Erebus (13 page)

I crushed the seat arms with my grip, feeling the push on my back intensify before I felt a slight, anticlimactic
thud
. We were down. Through the cockpit window I saw the outer doors of the landing pad shut. It felt a little like being inside a giant mouth.

***

Our stay on Calisto wasn’t a long one. We climbed out of the Icarus, and I found myself in an umbilical tube on the landing pad of Arcas City.

I looked around in wonder at the landing pad, which was situated in a large chamber that, like pretty much any structure on Calisto, was built within one of the many impact craters. This was just one of the smaller ones that surrounded Arcas City. Even so, the cavernous hangar was over a kilometer across and filled with dozens of spacecraft, service vehicles, and long, transparent umbilical tubes connecting to the walls of the crater.

While Sihota was talking to a gum-chewing tech in the entry way, I bounced a couple of times, playfully testing the low gravity, which was only a tenth that of Earth’s…until I ricocheted my head off the top of the tube. The tube was soft and gave, but even so, I decided it was best to stop before I made a total fool of myself.

Frampton and Vance had grabbed their duffle bags and made their way along the tube toward the wall. I turned and looked at Sihota and the tech with a raised eyebrow.

The tech grinned at me and said, “Turnaround will take about an hour. If you go to the wall and catch the circumference tram a quarter clockwise, there’s an observation tower you can go up. It shows off Arcas City quite well, if I do say so myself.”

“Go on, Layton, take the others with you while I get the Icarus prepped for the next leg.” Sihota inclined his head in the direction of the tube.

I didn’t need to be told twice.

***

We were standing in the lift as it shot up the side of the tall tower toward the peak. The vista opened up in front of us—Arcas City in all of its splendor.

I opened up my HUD link and a wealth of tourist information unobtrusively appeared in my vision as I looked over the crater city. It was vast, sixty kilometers wide with a clear dome over the crater. The buildings twinkled away, mostly at the crater’s edges, while the interior contained vast tracts of farmland, lakes, and forests. In the middle of the crater was another cluster of buildings encrusting a dome of rock.

On the other side lay another crater, smaller than Arcas City but still about forty kilometers in diameter. Inside, it was raw and grey, but around the edges, another transparent cover was growing from the outside in.

More information appeared on my HUD. Even as we watched, billions of nanobots were creating that cover. It had incredible tensile strength. Like Concorde, the space elevators, and the gas miners, it was a product of the nano-industrial revolution. Nothing on this scale could have even been attempted before the advent of nanoscale engineering. Still, forty kilometers was a good distance to cover, and it would take years to complete. But when it was finished, they would have the land area to sustain population growth for decades. And by the time it had been filled, I was sure another crater city would be complete.

At some point, most of the refugees would find themselves here, but for the time being, they were in the temporary relief facilities scattered around the JA.

The people here were more “regular” than the Linked. Many of them were even Naturals. As far as the Jupiter Alliance went, Calisto was the bread basket. It complemented Europa with its unlimited reserves of water and Ganymede with its metal-rich makeup. The three of them formed the triumvirate of worlds that would grant the Alliance independence from the inner systems.

It was rapidly becoming obvious to me that if someone truly wanted to harm the Jupiter Alliance, they would have struck one of these worlds or Concorde, the administrative center. They were the locations that were indispensable. The loss of Io was an inconvenience. But the loss of one of the other three Galilean moons or Concorde may well have been fatal for the Jupiter Alliance.

Sihota was taking Cheng and me to our destination next, and if I thought the ride into Calisto was rough, it had nothing on the journey to Hibernia, one of the gas miners speeding through the upper reaches of Jupiter’s atmosphere.

The view as we approached Jupiter reminded me of the journey we had taken in
Erebus
—dizzyingly fast, nearly suicidal. The massive sphere of the planet flattened out as we approached through massive, wispy clouds and moon-sized thunderheads. I was both disappointed and relieved that our course wouldn’t take us near the Great Red Spot, the most distinctive storm in the Sol system. The spot itself had waxed and waned over the last couple of hundred years, at one point nearly disappearing, but for the last few decades it had returned with a vengeance. Even the hardy gas miners avoided that maelstrom.

