Europa (Deadverse Book 1) (10 page)

- Ben –

There was a loud hiss, and the door failed to seal. The light was green, but there was a steady stream of air coming through a hidden crack somewhere in the wall. Ben rushed over to the visible air geyser streaming out into the vacuum and began feeling around with his hands. He moved the hands around the surface of the wall until the spitting air suddenly stopped.

“Ok, found it.”

He reached down towards his feet and lifted up a small gun. When he removed the hands from the wall, the stream of air began again, sending ice crystals bouncing off of his suit. Ben pointed the gun right up against the tiny leak, pressed a button, and coated the wall with a black gloppy substance. He then reached into a small bag on the ice floor and brought out a small disk, which he tapped onto the adhesive glob. His hands pressed on it, and the glue oozed out of the edges of the disk, sealing hard.

“That was close,” Ben breathed heavily into the comms.

“Yeah, that stuff hardens in a hurry.”

Cary was on the other end of the access hatch.

“I’ll try to reseal. Hold on,” she added.

The outer door sealed again, and they knew it worked as they had tested it a few times. Air flooded into the small chamber and in twelve seconds, Cary gave the thumbs up through the small window. Then he looked back down and reversed the process. Ben stood back and watched with his own gauges. They had nearly lost a whole dome when their consoles on the inside had indicated the hatch was sealed when it was not. They had enough bad luck, they didn’t need any more stupidity on their part. Now he watched as the gauges told him the air was being drained out of the outer hull. When the green light came on inside the access room, he looked back down. He waited a moment, looking around the wall to see if there were any additional leaks. He counted seventeen other disks all over the wall. There were some serious issues with the digital readings all over the base. The main computer system was mostly useless, except for the communications. Crysta had managed to get the digital coms running again.

Ben took one last look at the gauges and smiled in satisfaction. One small battle won, for now.

“All good in there?” Thomas asked.

“Yup. Let’s open her up and get Thomas back in here.”

A second light turned red, then began blinking. The blinking lights traced a path towards the outer door until they reached a large green light above the main access door. That light blinked into existence and the door began to slowly rotate open. Ben walked over quickly; the magnetic floors worked here. Odd, that they worked erratically all over the rest of base. As the door rolled open, Thomas was there in the rover, waiting. On the back of the rover was the large mech, laid across the back seats. Ben waved Thomas in and slowly, the rover came across the ice inside the dome, spinning a few times on the smooth surface. Once inside, Thomas jumped down and reached under the rover, dragging out a long cable. While Ben closed the outside door again, Thomas plugged the rover back into the power supply.

“Help me with this guy,” Thomas barked. He was tired, haggard and pissed off.

Ben didn’t quite know what kind of relationship Thomas and Susan had, whether they liked each other or not, but he did know that Thomas didn’t like things getting out of hand, out of control. The thought of Susan just bounding off after the alien vessel was sure to have set him off. Ben had more to deal with than just a broken base. There were many broken people within the base, but he wasn’t sure he could help any of them. To make matters worse, both of his doctors were unavailable.

Rushing over, he helped Thomas stand the mech up on its metal and carbon alloy legs. It stood up, almost gingerly, before stumbling a bit. Ben watched as the light turned green, and just for safety sake, he checked his gauge again. It was one hundred percent breathable air. They pushed through the small hatch one at a time, helping the drone soldier through. Thomas explained how nearly all of its internal sensors and displays were down, so they were essentially leading a blind giant robot through the base.

“And Bobby?” Thomas asked.

Cary sealed up the hatch and came walking behind them.

“We still haven’t found him. There are sections of the base that are buried under tons of ice,” she replied. All three still had their helmets on. That was one order Ben insisted on, almost maniacally. They could refill on air all over the base, so they didn’t have to lug around tanks of air, but he still wanted the helmets on. The base was just too full of holes, he said.

“Crysta is working on trying to access the databases and find the files Bobby used for the drones,” Ben explained as they struggled to move the unwieldy mech drone down through the clutter of crates and broken structure inside the engineering dome. They had repaired the outer hull and the coating of ice was nearly finished. A tiny moment of safety they desperately needed.

“Crysta?” Ben shouted over the com.

“Yeah,” came her reply, “I heard you guys. I’ve found the files, but I’m trying to find any information on, well, pulling a guy out. Honestly guys, I don’t think there is any. There were no plans to pull a guy out.”

“Keep looking,” Ben ordered.

“Yeah, of course,” Crysta replied.

