Europa (Deadverse Book 1) (17 page)

- Jenna –

A double funeral.

The entire base knew about it now. Cary’s gruesome death had set everyone on edge. They were going to bury her at space by shooting her into orbit with a small rocket. The base AI had calculated how to put her into an orbit that would drift and eventually fall into Jupiter several years later. Susan had pushed for keeping the body and composting her, but that just seemed too odd, despite it being a really smart idea, if you could take the inhumanity out of it.

Then, while digging out a few more rooms under the ice, she and Thomas, since they refused to let Emir work, found Bobby. The Brazilian must have survived the ice quake and likely ran out of air. They found him, laying in a corner, peaceful. He must have understood what had happened, and accepted his fate. It was a sad way to go.

So Connie adjusted the fuel, and everyone watched from the green dome as the small rocket carried the two bodies into space.

It was a somber event. Ben tried to say a few words, but found his mouth devoid of sound. Within a few minutes, the flash was gone and darkness again filled the sky. With that, everyone left, except for her good friend, Thomas.

“You have to tell me. Convince me. I have to believe you weren’t just being naïve, or stupid,” Thomas asked of Jenna after a few minutes.

Jenna turned sharply and faced her friend.

“Are you kidding me?” She blurted out in anger, “How dare you ask something like that! To me?”

“I have to know Jenna. Emir is a dirt bag. Tell me you’re not defending him for some odd reason, like the goodness of your heart.”

She wanted to slap him.

“No, you bumbling ape.”

“Hey, I’m just looking out for you. After the whole…” Thomas started.

“You know what? All you boys wer all so high and mighty then, defending my honor. Did anyone bother to ask me if I cared?”

“Jenna! He recorded you taking a shower. If that doesn’t offend you then…” but she cut him off again.

“Yes, it bothered me. But hell Thomas, we all get stressed out up here, especially if we’re alone. You lucky couples don’t know how well you have it.”

Thomas stopped for a moment, thinking on her words.

“And for your information, Emir approached me that night. He wanted to apologize. Said it was the first time he’d had the courage to do so.”

Thomas took a moment to answer. “He took hours to apologize?”

“God, you’re an idiot, you know. I love you, but you’re a damn fool,” she turned and began walking away.

“No. We then went and had sex for two hours,” she said slyly, turning to him with a coy smile.

Thomas was left stupefied. He wasn’t sure if she was joking or serious.

“What the hell did I just hear?”

Jenna knew better. Emir was just another lost soul. She didn’t trust him, he certainly had his issues, but then again, who didn’t. He had apologized to her, and she had accepted it. Then he’d opened up to her. Told her to not tell anyone, and she swore. For a moment, she was sure he was going to confess some dastardly crime. It bothered her later, after she found out a horrible crime had been committed. No, the poor troubled man confessed his dreams to her.

He couldn’t sleep. What few hours he did manage to close his eyes for were tormented by the images of a pyramid that flowed with energy. He had wanted to talk to Horace about it, but he felt guilty, he just wasn’t sure about what.

“Maybe you’re just possessed by an alien,” she had laughed.

Little did she know how close she was to his greatest fear.

“That ship did something to me. I can feel it, deep down inside. Not in my heart, or gut, nothing like that. I can feel it deep down in my soul, my mind and memories. Something is down there, and I don’t know what it is.”

He was truly terrified. He shook as he spoke, and so she had held his hands, and they continued to talk.

In his dreams, he saw the pyramid, and the energy that flowed from it. He wasn’t sure what to make of it. He saw worlds, beautiful, brimming with life, green and vibrant. The pyramid searched for the worlds, he thought, but he wasn’t sure why. He felt it scouring him, wiping him clean.

“I thought maybe, maybe it’s a weapon, to wipe us out.”

Jenna asked if it was.

“I see it in the worlds, and they are alive, more than ever. It doesn’t destroy them.”

