Free The Frozen Sky by Jeff Carlson Page A

any hint of another thinking race within a hundred and fifty lightyears.  Some joke.  All that time the amphibians were inside the solar system, a neighbor, a counterpart.  It should have been the luckiest miracle.  It should have been like coming home.  But that had been Vonnie's worst mistake, to think of them as similar in any way.  They were an intelligence that seemed to lack fear or even hesitation, and that might be exactly why her trap would work.
    She decided to risk it.  She was exhausted and hurt, and staying in one place would give her time to attempt repairs again, regain the advantage.  
    She found a small shelf in the crumbling rock face above the slide and settled in to kill more of them.

2.
    Jupiter's sixth moon was an ocean, a deep, complete sphere too far from the sun to exist as a liquid.  Not at temperatures of -162 Celsius.  Human beings first walked the ice in 2094, and flybys and probes had buzzed this distant white orb since 1979.  Europa was an interesting place.  For one thing, there was a uique oxygen atmosphere created by the slow dissociation of molecules from the surface.  It was water ice.
    It was a natural fuel depot for fusion ships.
    Before the end of the twenty-first century, the investment of fifty mecha and two dozen more in spare parts was well worth an endless supply of deuterium at the edge of human civilization. The diggers and the processing stations were fusion-powered themselves, as were the tankers parked in orbit.
    Spacecraft came next, some crewed, some robots too — and eighteen years passed.  It might have been longer.  Much longer. The mecha were all on the equator, where it was easiest for the tankers to hold position above them without constantly burning fuel, fighting Jupiter's gravity and the tug of other moons.
    Eighteen years.  But the glacial tides within the ice gave Europa a great many "environments" — grinds, stacks, chasms, melts —  and only the smooth, so-called plains were deemed safe by the men and women who guided the mecha by remote telepresence. Looking ahead, they sent rovers in all directions, surveying, sampling.
    At the southern pole was a smooth area that covered nearly forty kilometers.  Many rovers went there.

3.
    Vonnie shivered, an intensely ugly sensation inside her suit.  She'd locked the joints and torso, becoming a statue, preventing herself from causing any movement whatsoever, but inside it she was still skin and muscle.
    The feel of her body against this shell was repulsive.  Again and again she caught herself squirming and tensing, trying to shrink away from it, trying the impossible.
    The rut in her thinking wasn't much better.  She wished Choh Lam hadn't tried to...  She wished somehow she'd saved them.  Lam grasped so much so fast, he might have already found a way out, a way up .  She'd cobbled together a ghostling using his mem files but she couldn't give it enough capacity to correct its flaws.  She would have to shut down her ears or the override she'd programmed into her heat exchanger, each a different kind of death.  Better to forget him.  Erase him.
    But even at three-quarters logic he was useful.  He'd suggested a tranquilizer and Vonnie popped one tab, slowed down enough to feel clear again.  Clear and cold.  She shouldn't be cold, sweating inside her hard shell, but the waiting was like its own labyrinth of ice —  the waiting and the listening and the deep bruises in her face.
    She didn't care how sophisticated the medical systems were supposed to be.  On some level her body knew it was hurt, even numbed and shot full of don't-worry. 
    Her head had a dozen good reasons why she was safe but her body knew the amphibians would come again.
    The lonely dark was alive.  That truth no longer surprised her and she strained her senses out into the thin, cold spaces reaching away from her, more afraid of missing the amphibians than of drawing in an attack.  It was superstitious to imagine they