Europa (Deadverse Book 1) (21 page)

- Jenna –

It had been a three-day long party, if at least by Europa standards. Sure, they were still doing their work, but most of the ice tunneling had been completed, and there was no real need to make the base any bigger than it was. In an unusual change of circumstance, everyone agreed that the smaller base, with just the two domes and interconnecting tunnels and rooms, was a far better design than their larger, pre-icequake setup. The third dome, one of the smaller storage ones, was shut off and all air rerouted. In the old base, it was usual to go the whole day without seeing anyone, especially if you were working on experiments. Now, everyone was routinely running into everyone else multiple times a day. It was a welcome change, especially for Jenna, who never felt comfortable alone, whether feet under ice or outside on top of the ice. Eating together at night was a welcome change as well.

It was, of course, a subdued celebration. Cary’s death was still very fresh, if a little raw. Everyone tried hard to forget about it, without giving the event its due respect. What bothered Jenna though, above it all, was the fact that in forgetting the incident, everyone just seemed to forget that there was also a killer on board their base. That made her extremely jealous. At night, she found herself trying to find someone to sleep with in the same room.

She of course would have preferred to sleep with Thomas, as their familiarity was comfortable. But, there was always Connie, and Jenna liked her a lot. She wasn’t going to put that on them, especially since he knew Thomas would say yes, and then she’d just be getting in the way. God knows they needed as much time together as they could get.

Connie had already flown back up to the return ship twice in the past three days. For reference, the Tin Can was only designed to go up to space once a month. She was stressing the tiny spaceship, and everyone knew it, especially Thomas. Jenna had heard them arguing many times, but there was no turning Connie back. At the very least, Connie had completely fixed the return ship’s orbit now, and wouldn’t have to back up again.

Then there was Paul. Jenna was clearly older than him, the young soldier would never divulge his age, and she felt ridiculous having a crush on him. And that’s what she surmised it was, a crush. Jenna was thirty five, not a college girl anymore. She was one of the few human beings chosen to come on this mission of utter importance, had survived a horrible event, had walked into and out of an alien vessel, and lately, all she could think about was the tall Midwestern kid from Minnesota. She knew it had to be hormones, or an incredibly active imagination. As she blurted out loud once, “you gotta get laid.”

Maybe it was more than that. Jenna was not the youngest one on the team, but she always felt like it. Her personality lent itself to that. She was jovial and comical, pranking other members of her crew whenever she could. She laughed a lot, watched cartoons and loved nothing better than jumping around a dome doing summersaults in the low gravity. Everyone treated her as the kid, and she went along with it. Maybe that was why she felt closer to the young soldier.

Everyone else had enjoyed their mini celebration, at least as much as she could see. Sure, Glorin still kept to himself most of the time, pouring over files of his so called evidence of ETs. There was something certainly wrong with that man, but he had never bothered her. No one really did. Even Emir. She had never told anyone, but she had felt flattered by the whole video incident. Sure, it wasn’t cool for Emir to have recorded her. But she would often look around at the other women on the mission, women she looked up to for their determination, grit, and certainly their beauty, and she felt good about the poor sap having chosen her to record.

Not that she would do it again.

She hadn’t spoken to Emir since that night he had apologized. She felt bad for him, not because of what he did, but just for the way everyone else treated him. She got it, though. To everyone else, he was a pervert. Still, he had a lot on his plate, and with all that happened on the alien ship, it sure couldn’t be easy for him to deal with.

Then there was Charles. She hadn’t lied to him. Despite what everyone thought though, Emir couldn’t have killed Cary. Charles wasn’t letting up, though. Three times already the captain had approached her and tried to get her to ‘change her mind’ about what had happened. And every time, Jenna had made it clear she hadn’t lied, wasn’t lying, and that the story wasn’t going to change. Emir hadn’t done it.

That left her wondering who did. She liked everyone on the mission, it was a quirk of her personality, weakness or strength, she wasn’t sure. Jenna had lost many hours of sleep going through all the possibilities, and what scared her the most was that the one person who she kept thinking about, was the man in charge of finding out who did it.

She was almost certain Charles had done it.

She just didn’t know why.

