“Can we at least throw one of Noelle’s camera feeds up here before the next burn?” Traci asked. “Because this is going to be a real show.”
Roy answered with a flick of a switch, turning two of the overhead monitors into virtual windows. Psychedelic swirls of color spun past on screen. “Would’ve done this anyway. I was going to surprise you.”
The fresh light reflected in Traci’s eyes. “I think we’ve all had enough surprises for one day, but thanks anyway.”
“Just keep your eyeballs front. If I think you’re sightseeing, they get turned off.”
Noelle piped up from behind her. “I’m recording all of this anyway. You’ll have plenty of time to catch up on it.”
As Roy finished pitching Magellan back on course, the countdown timer came to dominate the control deck. “We don’t have much time so let’s run through this quick,” he said, squelching the small talk. “At T-zero we burn at max-rated power until we make up the lost delta-v. We’ll keep the nav director on continuous update mode so it’s cross-referencing Daisy.” He paused to let it sink in: Yes, I’m trusting our silicon-brained friend. “We follow the eight ball’s cues all the way through. When it’s all over, our nose will be firmly pointed at Pluto. If it ain’t, Houston can send us corrections after they catch up to us. You guys ready?”
No one spoke, just nods of agreement all around. Roy responded in kind before starting the maneuver countdown. He and Traci kept ready hands hovering above the throttles. “Ten seconds. Last chance.”
Silence. Outside, the swirl of color disappeared into shadow.
Even with one engine out, Magellan left behind an incandescent trail of plasma over Jupiter’s night side that lit up its churning pastel clouds for thousands of miles.
13
Mission Day 36
Velocity 366,200 m/s (819,166 mph)
Acceleration 0.98 m/s2 (0.10g)
Safely speeding away from Jupiter, they gathered over a well-deserved supper in the galley and shared a good laugh at Houston’s expense as the first of several frantic messages arrived. They could scarcely imagine the flight controller’s panic watching the drama unfold almost an hour after the fact: Abort to Orbit . . . no, Earth Return . . . wait, we can fix this! Sorry everyone, but problem solved. Try and keep up next time.
“This is kind of cute to watch play out,” Traci said as she scrolled through the messages. “Do they really think we were waiting for their read?”
“Don’t be too hard on Owen,” Roy said. “Takes a while to break old habits.”
“Or unlearn everything you thought you knew,” Jack said, though it was easier to break free of the old ways when you were the one getting farther from home each day. “How many puppies do you think Owen crapped when he found out?”
“Isn’t there something else we can talk about?” Noelle asked in her exasperated den mother’s tone, hoping to divert the children’s attention elsewhere.
The glint in Roy’s eyes gave up their scheme. They’d been hiding something from the kids, all right. “Since we’re going to miss the next couple of holidays, now seemed like as good a time as any. It is Christmas Eve, in case you forgot.” He hopped away in his slow-motion low-g lope to open a storage closet. He lifted four boxes, each about two feet square and addressed to each crewmember. “These came from one of the resupply modules. I have no idea what’s in them.”
“Gee, thanks, Dad,” Jack said as he reached for his package. “Doesn’t look big enough for a BB gun.”
“Just for that you get to go last.” He handed Traci a package. “The young lady first.”
She blushed. “Thanks.” It was too easy to forget that Roy was an old-fashioned Southern gentleman at heart when she was so busy keeping up with his demands. She turned it over, examining the gold foil wrapping: professional. If it had come from home, it sure hadn’t been wrapped by her parents. Neither one had ever shown much interest in such things—inside the box was what counted, they’d always said.
“Well?” Jack teased.
Traci ignored him, lifting the package up to her nose. Trying to guess at the secrets held inside was always the best part. “I smell . . . nothing,” she said with some disappointment.
“Remember who packed these,” Noelle reminded her. They did have to get past payload control at the Cape no matter who’d sent it.
