Europa (Deadverse Book 1) (16 page)

- Crysta –

“Ok, run it again,” Crysta said out loud.

She was alone in the server room, and her voice was drowned out by the hums of the fans working to cool off the computers. For the past week she had worked tirelessly to get together as many of the working computers as she could, and networked them all together in this new melted out room for one single purpose: Hammy.

The AI had survived along with most of the central command computers, but it had been severely limited due to the loss of the network and a good portion of its computing power. Now, after all this work, she had finally managed to get the AI fully loaded, and after running the compiling program three times to ensure the quality of the AI build, she had brought it back online. For several hours now, she had been running diagnostic programs to evaluate just how much of the internal memory programming the AI had lost with the ice quake. She was supremely happy to know that very little of her work had been lost. The AI had created so many backup redundancies all throughout the base, as she had taught it to, that once she had reconnected those missing computers up, Hammy had put it all back together again.

“All the king’s horses and all the king’s men, my ass,” Crysta had shouted. “This bitch did it all by herself!”

But now, the serious work had started. Ben sat down with her a few days ago and stressed the importance of having the AI up and running. Crysta had at first been confused. Hammy was certainly very useful to automate nearly all elements of the base, but in the condition everything was, automation was virtually impossible. Ben didn’t care about that. Instead, he needed a flight path home.

The news had stunned Crysta. They hadn’t heard if the return supply ship was in orbit or not. Ben, though, wasn’t leaving anything to the chance. He wanted the AI to start calculating a flight path back to Earth using all sorts of weight/mass varieties, including the standard return vessel and any other possibilities. This was the first time that she had heard anyone talk about returning to Earth in anything but the return ship. It had been widely assumed that if the return ship did not arrive, they would just consider Europa their permanent home. This new alternative had intrigued her, and so she had set Hammy on the job. The AI had all the astrophysics programmed in, so it was just a matter of making it understand what they needed.

Hammy had run several short simulations just to make sure all of its equations were concurrent with its programing. Now, it had to take in the actual condition of the solar system, the location of the planets and actual distances to start making real headway into the problem of returning home.

The timer read five hours and twenty three minutes estimated for the simulation. Crysta yawned. It was almost time to get some sleep, but she wasn’t feeling that tired. Everyone had been pushing themselves, and the computer expert had been averaging just five hours of sleep each day. To her surprise, she had gotten used to it. That didn’t mean she didn’t get tired. Everyone was tired.

The door hissed open as she walked out of the room and into the roughly cut hallway. The base had gone from a streamlined elegance to a chaotic set of ice caves. The floor under her feet was uneven and she had to move herself along by the rails on the wall. There just wasn’t any urgency in putting down the magnetic strips under the ice. Eventually, they would have to. Even the smallest bit of resistance helped their legs. Already, Gary was making sure they were getting plenty of resistance exercise. She hated exercise.

Two quick stops and she would head to bed.

Thomas, Emir and Jenna had been working tirelessly to dig out the caved-in sections of the base. There was extremely valuable equipment down there that could, if needed, be used. More importantly, as they dug, they found out that most of the rooms had simply shifted, and had not been crushed under ice. That gave hope that somewhere, somehow, although highly unlikely, Bobby may still be alive. The side benefit was that many of the base’s computers and servers were being unearthed, and Crysta was gathering them all up in one central location. Ben hated the idea, but Crysta had countered, as many others had, that if another quake hit, they’d probably all be dead anyways.

Several layers down through very unevenly cut ice, Crysta reached the first room. It was one of the several dozen rooms that housed all the experiments that had come from Earth on the supply ships. Some of the experiments were somewhat pointless. Most of them, Crysta thought, were completely pointless. There were experiments down here for cooking food in low gravity, low gravity toilets, and other odds and ends. Susan had run an experiment that raised slugs in low gravity to study the effects on them. They were silly and useless, most of them, but they helped pay for the mission. Every experiment run to its conclusion got the mission more money back on Earth, and more money meant more supplies.

Too bad more money didn’t mean no nuclear war.