Through the cockpit window, I could see a steadily growing speck. Before long, the Hibernia’s shape and true scale became distinct. It was huge. Not as big as Concorde, but where that station was clean lines and grace, this facility looked like a wing-shaped floating chemical factory that stretched left and right out of view.

“This is Hibernia,” Sihota called out. “Basically, its job is to dip into Jupiter’s atmosphere when it’s at perigee and suck up a load of hydrogen and helium. It continues its orbit, and then, when it’s at apogee, the furthest point from Jupiter it orbits, the station will shoot cargo balloons at a capture station before continuing back around.”

The Icarus crept closer and closer to the station. I couldn’t even see where we would dock on the damn thing at first, it was that complicated an arrangement of pipes and modules. Finally, I could make out a rectangle of clear, white light. Our rate of closure had slowed to what felt like a walking pace. Finally, we nudged our way inside.

***

The Hibernia was about as far removed from the cosmopolitan space city of Concorde or the sedentary agricultural nature of Arcas City as it was possible to be. The habitable sections of the station were cramped and labyrinthine, all long twisting passages, pipes, and low lighting. The living quarters were built around the machinery, not the other way around. This was a working station, where the comforts of humanity were not the primary concern. Nevertheless, because the gas miners ran with a skeleton crew, they had plenty of spare life-support capacity to keep a good portion of the refugees.

Melissa Gant, the guide who was showing me and Cheng to our temporary quarters, spouted tedious facts about the station, clearly proud of the place and completely ignoring our dubious faces. It didn’t help that the whole station was in free fall around Jupiter. We were in zero-g again, this time with no respite other than the brief periods of thrust when Hibernia sped up to compensate for the drag of Jupiter’s atmosphere.

“Currently, we have nearly a hundred refugees onboard,” Gant was saying as she pushed herself gracefully down the dark, pipe-filled corridor. “That’s not a problem for our life support in the slightest. The stations were designed to act as redoubts in case of a major catastrophe in one of the space cities. We share the load up here.” She beamed proudly.

“I’m sure,” Cheng said, hauling himself only slightly less gracefully after her. “I presume you have set aside some facilities for our use?” Cheng had switched into G-man mode. His normal levity had all but disappeared, replaced with an authoritative voice.

“Yes, we have set aside an office in the emergency shelter for you to use,” Gant replied. “There is full integration with the Jupiter net here and the Hypernet back on Earth, subject to normal time delays, of course.” We finally reached a set of doors, and she waved her hand, opening them. “These will be your quarters. Sorry, they’re a touch Spartan, but I’m sure you appreciate we don’t have much spare room at the moment.”

I poked my head in. It seemed we were sharing. I could see two bunks, well, alcoves, like two graves next to each other or against the wall, depending which way you looked at them. Without a word, I tossed my backpack toward one, which contained all I needed for what I hoped would be a relatively short stay. Cheng did the same with his own backpack, and Gant led us back out.

Gant droned on with the small talk about Hibernia. I let it wash over me. Anything I needed to know, I could get over Link. Instead, I was thinking about the people billeted around the station. This lot had all come off Io itself. Vance and Frampton were going to be speaking to the people off
Magellan
at Arcas City, and Agapov and Sihota would be questioning others from
Magellan
over on Europa. Drayton was going to be coordinating with the other investigation teams...and Cerise, the lucky girl, back at Concorde.

“And these will be your offices,” Gant said. The slight smile on her face told me a lot about what kind of environment was awaiting us. Sure enough, upon the door’s opening I could see that we had an empty room with a table and a couple of chairs bolted to the deck. “I’m sorry we can’t be more hospitable. We have another store room down the corridor that’s empty, which you can also use if you wish. Just say if you want any more furniture brought up, and we’ll try to oblige.”

“We’ll use one as our office and the other as an interview room. Can you see if you can square away getting it fitted out like this one?” I asked.

“Sure, we should be able to sort that out for you. I’ll get right on it.”