Then he’d wake up, rested, if not undisturbed.

“I don’t know what to do anymore,” Emir had lamented.

“You need to talk to Horace.”

“If I do, they are going to lock me up. I’m almost ready to lock myself up.”

“Do you want to go eat something?”

The question had made him laugh, and so they had headed off to where the fresh vegetables were being held and they gorged on tomatoes and spinach. She didn’t like either too well, and it turned out later that Emir hadn’t either, so they laughed at that and then headed to bed. To their own beds. That idiot Thomas would just have to wonder.

- Ben –

“You have to allow me to get back to the ship. It’s my job here.”

“And it’s my job to make sure you all stay alive,” Ben answered back.

“And a fine job you are doing at that, commander,” Glorin replied.

Ben hated the man. For several days, now the self-proclaimed xeno expert had been asking to go back to the ship to explore and catalogue. Those had been his words. Everyone was just trying to stay alive and he wanted to go take pictures. In two more days they would know for sure if their fate was sealed or not and this guy could only think about his moment of glory.

“I have interacted with the ship, I know what to do…”

And he went on and on about that. He wouldn’t shut up about it. Ben looked hopelessly towards Charles, who sat on the far side of the table. He had his arms crossed as he sat back in his chair, a half smile creeping across his face.

“Help me out here, Captain?”

Charles put his hands up in surrender.

“Not my call. You can bet your ass I’m not going back there.”

Glorin looked back. “See, even the captain doesn’t care. I can do this alone. I just need someone to drive me out there and drive me back.”

“And what of the time dilation? You spend a few hours in there a week goes by here.”

Ben watched with a bit of satisfaction as Glorin was taken aback by this forgotten bit of information. For a moment, Ben had won a tiny battle.

“I’ll take a radio with me and radio when I’m back out, whenever that is.”

Ben laughed in frustration.

“No. Not going to allow it.” Ben turned around, stopped, and then turned back.

“I tell you what. Let’s just wait until we see where the supply ship is. Two days. Then, after that, you can head down there and do whatever you need to do.”

They wouldn’t need him then, regardless of if the ship arrived or not. They might be better off without him.

“Do you promise?”

“Are you kidding me? This isn’t high school.”

“Sir, do I have your word then?”

Ben waved his hands and Glorin got up, angry, but satisfied for the moment, and left the command room. Both Ben and Charles watched as he left and a sense of relief filled the room when he was gone.

“Just tell me something, Charles,” Ben began, “what about him?”

“The guy is neither a surgeon nor an ice digger. Guy can’t even drive a rover. He doesn’t have much of an alibi, but that’s not surprising. No one here hangs out with him and he sure doesn’t hang out with anyone else. What does he do all day?”

“He writes reports. I’ve read them; I have to. On and on about something he saw inside the ship. I swear, Charles, I wasn’t there, but it’s like he just makes stuff up to make his reports really long.”

“So?”

“Charles. I saw your report of your little expedition. This guy has literally written twenty times what you wrote.”

“That guy needs a hobby,” Charles chuckled.

“That guy needs to help out digging out the ice. He can shovel.”

Charles had been doing that very thing for days now.

“C’mon, we’ve been over this more than enough times. The guy is pointless, useless, but he is also harmless.”

“That might have been true a few weeks ago. Now he eats our limited food and breathes our limited air. He should be pulling his weight,” Charles countered.

Ben sat back in his chair. He knew when he was defeated.

“All right, I’ll talk to him. You know he still won’t do anything.”

“No, probably not, but everyone else around you will know that you tried.”

With that, Charles stood up and walked out of the room, leaving Ben to his thoughts and a complete silence that brought about a hum in his ears. Ever since the ice quake, the hum had been there. He had never told anybody about the blow to his head. It had seemed like a minor thing, a slight bump when the world was turning upside down. But the pain had never left, and neither had the humming sound. Still, he had no time to talk to Gary.

