Europa (Deadverse Book 1) (9 page)

- Susan –

When the ice shook and began to splinter, she had two thoughts in her mind, and neither were for hers or anyone else’s safety. First, she had to turn off the water flow, and then seal the individual rows of plants. Those actions ensured the survival of most of the growing plants in the green dome. In her desperation to save her plants, she had neglected to get into a suit and hadn’t even worried for a second if anyone else needed help. A day later, the realization of her actions had hit her hard.

Ben had already chewed her out. He didn’t need to. She knew she had messed up and it had been pure luck that she wasn’t dead. Of all the domes on the base, the green dome was the only one that hadn’t ruptured. In fact, at the moment, the plants in the dome were being used as a filter and air provider for the two other repaired domes. The ice cover over the green dome was also serving as a radiation barrier for the survivors while new covers were being melted and poured onto the surface of the other domes.

Already five people had been lost to the alien ship, including her Gary. Cary had found the body of Geoff nearly a mile from the dome he had been in when it ripped open. She had brought him back and he was still on ice while they fixed the base. They sure could have used him. Horace had suffered a really bad hit to the head, and had lost a lot of blood, but was still alive, and currently stable. Bobby was still missing and since the network was still down, they had no way of finding out where he was at the moment of the quake.

The icequake.

The spot that had been selected for the base had been studied for years by many drones. Europa was an ice moon that orbited a gas giant, and was routinely torn apart by tidal forces between the giant and the dwarf. The initial plan had been to establish a base deep under the ice in the free flowing water where the tidal forces wouldn’t have done anything to the base. The logistics of creating a base that far under ice was daunting. They would have spent two years just building the base before they would even have been able to start working on the artifact and to top it off, they’d still need a base on the surface while they built the underwater one.

But the probes had returned a few locations that had seemingly little-to-no tidal effects. The ice was smooth, and free of the countless cracks that crisscrossed the surface of Europa. While the rest of the moon ebbed and waned and cracked under the godlike pressure of Jupiter’s gravity, a few spots remained untouched.

The icing on the cake was that that artifact had crash landed just under one of those spots. Many on Earth didn’t think that was a coincidence.

And yet, the icequake had happened.

Susan sat next to some of her tomato plants. They were still sealed in their own mini domes, just in case. She had her helmet off, but right next to her. They were pretty much confined to their suits for the foreseeable future. She wasn’t about to complain.

Everyone had been working around the clock to patch up enough domes to live in. With the missing and dead, that left just her and Cary, Crysta, Joyce, Thomas and of course, the ever-driven Ben. The mission commander had chewed her out real good, but hadn’t said a word since, not to her nor anyone else. They knew what they needed to do. But midway through the day, everyone needed a break. They ate from her vegetables and then most of them fell asleep. She would do the same, but only for a few hours. She and Thomas were going to head down to the artifact site to see how it had been affected and to see if they could bring any of the drone soldiers back. They would be helpful in the repairs.

One quick bite and the juicy tomato slid down her throat. She sat down on the frozen ground next to Cary and the two snuggled up to each other. There would be no warmth shared between them that time, but with all the losses, the idea that she was next to someone she loved was warming enough.

She took one more look over at Ben, who was stooped over one of the only working consoles. He was sitting on a bucket and scrolling through images and video.

“Boss, you gotta take a break, too,” she said.

He turned around, and she was stunned by the ragged look in his eyes. She was afraid if she looked in a mirror, she might see the same. He nodded, then looked over at the sleeping Joyce, further down the tomato row. Her head was slumped back onto the row, her brown hair spilling out into the dirt. Her mouth was wide open and she was breathing heavily. Ben wanted to say something, but held it in, then turned back to Susan.

“Have you received any emails from Earth?”

It was an odd question. Susan thought about it for a moment. She had been so immersed in work for weeks now, she hadn’t realized nothing had come through for her in a while. She routinely sent through data from her work, and often, back on Earth, her research group responded.

“It’s been…” Susan kept thinking, “It’s been a while. A few weeks? Maybe more.”

Ben had already turned back to the console. The images of the disaster were replaced by his own log.