Cary pointed over to a large ice table that had remained surprisingly intact. She ran over and began brushing off pieces of plastic and shards of ice off the top until the smooth cold surface shone through. Thomas and Ben managed to get the mech over to the table and slowly laid him down on his back, pushing him all the way up onto the table.

“Can you hear me still, soldier?” Thomas asked into the mech’s data line.

“I can. Getting kinda stuffy in here though.”

Thomas looked over at Ben who ran over to the mech’s chest plate display. Ben looked down and then back up, shrugging his shoulders.

“He has enough air,” the base commander said.

Thomas repeated what Ben had said to the soldier. “It might be the anxiety, or just the work up from all the moving. Try to relax a bit. We are working on trying to get you out.”

“Ok.” Thomas could hear the heavy breathing through the comms. “How long have I been in here?”

Thomas looked up at Ben. The commander could hear the soldier’s transmissions, but he couldn’t reply to them directly.

“Oh, a day or two. Not sure when you, uh, woke up.”

There was a pause before the soldier replied. “I think I’ve been in the suit longer than that.”

“Oh. That.” Thomas hesitated for a moment. “Honestly, uh, guy, I have no idea. We don’t have that kind of information here.”

“Where…” the soldier began to ask, but there was a gasp in his voice. “This isn’t my scheduled release, is it?”

Thomas had to think about what the drone soldier was talking about. When he realized the confused nature of the soldier, he looked back at Ben. The commander just nodded.

“No. It’s not.”

“Am I a prisoner?”

“Oh, no, we’re Americans. We’re trying to get you out of the suit.”

“An accident?”

“You could, umm, say that.” Thomas wasn’t sure what to say.

Cary walked up with a spare suit and Crysta came online on the data link.

“Ben, I’m sending you the files, but I see nothing in here. We’re gonna have to crack him out the old fashioned way.”

“I was worried about that,” Ben said. “Thomas, you better let him know.”

“Ok,” Thomas looked down at the data link. The soldier’s vitals were all showing OK. “Listen, soldier, we need to try to get you out of the suit, but we aren’t quite sure how to do it, and really don’t have the right equipment here, so just be ready, OK?”

“Where exactly is here?”

Ben swallowed. “Get ready for the shock of a lifetime, kid.”

“We are on Europa, a moon around Jupiter,” Thomas announced.

There was a small pause before the soldier replied.

“Say again?”

- Joyce –

It was her turn to watch them and it was a welcome break. For days now, Joyce had spent every waking hour she had trying desperately to link up in any way possible with anyone at all on Earth. First it had been a connection with Indy, but after exhausting all methods there, she tried other American com bands, military or otherwise. After she exhausted those options, she tried any band she could think of, analog or digital, all over the world. And yet, she kept coming up blank. Nothing was being pointed up to them, and she certainly didn’t have the power in their little base to send blank SOS messages to Earth in the hopes the random band browser was listening in. Still, nothing. They were dead in the water, and as far as she knew, so was Earth.

War.

She trembled a bit as she thought about it. They had yet to go to Ben with it; only she and Crysta knew the decoded messages the Captain had received from Earth. Nuclear war. A holocaust that had been a nightmare to those living on Earth nearly a hundred years in the past, but was a faraway possibility now. And yet, something had happened.

But what?

On the far bed was Horace Tarner, the base shrink. He had suffered a really bad head contusion, or trauma, or something. He had hit his head hard. She didn’t know. Whatever it was had been bad enough to keep him out for a day. Thankfully, he had woken up a bit this morning in utter shock. His first words were “I’m not dead?”

He had managed to drink a little, Cary had told her, and look around for a bit before going back to sleep. They really needed Gary to know if he had some kind of internal bleeding, or head injury they didn’t know. All of the medical equipment was apparently destroyed, but even if it wasn’t, no one there really knew how to use the really complicated stuff. Everyone had first aid training, but head trauma was something Gary had to deal with.

On the second of three available beds was the soldier. She had watched on the video as Ben, Thomas and Cary had cut away into the mech suit to tear the guy out. Bald and pale, but with bright blue eyes, the guy looked like someone who had been living in a cave. Essentially he had, and for how long no one knew. His name was Paul Gore, an appropriate name for a soldier, she had first thought. Joyce didn’t consider herself a pacifist in any fashion, her ex-boyfriends could attest to that, but she wasn’t a fan of the military either. Few people really were, but they just held too much sway any more in America. And just how could you be a fan of a mindless drone that could kill you in sixteen, probably seventeen, different ways.

Asleep just a minute ago, Paul sat up in the bed. Joyce started up in reaction.

