Arrival

Abstract

They told Hadley that Taliesin Chaos was in one of those rare “sweet spots” on Europa. Hugging the edge of the great Sarpedon Linea band, it spread across a ridged plain of ice 900 kilometers south of the equator, a muddled landscape sheltered from the full onslaught of Jupiter’s deadly magnetosphere. Taliesin was on the leading hemisphere, facing slightly downwind of the direction from which Jupiter’s radiation fields overtook Europa. Just around the horizon, on the other side of the ice moon, the king of worlds bathed the surface in radiation potent enough to kill a human in an old-style suit within six minutes. But on the opposite side, the radiation fell to manageable levels.