- Joyce –

She stared at the screen intently, her eyes focused on a set of numbers the AI was crunching. She watched the progress bar reach one hundred percent then clicked on the completed task. It opened up a whole new file, showing the numbers she had requested the AI run for her. She sat back in her chair, leaning it back a bit. Joyce glanced around quick and saw Crysta hunched over her screen, still working on the code the AI needed to work on their return to Earth. Another quick glance revealed that no one else was around.

“Pssst.”

Crysta sat up and looked around.

“Did you just pssst me?”

Joyce looked over at the door, waiting to see if anyone else came through. When she felt sure no one else was coming, she waved her friend over. Crysta rolled her chair over, a look of confusion on her face. She stopped right next to Joyce and looked at the screen, then at her. Joyce pointed at one specific set of numbers amidst the myriad of other data on the screen.

“Um, what am I looking at?” Crysta asked.

“Do you remember when I said, a few days ago, that I thought someone had moved the dishes?”

Crysta looked around, then down at the floor, then back up at Joyce.

“I guess, vaguely,” she said.

“Ok, it’s really bugged me. But I just wasn’t sure. For the past two days, I’ve been having to adjust the dishes just slightly.”

“Ok, isn’t that something that you would do on a normal basis?” Crysta was confused.

“Yeah, up until the point where I made an app that ran the correction every day.” Joyce explained that as their frozen moon when through space around Jupiter, she had to correct the dish positions by mere fractions of a degree each day to keep the aligned in an optimal setting. It wasn’t entirely necessary to do it every day, and the dishes would still work without months of realignment, but it was something a communications expert did, because she was who she was.

“Ok, so your app adjusts them? And now you have to adjust them?”

“Precisely,” Joyce said. “The app is running every day, like it should, and then I find them slightly off, too far ahead.”

“What does that mean?” Crysta understood some of the basics of Joyce’s expertise, but still wasn’t understanding what Joyce was getting at.

“What it means is that someone is moving the dishes, then moving them back to the precise location they need to be at. Problem is, the way I have the app set to run, it checks for manual movement first and runs again if it detects that.”

Joyce waited for a reaction from Crysta, but did not get anything.

“What I’m saying is, someone is moving the dishes, then moving them back. The app runs once, during its normal time at midnight, then again, when it detects manual movement. It’s supposed to auto-correct, but it’s doing it twice. Someone is messing with the dishes.”

Crysta understood a bit.

“This someone is only doing this at night?”

Joyce sat back in her chair, pointing her finger in satisfaction at her friend.

“What for?” Crysta asked.

Joyce nodded her head. “I have no clue.”

“Wouldn’t there be a log of it? Hammy must have someone on record.”

“Ideally, yeah, but you can do it manually from this console, without logging anything in. See, with this app here, I can run it and just type in the cords and press enter. Nothing gets tagged.”

“So, someone sat right where you are sitting?” Crysta asked.

Joyce looked down at her chair, eyes wide in revelation. She sat up suddenly, shooting herself up into the room. She screamed suddenly at the surprise, forgetting she had taken her boots off. Crysta laughed softly as Joyce floated back down to the ice floor and tip toed back over to her seat. She didn’t sit down though. Instead, she slipped her bare feet into her boots and walked away, coming to a stop at the door. She leaned her ear against the door and listened for a moment.

“What are you going to do?” Crysta asked. She was getting tired of being confused.

“Who am I going to tell?” Joyce asked. “I’m almost afraid to tell Ben. He will freak out even more than usual.”

“Um, tell Charles, it’s his job.”

“I don’t trust him.” Joyce stood at the doorway with her arms crossed.

“You don’t trust anyone that went on the ship and it’s getting ridiculous. Your paranoia is getting just a tad unnerving.”

“It’s not the ship,” Joyce pointed out. “Well, it is. But it’s also not. Look, he could be using the dishes to point them at Earth a bit different. Maybe he is getting more secret messages from Earth and is keeping it a secret from us? He’s done that already, right?”

Crysta bit her lower lip.

“Then what?”

Joyce walked back over to the console, pushed the chair aside, and got on her knees to type.

