Europa (Deadverse Book 1)
Read Europa (Deadverse Book 1) Online
Authors: Richard Flunker
Europa
Richard Flunker
Copyright © 2015 by Richard Flunker
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof
may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever
without the express written permission of the author
except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Published in the United States of America
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. If anything even remotely similar happened to you, I would LOVE to hear about it.
First Publishing, 2015
Editing by Jessica Flunker, © 2015
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To those who looked and wondered
- Jenna –
“Do you remember where you were when it happened?”
Jenna looked over the frozen landscape. A giant ice field lay ahead of her, a smooth surface cut through by occasional cracks. The ice was miles deep, covering an ocean that held more water than Earth had. Just over the horizon, and taking up nearly the entire sky, the huge gas giant, Jupiter, illuminated the clear night with its myriad of colors. Somewhere behind her, the sun, just a small pinprick of explosive light, shined onto the giant.
They were on Europa and on the verge of mankind’s greatest discovery.
She looked down and saw the large metal wheel. There was a slight struggle to turn it, sending tremors deep into the ice. Nearly a mile away, her colleague and friend, Thomas Astor, repeated the same motion. The two wheels had to be turned simultaneously. Two miles away, ahead of both Jenna and Thomas, with Jupiter slowly moving ahead of them, a giant plume of water vapor shot out into the sky, turning to ice nearly instantly and shooting off into space. There was no atmosphere on the ice moon, and very little of that ice would fall back down onto the ice it had come from.
“Well, let’s see.” There was a moment of hesitation as Thomas grunted against his wheel. “I was in my last year at the University of Wisconsin, working on Professor Gardener’s thermal experiments. Someone came busting into the lab, nearly ruining the experiment, yelling at us to go watch the TV... Ok, pressure readings normal. I’m sending the command through to the EUA to go ahead and release chambers two and five.”
Jenna strained to see into the distance, looking to see if she could spot Thomas. They rarely left each other’s sight, but this was one of those unique occasions. Love had once united them until disaster had struck their families. When they found themselves seated next to each other on the final interview for the Europa mission, they both knew love could get in the way of the momentous discovery, so friends they had remained.
“Copy your readings over to me, will you please?” Thomas’ voice echoed in her helmet.
Jenna reached down and pulled out a small digital tablet. She took off the outer, bulkier glove on her suit so that she could tap on the screen using only the thin inner glove. She could put up with the cold for a while, up to ten minutes. The whole inner suit was designed to protect against the extreme cold on Europa for up to thirty minutes, but few dared try. She brought up the readings for the three EUA they had deployed. The three deep sea robotic submarines transmitted data back up through the thick ice via echotransmission. She read the data back to Thomas.
“Everything is in line,” he replied. “So where were you?”
Three miles down, just a bit further, a second plume of ice water vapor erupted into the European sky, filling the horizon with a silvery plume of ice. The pressure released this time was greater, and the resulting plume, even more so.
“I was sleeping. I had been out the night before, and had drank way too much. My roommate came into my room yelling and screaming. I remember seeing the news on the TV, rubbing my eyes, and wondering if I was dreaming. Turns out I wasn’t.”
Two tremors rumbled through the ice. Jenna glanced down at her tablet and saw that they originated miles deep, right where they expected them to. The EUAs sent through new data and it compared favorably with what they had expected.
“I can’t believe that was ten years ago.” Jenna could tell Thomas was sweating just from his breathing. The valve he was turning had always been the hardest one, which is why she had always let him turn it.
“Two years now, we’ve been turning these valves, and here we are.” She could hear the pride in her own voice. She continued to turn her valve until she heard a click. It would turn no more. A heavy gust of breath echoed through her helmet’s speaker. Thomas had finished turning his as well. In the distance, a third and final plume spat out ice particles smaller than an Earth snowflake, but far heavier, miles out into the vacuum of space. This plume dwarfed the first two easily. Jenna could see a faint rainbow through the ice crystals. There was still plenty of sunlight, even this far out.
“Checking the entry chamber. EUA five is still there,” Jenna said into her com.
“It’ll be fine,” Thomas replied. “Too bad we will never see the fruits of our labor.”
That statement made her purse her lips in disgust. She and Thomas had argued about this very same matter many times over. They were the main engineers on the mission, specialists with the extreme temperatures as well as with digging through ice. Without them, the mission would have failed. The mission wouldn’t have been possible. She thought it was their right to be the first ones to go through the chamber.