She walked into the room where a crate Jenna had found earlier that day sat. She unhitched the side and flipped open the top. It was a series of video game consoles. She pulled out the series of data chips that would hold all the experiment instructions and tossed them aside. She loved video games as much as the next nerd.

“Seriously, a video game experiment in space?”

What she really found useful was all the data space on those consoles. She reached in and took one of them out. Back up in the server room, she’d take it apart and see just what kind of specs the console had, and if needed, she’d come back and haul more up. The small sleek black console fit just fine under her arm.

She headed back out into the hallway and turned left, heading down to where the large plasma drill sat silent and cold. The only light was the dim blue hue coming off of her tablet, which she used to navigate down an especially rough section of the hallway. She could make out the small doorway that sat nearly sideways. The ice had shifted completely upside down here, cracking and spinning within itself, Jenna had explained. Crysta didn’t even know that was possible. She was looking forward to seeing an upside down room, though. Jenna had told her that the room was a mess, but that she thought she had seen a crate with what looked like small personal computers in them. Crysta just hoped they weren’t too damaged.

She stepped over the foot pedal on the plasma drill and ducked into the room. She had to set her tablet down on top of the drill to hold on to the frame of the door, but once in, she reached back to grab her makeshift flashlight. She stepped fully into the room, and nearly dropped the tablet.

Her heart raced and she tried screaming, but nothing came out of her throat. Her breath had been taken completely away. She staggered for a moment and got light headed, then fell back against the frame of the door. She blinked several times and then shone the light of the tablet into the room.

Then she screamed.

It was a human body, pinned to the wall by its hands and feet, which were spread apart. The body itself was split wide open, from the top of the forehead, down the nose and perfectly down to the groin. The skin and bones were flayed out, almost perfectly. The organs had been removed and were in a neat pile on the floor. Crysta swallowed heavily when she saw the spine through the bloody mess. Above the head, on the ice wall, was a triangle painted from what appeared to be blood.

Panic set in. Crysta screamed again and ran out of the room as fast as the handles on the wall could take her. She missed one of the rails and did a perfect flip in the air, landing on the cold, rough, floor. She sat up and quickly tapped Charles’ comm link on her tablet.

He answered nearly instantly.

“Yes?”

“You need to get down here. NOW!”

- Ben –

There was no hiding it now. Charles stood by the body, examining every little detail while Gary sat on the ground slumped, in tears.

It was Cary. The doctor had confirmed that.

Charles had been equally shocked, but for other reasons.

“You’re telling me this happened already and you didn’t tell me?” Charles had been ruthless in his yelling. Ben could still feel the hot spit hitting his face.

There had been no holding back this time. After Ben had gone into the details of the ice cube and the drones, Charles had exploded. It was his job, he had shouted, to deal with things like this murder. And to top it all off, Ben had talked to Gary even before going to Charles. Now, the doctor was sitting sobbing on the ground, probably as useless as he could be.

After the shouting and proper scolding, Charles had gotten to work. He took pictures of the scene and recorded everything he was doing. He wasn’t a police officer in any way, but he understood the need to record everything. What’s worse was that the triangle depicted on the top of the body on the wall was familiar. It had the same lines coming out of the angles, just like Charles had already seen. Upon a more detailed inspection of the massacred body, Charles had found that the same pyramid picture had been carved seven times into the spine, in minute detail.

“Who’s been down here since the three engineers?” Charles asked.

“No one,” Ben said. The shock still hadn’t worn off. “They were the only ones working down here. I have it all logged.”

“Then that leaves me just one suspect,” Charles said, detailing the odd ice scratchings he had seen the other night. He stormed out of the room and vanished down the hallway.

Ben walked over towards the doctor, who was able to stop crying. He was standing in front of the body, wiping the tears from his face.

“We have to get her off of here.”

“Charles has all he needs?” Gary asked.

Ben nodded.

“Get Thomas down here,” Gary said, “and Ben? No more secrets. Everyone has to know now.”

Ben swallowed hard.

