Europa (Deadverse Book 1) (23 page)

“Sorry,” he said, then added, “sir.”

“Do you have something else you need?” Ben asked in a low, tense voice.

“I do. I want a firearm,” he said plainly.

Ben raised an eyebrow.

“What for?”

“Because I am a soldier. It’s what I do. I’d rather be ready.”

Ben thought about it for a moment.

“Even if I would allow it, Charles certainly isn’t going to allow it, and he is the only one with access to our few weapons.”

“I don’t need his weapons. I have my own. I just need access to my mech.”

“Your mech was a mess, everything was pretty much destroyed.”

Paul lowered his head.

“What about my comrades? Were their suits damaged?” he asked without looking up.

“I…” Ben thought for a second, “I am not sure.”

“Then I ask for permission to go out and check. You do know where they are buried?”

“If I were to tell you, and you went out and came back with guns, how do you think everyone else is going to feel? Some probably think you did it, you know, some psychosis or alien brain control.”

“Is that what Horace told you?”

“No,” Ben said. “He said you were perfectly fine. ‘Probably better than the rest of us’ were his exact words.”

“Sir, if I find what I’m looking for, no one else need know I have the weapon. And if they do, maybe they just might feel safer knowing I had it.”

Ben walked back over to the table and set his tablet down. Ben didn’t like unknowns, but at that moment, he decided to go with the unknown he knew, and not the unknown he still didn’t know. He touched a button on his tablet and the base com link came open. He found Crysta’s link and tapped it.

“Crysta?”

A second later, she replied.

“Go ahead?”

“I am sending the soldier, Paul, to you. I need you to set up a tablet for him, just for him. Understand?”

“Got it, boss,” she replied.

Ben looked back at the soldier.

“Get that tablet from Crysta, then wait for my message. I’ll send you the coordinates and a message to Thomas. He will have to take you out there on the rover and with a plasma drill.”

“Thank you, sir,” Paul said, turning to leave.

“Soldier?”

He stopped and turned.

“First of all, you better not be my killer,” he said with a coy smile. “And second, you better be there with that gun when I need you.”

Paul nodded and walked off into the hallway, leaving Ben standing there wondering what had just happened. Ben was by no means a pacifist or anti-gun in any way. Instead, he was just the kind of guy who had never owned a gun because he never felt the need to. He just didn’t feel like every single person needed to be armed, because, well, humans were stupid. He knew Charles, trusted him. If the Navy Captain ever felt he needed one of the three sidearm he had brought with him, Ben would be OK with that. He was, though, glad that he had never felt the need to.

Now, he had just armed another man here on the base.

Ben stood there for almost an entire minute wondering if he had just messed up. He trusted Horace though. They had both collaborated to put together the team to begin with, several years ago. If he said Paul was OK, then he was.

He reached out to the tablet again, this time bringing up Thomas’ link. He tapped it and it came online.

“Thomas?”

The engineer replied.

“I have a job for you. I am not sure you will agree with me, but at this moment, I don’t care.”

- Gary –

Neither of them would get over it, ever. Every night, they both sat silently together, always for two minutes. Then they would talk about her, for a few minutes. It was a ritual they had started that horrific night and that they did every single night afterwards. Susan had carved out a tremendously beautiful niche for them deep in the tomato jungle. They had more privacy than anyone else, and they were grateful for that now. True, the entire crew had lost one of its members; in fact, they had lost more than one. But only the two of them had lost their loved one.

Gary had confronted both Charles and Ben today, and it had gotten ugly. The doctor wanted answers from Ben about what was being done to find out who had killed Cary and he had to admit, he had lost his cool. He was yelling at the commander when Charles had jumped into the fray and had gotten a little physical with him. In hindsight, Gary could have understood the captain’s reaction to his outrageous behavior, but it was the accusations that came after that shocked him.

The captain accused him of doing it. He had the audacity to say that Gary had cut his beloved apart, in such horrific fashion. Ben tried shutting Charles up, but the captain continued. He had no evidence, other than the fact that Gary was a surgeon, and only he would have been capable of that. Gary tried to punch him and instead landed himself pinned on the ground, and there, in that vulnerable position, Charles had sworn to find out for sure, and space him.

“It makes sense,” Gary said, retelling the events to Susan.

“How the hell do you figure?”

“The captain is right. Logically, I am the only one on this base who could have cut her…” Gary choked for a second. After a deep breath, he continued, “cut her like that.”

“Well?” Susan sat across from him, nestled into their makeshift bed made from hemp weaving, all grown there in her jungle.

“Well what?”

“Did you kill our Cary?”

