren’t so far-fetched after all: considering the huge distances in space, it was extremely unlikely that aliens had visited Ganymede. It was more likely that the governments of the various power blocs on Earth had been able to build something there that nobody was supposed to see. Bavin immediately thought of the Russian RB Group, which probably possessed the necessary technology.
No. He couldn’t let himself get caught up in these crude ideas. How could a Russian company benefit from a secret presence on Ganymede? Bavin shook his head. But two reasons immediately occurred to him. First, for a long time RB had been pursuing the StarShot project, which intended to place powerful lasers throughout the solar system in order to send tiny spaceships to Proxima Centauri. Second, RB might be trying to explore mining options on Ganymede, which the company would certainly not get permission for due to the Ice Moon Ban Treaty.
There was no point thinking about it. Bavin had friends who worked at RB, but nobody in a high position. He logged onto the server that managed the data Gex had collected. It was several terabytes, as Bavin had feared. Just downloading a few files and looking for distinctive properties wouldn’t work. They'd never noticed anything in the many months they'd been controlling Gex from here. So the clues, if any, must be very subtle – maybe a change in the moon's magnetic field here or a particularly deep ice fissure there.
Well, why not use those programming skills? He would write software to search for unusual features. Bavin got to work immediately.
He needed less than three hours to complete the entire project. Fortunately, he’d already written a similar program for Mars. Back then, the idea was to detect underground mass concentrations so as to substantiate the relationship between asteroid impacts and volcanism in the early history of the planet. It was easier with Ganymede, because it was smaller than Mars. But he needed to incorporate data from a significantly higher number of instruments. The program would load them automatically from the server. All he had to do was start it.
But first Bavin stood up and stretched his legs. Was he on the right track? What if he really did encounter something peculiar? He didn’t want to come across like one of those conspiracy theorists. Then again, there had been and still were conspiracies; they just played out differently than the theorists believed.
Bavin sat back down and started the program. What he was doing was science: planetary science. Maybe he’d even find something he could show his colleagues. In any case, he’d need someone who was familiar with Ganymede, who could tell him whether what he found might really have something to do with the probe’s disappearance.
The program beeped. A progress bar indicated that it was loading data. An hourglass turned over, and then a timer appeared. The program would deliver the first results in nineteen hours. Perfect.
Bavin got up from his seat and stretched again. He was hungry. In his fridge at home, there should still be some of the curry his mother brought him two days ago. Dang it. He’d forgotten to buy rice. He’d have to eat the curry with bread. Bavin waved to Mark and Joanna, but they didn’t even notice him leave. As he closed the door to mission control, the world fell apart around him.
MS Geiranger, October 18, 2041
"That wasn't very nice," said Tarja, putting her hands on her hips.
Isabella stopped typing and turned around. When she had to write reports, she usually welcomed any distraction. But the intern sounded angry, and specifically at her. That was just what she needed.
"Can you tell me what you mean, please?"
"The surprise I prepared for you yesterday. I wanted to show it to the three old ladies at the workshop. But when I came to get it, it was gone. Did you take it away?"
"No, Tarja. Yesterday I was on the mainland all day, shooing people away from the gentoo penguins’ paths. Some people just don’t get it!"
And that wasn’t all. Afterwards, she’d also had to write a multi-page report for an Antarctic conservation organization. All cruise ships had to prove that they posed no threat to the fragile ecosystem there. Isabella certainly understood the underlying motive, but writing the reports was tedious and kept her from her research work.
"So you never even saw my surprise? Then who stole it? I neatly sorted all the slides on your table."
Isabella got up and walked over to the table by the door, where the microscope stood. Just as she thought: the slide she’d looked at with the two very different larvae was still in the microscope.
"It’s right here," she said. "Instead of looking carefully, you'd rather blame someone else. That really doesn’t fly here, Tarja."
"What? But I..." Tarja came closer, switched on the microscope, and looked through it. "But that's not the sample I'm looking for. Take a look for yourself!”
"Come on, Tarja. It will be all right. You’ve got to understand when you've made a mistake."
"Yes, and so should you!"
That was really unlike Tarja. She must be having personal problems. That happened to almost everybody on their first trip. They didn’t leave after two or three weeks like the guests did, but stayed for half a year. Some relationships couldn’t take it. Isabella knew this all too well, since her boyfriend had broken up with her after her first gig with Norwegian Expeditions. She put her hand on Tarja's shoulder, but the intern pushed it aside and pointed to the eyepiece, her teeth clenched.
Isabella sighed and looked through it. Crap. Tarja was right. There was only one larva swimming in the sample.
