White Ice, Black Depths

 The Separatists orbited the icy white moon and smiled. A white planet for a white people. The symmetry was obvious.

"It's even named Europa," one of them quipped. "Obviously it was meant for us alone."

"Could there be life down there?" Another colonist inquired.

"No," The President reassured them.  "Some microbial life, but nothing multicellular, much less intelligent. We've got the moon all to ourselves."

The drills were deployed and three perfect circles were cut in the thick ice of the moon's oceans. They sank to the rocky floor of the sea and anchored into the moon's core. It had taken decades of planning and trillions of dollars, but after the Himalayan Wars and the Pogroms of the Pacific, the world became a different place.  Racial discrimination of every kind was abhorred, and the Separatists had felt it was worth every penny to escape a world that would no longer tolerate their ideology.

After the drills were deep in the rock, teams of builders dropped through the holes they had created and used the drill heads as a foundation for the colony. A steel pyramid rose from the bottom of Europa's ocean, the tip of which just barely cleared the moon's thick ice shell. It was perfect, the architects declared, and the ships were soon left with just a skeleton crew in orbit. 

At the top of the steel structure, the president and his family lived in a penthouse that offered a view of the ocean, ice, and sky.  It was the only one of it's kind in the colony.  After their first night in the Pyramid the president's daughter asked her father an odd question.

"Do oceans sing?"

"Why do you ask?" Her father answered indulgently.

"Because I think I heard it singing last night. It sang to me in my sleep."

"The ocean's waves sometimes sound like music. The gravity of Jupiter pulls the water and makes tides under the ice, Or maybe it was the hum of the power cells.  Is that what you heard?"

"No. It sounded like a song."

"And what was the song saying?" He asked.

"I don't know. I couldn't understand." She shivered before returning to her breakfast.

Later he would ask the engineers if the power cells could be heard from his chambers. No, they said. The power cells were incredibly efficient and conservative estimates had them lasting for at least fifty years. But the Quorum and People of Europa felt there was no time to waste in finding a permanent, planetary power source. On Earth, every source of energy was from the sun.  Even petroleum was the result of organic material breaking down.  However on Europa the sun was too far away to provide sufficient energy for the colony. But there were already alternative plans in motion.

The Pyramid was situated between several geothermal vents. The "black smokers" would provide warmth and energy to the colony.

"It's not the first time we used Blacks to build a colony.  At least these won't want to vote later," joked one scientist. No one present was offended.

Teams of divers, in special insulated, pressurized suits, built generators that allowed the geothermal energy to power the entire colony. It was strange and surreal work, swimming in billowing black smoke, working in near darkness.  Jupiter pulled the water into crushing tides, making the work dangerous.  Several divers died in the process, all of them male.  But the female divers were never harmed.  What's more, they seemed to find serenity in the moon's depths, something often lacking among the Separatists.

It took six months to finish the generators.  Right on schedule for self sufficiency, it was time to start the next project - breeding a new white nation to conquer the stars.