Perpetual Winter: The Deep Inn (21 page)

              They would not advise Earth.

Chapter 18

Revelation

“But how did the Germans put these people to Jupiter in 1943?” Larissa finally asked.

              “And if they had that technology, why did they lose the war?” Lucas contemplated.

              “It is extremely coincidental for us to stumble on this. Who says the Germans sent them?” Sofia pondered.

              “It could have been the Russians,” Pierre said. “They could’ve found the Germans frozen in Russia itself and sent them here to have an advantage over us in the future.”

              “In that case, why didn’t they send frozen Russian soldiers?” Lucas questioned. “These, when they wake up, won’t easily side with the Russians.”

              “Maybe the freezing-thawing process leaves them with amnesia,” Pierre imagined.

              “Let’s suppose they found them after the Second World War, discovered how to unfreeze them over the years but never actually mastered the technique of freezing them,” Caroline said.

              “Yes, the art is principally in freezing,” Sofia confirmed, “and trying to keep from forming water crystals that break cell membranes during that process, because, when they proceed to thaw them, the burst cells will die. There’s no known solution for that problem. In the few rare animals that can be frozen and unfrozen, there are niches of water in liquid state below zero degrees or they’re almost completely dehydrated prior to extreme hypothermia.”

              “Even at the far reaches of the universe, you’re still well-spoken, Sofia,
Mariah laughed through the video conference, trying unsuccessfully to relieve a little of the tension in the air.             

              “Who can guarantee that the cargo ships landed in this zone because of a positioning mistake?” Pierre continued.

              “What do you mean?” asked Vice President Andrew.

              “Perhaps it was our vessel that made the landing error; the others are together next to the grotto and only ours was off course,” the Frenchman clarified.

              “And where could the other mission of settlers be?” Larissa asked.

              “I don’t see other settlers beyond ourselves,” Pierre said.

              “I see neither settlers nor their ships,” Larissa confirmed.

              “If no one’s here besides us and these frozen guys are here, what’s our mission, after all?”

              “If it were the Russians who sent this army here, then maybe our mission is to destroy it,” Pierre said.

              “We’re not volunteers, Pierre,” Mariah said. “Why would we come on that mission?”

              “We’re not settlers of any sort either,” Lucas popped off, but the others ignored him.

              “Yes, we did not come here voluntarily,” Andrew repeated. “But that our being chosen was influenced by genetics is consistent with Crane and Hendriks’ speeches. The puzzle comes together in this aspect. We’re not only here to knock off this German division; we came here to stay and have babies, like they said.”

              “We have scars typical of egg collection, at least three of us do,” Larissa added, referring to the fact that they’d noticed Sofia hadn’t undergone surgical intervention.

              “I was operated on, too. You just don’t realize it, but when I have some patience, I’ll explain it to you,” Sofia added.

              “Sorry if I didn’t tell you anything, Sofia, but you don’t have scars in the same place we do,” Mariah said while Sofia looked far away.

              “Calm down. It’s possible that we’re being influenced because we were kidnaped, but we have to retest the hypothesis that our mission here is different and not only to settle this planet, no matter how extravagant that seems,” Andrew said.

              “To settle...” Lucas said disdainfully in a soft voice.

              “Speak clearly, Lucas,” Vice President Andrew urged.

              “There can’t be frozen Germans on Jupiter,” Lucas clarified.

              “There can’t be frozen Germans anywhere, Lucas,” Sofia Suren emphasized, raising her voice.

              “But there they are, my friend,” said Pierre, looking at the video images of the frozen military division. “And I suspect that shortly we’ll get news from the scholar with expertise in German medical experiments, giving us instructions that will clear everything up.”

              “I’ve got that feeling too,” Mariah confessed. “The truth will come knocking loudly on the door, and it will come from Tyrell Hendriks’ fist.”

              Pierre, Caroline and Mariah descended into the grotto, taking more tools, after leaving a retransmission antenna on the ground. They wanted to see the ice army with their own eyes. When they arrived, they realized it was larger than they’d imagined. Mariah caressed Sofia, not on her face since she couldn’t reach it, but on the helmet covering her face. She should have had the courage to share with her friend everyone else’s astonishment at Sofia not having been operated on. Sofia forced a sad smile but winked with a sister’s complicity. Mariah then faced Lucas and Andrew and said to them, “Look, the brave colonists of Jupiter’s moons.”

              “Who said we’re colonists,” Lucas insisted, in a foul mood.

              “Well, Lucas, and who said we’re on Jupiter?” spouted Sofia.

              “What are you saying?” Andrew asked, surprised, looking at Sofia.

              “Who can guarantee that we’re on Jupiter,” Sofia repeated in a softer voice, trying to understand her own question.

              “Where would we be?” responded Larissa from the polar ship, interrupting the brief silence.

              “It’s certainly not Earth. It’s too cold, there is no atmosphere, and there is a thing called Jupiter in the middle of the sky,” Steven Boyd agreed, irritated, also via radio.

              “And who told you that over the last few months, you’ve seen the sky?” Lucas murmured, exceeding all limits.

              There was a sepulchral silence. Was what they’d seen in that transparent vault if not the firmament? A dome with an artificial horizon? Could they have been inside a gargantuan scenario for months on end? It seemed impossible, but the hypothesis had to be irrefutably tested.

              “Steven and Larissa, shoot a laser beam at Jupiter and take a reading of the ‘return’ echoes to see if we can end this insanity,” Andrew decided.

