Europa Affair

by M. D. Thalmann

  With blood streaming from their eyes, ears, and nose, they fell to their knees screaming.

  Fighting the agony of the mangled alloy and shattered bone that was pressing into and piercing his lung, Marwick shot to his feet and reached for a rifle that wasn’t there; it had been tossed asunder when the ORCA’d careened away from the blast. Before they could turn to run, little irremovable transponders that looked like tiny unwaggable tails at the base of their skulls started humming at a frequency that vibrated their very consciousness. They clutched their helmets, trying to block the sound, but couldn’t get to their ears. Nor would it have mattered if they’d been able to, as the sounds were coming from within.

  With blood streaming from their eyes, ears, and nose, they fell to their knees screaming.

  Books By M.D. Thalmann

  Europa Affair (novella)

  Static

  The 13 Lives of a Television Repairman

  Writing as Michael D. Thalmann

  Jaden’s Revenge (novella)

  Dimly. Through Glass

  Europa Affair

  a novella

  M.D. Thalmann

  First Edition, eBook – published 2017

  Europa Affair

  Copyright © 2017 by Michael Dirk Thalmann

  www.mdthalmann.com

  No portion of this book may be copied, retransmitted, reposted, duplicated, or otherwise used without the express written approval of the author, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, names, and events as well as all places, incidents, organizations, and dialog in this novel are either the products of the writer’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Cover Design: Asad Ali

  Editing: Siobhan Marshall Jones

  Special thanks to my ARC readers and beta team.

  All Rights Reserved.

  United States of America.

  For Vanessa, Izzabelle, Avery, and Wyatt, who have given me a reason to keep going at this, and have loved and

  encouraged me along the way.

  We’re going to get there, together, guys.

  Introduction

  Multiverse

  ∞

  Hello readers, and thanks for buying/borrowing this book. Europa Affair is set in the year 2073, just before the fall of Earth in the Static Universe. This novella has been carefully crafted to work if read as episode zero (prequel), three (sidequel), or five (companion story) in the saga, meaning that it doesn't matter if you’ve read the other episodes of Static (1. Halloran, 2. Elliot, 3. Marwick, and 4. Melina) or the Static Omnibus novel before picking this up. It works just fine on its own, but just in case, let me bring you up to speed: Humanity has splintered. No one is permitted to leave Earth without travel orders from the Regime. Humanoid machines, androids, conduct mining and construction efforts throughout the colonies, ever expanding the Regime’s footprint. Cyborg soldiers, Purifiers, protect the regimes assets back on Earth and patrol the vast emptiness between, enforcing travel bans by any means necessary.

  Before you read any further let me ask you a favor: Please, please, please review this book after you’re done… no matter what you have to say, I’d like to hear it.

  Okay, let's get to it, shall we?

  1: Orca Driver

  Open Space

  2073 A.D.

  Marwick’s fingers strained to reach a toggle only inches away. The skin of his knuckles, stretched thin by the ship’s thrust gravity, revealed the outlines of the bulbous alloy hinges within his digits. He’d long since discarded his gloves; they’d made his hands too heavy, even for a specimen like him, to maintain the dexterity required to pilot the craft during its twelve-G burn. He’d drawn the short straw; was now the test monkey assigned to see how far a Purifier could take the new Phase-Two ORCA gunship. In his mind, Purifiers from across the Solar System chattered and absorbed his thoughts, sharing vicarious exhilaration of this maiden voyage. He blocked everything out, focusing instead on the kill switch. Fighting the weight of his flight suit, Marwick drew a labored breath, holding it captive in his lungs while summoning all his strength for a final drive forward, and succeeded in reaching the override. He hesitated with his finger poised over the toggle, thinking that the location of this switch could be troublesome, making a mental note that it needed to be more accessible.

  Marwick flipped the toggle to the off position, and the second phase—a super-efficient hydrogen fusion engine—shut down, alleviating the thrust gravity for the first time since he’d left Mars. He relaxed and breathed freely, his skin tingling as it rebounded from the strain of the high G-force burn the ORCA had pummeled him with.

