Europa (Deadverse Book 1) (7 page)

- Connie -

“We have gone over these a hundred times. They work perfectly. We won’t be flying the Tin Can anytime soon, but we have another week or so till we need it and even then, I’m sure I have plenty of spares around somewhere. In the meantime, you can breathe old school.”

Connie went over the airflow design they had engineered for the suits. They had dismantled the internal air supply system for the orbital delivery vehicle, per her suggestion, and had implemented the regulators and pressure valves into the suit, along with copious amounts of glue and tape. They would have to rely on analogue displays of current oxygen time, each tailor made for the five lucky men and women who were going into the vessel after their lost crewmate.

Communication was an entirely different problem. There was simply no way to maintain contact with the base from within the vessel. Whatever form the brilliant engineers tried to rig up always ended up using some form of electricity. Even the simplest device, a telegraph, relied on pulses of electricity. Inside of the artifact though, they were going to rely on hand signals and writing on tablets, in the most literal of ways. The five had already been practicing their hand signals for the past eight hours.

Light had been an easy fix. The right combination of chemicals mixed together produced a rather bright glow for hours. Bottle that together along with some lenses, and the brave explorers had themselves flash lights. They were not nearly as bright as electric generated lights, but it was far better than stumbling around in the dark. The prospect of going into the alien vessel was daunting enough the way it was.

But the biggest thing all five of the volunteers had in common was the saving grace of their predicament. Each and every one of them knew sign language. It was really their only hope when communication was not expected in any other way.

They had rations for two days, if needed, but they really only had enough air for ten hours, maybe twelve.

Jenna attached the canister of oxygen they had brought along to the intake valve on the rover. She motioned the drone soldier over and it immediately tapped into it, refilling its own air. Jenna smiled through her helmet. It was like taking care of a pet. She then began dragging the rest of the canisters over to the shaft elevator. The rest of the drone soldiers would need a refill as well. She didn’t understand how their biological filters worked, but she knew they did, and well. They used far less ‘food and air’ than anyone else, and that was mostly because of the way the mech suit filtered and recycled. The mech AI also regulated their bodies; it was a way to get them to use far less energy when they didn’t need to.

Charles led the way to the elevator. They would drop the lift down and do their own jump into the shaft, just like the first time. Connie would go along as she had some of the best hands on engineering experience on the base. She had laughed at that though, as they were about to go into a foreign and completely alien space ship.

The doctor, Gary, came along as well, for obvious reasons. They still had no idea in what condition they would find Glorin in, if they found him. It was a heavy risk allowing him to go. Should something happen to him inside, the rest of the crew would be left with only first aid training. Gary had insisted, though. He wasn’t about to miss out on the tiniest bit of action this mission would provide him.

Emir had been forcefully volunteered. It was clearly delayed punishment for the video incident. He knew it well and had accepted the role quietly. He had only asked that he not wear any red clothing. It was a joke few had understood.

Of course, Jenna had volunteered and no one was about to deny her the opportunity she had desired from the very beginning. She was also the last to jump into the shaft and into the frozen darkness.

- Ben -

“Ok, we have clear video from the EUAs, Charles.”

Ben looked at the screens they had mounted in central command. Most of the crew was there to watch, except for Susan and Joyce. The botanist was busy with regularly scheduled work in the green dome, and Joyce had excused herself. She said she was tired and wanted to get away from the stress for a bit. Once the crew down below went into the vessel, they would have no more contact with them, and the lab would have to go back to its normal routine, at least for a while. Joyce just wanted to get started earlier.

Two more monitors sprang to life as Ben clicked on two separate video streams: one from a EUA and another from drone 7. He poked and prodded at other camera feeds, occasionally putting his fingers in his mouth to bite off bits of his nails. It was his sole nervous tic. Cary sat next to him, seemingly much calmer than the base commander. Her heart was beating through her chest, though. She had something strange, for sure, going on with Gary, but that didn’t mean she didn’t like him. A lot even. She also knew Susan was probably rushing through her garden chores to be back here with her.

Their little experiment had started as a joke, something to fight the boredom on the frozen moon. Instead, it had turned into something real, something concrete, and at the same time, something currently quite taboo back on Earth. The end of the mission had led Cary and Susan to talk about what would happen once they were back. It wasn’t something they looked forward to. It was too bad they couldn’t get a straight answer from Gary, either.