“Just pieces to the puzzle. We’re doing our part, they are doing theirs.”
“We’re the ones out in the cold, digging it out, while they sit in their little cubicles looking at pictures and theorizing,” Jenna had spouted that before. “We should get some reward.”
“We were chosen to come here. That’s quite a reward.”
A third voice cracked to life on their helmet speakers.
“I’m sitting here behind a desk looking at moving pictures of you whining about your just desserts.” Doctor Emir Tagula was the third cog of their engineering wheel. “Can we please just finish this?”
Thomas quickly retorted, “I wasn’t complaining.”
“Traitor,” Jenna laughed back. She looked back at the small rover that had brought them to the ice field. Jenna noticed the zoom of the camera and she wondered if the doctor was looking at her that way again. She shuddered a bit, and it wasn’t because of the cold.
Two long years she had labored on the Jupiter moon, along with twenty other men and women of the mission, including the Marines. They didn’t count though, she thought. Their living quarters were cramped and although they were all ultimate professionals, two years with the same people in a small living area had caused some issues. Crysta MacKnight, the IT specialist, had discovered the videos Emir had recorded. But it wasn’t like he could be sent home.
At least she was glad the mission was nearing the end.
“All three vents are fully active. Now, EUA five just has to finish out the drop.” Thomas looked down on his wrist and tapped some numbers into the tablet. A small timer appeared on the miniature screen and began counting down. Seven hours and fifty nine minutes remained.
Jenna saw the timer sync up automatically with her own wrist tablet. She swiped the numbers by on her screen and brought up the data stream for EUA five. The aquatic android was the relay point between herself and the plasma drilling robots deep under the ice. With the vent chambers fully free of any exhaust ice, the plasma robots could not finish the entrance borehole they would use to enter the artifact.
It just wouldn’t be her.
“No one asked me where I was,” chimed in the accented voice of Emir.
“That’s because no one wants to know.” Thomas made his view clear. Jenna felt bad for Emir. She didn’t like him because of the videos, but still felt bad for him. It wasn’t like he had done something to hurt her, directly that is. Thomas though, didn’t hide his hatred of the Jordanian engineer. Called him the Muslim paradox. A man that grew up in the desert was an expert on ice structures and engineering. All three were planet Earth’s foremost experts on drilling in ice, and they all knew it.
He had never liked him before. But he hated him after he filmed his friend showering.
“I was on a bus headed out of Cairo. It was in 2072, during the riots. I watched the most amazing discovery in my time on a four inch screen on my phone. I told myself ‘this is it, this will bring peace.’ Instead, even more riots broke out. The army had to use drone soldiers.”
Even Thomas knew his background. No matter how much he hated him, he had nothing to say. The riots had plunged Cairo, then Egypt, and then the Middle East into a turmoil so filled with hatred and contempt, that it had yet to recover. But it wasn’t a matter of religion or ethnicity. It was an issue of man vs. machine. It was a war of people vs. their government and their new soldiers.
Millions died.
That was nearly ten years ago.
Jenna tapped the final instructions through to EUA five and noted the irony. Emir loathed androids. Thomas loathed Emir. Jenna just wanted to be there when they opened the artifact.
She grumbled as she walked back towards the rover.
- Geoff -
There were two heads of security on the tiny Europa base 365 million miles from Earth. Geoff Hansen was the most important one, but he rarely felt that way. He was in charge of the lab and structural security. The other head of security was Charles Hoarry, a charming, handsome, outgoing man of incredible build, black hair and blue eyes. He was a soldier. A sailor to be exact. A captain in the Navy. He was part of the mission in case of any dangers to the crew. Millions of miles away from earth, on a frozen hunk of rock, the man who had no real job, was the most popular man.
Geoff had real enemies. Every day he fought against the fragile domes system they had built on the surface of Europa. Seven individual domes peppered the surface of the moon, each housing a different research section. Under each dome were the living and working quarters of every department. All seven domes were connected underground by tunnels. Geoff had to make sure the domes held up to the brutal exterior of the moon, while ensuring that air flowed properly between the domes, along with water. He physically walked the domes every day, looking for cracks or other signs of stress.
His was a real job. If he failed, they would all die, frozen or suffocated, on the Jupiter moon. But no one talked to him. Not like that.
Except for Jenna.
