Europa (Deadverse Book 1) (29 page)

- Connie –

There had been, over the course of her time on the mission, a few quiet days here and there. They were usually followed up a very intense project or experiment that involved lots of physical and mental labor over the course of a couple of days, and then the days after everyone was allowed to sleep in some. On those days, Connie enjoyed waking up early anyways. She would wander the halls of the base, then spanning five domes and countless of tunnels and hallways, and take in the silence.

Today it was quiet, even more so than usual. Susan and Paul were still sleeping, at least so she thought. But even with the lack of people talking or working, there was another silence that ebbed through the base. The machines, the humming of electricity, the drip of water somewhere, it was all gone. Now, the ice walls absorbed her steps and she was immersed in a silence unlike any she had ever experienced. She liked it.

It was a welcome break from the countless noisy rocket fire from the Tin Can. The poor orbital ship had endured far more than it was designed for. Her last stress test the night before had revealed all sorts of fractures and tears. How it hadn’t fallen apart in ascent or descent was beyond her. But it just needed to last one more trip. Exiting the green dome, where Susan’s plants towered over everything even more so than before, Connie entered into the small access panel room for the hydrogen reactor. It was a tiny room, with enough room for two people to sit side by side in front of the panel that remotely ran the reactor. The AI ran it most of the time, but from here, Connie could see the progress on the hydrogen extraction that fueled her little ship. Two storage tanks were nearly filled, and from here she would be able to transfer that fuel over to her ship.

As the ticker ran up to one hundred percent, Connie nodded and leaned forward, tapping the fuel transfer. Nothing happened. She tapped it again, and there was still no response. This had happened in the past. Every once in a while, water would condense inside the main fuel tank and then freeze. She would have to go out and find the freeze, heat it up and manually release the fuel to the Tin Can. It was a bit more than she wanted to do, but she was scheduled to fly up in about ten hours, and there was nothing else left to do, so she wasn’t too bummed out.

She checked her watch quickly. Certainly the Odyssey was awake already. Unlike on the surface, they had a continual list of tasks every day. She pulled out her tablet and tapped on the comms and tried opening a link to the central comm console, but it fell through.

“Hmm,” she buzzed, heading out of the access panel. She instead tried out both Susan’s and Paul’s comm. Susan didn’t reply, but Paul did.

“Yes?” he asked.

“I have a possible fuel freeze, so I have to go out and take care of it,” Connie replied, already near the exterior vehicle hatch on the green dome.

“Do you need any help?” he asked.

She didn’t. “Still, I tried contacting the ship and my tablet didn’t reach the main comm app. When you get a chance, can you get up there and see if it just needs rebooted?”

“Yes ma’am.”

She needed to teach Thomas how to talk like that.

The vehicular hatch on the green dome was much smaller than the one on the main dome, and dwarfed by the garage they had on the engineering dome that no longer existed. One rover could fit inside of it, if, as Thomas always joke, you didn’t feel like actually getting out of it once it was parked. There just a few inches of access space on either side of the walls, and because of that, they had taken to leaving the rover parked outside. It wasn’t good for the vehicle, and so the green rover was jokingly referred to as the junker. It was under constant repair due to its exposure to the European ‘air’. The only benefit to the destruction of the other rover was that Thomas had taken the time to get this one running rather decently. At least for now.

The interior hatch door was circular, and rolled away once pressure was equalized. Connie always pretended she was entering an ancient Mayan ruin like Indiana Jones. No one got it. She tapped the screen twice, then a third time before it came to life, and typed in the code to begin the equalization process.

Nothing happened.

“Now what?”

She typed in the code a few more times, and still, nothing. There were no error codes, just a malfunctioning door.

“I get that we’re leaving soon, but you couldn’t work for one day more?”

A small panel was just below the access screen. She turned a small lever and popped it open, revealing all the manual knobs. She turned one all the way to one hundred percent, and heard the telltale sound of air being moved from one room to another. A hint of vapor formed inside of the exit hatch, thanks to the warm air coming in contact with the ice. She closed the panel back up and typed the code in again.