Thomas sat on the far side of the room. He could barely make out the images on the screen, but he knew precisely what was going on. Down under a mile of ice were his former lover and his current lover. He didn’t like that prospect very much. They were supposed to dig the ice and then relax for the rest of the mission. This was not relaxing, he thought.

Multiple images showed the five crew members assembled around the spot where they best guessed Glorin had vanished down into. They had gone over the video over and over again, and all they could make out was the form of the professor slowly sinking into the hull. Now, they stood over that spot, waiting.

“Ok, we are here, Ben,” Charles’ voice crackled over the speakers.

Ben nodded at Cary, who typed in a command. A second video came on, side by side with the live feed down below the ice. It was the original feed; they were matching the video to pinpoint that entrance. The images flowed on top of each other and froze still.

“Two or three feet to your left, Charles,” Ben said into the mic.

Back on the screen, the captain took two small steps to his left, putting his feet right over the spot on the old video where the body was.

“Ok, right there,” Ben confirmed.

Charles turned and gave a thumbs up to the video camera on the EUA. Ben covered his face for a moment, squeezing his temples. When he looked back at the screen again, Charles had already turned around and was on his hands and knees, looking around the hull.

“Can you have the drones try again?” he asked over the comm.

“Already on it,” Charles replied. Ben saw as one of the drones walked over and stood next to the captain. Dropping down on its knees, the mech began exploring the surface of the hull with its hands. Ben switched the video feed to that particular drone and images of its metal hands filled the screen. It was digging away at the surface of the hull. The way the fingers rattled off the hull showed it was hard. Then Charles put his hand next to the drone’s hand and his sunk in immediately a few inches in.

“See?”

“I had to try,” Ben added.

The screen flickered momentarily, then the full view provided by the EUA came back on.

“It’s time,” Charles indicated.

The entire room held its breath as they watched the screen. Charles stood up and took one step forward. When his foot struck the hull, it began sinking immediately. But instead of just his one foot sinking, his entire body started going under, despite the fact his other foot had been standing on ‘solid’ ground.

“Ain’t that something,” Charles was able to utter right before his head slipped under the hull. The comm clicked and static came over it for a moment, then it was silent.

The image on the EUA spanned wider and all four remaining crew were seen on the screen, slowly beginning to sink where they stood. They weren’t standing anywhere near the supposed entrance, but were now vanishing into hull of the ship. Cary gasped when she realized what was happening and leaned forward quickly, turning the long spindly mic over to her.

“Gary, be careful,” she quickly uttered. When she looked again, the doctor’s head was already vanishing under the hull.

“Just be careful,” she whispered, sitting back in her chair.

In moments, their shadows were all but gone, having slipped away into the alien ship they had traveled millions of miles to explore.

“Now,” Ben said, standing up slowly and turning to face the rest of the crew, “we wait.”

Horace stood up and looked around the room. “I have to go write some reports.” He continued to look around. “Where is Crysta? I have to ask her what is going on with the emails to Earth. Nothing is going through.”

Ben had turned his focus back to the screens and waved aimlessly towards the exit. The psychologist shrugged his shoulders and walked towards the doors. He would look for her in her workspace first.

- Crysta -

“Ok, I’m here,” Crysta said, sitting down on the seat next to Joyce. Crysta held out her small comm link. The IT chief had setup up some confidential data links that she gave out to her few real friends on board the base, notably Joyce and Connie. Twenty minutes ago, while everyone was in the central command watching the five getting ready to descend into the alien ship, she had gotten a beep on her comm, on the secure data link she had setup. It had one message.

- You gotta come see what I found. –

“Whatcha got?”

Joyce turned and Crysta was immediately shocked. Her friend’s eyes were red, the kind of red eyes a person gets while staring at a screen for hours on end. Joyce put her hand on her screen and swiped, sending the information on her screen over to an adjacent monitor in front of Crysta. Joyce began scanning through the data, mostly documents with some images and maps. She took only a slight glance before turning back to her friend.

“Ok, you tell me what I’m looking at, seeing as you’ve been going at this for quite,” Crysta began, stopping for a moment before taking a closer look at her friend, “some time.”

