Listen up, rookie. Pour me some more of that synthetic poison, and I'll tell you what real hell looks like when it's frozen to the core.
See that scar over my eye? It wasn't the women at the port who gave it to me, or the fight over the last canister of oxygen. I smashed my head on the ice of Europa while laughing. And I was laughing at some sly mechanic.
His name was, let's say, Sam. The space wolves know him, whatever his passport number is. He fled Earth when they started imprisoning people for diesel fuel and murder. And he settled down with us, in the Conamara dome. He worked, drank, drank, and worked. And then, after yet another binge, which lasted exactly as long as he had clearance to use the oxygen rack, Sam felt the urge to go underwater.
"I'm tired of it," he says, "I don't care about the stars. I want to stun fish with a stun gun right in the ocean, under a kilometer of ice."
Well, a sober person would have submitted a proposal to build a bathyscaphe. Maybe they'd approve it in three years. But Sam wasn't sober. He was a genius.
He went to a scrap yard for used drill heads. He tore off the skins of shuttles that had crashed during the first wave of colonization. He rigged up engines from old "robot fish." He welded together a shell from three ammonia tankers. He fastened it all together with curse words and foam sealant, which, damn it, gets stronger than armor in the cold.
And the result was a vessel. Don't ask me what it looked like. Imagine if an old thermos had ♥♥♥♥♥♥ an underwater drone, and then their child had been kicked by a gravity tractor. Made of ♥♥♥♥, as they say... although what kind of sticks are there on Europa? Debris and vacuum tape.
The only problem is there's no decent engine. Getting a mini-reactor for such a trough? It'd be easier to grab Jupiter by the gills. Sam scratched his head, hiccupped, and climbed into his hangar. He rolled out a battery. A huge one, the size of the bar we're sitting in now. He said it was an old battery farm from some abandoned probe.
He stuffed the thing in the hold and secured it with cables from an oil rig. Now, he says, it's all peace and quiet. No turbines, no steam. Just a single Ilyich light bulb and a propeller from the regeneration system fan.
And he dove through the ice.
Can you imagine the scene? The ice above is a hundred meters thick. Below is a liquid ocean, the temperature just above freezing, but pitch black. And in this darkness, Sam floats. In a tin can welded together from trash. Instead of a sonar, he has an Elektronika tape recorder, beeping on batteries. Instead of a periscope, he has a piece of corrugated pipe with a video peephole from a child's toy robot.
So, he's floating in the depths, and around him, maybe, the tentacles of monsters are moving, or those, what are they called... hydrothermal worms. But for Sam, there's silence. Only the hum of his battery and the slosh of the liquid in the hold, seeping through the seams. He sits there, in just a dirty T-shirt, steering this boat with the remote control of an old bulldozer and winking at the mutant fish through a porthole he cut from the plexiglass of a wrecked all-terrain vehicle.
So he plied Europa's oceans. As long as there was coal in his batteries, he was Captain Nemo. And when it sank, he'd float up closer to the ice crust, clasp himself to some old geothermal probe, and hang there, hooking himself up with wires directly to the "black smoker" at the bottom to recharge. He'd sit there and wait for the thermal energy to flow into his batteries.
No one bothered him. Even cruiser-sized shrimp avoided him—probably thinking he was some new kind of crustacean junk that gave painful electric shocks.
So, kid, remember. If you want to live on Jupiter's icy moon, you either have millions to spend on a reactor or hands growing out of the right place and a sack full of contempt for all the laws of physics and logistics. Sam chose the latter. And he was damn happy.
Toothpick original - Aspen. Remake - RPDPLYR
