Europa (Deadverse Book 1) (20 page)

- Crysta –

It was quiet in the room, and a bit cold. She stood up, cracked her knuckles and looked around the room for her jacket. Slowly, she walked over towards a console on the far side of the room where her brown jacket lay. Her boots clung to the bottom of the ice floor solidly, creating resistance in her legs every time she moved. Walking on the magnetic floors had always felt weird, and she wasn’t sure she had ever gotten used to it. Her body felt just a bit of weight, but her legs told her everything was OK. Like everything else on the mission, her body just couldn’t make sense of it all, even after two years. Her muscles, bones and ligaments remembered Earth’s gentle pull too well.

She slipped her jacket on and instantly felt better, warmer. Turning back, she saw Ben, still sleeping in his chair. He had tilted it back against the wall where he had melted a notch in the ice for that very purpose nearly a year ago. She guessed that was the advantage to having the ice building material. She made her way back to her own console and sat back down in the familiar seat.

It was five hours now that her friend had been circling the moon in a tiny rocket ship far up above them. That was three hours longer than the longest time she had spent up there. The only other time one of her quick bursts into space had taken two hours was that disaster with the hoola hoop ship that had nearly cost Connie her life. She had tried too hard to bring that ship down when all their instincts told them it wasn’t possible. Now she was up there trying to do the same thing.

Crysta pulled out her keyboard and again and brought the screen on her main console out of sleep mode. She saw the timer and noticed that Connie was two minutes from coming back into radio contact again. She had been quiet the past hour, reading her book. “At least I’ll get to finish it,” she had commented. There was nothing for her to do at the moment, as the AI continued to analyze the return ship’s orbital path. Crysta took a glance at the progress the AI had done, and noticed, happily, that the first set of data was nearly done. The base AI would upload that information up to its shell in the Tin Can.

As soon as the ship was up above, Crysta opened up the comm.

“You OK up there? Hammy is done here, it’s uploading now,” she asked.

“Hey,” Connie responded, “it’s cold as hell in here, but I’m OK. Finished the book.”

“Did you like it?”

“It got really good at the end, so I just ignored Hammy and read through it.”

“Whoa, that was quick. Upload is already done,” Connie said again after a moment of silence.

“It’s all just numbers, in actual data size, that isn’t much.”

“Ok, if you say so. Hammy is inputting the numbers now. Give me a second.”

The comms went silent again as Crysta waited. The numbers were all there, so it was just a matter of the AI’s shell on the Tin Can inputting everything into the ships computer and displaying the information for Connie.

“Ok, everything is in. Seventeen separate burns will get us back behind the return ship and into its orbit.”

“Any word on that orbit itself?” Ben asked suddenly, making Crysta jump a bit. She was so focused on the moment that she had failed to see him get up.

“Yeah, looking at it now. Its, um, well, it’s barely hanging on. It must have come in shallow. I wonder if its own stabilizers are working or not.”

“How long?” Ben asked again.

“I don’t know, Ben. Hammy is downloading the data back down to you guys. Run it there. I’m going to start on the burns up here in about thirty seconds. It’s going to take seventy eight minutes to get into position.”

“Fuel?” Ben asked.

“More than enough.”

Silence returned to the room, but the comm remained opened. A few moments later, both Ben and Crysta could hear the low rumble of the rocket coming to life onboard the Tin Can. It rumbled for about fifteen seconds.

“That’s the first one. Next one coming up in two minutes.”

“What’s your plan Connie?” Ben asked.

“Let’s get behind it first. If I can, I dock and see what I can do about putting it into a stable orbit. If not, then I guess I’m done with that little adventure.”

“Very well,” Ben said, stepping away from the comm and heading towards the exit. He had been in the room the entire time, hadn’t left once. As soon as he left, Crysta brought the comm back online.

“You OK up there? For real?”

“Yeah. Hungry, that’s about it, but I can survive. It’s quiet as hell too, I’m debating having Hammy upload me some music. Think you can spare some bandwidth?”

“I got you,” Crysta said, pulling her keyboard out again. She began clicking and typing to bring up Connie’s database server. “Next time you’re back in touch, I’ll get something up there.”

“Ok, something calming, soothing. Nothing upbeat. None of your music, got it?”

Crysta laughed. “Chicken.”

“That’s me.”

- Connie –

If she wasn’t nervous before, she certainly was now. For several excruciatingly boring hours, the shell of Hammy on board her cramped ship’s computers was running slight rocket boosts to correct and change their orbital flight path. The first hour was just to speed up, go higher in altitude to actually get behind the return ship. The irony was that she needed to speed up to slow down. Once behind the ship, they spent the next forty five minutes altering their course again so that they were actually in the same flight path and orbit as the return ship. It was a tricky business, because the ship they were chasing was slowly falling out of orbit away from the moon, so once behind, the rocket had to fire every few minutes, even if in tiny bursts, just to keep up with the runaway ship. Two hours after she had talked to Crysta, Connie found herself now directly behind the return ship, where she should have been hours ago if everything had gone smoothly.