“I took all that data, the encrypted stuff sent to the captain. Gigs of data. Some of it was double encrypted, meant only for the algorithms on his console. Might need your friend to try to hack those. Anyways, I start going through this stuff, first, just glancing, looking, reading like it’s off the internet. It looks like boring reports, battle stuff, troop stuff, missions and what not. But, after a few hours, I start getting this feeling. The reports, they are building up. There are a LOT of requests for intel, forwarding information from overseas…”

Joyce was frazzled. She started shuffling through a stack of papers she had in front of her.

“Did you actually print this stuff? On our limited paper?” Crysta asked.

“Ok, look here, and…” she threw some papers off the stack, grabbing another, “and here. Ok. Now, this is where it starts getting odd. Its damn military talk, but I know this word. Look.”

Joyce handed her friend the sheet of paper, where she had circled and underlined a word.

“Detonation,” Crysta said out loud. “Detonation confirmed.”

She took the sheets that Joyce kept giving to her, all reading the same thing. Detonation confirmed. London. Paris. Mumbai, Tehran, Jerusalem, Berlin. She kept reading the sheets Joyce was giving her. New York City, Toronto, Chicago.

“Are these…Is this…” Crysta could hear her heart beating loudly. “Is this what I think it is?”

“I didn’t know for sure at first. It never flat out says it,” Joyce said, a hint of desperation in her voice. “But here, look at this one.”

Crysta took the sheet.

“President underground. Washington lost,” she pronounced the words, barely uttering them.

“What happened? What IS happening?” Crysta began digging through the papers herself.

“I don’t know. The details are rather lacking. I think the real meat and potatoes are in those encrypted files. Can Hammy crack them?” Joyce asked.

“I’ll see what he can do,” Crysta stopped for a moment, looking up at the screen in front of her. “Who else have you told about this?”

“Are you kidding? I’m not even supposed know about this. I hacked this, we….YOU hacked this. Who am I supposed to tell?”

Crysta reached out and put her hand on her friend’s shoulder.

“Alright, relax. I’ll get the AI to work on it. Let’s see what we can find out. Either way, if the captain makes it back from his little mission, then we’re going to get it out of him.” Crysta sat back in the chair, a thousand thoughts running through her head. “So, we agree, right? What this is?”

The look on Joyce’s face revealed her terror.

“Nuclear war.” The words nearly left her out of breath.

- Jenna –

Just keep your head above water.

A natural reflex. That is all it was. She didn’t even notice it until it seemed too late. Before she knew it, she was gasping for air and struggling to get back to the surface. Panic set it, if only for a brief moment. Then she realized, she didn’t have to gasp. She was breathing just fine. Still, she was being swept away by whatever it was she was in.

Jenna had gone under without even noticing it. One moment, she was standing on top of the oddly feeling hull of the alien vessel, and the next, she was flowing into it on some kind of current. She hadn’t even felt herself descend into it.

There was some kind of light all around her. As she twisted herself in the liquid, she could see Charles up and to her right, and Connie just above him. Looking down she could make out two more forms, likely Emir and Gary. She watched all four of her companions for a minute, turning her gaze from down to up and then back down a few times. All four kept the same angle and distance from her. If it wasn’t for the sensation of flowing with a current underwater, she would have thought themselves frozen inside the tub of gelatin that was the alien vessel.

Over the past two days, Thomas and she had discussed the nature of the alien vessel a few times. Clearly, it was something completely beyond their understanding. It was quite possibly biological, and therefore alive. It freaked her out a bit to think she was a microbe inside of a huge being. The other possibility was that for a ship to travel at the speeds necessary for interstellar travel, the material needed would be something humanity simply couldn’t comprehend. She compared it to the use of compressed gel atmospheres in extreme deep sea subs. It was amazing technology that allowed a human to go that deep, and for machines to go even deeper. Perhaps the liquid they were trapped in served the same function at light speeds.

Of course, traveling at light speed was just one form of interstellar travel, Thomas had argued. An argument they had enjoyed many times over. Jenna pointed out that unless you somehow managed faster than light travel, going at the speed of light was really slow in universal highways. She much preferred wormholes or space bending.

It was a theoretical argument. Just the technology used to deliver the humans onto Europa had been brought upon by amazing developments. The urge to discover the alien craft was a huge incentive, especially for the United States military. Funding to develop the propulsion that brought them to the frozen moon had come primarily from them.

And that crazy little man they were going after.