“Thank you, Ms. Gant,” I said to the enthusiastic lady.

“So Lana,” I said, reading her bio off of my HUD. “You were on Io for—what? Six months? At…let me see…Danube Planum? Prior to the incident?”

“That’s right,” Lana Shaftsbury replied. She was a small lady in her early thirties, and she regarded me with a mixture of fear and confusion flickering across her face. I didn’t think I was that scary, but then, I wasn’t sitting on her side of the table. I smiled at her to calm her down. The VRs tended to have us cops shouting and swearing at suspects and witnesses. In real life, we got far better results by building a rapport and keeping them talking.

“And what was your job down there?” Lana opened her mouth to reply. I held up my palm and gave her another smile, preempting what I suspected would be an in-depth explanation that would mean nothing to me. “And remember, Lana, I’m just a police officer. Give me the basics.”

“Well, my doctorate is in Io volcanism. My job was to record and monitor a volcano at the northern end of the Danube called Pele. It’s one of the most active volcanoes in the solar system. We’re trying to get an insight into the structure of the moon. Well, we were…” She tailed off. Clearly, she realized that all her work for the last few years was gone.

“Thanks for that, Lana,” I smiled encouragingly. “I need you to walk me through the events leading up to the evacuation—your thoughts, what you felt, anything suspicious you might have seen, things like that.”

Lana pursed her lips. Perhaps I’d presented myself as little too friendly for she evidently felt she could challenge me. “Mr. Trent, can you tell me why I’m being asked these questions by a police officer? Am I under arrest? Do I need a lawyer?”

“Not at all. If anything, you’re a witness. We want to understand what happened down there. Why it happened. That’s why we’re speaking to all the survivors.”

“Okay…” She still wore a suspicious look on her face. “The Danube research station was quite small. There are…were only twenty of us researchers there, but we had a couple of engineers and a pilot to hop us around.”

I nodded at her, inviting her to continue. All this I knew already.

“I was just working in the lab, looking at some data from a recent eruption, when Pete, my line manager, linked me and told me that we were going to evac stations. We normally have an evac drill once a week since Io is so active that we have to be ready to go at a moment’s notice. Anyway, I saved my work and walked over to the shuttle.”

“You walked over?” I asked. “You didn’t run?”

“Yes, I just thought it was a practice drill,” Lana replied, “nothing special. You know, like when you’re back on Earth, and you have to do fire drills every few weeks.”

“Okay, go on.”

“We got into the shuttle and waited. I was a bit annoyed because those drills always seemed to interrupt me at important times. Anyway, I was just sitting in my prescribed seat waiting to be released from the drill when, next thing I know, the shuttle takes off. I was completely surprised. We all were.”

“I can appreciate that.” I nodded encouragingly at her to keep her speech flowing. “What next?”

“As we were climbing away from the surface, I could see a bright flash of light through the window. I wondered what it was; I even wondered if one of the antimatter bottles had popped over at one of the power station prototypes. Then I saw the massive plume of debris spraying out of a huge hole in the side of the moon. I didn’t know what to make of it. None of us had ever seen anything like it. I thought maybe an asteroid or comet had struck Io, but we didn’t understand why we hadn’t had much warning. They would have seen something that could do that much damage months beforehand. Only later were we told about the
Magellan
.”

I knew this, too. A common theme we were finding was that a lot of people were surprised when they had found themselves actually being blasted up into space. I hadn’t wanted to start with the reasons why Lana here was on our red list, but now she was relaxing; it was time dig into her past.

“So, Lana,” I got up off the chair, making like the interview was over, and pushed myself off toward the watercooler in the corner. I got us both a drinking bulb before returning to my seat. I was definitely getting better at this zero-g maneuvering. “You went to MIT, I understand?”

“Yes, I’ve been there since my undergrad days, other than field work, of course.”

“It’s nice in Boston. I went there on a conference once. Years ago, mind, but I thought it was a lovely city.”

“Yes, it is,” she said agreeably.

“Lots to do, and I thought New York was the city that never sleeps. It’s got nothing on you guys up in Boston.”