“NO! No. I didn’t…” Gary looked up at the towering tomato plants, thirty feet high above him; their sprawling large leaves that were only possible on Europa. “Right?”

It was that possibility that had shocked him the most today. In the time since her death, he was so grief stricken that he hadn’t thought about the possibility that it could have been him, and logically, it made sense. He had wrestled with that possibility all afternoon. He had assumed that either Glorin or Emir, under some strange influence or paranoia from the alien vessel, had committed the deed, but it hadn’t come to him that he was there as well, in the ship. To blame them because they somehow interacted with the ship completely ignored the fact that they had all been swallowed up by the giant ship. There was no telling just how any of them had interacted with the ship, just who had been changed. Gary couldn’t concentrate, Glorin had become incredibly reclusive, Emir had broken down and Charles had become even more paranoid than usual. Jenna was the only one that seemed unfazed by the whole experience, but she usually weathered the storms better than anyone else.

Susan shook her head in disbelief.

“You can’t believe that, Gary,” she said, reaching out to take a hold of his hands, “otherwise, it will destroy you.”

He held her hands and felt the absence of Cary.

“I talked to Horace today, I had to,” the doctor said. He had rarely talked to Horace in any kind of psychological capacity the entire mission, so Susan was surprised.

“What did you tell him?” she asked.

“What I told you, that I thought, that maybe it was me,” he said.

“So what did he say?”

“Other than the usual stuff about PTSD and self-blame issues? He said what you said, that I was crazy,” Gary said, moving her fingers through his. “Just not that kind of crazy.”

“Who does he think did it?”

“He doesn’t think anyone on the base did it,” Gary said, looking back up at the large leaves.

“What?” Susan gasped a bit, “I’m starting to think that he’s the crazy one.”

“He was a theory,” Gary explained. “He told me today, that there is another personality on the base, aside from each of us still alive.”

Gary saw Susan’s confused expression.

“The guy came up with this intricate personality summary for each and every one of us on the base, way back before we came here. He’s able to predict how everyone is and acts, for the most part. But now he says there’s another person on the base.”

“The soldier?” Susan asked.

“No, not counting him. No, he is saying that whoever killed Cary, has another personality, a distinct person of his or her own self, you know, inside of them.”

“Wait, are you saying the shrink is claiming someone here is possessed?”

Gary shrugged his shoulders. “That’s what I thought too, but he doesn’t believe that stuff. He had an elaborate explanation, but what I understood is that, whomever did it, they have a split personality now. That’s why it’s so hard for him to figure out who it is. This murderous other personality only comes out when it wants to murder.”

“Are you saying,” Susan started, her hands shaking in his, “is HE saying that this personality is going to murder again?”

Gary nodded.

“Horace more or less guaranteed it.”

- Susan –

“I had totally forgotten how this felt,” Susan said, with a hint of glee in her voice. She pulled herself on the rail and floated into the large central corridor of the return ship, now properly named The Odyssey. Susan had endured the thrilling yet terrifying flight up from the surface of Europa and was the first resident of the Odyssey.

Connie guided her down the central corridor, down to the second set of living quarters spinning around the ship. Connie had already spent three days up inside the ship testing all aspects of the atmosphere, O2 production and filtration, temperature controls, water flow and control, as well as thoroughly testing out the living quarters and mess hall. Everything seemed to be in perfect order. So far, the only damage had been the last two spinning sections of the ship. These had been damaged nearly beyond repair. While each section could be closed off completely from the rest of the ship, the problem presented was one of reduced cargo capacity. The biggest issue was food. They could easily leave behind all the experiments they had hoped to bring back, and instead just take the data from the experiments. But the food required for the eight month trip home was difficult to not just calculate, but find space for now that twelve thousand square feet were no longer usable.

Thomas had suggested building a simple frame around the damage storage containers, and that the food would be just fine frozen. Sadly, the logistics of trying to retrieve the food from those containers were just too much. There was no time to build any kind of automated retrieval device, and doing a spacewalk while traveling at sixty-four thousand miles an hour wasn’t that appealing to anyone. Instead, the crew had spent some time trying to crunch the numbers of calories required to keep the alive for eight months. It was a bleak prospect.

It was Susan’s idea that saved them, though. The success of the low gravity flow and grow system she had developed on Europa would translate easily to the return ship. Everyone agreed with her plan nearly instantly. She would be the first person on the return ship, along with a cargo of living plants from her jungle in the green dome. In the forty days before they had to depart the moon, she would get a fully running hydroponic system up and running. The plants would serve the same function they had on the surface. They could help filter and provide breathable air, in conjunction with the ship’s own system while providing a constant source of food for the crew. They wouldn’t be able to rely solely on the growing plants, but it would take the burden off what they could bring with them.

