Europa i-net

Picollo@i.net.j.eur.139.070.100::

"It gets pretty cold at night under ten kilometers of ice. I made it out of my bar when the ego-hunters came, but it wasn't clean. I'm pretty sure I can't go back for supplies, so I'll have to make due with what I hid in these caches until I can come up with some better plan.

"I'm currently deep inside an ice cave I found up in the ice ceiling. They are all over the place, but finding them is a bitch. Jupiter sloshes Europa around like a drunken whore, and it plays out in the waves. Most of the time you wake up with a pleasant smile on your face, as the waves are gentle and predictable, but every once in awhile, it wasn't worth waking up. That slow-moving mountain wave that shrieks up out of the icy depths is what makes the ceiling such an interesting place. Between the horrific gusts of wind that will slap a whole ice-bubble colony back into space if they didn't prepare for the pressures that come roaring through with fingers of ice, to the awful fist of a shattered storm of ice broken up from deep below by unfathomable pressures, there is nothing like mercy in the face of that frozen Poseidon. I am a bit florid in my writings, but forgive me if the act of exercising my mind brings me a warmth that has no place on this frozen celestial sphere.

"My plans are to find the caches that other survivors lost inside of ice pockets when the caves reformed. I found some time ago that veins of the silicate structures from the ocean below can be easily converted into an ad-hock computing network with some low-energy nano-swarms and a few laser optic arrays. I have to burn them behind me, and they are only as robust as the worst of pre-Flight computer networks. They can't be used for much more than leaving these messages in bottle behind, and see if there are any optical channels through the ice that bounce me back any information worth having. I found a few caches that way, but I had to use up some of my precious thermite to melt a way there. I hit a pocket of some nasty mixture of frozen acids and ammonia crystals, but I was following good practice and staying at least two turns back the tunnel from the cutting location, so I only lost some shielding on the drone. It will make due with the repairs I was able to give it by harvesting some parts from the bolt-hole of some pilgrim past, built when the Republic thought that the ice was more stable than it is. I've heard of these things having families that refused to leave, even knowing that the wave might seal them away from civilization and help, and even a few that have survived in some unhealthy fashion.

"I want to know who put that contract out on me. I mean, I know it was this Kerimov character, that much is obvious, but he didn't reach his hand down from whatever castle in the sky he reigns in and post that message himself. I need to find some intermediaries and ask them some questions. And I want to meet those Peccaso Brothers team again, just for offending my sensibilities. They got the drop on me simply because my mind refused to believe that two pink unicorns in combat armor were breaking through the door and pointing railguns at my head."