The door still didn’t open.

“Connie, come in,” Paul’s voice chirped in her ear.

“Go ahead?”

“I am, uh, having an issue with my door.”

Paul had not slept in the green dome the night before.

“Seems to be going around.”

Connie walked him through the manual access points and got him out of his room.

“It works the same way with all of the doors. Looks like we have some kind of bug going around. When you get into the central console, let me know. I’ll have you read through the log and see what’s going on.”

Connie wasn’t worried. These sort of things did happen, usually more often than not. They had strived to create the base to be as automated as possible, but the reality was that levers, handles and knobs were turned as often, if not more than, the AI did it. It was no surprise to her that with barely a skeleton crew on the base, of which one was an expert on plants and the other a soldier, these little mishaps were bound to happen.

She pulled on a handle on the door and it began to slide back slowly. Inside, she went over to the suit cabinet, pulled hers out, and slid into it with the ease and expertise of someone who had done it a thousand times. Once everything was on, and checked, she rolled the door back closed, locked it, equalized the room to the outside, then began the longer process of manually opening the exterior door.

She was sweating more than she had hoped to.

“I guess I’m just earning my last day here,” she said out loud.

The rover was parked inside a makeshift ice covering. Thankfully, it did come to life as soon as she pressed the power button. She climbed in and turned the wheels off toward the hydrogen reactor. The rover sped off, slowly, but steadily.

“…Connie?” static broke through her ear piece.

“Yes?” She answered.

“I have been trying to reach you. I think we have more issues than just doors.”

“So it seems,” Connie replied, keeping her eye on the ice field.

“I’m here in the control room. There are two screens right?” he asked.

She confirmed it.

“Well, there’s power, but the screens are blank, except for a blinking cursor.”

Connie walked him through rebooting the two computers left to run the base while most of Hammy was up in the Odyssey. He followed her instructions step by step, but each time, the computers ended up on the same black screen with the blinking cursors. There were no error messages, nothing to indicate what the problem could be, and to make matters worse, the only person who could truly fix them was miles above them, and they had no way of reaching out to them.

“Ok, do me a favor. Find Susan, make sure she’s OK. Then get back to me. I think maybe this is just a hint we need to get out of here.”

“Yeah, good idea,” Paul replied with plenty of static.

Connie thought it through. She didn’t need the base computers to take off, as the Tin Can had its own independent system. Even if she couldn’t reach the ship, and they couldn’t reach the surface, certainly they’d still expect that last trip up into orbit.

The hydrogen reactor was buried under thirty feet of ice, but vented cleanly into the surface for excellent cooling. Thomas had carved out a small hallway that descended into the reactor room, and Connie checked it out first. There was nothing out of the ordinary, and the readings on the reactor itself were still nominal. Thomas had estimated that without any maintenance, the reactor would continue to extract its own hydrogen and create electricity for twenty years, maybe more. Too bad everything else was falling apart.

She descended into a chamber under the reactor. Two tiny shafts, barely a foot in diameter, carried the ionizers hundreds, and now thousands, of feet under the reactor. From there it melted ice and extracted hydrogen and oxygen, and pumped the excess water back to the base. Thomas had dropped a EUA down the shaft once and the cave the process had carved out was gigantic. He called it the cathedral of Europa. Eventually, it would reach the still liquid ocean under the ice and there would be no need to melt any more ice.

They would be long gone by then.

She found the main fuel extractor pump and checked it out. There was nothing wrong with it, although it wasn’t pumping anything through. The freeze most likely was on the outside somewhere, as it usually was. Back outside, she quickly found the main pump line, exposed as always. She would have preferred it buried, but then access to it would be complete pain. So she brought out her thermal reader and looked down the long tube. The Tin Can fuel tanks were just over a mile away. Not a long walk, but a walk none the less. She got out the reader, aimed it down at the tube and turned it on. Then she began walking.