Traci gave in and tore the wrapping off. Golden foil floated away, settling near an air-return vent as things tended to do in near-zero-g. She broke the seal and squealed. A worn University of Kentucky sweater had been lovingly folded and laid over top. “Daddy!” She lifted it out and held it to her face, taking in the scent of home.
Beneath it were a half-dozen pouches of seeds, starters from her mother’s herb garden. They all had a good laugh at that, as they would now come in handier than anyone could have known. Slipper socks, coffee packs, and a box set of some cheesy-looking romance novels.
Jack poked at the first cover he saw. Instead of a shirtless long-haired bodybuilder, the man was fully dressed and sporting a beard. And the girl . . . “Is she wearing a bonnet?”
Traci blushed again. “Amish romance.”
“That’s a thing?”
“Used to be. These are my Mom’s.”
Jack didn’t know what to say, which he’d learned was the best time to shut up. He looked to Noelle to rescue him. It was her turn anyway.
“I know my husband had nothing to do with this,” she said, pulling the tape across each seam to meticulously unfold the wrapping. When she lifted the lid, it was her turn to blush when the others howled. Because whatever else might be in there, the first thing she found was a negligee so sheer that calling it skimpy would have been prudish.
“Looks like he had everything to do with it,” Jack hooted. “Should we leave the room so you can get on with the rest?”
She scowled as Roy gave her an impish shrug. “No. We shall all endure this together.” The rest was all food, vacuum-packaged or otherwise preserved for the trip. “It’s cheese,” Noelle said as she lifted a wheel of brie out of the box. “From Mother.”
“Back in France? Of course it’s cheese. You guys have more flavors of cheese than you do permanent governments.”
She held up a dark green bottle. “And wine, also from home.”
“Okay, I take it back. And I’ll defer my turn to Roy, since you two obviously have a theme going here.”
Without a word, Roy tore open the garish red paper from his own package and pulled open the lid. Inside were nestled more boxes, all wooden, hinting at their vintage contents. He glanced over at Noelle, who simply waved him on.
He pried open the first box to find a fifth of Canadian whiskey nestled beneath bundles of packing straw. “I think you’re on to something about a theme, Jack. If you guys can behave, I might even be persuaded to share.”
Noelle pointed at the open box, which still appeared half full. “Keep looking,” she prodded him. Roy pushed aside the rest of the packing straw to uncover four whiskey tumblers snugged into cardboard brackets, each glass etched with their mission emblem. Larger than normal, each was crafted from a system of tight, concentric grooves funneled from its base. Liquids tended to wander in low gravity, and the glasses’ nested grooves used surface tension to keep everything where it needed to be.
“Zero-g highballs?” Roy asked. He turned one over, admiring the handiwork. “This is real glass,” he marveled, expecting it to be 3D-printed acrylic. “How much did this—”
Noelle pressed a finger to her lips. “I’ll never tell. Does it matter out here?” She waved him on. “Go on, there’s more.”
Setting the first one aside, Roy next picked up a small rosewood crate. A compass rose and anchor were inlaid on its lid. As he sprang open the latch, his eyes widened. “Is that—”
“It is,” Noelle said.
Not daring to lift the object from its felt-lined cradle, Roy held the open box up for the others to see. Inside was a five-inch brass sextant, polished
and restored to its original condition.
“It’s gorgeous,” Traci said. “There’s a story, isn’t there?”
“This belonged to my grandfather,” Roy said. “He was a navigator on a Liberty ship back in World War II. Last I saw, it was pretty beat up.”
“Now you know where it disappeared to last year,” Noelle said, then turned to the others. “I’m told that Roy used to constantly fiddle with this thing when he was young, taking it apart and trying to put it back together,” she explained. “One more, love.”
Jack and Traci struggled to hide their amusement at watching the famously gruff Roy Hoover’s tightening lips and glistening eyes. Noelle had planned this one quite well.
