Alastair Reynolds - A Spy In Europa

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A Spy in Europa - a short story by Alastair Reynolds
A Spy in Europa
a short story by Alastair Reynolds
Marius Vargovic, agent of Gilgamesh Isis, savoured an instant of free-fall
before the flitter's engines kicked in, slamming it away from the
Deucalion. His pilot gunned the craft toward the moon below, quickly
outrunning the other shuttles which the Martian liner had disgorged.
Europa seemed to be enlarging perceptibly; a flattening arc the colour of
nicotine-stained wallpaper.
"Boring, isn't it."
Vargovic turned around in his seat, languidly. "You'd rather they were
shooting at us?"
"Rather they were doing something."
"Then you're a fool," Vargovic said, making a tent of his fingers.
"There's enough armament buried in that ice to give Jupiter a second red
spot. What it would do to us doesn't bear thinking about it."
"Only trying to make conversation."
"Don't bother - it's an overrated activity at the best of times."
"Alright, Marius - I get the message. In fact I intercepted it, parsed it,
filtered it, decrypted it with the appropriate one-time pad and wrote a
fucking two-hundred page report on it. Satisfied?"
"I'm never satisfied, Mishenka. It just isn't in my nature."
 But Mishenka was right: Europa was an encrypted document; complexity
masked by a surface of fractured and refrozen ice. Its surface grooves
were like the capillaries in a vitrified eyeball; faint as the structure
in a raw surveillance image. But once within the airspace boundary of the
Europan Demarchy, traffic-management co-opted the flitter, vectoring it
into a touchdown corridor. In three days Mishenka would return, but then
he would disable the avionics, kissing the ice for less than ten minutes.
"Not too late to abort," Mishenka said, a long time later.
"Are you out of your tiny mind?"
The younger man dispensed a frosty Covert Ops smile. "We've all heard what
the Demarchy do to spies, Marius."
"Is this a personal grudge or are you just psychotic?"
"I'll leave being psychotic to you, Marius - you're so much better at it."
Vargovic nodded. It was the first sensible thing Mishenka had said all
day.
They landed an hour later. Vargovic adjusted his Martian businesswear,
tuning his holographically-inwoven frock coat to project red sandstorms;
lifting the collar in what he had observed from the liner's passengers was
a recent Martian fad. Then he grabbed his bag - nothing incriminating
there; no gadgets or weapons - and exited the flitter, stepping through
the gasket of locks. A slitherwalk propelled him forward, massaging the
soles of his slippers. It was a single cultured ribbon of octopus skin,
stimulated to ripple by the timed firing of buried squid axons.
To get to Europa you either had to be sickeningly rich or sickeningly
poor. Vargovic's cover was the former: a lie excusing the single-passenger
flitter. As the slitherwalk advanced he was joined by other arrivals:
 business people like himself, and a sugaring of the merely wealthy. Most
of them had dispensed with holographics, instead projecting entoptics
beyond their personal space; machine-generated hallucinations decoded by
the implant hugging Vargovic's optic nerve. Hummingbirds and seraphim were
in sickly vogue. Others were attended by autonomous perfumes which subtly
altered the moods of those around them. Slightly lower down the social
scale, Vargovic observed a clique of noisy tourists - antlered brats from
Circum-Jove. Then there was a discontinuous jump: squalid-looking Maunder
refugees, who must have accepted indenture to the Demarchy. The refugees
were quickly segregated from the more affluent immigrants, who found
themselves within a huge geodesic dome, resting above the ice on
refrigerated stilts. The walls of the dome glittered with duty-free shops,
boutiques and bars. The floor was bowl-shaped, slitherwalks and spiral
stairways descending to the nadir, where a quincunx of fluted marble
cylinders waited. Vargovic observed that the newly-arrived were queueing
for elevators which terminated in the cylinders. He joined a line and
waited.
"First time in Cadmus-Asterius?" asked the bearded man ahead of him,
iridophores in his plum-coloured jacket projecting Boolean propositions
from Sirikit's Machine Ethics in the Transenlightenment.
"First time on Europa, actually. First time Circum-Jove, you want the full
story."
"Down-system?"
"Mars."
The man nodded gravely. "Hear it's tough."
 "You're not kidding." And he wasn't. Since the sun had dimmed - the second
Maunder minimum, repeating the behaviour which the sun had exhibited in
the seventeenth century - the entire balance of power in the First System
had altered. The economies of the inner worlds had found it hard to
adjust; agriculture and power-generation handicapped, with concomitant
social upheaval. But the outer planets had never had the luxury of solar
energy in the first place. Now Circum-Jove was the benchmark of First
System economic power, with Circum-Saturn trailing behind. Because of
this, the two primary Circum-Jove superpowers - the Demarchy, which
controlled Europa and Io - and Gilgamesh Isis - which controlled Ganymede,
and parts of Callisto - were vying for dominance.
The man smiled keenly. "Here for anything special?"
"Surgery," Vargovic said, hoping to curtail the conversation at the
earliest juncture. "Very extensive anatomical surgery."
They hadn't told him much.
"Her name is Cholok," Control had said, after Vargovic had skimmed the
dossiers back in the caverns which housed the Covert Operations section of
Gilgamesh Isis security, deep in Ganymede. "We recruited her ten years
ago, when she was on Phobos."
"And now she's Demarchy?"
Control had nodded. "She was swept up in the brain-drain, once Maunder II
began to bite. The smartest got out while they could. The Demarchy - and
us, of course - snapped up the brightest."
"And also one of our sleepers." Vargovic glanced down at the portrait of
the woman, striped by video lines. She looked mousey to him, with a
 permanent bone-deep severity of expression.
"Cheer up," Control said. "I'm asking you to contact her, not sleep with
her."
"Yeah, yeah. Just tell me her background."
"Biotech." Control nodded at the dossier. "On Phobos she led one of the
teams working in aquatic transform work - modifying the human form for
submarine operations."
Vargovic nodded diligently. "Go on."
"Phobos wanted to sell their know-how to the Martians, before their oceans
froze. Of course, the Demarchy also appreciated her talents. Cholok took
her team to Cadmus-Asterius, one of their hanging cities."
"Mm." Vargovic was getting the thread now. "By which time we'd already
recruited her."
"Right," Control said, "except we had no obvious use for her."
"Then why this conversation?"
Control smiled. Control always smiled when Vargovic pushed the envelope of
subservience. "We're having it because our sleeper won't lie down." Then
Control reached over and touched the image of Cholok, making her speak.
What Vargovic was seeing was an intercept; something Gilgamesh had
captured, riddled with edits and jump-cuts.
She appeared to be sending a verbal message to an old friend in Isis. She
was talking rapidly from a white room; inert medical servitors behind her.
Shelves displayed flasks of colour-coded medichines. A cruciform bed
resembled an autopsy slab with ceramic drainage sluices.
"Cholok contacted us a month ago," Control said. "The room's part of her
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