The guy sitting up on the bed didn’t look like a killing machine, though. That was always the stark reality, that no matter how much you wanted to hate the military, it was still made up of men and women, just like you. Stupid reality.

“You OK?”

The light glimmered off the bald head, although, it was already starting to grow a gaunt layer of fuzz.

“No one could really tell me how it was to wake up from the drones. No one had woken up when I first went in.”

“And?” Joyce asked, curious. “How is it?”

“Like waking up from a serious bender, but without the hangover. Also, I expected to wake up in someone else’s house, not on someone else’s moon.”

Joyce almost laughed.

“Also, I feel…really light.”

“That’s the gravity on the moon. Takes a while to get used to,” Joyce pointed out.

He swung his legs around and reached for the floor, touching the icy surface with his bare feet, and instantly recoiling. Joyce reached a bit, lurching forward, then stopped when the soldier recoiled back onto the bed. He held his hand out, palm out, stopping her. He reached out again with the feet and put them fully on the ice floor. He sucked air in through his teeth, hissing loudly, then tried to stand up. Surprisingly, he stood straight up.

“Huh,” Paul uttered, “I thought that would be harder.”

He sat back down on the bed and began flexing his arms, feeling the muscles beneath the skin. For a brief moment, Joyce admired the man. Clearly, everyone had expected a weakling to come out from within the mech. It was assumed the reason for their great strength was the machine. She expected a thin shadow of a man, and the pale skin had certainly helped that thought. Instead, the bare chested man in front of her was about as fit as he could be.

Even Paul was surprised.

He swung his feet back up onto the bed and covered himself with a blanket. It was all they had for him. This section of the underground had been totally repaired by now, at least to the point of holding in the atmosphere. There was little risk of a vent, unless another icequake happened. But if that came to be, there would be little point being in a suit.

A door hissed open and Cary walked in, followed closely by Ben. They had some fresh clothes for him, but Joyce was unsure where they had found them from. Ben took the pile of clothes from Cary and handed them over to Paul.

“You’re a lucky guy,” he said, checking him out, “I’ve been told that there really should have been no way you survived your, extraction, I guess you can call it.”

Cary nodded. “The files we read tell us the whole waking up procedure takes twenty hours under a strictly controlled scenario.”

“Lucky me,” Paul whispered, taking the clothes and unfolding a shirt.

“Do you remember anything at all?” Ben asked.

“Nothing. One moment I’m in Fort Bragg, getting ready to go under, and next thing I’m waking up in the darkness of my suit.” They weren’t supposed to remember anything from their time in the mech, and so far, that theory seemed to be holding.

“Well, I’m going to have Ms. Hughes here catch you up to speed on our predicament, as well as why we are on Europa, why you are here, and, well, I guess to answer any questions you might have,” Ben said, nodding his head at Cary.

Joyce watched as the soldier lowered his eyes, in thought, or in exhaustion. It sure was a terrible way to wake up.

“Ms. Hunter, with me please,” Ben ordered, as he walked out of the room.

Joyce got up quickly, smiled at Paul, then at Cary, and left the room. She ran up to catch up to Ben at the end of the hallway. The commander was already getting into his emergency suit, so Joyce followed suit. She climbed into the suit with a speed gained from the hectic practice and experience of the past few days. In a matter of seconds, she was sealed within its constrained protection and was following Ben up the shaft that led up into the command dome, still not fully repaired. It was, perhaps, a long way from being prepared.

As they entered out of the shaft hatch into the main dome, darkness greeted them from below the partial dome roof, but Jupiter’s glow created shadows on the icy floor. It was akin to an ancient temple, now in ruins. Joyce caught herself staring at the vision, when she noticed Ben had already gone. She turned to follow him, bounding along the floor that was devoid of any magnetic force to keep her glued to the floor.

Ben was heading towards the Command Center.

“What’s going on, boss?” she asked.

“I have something I need you to look at. Something curious, but up your alley.”

The Command Center was actually clean, Joyce noted. It made sense, though, as this was Ben’s place. The man was notorious for his cleanliness and neatness. Everything had its place and he preferred when everything was in its place. No sooner had the ice stopped falling than he had started cleaning up the center. Still, it wasn’t the same place they had all grown used to. Most of the equipment had been damaged. It was just a stroke of pure luck that Ben himself had not suffered any injuries.