She found the blockage nearly thirty minutes later. Water routinely got mixed in with the fuel, and was only filtered out at the tanks, but if the flow was really slow, the water could freeze in the line and stop all flow. The frozen ice stood out like a blue smurf in the thermal reader and when she found it, she was glad it was only a small section. She set down the pack that she was wearing, and pulled out a rubberized cloth which she laid over the frozen section of the pipe line. She set the pack down and plugged the cloth into it, and heat began to emit from it, slowly.

It would take a while.

“Paul, check in. You get to Susan?”

No response.

Connie checked her tablet, and the signal was there, but there was no connection back to Paul or Susan. In fact, when she tapped on another app on her tablet, it started giving her errors. First the app crashed, then the whole tablet OS crashed. She set it down and waited for it to reboot. When it did, the comm app simply refused to open. She read the thermal reader again, and quickly calculated the melting time. It was enough time to go back and get the rover.

She had just stopped the rover next to her gear, nearly twenty minutes had passed, when her ear piece scared her.

“...there?” This time, it was Susan.

“Susan?” Connie replied.

There was more static, then the transmission continued. “…don’t know, but there are some screwy things going on here. Paul is stuck in the…”

“Susan. Can you hear me?”

“I think the main dome filtration is down too…..” Connie listened, “….twenty degrees….”

Susan couldn’t hear her. It was time to get back. She got out of the rover and ran over to her gear. The heat pad had melted the ice inside of the fuel line, as well as a small pool just outside of the line. The water had refrozen nearly immediately into a smooth surfaced mirror. As Connie gathered up her gear, a reflection passed in the frozen pool of water. She spun around and came face to face with one she never thought she’d see again.

“Connie. We need to leave now.”

It was Glorin.

- Susan –

“Hold on Paul, I’m almost through.”

Susan didn’t like the suits. She hated more than anything that they’d fog up so easily. Outside duty was for the others. That small period after the quake where Ben had insisted everyone wear them while inside was dreadful. Yet, Paul was on the other side of the door and he hadn’t responded in a few minutes now.

The air pumps to the central dome had stopped working. Air had stopped flowing in and out, and while that generally wouldn’t have been an immediate issue, the small control room right in the middle of the dome was air tight for a reason, and Paul had been locked in there for some time now. She wasn’t even sure how long, as the transmissions had stopped working correctly for a while now. Still, he had last replied nearly three minutes ago with something about his mother.

Co2 toxicity.

Susan had the green dome running on manual pumps, and even if those failed, her veritable jungle provided more than ample air and filtration. So she had rushed into her suit and got across to the central dome as quickly as possible, but had struggled for too long with the manual operation on the command door. And it was heavy. So she wheeled and struggled against it, until she finally managed to get it cracked just a bit. That was enough for a good old crowbar. The door didn’t stand a chance against physics.

He wasn’t passed out just yet, a testament to his toughness. Susan rushed into the room with an O2 breather mask and put it on his face. He managed to bring his hand up to hold it on. Within minutes, he was looking normal again. The soldier hadn’t panicked at all. Instead, when he realized he was running out of air, he sat down and slowed his heart rate and breathing.

“I was confident you’d make it to me in time.”

It was no wonder everyone likes this guy, Susan thought.

Once he was up and about, they made their way back to the green dome. Their only option was to wait for Connie and the refuel, and then they could leave the planet behind.

Paul took a moment to rest. He was tough, but he was still human. Susan left him on one of the myriad of ice benches Jenna had shaped weeks ago to accommodate the higher use of the green dome. Susan had been undecided about it. She liked that her green dome was now the most important building in the base, but she had always enjoyed her peace among the plants. Then again, peace had returned once most everyone had departed for the Odyssey.

Instinctively, she looked up. The ceiling was above her, towering nearly eighty feet, but what she was really looking at, figuratively, was the return ship. She had created a paradise in the dome and on that ship lay the way back to what, for everything Charles had explained, was the complete opposite of Eden. Before, the return was expected, but now, with both Gary and Cary gone, there was no hope in it.