Roy reached in for the last treat: a book which appeared brand new, though bound and styled as if it were a first edition. “Fate Is the Hunter,” Roy recited from its spine. The late Ernest K. Gann’s tales of aviation’s golden age had been Roy’s early inspiration to fly. “How did you do all this?”
“I had the luxury of time which was denied you. A perk of being the mission commander’s wife and not the mission commander.”
As Roy gathered his goods and meticulously placed them back in their crates, he looked as contented as anyone could ever recall. “I’m going to my room. I may never come out.”
“Just a minute there,” Jack protested. “I’m feeling a little left out.”
Playing mother one last time, Noelle reached for the last box and handed it to Jack. This one was wrapped in flat black foil with embossed skulls, which meant his sister had been involved.
“It’s supposed to be Christmas, not Halloween,” Traci said.
“Inside joke,” Jack explained. “I tried to be one of those Goth kids in middle school. Didn’t work out.”
“Why do I not find that hard to believe?”
He ignored Traci’s gibe and pulled the top off of a Styrofoam case. “Holy—” he trailed off, and pulled out the bottom half of the box. Jack opened and read the note inside. “From my sister,” he said. It held an honest-to-goodness old-fashioned vinyl turntable. Beneath it was a stack of a half-dozen classic LPs, all fresh-pressed reissues of famous late-twentieth Seattle bands, carefully wedged between more layers of foam.
“A taste of home, huh?” Roy said.
“I thought I was Goth. Turned out I was grunge.”
“You’re grunge, alright,” Traci teased. “She must have had a blast working that out with Owen.”
Jack set the foam crate aside and found one last surprise. A worn leather folder had been tucked away beneath everything else. From the looks of the thing, it had been hidden away somewhere else for a very long time. He unwound the string clasp and held it open in something approaching awe. Atop a stack of decades-old papers was clipped a personal note:
Jack,
With a long trip ahead, I thought you’d enjoy some extra reading material.
This dusty pile of papers you’re holding contains all available transcripts of Arkangel’s commander’s logs, uncensored in the original Russian. If anyone can make use of them, you can.
I hope it sheds light on whatever you may find out there.
Regards,
Owen
The musty smell stood out all the more for the antiseptic environs of their spacecraft. As Jack leafed through the pages, decades-old dust particles wafted out from between them. He looked up to find the others as wide-eyed as he felt.
Roy reached back into his crate to hand each of them a glass. “On second thought, some drinks may be in order. It would be a crime to keep this all to myself.”
14
Mission Day 37
Velocity 450,960 m/s (1,008,769 mph)
Acceleration 0.98 m/s2 (0.10g)
Not even a full day after their slingshot around Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system had shrunk to a pallid, gibbous marble as it receded into the black. Already distant enough that any signals from the ice penetrators and weather balloons would take almost half a minute to reach the ship’s antennas, it was more than enough to render any human intervention impossible. Houston was counting on them to relay the first batch of information from Europa, and Noelle was eager to be the first human to see it.
“This is what working at JPL must be like,” Jack said from the engineer station, nursing his third cup of coffee from the new stash unpacked from Cygnus. “Work yourself half to death just to watch your baby fly away into who knows what and no way to stop it if things turn to crap.”
“Otherwise known as ‘parenthood,’” Roy said. “All the more reason to wake up and stay frosty. We get one chance to pull in an awful lot of data.”
Jack couldn’t tell whether Roy really meant it or if he was just keeping peace with his wife.
Above Europa, Astrolabe settled into its parking orbit and began taking stock of its surroundings. Inertial sensors measured relative velocity, radar altimeters took note of the terrain sixty miles below, and cameras mapped the surface while judging its position.
When its onboard computers were satisfied that they were not about to crash into the moon, they jettisoned its protective fairing. Three-meter-long clamshells sprang open along its seams and fell away, exposing the penetrator darts and activating a proximity radar in the probe’s nose. The first dart shot out from the undercarriage and rocketed toward Europa’s icy surface.