Then again, it was lucky she hadn’t either. She had left the communications room mere minutes before the icequake, and it was currently buried under tons of ice, smashed utterly under the frozen water. The backup coms had been moved into the command center, along with other equipment Joyce had moved and managed to cobble together. As soon as they entered the center, Ben started walking over to her gear. He was right, it would be up her alley.

Ben pulled a crate over, her makeshift chair, and motioned her to sit down. She did, a quizzical look on her face. He brought up the screen, bringing the monitor out of its sleep status, displaying her screen saver of a picture of Nikola Tesla. She brushed her hand on the touch pad and the display brought up the main desktop, where Ben had already turned on some of her communication apps. On the upper right hand corner was Joyce’s always running IWI, the Indiscriminate Wave Identifier. It was a project application, a research project from Earth, designed to listen for random communication waves, radio, cosmic, alien, or anything else. It was a part of the greater SETI program that had become incredibly famous after the discovery of the alien artifact, despite the fact they had absolutely nothing to do with that discovery.

Joyce sat down on the crate and slid it over to the desk, scraping ice flakes off the floor. Ben pointed at the app and she maximized it on the screen. It was a plethora of wave signals, most she knew to be natural in origin.

“Ok?” she asked, wondering what he was about.

“Is that normal?” he said, pointing at one of the signals about halfway in the mix of other signals.

Joyce turned and looked. It didn’t look like any signal she was familiar with and was going to dismiss it when she saw the small red check mark at the bottom of the signal.

“What the hell. That signal is digital.” Her voice betrayed her shock.

The communications expert quickly isolated the signal and began reading through the data. The signal itself seemed dead, barely a blip, but the digital connection was one hundred percent established and linked. She ran the linking coding and saw that it was also encrypted. She brought the link up into the station’s com software to see if any of her encryptions would work. The moment she did, though, the station recognized the encryption and opened the data link immediately.

Ben and Joyce looked at each other, stunned. The screen had identified the signal as that of Captain Charles Hoarry. Joyce quickly lurched forward, opened the com and nearly shouted.

“Captain. Captain Hoarry. Can you hear me?”

They both waited a moment, but there was no reply. Joyce continued to monitor the signal itself. The connection was there, but again, it was almost a dead signal. The wave pattern was almost non-existent. As she explained that to Ben, he asked if maybe the com was open and he was just non-responsive. She said, while that was possible, the signal wasn’t showing that. If all they were hearing was dead noise, it would still be noise.

“See this signal here? Its cosmic radiation, look how the waves are all over the place,” she explained.

“But that’s space stuff, not actually sound.”

“Ok,” Joyce continued, “let me do this. I’ll open a com here to Thomas.”

She did and brought Thomas on the other line. As soon as he answered, she asked him to leave the com open and just be quiet for a moment. The confused engineer obliged. Joyce showed Ben the waves of sound that were registering even though no sound was heard. She compared them to the waves on the open comm from the captain, which was a nearly straight line.

“So, is that comm just completely dead?” Ben asked.

“No, the link is established and here, if I magnify the wave to a factor of twenty, you can see these occasional blips, tiny waves. Something is there, I just don’t know what is going on.”

“But you are sure this is the captain’s link?” Ben asked.

“Unless someone is faking the encryption, which is unlikely here on this icy coffin of a moon, then yeah, it’s him. Or his comm, at least.”

“Can you at least find out where it’s coming from?” Ben asked. Joyce already knew the answer.

“No, not with this gear. If it was a regular analog signal, then yeah, but not digital.”

“So what now?” Ben had been hoping for more concrete answers.

“There is something to this signal. It’s unlike anything I have ever seen, and yet, still oddly familiar. I’m just not sure why,” Joyce was bringing up samples of other signal data, to compare side by side.

“You’ll work on it, right?” Ben had turned to walk away.

“Of course, boss,” she answered, deep into her data.

“You don’t have to call me that, you know,” Ben answered, not really annoyed.

“I prefer to. Makes me feel like I’m doing work, which I need to be.”

Ben smiled in satisfaction and walked towards the edge of the room. He had the best person possible on the job. Joyce stared at the data when it hit her.

“It’s compressed.” She turned and Ben had walked out of the room, out into the whole of the dome. She quickly dashed through the list of apps on her monitor to find the general comms and opened a link to him.

“Get back here quick, boss! It’s compressed.” She took a breath and realized she had been shouting.

She was looking at nearly two hours of data streaming when Ben returned to her console.

“Say again?” he said, now without a helmet on. It was certainly important if he was disregarding his own safety rules. That made Joyce smile a bit.

“I knew I recognized this pattern. It’s compressed.”

“Like, data compression?”