December 6, 2022 · 🇺🇸 🇨🇳 🔶 Fiction Europa

Rendezvous

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[T]he universe is an ocean, the moon is the Diaoyu Islands, Mars is Huangyan Island. If we don’t go there now even though we’re capable of doing so, then we will be blamed by our descendants. If others go there, then they will take over, and you won’t be able to go even if you want to. This is reason enough.

-- Ye Peijian, the father of Chang'e lunar probes

“Thirty Seconds.”

The voice of the young ensign wavered, amplifying the tension that permeated the dimly lit control room. Dr. Shilpa Devareddy, director of NASA’s Europa Lander program, stood behind a battery of naval officers and mission specialists, her eyes fixed upon a large, holographic sphere, a three-dimensional tactical display of the Jovian moon’s ocean interior where two groups of small ellipses - four red, four blue - were converging. The unfolding events had occurred nearly an hour before, the time it took for the data-heavy transmission to travel the 390 million miles to Earth, but they may as well have been happening in real time.

Shilpa placed a hand absently on the ensign’s shoulder. “Magnify, please.”

The blue ellipses morphed into detailed representations of Atom-class XE microsubmarines, variants of the U.S. Navy’s most advanced autonomous underwater vehicle that had been developed specifically for this mission. Each vehicle bristled not only with highly advanced scientific instruments designed to search for any trace of extraterrestrial life, but a wide range of countermeasures and devastating effectors, as well as an artificial intelligence (affectionately known as “Falken”) that could pivot from mild-mannered explorer to rampaging warrior in a nanosecond. The red ellipses now depicted similarly rigged variants of the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s premier AUV, the Shāyú, or “shark.” The Atoms and Shāyús had blasted into the vacuum of space atop the most powerful rockets ever built, racing each other across the solar system for nearly six years, their hulls safely encased in cryobots designed to melt passages through miles of ancient ice before releasing them into the dark, frigid waters of Europa.

“Twenty seconds.”

Shilpa shook her head. How did we get here? For the scientist in her, it was all so very absurd, if not utterly immoral. She bristled at the horror of exporting human conflict to another world in the name of scientific exploration. If we cannot explore in peace, should we even explore at all? But for the Navy and the powers that be, it was simply a matter of realpolitik - entirely predictable, if not unavoidable. Confrontations like these were now commonplace beneath the surface of the Earth’s oceans. Beginning in the late 2020s, as the subsea domain became ever more a battleground of strategic competition, the first American and Chinese pods of microsubmarines entered on duty, and the great powers began exploiting the opaque subsea domain to wage a shadowy, anonymous war of sabotage, denial, and deception.

“Fifteen seconds.”

And of course astrobiology, much like all of science itself, had been slowly subsumed by the machinations of geostrategy. When faint traces of microbial life had been detected by the Lander’s predecessor, Europa Clipper, it seemed only a matter of time before Atoms and Shāyús would be clashing on the watery moon. As the race for Europa intensified, and Beijing doubled down on its outrageous interplanetary claims, NASA found itself turning to the U.S. Navy for assistance in developing an autonomous underwater platform capable of not only analyzing the complex ocean properties of an alien moon, but, if necessary, defending itself against Chinese aggression.

“Ten seconds.”

Now all Shilpa could do was watch and wait, and hope that the Atom’s dizzying array of cutting edge technologies would perform as expected, that Falken was truly as brilliant as everyone believed, and that, if it really came down to it, its extensive training in undersea combat tactics would be enough to repel a Shāyú attack, enabling the mission to survive for at least one more day.

“Five.”

Or maybe all the posturing, the rhetoric, the weaponizing – maybe they’d all been just byproducts of a pernicious, Cold War-style paranoia. Maybe somewhere in a dimly lit control room on the other side of the world, reason had taken hold, and a shared sense of curiosity, of humanity, had prevailed. Shilpa stared at the hologram. Maybe somehow they too understand that science belongs to all of us.

“Four.”

Shilpa watched as the targets closed, and she suddenly found herself picturing her daughter, swinging in the backyard -

“Three.”

The way she’d look up toward the heavens -

“Two”

As if wondering to herself:

“One.”

Is anyone out there?

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