“I’m going to change the app to monitor everything. I still can’t tell who does it from here, but I can log where the dishes are pointed to…” Joyce trailed off as she began typing furiously on the keyboard.

“Need help?” Crysta asked as she leaned over her shoulder. She waited for a moment, for an answer, and took a step back. Joyce was already deep into her programming. Crysta leaned over again, and watched. The code was easily recognizable, if not simple. A few errors popped up here and there, and the perfectionist in Crysta jumped several times, wanting to reach out and correct the mistakes, but she knew better. Joyce was fully lost in her own little world now, and breaking her out of that world would be a disaster. Instead, she walked quietly back to her desk, and brought up an AI terminal.

- Mirror everything from Communications console. – Crysta typed.

The screen cursor blinked for a few seconds, then data started pouring into her workspace. It was the coding that Joyce was doing on her end. Crysta watched and quickly corrected the small mistakes. She looked back every time to see if Joyce was aware, but the comms specialists just kept typing away. Crysta hid a small smile and kept on correcting the errors.

The code wasn’t easy, but Joyce just kept typing away, rarely stopping unless she made a glaring error. She was tired of not knowing what was going on. It was her job to know, and the little things were starting to get to her.

Joyce hadn’t known Cary that well, despite all that time together on the moon. She really didn’t know anyone that well, other than Crysta. It was the curse of staying in the server room all day, nearly every day. But the thought of someone killing another human on the base, and getting away with it was getting on her nerves. Someone was sneaking around the base and she was getting sick of not knowing who. She could hear transmissions from over three hundred million miles away, and she couldn’t hear a few lonely footsteps in the middle of the night.

Joyce stopped typing.

An idea. Now she had two things to do that night. It was OK, she was used to going without much sleep.

- Crysta –

It was one of those rare occasions where the IT expert left the server room, but she really needed it. Susan had sent a message out that she had just harvested a rather large crop of tomatoes, and that it needed to go, for storage space. Crysta loved tomatoes. When she heard the news, her mouth had salivated instantly. She couldn’t wait to taste those fresh, tart yet sweet, fruits.

And yes, they were fruits. She had won that argument with Susan’s help.

But the message only got better. Because of the large amounts of tomatoes harvested, Susan and Gary had whipped up a rather large batch of pasta sauce, and it was ready. Now, in the two years she had spent on the frozen moon and the nine months it had taken to arrive there, she had eaten plenty of spaghetti and pasta sauce, but it had always come from cans and frozen pouches. It was always a welcome meal, but it was just that, a processed substitute.

Walking down the main hallway that led to the green dome, she could already taste the freshness. She couldn’t wait.

This specific hallway had been worked on extensively. It had been enlarged and a magnetic layer was installed a few inches under the ice to facilitate walking. Lights lit it up the ice, which Jenna had taken the time to imprint a pattern and glaze it over. Everyone had taken a turn in putting their names and a short message in the ice. Well, everyone except Glorin. She wondered if he would be at the spaghetti dinner, seeing as no one saw him anymore.

She had once in the past two weeks. Crysta had just come out of the new server room just under the main control room having dealt with an overheating issue. It was funny to her that on a frozen moon, she still had to deal with overheating computers. What made matters worse, on an ice moon, was that overheating usually led to water issues, and that was bad. She couldn’t afford to lose any computers to silly water damage. But, she had fixed it, and even had a fantastic cooling system in place that used the melting water. She had Thomas to thank for that.

But as she had come up the ladder and into the hallway, one of the unfinished ones, she had reached to close the hatch, and there he was. His eyes were bloodshot, like someone who had been awake for a day, or longer. His hair was unkempt and his face a mess of stubble. She wondered just how much he was eating these days. She smiled and said hello, and he stared at her for a moment with a gaze of confusion before looking down. When he looked back up, he returned the smile and she noticed he was missing a tooth.

“Are you OK?” she asked.

“I just needed to walk a bit,” had been his reply.

She understood. No one liked him, but she didn’t mind him. She was a recluse herself, and valued her solitude.