“Ok,” Connie said, pointing down towards the set of containers spinning around the main shaft of the ship. Susan took a look out of one of the many windows down the main corridor, and spotted the counter spinning pods. They linked seamlessly with the central shaft, their centrifugal force creating a fraction of Earth’s gravity. After two years on Europa though, it was going to feel much heavier than what they were used to. Many of the crew down on the surface had expressed looking forward to it. Nearly everyone had forgone their daily exercising while they worked on the crisis, and Gary had chastised everyone for it.

Susan pulled herself through the corridor into the first set of spinning quarters. The change from weightlessness to some pull was unnerving. Certainly, it would take some time to get used to. It wasn’t the change in gravity that was most disconcerting, but instead, the change in perspective. The wall she was pulling herself on became the floor, and she began walking on the wall, or floor. She had to take a moment to process the change.

“I’m heading back out into the Tin Can,” Connie shouted from way down the shaft. Susan couldn’t see her as she stood on the edge of the spinning hub. As it came around, she spotted her down where the Tin Can was docked, and caught her feet as they vanished into the hatch.

“Give me twenty minutes or so to get the cargo pod docked on the other side, and then another ten to get myself back onto this side and then we will start unloading. In the meantime, all of your other gear is where you asked me to put it,” Connie spoke over their ear piece.

Three days spent working on this project. It had been a mad scramble as there was no time to waste. Susan wanted to be completely sure that her crop was established and growing before the ship started to cruise back to Earth. The first time they left the orbit of the tiny moon, they would hook onto Jupiter’s giant and gracious gravity well, and they would use it to build up speed to sling back towards Earth. If the plants weren’t rooted in and growing, they wouldn’t recover from any of the damage suffered during that stressful event.

The first day Susan ran around barking orders unlike any other time in her life. She needed pipes, tools, containers, crates and crates of substrate and distilled water frozen into ice blocks. On the second day, while half the crew loaded up all her gear onto the first of many cargo containers that Connie would fly up to the ship, Susan began preparing her plants for transport. The work was slow and delicate. She had to find just the right branches to prune off of the mother plants. These would work best because they came from dependable and proven growers, but would take longer to root than a seed might have. She packed each cutting carefully into a webbing of water and fiber from her hemp plants. She included some of the hemp plants in her crop, but as they didn’t provide food, they would take up far less space.

On the third day, they packed up the plants into the next cargo container. She had ridden up with them and Connie into orbit, and was now at work unloading and preparing her gear. It would take much longer to unload all the gear by herself. Thirty minutes later, Susan was at the hatch of the outer dock, waiting for Connie with a smile. The two of them set up a two man conveyer belt where Connie unloaded the crates from the container pod and floated them the length of the Odyssey to where Susan waited at the edge of the one of the hubs. From there, she would push each crate gently into the living quarter and watch as the centrifugal force gently pulled the crates down to the floor.

They had some fun with it, laughing as sometimes the crates spun their way toward Susan. Connie asked a lot about the kinds of plants they would be growing. Susan was grateful. She knew Connie had no real knowledge or interest in the plants, not like she did, but her simple questions meant a lot to her. Susan had never envisioned that this group would ever become close, like a family. It was naïve to think that. Everyone was a professional, chosen to come because they were at the top of their careers. They all had their own motives for coming on what could amount to a one way trip. Still, there were those among them that Susan admired, and Connie was certainly one of them. She was the kind of woman she had always wanted to be. Strong, decisive yet alluringly feminine.

Of course, she had fallen in love with both Gary and Cary on that frozen moon. Hours after Connie had departed the Odyssey, Susan sat at one of the windows, taking a small break. She watched as the icy moon came into view and was replaced just as quickly by darkness. Then, in a moment, the entirety of her view was filled with the fearsome majesty of the gas giant. Turning her back on the window, she drank slowly from a tube of water, and small tears streamed slowly down her face. She had never envisioned ever finding love on Earth, so it had come as a pleasant surprise that she had found love twice on a tiny frozen moon. To have then lost one was something she wasn’t sure she could cope with.

So she worked. For three days, sleeping only a few hours every night. Every single crate with the plants in it were opened and placed directly under light. She connected all the planters and filled them with the clay substrate she had used on the surface. The substrate was then covered by a metal mesh that held everything in place. She connected all the tubing and pumps and ran the water through each hydroponic fixture for hours to ensure that there were no leaks. Then, when she was satisfied that there were none, she took each plant, and with the care of a mother with her child, she placed each one into a small slit in the metal mesh, fixing them into place with a small clay fixture. They would hold the plant in place until they developed their own roots.