“No one has. We’ve been so busy we didn’t notice that Earth has gone quiet.”

“Huh?” Susan asked. She didn’t talk too much to Joyce, or Crysta for that matter.

“NASA, Earth, mission control. Nobody has sent us any kind of message in weeks. We’re so used to being alone up here, we failed to realize that maybe,” Ben stopped and looked up at the dome roof, looking beyond it, “Maybe, we are alone up here.”

For the first time since they had uncovered the artifact, and they had lost six people to it, and the icequake and the losses suffered from it, Susan caught a glimpse of fear in Ben’s eyes. They all relied on him. He was a driven boss, and not a very social guy, but not quite anti-social either; he just wasn’t anyone’s friend. But they liked that about him. He trusted everyone completely and respected everyone equally. For two years, these humans had been working and living further away than any human being in the Earth’s history, and all the potential disasters that came with such an endeavor. Never, during that whole time, did anyone ever feel afraid, and that was because of Ben. The look that Ben gave Susan, right before he turned back to his console, left her shocked.

- Thomas –

Ten seconds and he would have died. He was just getting ready to go to sleep that night and was on the toilet. He was about to sit on the vacuum potty when an alarm from his console went off. It was for his medicines, so he stepped back out of the bathroom closet and into his room to get the console and turn the alarm off. Nature was calling strongly, so he headed back towards the bathroom when the icequake hit. The half of his room where the bathroom was vanished under tons of ice. With the little air that he had left, he made it into his suit.

He was not ashamed to say he did shit himself, though.

Nearly twenty four hours had passed, and the effects were quite devastating. They had lost two men, and nearly a third more than half of the base was completely destroyed and under ice while the other half was wrecked pretty well. They had lost a good amount of their breathable air. In a stroke of pure luck, they still had the green dome, and that had been their salvation, not just for air, but from radiation.

Now he had to go outside. Their regular outdoor suits, the ones suited to block a large amount of radiation, had vanished under tons of ice. They were lucky that one of the rovers had been parked over by the green dome and not in its usual place in the engineering dome. The inside emergency suits had next to no radiation protection, so walking to the artifact site would have been a death sentence. But here they were, himself and Susan, riding across the ice that had changed its view quite dramatically. Instead of the once smooth ice plains he had ridden on nearly every day for two years, giant spears of ice pierced through the surface, creating a whole new environment. The ice shafts were forty-to-fifty feet high, jagged and sharp. Thomas couldn’t even begin to imagine the sorts of pressures needed to make them burst through like that. One day, if he lived through it all, he would sit down and do the math. He was an expert on ice, after all.

He wasn’t an expert on trauma, though.

Susan was clearly shook up. Everyone was, but she was especially disturbed. Everyone had seen and heard the verbal punishment Ben had laid onto her. It had been unfair of him, as if the icequake had been her fault. Still, Thomas had tried to talk to her about it, and she hadn’t said a thing. For as much as people didn’t like Horace, he was certainly being missed now, because in some way, somehow, he always managed to say the right thing to just make you pause and think. Reflection, he had called it. The best healer of oneself, was yourself. He used to say gummy shit like that all the time, made you laugh. One always thought he was talking to you like a kid.

Yet, it always rang true.

They continued to drive through the ice field, going slower than he used to on the open ice plains. He had to slow down a lot, turning through the columns, often coming to dead ends. He was so focused on driving that when he exited the ice shafts, what he saw next failed to register in his brain. He heard Susan gasp in his com link and he turned to look at her. Her eyes were dead set ahead of her, and he turned to look ahead and that’s when it hit him. Ahead of them, the familiar ice plains were contrasted heavily by the gargantuan shape of the alien vessel sticking out of the ice like a beached whale. About a third of it had come out of the ice, and it had bent, contorted, or melted, onto the ice plains while the rest of it remained under the ice. It was a green mountain against the white field.

“Susan, get the camera,” he shouted out as he continued driving. He slowed down a bit, though. Susan reached back behind her and turned on the front viewing camera. Two green lights came on the small black device.

“Ben, come in,” Thomas said, pulling up the base’s com link on his tablet.