Of course it hadn’t.

Connie found it a bit ironic. For two years they had worked on and at the base on a frozen moon. They had run countless experiments, many of them dangerous. They lived covered under feet of ice to ward off dangerous radiation, and beyond the ice was the incredibly thin and deadly atmosphere of Europa. And through all of this, the most excitement she had experienced had been watching a large supply ship with a spinning cyclotron around it go crashing down into the ice chasms.

It had been a boring two years. And then, when it was almost all done, it all turned upside down.

At long last, the laser link established a connection with the return ship, and Connie was certainly happy she wasn’t going to have to try to manually dock her Tin Can. Her tiny space ship was now making its way towards the rear of the ship in order to dock with it, and per Hammy’s data, they were seventeen minutes out. That was all the time the AI had to make all the calculations necessary to bring the return ship into a stable orbit. It was also time enough to get a better visual of the ship.

“Hammy, get me the visual up on the scope again.”

Her tablet burst into life again, bringing light to the dark chamber. They were much closer to the ship, and while still fuzzy, the image was much larger on her screen. She watched, in silence, as they approached the ship and then let out an audible cry about three minutes later, as the light off Jupiter and the sun hit the ship. That was just when Joyce broke the silence from her end.

“Welcome back,” she said, “can you see it now?”

“Oh, Joyce,” Connie was almost crying.

“Um…”

“Connie, what is it?” Ben jumped in.

“There is damage on the ship. I’m not sure what exactly. I knew something was wrong before, but it’s bad. It’s really bad.”

Of the seven rotating living and storage quarters, only the front four were working as they should. The rear three were not rotating at all, and from her first images, it appeared that some of the actual living quarters were barely attached to their rotating wings. Connie continued to describe the damage down to the base as she watched and got closer.

“The two rear sections are a complete mess. Look like a complete waste.”

“What about the drive?” Ben asked.

Connie knew that everyone was listening in on her transmission. She was letting them down.

“I can’t tell Ben, all the damage rotating around it is blocking my view. I won’t know until I get in close.”

“Negative, Connie, I think it’s time to abort this thing.”

“I don’t think so Ben. Everything else seems fine.”

“Are you crazy? How are you going to dock? And what if you get hit by debris?” Ben asked.

Connie looked at the images again.

“I don’t see any debris. This damage is old.”

Connie looked even more closely.

“Besides, the rear docking hatch is completely clear from what I can see.”

She then waited for his response, which she assumed would be negative. She waited for nearly a minute.

“You all still alive down there?” she asked, regretting it the instant she asked.

“Yeah,” it was Joyce. “You’re good to go up there. Be careful please.”

Connie was surprised. She could only imagine just what kind of verbal shitstorm had just taken place under her.

“Ok, Hammy, bring us in then. And how are those calculations?”

“I’m afraid I can only finalize it once we are docked. Only then can I make estimates on its current mass.”

Connie breathed deeply. She was afraid of that.

“Ok, base, I’m heading in. We will be docking when we are in blackout, so see you on the other side, hopefully with good news.”

-  Charles –

The captain reached up to make sure the earpiece was firmly set in his ear. He stopped halfway down the ladder into one of the several hallways that had been carved out of the ice after the disaster weeks ago. It led to the room where just a few days past, he had come across a horrible scene. It had lingered in his mind for several reasons, and that was something, as Charles Hoarry had seen some pretty gruesome scenes before. It was just that the gruesomeness of war was expected, and understood, even if it was horrible. But the scene that still burned hot in his memory, was that of the unassuming and quiet Cary, split in half lengthwise like a banana, precise and meticulously. That something beyond war. It was cold murder, calculating, something that required planning and careful thought. And to make it all that much the worse, it had been committed by someone on this station, someone that he had carefully screened for weeks and months before allowing to come. Even the wealthy billionaire, the one no one liked, had to pass his screening. Charles alone had the power.

And someone had slipped that screen.

He jumped off and allowed himself to float down on the moon’s gravity, taking a moment to breath before gently touching his boots onto the ice. He certainly couldn’t feel any of the cold coming up through the thick layer of insulation on his feet, but his mind didn’t allow him any comfort. The sight of ice everywhere kept him chilled at all times of the day. He began to pull himself along the rails on the side of the wall, down and towards the room.

He looked at his watch.

Twelve minutes.

Everyone else had gathered back again in the control room, waiting for Connie to report in. He took that moment to do his own investigation, and he wanted no one to know he was doing it. He had only a few more minutes until they dispersed again when the celebration cracked in over his ear piece.

“Docked!” he heard Connie joyously proclaim.