Paul took a deep breath, and Susan was brought back into the moment. She rushed around the corner and reached into one of the many cold storage closets she had dug out of the ice. In it she found one of the many jars of vegetable juice she had concocted over the past few weeks, and returned to Paul with it. She handed it to him and turned to look over her jungle.

“You OK?” she asked Paul.

He nodded slightly, while taking a drink of the red liquid. Susan waved and walked off. The tomato plants she had worked hard to selectively breed the past two years were now completely adapted to their life on low gravity. Their vines towered high above her, crawling up over every single metal spire and opening large wide leaves that took in the lower light. Large red fruit, nearly twice the size of anything found on Earth, hung in bunches of three to four all over the vines, with new growth and flowers appearing everywhere. There were already thousands of seeds that were packed up and on the ship, but they would never grow like that on Earth. Her work would be forgotten.

They would be forgotten.

Behind the wall of green and red were the fields of spinach, dark green leaves the size of a human torso, rich in nutrients and vitamins. A steady drip of water poured out into their basin, carefully calculated to the last drop, of iron and potassium. Within a few weeks, this would all be dead, with a few stragglers regrowing from the corpses of its dead leaves, but even those would not last long. Of course, nothing would last through the explosion the hydrogen reactor was going to have.

The spinach leaves bent easily as she passed her hand through them. She pinched one of the tomato leaves and it gave off its telltale smell. Then she came around to her final shipment up to the Odyssey, two small crates of freshly picked vegetables. Maybe it would be a gentle reminder to her, a farewell party to her work, and to her friends. She opened up the first crate, a small plastic lid, and looked inside.

She understood the workings of plants. It came naturally to her. What did not were the feelings of loss and regret. She could lose plants, it was part of the natural cycle, even if it wasn’t natural on a frozen moon. She had just never lost anyone she’d loved before. She had walked away from her parents at a young age, for they had never been able to put her peculiarities behind their love. Their deaths had come only as news, not bitter or sad. At the end of this mission, where her soul had attained its highest level of purity, where her humanity had returned back to the Eden she had always imagined, she felt incomplete.

And leaving here would never fill in the void left behind.

There was a loud hiss from the far edge of the dome that Susan recognized instantly. She rushed over as quickly as her magnetic boots allowed her to, just as Connie was walking in through the interior door. She stopped in her tracks when she saw the second shape come through and remove his helmet.

“Wow!”

“I think I had pretty much the same expression,” Connie replied with a half-smile, “but we have other issues to deal with.”

Glorin stepped through and began talking. His voice was raspy, as if he’d aged decades in his time gone.

“We need to leave as soon as we can,” he spoke.

Paul came stumbling around a wall of plants. “Well, at least I’m not hearing voices.”

Susan spun around to see Paul, still a bit wobbly, coming over towards them.

“What are you talking about?” she asked. “Why haven’t you radioed in?”

“The whole base is going fritz, and there is a reason for it. It’s crazy, but just listen to him.”

Glorin began. Emir had been taken over by the alien ship, which was by all means, a super computer. It was capable of controlling biological beings and had done so with the engineer. It had greater difficulty controlling humans, likely because of the more advanced brains and conscious, and that is why Glorin had been able to resist the initial attack.

Susan tried to follow along.

The alien vessel was designed to attack the Earth, to wipe out all traces of life. Why it crashed on Europa Glorin wasn’t sure, but what he did see was their design. Emir was just following through on that design, by killing people on the base. Everything that was going wrong with the electronics now were caused by the ship, which was sending out some kind of death squad to finish off the survivors of their first attack.

“What about Emir?” Paul asked.

“I killed him as I fled,” Glorin said. Paul looked back, ready to ask more details, but Susan jumped in.

“So if we leave now?” Susan asked.

“They are moving slowly,” Glorin continued. He was carrying a small case. “If we can blast off as soon as we can, likely within the next couple of hours, we will be safe.”

“So why wouldn’t they just fly up and destroy us in orbit?” Paul asked the obvious.

“Their ship is irrevocably damaged. It will never fly again.”

Paul looked over to Connie, who just shrugged her shoulders.