As they continued to drive towards the vessel, they could make out the small entrance shaft about a mile away, along with the elevator crane and the lone rover.

“Thomas, I’m on. Are you there yet?”

“You need to turn on the camera link to the rover. You have to see this.”

Silence.

They approached the shaft and stopped the rover twenty feet away. As they got out to walk towards the equipment, Ben chimed in again.

“I can’t link the feed, Thomas. What are you seeing?”

Thomas laughed.

“It’s the artifact Ben. Its, well, something happened, the quake maybe, but it’s out of the ice. Not all of it, but…” Thomas stopped to look in the distance again. Jupiter was there, as it always ways, day after day. But even the gas giant seemed insignificant compared to the alien vessel, a mountain of gleaming green, towering over them.

“The quake?”

“That’s what I thought too, but, I don’t see any other damage to the ice out here.”

“We don’t know enough about the tidal forces on this moon to know how it all works.”

“I agree, Ben, but if you could see it, it looks like it just…melted out of the ice.”

Thomas reached the shaft and the crane equipment and looked down. Pitch darkness stared back at him. The equipment around him was fine, no visible damage was seen. The plan had been to descend into the shaft and retrieve the drone soldiers, but if the alien vessel had moved this much, the entire entrance area might have been compromised, along with the soldiers. Just going down into the shaft could be a death sentence.

“Thomas?”

He turned to look towards Susan. She was over by the rover, on the far side of the vehicle.

“Come here, uh, now, please, quick.”

Thomas hopped over as quickly as he could, grabbing a hold of the rover to pull himself around faster than his legs could get him there. On the frozen ice floor, next to the rover, was one of the drone soldiers. It looked dead. It was entirely possible, as they hadn’t brought out any oxygen for two days. Thomas reached down and touched the control panel on its chest. It flipped open revealing a small screen. Thomas tapped the screen and it came to life. Data began to fill the screen and Thomas read it over.

“Looks like he’s still alive….” Thomas started, before falling back in fear.

The drone had jolted and moved.

Susan stepped back and as Thomas got up, they both watched it wriggle and seemingly convulse. Thomas reached back down and looked at the screen. He reached down and tried to hold the drone still so that he could read the screen.

“It says he still has enough air, we should try to get it back on board the rover and get it back to base.”

Thomas continued to try to tap at the screen to get more information when he remembered a conversation he had once with Bobby about the drones. He stepped back and brought his wrist tablet up and began tapping. He had to dig through the programs, but found the AI app and booted it up. He watched as the program counted up as it loaded.

“Maybe we can talk to it and get it to calm down, or whatever. Bobby showed me.”

The app loaded and came up. One signal was available. Thomas assumed it was the drone on the ground. He tapped on the signal and the signal linked with his tablet. His helmet was instantly flooded with shouting.

“HELP! HELP! GET ME OUT OF THIS THING!!”

Thomas took a step back.

“Susan, he...he’s alive! We’ve got to get him back. Help me!”

Thomas reached down to try to pick the drone up. Even in the lighter moon gravity, the drone was still heavy. He waited for Susan to appear to help, and when she didn’t, he looked back.

She wasn’t anywhere.

Thomas stood up quickly, and scanned the horizon. Susan was running and bouncing as fast as she could towards the alien vessel.

“Susan, what the hell are you doing?” Thomas shouted into his comm.

She didn’t answer, but stopped for a moment. Her arm went up and she waved back, then turned around and continued to run, bounding in small leaps, towards the vessel. She was already too far away to do anything, and he watched for a moment as she reached the vessel and vanished. It was quite a ways away, and he wasn’t sure if she had gone into it, or if he just couldn’t see her anymore.

“Umm, Ben, Susan just went AWOL on us.”

Thomas reached back down and tried to get the drone to stand up. He had muted the screaming coming from inside the mech, but noticed on the data link that he was silent. He opened the link again, and spoke.

“Can you hear me in there?” Thomas asked. He felt awkward talking to it. From everything Bobby had told him, that never happened. It was never done.

“Yes, sir,” came the male voice.

Thomas nearly laughed.

“Thomas, repeat? AWOL?”

“Ben, you’re not going to believe what just happened.”