Europa Deep – Paperback

Nineteen kilometres of ice. Eleven months of drilling. One door into the largest ocean in the solar system.

When the crew of Thera Bore finally break through the frozen crust of Jupiter’s moon Europa, their first sonar sweep picks up a sound in the black water below. A slow, steady double knock. Fifty-eight beats a minute.

It matches the heart monitor of their drill chief, Halvard Brekke, who has lain in an induced coma since the accident that nearly killed him. When his heart rate rises, so does the rhythm in the ocean. Beat for beat. No delay.

Then flight surgeon Sabine Achterberg checks the archive, and finds that the sound in the water was there first.

Every heart on the station has been slowing towards it for months. Something vast is keeping time in the dark beneath the ice, and it has been gently drawing every living pulse it can hear into step with its own. It does not mean them harm. It has been alone for a very long time. And each time Europa’s tides lay it down to sleep, it wants them to come with it.

With thirty-five days until the relief ship arrives, a frozen station, and an agency on Earth that would rather keep the shaft open than bring its people home, Sabine has to find a way to make a heart beat on its own again.

Europa Deep is a cold, claustrophobic underwater science fiction horror novel about first contact, loneliness and the rhythm that lives in all of us.