It didn’t take long for the humming to go away as the silence was broken. Joyce came crashing into the room, pulling herself along rails on the walls. The floor inside the central command was still magnetized though, and she sighed with relief when she could walk with some ease.

“Sorry,” she said, slightly out of breath, “I would have knocked if I had any free hands.”

Ben waved her on towards his desk. She walked over and set down several tablets.

“Here is all the comm data for the past six months, with heavy emphasis on the past two months. I would have put it all on one tablet except for the lack of any networking down there. Crysta has cannibalized every last working computer on base.”

“No worries. Did you look at any of it?” Ben asked.

“Just briefly. Nothing unusual. There is a lot of bad data in that last batch, probably right before everything went dead.” Joyce stood behind the desk, reaching out and grabbing a tablet before handing it over to Ben.

“Ok. What about now? Any luck with the dishes?”

“Yes and no. There is a lot of noise, but it’s really hard to go through the mess and figure out what comes from Earth, and even that, which of the streams is of anything useful. Crysta says she recognizes some of the streams of signals, and that they are purely military automated signals. I need the AI to run through all the signals to see if anything in there is a live feed, but it’s been kind of busy lately.”

Ben nodded. No one knew yet what the AI was running for him.

“What about TV or radio broadcasts?”

“Nothing. All dead,” Joyce sighed a bit. This had been the true goal of her little experiment. “And that’s not good either. I should be able to pull something. Well, maybe there is something in all the streams, but I thought I’d be able to pull signals that I could easily tell were radio, and I can’t.”

Ben had hoped for better news, but always knew deep down this was what he expected to hear. For nearly two hundred years radio signals had been blasting off Earth into space. That there were no signals to be heard, even this far away, was a bad thing.

“Now, just remember, we’re orbiting around the solar system’s second biggest radio station. It’s very possible anything coming from Earth simply isn’t strong enough compared to the Jovian radio signals.”

The large gas giant was a burst producer of radio signals at the 20 MHz range. Oddly enough, it was the position of one of the other moons, Io, that determined how that signal worked. It was certainly strong enough to be heard from Earth, and Joyce had spent countless of evenings studying the signals and mapping them according to Io’s movements for research on Earth.

“So we still have no idea what is going on back home…” Ben trailed off.

Joyce nodded.

“All right. So then, in your opinion, is there any reason in wasting valuable energy running the dish equipment?”

Joyce hadn’t expected that question.

“Well, to be honest, they barely take a fraction of all our electrical needs. But…”she stopped and thought a bit more. She turned and walked to the door before looking back. “What would we do if we did find anything out about home?”

“Maybe make us work harder,” Ben said without looking up from the tablet he was reading, “or hope better.”

“We are all working really hard,” Joyce responded, “and we will make hope work with whatever we get.”

Ben heard her but was so engrossed in a few lines of data he was reading through. When he looked up, she was gone already and the silence had returned. Quickly, he reached over for his personal tablet, tapped a music app and removed the silence from the room. It wasn’t loud, barely audible actually, but it helped so much.

He had seen it already. The rest of the crew worked hard and made the best of what they had. Most of their evenings were filled with laughter and stories, despite the losses in life and hard work. Most, if not all of the men and women had come on the mission because it benefitted them greatly. They all had great stock in the mission. It was clearly a high risk mission, a feat of human exploration on a scale never before even imagined. They all stood to become the leaders in their respected community of peers as well as incredibly wealthy. It was surprising to him that despite the near disaster they all still managed to work.

He didn’t know any better. All the reports that came in from Horace spoke of the same thing. Everyone was in unusually high spirits. He didn’t attribute it to any false hopes, but he did mention something about a form of denial. He had even compared it to grieving mothers who lost a newborn child. These would return to work immediately after and seemed oblivious to their loss. It was a method of coping.

Two days.

In two days, their hope might be unfounded.

Or maybe, he was the only one doubting.