“How soon can we fly?” Glorin asked, looking back at Connie.

“I’m already having Hammy run the numbers. I still have a link to the Tin Can, oddly enough,” she said while simultaneously tapping on her tablet.

The results were nearly immediate.

“We can have enough fuel, just barely, in about two hours,” Connie said, looking up from her tablet.

The transfer was already underway.

“Then let us prepare,” Glorin said, stalking off towards the under-hatch that led down into the lower rooms.

“Where are you going?” Susan asked.

“To retrieve the rest of my work,” he said without even looking back. He tossed the helmet aside. “I can assume that none of my work was packed up.”

Connie looked around, but didn’t know the answer. When she looked back, the old man was already gone, a hatch closing behind him.

“Ok, then, let’s rush a bit. Susan, get those crates over to the hatch and I’ll get them on board the Tin Can as soon as I can,” Connie ordered. “And Paul, I don’t supposed that, you could, maybe…”

“I’ll get my guns,” he said, reading her thoughts. He turned to run off, took a few quick steps, then stopped before going at a slower pace.

“He OK?” Connie asked.

Susan told him about the vent problems in the central dome.

“We’re good here, though, right?”

Susan nodded. They walked together over to the few crates Susan had just inspected and the two of them carried them easily over to the hatch. From there Connie set them inside and then stood next to the hatch, waiting.

“Do you believe him?” Susan asked.

Connie gave her a confused look, then a look of realization came over her.

“Well,” she started, “why did you go and say something like that? I don’t think we have a choice.”

“His story is kind of out there,” Susan added.

“Well, yeah, but this whole last month has been way out there,” Connie said.

Susan could only agree.

“Are you OK?” Connie asked.

Susan looked around again. “Just,” she said, pointing, “all this.”

“You should see your work on the ship. Not as big, but just as impressive.”

Susan tilted her head a bit. “Not…” she began, then stopped.

Connie reached out and put her hand on her shoulder. It wasn’t what she liked doing, there was a reason she was more of the tom boy than anyone else, but still, she had to.

“Let’s just get out of this hellhole. Too much has been lost here already,” Connie said.

She never did get a chance to reply, as the clanking sound of the hatch being thrown open interrupted her. Glorin started throwing small boxes up through the door and onto the ice. A few moments later, he came through and began picking them up. He looked hilariously clumsy carrying the boxes. Susan was sure that he was only able to do that on Europa gravity. On top of the four boxes was that small case he had come into the base with. It had that look of a leather bound book. She hadn’t seen it before, but then again, no one ever saw any of Glorin’s stuff.

“Ok, stack them here, and I’ll get them onto the Tin Can. Once I do that, I’ll decouple the fuel and come back for you all,” Connie said, rolling the interior hatch door into place and locking it. “Remember there are no comms, so be ready in about one hour,” she yelled through the thick door.

“Good, that gives me enough time to get some data off of the computers,” Glorin said.

“The computers are still down,” Susan replied. Glorin gave her a confused look.

“Oh,” he stammered, “that’s right. Ok. Let me see if I left anything else behind then.”

He went running off again, scattering like a rat. That’s what he reminded her of. A rat, leaving a sinking ship. Just as soon as Glorin had vanished down the rat hole again, Paul emerged from the opposite side. He had with him two side arms and a rifle, the last of his weapons. He stopped next to Susan and set the rifle down. He reached inside the suit closet and found his suit. As he began getting it on, Susan just stood there and watched.

“What’s going on? Where is everyone else?” Paul asked.

Susan quickly caught him up. “Something is just odd about this.”

“Odd, huh?” he replied, finishing up his suit and picking up the helmet. “Well, at least the air pumps are back on in the central dome. Computers, too, I think. They were booting up and the monitors were showing a lot more text than just a blinking cursor.”

“Really?” Susan asked.

“I think the sooner we get off this moon, the better,” Paul said, snapping the helmet on and locking it in. He stepped into the hatch and closed it after himself.

Susan stood still for a moment then sighed. There was nothing for her to do but wait.

And think.