She carefully measured the minerals and chemicals each set of plants required for growth, and after a few hours, took readings. She knew just the right amount for each type of plant and was delighted to see, on that third day, that tiny small hair, the precursors to roots, were forming on the plants.

She filled four different living quarters with plants, and would continue to work to make sure every living quarter had its own mini jungle growing in it. The lights had to be changed, added most of the time. Thomas, who was in charge of the electrical components on the ship, had complained vociferously that the lights added too much voltage to the already strained system. He had, of course, been shut down. The need to grow food greatly outweighed nearly every other need, short of the atmosphere pumps.

Thomas hadn’t taken well to the disasters. He had always been an emotional, somewhat angry, kind of guy, but since the icequake, he was on edge for everything. He yelled at everyone, and found even the tiniest reasons to argue, and his arguments usually resulted in yelling. He was stressed, Susan knew that. Everyone was, and unfortunately, that was just his way of dealing with it, if he was dealing with it at all.

Susan stayed away from nearly everyone. She had her plants. She had Gary. She once had Cary, but no more. The two remaining lovers had tried to console each other, but Susan felt, no, she knew, that without Cary, it just didn’t work. Gary called one day while she was up on the ship. There she was, stretched out as far as she could, trying to connect pipes along the top of the room, when her ear piece chirped with a comm signal.

He wanted to talk.

She tried talking back, but in the few days she had spent on board the Odyssey, she had found out the revealing truth. She found peace in her plants. He wanted to talk about Cary, as they had tried many nights, and Susan didn’t want to. She just wanted to get the room finished so that she could establish the next batch of cuttings. She tried talking, she did, but found herself asking ‘what’ over and over, because she just wasn’t listening.

She felt bad. She missed Cary and she also missed the Gary she had when the three were together. But now that it was just the two, it just didn’t feel right. She didn’t want to ignore him, but she didn’t want to confront him. There were moments when she hoped he didn’t realize she was ignoring him. Deep down, she hoped that after she was done with the plants, she would feel better, more at peace. Then she would find time for him. But the doctor was too smart. He had to be, or he wouldn’t have been on Europa. He must know. And if he did, how would he react when she came back? She wasn’t sure.

Six days after she was on the ship, Connie returned. She had the final shipment of plants along with Joyce and all of her communication equipment, which was still dwarfed by all the plants. Susan knew the work was going along well back on the surface, but still, she asked Connie for news. She remembered the look Joyce gave her. There was no news. They worked hard, they ate, then slept, and still, everyone knew there was a killer among them.

Cary’s killer.

She had six more days to go. Twelve total days on board the Odyssey as it spun around the tiny moon that had at the same time brought her unimaginable joy and equally as destructive despair. Twelve total days to ensure her small bundles of green life were beginning their journey towards the electronic suns above them. Six more days for Susan to bury the loss of a friend deep within the confines of her mind, as she buried the small tender shoots in the clay substrate. Twelve days within the spinning rooms, and she already felt her body enjoying the artificial pull against her muscles. She missed the green of Earth, the blue oceans. The cosmic magic of a singular planet with dirt that can sustain life.

Joyce would be there now, as she worked on her own part of the mission home, but Susan knew her enough to know they would barely speak. She spent most of her time on the tiny bridge of the Odyssey, up towards the front of the ship, just behind the damage debris shield. She came onto the bridge one night, with a plate of tomatoes as a small ice breaker, and found her sitting over a console with the display on. As she floated in quietly behind her, she saw the image. It was a live feed from the control room back on the base. Joyce was watching it intently.

Without startling her, Susan let out an audible sigh.

Joyce spun around.

“Oh, hey,” she said, returning to her screen.

“I brought these for you,” Susan said, offering the plate. “What are you doing?”

Joyce reached out for the tomatoes without even looking down at the plate.

“I have been sitting here watching this for hours.”

Susan looked around the cramped bridge. It wasn’t designed to replicate any Earth ship. Instead, it was meant to serve as a headroom for all the navigation equipment. It really only had seating for two, and those two didn’t really fly the ship from here. Joyce had set up screens and consoles all over the front, removing one of the seats to place in its stead several of the servers that would form the core of the AI. Once everything was installed, Hammy would fly the ship most of the time, and all the information gathered, integrated and manipulated there was accessible from anywhere on the Odyssey.

“What exactly are you watching for?”

“That,” Joyce replied, pointing at the console she sat at nearly exclusively when down on Europa.

“I don’t…” Susan began, but was interrupted by a sharp chirp that came from Joyce’s wristband.