“Beagle’s dropping her puppies,” Jack said. He’d picked up an annoying tendency to assign the probe his own preferred nickname, after the HMS Beagle expedition which had inspired Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution.
Few appreciated that the probe’s official name had in reality been chosen to honor the flagship of a nineteenth-century French expedition which had returned some of the first mineral and biological samples from Antarctica. Noelle had counted on official NASA’s historical ignorance and its predictable tendency to favor space-age-sounding names to achieve a minor victory for her native country.
“First puppy is awake and transmitting,” Jack said as the first dart activated itself. “Time to impact four minutes.” Based on their planned orbital period, each dart was timed to release equidistant from the others, encircling the frozen moon and continuously sending data. At least one of them should find its way through the icy crust and into liquid water.
“Booster cutoff. Impact in sixty seconds.” Adding to the forward momentum from Astrolabe, the dart’s solid rocket propelled its tungsten penetrator fast enough to blast through several meters of whatever ice lay below. The real trick had been to build in electronics that were stout enough to withstand several dozen g’s of sudden deceleration. They’d been kept as simple as possible: infrared spectrometer, magnetometer, and a digital imager with a synchronized LED strobe.
“Three . . . two . . . whoa!” Jack said. “Right on time. Ground-prox radar worked better than I thought.”
“Any other telemetry?” Noelle’s voice sounded a good octave higher. “I’ve nothing yet.”
“Relax,” Jack said. “Might take a second. Those relays just got shaken hard. Hang tight.”
“Easy for you—”
Jack sat upright as his screen came alive with vital signs. He was almost as surprised as Noelle. “See? Carrier wave. It’s transmitting.”
“What is this?” Noelle asked, pointing to the accelerometer graphs. “It appears to have stopped.”
Jack leaned over to see where she was pointing. “Yep, no vertical motion. Getting some sideways slop, though. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s stuck near the bottom of an ice floe. Maybe even hit hard enough to break it adrift.” He saw the concern line her face. “We’ve got five more probes. One is bound to hit water.”
As they sped onward, Astrolabe continued hurling its payload of boosted darts at Europa. At twenty-minute intervals, another penetrator rocketed from orbit into the frozen moon. One blasted into a mountain of ice before grinding to a halt, having carved a narrow crater thirty meters into its side. Two more malfunctioned and stopped working enti
rely.
The final two darts found better fortunes. Both probes hit thinner ice at opposite ends of a vast field of craggy floes known as the Conamara Chaos. Its jumble of icebergs was thought to have been caused by warmer waters churning beneath the surface, a geological phenomenon which made the region a promising target. Water plus heat energy favored life back on Earth and it was believed the same conditions on Europa held enormous potential. The question was, would it hold true elsewhere in the solar system?
Noelle shrieked with delight as the remaining darts began streaming data to their mothership. “There’s the carrier signal!” she exclaimed as the fifth probe’s vitals sprang to life. Each penetrator’s first transmission was a burst of vital signs to establish its position along with a quick sampling of its environment. “Spectrometer is recording,” she said with increasing confidence. “There’s our first data! Molecular oxygen atmosphere, pressure point-one pascals. Temperature eighty-eight kelvin . . . is the strobe charging?”
“Affirm. We should have our first visuals soon. Don’t sweat it,” Jack said, giving her shoulder a reassuring pat.
“It’s changing fast,” she said. “Temperature two-seventy-five kelvin, pressure twenty-four MPa. Salinity averaging twenty-eight per mil. Hydrogen . . . oxygen . . . it’s liquid water, near maximum density!”
“We still have the atmo probes to deploy,” Roy said, gently guiding his wife’s attention back. “Mama will be listening to her pups for a long time.”
Noelle nodded and turned to her other set of monitors. Jack pretended that he didn’t notice the tension. “Don’t worry, you’re going to have a lot of time to comb through that data. So will the guys back in Pasadena.”
“I know,” she whispered. “But I want to see it first.”
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