  TODD series androids had performed the initial testing and hadn’t complained of its vibration or sheer power, but Marwick was feeling the effects of both. Marwick felt as though he’d been trying to steer an explosion, rather than piloting a vessel. Pushing himself up in his seat, Marwick strained against his harness. With one hand he cranked his chin until crunching pops sounded, then made balls of his meaty fists, squeezing tight enough for his knuckles to crack.

  He reveled in the minor relief that the weightlessness offered him, all too aware it would soon be over. Without engaging his primary boosters, Marwick spun the ship around using compressed gas. He knew at his current velocity, a gravity-assist orbital entry would be impossible, so instead he was repositioning the gunship and aiming its primary engines at the destination. Empty pouches, husks from the protein paste he’d eaten, appeared to take flight as they remained stationary within the moving ship, and Marwick’s discarded gloves danced up past his shoulders. He plucked them from mid-air and secured them to one of the magnetic plates on the upper arms of his flight suit.

  “We have now reached the optimal angle for the next burn,” the ship’s AI alerted him in a soft feminine voice, and Marwick prepared to decelerate. The ORCA’s AI was constantly calculating thrust velocities, telling him how long and at what force factor he’d need to burn in order to avoid collision with (or altogether miss) Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa, and displaying the values on his HUD. Under normal circumstances she would have intervened and cut the engines, or made course corrections, but Elliot had disabled the autopilot for this run so that Marwick could push the boat harder than safety regulations would tolerate.

  “If you want to make an omelet…” Elliot had said.

  The AI chimed in again, imploring him to begin his deceleration maneuvers, but Marwick only stared at the ticker on the HUD and continued breathing deliberately. Every second he waited, the thrust value increased.

  Marwick took a slow, deep breath, knowing it would be his last chance to fill his lungs until he made groundfall and, when the ship’s computer warned of a sixteen-G deceleration burn, again in the soft voice of an ersatz woman, he clicked two toggles at once, igniting the chemical rockets and also reengaging the fusion drive, which instantly planted him into his seat with such tremendous force that his face felt like it was melting and contorting into something inhuman that would horrify Marwick when he saw it in the video replay.

  Clenching his eyes shut, Marwick fought to secure his sclera. He was afraid that they’d burst like water balloons. They were no doubt rupturing under the strain: he was damn sure that’s what he was feeling, but reassured himself that his nanites were holding them in place and mitigating any fissures. Even with the ship’s telemetry data on hand, landing blind would be a sonofabitch.

  In his mind, through the communications array jacked into his skull, he heard someone speaking to him. Even though it was being broadcast directly into his cortex, it seemed so very distant and unimportant, until it got too loud to ignore.

  “Talk to me, Goose,” Elliot Glassman, Chief
Military Science Director of the Solar Confederacy, said from Mission Control back on Mars, “We’re in the dark here.”

  “This boat is too much for humans,” Marwick said into his helmet mic with considerable effort. “Maybe even more than Purifiers can handle.”

  Purifiers across the system had seen the feed go black when he’d shut his eyes but had known he hadn’t died; the Collective Consciousness provided by the Bethlehem servers shared more than just sight, but also shared sounds and thoughts.

  “You’re not human, Marwick,” Elliot said, “Nor are you just any Purifier. You’re a goddamn 350-pound hunk of metal, with all the muscle mass of a silverback gorilla.”

  “Plus, you got a huge dick!” Peter said. Marwick recognized the aggravating drone of the baboon’s voice emulator even through all the Purifier chatter.

  “Piss off, Peter!” Elliot said.

  “I can’t feel my fucking legs. I’m going to back off the thrust,” Marwick shouted with resignation.