The eruption of cheers, laughter, crying and shouts that followed were precious. Precious to them. Presumably, they all thought they could go home now. But as he pulled his way towards the room that showed his failure, he knew, he understood full and well, that everyone else up above him were celebrating in vain.

The world had changed drastically since he was a little boy. He remembers the days of ‘peace’ as a child. A time and era when countries tried, at least visually, to get along. A time when most conflicts were local, an era where world wars were a thing of ancient history. It was also a time of change. A time when the world had changed, whether by human meddling or not; it was a world with limited resources for an ever-growing population. It was a world where the small nations went bankrupt trying to keep their people fed and then became the easy prey of the larger nations. It was a world where those same large nations grew paranoid and wary of other large nations. A world where walls were built once again, one from the ground and miles up in the sky. A world where eyes in space kept a close eye on enemies and where once again, the commerce of each nation depended heavily on the manufacture of weapons.

He lived the American sense of pride. He was taught of his nation’s superiority, and from  everything that he saw, he believed it. He joined the military still believing his nation tried to help the world, and continued to believe, despite his own nation building one of the largest walls in Earth’s history.

His eyes were opened the first time he had flown a mission deep into Russian territory on one of the first automated flying machines, invisible to their cold war enemy’s detection, carrying a nuclear armament worthy of Armageddon. It was only a test flight, but in that instance, he knew that war was the only end result of paranoia and fear. He knew, first hand, that while leaders of the world’s nations continued to proclaim peace, they built up their armaments. When once only two superpowers had nuclear arms, the balance had held. Now, more than a dozen nations controlled the power of the atom, and the methods to deliver it, and each one had their own agenda.

Charles knew, despite the celebration he continued to hear over his ear piece, that there was nothing to go back to. His wife and his children were dead. Everyone they knew was likely dead. In the brief chance that they had survived, their existence was miserable, and their lives would be short.

Charles didn’t want to go back.

He stepped into the room, floating over a small chunk of ice that had never been moved. The red still stained the ice under where the body had been stuck. He came back here every chance he got, always when no one else knew. He timed it, every time. Thirteen minutes it took to get down there if he took his time. His gut told him the doctor had done it. It was the only logical person, the only one with the skills to do such a hideously precise destruction. But no one else would believe it. While no one on the base had ever truly come to terms with the trio’s unusual arrangement, much less him, everyone could see that it worked. All three truly loved each other in what could only be described as something out of this world. Or at least Earth. Certainly, what they had was still technically illegal in every nation on Earth but one.

Charles sat many a night writing messages back to his Claire, and he had told her everything he could about them. At first, he was angry and distrustful. But the more he told his wife about them, the more she wrote back and said that love just works. And when it works, no one should judge. Charles couldn’t get over it. He waited for the backlash of jealousy, or the abuse, something. Instead, he watched the unconventional work and it infuriated him and amazed him at the same time. Doctor Gary Fletcher had the same chance of killing Cary as Charles had of killing Claire. Zero.

He thought.

“There is definitely damage to the rear pods, we would probably have to discard all rear three pods. But the drive seems entirely intact, tapping into it now…..”

Charles debated on pulling out the ear piece, but it wouldn’t be wise to.

His last letter to his wife had been bittersweet. He wasn’t even sure if she had received it. He knew what was coming, and yet, he couldn’t say goodbye. His sweet Claire. Curious, too. She wanted to know everything there was to know about the Alien ship. She saw it as a beacon of light in the dark storm clouds that were coming. She had truly, maybe naively, hoped that its arrival would bring the nations of Earth together. That’s why he loved her. While he only saw the putrid state of men, Claire constantly hoped for the best in mankind.

Now, he couldn’t even tell her about the amazing trip into the vessel. Haunting, too. Charles still couldn’t shake it. Ever since going inside, he kept seeing the corridor, the metal grating floor, the panels and walls. Everything looked like it was made specifically for him. For men. He didn’t believe in déjà vu, but he couldn’t help feeling like he had been there before. Smarter people than him, which was nearly everyone on the base, had told him that the time dilation inside the ship could have messed with him. He just preferred to trust his gut.

His gut kept telling him something was really wrong here, and more importantly, that something was really wrong with that vessel.

More cheering erupted in his ear.

“…in phase two. Alignment is working. Coming down into a lower orbit. Stabilizing easily…”

He looked at his watch. Twenty two minutes. It was time to head back. There was one other suspect that he wanted to crack, and it was the obvious one. The Middle Eastern engineer just reeked of guilt. He had been picked on for his shower video, and for good reason. In the closed environment of the base, where mistakes could lead to their deaths, Charles couldn’t afford stupidity of that level. He had even suggest venting the man onto the moon and when that had been frowned upon, he wanted to lock him up for good. He had touched the ship, had confessed to receiving images or visions, and Charles had seen the pyramid etched into the ice. The same one etched into the bones of Cary.

So why was Jenna protecting him?

He had to find out.