"I'm sorry," said Isabella. "When I looked at it this morning, there were still two."
"But that’s impossible. This can’t be the sample I prepared," said Tarja. "Are you lying to me? Why? So I can get a poor review from the old ladies? I'm not your competition! I actually really like you."
Tarja was looking at her with narrowed eyes. Isabella saw that there were tears in them, and she felt sorry for the young girl. Tarja reminded her of her own youth. She also wouldn’t put up with adults who had no idea what they were doing. But the office was a professional environment, and she needed to learn to pull herself together.
"What's gotten into you? Every so often, one larva will eat another. Superba is known for being cannibalistic when there’s a lack of food. And the sample was lying around for a day. The larva got hungry, and there were no alternatives. You should know that!"
"Isabella, did you even take a good look? This sample has a nauplius II swimming in it. There was also a calyptopis III in the one I gave you. It's a lot bigger! You're not going to tell me that the little one ate the big one, are you?"
Hold on. Isabella was dead certain she’d left the sample with the two larvae in the slide so that Tarja would know she’d found the surprise. She bent over the eyepiece. There really was a second-stage larva in there. She switched on the observation tablet. It was integrated into the table and displayed what the microscope saw. She took the digital marker out of its case and measured the specimen. It was significantly larger than a typical nauplius II, and the exoskeleton seemed to press the transparent body into shape. It looked like a man with a belt buckled tightly around his big belly.
"The nauplius II must be about to molt," said Isabella.
"Isn't that way too soon?" asked Tarja.
"Well, that depends on the environmental conditions. Which aren’t that great in a microscope slide."
"Ah, so you mean the other way round?" Tarja asked.
Isabella nodded. When the food supply for krill became too low, many specimens decreased in size. They would also molt, to better fit into their now tighter clothes. When she was a teenager, Isabella had sometimes wished she could speed up becoming an adult by shedding her skin.
"But one of the specimens is still missing," said Tarja.
That was true, though the larger larva could easily have eaten the smaller one. Isabella thought about the red eye the microscope had opened at the very moment she’d had to go outside.
"You know what?" she asked. "We'll just watch both of them going through their changes live."
"You mean the camera recorded it?"
"I’ve got a hunch."
"Let’s do it, then."
Isabella pressed the play button on the observation tablet. The nauplius II jumped up on the left side of the screen and a calyptopis III appeared on the right. The size difference was impressive. The calyptopis III already had many of the characteristics of adult krill.
Suddenly, the nauplius II moved forward. It pounced on the calyptopis, which didn’t defend itself but rather appeared to freeze. For around a minute, both seemed to feel comfortable in the embrace. Then, all of a sudden, the body of the calyptopis opened up at the point where the smaller larva was touching it. The latter was now swept almost automatically inside the calyptopis, where it visibly began to digest its victim's organs. It did this very efficiently and didn’t even stop at the chitin structures.
"What is going on?" asked Tarja.
"I'm wondering the very same thing. The nauplius II must produce an especially strong acid that was fatal to the larger larva. This is a significant discovery. Nobody has ever observed such behavior in Eu. superba before!"
General Laplace Hospital, October 18, 2041
"I'm so sorry," said Alina.
MOM sat on his bed and shook her head.
"Give me the mirror already," said Bavin.
"That’s not necessary. You'll look a lot better in a few days."
"I was in the Mongolian War, Alina. I don’t have any problem seeing bodies blown apart by bombs."
A shiver ran down his spine. What had he just compared himself to? It couldn’t be that bad! MOM winced.
"All right, if you really want to."
She handed him a pocket mirror. Bavin looked at it and had to swallow. Good. At least now he understood why his mother hadn’t gotten a word out that morning when she’d visited. For once, his father had to do the talking. Later, through the open window, he’d heard a woman crying loudly in the parking lot before she’d driven off, tires screeching.
"That's not a problem," he said. "The doctors have assured me that most of the scratches are superficial and I can leave this room in a few days."
"I'm glad for you."
"Are they still outside?" he asked.
"Oh yes, you're being well-guarded. I was searched thoroughly."
"I explained to them that it wasn't aimed at me, but they won’t listen. As long as they're not sure who the target was, I'm under police protection."
Alina shook her head. "You're right, you certainly weren’t the target of the attack. The bombers definitely come from the world of conspiracy theorists. I took a look at what's been going on there. The Gex mission is one of the most important topics at the moment."
"I can imagine, especially now. But for one of them to resort to violence?"
"Well, that wouldn’t be anything new," said Alina. "And what’s more, the majority of the conspiracy theorists believe the explosion was intended to conceal the facts. So apparently it was the Deep State’s secret service that got you."