  “No, you’ll hit the fucking moon. Listen, buddy. Your Bone Saver suit and your nanites have closed off the blood vessels in your legs because you don’t need them right now. The nanites that are normally in your thighs and calves were routed to create a scaffolding in your heart, lungs, brain, and arms, so you can fly the goddamn boat. Everything you’re feeling is perfectly normal.”

  “You don’t know how this feels!”

  “Not exactly, no, but I have taken my Fruit Company phone to the toilet with me on more than one occasion and lost track of time, so I have a pretty good idea.”

  Marwick gritted his teeth and clamped down harder on the yokes at the end of each armrest as the ship shuddered and bucked under the strain.

  Knowing better than to risk opening his eyes to check telemetry, Marwick thumbed a button on his left yoke that piped the feed from his HUD to his cortical display, a computer-generated mental auditorium where Purifiers received battle plans, targeting information, and oftentimes the last sights and memories of a fallen brother. He could “see” Europa now: tiny and bright, so far from the Sun, yet glowing like a blood-streaked bulb. It was approaching—fast.

  “Disengaging engines in three, two, one,” Marwick labored into his mic, to no one in particular, and lunged for the kill switch once more, not hesitating in the slightest before cutting the engines this time. Finally able to fill his lungs without having to struggle, he drew in a deliberate breath and then let out a sigh. “Tell Oxsterbaxen to move that fucking override switch closer if he wants to keep his ships out of the Oort Cloud!”

  “Noted,” said Elliot, “That’s why we chose you.”

  “I thought I was just broken eggs,” Marwick said with feigned rancor and steered his descent toward the largest crater he could find. Nothing would anger him on this moon, he decided: he wouldn’t allow it. He loved Europa—it was a comfortable, dark world that no human had ever set foot on.

  Marwick had visited here before, stopping for a moment of tranquility after dropping off TODDs at Io to replenish the mining colony and later bringing specialized TODDs with auger arms to Europa to set up the ice-drilling stations.

  His ORCA settled onto the surface of the Jovian moon with a clang. Motors in the stabilizer arms whined as the vessel raised and lowered its landing probes in reaction to the terrain. It took only a moment to achieve stability, meaning that the ORCA’s attitude was level within a half degree.

  “We have touchdown and level base,” Marwick said into his communicator, followed by, “I need to rest some, boss. The noise is getting to me.” He was referring to the drone of the Purifiers’ hive-mind and its constant flood of thoughts and memories. He’d been developed as a prototype, well before Elliot brought the Bethlehem Collective Consciousness online, but had been so sturdy and affable that Elliot had kept him around even after the Purifiers had gone into full production for the Solar Confederacy. Marwick was the only one who could unhook his interface.

  “Roger that. Good job, bud,” Elliot said with avuncular pride.

  “I’m jacking off.”

  “We seriously need to work on your phrasing.”

  “Well, jacking out, then.”

  “Just keep the ship’s comms connected to the entangler. Roger?”

  “Roger wilco,” Marwick said, then peeled his helmet off. He reached for the cable inserted into the base of his skull, gave it a half-turn, and removed a three-inch spike from the port he’d been retrofitted with. This disconnected the comms array, effectively removing him from the Collective Consciousness. Uncomfortable worry swept over him, so he also disabled the quantum entanglement communicator by powering it down, then mumbled “Willnotco” and tossed the entire ensemble into the helmet.

  His neural overlay sent a message to his cortical display that the nanites had completed all the repairs to his organs, and Marwick opened his eyes to once again behold the wonder of Europa. It would always inspire awe in him, regardless of how often his missions would bring him there. He turned a resistance knob on his Bone Saver suit, releasing all the tensioning lines and relieving the compression in his limbs and torso. What could have been molten lava poured into his femoral arteries, an intense burning reached the tips of his toes in mere moments. The sensation of heat from the fresh blood was immediately replaced by something akin to being stabbed by thousands of tiny ice-tipped spikes which found their home precisely at the tip of each nerve ending. He squirmed in his seat and gripped the folds of his suit at the knees, working his legs up and down to help things along, reluctant to engage Shock-Protocol, which would block out the pain but at the cost of his other senses being dulled.