This was supposed to have been a scientific mission. Charles was along only as a formality. This wasn’t what he was expecting to deal with. How would he face everyone and tell them they had a murderer on the base? Not just a murderer, but a psychopath, from everything he saw in that room.

He tapped a button on his tablet and Thomas responded.

“You need to get down here. I need your help.”

“What’s going on?” Thomas asked.

“Hell. Hell is going on.”

- Horace –

The headache had to come today.

After several days of no noticeable side effects, today he got hit by a particularly strong headache. It was the kind that left his eyes aching, and his temples throbbing. He knew it was from the injuries he had suffered to his head, and Gary had said they would come, and that it wouldn’t be too bad. But right now, he was in pain.

Sitting across from him was his other pain: Charles.

The captain had taken Emir into custody, if one could call it that, the night before. He had drilled him extensively for a few hours, but then Jenna had stepped forward. The three ice engineers had finished their work below the ice at around nine thirty EST and had all gone up to the green dome together. Thomas reported that Jenna and Emir had remained behind to get something to eat. From everything that Gary could figure out, the murder had taken place around midnight. Much to Charles’ dismay, Jenna had confirmed that she had been with Emir in the green dome till nearly that time.

Of course, the captain had then drilled Jenna quite a bit. He liked her a lot, but he was so sure in his suspicions of the Middle Eastern man that he couldn’t get past the fact that it wasn’t him. Jenna repeatedly confirmed that they had been together, talking, till nearly midnight. She refused, though, to tell him what they were talking about, insisting it had nothing to do with his investigation.

So he was back to square one and now he needed the shrink’s assistance. The shrink he didn’t like.

“Is it possible that Gary could be wrong with his timeline?” Charles asked.

“Of course that’s possible. The man is in shock. But if you want my opinion, I don’t think he is. Have you ever seen him wrong with anything medicine-wise?” Horace countered.

“Something still doesn’t add up.”

“Of course it doesn’t. We have someone on the base that has killed,” Horace said.

He pushed his tablet towards Charles who took it and looked at it.

“That’s Gary’s report. He says that from the precision of the damages, whoever did this must have taken at least two to three hours. A highly skilled surgeon could have done it sooner.”

Charles set the tablet down.

“So,” Charles shook his head, “it could have been him?”

“He is a highly skilled surgeon.”

“He would kill his lover?”

“Maybe the love triangle wasn’t working anymore,” Horace pointed out.

“Then that would mean Susan could have done it, too.”

“I think you will find that, the harder you look, the more you will think anyone here could have done it. We are under a severe strain and the stress is making us all act different,” Horace said. He stopped and rubbed his temples.

Charles noticed and pushed a glass of water over to him. Horace took a drink. One of the benefits of Europa was a steady supply of cold water.

“Concussion getting you?” Charles asked, but Horace shook it off.

“What about Paul? He’s the only one that doesn’t quite fit in and his mysterious recovery from waking up is still a bit puzzling.”

Charles shook his head.

“I actually have video footage of him sleeping during the time of the murder. I don’t know, everything in me says Emir did it.”

“If you’re referring to the pyramid symbols we have now found three times, then I can see where you are headed. We all think poorly of Emir, but let’s not forget that Glorin also stuck his hand in the beams. And to be perfectly honest, if we want to investigate fully, you and Connie were on board the ship, as well as Jenna and Glorin.”

It was what Charles was having a hard time with. Jenna was standing up for Emir, but she could just as easily have been an accomplice. But if that was true, then he was one, too.

“Am I going crazy?”

“Why are you asking that?” Horace countered.

“I am really starting to think that those damn aliens on that ship have something to do with it.”

“And why would that make you crazy?”

“You serious? You believe in that stuff?”

“Captain. As far as I’m aware, six of you went into a verified alien vessel. A ship that comes from some other planet that can travel at speeds completely beyond our technical capabilities. Two of you interacted with said ship to either their benefit or detriment. And you think believing in aliens makes you crazy?”

Charles sat back in his chair.

“Ok, so if it is the aliens, then how do I deal with it?”

“I don’t know if WE can,” Horace began, “but what we need to do is somehow figure out how to stop it.”