That was the last time she saw him. Granted, she didn’t see anyone that much other than Joyce and Ben. She spent all of her time with Hammy, the base AI. The work for plotting and planning a route home was consuming the AI’s capacity to the max. She had to actually create new code to allow other non-AI subroutines to work, otherwise the base’s automatic systems wouldn’t run. In the matter of two weeks, she had essentially written an entirely new AI just to run the base, and left Hammy up to its astrophysics.

Still, the past two weeks had been a sort of relief for most. The return ship was being analyzed for repairs, but everything seemed hopeful. The crew had gone about taking out whatever experiments remained intact after the ice quake and had actually run some of them. Everyone was still hopeful to return to an Earth they recognized. To most, the trip to Europa was not a one way endeavor, and wealth, fame and notoriety awaited them back home. It was something to cling to. Cary’s ghost still haunted the deep cold hallways that had been all but abandoned except for storage. The fact that her killer was still here on the base seemed to have been forgotten, which Crysta found a bit terrifying. She thought about it all the time. It’s why she kept the server room locked. Charles hadn’t come up with a good suspect, and so everyone just waited. Joyce had mumbled on a few occasions how she could catch the person if they ever did something again, but she hadn’t mentioned what. Maybe her friend didn’t even trust her.

Joyce looked worse off at times than even the crazy billionaire, Glorin. Crysta had talked to her a few times, but her friend was completely consumed by Earth and this killer they had on the base. She had created a conspiracy theory where Charles had, under orders from Earth’s military, killed Cary as some kind of sick psychological test for the rest of the crew. She was starting to believe that the war on Earth was just a cover story and was actually keeping an illegal tap on Charles’ communications. Illegal in the sense that if Earth was still like they had left it, Joyce would get in serious trouble if anyone found out.

Of course, she was the communications expert.

And what if she was right?

It took one whiff of that scent to make Crysta forget about everything she was thinking about. It was there, the tart yet sweet smell of fresh tomatoes, mixed in with herbs and spices, namely oregano and parsley. She instantly had visions of pizza, lasagna and ravioli. The smells nearly overwhelmed her. She knew it was just noodles, but, just the idea of fresh food after so much frozen and canned food was incredibly appealing.

A line had already formed in front of her, and beyond it she could see a pillar of steam rising gently up into the green limbs of the plants that had provided the tasty meal. Crysta had once taken an ecological vacation to Costa Rica, several years before the mission. This reminded her of that, if she could put aside the ice pillars and walls. Instead, she pretended they were the sides of a cliff, and she was walking that dirt trail up to where she saw the colorful birds and monkeys.

She hated to admit it, but she wanted to go home. She enjoyed her solitude, she just enjoyed being able to go outside and be alone, too.

It didn’t take long to get her plate. She watched with drooling anticipation as Susan first poured the hot steamy noodles on her plate, then a plentiful serving of the sauce. She wasn’t even sure she said thank you as she walked away; she hoped she had, but all she could think of was that first bite. The first bite was always the best. She nearly tripped as she rushed as fast as the tiny moon’s gravity allowed her to. The only real way to move fast on Europa was to force the lifted foot down onto the magnetic floor, so running in the base always looked like forced marching.

Crysta didn’t care how ridiculous she looked. She found a place to sit at one of the benches surrounding the chicken pen. One quick look revealed just how much they had grown. Susan had predicted that the minimal gravity would make them grow even faster than they had been bred to. They looked almost like normal sized chickens, not that Crysta really knew what normal sized chickens looked like other than from pictures. She had never, and would never, own an animal or pet. Her solitude excluded animal, as well.

The steaming plate was hot to the touch, and it felt good on her lap. She broke open a small packet of pepper, and watched with delight, as usual, as the tiny flakes floated down onto the noodles and sauce. She could already sense the buildup of saliva in her mouth. Anticipation was amazing. Just as she reached out her fork to dig into the meal, her tablet beeped. She took a quick look, nodding it off. The fork pulled up a heavy heaping of noodles, but the tablet kept beeping.

“Ugh,” she grumbled, setting the fork down on the plate.

She swiped the tablet to life and quickly read the only message showing on her screen. It was from Hammy, the AI. She read it once, then again. Dread set in her chest. P

“Oh, shit.”