  To the right of his chair, which had gimbals and hydraulic shock-absorbers in every which direction to absorb thrust and gravitational forces, was a small Eskimo House cooler. Eskimo House was a trademarked name that meant “cheap plastic box.”

  He popped open the lid which, thanks to the one-ninth gravity of Europa, then went flying off and danced its way slowly to the floor some two meters away, its tether having detached for no apparent reason. “Piece of shit cooler!” he shouted and grabbed a pouch of the purple protein paste that was often used to aid in the recovery of Cryo-Travelers, and for which he’d developed an affinity. Tearing the pack open with his teeth, he mumbled to himself something about how he should have sprung for the Abominable Snowman cooler, but that he hadn’t had the money. Abominable Snowman was a trademarked name that meant “are you fucking kidding me with these prices?” They were not.

  Marwick connected his sight-line communication device (which all EVA helmets had to be equipped with for safety reasons) to his cranial port and donned his flight helmet once more, purposely neglecting the broadwave array and entanglement communicator. He tested his legs before trusting them fully by hopping a few steps to help him acclimate to the low-G and then bounce-walked from the flight deck, enjoying the feeling of the Jovian moon’s slight gravitational pull, as opposed to the constant nagging push of thrust. Rather than taking the lift, he used the evac-pole (apparently Oxsterbaxen had always wanted to be a fireman) and slid down to the lower deck. He didn’t even need the pole to slow his descent counter to the weak pull of Europa and only trailed his fingers as he fell.

  Marwick passed through the cargo hold door, punched the code for the airlock sequence into a data-pad on his forearm, and thumbed his helmet clamps shut as the chamber achieved balance with the outside air density. The change in pressure made Marwick’s insides swell just enough that he had to relieve himself into the suit’s reclaimer. Evidently, everything down there was back to normal.

  A reflector and light housed in a small glass bubble above the exterior hatch spun and threw light, and a klaxon signified it was now safe to open the hatch.

  Marwick tightened his fists until his forearms burned and then relaxed them, his body tensing from the adrenalized anticipation surging through his veins. He balled one fist again and depressed the plunger-button by punching it with cautious restraint. The door opened.
>
  2: High Ho!

  Europa

  An imposing human-shaped android with the numbers 337 stenciled across his chest plate, back, and both thighs knelt down on one knee over a hole in Europa’s icy dermis. Next to him a similar but different replica looked off at the roiling storm that was the Great Eye of Jupiter.

  Decades of damage and disrepair had given the TODDs something they’d never expected: individuality. Some were rusted while some had been dented, and yet others remained shiny new. Aside from their level of wear, still more had been adorned with various attachments in lieu of hands or feet. Nearly all were without their signature .50 caliber rifle. They’d been patchworked together into a witless society of slave laborers after having been deemed unfit for combat. TODD 337 was cleaning crushed ice from his auger-bit arm, while his counterpart, whose call numbers E340 were stenciled in just as many places as those on unit 337, mindlessly pressed ice shavings into blocks. Unit 337 looked up to the Jovian display to marvel alongside his partner when he saw what appeared to be a man bounding over the ridge, making hyperbolic leaps and slow arcing descents. “Rick, watch what you’re doing!” TODD E340 said to TODD 337. They’d taken to calling themselves by playful, human names, as it made telling stories and jokes to other TODDs that much easier. E340 slammed his fist into Rick’s forehead, bringing him back into the moment. “Wake up, dummy!”

  “Sorry, Jeff, I was just worried that that was… you know…”

  “If it is, it’s best he finds us working.”

  Rick plunged the auger into the ice for a final dip, spun the borer in reverse, shooting up flakes of snowy water-ice. He pulled his drilling arm out slowly, pulling more chunks with it. Jeff deposited a suction hose into the now vacant space and cleared out the shaved and crumbled ice that the corkscrew hadn’t been able to draw out.