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

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