“Hold on, Jenna, wait for it,” Geoff leaned into the tiny microphone on the panel. He watched the levels normalize inside the small hangar, one of three that led to the frozen outside world. The short engineer was always in a rush to undo and get out of her suit. He had chastised her many times, threatening her with frozen limbs and freeze burned fingers. She always laughed it off.
Two lights turned green on the panel in front of him and he smiled. “All clear.”
Fog filled the hangar as the vapor in the injected air froze momentarily. Geoff jumped down all three steps onto the ice floor, waving his hands in the fog. He walked up to Jenna and helped her get the helmet off. It twisted open with a hiss.
“So, this is it, right?” he asked.
Her cheerful face, a large smile and big brown eyes greeted him. That face made his day. Her single red braid spilled out over her shoulder from where she had tucked it in the helmet. She nodded, smiling even more.
“Just a few more hours now,” Thomas answered as he removed his helmet and set it down on the rover. Geoff would go over each of the two suits in minute detail to make sure there were no rips or tears. That was also his job. For the moment though, he was putting it off.
Geoff followed the pair of engineers back into the hangar control room. The small dome here was home to the ice drills, the plasma coils and the mountains of spare parts for the EUAs. This is where they did most of the work. Looking up, he laughed a bit. Jupiter was clear in the sky. It was one of two domes that were actually clear. Most of the other scientists didn’t like the clear domes. It made them feel vulnerable. “We’re engineers,” Thomas always liked to point out.
The short Swedish man hurried on his legs to follow the taller Thomas down into the hallway underneath the engineering dome. Thomas reached down and opened up the hatch, reached down through the hole in the ice, and pulled up a ladder. All three of them disappeared down into the room below. Four rooms joined into a living area with a kitchen. A bathroom attached to the main living room, all carved from the ice. Despite the material used to create the buildings, the temperature stayed a reasonable fifty eight degrees. Two small androids spent every working minute going over the surfaces, refreezing and rebuilding. Even the furniture had been carved out of the ice.
On the far side a hatch opened into one of the many tunnels that connected all of the domes together. Inside, darkness froze into the walls, but with a flip of a switch, dim LED lights illuminated the hallway. They walked down the corridor in silence. The news had already spread. Everyone knew the day was coming, but it was still exciting. Geoff had half expected the station’s communications channels to be busy, but instead, they were silent. Certainly, Thomas and Jenna could have just radioed their news in when they arrived at the hangar. This walking down to central was annoying.
Mostly though, it was because he didn’t like anyone.
The Swede had been knee deep in hog feces when his phone had lit up with texts and videos. The world had lit with texts and videos as well. It was on all of the news, on every channel, online and offline. The news of the century, or the millennia. Really, it was the news of the history of mankind. But what Geoff remembered the most was the fact that he had dropped his phone in the pig shit. He had been grumpy ever since.
Truth was he had always been grumpy.
They reached the chamber where all the tunnels connected. It was a large chamber, just underneath the central dome. Meetings were held here at times, or mission wide meals, or movie night. Geoff had always been spooked out. While men and women ate and enjoyed social time, seventy feet underneath them twenty more men lay in deep frozen sleep, waiting for this very moment. They had social time over a frozen crypt. Right in the middle of the large circular room was an elevator. It was mostly used to go up into central. Geoff hated thinking about going down.
The elevator had four buttons. Geoff had used three of them. That’s because two hundred feet down was one of the reactors that provided power for the research station. The first button was up, into the central dome.
The doors slid open to reveal the entire population of central waiting in anticipation. As soon as Jenna stepped out into the dome, the only other one that had a clear ceiling, they erupted into applause. Jenna stopped short, shocked, but a smile grew on her face. She ran forward, her hands together and swinging up in the air. She celebrated as if she had just won a sporting event. Thomas nodded his head, but Geoff could see his stomach jolt up as he chuckled, quietly. The engineer followed his partner out to the applause.
Geoff tried his best to bury his scowl and disdain. This was why they had come to the moon. This was why they had trained for two years, and why they had traveled the furthest of any men in history. This is why they had risked their lives on a frozen hunk. This was why they had spent the first two months inside small tin cans while the domes were built, the overwhelming odor of human bodies sticking to the metal walls, frozen. This is why HE had endured the rejection of all the women on the base. This was their job. To them, it was a quest for glory.
For Geoff, his only quest was to keep them alive.
Of course, now it was Charles’ job to make sure they stayed alive a little longer.