Jenna didn’t like him. Very few people did. He had no scientific or engineering background and routinely just made up the bullshit that he called his xeno expertise. He ranted and raved about all the research he had done back on Earth and it was always a joke. He could never show any proof of his discoveries, always quoting some kind of corporation policy he had and the ‘eyes of spies are everywhere’ crap he continually spewed. Even with creeps like Emir on the mission, she disliked the short man with the bushy black eyebrows the most. Somewhere, deep down, she wouldn’t mind if they found him dead.

That was a horrible thought.

Jenna snapped back out from her daydreams. There was something up ahead of them, down below. It looked like an egg, but, as she drifted closer, it was clearly something much larger. She saw Gary look back up to her. He signaled ‘can you see that?’ She replied that she could. Emir was doing something too, but she couldn’t make it out through all the goo. There was still a constant light around her. Nothing bright, just, there, like a dull green light deep in a basement somewhere. A quick check behind her showed that Connie and Charles were still there in the same spot as before, as least relative to her. Charles gave her a thumbs up, and she replied.

Whatever it was they were in wasn’t killing them.

For now.

There was no sense of distance or size within the vessel. She could still feel the motion of her body through the liquid, and that was the only way she knew she wasn’t frozen in place. Now though, the egg shaped thing ahead of them kept growing bigger and bigger and Jenna had to train her mind to think that it wasn’t growing bigger, they were just getting closer. Several more minutes passed by as the egg grew larger and larger. It was dark in color, almost black, yet not quite. Before long, it was clear the egg was far larger than they were, in fact, it was larger than one of the domes they lived in on the surface of the moon. It was only then that she could see what could only be described as a long thread coming out of the pointed end of the ‘egg’. It disappeared deep into the vessel.

Whatever this thing was, they were being pulled to it. She had no way of knowing just how deep they were, or how far they had travelled. She had a small analog watch inside of her helmet that ticked away nearly silently and according to it, they had been descending for nearly ten minutes. She was starting to panic as the egg got so large, that was all she could see. She knew that she had volunteered for the mission and that going into the complete unknown like that was, at best, potential suicide. She had been gung-ho about it. She wanted to be the one. Now, it looked like she was about to collide with whatever it was deep inside and her heart began to race. She tried twisting around, but found that it was worse than being in zero gravity. She could turn her head and torso a bit, but her body just kept moving down.

She could see the edge of the egg and for a moment, she thought she could see through it. Her panic subsided for that brief moment until she realized she was going through it. Her heart exploded as the slow motion of the water was replaced by the scream inducing sensation of free falling.

It didn’t last long when she crashed with a thud onto the ground, the floor, or whatever it was.

Then she heard two more thuds.

Standing up, she looked around and saw that they were in a large cavern of sorts. Not surprising, it was shaped like an egg on the inside. The strange ambient light was strongest here, which again distorted the sense of size, but Jenna guessed it at a couple hundred feet long. She turned and saw her four companions standing up, and that’s when she realized she had heard them fall as well.

“Did you all hear me?” she shouted inside of her helmet.

Emir was the first to turn and look, but the others, after looking around quickly, turned their helmets towards her.

“I did. I DID!” Emir shouted. It was muffled, but clear enough.

“There must be some kind of atmosphere in here,” Connie said, barely audible through the helmet.

“Let’s not go cracking our helmets off just yet, folks,” Charles shouted.

“The captain is right,” Connie said, louder this time, “We have no way of reading what kind of air is in here. Let’s just be thankful we don’t have to walk around signing.”

Jenna began walking off towards the pointed end of the room when a hand reached out to grab her.

“Hold on there,” it was Charles. “Let’s figure out where we are at first, OK?”

The engineer spun around. “We are inside of the alien vessel. We did nothing to get here and now we’re inside of the egg. We need to get moving to find the professor.”

She noticed Charles smile inside of his helmet. That was what he called Glorin, much to his chagrin.

“Fine, just check your air first, and check for leaks I'm your suits. Let’s not mess this up,” Charles ordered.

As Jenna checked her air supply and then start checking her suit, she did notice the captain pull out a hand gun and check it as well.

“You brought a gun?” she shouted.

Everyone turned, although Jenna was the only one seemingly surprised.

“That is my job. Not a chance I’m going in here without one.”

The captain straightened himself and then began walking away from them while everyone quickly fell in line behind him.

“Any ideas where we are? Or what this is?” Charles shouted out behind him.

“You don’t think this is really an egg, like Jenna said? Maybe the aliens were bringing an egg to Earth?” Emir speculated, his voice quivering just slightly.