              Steven and Larissa went outside the polar ship. They placed the laser source next to the ship and a receiver three hundred meters away. They returned to the capsule and began shooting in lengths of successive waves, sweeping the sky as the reader registered the results. They were able to distinguish tenuous return signals from the capsule’s background noise, but the differences and sizes weren’t right for the planet Jupiter. They seemed to be attenuated signals coming from a rocky planet in the sky, and the distance was exactly that of the distance between the Earth and Mars.

              Everything was an open question. They were all overcome by an extremely muted sense of astonishment. The sensation of danger was greater than ever. No one believed they’d seen imposters of the President of the United States, Emilio Cardoso, and of Prof. Crane on the monitor and this guaranteed one thing for them: the planet Earth was at risk of extinction and they were part of the solution.

              “Our ship is not a scenario. It’s a spaceship,” recapitulated Pierre. “There’s a very visible impact where the logistics ships landed.”

              “Plus this vessel’s technology is light years beyond Space Shuttle II and it’s clearly American,” confirmed the pilot and geologist Steven Boyd.

              “The laser’s return signal is weak and the vault itself can interfere with the reading. It’s possible we’re being influenced by our desire that this to be the Earth, that we survive and that we’re able to meet our families again. We have to retest the theory that we’re on Ganymede, no matter how crazy it all seems,” Andrew said.

              “I’m not influenced by dreams,” Lucas declared. “There is no future for me on Earth.”

              They agreed to double the laser beam’s energy and repeat the shots. They would carry out two independent mathematical analyses to decide if what they were seeing was the echo from a rocky planet much more distant than Jupiter, being seen in a film shown on a gigantic electronic screen. Steven and Larissa repeated the shots with high energy focused on the signal source and clearly picked up the oscillations over background radiation. Andrew turned on the robust laptop. They divided themselves into two groups, one on the ship and the other in the grotto, to mathematically analyze the results. After four hours, both had arrived at the same conclusion: there was a signal over the variation in background noise, probably due to the presence of a rocky planet. Worse, there seemed to be two satellites over them. There were no signals indicating the presence of a moon. The rocky planet was the Earth and they were on Mars, but under the surveillance of satellites about which they knew nothing.

              “We’re definitely not on Ganymede,” Steven Boyd confirmed a few minutes later from the ship. “I just received an analysis of the rocks you sent by drone. They are completely incompatible with a planet on the outer rim of the asteroid belt.”

              “Where are we, geologist?” the vice president inquired.

              “Mars. We’re on Mars. And the satellites show that we’re not alone.”

              “And that’s why the Rover left marks on the ice. That’s not just water that’s been frozen for an eternity. It’s dry ice, carbon dioxide in the solid state. It exists in great quantities on Mars,” Caroline said in a whisper.

              “And there are no traces of carbon dioxide on Ganymede,” Sofia exhaled.

              “Smooth stones, underground veins, stalagmites and stalactites demand that water run for centuries and centuries. Nothing that water melted by a mere volcano would explain. We’re stupid,” Mariah concluded.

              “From the beginning of the mission, it’s always been Mars. The ship was designed for Mars. I’ve never heard any scientist talk about that phantasy of launching tons of bacteria on Venus, much less seeds and eggs five hundred years later,” Sofia Suren realized.

              “There’s a lot to be explained. President Cardoso himself told us the Ganymede story. If they lied to us, maybe it was because they had to lie. We need data. We’ve got to get more information,” Andrew concluded.

              “Hey, guys, come look at this,” Pierre called out. He’d approached the vault door that closed the enormous hanger. “It looks like a coded opening system.”

              They approached it. On the ground, Pierre had lifted a slab and discovered a device with an alphanumeric keyboard. Below it a complex, unintelligible expression was written.

              “It’s a code,” Mariah said.

              “It can’t be a direct entry code,” Andrew advised.

              “No, it can’t. We have to translate it using the Enigma system’s code machine,” Pierre bet.

              Enigma was the electromechanical encryption system used by Germany during World War II that the English, headed by Touring, had deciphered. They called Steven and Larissa, who looked in the computer server for the German Enigma code’s algorithm. They exported the software to the laptop with the group in the cavern and Andrew proceeded to decode it. When decrypted, the code gave three German names: Eva, Klara, and Edmund. They introduced them into the keyboard, heard a motor start and the vault door began to move. First, it moved away from the wall, with dust and dirt falling off, then it opened sliding parallel to the grotto’s face. The six entered a very straight and much deeper chamber with a metal bridge across it. To the left and to the right, they saw horizontal terraces. Many of them were above and, more dramatically, below, in a tremendous shaft. They were verandas or enormous shelves, filled with transparent ice cubes. In each of these cubes a
s
woman, Caucasian, almost nude and frozen. The women seemed between seventeen and twenty years old, with the exception of a few older ones who were dressed. To the left and to the right, they extended for more than fifty stories along the entire hall.

             
The female genes,
they all thought.

              They crossed the long hall to another vault door and once again there was a keyboard below the ground, under a slab, with the same code: Eva, Klara, and Edmund. They typed it in. The door behind them closed and another, in front of them, opened. They continued down a corridor with air shafts, going through smaller doors, all sealed with the same code.

              These didn’t open with a motorized mechanism, but, rather, a lock wheel. They were safe doors inspired by naval submarine engineering. To open one, you had to close the previous one. They tried to go back but found no mechanism to open the doors in the opposite direction. They decided to go ahead and, after having passed a third door, climbed up stairs carved into the side of the shaft’s rock. They went through a fourth one and when they began to open it, it sucked dust from the stairs through crevices in the door, entering into the area that revealed itself.