“Seriously?” Charles said, stopping and glaring at Emir. He shook his head and looked at Connie. “What do you think?”

She was on her knees, and was sticking her fingers through the floor. Jenna stomped and felt solid ground, not the soft goo of the hull.

“We are walking on a grated floor that’s been fitted onto the substance we were pulled through. From what little we saw, I’d say the substance actually coats the vessel and we are now inside. This is all clearly artificial in here. And by artificial, I mean, built, crafted.”

“I don’t see anything else in here though,” Charles continued, “Right? I don’t see wires, bolts, nothing like that.”

“And we don’t see a dead little man lying about,” Gary added.

Connie nodded. “Nothing that I can see. We were deposited here, and as you can see, there’s nowhere to go but ahead of us.”

“So, we are at the entrance,” Jenna threw in her thoughts.

“Maybe. There is no way I could say. I’m barely an expert here,” Connie replied.

Gary laughed. “It’s too bad Glorin isn’t here.”

“All right, let’s stay focused,” Charles immediately quipped before everyone could start laughing. The billionaire had been extremely frustrating from the first day Charles had met him, and this was no different. This was not what he had expected to do when millions of miles from his family.

“Let’s move forward and everyone, just be careful and aware.”

Jenna dropped in behind everyone as they began walking towards the pointed end of the large room. As they walked, they could see the shape of the room by the odd glare their chemical lights gave off against the walls. The room was now visibly hundreds of feet long, if not more. They also weren’t bouncing around like on the surface of the moon.

“Normal gravity,” Jenna said.

“I was thinking the same thing,” Connie added. “Beyond me to think that a civilization that could cross millions of light years couldn’t manipulate gravity.”

“Yeah, but this feels like Earth gravity,” Jenna pointed out.

“That freaks me out,” Emir added as they continued to walk.

“Why?” Gary asked, turning around just slightly to look back on Emir.

“Why would it be the perfect gravity for us? It’s too much coincidence that whatever planet this thing is from has the exact same gravity as our planet,” Emir explained.

Gary continued walking, thinking about what he had just heard.

“For that matter, why aren’t we falling over? We have been used to Europa gravity for almost two years now. Even with all the physical training we do with the weights, we should be feeling some intense fatigue right about now. We are actually going to be nearly bed ridden for a month once we get back to Earth while we get our strength back. No way our bodies should be walking around like it’s nothing,” Gary explained, then pointed up ahead to Charles, a good ways ahead of them. “Yet there goes Captain America like he’s running a marathon.”

Charles had indeed been walking at a far greater pace than them. The rest of them were so used to walking slowly, even when magnets held them to the base floor. But Charles’ instincts had kicked in. The moment he felt normal gravity, he had fallen into a heavy pace.

“What I want to know is, why we could come in here, hell, why we were brought here, when the mechs can’t?” Emir asked.

“Maybe they don’t like robots,” Connie said, picking up her pace as well.

“Maybe they can read our minds?” Emir continued to ponder. He stopped for a moment and looked up.

“Then they wouldn’t need videos to watch me shower,” Jenna said, walking past him. No one said a thing, although Jenna thought she heard Gary laughing.

A few more minutes passed as they continued walking in silence. They had to pick up their pace to catch up to Charles, but when they did, they nearly ran him over. He had come to a stop just before the floor began to descend. The pointed end of the egg room had suddenly become much smaller. It dipped down into a much smaller room where a large green globe sat suspended in the air, spinning ever so slightly. All five of them stood there watching it in awe, as it would expand a bit then deflate. The deep green light appeared to emanate from within it, but how it reached out through the vessel was a complete mystery.

Beyond the large sphere were three columns of dark green matter, flowing upwards from three separate holes in the grated floor and up into the ceiling. It appeared to be the same material that the hull itself was made out of. And there, right next to the column of flowing liquid furthest on the left was the form of a man, sticking his hand into the flowing column. As he looked back, they all could see the face of the man they all hated, smiling back at them like someone who had found their long lost toy.

“I’ll be damned,” Charles muttered.

“Hey captain, I thought you followed along with me,” he said, wiping away the liquid off of his arms and walking up towards Charles. “But how did they get in here so quickly? For that matter, why are they here? Where are the drones?”

“Professor?” Charles asked. “We came to rescue you.”

“Huh?” Glorin gave the captain an equally confused look. “Rescue? I just got here.”